by Eric.

We decided to ride north out of Ubud up the side of the volcano to the big crater at the top. Almost all day we went uphill. As we got closer to the top it got steeper.

The first 20k, we reached the town of Tegullalung (sp?) and passed a lot of wood carving shops. Shop after shop after shop. Piles of identical sculptures sat outside the shops like they were junkyards, except they had just been made. You had the ever poplular man holding his baseball bat-sized penis, stools painted like frogs, and generally the kind of stuff Joan says you see all over Santa Cruz, Calif.

From a nice man named Gede (pronounced exactly the way an Australian says hello), we bought some particularly huge items, which you don't see in the states very often. (Sorry we gotta keep a secret; they're gifts).

(Editor's note: they were beautiful, hand-carved doors. And they never arrived. They were supposed to be wedding gifts. We ordered in January 98 and they were supposed to get to California by July 98. It's now Jan. 99 and they still haven't arrived. So beware of Gede. If the doors ever do arrive, or if we get our money back, we'll change this warning).

We paid more to ship them than to buy them. Gede's shop looks just like my Uncle Bob's basement: dimly lit and dusty carvings all over the place. One difference: Gede tracks his inventory on a computer.

Buying these things is a little like buying a car. First you buy the item, then the packing, then the documents, then finally the shipping. We added everything up and bargained for a final number and paid in dollars. Gede thought we were buying the carvings to resell them at home. We told them they were gifts and he didn't believe us.

The whole thing reminded Joan of something a friend said long ago about visiting the Third World: You must resist the temptation to become an importer-exporter.

Although Bali is shaped like Maui, the topography is very different. On Bali the rain has created lots of deep trenches that run straight down the hillside. This makes it difficult to travel around the volcano--when you travel across there are major dips in the roads. It is much easier to ride directly up or down the volcano. Several roads run up and down the volcano, not many run across it.

We made a wrong turn onto one of these transverse roads. It went down steeply to a short bridge, which crossed an extremely narrow ravine about 40 feet deep. We stopped to admire the view. A pickup truck also stopped. A woman with a huge basket of Hindu offerings (woven banana and coconut leaves filled with flower petals and sometimes a little food, like rice grains or banana slices) got out and placed a few of the boxes and some burning incense on a statue at the end of the bridge. She waved wet flower petals over the pile, then got in the truck which drove off. All of the bridges on Bali have at least one guardian statue, and the statues always have offerings.

After an hour we stopped to take some picture of some rice terraces. It took a few minutes to get the camera out and pretty soon several people were around us trying to sell us those stupid chopstick holders. "One dollar," a man said. Then he saw my brand new leather boots hanging on the back of my bike. "I trade for shoes," he said. I paid $100 for those shoes. I didn't trade.

We stopped for a cold drink in a surprisingly clean little shop about 20k north of Ubud. We practiced our Indonesian with a very nice young woman named Putu (in some classes, Putu is used in place of Wayan). She's married and has a two year old baby. That was the extent of our Indonesian at the time. She also has memorably perfect teeth.

We asked if she grew up in the villlage. She said she came from a village about 5km away. I played the horn for her and she recognized Yesterday, by the Beatles.

Just after we left it started to rain a little. People walked by with umbrellas or banana leafs over their heads. A few minutes later it started pouring. We kept riding but we didn't see too many people out at all in the really heavy stuff. It lasted about 30 minutes.

The last 20k before the top is sparsely populated by Bali standards. Traffic was light. Also the people we saw didn't yell to us so much.

The extravagant temple entrances came right up to the road. Dogs wandered around the road and slept in the temple doorways.

About 5km from the top we started passing roadside fruit stands, mostly selling rambutan, a hairy-skinned red fruit containing a sweet, white grape-sized center with a seed. Our guide book is quite enthusiastic about all Indonesian food. I'm not so enthusiastic, but Joan did like the rambutan, which she had tried in Costa Rica. The guidebooks are also enthusiastic about beers here, but the beers are awful.

I thought about buying some rambutan out of sympathy or maybe pity. It seemed like few people travelled the road, and we passed quite a few fruit stands. I didn't have pity for that many. I don't understand how it could be worth it to sell fruit here.

We started at about 1,000 feet, and the top was about 5,000 feet. The view from the top was great, but the town wasn't. The top of the volcano is actually a giant deep crater. In the middle of the crater is another volcano. So the view from the top is of a mountain in a hole: a marsupial volcano. The "joey" volcano is active and it smoked the whole time we were there. In the 1960s it wiped out a town in the crater. You could clearly see where the lava had flowed and the roads had been rerouted around the black ooze of rock.

I would be too chicken to live in the shadow of a smoking mountain.

A uniformed man in a booth at the top charges an entrance fee for tourists who want to visit the crater floor. We didn't want to go to the crater floor, but we were confused so we paid anyway. It was only about 20 cents. For that we each got a stamped and stapled receipt. Bali loves these things: uniforms, stamps and staples.

While I paid, four young men swarmed around us, asking us the irritating list of questions we get from kids. They fingered everything on my bike, especially my horn. These guys seemed worse than most, and had a general thug-like look. They must have learned from American TV: long hair down to their eyes, baggy shorts, dirty T-shirts. And a screw-you manner. We left quickly.

We passed some fancy restaurants with great views over the volcano, all of them far over-priced by Bali standards. They were surrounded by postcard and trinket sellers. This is where the tour buses stopped.

We rode about 30 minutes along the crater rim to Hotel Miranda, in a town called Kintamani.

We were exhausted. Although the Hotel Miranda is not that great by Bali standards, it served pretty good food. We ate and crashed. Howling dogs woke us up over and over again. Later we met another couple that had stayed in the same room. Kelly said she didn't sleep at all that night---she was too spooked by the dogs and the hole in the ceiling. Instead she read a whole novel.

In the morning we ate breakfast and left.

The most interesting thing that happened to us in Kintamani was meeting a couple of antrhopologists at breakfast in the hotel. They had been working on Bali for six months. The woman was studying the relationship between people who live in the north of the island, and the mountains. We discussed the dogs that kept us awake. They said in some villlages at night the dogs gather in packs and can be quite intimidating. During the day they don't bother you, but at night, they sometimes try to bite.

I had been wondering about this. Dogs are all over Bali. Mostly they stink. I never touch them even though they will walk right into restaurants and beg, usually at a little distance. Also, they keep the cat population down, thereby keeping the rat population up. I thought someone owned the dogs. But mostly they're just freeloaders eating the Hindu offerings so carefully laid out for the gods, and whatever else they can get. They sleep a lot during the day so they can howl longer and louder at night. As far as I know Indonesians don't eat dog meat. Sometimes I wish they did.

I'm wondering. Monkeys are supposed to be smarter than dogs. Why do we see more dogs than monkeys on Bali?

Next: one of the most beautiful roads in the world.

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