I’m using a pretty broad definition of art in this context, covering everything from fine art to handicrafts to ancient structures. All of that stuff UNESCO crams under the rubric of Tangible Cultural Heritage. And even the performing arts UNESCO considers Intangible Cultural Heritage. Close to our entire purpose in visiting other places is to see how those cultures express ideas about beauty, truth, and history.

I’ve already written about crafts and performance in Java, so for the purposes of this post I’m narrowing my definition of art to museums and galleries. But as you’ll see, that leaves a pretty wide range of expression on the table.

ArtJog

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. Our stay in Bali coincided with their annual arts festival, Pesta Kesenian Bali. That same luck of the calendar delivered us to Yogyakarta during their annual arts festival, ArtJog. Staged at the Jogja National Museum and lasting five weeks, each year’s festival is curated around a theme. This year’s theme is Motif: Amalan, and is incomprehensible even by the standards of ArtSpeak.

To be fair, this morsel was translated from Indonesian (by ArtJog, by the way – I didn’t just run the original through Google Translate), but I really don’t think that’s the problem.

Thankfully, comprehending this year’s motif wasn’t necessary to appreciating the work that their rubric prompted. I’m pretty sure there was work on display that pre-existed, but the vast majority of the work was created for the show. This is a prestigious exhibition, and artists step up to be included.

The entrance to the museum drops you right into it, with a massive piece called Secret of Eden. Tree roots grow out of the ceiling and spotlights cast eerie shadows on the walls. You walk through the door and enter another, alien world. It’s a brilliant way to bring you into the exhibition.

This gives you a real feeling for the overall space.

Once past Secret of Eden, the rest of ArtJog is more traditional arts festival fare: paintings, sculpture, ceramics, kinetic art, multimedia pieces… But the range of expression and the quality of the work was impressive. We actually came back for a second visit, rather than racing through. There was a lot to see.

One of our favorite pieces was called Rupa tan Matra, which roughly translates to Unmeasurable Work, referring to the labor women put into the home. To us, it was the Cotton Kitchen, every item made completely of cotton. We were allowed to enter the room and get up close. The vision and the craftsmanship were perfectly aligned.

Here are some highlights from the rest of the show. We’ll warm you up with some traditional media.

This one needs its own explanation. There were about 8-10 of these in a white room. They all just looked like blurs, but after staring, and some strategic squinting, the underlying images came into soft focus. But they didn’t have any definition until I saw them through the camera lens, which picked up contrasts the human eye couldn’t make out. I always think of cameras as capturing what we see, but it’s clear cameras see differently than we do. This photo is what the camera saw, not what I saw.

And we’ll close out with the installations and oddities.

Sonobudoyo Cultural Museum

We’re always interested in what the kids are up to, but it’s hard to understand the modern context without going back to the source. The new work riffs on traditions, so it’s important to see both sides. The Sonobudoyo’s focus on Indonesia’s rich cultural heritage is the perfect counterpoint to ArtJog’s commitment to the moment.

While we’d seen many of the more modern exhibits, like the masks and puppets, in other contexts, seeing the ancient work, going all the way back to the Neolithic era, was wonderful.

The closest the curators could get to dating the Neolithic pieces was “1st Millennium,” which is pretty loose. You’d hope they could narrow it down a little tighter than a thousand-year window, but this stuff is pretty fucking old, no matter where it falls on that spectrum.

There was also a nice collection of the expected puppets and masks.

We’ll close out our visit to the Sonobudoyo with a random collection of Other Shit.

Wahanarata Royal Carriage Museum

This was a very strange place, and Dorothy and Nef had very different responses to it than I did. They thought it was a museum devoted to a particular slice of vehicular history, and I thought it was a monument to oppression, and couldn’t figure out why Indonesians tolerated its presence. Not that far apart, really.

Admittedly, there were some sharp wheels on display, all from roughly 1900, plus or minus. They were all royal carriages, and they were almost all Dutch, which is the part I struggled with. The Dutch permitted Indonesian royalty to exist only to the extent that they were agreeable puppets. It was easier for the Dutch to stand behind the throne than in front of it, with the Indonesian royal families serving as a wafer-thin fig leaf both concealing and legitimizing Holland’s brutal rule.

As part of this arrangement, the Dutch provided the royal families with carriages, toys intended to make them feel important. Modern. European. In the same way that Western dress infiltrated Indonesian society under Dutch rule. The condescension of the Dutch comes through loud and clear, although I’m less inclined to indict the Indonesians for complicity. Life during wartime…

All of which would have been fine if the carriages had been displayed with any shred of this history attached. They’re not simply artifacts of transportation history, they have meaning and intention. The signage was neutrally informative when it could have provided depth and context to the displays. It seemed like a curiously deliberate omission.

Contrast that with Bali’s Bajra Sandhi Monument in Denpasar, which featured historical vignettes, by way of charming dioramas, of key events in Bali’s history, with plenty of space given over to Dutch fuckery. If you walked into the Wahanarata with no knowledge of Indonesia’s history the displays would leave you with the distinct impression that the Dutch were kindly, generous carriage makers. If I were Indonesian I would want to burn the whole thing down. Or at least guest curate.

But Dorothy and Nef weren’t wrong (even though they deemed me a humorless git who couldn’t just appreciate a nice collection of antiques). There were some outstanding examples of the carriage arts on display. Why not simply enjoy them for what they are, rather than what they mean?

The Sultan’s Palace

A funny thing about the Sultan’s Palace museum is that it’s actually the Sultan’s palace. The current Sultan. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but Yogyakarta is a monarchy, whose Governor is the Sultan. Or whose Sultan is the Governor. The current Sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, wields official state power as payback for the then sultan’s support for independence during the post WWII revolution.

Chunks of the Sultan’s ancestral home have been turned into exhibits and opened to the public. But he still lives there. I said it was a funny thing, but it’s also an interesting thing, with exhibits focused around court life.

Like the illustration of troops, there were also hats and parasols on display that codified fine-grained definitions of role and status in the court. A lot of attention was given to these distinctions, in large part, I think, because it was all the Dutch let them do. They were cosplaying as rulers, making the cosplay itself the only thing they could control.

Every single design element of each of these hats communicated detailed information about the wearer’s position at court and relationship to the Sultan.

The same with the parasols. Color and pattern were an elaborate code, decipherable by every one at court.

Wet Ground

There’s a nimbus of ArtJog-adjacent galleries that pop up with shows coincidental with the main event, and ArtJog publishes a helpful listing of who’s doing what. We went to a popup craft market and found a maker of shagreen leather accessories, we found a gallery with breathtaking modern takes on traditional batik, and we visited Wet Ground, a little gallery with a small but choice smattering of wall art. You know. Art.

Monggo Chocolate Kingdom

If you think this stretches the definition of art to the breaking point, fine. You can just stop reading. I put it at the end on purpose. I think that the crafting of chocolate directly speaks to beauty, truth, and history. Rather than agreeing to disagree, perhaps we can just agree that you’re very narrow-minded.

But lest you think I’m shoehorning a factory and tasting tour into this post, Monggo did start out with a museum. Of chocolate art. Packaging, marketing posters, anything and everything chocolate-related.

The art was swell and the company history was interesting, but the truth is we just love factory tours. There’s something hypnotic about seeing things manufactured, the elegance of the orchestration required to make sure all the moving parts are moving in sequence. I’m hard pressed to imagine what I’d be disinterested in seeing manufactured. Turkey franks? Sure. Hula hoops, toilets, cardboard boxes, tires… Yes, yes, yes, and yes. It’s a human/machine ballet whose choreography never fails to entrance.

But they had a museum of chocolate posters, so it counts for this exercise. Don’t like it? Think I’m willfully blurring taxonomic boundaries? Get your own blog.

Chocolate in Indonesia is a Dutch hangover. Along with the twitching. Cacao itself was brought over by the Spanish in the 1500s, but the Dutch amped that up into large-scale production for export when they took the reins. Meaning that there’s really no historical legacy of chocolate consumption in Indonesia. That said, a handful of entrepreneurs have set their sights on creating modern artisanal chocolate, leveraging Indonesia’s still potent cacao production.

Monggo which means yes, please in Indonesian, is one of those ventures, founded by a Belgian expat in 2005 because he missed the chocolate from home. It’s grown from a one-man business, peddled from the back of a pink Vespa, into a thriving venture. At its pre-pandemic peak, Monggo employed over 160 people and produced 300kg of finished chocolate per day. When they outgrew their modest space in Yogyakarta, they moved to the spacious ‘burbs and christened the compound an entire Chocolate Kingdom.

The Kingdom includes the production facility, all behind glass so you can follow the process, the museum of chocolate art, and a shop/tasting lounge. As part of our modest entrance fee we were assigned a docent who stayed with us the whole way through, helpfully explaining the process and answering questions.

Truthfully, I could watch this all day. I think there’s something wrong with me.

This was followed by mixing and molding and packaging, but there’s nothing quite like seeing raw ingredients transformed, as if by alchemy, into something entirely new.

How did it end? In a potlatch of chocolate, of course. After touring the production facility, we decamped to the shop and tasting lounge where we picked up enough truly excellent chocolate to last the rest of our trip. Our favorites were the mango, unsurprisingly, and the rendang, which caught us by surprise. Rendang is a spice mix used for cooking beef in Indonesia, and we didn’t expect to find it in chocolate. But we’re glad we did.

We enjoyed bowls of their house-made gelato while we waited for our car. You’ll be shocked to hear that the chocolate gelato was very, very, good.

Silver

Kotagede has been a silversmithing center for hundreds of years, dating back to the onset of the Mataram empire in the 16th century. They are known, as they have been all along, for incredibly delicate and detailed filigree work. Impossible to count, and no one seems to have made the effort, but the eyeball test suggests easily more than 100 silversmiths just in Kotagede, let alone the rest of Yogyakarta.

Our first stop was Bagus Silver, a little shop we just wandered into at random. It was the first silver we’d seen, and we were quite taken.

Then we found the big kahuna, HS Silver, a shop that has been operating since the 1950s. Part of their manufacturing operations were onsite, which they walked you through, which was pretty entertaining. But the shop was the highlight. The quality of their fine filigree work was head and shoulders above the other shops we visited.

They’re a nearly vertical operation, short of actually owning a silver mine. The raw silver comes from Western Java, but after that HS does everything else. They smelt it themselves, so they can control the mix, adding just 2% copper into the silver. The highest government designation is .925, but HS silver is 98%.

