Travel like a drift throught world..

t’s tempting to just never leave the villa. It’s cool and breezy inside and like living in the Garden of Eden. But now that my friends have joined me, everybody wants to go and see Bali. It’s all beautiful and Anwar, the driver I met in 2005 knows all the best places to go and has enough sensitivity about individuals’ peculiarities to know where to take us and what to skip– although it’s a diverse group and he must be getting confused by now.

Our first day out with him was to the mountains in north central Bali and Danau Bratan (Lake Bratan, site of a famous temple). We headed southwest from Ubud to Mengwi, site of another famous temple, Pura Taman Ayun, a huge and beautifully kept up complex built in 1634. It’s got a huge moat and a couple of landscaped courtyards and a big climbable bell tower. Climbing it is the only way to get a look at the inner sanctuary.

From there we drove through lush green rice fields for a couple hours, along mostly uncrowded narrow roads straight north into the mountains towards Bedugul. On the western shore of Lake Bratan is Candikunning where you can get your picture taken holding a giant bat, a huge python or some kind of a monitor before moving on to the Buddhist-Hindu temple, Pura Ulun Danu Bratan. It appears to be sitting in the water and it’s very picturesque. If it wasn’t so far from where all the tourists are it would be far more overrun. It’s overrun enough as is. From there we headed to Munduk up in the misty mountains. We parked a trekked up and down the mountains to a gorgeous, isolated waterfall in a forest of spice trees. After that it was some amazing mountain top restaurant with a view of the whole world and then a trip to the vast Bali Botanical Gardens (Kebun Raya Eka Karya Bali) with whole areas dedicated to ceratin species like bamboo and orchids.

I was more than ready to call it quits after that but Anwar knew everyone (else) would want to see the temple in the Indian Ocean at Tanah Lot, so we headed south again for the sunset ceremony, the most touristy thing imaginable. When Roland started growling at me (as if it was my fault we were surrounded by hundreds of Australians and Ma and Pa Kettle) I pointed at that this would be the most beautiful spot on earth if there were no people around. After we left it was just about an hour and a half back to Ubud and straight to Kafe, one of our two favorite organic restaurants for dinner.

I never drank a coffee in my life and I resisted the temptation to try yesterday when Roland, Helen and Michael sampled some coffee made from mongoose crap. Sound enticing? We spent the day traipsing around northern and eastern Bali seeing sites from the Batur volcano and Bali’s mother temple on the slopes of Mt Agung to an aboriginal village, Tenganan, known for intricate books painted on palm leaves, and the ancient kingdoms’ hall of justice at Klungkung with wonderful paintings of punishments all over the ceiling. Roland especially liked the one depicting demons sawing into someone’s head who had been disrespectful towards his parents. But the highlight of the day was probably the trip to a coffee and spice plantation where one is able to sample some Kopi Luwak.

As a preface just like me say that I’m a huge fan of argan oil from the Essaouria region of Morocco. The oil is pressed from the undigested pits of a fruit that grows on the argan trees which are eaten by tree climbing goats and then pooped out. (See the photo at the link above.) So it isn’t poop-processed food per se that turns me off. And the mongoose poop coffee doesn’t really even come from a mongoose. The creature is a civet cat. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the concoction we’re talking about: “Kopi Luwak, also known as caphe cut chon (fox-dung coffee) in Vietnam and kape alamid in the Philippines, is coffee that is prepared using coffee cherries that have been eaten and partially digested by the Asian Palm Civet, then harvested from its feces.”
Sound unappetizing? Roland, who used to work at Starbucks and is a coffee addict said it’s strong but “bueno.”

If you want to add a bit of a fear factor moment to your coffee morning with your friends, ask them to drink some civet droppings with you. It will be quite a test of courage for some of them. Really though, there is nothing to be alarmed at. You are actually serving them coffee, but it is coffee that went through a more exotic process than your regular cup of Joe goes through.

It is called civet coffee. What makes this coffee most unusual is that it literally is the dropping of the palm civet. These furry little creatures love coffee cherries, particularly the reddest ones. They do have excellent taste, don’t they? They swallow them whole. While in their stomach, the cherries are processed by the civet’s stomach acids and ezymes. After a while the beans exit the civet body. The fruit has been removed but the beans are whole.

The resulting bean is has an aroma and flavor distinctly its own. The beans are cleaned and dried before roasting, if that’s on your mind. When roasted it results in oilier beans. The oilier the better is what the experts say. The result is coffee that tastes rather like dark chocolate with a hint of hazelnut.

Civet coffee has more than one source. The best known is Indonesia where it is called Kope Luwak. This exotic coffee sells for about $600 a pound.

Roland claims it’s $1,000 a pound and that the British royal family and Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel pretty much buy it all up every year between them. The cup he, Helen and Michael shared cost them $10 in the middle of the jungle and the place where we got was also selling a small jar of the beans for $35 (enough to make 2 cups back home; we all passed on that).