Kate and I stepped off the plane and into the heat and humidity of another tropical day in Bali. We lined up for immigration inside the terminal, and when we reached the front of the line our troubles began.
"Do you have an onward ticket from Indonesia?" asked the customs official. We didn't. Although it was an official requirement to get the free visa, we'd heard that it was a rather lax one, and that simply showing sufficient cash would do. We planned to buy our onward ticket (to Vietnam) in Indonesia, where it would be cheaper, and once we had a better sense of how long we wanted to stay. The customs official, however, had other plans. He said he couldn't give us a visa. I asked him what we needed to do, and said he could make us a special arrangement. Covering his hand with his mouth, whispering, he said we should give him fifty dollars. Kate and I gathered together this amount (fortunately, we'd had the foresight to acquire some small bills before leaving Australia) and discreetly slipped it to him inside our passports. We received our visas, and continued on, if a little shakily, to collect our luggage. Welcome to Southeast Asia.
We hired a taxi to take us to Kuta, a touristy town that we thought would make a good base for our explorations. We asked the taxi driver to take us to the center of town, and named a road, and from there we'd start looking for a hotel. Instead, he took us to a hotel of his choice, a little south of the center, and he ended up walking into Kuta in the heat of the midday sun with our full packs on our backs. We had to stop several times to consult the map and get our bearings, and people constantly offered us transport and hotels. Eventually a pleasant man named Andi offered to show us the road we were looking for, and we ended up following him to some hotels, and finally just picked one that looked nice. It was overpriced, of course, but everything here is so cheap that we didn't really mind.
Kuta is an ugly, ugly place. It exists solely for tourists, which makes me wonder why tourists even bother going here. It is one big sell -- souvenir shops, "upscale" shopping boutiques, and touts offering transport and hotels every step of the way. The restaurants are full of japanese and western tourists, and the menus reflect the clientele -- Indonesian food is actually hard to find. The beach is less than ideal, the weather is incredibly hot and humid, and days are spent constantly mopping sweat from head and chest. Everywhere you go, people ask: "transport?" They sing "hellooo-ooo" to you and then try to sell you newspapers or hotels or t-shirts. If the rest of Indonesia is like this, I'm going to be very, very disappointed.
On the bright side, everything here is very, very cheap.
Kate and I met up with Farley, Kate's travelling companion from New Zealand, and we hired a driver to take us to Ulu Watu, a village to the south that has a famous temple and beach. The driver's name was Gede, and he was referred to us by Andi. He was a friendly guy, although his english wasn't great. We stopped first at the beach, which was down inside a rocky cove. Unfortunately the tide was in, the waves were huge, and the current around the cove looked rather treacherous. We waded in the water a bit but mostly relaxed in the shadow of the cliff walls. Kate and Farley eventually succumbed to the pestering of the local women and received massages, while I did some reading.
Later Gede took us to a Hindu temple, where we walked around a bit. The temple is full of monkeys, as most temples here are, and they are rather mischievous. They'll steal anything they can get their hands on -- hats, hair clips, water bottles -- so we had to be sure everything was tightly strapped down or hidden away before exploring the temple. At sunset, we sat down to watch the Kecak, a traditional dance.
The orchestra for the Kecak is seventy men and boys, who create an astonishing and delightful music with their voices. It is mostly stacatto chanting, and the overlapping rhythms and syncopation are great. I'd never heard music like that before, and it was wonderful discover something new. The dance itself was fairly entertaining, and the accompanying program helped us to uncover the story behind the dance. Like the music, the dance consists of many overlapping layers -- from the positions of eyes, fingers, and toes to more general body language and staging. I'm sure we missed a lot because we don't speak the language of Balinese dance.
We took a shuttle bus to Ubud and again I was disappointed. I had heard that Ubud was a great cultural center, with amazing art and food. But again we were confronted with touts hawking transport and accomodation. I want to see Balinese people doing Balinese things. I want to see a Balinese town. Instead, I'm in a town which is full of tourists, and with Balinese people doing things to get tourist dollars. While it's not as bad as Kuta, it's still very frustrating.
But I'm starting to adjust. There are Balinese people here, after all, and we're starting to learn how to peel away the layers of tourism to get at the culture underneath. We're giving Ubud more time, and we're going to try to get away from the very touristy heart of town, so that we can see if we can find the real Bali. Ubud should have a lot of potential: there are cooking and woodcarving classes, and traditional dances every night, and interesting towns and temples nearby.
Legong and Barong
On our first night in Ubud we saw the Legong and Barong dances. The dances were accompanied by a gamelan orchestra, and once again I was absolutely thrilled by the music. A gamelan is similar to a xylophone, but sounds like a bell. There were fifteen or twenty in the orchestra, each with a different range, and the overlapping layers of music were great to listen to. And once again: while the dancing was okay and interesting, I'm pretty sure I missed a lot.
