Travel Diaries #24 - Bali
Is tourism good or bad? I reminisce on a holiday I had a few years ago to the place known as The Island of the Gods, and one that's as famous now for tourism as anything else: Bali, Indonesia.
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Is Ignorance Bliss?
“What is up or down?
What is black or white?
What is right or wrong?
In Shadow Play, no such conclusions exist.”
- Balinese shadow-puppet artist
So goes the inquisitive local voiceover at the beginning of an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s excellent Parts Unknown TV show, wherein in the tragically late host visits Indonesia, and specifically the small island of Bali.
When Bourdain gets to Bali he sits by the pool of his hotel resort railing about tourism. We get shots of Western tourists on holidays and relaxing on beaches, distant couples getting foot massages and scoffing on burgers on poolside loungers, DJs playing loud EDM music, fellas cracking beers with the lads and having a slightly self-conscious good time, all rather innocently having a pleasant time – or ignorantly, depending on how you look at such tourism in the context of the host environment.
We’re told about the waste and the wantonness of those who come to Bali seeking a good time in paradise, with little regard for where they actually are, much less what happens after they leave.
Our host is clearly disgusted with the sort of people who come to an undeveloped – yet rapidly developing – paradise and treat it as nothing more than a playground, a resort, a holiday destination. Not only that, they don’t even see that it is or could be anything more than those things.
Much of Asia east of Afghanistan (including my home away from home of Vietnam, of course) is littered with people who go for the same reasons they go to Bali – it’s cheap, it’s beautiful, it’s safe, and because it exudes a sort of exotic feeling spirituality that’s partly indigenous, partly a lore cultivated by decades of stories and media about backpackers going to these places, from India to Indonesia, for the purpose of ‘finding oneself’.
And hey, if it was good enough for The Beatles, then maybe there’s something to it.
Or, as Bourdain puts it as he moves to a more charitable tone: people are attracted to
“come to do yoga to improve their lives in a spiritual or physical way”.
I could not judge, for the sole reason I went to Bali was to surf, and I ended up doing some yoga too, precisely because I wanted to improve my life in a physical or spiritual way.
Or, to put it another way, I needed a break from travelling.
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Bali
Of all the countries I visited in South-East Asia, or anywhere really, Indonesia struck me as the most interesting, and the one I’d most like to explore further. This is possibly because it’s the one that I bothered to explore the least while I was actually there.
I wasn’t there to travel. I didn’t even really know much about Bali, or wider Indonesia. I told someone recently I’d been to Bali once on a surf holiday. “How bougie of you”. I honestly had no idea. I just heard you could surf there. I was oblivious to the Eat Pray Love reputation of the place until I got there, though I must have had some idea there was an air of tourist-friendly luxury to be found. I harboured no intentions of finding myself on Bali, or anything like it. I just wanted to learn to surf, and to relax.
Bali is an Indonesian island that’s just to the east of Java. It’s somewhere south of the equator, though not by much, and it’s about the size of Mayo, though with a population closer to that of Ireland, and more Hindu temples. Unlike the predominantly-Muslim Indonesian archipelago of 17,000 islands, the majority of Bali practices their own form of Hinduism, which has existed there since the 15th Century. This could explain the island’s ‘otherness’ within the country, and its often gracious acceptance of mass tourism.
I booked myself into a nice Dutch-run hostel in Canggu, which is just north of the cities (or villages or suburban sprawls or something) of Kuta and Seminyak, which are the most built-up, the most touristy, the most developed, and from this you could say, the most disheartening parts of Bali. Their reputation is that of the Australian Magaluf (though shouldn’t that be the Balinese Magaluf?), places where people come to drink the heads of themselves and fuck each other in a foreign country, though which provides such an array of home comforts as to avoid the hassle of being in a foreign country. Given that half the draw of the Mediterranean as a holiday destination is the warmer weather, you’d have to wonder what the point of going to Bali is if you’re just going to “drink piss and root Sheilas”, other than maybe the price difference. Nonetheless, some places develop a reputation as a good place to party, and places like this will always exist, in some form, the world over. Bali seems to have willingly offered this service to those that would seek it, or at least some of its people, in some of its parts.
