Balinese Ways

Tirta Empul

Outside of Ubud lies a thousand-year-old temple where Balinese go to purify themselves under holy water fountains fed by natural springs.   We made a family outing to Tirta Empul to immerse ourselves in the cool, refreshing waters.  Lynn, Alexa and I changed into our sarongs and waded into the temple pool as large fish swam by our legs.  Charlotte remained dry and took on the role of family photographer.

We went down the line of fountains, dousing ourselves under each spout for several seconds as the water poured over our heads and bodies.  We emerged refreshed.  We avoided the two spouts with special carvings associated with death.  The Balinese in the pool with us made offerings, lit incense and prayed to the spirits.

the girls enjoyed feeding the koi, many of impressive size, in a nearby pool that served as an enormous fish pond

Village Cremation Ceremony

Driving through a neighboring village as we returned to our villa, we passed six animal effigies lined up across from the dalem temple.  This meant the village was preparing for a mass cremation ceremony.  A couple of days later, Alexa and I went on the motorbike for a closer look.

Preparations were under way for the cremation ceremony that would occur the next day.  Stands were set up for each of the six deceased, with their photos placed high on the wall of the temporary structure overlooking the array of offering made in their honor.  A priest chanted prayers in the background.  Families hung around chatting, a mother nursed, two boys examined the effigies – three black bulls and three red dragons.  A steady stream of families arrived with offerings.   Three stands where the cremations would occur were set up in one cemetery, three other stands in an adjoining cemetery.  The black bulls signified a higher caste, the red dragons a lower caste.  Each apparently had their own cemetery.

photos of the deceased overlook the offerings below

The Caste system endures

The youngest sister of Dewa Cerik’s wife recently had a child.  She had had several boyfriends and had nearly married a man, a favorite of her family’s, who was also from her same second-rank caste.  But she greatly upset her father, who refused to talk to her for quite a while, because she chose instead to marry a man from the lowest caste.

The child of a mixed caste marriage takes the caste of the father.  As a member of a lower caste, the sister-in-law’s son would not be able to enter her family temple unaccompanied.  The food at family meals are shared amongst the family.  The sister-in-law’s son, because of his lower caste, would be able to eat food that had first been eaten by other members of his family, but once he took some of the food, none of his higher caste relatives would be able to eat of any more of the dish.

the family temple of Dewa Cerik's in-laws

A newborn

Dewa Putu, who worked at Villa Jati where we stayed last year in Silungan, told us shortly before we left Bali in December that his wife was pregnant.  When we returned to Bali we brought a baby gift.  Putu visited us shortly after our return to Bali.  He was sporting long curly hair which we learned meant that the baby had not yet arrived, as a prospective father doesn’t cut his hair during his wife’s pregnancy.  Putu said this is because long hair on a man is ugly which makes him unattractive to other women and helps keep him faithful.  Whether this is a joking or serious explanation for the custom of not cutting his hair, I couldn’t tell.

Then on August 17th, Indonesian Independence Day, the text from Putu arrived announcing that his son had just been born.  Dewa Cerik said that this was a great stroke of luck, as the government would pay all hospital fees and most school fees for children born on Independence Day.   We visited Putu, his hair freshly cut, at his family compound about a week later to see the baby.  The baby’s name, as best I could understand it, was Great Independence Day.  I assume he’ll go by a nickname.

Putu lived with his parents and in-laws and a total of nine children in the family compound.    The day we visited was a special ceremony day where items made of iron are blessed.  Putu said he was tired, not only because of the baby, but because had been up early washing his boss’s three cars and four motorbikes in preparation for the blessing ceremony.  His father, a priest’s assistant, was out when we visited blessing cars and motorbikes.  His mother, also a priest’s assistant by virtue of marriage, was dressed all in white and making offering in the adjoining family temple.

(pre-baby) Dewa Cerik, Dewa Putu and young Dewa Alit

freshly shorn Dewa Putu and family at his family compound

Ancient blessings for modern technology

Dewa Cerik said that the practice of blessing cars and motorbikes grew out of an ancient Balinese ceremony for blessing items of metal that were within the temple.  Then one day, as Dewa Cerik tells it, someone said that because cars and motorbikes were made out of metal they should be blessed too.  Later a high priest said that wasn’t necessary but by then it was too late and the practice had taken hold, so throughout Bali on the day of this ceremony cars and motorbikes are adorned with fancy offerings and priests assistants are kept busy with the lucrative business of blessing all the cars and motorbikes in Bali.

blessed motorbikes

Land of Pirated DVDs

There are several stores in Ubud that are devoted to selling DVDs of movies and tv shows.  The stores are laid out like a standard movie rental store in the U.S., with sections for drama, comedy, kids and new releases, and tv shows by season, such as complete seasons of The Office or Game of Thrones. The difference is that every single DVD in the store is a pirated copy.  It is a very efficient system, as I would read about a newly released movie in the NY Times online only to find it already for sale in the DVD shops in Ubud.

The quality of the DVDs varies widely.  Many come with English subtitles, though it is a mystery as to why they bother offering English subtitles for English language films.  The mystery deepens because the accuracy of the subtitles over the course of a movie varies from fairly good to completely off-the-wall.  A child asks for pancakes for breakfast; the subtitle reports the child asked for birthday cake.  Much of the time the subtitles bear no relation to what is being said.  They seem to be the hallucinogenic ramblings of someone riffing off of the sounds of the words spoken in the movie.  When Brad Pitt’s character says they are off to Israel, the subtitle says they are going to the 'origin'.  The subtitles appear whether you want them or not.  In movies with poor sound quality, I can’t help but look to the subtitles to make sense of what the characters are saying, only to wind up hopelessly confused.

The packaging of the DVDs is slick, with the cover art of the original DVD reproduced fairly faithfully, including the warnings not to make unauthorized duplicates of the DVD.  The reviews are real as well, though perhaps not the same ones that appear on the studio-issued DVDs.  The featured review on a bootleg DVD of the critically-acclaimed Javier Bardem movie, The Sea Inside, begins:

“A vanity project that … proves unequal to the task …”

Flores

We had a wonderful, adventurous, several day trip to Flores island filled with many highlights and the occasional low point.

Last year we didn't have much of a chance to travel around Indonesia.  The furthest we went was to Gili Air, a tiny dot of an island, across the channel separating Bali from Lombok.  This visit to Bali we wanted to make time to see more of Indonesia.

At dinner one night our friend Gove told us that if we were looking to visit another part of Indonesia that we should consider Flores.  Flores is three islands to the east of Bali - past Lombok and past Sumbawa.  The next day our friends Walker and Wendy put us in touch with a former manager of theirs who is now working as a tour guide in Flores.  He came up with a cross-island itinerary that while it would take us to many beautiful spots would also have us spending most of our trip in the car.

As we were still burned out on travel, we decided to stick close to the port town of Labuan Bajo on the Western edge of Flores.  It is a good jumping off point for visiting the Komodo dragons and for snorkeling on nearby islands.

Lynn booked a hotel and the flights.  Within a couple of days of having no idea where we'd go, we were set for a trip to Flores.

After booking the flight I did a little research on the small, regional airline we'd be flying, Merpati.  A quick search turned up a spotty safety record, a recent accident, and a Jakarta Post story that regulators were looking to ground their entire fleet of Chinese made MA60 turboprop planes.  A look back at our itinerary revealed that our flights would be on MA60 turboprops.  I decided it best to keep this info to myself.

Fortunately the flight, though delayed, was uneventful.  The terminal at Labuan Bajo was a tiny, two room building.  The driver from the hotel was waiting in the lounge area so we were soon off to the Jayakarta hotel, a new large upscale hotel on the outskirts of Labuan Bajo.  It was one of only a handful of modern hotels in Labuan Bajo, and luckily still had rooms available during high season.   It had a big modern room, a large swimming pool and a monster chess set with pieces nearly as tall as Charlotte that Charlotte played many a fierce game on.

We wanted to move out of the big, modern hotel and experience staying on a small island.  Independent travel guides gave high marks to Seraya Beach Resort, a basic resort of beach bungalows located on a tiny island north of Labuan Bajo.  You could only book a bungalow by showing up to the sister hotel in town.  When I called I was told they were fully booked but to try back after 9 pm in case any guests had chosen not to extend another night.  We ate dinner in town near the sister hotel so I stopped in around 8:30 to check, but the manager still didn't know so he said just to text him after 9 pm.  I did and he said that a single room had opened up and that they could give us two extra mattresses, we just had to come by in the morning to pay.

We had arranged with a  tour guide to charter a boat for a trip to Rinca island, about an hour and a half south of Labuan Bajo, to see the Komodo dragons with perhaps a stop along the way for snorkeling.  But we then had some concerns about the safety of mingling with wild Komodo dragons.  I did some online research that turned up no attacks on tourists, but there were stories about locals being attacked- including a poor chap who was sitting in his living room peeling an onion - and attacks on park rangers.  Some of the attacks had been fatal.  The authors of the independent travel guide we were using, a Western couple with young children, reported being chased a brief distance by a Komodo Dragon, which gave us further reason for concern.

According to the news stories there does exist an anti-venom to the toxic bite of the Komodo dragon - which I was glad to hear as I was under the impression that there was no treatment for a Komodo bite.  I was relieved at the thought of the park rangers carrying emergency packets of anti-venom with them.  But that happy thought vanished as I read further.  The anti-venom is not carried by the park rangers, nor is it available in Komodo park, nor apparently anywhere on the island of Flores.  Ingeniously, the anti-venom is safely stored in Bali far from where it would be needed ensuring that any victim would have to suffer the toxic effects of a Komodo dragon bite for at least six hours before treatment.

Having had the pleasure of seeing one Komodo dragon safely enclosed behind glass walls in the National Zoo in DC and another less safely enclosed behind a low stone wall in the Reptile Park in Bali (where we were given the option to pay to watch it devour a live chicken) we decided we didn't need to endure the anxiety of exposing our kids to Komodo dragons in the wild, even if that meant being uncool scaredy cats.  So we told out tour guide at the last minute that we had a change of plans -- instead of a trip to Rinca and back we wanted to spend the entire day snorkeling and then be dropped off on Seraya island at the bungalows.

Our adaptable tour manager, nicknamed Kancek (meaning "sweet") came up with a new itinerary on the spot -- visiting three nearly deserted islands for snorkeling, the last one only a 15 minute boat ride from Seraya and then they would drop us off at Seraya.

Kancek

We went into town to pick up snorkeling gear - equipment that fit Charlotte being a particular challenge  We got flippers in one place and a mask in another and after visiting three shops we finally had a complete set of gear together.  And by "shop" I mean a bare concrete room in which a family who lives next door displays their motley collection of snorkeling gear.

We drove straight on to the dock right beside our chartered boat.  The captain, a young thin man of Sulawesian ancestry, had two boys with him, one around 11 (brother-in-law) the other around 9 (nephew).  The captain explained that they had the day off and were coming along for fun "like tourists."  He also had a crew of two young deck hands and an older man who was both cook and crew.

The boat was quite nice and in fact grander than what we needed for a short hop to nearby islands. Kancek told us that he wished we had told him earlier that we weren't going to make the longer, rougher crossing to Rinca, as he could have provided us with a smaller, cheaper boat.

The boat was recently refurbished in yellow wood and had two sleeping cabins and a flat roof that ran nearly the entire length of the boat.  The front of the boat had a table in the center with wooden benches on either side.

Once all our gear was stowed on board, we crossed the harbor and made the hour-long journey to our first stopping point.  We pulled alongside another boat and saw a handful of tourists already on the island  We went off to a deserted part of the reef.  The coral reef was extensive and the fish were plentiful.

Our next stop we pulled directly alongside a boat where a young couple were enjoying a suddenly not-so-private romantic lunch.  We entered the water directly from the boat and swam towards shore to reach the coral.  The coral stretched for hundreds of yards and was quite close to the surface, often just a couple of feet below us.  An abundance of fish swam all around us.  They were close enough that we could reach out to touch them but when we tried they darted away.  We saw tiny blue iridescent fish, large schools of black fish around eight inches in length, and the occasional larger two-three foot long fish swimming along a short distance beneath us.  It was  wonderful display of the variety of fish life as well as the variety of types of coral  The coral dropped off sharply in the depths  The water was clear enough that we could see schools of fish in the distance beneath us, a few looking much larger than the fish we saw in the coral.

After a long snorkel we returned to the boat to head off to our next snorkeling spot.  Lunch soon arrived, plate after plate of delicious food.  Noodles, an assortment of vegetables, fried chicken, fish, potatoes and a huge container of rice.  The plates were heaping full.  We ate until we were stuffed and consumed barely more than half of what they offered us.  We hoped that the remaining food found other takers.  Then came a huge plate of fried banana fritters for dessert.  We stuffed ourselves even more and were amazed at how such delicious food could have been prepared on board the boat.  (Of course, most of it was probably prepared before the journey began.)

The water at our third snorkeling spot was even more pristine than at the other spots.  It was like visiting a garden of coral.  There were so many different varieties and shapes.  Many were soft and undulating in the water.  Some were electric blue and would open and close as the water pulsed in and out of them.

The waters were teeming with fish of all colors and patterns.   When Alexa saw a fish she particularly liked she pulled the snorkel out of her mouth and held it in her hand while she free dove under water chasing after the fish.  I was impressed with her freedom of quickly joining her fish friends and swimming along them underwater.

This picture (found on the web) gives a sense of the abundant fish and variety of coral around Flores:

flores snorkeling photo from outforvacation.com

At last after a full day of amazing snorkeling we returned to the boat which then set course to the nearby island of Seraya Kecil (small Seraya).

We passed a point and arrived at a small beach dotted with little bungalows.  We tied up at a buoy.  The captain hailed the staff on shore, but nobody there took much interested in us.  Eventually a wooden canoe rowed out.  Its bottom was filled with water.  We learned that the resort's small motorboat was off on a supply run and it wasn't clear when it would return.  Our captain offered up a couple of wooden boards to lay on the bottom of the canoe so that our bags wouldn't get soaked in water.  Lynn and Charlotte made the trip to shore in the canoe along with most of our bags.  As they and our bags were deposited on the beach we heard the sound of a motor in the distance and soon the motor boat came into view.  It came out to the boat to collect Alexa and me and the rest of our bags - and a couple of the boys from the boat to retrieve the wooden planks from the canoe - and then eventually we too were deposited on shore.

Seraya bungalows along the beach

We shared a duplex bungalow with a middle-aged Australian who was busy opening a papaya when we arrived and who had already been there a week.  Our bed had a thin mattress and no top sheet.  Two uncovered vinyl mattresses for the girls lay on the floor  The thin walls were made of thatched bamboo.  The open air bathroom in the rear had a squat toilet and a faucet for bathing.  An information sheet on the wall informed us that we were allocated 50 liters of water a day per person for bathing, that water for use in flushing the toilet should be retrieved from the bay, that electricity was available between 6-10 pm and that any food in the bungalow should be stored on hooks on the walls.

Repeated trips to the restaurant area with requests to the staff for further supplies eventually resulted in two pillows for the girls, a ripped sheet that served as a bottom sheet to cover the vinyl mattresses and a quarter sheet that the girls could use as a top sheet and a bar of soap for the bathroom.  Lynn and I were not able to secure a top sheet.

We had been warned from the travel guides that dinner could take a long time to arrive and could be unpredictable.  Our tomato soup arrived fairly quickly, our grilled snapper about half an hour after the soup and Charlotte's spaghetti another half an hour later.  Most tourist restaurants in Bali have way more staff per guest than a similar restaurant in the US.  But the dining area at Seraya had only three or four young boys to serve the 50 diners, and I expect a few hardworking women cooked all the meals, making mass quantities of one dish at a time, in the tiny kitchen.

By the time we finished dinner we were tired and ready for bed  We brushed our teeth as best we could and arranged our bedding as well as possible and lay down to sleep.  The girls fell asleep fairly quickly.  Lynn and I both lay on our thin mattress trying to fall asleep despite the lack of any covers - without any success.  A buzzing mosquito kept us awake as we vainly tried to swat it.  Any chance we had to drift off vanished when we heard creatures loudly scurrying above us in the rafters.  We couldn't tell whether it was inside our room or on the roof but we knew the animal moved fast and sounded large - and it was skittering about in a way that seemed quite rat-like.  Eventually the sound disappeared and we relaxed.  But after a little while it returned again.  It was now well past 10 pm so we had no electricity.  We had not brought a flash light.  So we lay on our beds in the pitch black not able even to cower under our non-existent covers listening to the loud scurrying sounds above us.  There were air gaps in the walls to the room so even if the animal was outside the room it could be inside the room in an instant.  Suddenly the unknown animal came right down the wall straight at Lynn, who was lying right next to the wall.  This gave us both quite a fright.  Fortunately the animal didn't touch either of us.

Lying in the dark while these animals roamed around our hut was torture.  We were afraid that the animals could crawl right over the girls lying on the floor on the vinyl mattresses.  I finally got up and rummaged in the dark for my cell phone using the light from its screen to scan the walls.  Luckily no beady eyes stared back.  Whatever the animal was it seemed not to be in the room with us, but crawling up and down the other side of the thin walls of our bungalow.  The thin walls serve to amplify the sounds as if we were on the inside of a drum, which made the experience that much more unpleasant.

I reassured myself that it was probably just a harmless gecko.  We grabbed some clothes and used them to cover ourselves as best as possible and eventually around 4 am or so we fell asleep.

In the morning we chatted with our Australian neighbor who had had a fine night of sleep.  (Indeed, we heard him snoring loudly.)  We learned that our mystery animal was indeed likely a rat as they are a known menace.  Our neighbor had woken the day before to find a half-eaten banana in his room which he attributed to the gnawing of a rat.  When I mentioned our experience to the manager he agreed that it was probably a rat, one species of which is famous for growing to a gigantic size in Flores.

Lynn and I discussed whether to stick with our original plan of spending another night at Seraya bungalows or to leave early.  We didn't wish to endure another night like we had just had or risk rats nibbling on the girls' toes.

The only scheduled departure from the island was the 8 am run back to Labuan Bajo.  If we left at 8 am we would have had no chance to experience a day on the island and the miserable night we had endured would have been for nothing.  The manager said we could hire the boat to make an extra run back to Labuan Bajo at 3 pm but we would have to leave our bungalow by 11 am.  So we agreed to that plan.

We declined the complementary breakfast of bread (with a bit of cheese) and instead we splurged on banana pancakes, scrambled eggs and fruit salad, to the envy of the young backpacker crowd in the dining area.

We then donned our snorkeling gear and waded into the water.  We swam out to the coral reef that runs the entire length of the beach  Like the places we had snorkeled the day before, the coral stretched out as far as we could swim on either side just below the surface and a profusion of fish swam about.  We could then see the attraction of the place -- in spite of its rustic "amenities" and its pesky rats -- as you could walk out of your bungalow and in a few steps be swimming in a glorious coral reef chasing after colorful fish and counting the starfish dotting the sandy bottom.

Despite having had a decent night's sleep and a fun day hanging out at the beach, Charlotte was quite unimpressed with the Seraya bungalows and kept asking if she could rate the resort "0 stars" as she hoped that if she rated it 0 stars enough times would it lower the resort's rating to 0 stars.

After we went snorkeling, Alexa and Charlotte hung out on the beach playing in the sand and inventing games  It was very quiet and relaxed on the beach  You could imagine a thousand years ago people living a similar life spending their days in unbroken stretches of unhurried time.

The rest of the day passed by peacefully and we then enjoyed our motor back to Labuan Bajo, where we all dozed off on the boat, including some of the crew.

Kancek met us at the dock.  He said that he knew that we weren't going to like Seraya because of the rats, but that he couldn't tell us that.  We had to find out for ourselves.

He set us up at another modern hotel, though one that was smaller and more charming than the Jayakarta.  We were never so happy to see a bed with clean sheets and a shower with warm water.

The next day we drove an hour and a half along a narrow twisty road into the hills of western Flores.  At one point the road had washed away, and our guide, Bendi, grabbed river stones to build a path for our car to drive over.

Looking west towards Labuan Bajo and the sea beyond

rebuilding the road

We soon arrived at a little village at the start of the path to the waterfall.  Bendi hired an old man from the village to accompany us to the waterfall as we were obliged to do, and accompanied by the old man's young granddaughter we all made the hour trek down the steep side of a hill, across rice fields until we reached a crisp mountain pool fed by a large waterfall.

the local guide

For the first hour we had the place to ourselves.  The water was cold but refreshing.  Alexa and I swam towards the waterfall and found a way to duck behind the falls.  We swam to a little rock in the pool and dove back in the water.

Charlotte with the guide's granddaughter

The guide was just sitting beside the water with his granddaughter.  I idly wondered whether he knew how to swim.  A short while later Lynn screamed in panic as the old man and his granddaughter had slipped into the water and the old man was lying face down in the water making no effort to get out.  Bendi raced to pull him and his granddaughter from the water.  They both seemed fine, and things quickly returned to normal but it was quite a scare.

Charlotte kept busy harvesting the abundant long strands of bright green algae that grew on the rocks along the water's edge.  Eventually more tourists arrived accompanied by local guides and local kids, and some of the kids joined Charlotte in her farming operation.  They wound up with quite a large pile of green algae drying in the sun.

the algae harvest

Charlotte and local boys harvesting algae

When we returned to our hotel in Labuan Bajo, Kancek was there to meet us so we could pay him for the day's outing.  He mentioned that the local guide's son (the father of the little girl) had drowned in the pool at the waterfall.

We enjoyed a gorgeous sunset from the beach of our hotel while the girls played Nuke 'Em on the beach volleyball court in the fading daylight.

We returned the next morning to Bali, which seemed quite hectic and crowded in comparison to Flores.