Kate and I discovered, in a rather direct way, that our hotel room had mosquitos, so we changed hotels. This took most of the morning, as we wandered down just one side street and perused the many accomodation options that were available. Eventually we settled on Weni's Bungalows, moved our bags in, then went to get massages.
For just US$8, we were promised a relaxing massage, followed by a salt scrub and a herbal bath. What a deal! But this was not relaxing, pleasant, Swedish-style massage. This was Javanese-style, which, as far as I can tell, involves jamming one's thumbs as hard as possible into tender muscles. Instead of being relaxed, I ended up being more tense then when I entered. But the bath was nice: I selected a Javanese spice bath with cloves, cinnamon, and pepperminty cinnamon leaves.
From the massage house we walked to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary, which is home to several temples and, of course, a whole lot of monkeys. The monkeys were fairly aggressive, and would jump on our legs in an attempt to get our bananas. Fortunately, the heavy rain meant we'd brought our umbrella, and the umbrella made a handy monkey-repelling device.
The temples were closed, unfortunately, but we got to enjoy some of the interesting architecture and sculpture around the outside walls. The themes were intriguing: a monkey holding his extraordinarily large penis; a demon that consisted of just one big eye and one big tooth; another monster with a demon's face and body of a naked woman; and all kinds of animals in rather odd poses.
Kate and I take travelling very seriously. This is more than just a vacation for us -- it is a chance for us to understand the greater world on a very personal level. We try to avoid the tours; we want to see beyond the veneer that the locals package up for easy consumption. Towns like Kuta, (and to an unfortunately growing extent, Ubud) are places to be avoided: they don't exist beyond their services to the tourists. They are souvenir shops and restaurants with international menus. Beyond that, there is little else apparent to the naked eye. That is why my first few days in Bali, first in Kuta, then in Ubud, were so frustrating: we have precious little time in each place we visit, and to waste it in such a cultural vacuum is maddening.
And then there's the heat. It is unavoidable and leaves us fatigued. Just walking around leaves our shirts damp and our foreheads dripping. Shade provides little respite; air conditioning is a rare luxury. The heat is just something he have to deal with.
Slowly, though, we're adjusting: to the tourism, to the heat, and to everything else. We're starting to see beyond the desperate quest for tourism cash that lurks everywhere. We're learning how to avoid the heat. We're enjoying ourselves more, and seeing more, and learning more, and taking better advantage of our time here. The distractions that troubled me for our first few days have subsided to a dull roar. Simply put: we're having more fun.
The Streets of Ubud
The first thing that hits me when I step out of this internet cafe is the noise. It is the growling, yelping, barking noise of hundreds of poorly-maintained scooters and motorcycles. They are the preferred mode of transport here. They belch blue smoke and maintain a constant low whine. They wake us up in the morning and put us to sleep at night. Everyone drives one; sometimes whole families roar by, all piled onto one bike. Most people wear helmets, as required by law, although many are nothing more than loosely-strapped construction hard hats. The young toughs don't wear helmets, of course, and they are the ones with the fastest bikes. When the women ride, in their satin skirts and blouses, they don't slouch. They sit like secretaries about to start typing on the handlebars.
The second thing I notice when I step through the door is the heat. Even now, at six in the afternoon, it wraps you like a blanket. It isn't oppressive at this stage, so late in the day, but it is deceptive. It is still lurking. Inevitiably one is inspired to perform some late walking errands, and soon, with just that slight bit of exercise, one is again damp with sweat. It is a curious (and as yet unexplained) phenomenon that the temperature actually appears to slightly rise just after the sun sets.
Finally, as I step onto the street, I notice the smells. There's an underlying fragance of coconut and flowers and other tropical things, a pleasant smell mixing with the dust in the air, but one that generally goes unnoticed. It is dominated most often by the sweet cloying aroma of clove cigarettes, which is Bali's drug of choice. Only the men smoke them, but all the men smoke them. Fortunately, I actually find the smoke rather pleasant. Other times, you'll get a noseful of blue exhaust as the cars line up on Ubud's increasingly congested streets. Then there is the occasional rich smell of garbage, or the delicate aroma of the open sewers that lie just beneath the red-painted sidewalks.
Walking those sidewalks is something of a challenge. You see, those sidewalks began their lives as gutters, carrying household water down the street. Eventually they were dug deeper, and lined with concrete, and then capped with an endless, and theoretically continuous, succession of small concrete spans. The challenge is that the concrete spans are sometimes missing. Instead of a piece of sidewalk, there will be just a gap giving a glimpse of grey sewer runoff. These gaps are actually quite regular, and when considered along with the steep rise and fall of the sidewalk as it meets driveways and alleys, it is really not surprising that I prefer to walk on the street.
