Bali Day 20: Last Day in Bali - Duck Parade & PIRATES!

Bali Bangers by the pool. Obviously.

Today is our last full day in Bali and we're going to squander it drinking and floating in the pool and watching duck parades and battling pirates.
As one does.
I started the day with a walk through the local neighborhood. I have mentioned Balinese traffic many times in this blog, but today, I was caught in a different kind of traffic jam.
A Duck Jam.
There are, as I have also mentioned, duck herders, who transport large flocks of ducks down the roads and along the beaches here in northern Bali. And now, I have video proof, non-believers! 3 very short videos, in fact.

As a bonus, you get to hear my extremely limited grasp of Balinese. The transcript, with translations, for those who care:
Omsuasiastu -  Greetings fellow human who speaks conversational Balinese!
Kenken kabre - How are you?
Babek! - Duck! (Because, really, that's about all I could say at that moment.)

As a side note, you see the duck herder for just a moment in the first short video. Look at the huge smile on his face. That was the usual reaction to being greeted in Balinese. It could have been my pronunciation, but I really think the people are just naturally very friendly and delighted when someone who is clearly not Balinese makes an effort to learn a bit of the language.

The last video shows the traffic jam this caused. I could get used to this sort of traffic jam.

I continued walking for a bit, enjoying the area and the smiling people.

Ducks on the road.

These are shiny new versions of the rototiillers some rice farmers use. They are ridiculously huge. The arms are about 8 feet long.

Very typical Balinese house in the area. The front doubles as a store.

Same house with a view of the store.

This is a relatively swanky housing development for locals.

Same place.

Full karaoke!!

This is the inside of the Karaoke place. I never saw anyone in there at all.

This is a luxury housing development being built for locals. Each house has 2 rooms and a kitchen. the sign says they will be $10,000 (USD) each, far out of the reach of most Balinese people.

On my way back to the villa, a guy stopped his scooter to chat with me. We had the usual discussion, "Where are you from? How long in Bali?", etc. Then he said,
"You teach me English, I teach you Indonesian!"
I have learned that you do not agree to things like this. You do not say, "Maybe tomorrow." They will come back tomorrow.
So I tried, "Yeah, we're doing great teaching each other right now."
"Okay!" he said, starting up his scooter and heading off. "I see you in the middle."
And he rode off, leaving me in a cloud of dust and confusion.
Meet me in the middle?
As my Australian friends might say, "What the fuck are you talkin' about, mate?"
I continued my walk back to the villa, pondering ducks and how many Bali Bangers I could make with the remaining rum (answer: plenty...). I walked for several minutes and then, rounding a corner, I almost walked into my new friend. He was off his scooter and smiling brightly.
"Shit," I muttered when he took off his backpack and put it on the ground. I knew where this was going.
He pulled out a bright yellow cloth - the same one he had been holding up at the beach wall of the villa a few days before. He unwrapped it to display the same cheap plastic trinkets he had tried to sell me then.
"Very nice! Make good gift!" he said.
"No, thank you. Selamat tinggal."
I walked off an, mercifully, he didn't follow me.
Just outside the villa, I met two guys who I assumed were gardeners at the villa next door.
"Omsuasiatu!" I said.
"Suasiastu," they replied. "Marrrrrrrijuana?"
"No, thanks, Boss," I said cheerily.
I opened the gate and headed into the villa.
We had heard that drugs were rampant in Bali - specifically  'shrooms. We had also read that 1 in 3 people trying to sell them are undercover cops. The penalties for drug possession are steep. Not as steep as Singapore, as we will see tomorrow, though.
I hadn't been offered any drugs in nearly 3 weeks, so, while it wasn't 'shrooms, I really feel like out vacation is complete now.
Once back in the villa, I had one final chance to enjoy the rice farmers next door. They were in their kubus, tooting their plastic trumpets and banging their sheets of metal to keep birds away from the rice. If you listen carefully in the video, you can hear the tooting that was a near constant background sound during the day here.

Rice farmer in his kubu, tooting his own horn.

The view is gorgeous.

We did a bit of packing for tomorrow, but spent most of the day just relaxing in the pool and wandering along the beach.

And, as if the day wasn't already magical enough, what did we see while wandering along the beach?

Well, yes, garbage, of course, but we also saw...

PIRATES! Or, more precisely, fishermen. They trolled along the shore every day, all day long.

But it got even better! We saw our final duck parade in Bali! I mean, unless one accompanies us to the airport tomorrow, of course. It would probably be difficult to explain at customs, but I'm willing to try if things shake out that way.

After the pirate attack and the duck parade, we were ready for dinner. Kerri had ordered an Indonesian dish called Beef Rendang, which was spicy and delicious.
I ordered grilled fish with Balinese sauce. That was the entire description, so I took a chance.

Beef Rendang. It was scrumptious. Kerri thought it was a bit too spicy, but compared to my meal, it was a vanilla ice cream.

My grilled fish looked like it had tussled with a shark and came out the worse for it. It stared at me as I ate it, but I could barely see because of...

The top bowl is the Balinese Sauce that accompanied it. That reddish color is nature's way of saying, "I will kill you painfully and slowly. From the inside out."

When Putu brought me the fish, I was slightly startled by its pre-chewed appearance, but it was delicious. The Balinese Sauce that accompanied it was a dangerous shade of red that warns of dire gastrointestinal consequences for any who dare to eat it.
"What is the sauce?" I asked Putu, noting its vaguely fishy aroma with top notes of volcanic, supernova heat.
"Chili, garlic, squid!" she answered brightly.
"Bagus! Suksema!" I said. "Good. Thank you!"
But that was a lie. A terrible, terrible lie.
It was not good. And, while I was very thankful for the meal that Putu prepared, I was not thankful that she presented me with an evil bowl of living pain.
I tried a tiny smear of the sauce on my fish and was immediately transported to a different and terrible universe of fish-flavored pain. The sauce, which I shall now and forever call Lethal Lava Sauce, was a bit warm in the same way that the universe is a bit big or that time is a bit long.
It was a nuclear explosion condensed into a pinpoint of excruciating agony on my tongue.
When my vision cleared and the steam stopped shooting out of all my orifices, I got up off the floor, wiped my running nose, and opted for the sambal mattah, a fresh hot sauce that I've really been enjoying in Bali, primarily because, while it is very hot, it doesn't actively try to kill me by dissolving my esophagus.

To celebrate surviving a taste of the Lethal Lava Sauce, we took a group photo. Me, Kerri, Putu, Terry, and Komang. They were absolutely delightful.

We spent the remainder of the evening packing and burping up steaming cloud of squid-scented pain. We took a break to relax and watch our last sunset in Bali, while my tongue and intestines slowly smouldered inside me. Tomorrow, we start the ordeal of heading home.