Bali Tour Guide

A house in Bali has no dining room. Why is that? Where do they eat? Those are the questions in your mind. Before we talk about it, we need to see how a Bali house is built. The house in Bali is built based on a concept of "mountain-ocean" line. The lay out of the building must follow the idea or believe that the direction toward the mountain is sacred but the direction toward the sea is less sacred. The mountain is considered sacred because it is the highest point or closest part to the heaven. Meaning that the higher the place, the more sacred it is. This is the reason why the sacred building, such as family temple, is located somewhere in the northern part of the house for people who live south of the mountains. Less sacred part, like kitchen and toilet, is in the direction toward the sea. For Balinese who live in south Bali, south of the mountains, the house will consist of: building for the parents and family temple which is located in the north. Special building for cer

If you buy something in Bali in most shops and markets, you need to bargain. Bargaining can be difficult if you are not used to it. Some of the people that I talked to told me it is quite embarrassing to bargain, because they rarely, if not never, do it in their life. In Bali the sellers expect you to bargain when you want to buy something. If you don’t bargain, you might pay too much for something you buy. So, how do you bargain? When you walk accross a shop, let say a T shirts shop, the seller often shout loudly to you in their Balinese accent, "Come ya, just have a look. Not buying is okay." You walk in and see something you like and take it. You try it and the seller give a price. Tell the seller that the price is too expensive, shake your head, and give the T-shirt back to the seller. Then the seller will lower the price or ask you to name your price. Normally, people bargain fifty percent of what the price is offered. Let say, the price is 10 bucks, then you bargain 5 b

A Hindu Bali temple festival takes place every 210 days or six months(which is a year according to the Bali lunar calendar). In this special day, the local villagers prepare themselves to pray at the temple. The children are very excited and wear their best clothes to go to the temple. The ceremony at the temple usually started from early morning and finish late at night. The people will come more in the afternoon or early evening. The ladies brings offering on their heads; the offering is made of cakes, fruit, and coconut leafs. The men bring incense and flowers as these will be needed when praying. A temple festival is also the precious moment where people gather in the temple yard. So, a temple is not merely a place for praying, but it has turned to be a social place where friends and relatives meet each other. They talk about everything in the outer yard of the temple. This is also where they can watch dances performed by the local girls. At the temple festival you can see dances p

In earlier post, I have written about Balinese like drinking coffee or tea in the morning, at noon, or even in the evening. More people drink coffee to tea or milk. And usually when we drink coffee we have something else with it, be it Bali cakes that you can buy at the local markets or just boiled sweet potatoes as you see in the pictures. Those potatoes as the their name suggest, taste sweet. There are several kinds of sweet potatoes grown in Bali. The most common one is the white sweet potatoes with pink skin. There are also orange potatoes and purple potatoes. What you see in my photo are the white and orange ones. Balinese drink coffee and have snack at their leisure time. During the heat of the day, they sit at a pavilion called Bale Bengong or Sikepat chatting with their friends and families. People can also have snacks and coffee at their rest in between works, for example, farmers resting in the midday before resuming planting rice at their rice field. In every occasion there

I was sipping my Bali coffee at a small cafe while waiting for the clients that have gone into the monkey forest with the local guide, when somebody came and said to me that one of my tourists had been bitten by a monkey. Possibly a big monkey, he remarked. And so, I walked quickly into the forest entrance and saw that Sue, the tourist, has been surrounded by the locals that gave her first aid treatment, some betadine, and bandage. Many visitors and tourist (well, visitors are local and tourist are foreign visitor :-) )gathered to see what happened. Every body seemed quite panic, and talked and talked in Balinese, the language that Sue did not understand. That made her more worried. (Well, luckily, I understood. I am a Balinese) A police car arrived and two officers came out of it. Surely they were not going to "apprehend" the monkey, but they only would take Sue to the Tabanan Hospital. I went with them taking Sue because I was only the one who spoke English and Balinese. Su

The answer you get of this question may vary if you ask different people. The priest may say, yes it is. But many Balinese, although they are Hindu, consume beef. And people in Bali breed cows for meat. You will not see cow wander in the streets, because they are just cattle. Some people don't eat beef because they think they should not eat beef because they think it is a sacred animal. They say they will have a headache if they do so. Well, may be because of the cholesterol or some thing like that. And another thing, we don't consume cow milk or any other milk in the past. We just recently do this, because it is been advertised a lot in the media, that milk is healthy for our body. But many of the older generations, many of our parents or grand parents don't fancy milk. They don't drink milk, they'd rather drink coffee than drinking milk. I can understand that, because milk taste awful sometimes. Oh, did I mention that our cow doesn't produce any milk? Their mi

Today I took picture of Durian, one of the most popular tropical fruit. It is notoriously known for its bad smell among the westeners or tourist. For Balinese or Indonesian people it smells nice. And it tastes delicious as well. You can find people selling Durian in the local markets, by the streets of Denpasar, and in many villages in Middle and North Bali (Bestala Village). Related Post: The Fruit That Smells Like Hell But Tastes Likes Heaven