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Published: March 15th 2009
Bali island?
some island from one of the ferries ... I think it's BaliOK, I’ve been holding off on writing this blog because it’s about Bali. I feel like I didn’t do Bali justice, and like most of you guys, being Australians, know more about Bali than I do. I guess the simple thing to say would be that I didn’t like Bali, but that’s probably not fair. There’s an awful lot of interesting stuff to see and do, and a fascinating culture, and diverse scenery. There’s also the drunk aussie holiday-makers and fat middle-aged men who think it’s cool to walk around topless even when they’re nowhere near the beach (in a culture where the locals hardly ever even wear short pants), and locals chasing you with calls of "you want young girl?, you want young boy?", but if you get away from Kuta there’s not that much of it. As it was I spent about four days in Bali pretty much doing nothing, just taking a bit of time out. I couldn’t even go swimming because my leg wasn’t quite healed yet. I did go snorkelling once in Labuanbajo (before I got to Bali), but the water is a lot cleaner there. But yeah, I guess I didn’t really “get” Bali. Perhaps
laneway
a typical "gang" - laneway - in Kuta it was because I stayed in Legian, not Kuta proper, but I didn’t even like the other tourists. It was cool to hear Aussie accents again, but it would have been nice to hear some other ones too. The bars seemed to be filled with groups of young people who still think they’re in Australia. Kuta’s always called a “backpacker” hangout , but I’m not sure if people don’t know what a backpacker is, or if I just didn’t go to the right places.
I think the thing to do if you want to see Bali is to get out of Kuta and work your way slowly around the island. Anyway, I didn’t do that, so this blog is a bit boring. The one good thing I did do though, on my last day, was arrange a driver to drive me around the island for a day. But first I should talk about getting there.
Labuanbajo (on Flores) has a small street for tourists, which I think I mentioned in the last blog. This means it’s easier to arrange transport all the way through to Bali. This was advertised as the air conditioned bus with reclining seats. What
they don’t mention though is that time-wise, you’re actually only on that bus for about half the time, and that the seats are actually reclined - but they don’t go forward, so it’s fine if you want to sleep, but not so great if you want to look out of the window. Altogether the trip took about 40 hours I think, about six of which was waiting for the bus to fill up in Lombok, just across from Bali, before they’d leave again. It was all a bit flakey, but not as dodgy as previous bus trips, and much more dodgy than the trip from Bali to Yogyakarta, where I am now. I’m not sure if I mentioned this in a previous blog or not (I think it was in one which I wrote but never posted) - if you want to travel overland between Jakarta and Dili (or, I imagine, anywhere east of Dili such as Ambon or Papua) it’d definitely be better to go east, rather than west as I’m doing. Doing it this way is a bit like trying to understand Australia by landing in Kalgoorlie and heading east.
So the trip began wandering
around looking for the correct ferry terminal. Apparently the big ferry terminal was for the local ferries, not the Indonesia-wide, well-regarded, Pelni ferries. So after finally lugging my backpack around half the town, I got on the right ferry. From memory (it seems so long ago now) this was about a 12 hour trip. It passed through the Komodo National Park, as far as I can work out, I think even past Komodo Island. The ferry takes us to the island of Sumbawa, where the bus drives the length of the island, and then ferry across to Lombok, which is becoming known as “the next Bali”, and then onto Bali itself.
Despite travelling from a slightly touristy destination to Bali, I was the only foreigner on the whole ferry (and so, it goes without saying, on the bus). On the ferry I got talking to a local who spoke good English thanks to having worked on a British cruise liner for a few years. He talked about the places he’d been, and about where I was travelling. On hearing that I was headed for the Middle East, conversation turned to the “holy” Muslim lands, as he was a Muslim.
Barong
represents "good" in the Bali traditions “Saudi Arabia is supposed to be the holy land for Muslims” he complained, “but you know, they have prostitutes there”.
This surprised me. I know that most countries have street hookers, but I really thought that Saudi Arabia would be an exception, perhaps along with the Vatican and Niue. I tried to imagine what a Saudi hooker would look like. She’d probably have that vacant look on her face, not that you could tell of course, as she’d have to be wearing the burqa. Like all hookers I guess she’d have to be wearing a ridiculously short skirt, perhaps all the way up to her ankles. Perhaps the grille over her eyes would slip occasionally, suggestively showing just a hint of nose. In a country that treats alcohol like other illegal drugs, I don’t even know where she’d hang out without any bars to frequent. You’ll notice that I’m not resorting to any obvious but contrived puns about hookah bars.
It seemed altogether unlikely. I expressed my surprise.
