@pfooti · 2025-07-21

July 17th: Munduk to Banjuwedang

Text heavy post. Not a lot of photos from our travels (I was not feeling well), but I’ve got some thoughts to put down in a text form, so this is a good spot for it. I’ll stick in some photo-is-unrelated stuff that I couldn’t work into earlier posts.

Thursday morning, Chrissy went birding. I slept in, and she didn’t take any pictures. But she saw a bulbul and a brown cuckoo-dove (or so she was told; that particular bird may not actually be present on Bali, but it was a brown dove looking thing regardless). We didn’t see the Balinese Starling at all (they’re quite rare now).

Bali has a lot of cockfighting. Much of it is illegal; the legal cockfights are held in temples on particular holy days, and are not to the death (the fight is ended after one bird is wounded). I don’t know if all the basket roosters are destined for cockfights, but there are a lot of good looking birds!

We get picked up by Balik (guide) and Mayat (driver), and we drive to the Naya Gawana resort in Banjuewedang. It’s just outside the West Bali National Park and Menjangan island, which are the reasons why we’re here. We plan on snorkeling in Menjangan tomorrow, and we’ll arrange a boat visit to the mangroves in the national park later.

Jackfruit look silly. They look like they were designed by committee. “Let’s make the fruit just stick straight out from the trunk of the tree at head height so people can find it more easily. Okay, but they have to have lots of little nubs on them to hold more easily.”

Along the way, we stop at a commercial pearl farm (Atlas Pearls) and learn about pearl farming. I knew that oysters needed to be seeded in order to get a pearl commercially, but I didn’t quite realize how it was done. First: the pearl “nucleus” is a pretty big sphere, not a sand grain. Gives the oyster a head start to make a big pearl. Second: the oyster doing the growing of the pearl gets a donation of mantle from an oyster that has a very nice colored shell. The mantle from the donor oyster will mostly determine the color of the pearl (kind of like grafting a fruit tree bud onto a rootstock, the oyster shown below is the rootstock). The mantle “donor” (I mean, it is a farm, all the oysters die eventually) supplies about twenty pearls worth of mantle (they cut it into little pieces and shove it in after the nucleus).

According to the marketing materials, most of the pearl workers are women. Here she is demonstrating inserting the nucleus into a prepped oyster. Also: these oysters don’t look like what I expect- they’re quite round, and a bit bigger than my palm.

One thing I think about a lot as we travel, and I keep thinking about it while we drive from Munduk to Banjuwedang is that our guides often don’t eat with us. Last year in Morocco, the tour guides did, but they were not local guides, they were the owner of the tour company and her assistant. But in general, we get brought into the restaurant, and then Balik says “okay, I’ll pick you up over there when you’re done” and he goes off. I would totally eat with him, and I’d even pay extra for the food, but it’s not a thing.

I spend a lot of time considering this; I know that when we are given welcome drinks (we always get a welcome drink at each hotel, and often at whatever other thing we are doing, like the cooking class from before), he gets one. I want to be welcoming and inclusive. On the other hand, when Chrissy and I were learning basics of Balinese cookery, he was hanging out in the guest area, scrolling instagram and eating snacks that the hosts had brought him. He may not even want to eat with us- this is his time off. I know if I had to eat hotel food all the time, I’d probably not jump at the opportunity to do more. I figure: at least I can try to be as easygoing of a job as possible, so Balik and Mayat don’t complain about me on the groupchat. I’d asked another guide if there was a whatsapp group where all the tour guides could share tricks and stories, and he laughed nervously and said no. I didn’t believe him.

“Okay boss, I carved that sphinx just like you asked.” “A realistic lady sphinx?” “Yep, I put in the shoulder boobs and everything.” “Great.”

Plus, it feels complicated and difficult to ask Balik to eat with us in a between-equals way. I know that I am overthinking this, but I don’t want people to feel condescended to. I don’t want to imply that he should want to hang out with us over dinner. I also don’t want to pressure him, to make him feel like he has to sacrifice his time off to sit and make more small talk or do more educating of us over his dinner break. I am torn about a dozen things just on this simple fact: our guides don’t eat lunch with us. If nothing else, this is a glimpse into the parts of Autism that I like the least. I am certain that neurotypical people know what to do here. They could have easily asked Balik if he wanted to eat with us, and graciously been like “sure” when he inevitably declined. Being Autistic is, at times, feeling like everyone else was born knowing how to talk to each other, and I’ve got to infer the rules from observation and feel all the anxiety and over-thinking that comes from it.

Anyway, I spend a lot of time thinking about all of this, and I don’t bring it up. We get to Naya Gawana.

I thought I’d add the only other photo I took on Thursday; the bed at Naya Gawana. Every place we have stayed has used a lot of fresh flowers every day to put little decorations everywhere. It is lovely, really.

I’ve been feeling kind of woogy all day. I took an Imodium this morning and it worked; I didn’t need a dozen bathroom breaks on the drive north. But still, felt woogy. By the time we get to the hotel, I’m feeling exhausted, and lay in that lovely bed.

Bali, like many other places Americans can visit, has tap water that makes most Americans sick. It is not dirty water or unhealthy, it just happens to have a mix of bacteria in it that Americans aren’t used to. So you order bottled water, and brush your teeth with filtered water (they give you all the filtered water you need in the hotel) and avoid fruit you cannot peel or leafy raw salads. You should also be careful of ice cubes (freezing doesn’t kill all the stuff, but most nice restaurants and hotels use filtered water for ice) and straws. Bali has a plastic straw ban, so there’s a lot of bamboo straws, and not everyone sterilizes the straw between uses. Anyway, yesterday while the cat named Foreshadowing looked on, we each drank a fresh juice that had ice cubes and a bamboo straw (we didn’t use the straws, but they were served with the straw in it). The ice was probably the culprit, or maybe it wasn’t the juice at the juice stand at all; there’s no way to know for sure, but we both got sick and that was the thing we had in common that was most sus. They call it Bali Belly, but it’s basically just one of any number of bugs getting a toehold in your gut and going to town. I’ll spare you the details, but they weren’t awful; my time in Morocco was worse, mostly fever, chills, and zero appetite.

So yeah. I hit a 104F fever thursday night. My phone has a “take your temperature” feature that is quite handy. Chrissy didn’t get above 101, and I don’t think she got quite as sick; she’s got a higher constitution score than I do. We traveled with azithromycin, so I took some, plus some ibuprofen, got into that lovely bed, and didn’t get out of it except to use the bathroom or drink water for the next sixteen hours. Does it count as sleep when you’re waking up from fever dreams every hour? The fever starts breaking by morning.

Sunset from our balcony at Munduk Moding Plantation, Tuesday night. If the clouds were not there, we would see the sea. The Bali Sea to be exact. Later that night, we’d see the Southern Cross and a bunch of other lovely stars. But that was a few nights ago from this post.

Spoiler alert: we got better, don’t worry. But that’s one big reason (plus wifi issues) these posts are a couple days backlogged; I really wasn’t brain-capable to write anything.

Someone likes putting rocks on top of other rocks almost as much as I do.

Conversation happens inside — sign in to Overstory to read and write comments.