Bali Burning – Beauty and the Beast

The overnight train to Ketapang in the far East of Java was a mere seven hours, but we were a bit ragged after the first eleven earlier in the day, and not having anywhere to lie down is hard (in theory we already know that but we keep thinking it won’t be quite so hard the next time…?!)

When we arrived in the morning Theo’s cold had him by the throat and none of us had slept more than a couple of hours. We were a little fragile and emerged slowly from the train at 4.55 …to a beautiful dawn.

We headed away from the station marvelling at the colours in the sky and after only a few minutes walk we found the port.

With tickets in our hands we were pointed in the direction of the sea and we wandered a little towards what looked like a ferry, when we got close we saw there was another boat loading up with trucks and cars, and we headed for that.

The forty-five minute crossing was taking us to Bali.

Bali! So many people we love have been there and nearly all of them have said ‘you have to go to Ubud’, ‘it’s the authentic heart of Bali’. Some told us there was a monkey forest sanctuary there as well, it really did sound amazing so we had booked the ‘Darma Yogi Guesthouse’ for three nights initially (second cheapest guesthouse of the whole trip), and finding our way to Ubud was to be our last act in what had been nine days of travelling, with a wedding thrown in for good measure.

We arrived in Bali at 6.30 having watched the sun rise over the mountains and we were on a bus heading to Depensar (the capital) by 7.00. We were on a very different island now. No need to wear headscarves here…this was Hindu country!

There were temples and statues everywhere, ornate and beautifully carved. Rosa saw monkeys playing by the side of the road – yay! …but our optimism and joy at the sunrise and beauty of the place was worn away by the time it took our bus to travel the 120 km’s to the city.

There was so much traffic, and either the roads were full of potholes or our bus didn’t have any suspension, four long hours later and I was ready to walk to Ubud.

‘Let’s just get off this bus!!’

I pointed out that by going into Depensar and out again to Ubud we would be travelling three sides of a square…and we had no clue where to get a bus to Ubud anyway, everything we’d read had been vague and contradictory so….’let’s get off in the next town and see if we can get a bus/hitch/taxi (walk!) the 18kms to Ubud…please!?’ (…I hate this bus!)

I nearly had everyone agreeing with my slightly crazy plan but just before we got off Theo suggested we talked to a local who might know something useful. An eminently sensible idea and there was a young guy sat a couple of rows up from us.

Andika had a mop of longish curly hair and a ready smile, he was a student and a really sweet person who spoke excellent English. He was happy to help. He looked up buses for us from Depensar to Ubud. He lived in the capital and knew which buses we needed, he was getting off where I had wanted to, to meet his dad, but we would easily find the ‘2KB’ in Ubung bus station and then change to the 4KB (I wrote it all down) …and no he hadn’t hitched on the island before and he didn’t know whether there were any buses to Ubud in the next town… so the pendulum swung back towards sticking on this bus as the way most likely to get us to Ubud. We were thanking him when I glanced at my map and noticed that this was his stop and he rushed off the bus.

The last hour into town passed slowly but the buses Andika had suggested were cheap, easy to find and air conditioned …and they ran really regularly – an absolute blessing 🙂

The traffic continued to be pretty intense but we didn’t care as much anymore, our bones were no longer being jolted into dust on a very hot bus.

We finally got off our third and last bus of the day (seven hours in all) only five minutes away from our guesthouse and we found it easily, it was stunning, probably the most beautiful guesthouse we have stayed in.

We had a first floor balcony room with table and chairs and a wooden door into our room, simply furnished and with a bath (not that I had one but I could have!) The guesthouse was part of two or three joined together and  built around a central temple courtyard, with a small swimming pool just opposite our room…and everyone could use it…

Upstairs from us was a spa offering reflexology, aromatherapy, Balinese massage, revitalising facials…The soft spa music was turned on at 10.00 and turned off at 18.00. (Soothing on the first couple of days …and only a little irritating by the last day…)

We didn’t have much left in us so we went to the little restaurant two shops down and had a great meal. It became our favourite, local, cheap and delicious, a simple place to eat and watch the life of the street go by.

Eating was the extent of our adventures into Ubud that day and we went to bed…. It had taken us all day to get there and we were done.

The next morning I woke up with terrible stomach cramps and Rosa had Theo’s cold. We were not in good shape…so we did very little. We had planned to do very little anyway but more as a rest than because we weren’t fit to do anything else. We didn’t even have it in us to get in the pool although with the combined unwellness of us all I think we could have started an outbreak if we’d gotten in and added our germs to the pools ambience!

We ventured out in the afternoon to at least see a little bit of the town but we didn’t go far.

