Bali was never high on my list. Yeah, I’ll go anywhere, but there were a lot more interesting places to visit than a place that I saw as a quasi-hedonistic party scene. I’ve never done well with those situations. I’m just totally clueless and I don’t get it. And so when we were planning the trip I was relatively surprised to hear Carol say she wanted to come here. She said her interest was piqued when she read Michener’s “Hawaii,” even before Angela was born. Much to my pleasant surprise, there’s a whole lot more to the place than the party scene, which is certainly healthy and thriving in parts of the island.
Landing in Denpasar was a real eye opener. It could have been SFO. Planes stacked up on each other, and tarmacs full of a veritable rainbow of colored tail fins for the various local budget travel that has exploded, sometimes literally, onto the Asian air market. Inside the terminal at immigration processing there was one open kiosk for Malaysian passports and there were a dozen or so for foreigners. Long lines went fairly efficiently, but it was obvious that this was, indeed, going to be a different breed of cat. The immense variety of humanity within the baggage claim where flights had come in from literally everywhere was staggering, not only from an ethnic and cultural aspect, but also just for the variety of alternative lifestyles that a lot of people who come to Bali seem to exhibit. It certainly gave the appearance of being a place that tolerated a lot of individuality. And this was at 10 p.m..
We didn’t want to stay in the party area and I had found the small town of Ubud in my reading. It is a fiber area for Carol and has a lot of activities for the non-party types like us. The hour drive was nothing we had not seen before, tons of traffic, end to end shops all shuttered for the night with their metal garage type doors locked down and very little empty space since it seemed to be another one of those endless city urban sprawls where one village leads into another and you can’t really tell when one ends and the other begins. Literally thousands of shops selling everything imaginable lay hidden behind the doors. The shops are almost always single garage door sized and are end to end mile after mile.
However, in the morning when the light shone on Bali interior, it took on its quintessential picture postcard feeling. Out the balcony of our hotel is a rice field backed up by the graceful coconut palm trees stretching to the sky and just daring anybody to walk underneath lest it drop with a thud a green coconut. The coconut palm is so much more picturesque than the mile after mile of the stubby, thicker oil palms all planted with precision in an “orchard.” Now, with this vision at my doorstep, it felt like what I had envisioned to be Bali. A woman in a red sarong cut the weeds and grass with a hand sickle from the established path lest the greenery take totally over. Everything is done by hand here, we saw no machinery of any kind in the fields.. Later she gathered it all up into a bundle, placed it on her head and walked with her flip flops flapping down the rows to a path like she has probably done a thousand times before, seemingly totally oblivious to the world, she still could manage a smile and a hello when I said good afternoon.
Whereas in Borneo, we saw little of the traditional dress on men or women, now we see it everywhere. The men wear little turban-like head coverings, but they are really nothing more than thick colorful strips of cloth wrapped around the head with the center left open. The men and women wear the traditional sarong, simply a floor length piece of cloth wrapped around the waist and tucked in at the top around the waist. The women, young and old, wear these along with the men. Flip flops are the standard footwear and there are shops selling such an array and variety of them that it boggles the mind. I had no clue that they could come in so many ways.
This is, surprisingly to me, a very heavily Hindu area. I’m finding such a broader level of culture. I had no clue. I just knew that Indonesia was a heavily Muslim country so was surprised to find a majority of Christians in Borneo and now a majority of Hindus here in Bali. Shrines and temples abound on every street and each morning and each night people carry trays holding offerings on mini-trays and placed in doorways and various other places as a symbol of good luck and blessed offerings. Banks, schools, shops and houses all seem to have a small shrine adorning the outside of the buildings and temples are to be found in abundance as well. Java with over half the population of 250,000,000 is heavily Muslim while the other 17,000+ islands have a wide variety of culture, religion and traditions very different from Java.
One thing that became very evident upon first light is that Balinese look, well, they look Balinese. Unlike Borneo where the ethnic Chinese register about 50% of the total population and the intermarriage with ethnic Malays form a lighter skinned population, Balinese have a beautiful light olive sheen to their skin. The lack of facial and body hair gives the skin a sleek look and they are a lovely people. They smile and are a joyous lot and are said to be one of the most patient of people. This is good since the roads and traffic require that in spades. The women are petite and beautiful and the men are shorter than average but with nice features as well.
