Bali Bicycle Eco Tour

A colorful offering on the dashboard of our minivan ensured a safe & comfortable lift up to Breakfast at scenic lookout point at lake Baktur. An ornate Garuda mythical bird decoration guards the Coffee & tea while breakfast was a standard buffet of fruit & Bali banana pancake and scrabbled eggs.

We tour a small botanical garden before starting to bicycle. We see vanilla, cocoa & coffee plants. Our tour guide shows us how they hand roast, crush, and filter out the coffee grids from the coffee bean shell.

We taste the local handmade Bali coffee & hot chocolate.

Next comes tasting real fresh local fruits including ripe chocolate. White large seeds of the cocoa fruit are the size & shape of garlic cloves and have a tasty sweet white flesh similar to the Mangosteen fruit. After eating the flesh what remains is the hard dark 100% chocolate nut. The nut itself does not really have any taste; chocolatiers add sugar & milk to the processed chocolate oil & powder to get chocolate candy.

A Bamboo factory is our 1st stop as we bicycle downhill on small village roads. We see them separate the hard sheath for weaving mat & walls from the wood and pulp. “Nothing is wasted”, says our guide. The bamboo wood is used as cooking fire fuel & the pulp fed to live stock.

Bamboo grows incredibly fast. Here we see a sapling that will be 3 meters (10 feet) high in 1 month.

We also get a lecture about typical Bali family compound & life. Cooking house is on East wall with door facing west, meeting platform in center, family houses on south & southeast, old people housing on west, and family temple on NW corner. Unlike in the West, in Bali it is the youngest child that inherits the family property and thus is the leader of the family.

Antique statues made to order! The boy make 8 "antique" statues a day.

Next stop an ancient village Temple with Balinese architecture & special Hindu paintings. The Temple is organized to represent the 3 realms of Bali: Sacred Mountain interior, common fertile flat land, and adventurous surrounding sea.

For energy snack I enjoy a ripe green banana, a variety that is common in SE Asia.

We stop to view rice harvest and threshing to separate the rice from the harvested stalks. Harvesters take a break and enjoy some water that we give them (Contribution).
This is where we had our 1st casualty. One guy of our group lost control while stopping and toppled over injuring himself on the bicycle and roadway. He was helped up, was treated on the roadside & courageously finished rest of the trip with us. Later an older lady also crashed on a tight turn. She finished the trip inside the following support van.

We stopped at the optional ending point just after crossing a small dam. I could not resist, so the others watched as I crossed thru the shallow river. Once on the other side my companions told me to start back from higher up so I would go faster. I did this and realized they just wanted to see me create more of a splash and get wet! (Adventure)
Due to our 25% casualties and that most of us had already seen it, we skipped the Monkey Forest sanctuary in Ubud and drove directly to our buffet lunch at a nice open air restaurant just East of Ubud. A good selection of local dishes and relaxing companionship conversation was a nice way to end our tour. I share Landmark Forum with several people who express interest and say they will checkout the website.