They cast their own silver bars, and extrude it into the thin sheets they use to create fine wire of different gauges. The frames are slightly heavier than the interiors, and they even use silver powder to solder the joins.

It doesn’t seem like human hands should be able to do anything both this precise and tiny.

Another level of precision that seems ever so slightly inhuman.

The massive showroom, unsurprisingly, was the standout. The range and the quality were truly impressive.

As is well documented by scientists, tourism is an extractive process, and we extracted happily and thoroughly.

The Taman Sari Tourist Village

You can enter the Tourist Village from the street, but the heart of it is right off the Taman Sari Water Palace. It’s a residential complex that has some complex relationship to Yogyakarta’s Sultan that we couldn’t quite tease out. Some people seem to live rent free in exchange for using their homes as shops, and the Sultan wanted to take some of it back to create luxury housing but the peasants revolted. All told to us anecdotally in broken English, so details are hard to pin down. Wikipedia was, sadly, of no use.

Regardless, the village has quite a few little shops spread about, all, for the most part, combination workroom and retail. We got to watch people work and then buy things from them. Buying things is what we do best.

Waroeng Loekis

The very first shop after entering from the Water Palace is Waroeng Loekis, full of outrageous paintings and painted t-shirts from a painter and his wife. Really lovely people, and work that’s whatever the superlative of vibrant is. Vibrating? When I came back with Nef she had to get a t-shirt, too. Different art, but we’ll definitely have to avoid wearing them at the same time. Or not.

Voice of Jogja

The shop right next door was also t-shirts and prints, but it couldn’t have been more different. Here, the designer took traditional characters from the Ramayana and did them up as classic comic book superheroes, à la John Buscema or Bernie Wrightson. This is a documented sweet spot for us, the modern twist on traditional techniques and motifs. The artist’s goal was to recontextualize the old stories for a younger generation, to make them relevant and keep them a part of current culture, not just the dusty past. Check!

Of course, I bought a couple of shirts. They heat transfer on premises, so I picked the size and shirt color and they did the transfer while we were there. I picked two that focused on the Punakawan characters the Indonesians inserted into their tellings of both the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They decided the stories wasn’t funny enough, so they added four characters for comic relief. Semar, parent of the other three Punakawan: Gareng, Petruk, and Bagong.

Diva Galleri

Our final stop was a little shop we found by accident. It looked like a coffee shop from the outside, advertising Kopi Luwak, but we’d already done the civet dance, so we were prepared to pass it by. But a peek inside revealed… puppets! And masks! And batik paintings!

We walked away with an absolutely stellar Wayang puppet, Kamajaya, the god of love. He came as part of a matched pair with his wife, Kamaratih, but he was a little expensive so we split the lovers up. He’s made of painted water buffalo leather and his central support is a piece of carved water buffalo horn. The shop proprietor made all of the puppets.

Wayang Kulit Gift Shop

We went to a performance of the shadow puppets, the Wayang Kulit. Or that’s what we thought. As it happened, through a little cross-cultural miscommunication, we saw the Wayang Orang instead, a masked dance. No puppets. But the gift shop at the performance space had the puppets, so we spent quality time there pre-show.

We didn’t understand at first that Sulistyo, the enthusiastic guy showing us around, was actually the master puppet maker. He made all the puppets for the Wayang Kulit and all the puppets in the shop. We thought he was just really into it, but it was great to pick up pieces directly from the creator. I felt better about separating Kamajaya and Kamaratih, knowing that we’d created space for our very own Krishna, the god of protection, compassion, tenderness, and love. That’s two gods of love! In one house! Three, counting me.

Lurik

While batik is the star of the show in Java, there’s a completely separate weaving tradition called lurik, which simply means stripes. There’s a hotbed of it in the Bantul neighborhood, right next to where we’re staying in Kotagede, so we massed the troops for a field trip. The goal: two workshops and a store.

Dibyo Lurik

Our first stop was Dibyo Lurik, a small workshop with a single weaver onsite. They work with other weavers, which they’d have to, as this one poor woman could produce only seven meters of fabric in a full day.

After marinating in batik’s riot of color and pattern, the austere beauty of the lurik felt like a palette cleanser. I wasn’t expecting to be enchanted by subtlety, but there you go. The very definition of travel being broadening.

I checked prices as we were looking through the goods, and reported that the lurik was 350,000 rupiah/meter, about $20. Not an unreasonable cost for artisanal hand-loomed fabric, but a substantial amount regardless. It turns out that I couldn’t process what I’d actually been told, which was 35,000 rupiah/meter, because $2/meter for this fabric was literally incomprehensible. We loaded up.

Tenun Lurik “Kurnia”

Our next stop was what seemed to be the largest lurik producer in Bantul. Where Dibyo Lurik had a single loom and a very tired woman, Tenun Lurik “Kurnia” (tenun means weaving) had several rooms full of active looms.

The work at Kurnia was even more beautiful than what we saw at Dibyo.

Ardjo Lurik

Our final stop was a little shop, Ardjo Lurik. The shopkeeper was napping when we arrived, but got up and opened up for us. She doesn’t weave lurik herself, but uses what’s produced in the neighborhood for her own creations.

Baskets

We’d birddogged a shop called Mercia Natural Baskets, but what we didn’t know was that it was in the center of an entire basket district. We went to visit a store and had fallen into a field trip, all unbeknownst.

The basketry came in all shapes and sizes, but the most spectacular form was, hands down, lampshades. They existed in every combination of refined vs. rough, symmetric vs, asymmetric, organic vs. abstract. The range was dizzying, and the saddest part was that there was not a single piece of a scale that permitted bringing it home. Oh, we discussed it, we strategized, we planned. And while theoretically possible, we abandoned our schemes and settled in to just enjoying them for themselves, and not as potential loot.

Still. We are Olympic-level looters, and it hurts to be thwarted. We are bad at unrequited.

Here’s an overview of the extraordinary range.

And some standout individual pieces.

Glass

Nestled into the basket district was a lone, dusty outpost of the glass arts. We’d seen their specialty before, at a shop in Ubud in Bali. Glass vessels are slumped over natural wood so the two pieces fit together perfectly. It’s a lovely effect, but what we saw in Bali was much more modest in scale, more tumblers-on-coasters than the sculptural pieces on display at Deco Glass.

Parri Genuine Stingray Shagreen

We’d gone to several of the small exhibitions ancillary to ArtJog, Yogya’s annual art show, and this one found us out in the hinterlands at an eco-spa and restaurant called Yabbiekayu. Nef found a table with little stingray leather bracelets, which turned out to be the merch outlet of a real store. It’s not like we had options at that point. We had to go.

First, let it be said that the stingray skins are ethically sourced. They’re not endangered, nor are they harvested for their skin. They are fished for meat, and before the owner/designer had his epiphany to use them for luxury leather, the skins were just trashed. So, recycling. Super green.

Whew! That’s a lot. It’s one of the reasons we’ve found Indonesia so compelling. In our ongoing game of Would You Live Here, Indonesia gets an upvote for its accessible language, it’s ridiculously low cost of living, its friendly folk, it’s delightful beaches, and it’s rich cultural offerings. We’ve loved Indonesia, and we only just scratched its surface.

Batik is a particular flavor of wax resist dying, which has been a thing since ancient times, having been practiced in Egypt, southern China, India, and different parts of Southeast Asia. Javanese batik techniques are the most sophisticated of the various flavors, although it’s impossible to put a precise date on their origins. UNESCO estimates that the local traditions are over a thousand years old.

One of our very first stops in Yogyakarta was Malioboro Street, the downtown batik mecca. Half the stores sell batik, the other half sell bakpia, little cakes filled with sweet flavored mung bean paste, and the final half are snack emporia. Yep, come to Escape Velocity for the highfalutin Latin plurals. Stay for the math jokes.

Batik Junwita

The very first shop we visited on Malioboro was Batik Junwita. We were not prepared. Batiks come in several flavors, the primary distinction being true batiks, which are made by hand by applying wax as a dye resist in various layers, and prints, which mimic batik patterns but are printed commercially. Shops that sell printed batiks look much like other clothing stores, but louder. There will be a rack with a particular design in multiple sizes, and if you see something you like in a print you can ask and they’re likely to have it in stock in other sizes.

But real batik fabrics are hand made, one at a time, so literally every garment and piece of fabric in these shops is unique. If it doesn’t fit, too bad, but more to the point, it’s actually disorienting to be in a retail store with zero duplication. The range of choices in any one shop is dizzying, and there are hundreds of these shops all over Yogyakarta, a lot of them on Malioboro. It’s impossible not to get swirly eyes. Here’s Junwita. Quite the introduction.

One of the hallmarks of the shirts, even inexpensive shirts made from the printed batik, is the insane precision in the cutting and assembly. You can see it here on a shirt from Junwita, with the placket matching the pattern practically to the centimeter. The pattern tends to repeat in perfect symmetry on the back in a single piece. It’s stunt sewing at its finest.

Creative Batik

As I mentioned, Dorothy wasn’t bowled over by the batiks at first. A little loud and unsubtle for her tastes. Precisely why I loved them so. But then we found Creative Batik, which happened to be less than five minutes by foot from our apartment in Kotagede. It hadn’t come up in our research ahead of time, we just saw a sign for it on the corner. If we hadn’t been neighbors we’d have never found it.

This was the sweet spot Dorothy and I are always seeking: traditional techniques and motifs mixmastered through a modern sensibility. We seek that out wherever we go, and we found it in Yogyakarta, by accident, practically next door.

Here are the clothes we got at Creative. I picked out three pieces of fabric they made into custom shirts for me, and then bought another off the rack when I picked them up. The base price of the shirts, including the tailoring, was $32.

Batik Sastronegoro

A high end shop that we’d read about while doing our homework was Batik Sastronegoro, near the Taman Sari craft village. We went one evening, and, as has happened repeatedly here, the place didn’t seem to exist. We careened about looking for it and got picked up by a fellow who asked where we were headed. He promised to take us to Sastronegoro so we followed him. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it was dark, and we were wandering through tiny lanes and alleys, and while we currently outnumbered him, who knew how long that would last? Long enough, as it turned out, to arrive at a house where he knocked on the door. When they opened it up, it was… a batik shop. A closed batik shop that they opened for us.

It took a few minutes to piece it together, but Batik Sastronegoro had closed, and the family that operated it had reopened as Batik Tulis Griya Sentong. The guy who picked us up was a friend of the family, so he knew where to bring us.

Sastronegoro had a long, multi-generation tradition of producing beautiful, highly detailed work, and they were incredibly generous with their time and attention.

