December 2003

You can tell when the popular Kuta Beach ends, and the more upscale Legian Beach begins, when the whispering strangers stop trying to sell you underage Balinese girls, and instead merely offer marijuana and hashish.

That's really, sadly true.

The Bali you've probably heard about doesn't exactly match the Bali that's actually here. (At least, not if you go anywhere tourists normally go. More on that later.)

I have no idea what Bali might have looked like twenty-five years ago, before the tourism boom of the 1980s led to a massive shift in the island's economy toward servicing the wealthy English-speakers descending on this island of rice paddies. I have no idea what Bali might have looked like ten years ago, before the southeast Asian economic crisis of 1997 sent Indonesia's rupiah to lows from which it still hasn't recovered. I have no idea what Bali might have looked like three years ago, before terrorists blew up two Kuta cafes, devastating the island's tourism industry, possibly for good, judging from the ghost-town quality of the hotels and shopping areas in Kuta, Ubud, Sanur, and every other tourist area I visited.

I'm sure this must have been one heck of a nice place once. I hope it is again. It ain't now.

I should add in passing that drug trafficking in Indonesia is a capital offense. It also seems to be one of the main activities in Kuta. In a simple 20-minute walk down the beach on any given night, you'll see dozens of capital offenses attempted, right in your face, continuously, relay-race-style, one peddler breaking stride just as the next one starts in.

Nice rebuttal to the pro-death penalty deterrence argument.

(Yes, I know -- I destroyed my own perfectly legal medications before entering Malaysia, just to avoid any possible misunderstanding. Of course: I heard this a hundred times from actual cops and FBI people while doing research at CSI -- crooks usually don't consider consequences, which is part of how they get where they are in life. Law-abiding citizens do. So deterrence mostly deters people who don't need deterring, and not understanding that is why the deterred continue to think deterrence works.)

Kuta is also physically hideous. Picture the worst beachfront motel trap you ever saw in Florida. Then double the neon, replace half of the hotels with gated-security five-star palaces now in decline, close half of the other businesses, and grind the sidewalks into ankle-breaking rocks teetering on the very edge of careening traffic. Finally, populate the streets with girls on motorscooters offering oral sex, many of whom look disturbingly like Tiger Woods.

I always said no, since I'd like to be able to watch golf with a clear conscience.

The total effect was overwhelming -- sadness with a happy face, wall-to-wall electric poverty, the very worst in the human spirit rammed into your face with persistent enthusiasm. I was almost sprinting by the time I got back to my hotel.

By the time I got back to my room, I was crying. Honest. The sheer swarming desperation of these tourist-forgotten people wears like sandpaper on your soul every time you move.

So, I didn't move for the rest of the first night. Instead, I watched the Indonesian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which is surprisingly accessible, since Bahasa Indonesia is in Roman script. Try it yourself (I wrote down a few of the questions, since I figured you guys would enjoy playing along):

Karpent perang Boer War (1899-1902) terjadidi?

A. Ingriss
B. Afrika Selatan
C. Belanda
D. India

If you knew that the Boer War was fought in South Africa, and thus guessed B, you could have just won eight million rupiah.

That's less than a thousand dollars.

Damn, this is a weak currency. In fact, a million rupiah (in the form of a telephone gift certificate) is actually the consolation prize.

Damn, these people are poor.

Which is why I don't want to be writing what I'm writing. They need tourists. But I also can't lie about what I saw. I could, perhaps, pretend I never visited Bali. And I actually considered that option -- at least until the day I was briefly adopted by an entire smiling village, and thus found something encouraging, if still ambiguous in meaning. More on that later.

Back in Kuta for the moment, however: one thing I still don't understand is the consistent flow chart of criminal enterprise offered, as if all the shit peddlers had a meeting and are reading from the same script, verbatim:

"Hey boss! Taxi? Marijuana? Hashish? Pretty girl, very young?"

