Bali High

If you’ve never seen the classic musical, South Pacific, then you have no idea what the title to this post means.  Rather than making it easy for you, I’ll direct you to find the video in your local library and to watch it in its entirety.  I had to play in the pit band for this particular gem not once but twice, so I think it is only fair that I force you to suffer through it if you want to attain complete enlightenment. “Some enchanted evening…”  

Bali was wondrous. It had everything we could want. It is a one-stop tourist's dream. If you need a little of everything on your vacation and you have only a week or two, Bali is your place. But sadly, and this is entirely my fault, not Bali's, it was just okay for me.  What I mean is, if you hadn’t noticed, we have been out and about for a bit more than a week or two at this point. Eastern culture was beginning to get old for me. Now I’m not saying you should erase Bali as a destination from your bucket list.  By all means, go! You will have great fun!  The island is littered with impressive temples. It is just that the temples in Cambodia and Thailand are an entire level up on the impress-o-meter.  In addition, Bali does indeed have excellent scuba diving and snorkeling.  But our dive was not as good as ones I've been on in Hawaii or Mexico or the Caribbean.  The food was quite good, but no match for Thailand.  Bali has gorgeous mountains, but if you want that, I can think of dozens of easier locations to get to where the mountain scenery is equally majestic.  Bali’s people are incredibly friendly, but not quite so friendly as the Kiwi’s of New Zealand or the Ticos of Costa Rica or the Cambodians or even the French. Well, OK, maybe not the French. Just a little bad tasting humor there.

I know what you're thinking, and you've hit the nail on the head.  I’m a little jaded.  I’ve had too much of a good thing. Why shouldn’t you go to Bali and get nearly the best of all of these reasons to vacation in a one-stop shopping spree on one small Indonesian island?  After all, not everyone can spend a year traveling the globe seeking out the best of everything. But here is where my blog comes in handy.  Now you don’t have to seek out the best.  We’ve done the hard work for you!  Now you can just go directly to the best, without having to look for it!  You’re welcome.

In point of fact, we (yes, I am including myself) had a great time in Bali and are glad we saw it.  But for me, there was really very little that was new after six weeks of traveling in Japan and southeast Asia. We will go back to Hawaii again and again for the great weather and the beaches and the tropical island feel.  And those things are comparable in Bali.  It is just that Bali is so freaking far away, and there was really nothing to see there that we hadn’t seen already, only bigger, and better.  Again, I’m not sad we went.  How else would we have known?  But there you have it.  And I still do have details of our time to record.  So here it goes, and enough with the editorializing.  Just the facts:

We arrived at the airport and were picked up by a personal driver who drove us immediately to Ubud, the artistic center of the island, about an hour inland.  He dropped us off at our hotel and offered to give us a tour on another day; a proposal to which we agreed, with a smile.  Our hotel room was absolutely amazing.  It was huge when judging against most of the other places we’ve stayed.  It had a central living area and two large separate bedrooms each with its own full bathroom. The walls were twelve feet high, but not connected to the ceiling which was a sloping bamboo/thatch affair that towered a good twenty feet above us in the center, and left us with an open air feeling to the place.  There were exquisite hand carvings on the furniture and all of the dark wooden walls.   We loved the place, which was good, because our last day there was a national holiday and an annual day of rest for the locals.  This meant not only that we would not find anything open, but actually that we were by law restricted to our hotel room for the day.  No going out on the street was permitted.  Everyone was required to stay at home for the day.  So it was really fortunate that we loved our room.

Breakfast in the dining/living room in our fancy-schmancy suite.  Yes, that is an open air non-wall.  The kids' bedroom is through the doorway at the top of the picture.

Here's a different view, highlighting the roof.  You can just see the doorway to our bedroom at the bottom left.

This is that doorway when shut. That is all carved into the wood, and that kind of workmanship was everywhere in the hotel.

The day before the day of rest was a day of celebration.  It was a time to bury all of one’s demons and banish them to the underworld so one could start a new year fresh from fear and guilt.   The Balinese take this literally. Every Balinese village participated in building intricate yet enormous statues of plaster that were called Oga-Oga (which basically means monster or demon).  The locals paraded them around the streets at night, telling stories with song and dance.  We attempted to watch some of the parade but were so thwarted by the massive crowds that we gave up after about an hour and half having only seen two Oga-oga.  We had seen dozens of them in the days leading up to the big night, so we weren’t devastated, just a wee-bit disappointed.  In theory, the locals were supposed to burn their demons at midnight to banish them forever.  We did, however, see quite a few of these magnificent monstrosities still standing the next day.  It seems many people can’t bear to part with their creations after putting in so much hard work to build them.  