Dorothy and Nef both bought heirloom pieces, done by the clan’s grandmother about forty years ago.

But that wasn’t the end of the evening’s adventure, although it would have been enough. Our guide, in walking us back to the street, gently suggested that we might want to visit his father’s workshop. Not having been shanghaied so far, we figured we should say yes. New experiences, new adventures!

This was another form of batik that we’d seen in some shops, but nothing we’d looked at carefully. Whereas the fabric batiks were almost entirely abstract, some artists specialized in using batik as a technique for figurative illustration. Fabric paintings, basically.

Galeri Batik Jawa

We had one more place on the list we’d compiled from advance research: Galeri Batik Jawa, which specialized exclusively in indigo. We were surprised at how rich they were able to make a monochromatic palette look. We were expecting to be interested, but not enchanted. Silly us.

Babaran Segaragunung Gallery

One last, unintended batik adventure was in store. We were in Yogyakarta during their annual art extravaganza, ArtJog. The main event is at the national museum, but there are small galleries all throughout the area putting on ArtJog adjacent shows with local artists. We made our way to several, one of which was focused on textile arts. We didn’t know what that meant exactly, but shouldn’t have been surprised that it meant batik.

Which we discovered when we were finally able to get there. The producer had sent me a Google Maps link to the location, but you can’t put that directly into the ridesharing apps here, Grab and Gojek. So I entered the name of the gallery into Gojek manually, and it popped up as a destination. It dropped us off at what turned out to be the studio for the gallery, not the gallery itself. The people working there were mystified by our presence.

Having figured out the error, all I had to do was get Gojek or Grab to pick us up and take us to the right place. Which they’d have happily done had any cars been in the area, but we were in a noticeably non-urban location. We timed out on searches on both apps, and weren’t keen on the 45 minute walk to the gallery. Completely doable in the worst case scenario, but the day was already getting hot, and we’d trekked Parambanan and Borobudur the day before, so we weren’t feeling so fresh.

I reached out to the producer on WhatsApp and asked if she could send a car from her end, where they’d be more likely to be clustered. Her affirmative manifested in about ten minutes as a scooter carrying these two gentlemen.

The fellow in the back introduced himself as the gallery’s curator, and the gentleman in the front was one of the artists. That fellow, Lejar Daniartana Hukubun, had quite a story to tell.

After a little back-and-forth with the producer, it didn’t seem like a car would be forthcoming. I checked Grab again, and there was a car in the area. Our new friends clearly didn’t trust us to negotiate the taxi successfully, so they instructed our driver to follow their scooter. It only took an extra hour, but we finally made our way to the gallery.

There was a main gallery with major pieces that weren’t for sale. There were variations on batik as a technique that ranged from subtle to graphic.

The rest of the gallery was a little more like a store, but not one that seemed to have any experience actually selling things. Every time we asked the price of something either someone had to be called or intense head-to-head conversations occurred.

These two pieces were by the same fellow who did the blue pieces in the gallery. We would completely have bought one, as they were objectively spectacular, but they were so big, we couldn’t figure out how we’d display one. We were very, very sad to leave them behind.

The rest of the story there was about Lejar Daniartana Hukubun’s work. He’s written a story about the fuckery being perpetrated by the Indonesian government on the indigenous Malind tribe of Merauke in Western New Guinea. Shockingly, that fuckery is about land and resources. Lejar didn’t say, but we strongly suspect the Malind are his people.

Lejar has told this story in a book, in videos, in a modernized take on a Wayang puppet show, and in his own artworks, in both batik and illustration.

But of course, this all resolved in shopping. Given that they had sent ambassadors to rescue us, it was the least we could do. After much careful consideration, Dorothy settled on a positively stunning silk batik scarf. The ability to produce batik on silk at all, let alone at this level of detail and precision, is kind of mind-blowing.

Other Batik

Dorothy bought interesting, less elaborately produced fabric in other shops, too.

I found some full-on batik t-shirts at nDalem Mbah Bei in Taman Sari, but that was the only place I saw them. You’d think they’d be an obvious thing, but for whatever reason they’re rare. T-shirts with batik prints are in souvenir shops everywhere, but real batik, not so much.

And one final trip to Malioboro netted me a couple of last-minute keepers.

And here is my personal wall of regret, shirts I loved but didn’t get, either because they didn’t quite fit or I was very briefly overcome by common sense. After all, I bought more shirts in Java than in all our travels to date, I think. To say nothing of the ikats I got in Bali. Not to lapse into jargon, but I lost my shit here. Still, these are the ones that got away.

But Wait, There’s More…

One of the things Dorothy and Nef were most excited about in Yogyakarta was taking a batik class together. They took a two-day intensive class in Oaxaca on natural dying, and they were looking forward to learning enough batik technique to bring it home and use it on their own projects.

The challenge was finding a class geared towards practitioners, not ladies-who-lunch looking to make their own souvenirs. There’s a ton of those sorts of tourist enrichment activities here, from batik to silver to cooking classes. The trick is finding the classes geared to the serious student.

We thought we’d ask our new best friends at Creative Boutique, and to our delight they offered their own classes. They were four person classes and they only had one other attendee, so we bought the fourth seat and burnt it, just so we weren’t waiting for a random fourth to pop up. Or not pop up, and miss the whole thing.

They asked if I wanted to take the seat, since we were paying for it anyway, but I explained that my hands were like mittens, and I’d only hold everyone back. Having seen the pictures and heard what actually transpired during the class, that was a great call. That experience would have made me cry. And not in the good way.

The basic batik process is simple, in a sense. What makes it hard is the skill required to do it well. It’s a form of resist dying using wax as the resist medium. There are many ways to create a resist, from practical, like wax or paste, to physical, like tie-dyeing or shibori, where the knots in the fabric create places the dye can’t reach.

In batik, you apply wax to fabric and then dye it. The dye color doesn’t take wherever the resist has been used, so those areas are undyed. After dyeing, the fabric is boiled to remove the wax, and the process is repeated as many times as necessary to create the finished design. The more colors in the design, the more times the fabric has to go through the process. And the more time consuming and costly it is.

Tulis is the term for applying wax by hand. Tulis literally means handwritten. It can be applied by brush, but is most often applied with a small pen, called a canting, that has a reservoir for the molten wax. The wax can also be applied with a copper stamp called a cap. Dorothy has had a cap for years, as it’s a beautiful artifact in its own right. The C in Indonesian is a ch sound, by the way, so that’s tjan-ting and tjap.

Dorothy and Nef had originally wanted to learn both methods, at least until the teachers explained how the cap is actually done. Getting the wax onto the stamp in exactly the right amount, consistency, and temperature is hard enough, but then you have to turn it upside down without dripping and apply it to the fabric by hand, without any sort of jig to align it properly to the previously placed stamps. You could make a mistake on the final stamp and ruin an entire piece.

The canting takes enough precision on its own to be daunting, so the executive decision was made to skip the cap and stick to the tulis.

The goal was to come home with reusable knowledge, not just an artifact. Mission accomplished. Also, Dorothy and Nef were consistently awestruck at the batiks we saw after they took the class, burdened as they were by understanding just how very hard it is to execute with the level of precision on display.

Wayang Orang Sonobudoyo

We’d yet to see a shadow puppet performance, so I contacted the Sonobudoyo Museum, which stages performances of both live dance and shadow puppets. I specifically asked about the shadow puppets, and was given performance information for the Wayang Orang performance. Which I didn’t notice was one of the live masked dances, not the shadow puppets, which is Wayang Kulit. So we still haven’t seen the shadow puppets.

Which is sad, but it’s not like the dance is annoying. Plus, we’ve seen so many renditions of the Ramayana, we felt like we knew all the main story beats and could take it in like a local. But the Ramayana is big and wooly. It’s about 1,700 pages, or about 1.5 LoTRs, which is the preferred unit of measure for sagas. There’s a lot going on, and while it’s fundamentally Rama’s story, it doesn’t really progress in a straight line. Performances are, by definition, excerpts, so our previous experience didn’t wind us helping us out. This was a chunk of the Ramayana we’d never seen before.

Still, the fancy printed program had plot synopses for each of the seven scenes, which should help. Or, as it turned out, not. Here’s the outline of the evening’s performance from the program.

All well and good. But only tangentially related, it seemed, to the action on stage. To be fair, this first scene wasn’t actually part of the Ramayana. It was a bonus dance of young women coming of age. With birds on their heads. As they do.

Sorry for all the videos of the backs of people’s heads, btw. We were all of four rows back, but the seats weren’t raked. Bad theater hygiene. Bad.

The Ramayana started for real with what the program notes tell us is the Queen mooning about Arjuna to her rakshasi, shape-shifting evil demon warriors. Here, they appear to have shape-shifted into women with adorable kitty heads. Except for the actual demon, who apparently can’t be bothered to make the cat face.

We couldn’t map this to any part of the narrative as presented in the program. It appeared to be an opportunity for this delicious boy to hold very, very still so he could be stared at. And drooled over. There was definitely drool in that room.

Stabby McCatFace and Normal Lady have a mano-a-mano. We had no idea who these characters were, or what their relationship was to the plot outline. Doesn’t matter. No one doesn’t love delicate lady fighting.

The two champions square off. Mighty blows are struck.

The coup de grâce.

The final battle. Between a different pairing of Stabby McCatFace and Normal Lady. Because it never gets old.

It was all silly fun and we had an excellent evening out. Even though we never did get to see our shadow puppets.

Prambanan Ramayana Ballet

We had already been to Prambanan, as part of our day trip to Borobudur. What brought us back for a return visit was an outdoor ballet extravaganza staged in the shadow of the temples.

I’d attend an autopsy in that setting, but even that wasn’t an option. The major storm we’d enjoyed earlier in the day had subsided, but the grounds were soaked enough that the evening’s performance was moved to the indoor theater. Sad. Indoors or out, however, the audience still gave its all. We definitely felt out of place, unmasked as we were.

Still, this was the part of the Ramayana we were most familiar with from previous performances, which provided, as you might guess, absolutely no help in following the dance, because the story is so bonkers. Graciously, supertitles were projected onto a screen, so we had a boost. Let’s walk through it.

First this, which just seemed like a prelude with bows, no arrows. An amuse-bouche before the main action.

Rama, his wife, Dewi Sita, and his brother, Lakshmana, are wandering the Dandaka forest, having been banished from their kingdom for, the evidence suggests, excessive gorgeousness. A beautiful golden deer frolics in a clearing in the forest, and Dewi Sita, enchanted by it, begs Rama to chase it down and kill it. Because that’s what you do to things you admire. Or fear may be more beautiful than you.

