More from Bali

I thought that we should write a few more words about Krabi as most people consider it a beautiful place. Looking at the picture below, you can easily see why.

What really turned us off to Krabi and the Phi Phi islands was the shear number of people. It seems that everyone in the world that can travel has discovered this paradise. We took a speedboat out to the Phi Phi islands one day and were jumped from cove to cove and beach to beach at break neck speed. When we got to the enchanting cove where the Leo DiCaprio film The Beach was filmed a few years ago (about a supposed Utopia), they told us to quickly jump off the back of the boat for our 35 minutes on shore. We scrambled off to find a beach about 200 feet long with something like 500 other tourists who came in on similar speed boats. The water was too dirty to swim (besides you would have to try to dodge the incoming boats dropping people off) and it was hilarious to see everyone standing around with the same confused, lost look on their face. Even some teenage Italians who were on their third beer of the day before we boarded the boat were saying, "what-a are-a we-a doing-a here-a?"

So, Krabi didn't have much magic for us, but Bali does! Yesterday we took a tour of the interior of the island up into the mountains. We were picked up in a Land Cruiser, which I figured was mainly so tourists like us could feel a little rugged. In fact we very much needed the four-wheel drive as we climbed up the jeep trails into the interior of island on the side of a volcano. We visited a quarry where the locals were cutting bricks for the building of temples and houses, and saw the beautiful rice terraces that seem to make up the building blocks of the island as it stacks toward the sky.

Here a man cuts the bricks out of the rock face with an axe.

This is his wife, carrying the bricks out of the quarry to sell in the market.

This is a view of some of the rice terraces as they march up the side of the mountain.

Bali is by far the cleanest place in Asia that we have been. There is some garbage on the side of the road in the city, but the whole countryside seems well manicured and maintained.