bachelor's breakfast

I've managed to get pretty healthy just eating a variety of fruit every morning around 7:30. nothing else except some yogurt once a week. papaya, mango, pineapple, watermelon or mangosteen, banana...yum. I get hungry again around 9:21 am. go figure. All I have to do is ignore that until lunch. easy now, hard when I started. The benefit is I digest easily, I feel better (swimming every day) and I've lost all my baby belly fat. ahh, little miracles.

3 squares a day

daily gourmet!

amazing food!

this dish is nasi campur (cham-purr)

-"mixed rice"

the wrapped items are a sweet rice roll with a savory/cumin flavored chicken. also shown, tempe manis -sweet sauce, crunchy flavor. also, in the banana leaf is a chicken dumpling. this is staple food.

Ginger Tea and Rolling Blackouts

Ginger tea is perhaps the finest tasting beverage i've had in awhile. The root is straight from the garden next to the kitchen, loaded with flavor and prepared perfectly. I could drink it all day long,

unless...

The rolling blackouts hit the land far and wide.

Let's set the scene,

I imagine a moist, tropical little municipal office deep in the heart of Bali's central city of Denpasar, the air thickened with plumes of clove cigarette smoke at night time. Inside are eight Balinese men preoccupied by a chess tournament that was started twelve days ago with the best of intentions; to decide the fate of the most corrupt among them. The loser will have to buy next time he collects. Laughter aside, their motivations are pure; live to protect number one. An effort that is completely possible with a little help for one's wife. Well, all the help actually.

Meanwhile, running concurrent to the goings-on within the corruption den is a series of events unfolding at a rapid clip next door under the Department of Redundancy Department. Little do the chess players know that due to a sluicing underground fire-hose shot of rice paddy runoff a deep hollow is collapsing beneath the DRD and this will soon form a chasm wide enough to swallow the Giga-Vector Watt Extrusion Contingency Device sent here by the Dutch to prevent rolling blackouts.

God help us all tonight, and please pray to the Hindu Gods of candles, flashlights, matches...and my internet access.

me and Ben's boys at Canggu beach

Canggu beach at sunset

nice end to a great day.

a little more crowded than usual due to the holiday weekend.

Durian

This is not advised;

eating durian, aka; "toe jam fruit" on a bike trip break. gross, creamy, custardy center, stinky as hell. ben made me try it.

sample of the good stuff

After diluting with water my friend Ben and the gardedner Joko will bottle, label and sell at nurseries and farmer's markets in Bali for $3 a bottle. You spray it on your soil along with a microbial mixture and never turn the soil. The microbes help you to improve crop production by a factor of ten. Guano is the best fertilizer.

fruit bats

what looks like shadows are actually thousands of medium size fruit bats

Bat cavern

Down in the caldera behind the cone we arrived by truck to achieve our first objective. This was to negotiate a fair price for bat guano which ends up being really great for gardens. We settled at $1 per kilo. Way to high but still usable, we'll have to find an unsupervised cave. This one had a few teenage boys near the base just hanging out near a store. They had no idea what the hell we wanted bat guano for but since we showed up with shovels and buckets and asked to buy some (out of respect), they decided it had value. Go figure.

The Green school gardener stood back in the green shirt waiting to get to work.

Bat caves are amazing. Vibrating and chaotic. This one was filled with whirring fruit bats, all huddled together

Gunung Batur

This is the moment after a big climb out of Mt. Batur's caldera following our guano mission. The cone in the background is in the middle of the huge Caldera (approximately 10 mile diameter). The phrase "switchback" takes on a new meaning in Bali. I would describe the climb as a zigzagging yet fairly straight line up ridges that point up to the top of the rim. ouch! over a thousand vertical feet. emphasis on vertical.

The best part was the 2 hr downhill through ancient vilages and farmland , up and down river gourges, on and on back to Ubud

Ketewel

This is Ketewel, a black sand beach north of Sanur that has some nice surf and almost no people

We go here for some pretty fun body surfing. Today was pretty flat but it's always nice to go to the beach when you're sweating all day. Canggu beach next saturday: waves all morning, food sampling at a friend's new cafe for lunch, more waves, and top secret property research late in the day.

Giant Asparagus

I found a pair of Bamboo shoots at the entrance to the place I'm staying that looked exactly like my favorite vegetable. Ben posed next to them to show how gargantuan they actually are. I don't know how fast they are growing but I suspect they weren't there a few days prior.

steamy afternoon

I was riding my bike around the town of Ubud where I live on a sunday looing for a house to rent for my family. This pic is in the village of Pestastanan which has many painters. The red roofed house has a pool and goes for $1200 a month. A dutch family will move in in july. the price is steep anyway compared to what's available.

Malang, Java

During my second trip to Java to work in the bamboo laminate factory for a week we stayed in the home owned by the factory manager. He and his father and brothers run the village and live right next to the factory which is hidden in order to protect it from local mafia control. During a break we were at his house and this musical troupe came by to earn a little money. We also visted a bamboo forest beneath a cliff, high in the mountains. The local village is home to a hearty group of farmers, all of whom are in exceptional shape from hauling bananas, bamboo, rice and forest products through the tropical trails to bring to the markets and for pick-up at roadside. Their homes are filled with potted plants and displayed in a way to outdo each other.

lil" chicks

Rian next to a sawah hut

sawah (rice fields)

sawah (rice fields)

this shot is looking down a valley that separates two old kingdoms. My understanding is that each kingdom tried to impress the other with their ability to control water. The more dramatic the curves and terracing the stronger the image representing the kingdom.

8:00 am

the line-up