Bali - Day 8

(This is a LONG one. Consider yourself warned.)

Back to surfing—and I couldn’t wait to get back on the board. I’m addicted. The way I feel about surfing, is the way I imagine dad feels about golf. Or felt before he quit for 3 years. The desire to get out and do it every day for hours, and to constantly improve. It’s a sport that you can do brilliantly one day and fail miserably the next. There’s no constant or continual progression—each day is a new challenge. I love the rush of adrenaline and the feeling of popping up on your surfboard and riding the wave in. I’ll hold back all the mushy, spiritual, woman and nature kind of stuff—not sure I’m there yet, but needless to say, I could do this for many, many more days.



I have also figured out why all our male surf coaches became surf coaches. Jumping up on surfboards and popping out of waves causes a lot of swim shorts and bikini tops and bottoms to pop off with surprising (or not) regularity.

After surfing today, I got to make my elephant dream come true. One of the things I really wanted to do in Bali was ride an elephant. After being there a couple of days it didn’t seem like anyone shared my dream, so I was debating whether to go off myself and do it for a half day or just save that dream for another day. I was talking about it yesterday in the pool with Mandanna and she surprised me by saying she would LOVE to go and was super excited about the “elephant dream” too. She also wanted to hug and kiss them and stuff, which I wasn’t sure if you could I do but I made sure to feed that hope. ☺



We hired a driver for a ½ day to take us up to the elephant sanctuary. It was about an hour to 90 minute drive, and we got him for forty dollars. Amazing. When we arrived at the magical elephant spot, we asked our driver to stop so we could take pictures with this sign - which we were probably disproportionally excited about:




After we took every possible angle, we decided it might be even more exciting to actually see the real elephants.



Right as we arrived a torrential downpour occurred, canceling the elephant shows and possibly putting our ride in jeopardy. We figured we’d go in to the reserve and eat some lunch and hopefully watch the storm pass. It was really cool to see this from our table as we ate:





We decided that even if we didn’t get to see the elephant show and had to ride them in the rain, that we were still thrilled we took the journey, because the landscape we passed in the car on the way up showed us what the “real Bali” was like, and took us out of the whole tourist trap areas much more than our trip to Ubud.



We passed rice fields with little huts that are built every so many yards for the workers to lay down and take naps when they are tired (great idea!), and we saw the men and women working in their rice paddies with traditional clothing and pointy cone hats. We saw women and men walking down impossibly narrow roads, risking their lives in what should have been one-way traffic, and wasn’t, with ridiculously large bundles of sticks, or baskets, or clothing, or whole houses on their heads. We saw tiny little shack homes, and people building wood and ceramic sculptures, and gorgeous landscape for miles and miles. It was one of my favorite moments of the trip.





Followed shortly thereafter with another of my favorites. Getting on board a real, live elephant. The rain finally went down to a misty trickle, so we donned our raincoats, grabbed the proffered umbrellas and each boarded an elephant for a walk through the jungle.



IT WAS AWESOME.

I felt like a Queen or a Sheik or whatever royalty might ride and elephant and Mandanna and I had huge smiles plastered from ear to ear as we snapped pictures of each other and found out important facts about elephants, like the fact that Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice) had ridden Mandanna’s elephant in 2002.



We tromped through the jungle and saw where the people in that town lived (in the jungle), and other elephants ranging around. It stopped raining and for the grand finale, the Park Ranger (?) took our cameras and took pictures of us frolicking in the water on our elephants and sitting on the elephants knee and doing tricks with the elephants. BTW: we were pretty much the only people in the park at this point—seems it scared away all the other tourists.





We wandered around some more and saw the two new baby elephants (the only ones born in captivity in Bali ever.) and bumped in to the owner of the park who is an Australian transplant who bought ten elephants and built this elephant park and runs the place. He was very interesting, and I bought the documentary about him and the elephants he rescued from death in Sumatra to bring to Bali.



Mandanna and I were on cloud 9 after a “Brilliant Day” (as she says with her awesome Brittish/Australian accent) and I honestly think it was one of the most perfect days I have had in a long, long time. Surfing, Country tour, Riding elephants. Does it get any better?