Photos:
Kuta: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060118&l=4d7c5&id=1101094
Central Bali: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060344&l=097e7&id=1101094
Ubud Monkey Forest: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060353&l=4663e&id=1101094
Bukit Peninsula: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2060355&l=c22e7&id=1101094
After a few days of cold rain in northern Vietnam, I was more than ready to return to the tropical paradise known as Bali—the little island that was also my first love in Southeast Asia back in September 2007. I flew through Kuala Lumpur, and because technically I was taking two separate flights instead of one connecting flight, I had to pass through Malaysian immigration. I had slept most of the way from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, and when I woke up we were landing, and I hadn’t yet received an immigration card. Assuming the cards were handed out while I was sleeping, I asked the flight attendant for one as I left the plane, but to my surprise she told me that immigration cards were no longer required. Sure enough, I passed through immigration with nothing but a swipe of my passport—no filling out forms in block letters with blue or black ink, no writing my name in handwriting that isn’t legible anyway, and no lying about my “Address in Malaysia” (as if I ever know that in advance). Malaysia, it seems, is embracing the computer age. Will all you other countries do the same, please?
Both my flights were uneventful and on time, which was no surprise given that I was flying AirAsia. I still have yet to have a flight on AirAsia be delayed for more than a few minutes. I really love this airline.
As I walked though the automatic doors that separated the air-conditioned terminal from the boiling Bali air, I immediately reevaluated my happiness at having traded the cool days and shivery nights of north Vietnam for the flaming sun and suffocating humidity of Indonesia. Had I forgotten India? Was hot weather really my thing? I decided to stick close to the ocean, or to make sure that I was on a motorbike with the wind in my face.
But as it turned out, the heat wasn’t much of a problem during my stay in Bali. The rain, on the other hand, was. According to my guidebook and multiple external sources, the rainy season doesn’t affect Bali much. If that’s true, I’d hate to see the islands that it does affect, because by my estimation it rained nearly half the time I was there.
The first day, however, was nothing but sunshine. Sunshine so hot that despite the sunscreen that I had lathered onto my skin, I left the beach looking something like a lobster. That probably had something to do with the fact that I spent about seven hours in the water surfing—I think it was the reflection from the surface of the water that got me.
But the good news is that by the end of the day I was standing up on medium-sized waves and riding them for something like ten seconds each. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I had rented the biggest surfboard on the whole beach. Riding this thing was like standing on top of an aircraft carrier—the waves were crashing below me, but I hardly felt a thing.
That night I walked the streets of Kuta and checked out some of the (in)famous Bali nightlife that I had mostly stayed away from during my last visit. The various bars and clubs ranged from totally clichéd to actually kind of fun, and the one I eventually settled on featured a local band that covered Western rock ‘n roll hits—everything from Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘N Roses to Rage Against the Machine. They did one of the best “Killing in the Name of” renditions that I’ve ever heard.
By the time I headed back to my guesthouse it had started to rain, and the rain continued all night and into the following morning. The annoying thing about rain in Bali is that it washes all the trash from the alleys and makeshift garbage dumps into the ocean, so when I got to the beach around noon to continue my surfing education I found the water littered with plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and even toothbrushes—hardly the image Bali seeks to promote.
I surfed anyway, but by mid-afternoon the waves had died down to almost nothing, and the veteran surfers on the beach told me that the “swell” wouldn’t be “working” for several days. I thanked them for the lesson in surf lingo and made plans to head north to the central mountains the following morning.
I rented a motorbike from my guesthouse for Rp 30,000 (~$3) per day, packed a small daypack, and set off the following day, passing first through the hip clubbing area called Seminyak and then through Bali’s largest city, Denpasar. After Denpasar the landscape changed drastically; asphalt, concrete and billboards were replaced by palm trees, rice terraces, and locals dressed in traditional Balinese garb. I was back in the Bali I loved.
I rode north through some of the most beautiful rice fields I’d ever seen, and gradually the terrain got hillier until I had to downshift to third gear and continue that way for the rest of the journey. The weather changed, too; the blue skies and intense heat of south Bali were replaced by clouds, cool mist, and, eventually, steady rain. Luckily my daypack was small enough to fit on the motorcycle seat flush against my back, so my body blocked the rain and my camera, books, and extra clothes remained almost entirely dry.
I took a few wrong turns on the way up the mountain—the maps in my guidebook were too general to be of much help on these back roads—but eventually I reached my destination: Danau (Lake) Bratan, set in a valley surrounded by several dormant volcanoes. I’d spend the afternoon and night here and continue north the following morning.
