Bali

For the majority of the world, the tropical scented name of Bali conjures one of five images: unspoiled beaches, a tantalizingly unfathomable depth of art and culture, picture perfect surf breaks, scantily clad exotic women, or plastique explosive tinged remnants of one of the world’s most horrific and tragic terrorist bombings.
Bali has been an internationally acclaimed tourism destination since the Dutch colonialists began marketing it as such between the two world wars. During that time, European advertising firms grafted images of topless, buxom Balinese women onto posters and billboards, in turn triggering what would become a veritable tsunami of foreign visitors by the end of the century.
Attracted by images of paradise and the island’s unique religious blend (Bali is a bastion of relaxed and cheerful Hinduism in the midst of an otherwise devout and conservatively Muslim string of some 15,000 islands), tourism now accounts for some two thirds of Bali’s annual GDP. Following the terrorist bombings of 2002, there was a major downturn in the tourism market. After some 200 people, many of them Indonesians, were killed, visitors were given the impression that even the fearsome visages of Shiva and Ganesh were not enough to keep out the radical Islamist scum. But despite continued threats from Jemaah Islamiyah (the Southeast Asian branch of Al Qaeda) and the recent repeal of the organization’s spiritual leader’s two-year jail sentence, around the holiday and New Year season, the party and life in general carry on in Bali just as they have for the past six decades.
Rose and I left Madiun on December 27th and met my brother Oz in Denpasar, Bali’s capital city, the following evening. Denpasar is a typical Indonesian city – crowded, dirty, noisy, busy – infused with omnipresent Hindu temples, offerings, and stray dogs. (In Islam, dogs are seen as being dirty and unholy, and are consequently, unlike the vast majority of the developing world, not found throughout most Indonesian cities and towns. I shudder to think about how local dog populations are monitored and maintained.) North from the heart of Denpasar lie the most popular beaches in Asia for which Bali has in recent times become globally famous. Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak span northwards from the international airport, increasing in luxury, cleanliness, price, and general peace of mind the farther one goes.
Rose and I spent the first night at my regular haunt in Legian, the Sayang Maha Mertha hotel. My buddy John, a Fulbrighter stationed in South Sumatra, was also in Bali, so we split a room, leaving Rose in peace to grapple with her jetlag. The next morning I awoke to her knocking on the door, still suffering from hundreds of bites and a newly contracted ear infection. She looked truly miserable. I hadn’t yet made a visit to an Indonesian medical facility, but Rose’s condition certainly warranted more than just the “wait it out” approach I had adopted to deal with gastrointestinal ailments and minor infections.
After wandering through the labyrinthine markets, stalls, and backstreets of early morning Legian and Kuta, fending off touts offering everything from cologne to watches to foot massages, we eventually found the Legian Medical Clinic, tucked into a small, nondescript alleyway still dripping from last night’s rain. Once inside, the clinic was clean and spacious, although it suffered from the Terrible Neon Lighting Complex that seems to affect every office, building, and house in Indonesia regardless of status or style. The on-call doctor was free, and was able to meet with Rose after only a ten minute wait. In the interim, Rose sat scratching, sweating, and looking generally miserable as the two on-duty nurses watched a prototypical Indonesian teledrama being broadcast on the muted TV over head. There looked like there were a lot of crying pretty girls, grade-C ghosts and spirits, and vats worth of ketchup-style blood. Classic.
The doctor invited Rose and me into his office. There was an examination table, a bookcase full of large and imposing medical journals, and a host of framed degrees displayed over a matching green marble cabinet and desk. A pretty young nurse stood at the ready staring over our heads at the back of the room. Despite its cramped nature, the room and furniture were clean and new, and the doctor seemed well put together and attentive. After asking us to sit down, in pretty good English the doctor asked what the problem was. Rose began showing off her bites. The doctor investigated for thirty seconds. The nurse averted her eyes.
“Usually we would use predisone for this,” the doctor said after finishing his mock examination, referencing a high powered oral steroid, “but that prescription requires a special visit to a dermatologist. We can use a topical corticosteroid instead.” Alright! I thought to myself. Even if this dude is a hack, at least he knows how to properly pronounce these drugs. “Okay, just give me whatever works fastest,” begged Rose. The doctor wrote out a prescription, had the nurse assemble the proper drugs, and several minutes later handed Rose a package alongside a bill for the equivalent of US$140. Several days later, after talking to a young Brit who visited the same clinic only a few hours after us, we realized that if we had taken the prescription and gone around the corner to the non-Western apothecary, we could have bought the same host of medications for one tenth the price.

