The Magic Northern Bali

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It was going to be another long day with a full tour scheduled visting the far northern area of Lovina Beach - where the sand is black however we unanimously decided to deviate from the tour plan and shorten it up so we never did get to see the black beach. We did visit this beautiful Lake Beretan with the floating temple of Ulun Danu. I don't quite understand it but apparently this lake has tides so I'm not sure how that works? I'll have to ask about this because there are only so many questions you can ask as you walk along and everything is so new and fascinating. At this stop we saw them replacing the roof on one of the temples - it looked like very heavy work as the material they use for the roof comes from a type of palm tree and they have large sections that they raise at one time.
We visited an area called Pupuan and Antosari and this is where we could see for miles and miles the rice terraces that account for a large percentage of rice grown in Bali. I now know there is red and black rice as well as the others that are more common. We had the black rice for lunch - it's more of a desert rice and it tasted burnt so it didn't taste that good - but it didn't taste that bad either. You serve it with co-conut milk so it's very low in fat as you can imagine. We had lunch overlooking the rice terraces and that is always a treat! VERY narrow winding roads up to this spot. I'm sure glad I wasn't driving.
The drivers by the way are absolutely fantastic defensive drivers. I have no idea how they manage to negotiate our transport through this crazy traffic without killing someone or us being killed but so far they have managed it; I hope their luck continues! We stopped at a local market on the way back and this fruit stall where I attempted to buy fruit wanted $48.00 - yes $48.00 which is 480,000 rupias. I had about half dozen of the small bananas, and some other fruit which I can't recall the name of but will learn what they re so that I can remember them to share later... anyway needless to say I did NOT buy the fruit. What I bought later was some of the "mongoose" not monkey crap coffee to bring home. It was a bit indulgent at $20.00 for a very small bag but I wanted you all to have the opportunity to try some coffee that tastes like shit, if you will excuse my expression BUT that is what it is... They feed the mongoose coffee beans and the mongoose apparently only choose the very BEST beans to eat - they don't eat the lesser in quality ones - they must be VERY smart ... anyway, they eat the beans, they are processed through their feces and then collected and processed until they of course are very clean. Apparently each plantation would likely have 1 mongoose and would collect enough dung to make 1 cup of coffee a week. $20.00 is a LOT of money to these people.

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