Day 2 in Bali

We had hired Made for the whole day- 12 hours! The night before he proposed a suggested sightseeing trip and Melissa had a few ideas so we did parts of both. The nice thing about a private tour guide is that you can skip parts you don't want to see and linger at some of your favorite locations longer. I had woken up with a lost voice due to my allergies, so even though I was feeling fine the stuffiness kept it a bit less than ideal conditions.

Our first stop was a Barong dance perforamance. It's a traditional Bali dance and the ladies involved creeped me out! They shift their eyes while wiggling their fingers. It was impressive, the costumes were ornate and it was amusing for not understanding the plot exactly (it wasn't in English but there was a paper guide to follow through the scenes).

 SPEAKERS ON!

The next stops were the weaving, painting, jewelry and woodcarving areas. We skipped the painting area but caught the other villages.

The carvers do one piece from start to finish

Hand dotting patterns on fabric

After the handicraft villages, we headed up a mountain to eat lunch on a cliff overlooking an active volcano. The trek up took forever, but the view at the top was amazing. A huge rainstorm burst during our meal but the whole thing was so incredible that it was just part of the fun.

Not sure why I made I'm wet and uncomfortable face haha

On the way down from the mountain, we passed some rice terraces and headed to a plantation. We had a free tour with the most adorable tour guide ever. They had all different types of fruit, veggies and spice plants and it ended with us splitting $5 on the world's most expensive type of coffee (a discounted deal with the expectation of buying something from the gift shop). The coffee uses civets to select the best beans, then digests them and uses the bean droppings for the coffee. The coffee is the roasted, ground and sieved before becoming a quite strong cup of coffee. Included in the coffee tasting were tastings of a bunch of teas. I ended up buying the lemon tea- it tasted good on my sore throat. The video is Melissa poking a plant that furls it's leaves when touched.

She's so tiny and adorable! Spoke the entire time while smiling

Grounding the roasted beans

The nocturnal little rascal dodge my camera forever- he won. 

Roasting beans while balancing the hat on my messy bun

Most expensive coffee...tasted like $h*t (haha jk I just don't like coffee)

Following the plantation tour we headed to Ubud where we went to the monkey forest! So many monkeys!! 

Was taking a picture of myself when some monkeys started acting up a few feet away.

Following the monkey forest we went to a temple (hence the white shirt thrown on out of courtesy) and the required sarong. Despite Indonesia being the biggest Muslim country in the world, Bali is mostly Hindi. We passed quite a few temples throughout the day.

Chilling with my peeps

Everywhere we went we saw people balancing items on their heads- quite impressive

We left the temple, got stuck in some major traffic and had Made buy us a dinner of local food before returning to the hotel. He said we'd get overcharged so he hopped out and bought it for us. He described the food as suckling pork- so I was thinking tender shredded pork. It ended up being crispy like bacon and had some questionably fatty parts. After such a long day with losing my voice, anything was gonna be fine at that point!