Ben LOVES riding his mountain bike and he searched high and low to find a tour company or bike company in Bali to take him on a REAL mountain bike ride. There are lots of tour groups claiming to offer bike rides through the "real Bali" but with names like "Happy Bike" offering bikes with baskets on the front, they weren't going to cut it. Ben found a group that had actual mountain bikes and sounded like they had scouted out some amazing single track trails so we decided to give it a shot and were not disappointed! It was one of the coolest things I have done and a highlight of this trip for sure. It took us 1 1/2 hours to get to the starting point, a remote village high up in the mountains, these villagers rarely see tourists and were very interested in who and what we were doing. I was sitting in the truck trying to braid my hair before we started and had 3 villagers right next to my open window watching my every move, all smiles and they would say "hello" (the only english word they knew) every time I looked up. These were not kids, they were grown men and women, native Balinese. We were at around 10,000 feet elevation and it was nice and cool when we started riding. Over the next 4 hours we traversed down these amazing foot paths that have been used for centuries to get from village to village. We rode through fields of flowers grown to be used in the offerings the Balinese make and give several times a day. We rode through the most amazing bamboo forests, the villagers were hard at work harvesting the bamboo to sell for building material. We came upon a group of villagers roasting a pig, they were all sitting around chatting and watching their soon to be feast cook to perfection. We saw women hard at work beating their rice and brushing it onto tarps to dry in the sun. We rode through the rice paddies and watched a group of villagers dressed in there best clothes going to a ceremony at their local temple. These women of all ages were beautiful and carrying a huge assortment of food in amazing arrangements balanced on their heads, again offerings for the ceremony. Our final destination, a serene white sand beach of course.
