So the food in Bali and Wakatobi was fantastic. So I'll share a little bit about that today...

First, on the top left is fried noodles and chicken satay. The fried noodles became a staple for me, as I really loved the flavor and it seemed to be available for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The chicken satay was a grilled chicken with a peanut sauce. At this particular restaurant, the grilling was finished at the table on a small charcoal grill that they brought to the table - it worked great to keep the chicken warm throughout the whole meal. Almost all of our food was great in Bali (except for when we tried anything semi-American style), and the food in Wakatobi was fabulous every day!

The other major thing was all the fresh fruit we got. I have fresh pineapple, watermelon, honeydew, and other "regular" fruits. There was also several fruits I've never seen before. The second photo on the left is rambutan or hairy fruit. The red "hairy" outer shell would be cut away to reveal a white fleshy, sweet fruit surrounding a large seed inside. To be honest, we also called it "eye-ball fruit" as it had that tendency to look like eyes!

Additionally, in the top photo on the right, you can see a brown fruit in the middle basket on the bottom row. This is salak or snake-skin fruit. This fruit would be peeled and would reveal a kind of fruit with cloves similar to a bulb of garlic, and the flavor and texture was something between an apple and a pear. Very good. Below the vertical shots is a close-up of the snake-skin fruit.

We also visited a farm of sorts. This farm was more of a tourist farm where they would grow a huge variety of the things often grown in Bali, so it had a path through a bit of "jungle" with various plants growing. One thing they had and specialized in was coffee. They had several different kinds of coffee there that they would grow and roast on site. One in particular is Luwak coffee - which is widely considered the most expensive coffee in the world (though, for the life of me, I can't figure out why someone would pay extra for that!).

Anyway, the farm owners sold the various teas and coffees they grew there (yes, including luwak), and offered free samples. When they brought us little trays with small cups with the various flavors to try, I don't drink coffee, and I didn't care much for the teas (I must be spoiled with all my sweet fruity flavored teas I drink at home). So,I decided to get a little creative with my photography and arranged the cups in various ways and played with different depths of field to see what kind of artistic shots I could achieve.

I had done a little playing with the depth of field with the fruit shots as well, but found that the deeper depths of field worked best with those to show all the various fruits and their textures in a single shot. At first glance I took the fruit shots for the mix of colors, then decided that the textures were just as important!

Above is the close-up of the texture of the snake-skin fruits.

I miss all the fantastic fresh fruits and juices we got while in Bali and Indonesia.

- Bill