More Ubud please, and a side of Borobudur

We had a real blast with Bob's parents, bombing around Bali for three weeks, eating really delicious food and staying in accommodations that were just a wee step up from our normal tendency towards backpackerness. After they departed for Canada, we stayed two more nights in the luxurious Ubud hotel that the four of us had stayed in near the Monkey Forest, then we moved to a home-stay about two blocks away for less than a quarter of the price. There's no air-conditioning or swimming pool, but we get to make faces at the host family's grandchildren and just observe their lives. That part has become more and more interesting as the days drift by because most of the population of Bali is preparing for Galungan, a semi-annual Hindu ceremony and celebration that peaks about three days from now. The sidewalk offerings that sit outside every doorway are getting more elaborate. Everyone seems to be spending at least a few hours each day working up some even more spectacular offerings for the big day and decorating their houses, shops and household shrines with silky fabrics, woven baskets and dangling bamboo flagpoles. Although we keep saying to each other how sick we are of eating in restaurants, there is no end to the excellent dining options in Ubud. We've eaten at several hippie health food joints, a chocolaterie, an Indian restaurant and a wide variety of Indonesian warungs, both costly and not. Well, "costly" being relative. The last really costly meal we ate totalled $35 for the two of us. Before that there was the night we spent grooving at a jazz club, eating and drinking cocktails and a bottle of wine and listening to a surprisingly good three-piece combo, and that bill topped out at about $100. We might get near that again tonight, but it IS our 30th wedding anniversary after all. We recently got back from a three-day jaunt to Jogjakarta on the neighbouring island of Java where the highlight of the trip was spending hours circling the multiple levels of the ninth-century Buddhist monument called Borobudur with its thousands of relief carvings portraying the life and times of Buddha. Borobudur is one of the largest religious monuments in the world and the amount of detail to absorb as you walk its aisles is amazing. On some of the levels, there are four series of reliefs, one each at shoulder and knee height on the right and left walls. We'll post one or two pictures of the relief carvings -- imagine thousands of them. Astounding. The view of the encircling volcanic mountains was supposed to be spectacular but we only saw hints of their slopes amid the cloudy skies. The downpour held off until we were setting up our final photo of Borobudur from the exit area. The big volcano nearby last erupted at the time of a major earthquake in 2006, killing thousands. Some of the tourist sites we visited over three days were actually just fields of brick rubble and others were still the focus of major reconstruction efforts. Our guide told us an amazing story of his experiences on the day the earthquake hit. The roof fell in on his house; it took him hours to find his clients after they'd been evacuated from their damaged hotel; he stuck his mother in a stranger's car and sent her away from the city which was in chaos as people fled the volcano north of the city and a possible tsunami in the south. We've extended our Indonesian visas until May 31 because the occasionally violent protests in Bangkok continue and we don't feel comfortable using our return flight tickets. We may just scrap those tickets and go directly to Cambodia. But before that we will probably (our plans are never locked in) take a fast ferry to the newest backpacker haven in the Gili islands and crash on a beach for a few weeks. Sound familiar?