Quarter Year

We landed in Ubud to find an artsy town that had succumbed to tourism as well, though not in the dirty-grime, back-alley drinking sort of way that the affordable areas of Kuta are. Ubud has tons of touts on the main (Monkey Forest Road) drag. We followed one to a hotel and rented the scooter that would be ours for the next three weeks.

Had we not done this, I would have been on my mother’s doorstep again this Christmas. I’m sure of it. But we did rent it and the very next morning (our second morning in Bali), we rode up and away from Ubud. We took risks, turning down roads we knew went nowhere, that turned into poorly paved, or unpaved trails through the hills and the rice fields and we really never came back. We would spend hours away from everything that we would have been sitting in if we had not had the scooter. We did stay in Ubud, but we would wake up early and see what we found to be the most beautiful time. It was the time when the Balinese people were still untainted by tourism. The women went to the markets early to buy and sell produce, kids walked to school, men and working women carried their scythes in their belts and walked or biked or scooted to the rice fields. There was no one shopping in the Polo stores or eating in the cute, upscale cafes. The people who walked at this hour did so without shoes and without mixing with us at all except to wave or smile as we passed by. We didn’t change them and that felt good every time.

I know now that Colombia probably wasn’t that bad. Fred claims that Colombia is still his favorite country that he’s visited. This could be a result of it being the first of his big trip or it could be that he got away from it more than we did. I’m not sure.

Writing this next part, I know that many of the things that I will say are probably wrong, but I will write them anyway. Bali and Colombia are both what we would consider third world. The average person makes about $4/day in Bali and I would assume at least that in Colombia. Bali and Colombia were both colonized, Colombia by the Spanish and Bali by the Dutch. However, it seems obvious that the hold the Spanish had on Colombia was much stronger than that of the Dutch. There are very few traces that they ever existed on Bali at all, save for the fact that there are brick houses in some places, and one building in Munduk appeared to be slightly European looking. Other than that, the hold the Dutch had on Bali outside of the main city, Denpasar is non-existent.

I see this island more like Corsica than I do like other colonized places. It still holds its own values and traditions despite the populations that have held it, including Indonesia. It is Bali.

The people here seem happier than they did in Colombia. They wave and smile as if we are a funny novelty riding through their towns, which we are. They are very peaceful. At no time have we felt at risk here, not even when we took 20 wrong turns and ended up in towns without electricity or running water. Violence does not appear to be in the blood of the Balinese, not with animals, not with children, not with us. There aren’t guns here like there are in America and it feels safer because of that. Also, no drugs.

Whereas I was very angry that the Colombians didn’t take care of their people or grow enough food to support the population, the Balinese do. Not with health care (it is very similar to the USA in that respect), but within communities it seems like they make do. There is an abundance of food growing here and people work with and in it all the time. They eat.

The frustrations that I had with Bali were the social level issues that I would probably have with most 3rd world countries. They are the ones that I expressed in my post about Iluh. Why can’t people create work, why is the education so lacking. Why don’t they figure out how to rise above 3rd world status and charge what they are worth?

I know these are entitled thoughts. I can’t help it. Lately I have thought to myself as the 13 year old girl hands me my rice and gives me $.20 in change, KEEP IT! This rice is worth more to me than what you are charging. But, those are the things that I find so endearing about it. Most people are so honest. When we got off the tourist path, we would pay $2.00 for both of us for dinner. We saw everyone else paying the same.

Breakfast was the most depressing meal of the day. We ate at the hotel because it was free and who are we to pass that up. It was depressing in the same way a retirement home is depressing. Not that everyone there is old, but we were slow. The Bali around us was colorful, fast and dirty and so unlike us, sitting, sipping tea and talking about what we’d do that day — sit at the pool or go to the safari park. We wanted to get out and get going as fast as we possibly could.

Sometimes when we came back from the market we’d do a jalan jalan (tour) through town. It was sort of a victory lap through the main streets of Ubud to look at the people sitting in restaurants eating and drinking and not ever knowing what Bali looked like. They sat in colorfully lit open air restaurants that we were suckers for in real life, but couldn’t seem to stomach when they charged the equivelant of 5 days wages for the wait staff for one meal. We could never resolve our feelings about such extravagence. We’d been to a restaurant for dinner three times. The first two nights we were in Bali, we ate out, not knowing where else to go. The third and final time we ate out was on Christmas. Restaurants aren’t real here, MAYBE in Denpasar, which is a legitimate city, but not in the rest of Bali. If you see one, it is for tourists or tour buses to stop. Once for lunch we drove for about 2 hours our into the rice fields. To our joy, we found a cute roadside joint. The menu was in English and the prices were high. “Do tourist buses stop here?” Mike asked. “Yes, of course,” the girl said. We ate there anyway because we were really hungry, but we didn’t stop anywhere again. We spent that lunch talking to her about how Balinese men were “playboys.” It was one of maybe 300 words she knew in English and I found that funny.

Instead of restaurants, they have food stalls and push carts. Sometimes they will have mini restaurants on the backs of scooters that stop to sell small plastic bags of homemade snacks to workers in the fields. This is where people eat, if not at home.

The Balinese live out in public in ways that we don’t. Whereas PDAs are not ever seen here, it is not uncommon to see naked people bathing in the river at sunset or washing their clothes in front of their houses in the mornings. You see people eating in the foodstalls, with their hands (this is traditionally how it is done, Aviva showed us how before we left). You can see people napping in the roadside stands that are really covered huts with platforms. These things made me uncomfortable at first. I was taken back by the privacy that I was invading each time I saw someone doing something that we do behind closed doors at home, but eventually I realized they didn’t mind and neither should I.

When we left for Jakarta, we were happy with our time spent on Bali. We couldn’t say that we ever went to the beach. I never went in the waves or got a tan, but we were satisfied with what we had leaned of Bali. We got to see people who worked hard, long hours and who worked with their families. They worked together to make their lives function and I really felt that we got a back-end view of Bali. I thought we understood what it would be like to be from Indonesia.

When we got to Jakarta everything changed.