Ubud :: Indonesia
You'll never go broke putting beer logos on t-shirts.
Places: Depensar, Kuta, Ubud, Bedulu, Gunung Kawi & Tinta Empul.
Coolest thing I did: Stumbled onto a proper Hindu festival, Galungan, which in Ubud includes monkeys. My thoughts on monkeys are well documented.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: That people from Bali are actually Hindus or Buddhists or something. They're not Muslims, that's for certain.
The plane over didn't bode well for my liking Kuta Beach, the Costa del Sol or Cancun of the Australian package tourist. The bulk of the flight from Darwin to Depensar was either families with lots of kids or single males well into their 40s or 50s the wrong side of too much brown spirits. I was a little scared that I'd end up sharing the beach with lots and lots of Aussies doing their best to give us a bad name abroad, but I should have been warned by the presence of several French and Germans that we wouldn't completely own the place.
Your heart does break ever so slightly to see just how perfect the beach at Kuta and surrounds is, with kilometres of surf breaking in nice straight lines into a beach that is a salt-and-pepper mix of volcanic black and snow white. The hippies that first put it on the map in the 60s must have been gobsmacked to see it without any development and thus helped it on it's rise to fame. I can still remember when Thailand was a cool, edgy place to go on holiday but I can always remember south Bali being developed so I was kind of surprised that I didn't completely hate the place like I thought I would. I mean, there are tons of Aussies and some of them are as loud and rowdy as you would expect, but the converse is that the Balianese themselves are a very, very understanding and welcoming people. They would have to be. This does also seem to bring out the better side of lots of Australians and there does seem to be an actual cultural exchange, even if it is just watching the Aussies chatting with street vendors on the beach while chomping down on their Nasi Goering.
I think this is one example where even though the development has not been all that kind to the environment (just walking along that beach at sunset whilst garbage swirls around your ankles shows you that) it does seem to be appreciated well enough by both sides. Tourism is the industry here and the chance to buy t-shirts with the logo of the local brand of beer is something Aussies have always appreciated. I assume the Indonesians also love our inability to bargain without feeling like a prick.
Kuta is really about two things, surfing and nightlife. There has been an attempt to cater to upmarket Europeans, which can be seen further up the beach in Legain where you can see all these sprawling bungalow complexes where the Euros can sunbathe in view of the beach while still being separated from the touts by a low fence and security guards. However the nightlife was what I was most afraid would put my countrymen to shame, after all when we go overseas it's generally once we've had 9 too many that we tend to do things that would get us escorted from the suburb at home. There was a fair smattering of young surfers out drunk, but they seemed content to limit themselves to trying to pull the other young Aussies of the complementary sex and weren't even that fussed by the Indonesians. What was a little bit sad was the much older crowd, the tattooed greying men I'd seen on the plane over from Darwin. I'd say this had always been a location for older men, especially the aging, blue rinsed ponytail types, but no my single night out in Kuta I got into conversation with two separate large groups of Australian men old enough to be my father and the common theme in both cases was the commodities boom.
It seems that the resources boom at home has meant that there are a lot of single older men, either that way from the start or due to broken marriages resulting from long times appart from their families. The couple of guys I spoke to did seem to realise that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and they had to make as much money as possible while it lasts, no matter how high the human cost. The thing most lacking from their workplaces, which also double as home due to their remoteness, is fun, especially the fun resulting from there being women present. Most of them are full of as much braggadocio as younger men in large groups are, only by the end of the night they seem to realise how unlikely they are to be going home with any 20 year olds from the Sunshine Coast. It's all a bit sad, and I suspect it's part of what keeps sex tourism alive in this part of the world, but I imagine months on end in the Pilbara can drive men to this kind of thing.
The whole place is mad for scooters, whether they are driven by white people or locals and you quickly get used to being nearly mowed down in narrow alleyways that should really only be for foot traffic. You can tell no-one really cares about such rules when you see that many of the small shops sell litre Absolute Vodka bottles full of petrol at a small mark up all up and down the small back alleys, called Gang for reasons I'm sure you'll find out if you're reading your Lonely Planet more closely than I am right now.
