Bali: eat, pray ... loved to death?

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This was published 12 years ago

Bali: eat, pray ... loved to death?

Living culture ... there are still pockets of Bali unaffected the huge influx of tourists.

Living culture ... there are still pockets of Bali unaffected the huge influx of tourists.Credit: Geoff Strong

Geoff Strong finds Bali transformed by Julia Roberts' film, but discovers there are still ways to escape the tourist hordes.

''Ubud? Heh heh heh!"

This was always old Wayan's reaction whenever my wife and I returned in our hire car to the house we had rented in his village. No matter where we had been, he always assumed we had been to the bright lights of Ubud and his conspiratorial cackle suggested he thought doing so equalled cavorting in fleshpots of sin.

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Wayan's village was about 25 minutes' drive further up the mountain from the sprawling town that likes to think of itself as Bali's cultural capital, but the two could be in different countries.

The village called Kelusa sits on one of the many ridges that tear down the side of Gunung (Mount) Batur, a volcano that last blew its stack big time 200 years ago.

These ridges are isolated from each other by sometimes impossibly steep ravines cut into the soft volcanic soil by rivers rushing down the mountain through lush tropical vegetation. Kelusa is virtually surrounded by deep gorges and has only two viable access roads, making it well off the beaten tourist track.

Executive style ... the house (and pool) the author rented for $400 a week.

Executive style ... the house (and pool) the author rented for $400 a week.Credit: Geoff Strong

When we rejoined the tourist track it led us to Ubud, still basking in Hollywood movie fame. A fame that seems to have transformed the place more than any of the changes we have noticed in the 20 years since we first visited. There are now vastly improved footpaths, fewer and less annoying touts, more stylish hotels, spas, shops, cafes and yoga classes, yet a diminished sense of being a true Indonesian town on this distinct part of their varied archipelago.

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Kelusa by contrast offer no hotels or tourist accommodation of any kind, no restaurants, cafes or even shops bigger than tiny stores selling the most basic supplies. There are just lanes of typical sprawling Balinese house compounds, several temples including two large ones and a handful of workshops producing some of the handcrafts that fill tourist shops in Ubud or Kuta. Apart from our house there seemed to be nothing for non-Balinese and during the two weeks we stayed in July, the only European faces we saw in the village belonged to each other.

We had timed our visit for Galungan, the 10-day festival celebrating the Balinese belief that ancestors revisit the earth at this time. We had no need of guided tours to experience the real Bali, it was all around us. The entrance of every house was marked by a tall penjor, a bamboo pole bent at the top like a fishing rod and ritually decorated sometimes in extraordinary intricacy, a bit like we might do a Christmas tree.

Hollywood sized ... some locals have not taken kindly to the rapid changes in Bali.

Hollywood sized ... some locals have not taken kindly to the rapid changes in Bali.Credit: Geoff Strong

A neighbour even came in and constructed one for the front of our place, a task that took a couple of hours. Throughout the festival, the locals invited us to every conceivable ceremony and even to dine at their homes.

We discovered on a previous visit that taking an interest in local culture and my wife gaining a smattering of Balinese words (as opposed to Indonesian) unlocked cultural doors. It began when a hotel worker invited us to an aunt's wedding. On the day we dressed in local garb but asked our host if people would mind foreigners at the function. He responded: "You are not foreign, today you are Balinese."

Subsequent visits have found us the only "bule" (foreigners) at all sorts of ceremonies, from temple dances to a high cast cremation. This time if the doors didn't open we had the consolation prize of the house we had rented (via www.balispirit.com). It is owned by an executive for a large international company based in Seattle, which she built partly for her own retirement. It featured palatial spaces, an enormous secluded pool, manicured lush garden and even a household temple, all for $400 a week.

We needn't have worried. For the festival we were taken in by a neighbouring family. On the first visit their daughters aged 13 and 11 gave an impromptu performance of legong dancing. The music squawked out of a mobile phone with the volume turned to max. Then at the performance end, the eldest girl switched the music to something equally strident with a different beat. I asked if it was Indonesian pop music. "No," she said "Laddie Gagaaa," (Lady Gaga).

On Galungan day itself we joined a ceremony conducted by the family patriarch, a 75-year-old pemangku (or lower caste) priest. There were several temple visits and a march around the village by rival temple barongs (a highly decorated ceremonial animal mask) each accompanied by a portable gamelan orchestra transported on bamboo poles. A week later the old priest died, so we were then invited to his cremation, a ceremony that went on from about 4 pm until midnight.

