Day3--Bali Bike Tour

Monday.  This was great.  We'd had several friends do this bike tour with the same company.  It's almost all downhill.  Some unexpected's:  one of our neighbors across the street had chose this same company on the same day, they were in a different group, though.  Also, one of the boy's in Madison's Chinese class was in our group with his family.  Warning: I took a lot of pictures! 

The tour company picked us up at 7:30 a.m. at our villa in a car.  We had some great terraced rice paddy views during the 45-60 minute drive up.

We arrived at our first destination:  breakfast.  Also overlooking Mount Batur (an inactive volcano) and Lake Batur:

We toured a coffee plantation...the little creature is part of the harvesting process.  We'll forgo telling you how.  We learned how to roast and grind the beans.  We then tried out the hot chocolate (they do grow cocoa beans there, too).

We were introduced to all kinds of new fruits that day.  The skin on this one feels like alligator skin and it tastes similar to an apple:

We were then driven to a large field and "parking lot."  It was full of many different sized bikes.  This is where we started the bike tour portion...and said good-bye to the fascinatingly large spiders...and headed down this road:

Part of the wonderful thing about the ride, is that it is an actual tour of the heart of Bali.  Our first stop was at a traditional Balinese house.  What looks like the front entrance is actually the entrance to the family compound.  Most have been around for hundreds of years.  In their culture, the youngest son is the one who picks up the responsibility of taking care of the aging parents (because he is the youngest at the time of this occurance).  They have separate buildings for different things:  kitchen, ceremonial house, sleeping house, etc.  They are not nearly as nice as what we are accustomed to.  They dry out their own rice in between buildings, raise their own animals for meals and celebrations...or to sell when they need money.  One building had two large stones in front, to the side of the steps.  This designates that there are two children.  Each family compound has their own family temple.

We went further through the neighborhood/village and came across this poor guy who'd dropped his chicken off of his motorcycle.  He was waiting for someone to come help pick it up and hand it back to him.

We continued on and our next stop was in a rice paddy.  Literally, for one of us.  We learned about their irrigation and planting procedures.

We continued on local side streets from village to village.  I wished I'd had video of the two little girls.  They were sooooo excited that we'd waved to them as we passed.  Along the way, we stopped to see this huge, very old tree.  Some of the local kids were playing soccer.  Our American kids had to join in.

We also stopped at a wood-carvers shop.  Most villages are known for something (woodcarving, painting, weaving, gold, silver, etc.) and that's what everyone in the village does.

At the end of our bike tour, probably around 2:00 p.m. we finished here.  I was walking across a bridge to return our bikes and took this picture of where we'd just been.

 We were treated to a great Balinese lunch here:

Would highly recommend this tour with this company to any size family, regardless of age.  There were many guides with each group (which typically consists around 15 people) and a car that followed each group if someone got too hot or tired.  Bikes, helmets, water, breakfast, and lunch were included with the tour price.   USD with rough conversion cost us $36 per adult (for Jeremy, Sarah, and Allison) and $25 per child (for Madison and Parker).  We can't remember if McKenna was free because she was under 5 or if we paid for her.  We didn't complain if we did pay as we thought the overall price was lower than reasonable!