84. Ubud

The trip from the airport to Amandari took over an hour, despite the relatively short distance. There's only one street from Denpasar to Ubud, and it is a beehive of activity. The entire street is lined with a virtually unbroken stretch of shops and temples, with the shops mostly selling carvings and offerings for the temples (and tourists). The business of the villages spills out onto the street, and much of the street traffic is engaged in drive by shopping as well, so traffic really crawls through the atmospheric chaos.

Bali is the lone Hindu outpost in overwhelmingly Muslim Indonesia. Indonesia is littered with Hindu temples, as it was once completely Hindu, but several great Muslim empires succeeded in throwing out the previous Hindu rulers, and the Hindu hierarchy fled to little Bali, where it has practiced its confusing religion more or less unhindered ever since. Despite being Hindu, it was clear that tourism had taken a beating after 9/11, and all the hotels we stayed at were virtually empty. Shortly after we left there were terrorist bombings in Bali itself, killing lots of tourists, which I'm sure didn't help boost tourism either. (More pics of the Amandari).