Walking on the street probably isn't such a good idea, but the trucks and buses and scooters and motorbikes (there are very few cars on the road here) have had a lot of practice at avoiding slow-moving obstacles. Don't worry, this is actually safer than it sounds.
Ubud is a very touristy town, and a few of the locals that I've talked to have lamented its downfall. Some moved from Kuta to be here, and now they're looking to move on again. The streets are dominated by craft stores, tour operators, and money changers, and many people, regardless of their original business plan, now also offer internet access. The Japanese make up the bulk of the tourists; they scuff their feet as they negotiate the treacherous sidewalks. It is a strange irony that the Japanese dominate here as tourists: during World War II, they filled the country as occupying imperialists.
But as we stay longer the noise of tourism fades to the background, and we start to see the culture that brought us all to Bali in the first place. For example: everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, are colourful little trays, as big as your hand and cleverly constructed from palm leaves, that are offerings to the gods. They are on the sidewalks and tables in statues, alone, or in piles of dozens. Each little tray contains fresh orange and red flower petals, and a bit of rice, and some moss. Eventually they decay, and the streets and streams are filled with the wilted and bruised and flattened remains of yesterday's offerings. In the morning the offerings are laid out and each one is graced with a burning stick of incense. The offerer will sprinkle the little tray with water, three times, and with the final sprinkle she will make a curious little wave with her hand, graceful and calm, and then stand (or squat) there, motionless, for a few seconds before moving on.
Another example is the dancing. Every night, usually in several locations, traditional dances are held. They are strictly for the tourists, but they are entertaining nonetheless. Early in our stay we saw the "Barong and Legong" dance, and I was amazed not so much by the dancing as by the music. The dancing was beautiful but only vaguely comprehensible -- like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. The music, on the other hand was incredible, an structured cacaphony of overlapping rhythms and motifs.
We've discovered that the best way to avoid the tourist-oriented towns is to get out of them. We started small, at the beginning of our stay, with a little trip to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary, and we liked it so much we went back. This time, though, there were more tourists and the monkeys were more aggressive. Things actually got a bit of hand. At one point a large monkey grabbed Kate's leg, and when it saw that no more bananas were forthcoming (we were all out) he, in a fit of spite, decided to sink his inch-long canines into Kate's pristine calf.
The bite wasn't deep, but it had broken the skin and this was cause for alarm. Rabies is common in Asia, and can be spread easily in animal saliva -- just a lick is enough, let alone a bite. Then, of course, there all the other nasty little critters that run around a monkey's mouth. After a few minutes of careful consideration, and with mounting concern, we decided to visit a doctor. He cleaned the wound and prescribed antibiotics to prevent secondary infection. He didn't mention rabies, our big concern, so we put the question to him. "Ah, no rabies in Bali," he replied.
Monkeys aside, our best out-of-town adventure happened very close to Ubud. It's remarkable how little you need to walk to get away from all the hustle: we went about 500 meters down the main road, and then turned onto a small path, and suddenly, we were in the middle of a vast rice field. Water flowed in small channels all around us, feeding the swamp-like paddies, as we strolled in the shade of palm trees along an ancient path. After a few minutes we came upon a curious man sitting in the shade. When he saw us approaching he jumped to his feet and asked if we wanted a coconut. We agreed, and he beckoned us up onto the bank of the rice paddy. He introduced himself as Gushti. He put his feet into a loop of twisted grass, and began to shimmy up a palm tree. At the top he selected one of the giant green nuts, and then carefully, perhaps betraying a bit in the way of acrophobia, he descended back down to ground. The whole time he grinned crazily. He used a short curved knife to chop a hole in the coconut, and then rigged up a little channel to making drinking easier. Finally, he offered it to Kate and I to drink.
I've never been a fan of fresh coconut water, but I must admit it was delicious. He then chopped the coconut in half and we enjoyed the fresh coconut meat, soft and moist. He then asked for money -- ten thousand rupiahs, about one US dollar -- and he was just such a goofy guy, all smiles and humility, that we didn't mind giving it to him. We probably should have negotiated before he climbed the tree.
Continuing through the rice fields, we met another rice farmer with a bit of extra time on his hands. This one was also named Gushti, and when we asked him about directions to nearby places, he took it upon himself to show us around. He led us along the bank of a rice paddy, past his hut where he lived with his brother and a cow, and down into the jungle. We had been walking on a wide flat ridge, with river gorges on either side. It was into one of those gorges that we now walked. The path was slippery, and our sandals made for poor traction. Gushti lent us a hand as necessary, and we went down further and further into the humid jungle. Eventually, we reached the river.
