Today we engaged our driver again, to take us north and west, past major temples in Mengwi, and Bedugul to Gitgit, which shares the 2 distinctions of having Bali's highest waterfall, and (in my estimation) Bali's nastiest public toilet. I took pictures of the beautiful waterfall, but I think the toilet is best left unpublicized.
It's worth noting that although we drove from Ubud in the south of Bali, all the way up to Gitgit near the north coast, over slow, twisting mountain roads, the drive only took about 2 hours. Bali is even smaller than Massachusetts.
The first temple we visited, Pura Taman in Mengwi, was festooned with rows of decorated bamboo poles, called "penjors". It's difficult to see in the photo, but each penjor was a little bit different, and they were numbered, which led us to believe that they were part of some sort of competition. Dewa, our driver, explained to us that the villages in Bali participate in a big competition each year to determine which is the most beautiful, the cleanest, and the best decorated.
As we climbed into the northern mountains, the palm trees got progressively smaller and sparser, and the rice terraces began to give way to other crops. Our second temple stop was at Pura Ulun Danu, perched on the edge of Lake Bratan near Bedugul. This temple had gorgeous expansive gardens, with vegetation that looked much more like San Francisco than Bali, but turned out to be stubbornly resistant to decent photographs.
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