At the Palm Beach, Florida airport on our way back from Colombia.

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.

There are bugs in the room, and this evening I came home to the nastiest spider I’ve ever seen, relaxing next to our lightswitch with an air of entitlement. It’s definitely not the paradise Lonely Planet promised, but I reminded Azure, half-encouraging myself, that if we could overcome our dependence on nice rooms we would save a lot of money (and therefore travel longer). She reminded me that nobody at home would consider any of our rooms “nice,” and we do save a lot of money because of it. Oh yeah. Azure wrote a hilarious post about the hotel here: http://www.quarteryear.com/us-vs-bugs

Right now, at 8pm, prayers are echoing in our room from two separate mosques, one voice from the east, one from the west. It’s beautiful, if haunting, and it’s a little bizarre that one muezzin is a child. This area does feel different than other parts of Bali. The young men leer more. Hindu locals have told us that this is what Muslim areas are like. I’m sure Muslim locals would say the opposite. I don’t know the religion of the young men, but, compared to the rest of Bali, Medewi is much less welcoming.

Two miles past Medewi beach we rode toward the water. Groups of young men perched on their motorcycles hanging out next to the ocean beaches, tons of men. There were some women here and there, but mostly just young men staring at us, calling out, “HEY! HEY MAN!” I don’t like when people yell at us. When we first encountered this in Kuta I wanted to ask the touts, “How would you feel if someone yelled, ‘HEY!’ at you?” Maybe not that bad, it turns out. At a homestay in Ubud the owners did exactly that to get a family member’s attention, yelling down to the courtyard, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” It really rubs me the wrong way, but that’s how they do it. A nasty old woman there was responsible for both the yelling and the loogie-haucking outside our window, several times a day.

Back in Medewi, to the west along the shore, a series of pens at the edge of the beach hold cows who graze the trees and grasses. Across the road rice paddies sprawl under the most plastic bag scarecrows I’ve seen anywhere in Bali. The bags are tied to strings that run across the mature rice, and when a farmer notices birds eying his field he yanks the strings and the bags jump. If that fails, a lady standing in the field yells and swings a large flag toward the flocks. From here a number of Hindu shrines dot a village road that lead us inland. We stopped to watch two cocks start a pickup fight.

We crossed the main road and drove toward the mountains, an hour before sunset, surprised that the small towns here aren’t as poor as we expected. The brick houses are well-constructed and the neighborhoods are cute and clean, even deep into the hills that roll down from the national park. The road pierces the jungle for miles and just when we were convinced it would cross to the opposite coast, it petered out to gravel. We turned around.

High in the hills we ran into a mobile vendor who sold us some tasty fried tofu snacks wrapped around beansprouts. The people were nice, most smiled at us, as is usual outside the cities. We were so deep I’m sure no other white people had been up that road any time recently, and the people who didn’t smile at us gawked in surprise. One side of the road teased glimpses across a valley that’s raw and thick with coconut palms and primary growth, jungle toppling onto itself. I wanted to take a picture of the natural beauty, but it would have been a picture that demands a pre-delete button, Azure and I joke. You know your next picture will be a throwaway, so you press “pre-delete,” then take it anyway.

We coasted down the hill and stopped at a grocery store for some carb snacks – chocolate bread, jackfruit chips and peanuts. At a gas station Azure offered a chip to the driver behind us, and he happily took her up on it. Everyone lol’ed.

We stopped at some food stalls and ordered bakso (soup with balls of “meat”), though after watching a lady make an egg-filled, veggie-rich soto ayam (chicken soup) we second-guessed our decision. The bakso held its own anyway. While deciding where to sit we did the usual smile-at-people routine, and one little boy called, “Tourist! Tourist!” but his mom shut him up quick. It reminded me of something that happened regularly when I said something stupid as a kid. Specifically I remember the Canadian Exchange – a yearly event when players from a Canadian soccer team stayed with families from our American team, then a couple weeks later the roles reversed. I welcomed the Canadian kid to our home, saying, “Welcome to the lifestyles of people on Somerset!” imitating Robin Leech. My mom shut me up quick, even though it was just silly in my mind, because of course we weren’t rich & famous. It was just another house, to me. Maybe we were rich compared to that kid, though, I don’t remember.

One of the years I stayed with a Vancouver family who lived in an apartment. They ate french fries with gravy and had a toddler daughter named Sidney – I felt sorry that she’d grow up in an apartment. I called my parents collect (they were proud that I could pull that off), but I was homesick and scared because the family was unexpectedly different. I don’t know if I felt sorry for them or uncomfortable about being outside my bubble – probably a combination – but I remember crying.

Today, in Bali, as we drove through some of the poorer neighborhoods and watched the pickup cock fight, I thought about how last year we passed similar Colombian poverty and felt sick from a distance. This year we’re in it, on a bike of course, but we face the differences and keep pushing ourselves to understand it. As we went deeper and deeper into the mountains I started feeling nervous. I glanced at the gas, we had plenty, so I had to ask myself, “You’re not nervous about the scooter; do you trust the people?”

On this trip I’ve come to the conclusion that fear is not a good reason to not do something. Fear is an emotional response to perceived risk, and our perceptions are so often wrong.

Back at the food stalls Azure ordered a delicious pancake thing heavy with chocolate, peanuts and condensed milk, and the cook battled flying ants as dusk dropped to night. We drove home through a storm of flying ants, they were all over the road, maybe attracted by the headlights. They floated thick like Seattle’s cottonwood blooms in truck headlights, then rolled like dry leaves as the trucks passed. As we crossed the bridge into Medewi two swarms of larger bugs pelted my neck and chest, at first I thought it was gravel. It was disgusting. As soon as we got home, and I snuck past the enormous spider, I washed my face and hands. Not much you can do about that.

The fact that the woman working at the hotel came down in price without us even asking for it should have been a sign. We put down our stuff and I went in to wash my face and arms from the exhaust. I was greeted immediately by an inch long creature coming out of the drain. All 20 or his legs were kicking and I screamed. Mike didn’t respond, he just laid on the bed. There were other, less offensive creatures in there as well and I picked up the shower head and mercilessly washed them all down the drain. I showered, closed the bathroom door tightly and took a nap.

We didn’t spend much time looking around the room in the daylight. We hadn’t thought about it then because we were so tired. When we woke up, we went for a long ride and when we got back it was dark. I went to switch on the porch light, so I could get my key in the door. I unlocked it and went in. Mike waited to tell me that there was a spider outside, not one foot from there my hand had flipped the switch. “Where?” I asked. He pointed. “Oh my god!” The spider was literally the size of my hand. And it was fast. We spent the next ten minutes trying to get it away from the door, trying to scare it away, but not have it attack us. Mike went to look at another room. I thought about the spider jumping onto my face.

It wasn’t any better, so we decided to stay. There was only one light in the room. It was the one above the fan. The other bulbs had been taken out and since Bali has made an attempt to use only energy saving bulbs, it was harsh, almost neon. It was hot in the room, so turning off the fan was not an option and the light flicked all night with the fan. The room felt not unlike a prison cell.

The bed was up against the wall and there were burn marks from the outlet that stained the wall and the sheets next to the outlet. We pulled the bed away from the wall, cautious not to look too closely at what was behind it. We laid down on the bed, clothes on. The light flicked. Flick, flick, flick, flick, flick. I looked down at the floor. A few big ants were running around. I killed them with my shoe. I looked over at the dresser and noticed two spider nests clinging to the underside of a small ledge. “They probably won’t hatch tonight,” Mike said. I was not willing to take that chance, so I took a piece of paper and scraped one off. A mama spider jumped out and I yelped and jumped back. I killed her with my shoe and then made Mike do the other one. My nerves couldn’t handle it.

I laid back down and stared at the ceiling for a while before I watched the littler ants rush in to clean up the remains from where I had killed the bigger ants and knew there was nothing I could do. I zipped up our bag and rolled the sheets around me tightly. It was 80 degrees in the room, but full clothes it had to be.

The next morning, we had our free breakfast on the porch. Our door was open and I could see two more nests in the door jam, mama spiders nervously pacing back and forth in the transparent cocoons. Beneath the door was an ant nest. It was inside our room. “Did you see that?” I asked, pointing to the ants. “Mmmmhmmm,” he said.

“I hope they don’t expect that we’ll stay here,” I said.
“I think they got the picture when they heard all the screaming last night.”

Mike would later tell me that if I had asked to pack up and drive back in the middle of the night, he would have gladly done it. The bugs won.

Nasi Campur

Nasi Campur stand

Then we go over to the Ice stand. I get the Es Buah (ice fruit) and Mike gets the Es Apokat (ice avocado). This consists of cut up pieces of whatever you ordered with shaved ice and condensed milk on top. Once you have eaten the fruit and ice, you drink the sweet milk until the bowl is completely dry. It might be my favorite desert, especially when my mouth is burning from the sambal. ($.30 each)

Es Buah

Es Apokat

We could be done after that, and most nights we are. Some nights I like to go to the sticky rice stall and get some sweet rice for the morning. It makes a good supplement to whatever free breakfast we get from the hotel. Before we found out about the Es Buah, I used to get the rice treats for desert. There are all sorts of rice products and some tapioca pieces at the stand too. When you have made your choices, they sprinkle shaved coconut and chocolate on your selection. ($.20)

Waiting for the rice treats

Adding the final chocolate.
Sometimes Mike wants a Bakso (meatball soup) or Soto Ayem (chicken soup) after dinner. I don’t think he needs this, but he says he does, so we’ll sit down and he’ll load it up with too much sambal and start sweating. He doesn’t think a meal is complete if his mouth isn’t burning afterward. They put cabbage and rice noodles in the bottom, then pour in the broth, top it with chicken and egg. The sauces are on the table to make it as spicy or sweet as you like it. ($.50)

Round 2 at the Nasi Campur stand

Things you can expect from the Gianyar market and others like it.

1. People will serve the food with their hands. They will not use a single utensil to transfer it from its bowl to your plate.

2. There will be flies and other bugs around. They will be on the food. This is unavoidable.

3. At no point will the food have been refrigerated during its journey to your mouth, including meat.

4. There will be dogs and kids running around.

5. The food will be authentic. It will be spicy and delicious.

6. You will know #5 is true because you will be the only white person there. On only one occasion did we see another white couple. They were with a guide and they did not eat any of the food, not even the es buah!

Years ago, Ari’s uncle converted from Hinduism to Christianity in an effort to become a better person. I don’t necessarily think Christianity’s values are any better than those of Hinduism, but Hinduism is the religious norm of Bali. Religious conversion would be a monumental, conspicuous declaration, a tangible reminder to himself that being good is a decision. I’m familiar with the strategy of rejecting cultural norms to feel I’m living intentionally, I noted, as Christmas approached in the US. I even got a tattoo to remind me.

Maybe I’m projecting. Ari’s uncle converted, then he was miraculously cured of some sickness in his leg, then he really let the faith rush in. He never brought up relgion, though, except when I asked.

Uncle swims farther against the tide in practicing organic farming on his clove farm. His pesticide consists of tobacco leaves burned under the tree to smoke out the insects. He uses natural sulfur to fight fungus on the roots. He sources his organic compost from the town’s restaurants & food stalls. Before the shift to organics, the chemical fertilizer stripped the soil of important components, and his clove trees hung sick until he tried the compost. He’s the only organic farmer locally. I asked if his religion and farming practices were related, but Ari said they weren’t. I think it’s too much a coincidence that the only Christian and the only organic farmer we’ve met happen to be the same person. My own conclusion is that this man thinks critically, holds himself to high standards and makes an effort to move in the direction of his principles – that’s how he’s different. I found him to be extremely thoughtful and polite.

Bapak

Bapak, a 71-year-old who looks 85, said his family split from a larger kingdom near Ubud (on Bali, crossed the mountains and established their new home in 1883. His is the seventh generation since the split, Ari’s is the eighth, the kids running around the living area comprise the ninth generation in Munduk. He emphasized that the pioneers’ names – and even those of the second and third generations – were never recorded and are forgotten.

The family has lived on this land – where we ate and talked – since the 1883 exodus. In 1965 Munduk got a road and was officially established. Ari can remember the road being bumpy and unpaved even in his lifetime. The lakeside fisherman’s village we visited, Limpah, still lacks a road. I asked if people live differently in Limpah than do people here in town. Ari didn’t understand the question at first, then he said, “no.” I suppose I asked a strange question in the first place, I’m not sure what answer I expected.

The Dutch ruled Indonesia for 300 years. During WWII a base building (like a communication hub) operated in Munduk, and Bapak remembers a Dutch soldier giving him a piece of bread when he was seven-years-old. Then the Japanese forced the Dutch out, ending the 300-year rule. The Japanese didn’t give Munduk trouble since it was so small and poor, they simply claimed all of Bali and that was it. Apparently they had a presence in Denpasar. Indonesia gained its independence when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I asked if Bapak had been frightened after the ruling powers left (would there be civil war?) but he said, “no.” Apparently Bali was pretty well-united.

We asked Bapak if he’s friends with Bapak Dewa from across the street – the coffee farmers’ grandfather. Satisfyingly, he is. They’re about the same age and I imagine they grew up together and share memories of different times. At a little temple in Ubud I met another old Bapak dressed in a nice sarong and headscarf; he asked me for money after I took his picture. Today we ate lunch with a family following a private tour of their farm, and they let us hang out and ask prying questions the entire day. They even bought us snacks. Then this evening another family cooked us dinner, and Ari translated all night while we asked prying questions of Bapak and the uncle. At no point throughout the day would anyone accept money from us, and though we spent almost nothing, it was by far the most valuable day we’ve had.