The heat, congestion, and general seediness of Kuta and South Legian finally got to Rose, and mid-morning she took-off for the cooler climes of Ubud, an hour to the north, where she had reserved a hotel for her, Simon and me for the next three days. I would wait for Simon to arrive – his plane was slated to touch down in Denpasar via Jakarta, Seoul, San Francisco, and New York in the early evening – and then we would hire a taxi to take us to Ubud.
With a few hours to kill, I headed down to the beach to visit some friends I had made on my previous visits. The five minute walk from the hotel to the sand was not a relaxing or pleasant one, being bombarded by touts selling phallus shaped ashtrays and bottle openers and children begging and pushing two dollar knock-off Oakley and Gucci sunglasses. The roads were narrow and twisted, and when combined with the mobile knockoff marketplace and the perpetually inattentive and inexperienced Aussies on their surfboard laden motorbikes, made for a harrowing stroll.
On a good surf day, you can hear the cannon like rumble of the waves from three or four blocks away. With the rainy season though, tides were in flux and often not conducive to the big swell and multiple left and right hand breaks that make the beaches of Kuta and Legian ideal for surfers of all stripes. As my surfing is limited for the most part to talking and writing about it, I was not upset to find the normal head high tubes replaced with gentle and intermittent three foot rollers.
I approached the surf board rental cum waterside restaurant that served as my hangout and lunch spot on past trips, and asked for my buddies Arip and Dana, but was told that they had returned to their villages in Java for the New Year. During my last trip, John and I had surfed with Arip and Dana all day every day for a week. For five dollars a day, they rented us longboards and took us from the uninitiated start (where we first mistakenly attached the ankle leashes to our wrists – Fulbright scholars?) to the point where we could catch waves and even occasionally made it look like we knew what we were doing. After two hour long sessions in the water, we would retreat to the shade of the warung (low key restaurant) where we would quaff beers and gorge ourselves on what must be the best nasi goreng in all of Indonesia. At night, we would reconvene on the beach under the palm trees and breezy stars, and for four dollars, between the four of us split a liter of arak, a potent Balinese rice liquor.
One night, Arip and Dana convinced us to explore the Kuta nightlife scene, renowned for drunk and obnoxious Australian surfers and the legions of bimbos that follow them around. At the Bounty, a discotheque with a roof shaped like a pirate ship, the bouncers allowed John and me to pass unobstructed, but Dana and Arif were stopped. The two guys had warned us that this might happen – while foreigners, particularly bule foreigners, are allowed to enter free of charge, locals must pay a fifty thousand Rupiah cover charge, equivalent to the same amount of money that we were paying for a full day of lessons and board rentals. John and I nearly threw a shitfit, sounding off about modern day apartheid and blatant racism, to which the local bouncers looked at us with blank and uninterested stares. After several minutes of watching scantily clad blonde girls walk by while we stood outside making ethically valid yet unsuccessful arguments, we ultimately paid for the guys to enter, proving that when forced to choose between miniskirts and morals, it’s usually the latter that unravel first.
Once inside, John was drop kicked in the back and Dana was nearly beat-up in the bathroom within the first ten minutes of stepping onto the dance floor. We declared perpetual war on Australian surfers, and vowed never to return to the Bounty again.
Now, three months later, despite the ominous sky and nearly placid water, the beach was more crowded, the Australian surfer contingent having been equalized by the vacationing European and expat family set. I rented a board, donned a surf shirt, and sprinted for the water through fine grained sand. Beyond the breakers, as a few decent waves rolled by, I watched black clouds growing closer over the tops of the surf shops and palms back on the beach. Thunder began rumbling, and within minutes a torrential downpour set in, forcing the hundreds of sun worshipping families and non-water bound Aussies to run for the cover of their hotels.
I stayed out on the waves alongside a dozen locals and a handful of my sworn enemies. The waves picked up in intensity, the thunder continued to boom overhead, and the monsoon rain reached a crescendo, bombarding the mirror-like troughs between waves with an orgiastic intensity. I exchanged knowing smiles with dark, long haired men covered in tattoos and scars, the shoreline barely visible through the roar of rain, the waves breaking in ordered sets of right-handed harmony. Rainwater dripping off my nose mixed with the waves’ breaking spray, and I sat on my board rising and falling gently with the surf, watching, breathing, reveling in one iteration of Balinese perfection.

