Bali 3

Hello, dear readers. I'm sorry to have left you hanging for a while, but I just haven't felt like writing. Maybe the rice is starting to get to me. Anyway, after my disappointment in Sanur, I decided to go to the countryside. However, Paul suggested that I first check out some of the breaks on Nusa Lembongan peninsula, so I headed down there with Tankas (the driver) and Paul's son Nikko, an excruciatingly nice 20-year-old from Java. The southern peninsula is a beautiful, (relatively) sparsely populated thicket of low coastal forest, and it would have been a lovely place to stay. Unfortunately, the surf wasn't happening there either, so I headed up to Ubud, an artsy town in the middle of Bali. When I got there, after passing through countless miles of craft shops, it was drizzling. I followed a tout to a surprisingly lovely losmen (homestay), and, after settling in, wandered the streets for a little while. Ubud reminded me in many ways of Port Townsend, or Ashland; it's full of small galleries and nice restaurants, with well-off couples strolling serenely down the streets, looking for furnishings for their loft. The difference is that, this being Bali, everybody is trying a lot harder to sell you stuff. I had planned on visiting a few shops to find Christmas presents, but the overwhelming expectation that greeted me whenever I so much as turned my head towards a storefront was too intimidating, especially since I never like shopping alone (except for books). Instead, I aimlessly walked down the same street several times, had a too-expensive dinner alone, got rained on, and went to bed. The next day I decided to take a walk in the rice fields. The area around Ubud is undeniably beautiful, rice paddies interspersed with small farms and decent-looking houses. There was a very pleasant view from my losmen, and the walk was absolutely gorgeous. I had a nice lunch at a reasonably cheap organic farm and restaurant in the middle of the field, which made me nostalgic for Nash's. Everything was going great, until it started raining again. I was soaked within minutes, and didn't especially care, except that I also couldn't figure out where the trail went next. I ended up wandering through a residential neighborhood in a steep creek valley, making some exploratory ventures onto the margins of rice paddies, and, finally, finding a concrete path that lead me, mysteriously, back onto the trail I had already been on, going in the opposite direction. I don't think my sense of direction has ever failed me this thoroughly before, but at this point I was getting raw spots on my feet from the fine, wet gravel of the trail, so I was happy to get back. I didn't do much more until that evening, when I went to a traditional Balinese dance performance. These performances exemplify the conflict between tradition and profit present in many developing countries: traditionally performed as part of temple ceremonies, they are now presented nightly, in condensed form, to a crowd of generally rather bored foreigners. The show opened with some gamelan (traditional Indonesian metal xylophone) music, which is fabulously intricate and challenging, and sounds, to the casual Western listener, like clanking frenetic noise. I enjoyed watching the musicians wielding their metal hammers at high speed, and occasionally enjoyed a passage of the music, but the repetitive and foreign nature of the music kept me from really appreciating it. After a few minutes of this, the first dance began. Balinese dance involves a lot of slow hand movements and head twitches; this dance was pretty much exclusively that, and not very exciting. Luckily, all the dancers were women, so I was able to get through it by using standard dance-performance watch-the-hot-one strategy. The next dance was somewhat more interesting; a quite probably gay (although it could have just been the pancake makeup) male dancer did some intricate steps involving a fan, his coat, and a row of metal bells. Following this was a dance involving the witch Rangda. I was expecting it to be at least a bit exciting, but it was more twist-and-twitch stuff, and Rangda was quite the disappointment. This was followed by another  comparatively good one, called the bumblebee dance, which showed a courtship ritual between a male and female dancer. After this was a supposedly emotional dance, about an old man; emotional it may have been, but I was pretty tired of dance at this point, and I zoned out for most of it. The final dance was a battle scene from the Hindu epic, the "Mahabharata". This was quite well done, especially the part where the warriors used their giant umbrellas to simulate a chariot; however, I was pretty glad for the dance to be over so I could get back to bed. All I do is party...
