Bali

Our next trip occured at the end of January with Jenn's parents during our Chinese New Year's vacation. Having spent the previous 182 days in Malaysia for tax purposes, we were finally able to leave the country and explore the rest of South-East Asia. We started in style, with the small resort island of Bali in Indonesia.

We stayed in Ubud at Casa Luna resort - very classy. Awesome room service breakfast every morning.

This is the pool for our hotel.

This temple was just off the main road in Ubud, called the Lotus Garden Temple. Just behind the Lotus restaurant, there was a huge pond filled with lotus flowers and a walkway down the middle leading to this temple. At night, they would perform traditional Indonesian dances in front of the temple for the guests of the restaurant.

A lotus flower from the pond.

One of the statues inside the Lotus Garden Temple.

A traditional Indonesian dance. There's lots of clanging of bells and cymbols and surprisingly little movement. They stand very still, moving only their eyes and wiggling their fingers. I'm not sure how they do it, but they can bend their fingers backwards and then wiggle them around - some of them can do it with their toes too. It's a little creepy.

We took a trip to "the mother of all temples" in Bali - Besakih Temple. This is the island's largest of around 11 000 temples, with 35 different shrines/halls and is located at the top of Mt. Agung. It dates back to prehistoric times and was declared the state temple in the 12th century and has remained so ever since.

This is the entrance to the North temple at the top of the hill and is one of the oldest temples in the complex.

This is one of several black sand beaches on the East coast of Bali. The sand here is completely black from the 3 volcanoes on the island. When we were here, it was completely deserted aside from us and a few fishermen. Very cool.

This gives you an idea of just how black the sand was on this beach (or maybe just how nice Jenn's last pedicure was).

A rice paddy as seen from a lookout point on the East coast.

The Ujung Water Palace was built in 1921 by the last Raja of the Karang Asem kingdom. It was mainly used to entertain guests and for his personal pleasure.

These steppes lead down to the Water Palace.

On our way home from our tour of the East coast, we passed several parades of worshippers heading to various temples to give offerings. This was one of the bigger parades held in Ubud. The strangest thing about this was the next day when we were asking around to try and figure out the reason/significance of the parades throughout the coast, none of the locals seemed to have the slightest idea what we were talking about "There was a parade yesterday???"

This is the view of Kuta beach - the most famous beach in Bali, very popular with the surfing crowd.