I checked into a cute guesthouse with a sweeping view of the lake and the mountains and then headed down to the shore of the lake to have a look around. Perched on the shore of the lake was Pura Ulun Danu Bratan, which is supposedly a very important temple for Balinese Hindus. Dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of the waters, the temple plays host to pilgrimages and ceremonies by Balinese who wish to ensure a plentiful supply of water for their villages. Fittingly, the holiest part of the temple sits on two islands just offshore and seems to float on the water that it blesses.
After wandering around the temple for a bit, I drove my motorbike back toward town and stopped at the enormous fruit market that lay just off the main road. The lush valleys in central Bali are perfect for growing a wide array of fruit, and just about every type I could imagine was featured at the market. The fruit from this part of Bali supplies most of the resorts and restaurants near Kuta.
By this time the rain had stopped, so I got back on my motorbike and drove through the mountains to two lakes a few kilometers northwest of Danau Bratan—Danau Buyan and Danau Tamblingan. The road took me along the ridgeline high above Danau Buyan, and the view down onto the lake and the surrounding farming villages was spectacular.
At this point the sun was drifting lower in the sky, and not wanting to drive down the steep mountain road in the dark I hurried back down to Danau Bratan and arrived at the shore of the lake just before sunset. But with only a few kilometers to go before I reached my guesthouse, I ran into a procession of a few hundred locals that was taking up the entire road. I inquired as to what sort of procession this was and learned that it was a funeral procession for an important citizen who had recently died, which seemed strange given all the cheering that was going on (and some of the members of the procession even waved at me and asked me to take their picture). Perhaps it’s the Hindu belief in reincarnation that made this funeral a joyous rather than a somber affair? If this was a particularly virtuous man, then I suppose he’ll be reborn as something even better next time around?
The following morning I ate breakfast at my guesthouse with a guy from Las Vegas (the rare American sighting in Southeast Asia), and then I visited the Bali Botanical Gardens, which were on the lower slopes of one of the mountains surrounding Danau Bratan. My guidebook gave the gardens rave reviews, but I was a bit disappointed with the general lack of flowers. The green plants were plentiful, sure, but I was hoping for bright tropical flower blooms—after all, if I just wanted to see green plants in Bali, I wouldn’t need to visit any botanical gardens.
Around 10am I set off for Gunung Batur, an active volcano about 20km due east of Danau Bratan. That’s 20km as the crow flies—but because the terrain in between Bratan and Batur is nothing but rugged volcanoes, there isn’t a road that connects the two places. To get to Batur I’d have to drive north all the way to the coast, and then drive east along the coast and back up the mountains to Batur.
Despite the roundabout route I’d have to take to Batur, the journey was still only about 80km, so I expected to be at Batur in a little over an hour. But the ride turned out to be far slower than I expected, first due to the steep, tortuous mountain roads that took me down to the coast, then the heavy traffic I hit in Singaraja, Bali’s second largest city, and finally the sharp climb back up the mountains to Batur. But all the changes in altitude did provide me with spectacular views of the island—from the 2000m peaks above Danau Bratan I could see all the way down to the north coastline, and from the 1700m road around Batur’s crater I caught views of south Bali all the way to Kuta. And with the drastic changes in altitude came abrupt changes in climate—the Bratan highlands were cool and damp, the north coastline hot and dry, and the Batur highlands cool again, but not quite as wet as around Bratan. I got rained on a bit during my descent to Singaraja, but the climb back to Batur was dry.
I reached Batur just after noon and stopped by a famous temple that was once buried by an eruption of the volcano. It was here that I ran into the worst money-grubbing touts that I’d met in all of Bali. To visit the temple, I was required to wear a sarong and a sash, both of which the touts were prepared to loan or sell to me at some ridiculous price. Fortunately I had a sarong in my bag that I was using mostly as a towel, but I still had to get my hands on a sash. Figuring I’d never need the sash again, I told the ladies that I wanted to rent one, and asked how much it might cost to use it for half an hour or so. The response? Twenty thousand rupiah—just over two dollars. While that might not seem like much, it seems a little ridiculous when you consider that I paid only Rp 10,000 to buy the sarong I was wearing, and that the sarong used about fifty times as much fabric as the sash. By my estimation, the sash should cost Rp 1,000-2,000 to buy, and less than that to rent, but, wanting to be done with the whole thing, I offered to pay Rp 1,000 to rent it for a half hour. But the ladies wouldn’t give it to me for anything less than Rp 10,000 even though I sat there and bargained for fifteen minutes. It wasn’t until I told them that I didn’t even really care about visiting the temple and walked back to my motorbike that the price quickly collapsed to Rp 1,000. I think that’s the first time I’ve had to use the walk-off since India.
