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A Passage to Bali

(Warning: this is a bloody long post)

Alright, half a moon ago, I went to Bali on a working holiday. My sister, the centre of gravity in the family (cos she’s the prime earner of this social unit) decided that she’s gonna celebrate the ending of her semester at SMU, where she’s taking a suicidal two-year Masters of Science in Accounting course.
Of course, a minor difficulty was that I had three papers to hand on the week I’m supposed to go to Bali, and had a History research paper due two days after I came back from that island. The result is being forced to work in the airport, on the flight, and in the hotel at night.

my workstation in the hotel: right beside the sink. And no, this is not loserish

Still, Bali (meaning ‘offering’ or ‘come back’ in local language) is a pretty nice place. Bowing down to the usual practice of using Singapore as a size of measurement, Bali is roughly eight little dots on the map.

placed here as a tribute to Lonely Planet
The people had ‘modernized’, however, and no longer goes around topless *ignores deafening chorus of groans*. Unfortunately (or fortunately for my history paper) we could only visit that island for 4 days 3 nights, and only had time for visiting the southeastern portions of the place (i.e., the more touristy places).
We stayed at Taman Ayu Cottages, Kerobokan, Kuta.

This being a budget trip (total fee for 4 people, including the mandatory climax at the DFS liquor store, amounts to less than $2,500, despite unrestrained spending), we stayed at their cheapest room.

Taman Ayu Cottages’ cheapest room

This being Bali, you only go for five types of tours: spa, beach-and-surfing, cultural, hunting-for-natives-in-local-grab, or some mix thereof. As this trip was planned by my sister, we went for a cultural thingy, and spent only two hours browsing in Kuta, the major bom- er, shopping district. Shopperholic Synonymous members should enjoy that district though; it’s quite small, but apparently some of the stores there sell some unique and classy stuff, with the only problem being that they target ang mos rather than Asians, but this means well-grown people should have a nice time there.

Kuta beach. It’s bloody crowded, though

Another thing: Bali’s tour guides are an inextinguishable source of local information. They’ll spam information (in a good way), especially about Balinese culture, telling you much more than you can be reasonably be expected to remember or want to know, unless you’re a history student specializing in Southeast Asia.

These guides are bloody polyglots. For example, my first-day guide (pictured above, with funny head thingy) was a near-sixty granddad. At that age, he just mastered Chinese as a spoken language less than half a year ago (according to him, at least) and speaks Balinese, English, French, German, Russian and Japanese to various other groups of people we met. Bloody hell. Of course, Differential Opportunities theory applies here as well, and some of the other guides’ command of spoken English… well, just say that if PROSE members are there, they will suffer repeated multiple strokes.

Anyway, the first thing you’ll notice in Bali, right after the sometimes flooded, usually narrow and always atmospheric roads, is the preponderance of rice fields.

Some of these fields have been cultivated for centuries, if the guides are to be trusted, and they lend a relaxed, tranquil ambiance to the air. Irrigation channels run everywhere. Apparently, the conditions are good enough that the Balinese are able to harvest up to three times a year. That seems to be a pretty high yield. The state government is too selling land with ownership up to 30 or 40 years, so those who likes to feel nostalgic (i.e. lie to themselves) about old, outmoded, edenic rural communities, you probably have a prime candidate for relocation…

Generally, the people of Bali marketed their culture and way of life for tourism. This means, for the inquisitive tourist, good things and bad things. The bad thing (among others) is, obviously, a commodified culture naturally means an additional variable to the original culture itself, and selling culture is different from just culture itself. When people interested in studying culture gets there, what you get is a modified, different culture rather than a less tempered product. This adds an additional interpretative layer to the object of study, and may well irk purists (no, I am NOT going into the Carr-Elton debate here).
The good thing is that there are no completely fabricated tourist traps here; there’s no need to construct those, as Bali had a pretty rich tradition to draw from. You get to peek into the everyday lives of the locals. There’s dozens of temple festivals, and their religion, a kind of Balinese Hinduism that emphasizes the worship of the three highest Hindu deities, Brahma (often represented by yellow or red), Vishnu (represented by white) and Shiva (by black). They wrapped checkered cloths on holy trees and around statues found on bridges, roundabouts, house entrances, etc, as to represent ‘holiness’.

