8. Coasting (Amy's)

From ubud, it's pleasant to drive 35 km into the countryside up to the lip of one of the volcanic calderas, and look down into its lake and the new cone building inside the caldera, and up to the high peak on one side of the rim. It's even more pleasant to rent some mountainbikes, and a guide, and ride the whole way down. We had so much fun. Craig, Ketut, Jerry, Allen and I joined an English couple and a biker from Belgium and our 2 guides (one named Koleh) and 2 sag wagons. They gave us pretty nice bikes and took us on a really nice route. So quiet, so beautiful and so friendly.

I didn't realize that many roads in Bali are as wide as they need to be, which means wide enough for 2 small motorbikes to pass. We occasionally saw bigger traffic, but mostly we were on narrow well-paved roads and a few that went into the countryside and were more potholey so that mountain bikes were a great thing to have. Up at the top of the mountain, we were in communities where people grow forests of a kind of acacia wood, for carving, and some dryland rice, and chillies, and corn fields, and tangerines, and bananas. Our route took us through a number of small villages, and apparently the passing of the bikers is an event many of the locals look forward too. Lots of kids were waiting for us, calling "hallo! hallo!" and we have a cute picture of one group of four young kids all waiting for us with their four adorable black and white puppies. "Hallo! hallo!" The parents don't seem to mind and everyone is quite cheerful as we bike by. We saw folks harvesting rice, drying rice, carving, washing, hanging out. Lower down, we came into rice paddies with bananas and coconuts. Lower down, we started to have a few nice dips into gullies, and out again. Sometimes the road would curve along the edge of a canyon so you could look down into the tops of glistening coconut palms. Sometimes it would be in woodlands, or along rice paddies with ducks. Once or twice we'd pass clusters of villagers threshing and some wore the traditional javanese headcloths that usually you only see in old paintings.

I would do this again in a heartbeat. The breeze is cooling, it's easy to coast downhill and the quiet and peace of the countryside was really nice. Wish all of Bali was so quiet and easy! Lower down the roads get congested. But up high, on a bike, the world sure is peaceful and cool!