Rama takes off to chase the golden deer, leaving Lakshmana in charge of Dewi Sita. Here we have the Dances With Deer interlude.

Soon, however, Lakshmana hears Rama calling for help, and leaves to come to his aid, but not before encircling Dewi Sita in a magic spell that will keep her safe as long as she stays inside it. You can see where this is headed.

However, it’s all a plot by the evil demon Ravana, who intends to kidnap Dewi Sita. Cause she pretty. The golden deer was his henchman Maricha (all the demons are shapeshifters) and Rama’s distress call was Ravana imitating his voice. The demons are also voiceshifters.

Ravana performs a seductive interpretive dance intended to attract Dewi Sita, which, him being a horrific demon and all, fails to close the sale.

So he comes back shapeshifted as a beggar and tricks Dewi Sita into leaving her protective circle. Which wasn’t truly all that hard. Dewi Sita is very, very pretty, but a little simple.

However, a bird creature demigod named Jatayu has been flying through the sky, in the carefree manner of bird creature demigods, and makes the mistake of witnessing the kidnapping.

Ravana isn’t pleased, and dances with the bird god until Jatayu is mortally wounded. Meanwhile, Lakshmana catches up to Rama and they figure out they’ve been had, so they race back to the clearing and find no trace of Dewi Sita. What they find instead is one of Ravana’s demon pals, looking to finish them off. I love both the demon’s dance and Rama’s insouciant sash flipping.

Our hero prevails, and the dying Jatayu appears. Sadly, he has to spill to the boys before getting to enjoy his dramatic death.

The brothers do what any of us would do in the same circumstances. They ignore the bird guy and call the monkey king Hanuman for assistance. Hanuman responds, as any of us would, by performing a spirited monkey dance.

Meanwhile, Ravana is still trying to woo Dewi Sita, with what appears to be some playful butt touching. Curiously, this does not work. Enraged, Ravana attempts to kill Dewi Sita, as one might, but is held back by Trijata, a demon he has tasked with taking care of Dewi Sita during her captivity. I’m not at all sure what’s going on here, but there’s a clearly complicated dynamic amongst these three. Everyone appears to have feelings.

Hanuman then makes himself very large, takes a single step to Lanka, Ravana’s island kingdom, and confirms Dewi Sita’s presence. There is much warring and fighting, culminating, as you knew it would, with a Boss Battle.

It all takes a year before Rama is able to rescue Dewi Sita. On being reunited, however, Rama expresses his concerns over how she’s spent the last year. Or as the supertitles so delicately put it, he “doubts her purity.”

Really? Your wife is kidnapped by a demon and when you finally rescue her, you wrinkle your nose and declare, “Eww, you got demon stank all over you. I think you fucked that dude.” What a douche.

Never one to pass on a challenge, Dewi Sita declares that she will prove her chastity by… setting herself on fire. Jesus, these two deserve each other.

However, the fire doesn’t burn her, as the fire god Agni protects her and delivers her back to Rama, vouching personally for her chastity. Which is good enough for Rama. Dewi Sita, firmly on brand, conveniently forgets that her husband was ready to let her die in flames because he didn’t trust her. She has her man back, so… happy ending? As close as the Ramayana gets.

Whew! The happy couple reunites and… curtain. Metaphorically.

During the curtain call we’re told that we may approach the cast for pictures. I’m old, so I didn’t understand that this meant a selfie scrum. I was somehow able to negotiate the crowd and get photos of our delightful principals that didn’t include a leering geezer spoiling the view.

Our story ends, as all good stories do, with merch. Dorothy got to this shirt before I did. She is clearly the hero of this epic journey.

We booked a dedicated car and driver for the day. Neither site is that far from Yogyakarta, but the ride-sharing apps don’t work in the hinterlands. First stop: Prambanan.

Prambanan

As part of our package we were offered sunrise at Prambanan, which is supposed to be magnificent. It also requires cooling your heels for a couple of hours until the temple opens to the public. We enjoyed sunrise at Angkor Wat. We good.

Prambanan is Angkor Wat’s little brother, the second largest Hindu temple in Southeast Asia. It was originally built in 856 and was dramatically enhanced in 930. Sadly, it only survived until 1006, when a massive earthquake reduced everything to rubble. It wasn’t until 1930 that restoration began under the Dutch. They don’t get enough credit for their good works. It wasn’t all slavery and extraction.

According to our guide, Prambanan was also an answer track. Borobudur was constructed between 778 and 850. You’ll note that Prambanan was started just six years after Borobudur’s completion. The local Hindus were apparently dismayed by the massive Buddhist temple in their backyard, and built a response, not to be outdone. It turns out they were slightly outdone after all. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Prambanan is the largest Hindu temple in… Java.

The restoration work is massive, ongoing, and mind-blowing. They are able to reassemble temple structures, from the mountains of rubble, using about 70%-80% of that structure’s original stones. That just boggles. I am boggled. Still, only 22 of the estimated 240 temples in the Prambanan complex have been restored. It’s the archaeologist’s Full Employment Act. But what they’ve been able to do so far is spectacular.

As a Hindu complex, Prambanan is devoted to the Trimurti: Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. They each get one of the three largest temples, and a satellite temple for their preferred mode of transportation: Brahma’s swan, Shiva’s bull, and Vishnu’s garuda. Vishnu clearly has the best ride.

Each of the three main temples also has inner sanctums, shrines with unlit statues. I think the dark definitely contributed to the ancient vibe. Very Indiana Jones.

Prambanan is also adorned with stupas, like the ones at Borobudur. Except they’re not stupas at all, they’re called ratna, and are completely different. They just look a little alike. While Borobudur’s stupas specifically contain statues of Buddha, the Hindu ratna are a purely decorative architectural element with religious significance, rather than a niche. They still look cool.

More Ramayana, Please

Prambanan is known for its bas-relief panels that retell a core part of the Ramayana, from the abduction of Rama’s wife Sita to Rama’s killing of the demon Ravana. This is the precise part of the story portrayed in the Prambanan Ballet’s performance. 72 consecutive panels across the three main temples are ordered so that you traverse them clockwise, or Pradakshina, always keeping the temple to your right.

More Stuff Carved Into Stone

In addition to the Ramayana panels, Prambanan is chock full o’ delicious sculptures and carvings. As you would expect.

We were offered a short walk to another part of the complex to view a Buddhist temple, but since we were headed for the largest Buddhist temple on the planet we chose to preserve our legs. On our way back to our ride, we passed a cassowary in a cage. Does there need to be a reason? You’re so literal.

Borobudur

Prambanan is a complex made up of hundreds of individual temples. Borobudur is a single gargantuan temple, filling the horizon and inspiring legitimate awe. As the design spec foretold.

As was the case with Prambanan, Borobudur was lost for centuries. Construction was completed in 850, but the temple fell into disuse by the 1500s, abandoned as Java’s cultural center shifted east and its religious center shifted towards Islam. It was eventually covered in volcanic ash and reclaimed by the jungle. Until a white guy discovered it!

In a brief interregnum sandwiched between Dutch fuckery, the British owned Indonesia. It only lasted a few years, from 1811 to 1815, but that was long enough for Sir Stamford Raffles, the very model of a modern Major-General (it’s actually hard to believe that Sir Stamford Raffles isn’t a Gilbert & Sullivan character), to stumble on Borobudur and, to his credit, recognize that some work needed to be done.

Actual restoration wasn’t commenced until 1907, under the kindly Dutch. That stabilized the structure, but the restoration that gave us the Borobudur we see today didn’t start until 1975, culminating on completion in the temple being deservedly named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

The Buddhists, god love ’em, are geometry geeks. Borobudur is in the precise shape of a big fucking mandala, with four entry points in the cardinal directions and concentric levels rising through the three zones of consciousness: Kamadhatu (the realm of worldly attachment) at the lowest level, Rupadhatu (having transcended desire but still possessing an earthly form) in the middle, and Arupadhatu (the transcendence of earthly form) at the top, crowned by the central sphere representing Nirvana.

Experiencing Borobudur is to rise metaphorically through the zones of consciousness and arrive at the summit. Which is the closest to enlightenment I’ll ever get.

Even before entering the temple, the views from the outside are ridiculous.

One may experience the lovely grounds as one likes, but the ascent to Nirvana requires special shoes. Street shoes are verboten, to preserve Borobudur’s steps. These uncomfortable slides are gift with purchase. They wouldn’t take them back.

And there are plenty of those steps to reach the peak, around 150 in total.

The payoff is obviously the summit, but there’s plenty to see as you ascend through the various zones of consciousness. Borobudur boasts 2,672 relief panels, almost four contiguous miles of carving. Nearly 1,500 of those panels are a single narrative (the remainder are decorative), telling the story of Sudhana, a human who falls in love with Manohara, one of the Kinnari bird ladies. Why not?

To say nothing of the various non-relief statues and carvings.

But you came for the Stupas of Nirvana, and I have been denying you. They are everything they are advertised to be: beautiful, resonant, and deeply imbued with meaning and intention. They are simultaneously soothing and thrumming with power and energy. Nirvana is, as it turns out, a perfectly lovely place to spend an afternoon.

When it came time, we just couldn’t. Perhaps this is proof that we’re too old to keep doing this. Not enough in the tank for the Chicken Church. Time to hang ’em up.

The festival features arts, crafts, traditional and modern performances, plenty of food, a night market, and a midway. It is ridiculously well attended, and has the vibe of a county fair. But it’s Bali, so everything about it is beautiful. We went our first night, and it was so much fun we spent the next two evenings there, as well.

Grounds

To call the grounds rich is to diminish them, but there are only so many superlatives to throw around. Close your eyes and spin, and when you open them you’ll be staring something marvelous in the face. It’s dense.

This is just the entrance gate.

It’s not at all clear how much of the decorative infrastructure is reused vs. what’s created fresh each year. Some of the more elaborate constructions seem to be made of ephemeral materials, but even if some pieces are reused, they’re all beautifully maintained, and certainly look brand new.

This is just one of the stages.

But wait. There’s more.

As promised, there’s even a midway, as part of the stalls that make up the market area.

And plenty of food stalls. We were there three nights and ate dinner in the stalls every evening. The cuisine has a distinct top note of ouch. I believe they use the chilis in surgery instead of anesthesia, to distract from the pain. When we are given the option of pedas (spicy) or not, we choose not.