OK, somebody notify DARE: taxicabs are now a gateway drug, leading directly to the use of marijuana and hashish.

Secondly, if someone has turned down marijuana and hashish -- and is, in fact, walking away as quickly as possible -- how likely are they to suddenly stop, turn around, and say from ten yards away, "what's that? An underage GIRL, you say? Well, why didn't you say so?!?!"

I can't imagine this happens much. But the pitch always goes that way, word for word. Maybe it does.

As to the walking-away-rapidly bit: one thing I noticed everywhere in southeast Asia was that Asian faces almost always returned a smile on the street. And for whatever reason, I'm the kind of person who likes to smile at people and be smiled at. Which means I'm pretty lonely sometimes in New York or Los Angeles, and so I notice when people suddenly start returning my submarine-like face-pinging with a similar toothy display. And just as reliably, faces with European features almost never, ever smiled back or even made eye contact. This was true in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and every small town on the way. I don't want to stereotype, and I have no explanation. It's just what I'm honestly seeing, every single day.

I think this is part of why I still have yet to meet a single fellow American on this trip. I'm sure they're here. They're also, by all appearances, hermetically sealed, even on the street.

So I promised myself I wouldn't let myself slip into that.

Then I got to Bali.

Sometimes it starts before you even wake up. I was blasted out of bed one morning at 7 am by phone call from a taxi driver from two days earlier, who had noted my name on my luggage and thought perhaps he might win a fare by calling me in my room shortly after dawn and beginning an aggressive sales pitch.

This guy is not only desperate, but resourceful. So you can admire that, and take him up on his offer, knowing that you're going to be milked like a doe-eyed Balinese cow from the moment you get in his cab, or you can hang up the phone. Either way, sandpaper on your innards.

It continues from that moment onward. Bali's small on a map, but even smaller on planning, which means it takes an hour by car to get from anywhere to anywhere. The only sane option is to hire a driver for the day, and force yourself to be comfortable with the whole swarthy-manservant native-guide deal. More sandpaper.

The traffic in Bali, I should add, perfectly fits the trend begun in Malaysia and amplified through every Asian stop since. The drivers aren't merely suicidal here, but often completely psychotic. A two-lane road with no guardrail hugging a precipitous cliff might still have room for three motorbikes, a bus, and your car, all side-by-side, as your impending Starsky-and-Hutch-car-rolling-kablam variety of doom lurks just inches away. And never mind the three motorbikes, a pickup truck, and two bicycles coming in the other direction. Pretty soon, fear (not to mention common freaking sense) overcome any vestiges of liberal compassion. More sandpaper.

And rest assured that your driver will take you not just to your desired destination, but to anything and everything along the way he thinks you might be interested in seeing. And at every stop, desperate smiling Balinese push silver and bamboo and batik and beads on you just as hard as the underage-ass-peddlers of Kuta. Either you spend money on stuff you don't want, trying not to resent the process, or you look at a poor person, probably with several children, and say "no," over and over, because one "no" simply has no meaning here. Either way, sandpaper.

This place is like Knysna (see the South Africa entry) squared. And finally, you just start shutting down. Or I did, anyway. See how much empathy you can still muster the third time you are aggressively offered a taxi ride while you are getting out of a taxi. Are these people even paying attention, or just calling out at tourist-toned skin randomly?

The only way I found even to get down the street here is to just put your head down, avoid all eye contact, and pretend the constant barrage of "hey boss" and "hey dad" and "hey mister" isn't happening. Just treat it all like a bunch of noisy, intrusive street lamps, stepping around the ones that try to physically block you, never making eye contact, and you'll gradually get to the pay phone and back. So now I'm as clenched-faced as the other westerners I've seen. And ashamed of myself.

Sandpaper, sandpaper, sandpaper. Your insides feel like they're bleeding.

I was actually relieved to see now-familiar headscarves on a group of Javanese (I think) women in the hallway of the hotel. Here, for a moment, were faces I knew how to greet, smiles I knew would understand my own, even if our faces, beliefs, and ways of life remained completely different.

