Along the way to Amed we stopped to talk to another jewelry maker named Wayan Murna in Semarapura (KlungKung). He was a classmate of my driver Wayan (Kracho). I got a better price from him based on weight of silver, $4,200 Rupiah per gram all labor included. The only difficulty is he does not speak very good English so I would have to rely on Kracho to do a lot of the communication. I stopped at a Goa Lawah Temple in a cave filled with bats including a sacred all-white albino bat. The cave is also filled with python snakes that come out and eat a bat when they get hungry. There was a ceremony going on so I could not enter the caves where you see the snakes but apparently it is normally easy to see them. I enjoy all of the spirituality of Bali, every morning I watch them bring offerings of flowers, incense, and food to appease the evil spirits (placed on the ground) and to pay tribute to the spirits of their ancestors (placed up high on Alters or on statues). We also went to the Taman Ujung water palace, which was pretty but lacking its original opulence. Wayan took me to a place he thought I would like in Amed. I told him I wanted to be right on the beach and that I wanted a clean western bathroom (I learned that I was willing to pay extra $5 for this as the Balinese bathrooms are really quite rough). The bungalows were called Wawa Wewe and my room was spacious and clean like an “A” frame cabin with a loft upstairs and all glass front and an open-air rock bathroom. My unexpected roommates, several short tailed cats, made their presence known as they climbed in through the roof or the open-air bathroom. Cats I can handle. It was nice and cool in my bungalow during the day this became very important later in my stay. It was a pleasure to find that my resort was right next door to the expensive Fung Sui resort that was written up in a travel magazine. The beaches are filled with black pebbles and black volcanic sand. I spent most of the first day making a large black sandcastle. On the second night I got sick with Bali Belly where I remained in bed the next three days… not an experience I want to repeat.
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