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Published: October 22nd 2009
Balinese Dance - Legong
You can see how it's all about eye movements and hand movements. Sometimes sitting in a restaurant in Ubud is just like sitting in a restaurant in Asheville. Same food - huge, delicious organic salads, burritos, veggie burgers, mixed veggie bowls with rice and tahini sauce. Lots of tofu. Same food as health foody Asheville. Then there are the same folks sitting around us. In Malaysia we saw one couple from the US during the whole month. (That’s the truth, not an exaggeration.) Here people from the US are everywhere, and they’re the same sorts of folks - exactly - who we see in downtown Asheville. The conversations are the same too: lots of talk about yoga, organic food, macrobiotic eating, alternative health and wellness…. It’s quite odd. The food is delicious, but sometimes the Asheville-ness becomes a bit much.
Ubud is nothing like Asheville. Once you start thinking that Ubud is just like Asheville, though, you realize that it’s not. Yesterday I took an hour’s walk in the morning, just to get some exercise.
I walked through the streets of Ubud. It was a big holiday - Galungun. All along the streets were tall and waving penjors, these
beautifully decorated bamboo poles with these flowery structures hanging down off of them.
There weren’t many tourists about yet, but there were lots of locals out. They were all dressed in their Sunday best - women in beautiful net-sort-of jackets and lovely batik sarongs (wrap-around skirts that are hand-made through wax-dying and stamp-blocking); men in white shirts, sarongs, and batik headdress hats.
Everywhere people were putting out offerings. There are temples everywhere in Bali. Sometimes they don’t look like temples - just a little stone pillar on the side of the road. There are also stone-carved statues everywhere.
Balinese people were putting offerings - which May described: small bits of flowers, rice, grass on a piece of banana leaf - everywhere. They put them on big temples, the little offering temples, on bridges, on stones, by rivers, in doorways, on fences, on sidewalks, and just on the road. They place the offering, pray to it a bit, and sprinkle a bit of water over it with a flower. I saw one woman sprinkling water on an offering placed on an electricity meter at the market. There are spirits and god everywhere, I think - the river, the
spring, the rocks, the land, even the electricity meters.
I walked out into the country, into rural Bali, where the houses were a bit shackier, and there were rickety one-table local restaurants and gasoline for sale in plastic bottles, and finally just jungly green. I went down into a ravine to a river. People were placing offerings everywhere along the bridge across the river, and chatting, sort of like when church lets out at home.
There were a bunch of motorbikes parked off the side of the road and a concrete path, so I decided to follow it to see where it went. After 100 yards or so through the jungle it came to a huge concrete basin where pipes from the river emptied out, and around 30 men were bathing and laughing and talking. I guess it was the neighborhood bath.
So: scratch the surface, and Bali is very Balinese. It appears to be just like Asheville, but it’s not.
One more funny thing: We took a taxi tour one day. Our driver, a very nice young guy named Nick, was telling about Galungan, the big holiday going on now. We were saying how the
penjors, the big decorated bamboo poles, seemed to be somewhat analogous to Christmas trees. He had never heard of a Christmas tree. So we had to describe Christmas (which he had heard of just a little bit, but is weird from afar). Then we had to describe an evergreen tree; here it’s jungle, so every tree is an evergreen. Then we had to describe all of the really weird habits we have around Christmas. His reaction - perplexed amusement, charmed but confused - made us realize how very far we are from home, even though sometimes it seems like we’re just down the street.
Ubud is pleasant and easy. As May wrote, we’re winding down a month in Ubud. Mostly Ubud is nice because it’s pleasant and easy. Malaysia wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t easy. In Ubud, everyone speaks English. There is delicious tourist food everywhere - less expensive and better. Ella can eat things that she eats at home, and eat healthy and well. The weather here too is perfect - highs around 80 - 85, lows around 60 maybe. It was just too hot in Malaysia.
Ubud too is a village. There’s lots of green, and
jungle, and quiet, and dove calls and crickets. Mostly the places we were in Malaysia were concrete and traffic-filled. Also, the people here are so incredibly nice and friendly and smiley. Actually, Malaysians were nice and friendly and smiley too, but the Balinese are more so. Finally, a nearby nonprofit library, which May mentioned, has excellent books - a superb collection for all of us. On the whole, it’s been easy to spend a month here.
What we do in Ubud. Not much. A typical day here looks something like this:
6:00 - 7:00. Wake. Me or May will often take a walk, because all we really do the rest of the day is sit around.
8:00 or so: Breakfast. We sit on the porch of our lovely guesthouse (green jungle, birds and crickets chirping, statues in the yard of Balinese gods), and the guy who runs the guesthouse fixes breakfast and brings it out. Banana pancakes, pineapple pancakes, omelette, or fried egg. And fruit - mango, pineapple, watermelon, cantaloupe, papaya, sometimes a fruit called a rambutan (red and hairy, tastes like a sweet grape) that grows on the trees in the yard of the guesthouse. Hot
Our Guesthouse
Lovely porch, greenery - where we eat breakfast each morning and read tea or coffee.
