THE JOURNEY OVER
Basically, “You can’t get
there from here” easily. So we had to fly United to Tokyo
then spend a day in Singapore
then get on an Indonesian carrier for the final leg to Denpasar. Thankfully,
this two-day ordeal means very few Americans in Bali.
It was kinda neat to see Singapore even if
just for a day. Talk about modern: THE most gorgeous airport I’ve ever seen, architecturally
skyscrapers, everyone on the excellent metro talking on a cell phone or
listening to an iPod. We walked around the old colonial district and checked
out the famed circa-1820 Raffles Hotel, Indiatown, and what remains of the
waterfront Chinatown.
HOTELS and COSTS:
The guidebook said Bali is not the tourists’ bargain that it once was, but
you coulda fooled us.
We ate full dinners for a
total bill of $3. We averaged $17 for very nice, family-run hotels that
included breakfast and had beautiful and elaborate gardens and pools, shrines
and verandahs. Many had elaborately carved red-and-gilt doorways, with the requisite
protective spirit leering at you from above the door. Sure, many of the places
had the usual cheap Third World hotel oddities – one towel per room, no TP, robust
cockroaches and mildew in the bathrooms, erratic or no hot water, one sheet per
bed – but what did we care?
The biggest hotel score was
half a bungalow about 75 feet from a black sand beach – for a mere per night.
We rented a shitty Suzuki for
an unbelievable $75 for eight days. Yeah, OK, a bolt supporting the passenger’s
seat fell out and Chip had to struggle with the left-side driver’s shift stick,
but it was part of the adventure. Due to Bali’s
extreme topography – a mountain range bisects it – every trip involved labyrinthine detours
through tiny towns and streets full of motor bikes, chickens, door-side offerings
to spirits, dogs, vendors’ carts, buses – even a troop of begging monkeys
running after scooters!
UBUD
We spent a quick first night
in the touron nightmare of Kuta, from which the drunken, pissing, screaming
Aussies thankfully rarely venture. A minibus trip brought us to Ubud, a rural
town in the uplands known for its artisans (and ex-pats). Ubud is one of the
best places to visit craftspeople at work and to see traditional dance and wayang
kulit, the shadow-puppet shows.
Ubud is now overrun with
tourists in the high season, but we were very early so it was fine.
We took long walks out into
the gorgeous, surrounding rice paddies, communing with ducks and old guys yelling,
“Hallo, turis!” (The famous friendliness of the Balinese people is still very
much in evidence.) Homemade noisemakers of bamboo and tin cans scare off the
birds, and little boys fly kites.
We also went to Ubud to see
Annie, Chip’s flight attendant friend who’s lived there 30 years in a great
house with a drop-dead beautiful view of the paddies. She was upset because
recently a huge boa has been sneaking in between the roof and walls and eating
her cats!
CULTURE
For all of its modernity, I
must say this is the most flat-out exotic place I’ve ever
been. Traditional culture is
still very alive; I’ve never seen so many men in native dress, namely the
sarong (even guys doing concrete work wore a T-shirt and sarong.).
I got by well on two
Indonesian words: the ubiquitous “Hallo”
and “terima kasi,” or “thank you.” Due to its long colonization by the Dutch,
Arabic script is used, and many words are quasi-recognizable to an English
speaker.
Religion is an indivisible
part of everyday life. Bali is Hindu and
animist, vs. Java, which is Muslim (we saw an amusing Muslim-ladies TV talk
show with the audience all in pastel head scarves).
Water is the No. 1 most
sacred thing, and we visited pretty and elaborate water palaces and temples,
witnessing worshipping crowds in traditional dress -- for women, a lacy blouse
and sarong. Chip saw a beach ceremony in which a widow scattered her husband’s
ashes into the sea.
There are temples literally
everywhere, with great, cast-concrete images of gods and demons, many intended
to be comic (a demon devouring a child is common). Every morning, wives set out
hand-made palm baskets of offerings, with flowers, rice, incense and holy
water. There was even an offering tray in our car!
At the four corners of every
bridge, I noticed small demon/deity statues to presumably bless and protect the
crosser. I envision a warehouse in Jakarta
full of bridge demons which every highway engineer must requisition.
Each house entryway has a
barrier just behind the door because spirits cannot turn corners. Our favorite
Ubud hotel had an elaborate shine that a guy tended to for an hour a day. In
the fields are vaguely human-shaped palm-frond images called “rice mothers” to
bless the harvest.
We went to the only Buddhist
temple in Bali, and saw 11th
century tombs cut into living rock in a mountain stream’s canyon. In the
highlands, we heard prayers broadcast five times a day in Lake Bratan’s
mosque. To visit it, I put on long sleeves, a sarong (one must always wear a sarong
and special sash in any Balinese temple) and a head scarf. Chip loves the image
of me he took in that get-up and tells everyone I’ve converted now!
