Crash course in Balinese culture

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And finally I made it to SE Asia after leaving NZ and a short stopover in the Brisbane airport. I had been in Bali in 2002, 3 weeks before the bomb attack in Kuta. I remebered it being sunnier, not as dirty and with lots of tourists and topless girls in the beach. It might just have been that I was in Bali during the high season or that I had an idealized vision of the place.

This time, there were still a lot of tourists, but because it was the end of the rainy season, it was mostly clouded and partially raining. And Kuta was a lot more contaminated than I remember.



I arrived at around 2pm in th airport and the first thing I did after getting my backpack was negotiating a taxi from the airport. Like everywhere in Bali, people will try to sell/offer anything and everything has to be bargained. No point losing one's patience; it's the way it is. I knew that the price should've had to be between 50.000-70.000 Rupiahs (IDR), (approximately 5-7 USD) and a few actually got close, offering rides for 100.000.

There was one taxi driver that asked me 300.000 for the ride. I just looked at him and started laughing. When he realized he had gone too far with the offer, he just laughed along with me as if saying "it was worth a shot".

They have taxis with fixed prices at the airport, which you pay beforehand and I payed 70.000 IDR for a ride to my hotel in Kuta Beach. On the way to the hotel, I started talking with the taxi driver and my first lesson on Balinese culture were names. There are set names for the children and it depends on their numerical order. There are 2 or 3 names that can be chosen for a child, whether it's the first, second, third or fourth in place. The fifth starts the cycle again (1.- Putu, 2.- Made, 3.- Komang, 4.- Ketut).

I stayed at the Saronga Cottages Hotel, which wasn't bad; decent room, swimming pool and breakfast for about 22 USD.



After leaving my stuff, I went out for a walk along Kuta Beach and the city center. I didn't want to spend more than 1 night there and was more interested in visiting a city called Ubud. Ubud is also very touristy, but not in the same style as Bali; it's a lot more chilled and places tend to close early at night. It's also where more of the Balinese culture can be seen.

That evening, I got something to eat and booked a shuttle for the next morning to Ubud.

I really wanted to go out that night, but I went to the hotel and crashed on the bed, intended to just rest for a while, but couldn't get out of bed afterwards. I had been up since 3am the previous day.



I woke up the next morning, had breakfast (standard breakast in most places consists of fruit salad, a banana or pineapple pancake and coffee or tea) and then waited until the shuttle picked me up.



If one's not used to traffic in Indonesia, it's pretty shocking at first. Cars and vans go through very narrow streets while pedestrians and scooters dodge them. Traffic is chaotic as well and no one ever stops, but it seems to work and it's one continuous flow of scooters, motorbikes, cars, buses and pedestrians in every direction. But it's easy to get acustomed to it in a short time.



We arrived in Ubud after a few hours and as soon as I got off the bus, countless offers of accommodation and tours were offered. I walked to a tourist information center which was completely useless and then decided to look for somewhere to sleep on my own. Somehow I ended up in a hostel in the end of a narrow road which was quite decent ("Kabera") and only for 100.000 IDR. The owner was called Ketut and was a very friendly woman.

My next door neighbor was a Czech girl called Sharka and one of the best advices I got from her was that whatever tours, buses or anything that I had to book in advanced, it was better to ask the people at the places I was staying at.



Bali is full of temples. Most homes will also have a small temple as well. The hindu and the balinese culture is the center of all activity on the island. People place an offering (or "canang") every morning to their god. There's a good article on Balinese hunduism in this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balinese_Hinduism.



In the afternoon I went to the "Sacred Monkey Forest", which has a large population of long tailed macaques living in a sanctuary in the middle of Ubud. It's a very beautiful place and the monkeys are everywhere. It's easy to lure the monkeys with food, but it's not advisable to hide the food, because the monkeys will always find it and they can get very vicious (http://www.monkeyforestubud.com/monkey.html).



Afterwards I looked for a place to eat and ended up in "Gula Bali" in which they served traditional Balinese food.



In the evening I went to see a popular "Fire Dance" known as "Kecak". This specific one was "The death of Kumbakarna" (an episode of the Ramayan Epics), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kecak. It was definitely worth seeing this dance, very entertaining and the chants they did as a group were spectacular.



I woke up rather late the next morning and asked Ketut for things to do. She gave me a list of tours, but it was already too late to go on any of them, so I went out looking for a driver that could take me to see the most interesting places. I bargained with a man called Made to do the tour for about 330.000 IDR and I had to pay a few entrance fees for some of the places. The normal price to do this trip (in a group) is 130.000 IDR p/person.



Made took me to the Elephant Temple, The Rocky temple and we went to a place in which they make the kopi luwak (lukaw coffee), the most expensive coffee in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak). I had a great coffee and herbal tea tasting there, all for free, except the Luwak coffee which was 50.000 IDR a cup.

To enter the temples I had to wear a "sarong", a sort of skirt that has to be worn to cover the legs. During the trip, Mede explained a lot of things about the places and the culture and was eager to answer all of my questions. I had no idea about hinduism (and still don't know much), so it was a good first insight into this religion.

At lunch time he left me in Kintamani, a place with a lot of buffet restaurants that overlook Mt. Batur, a volcano. The one I ate in was the "Panca Yoga". It was raining a lot and I stayed there for maybe 1 1/2 hours having lunch and waiting for the rain to stop to get a good view of the volcano and the valley, but except for maybe 15 minutes, the visibility wasn't good. We ended the tour with a trip to the rice terraces. In all, I enjoyed the trip and having a guide was excellent.



I didn't want to spend any more days in Bali, because I really wanted to travel east in Indonesia, so I decided to go to lombok the next day and of course made all the transportation arrangements with Ketut (255.000 IDR for transport to the port and then fast boat to Lombok).

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Comments

[Andres]

saludos de Lonquen
Hola Dani, Finalmente saliste de Australia y NZ. que interesante será ahora conocer culturas no occidentales. Muy bonitas fotos. Por acá todo muy bien. La Trini hoy cumplió 11 años. Tiene unas amigas invitadas hoy y lo celebrará en un par de semanas mas. Mañana la Mamo y papo y nosotros con Moni estamos de aniversario de matrimonio, cumpliremos 19 años de casados. La pega sin novedad. Te mandamos un fuerte abrazo , Andres