Bali is lush. The rustling waves of emerald rice fields are crested with frothing fronds of palm, and the stones of the temples are hidden by thick green moss. Everywhere are brilliant blue bumbling flies the size of your thumb, darners of glittering vermilion, and butterflies in velvety black and neon green: even the air is full of fluttering, darting life.

In Bali we stayed in Ubud, which is inland, surrounded by hills and rice fields. It's an artsy, newagey town: you can spend the afternoons drinking wheatgrass while perusing a photocopied version of The Omnivore's Dilemma, attend a cultural performance every night, and leave loaded down with every kind of art, from canvases to batik.

Like elsewhere in Indonesia, the most common take-out dish is nasi campur, or rice with side dishes. On a bemo across the island, we ate rice with spicy pulled chicken, coconutty green beans, and crunchy tempeh. It was simple and wholesome, portable in its paper to-go cup, and went perfectly with sweet Indonesian tea, which you can buy bottled as Teh Botol, conveniently setting up all sorts of lolcats jokes.

Dutch colonists took the simple everyday Indonesian meal and transformed it into an feast for wealthy landlords and official occasions: rijstaffel, or rice table. This dish expands on the traditional rice-centered meal by drawing on foods from all over Indonesia, as well as Dutch favorites. The resulting feast can consist of 40 or more dishes. We tried a small version of this feast in a restaurant, but aside from the number of dishes, it did not equal some of the plainer nasi campur dishes we had. In fact, with the exception of my cooking class, as a rule, the less we paid for a dish, the better it was.

Ubud's specialty is babi guling, or roast suckling pig, and everyone seems to agree that the place to get it is Ibu Oka, a popular warung in the heart of town. A careful selection of juicy meat, crisp skin, and blood sausage is laid on a bed of rice, with a scoop of seasoned vegetables and smothered with a just barely spicy sambal. The pork is tender to the point of melting, the skin crisp, and the sausage rich, making a perfect island feast.

Ubud was also the site of what is most likely my last cooking class for a few weeks, since we head into Korea and Japan next, where prices are sure to rise. This class was particularly interesting to me, as Indonesian cuisine is probably the farthest from my repertoire - of all the cuisines of the countries we're visiting, Cambodian and Indonesian are the only ones I haven't eaten regularly or experimented with at home.

Indonesian, similar to Thai and Cambodian foods, makes extensive use of chili-based paste that can include ginger, galangal, lesser galangal, turmeric, garlic, shallots and a variety of spices. The defining features of the Indonesian paste (or at least the Balinese version) are the addition of candlenut (a bland, oily nut, rather like a macadamia) and fermented shrimp paste, usually roasted. These, and a heavier dose of turmeric, give many Indonesian dishes a toasty, nutty flavor.

Another defining feature of Indonesian cuisine is the sambal, or chili sauce, which comes in infinite variations. It can be cooked or fresh, and can incorporate a wide variety of ingredients. The cooking class covered the general use of spice paste and sambals for making curries, grilling meat and fish, and garnishing, as well as the making of sate, but my favorite dish was a simple seasoned mixed vegetable of the sort we've had it many warungs, called urap. To make it, steamed vegetables are tossed with a mixture of shredded fresh coconut, crisp fried shallots, palm sugar, and chilies. This dish is definitely coming home with me!