A Long Weekend in East Bali - Sideman - Day 1

We just returned from three days in rural east Bali.  We had a chance to see a couple of villages that were off the regular tourist track, giving us another taste of what Dewa calls the "real Bali", a place that we see often, but only experience occasionally.

We took advantage of a long weekend to meet up with friends from Green School in the small fishing village of Amed, about an hour north of where we had stayed previously in the tourist town of Candidasa.  Charlotte has great fun playing with their two boys.   It's disappointing for Alexa not to have someone her age, but she enjoys playing mother hen to the group.  Separately, our kids are quite a handful, but when they play together they absorb each other's energy, making it easier on us parents. 

We set off a day earlier than our friends so we could spend a day en route exploring the scenic village of Sideman (see-du-mun), in the hills below Mount Agung.  We had heard of its beauty, and wanted to see it for ourselves.

rice fields in Sideman

We arrived in the late afternoon.  Our small hotel adjoined working rice paddies and overlooked a vista of terraced rice paddies as far as the eye could see with mountains in the distance.  It is so ridiculously beautiful that it looks unreal.

The girls and I wandered over to check out the farmers threshing and bagging up the rice, and a little freestanding hut that housed cows.  We then headed for a swim in the pool at the larger, newer sister hotel a few yards down the road.

The next morning we headed into town with one of the hotel staffers to watch local weavers at work.  Sideman is famous as a weaving village, specializing in the ikat style of weaving where the weft thread is resist-dyed to create a pattern when woven.

weaving ikat fabric with the resist-dyed thread in the foreground

We were led into a large room filled with dozens of wooden looms.  About ten or so were in use, with young women weaving intricate patterns on these looms that they operated manually.  Pedals at their feet caused the shuttle to zoom back and forth.  After each pass they pulled on a wooden board that pressed the thread into place.  The thread was very fine and the work was slow going.  

Intricate patterns emerged in the cloth yet only a single thread was used.  Our guide explained that the pattern is painstakingly dyed into the thread in a process that takes several days.  The thread is laid out on a pattern board, then plastic is tied around the sections of the thread that are to remain white.  A couple of photos of the pattern boards are shown below.  From looking at the pattern boards you can see the tremendous effort it takes to wrap the thread onto the pattern board, and to then tie thousands of little pieces of plastic around all the parts that need to resist the dye.  After the plastic is attached, the thread is dyed in the base color.  The plastic is then removed, revealing the white thread beneath.  The white sections of the thread are then painted the remaining colors in the pattern by hand.

Once this preparatory work is done, the single thread can be used to weave the fabric and the pattern will then emerge on its own.  Great care needs to be taken to keep the thread aligned with the pattern, especially when the thread breaks, as the weaving needs to be restarted so as not to throw off the pattern.

Alexa and Charlotte were intrigued by the weaving process and spent quite a while absorbed in watching the young women weaving.  I was impressed with the skill that went into producing the patterned fabrics, but also somewhat disheartened by the futures these women face.

Our guide said that the young women could produce about two meters during an eight-hour workday for which they would be paid about 20,000 rupiah, or $2.  Even after all this time in Bali it is still hard to absorb the fact that many Balinese need to find a way to survive on $2 per day, and remarkably somehow manage to do so.

It is also sobering to contrast the enormous manual effort that goes into growing rice or weaving these fabrics, and realize that these workers are competing in an international marketplace against highly automated operations that, in the case of the weaving, can produce in a few seconds a greater quantity of an arguably higher quality product than these weavers can produce after days of painstaking effort.

The room with the looms was part of a larger family compound that also housed a store.  We checked out the finished fabrics in the store, and made a couple of purchases.

