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Heaven on Earth10 January 2010, 19:23:14 - (179 hits) BALI is often referred to as paradise, and indeed, at the villa where we slept in big beds on crisp sheets, surrounded by sumptuous wood furniture and an overhead fan that whirred a gentle breeze, it is Shangri-La. The air is redolent of smoky agricultural fires, and a symphony of birds and insects rub their feet together to croon love songs. K-Chch. Zzzzz. Sweet, sweet, ssssss, koo koo who.
"A-oo, a-oo," crows the rooster all day long. "Geck-o" - the eponymous lizard sounds like a small child hiding under the table, playing a joke.
A long pool overlooks terraced rice fields, and the sound of trickling water is everywhere - from the irrigation system of the rice fields to the four or five gold fish ponds within the lush tropical landscaping.
Banyan trees bend and dribble long tendrils with a flush of pink, orchids take root on trees and in pots, and the servants who dutifully water them and feed the fish also tend to our human needs - from preparing breakfast to offering us insight into the culture, religion and way of life. We eat mangosteen, lichee and snake fruit in the shade.
But not everywhere is it paradise. The path through the rice fields is strewn with trash. Dogs roam freely, sleeping on the cool asphalt roads, and a driver needs to honk frequently to keep from committing canine massacre. And that smoky smell? People burning trash.
As we visit tourist destinations - ancient temples, volcanoes - we are assaulted by street vendors who invade our personal space to get our attention, offering wares at prices embarrassingly low - "cheap, cheap," they call after tourists. Three dollars for a sarong, 70 cents for a box of pencils each with a hand-painted animal, $20 for a complete hand-carved chess set.
There's a game they play, and I fall for it. "Two dollars," says a vendor, holding out the chess set.
"Two dollars?"
"One dollar," he comes back at me.
I'm thinking he's offering me this hand-carved chess set for a dollar, but he takes out a single piece - a pawn, intricately carved - and offers it for a dollar.
"What would I do with a single piece?"
"$30 the whole set," he says.
"No no no," I try waving him away, although at $30 it's still a great deal, except that I don't want it.
"$20" is his final offer.
Another woman, with a 12-inch stack of neatly folded sarongs on her head, tries to sell these starting at $10 each. Uninterested, I offer her 2,000 rupiahs (20 cents) to take her picture. She wants more, and when I put the money back in my pocket, she agrees to let me take the picture and even smiles for the camera.
By the time we're getting back into the car, she is offering the sarongs for $3, and when the door accidentally touches the chess set as we desperately try to escape, the vendor apologizes for getting in the way. Through the glass window of a restaurant, children make sad faces, trying to hawk their goods as we eat gado gado and other Balinese delights.
Nearer to the temple, flies are swarming a fruit stand that smells like a bodega as sarong vendors swarm the tourists. "You need this for the temple," they say as a crowd drapes you with beautifully patterned cloth. Finally, you buy one just to keep the other vendors away, although now the other vendors are further lowering prices.
Viewing the magnificently carved Buddhas and other deities in stone and wood, as well as silver, woven and painted goods, and seeing how affordable the prices are, one understands why everyone who comes here dreams of their own import business.
I found myself in Bali because, sometimes, you win the lottery of life. My friend Betty told me she was going to Bali, and when I wore my jealousy, she said "Want to come?" Her brother, Carlos, and his girlfriend, Melissa, were staying at a villa in Bali that had LOTS of room. It took me all of three minutes to say yes, and only that long because I was terrified of the 30-hour flight.
We would all be flying separately, and so I was also anxious about finding the place. A driver was supposed to pick me up and take me there, but if he failed to show, all I had was a hand-drawn map of the route through the rice fields I'd printed from the villa's Web site.
Fortunately, my driver did show up. He had the windows of his Toyota open, and the air was smelly and polluted. In the dark, Bali seemed built up, and I thought, I've come all this way for Key West with 10 times the population density.
A zillion motorcycles were weaving in and out, and at any moment I thought we'd all be dead. But as we drove away from the busy road, the driver let me out on a brick path under a moonlit sky, and we entered the gate to the courtyard of the villa. I could hear water trickling everywhere. Betty showed me to my room, and I opened the windows on all three sides, surrounded by tropical paradise. The next day, I awoke to a view of the rice fields.
After breakfast, we swam in the pool overlooking the paddies, and then walked about 3 or 4 miles into the village of Ubud, the arts and cultural center of Bali. The path through the rice fields was 12 inches wide; on either side of the path was a ditch for the irrigation of the paddies, and we shared the path with motorcycles in either direction.
Along the fields we passed about 10 galleries where artists were making and selling work. Each artist seemed to have four styles: a traditional Hindu style, a tropical Rousseau style, pen-and-ink drawings, and a foray into abstraction. Sometimes husband and wife work together to produce these four styles, each specializing in two. When they weren't in their galleries, the artists were working the rice fields, driving taxis. People in Bali do whatever they can to earn money.
