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Jan. 14, 2005 Reading about the tsunami reminds me of Bali and the good time that I had there. Bali, an island in the Lesser Sunda Islands, is one of about 28 provinces of the Republic of Indonesia, whose 13,000 islands are scattered between Southeast Asia and Australia, on the Pacific Rim. Half again as large as the state of Rhode Island, Bali, with its capital at Denpasar, is the home of about 2,500,000 people, 90% of whom are Hindu. Hindus ruled Java, just west of Bali, from the 6th or 7th century, founding a colony of Bali in the mid-14th century, The Muslims conquered Java around 1500, so that Islam has predominated there for these last 500 years. But they never got as far as Bali, which thus remains Hindu to this day. The weather in Bali, on the 7th latitude south of the equator, is just superb. All year long, day in, day out, the high is in the mid to upper 80's, and the low in the mid 70's, on the shore. In the many mountains of the island, it's cooler, in the 60's. Rainfall is fairly heavy at 70 inches a year, wet in January, February and March, drier in June, July and August. One may not speak of winter or summer in Indonesia. In 1989, I was in Singapore and decided to take a jaunt to Bali. I went to an agency near Rochor Centre, a shopping mall in the Lion City, if you translate 'Singapura', where I talked to a young Chinese travel agent, who enrolled me in a tour party of 6 or 7, mostly Chinese. Usually I don't like tour groups, but knowing hardly a word of the Malay language--which today goes by the name of Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Malaysia, depending on where you are--I figured I'd get lost if I went by myself. Meeting one morning then at Changi Airport, we all got on a Garuda Indonesia plane, flying to Jakarta in an hour. On a second one-hour flight, we made Denpasar, a city of 400,000 on the southern part of the island. Incidentally, there's a highway from Jakarta to Denpasar, with buses that are ferried across the 2-mile strait separating Java and Bali, but I didn't have the time for the 500 mile bus ride. The tour included excursions in a van driven by an English-speaking Balinese youth. Some of the sights we saw were memorable. The Balinese sun is so brilliant in places that it almost hurts to look upon the glossy greenery of the jungle. In places the branches of the trees arch over the road, as if you were driving in the nave of a cathedral. Here and there, rice paddies, swimming in a foot of water, also glisten in the sun. On the embankments and the dykes, water buffalo lie lazily around while ducks are busy overhead. Coconut groves are everywhere, and now and then out in the country you'll see a stone house with a roof of thatch. The major highways are two-lane, but the smaller ones are single lanes, with two-way traffic, which means that periodically you have to maneuver around an auto coming opposite, usually with a half dozen teenage girls standing on the side, giving instructions to the drivers. The transition from country to town is almost imperceptible. The thatched houses just start getting closer together till you have long rows. Each house is surrounded by a high stone wall carven in fanciful designs. The walls of adjacent houses form a rampart all along both sides of every lane in town. In many a town, there is no sign of what we call civilization: no stores, no street lights, no signs, no wires. Of course, in the cities, like Denpasar and Singaraja, all these things exist, but you wouldn't exactly compare them with Omaha or Bakersfield for modernity. At the time, I was told one could buy a thatched stone cottage in Denpasar for US $2500, but I don't know that you can just move in. After all, Indonesia, with 240,000,000 people, is already overpopulated. One day we visited the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Padangtegal, in the Ubud District. There over 100 long-tailed macaques live in the trees that canopy the sanctuary, no, not in cages, just in the woods. Accustomed to human beings, they descend to the ground to receive presents of bananas and peanuts, which vendors sell in nearby stalls. Monkeys are sacred in the Hindu religion, so you're not allowed to pet or handle them, but you may offer them tidbits, which they take politely from your hand-- sometimes. The monkeys are allowed to handle you though, and as I was walking along carrying a dozen bananas, a mature macaque jumped down on top of me from an overhanging bough, stealing two or three of them. There were a couple of monkeys at our hotel as well, but these could be petted. They seemed to love it too, purring like cats as you stroked them. We visited an art market near Denpasar. The Balinese are natural artists and artisans who produce masses of paintings, statues, wood carvings, jewelry and pottery. At that time, an artist earned $1 or $2 a day, so you could buy a whole forest of carved trees, complete with removable leaves with their petioles in sockets, for $300. Paintings began at $1. It was an irony for me that many or the primitive paintings seemed as well executed as those of Gauguin or Rousseau, which you probably couldn't touch for $1,000,000. Pura Taman Ayun temple in the town of Mengwi was another of our sights. Rather than a single building, the temple is a complex of buildings, surrounded by a fifteen-foot stone wall with 'gargoyles' spouting water into an encircling moat. Inside, in one of the shrines, beautiful Balinese ladies offered trays of fruit to the gods at their altars. There was also a cockfighting pit inside. At the temple, I was surrounded by a group of Indonesian teenagers who wanted to greet me and take my picture. I guess I was a novelty in those parts. We attended a Balinese opera, sung in Balinese, not the same thing as Bahasa Indonesia. The opera was performed in a walled enclosure beneath the open sky in midday. In the play, a lovely maiden is captured by robbers, later to be rescued by a friendly dragon. The dragon, red and gold, was a very realistic creation, with several youths hidden inside to give the dragon feet to walk with. An orchestra of gamelans played the music. The best part of Indonesia though is the people. If you walk down the street in Bali, absolutely everyone will greet you. Not one person will fail to say hello. And if someone speaks English, you can count on being able to strike up a conversation. In this regard, they have much to teach Americans. Poverty is severe there, but the children all look healthy. One odd thing I noticed is that some people keep pigs as pets. These are not the big fat porkers one usually thinks of in the US. They were lean and hairy, more like peccaries or javelinas. The only two things that keep me from moving, there are immigration requirements and the near-unavailability of many consumer products that I've grown to consider necessary, for instance, books and bicycle parts. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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