Performance

We saw dance and music performances every night, and got a crash course in Balinese gamelan music, which is both offered on its own and accompanies the dance. I kind of wasn’t expecting to like gamelan, as it doesn’t use a Western tonal scale, and operates, in my mind, in the same taxonomic space as Chinese opera. Which sounds to me like cats desperate to convince you of something very, very important.

I may have to revisit that bias now, as I truly loved the gamelan music. It has the manic, coked up energy of a Raymond Scott Looney Tunes score.

Gamelan is not, as I had ignorantly thought, an instrument, but a style of music. While there’s the odd flute or string, the vast majority of the instruments are percussive: drums, xylophones, gongs, and metallophones (tuned percussion). That’s a gangsa metallophone on the right.

While this isn’t the craziest music we heard, it’s the craziest we recorded.

But that wasn’t our first exposure to gamelan music, which came on our first night, in an outdoor arena that seats 6,000, but had plenty more standing.

What we didn’t know we had walked into was some sort of weird all-female gamelan orchestra battle of the bands, featuring dozens of women in identical outfits, like a Bizarro Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

They must have been local celebrities, because each band had a cheering section with fans waving flags the same color as their outfits. The whole thing had the energy of an Iggy Pop performance, the ambiance of a World Cup match, and the choreography of a Busby Berkeley jam. It was enchanting.

Then there was this, and whatever was making those weird harmonics. I thought it was singing, but Dorothy thought it was flute and strings. We both thought it was wild.

Topeng Dances

Topeng is a masked dance that is found throughout Indonesia, not just in Bali, with roots that stretch back to 850 AD or earlier. While they originally focused on nature and ancestors, the introduction of Hinduism to Indonesia added the Ramayana and Mahabharata as source texts for new dances. Still, many dances represent archetypal characters more than structured narratives.

Here’s the blustery guy arguing with another character. This went on for so long, without dance or music, that we had to leave. I’m sure it was funny if you spoke Indonesian, but that left us out.

We think this character is Patih Keras, a high-ranking court official. But that doesn’t get us anywhere near understanding the narrative of this dance. This clip is long, as I wanted to capture an entire performance, so feel free to bail. I certainly wanted to, or have magically sprouted a tripod. On the other hand, it does an excellent job of capturing the sonic range of a gamelan orchestra, which can go from eerie to frenetic, delicate to thunderous, and every stop in-between.

In this particular case, the music is sinister and the dance is a little creepy, making a compelling combination. The dancer’s fine body control is something to behold.

Ramayana Dance

While the Topeng trended more folk dance, there was another troupe that focussed on Ramayana dances. Knowing that didn’t make them any easier to understand, but there was at least some familiarity. The Ramayana has been a consistent through line during our time in Southeast Asia.

We think these dances had something to do with trickery, abduction, and, shall we say delicately, seduction. But only because that seems to be what the entire Ramayana is about. This may have been about a lovely picnic.

Again, the body control is very hard to wrap your head around.

This dance, though, was the bomb. We were totally not expecting saucy drag. Shockingly, Googling “ramayana saucy drag” brings back nothing, when it should most assuredly be bringing back this.

More Ramayana…

This performance was less dance, more play, and was played very broadly. So broadly that I tagged it as commedia dell’arte when I filed the photos. It’s still from the Ramayana, and appears to involve giants, or giant hermits, kidnapping fairies, or little girls, or princesses. And impertinent men hitting on saucy wenches. Or something. There was much declaiming.

The Crafts Mall

And this is where our dreams came true, and the reason we didn’t bother trying to fabric shop on Jalan Sulawesi. This was a selection of artisans so perfectly curated that we didn’t have to go anywhere else to find the very best artifacts. They had conveniently all been brought into one place, seemingly just for us.

The indoor mall had a large open courtyard, with a side gallery featuring a series of four rooms with textiles and jewelry.

Crafts

The courtyard had all sorts of things, from housewares to sculptures in a variety of media. For whatever reason, what leapt out was one woman who hand painted baskets, purses, fans, and wall hangings, using canvas and reed. Dorothy picked up a swell fan.

Jewelry

There’s a famous silver village, Celuk, just half an hour from Denpasar, that had been on our list. But since it seemed like every major Celuk jeweler had a booth in the craft mall, no need. I bought a ring and we both bought earrings.

The four large side galleries were all set up identically: three walls of textile makers, the fourth wall and the center island for jewelers.

And… Ikat!

We’d done a good job picking up display quality textiles on our day trips to Tenganan and Sidemen, but we needed things that could be cut up and made into garments. We only have so much wall space, but I wear shirts every day.

As with the jewelry, it seemed like every artisanal ikat maker was represented at the craft mall, so it was an incredible one-stop shop. We bought fabric each of the three nights we attended the fair. They started to recognize us.

The range and selection was astonishing, and rewarded three nights of viewing. Every time we went back we saw amazing things that we’d somehow overlooked on previous visits. I’m glad we took the time to go slow and dive deep. Our wardrobes will thank us.

One of the most amazing things we saw was ikat with figurative, brocade-like designs. I understand how that’s theoretically possible, but it still doesn’t seem practically achievable. The technical complexity is just through the roof.

Here’s another thing that should be impossible. That hand-woven stripe on the right isn’t pieced in. It’s woven on the same loom as the ikat. Then just to show off, it shifts back to ikat. Insane.

But this is going to end up exactly where you thought it would: with loot. We bought us some fabric.

I have to blame Dorothy for the fact that I’m a fabric slut. I can’t imagine that I’d have wound up in that place without her influence and guidance. My world is profoundly enriched by that, as it is by her in so many, many ways.

Unless you need dental work done. Then Denpasar is a must-visit dental tourism destination. Because, you guessed it, we needed dental work done.

Dorothy developed a throbbing pain in a tooth with a filling, so we got a referral to a dentist in Amlapura, a mere hour from Amed, rather than the three-hour drive to Denpasar. Verdict: “Dude, that’s fucked up. You need to see an endodontist.” They provided a referral to a provider in Denpasar, but they couldn’t see her soon enough, so we found someone the old fashioned way: Google Reviews.

We made an appointment and got dropped off here. Which is whatever the superlative of unprepossessing is.

Despite the first impression, the interior was clean, modern, and well-staffed. We’d made an appointment for an exam for Dorothy and a cleaning for me. My cleaning was outstanding, maybe the best I’ve ever had, and the price tag was 600,000 rupiah, about $35 USD. It was so good, I canceled my return cleaning at my expensive Chicago dentist. This is how I’ll be managing dental care going forward.

Dorothy’s X-rays and exam came to $18, and they scheduled her for a crown. One appointment for the surgery and the temporary, and a follow-up appointment to install the final crown. That last appointment was five days before we needed to be in Denpasar to fly to Yogyakarta, so we decided to burn our last five days in Amed and pick up a hotel in Denpasar. Easier than the back and forth, and onsite in case any follow-up care was required before we left.

As it happened, they were able to replace the filling on Dorothy’s first visit, so she never went the crown route, but we stuck with our plans to finish up Bali in Denpasar. Why not? By the way, the hypermodern, ridiculously skillful filling came to $60 USD. Here’s hoping our next dental emergency happens outside the US, where we can afford it.

We were pretty confident we could fill five days in Denpasar. Despite its reputation, a little digging revealed a fair amount going on. There was a whole street of fabric stores, a massive craft market, an array of temples, and an annual, month-long arts fair. We’d be fine.

Goa Lawah Bat Cave Temple

Our first stop was actually on the road to Denpasar, the famous Bat Cave Temple in the seaside village of Klungkung. It’s truly built around the opening of a bat cave, although that part wasn’t open to the public. It’s one of Bali’s six most holy sites, and dates back to the 11th century. And it’s bat-themed. Which is, I suppose, all you truly need to know.

We thought this was pretty cool, right at the first courtyard. But then we looked closely and realized it was starlings, not bats. Still pretty cool.

The courtyard also featured a couple of these crazy seed beasts. I have no idea why it appears to be standing over a pair of severed human feet. It does give one pause.

T

Like all proper Balinese temples, a cadre of fierce yet charming guardians.

There was plenty of action cross the street from the temple, too. There were services being conducted right by the beach.

Even better, there was a massive bat-themed sculpture (Installation? Roadside attraction?) that was the total highlight of the visit.

Hunting Crafts

I had a couple of hours to kill on our day trip to Denpasar for Dorothy’s filling. I thought I’d check out the Kumbasari Art Market, four floors of crafts. I figured I could scope it out in advance and that Dorothy and I could make quick work of it together when we came back.

Kumbasari was impressive in scale, the first two floors dedicated to clothing and textiles and the upper two floors featuring handicrafts. Bali is known for its beautiful ikats, and while we’d picked up museum quality specimens in our day trips to Tenganan and Sidemen, we were short on textiles that could be fashioned into personal wardrobe.

With that prompt, I was in and out of Kumbasari pretty quickly. The third and fourth floor crafts mall was mostly souvenir grade goods. There were some nice wooden bowls and trays, but nothing that inspired acquisitiveness, and certainly nothing that warranted trying to squeeze in the additional weight of wooden artifacts. And the first two floors were mostly utilitarian ready-made clothes for locals, so no treasures to be unearthed there, either. Unless we truly ran out of things to do, there’d be no reason to return with Dorothy.

That took all of half an hour, so with more time to kill I crossed the street to Denpasar’s largest fresh market, Pasar Badung. We’d be staying in a hotel for our five days in Denpasar, so we wouldn’t be cooking. Still, these local markets are always a treat and it was fun to walk through. But knowing that we wouldn’t be shopping there meant it was more a tourist visit than a scouting trip, so that didn’t take long, either.

Finally, I took a quick tour of Julan Sulawesi, three solid blocks of nothing but fabric stores. I didn’t do any shopping on my own, but this definitely warranted returning with Dorothy.

We did go back, but the goods leaned distinctly utilitarian. There wasn’t a lot of art there, and we wound up scarcely stopping. Part of that was because the night before we’d gone to the annual arts fair, Pesta Kesenian Bali, and that’s where the action was. They had a craft mall set up with an exceptionally well curated selection of textiles, jewelry, and crafts. We went three of our four nights in Denpasar, and found something new each night. With a rich array of art, performances, and food, I had to give Pesta Kesenian Bali it’s own post.

Bali Provincial Museum

The Bali Provincial Museum was just the right size to do in about an hour without feeling overwhelmed. There are three galleries, each housed in a discrete building. As with so many Balinese museums, the grounds were as, or perhaps more, spectacular than the collection.

