Meeting Bali

We've been in Bali, Indonesia's small but oh-so-famous island, for a little less than a week now; but in that time, we have gotten rich, enticing tastes of many aspects of this beautiful place: the art and music and dance, the landscape, the food. It didn't start out so wonderful. We arrived in Kuta, a crowded, cheap-feeling resort town where RipCurl and Billabong stores line the main street and stalls selling vulgar t-shirts and low-quality clothes line the alleys. Needless to say, we weren't planning on spending much time there, just stopping for a night because of its convenience to the airport. Our plan was foiled, though, by the fact that our luggage had apparently liked Sydney (where we had a stopover on the way out of New Zealand) and decided to stay there. So until it arrived, which turned out to be two full days later, we were stuck. Not wanting to hang out at the beach in my underwear, which was all I had for a swimsuit, we spent much of our time at the hotel pool instead, which was beautifully set in a lush garden. We also walked around the town, as much as we could stand. We stared at the ground a lot, watching out for the daily offerings of flowers, food, and incense within a palm leaf that Hindus (the majority in Bali) set out on the ground each morning-- one of many ways in which mundane things are made beautiful here. We also visited the stark and moving memorial to the 200+ victims of the nightclub bombings that terrorized Kuta in 2002.

Finally getting our bags and leaving Kuta, we headed for Ubud, a small, artsy inland city that feels a little like Northampton. Here, unlike Kuta, the reason that so many people we respect got googly-eyed when talking about their own trips to Bali became much clearer. Ubud attracts a lot of tourists, meaning that there are of course a lot of touts; it is impossible to walk down the street without every 3 meters having hopeful voices ask, "Transport? Taxi?" while miming steering a scooter. But "no, thank you" is accepted with a smile, unlike in Egypt (although here they'll usually say, still hopeful, "Maybe tomorrow?"), and the high-intensity, jumbled, colorful beauty of the town more than compensates for any annoyance.

Ubud is known particularly as a center for the arts, and we have enjoyed exploring that side of it. We visited two museums, one noticeably better funded than the other, but both quite delightful and interesting with their collections of both traditional and more recent Balinese paintings and sculptures. The traditional works center around the great Indian epics and stories of the Hindu gods, and are rendered in extraordinary detail-- reading the paragraph-length captions accompanying the pictures gave us some idea of what was going on, but the artists always showed much more than was described. Many of the more recent pieces from the 60s and after, called "Young Style", were influenced by the presence of various European artists in Ubud, some of whom stayed here permanently. Some were described as having a "Western aesthetic," mostly for the use of perspective and, sometimes, the focus on one or two characters instead of many. But they also had a very distinct look from any European art we've seen, with an often extraordinary use of pattern, detail, and color. All three of those elements seem to be a central part of the visual life here: the shops spill over with gorgeous (sometime, er, irresistible) batik fabrics and clothes, which are also worn by people visiting the temples and the women who carry baskets full of offerings on their heads. There was rarely a painting of people that did not include representation of the fabric of their sarongs.

Besides the museums, we also took in two performances. The first was a series of traditional dances, accompanied by 15 or so musicians playing traditional (clangy, I have to say, to my ears) instruments. Some of the dances, mostly involving two or more female performers wearing tightly-wrapped silk bodices and skirts, would have been entertainments for a king in his palace. One, a warrior dance, would have been done at ceremonies to extol the virtues of Balinese-style manliness. (It was interesting for us to think about how this dance, which celebrated dexterity and fine movements, would have been different if it were an American warrior dance!) The most amazing thing about the dances was the incredible control the dancers had over every part of their body. They would hold their ring-fingers at impossible angles while quick-stepping their feet, always in a forward bended squatting position, and then move their eyeballs purposefully and keep their eyes open to painful-looking sizes. The next night was quite a different scene, as we went to a shadow-puppet show. We couldn't follow the story much, as the only bit in English was the occasional joke (including one with a puppet named Monica Lewinsky who has another puppet kind of drooling all over her, who then invites her for a honeymoon in Iraq... no, how about Bali instead... odd, no?). But it was cool to see the outlines the metal puppets made, backed by a glowing flame.

Although the main streets of Ubud are quite busy with traffic, not far off them are dirt roads, often narrowing into stone or dirt paths that lead through rice paddies to people's homes. We walked along two of those, one climbing gently along a ridgeline, and the other meandering past people working and ducks, cows, and chickens hanging out in the paddies. The green of all of it is both brilliant and calming. In addition, just at the bottom of one of the main streets is a quite enchanted-feeling, sacred monkey sanctuary and temple complex. Stone carvings of dragons, komodo and otherwise, seat peacefully in their moss-covered state, seeming quite breathingly alive. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous monkeys demonstrate the aptness of the phrase, monkeying around. They topple off walls, chase each other in circles, pounce on each others' stomachs and pick off bugs, beg for bananas, tackle the hard shell of coconuts-- all in all, quite a scene. We also took a little field trip out of Ubud to visit an excellent bird park. Set in a lush garden (everything here seems to be lush), the park had separate areas for South American and African birds, many of them cage-free, as well as groups of birds from several of the Indonesian islands; two of these exhibits, Bali and Papua, were set in miniature jungles enclosed by huge nets. There was also a bird show in which eagles, parrots, and owls flew from handler to handler chasing bits of meat, all backed by a landscape of rice paddies.

Given all these paddies, it should be no surprise that a food we've been eating a lot of lately is rice. We've sampled several of the typical Balinese dishes that go with it, and they've been almost universally delicious. One favorite is nasi camphur, which basically seems to mean a mini-smorgasbord of yummy vegetable, tempeh, and chicken preparations centered around some rice. We've also had jackfruit in a couple preparations, which tastes like a cross between artichoke and heart of palm; whole fish with forceful garlic sauces; gado gado, steamed veggies with peanut sauce; and rendang, a nicely spiced sauteed beef. There are also fruit juices of all sorts, sometimes ambrosia-good. (Although the avocado and chocolate juice was, I think, a one-time type of thing!). Tonight we've placed an order for a specialty dish: a whole duck, smoked with delectable spices. And the irony of it is that it costs less that one bowl of noodle soup we ate for lunch in our long day at the Sydney airport.