It was only later that I realized why the touts were so bad around Gunung Batur—apparently, this is a big stop for the big luxury buses that drive package tourists around to see the sights of Bali. The touts here are used to charging ridiculous prices for everything and getting away with it, so it takes a good deal more effort for someone like me to get a fair price.
The temple, ironically, turned out to be nothing special, and after a quick fifteen minute visit I continued along the road that looped around the rim of the volcano crater to the village of Penelokan. It was here that the views got particularly good—looking down into the crater, I saw first green farms built on the hillside, then black lava flows left over from the last eruption, in 1994, and then the giant black cone rising up in the center of the crater. In addition, the section of the crater to the east of the cone was filled with water, forming the attractive Danau Batur.
I admired the view from Penelokan and then ventured off on a side road that took me down into the crater and to the shore of the lake. I had planned to stay the night in a village beside the lake, but so many touts approached me trying to sell bracelets and cheap artwork while I ate my lunch that I decided I had seen enough. I’d leave Batur to the package tourists. On a side note, the lunch was quite good—fresh fish directly from the lake. If only I’d been allowed to eat it in peace.
I set off from Batur around 1pm and planned to arrive in Ubud, about 40km south, by two. This time the roads were fairly straight and well-paved, so I made good time for the first 20km, but then I hit a powerful rainstorm that seemed to come out of nowhere. The rain stung my skin but, feeling macho, I kept riding until it was coming down so fast that I could hardly see where I was going and my bag was getting wet. Apparently I’m not quite as much of a tough guy as I’d hoped.
I waited out the rain under the roof of a roadside stand and practiced some Bahasa Indonesia with the storeowner, who didn’t speak a word of English. The popular first question to ask foreigners seems to be “Sudah lama Bali?” which translates literally as “Already long Bali” but means “Have you been in Bai long?” In general Indonesian is a very efficient language—many words are understood and thus omitted. For instance, there is no “to be” verb—it’s always understood. Also, verbs don’t change for tense, nor do they change for subject—“makan” means (I) “eat,” (he) “eats,” (I) “ate,” and (I had) “eaten” (the last would translate “sudah makan,” or “already ate”). All this makes things quite convenient for people like me who are trying to chatter like the locals without any formal training.
Eventually the rain stopped and I continued on to Ubud, and by the time I arrived the sky was blue and there was no sign of rain in any direction. The weather here changes more rapidly then anywhere I’ve ever been.
Some of you might remember that I spent a good amount of time in Ubud last year attending the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Indeed, I was here for nearly a week in September 2007, but I was so busy attending the many festival events that I didn’t get a chance to see much of the town itself. Ubud is a beautiful and wonderfully relaxed little town, and it’s become the counterpoint to Kuta for both package tourists and backpackers. Packed with local artists, fine restaurants, and traditional culture, and surrounded by verdant rice fields, it’s no surprise that Ubud has already been “discovered”—it’s now the second most popular destination in Bali after Kuta.
I tried to check into the bungalows I had stayed in last year, which were set off a quiet side road overlooking the rice fields, but they were already occupied and I had to settle for another place closer to town. In general, though, accommodation in Ubud is a pleasure—for Rp 50,000 (just over $5) you can get a spacious private bungalow surrounded by rice fields or gardens and including hot water and breakfast in the morning. Even for Southeast Asia, that’s a steal.
One of the main attractions in Ubud is the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, which is home to three temples and over 100 Balinese macaques, a breed of the most successful family of primates on earth (after humans, of course). I hadn’t visited the forest on my last visit, so after checking into my bungalow I immediately set off for the place, which is just south of town. The monkeys look cute and harmless at first glance, but in reality they’re anything but. I bought a few bananas at the entrance to feed to them, and as I pulled them from my bag two monkeys jumped on me and ripped two of them from my hands. These monkeys are greedy, aggressive, and seemingly quite well fed. And if you come too close to their babies, they bare their teeth and hiss at you. Not exactly the type of animal you’d want to take home as a pet.
I wandered around the monkey forest for half an hour before the sky darkened and then opened. I sprinted back to the ticket booth to protect my camera and made it underneath the shelter just as the rain really started to come down. Once again, I hadn’t seen the change in weather coming at all—only an hour before, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
I was hoping the rain would go as quickly as it had come, but an hour later I was still standing under the ticket booth and the rainstorm had turned to a thunderstorm. Sick of huddling under the ticket booth and resigned to getting wet eventually, I put my camera under my shirt and ran back to my bungalow. By the time I got there my clothes felt as if they had just been submerged in a pool, but I’m happy to say that my camera is just fine.
As it turns out my decision to run home was the right one because the rain continued for the next several hours, until well after dark. Thankfully I had brought Love in the Time of Cholera along, and with the thunderstorm raging outside my bungalow proved quite comfortable (and waterproof).