The collection itself was… odd. There were representations of multiple art forms, but all of the artifacts on display seemed modern. I’m not at all clear what their curatorial POV might have been, but it was still all interesting stuff.

Bajra Sandhi Monument

This, despite looking ancient, is modern, designed in 1981 with construction completed in 2013. Its design abstractly celebrates Indonesian independence, which was declared on August 17, 1945. The monument has eight main pillars, 17 gates, and central tower of 45 meters. Which, you know, visually screams, “Hey! It’s about independence.” Couldn’t be more obvious.

Still, even if you somehow miss the hit-you-over-the-head symbolism, the building is awesome and the site is beautiful.

The exterior is also festooned, as the Balinese do, with guardians.

The first thing you notice is the faux Victorian interior, complete with marble columns and staircases and a pond. Because, you know, Independence.

The second thing you notice on entry is the garish, exaggerated sculptures of pig-nosed turtles. They surround the main floor, with their snouts facing out and their tails facing in. There’s no overt explanation for their presence, but Hindus believe the world is supported on the back of a turtle, so… probably?

The second floor is a rotunda with wall to wall dioramas covering the entire history of Bali. So, plenty of chieftains overseeing their bucolic domains, and plenty of Dutch fuckery. Which, sadly, is not the name of Amsterdam’s red light district.

It’s a lot of fuckery to take in at once, and I’m not sure the dioramas truly help it go down easier. Dioramas don’t usually make me want to cry.

It turns out that a 45 meter tall tower holds lots of steps. Lots and lots of steps. But if you make your way to the top, no matter how slowly, you are rewarded with spectacular views, both of the surrounding area and the compound itself.

Puri Agung Pemecutan, The Pemecutan Royal Palace

This 17th century palace is technically open to visitors, but only a tiny bit. You get the outside, but the inside is off limits. Still, sometimes a lot is too much, so I’m not going to complain about having a manageable scale.

Mostly, as seems to the case in Bali, it was about the statues. There were the expected Balinese guardians, but the emphasis here was on goofy animals. Hard not to love ’em.

Roadside Attractions

No trip anywhere is complete without enjoying what can be found on the way.

This was an innovation in dessert so compelling we went back. They make and stock plain yeast donuts. The bins on the left are the icing dips, and the bins on the right are the toppings. So you could get mango icing with peanuts, or chocolate icing with crispy ball pink. As you should. And they make them to your spec right there. In front of you.

And this, just your run of the mill bridge decoration. Basic.

And finally. I thought it was a lesbian bar, but it turned out to be a women’s clothing store. I wasn’t going in either way, but I was still kind of disappointed.

And it was, if it was important to have our noses rubbed in the destructive impact of overtouristing.

By hype, Bali is thick with tourists coming for yoga centers and wellness retreats. We intentionally chose to stay in Amed, an off-the-radar beach town, to avoid that, and it worked. Even Denpasar seemed more like a bustling capital than Man Bun Mecca. We were beginning to think that Bali’s reputation was unwarranted.

Har.

It’s not just that we were greeted by a sign on our way into town offering a men’s retreat where you could “Learn To Love Like A King.” Ok, fine. That is such low hanging fruit for mockery that it’s doing its own heavy lifting. But there’s nothing funny about the devastation wrought on Ubud by tourism.

I am not immune to the irony, or whatever the superlative of irony is (self-loathing?), that the only way to learn about the impact of overtourism on Ubud was to arrive as tourists. That’s the throbbing cognitive dissonance that has been a top note to our entire travel extravaganza. Sometimes I feel like a john who justifies his behavior because he treats the girls so well.

We maintain a light footprint. We live as close to the local lifestyle as possible. We support artisans over merchants. And we’re still helping to drive up the cost of living and housing wherever we go. We’re still part of the problem.

Which makes whinging about Ubud problematic. But nothing I can’t overcome by ignoring it!

Ubud reminds me of nothing so much as San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Like San Miguel, Ubud is a charming town whose charms have been nearly obliterated by tourists. In both cases you can squint and see the town that was the original draw, the elements that attracted tourists in the first place. San Miguel still has much of its original allure, as its clientele is the 1%, and their EPCOT Center village will be properly maintained. Don’t make them contact the manager.

What’s disturbing about San Miguel takes a minute to notice. It’s not that it’s a squalid hive of tourists, it’s that there are close to zero locals loose. No visitors, just shopkeepers. Mexicans have been priced out of San Miguel, which boasts Mexico’s worst income inequality.

Ubud is pretty much the same story, although its native charms are less manicured than San Miguel’s. But the setting, the old temples, the winding streets… The attraction is still evident, despite being buried under the avalanche of boutiques and souvenir shops that cater exclusively to tourists.

It’s not the wellness centers and the retreats. It’s that there’s nothing left of Ubud for people who actually live, or lived, there. It has given itself over completely to the predations of tourists, the most invasive species of all.

Because San Miguel truly is a way station for the 1%, it’s clean, curated, and modestly peopled (the only modest thing about it). There’s only so many folks who can afford San Miguel, which is how they like it. Ubud, on the other hand, was reminiscent of the souk in Marrakech, a veritable ant farm of gringos. It was, if I may permit myself, disgusting.

“But I’m not like those other guys, baby. I’ll love you like a king.” Which I think means that when I’m done with you I’ll fuck your daughter and your livestock. It’s what kings do.

*sigh* Welcome to Ubud.

Despite the above, we managed to squeeze out several positive experiences in our day there: a pair of nice temples and one spectacular, wholly unexpected museum.

The Royal Palace: Puri Saren Agung

Very little of the Royal Palace is open to the public, though what is available is choice. The palace was built in the early 1800s and restored after the 1917 earthquake, so it’s fairly modern. It’s used these days primarily as a performance space for traditional dance and gamelan music.

No Balinese palace is complete without a panoply of delightful carvings and adorably fierce guardian statues.

Puri Kantor Legacy Palace

Puri Kantor, like the Royal Palace, isn’t terrifically old, having been built in 1930. It’s a hotel now, with its grounds only available to guests. We got to view the courtyard, which was plenty interesting, especially since there was renovation underway.

There are still plenty of highly skilled stonemasons in Bali, working on both restorations and new construction. It was fascinating to see one of them at work.

Setia Darma House of Mask and Puppets

On paper, this looked like an interesting place. In real life, it was breathtaking, combining a ridiculously beautiful natural setting with a world-class museum collection of masks and puppets from all over the world.

Despite being hard by Ubud, 6 km and about 30 minutes by taxi, the place was deserted. There was one other couple there during our entire visit. It’s actual culture, so I suspect it doesn’t resonate with the kinds of tourists who find Ubud worthwhile. Fine. We were more than happy to have it to ourselves.

The museum is set up as a massive traditional Balinese compound, with each gallery taking up a discrete Javanese wooden house, a joglo. While the focus is on Indonesian masks and puppets, the collection features artifacts from all over the world. The compound also serves as a cultural hub, hosting performance and workshops.

Like many specialty museums we’ve seen, Setia Darma is the brainchild of a lone obsessive. Hadi Sunyoto is a wealthy collector who turned his private collection into a public museum in 2006. On the plus side there’s no entrance fee, so thanks, Income Inequality!

While there is, I’m sure, scholarly discourse available on the fine distinctions between regional storytelling traditions, we’ll have none of that here. That would require knowledge and expertise, and I’ve sworn off. What we have instead is a breathtaking collection of artifacts that can be appreciated for nothing more than their raw beauty. That’s enough for me, and it will have to do for you, too.

Wayang Kulit

Originating in Java, but performed in Bali, as well, Wayang Kulit is the traditional Indonesian shadow puppet show, a storytelling form over 1,000 years old. Unsurprisingly, the collection of Wayang Kulit puppets is excellent.

Balinese Ramayana Masks

Like many Southeast Asian storytelling traditions, the Ramayana figures prominently in Bali, and is responsible for some of the most beautiful masks.

Masks From All Over

Although it favors Indonesia, this truly is a worldwide collection.

Marionettes

We did a poor job of documenting countries of origin for the marionettes, but it’s pretty clear they represent a lot of different cultures and traditions.

There was also a display of hyperrealistic marionettes with no real explanation. These don’t look like archetypes, they look like very specific people. Other than the first one, which is obviously Obama and which was tagged to identify the other marionette as Hadi Sunyoto, the museum’s founder, there’s no information on who these people might be. But they’re definitely real people.

Random Acts Of Puppetry

There was a small display of New Guiinea Hand Puppets. A seriously missed gift shop opportunity.

There were a few full-size, multi-person Barong puppets.

And even a collection of puppet-themed paintings. As if the entire place didn’t already scream, “I have more money than I know what to do with!”

This one warrants its own discussion. The demon creatures are a Javanese-specific addition to the Hindu Ramayana narrative. The creature seated on the right is Samar, a Javanese demigod. The character on the left is Petruk and the bowing one in the middle is Bagong, both of them Samar’s sons. Along with their brother, Gareng, they make up the Punokawan, or clown servants. They are a consistent presence in both Balinese and Javanese wayang puppet shows.

OK. Great. But what the fuck is actually going on in this picture? Whatever it is, the women are clearly horrified. I’m horrified, and I have no idea what’s supposed to be happening. I can’t decide if I desperately want to know the story behind this or desperately don’t, so I can make up my own. Please offer potential narratives in the comments, like a New Yorker cartoon contest. There will be voting.

So did the Setia Darma House of Mask and Puppets make the visit to Ubud worthwhile? A resounding yes. As repulsive and disturbing as we found Ubud, the mask museum was at the other end of the spectrum, a peak experience and a must-visit if you ever find yourself in Bali.

Which you should.

As always, though, in Bali the journey is as important as the destination. Unless you’re asleep in the back of the car, it’s impossible to drive around Bali without being devastated by its raw, unfair beauty.

Besakih Temple

I have confessed, to my shame, to a notable case of Temple Fatigue towards the end of our ten weeks in Vietnam. There are just a fuck ton of temples and pagodas slathered thickly throughout the land, and they do get a little samey after repeated viewings.

And I’m going to get myself in trouble here, but I’m expressing a personal esthetic, not assaulting a sovereign nation’s cultural patrimony. I find the Vietnamese temples a little twee. Not at first. But on repeated exposure their delicacy starts to feel a little forced. Like how Brits seem so polite until you remember they were all caned at school for speaking up. Not Piers Morgan, obviously. Some folk clearly weren’t caned enough.