I know when I’m ill I’m not in the ‘wonder’ so I tried hard not to allow the filter of my mood to affect me but I think I failed …I found myself disliking the fact that there were so many tourists, loads of them …but so what, I’m a bloody tourist, was I annoying me? (maybe) …I felt irritated at the constant loud, smelly traffic on every road we encountered, with motorbikes going down the little back lanes we tried walking down to get away from the traffic on the main streets. I was even annoyed that there were so many shops in this beautiful town, designer chic rubbing along with little market traders, everyone hoping to sell us something. My way is to greet every person who tries to sell me something as a human being trying to do their job. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been asked if I want a taxi – I can still smile and explain I want to walk because it’s good for me, to wish them luck, to smile. It’s not their fault I’ve been asked seventeen times and it’s a helpful service they are providing…and I can occasionally see the flicker of surprise that I’ve greeted them like they are people not an irritation. The person peaked out from behind the job most times, but it was exhausting and I didn’t have much left…every few seconds we were offered taxis, tours, massages, the chance to come inside a shop to look at clothes, souvenirs, incense, sarongs. No different from the India I know and love so why was this getting to me?!

What I saw was that the Ubud my friends loved, the undiscovered jewel in Bali’s crown, was now a beautiful place to come shopping if you didn’t mind the traffic. I suspected friends like mine had told their friends about this beautiful place and our combined touristic weight had changed Ubud.

Perhaps if I was on holiday for two weeks and wanted to get myself some fabulously cheap massages and a new wardrobe, eat a wonderful variety of food and stay in a stunning little guesthouse I could really recommend Ubud whole heartedly…and writing it down makes me wonder why I was feeling so neg? It could simply be the fact that my stomach cramps turned into the cold, that I was ill and deeply tired and that was colouring my perception…

I just wanted peace and I didn’t find it.

I think my idea of where I was going was wrong really, I thought it was a small town where not many people went because there were no beaches. That it was a peaceful spiritual place…but if I’ve learned anything during this trip it’s that I need to look for what’s precious, stay open and be patient.

Maybe Ubud would surprise me yet…

The next day we had to go to the  Pelni Ferry Ticket Office, (a two hour journey back through Depensar with a change of buses) we had our bus cards now and knew it would be air conditioned even if it was long. We could do this…

The website was not easy to navigate nor 100% accurate so we had to go to the offices to find out what our options were for travelling towards Timor Leste/East Timor (…interesting fact: Timor means East and Leste means East so whichever way you look at it the country is called ‘East East’ …I guess for a long string of islands of which this is the most Eastern it’s not too bad a name :).

It took us nearly three hours to get to the offices, me and Rosa streaming with cold, and Theo with a hacking cough…we were pretty much the only passengers on the buses though so we didn’t have to feel guilty at least.

The Pelni Ferry Ticket Office (the capitals are a mark of reverence by the way for our transport gurus through these Islands – of which there are officially 14,752 – where would we be without Pelni?) …anyway the Pelni Ferry Ticket Office was mercifully not closed for lunch and we the kind man behind the counter looked up all our options.

Our hope had been to be able to spend a week on Bali and then head East – to either of the Nusa Tenggara’s depending on where the ferries went. We knew we needed to base our travels around the ferry schedule rather than make a firm plan and hope it worked out, these ferries got full.

Our first option was to go the next day, leaving early in the morning. None of us wanted to do that.

The second was to go the day after in the evening, but it was a 47 hour crossing because it went to another island first, which also made it more expensive.

Option three was to leave in four days time but miss out the chance to see the Komodo dragons, going straight to West Timor (…can that be right?! West East – I wonder if it has another local name?!)

Our last option was to go in six days time, directly to Labuan Bajo near where the dragons were… only 33 hours and cheaper…but that left very little time to at least try and find a boat to Australia.

Tricky.

The most sensible option was to stay for four more days on Bali, in our fabulous guest house, recovering from our colds, visiting some temples, seeing the monkeys in the forest and then go directly to West Timor…but the dragons! We’d miss the dragons!!

Rosa has loved Komodo dragons since she was little and even though these cannibalistic (ugly) giant lizards do not have quite the same place in our hearts as camels, pandas, koalas, kangaroos, duck-billed platypuses and orangutans, we still wanted to see them.

So, if we wanted to try and see dragons we had three options, go tomorrow …an absolute no from all of us. Go the day after that, expensive and VERY long – or stay here another week.

We went for expensive and long after a long debate that had us sat in stony silence for about three minutes at one point…it was not an easy decision!

If expensive and long turned out to be rough as well then we were in for a stinker 🙂

Tickets bought (£30 each with a cabin and food for two days wasn’t too bad we decided on the expensive front…)

We got on the bus back, and there, sitting at the back, was Andika! The chance of us meeting the same person randomly, twice in three days, was incredibly remote – we really liked him already and now we got to spend an hour with him finding out a bit more about his life.

We found out that the love of his life was his dog, a cute little thing called Katsu. He was studying law and had just gone to Java for an essay writing competition – he’d made it into the top five but the prize money was only for the top three. Rosa and he chatted easily and we invited him to come and stay with us if he ever made it to England…we exchanged numbers and parted friends, he was one of our highlights of Bali…

We walked back through Ubud and saw a vegetarian/vegan restaurant that looked so lovely we decided we’d eat there that night. We had a swim and did nothing for a couple of hours, it had taken all day to book our tickets and a rest made sense.

We ate well that night on fresh salads, tempeh and tofu and enjoyed the vibe of the place…we had a ‘strictly’ moment watching couples dancing the Salsa, and hadn’t our beloved friends Angie and Kathy come to a restaurant in Ubud where Kathy had danced the salsa?!