A couple of Oga-oga, each about 15 feet tall.

Here's another beauty.

And hard work seems to be a recurring theme in Bali.  We asked a few of the locals if they had ever been off the island, much less out of Indonesia altogether, and the answer was always “no”.  But the explanation was what was interesting about their answer.  Eventually many of them cited lack of money as a big reason for never travelling.  But that was never the first reason cited.  They always said that they, the Balinese, were too busy to go anywhere.  And I truly believe that.  They are constantly preparing offerings (often just artsy arrangements of flowers and plants and sometimes food) for their Hindu gods and they are putting in a tremendous amount of effort making these offerings.  They also seem to spend more time in prayer than seems possible while still going about your daily life.  But this is just “what you do” if you are Balinese.  They seem to reap enjoyment from it, so who am I to question it?  I simply wanted to explain what keeps them so busy day in and day out, so that they have no time for the frivolity of something like travel.

This stone carving in a temple wall had about a dozen "offerings" scattered about beneath it.

I think the best part of all of the offerings is the sheer number of beautiful statues that riddle the island.  There are easily more Buddha statues on the island then there are people.  They range from thimble-size to two-story building size.  But on top of that, there are also millions of carved or molded or otherwise created renditions of hundreds or maybe even thousands of different Hindu gods.  You cannot stand anywhere on the island and look about you, without spotting at least one statue somewhere, whether it be carved in stone, or wood, or made of gold or bronze or silver or pewter.  The artistry is brilliant.  But again, nothing we hadn’t seen, although in much less abundance, in Thailand or Cambodia or Malaysia or even Japan.  I imagine India to be much the same in this regard, as this is from where the Hindu gods originated. Morocco will be a marked change since the Muslim tradition requires that no images or likenesses ever be created. But enough about idols and religion.  Where’s the action?  Where’s the drama in this post?

We went river rafting one day in Ubud.  The rapids were small, but incessant, and so we had a lot of fun.  The highlights were supposed to be the waterfalls that emptied into the river on either side as more often then not we were between high cliff walls as we floated, and they were definitely beautiful, but we are really jaded when it comes to waterfalls at this point.  I imagine I’ll never go to Niagara, as it would be too much of a disappointment for me.  Maybe after a few years, I’ll have lost my tolerance for the things and will be a cheap travelling date once again. 

Josh got to kayak for half of the river while the rest of us had to stay in our raft.  That's him in the little boat.

For me the actual highlight of the rafting trip, other than winning the splashing war against the nearby boats, was the plethora of intricate carvings in the cliffwalls themselves.  No description would suffice.  But the carvings went on for at least a kilometer and went up many meters from the water level.  They were pretty cool.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

Carvings like this went on forever on the cliff walls at river's edge.

Here's more.

And more.

What the heck.  One more with the goose.

We also went to the famous monkey forest in Ubud.  It was a very short walk from our hotel.  Hundreds of monkeys lived there and ate fruit fed to them by the tourists who could buy the fruit from vendors along the way.  We watched the baby monkeys for nearly forever.  We watched teenage monkeys wrestling with each other and with the tourists. We watched crotchety old grandpa monkeys who couldn’t be bothered to do anything other than bare their teeth at us.  It was all pretty cool, but again, we were already pretty monkeyed out before this, after the close encounters with monkeys in Costa Rica and in Cambodia and even in Kuala Lumpur.  I did have one little guy jump up and sit in my lap for a while. Then he sat on my head for another not so short while. And then, after all of that buddying up, he decided that he suddenly didn’t like me.  So he bit me on the arm.  No, he didn’t break the skin, so no, I won’t be foaming at the mouth any time soon.  And the biting monkey wasn’t nearly as bad as the monkey ten minutes earlier who decided to pee on me which I didn’t notice until I was nice and soaked.  But the temple that the monkeys lived in was quite impressive and the baby monkeys were pretty darn cute, so we had a splendid time all in all, despite the urine.

Told you they were cute.

The guys on either side of the staircase, not so cute.

OK, now we're talking whole new levels of cute.

Other than the monkeys and the rafting trip, Ubud was about chillin’ at our beautiful hotel, getting some homework done, and making arrangements for our Europe trip.  We did do a lot of window-shopping and would have loaded up on beautiful artsy souvenirs, but alas, our suitcases are too full to fit anything new.

