Bali

September 28-30

After so much hard work traveling through Southeast Asia we decided we needed a vacation. So we booked a flight to Bali. Really, we knew we wanted to make it to an island in Indonesia – something exotic and wonderful – but we didn’t have an exact location until Michael found a great restaurant on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. It is an all dessert restaurant that is called Room 4 Dessert. Chef Goldfarb does tasting menus – entire tasting menus of just desserts.

So, we went to visit Bali so we could eat a lot of dessert. Seems about right.

Ridiculous? Yes it is. But also delicious. And the “meal” had cocktail pairings, because of course it did.

Besides eating desserts, we also checked out some fancy coffee. Bali is known for their luwak coffee. So here’s why it is so famous: Asian palm civets eat the coffee berries and then poop them out. Every day, at Lumbung Sari coffee farm, employees wander around the farm picking up their droppings so they can find the undigested coffee beans. Then they treat the coffee beans the same way that any coffee beans are treated. They are roasted and then ground to make coffee. What makes the coffee better is that the civets only choose to eat the best cherries and also fermentation occurs as the cherries pass through the civet’s intestines. Too much information? Agree. There is some concern about the ethical aspect of this type of coffee. Some farms keep the animals in cages and force feed them. However, the farm we visited relies on wild civets.

Here is a picture of an Asian palm civet:

She is actually pregnant. The farm only has two civets that they “keep”. One is kept in a cage and the above has a cage that they leave open and that she chooses to stay in. I don’t know why – I guess she likes being taken care of. Neither of those two civets will eat the berries. Apparently they are pampered now and will only eat fruit. However, wild civets come in at night and eat the berries and 💩.

Here is a cacao tree at the farm.

Besides the coffee, this farm also makes a handful of different teas, cocoa, and flavored coffees.

And finally, we drink!

The full cup was the fancy coffee and it was delicious, as promised. It was pretty sweet without any added sweetener. The rest of the coffees and teas were delicious as well. We’re bringing some poo coffee home so you all can try it too!

We also took a trip to some rice terraces. They were beautiful and gave us the chance to wander around a bit.

These are the kids that sold Michael some postcards.

They had his number, big time. After selling him much more than he needed (what we needed was zero), they were then not even pleased with his purchase and immediately started trying to sell him more. Then after we got off the terraces another little girl tried to sell us the same cards with a starting price of 1/5 what Michael had paid. Haha. You win some, you lose some. I guess if we’re going to “lose some”, I’d want it to be to some kids in Indonesia.

And, of course, we had a chance to check out some gorgeous beaches.

And these sunsets!

Plus, some random locals shooting off fireworks. It may not be a Fourth of July display, but it was fun to see them.

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While relaxing on such a beautiful island, we also got very lucky. In August, Bali was hit hard by a 5.2 magnitude earthquake. Then while we were in Bali another Indonesian island, Sulawesi, was hit by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake. The most recent news I have is that 1400 people died in the quake and the 20 foot tsunami that happened shortly after. There are still over 1000 people missing and over 70,000 who are now homeless. Then a volcano erupted on the same island (although in a different area of the island which is about the same size as Missouri). It sounds like the volcano eruption isn’t currently impacting anyone as the area doesn’t have inhabitants, but still – come on! This island deserves a break!

We feel very lucky to have been able to visit this country without experiencing any of the horrible effects of these natural disasters. What we saw of Indonesia was amazing and hopefully they’ll have some time to recover after so much devastation and so much loss.

So that’s it for Asia. The next day we hopped a super early 1am flight to Australia. In the words of Michael, “the sun is setting on the Asia portion of our trip”.