Canggu is a kind of half-in, half-out suburb of those towns which form the sprawl of the greater Denpasar area, Bali’s capital. In Canggu there are lush green rice paddies and local homes and warungs, though there’s also the increasing proliferance of Aussie coffee shops and yoga hubs, Billabong surf stores, and places selling gourmet burgers and acai bowls for brunch (looking over Google maps, with its real-time update of businesses and premises, I get the feeling that even now the place could be a lot less green than when I was there, and there’d be a lot more brunch options).
It’s not quite as built up as nearby Kuta and Seminyak, which have the feel of large American strip malls. Kuta’s alleyways are lined with that are 6 feet apart, their balconies within touching distance due to disregard for planning regulations and a big regard for cash. It’s full of those tacky souvenir shops with keyrings, hats and flags. Some of the novelty registration plates hanging in the cramped doorways read things like:
“John is Gay”
“Australia is the fuckin’ best place in the whole fuckin’ world”
and one with the words “Fuck off, we’re full” beside a picture of a map of Australia, Australia of course being a famously empty place, though also a famously racist place.
The other guests in my hostel are fellow surf-tourists, mostly Dutch and German with some Americans or Scandinavians. Compared to the typical hostel-frequenter in South-East Asia these are a generally more pleasant, down to earth and respectable bunch of holiday-makers whose company I enjoy immensely.
The surf instructors are all Balinese, some younger, some older. They all embody the stereotype of surfer dude (the kind who’s laid back and wise, not the kind who annoys you with how they talk or tries to punch you because you sat at the wrong place in the lineup): chilled out, bleached hair, physically lean and ripped, and in between handling us into place to catch waves during our lessons (their instruction usually amounting to the odd whisper of ‘just relax’ or ‘go’), they’d absolutely rip a perfect wave or two, seemingly oblivious but knowing everyone is watching at the same time. They are welcoming, friendly, good craic.
The beaches are as typically perfect as you’d expect. It’s one of those places that whatever you’re picturing, that’s what it’s like, though probably a bit more built up in this area. I see when I get there that the reason this place is so popular for surfing is that there’s always somewhere to surf, for most people, pretty much every day. Perfect waves the likes of which I’ve never seen form and peel off before pushing towards the shore as if shepherded by a snow plough. It’s not too hot, but although it's often overcast, it’s never cold, just nicely balmy with a sea breeze that doesn’t chill. The odd entrepreneur cooks up food on makeshift grills which we enjoy under the palm trees, looking out over surfers and sun-bathers alike.
They’re never in much of a hurry, the cooks, and nobody else is around here to be honest. The place does exude the laid-back island vibes one might project on the place, which must have been a source of great frustration for their Dutch colonisers. To this day it is one of the great joys of travelling to watch northern Europeans squirm with barely concealable frustration on some beach in South East Asia cos the fella mixed up their order of noodles with someone else’s rice, and doesn’t seem to understand why there’d be a problem, much less care.
“But we ordered first…”
I eat lunch most days in a local warung around the corner from the hostel. They offer carvery-style selections of foods, you can point at the ones you want. Meats in sauces and various veggies and rice in sauces and things like that. There’s usually a bottle of hot sauce left on the table, locally known as ‘spicy’. I watch with fascination as the locals eating theirs with their hands, not chopsticks as I’d assumed everywhere ‘over here’ uses. Every second tourist is reading a copy of the same newly-released surfing book – William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days – which I’d randomly found in a bookshop in Hanoi a few days before my trip.
My days quickly fall into a pleasing routine: get up at 7-ish for rooftop yoga at sunrise, or lie in and wait for breakfast, which is prepared for us at the hostel. We lounge around for a bit and get ready for the day before loading up the cars with our surfboards and things and going for a few hours of surf lessons, usually at Kuta or Seminyak, which although only 5km away, took about an hour by car due to traffic on the narrow roads. Everything is done at a casual pace, though we still fit so much into our days, days you look back on where you ‘did nothing’, yet did everything too. Handing out boards, warming up, getting in the water. Overcast but a steady 28 degrees every day. Sometimes a breeze, sometimes not. A couple more hours of surfing before driving home through another hour of traffic. Lunch on the beach or in the neighbourhood warung. Time for a nap if you want. More yoga. Dinner in the evening with the gang – a burger at a western bar or some rice dish at a local place. A beer at a local bar. A party on the beach. Maybe have a beer. Hang out with the Balinese lads back at the hostel. Sleep when you feel like it, you don’t need to stay up to wring anything more out of the night. Tomorrow will be more of the same, and it will be great too.
