Bali

The rain in Bali is exciting.

A knock on the door and it was Hano the dog, telling me it was raining. At last! Finally the air pressure could drop and perhaps my persisting headache could be released! Hands under a streaming gutter, hands full of water I press my eyes with rain. Overjoyed with the rain, I celebrated by eating a mango, slung in a hammock, feet directly in the downpour; swinging fruits of joy. When the downpour had subsided, I puddled and stomped my feet in the pools, cleaning my feet of all the sweat and dirt. Afterwards grey clouds still hung in the sky despite the rain, a tiny bird is flitting between large leaves.

I’m staying at a homestay in a village called Mas, a 20 minute walk from the hectic Ubud. Ubud feels like a neo-zen-pseudo-spiritual planet for people who enjoy the idea of raw food and daily vinyasa yoga. I felt like there were many tourists there discussing feeling blessed to have spent two hours at the pool while they drank their raw cacao-spirulina-smoothie and “oh have you been to the ecstatic dance class at the Yoga Barn yet?! It was as freeing as the time I swam at the nudist beach in Mexico while the guy who owned the resort presided on the cliff above me, as naked as the day he was born.”

At one cafe Rose and I got stuck in conversation with a woman in her sixties who had recently discovered the joys of tantric sex, Tinder and tourism…

Four days spent in Ubud incited the cynic in me. In a staunch refusal to admit that yeah, ok, that raw mocha cheesecake is actually quite delicious, I rebelled by eating at the local warungs and ordering Balinese foods I couldn’t pronounce.

It is exhausting trying to remain stolidly cynical of others, and the heat wore me down. I began to ignore all the new-age Dharma Bums and enjoyed the sunshine.

Here are some things I noticed and learned while enjoying said sunshine:

Each morning everyone prays and performs puja. The shop keepers bless their shops, on the lowest step or on the footpath close to the curb. Small strips of a flaxen-looking plant (bamboo?) are wound around the handlebars of scooters. In the cupboards of shops and in the refrigerators of mini-marts, are bags of flaxen-bound tiny baskets, pre-stacked with marigolds flowers, slices of fruit, and sometimes a rolled cigarette. Once the puja basket is set down, incense is lit and a moment is taken. After a hot day of being trampled and wilted by sun, the puja offerings looked spent of their blessings. The tired offerings are cleaned away at some point in the night, ready for the puja the next day.

In the taxi from Denpasar to Ubud, the taxi driver turned the radio on at 6m to listen to the evening prayer. Gamelan and guttural singing. We all sat in silence.

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Bali kopi means Bali coffee. It’s about the cheapest drink on the menu and it’s delicious. Muddy, thick and black, it reminds me a lot of Turkish coffee. Sometimes served sweetened and sometimes not, for me it is the first drink of the day. A Bali custom I stumbled upon is to dunk sugary puffed rice in the black kopi each morning. I instinctively dipped the rice into the kopi which impressed my Balinese host family to no end (years of dunking biscuits into coffee in New Zealand trained me, unwittingly so).

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I felt a tickle, a crawling pitter patter under my shirt, tinkling up my stomach. I lift up my shirt and there is a large ant, crossing over pale-skinned terrain to… bite?

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Mas
Mas is a village made famous for woodcarving. I am staying with a Balinese family in a compound, which is how most Balinese people live. The compound seems to house a few families, or extensions of the one family, has a temple, and guestrooms for visitors. It is in a guest room that I am staying. Made and Nyoman are a really lovely couple who are looking after me and keeping me well fed with bananas and mangoes. Made is a wood carver, and he carves life-size komodo dragons.

Fatigued by heat and the Ubud tourism, I slept for the first two days of my time in Mas. On the third day (today) I awoke early and walked back into central Ubud to buy a new book. The heat is great for book-reading. It is too hot to move much, and also, I noticed many people seem to take rests in the highest heat of the day, and generally tend to be calmer, less harried, and warm(cos of the heat!). So I took a leaf out of their book and read read read. The road connecting Mas to Ubud is lined with frangipani trees. The frangipani flowers are used as offerings for the puja, and are knocked down with large bamboo poles. Faintly the flowers floral scent mingles with dusty scooter exhaust fumes.

Warungs are the local hole-in-the wall eating establishments. While I have been staying in Mas, I’ve been eating each meal at two of the warungs on my street. There is a community of expats and digital nomads living in Mas, as there is a coworking space in the neighbourhood, so I’ve been meeting a few people and making Enspiral connections. The Balinese stop at the warungs to eat, change cash, pick up takeaways, or for conversation with whoever else is there as patrons or cooking. Always people arrive by scooter, it feels like the warung is a pit-stop on the way to their destination.

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I’m at cafe very close to the Monkey Forest, too close for my liking, as someone who doesn’t like monkeys. Out of the shadows lopes a monkey, tail slinking, it’s eyes most probably simply casting around for a drink to steal but I fear the worse: death by monkey attack.

The couple next to me picked up the slingshot and pretended to shoot the slingshot at the monkey and instead of being afraid and running away, the monkey bared it’s teeth. Again I’m guessing, but I suspect monkey was probably incensed by the mere idea of stones being slung at it by pale humans with indistinguishable accents.