The next day, I decided to climb Gunung Agung, the highest volcano on Bali. Typically, the climb is done at night, in order to arrive at the summit for the sunrise, so I planned on taking the day to see a few sights. I contacted a guide, arranged to meet him in a mountain town called Muncan, and tried to catch a bemo to the town of Gianyar. I ended up hiring a driver instead; it was sort of expensive, but very good value compared to a taxi back home, since I had him for the whole day. I started with a visit to the temple and cave Goa Gajah. The cave mouth is intricately carved, but the interior is pretty unspectacular; however, there was a nice waterfall, and the jungle nearby had a trail going through it. After making a much too large donation at the entrance to the jungle section, I started off for a jungle temple way back in the woods. On the way I passed a real, wild cave, and walked a little way in; it seemed to go pretty far back, but I didn't have my headlamp, plus it looked like the kind of place that Rangda might live, so I went in a manly twenty feet, took a picture of a bat, and carried on. The temple itself was unspectacular, but I had an interesting adventure trying to find my way back. I went up some steps, as the man at the entrance had instructed me to do, but instead of reaching the parking lot, I found myself in a random village. At first, I assumed that I had just come out a little further down the main road, but pretty soon, after getting some bemused looks from Balinese people (whose help I refused on the assumption that they were trying to sell me transport), I realized I was lost. I wandered around a bit, trying to enjoy the lovely stone walls and terraced roofs while simultaneously finding my way out, until I found what looked like a trail, absolutely covered with trash. (Litter, as I've already said, is an appallingly huge problem in Bali.) I walked uncertainly down it, and found myself back at the main temple. After that adventure, I moved on to Semerapura, where I saw another temple. Yippee. From Semerapura it was a long and beautiful drive through mountainous country to the town of Tirtagangga, which is home to an impressive water palace. This was by far the best ruin I've seen on the entire trip; not only were there awesome stepping stones and giant carp, but there was a swimming pool. I spent a good hour splashing around, with vacationing Balinese, in the same stone pool rajas had used a thousand years ago. The Balinese kids thought I was hilarious, probably because of how ridiculously pale I looked, but they were friendly, and I met some nice vacationers who weren't trying to sell anything to me! The water was a perfect, refreshing temperature; it was by far the highlight of my time in Bali. After this, we proceeded to Muncan, where I discharged Made (my driver) and went to the guide's house. Ketut Uriada is a veteran guide; he is also a welcoming, kind, and humble man, and I thoroughly enjoyed my stay with him. Muncan was equally nice; it's virtually untouched by tourists, and I took a great evening walk, absorbing the relaxed rhythms of a Balinese village. Unfortunately, no tourism doesn't mean no poverty, and I was asked for money several times, but all in all it was pretty easy to relax. Even though the rain prevented me from climbing Gunung Agung, I got a peaceful night in a nice village, and Ketut helped me get a cheap bemo back to Denpasar the next day. That afternoon, I went to visit the Green School, a place that's been getting a lot of attention lately due to a TED talk given by the founder. As the name suggests, it's an alternative school that teaches students holistically, and emphasizes fun, hands-on learning about topical subjects; in other words, it's Five Acre, but with really awesome bamboo architecture, a vortex generator, and a farm, in Bali. I was officially there as a representative of Five Acre, and I talked to the admissions director about a sister-school type program; he seemed interested, but the school is in it's third year, so he and the rest of the administration are also monstrously stressed from trying to deal with all the problems that a new business, and especially a new school, experiences. However, I do think something could end up happening, and I also encourage you to check out the school and help them get off the ground. It really is a phenomenal project; I don't have the energy to describe it here, but the website gives a pretty good idea: http://www.greenschool.org/ Of course, if you really want to donate to a school, the Five Acre scholarship fund can always use some help too...Also at the Green School, I met an interesting French woman who is planning, with a partner, to start a similar school in Columbia. I gave her a ride into Denpasar and we chatted for quite a while, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out. I stayed in Kuta again that night (not quite sure why...), and went out clubbing, but didn't have much fun, and ended up missing the bemo to Gunung Batur, the other volcano, the next day. Instead, I stayed in Sanur, where the highlight of my day was reading an article in a 1997 National Geographic about Queen Maude's Land, in Antarctica, and imagining myself in a place with absolutely no people. That brings us to this morning, when Nikko and Tankas came and picked me up for a tour of the island. Our first stop was a Barong-Rangda dance performance. This dance is particularly famous; it features a battle between the Barong, a mythical animal representing good, and the Rangda, a mythical witch representing evil. The initial dancing, with the Barong being pestered by a monkey, was quite well done; the plot following this, however, was rather campy, although well executed, and sung (sometimes atonally) in Balinese. A bizarre touch was the repeated use of bundles of leafy branches as weapons. However, the quality was quite high, and overall I enjoyed it more than the first performance I saw. After this, we drove up to Gunung Batur, a beautiful summit surrounded by a larger crater and crater lake. We had a buffet lunch on the rim, taking in the view and talking about Age of Mythology; when we descended into the crater, however, things got worse. I wanted to take some sort of walk (I had really wanted to summit, but the price for completely unnecessary guides was exorbitant), so Tankas drove us to a parking lot in the middle of town, where we were immediately mobbed by women from the "Seller's Association". I humored them by looking at some bracelets; however, Nikko abruptly decided to buy one I was looking at, paying way too much money for a shoddy, uncomfortable bracelet. The women continued to hassle us, while I explained to Nikko the concept of walking away. We didn't get far on our walk, either; an angry dog made us turn around and go back to the car. Tankas took us out of town, in continued search of a walk, but there didn't seem to be a good trail anywhere. Combine this with the litter, the flies that infested our car, and the severely crippled women we saw and gave money to who appeared to be living in the woods, and it was a pretty unpleasant experience. It was sad that such a beautiful place had so many problems, and I left with a feeling of discomfort and depression. This was only reinforced by the temples we visited next, crowded with tourists and surrounded by hawkers selling cheap shirts and penis-shaped bottle openers. A monkey forest was slightly more fun (monkeys are always fun!), but still depressing, especially because of the man holding a flying fox up by it's wings and charging tourists to take a photo of themselves doing the same. Our last stop was Pura Tanah Lot, formerly one of the most sacred temples on Bali, and now the most congested. To reach the temple overlook (the actual temple is on a small island), we had to walk past hundreds of identical, cheap-crap stalls, and through mobs of tourists; the moneychangers have invaded the temple, and I couldn't believe, when Nikko mentioned that evening prayers were taking place, that anyone could pray in such a place. The only thing that made me want to linger was a few local surfers, desperate for waves, trying out the hairy shorebreak by the temple. I will be posting an extended rant on tourism in my next entry; for now, I was relieved to go to a nice Japanese restaurant for a cheerful farewell dinner with Paul, Nikko, Paul's wife Ellie, and Tankas. Tomorrow the surf is supposed to be good; hopefully I'll be able to end this enlightening trip on a physical high note. LYA