The earliest stone inscriptions recounting the stories of Indian traders bringing Hinduism to the Indonesian archipelago date from around the ninth century AD. While the history surrounding that period is relatively opaque, it is widely recognized that by that time, the complex rice irrigation process known as subak was already well established. Throughout Bali, over twelve centuries later, those same irrigation systems, minus the twentieth century addition of diesel powered pumps and rubberized tubing, have remained virtually unchanged. Postcard quality terraced rice paddies grace the sides of nearly every square inch of arable land, and hobbled old men and women, still outfitted in the traditional garb of rural agriculturalists, rub shoulders with the millions of camera wielding tourists who visit the island each year. With direct connections from Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and even the occasional European destination, Bali is a hub of juxtapositions that are simultaneously proto- and atypical of the Indonesian archipelago as a whole. While the culture of rice in Bali (as throughout Indonesia) has changed very little over the past millennium, the island’s religion, politics, culture and economy have shifted dramatically in response to some of the world’s first geopolitical sea changes.
Simon arrived in Bali the night of the 28th. After a ten dollar dinner of gourmet Greek along Seminyak’s Jalan Oberoi, we left the environs of Denpasar the next morning for the more tranquil, natural, and culturally prescient Ubud, where Rose was waiting.
The drive from Denpasar to Ubud is a simple hour long affair. Simon and I hired a taxi the next morning, and by ten AM were standing on the terrace of our four-star hotel, overlooking the unspoiled hills and valleys that surround the outskirts of the city. Rose’s drugs had begun to kick-in, and she seemed to be in a much better mood when we found her sipping on unfiltered Balinese coffee, watching a gentle rain fall while leafing through her naturalist’s guide to Bali.
In the late thirteenth century, Ubud rose to prominence after the Javanese Singasari dynasty collapsed, thereby losing its control over the subjugated Balinese kingdom. Shortly thereafter, the center of power for the Balinese Pejeng dynasty was established near modern day Ubud. Autonomy only lasted half a century though. In 1343, the notorious Gajah Mada, of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, defeated the Pejeng and brought Bali back under Javanese influence, where it would remain until the Dutch subjugated the island in 1906, after three centuries of bitter fighting.
The three days that Rose, Simon and I spent in Bali were relaxed and agreeable to the extreme. We spent our first night at an open air Kecak dance. The Kecak tells the tale of Ramayana, the quest of Prince Rama to rescue his wife Sita after she was kidnapped by Rawana, the King of Lanka. In the Ramayana, Rama journeys to Lanka accompanied by the king of monkeys and his monkey army. Throughout the dance, a circle of men, varying in number from a dozen to several thousand, all bare-chested and dressed in traditional checker-patterned sarong, provide a haunting accompaniment to the play as Rama and his legions of monkeys quest and fight.
My first time in Bali, it just so happened that I was able to witness a “Celebration of Life” to honor the second anniversary since Bali II, the second bombing in Kuta that took place in October 2004. The Celebration took place at Tanah Lot, a spectacular Hindu temple perched on a rocky islet silhouetted by the setting sun. That evening, five thousand Kecak dancers performed their art, chanting the unforgettable “chak-a-chak” in unison, the deep tones reverberating off the surrounding cliffs as the rising tide broke over their feet.
With Rose and Simon, the Kecak we saw was a more low-key performance, but still impressive nonetheless. Afterwards, a traditional fire dancer went into a trance and strut around through flaming coconut husks, kicking embers into the faces of surprised front row tourists, soliciting sadistically entertaining screams and shouts from adolescent Japanese girls. After he finished, a Hindu priest came forward and splashed holy water on the wide eyed dancer’s face and body, thereby bringing him back to the present reality. Afterwards, I approached the heavily breathing man, and translated a few questions for him put forth by a young British girl and her mother. “What do you think about when you dance?” “No, I do not think at all.” “Are your feet hurt?” “It does not hurt. See… my leg hair is all here still. There is no problem.” “How long have you been doing this?” “I started when I was young, but now I am old!”

After a few very nice and relaxing days, the three of us headed back to Southern Bali for New Year’s Eve. John had purchased US$85 tickets to a party at a local resort where one of his friends was playing in the band. The price seemed ridiculously high, but was said to include a gourmet buffet, a fashion show and live entertainment.