8:00 - 12:00. Read. May and Ella usually read during this period. Ella has been reading voraciously. We sit on the porch of the guesthouse and just read. It’s not to hot, with a lovely view of the green jungle, shady. Often Jordan and I will do something else - I have been planning and reserving the rest of our trip, and Jordan has been applying to college.
12:00. Lunch. We usually eat one meal at a Padang food restaurant, which is Indonesian food (described below). And we eat one meal a day at a tourist restaurant. The tourist restaurants are superb. They have excellent organic salads, excellent hand-made / home-made pasta, delicious sandwiches and burgers, wonderful pizzas. Every meal we’ve had here, except for one, has been better (often much better) than our favorite restaurants in Asheville. And they average around US $3 per meal per person.
1:00 - 4:00. Swim. Most of the afternoon we swim. There is an incredibly nice pool at a hotel that is 20 yards from our guesthouse. We pay $2 each to swim. The pool is lovely blue water, with landscaped jungle green and rice fields all
Ella in Guesthouse Garden
This was the view from where we ate breakfast and read at our guesthouse. around it. Usually there is nobody there but us. It’s pretty hot in the afternoon if it’s sunny, so it passes the time nicely. It’s what Ella likes to do - read and swim. And here, in some ways, we’re doing what she wants to do, because Malaysia was hard on her.
4:00 - 5:30. Read again.
5:30 - 7:00. Dinner. Another yummy meal.
7:00 - 8:00. Walk and stroll, or go back to the room and read some more.
9:00. It’s late. Time for bed. With a schedule this hectic, we have to get our 10 hours of sleep….
Padang food. In addition to all of the tourist food, which is fabulous, we eat Padang food once a day. Padang food is from Padang, in Sumatra, in Indonesia. When Jordan was two years old, we spent a month in the area around Padang, and we ate Padang food twice a day. The most famous dish is rendang, beef cooked for hours and hours in coconut milk and spices. For Jordan’s two-year-old birthday, she chose to have for a special birthday treat both lunch and dinner of “wendang and wice.”
Padang food looks very
odd. You walk in the restaurant, and there are 30-40 bowls in the window. Not much of it is recognizable. We sort of know what most of it is, from eating it so often before, but we don’t really know what a lot of it is. There are lots of odd fish parts (tails and heads), and just things you can’t tell what they are. Rendang itself, which is delicious, looks like rocks in thick mud.
May and I love Padang food. We eat a piece of rendang, some curried cabbage and green beans, and some rice. Ella gets curried fish (tuna) and rice and two potato balls. The potato balls seem to be mashed potatoes with spices, made into balls, then fried. Ella loves Padang food. She eats a whole huge plate, every meal. It looks weird, but it tastes good.
Balinese dance. One of the best things about Bali is the rich culture. The offerings and the holiday described above give a sense of it. There’s also lots of painting and carving. There’s also lots of Balinese dance. Every night there are 10 or so dance troupes around Ubud putting on a dance performance for tourists.
They’re shows for tourists, but they’re superb.
The dance is hard to describe. The pictures here give a sense of it - rich costumes, masks, lots of widening eyes and shifting pupils and wriggling straightened out fingers. Stunning grace. Odd, unexpected, surprising rhythms and movements. Storytelling dances.
The music is made by a Balinese orchestra called gamelan. It’s like xylophones and gongs, and lovely. It makes sort of a lilting, hopping-along, lively, prancing sort of sound. The scales that the music is based on are apparently different from the scales that our music is based on, so it doesn’t “make sense” to our ears like Western music does. But it fits perfectly with the dances - it clearly makes sense to them.
Many of the dances are stories from Hindu mythology or Balinese traditional stories. The “real” dances take place in temples, as part of religious celebrations. (Bali is Hindu. Most of Indonesia is Muslim - Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country. But Bali is one last bastion of Hinduism.)
Gili Air: Tropical paradise. After about a week or so in Ubud, Jordan and I took a five-day trip to the nearby Indonesian island
of Lombok. Off of Lombok are three tropical paradise islands. We chose one: Gili Air. Ella wanted to stay, because she realized that she likes staying in one place much better than traveling, and because she loves Ubud so much.
It was low season on Gili Air, so we got a great deal on a superb room, surely the nicest we’ll stay in. The beach was long and sandy and the water was drop-jaw clear and tropical blue. All along the beach were restaurants with seating right on the water, either in tables or these shaded reclining little huts. We got our big beer, and our delicious food, and sat and watched the water. Then swam. Or snorkeled - the snorkeling was good. It was a good place, as the pictures show.
In sum: Bali is pleasant and easy. When we wrote last from Malaysia, we talked about how hard travel can be. Here I hope we’ve conveyed how easy and pleasant and relaxing it can be. It’s good to have both: hard travel and easy travel. Now that we’re out of Malaysia, we miss it - well, most of it. We’ll certainly miss Bali when we leave
Holy Springs
We went on a daytrip, and we visited this holy spring. as well.
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Doris
non-member comment
Bali
Thanks for wonderful descriptions of life in Bali. I must say I am jealous....it sounds so wonderful. I am especially envious of the beautiful salads and fruit. Our selection is not too great now. I have given up on my usual cantelope for breakfast. I am sure all of you are having the time of your life. Love to all, Doris