Set amid the rice fields, temples and river gorges of rural Bali, art comes naturally in Ubud. And it’s one of the easiest destinations in the world to get in touch with your artistic side, thanks to a myriad day, half-day or longer arts courses just waiting for the taking.

So it’s worth planning some time to be creative. Here’s just some of the arts you can learn in Ubud:

1: Silversmithing
The area around Ubud has been a centre for silvercraft since time immemorial. Sketch out your own design. Then cut, beat, shape, solder and polish silver into the style of your choice. Book classes at Pondok Pekak learning centre (+62 (0)361 976 194), Studio Perak, or with Ayu (+62 (0)3619245833) at WS Art Studio.

2: Wood Carving
In traditional Balinese culture, wood carvings decorate not only temples and palaces but private homes. ARMA Museum and Puri Lukisan Museum offer day classes; Pondok Pekak learning centre (+62 (0)361 976 194) has half-day introductory courses.

3: Painting
Learn classical Balinese court painting, traditional Balinese art or contemporary Balinese art styles at ARMA Museum and Puri Lukisan Museum. Or try Pranoto’s Gallery to develop your own style in oils.

4: Fruit Carving
If you’ve ever wondered how to create those elaborate fruit sculptures you see in Asian restaurants, or just want a bit of practice before turning your attentions to wood or stone, spend half a day at Pondok Pekak learning centre (+62 (0)361 976 194), creating a masterwork out of a watermelon.

5: Paper Making
Work with mulberry pulp, leaves, dyes and silk to create your own handmade papers at Lingsir Paperie (+62 (0)361 977 984).

6: Basket Weaving
Elaborate baskets, both for offerings and for mundane life, are a big part of life in Bali. Learn how to make them from palm leaf, bamboo and more at ARMA Museum and Puri Lukisan Museum.

7: Offering Making
Offerings crafted from bamboo, palm leaves, fruit, flowers, rice, incense and coloured dough are an essential part of Balinese Hinduism, decorating private homes and shops alike, and reaching their fulfilment in the gigantic offerings prepared for major ceremonies. Learn how to shape these beautiful, ephemeral items at ARMA Museum and Puri Lukisan Museum.

8: Batik
Batik textiles originate in Java, but there are plenty of artists working with batik in and around Ubud. Use hot wax to print designs and paint them in natural dyes, creating your very own piece with artist Nyoman Suradnya at Nirvana Batik or at textile specialists Threads of Life.

9: Dance
For the un-selfconscious, a host of venues offer training in classical Balinese dance, among them ARMA and Puri Lukisan. Or learn to tango with the Bali Tango Club — beginners classes are free on Mondays.

10: Ceramics
If wandering through the rice-fields won’t get you grubby enough, try working with clay at Sari Api Studio, 3km north of Ubud. Workshops cover everything from the basics of working with clay to advanced techniques, using wheel or hand.

11: Balinese Music
From bamboo flute to gamelans and gongs, Balinese instruments are complicated to master but simple enough to be rewarding for the beginner. ARMA, Pondok Pekak (+62 (0)361 976194) and Puri Lukisan offer short introductory courses in a range of instruments, or try Nyoman Warsa at Pondok Bamboo music shop (+62 (0)361 974 807).

12: Beadwork
If you’ve ever admired elaborate belts, bracelets and courtly decorations, or there’s a ten-year-old girl inside you itching to get out, beadwork is a rewarding way to spend the day. Puri Lukisan offers courses for 3 hours or 6 hours.

13: Kites, Puppets and Masks
Puri Lukisan offers courses in traditional Balinese crafts. Create a kite butterfly to take home, craft a traditional shadow puppet out of leather, or paint your own mask based on those used in traditional Balinese dance.

14: Life Drawing
Pranoto Gallery holds regular life-drawing classes on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 10am: bring your own materials.

And More…
A myriad venues across Ubud offer cooking classes, in styles from Balinese to Vietnamese. Yoga specialists such as Yoga Barn offer the full spectrum of yoga classes, up to teacher training level. Ketut Arsana’s Bodyworks offers training in Balinese massage, while Thai massage and reflexology are also available.

Ubud, with the dazzling ricefield landscapes around it, the colourful rituals and the dazzling dancers, is also an outstanding location to practise your photography. David Metcalf, who’s been taking photographs in Indonesia for almost 30 years, leads well-priced full-day and half-day photo tours out of his gallery in Monkey Forest Road, and will take you further afield too.