Perhaps culture is an individual thing as much as a collective thing.

Or perhaps my a la carte approach to culture is a recipe for individual loneliness, and I'm just a good cook at the moment.

I suppose we might all realize this subconsciously -- that separation from your group, even when conscientiously chosen, is as traumatic as ostracism and exile. Maybe this might explain why large chunks of entire societies sometimes prefer mass psychosis to self-examination.

Speaking of psychosis, I just saw five minutes of Fox News Channel, which is on the cable feed along with tourist-friendly news channels from England, Australia, France, Japan, and Germany.

Only on the American channel: a curvy blonde in a leather skirt and go-go boots was tossing GOP-daily-fax questions to a uniformed Army general, whose responses were given neither thought nor rebuttal.

My hand to God, dear friends: I have yet to see anything comparably stupid in any industrialized democracy, anywhere on the planet. This is much closer to what state-run media look like, although few put quite the same premium on hot chicks.
Fox News is almost exactly what Malaysian state television would look like if the Koran demanded that all women show their legs.

Right this minute, America doesn't feel like home nearly as much as I wish it would.

Maybe what I'm feeling about America right now is part of why westerners have so romanticized Bali. The image I've always been given, by everyone I've ever asked, including people who visit, work, and live here, is of a peaceful, gentle people with a cohesive society that has lived and worked in harmony with nature and each other for hundreds of years -- the Shangri-La we all wish was possible for ourselves.

Never mind that it's rubbish. To begin with, the very idea that cultures are unchanging, much less able to be preserved intact in the midst of a tourist economy serving visitors from planetwide, is as insane as the Academie Française sitting around Paris deciding which words are and are not "French" - itself a multi-millennial amalgam of influences from the Romans to the Moors, and never mind the English-influenced patois they're now using in the streets beneath the Musee.
Balinese Hinduism only even exists because a bunch of Indians came here and changed everything that came before.

Cultures interact and merge, often obliterating each other. That is the story of human history.

I checked: Balinese art prior to 20th-century European interaction looks remarkably little like the handicrafts now pre-processed in Java and finished as Authentic Bali Souvenirs for the boutiques of Ubud. Even the Balinese language itself is taking on borrowings from English, Bahasa Indonesia, and every tourist dialect rolling through the island.

But still, people act like this is a timeless world, somehow pristine and preserved -- even while traditional Barong dances are now commonly presented, stripped of all ceremonial significance, in Sea World-like amphitheatres by performers clearly bored out of their wits but eager to earn tourist dollars impossible to access by any economic means indigenous to Bali. (And after which a viewer is about as intimate with the details of Balinese culture as one is with Shamu. Meanwhile, the lead dancer can be glimpsed walking away with his costume shoved into a Nike gym bag.)

How the bloody hell is this culture "unchanged?"

But still, the pretense is so appealing that everyone just goes along.

And as to the inherent peacefulness of Balinese culture: in said Barong dance, viewers (if they bother to understand what's going on, which is not self-evident) are treated to images of random violence, facial mutilation, sexual bondage, genital castration, and mass suicide. Add a camera zoom or two, and it's an episode of CSI .

Or visit the old courthouse over in Klungkung, where a frieze depicts legendary Balinese punishments for crimes ranging from being a bad farmer to not breast-feeding one's children, all of which are punishable by various imaginative mutilations. (The penalty for farting? Having your anus ripped out. Seriously. I swear. I took a picture. I mean, damn.)

No, they don't actually do any of these things, any more than Westerners actually rip out an eye for an eye. But for pure cultural ultraviolence, Quentin Tarantino ain't got shit on these people.

And still, the postcard image remains so appealing. I get why people want it to still be here so much.

