A week in Bali (Day 4) - Tegalalang and Petulu

It started raining heavily during lunch and again later in the evening when we left Tegalalang. Seriously, don't bother to waste the money to enter Tegalalang. Bedugul and the other mountainous areas in Bali have rice terraces too, and the ones we saw going up Bedugul two days before were much more appealing.

We only had Petulu left. It was only 5.30pm when we left Tegalalang, so I was kind of regretting not having more places in the itinerary. Then again it was still raining so yeah, never mind. Omar said he never went to Petulu (the reason was obvious why later) with other tourists before. According to the travel guides, the Kokokan (Koko crunch - actually egrets) would fly off for the day for food (later we found out where some of them went... outside our hotel room.....) and coming back to roost at around sunset.

Flying in for a landing

Omar alighted at a booth just outside the village just like Tegalalang. So commercialized... argh. So he came back and asked us if we wanted to walk down the village which was about 800m and he could pick us up half an hour later. Or we could all sit inside the car until 6pm.

So we walked along a narrow village road (2-way!).  Little wooden shacks and tiled steps leading up to traditional homes lined the road, and we caught interesting glimpses of village life, e.g. a group of village boys gathering at one of the shacks to watch football on one CRT and play old video games on another, it kind of reminded me of my childhood, so I liked seeing that.

Village Life

Walking further in, we began to see the birds flying in and landing on their nests which were super high up in the tall trees. There were actually little warungs planted among the padi fields for you to put up your feet and enjoy the view at a less neck breaking angle.  It wasn't very easy to take photos, and being a tight pussy I did not buy a more powerful lens, and all my camera could capture were essentially tiny white long-legged things flying here and there.

kokokan nests

if you blink hard enough you can see the white birdies on the tree...

I would say it was ok, but I thought the village life was more interesting than those birds. I had more fun watching the funny ducks outside our hotel room. The tour guides painted a more intriguing imagery though: Locals sat that the birds are manifestations of souls of people killed in the aftermath of the failed Communist coup against the Indonesian government in Jakarta in 1965. Soon after some 100,000 people connected to the Jakarta coup were massacred in Bali, the egrets mysteriously appeared in Petulu in 1966.

Cats' "Memory" Violin Score

[original source (pdf)]

Kho Kho Nara

A whole group of bears convened upon the hapless Kho Kho Nara for its fried chicken. It was my suggestion, because fried chicken was the one thing I craved maximus from my South Korean trip. And I still hadn't been able to find the perfect place that reminded me of that wonderful fried chicken I had there (don't ask me about the fotos, they are probably in the junk somewhere that I hauled from my other home).

The restaurant is CRAMPED. After all it is located in the CBD, which means $$$$ in rentals. I can totally understand, but it was impossible to take photos nicely when another bear's elbow is digging into your ribs while the other is reaching over  you to grab at the yummy chicken wings.

"I'll make love 2 you like you want me to And I'll hold you tight, baby, all through the night" (Boyz II Men's song)

The chicken is INSANELY GOOD. Crispy, freshly fried, fragrant. Even the original fried chicken was wonderful. If the damn chicken is a man, I would bring him home and make sweet sweet love to him all night long and then eat him. It was really expensive, but really yum. I would go there just for the wings, they were that good. There were three flavors, Original, Soy Garlic and Sweet & Spicy. I personally like the garlicky one, because it carries the piquant fragrance of garlic and is yet cloyingly sweet. Vampires beware!

김치 찌개 - affordable but blah...they used cheap belly. I don't know why I had instant image of leftover samyeopsal

Beef 비빔밥

The rest of the lunch menu is ok including the banchan. Way cheaper than its dinner menu (same items by the way), but not worth writing about because they were a letdown after having those ambrosial chicken wings.

In a nutshell,

Kko Kko Nara Korean Restaurant
57 Tras Street #01-01 Singapore
Tel: +65 6224 8186

Bebek Bengil (Dirty Duck)

Dirty Duck Diner

We continued on with being literal by having Bebek Bengil (Bebek meaning "duck"). It's heavily touted online and in travel guides that this is the most famous restaurant in Ubud. Even though I rarely eat duck nowadays ever since I decided that they were too cute, I decided to break the rule for once to try this so-called famous duck.

Beautiful garden

It is definitely an organized operation. They have the drivers drop the guests off with matching numbers, then the drivers park behind the restaurant, while the guests follow the waitress through a beautiful garden with loads of little huts. Each hut has a few tables, some even with Japanese-style sitting. Looking through the menu, we notice that they highlighted the half duck portion with a box so it was an obvious choice for us.

Menu

We thought it was a two person portion, given the price (100K rupiah!!!) but turned out it was a one person portion, according to the waitress who gave us a polite version of "WTF" face. After eating only noodles and rice over five days already, we decided to order potatoes and salad to go with the duck.

Tiny Bird, tiny portion

The duck was really crazy ass tiny, so were the potato and salad portions. And extremely dry and gamey tasting despite the vague taste of spice. I liked that there were three condiments, but they were not enough to overcome the feeling that we had been very disappointed and let down by the experience. A bit like the Pension Charlotte where we stayed at in Hakone, which was very heavily praised by another Singaporean lady but was actually not really that great.

A week in Bali (Day 4) - Yeh Pulu

I really think that Ubud is severely ruined by "Eat Pray Love"rs. It is supposed to be the cultural centre of Bali, but it is the most tourist-driven and over-commericalized area we encountered. Every bloody sight cost 15K rupiah to enter, even Yeh Pulu, which we had been conned by the travel guides as "water container" temple with intricate wall carvings. Well... we did see a short wall of carvings, but that's all.. and we didn't see where the supposed water container was. I almost thought that the water container was this statue somewhere along the path to the shrine, because on our way back an old lady with a coterie of little children (including the bad boy - see below) was praying in front of it.

The only thing interesting about Yeh Pulu was this really adorable puppy that sniffed and followed us everywhere. Unfortunately there was a very naughty boy who ran out and chased the poor doggie to stop him from following us, at one point, he even tried to step on the doggie's head. I wanted to scold the little boy but Bobo stopped me. And he stopped me from playing with the doggie. He said I would make the doggie's life more miserable, because the boy would only be more merciless.

Ok, according to "The Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok", the small spring after which the site is named (yeh meaning "holy spring" and pulu being "stone vessel" rises close to the statue of Ganesh and is sacred. The Balinese are so literal, aren't they, first Goa Gajah (meaning Elephant cave literally with its statue of Ganesh inside) then now Yeh Pulu.

Says here too that "carved away from a cliff face, the 25 metre long series of Yeh Pulu carvings are said to date back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. they are thought by some historians to depict a five-part story and while the meaning of its story has been lost, it;'s still possible to make our some recurring characters and to speculate on the connections between them; local people, however, describe the cravings as showing daily activities from time past. I think I believe the local people more, but seriously, who pushes the cow (look at the first photo of the carved woman pushing at an animal rump)?