For more on Ubud in general, please do read about where to stay in Ubud, how to spend a weekend in Ubud and the best restaurants in Ubud.

Not found a place to stay yet? Agoda has great deals on Ubud hotels and guesthouses, from the indulgent COMO Shambhala Estate to great value central ricefield spots like Sri Bungalows and homestays like Tu Eka.

The post 14 Great Arts Courses in Ubud, Bali appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

This depicts, believe it or not, a traditional tribal tomb.

Can you imagine what the funeral was like?! I mean, seriously.

Z’s dad, who visited with us, thought it childish of me to preserve this immortal — albeit definitively (ethno)graphic — image. Despite having sniggered audibly himself.

The phrase, “Be Confucian”, came up, a handy catchall I would recommend to any parent, which S introduced after unschooling on Confucius . (Believe you me, as a parent you learn a lot more by unschooling with your child than you ever would by following the Year 4 primary syllabus.)

Anywise, we have learnt from the museum of ethnography that the tribes of Vietnam are about as Confucian as the tribes elsewhere in the region (though the ones Z and I have met have consumed their lethal rice spirit from large plastic jerry cans rather than charming ceramic jars).

Take the Han-hi. They propitiate the harvest spirits with a lengthy round of drinking games involving a seesaw and a wobbly bamboo balancoire.

Fall off. Drink. Fall off again. Repeat until you all fall down.

They have both seesaw and balancoire at the museum, outside the lovingly built traditional house, complete with granary and stables. Great fun for Z. Who, I should add, was totally sober. Although possibly not quite as fun as the 18m-high men’s house with stairs to match.

We caught a water puppet show at the museum, too. Another traditional Vietnamese entertainment which one can imagine working just beautifully performed al fresco in its original setting of a flooded paddy field, with a lot of baying, booing, gasping and rice hooch. Though, to be honest, it’s pretty cool simply in the tranquil garden of the museum, surrounded by the infinite varieties of traditional tribal houses.

The puppets tell simple morality tales, enlivened by excitements such as firework-spouting water dragons or predatory tigers climbing trees above the water, the better to bounce on cute baby ducks, in stints of about five minutes each. It’s really fun.

The puppeteers? They work waist deep in that murky water, behind the green bamboo screen, emerging for the curtain call sporting quite fabulous gold silk robes which, I couldn’t help thinking, must be an absolute bugger to wash.

Anywise. Tomorrow, or, rather, today, since it is 30-ish during the nights, and my spawn, even when not super-heated, has the irritating habit of saving up about two hours’ worth of chatter and insights until some way past bedtime then filibustering like a pork barrel politician, is our last day in Hanoi.

We are taking the night train to Lao Cai, high up in the cool (yay!) hills near the Chinese border, spending the day in Sapa, admiring the landscape and the colourful costumes the wholly assimilated tribespeople in those parts don for the crowds, then making our way to Dien Bien Phu, the scene, in 1954, of a spectacular French military collapse unparalleled since …. ooh! … 1940 or thereabouts, and for our purposes the last stop before crossing the border into Laos.

In Laos we will trek, stay with some rather less assimilated hill tribes, and possibly (roads permitting) spend a couple of days in a treehouse reached by zipwires watching the gibbons.

Hanoi has been wonderful. But, as ever, when we leave a city for the last time on this journey, I’m beginning to itemise what we haven’t done.

Here, we have managed to miss not only the Vietnamese State Circus in Lenin Park — I lost my credit card an hour before we were about to go on Sunday (DOH!), and they have no shows Monday and Tuesday (double DOH!) — but the mausoleum complex of Ho Chi Minh. Where the founding father of Vietnamese nationalism (and Communism), who specified in his will that he wanted to be cremated and his followers should not “do a Lenin” and embalm him, is preserved, in perpetuity, Vladimir Ilyich-style.

Z had rather been looking forward to this, as had I. As he remarked, before we learnt that the museum is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays only, “I’d like to see a human body preserved in formaldehyde… I think when I’m a grownup I will be buried in an airtight vacuum coffin so my body doesn’t rot.”

Today, I think, we will go to the Women’s Museum to learn about women soldiers.

Z, however, thinks otherwise. “A women’s museum?” he said. “Why can’t we go to a men’s museum? Or the arcade? Or the waterpark?”

I guess we’ll have to see how well my feminist educational urges stand up to the heat…

The post Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic appeared first on EscapeArtistes.