One of the dilemmas in Bali is how to handle bargaining.  Bargaining is expected, and is part of the social interaction between buyer and seller.  It is a little ritual, to be done in good humor and not antagonistically.  So fully aware of how much effort goes into producing the fabrics we wished to purchase, and how little the weavers made, I still bargained with the shop manager over the prices of the fabrics.  I don't think the trickle down theory applies that directly in Bali, as the women who worked as weavers were not part of the same family as the one who owned the workshop and the store.  Whatever I paid for the fabrics was going into the store owner's pocket and not into the pocket of the weavers and was unlikely to affect their wages. 

Our guide then offered to take us to his home, where his wife wove fabrics using a traditional hand loom.  We followed our guide on foot for 15 minutes down side streets and back roads and along foot paths until we reached his family compound.  

We met his wife and two small children.  They live in a two room dwelling in his family compound, where his parents, uncles, and other relatives also live.  The bedroom was almost entirely taken up by a large bed where it seemed all four family members slept.  It was the first time we had been invited by a Balinese family into their home (though we had toured one earlier on our eco-bike ride).   It was clear how little opportunity for privacy there was with the whole family sharing one room within a few yards of all the other family members living in the compound.

Our guide's wife with her daughter and her handiwork in the foyer/workroom of their dwelling

Our guide's wife was sitting at a small, bamboo-framed loom, weaving an intricate pattern that required threads of many different colors, while the two children played nearby.  We admired her handiwork but couldn't bring ourselves to purchase it as it wasn't to our taste.  Our guide said that the small section of fabric which his wife had spent two months creating would sell in the market for around $80. 

The car that had taken us from our hotel into town had developed a problem, so our guide arranged for a couple of motorbikes to shuttle us back.  This was one of those "go with the flow" moments as none of us had helmets, the roads were in bad shape, hilly and with many turns, and we'd never seen the guys with the motorbikes before.  Lynn and Alexa hopped onto the back of one bike.  Charlotte and I onto the back of another.  I had given both girls a very short ride on my motorbike around our neighborhood the week before, so while they were both a little nervous at least this wasn't their first ride on a motorbike.  We made it back safely from the short ride in time for dinner.  

As our friends who visited us from Jakarta had said, a menu in Bali is best viewed as a listing of various theoretical possibilities that may only have a small chance of being actualized during any given meal.  That was certainly true at dessert that evening.  The girls were excited to order ice cream for dessert, which appeared in many different forms on the dessert menu, only to be told that, sorry, but there was no ice cream at all that evening.  In fact, of the approximately twelve desserts listed, only one was available, and that one was not appealing.  The girls were good sports, went back to the room to take their outdoor shower, and slept enclosed in a cone of mosquito netting that gave their bed the appearance of having been freshly whisked from a princess's bedroom. 

View from our room

l

A Sumatran style house incongruously overlooking the valley.  (It's for sale.)

the sister hotel where we went swimming nestled amidst the rice fields

the farmers had to walk across the hotel grounds to reach the road

Charlotte hurrying to catch up.  Lynn is on the lower balcony.

Separating the chaff from the rice kernels

Charlotte near the cow hut

good balance beam practice.  the berm is narrow and if you slip you wind up in the rice paddy.

Looking at the vista of lush rice paddies stretching off into the distance it is hard to imagine that every single rice plant is planted one at a time by hand by a farmer bending over to place the rice shoot into the mud

the white spots on the thread produce the pattern when woven

a couple of pattern boards.  the thread is laid out on the board.  the pattern guides the places where the plastic is attached.

another pattern board

the yellows, greens, peaches and other colors are hand painted onto the thread

transferring the thread onto a shuttle bobbin.  the spinning wheel is made from a bicycle wheel.

the display of finished fabrics in the store

our purchase, one day to be made into pillow covers

the view from the balcony of the store

on the walk to our guide's home.  many men work as stone carvers, working on cutting the volcanic stones into building blocks

fabric woven by our guide's wife.  the product of two months of effort on a hand loom

our guide with his son

the daughter at the entrance to their house

returning home from a short day of school

Posted by Nat, edited by Lynn, photos by Lynn & Nat