Our first day of biking was one of the most difficult, as we were going uphill most of the time. We passed by beautiful rice fields and small houses, as well as buildings with elaborate statues. As we biked, people sitting on their front porches and steps waved and asked us where we were going and where we had come from. Young kids said “Hello!” and waved excitedly as we passed. We saw a cow being washed in a river and chickens everywhere. We had started biking late in the day and it got dark before we reached the hotel. We flagged down a very small truck, and the driver immediately agreed to take us the last few miles to our lodging for the night.

At every place we have stayed in Bali, the first thing they tell you is to sit down and relax. You are welcomed with delicious fresh juice and not expected to do anything but rest for the first ten or fifteen minutes. On our first night of biking we stayed in a small lodge called Village Above the Clouds. It was connected to a small village high up in the mountains in a rice growing area. The income from the lodge helps to fund an after-school program for children (the Freedom School), has paid for the homes in the village to receive running water, and supports a health clinic.

The next day we biked through Bedugul and along three high mountain lakes. We came upon a Balinese funeral ceremony. There were lots of people sitting nearby. On one side of the road, there were elaborate and colorful structures that had been built to be carried. People had started several small fires, and some people were burning money in the fires.

On our second night of biking, we stayed at a very small roadside place that was called an eco-tourism lodge but was really a homestay with a Balinese family. In the morning they invited us to come watch their family ceremony. It was held on the rooftop of a small building. Everyone from the extended family came. The ceremony is held once a year, and it is to honor the gods and give back to nature. We were not able to stay for the whole ceremony because we had to start biking, but we were able to watch the women set up the table with offerings, and listen to the men play all of the different instruments. They sat on the ground on a tarp in a circle and laughed and talked while they played. It didn’t seem like they were struggling to remember notes, or sticking to a certain song. They just played and tried to match each others’ music with their own.

That day we cycled downhill nearly 4,000 feet on our bikes, on a very steep and winding road. We could see rice fields stretched out to the Bali Sea far below.

-Isaiah and Natalia

The sun was just setting as we left the airport in Bali on Wednesday. We could see the yellow and orange of the sky behind the city’s new and traditional buildings. We were picked up (a first for us) and taken about an hour away to Ubud. Daddy talked to our driver, who shared many interesting ideas about Indonesia. He explained how the central government in Jakarta put pressure on Bali for development that conflicted with the Balinese people’s desire to protect the environment. He explained how Balinese Hinduism was about everything being connected with the gods (one god with different faces) and nature.

We stayed at a beautiful small hotel, called Kano Sari Villa, in Ubud. The backyard was a sea of jungle. You could faintly hear the waterfall, and each morning roosters would crow to wake us up. We also heard monkeys. Our rooms looked out onto the dense forest and the beds were covered in a clear canopy of fabric (mosquito netting).

Parts of Ubud were very tourist oriented, filled with restaurants and small shops. Other parts of the town were residential with traditional Balinese homes. Many of them looked like temples and others were small, plain buildings. Each house – really a family compound – had a family temple, that was used daily. Offerings of food and flowers in small baskets could be found everywhere and we constantly saw women making these offerings, by placing them down and lighting incense. The streets were packed with motorbikes.

On our first day in Ubud, we visited Alia, a colleague of Daddy’s from PICO, who happened to be in Bali with her family the same time we were.

On our second day in Ubud, Daddy and I (Natalia) took a cooking class. We first went to a traditional market, where we learned about the different fruits grown in Bali. These included mangosteen, salak (snakeskin fruit) and rambutan. They showed us spices that are used in Balinese cooking, all of which looked much fresher than the spices we have in the U.S. They took us to a rice field where they explained that they are able to get three crops of white rice a year, but only two crops of brown rice. The rice is harvested in terraces with an irrigation system organized by families in a village.

The cooking class took place in a family’s house and we learned about family traditions in Balinese culture. When people get married, the bride and groom go and live in the groom’s family compound. This means that some houses have thirty or more people living together. When a baby is born, the placenta is buried in the courtyard of their house — on the right of the entrance to the house for a boy and the left for a girl. This is thought to protect to the child during its lifetime.

Meanwhile, Mommy and I (Isaiah) went to the Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA). There were two kinds of paintings: modern, which were similar to the ones at the Smithsonian, and traditional, in the centuries-old Indonesian style. After that, we walked over to the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, a very small forest full of long-tailed macaques. The forest also had a temple and a cemetery. Unlike in other forests, all of the monkeys gathered around the area where the visitors were, because that was where the food was (a stand sold bananas you could feed to the monkeys). There were about 200 monkeys in the forest. Several monkeys climbed on tourists.

