Ubud and area II

Walking around the Ubud area of Bali and a little off the road we came across the spider below. In Balinese it's called a Kekawa and while not deadly it can give a pretty nasty bite. It spans about 4 inches leg to leg while the body was at close to 2 inches long. Jacqueline was about 1 ft from walking face into it before, for an unknown reason as I hadn't seen it, I grabbed her shoulder and stopped her. Pretty isn't it?

Ubud is the center of the Balinese art scene. There are high end shops and low end shops and everything in between. It's hard to tell whether you're looking at something of which there are hundreds similar, if not identical, in the shops around it. To give you an idea of the volume of work available the shot below is one small part of one small store. I don't want to sound like I'm taking anything away from the artist, each painting shows more skill with a brush than I can hope to show but when every shop/gallery says the artist is their grandfather you start to wonder.

This is a Ubud rice field but there are rice fields all over Bali, I guess it was with the cultivation of rice that the first cultural vestiges of what is now Bali began. Though don't take my word on that, as it's just something I read. There was an old topless man in shorts and a ball cap occasionally yanking on a line which spanned the field. Each time he pulled the line it would rise and with it the rags tied to it would leap up. An active, if manual, scarecrow but not for crows. I haven't seen crows here.