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Written on: Thursday August 18th, 2011
A journal entry from: South East Asia
Eva, the German girl that I met and I have decided to travel on together
as we want to do the same things. We got up here 2 days ago and the
weather was pretty average and rainy so just spent most of the day
relaxing with our books. We went to dinner and ended up meeting a
German couple who are backpacking for 6 months on their honeymoon and
had a few drinks with them.
Yesterday we hired a driver and he took us to some cool places. We went
to 3 temples to start with and took tons of photos! After that he
drove us to a coffee plantation and we got to sample different types of
Balinese coffee including civet coffee. The civet is a little animal
that eats the coffee beans and then poops them out. The coffee is made
from collecting their poo, drying it out in the sun, washing and
roasting it. Apparently the civet's digestion process makes the coffee
amazing. It was really nice!! Then we went up to the volcano
and one of the lakes and had lunch at an amazing restaurant overlooking
the volcano and lake. After lunch we went to see some craftsmen in the
local towns and to Tanah Lot for the sunset.
Today we went to Monkey Forest Sanctuary which was really cool once I
got over being terrified of the monkeys (I just kept thinking rabies,
rabies, rabies!). We didn't bring any food in with us and they left us
alone, so all good. After we went up to the main road where they were
having a cremation ceremony for the king of Ubud's mother who had died
earlier this year. It was pretty crazy - they put her coffin into a 9m
high sarcophagus and had a procession down the street with music. There
were millions of people and it was roasting hot so we only stayed the
first hour. They took it to a cremation site to be burned but that
wasn't happening until later. Now just chilling out for the afternoon.
Tomorrow we have booked a shuttle bus to Palangbai and are going to stay
a couple nights there before heading to Lombok then one of the Gili
islands. Yay! It's super expensive for the fast boat across so we will
do it the scenic way.