If I could plunge my head into that cauldron of perfect-Bali huggy goo, it probably wouldn't hurt nearly as much that my president is a disgraceful and obvious liar, the media who are responsible for pointing out the obvious are usually sycophantic incompetents, and my fellow Americans are thus standing by paralyzed as the environment, the social contract, and their economic futures are savaged daily. And I wouldn't feel my own personal responsibility to fight this lunacy.

Heck, no, I could just put on a sarong and dance, like the empty-headed consumers wandering Ubud, taking delusional refuge in the mystic magic of unchanging native goodness, made manifest in this amber-preserved Balinese wonderland. I dance, therefore all will be well, if I only believe. Click your heels, Dorothy. God, yes, I wish.

But this is an image which itself, by luring millions of people from other lands with enough money that much of Balinese society soon rearranged itself for profit, has done much to ensure the destruction of whatever good was here.

And good there must have been, because I saw some of it by accident. And it was great. Which I'm getting to, I promise.

Ubud, the island's other primary tourist hub, is mostly a series of boutiques and restaurants that might as well be on Martha's Vineyard, albeit filled with semi-Balinese (see manufacturing sequence, above) goods in stalls ricky-ticked with Balinese curlicues.

From Ubud, it's a short two-hour ride to the holiest temple on the island, where you'll find a quarter-mile of closed hawker's stalls and a road-load of desperate children shoving wilted flowers into your hand and demanding, in their only three words of English, "give me money."

This is a really disturbing image for me: unwashed begging children in the midst of the holiest place in what is supposed to be the world's healthiest culture.

I was so fed up and sad and overwhelmed with the entire experience that I finally just walked off on my own, trying to clear my head and find a way to live with myself and figure out what to tell people about all this.

This is the semi-good part I was promising, coming right up.

My tourist map indicated a road out of Ubud that eventually led to a spot overlooking a river to the west, where I figured there might a nice view of the sunset. It looked like it would be a mile or two at most, with only a couple of turns to make. And at least I could clear my head.

So, off I walked.

In maybe twenty minutes, I was out of the touristed area, walking through terraced rice paddies in various brilliant shades of green. These are truly beautiful, if you manage to put the horrifying sun-cooked back-breaking manual labor involved out of mind. Since nobody was breaking their back right that minute, I tried. And yeah - it was pretty gorgeous.

It had rained earlier in the day (as it does about a dozen times every day in Bali, which is also beautiful, if you don't mind steam coming out of your teeth), and so waterfalls were appearing along random rocky outcroppings at the side of the road.

This was becoming a beautiful walk. A postcard walk.

And about two hours later... I was still walking. The mile or two had become a series of wrong, increasingly uncertain turns.

And so I was lost. On a back road in the middle of a field. In Indonesia. And the sun was getting low on the horizon.
Part of me was a little freaked out. Still, it was so nice to be away from the Tiger Woods look-alikes eyeing my crotch that heck, I really didn't mind at all.

So I kept walking. Bali's not that big, I figured. Just keep going in one direction, and eventually, you'll hit water. Then, um... make a left...?

(If you've read much of my work, you already know my plans are rarely any more intelligent than that.)

So I walked. And finally, there was a small building.

I walked some more. There was another. And another.

And then people started coming out of the buildings. Walking in the same direction as me.

Some of them looked at me quizzically; some of them smiled. None of them seemed to speak a word of English other than "hello." This was entirely fair, since my Balinese is limited to "thank you very much" (a phrase which sounds strikingly like "mother suck some more" and is thus uncomfortably easy to remember).

Only being able to say "thank you very much" made me, for this day, the Latka Gravas of Indonesia. Which I indulged in with gusto.

Eventually, there were maybe thirty people walking along, all in the same direction. Since behind me there was nothing -- and nothing that was getting dark -- and these people were clearly headed for something, I figured I'd go along.

Meanwhile, the Balinese, if I understood their tone and body language, were essentially saying to each other:

"Who's the guy? Is he with you?"
"I dunno. I thought he was with you."
"He seems OK. You think he knows where we're going?"
"I don't think he knows where his own ass is. But yeah, he seems all right."
"Why does he keep saying "thank you very much?'"
"Hell if I know. Whatever."