I start to forget what day it is.
I’d booked in there for a week, with a week left to ‘do some travelling’. I was having such a pleasant time that I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I learned of places like Ubud where people go to experience some of ‘the real Balinese culture’. Temples and monkeys and whatever else they have there. All very interesting, I’m sure, though I’d little interest in it at this point. Maybe next time. I’m busy learning to surf, and learning to relax here. I booked into the surf hostel for another three days. I’d no interest in travelling anywhere, to be honest.
Sometimes when you go somewhere you can do yourself an awful lot of pressure and stress by researching the places to go and things to see. Often these are very much worth seeing – they’re popular for a reason. I’d done myself a favour though by researching nothing about Bali. I was blissfully ignorant. I had no long-standing need to visit Ubud or see these monkeys or to see some temple or to go to this place or that. I was content to see the local things that lay right at the end of my road: flags fluttering in the breeze, incense billowing from roadside Hindu temples as locals queue for religious ceremonies, lush fields with even more shades of green than I’d been led to believe there are back home, ladies in coloured scarves dishing out ladles of meat and vegetables, sunlight peering through cracked cement walls with terracotta cappings, children laughing playing at the side of the road, chickens clucking, placards on electricity poles displaying cheesy images of local political candidates, sunsets over the ocean, petrol for sale stored in Absolut vodka bottles on roadside wooden stands, clove cigarettes and warnings on packs of Marlboro that seem to be promoting smoking rather than warning against it, young lads playing football, bored couples on holidays sitting cafes on rainy days, the feeling of sand on your feet as you slowly walk barefoot on tarmac at the end of a long walk on the beach, gobshites with moustaches shouting loudly about surfing at beautiful blonde women, the sound of waves reaching the shore no matter where you were, no matter what time, tired eyes catching sun rays down empty roads at the end of a long, never-ending, timeless, eternal day, mopeds forever whizzing about in the background, and yet silence somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.
Islands all the way down
Towards the end of my holiday, I wanted to visit an even smaller island. It might be even more relaxing than here, and at least it’d be a bit of quote-unquote travelling to tick off the list. At least I’d be able to say I went somewhere – in fact, I went somewhere by boat, which would be all the more impressive. I ended up on an island called Nusa Lembongan, about an hour’s boat ride from Bali, after a mix-up with a taxi driver whom I thought was taking me to a different port, with a ferry for a different island, but which turned out to be an hour away. Adopting a ‘whatever’ attitude, I hopped on the boat anyway, assuming that whatever I was looking for on one of these islands, I could find on another.
I’d always wondered why in the name of God anyone would ever want to go through with spending a week lying on a beach for a holiday, but as the boat put-putted into Mushroom at Nusa Lembongan, to a scene that looked like it was on the photo-shopped brochure for a honeymoon catalogue, I began to realise that maybe these people were onto something. I immediately got touted by a fella back to his hotel, he’d seen me coming a mile off, though it was one of those situations where I was happy to be taken advantage of, as long as it solved my problem of finding somewhere to stay, considering I had none, as I was now on a different island to the one I thought I’d be on just an hour ago. Lembongan is small, a bit too big to be truly walkable, or unspoilt, though charming in places, and although busier than I’d expected, relatively quiet compared to the parts of Bali I’d seen.
On a beach on the north shore, by sadly murkier and less paradisical waters than the ones on offering at the harbour below, a father flies an enormous ten-foot black kite with his young sons. The kids were as excited as any could be at their young age. On Bali one’s attention is regularly drawn to the sight of a colourful flag fluttering hundreds of metres in the air overhead. I’d always presumed they were something to do with surfing, even though they always flew vertically, rarely changing direction, unsuitable for making weather predictions. I’d asked one of the surf instructors, Asis, what they were for.
