Holiday, Again

“You look like the kind of bloke who’s going to get a job.”
“Well, Bob, despite my best efforts to front the life of a man of leisure, you might have me there.” My ten day holiday finished with a night out on the town in Ubud, Bali talking to Bob, a Southeast Asian ancient maritime migrations specialist who, at one point, rowed his own hollowed-out canoe from Java to Madagascar. Much of the rest of the break followed a similar bent of amusing albeit slightly surreal experiences.
My time in Jogya was of a traditional sort, spending days at Borobudur and Prambanan, two of Southeast Asia’s most famous attractions. The May 26th earthquake left Prambanan slightly worse for wear, and walled off to tourists. A few backhanded bribes later, though, and John, Deanna, Elena, Nico and I were crawling amongst arguably the world’s greatest Hindu temple, known widely as one of the original manmade wonders of the ancient world. Deanna, a PhD candidate in Sanskrit and South and Southeast Asian history, was in heaven.
Borobudur, Prambanan’s pyramid-like counterpart, nestled amongst rolling green jungle with a jaw-dropping view of smoking Mount Merapi (the world’s most active volcano), was exquisite. The story of Buddha unfolds over nine ascending layers of intricately carved volcanic pumice that were only rediscovered a century and a half ago. John and I spent our second night in Jogya drinking heady alcohol on the foothills of the smoking mountain, listening to my buddy Nico’s rock band as his art school colleagues partook in an epic bacchanal reminiscent of the freshman American frat party. “YOU ARE ALL LIGHTWEIGHTS IN THE PUB CRAWL OF LIFE!” John screamed at them over the PA system.
Ramadan began our third day there, and subsequent ragers were kept to a low key minimum. I did however spend a day with Scuba (aka Mark) from Hands On Disaster Response. Hands On is leaving the Jogya area within the week, and one night I witnessed the group auctioning off the shovels, wheel barrows, pick axes, and even a chain saw that they had been using to remove rubble over the past four months. The following day, I returned to Sawit, one of the hardest hit villages near Jogya, where I met with Scuba, some of the village elders, and Akbar from Yayasan Kompip, the Indonesian NGO that I’m working with to establish microfinance initiatives in Java. After a few hours of cheerful banter, bananas and tea, we decided to back another micro-lending initiative in Sawit. Hopefully Dave Campbell, the itinerant and effusive benefactor of Hands On will front the money to provide long term economic support to the devastated village.
Having thought that I had finished with the humanitarian and cultural side of my holiday, a group of us decided to make our way to Bali, where the nightlife-suppressing specter of Ramadan is superseded only by the threat of belligerent Aussies and the suicide bombers they attract. John, Deanna, Caitlin and I spent our first few days surfing, the nights frequenting clubs and bars, berjalan jalan (hanging out) with the local Indonesian surfer crew that taught us how to make longboarding look easy. Three hour sessions in the waves were interspersed with forty cent bowls of nasi goreng and tahu pedas, soaking up the life of a true hedonist.
After a few days of rinse, wash, repeat, we expanded our boundaries and set-off for Tanah Lot, a hindu temple perched on a series of breathtaking cliffs on the Southwest coast of Bali. To commemorate the one year anniversary of the most recent Bali bombings last October first, 5,700 villagers dressed as traditional Kecak dancers performed ceremonial rituals while lights played across the cliffs and clashing waves. As a Balinese theater troop performed wayang under the aegis of a National Geographic film crew, the thousands of dancers hollered and clapped in a surreal unison that reverberated and echoed in tune with the smashing waves. After an hour and a half of dancing and singing, the entire mass of dancers lit individual torches, and made their way off the beach in a surprisingly unsweaty mass of sarongs and flip-flops. We all agreed, it was one of the top ten coolest things we’d ever seen.
Continuing our Balinese cultural odyssey, the next day we made our way north to Ubud for the city’s third annual writers and readers festival. There were a number of fascinating workshops available (at the student price of five dollars each!), but I decided to attend the three most relevant and interesting sounding sessions. After the Wave featured two Acehnese poets speaking through translation and a Sri Lankan novelist and humanitarian with flawless English with whom I spoke about starting microfinance in his village near Colombo (on a microfinance note, Citigroup just announced a series of low-interest loans totaling $100 million to be made to microfinance groups in over thirty countries around the world. It looks like the trend is catching on).
The Rise of the East featured a fascinating discussion about the rise of Asian and Muslim literature and how it will dominate global culture within my lifetime. Suketu Mehta, a Pulitzer prize finalist and recent author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found made some excellent points. He spoke about Diaspora and the new examination of the fragmentation of identity. He addressed the twenty-first century’s multinational generation, and its characters who are comfortable in any and all youth cultures. He also brought up an interesting point regarding literacy – first generation literate people don’t have enough English to work internationally, but just enough to be alienated from cultural tradition. He didn’t stress this point, but I wondered whether such feelings of non-belonging lead to extremism and radicalism? The panelists, all Asian, also bashed what they called “the post-colonial romp through literature – an ill-advised label for English writing by non-‘Westerners.’” The panelists spoke of technology solving the problem of language, after which the “story” will once again become the prominent part of literature. They referred to the ping-pong game of ideas between West and East, from the Bahagad Vita influencing Thoreau to Martin Luther King influencing Indian untouchables. After the session was over, we had coffee and drinks with Suketu. My favorite quote of his was, “I slam, you slam, we all slam Islam. Read the Qu’uran.”
In the town square that night, after a presentation of Wayang Skateboard: A Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Tradition, we watched a film made in 1977 by the renowned filmmaker John Darling. With incredible 16mm color, he documented the last days and the cremation of a Balinese carving master, who died in 1976 at age 116. Imagine the experiences that man went through in his life.
We finished the night off with Bob at the local bar. I told him I was interested in rowing across the Atlantic, and he told me that was boring and for pussies. I plan on meeting up with him the next time I’m in Bali.