Bali (Day 6) - Candidasa

Today should be fun.  We rented a couple of scooters to ride around the area today, so we will have complete control of our day.  To start the day,  we had an American breakfast at the hotel that should last us a bit.  

We then took off on the scooters around 10 AM with the first stop being only 10 minutes away, Tenganan Pegeringsingan Village, an ancient village where villagers still live a traditional life.  While most of the villagers are rice farmers, some sell their crafts such as egg painting, weaving, and carving / painting on palm leaves.

The village was very picturesque.  You can see the craftsmen at tables outside their homes selling items that they made. 

There were many traditional buildings throughout the grounds of the village.

We spent about 1 hour walking around the village and talking to some of the people.  We talked to one man who was making something in preparation for the upcoming village festival.  He said that the kids aren't interesting in learning about how to do any of the traditional crafts or living anymore...they just want to play on their phones...sounds familiar.

Our next stop is Lempuyang Temple.  We thought we could ride our scooters right to the temple, but we were directed off the road into a parking lot 1.5 miles away.  Because of the popularity of this temple, you have to take a shuttle bus up the mountain to the temple.  We were pretty surprised by all this and we wondered what made this temple so popular.

When we bought the tickets for the shuttle bus the person mentioned something about waiting 3 hours for a photo...what?  We had no idea what she was talking about.  We bought the ticket and headed up the steep, long mountain road.

From the shuttle stop, we had to walk a another 5 or so minutes up a very steep road until we finally arrived at the entrance.  There we purchased the tickets for the temple and was given a number...ours was 410.  It winds up that this temple is so popular because people want to take a photo of themselves inside the "Gates of Heaven" with Mount Agung volcano in the background.  When we arrived they were calling number 180...now we understand what they meant about waiting for 3 hours to take a photo.  There was no way we were going to wait...we just snapped this photo in front of the "Gates of Heaven."

The crazy, or is it sad thing about it was that today you couldn't even see the volcano due to clouds. Such silly people waiting for the "Insta-worthy" photo.

On the other side of the courtyard from the "Gates of Heaven" was this cool staircase that we didn't have to wait to get a photo in front of.

This is a photo from the top of those stairs:

By the way...this is what the backside of the "Gates of Heaven" look like.

The next stop was 20 minutes away, Tirta Gangga, a royal water palace.  There were many people, but the place was really beautiful.

It was now 2:30 PM and I was starving so we decided to eat at a restaurant inside the water palace.  We didn't want to eat anything too big since dinner was only a few hours away, so we ordered snacks of Chicken Quesadilla (Tim) and Vegetarian Nachos (me) along with a couple of fresh mango juice.

I needed to get one more shot of that cool tower before leaving.

Oh...here are the bikes that we rented.  We paid extra to get the bigger 155cc engine versus the 125cc ones.  The cost to rent each of these scooters for the entire day?  150,000 IDR => $10!

One lasst stop is Virgin Beach, not far from our lodging.  I brought our swimsuits, but it was already after 4 PM, so we didn't have much time to go swimming.  Instead we just walked on the beach a tried to find a temple that I thought was here.

We walked to the end of the beach and up a flight of stairs and found a parking lot, but no temple.  I asked someone and they said there was a temple but it was not opened to the public, so we just walked back down the stairs and back to our bikes.

Here we are getting ready to ride the bikes the last stretch to home.

Speaking of home...here is the view off our balcony just after sunset.

After a full day of running around on the scooters, we decided to eat at the hotel.  We both ordered the Barramundi fish which tasted delicious and wound up being a pretty healthy dinner.

After dinner we went back to our room.  It was already after 9 PM...wow...that was a late dinner.  We were both very tired, but managed to watch some YouTube, and a bit of blogging before calling it a night,  Tomorrow we have a driver picking us up at 9:45 AM to take us to our next lodging location about 1 hour away.  Until then...