In his book, Under the Volcano, one time Age journalist Cameron Forbes includes a comment about the enormous amount of time Balinese invest in religious ceremonies; "The main occupation of the Balinese is being Balinese." This was apparent on this visit where we were even invited to a ceremonial pig slaughtering.

Galungan ends on the day called Kuningan, when one of the temples in the village hosts the island's only legal cockfight (also not for the squeamish). Thousands come from all over to watch rooster against rooster, each enraged bird armed with a knife tied to one foot and trying to disembowel the other. The birds are blessed beforehand and bets are laid. Despite the religious imprimatur it is disconcerting to watch a disembowelled bird, with giblets dangling as it flutters through the air to land dead at the feet of its owner.

Religion for most Balinese in otherwise overwhelmingly Islamic Indonesia is a mixture of traditional animism and ancestor worship overlayed with the multi-gods of Hinduism that first arrived in the area about 1000 years ago with the Tamil Chola empire from southern India. It once covered much of Indonesia but retreated to Bali with the arrival is Islam elsewhere in the 1600s.

While most Australians come to the island for a cheap beach holiday, they are missing a culture still intact despite tourism. The Balinese mindset is a colorful mini-universe quite distinct in a world where secularism is fighting for inflence against monotheistic Christianity and Islam.

On a ridge further east and down the mountain from Kelusa is a road called Jalan Sriwedari that runs through the villages of Taman and Tegallantang. It is the site of conflict between this old Bali and a newer, sanitised tourist-friendly version. Much closer to Ubud, we rented a house here three years ago. In the meantime Hollywood came and produced that film starring Julia Roberts, where she ate and prayed in different parts of the world, but finally found love in Bali. Then there was that one celebrated scene where she rides an old fashioned bicycle down Jalan Sriwedari and a few moments later miraculously appears on a beach at Uluwatu which is actually 60 kilometres away.

But that bicycle scene has done wonders for the appeal of Jalan Sriwedari, to the extent that it has undergone a spectacular transformation from rice farming to real estate with rental bungalows popping up everywhere. This had caused divisions among the locals, with one group trying to keep to the old ways erecting an almost Hollywood sized "NOT FOR SALE' sign along the road.

It was a sombre realisation that the ricefields along the road are filling up with houses that will be mostly rented out to people like us who want a Balinese experience in the country. Like us, they will visit an Ubud which now boasts, Wi-Fi at nearly every cafe, shops that would not look out of place in South Yarra, with more traditional massages and yoga classes than you could say "Om" at.

In Bali, the firstborn of either sex is often called Wayan. It is a bit like the Australian sketch in a Monty Python show where everyone was called Bruce to avoid confusion. Wayan was the name of all three guys who looked after our house, including old Wayan who was night watchman. An even older Wayan was the priest who conducted the Galungan ceremony and died a week later, of heart and liver problems.

As Hindus the Balinese believe in reincarnation, but they also believe that a soul will stick around and not go to the great recycler, if a few things do, or don't, happen at the funeral. Firstly, the soul must be tricked into not knowing the way back home, thus the body conveyed from home to the burning ground, is spun around at each crossroad to make it lost. Secondly there must be no outward show of sadness lest the soul feel sorrow for the mourners and stick around anyway. There are few worse nuisances than a soul that hangs around.

All these procedures were followed for very old Wayan. The body was viewed (and photographed on mobile phones) both at home and at the cremation ground. He was placed on a rack between two sheets of iron. The big paper bulls are reserved for cremation of higher Hindu castes.

His body was burned by two flame throwers powered by high pressure kerosene while a priest sat on an elevated platform chanting incantations and ringing a little bell. The women sat in front of the priest in a semicircle while the young men sat around the corpse watching it be consumed by flames and snapping it with their mobile phones. Boys will be boys.

It was around midnight when the burning was finished. The remaining bones were wrapped up, spun around a few more times and taken to the nearest river to be thrown in after yet another ceremony.

I sat with the family and their friends throughout this, it was a strangely powerful experience and all the while nobody seemed to care that I was the one person who wasn't Balinese. Curious perhaps at our interest one of the locals asked "Do you have ceremonies in your country?"

"Not really, not like this," I replied.

Then I thought, maybe the stockmarket ... and maybe the football.

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