THE RICE TERRACES AND UNESCO VILLAGE

After the Royal Family temple, we continued climbing, the weather got cooler and the jungle thicker.  Definitely more remote, I felt that this was the true unspoiled Bali.  We had seen many rice paddies on the flatter terrain since arriving two days earlier, but they are not terraced like these.  These rice terraces have a completely different look from the rice terraces in China, but are still beautiful.  

The village of 2,500 people sits deep in a jungle of vine-covered trees and thick bamboo. In general, people still dress in traditional dress and carry loads of goods balanced on their heads.  But we did see an old pick-up truck being loaded with eight or ten long stalks of bamboo logs of at least 10-12 inches in diameter.  They looked impossibly heavy and difficult to transport in such a primitive way.

The pictures below give an idea of the rice terraces and the charming village.  There are no gift shops in the village--just roadside food markets, residences, and restaurants.  We ate lunch in a restaurant on stilts with a small, traditional buffet.

These are not people, they are scarecrows.

The skies are looking ominous, but no rain--yet.

Rice is the main crop of the area obviously and so I enriched the economy by buying some red rice and some black rice.  You can buy both at Tom Thumb but I want to see if this rice is really different.

Komang settled us here and then went off on his own while we had lunch.