Turned out it was the same restaurant which made us happy and we decided tomorrow we would make the most of our last day – ill or not we were going to the monkey sanctuary.

We got there around midday – we weren’t moving fast at this point in our travelling – and headed in.

The trees were magnificent and the monkeys both cute and scary …we slowly walked around watching them playing…several of them were washing what looked like stones in puddles with great concentration.

We also had a purpose in the forest, we had been asked to sing at the wake for Sarah Hulme, who had died tragically in a car accident. She had loved our music and because we were away we asked if there was somewhere we could sing a song for her, a place that meant something to her? Sarah had loved Bali so we made a shakey egg out of rice and a small tupperware pot and found a quiet spot by a temple to sing ‘Child of the Universe’. On my first shake of our newly fashioned rice shaker two monkeys appeared – okay so that wasn’t going to work. We hastily put it away, Theo started singing and then one of them there monkeys decided to climb on to his shoulder…I wondered what Chinese sign Sarah had been, and I felt sure she would have loved both the sweetness and the humour of it when the monkey decided it was going to eat Theo’s hair mid song.

Shortly after we’d finished singing we heard drumming in the distance. It sounded a bit dissonant but still interesting so we headed up towards the noise.

Theo reliably informed me that this was ‘Gamalan’ – forty men playing different drums, cymbals, bells and gongs – it was bloody loud and a bit out of time as far as I was concerned (still not quite feeling the love!) but Theo was entranced and so we stayed a bit longer…and that’s when I saw the coffin.

Was it really a coffin? What would a coffin be doing on the back of a rather beautiful looking cart in the middle of the monkey sanctuary? As we watched the ‘coffin’ was moved onto a podium and the beautiful cart was set about by two men with chainsaws – systematically destroying and dismantling it! They made a big heap of all the pieces and then a second gamelan band arrived followed closely by a huge statue of a black bull on the back of another cart, pulled into place by twenty or so people.

That cart was swiftly followed by another bearing what looked to be a second coffin. This cart had wings and was beautiful…

What was going on?

I asked one of the many men wearing short sarongs and traditional style headgear…were they attendants of some kind?

A ‘traditional Balinese cremation’ was his reply.

Everything that happened after that took on a deeper significance.

From a respectful distance we watched the dressing of both bodies and the love and care taken over preparing each person for whatever is next.

The body that had arrived last was wrapped and placed inside the bull, the other remaining in its simply decorated coffin.

…and then they set light to them both.

Small flames at first, licking around the edges of the bulls feet and the ornate coffin…and then huge flamethrowers were brought out to make sure both bodies were definitely burned.

I moved round the front after the burning had been going on for twenty minutes or so and saw the skeleton of the woman in the flames. That image will live with me, but no more so than the images of all the other dead people I have seen in my life, the spirit of the person I had loved had gone with their last breathe.

We tried to find out their names. Theo and I were planning to go to a temple that evening to put flowers on a shrine and we wanted to include them with the other people we were going to send our love to.

The man in the bull was called Maday Parna but we couldn’t find out the name of the woman. The man we asked confirmed that the Maday’s family did have more money than the unnamed woman so he had a bull to burn in but people in the villages contributed when someone died so the family didn’t have to face the cost alone. I liked that – just because you were poor didn’t mean you didn’t get to be included in the rituals, just burned in something a bit less fancy.

We left after the flames began to die down and then it started to rain.

Fitting I thought.

We got soaked walking back to our room but we didn’t care…this was the three month anniversary of our travels and we had witnessed something unique. Something my brave and dear friend had wanted to do when her six year old daughter died, hit by a car. We knew we’d never get permission for that in the UK, for all sorts of reasons, but there was a desire then to make death more part of life…and to keep our loved ones close. Our ancient Neolithic relatives kept their dead people under the floor and in the tragedy of the death of a child I totally get the desire to do that.

There was a lot about that experience I loved, common sense, when the fires were lit everyone moved back – no one had to be told to get out of the way of the flamethrowers, no barrier was set up, and no one was spared the view of the skeletons still burning after all else had gone.

We found flowers and Theo and I went in search of a temple to say a blessing for his Aunty Dorothy, for Sarah, for Brian, our friend in Guilin’s dad, for Pauline Duncalf, the mum of a dear friend who had died in the last few weeks, for Tim Harland, wonderful husband, dad and inspirational man, Maday Parna and the unarmed woman in the coffin …and for everyone who has been killed in Israel and Palestine.

I have no idea if making prayers or having moments of stillness affects anything in the wide world but I know it affects me. It exercises my compassion muscles and gives my heart a chance to take charge …every now and again I think it makes sense for us to stop and remember that we care, just how much we love…what matters in life …the best parts of all religions in truth.

Each flower gently placed at the feet of the gods, the universe, the infinite place we have come from …and will return to. Love shared and connected with, tears softly shed…

Bali had found a way into my heart and I have two bracelets brought from the barefoot street sellers to remind me of the chances to be kind in the little exchanges we have day to day with everyone we meet.

…I whispered a wish for us three to make it safely to Australia and we headed off to eat.