Or some such.

Soon, it was all smiles, and everyone was introducing themselves, which I know for a fact because about one in four of the words I heard from the men was "Wayan," and in Balinese culture the firstborn son is always named "Wayan." There are also specific names for the second, third, and fourth sons, after which you start again with "Wayan" and repeat.

George Foreman would love it here.

So I pointed at myself and said "Bob."

I have no idea what that syllable means in Balinese, if anything. But this, I soon learned, was apparently the funniest name in the history of Bali. Everyone started repeating it -- everyone -- over and over, and laughing with a very good-natured, welcoming-the-dumb-ass kind of delight.

(If you thought the Thai monk named Yut had an amusing name, you know exactly what they were playing with.)

And then the road turned a corner, and everyone stopped, and I finally saw where we were headed.

A whole bunch of people from this little village had walked down the road... just to watch the sunset.

So we sat down. And among lots of silence, and lots of smiles, we watched the sun do the thing it does, over a bunch of brilliant green trees and rice paddies, while fresh rainwater trickled along some rocks to our distant left.

And then... we got up. And walked back to the village. I went along because it was now getting too dark to see anything down the road, and I had no better ideas, and besides, these people were making me feel incredibly welcome.

Back in the village, most of the guys went to a little garage-like area, where there was a ping-pong table under a fluorescent light. (I made a mental note: they have electric power. I can't be too far from Ubud...) And the guys started to play, taking turns, two at the table, everyone else watching and cheering. So I watched and cheered, too.

(These guys were good. I guess when there's not much else to do... in any case, somewhere in the middle of Bali, there's a village with the best damn ping-pong players I've ever seen.)

At one point, they even invited me to take a turn, but I made a few gestures between my hands and the distance, indicating that I would probably lose their ball or something. They laughed the big welcoming laugh again.

If this was a college frat, I probably would have joined.

As it was, however, soon it was time for everyone to sleep, and so I looked at my map and tried to figure what to do next. One of the guys came over, looked at the map, and then gestured for an older fellow to have a look. Which reminds me: a surprising number of people I've met on this trip -- even a few taxi drivers -- seem to have no idea how to read a map. Perhaps their experience is with the actual, immediate world itself, not an abstract representation devised by visitors. I guess.

Eventually, one of the other guys just gestured for me to join him on his motorbike. And so off we went, roaring crazily through hilly, wet, winding roads through the darkness. I wasn't sure if this was exciting or just terrifying.

And this fellow -- I'll call him Wayan, because hey, it's a one-in-four shot -- eventually dropped me off at the Four Seasons, perhaps the ritziest tourist hotel on the entire island, and (I think) the one closest to the little village. From there I got a cab, which drove me along yet another long row of yuppie boutiques keeping half of Java busy making "Balinese" stuff, and once back in Ubud, I found my way back to the Sodom and Gomorrah world of Kuta.

Later on I looked at a map, and I'll be damned if I have the slightest idea where that village was. Definitely west of Ubud. Southwest, I think. On the same side of the big river, I think, because I don't remember crossing it. But I really don't know, and I guess I never will.

I wish I did. I'd love to send them a whole boatload of ping-pong equipment.

And I wish I could tell you guys where it was. You'd be able to see these wonderfully kind and funny and talented people yourself.

Of course, by doing so, I'd be messing with the village's culture. Pretty soon they'd have a little ping-pong stadium set up, and the tourists could watch, and it would be another Sea World experience instead of the actual one I feel incredibly lucky to have had, however briefly.

And that's the thing. Bali, whatever it was, must have been wonderful. In places where you probably won't go, it apparently still is. And when tourists do find the new places, they'll also destroy them.

Whatever Bali was, it isn't there anymore. And whatever it is, it won't be there much longer.

And the only way to find it is by getting lost.