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Christmas Island ~
December 19 through December 28, 2000
$1 U.S. = 9200 Indonesian Rupiah
(Remember to click on the thumbnails for
enlargements of the photos)
Ubud, Bali,
Indonesia
December 19 through December 28, 2000
(ccl) My friend Andre' Golubic
recently told me about a German word for the anxiety that many people feel
before they travel. It's called reise veber, and
probably most of us have had it at one time or another. Andre' asked me if
we get it, and I told him that with the number of times we've made a move in the
past eleven months, we'd be in the hospital if we got too anxious before each
one. But I suppose there's still a small amount of tension that
accompanies each bus ride, train trip, or airplane flight, and we try to lessen
that as much as possible by preparing for the move to the degree that we
can. To this end, we bought our Lonely Planet Bali book while in
Bangkok, and read up on the procedures for entering the country. We also
got on line and found a nice hotel to stay in over the holidays, since we knew
that accommodation can be difficult to find there during Christmas. We
found out that immigration authorities may ask you to show your onward ticket
upon entering Indonesia (Bali is one of the more than 17,000 islands that make
up the Indonesian archipelago.), but felt pretty reassured by Lonely Planet
that they almost never do. We actually even tried to purchase tickets in
Bangkok, but were told by travel agents there that they could not sell tickets
for flights that originated in Bali.
So now, of course, given Murphy's
Law, you know what happened...
We were nearly the last people to
move through the achingly slow immigration line upon arriving at Denpasar
Airport. When we finally got to the counter, and laid down our passports
and documents, the immigration official asked to see our onward tickets.
We had gambled and lost, and now this bored civil servant had the power to
refuse us entry into the country. We told him that we didn't have onward
tickets, and he suggested that perhaps we'd like to go buy them from one of the
airline counters. Knowing that this is probably the least cost-effective
way to purchase air travel, we told him that we really didn't want to do
that. He then glanced furtively around him, lowered his voice, and looked
us in the eyes: I knew what was coming. He suggested that he might be able
to help us if we would only help him. He would be willing to stamp our
passports if we'd give him $20. The fact that his cohorts were well within
earshot led us to speculate that this was a common practice, and that reporting
him to his supervisor wouldn't do much good, so we decided to pay the bribe and
get on with things.
This left a pretty bad taste in my
mouth: after all, it was our first exposure to the "friendly people
of Bali". Sometimes it's tough to shake an incident like that.
You feel taken advantage of, yet you know you were in the wrong as well.
But we've both been trying to get better about "letting go"
of angry feelings, something that challenged us constantly in our careers
before we began this odyssey. So we put it aside, letting it well
up only a couple more times, and settled down to introduce ourselves to
the island in a more proper manner.
Part of our pre-arrival research involved figuring out where we were going to go
once we got to Bali. It's an island, but it's still a pretty big place,
and the options available to tourists run the gamut from deserted beaches to
quiet fishing villages to the pre-fab party beach town of Kuta. We had
heard enough about the artist community of Ubud to know that it sounded, to us,
like the right combination of natural beauty and creature comforts. We
booked reservations on-line at a little hotel called Ketut's Place, and planned
to stay there through Christmas until the 28th when our friends, the
above-mentioned Andre' Golubic and his girlfriend, Sha Ficarrota arrived
from Atlanta to kick off their four week tour of Bali, Thailand, and Cambodia
with us.
We met the owner of the hotel, Ketut,
upon arrival. "Ketut" sounded like a pretty strange name to us
then, but after spending a few days on the island we got used to it. The
reason? The Balinese name their children depending on their birth
order. The first child is named Wayan, the second Made (pronounced "mah-day")
, the third Nyoman (pronounced "yo-mon"), and the fourth Ketut.
These names are used regardless of sex, so if the fourth son marries the fourth
daughter, you have a married couple who are both named Ketut! And, what,
you ask, happens when there are more than four children? It starts all
over again! Number five is Wayan, number six is Made, etc., etc. We
have met a few people with other names, but about 90% of the people we have met
are named these four names. Confusing? Not for them, and at first we
thought we would have no problem with it, either. That is, until we had
met four or five Ketut's, and two or three Made's. Then we had to add our
own modifiers, like "Ketut the hotel owner", and "Nyoman the
batik artist, not Nyoman the sarong salesman". Even now we find
ourselves whispering to each other, "Now, is he a Wayan or a Nyoman??".
The Balinese have a culture like no
other we have seen. Two million tourists come to Bali each year, and
tourism accounts for about one-third of the economy here, yet Balinese society
seems to have remain relatively untouched by it. On our first night in
town we witnessed a procession of hundreds of men, women, and children, on their
way to the local temple to celebrate a festival. All of them were dressed
in the traditional Balinese costume, which is required for entry into a
temple. Both men and women must wear a sarong and a sash called a selandong
around the waist. Women wear beautiful lace tops and men wear
colorful handkerchiefs tied in such a way as to leave a jaunty little
"fan" in the front. 