“Yes”, he said, “in Dubai”.
This I could believe. On my 24-hour stop-over in Dubai a few years ago, the most salacious offer I got was “you
Barong & Rangda
the monkey, the friend of Barong, I forget his name want fake watch?” which makes a nice change, but I could believe there might be some hookers in Dubai, although you’d think they’d want to be getting danger money. So I was able to point out that Dubai was definitely not part of Saudi Arabia, and so while there might be prostitutes in Dubai, there probably were none in The Land of the Two Holy Mosques. I think this comforted him a bit.
So the ferry finally got into Sumbawa, and instead of a nice air conditioned bus, I was greeted by someone who, strangely enough, had some ID showing he worked for the company. No-one I’d met so far had had ID or official T-shirts, so I could tell that things were becoming more civilised already. He led me to a local minibus, with the usual business of cramming in way too many people, and having to nurse my backpack. This took us on a 90-minute trip through the countryside, until finally we got to the bus depot. Then followed the bus ride across Sumbawa, a ferry to Lombok, waiting around for no good reason all morning, then a ferry to Bali. I’ll spare you the details.
Barong & Rangda
part of the dance, not sure what the dancers represent The most notable thing for me as soon as we got to Lombok was that the dogs and the pigs were gone. As I mentioned, these animals were all over the place in Flores and Timor, particularly the pigs. But there were none to be seen in Sumbawa. This is because, of course, both those two animals are
haram in Islam. In Bali the dogs were back, but not the pigs. In Java some of the educated middle-class locals who are Muslim in government designation only do keep dogs, apparently. I haven’t seen any yet.
This meant I got into Bali at about 22:00 or later. I’d been told that Legian was a good place to go, not too commercial like Kuta, but close enough. The point of course is that there’s no point to go to Legian or Kuta unless you want the commercial stuff, so you might as well go straight to Kuta. Anyway, I got the taxi in the considerable distance from the bus depot into Legian. This is where I learned not to trust Lonely Planet and to instead download the information from Wikitravel onto my laptop before going anywhere. LP listed only two
Barong & Rangda
I got a bit lost at this point, I think these represent spirits places to stay in Legian, which given that it’s wall-to-wall tourist stuff, like Kuta, is a bit strange. The taxi driver finally found the one I was looking for, and left me there. This involved a walk down a very long alley-way with a very ferocious barking dog, but the place seemed completely shut, back past the dog again, out into the street.
So I wandered around Legian for a bit. The place is dotted with “tourist information” booths which don’t give you any information and only know about hotels in the holiday-maker budget, not the backpacker budget. Finally I was able to find a nice hotel very central in Legian for Rp 60,000 a night, which I thought was fine, particularly since I didn’t want to wander around late at night any more with all my stuff.
So for most of my time in Bali there was nothing interesting to blog about. I slept a lot, waited for my leg to heal, which it has almost done now, walked down to Kuta beach, got my sandals fixed, wrote some postcards and lost them again, stocked up on doxycyline, ate MacDonalds, all that good stuff. This was a
Barong & Rangda
more characters in the dance, don't remember what they all represent bit of a waste of time, as I’m now finding that I have to rush so that I don’t overstay my visa.
The tour I got from the driver on the last day was quite interesting though as it covered a fair percentage of Bali. Most of you have probably seen all this, but for the few who haven’t been to Bali.... It began with a performance of the traditional Balinese dance “Barong and Rangda”. I got a little brochure explaining at a high level what it’s about, but I lost it, so you’ll just have to google for it if you really want to know. Basically it’s about the on-going battle between good and evil, which are meant to be in harmony, with neither one ever winning. It also involved a lot of evil spirits entering people, and other mythological devices. I took heaps of photos that would have been nice but for some reason my camera wasn’t working too well and they’re all too dark, even though they weren’t taken into very bright sunlight, so the ones I’ve put up here aren’t that great, but they’re the only ones that aren’t too dark. I think dropping my
Barong & Rangda
I think this might be the god camera a few times on this trip has gotten it a bit confused.