The following morning I did some more exploring in the monkey forest, but by mid-morning rain was threatening again and I decided to head south to the arid Bukit Peninsula (south of Kuta) in hopes of dry weather. The journey from Ubud to Ulu Watu, on the southwestern tip of the island, took me about two hours, and I’m happy to say that I managed to outrun the rain.
My destination in the Bukit Peninsula was my favorite beach in the entire world—a place known as Lemongkak to the locals and “Dreamland” to the few foreigners who have managed to find it. This is the beach on which I had spent my 25th birthday, and the same one I visited a couple weeks later with Natsumi. I had some friends there and was looking forward to seeing everyone again. But most of all I was looking forward to spending the next two days on an isolated beach surrounded by cliffs, covered in clean, white sand, and fronted by turquoise water and waves perfect for bodysurfing.
I had picked up a more detailed roadmap of south Bali in Kuta, and it looked as if I could take a shortcut to get to Dreamland, so I made a few turns and came at the beach from a new direction. I wasn’t positive that I was going the right way, but I figured that I could always turn around and go the old way if the new one didn’t work out.
When I reached the end of the road that would supposedly take me to the north side of the beach, I came upon a construction site—what looked like the beginnings of a hotel being built on a cliff, and cranes and construction workers everywhere. Clearly, I had taken a wrong turn. I retraced my path and made for the beach in the longer, old-fashioned way.
But as I approached the beach from the road I had driven twice before, I saw the same cranes I had seen only a half hour earlier. I wondered how I could have taken a wrong turn again this time, and then it hit me—this was the beach. The cranes were sitting on the very sand that I had stood on to watch the sun set on the night of my 25th birthday. The construction of the hotel was taking place directly on top of the bungalow I had slept in only six months ago. I felt sick to my stomach. What had happened to this place?
I climbed down to what was left of the beach, and the scene got even worse. The beach was littered with plastic bottles, empty bags of potato chip, and candy bar wrappers. A channel had been cut down the middle of the sand, and it was filled with dirty water and floating refuse. All of the simple bungalows and restaurants that used to sit on the sand were demolished.
I asked the construction workers what had happened, and my suspicions were confirmed—someone had bought the land, realizing it was a truly beautiful spot, and had begun building a luxury hotel on what used to be a beach used by locals and a few foreign backpackers. All the bungalows and food stalls had been demolished four months ago, and the foundations of the hotel were laid two months later. I felt as if I wanted to puke.
Dejected, I got back on my motorbike and drove a few kilometers south to another beach—one not quite as attractive or private as Dreamland had been, but still a peaceful spot. I spent the afternoon on the beach (which was littered with trash that had presumably floated down from the construction site), and that night I hung out with some surfers who were staying in the bungalow next to mine. I told them about the terrible happenings at Dreamland, and they said they had heard about it only yesterday from the owner of these bungalows. I immediately jumped up and went to find the man, desperate to find out whether he had any more information about the place. Sure enough, he did; the land was not bought by just anyone, but by the family of Suharto, the recently-deceased corrupt dictator that ruled Indonesia for 30 years. How fitting that his family should be the one to ruin this perfect place—first he robbed his country blind, and now his family is using the profits to destroy the country’s natural beauty. Lovely.
I spent the next day at Pantai Suluban, the beach that I had settled for after finding Dreamland in a state of ruin. I made a few side trips around the peninsula—one to an important temple called Pura Luhur Ulu Watu that is set on the cliffs overlooking the crashing waves below. While visiting the temple I ran into some more friendly macaques of the same breed as the ones in Ubud, and these guys were just as friendly—one jumped on an old woman, ripped her glasses off her face, and escaped into a tree, whereupon he proceeded to chew the glasses into a gnarled mess. I felt lucky to have only had my bananas stolen.
Eventually I made my way back to Kuta in time for one more night of revelries before my flight to Jakarta. I went to dinner with the Swedish girls I had met back in Vang Vieng, Laos—they had just come from Singapore, and were headed next to Australia and New Zealand. Their only problem was that they were almost out of money, and Australia isn’t particularly easy on the wallet. They said that most likely they’d need to cut the trip short and return to Scandinavia, where they’d proceed to work for two more months before they had enough money saved to travel for another five. I didn’t feel particularly sorry for them.
As I packed my bag for my flight to Jakarta, I found myself leaving Bali with far less trouble than I had last fall. Bali was almost perfect last September—blue skies all the time, pristine beaches, and, most importantly, I was seeing everything for the first time. My return during the rainy season meant foul weather, trash in the ocean, and disappointing development. I still consider Bali to be the closest thing to paradise that I’ve ever experienced, but this time around I managed to spot a few blemishes as well.
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