Bali

Bali was a beautiful tropical island. When the Dibbs were describing it for us they told us it was like the Hawaii of Asia. It is a very different world on that island than the small world that I live in. Just coming in to the airport and getting a ride to our hotel at night was a scary thing. We got off the airplane to a dilapidated airport and when we got outside there were a lot of people hanging around trying to get us to pay them to take us some place. When we got in a taxi to go to our hotel, we stopped at the first stop light and a sad 5-6 year old begged outside our window. Joe gave him some money and then his mom came up to us with her 1 year old strapped to her and looked at us with sad eyes with her hand held out. After being in Singapore, arguably one of the cleanest countries in that region, Bali seemed quite dirty. There was trash all along the roads and graffiti in lots of places. There were dilapidated buildings lining the roads that often looked like they could use repairs, but even the new buildings didn't look as finished as they would probably look here. We had to pass 2 guard gated checkpoints in order to get into our hotel, and then a metal detector to enter the lobby. Once we got in, it was absolutely gorgeous. The next few pictures are taken on the grounds of the resort.


The view from our window, the beach is just beyond the trees to the left.

When you got away from the city, there would be large rice paddies, and they were so green and lush and beautiful. There was one area that we stopped at where they terraced a whole hill and the effect was breathtaking:

We asked our driver who owned this and he said it was owned by one family one large family.
Here is another rice paddy, the house behind it was not typical.Our driver was lucky, his father in law saved up enough money until he could buy a car for his daughter's husband so that he could be a driver. Our driver said that he lived with his wife and child, his mother and father-in-law, two aunts and two of his siblings. He did say that there was a garage to park his car in. For Bali it was a nice car, but for America it was just an average car- it had 7 seats, but was more like a station wagon than a van.

The roads were full of people on motorcycles. They did not restrict motorcycles to their own lanes, they were allowed to pass between cars. A two lane road would have 3 deep motorcycles then a car, then another motorcycle then another car. They had all learned to drive like this, and although it seemed very unsafe, we didn't see any accidents while we were there. Here is the view as we are stopped at a red light. In the rural areas it was even crazier, what would be a one lane road here was a two lane road with motorcyclists on either shoulder.
When you came to parking lots, you would see more motorcycles than cars.

The driver was often paying to park- even if we just pulled in to use an ATM, or he would pay a man who helped him back into traffic. In the little booths along the side of the road there were often jars that looked like Mason quart jars with yellow liquid in them. When we asked, the driver said that that was petrol-gas. The top of the jars would be covered with plastic like a plastic baggy. We saw all sorts of crazy things on the scooters- a family of 5, women riding side saddle so they could ride with a sarong, even a woman texting while driving the scooter. One woman had two small children with her, so she tied the youngest to her.

The other thing that surprised me about the country was how much trash was everywhere. We visited "sacred" sites that would have trash in the forest within the site. There were workers there, so you would assume that they would pick it up, but the trash had obviously been there for a while. Here is a picture of a large pile of trash next to a fairly nice river. From the looks of it, it wasn't a designated trash disposal area, but there it was. The rivers generally were very dirty and polluted and even the ocean and the beaches were fairly dirty.
This is a picture of the water directly surrounding the Royal Temple with all of the pagodas I posted about earlier. If you look at the water at the top most part of the picture you can note that all of the things floating in it are plastic water bottles. Since this is next to a temple you would think that would be a place that would be clean, but apparently it is not part of their culture.
I really did enjoy seeing a different place and to see how other people half a world away live!