I know that one of my most lasting impressions of Bali will be the sight of
these beautifully dressed women nonchalantly balancing huge offerings of fruits,
sweets, and flowers on their heads as they chatted and laughed with friends on
the way to the temple that night. Some of them looked to be close to two
feet high, and many of the women were able to balance the offerings without even
using their hands. Every time I see this in Bali, and since that first
night we have seen many similar processions, I think about how my mother
threatened me throughout my adolescence with a posture bra, and how if I was a
Balinese woman, I'd probably have to drive my offering to the temple in the car.
The procession we saw that night
included several gamelan orchestras. Gamelan has its roots in
Java, but the Balinese have their own style of playing. The band consists
almost entirely of percussion instruments, with the main instrument being the gangsa,
which is much like a xylophone. Played by striking the bars with a hammer
held in the right hand, and then quickly dampening the sound by touching the
bars with the left had, the gangsas produce a clanging, clattering cacophony of
sound that takes the western ear by surprise, but which grows on you soon
enough. Imagine your doorbell possessed by the devil, and you're getting
close to what a gamelan sounds like.
The thing that began to sink in that
first night, and which I continued to witness throughout the next several weeks,
is that cultural preservation is of central importance to the Balinese.
Bali is a Hindu island smack dab in the middle of the string of Muslim islands
that make up Indonesia, and it is committed to keeping alive the religious and
social rituals that have been part of life here for centuries. I like this
piece of a Noel Coward song I found in a magazine about Bali (Noel and Charlie
Chaplin, who he had in mind when he wrote this song, were just two of the many
famous westerners who frequented Bali in the 30's and 40's):
As I said this morning to Charlie,
There is far too much music in Bali.
And although as a place it's entrancing
There is also a thought too much dancing.
It appears that each Balinese native
From the womb to the tomb is creative,
And although the results are quite clever,
There is too much artistic endeavor.
Coward, of course, had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek when he wrote
this, but what he writes about is something that surely every visitor to Bali
must discover. EVERYONE seems to have an artistic or musical skill.
Hotel managers paint, waiters perform the traditional dances at the Ubud palace,
economics students apprentice to batik masters. The Balinese place an
importance like no other people I've seen on younger generations understanding
the traditions, values, and crafts of the older ones. In fact, every
Balinese house includes a temple where respects are paid to the family's
ancestors. Kids learn to dance and to play the gangsa and to paint and to
carve wood, and they learn to make temple offerings and will participate in as
many as thirteen celebrations during their formative years. If children of
any society experience a profound rite of passage, a coming of age, it is the
Balinese.
And, luckily for those interested in
preserving Balinese religion and culture, rice growing, one of the main
occupations of the Balinese people, allows for plenty of time for the above
mentioned pursuits. The rice terraces that seem to occupy every spare inch
of land have been in place for quite a long time, some of them centuries.
Once the rice is planted, there just isn't that much to do until harvest time,
so there is spare time to relax and play music and tell stories and go to the
temple. Maybe the kids don't have Nintendo and there's no two week family
vacation at the beach every year, but the family unit is intact and most people
appear happy and content. Every day we saw families riding together on
their motorbike, husband driving, little boy in front of him, wife in back with
one hand around her husband's waist and the other helping to balance the
family's offering on her lap, and another child sandwiched between the mother
and father, all dressed in their finest and heading to the local temple.
So we began to settle into life in a
tropical paradise. Christmas was rapidly approaching, and while there
would be no major gift-giving, no multi-present extravaganza this year, we
wanted to get a few little presents for each other. I spent my first full
day in Bali in bed with some sort of strange stomach ailment, but it only lasted
about 24 hours, as many of those things do. Ubud is rife with shopping
opportunities, so we split up for a couple of afternoons and bought each other
some nice pieces of local art and other items. We decorated the porch of
our bungalow at Ketut's place with some paper lanterns and a couple of metal
Christmas trees, all of which were loaded with small candles and produced a
Christmasy-glow in the sticky tropical heat. It was my first Christmas
away from either of my families, and it seemed a little strange, but we enjoyed
the peace and quiet and absence of the shopping and partying frenzy that leads
up to the day every year. Although several restaurants around Ubud were
advertising Christmas dinner specials with turkey or goose, Wiley deferred to my
new-found pledge not to eat meat or chicken, and we had a Christmas dinner feast
of sushi.
I spent the day after Christmas being
pampered like never before, as Wiley had given me a spa package at a place just
down the road from Ketut's Place. My day started with an hour-long
massage, followed by time in a dry sauna, a steamroom, and a whirlpool.
Then I was slathered with Dead Sea mud, which was then rinsed off after it
hardened. After that, I spent 15 minutes in a perfumed Jacuzzi tub, and
later had my hair steam-conditioned and had a manicure and pedicure. The
whole thing culminated with a facial, a vegetarian lunch, and the presentation
of a free t-shirt! It was a banner day, and I felt glamorous and spoiled
when it was over. I plan to do it one more time before we leave to come
back home to the real world.
