Day 3 - cycling

So, yesterday I went on a eco cycling tour around Ubud. This consisted on a tour guide (called Joe/ketut thus the fourth son...) taking us around on a van and then down hill on bikes.... the various activities were:
1) rice plantation visit...

2) breakfast with view to the volcano. Stunning views really...

3)visit a coffee plantation (revisit for me....). In this one however I managed to take a good pic of the coffee-eating-and-shitting animal (Luak) and they actually offered you a cup for the peice of 80 000 rupias, really expensive for this country (about 4 pounds when apparently it costs like 20 in London?).
4) get bikes and try not to kill myself or others. Go downhill. And this my friends is a lively feeling when it is extremely hot.... the paths we went through took us through villages and landscapes that we would not have seen otherwise

5) visit a balinese family and learnt a few things. First that they have a family temple per house (mayb more than on family), this is like a little graveyard with toombstones for ancestors and gods in which noone but the family can enter. Second that yoy can see the number of families in a house by counting the number of kitchens, this is the balinese solution to the mother-daughterinlaw issue....Third that it is true that they bury the placenta of their kids. See picture of kid and see stone on the ground on the side. Yep, thw kids placenta...

6) visit another rice paddie

7) eat at a nice restaurant some balinese food. A good opportunity to learn more about my friends in the tour:
-a couple of irish
-a couple of british from Liverpool I had trouble understanding
-A couple from Australia
- a couple from the southe of the usa, funnily enough they were both women
-a single woman, it is interesting to say that there are actually a lot of women travelling aline in this place...

A couple of highlights befor finishing the post:
- how the kids stayed cheering on the side of the road trying to get high-fives from us. I did try to do it once, lost control of thw bike and almost run over 4-5 kids in one go... should have seen their faces, they were not cheering no more!!!! (How many points is that in carmagedon????)
- how I made the guide call his friends who were taking the bikes back because I had left my sun glasses on the bike, untill we realised I was actually wearing them....
- the poor guide wasnt feeling very well, apparently had "bali-belly" also known as what happens if you eat a steak tartar in turkey...

- when I fell ankle deep in mud, in a rice paddie.