THE ARTS
People go to Bali specifically for its arts, and we were no exception.
You drive through entire villages devoted to one craft: a certain type of
chair, wood carvers, stone cutters, idol and mask makers, weavers, acrylic
painters, and batik artists. The most spectacular new addition to my folk-art
collection is a fabric kite of a leering flying fox bat with a 5-foot wingspan
hovering over my dining room table.
Bail is most famous for its
gamelan orchestras, and you hear it all day everywhere. To be a gamelan musician
is expected of every man, and the banjar, or village cooperative, owns all of
the group’s instruments, which anyone can play. Gamelan is almost 100%
percussion, on xylophones, gongs, and bells. It sounds entirely improvised, but
is decidedly not. It seems discordant to the Western ear at first, but its
tonality grows on you. It has a sparkling, laughing, merry sound full of joi de
vivre.
Bali is also famous for its elaborately costumed dancers.
Young women enact sinuous movements with splayed feet, hyper-extended fingers on
fluttering hands, and flashing eyes. We also saw a performance of seated men
“dancing” and singing a staccato, a capella tune. We missed the barong dance,
in which a buffoon half-lion/half-human figure cavorts. One Sunday morning, we
happened upon charming kids practicing dance in Ubud’s former imperial palace.
But the No. 1 thing I HAD to
see in Bali was the shadow puppet drama. It is
a dying art, with only about 10 puppeteers left on the island. The simple
marionettes are cut from cow hide with stick-operated arms. The art form is a
metaphor for life’s mysteries as you view the puppets’ shadows only, cast upon
a screen backlit by a flickering oil lamp. One guy simultaneously operates up
to four characters from Hindu mythology who speak in High and Low Balinese (and
sometimes English in our show) and provides the percussion, accompanied by a
simple gamelan orchestra. The show has elements of high drama, slapstick,
battle scenes and song – I can in no way describe how magical it was. It was
certainly THE most unique dramatic performance I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a
lot.
OUTDOORS STUFF
Of course, we didn’t go to Bali just for the arts. We rented bikes in Ubud to ride
to a tiny village known for the hundreds of ethereal, white egrets that roost
in its trees near sunset.
We walked in the achingly picturesque
palm-lined paddies for miles, Chip in photographers’ heaven.
We climbed the volcano above Lake Batur,
formed in a vast jungle-filled caldera and truly one of the most scenic places
I’ve ever visited. The guidebooks said you could find the route easily and
didn’t need a guide, but times have changed. As we drove to the trailhead at
dawn, two guides on a motorbike followed us, then when we stopped, screamed,
‘You must respect my association! [Code for: hire them at an exorbitant rate.] You
cannot climb by yourself! We go to police station now!” It didn’t help that I
smirked when a guy claimed, “I am not a criminal!” We shrugged them off, drove
another two miles to lose them – and found the trail and climbed it ourselves!
At Lovina Beach,
for $8 each, we took a three-hour boat and snorkeling trip to see leaping dolphins
at dawn. The reef was just out of the world, better than Cozumel
even.
On Lake Bratan,
we rented a crude wooden canoe with handmade outriggers for $5 for four hours.
We went around in circles for 45 minutes, but eventually got the hang of the
damned thing.
CRITTERS
In towns, wicker cages with
men’s beloved fighting cocks are lined up in front of houses. You see
cross-legged guys stroking the fearsome roosters and chatting.
There are mangy dogs everywhere,
on roads and asleep in restaurants, and a few nervous, bone-thin cats. Dogs
embody demons so are appeased, many eating rice offerings, sleeping, and
copulating in temple grounds.
Vast flocks of quacking,
flightless ducks roam the paddies, looking for snails and fish and providing
fertilizer. Brahma bulls are still used by some farmers to plow the paddies.
Ubud has a famous forest in
which langur monkeys are fed for the pleasure of tourons. The place is just crawling
with monkey families, with many cunning babies in May. They wrestle, squabble,
and leap into a pond. We even saw a begging monkey on Batur’s summit! Oh, and
then there was the guy walking a huge macaque on a leash on the beach.
The one big, expensive (all of
$20 each) touristy thing we did was visit the Bali Bird and Reptile Park,
with hundreds of tropical species from Asia, Africa and the Americas. I was
spellbound, recognizing many bird species from my forays into the wilds of
those regions.
They had a super-cool (and
free) opportunity to be photographed with gigantic parrots on your arms or
clutching turtles and iguanas. I was in heaven!
There was a vast walk-in
aviary of shrieking species from Papua, but our favorite part was feeding time
for the Komodo dragons. The up-to-30-foot monitor species is found only a few
Indonesian islands. Twice a week, the dragons are fed three whole rabbits by a nonchalant
rangerette. Way cool!