Gushti encouraged us to go for a swim, and claimed the waters were holy, but we figured it wasn't the healthiest thing to do. By this point we'd abandoned our sandals for the more steady footing that bare feet provided, and the mud squished between our toes. Gushti beckoned us even further along, and we waded calf-deep into brown water, finding precarious purchase on vague rocks on the bottom. Eventually we saw our destination -- a ramshackle-looking bamboo bridge suspended four meters above the water. At this point, having lodged us deep in the jungle, Gushti decided to negotiate. He wanted 20,000; we offered 10,000. He stayed at 20, and we re-offered 10. Then 15. Finally, we agreed on 20. Clearly, Gushti knew when he had the upper hand.
We crossed the bridge and began our sweaty ascent up the other side of the gorge, sweating profusely in the mid-day heat and sliding on the slippery grass and mud. Finally we reached another rice field at the top, and Gushti bid us goodbye. We went out to the road, pointed ourselves in what we felt was the general direction of Ubud, and started walking. The road wound up and down a narrow ridge between the gorge we'd just crossed and another to our right.
We passed through rice fields and grass, and by the odd artist's store. There were no other tourists; it was just Kate and I and the odd Balinese wanderer. With heavy black clouds approaching we hustled along the path, past ancient steps, and finally emerged back onto the main road of Ubud.
If there is any one thing about travel that excites me the most, it is food. I am passionate about all things edible, and travelling lets every meal become an adventure. Discovering the native ingredients, the local specialties, even the strange takes on familiar food -- that's what I love about travel.
The restaurants here in Ubud are good, and there's a wide range to choose from. But I've always been a bit suspicious; a single menu usually ranges wildly from Indonesian to Chinese to Western. And I wouldn't really know what good Indonesian food tasted like in the first place. And to top things off, Balinese cuisine is entirely different from Indonesian cuisine as a whole.
Kate and I sampled all kinds of restaurants, from buffets to simple rice-and-satay dishes; from upscale service-and-a-view destinatinos to smaller back-room warungs. We got to know the names of the common dishes: chicken satay (chicken on a stick, both indonesian style and balinese style), nasi goreng (fried rice with vegetables), nasi campur (rice with meat and whatever the chef finds lying around), mie goreng (fried noodles with vegetables), gado-gado (vegetables with peanut sauce) and more. The food was, generally, very good. But I felt it was time to take the next step in understanding the cuisine. It was time for the cooking class.
Our class began with the tour of the market. Kate and I were the only participants, and the chef walked us through the vegetable stalls, introducing us to the fruits, vegetables, and spices that were common to Balinese food. Most were familiar, although I'd never used many before. A few were completely foreign.
We retired to the restaurant and our chef took us through three hours of cooking and eating. He (with some token help from us) prepared no less than eight different dishes: from a vegetable lawar (a tasty vegetable-with-spices dish) to Balinese-style pork satay, to a heavenly Sambal Udang (curried prawns). At the basis of most of the dishes was the "basic spice" -- a hand-ground paste consisting of cloves, star anise, peppercorns, chilis, onions, garlic, ginger, lesser galangal, greater galangal, shallots, and a few other things I can't remember. The basic spice never varied; it is the heart of Balinese cooking. Learning about it was eye-opening, and gave me a better understanding of what I've been eating for the past week or so. Also, much like learning about mole recipes in Mexico, it gave me great ideas to use in my kitchen at home, and I can't wait to host a feast for all my friends at home.
Kate and I are staying at a place called Weni's Bungalows. Like most accomodations in Ubud, this is someone's home. Homes here are large (and presumably ancient) walled compounds with tile floors and gardens and several small buildings, and always contain a small temple area. We're in a bungalow off to the side. Weni is friendly and is thrilled that we've stayed as long as we have. She (or her daughter) cooks us breakfast every morning, and serves it with fresh fruit and tea. The room we're in is a bit small for two people and their accompanying luggage, but for 35,000 rupiahs (about US$3.50) per night, it's hard to complain.
But at US$3.50 per night, you do need to give up some luxuries. For example, our toilet doesn't flush. Instead, we pour water from a large cistern into the bowl, and hope the contents of the bowl are flushed into the sewer. This usually takes several pours. Over the week, though, we've become better at this: too much water too quickly, and the contents of the bowl are all mixed up; too little too slowly, and there's not enough pressure to provide a good flush. There's also no hot water, and occasionally no water at all. Worst of all, though, there's an animal that lives in our ceiling, that makes an incredibly loud squeaking noise every few hours or so at night. It is a sound we've never heard before -- we didn't even know animals could make such noises -- and we have absolutely no idea what is causing it.