My husband and I had been waiting for our hotel shuttle outside Ubud Palace for 40 minutes. My sari was crumpled, my feet throbbed, and I was so fatigued from the stupidity of waiting that I was either going to climb into a van of ‘Eat Pray Love’ Chinese tourists (I was rejected entry), or throw myself under the wheels of the next hotel van which rocked up to the curb, unless it said Nandini Bali. The next van said Nandini Bali.
There’s always a moment during a vacation when you’d rather be five feet underground or back home, depending on whichever is furthest away from your current version of hell. Which is where you are right now, right here, the teeming entrance of Ubud Palace. Every taxi driver we’d encountered had cheerfully assaulted us with: “My name is fill-in-the-blanks. Your name is fill-in-the-blanks. How long are you staying? Maybe you need a driver? Maybe you want to go to Monkey Forest?”
Ubud, pre-Julia Roberts, must have been a paradise. Locals will insist there are still hidden charms. Locals will talk about coffee as if it were an Indonesian invention like batik or pasola, a ritual mounted spear-fighting competition, if you must know. And yes, the cafes are divine, and yes, the hospitality is unparalleled. We had a breakfast for champions at Janet Deneefe and her husband Ketut’s house. Janet runs the Ubud Food Festival and the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, so it was appropriate that she introduced us to the delicacies of jackfruit and banana flower and lawar, which sounds and tastes like a pig-blood infused haiku.
And yes, there is something emotional about watching families of men install 20-foot curved bamboo penjor poles along the streets for Galungan, the Balinese festival which celebrates good over evil. And yes, the cute children, and yes, the street dogs that pose at doorways of temples. But Trip Advisor just voted Bali the world’s top destination of 2017, which can mean only one thing—it’s time to find another Bali.
The government of Indonesia has already come up with a scheme to identify 10 new Balis. With an archipelago of over 8,000 islands—all lush, all floating in perfect waters, it seems lazy to insist upon the one synonymous with new age yogi-raw food-meetups and surfer dudes, which thanks to the massive influx of tourists, now struggles with waste management issues, erosion and problems with drinkable water. Still, here we are.
Galungan, away from the city
Our hotel, Nandini Bali, is half an hour from Ubud, near a village called Susut. It is a haven of a place. A funicular takes you up and down the forest slope, and at the bottom of the property, there is a waterfall, where they offer rose petal-strewn spa therapies. Around the hotel, there are bamboo groves, thickets of banana trees and paddy fields where ducks splish-splash about. Rain pours down in impressive sheets every day. The green hurts our eyes.
After the debacle of downtown Ubud, we decide to celebrate Galungan locally, in the village, by walking around. There are offerings to the gods everywhere—tiny baskets made of palm leaf, filled with betel-nut and lime and flowers. Some offerings are protected by umbrellas, others have wine glasses and Ritz crackers. The penjor poles are swaying like giant scorpion tails along the street.
There are rest stops where men in natty white head wraps gather. Two adorable girls in bright lace kebaya tops follow us for a while. “Can we take a photograph?” I ask. They nod and smile and after seriously confabulating with each other, say, “Money, money.” We pass burly stone temple guardians wearing black-and-white chequered skirts, nubs of marigold tucked behind their ears. Isolated houses sit in fields of paddy. Four roosters trapped under cane baskets scratch around until it’s time for the cockfight. Scooters putter by, the green road stretches on.
We come upon the temple, where a band is playing music. Without sarongs we cannot go inside, so we watch from the sidelines, and then amble some more. We meander behind two women with baskets on their heads. One holds the hand of a little girl. The other clasps hold of a little boy. I want to abduct that little boy in his natty headgear. Suddenly, the procession is upon us. At the temple they had told us no photographs, so we sit on a parapet and watch as an enormous dragon is carried by us. There’s a feeling of serenity, of having arrived at the right place with no great effort, and no desire to frame it.
Dogs, silence, green
We start walking again and a small black dog from a farmer’s house comes out to greet us. It’s the kind of landscape that invites you to superimpose your life upon it. Dogs, silence, air, green. That’s all we need. I tell my husband about my last trip to Indonesia, which was almost a decade ago. I had stayed with a friend in one of those isolated houses in the paddy fields in front of Mount Merapi in Yogyakarta. Every morning, we had eaten papayas the size of hand grenades, watching the breathing, smoking volcano ahead of us. We had gone to see the temples of Borobudur, and I had been greedy to fill my bag with textiles and hand-carved wooden objects, but what I really remember is the volcano and the fruit. Has that place changed too?
On our way back to the hotel, we pass a chicken battery. It is a low slung structure with hundreds of chickens in their troughs, listening to the automated sounds of a mantra box. There’s something creepy and peaceful about the scene. It’s impossible not to attribute a touristic metaphor to it. The hordes and busloads, the chicken mentality. The dangers are coming, it seems to say, so what should we do? Chill out and listen to mantras, or break free?
