Day 10, Oct-19

The four divers, Par/Elizabeth and Alan/Tanya departed 6am for an island 45 minutes off the southeast of Bali where they found their trip highlight:  4 meter long manta’s gliding above them, and a 2-meter tall mola-mola’s – the fish that just seem like a large swimming head in the ocean.  Sometimes they are called sunfish.

Kimiko and Kaori went shopping for Balinese baskets and paintings, then explored pottery studios.  A famous type of pottery called “Jungala” caught their fancy enough to take up space and weight on the return luggage.  Local baskets bought from the sister of Made came at half the market price.  It turns out locals buy their goods down in Denspasar about an hour south for a fraction of the tourist cost, and resell them to their locals, still less than half the ‘tourist price’.  Both Kimiko and Kairo capitalized and loaded their return luggage with these baskets.

Kimiko also found a Balinese abstract painting she loved at a local artist studio; I took a quick trip out to inspect the finding.  His prices were sky high western style, but the work was fantastic.  Never to buy on the spot and suspicious of driver kickbacks, I left the shop to go out and comparison price and research using the high tech tools of Google search.  It turned out this artist was becoming rather well known in the world of abstract art – he was recently commissioned by a fancy hotel in Tokyo for a lobby centerpiece.  His work stood out from the typical tourist ‘stenciled’ or ‘mass produced’ pieces of souvenir art.  I came home that evening wondering if I should trade in portraits of Benjamin Franklin for this abstract artwork.

Abstract artist in Ubud, Bali.  Excellent paintings were found in shops.

When the seven of us re-united at the villa later in the evening, and for our last dinner at the villa, the chef had prepared another culinary bombshell:  lobster thermador with crepes suzettes – it went so well with our “imported” Sauternes.  We were finding it difficult to go out for dinner when the best was at our service, and we had canceled all our evening meals outside the villa except our last night.  I was going to miss Mr. Oka's cooking.  We were almost like a big family now, all of us.

Alan had his usually fun teasing Kaori, calling her a ‘princess’ of shopping, and Kaori telling him to shut up.

That evening, we started to make early plans to return, including seat selection on Singapore Airlines.  I used my laptop from the study, and I also was keeping watch on the volcano in case it might somehow disrupt our return trip transportation flying over or near Java.

That night was restless with strong monsoon-like downpours.  The rainy season of late October was approaching, indicating the end of the welcoming weather and signaling for us to return home.