How to begin... moving chronologically doesn't seem quite right because my fundamental experience of Bali is the way that time as I know it becomes unrecognisable. Time slows , perception deepens and life is experienced in a series of images and encounters often as dream-like as the landscape can be.Maybe its more like how time was processed when you were a child and that's what makes it so pleasurable? Anyway this will be a little montage of our recent holiday and for anyone who may find information about our hotels and destinations useful I'll try to include some.
Because we arrived at night, we heard Bali before we saw it: the thunder cracked directly over our heads and then the lightening pierced the windows. For an irrational moment I thought that perhaps a natural disaster was underway but the next day when we mentioned the 'storm' the Balinese staff at our hotel looked at us blankly. It was obviously no more than a tiny reminder that the wet was coming . Not for us though. That was nearly the last time we saw any rain. I say nearly because on our last day we made one more fervent wish for a tropical storm and heaven knows what god was smiling on us but we got it! The kids were ecstatic-we don't see much rain down here in the south -and there it was coming down in great gobs. We swam in it til the splashes from the raindrops hitting the pool got too big and then retired to the verandah to watch it falling in sheets, cooling and cleaning everything in its path.
I'd stayed at Alam Shanti in Nyuh Kuning before so knew what to expect. It still took my breath away and as a bonus I got to witness the delight of my kids and hubby who had never been before, A year and a half had passed and things looked a little different-instead of corn in the garden there was a magnificent crop of cucumbers alongside a patch of iridescent young rice. We were in the 'cheap' room(Saraswati) but you wouldn't know it. At $50 usd for all four of us we could hardly believe the size of the verandah-the kids could have played football on it. It was four -in the -bed and comfortably so(huge) for the first few nights as my 11-yr-old wasn't quite ready to sleep out on the verandah. Later when he got his Bali legs and befriended the geckos who always seemed to be resident above his daybed, we couldn't stop him.
As fate would have it we never made it to Alam Indah-a sister hotel just up the road-instead moving into the top-end room at Shanti. You think nothing could be lovelier than where you are and then you go to Gangaa..... We spent hours watching the farmers ploughing the field before us in preparation for the next crop. What a beautiful creature the bali cow is, delicate,luminous eyes and such graceful movement for a beast of burden. From a distance the ploughing looked so idyllic with the farmer ,plough and beast seeming to glide through the mud. Later we saw up close what hard work it was, the way he used his weight as a downwards force to counter the cows forward motion. Hard work yes, but only for a time in the morning.Something I learned and revelled in about Bali was the complete lack of a protestant work ethic! Work seemed simply to be a means to an end, a function related to providing basic needs for oneself and ones family. The rice needs to be planted then out come the neighbours et al to help, nothing more to be done? then go home and rest or make something or go to a ceremony or practice the gamelan....Work didn't seem to be something to invest your ego in and define yourself by in the way we do. I realise its so easy to project onto another culture when youre a fly-by-night tourist and I think a lot of the hard labour is hidden from our eyes particularly the work entailed in looking after us in the tourist venues but still it seems to me there's a lot to be learned about what's really important there....
Back to Ubud:swimming ,eating,smiling ,eating ,what else ...oh yes massage. On day two I hurried off to my inaugural massage of the holiday at Bodyworks(JL Hanoman), a place I knew it would be good. Well the first one was not the best.It was a quiet Sunday morning and I think the receptionist, who was not without some training, jumped into the breech when we showed up wanting two massages. The next time I went there(finding the' best massage' was my personal holy grail for the three weeks) I had a therapist called Uri(sp?)who went by the very grand title of 'Masters Assistant'. She was exceptionally skilled and something seems to have really changed in the way my shoulders hang !I hope it lasts. Ditto my partner.He had the male 'master's assistant', Wayan, and raved. Those massages were 160,000Rp. I decided this time that I was going to pay a bit more and seek the seriously therapeutic stuff and to that end off I went to the highly recommended Bali Botanica to get a Shirodara. For the uninitiated, like me at the time,that's a constant stream of oil poured onto your 'third-eye' for a good 25 mins, plus a deep shoulder and scalp massage. By the time the therapist murmured something about sitting up I was floating like a tin can , the fronds of the big palm in front of me had taken on gargantuan and surreal proportions and I'm not sure my thoughts have ever returned to pre-shirodara organisation! I'm told you can have a 2 ½ hr treatment where all your other chakras get the same attention ! If the authorities knew about this they'd make it illegal for sure.
Next:More Ubud, day trips, food, music and drama