Mengwi

After the last day of the EWC conference, my EWC friend Beryl and I rented a car, but made the mistake of not renting just any car, but a really crappy car that belonged to Norman, our really crappy driver. He was old, wrinkled, exuded about as much of the famed Balinese friendliness as the rock statues dotting the many Hindu temples around the island (actually that's not fair to the statues because at least many of them are smiling), and didn't speak much English. But Beryl and I had gotten a late start on the day, and his was the first car sitting outside our hotel. Dear old Norman wanted us to pay the regular full day fee, but once we agreed on it and told him some places we were interested in visiting, he didn't seem particularly keen on visiting them. "Oh, that boring, very boring," or "that very far, very hard to find" and so on. So in the end he took us to Ubud, then cut over from there to Thana Lot with a little stopover in the middle at this small town of Mengwi, the center of the Mengwi dynasty that controlled their own little kingdom until the late 19th century. The big attraction here is the Pura Taman Ayun temple, the Mengwi family's personal temple. The weather was kind of crappy and I was hungry and sleepy and grumpy, etc. etc. etc., which is my excuse for having taken so few pictures of this place. I blame it all on Norman actually. Despite having the crappiest car I'd seen in Bali, riding in his "minivan" somehow managed to make me very sleepy.