Arts and Crafts

The ARMA hotel offers several choices of breakfast: Indonesian, American, and 'healthy'. The healthy option seemed suspiciously similar to the American, only with the notable absence of a fried egg. Eggs Florentine, a cheese croissant, a tiny baked potato, juice, and waffles were served up and thoroughly enjoyed.

The "American"

We planned to spend the day taking advantage of the classes run at ARMA. K took the first class in batik painting. While the instructor, Made, spoke a little English, he leapt straight in with design without any explanation of the batik process.

"I'll just start you off"

K drew her own design of a phoenix in pencil on cloth, which was surreptitiously enhanced by a few delicate strokes from the artist. This sketch she then outlined in hot wax delivered using a canting. The wax outline repels the water-based inks, which are used to flood the areas of the drawing with colour. When dry (rapidly in the hot sun), the design is brushed with a clear fixing solution, dried again and then washed in hot water. The golden wax outline disappears, leaving a striking white outline that is the signature look of batik.

K also took a one-on-one lesson in traditional legong dance - the kind we had seen performed on Sunday and which is usually learned by girls from a young age. The teacher was friendly and patient, but took the same hands-on approach to arranging K's limbs into the correct angular posture as we had seen during the children's lesson.

"Shoulders back"

I had to leave before the end for my own class, but the progress I saw left me in no doubt as to the difficulty of the dance and the need to drill the moves from an early age. I have great respect for the performers we saw.

My class was in wood carving. Ubud is full of workshops overflowing with beautifully carved wooden sculptures and furniture. Such is the abundance of wooden craft, it is tempting to believe that it can be churned out with ease. The following two hours spent battling with a block of hibiscus wood, which resolutely refused to look anything like a turtle, proved me very wrong indeed.

Having selected my design of a turtle, I set to work with chisel and mallet. The half block of wood had already had some of its bark stripped to reveal a clear surface, on which a top-down view of the creature was outlined. I began to remove all of the bits of wood that didn't look like a turtle.

"Be one with the wood"

My teacher, Wayang, was smiley and friendly, turning out to be the husband of the equally amiable legong dance instructor. Holding the wooden block in his feet, he hewed out chunks effortlessly with the chisel, and sliced through the tough grain with a sharp knife as though were butter. I did the groundwork for the design, but had more than a little help making good. Carving, I opined to K, is not something one can hope to be competent at after only one session - unlike batik.

Having stretched our creative sinews, we sought nourishment for our bellies.

Central Ubud is full of cafés offering up healthy, vegan, organic super food-laden raw dishes, with a shot of wheatgrass juice in the side. Healthy for my colon this may be, but as a vegetarian I generally shy away from those places. I don't want anything weird, just tasty food like everybody else is eating but without the dead animals. Thanks.

Nasi campur

Fortunately, slightly out of town, there was a simple warung offering just what I was looking for: veggie nasi campur. At Suparna Hari 2, we sat ourselves in the empty warung and were served rice with a mixture of tasty but unidentifiable curries by an unusually unsmiling lady.

We returned after dinner to the Pura Dalem Puri temple for the second evening of the ceremony.

Offerings

There were yet further processions of people bringing offerings of fruit and flowers. Lines of women carried the offerings in large baskets perched atop their heads. Posture among the people of Bali is exemplary, as though they have all had lessons in correct deportment.

Unlike the opening night, there are no festivities apparent. At around 9PM there was an exodus to the car (motorbike) park and everybody made a good impression of the proceedings being over and going home.

With no ceremonial dance forthcoming, we sought another kind at the nearby Jazz club. It was Latin night and the floor was full of people doing salsa and batchata. We watched for a while - there being no space for us to throw our own moves - before heading back.

We exited just in time to catch the end of a legong performance at the temple that seemed to have struck up just as we had left the scene.