A taste of Ubud, and a short drive through the countryside

After another long day on the beach at Legian, we were ready to spend the next day away from the coast. We elected to visit Ubud, after reading about it in the Lonely Planet Guide, where it is described as the centre of cultural tourism in Bali. You drive up through some villages renowned for particular art forms, for example Batubulan is lined with enormous, dramatic stone carvings, samples of the work done there while Mas is full of wood carvers. Arriving at Ubud we drove around to find specialist stores selling jewelery and batique cloths. Eventually we traced the stores we had ear marked from the Lonely Planet guide and were disappointed at both the high prices and, in the case of the jewelery, the lack of originality and style. Instead we turned into the open market and shopped around for cotton batiques eventually getting some serviceable pieces for the sort of prices we had expected to pay based on our earlier investigations in Kuta. After this we made our way to the NGO store called “Bali cares” where you can get an excellent chai masala (spiced tea) and rub shoulders with the darlings of the alternative Berkeley California hangouts. Here Zaria made a new American friend called Zaya (short for Zionaya). They shared maize and boiled peas in their pods. Zaya lives with her father who is from Berkeley and does a variety of artistic things like dance and painting in Bali and had even visited the Art project we planned ot visit in East Timor.

Like Legian and Kuta, touristic shopping seems to be the main experience with culture coming a second, and so, on the whole we found Ubud expensive and rather affected but of course we only visited on a day trip and didn’t have the opportunity to know more about it.
By now we were so fed up of shops and shops and more shops that we longed for some real country side, so we asked our driver, Wayan, to take us in a northerly direction. At last we saw some of the Bali we wanted to know about – bright green rice fields and temples at frequent intervals, groves of banana trees, shrubby clusters of hibiscus and oleander. It poured with rain drenching the trees, the temples and the rice fields, and after we had enjoyed this scenery for a while, we turned down towards the coast again and returned to Legian.