My point being, if I can crawl out of the hole I just dug, that we are having no such problem in Bali. Maybe after ten weeks we would, but I doubt it. For one, we’re not temple chasing here. We’re taking a more measured approach after our Vietnam experience, so that should reduce our risk. But I also just love the ferocity and joy in the Balinese temples. Their guardian gods are locked and loaded, ready to defend to the bitter end, if necessary, with nothing but love for their followers.

If we’re going to be choosy about our temple excursions in Bali, then we can’t miss Besakih, the largest and holiest temple in Bali Hinduism. Built on the slopes of Mount Agung, Bali’s largest active volcano, it’s not even one temple. It’s a complex comprising 23 separate temples. It’s also very, very old. It dates to at least the 8th century, but the stone bases of several temples, including the main temple, Pura Penataran Agung, resemble megalithic stepped pyramids. That would place the oldest structures at about 2,000 years old.

As you enter the temple grounds, the first thing you notice is Mount Agung looming over the meru towers and the tropical foliage.

The courtyard before the first temple has a massive fountain, featuring dragon heads and clawed feet.

Just past the fountain is the reveal, Pura Penataran Agung.

The temple’s plaza is used for prayer and is off limits to tourists. There are ceremonies going on all the time, so some parts of the complex will always be in use and inaccessible. Our guide, as a native, was permitted in, and took this 360° video for us.

We were able to get a look at the main plaza on our way up the side of the temple. The umbrellas are meaningful, as they collectively represent the Trimurti: Red represents Brahma, Vishnu is black, and Shiva is yellow and white.

Once you get to the top you can see the Gates of Heaven up close. We learned in Vietnam that the Gates of Heaven shape represents hands raised in prayer.

As we ascended further up what felt more like a small city than a temple complex, we reached the area where visitors are allowed to pray. We had purchased small pre-fab offerings on our way in, which is why we were able to enter the area. Our guide lit the incense for us, and we placed the offering where directed and knelt on the stone floor. A priest chanted and sprinkled us with holy water. Money was stuffed in a donation box. It’s almost like we knew what was expected.

Getting to the top also gave us access to spectacular views…

And a closeup look at the Besakih’s defining visual feature, the pelinggih meru towers. These are the primary shrines in Balinese temples, built with a masonry base, a wooden chamber, and thatched roofs.

The thatching is replaced every ten years, and the towers require ongoing maintenance. We were unsurprised to find construction going on while we visited.

The entire site was chockablock with interesting things to see wherever your eye happened to stop for a moment.

And of course, no visit to a Balinese temple would be complete without visiting the gods, who always seem delighted to protect and serve. Just like the LAPD.

There’s something about the culture of polytheistic Hindu animists that really speaks to us. The monotheists seem closed down and locked up by comparison. I suppose when your theology acknowledges multiple right answers it’s easier to relax into a lifestyle with a more expansive definition of normal behavior.

Sidemen: Textiles & Silver

This was the whole reason for the day trip. Songket is a ridiculously rich, complicated brocade only made on backstrap looms. There is no way to manufacture songket; it has to be made by hand. Thankfully, Sidemen, one of the few places that makes songket, was close at hand.

Pertenunan Pelangi Traditional Weaving

We’d researched shops and studios in advance, so we knew we wanted our first stop to be Pertenunan Pelangi. They explained that almost all songket weaving is done in women’s homes, because of the backstrap looms. Pelangi sells their finished pieces, but their onsite weaving studio produces ikats.

Which is fine, because watching ikats being woven is plenty fascinating. A large room was filled with over a dozen looms, a handful of which were in use while we were there.

What’s ikat? I’ll quote myself, from the post on Tenganan’s double ikat.

Pelangi specializes in endek, which is a weft ikat. That means that the warp (vertical) threads are a solid color while the weft (horizontal) threads are dyed to make the final pattern. That information is important in understanding what we saw on the second floor. There, a young man wove colored plastic strips into frames to create patterns. It took a few minutes to understand what we were seeing.

He was creating templates for dying the thread used to weave a particular pattern. They can weave from their library or create custom patterns on demand. This method, which we had never seen before, allows for mind-bending precision, permitting traditional ikat weaving to mimic complex brocades.

Later, when we went to Ubud, we visited Threads of Life, a high-end textile boutique, where they had examples of the hand-tied thread, ready to dye.

Minds completely blown, we staggered into the shop. There’s one section for the songket brocades they carry for local weavers.

And another section for their own ikats. Which were just fucking spectacular.

Kupu-Kupu Traditional Weaving

Our second stop was, as it happened, right across the street from Pelangi. Where we found a woman, a backstrap loom, and songket in progress. We got to see songket being made after all!

What’s the big deal with songket? Well, it’s an ancient weaving technique, dating back to the 7th century. It originated when Chinese traders brought silk thread to Indonesia and Middle Eastern traders brought gold thread. It is rich and luxurious, almost decadent, and another weaving technique it’s difficult to wrap your head around.

I am thrilled we got to see it being made, as there’s no way to appreciate it otherwise. I watched the weaver work for several minutes before I figured out she was weaving. I thought she was setting up the loom, because I’m used to seeing weaving where the shuttle moves back and forth on each weft row. Instead, she was taking individual warp threads and wrapping gold and colored supplementary weft threads around them to create the brocade pattern.

Every time I think I’ve seen the full range of complexity in weaving, shit like this happens.

Would anyone like to place a side bet on whether Dorothy bought a piece of songket? I thought not.

Agung Silver

Sidemen is actually best known for its custom silversmiths. You have to be a textile nerd to know it for its weaving. Since we were there, we let our driver take us to a place he knew, Agung Silver. The shops all have tourist classes. They give you seven grams of silver and a couple of hours to make a ring for about $30. Which is fine if you want the silver equivalent of a handprint ashtray. I have never understood the desire to make something badly yourself instead of spending that money on an artisan’s labors.

It was unprepossessing, but full of lovely things. Dorothy got earrings and I got a ring. I have decided, in my dotage, to becoming a ring wearer. Do not judge, lest ye be judged yourself.

Just Add Water

Technically this was a different day trip. Perasi Beach, known as Virgin Beach, had been suggested as part of this day’s itinerary, but we passed on it for the Sidemen trip because we’re old and weak. Dorothy’s craving for a white sand and turquoise water experience, however, was not to be denied. Our black sand beach in Amed was amazing, but tropes are tropes, and they are disrespected at your peril.

For those of you keeping score, this is what happy looks like.

Cremation Creations

On our way back, our guide pulled over so we could get a look at these astounding funerary sculptures being constructed. They are custom built to order for cremation ceremonies, and are lit up along with the loved one, to ease them on their journey. It’s a shame to see this much craft and devotion go up in flames, but they are purpose built, so they know their fate going in.

We were most taken with this piece. The fish part swam you to your destination, and the fierce beast head protected you on the way.

A new note for Sam and Ruby. In addition to daily altar offerings, we may require a Balinese style sendoff when we’re finally done. I’d had something more Viking in mind, but how can this not shift your perspective?

We had driven through the mountainous inland on our way to Amed from landing in Denpasar, but we’ve been on the beach since. Now that we had our bearings, the drive into the backcountry was a delight.

But what’s a roadside without monkeys? Didn’t know we were going to get all existential, did you?

There was an entire roadside monkey village. These guys may have been meant to stand guard, but they were notably derelict. They just let us past.

I did get out of the car to capture pictures, but I never approached them and never made eye contact. I’m not that stupid. Although Dorothy stayed in the car, so maybe I am.

Our first official stop on this tour was, of course…

Tenganan

Tenganan, like many of the traditional villages we’ve visited in Southeast Asia, has an entrance fee. Or in this case, a donation of your choice. Whatever you donate gets you in and assigns you a local guide. Which is good, as there’s a lot going on and no obvious way to parse it without an expert.

Tenganan is over 1,000 years old, Bali’s oldest village, and is one of the homes of the Bali Aga, the original indigenous Balinese. It holds about 250 families, around 750 people total. There are no homestays or Airbnbs. If you weren’t born there you can’t so much as spend the night, let alone move in.

About half of their economy is agrarian, primarily rice, with the other half handicrafts, mostly textiles and basket weaving. They are almost completely self sufficient. They do their own construction, carve their own wooden ornaments and stone statues, grow their own food, and raise their own livestock. The entrance donations go directly to the village, to help them sustain their atavistic culture. They aren’t untouched by modernity so much as uninterested.

But they will happily take a credit card.

The setting is, unsurprisingly at this point, idyllic. Bali, am I right?

The village is full of wonderful statues and carvings, all of them made by villagers at one time or another. I asked how old the doorway guardians were, and our guide laughed. No one knows.

The carved friezes in the public square depict various scenes and rituals associated with village life. This is where we learned that cockfighting was an important cultural and religious component of Balinese life.

Which explains this. Kind of.

That is a hand-dyed rooster, caged for our protection as it’s been trained as a fighter. While cockfighting is a Bali thing, dying the roosters ridiculous colors is a Tenangan thing. I couldn’t figure out a reason. I think it just amuses them. I stole this from Flickr, because I wasn’t able to enjoy the caged rooster in all its natural glory. No reason for you to be denied.

The wood carving is also present in elaborate doors and fanciful tools.

But I’ve buried the lede. We came for the traditional crafts and so did you. I’ve kept you waiting too long. Thank you for indulging me.

Geringsing Double Ikat

After touring the village, the guide took us to a weaving shop. Which, surprise, turned out to be his home. Hey, we’re there to support the economy however we best can. But the lovely side effect is that, after looking at the outside of the village, we got to go inside someone’s home.

Part of the home was set up as the workroom and shop, where both husband and wife worked and displayed their creations.

So what’s all the fuss about? Why is geringsing double ikat such a thing? First you have to understand how ikat creates woven patterns.

There are a variety of ways to create patterns in textiles. You can take a solid fabric and embroider over it. You can print patterns on it, either through modern printing techniques or through older methods like batik. Brocades are made by layering solid colors of thread in various patterns in both the warp (the threads running top to bottom) and weft (the threads running side to side).

Then there’s ikat. In ikat, the warp or weft threads are resist dyed in a pattern, so each thread is multicolored in stripes. The distance between the colors and the pattern of the thread’s color repeat defines what the finished weaving will look like. You design the finished weaving when you dye the thread.

Single ikats use the resist-dyed thread in either the warp or weft direction. Double ikats use different resist-dyed threads in both warp and weft directions. This is considered the single most complicated weaving technique of all, so difficult that only a handful of locations all over the world are capable of producing it (without going mad). Three villages in India, one in Japan, and Tenganan.