The roads are really narrow and are two-lane only because somebody painted a white line down the middle. The best way to drive them is to point the hood ornament directly along the white line for as long as possible until a car, seldom, or the mass break out of motor bikes come your way. If a car is approaching it means getting one set of tires well onto the limited shoulder and praying that he/she will do the same in the other car. It is also exacerbated by people who simply stop and leave their cars on the road without even the semblance of pulling as far off as possible. We passed a man happily washing his car in the middle of the road while traffic in both directions looked for an opportunity to get around him. The real fun is when the big dog of the road, the tour buses come towards you. They seem to have little compunction to pull over and this makes for some hairy moments. Another curious habit is that oncoming traffic seems to have the right, or at least the practice to turn in front of oncoming traffic. But everybody seems to understand the rules and as crazy as it seems to my western prejudiced driving habits, it all works without any semblance of anger or impatience.
An interesting feature that Carol noticed on our map is that there are 9 major roads that go north and south in the island from the bottom to the top, there is not a single one cutting across the middle of the country or a major road connecting the parallel north/south roads. Any road that goes laterally across the Island heads directly for the coast and then skirts the island on its rim.
Primary in our interest in visiting Ubud was a place called “Green Village,” which our ex-student Shane Liem told us was amazing. She was right. Comprising several aspects such as a school, a planned community and a production plant, The “green village/school is made entirely out of bamboo. They discovered a process to eliminate the sugar inside the bamboo so that the bugs don’t like it any longer. They’ve done some amazing architectural building using just bamboo.
Pictures can be seen at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/16/world/asia/bali-green-village-bamboo/
They also operate a “green” school for children of the area. A full k-12 program teaches all subject matter in a “green” process and environment. The classrooms again are all made from bamboo and everything is approached from a basis of sustainability. We were told that tomorrow is “Earth Day, “ and at the school it’s like Christmas. With over 300 students a fifth of them are Balinese and the rest are foreign students who live both at the school and/or are dropped by parents/drivers. At a cost of $8,000 for the elementary programs and $14,000 for the middle and high school students, it ain’t cheap, but they have Montessori type approach to learning in an environmental setting.
The number of restaurants, guest houses, hotels and home stays in the area are stark testimony to the heavy influx of tourism in the past few years. With a population of 30,000 my feeling is that a vast majority of them are involved in the tourist trade. But it is a beautiful area where one can go on all kinds of adventures from white-water rafting, visiting monkey sanctuaries, do elephant touring, rent motor bikes (Carol flatly refused to even consider it, probably wise) and have a wonderful and fulfilling cuisine experiences. Here’s the website for further exploration.
http://greenvillagebali.com
We decided that in spite of my initial objections to the party scene, it seemed somewhat strange to come to Bali and not at least see the beach and coast line. Asking what was a particularly beautiful beach near the airport, we were pointed to Nusa Dua. The trip down in daylight confirmed what I had thought on the nighttime run to Ubud. Mile after unending mile of shops and villages. One village is especially known for working with the wood from the forest making beautiful furniture, another for using the lava rock (there are two volcanoes on the island) into Hindu statuary while another one is the silversmith village which gets its silver from Papua, a province on the island of New Guinea. It also has the world’s largest gold mine. So, although they all run together and seem the same, in fact, there is a lot of individuality to them. Curious how the maps looked with the vertical highways I googled Bali and looked at the “earth” view, and there I could see the parallel strings of roads easily identifiable with the wall to wall buildings I mentioned.
We stayed at a comfortable but cheapy hotel, having met the requirements of our stay, AC and WI-FI. We were able to make a pilgrimage to a beach and it was just as lovely as one would suspect from looking at the travel brochures. The water a turquoise blue, the coarse sand beaches from countless volcanic rock being pulverized into small bits, and the rocky outcroppings which give the beach character with the waves crashing into the reef and spilling white water closer to shore. The water in the lagoon was bathtub warm, literally warmer than the tepid showers we’ve had in the hotels. It might be refreshing, but it’s not gonna cool anybody off on a hot day. But still I’m glad we did it and I now have a better idea of why I wouldn’t want to stay here in spite of the beauty.
Gringos everywhere. Old and young, singles and marrieds, hipsters and hippies, they come from around the world to partake in the beach nightlife. They laze around the pool or at the beach all day and then party at night. I once was given a compliment by a fellow travel agent who meant it as a put down “You like to travel, and I like to vacation,” she said. And it’s true. Probably the only accurate thing I ever heard from her. So we came, we saw, we got out of Dodge. Glad we did it, glad we only gave it one night.
