A touristy experience

I have to say I was actually ready to return from Bali when my plane took off Sunday evening. While Bali is certainly a nice place with some great sights it is way too touristy for me. Constantly being hassled to pay this, buy this, look at this, come here, go there is not my idea of traveling. So while I’m glad I went to Bali, I’m also not disappointed that I left it for last and almost didn’t make it there.
I did however REALLY enjoy the food. In fact this was really an eating weekend. In one day I ate French toast, 2 servings of ice cream, three good beers, a serving of traditional pork (babi guling is a Bali specialty and included tender pork, blood sausage, and delicious crispy skin and crunchy cracklings), a banana nut muffin, rye bread, a chicken sandwich and garlic mashed potatoes! And every other day I had at least one meal of MEXICAN food! So yeah, Bali has some redeeming features!

A total of 4 of us ETAs stayed in Ubud for 2 nights with one day looking around the city and buying gifts. Ubud is almost as touristy as Kuta (which is not actually Indonesia, but actually an Australian party town moved to an Indonesian island), but in a completely different way. Instead of clubs, and surfing, Ubud is all about cafes and art. It was kind of fun to walk around the city looking in a bunch of stores and galleries (Mom and Leith, you guys would have loved it…and left completely broke), but I spent my money in the local market. After 3 hours of bargaining I was exhausted! I really like bargaining for things, but when it becomes necessary to bargain for absolutely everything and the people you are bargaining with start out at ridiculous prices, it’s really just a pain; at one point the price dropped on something I wanted by 200% as soon as I spoke a single word of Indonesian! I ended up paying less than 1/6 of the original price.
After the day of shopping and eating in Ubud the next day we went on a temple tour which was pretty disappointing to be honest. Even at these temples we were constantly harassed by someone for something. Despite this Pura Besakih (aka the ‘mother temple’) was pretty interesting, once we finally got in past the ‘mandatory guides’ (they weren’t but we ended up paying a guy a little, mostly just to be left alone).
At several of the temples, most of us were struck by how insincere some of the temples seemed. While it was demanded that tourists wear sarongs and sashes, there were other people throwing their cigarettes around and hawkers of all kinds in the temples. I have absolutely no qualms with wearing appropriate clothing, but when it seems like that is required mostly so that tourists have to rent a sarong, that isn’t right. This is supposed to be a holy location, but it turns into a gimmick. I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say that there was not an authentic feel, it seemed the temples were there primarily for tourists to see; though to be fair we did go to the biggest temples that tourists commonly visit.
One slight exception was Gunung Kawi Temple, though there were souvenir stands there too. This was my favorite place we visited; the valley/rice/palm tree views were stunning. In fact, the valley was so lush with growth you could hardly tell there was a draw there. As for the temple, there are numerous temples carved into solid rock. Outside of these older temples there are newer, and in my opinion more sterile looking shrines.

So all in all I considered Bali to be too touristy, though 30 years ago I bet it was a great place to visit. I’m also guessing that if Bali was the only place in Indo you visited you would love it, but after seeing so much else Bali seemed like a hole. Though I did enjoy the touristy-ness in that it allowed me to eat food I had forgotten was so delicious!

Here are some of the pictures:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2084645&id=15804233&l=271265a076