Tenganan has been making its double ikat, geringsing, for at least 700+ years. The earliest known citation is from 1293, but some theories tie it to the Indian Gujarati double ikat going back 2,000 years.

But wait. Geringsing isn’t just a double ikat. It’s a powerful, magical double ikat, capable of providing its wearers protection. It’s right there in the name. Gering means sickness and sing means no. There are rituals and practices associated with the weaving process that imbue the Geringsing with its powerful properties.

Warriors have worn geringsing into battle, but its more common use is to protect villagers during rites of passage and important transitions. Death is one of those transitions, and a geringsing may no longer be used after it’s helped a villager over the final boundary. That’s how antique geringsings get sold.

Our guide’s wife only made single ikat, although he had vintage pieces his grandmother had made fifty years ago. He still had the components of her backstrap loom, although his wife doesn’t use it.

Our guide told us that no one made geringsing anymore, that it was too hard. That was, how do I say, untrue. His wife didn’t make geringsing and he had us in his shop and didn’t want to lose a sale. Rather than take us to another workroom that made modern geringsing, he pimped his grandmother’s vintage pieces.

Which was fine. The antiques are more expensive than the new pieces, but they’re also antiques. We could have insisted on being taken elsewhere, and chose not to. That’s on us, not him.

We started by looking through his wife’s single ikats. Maybe she wasn’t up to the rigors of geringsing, and who can blame her, but her single ikats were beautiful.

She even had a couple of brocades to show us.

Then we asked for geringsing, and that’s when the private stock came out. They had a few more pieces, but they were similar enough that they just showed us these two.

Palm Leaf Books

Our guide’s wife was the weaver, but our guide made palm leaf books. There were two styles, one a calendar and one a retelling of the Ramayana. We picked the epic, of course.

The method was fascinating. Palm leaves are trimmed to serve as the book’s pages, and the design is etched into the palm pages with a stylus. Burnt macadamia nuts are then rubbed into the pages as an ink, sinking into the etched lines. The excess is cleaned off, bringing the drawings to life.

Stick Ikat

Having selected an antique geringsing, a modern single ikat, and a palm leaf book, our guide walked us and our haul to the lady who had the credit card terminal. And her own workroom/shop. While ringing us up she encouraged us to look at her work, but we demurred. Having just spent Berber carpet money, we were tapped out.

Then we looked at her work. Fuck.

Ikat is hard enough to wrap your head around, and double ikat requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The artisan referred to this as stick ikat, and while this is a single ikat, it’s almost as mind-blowing as the geringsing. How? Just… how?

I could find out almost nothing about this technique online. But seriously. How?

Ata Reed Basket Weaving

Just when we thought our last shekel had been surgically extracted, we came to a basket weaving shop on our way out of the village. I’m sure our route was entirely coincidental.

All the work had been produced by the man sitting in front and his family. The baskets are woven from Ata reeds, which grow in abundance in Tenganan. The work is tight, precise, and elegant. How could we leave empty handed? We’re not monsters.

We wound up enjoying the rest of the tour, but Tenangan had been the motive force for the trip, and it was 100% the highlight. We were expecting spectacular weaving, and were still blown away, but we weren’t expecting the delightful peek into ancient village life. Thanks, Bali.

Lebah Agrotourism

Lebah Agrotourism, a coffee plantation and honey farm, sits just outside Tenganan. It wasn’t on our itinerary, but our driver said it was worth our while. Who are we to argue?

Well, we did try to argue. The sign on the front said their specialty was Kopi Luwak, which is civet coffee. Civets, which are just weasels with airs, eat coffee cherries and poop them out, fermenting them in the process. The cherries are harvested and then made into coffee the usual way. As if nothing untoward had occurred.

Dorothy is a hardcore omnivore who will eat just about anything, but she has, entertainingly, drawn the line at Kopi Luwak. Not a chance, which made the stop seem superfluous. But our driver insisted that fun was to be had, so we relented.

Like, I suppose, the entire island of Bali, Lebah was a lush jungle paradise. We started with a walk through the coffee plantation. It’s not a plantation in the rows-of-trees sense, more just a place with lots of coffee trees.

A lot of the large-scale Kopi Luwak providers keep caged civets and feed them coffee cherries, like a caffeinated goose, but Lebah does it the old-fashioned way: they scour the jungle for civet scat and scoop it up for the partially digested coffee cherries. Free range, y’all. Also, world’s worst job?

The honey operation is likewise not an industrial operation, just a jungle with a lot of beehives. They keep two kinds of bees and make two kinds of honey. There’s the standard bee (Apis Cerana), which they call the Asian Bee, and then there’s these tiny little bees, almost gnat-sized, which they call friendly bees (Apis Trigona, or the Kelo Honey Bee, locally), because they bite instead of stinging.

The friendly bees live in forests, which means that harvesting the honey is a foraging operation. Lebah has been able to breed them, which is much harder to do than breeding standard bees, so they have their own population and can harvest honey onsite.

As their size suggests would be the case, the friendly bees produce much less honey than a standard bee. Each friendly bee colony produces only 1-2 kg/year, whereas a standard bee colony produces up to 10 kg/year.

But the differences really show up on the tongue. The tour ended with a tasting, meant, I believe, to part us from our cash. The standard bee honey was very good honey. If I’d tasted it on a farm in Wisconsin I’d have said, “That’s very good honey,” but I wouldn’t have gone all Tex Avery on it.

But the friendly bee honey was… something else entirely. It was way more complex than regular bee honey, with more going on than just sweet. It has an almost sour undertone, and is much less viscous than standard honey. It’s also eyepoppingly expensive. They don’t make enough to export, so it’s pretty much only available at Lebah. 60 ml was $20 USD.

It’s in a sealed bottle, so we’re confident we can get it past customs.

But the highlight of the tasting was shaming Dorothy into trying the Kopi Luwak. I don’t drink coffee, and I’m remarkably more squeamish than she is about what I put in my mouth, but I told her that I’d have some if she did. I was as good as my word. Joint verdict: Good coffee. Less alkaline than coffee that hasn’t passed through a digestive system. Not worth the weasel poop.

Taman Ujung Water Palace

Water palaces are a thing here, and they are, sadly, not grandiose, palatial water parks, which is certainly what I was hoping. Rather, they are palaces in which water is a critical part of the site design. Taman Ujung was constructed from 1909 to 1921 by the last king of Karangasem. He leveraged a site the previous king had built for exorcisms. So, no bad vibes. Nope. None. Everything fine here. Fine. Everything is fine.

The grounds and structures are, well, fit for a king. They are gracious and serene and beautiful, and less ornate than you might think. Luxurious, yes, and grand, but more stripped down than expected. It’s hard to think of a site like this as tasteful and restrained, but we’re grading on a curve here.

Belying that whole restrained thing, the compound is stuffed to the gills with fabulous carvings and sculptures.

We didn’t spend a ton of time here, but it was a lovely, relaxing interlude in an objectively stunning setting.

Maha Gangga Valley Rice Terrace

This was a funny place. On the one hand, it’s a working farm, growing rice, vegetables, and flowers, as well as managing livestock. On the other hand, it’s a roadside attraction, offering a curated experience and leveraging its natural beauty for tourism.

We were kind of expecting to be underwhelmed by the visit, due to the theme park undertone, but we were charmed by the setting and our guide.

The guide is part of the experience, and is included with the entrance fee. There’s no just wandering loose. When you arrive at the gate, you’re presented with a menu of options. You can go for a simple trek, you can swim in the pool under the waterfall, you can have lunch at their restaurant or visit their spa. You can stay in one of their huts. We chose a guided trek, which was least expensive and took a couple of very enjoyable hours.

While they’ve tarted up the fields with follies for the tourists, Maha Gangga is first and foremost a rice producer. There’s something about the green of rice paddies that seems to be its own particular color.

Beyond that, the site was truly stuffed. The valley it sat in was gorgeous.

They had ponds with both catfish and koi. We enjoyed the feeding frenzy for both of them.

There was a little stone temple just sitting in a field.

Hut-el rooms.

There was a lovely valley with a waterfall and a pond. And, for no identifiable reason, this:

There were lots of amazing flowers and plantings, some decorative and some planted and harvested for sale.

This is bola adil, a traditional Balinese gambling game. It looks like Twister, but it involves rolling a ball on a custom-made board until it falls into one of the shallow indents (it can take awhile), with betting on where it will land. We played a few rounds, with victory ever out of reach, but it was fun.

And finally, there was this. For scale, I’d say it was about 20′ tall. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.

Where We Didn’t Go

As usual, where we chose not to go says as much as where we did visit.

When we proposed a trip to Tenganan, our driver immediately suggested two other stops in that direction: Tirta Gangga and the Penataran Agung Lempuyang Temple. He proposed both locations because they’re top bucket list stops for tourists. We declined, for the same reason.

Tirta Gangga is a water temple, like Taman Ujung. Taman Ujung is older, larger, and classier, but it’s much less traveled because it lacks Tirta Gangga’s Instagram pedigree. Which is why we didn’t go. I don’t even feel guilty about scraping this photo.

I love almost everything about our lifestyle, but one thing I definitively hate, besides the French, is what Instagram has done to travel. How long did that shot take to stage? How many people couldn’t enjoy themselves while it was happening? How can someone be so aware of the frame’s composition and unaware of their surroundings? On the other hand, it was pretty cool to learn that koi can be fed with self-regard. It’s the unexpected lessons that really hit home.

We passed on Lempuyang Temple for pretty similar reasons. It’s heavily touristed, and even more Instagram-degraded than Tirta Gangga. In fact, when you pay your entrance fee you’re assigned both a photographer and a number for the iconic photo spot, the Gates of Heaven. You queue up and wait for your number to be called, hand the photographer your camera, and pose for your Instagram photo. You get a couple of minutes to get your shot, at most, before the next number is called.

Instagram has made a photo factory out of a holy site. It’s stomach-churning.

Somehow even worse, there’s no reflecting pool. The local photographers hold a mirror under the camera to get that effect. To be fair, though, the choice to be good tourists was pretty easy. It requires over 1,700 steps to visit all of Lempuyang’s temples.

We were having a conversation on the topic of physical limitations the other day, lamenting that Bali seemed to offer a number of adventures we’d aged out of. Ziplining through the jungle. Hiking to the caldera of an active volcano. Whitewater rafting…

Then we realized that we wouldn’t have done those things when we were younger. It felt good to know that our age and fitness weren’t keeping us from adventure, just our natural aversion to things that might be fatal. It was very affirming.