Our personal driver finally did give us that tour of the southern half of the island.  It was mostly more temples and more waterfalls.  One temple was called the temple of the Holy Water.  There were hundreds of natives all squished like sardines in a swimming pool fed with water pouring out the walls of the temple.  The line to get in the pool was enormous.  I guess that Holy Water really works.  We never did figure out what exactly made it holy.  When Carol asked, the driver’s reply was that it was because it was in the temple.  So which came first?  The temple or the water?  Why is the water in other temples not considered holy?  We’ll never know.

You'd think it was holy tequila or something, with this many people wanting in.

On our little island tour, we did get to stop at an especially beautiful rice farm where the terracing of the rice fields was exquisitely done.  That was new for us, since we decided to skip Vietnam.  You had to be there to appreciate the beauty of it.  For the kids, even being there wasn’t enough to make appreciation happen.  But I guess I could say that about a lot of the stops we’ve made on this trip. 

All that stuff that looks like grass?  That's all rice.

If you want to enter one of the temples, you've got to put on a sarong.  I make this look good.

Even the trees in the temples have to wear a skirt.

This one is called the elephant cave temple.

After the tour, we said a teary goodbye to our driver and he dropped us off at our hotel in Denpasar.  We had three days to appreciate the beach.  Carol and I did just that on our second night when we ate dinner literally on the beach (sand in our toes) as we watched the sunset while we chowed down on every kind of seafood known to human beings in one meal.  I distinctly remember an entire fish (eyeballs and all), shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, calamari, and scallops.  I’m probably forgetting something, but really we were paying more attention to the sunset then we were to the food.  The sunset was “brilliant”, as our new British friends are fond of saying.  Sadly, we didn’t have our camera at the time, and we didn’t get back the next night.

Here's a sunrise at the airport when we had to leave.  Not quite as good as the beach sunset, but not too shabby either.

Even more sad, however, was the next day, when we went back to the beach after it had been raining for awhile.  It was less a beach, than a dump.  There was so much trash in the ocean and on the sand that you couldn’t take a step without touching something plastic.  Josh tried to get in the water once, but he was quickly grossed out.  I was so depressed, that I had to go back to the hotel immediately.  Carol continued to walk along the beach for a mile or so.  She says that the trash situation was not a problem much further down near a resort hotel.  I guess the hotel pays people to clean up their section of the beach.  But her story didn’t lighten my mood any.  I just get so worked up when I am reminded how poorly we as human beings do at our duty as stewards for the Earth.  Bali is supposed to be a little bit of heaven on Earth.  Instead, at least at that stretch of beach, it was just nasty.  No, I didn't take any pictures of this.  I don't want to remember it.

The only activity we did while staying in Denpasar was a morning scuba trip.  We were picked up from the hotel and driven about an hour and a half to a cozy little cove where a boat awaited us.  Carol and I did an hour scuba-dive and the kids snorkeled under the supervision of the captain.  The visibility was perfect.  The number of creatures was impressive.  But the variety was only so-so.  We saw garden eels sticking their heads out of the sand.  I saw a lobster, but only for a split second because it scooted under a rock and out of sight.  I had no idea lobsters could move so fast.  We saw a baby reef shark.  There were thousands of jellyfish that were fun to squish (think Dory in “Finding Nemo”) and about a dozen or so species of tropical fish including Nemo’s (clownfish).  It wasn’t the best dive trip we’ve ever had, but it was good fun.  For the kids, the highlight had nothing to do with ocean-life.  While we were heading back to shore, the captain let the kids sit on the stabilizing rails that hung out from either side of the boat.  Rather than trying to explain what I mean, I’ll let the pictures show it all.

To get an idea of what I mean by "stabilizers" on the boat.  Look at how beautiful the water is!

Josh flying back to the beach.

One gratuitous underwater shot.

Even a couple of days before we left Bali, I think we were all ready to go.  This was to be our last stop in Asia (if Indonesia is even considered part of Asia).  We had had our fill of Eastern culture, at least for a while.  Carol and I were looking forward to Morocco and then Europe and all that Western culture brings.  The kids were looking forward to the Singapore Airlines flight and to the Singapore airport itself, which is more of an amusement park and shopping mall than it is an airport.  We have had maybe too much of a good thing.  We slept in eighteen different places in six different countries in Asia.  We have that feeling you get when you’ve been out in the sun all day and are now bone-tired.  Only we’ve been out in the sun for six months and could really use some sub-thirty degree (Celsius) temperatures for a bit.  Not that the Moroccan desert will cure what ails us.  But at least it will be a dry heat, which is a whole lot different.  Sub-hundred-percent humidity will be nice too.  And how could we not look forward to a camel ride in the Sahara?

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve