Selected Writing from and about Bali
Peter Marmorek
July–Aug, 2011
July 3rd, 2011 (01:51 am)
My watch says it's ten o'clock, though that's Toronto time, and we're roughly in the middle of nowhere, definitely on one side or the other of the international date line, which might mean it's either tomorrow or yesterday, although it feels as though it's still today. It has been feeling as though it's today for a very long time. The Korean Air stewardae keep coming around and offering us food, though I foolishly ordered vegetarian, and in these days of cutbacks "vegetarian" means all-purpose low sodium, hallal, kosher, non-flavour food. The first round was steamed vegetables, though as we brought smoked salmon sandwiches with us, we're certainly taking in more calories than we're expending.
So much for close-ups; now let me cut to the establishing shot. Diana and I are in a giant Airbus, having left home 16 hours ago, and with 11 hours still to go before we land in Bali. There we find our luggage, buy a visa, go through customs, and (insh'Allah) are met by people from our hotel who drive us there and let us collapse. I'm looking forward to collapse, and to recuperation at some point a long time after that.
Large parts of travel have improved since I first went to SE Asia, 26 years ago. That I can type on my iPad in midair, that we have over twenty movies from which to choose (watched a very young Paul Newman in "The Hustler" with considerable pleasure a few hours ago), that we are given blankets and pillows and slippers and toothbrushes and bottles of water with which to beguile the many very idle hours is all new and pleasing. The screen in front of each person offers them not just movies, but video games, music, short films, documentaries, maps showing where we are and the time it will take before we are somewhere else, and a truly depressing selection of audio books; two samples were "Mystery Men of Wall Street",and "Cathedrals in a Nutshell" (Is it a summary of cathedrals, or a man with a somewhat outré hobby? I may have forever passed up my chance to resolve the tantalizing ambiguity). The Korean audio books might be far better, but that too is something I will never know.
But while the technology has improved, I suspect my ability to enjoy long flights has decreased, and I know my ability to sleep through them has. Once, in Burma, I managed six hours of sleep on the floor of a railway car, with my head under a seat so that I had to remember on waking not to try and look around. (All other places were filled; it was the only place left.) Now I struggle for six hours of continuous sleep at home in the comfort of my bed, let alone in the Airbus.
But prologues are often tedious, and probably more when they're trying to describe tedium itself. So, why are we going to spend a month in Bali? Because we can, as this is a summer without an art show by Diana or a Writers' Croft course on my plate. Because Bali sounds a lot like paradise in all the descriptions I've heard of it: fascinating religious traditions, complex arts of all kinds, friendly people, great cuisine, volcanoes in the centre of the island, and snorkelible tropical ocean all around. Diana is walking on a non-functional foot (long story, but not mine to tell) so hiking isn't viable, but Bali has wonderful cycling (the books say), and we have an expensive and waterproof carapace for our camera, so I hope to post pictures of fish and coral.
Our plans are pleasingly unspecific, beyond landing in Seoul in three hours, flying the last seven hour leg, and staying in Sanur at a indulgent hotel for four days while we figure out what we really want to do on the fifth day. Wikitravel says of Sanur, "Sanur is Bali’s oldest upscale resort area and is a mature beach-side town.... Sanur tends to appeal most to middle-aged and older families, especially Europeans." (I suspect that's travel-speak for "no drunken Australians", as opposed to Kuda which we are told is knee-deep in them.) But we are middle-aged and European (both, by birth) so we shall see if the flip-flop fits.
We have just gotten another meal of boiled veggies. Bringing the smoked salmon along was a really good idea.
July 6th, 2011 (07:48 pm)
I remember a warmup writing exercise, "What lesson do you have to keep learning over and over?" For me, one of the answers is surely that the cheapest is usually not a good deal. I booked a trip with Sunset tours that we went on yesterday; they were cheaper than anyone else, including the man on the beach, and we were to find out why when the "one hour snorkeling" devolved into "fifteen minutes next to twenty other boats in muddy water off a crowded beach with dead coral and few fish". "Watch the sea turtles", turned out to be "pay extra for admission to a crowded zoo" (Sunset Tours had said "all costs included".) But it was a good day anyway, as the hours spent driving from place to place gave a fascinating view of different sides of Bali (or the south-west (tourist) corner), and the "hidden beauties of dreamland beach" (I had become suspicious of "hidden" when the van in front of us had a www.dreamland-villa.com sticker on it) were wonderful tumbling waves on a gorgeous beach.
We started by driving to Seminyak, which is next to Kuta, the main tourist town. It's the upscale tourist world, all high end fashion ranging from surfer accoutrements to 17 colour ink tattoos. Over 90% of the pedestrians were occidental. We were there to pick up the other couple on our tour, a young Singaporean pair (both in banking), and as our van drove into their hotel's parking lot, it was carefully wanded by security, presumably sniffing for plastique. That was repeated a few times, as we drove through the various offerings of the tour, which fortunately improved after the snorkeling/ turtle debacle.
The monkey temple was the highlight, for the temple, for the 200 meter view over crashing surf, and most of all for the monkeys. (We have WAY too many cute monkey pictures.) The monkeys are sacred, and get to keep whatever they steal ( just like financiers back home, I guess). I was puzzled why they'd steal sandals (we saw two stolen... The monkeys crept up behind two separate young girls, then leapt, snatched, and ran) but it's not some weird simian sexual fetish; the guides then tried to bribe the monkeys to give back the sandals by offering them food.
The drive was fascinating for all sorts of reasons. There was the traffic itself (left-hand drive, like the UK). Traffic lanes are marked, but seem to be more a general suggestion than a rule. There are about three times as many motorcycles as four-wheeled vehicles, and the personal space each vehicle gets is MUCH smaller than we are used to. If you put some large rocks in a bowl, then add small pebbles which fit in-between, that's a rough approximation of how traffic works with four wheeled and two wheeled. But we didn't see any accidents, so everyone seems to know what they're doing. Lots of honking, which seems to say "I'm here", rather than "look out". The skies are also crowded, but with giant kites (we saw six young men carrying one before launching it, and it wasn't the biggest.) Today is a religious festival, and the kites are believed to "whisper in the ear of the gods", so there may have been more than usual... but there are numerous enough and high enough that they form a hazard to aircraft, (Lonely Planet claims).
The tour ended with a seafood feast as we watched the sunset in the east, as Bali is south of the equator. (Just kidding about the east, but as we are a only a few degrees away from the equator the days are all twelve hours, and the sun sets/ rises really fast, with almost no twilight/ dawn at 6:15. The weather has been sunny and warm (35 in the day, 22 at night) and both the ocean and our hotel pool are very swimmable.
Today was the Hindu festival of Galungan, celebrating the creation of the world, so much of the island was closed. We took a taxi to the southern end of Sanur, which turns out to be much more happening than our end, with more stores and smaller winding streets rather than industrial boulevards. We watched people giving offerings at various temples (I do love religious festivals.) The offerings were small palm leaf boxes (ten cms square) each with some herb, four or five brightly colored flowers, some cooked white rice, some cooked saffron rice, and many sticks of incense. A temple is a walled open space with a number of altars, so as the day went on both those altars and the many others around Sanur were piled high with offerings.
We rented bikes, and rode along the five km boardwalk by the beach, admiring spider boats, hotels, and the general beauty. Then we took the main tourist street back, getting some batik, having lunch at "The Ducks Nutz", where the friendly Australian owner gave us advice on where to go in Bali, and about how much taxis should cost from Sanur to Ubud, to which we decamp tomorrow. I admired, having been alerted by skilled map-reader SW, how the German embassy is located directly across the street from Swastika bungalows. (Lots of swastikas here, as there has been in Hinduism for the last several thousand years).
July 8th, 2011 (07:40 am)
I saw a young Balinese woman wearing a very strange T-shirt in Sanur, just before we left this morning. It read, "I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever met." Somehow that line keeps resonating tonight in Ubud, as I wonder: when did Ubud become some sort of strange Balinese theme park and stop being a real place? Was it "Eat, Pray, Love" that pushed it over some psychic edge into the plasticized abyss? (Relevant: they have "Eat, Pay, Leave" T-shirts for sale in the town market, adjacent to the penis-shaped bottle-openers.)
I'd been feeling badly about impetuously booking a hotel outside of the main town centre, which I did based on Lonely Planet recommendations, and availability. I'd heard everything gets booked in high season, and a few places I'd tried had been full, so when the Matahari said she was available, I went for her. It may have been a really good decision.
We got here by tourist bus, in about an hour from Sanur, along crowded highways. We settled in, and decided to walk from the edge into the town. The streets were solid non-stop traffic, and that doesn't even begin to describe it. Cars, vans, innumerable motorbikes all creep slowly along, their motors spewing an incessant mix of deafening engine roar, and acrid monoxide fumes. I empathize with Ubud's many smokers; inhaling through a lit cigarette probably blocks the carbon monoxide, and might well be much healthier than inhaling this "air". All the stores, a half meter from the street, are aimed at tourists, selling a California newage blend of crystals, aromatherapy, aura realignment, health foods of the world, clothing, painting, sculpture, tickets for tours or dances or white-water rafting or whatever a buyer might want. It was appalling.
Part of what made it so was having heard from so many people what a magical place Ubud was. To come here to this tawdry carnival of gimcrack candy-floss is such a letdown. This is a place aimed at giving tourists what they want, whether it's mirrored crucifixes, Tibetan thangkas, reclining Buddhas: it's for sale. Perhaps an Italian gelato, or wheat-grass detoxicant to quench one's thirst? As we walked through the town, Diana said to me, "I'm too old for this." Which was pretty funny, because I'd just been thinking, "I've outgrown this."
And that is part of the truth. Another part is that there's a certain arrogance to come as a tourist to somewhere and complain that there are too many tourists there. But a dear friend from Japan, who runs a belly-dancing school, just left Ubud last week and raved about the fantastic quality of the dance here, and about how much she loves this place. And I'm sitting here in the cool of dusk, in an open air pagoda listening to the sounds of cool water trickling over the edge of the jacuzzi down towards the bamboo forest that opens out behind us. So the question is how to find what we need, what will feed us, amidst the plethora of people trying to sell us things that won't.
July 14th, 2011 (10:53 am)
As Diana and I explore Bali, we sometimes stumble blindly into an unknown dance performance, or a strange guest house, or an enticing restaurant. But we often trust the words of others, most often Lonely Planet or Trip Advisor. They often differ; the former rated Matahari Cottages, our Ubud home, very highly while we had agreed with the latter that the beauty of its setting was marred by musty and rundown cottages, and consistently awful food.
Now we are staying at the Hotel Uyah, in Amed. It's Lonely Planet's top choice, but averaged a mere 3/5 on Trip Advisor. We love it, so I've been wondering about the bad reviews. Two of the lowest were from people who had booked, arrived, disliked what they found, and tried to cancel their reservations. This had precipitated violent encounters, with fury and threats from the Uyah staff, tears and flight from the tourists.
As I tried to understand this, I remembered that Lonely Planet gives a warning about bartering: if the seller won't go below 50,000 and you won't go above 45,000, you are welcome to smile and walk away. But if she then says, "Okay, 45,000," you MUST buy. You have given your word, and in Bali that counts for much more than it does in (for example) North America, where we expect (and get) lies and betrayal from politicians, from advertisers, from media.
One facet of what that means is that Bali is clearly a much more honest culture: in Ubud we often saw stores or guest houses open to the street with no one in attendance and computers on the counter and other valuables exposed in a way we'd never see at home. Stealing is – at its most basic – taking something without an agreement from the other person, so it's not done here.
Everything in Bali seems to be based on relationships; the directional relationships define the layout of your village, your compound, your bedroom. But your familial relationships define which compound you live in (a wife moves to her husband's), where you live in the compound, and your status within it. Diana read me a passage from "Fragrant Rice" the memoir of an Australian woman who marries into a Balinese family, in which the narrator causes outrage by addressing her mother-in-law with a familiar verb form rather than the correct formal form. Even language is defined by the network of relationship.
We saw a distressing number of beggars in Ubud, almost all young women with babies. Clearly there is no father into whose compound they can move, so they have fallen out of the system of relationships, which here means everything. What a contrast to North America, where we move out of our parental home to a different city, decorate our new house as we like, maybe go through a few relationships before settling into one (or not). Maybe we adopt a different form of the religion in which we were raised, or a different religion, or no religion at all. We become self-made people, shaping (or trying to shape) our lives as we choose.
In Bali, people are always aware of the cardinal directions, because they define absolutely where you are in relationship to the physical and spiritual worlds. Similarly your family and your village define where you are in relation to the human world. I don't at all mean to value this as better or worse than the Western way of living; I doubt that such valuations have much meaning whoever is giving them (let alone a two week tourist!) I have no idea how life works here for people who don't fit into this tradition, because their religious or sexual compass points in a different direction.
But I am drawn to marvel at the width of the chasm that lies between this world, and the world in which I live, in a city where more than half the residents were born elsewhere, and into a generation whose defining anthem had as its chorus:
"How does it feel to be on your own,
with no direction home,
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone?
It seems a song very far from this land, in which the stones, the directions, and how you are known are all so irrevocably embedded with the defining imprints of who you are.
July 21st, 2011 (06:53 am)
Friends who aren't fond of cold weather asked in amazement: "Why would you go to Bali in the summer?" The answer to that at least is now clear - for protection from the Toronto summer, which is reaching 38 C. this week, (over 100 F) about 6-7 degrees hotter than Bali, and a lot more humid. Relatively, it's a temperate climate down near the equator, protected from the extreme weather of home.
Protection is something I've been thinking about, and musing about how much more of it I travel with than I used to. My first international travel was 62 years ago, when I emigrated from England to Canada, with my only protection being a diaper my mother would change as needed. I was, I am reliably told, the only member of our family who didn't need protection against sea-sickness. Like all young babies I was an intrepid traveller, akin to the Balinese babies who stare happily ahead while held by their mothers on the handlebars of motorbikes speeding down the highway.
But these days I travel with a lot more protection. Before I dare go outside, I cover myself with sunscreen. I carry travel insurance to protect us against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our Panasonic camera, Lou, has a plastic carapace that guarantees protection down to 30 meters below the ocean's surface. Bali itself is hugely tourist focussed, and I enjoy the resultant ease of travel, which protects me from the rigours of having to navigate a foreign society. And while I obviously love the foot-in-both-worlds travel that the iPad and ubiquitous wifi allows me, the other side of that coin is that I am not as immersed in this world as I might be, because I'm so deeply in touch with that world. When you try to be in two places at once, are you really anywhere at all?
To some extent that is the modern human condition, fragmented, multi-dimensional, blogging about our experience at the demo, while watching the media's coverage, texting other friends, responding to comments on Facebook, while soaking a twisted ankle in a bucket of ice water. I commented to Diana how I always saw the most beautiful coral when she had the camera, but perhaps that's because when I have the camera I'm not looking as much at the coral... I'm looking at the viewfinder on the camera. (It might also be because I swim better without the camera, so I cover more ground, of course.)
A friend asked me about two months ago what I was planning to do this summer, and when I told her that we'd be spending a month in Bali, she looked at me and said, "Wow, that will be the trip of a lifetime." And I smiled, and said I hoped so, because what else could I say? But now her comment makes me wonder why it isn't, and what the trip of a lifetime would have that this trip doesn't.
Ttoal (the trip of a lifetime) would change my life, would make the map by which I navigated after it different from the one I used before. Perhaps my first canoeing trip in La Verendrye park was ttoal; all my subsequent canoe trips wouldn't have happened but for that. But while I have hugely enjoyed the intimacy with Canadian wilderness into which those trips put me, the first canoe trip itself wasn't transformational as much as initiational. My first trip to Asia (1985, six months, eight countries) gave me a sense of my ability to travel alone, and hugely deepened my sense of Asian life, and of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism (alpha order, btw). That lead to my becoming a teacher of World Religions which has lead to my involvement with groups such as the Muslim Student Association and Tikkun, and the wonderful people I've come to know through them, and the actions we've done together.
While we are enjoying this trip hugely (the Balinese people are amazingly friendly, the food is excellent, the flora lush, the snorkeling magical, the music and dance exquisite, and the religion welcoming and intriguingly different from Indian Hinduism) we will return essentially the same people we were when we left.
Is that because ttoal has to happen when one is younger and more changeable? I wouldn't like to think that all my major changes are in the past, that my orbital path is set with only a few fine firings of my lateral thrusters possible before I return to earth. It might be because this is my fifth trip to Asia, so it is more familiar than once was. And it might be because I am traveling as a tourist; had I instead signed up for one month of working with some NGO involved in changing the lives of people would that have changed my life more and become ttoal?
Hinduism characterizes the four ages of life as the student, the family founder, the businessperson, and the sanyasi or religious seeker. Perhaps we move through four lifetimes, and ttoal is specific to each. In my lifetime as a student, for example, my four years in Boston at MIT were certainly ttoal. And perhaps then the trip of a lifetime I might find now is one that takes me into inner space rather than to new countries. Even though whatever spiritual discipline I might follow, it probably won't encourage bringing an iPad along.
July 22nd, 2011 (11:17 am)
Bali is known as "the land of smiles", and it is true that people here do smile at you a lot. They also yell "Hello!" at passing tourists, whether they're walking, riding, cycling or being drive. And then they smile even more when you say "Hello!" back to them.
At first I wondered whether this was part of what young children are taught in school, to yell "Hello!" to foreigners. This isn't quite as far fetched as it might seem; they do teach tourism as a subject through school here, and a good way to start any subject is by giving kids a sense of their power and how they can use what you've taught them. You start by teaching them "Hello!", and work your way up to, "Would you like to sign up for the diving special to the island coral reef today?"
But the Balinese not only smile too consistently for it to have been an affect taught in school, but they smile at one another, and the older adults smile and say, "Hello," to tourists as well, albeit without the violent enthusiasm of the children. So this friendliness to the other seems to be an authentic Balinese trait.
Once I'd figured that out, the driving patterns started to make a lot more sense than they had previously, when they'd seemed like a thousand chaotic accidents just waiting to happen. But they never did, which left me glad but puzzled. The chaotic part was the disregard of lanes. The standard Balinese road is two lanes wide, with the houses (and children, dogs, chickens) all no more than two meters away. There are about three times as many motorcycles as four-wheeled vehicles on the road, and they are all passing one another (and pedestrians and cyclists) more or less continually.
The basic guideline is to stay as far to the left as you can. But a car will be in the wrong lane passing two motorcyclists (one of whom is passing the other) while a car is coming head on towards it, passing a motorcyclist in its lane. That's the chaotic part. Then the car oncoming slows down enough that the other car can finish passing and pull over in front of the motorcyclist who has also slowed down to let the car get in front of it. It has a certain element of the grace of Balinese dancing, and it consistently works, which is the amazing part.
In North America, we are taught to drive legally, to follow the rules of the road, such as "stay in your own lane." If you go out of your lane to pass, you get back as fast as you can. If someone is overtaking and is driving towards me in my lane, I honk and flash lights to alert him that he's in the wrong place and that he needs to get back into his lane. I will of course slow down or drive onto the shoulder to avoid hitting the idiot, but of course with a keen sense of being wronged by some bloody asshole who clearly doesn't know how to drive. And I think that's the way most of us on our continent would react.
Tim Leary once astutely commented that if we were taught to drive lovingly, we wouldn't need all the rules that tell us how to drive legally. At the time I thought it was just an amusing conceit, but in Bali that seems to be how it's done. The goal is for everyone to arrive as fast and safely as possible, so drivers are watching and working with the pattern of vehicles on the road, rather than just focussing on their own car. There is a lot more honking here, but the honks means something quite different from "Look out!" or "Stop what you're doing!" as they do at home. Here they might better translate as "I'm here", or perhaps even "Hello!". The assumption is that if everyone knows where everyone else is, we'll all work together to make the highway work.
In North America, we drive as individuals separate and distinct from the other individuals with whom we share the road. But in Bali that awareness of the other that starts with three year olds yelling "Hello!" at strangers evolves into a way of driving communally with compassion. And it works a lot better than rule-based driving does, which is very interesting indeed.
July 31st, 2011 (07:14 am)
When I first travelled abroad, in the early 70s, the Canadians usually wore flags on their backpacks, though some anti-Vietnam Americans also did. But you could often identify Canadians by overt symbols: I had a Canadiens' crest on my pack, which prompted a little boy in Turkey to ask me if I was Larry Robinson. I told him I only wished I were.
Later, in the 80s or 90s, it was MEC that was the give away. MEC packs, pants, belly-pouches.... if you were from Canada,they were the clothes to wear. Once, in Hanoi, I realized I was wearing or carrying 11 products from Mountain Equipment Coop. And many of my compatriots weren't far behind. Spot-the-Nuck was an easy game: just look for the MEC patch.
These days it's harder. Few Canadians are advertising they're from the land of oil sands and Afghanistan invasion, and while MEC is around, it's not as ubiquitous. But I've realized what sets Canadians apart from all other countries in the world: we're the ones who aren't talking on cell phones. Everyone else, locals, Americans, Europeans has cell phones and can afford to talk on them. But not Canadians- the roaming charges put the kibosh on that.
Oh Canada, the true North strong and fleeced....
August 21st, 2011 (05:03 pm)
Looking back at our time in Bali, I start to more fully appreciate how remarkable a culture it is for a tourist to experience, despite the changes caused by tourism. Not all tourists choose to visit Bali specifically to experience Balinese culture of course: at one end of the spectrum there are the twenty-something Australians surfing by day and partying by night in Kuta. At the other end are people such as George Friedman, (founder and CEO of the “Global Intelligence” magazine Stratfor) who recently complained that it is no longer possible for a tourist in Bali to encounter Balinese, because they aren't allowed onto the grounds of the expensive hotels in which he had to stay (possibly for security reasons?)
Our experience was that it's easy to find Balinese who are remarkably open to tourists, and more than willing to talk about Bali, about politics, or about their lives. Some were our taxi drivers, some people in markets, or those working in (or hanging around) the hotels where we stayed. People who know English tend to be the ones who work with tourists, so one could argue we were talking to a biased sample of Balinese, but both Diana and I were struck at how readily many people would talk to us about how they lived, the division of work between men and women, their hopes for their children.
Even after all the talking and reading, the threads of what make Bali unique are so interwoven that pulling on one pulls them all, as in a batik. Why did Bali seem to be the happiest place I have ever travelled? Was it because it was also the most religious culture I've ever encountered? It seems simplistic to claim that as a cause (correlation does not prove causation, as all statisticians warn). Yet it felt as though there were some relationship. Bali is homogeneous (90–95% Balinese Hindu, which is surprisingly different from the Indian version) and largely rural. Family groups are based on large extended families, which offer increased support for (and demands on) individuals. Might those elements hold the key? Then there is its unusual history: about 500 years ago Bali was flooded with the elite Hindu artists and nobility of Java, who chose Bali as their retreat as Islam spread through the rest of Indonesia. Contrast that to the polyglot refugees who immigrated to North America. Like some cultural uncertainty principle, the more I learned of what Bali is, the less I understood of how it had come to be that.
When you throw a million tourists into India, India remains unchanged — its more than a thousand million inhabitants absorb the visitors without a ripple. Bali has under four million inhabitants, so you’d think it would have been radically changed by the six million tourists who visit it annually. On the surface it has been: in tourist towns like Ubud, Sanur, Kuta most of the shops try to offer those products that tourists want, whether tailored batik suits, seventeen colour tattoos, or grande half-sweet vanilla lattes. But beneath the surface, the currents run opposite to what one might expect.
India is a hard country in which to travel, because so many of the people whom one encounters as a tourist want to make money from you, and are willing to say whatever might lead to that. I once tried to hire a tuk-tuk, a small three wheeled taxi, to take me to the Shanti guesthouse. Simultaneously, one driver explained to me that it was completely full while the other assured me that it had burned down the previous week. They would have made more money by taking me to their preferred hotel which explained the stories, both obviously untrue.
In Bali, by contrast, when we wanted to go from Sanur to Ubud our hotel offered us a taxi ride for what seemed like a lot of money. When we asked about buses instead, they explained where the tourist buses were, and how much they'd cost (about 1/4 of the quoted taxi rate). In an Indian temple ceremony, one is ignored unless one is asked for money. In Bali we were welcomed, and blessed along with the Balinese, and people seemed genuinely pleased that we were participating.
Tourist economies on small islands are often problematic, particularly when there is a wide economic difference between the tourists and the locals. The locals often resent people who invade their culture with more money than they have, and who have no sensitivity to local mores. The results can range from gated resorts and segregated beaches (Jamaica comes to mind) to the disappearance of indigenous culture except as an item packaged for sale to tourists (many of Thailand's once idyllic islands have suffered this fate.) Somehow, Bali avoids both of these.
Perhaps the reason is that money doesn’t seem to be the primary motivation for most Balinese, which makes them very different from much of rest of the world. Clearly the huge amount of time everyone spends every day in religious ceremony is not economically driven. We talked to a Balinese man who had had five deaths in his extended family this year (a few of cousins of cousins, people he hadn't known personally.) But each death required he take five days to participate fully in the funeral ceremonies (and those are twenty-four hour days.) He and his wife (an ex-student of mine) agreed that this made it hard to hold a regular job, an conclusion that appeared to bother her significantly more than it did him. But of course she was from Ontario originally, not Bali.
In Bali's consistently warm climate most houses and stores are open to the world, without walls. We were struck over and over again how we could wander into a store, past the computer and cash register, and look around at the merchandise, then leave without anyone being there to watch us. If we asked for help, someone would emerge from the back room and help us, but clearly significant shoplifting doesn't happen. When I idiotically left my ATM card in a bank machine, it was given to the bank manager, who amusedly returned it to me the next day. We were never short-changed, and when one had agreed on a price for an item, that was the price. Money is clearly not important enough to be dishonest over.
Several writers have observed that Bali sees the waves of tourists as a tribute to its quality of life, and is proud of them. When we told the woman who owned the tiny three table warung (restaurant) where we had the best (and the cheapest!) food we had in Bali that we were leaving the next evening, she immediately offered to buy us a fish that morning at the market and make a special dish for us before we left. There was no sense of trying to get one last meal from us, but a genuine sense of wanting to share the richness of her cooking skills. (It was superb, for the record.)
Cooperation is essential in Bali, as the terraced rice paddies have to share the water the rice needs. There is a complex irrigation system that shunts the water into different paddies at different times of the growing cycle. One can't refuse to work with one's neighbour, and there are people in every village to arbitrate disputes and make sure everyone gets their fair share, and no more. When offerings of foods are made at the temples to the gods every day, equal offerings are also made to the demons to keep them placated and happy. The Balinese weaving with which sacred statues are garlanded is a simple white and black plaid, similar in meaning to the yin/yang symbol. Both sides of life must be acknowledged and respected. In bartering for goods, a standard phrase we would hear was, "OK, final price. Good for me, good for you." A final price has to be good for both sides, just like everything else.
There is a fine old Sufi saying, "When the pickpocket looks at the wise man, all he sees are pockets." Perhaps we in the west are like that pickpocket, looking at the world and only trying to figure out how we'll get money from it. But the Balinese look at the world, and whether they first see religion, or family, or culture, or art it's clear that they aren't just looking at pockets. Frequently we would hear how people were working (or had worked) in tourist centres before moving back to their family of origin's compound (or their husband's). Is the key that explains Balinese happiness and friendliness that they recognize that they already have the essentials of what they need? That seems closer to the heart of the Balinese mystery, but the mystery still remains. Perhaps a second visit is called for....