As part of our continuing quest to
find jammin' tunes wherever they may be around the globe, we sought out some
jazz music at the local venue in Ubud, The Jazz Cafe. I've always been a
casual admirer of jazz, but have never known too much about it, and we don't own
a lot of recordings. The group that was playing the night we were there,
we later learned, was a hodge-podge of local musicians, who were just sitting in
for a jam session together. To me, they sounded like they had been playing
together for years, but much of jazz is improvisational, and good musicians can
sound great together without having played together before. After a
fantastic three hour set, the group called it a night, and to our surprise and
delight, the bass player made his way over to our table and sat down! Ito
was from Java, and played the bass like no one I had ever seen before. He
turned what is typically a rhythm, accompanying instrument into the lead
guitar. Ito had a ready smile and we liked him immediately. He
invited us to come see him a few nights later with his regular band in the
neighboring town of Sanur, which we did. We plan to seek him out a few
more times before we leave the island. 
One of the unexpected rewards of this
trip has been meeting, either in person or virtually, other round-the-world
travelers. Certainly, we have met lots of people in hotels, restaurants,
buses, and bars along the way and have shared travel adventures, but we've also
received email from other travelers who have found our web site through various
methods and have written to ask questions or just say "Hi, we're about to
do what you're doing.". Several months ago I heard from a couple from
San Luis Obispo who were doing much the same as we had - selling the house,
quitting the jobs, and hitting the road for a year. By coincidence, it
turned out that we were on Bali at the same time, so we made arrangements to met
them for drinks and conversation a couple of days after Christmas.
Ed Hawkins was a lawyer, and his wife
Linda worked in compliance for a bank, when they decided to chuck it all and hit
the road. They have been traveling since September, having stopped first
in Hawaii, then the Cook Islands, before making their way to Bali. Ed
spent some time traveling around southeast Asia shortly after the Vietnam War,
but it was Linda's first trip this far east. They were funny and
interesting and loved good music and beer (well, Ed loved beer - he had to take
up the slack for Linda, who doesn't like beer), and we shared advice and stories
well into the night. I found myself remembering when we first met Scott
and Laura Kruglewicz from Atlanta, who had traveled around the world in 1999 and
whose web site I had read religiously. When we met them, I knew so much
about them already that I begin to feel like a stalker. Ed, who had read
our entries from the countries they were going to, also knew a lot about us and
our experiences, and at first it was a little odd, meeting a stranger who knew
so much about us. It was a great night and it was wonderful to make new
friends and exchange war stories.
We had begun to feel like Ketut's Place was home. The place was
immaculately kept, and the employees couldn't have been nicer. Ketut's
kids usually visited daily, especially once they discovered the one pound bag of
M&M's that Santa brought Wiley. Ketut tried to explain to us that his
family was preparing for a big festival that would take place after we had
checked out, and that his whole family was there to help get ready for it.
Each day we nodded hello to Ketut's grandmother, who must have been well into
her 90's, as she sat making little palm baskets in which offerings to spirits
are placed. It's possible that Indian Hindus wouldn't recognize their own
religion if they came to Bali. That's because the Balinese had a
well-defined religion when a prince from a neighboring island brought Hinduism
here hundreds of years ago. They still worship the main Hindu trinity of
Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, but their supreme god is Sanghyang Widi. Also,
in what is probably the most obvious display of religious beliefs to foreigners
visiting Bali, the Balinese have a hefty dose of animism in their
religion. Animism is often explained as the belief that God is in
everything, and the Balinese interpret this as meaning that spirits, both good
and bad, inhabit all things. Offerings for the spirits are visible at the
entrance of shops, hotel rooms, rice fields, government offices, and restaurants. It is
the job of the women to make these offerings and ritually place them every
single day. One store owner told Wiley that his mother spends three hours
every day making little baskets from palm leaves, filling them with offerings,
and placing them in his shop and home.
On the 28th, we bid a fond farewell
to Ketut, after promising him that we would stay at his place the "next
time we come to Bali". We had paid in advance over the Internet for
all eight days of our stay with Ketut, and were relieved that it turned out to
be such a nice place. Ed and Linda told us about how that same situation
had backfired on them when they pre-paid to stay at a place for a month in the
Cook Islands. Their bungalow was filthy, and the mosquito net they brought
turned out to be more useful in keeping the rats at bay during the night.
The owner insisted that they were seeing crabs, not rats, and they
ended up leaving there after staying only two weeks.
We had made arrangements several days earlier
to rent a house on the other side of town, where we could stay once Andre' and
Sha arrived. Their flight was scheduled to land at 2:30 from Hong Kong, so
we packed up and moved to our new location, and headed off to the airport to
pick them up.
Click
here to continue in Bali with "2001: A Gutter Odyssey"
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