Elementary school is free, high school has to be paid for, and university is out of the question for all but the richest Balinese. Even with an education, it's hard to find employment.
The people are sweet and good, and leave offerings of rice, flowers and incense on little bamboo trays for their gods. Just as Bali's cuisine is a fusion, so, too, is the culture a melange of Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese and Thai. I was surprised to see how overrun with motorbikes paradise can be. Motorbikes are used for everything from the family sedan to trucks. It's not unusual to see people on motorbikes transporting construction supplies, coconuts, live chickens and families of four, including small babies on their mother's lap.
The free-range dogs are as serene and sweet as the people. During a performance of Kecak dance - sort of an a cappella version of a ceremonial dance that is usually accompanied by gamelan music - at least two dogs wandered into the arena during the show. During another dance performance, a dog lay down center stage and slept during the performance.
Best of all were the sounds of Bali: At night, a thousand cicadas, crickets, frogs and lizards in the night, punctuated by bamboo beat (actually, contraptions to scare birds out of the rice fields), much like the gamelan music we went to see every night. I came home with the music in my head.
We visited a coffee plantation, where a botanical garden of nutmeg, cinnamon, chilies and ginger creates a heady aroma. We watched a demonstration of the roasting process, then the roasted beans getting ground by mortar and pestle. There were cages with "foxes" inside, and when I asked our driver about this, he asked the coffee roaster, then came back with an explanation that I'm sure was lost in the translation: The coffee is fed to a fox, digested, and then recovered for a finer coffee bean.
At the tasting tables we sampled cocoa, simply mixed with hot water and delicious with no milk or sugar; a ginseng coffee that is sweet and light without milk; lemon grass and ginger teas; and several roasts of coffee, including the one predigested by the fox (I abstained, thank you). When I got home and researched this, I learned that kopi luwak is, indeed, an expensive Indonesian coffee because the bean is predigested, and fermented, in the intestines of a civet cat (looks like a fox) endemic to Java. The animal will eat only the choicest, most perfectly matured beans which it then excretes, and plantation workers retrieve from the ground for immediate roasting.
At Padabai Beach, while reading a book, I am approached by an old toothless man (probably my age). "Is your husband sitting here?" he asks, pointing to the chaise next to mine.
"Yes," I say sharply.
He points to a young man covered in tattoos and asks if that is my husband. When I laugh and say no, he pulls out two beautifully carved wooden boxes. He offers them at a low price, and I say no thank you, I have no need for them, although they are beautiful. He asks what price I would like to pay, and again I say I am not interested in having the boxes. I tell him he should sell them at a higher price to someone who can use them.
"Good for you, good for me," he says, lowering his price still. Finally, I agree to buy one small box for 30,000 rupiahs - $3 - just to make him go away. All I have is a 50,000 rupiah note, and he gives me the two boxes for $5.
That night, at a Balinese shadow puppet theater, most of the play is in Balinese, but the English part, made for tourists, parodies the "good for you, good for me" conversation I had at the beach with the vendor - apparently this is a classical tourist experience.
The puppet show also parodies the taxi drivers who get you at every turn in Ubud. "Hello, how are you, taxi?" "You need transport?" "If not today, how about tomorrow?" They gesture as if steering the wheel.
That night, our driver takes us by his painting studio. He is an artist by day, driver by night. He says he uses his taxi business to advertise his painting studio. The next morning, while walking through the rice fields, I see the driver cultivating a new plot with his father. He is a farmer, too.
Wayan, who manages the villa where we stay, is a devout Hindu. He tells us that he is in the lower caste, and even after a life of doing good and being observant, he will never go on to a higher caste in another life. Although this strikes us, in our upwardly mobile culture, as profoundly sad, he insists he is happy. And who are we to know happiness? Perhaps it is this very acceptance that is true happiness.
Putu, our driver (in Bali, both Wayan and Putu are names that mean "first born," so there are many many Wayans and Putus), tells us there is no happiness in this life, and that in order to achieve happiness you must get your karma to heaven.
Whenever we needed something - a taxi, a take-out dinner - Wayan would say "I arrange for you." And so it was with massage. We couldn't leave without experiencing Balinese massage, and our last day seemed appropriate. I chose the hot stone massage with ginger, said to improve the circulation, in preparation for the 30-hour flight home. Our massage therapists arrived by motorbike, of course, carrying the hot stones and a crock pot to heat them. They stripped down two beds, set them with sarongs and towels, gave us sarongs to wear and then promptly stripped them off.
There was lots of ginger-scented oil - and the massage therapist's thumbs really dug in.
"Ouch," I heard myself say a few times. Then came the hot stones - they were really hot, and after slathering them in the oil and rubbing them all over, they balanced the stones over my body, then covered me with a sarong.
I found myself asking, what is pleasure? Here was an experience that is pleasure for the tourist, but I'd prefer the pleasure of the artist, painting in the fields, working the land. Bali is what happens when an entire island is made up of artists and artisans, musicians, dancers and performers. It is in their happiness and spiritual devotion that these people have found wealth. News from centraljersey.com
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