Religion is inherent in their lives. Every day, before businesses open up, their owners will perform some ritual in front the shrines in front of every Hindu store.

They even put flowers from such rituals in the tour conversion van, although I suspect this may merely be an attempt to impress the tourists on the cultural internalization of the average Balinese. Culture is an important selling point of Bali, after all.

We stumbled upon some festival (I forgotten exactly which of their untold myriad of festivals) and saw these decorations on their streets:

On a related side note, this religio-cultural relationship spiraled into an intriguing focus, which decent, wholesome people like me believe is best represented by pictures:

Many know the great name of Sigmund Freud, but few knows the Austrian’s works were inspired by what he saw in Bali. And yes, the picture on the bottom right shows a man holding a huge knife staring maliciously at a woody.

Their architecture style is similar to the Buddhist kingdoms in Southeast Asia.

However, the symbolism behind the very similar style is different, at least, according to my sister, who is the familial expert on non-violent aspects of classical Southeast Asian history (she corrected our tourguide on a couple of occasions. Beware). For example, the number of levels in a roof has different meanings for the Balinese.
Roofs with two levels are dedicated to appease malign spirits, while those with odd numbers are for good spirits, ancestors or gods.

on the extreme left, for appeasing malign spirits

for worshipping ancestors

Anyway, the length of this post is getting way out of hand, and I’m just gonna throw many architectural pics at you.

Some typical Balinese house pics

Note that even a normal-class Balinese home has a courtyard just for religious ceremonies

We, as is mandatory for tours these days, visited the Bali’s cultural-tourist-industrial complex. Bali’s tour guides are an integral component of this complex, since they will bring you to all the traditional batik, wood-craving, oil painting, silversmithing trades, in the hopes that you’ll buy something from there. To give them their due, these handicrafts are certainly impressive, both in quality and in price.

Bloody beautiful, but the cheapest hankerchief-sized batik cost Rp 250,000. That’s S$ 40 minimum. Hell and Damnation

Other traditional stuff. The key here is to offer a third of the prize listed on the price tag. You may actually get that price.

Okay, this is really getting ridiculously long, so, to summarize, we visited a recently rediscovered 7th Century cave,

the Elephant Cave

saw the omnipresent phallic symbols inside it,

representing Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma

and met a genuine wise man paying a visit there

No tricksies! All Hail the Wise Man!

We went to some spice plantations,

and went to an active volcano which had scored a few thousand kills. The restaurant there isn’t anything special though, and its entrance is plagued with a bunch of endearing but pro-active and persevering hawkers.

We too visited a centuries-old temple, destroyed by another volcanic eruption in 1963 and restored (a.k.a. rebuilt) later on. Pretty big, but no Angkor Wat.

Finally, we visited an ancient Balinese court of justice.

the waiting room,

and the court itself

Just one last bit: for the wine lovers, the Balinese red wine tasted like the Vietnamese red wine Junming gave me: you need to mix it with ice water to dilute it in order to make it drinkable. Only drink it if you’re open-minded like Leon Trotsky. Their white wine tasted like hard liquor, with 40% alcohol. They ask you to squeeze lime in it, so that it will at least have a hint of lime. You can somewhat duplicate it back home by mixing really bad whiskey with lime juice. Of course, this comes with the corollary: don’t try this at home.
Lastly, a final piece, I promise. If you visit Bali and stay in Kerobokan, Kuta in Bali, take a taxi to this excellent bar called Tu’u Bar. It will cost about S$30 per person, but the food and the service there is bloody astonishing. It’s probably the best food I’ve eaten since Ding Tai Feng in Taipei.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures. Bali is somewhat worth it for screwing up a Chinese history research essay, and that’s really saying something.

it’s corkscrewed, actually. that’s probably even worse than normal screwing

Okay, finally signing off on. Cya buggers.

nostrils cleared on
Monday, April 16, 2007: 11:28 pm

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A Passage to Bali