-Natalia and Isaiah

We arrived in Tokyo, Japan around 10:45pm, and took a crowded train to the neighborhood of our hotel. The metro was similar to the ones at home, but much busier for the time of night. The train was packed with businessmen in suits and the walls of the train were filled with colorful advertisements, mostly in Japanese but also some in English. We walked from the station to our hotel, passing people talking and smoking and eating in restaurants. The side streets were filled with hanging lanterns, bright lights and colorful awnings illuminated by the lit up buildings.

Hotel Edoya was on a quieter street, a few blocks from the hustle and bustle of nighttime life in the city. It was a very simple building and we squeezed into the tiny elevator to the main lobby (our backpacks took up most of the space). There were slippers sitting in the entrance to our room, and there were three doors leading off from the small space where we left our shoes. One held the toilet (the toilet had a heated seat!), the other a shower and a small square bathtub, and the third was a sliding door into the bedroom. The bedroom consisted of four mattresses lined up next to each other on the floor and a TV on top of a small, bright yellow fridge. We collapsed onto the beds, but were immediately pulled back up by the prospect of food and seeing the city at night.

Even at two in the morning, the streets were filled with people, who didn’t seem to mind the late hour. We were surprised at how many open restaurants there were. We found a good place to eat, and ordered a random assortment of sushi and other dishes, mostly by pointing at the pictures on the menu. We watched people smoking at the counter where the sushi was being made, and others hurrying past the restaurant doors. Tokyo has a lot of automatic sliding doors, and the taxicab doors open automatically too. When we were done eating, we got in a taxi to return to the hotel, but we had to guide the taxi driver back. It was funny to see that we had a better sense of where we were going than he did.

We got about three hours of sleep before we had to get up again to leave. The breakfast consisted of rice, soup, noodles, and vegetables, and eggs that we thought were hardboiled (we learned the truth when Isaiah tried to crack one open). After breakfast we walked to another train station and took the SkyTrain to the Narita airport. The train stations had escalators and those stands where you slide your ticket in and they come out the other side, just like we are used to, but they also had colorful vending machines covered in Japanese. This train was much nicer than the metro we had gone on the night before, and there were reserved seats. We passed by many apartment buildings, a large group of men stretching in what looked like a parking lot, a lot of small and traditional looking houses and then fields growing crops before reaching the airport. Suddenly we were boarding our flight, and leaving Tokyo as abruptly as we had arrived.

-Natalia

We started our descent into the Grand Canyon around 1pm on Sunday and had a long day on a steep trail. There was a lot of loose rock and many switchbacks. About two miles in we met a guy hiking back to the rim, and in exchange for some extra water, he played his didgeridoo for us – a wind instrument originally from Australia, usually made from hardwoods – often eucalyptus trees. We continued on to Horseshoe Mesa, the ruins of an old building and you could still see where the fireplace and chimney has been. From there it was only a mile to the campsite, but it was by far the steepest part of the trail – about a thousand feet down to the creek. Isaiah and I rocketed ahead, and made it to the campground way before our parents (but still after the sun had set).

Day two on the Tonto trail gave us our first glimpse of the Colorado River (it is so green!) and took us on a winding route on the edge of a plateau above it. The hike was precarious and unpredictable, but beautiful. We stayed at a campsite called Grapevine (named after its creek) – which was by far my favorite campsite of the trip. The minute we arrived, Daddy went and laid down on a large rock and put his head in the creek to cool down.

Days three and four were much easier, because the hikes were shorter and we were getting stronger. Our fifth night camping in the backcountry we didn’t have a water source at our campsite and we had to fill a drybag with water so we would have enough for the hike to Phantom Ranch. At Cremation Creek (a dry wash in April) we were able to watch the moon rise above the high walls of the canyon after dark, which was an incredible sight to see.  

Phantom Ranch was not at all what I expected. It is one small building, half of which is a kitchen, and the other a dining hall/canteen, surrounded by trees and little cabins. It is very integrated into the woods, and doesn’t seem at all intrusive to the nature surrounding it. We stayed in a cabin at the ranch for two nights, and met people of all ages with so many different stories and backgrounds. The dining hall is filled with a few long tables, and you eat breakfast and dinner with all of the other hikers/travelers.

We spotted a space station on our second night at Phantom. It looks just like a moving star, or an airplane without the blinking lights.  A Park Ranger told us that there is a website (www.spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/) where you can track when the space station may be passing your area. Interestingly, American Astronaut Mark Kelly just arrived at the space station on March 27, 2015. He is staying at the station for a year (breaking the record for the longest time in space at one time for a U.S. astronaut) and is currently in a twin study with his brother to compare the effects of space on the body. (Mark Kelly is also the husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.)

We spent two days hiking out of the Canyon on the Bright Angel Trail. Day one was easy and fairly short. The stars that night were beyond incredible and we even spotted a shooting star! The last day was by far the hardest, despite the wide, well developed trail we were on. Once we got within three miles of the top, the trail was swamped with day hikers, and you could faintly make out tourists standing along the rim of the canyon.

-Natalia