I think part of the reason I didn't get so scared the hell of Kuta was that I found myself living a classic backpacker slum between two Gang knows collectively as the Poppies. It's all cheap places to eat, alternating internet cafes, bars, t-shirt stalls (his: Harden the fuck up. hers: toughen up princess. My pride in my country knows no bounds...) and tourist information places, and despite myself I feel cozy and safe in these kinds of places. All I had to do was tell touts on the beach I was staying in the Poppies and they trudged off thinking it was a waste of time to try and sell whatever it was they were selling to a tourist more likely to have a less tight arse than mine. And what crap they sell. One bloke was hawking a bow and arrow set, which made me giggle at the thought of someone sitting on the beach picking off people as they came out of the surf. That wouldn't have been hard either, people actually wear helmets surfing out there due to the fact that any given wave is going to have about 20 people trying to catch it. My surfing isn't that great anyway, so I tactfully declined to embarrass myself trying to do so in front of that big a crowd.
So onto Ubud I came, up on the slopes of a couple of nearby volcanoes and so chock full of temples and whatnot that it's the very antithesis of Kuta. Except of course, it's just a geared up for tourists. They are a different breed, the ones that would rather take pictures of scary Gods they can't identify rather than stay in the tack of Noosa with Noodles that is south Bali. You do hear them pronouncing their superiority at times too, well I assume that's what they're doing because I don't speak passable French and that's what most conversations take place in here. For some explicable reason all of Paris appears to have upped for the summer and planted themselves here. I expected the Dutch if anyone from Europe, after all, they did own the place once.
Ubud is a nice place, with street names that tell you where you are. At the end of Monkey Forest Road is, well, a forest full of monkeys. I managed to rock up to town the day before Galungan, which I'm told by google is "celebration is the triumph of dharma against adharma (evil)", which of course it very well looks like. I was made to buy a sarong and scarf to wear around my head (making me suspect this is all some ruse to sell tourists more sarongs, I hear the sarong lobby has loads of clout in Jakarta) and wear it around all day if I wanted to get into temples and see secret stuff. Lots of people giggled at me, mostly children but I did get to see lots of ceremonies that I didn't understand. The women carry big boxes of food and stuff on their head to the temple, where they sit them on a big dais out the front. Then a bloke who I assume is a priest sprinkles holy waters on the offerings, then plays these bells for about 15 mins, then sprinkles lots of the people, then they all get up and have a good natter to each other while the next sitting comes in and does the same thing.
I took a day trip with my landlord around to lots of different temples throughout the day and saw lots of variations on the same theme, with everyone's kids giggling at the way I was dressed and having a good time. It's like Hindu Christmas or something. It was good to have the landlord and his co-pilot (who was his elderly neighbor, who's job appeared to be to chain-smoke clove cigarettes and grumble away in Indonesian the whole time) tear around the blind corners and sideswiping dogs and small children instead of trying to do it myself.
One thing they did was introduce me to the need for tourists to take pictures of rice paddies. Bali is stupidly humid so it's all wet rice cultivation and generations have gone out of their way to carve horizontal pools into the side of almost vertical hillsides to make more use of the limited arable land. It seems that taking a photo of rice paddies is good, but you get extra points for farmers, scarecrows, bicycles and farmyard animals somewhere in the photo too.
I liked that the kids have something to do in the whole festival. They get to dress up as the Barong, which is kind of like a Chinese dragon, only it only has two kids inside and has a pigs head. They go around to your house and if you give them some money they dance around a bit and get all that nasty adharma out of your house. There's a much bigger bunch of kids following the Barong around playing Gamelane instruments, which make lots of varying metal clanging sounds. I did see two Barongs meet in the street but they seem to pass without there being some kind of Barong-off, which would have been cool.
So I'm enjoying my forced exodus from the UK to wait for a work permit a whole lot better this week. More Indo to come as the next few weeks progress. Or until I get a work permit, whichever comes first.