The most notable thing about Bali is how religious they are. They’re pretty much all that’s left of a once-mighty Hindu empire in Indonesia, and quite strongly resist conversion, even when they migrate to other parts of Indonesia or marry a Muslim. Almost every shop or house has a little sacrifice of rice and vegetables out the front, to the god Shiva, who is generally regarded in these parts as the most important part of the trinity, but of course they have their own local god, and are very strongly monotheistic, something that in India some Hindus are and some Hindus are not. Indonesia is based on something called the “Pancasila” or five founding principles, the first of which is the belief in one God. This may have been a nod to the Muslim majority, something that needed to be inserted in there to even have a chance of winning the big debate in the 1950s and 1960s of whether Indonesia should be a secular state based on the Pancasila or whether it should be a Islamic state; or it may have been a cynical way
Barong & Rangda
something about the God bringing someone back to life to disenfranchise the large atheist communist movement (today the mantra in the west is that Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation; in the 1950s it might have been that Indonesia was the nation with the largest communist party). My guide for the day told me this, and added that an Indonesian’s ID card shows your religion, which must be one of the four: Islam, Christianity, Hindu or Buddhism. I added that I thought Confucianism was allowed as well, and he said no, but just today there’s an article in the Jakarta Post (an English-language broadsheet) talking about it, and yes, Confucianism is allowed. This is of course a kludge, since Hindus and Buddhists don’t really believe in “one true God” in a theistic sense; but it seems to keep the peace. Certainly the impression from the guide is that they don’t feel any resentment to the Muslim majority within Indonesia. I asked him if, given their very different culture, if there’d been any push for Balinese independence from Indonesia. “No”, he said. “We’re Balinese, but we’re Indonesian too. Bali’s a small island, there’s just too much trouble - look at East Timor, they’re still having trouble, always trouble”. I
Barong & Rangda
don't know what was going on here, but most of the other photos didn't come out well :-( This is one of the few that shows some of the characters clearly had to agree with him there.
Anyway, so my guide, whose name I forgot, took me to Mt Batur, a high extinct volcano in the north of the island. It was fairly scenic but really it’s just a hill. You can see it in the photos. The main attraction here is that you can pay a small fortune to eat lunch on a restaurant that pretty much hangs out over the edge and gives you a good view of the crater. On the way back past some really nice art places, we stopped at an “agritourism” place which shows how they grow a lot of fruit, how they make coffee, etc. Up on the slopes of Mt Batur there’s not enough water to grow rice like they do everywhere else in Indonesia, so they grow fruit and coffee instead. Here they were selling Kopi Lewak for only $US10 a cup, I don’t know why it’s that cheap, but I didn’t feel the need to try it anyway. They gave me samplers of Balinese coffee, cocoa, ginseng, ginger, and something else, which mostly tasted really good, but obviously I couldn’t buy any.
Every town we go through seems to
have its own artistic speciality. One town does silverwork, another does gold, another is full of paintings, or carved bones or stone sculptures or whatever. You’d think they’d mix it up a bit, but I guess it makes it easy if you’re in the market for a carved-up ox skull.
After this, my guide took me to a large touristy temple which you can see in the photos. It’s based around a sacred spring. I get the impression that pretty much any slightly unusual natural feature is considered sacred on this island. I asked the guide if he didn’t have any objection to the masses of stalls outside the temple selling everything from “I love Bali” T-shirts to giant wooden phalluses just outside the grounds of a sacred temple site, and he didn’t seem to understand the question. Balinese Hinduism seems like a very pragmatic religion, without the sacred/profane dualism of the Abrahamic religions.
After this we went via the monkey forest, which again is sacred, I guess because it has monkeys, but didn’t seem that special to me, to Tannah Lot. This is the temple where it seems every tourist in Bali must go. Along with about
Barong & Rangda
I think this guy's role was to insert some humour a thousand other people I stood there and waited for sunset so I could get a nice picture, but of course all I got was photos of a thousand tourists waiting for sunset.
So that’s really about all I have to say about Bali. I’d like to come back when I have more time and energy and explore the whole island slowly. I’d even like to do Kuta, ideally with a bunch of mates and some nice clothes and a bit of money. As it was, I probably should have wasted less time there and gone straight onto Yogyakarta, where I am now, but that’s for another day.
The bus trip to Yogyakarta was much smoother. This time the seats actually reclined, and everything went smoothly. For some reason I’d been told that I’d get in at 03:00 a.m. the next day (36 hours later), which did sound strange given that it’s not that far, but I was pleasantly surprised to get in at 07:00 the next morning (after leaving at about 15:00).
Just another little thing that contradicts the mantra we have in the West about Indonesia as the
Barong & Rangda
and just when you might have thought that the one thing that might be missing from a traditional Balinese Hindu dance about the perpetual struggle between good and evil might be a giant dick joke ... world’s largest Muslim nation. If it’s such a Muslim nation, why is their national airline named after a mythological Hindu creature?
I see that my blog from three weeks ago or so is still number one if you google for “eating dog in Kupang”. This makes me feel like I’m the world expert on something, no matter how abstruse. It doesn’t work for “eating RW in Kupang” though. Hopefully this link:
eating RW in Kupang will fix that though 😊
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