The event was terrible. Hundreds of Indonesian nouveau riche packed into the resort with their extended families, per usual, showing off their newfound success by spending exorbitant sums on unnecessarily gaudy and expensive goods and services. The one redeeming feature of the evening was that it exposed Rose and Simon to a different side of Indonesia, which as a normal tourist, one does not have the (dis)pleasure of seeing.
We left the event before midnight. Simon and Rose headed back to their hotel, John and I spent the countdown on the back of motorcycles in heavy downtown traffic making our way to the discos on the beach. We stayed out until sunrise, and I brought in the first day of 2007 making resolutions to the waves breaking on the beach.

Rose, my Mom’s sister, spent a year in the Philippines after she graduated from college in the late 1970s. Despite having traveled to over sixty countries in the interim – including an amorous traipse about Timbuktu, Bamako, and the rest of Mali with a Tuareg salt trader – this was her first time in Asia in almost thirty years.
Rose’s expectations of what she would find in Asia contrasted starkly with the hypermodern realities of the present day. While in Jogyakarta, we shared a dinner together at a restaurant called “Dixie” – as in both the twelve ounce keg party drinking cup and the Confederate American South. I indulged in a fried egg covered cheddar bacon cheeseburger and Rose had a mayonnaise drenched house salad. The view from our second story table was of congested streets and neon billboards advertising film processing, semen (cement), and facial whitening products. The family of four sitting at the booth next to ours was sharing a meal in silence, the father intermittently switching between two text messaging devices, the son with both ears plugged into a portable MP3 player, the daughter fiddling with video games on her cell phone, and the mother sullenly picking at her calamari.
The last time Rose was on this continent, electricity was not yet widely available, sewage still ran through open pits, the United States was just beginning to extricate itself from Vietnam, there were more bicycles than cars, the Communist threat was being suppressed by covert CIA operations in Jakarta, Suharto was at the peak of his power, and terrorist suicide bombing was several years away from its inception in Iran. While a lot has changed in the world since the late 1970s, perhaps that change is nowhere more pronounced than in Asia. Rose came to Asia expecting to find the world that she left behind. Instead, she found a place that is disturbingly familiar, where “local” culture still exists, but in a shiny, oftentimes prepackaged variety. She didn’t like what she found.

New Year’s night, while Oz and Rose recovered from their rain soaked traipse around Uluwatu and Tanah Lot Temples, John and I had dinner with some friends from Jakarta. Jenny, an attractive woman in her early thirties, works for the Indonesian equivalent of the fine people that bring you the SAT in the U.S. She and some friends from Jakarta had rented a bungalow near the beach in one of the nicer parts of Seminyak, and they had invited us to join a dozen or so of their friends for a catered dinner.
Arriving by taxi, John and I were escorted through Mediterranean-style white washed open-air hallways lined with perfectly symmetrical black pebbles. At a door numbered with a simple but sophisticated number “5”, we were ushered into a space filled with orchids, falling water, and moonlit night, lounge music wafting through the air over the murmur of a handful of guests. We were greeted with European style kisses and were told to gorge ourselves. Grilled Balinese chicken, lamb, and vegetables lay sprawled in a cornucopia of deliciousness, begging forth the appetite that never quite seems sated in these tropical climes.
Over Australian Shiraz and Coca Cola for the Muslims present, the conversation bounded from the Indonesian medical industry to the mining in Papua to the price of beach front real estate. One particularly sharp and well-informed woman in her late forties spoke with me about her doctorate at UC Davis and at length about the alternative energy industry in Indonesia. Upon inquiry, she elaborated how the government will invest up to US$22 billion in the sector over the next decade, in turn, if all goes well, pushing Indonesia towards the noble position as the first Muslim nation to be independent of fossil fuels.
At one point, John and I were cajoled into swimming in the spectacularly lit gunnite pool despite our protests of not having proper swim kit. Lounging about in our dripping boxer briefs, we were only then informed that the smart and well put together woman in her late forties or early fifties (a bit old relative to the rest of the crowd) was in fact Mari Elka Pangestu, the Indonesian Minister of Trade. Mrs. Pangestu is the first female Chinese to hold a cabinet position in Indonesia, is on the board of several international economics journals, is co-coordinator of the Task Force on Poverty and Development for the United Nations Millennium Project, and has a Wikipedia page devoted to her. We apologized profusely for our indecency, and in true style, she laughed off the matter, saying that she would have joined us had her husband not been there. Bali, like the rest of Indonesia, is certainly a very special place.