Mass tourism makes me cynical and a little depressed, and I confess that when we made plans to go to Bali – at the top of everyone’s list of travel destinations during our year here – I was a little unsure about it, thinking that perhaps we should have gone somewhere else. Tonight, after we have just arrived home from a week there, I’m suffering from that anti-climactic moment you get when you come home from a trip, and everything is back to normal (a feeling which in itself is remarkable, given the lack of normalcy about every aspect of my life right now). It was an amazing week, and Bali is a real place, even with the Starbucks and the Hard Rock Café and the troops of westerners everywhere putting on their best Elizabeth Gilbert outfit and riding around on tall bicycles with flowers in their hair, soaking in the culture though unable to say thank you in Balinese (matur sooksma) or Indonesian (terima kasih).
Here’s one thing I learned, on a small scale in Borubordur and on a much larger scale in Bali: if you can speak coherently in a native language (even if it is the second language of the Balinese, they’ve known Indonesian since birth) it changes the experience dramatically. In places like Ubud, flush with tourists trying to go native (if going native is doing lots of yoga and wearing loose fitting clothing), being able to make sense, however ineptly (very, in my case) changes the dynamics. It makes bargaining easier, and more fun, and much less stressful, it means you can have a conversation with a taxi driver or a person giving you directions. Even though almost all of the Balinese I met spoke better English than I speak Indonesian, they were generous and seemed pleased to let me lumber along in Indo, patiently waiting for the sense to leak out of my ill-formed sentences.
We arrived on Saturday morning and were met at the airport by a driver who took us to Sanur Beach, on the southern part of the island. We had initially planned to spend a night or two there, but were delighted that we hadn’t found a room, because Sanur Beach was rather tacky and dirty, a crowded tourist destination with little stands lining the beach selling overpriced food and cheap souvenirs – the Bali I feared when we booked the trip. But we got on a boat for a 30 minute ride to a tiny island off the coast, Nusa Lembongen, where we found ourselves staying in a lovely cottage just off Mushroom Bay, a beautiful beach with calm water and a Hindu temple that went into full ritual action on our last day there, complete with pig butchering with live gamelan accompaniment and processions of women with offerings on their head.
We relaxed there, and swam, and walked around, and had a great meal on a backstreet with at Pak Augus’s resto, and the next day we hired a traditional Balinese boat – a kind of early version of the catamaran, wooden with bamboo ballasts attached about 4 feet from either side. Our driver, an old fisherman from Nusa Lembongan, took us to some coves on another island, and a point off the coast of Lembongan, for some of the best snorkeling I have ever done, rich with fish and coral, an incredible morning and the first time Graham had ever seen anything like it. He was astounded.
Writing this, I realize I can’t walk through the trip, which included three destinations and lots of miles behind the wheel on the wrong side of car. But it was amazing, start to finish, and here are some of the highlights:
When we arrived in Ubud, driving from the north after a night in the caldera that has another volcano inside it (Danu Batur), we were suddenly in traffic, surrounded by other Western tourists, with Ralph Lauren stores and tour buses and busy. We got a little lost coming into town, mostly because the maps and the road signs are enormously difficult to correlate, and while we spun around the city trying to figure out where our hotel was, we drove by a Starbucks, which sent Seamus into paroxysms of hyperventilating anticipation and me into one of my regular and tedious-even-for-me rants about blah blah blah you know it without me telling it. For the next two days in Ubud, Seamus kept up a regular (not incessant) drumbeat about going to Starbucks, each time providing a cue for my aforementioned rant. My wife, who is much wiser than me, on a foray with just Seamus and Graham, finally agreed to take the kids to Starbucks, and they went in, and Laura engaged in a long conversation with the barista, who told her that the coffee there came from Costa Rica (Bali coffee, by the way, is amazing, and just down the road) and where she should go for really good coffee in town. They bought their drinks, drank them in the Starbucks, and then wandered around the corner to another coffee shop that Seamus had discovered on an earlier explore on his own, where he’d had a long conversation with the owner. That coffee shop was empty, and Seamus said his goodbyes to the woman, because we were leaving. Later he said to me, “Dad, that was the first time I’ve ever felt bulimic.” Amazed that the coffee at Starbucks is shipped across the ocean, he became depressed at the notion that the busy Starbucks might be a threat to the local operation of a woman from Ubud. It was like a 30 minute seminar on globalization, rather better than the eternal lecture I have tried to provide my son for most of his life.
At Ibu Oka’s, a famous roasted suckling pig restaurant in Ubud, Graham did what he always does now, and got up to finagle his way into the kitchen. He was gone this time for about 20 minutes, and we really took no notice of his absence, until we looked up and saw him riding up on the back of a motorcycle with one of the restaurant employees. He’d wanted to see the roasting pig, but they don’t do it on site, so the employee had thrown him on the back of his bike, ridden him several blocks away to the kitchen, taken him back, and let him turn the spit and baste the whole pig with this coconut milk glaze. This was, by the way, extraordinarily delicious meat, with this thick skin of basted pork fat that you have to taste to believe. Graham came back ecstatic about the experience, which he shared with everyone in hearing distance. The night before he had gone out on Lake Batur with the owner of the hotel there to gather our dinner from the fish farm out on the lake – he’s definitely becoming the culinary student of our family year abroad.
We rented two motorbikes on Nusa Lembongen and drove around the island. Laura had never driven a motorcycle before, and I have only driven one a few times, and the roads were what Laura referred to as goat tracks, and none of had helmets, and we rode over a creaky suspension bridge that led from one island to another, and rode out to the mangrove forest where we got a tour by boat through the dense grove along the coast, and Laura drove off the road once and crashed into a tree in an overcompensated attempt to not hit a cyclist who was coming down a steep hill that she was trying to get up. She got a dramatic bruise on her leg and a good story out of it, and endless ribbing from Graham, her passenger on the back of the bike. We had incredible tuna that day, though by the time we got back to the hotel Laura was wiped out from clenching the handlebars a little more tightly after the accident. She made me drive the bike over the bridge on the way home (though she had already done it once).
We visited the most amazing Hindu temples, wearing our obligatory sarongs, purchased outside a restaurant in Padangbai. We went to 1500 year old temple ruins. We saw temple ceremonies, and a dance where a guy went into a trance and danced through burning coconut shells for about 15 minutes in bare feet. We were accosted by aggressive hawkers selling truly horrid crafts, and also some incredible crafts. We had a great dinner with another Fulbrighter who does research on Balinese temple ceremonies, with his wife and two year old, by our hotel pool, on a transcendent evening. We ate the best food we’ve eaten yet, and we swam in the Indian Ocean. This is Indonesia too, and it was a taste of how vibrant and varied this country is, and it gave all of us, the kids especially, a new sense about the country and the people (aside from a few aggressive hawkers, the people were wonderful: friendly and helpful and funny). It was a great trip, and today I went back to teaching, which was a little difficult, I have to admit.
rebuttal: (from Laura) In my defense, the trip to Starbucks was part of a bargain. I agreed to take Seamus to Starbucks if he agreed never to ask to be taken to another American corporate chain for the remainder of our stay in Indonesia. It seems to have done the trick but for different reasons than I anticipated.
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