July 16th: Munduk, Bali

When you travel as an American, you’re kind of always traveling in public. It is overstating things to say that everyone you meet while traveling speaks English, but it is not a far overstatement. For sure you have to assume everyone does. There’s currently a lot of French and German speaking travelers around us, they all communicate in English to the Balinese locals, with some exceptions like where i heard one tour guide giving an explanation in German to a family. Still, if Chrissy and I want to have a private conversation, it is a little difficult. Everything we talk about might be overheard. So we need a code.

Wednesday, we did one major and one minor outing. There’s also two pieces of foreshadowing in this post for upcoming stuff (I can say with the foresight of today being the 20th). The major outing was a trip to see some waterfalls. The minor was a tour of the coffee plantation we’re staying at. Let’s talk waterfalls first.

Fooled you; we’re doing some agricultural touring first. We got dropped off at a hotel with a sign pointing towards a trail that said “waterfalls”, but it didn’t mention that this would be a couple of kilometers through developed farmland first. It was pretty fascinating though. You may feel like you are walking through a jungle at times (not when you’re next to the rice paddies though), but you’re not. All the land around you that looks like jungle is cultivated. Cinnamon, clove, vanilla and coffee are all grown, three of those are just trees, and they’re typically not planted in the rigid layout of an American orchard.

I think I mentioned this earlier - Bali’s money economy is based on tourism (largest source of revenue by far) but its labor economy is farming (largest type of work by far, and probably under-counted at that, as many farmers are also artisans who help with the family rice plot). If nothing else, most families (according to our guide) have a rice plot that they all work. A twenty square meter rice plot yields enough rice to feed the family (Balik has 16 people in his family, only two of whom are working cash jobs, the rest are kids, retired, or work their own farms).

In that particular area (pretty high elevation), coffee grows well. So do hydrangeas. I didn’t take any pictures of the hydrangea farm, or of the hydrangea lei that they gave us when we checked in to the hotel, but they’re a pretty pungent flower. I wish I liked them more. I’ve smelled a lot of things in Bali, and only two of them have been really unpleasant to me: hydrangeas and one variety of snakeskin fruit (more on that later) - the first snakeskin fruit I ate was great, but some of the other varieties turn me off.

After walking through a lot of jungle farm, we got to the first waterfall. At the botanical gardens yesterday I was messing around with focal plane, today I was messing around with exposure. I am really terrified I’m going to come out of this trip wanting to be a camera nerd. Like CAD, I refuse to learn about cameras, because I know I’ll fall into an endless well of stuff and knowledge, and my brain is full right now. But anyway, here’s some waterfall shots.

From there it was a short hike to an enormous staircase, and I do mean enormous. The guide said it was only 175 steps, but most were pretty uneven. We passed up the opportunity to see waterfall number three, since it was another 400 stairs. You basically hike along the top of the ridge, and then the stairs take you down into a valley to see the waterfall, but you have to climb back up to get out and see the next. Or turn back, if that’s your jam.

There, we get to another waterfall.

After we get back up the Steps of Doom, we stop off at a little shop / coffee spot for some juice, and then it’s back to the hotel for the coffee tour.

The coffee plantation (Munduk Moding, where we are staying) is quite lovely. They grow a lot of coffee locally, and also buy and roast beans from local farmers. There’s a general tour and a cupping. The coffee is okay. I have pretty specific tastes; the Balinese style of coffee prep doesn’t agree with that (it’s not bad, just not for me). Asking for a v60 prep of the honey process coffee yields a pretty good cup. I like it, just not enough to find room in the luggage to bring it home.

Dinner was fish stew served in a coconut. On the one hand, I am wrong when I say “all Balinese stews tend to overcook their meats”, since I have had a lot of really good curries since I wrote about this phenomenon a few days back. But on the other hand, this stew was pretty overcooked. The stew parts were delicious, but the filet fish kind of got dried out in the process of cooking it. The squids and shrimps were great, though. Difficult to cook something with such different rates, so I sympathize.