INDONESIA (Bali)

DAY 13

We took an afternoon tour which started off by viewing some rice fields at Sayan Terrace. The intense green colors were amazing!

Next was the Taman Ayun temple in Mengwi. Surrounded by water moats, it is the second largest national temple and is famous for its stacked roofs.

At Margarana we saw a war memorial with a cemetery (from the fighting with the Dutch in 1946).

We then drove to Alas Kedaton, a temple with plenty of pushy, demanding monkeys and very large Kalong bats which lived wild in the trees.

On the way out, we passed a man next to a small tree of about six bats; they weren’t chained but were there willingly. He even threw one into the air and it came back. We got to feed them some sweetened condensed milk, and I got to hold a bat with about a 3 foot wingspan. I was then draped with two pythons and a pangoline (a scaly anteater). The man was so pleased that I wasn't frightened that he just kept piling more and more on; it got quite heavy.

We finished our tour with a sunset at the beach at Tanahlot (a temple dedicated to gods that protect people from the sea demons). One can only reach this temple when the tide is out. There were also black and white banded water snakes sleeping in some of the small lower caves. It is supposedly good luck to touch one, so we did.

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