“They’re for art” he informed me.
“Because people on Bali don’t have many hobbies. So they make kites and flags for art and fly them for something nice to do.”
I spent the weekend (or maybe it was a mid-week collection of days the same length as a weekend) cruising around on yet another rented scooter, eating food, swimming and watching sunsets on the beach. Even Lembongan has gourmet burger restaurants, smoothie cafes and luxury hotels. There’s an even smaller still island of Nusa Ceningan, this Russian doll island-off-an-island-off-an-island connected to Lembongan via a yellow suspension bridge that’s suitable for pedestrians and bikes only. Further and further off the beaten track you must go to find people still living in the traditional ways you came here expecting, though it’s never enough, even when pushed off the edge of the earth into the ocean. A place only accessible by foot or boat, and people live in bamboo huts, and still there are tiki bars selling mojitos and a plush resort with an infinity pool. The march of progress knows no boundaries, there’s no ocean wide enough to prevent it landing.
A seat with a view. A bar with tidy two-man band playing the best acoustic blues-folk covers of Smells Like Teen Spirit and Wonderwall I’ve ever heard. The sun sets over the island of Bali, from where I came, where I once was. Over the cliff is the one of the most surreal views I’ve ever seen, surreal because it’s both a once-in-a-lifetime view of something that is, objectively and spiritually, geographically and aesthetically, perfect, and so familiar in the cultural consciousness that it’s almost a cliché. There’s a secret beach on the hard left (I think it was called Secret Beach). Rock pools frame the shore. The waves must be several hundred metres long, the pristine motion of an airport travelator, and yet so large, so sinister looking that they could only be formed in howling gale-force storms back in Ireland. Everything surrounding is a picture of stillness, but like a computer screensaver that refreshes every so often. Blink and you’ll miss it, though it’s always moving, somewhere. The skyline of Denpasar is visible against the edges of orange and purple as the sun sets over Bali, 12 miles away. Despite the distance individual buildings are cel-shaded against the sunlit background, or perhaps the spirits of temples and apartment blocks project against the background like the Bat-signal.
Another wave peels off, just like the last one. With the distance it could be gently lapping against the shores of Lough Carra, though it’s probably 15 feet tall. I am hypnotised as walls of water peel off in large strips and rush down to their inevitable conclusion, though one that travels far longer than you could have expected, longer than the blink of an eye. In a corner a seemingly-random series of waves raise their heads dragon-like up to vast heights. They rise in beautifully contoured cirques until they break left and right across a line spanning several hundred metres into a voracious mass of powdery, foaming, seething, swollen masses of destruction. Impossibly placed palm trees sit on top of the cliff, above a sea-arch where waters rush through.
There’s so much going on in the scene below and before me that it could be a renaissance painting, though there’s also nothing going on at the same time, like the painting has been blown inside-out and it’s all, in a sense, perfectly still. No-one populates it, I have my back to every single person in the world. There are distant roars and whooshes but they’re dominated by the soft-but-lively sounds of the band playing behind me. It’s a hypnotic symphony that’s impossible to look away from for fear you might miss it, though it’s been happening forever and will continue long after the sun goes down.
I have travelled a long way to see this, having never even known it existed, and it could exist nowhere else.
The sun sets behind Denpasar in the distance, the mass of buildings is invisible from here, none of it is real either only a projection of life. I could never have sailed here alone without the guiding hands of civilisation and progress, and for that I’m grateful. Before me lies a sky and an ocean that I’ve never seen before, although they’re the same ones as all the others. One of those sunsets where orange and purple merge and you realise they were the same colour all along, and the sea and the sky are much of a muchness too.
The Right Way to Travel?
“Who is the hero?
Who is the villain?
Who decides what is right or wrong?
Bali is as much the island of the gods as it is the island of the demons.”
Bourdain’s monological debate on the nature and effects of tourism to far-flung places which struggle with their own home-grown issues highlights an eternal dilemma in the minds of some travellers, though one that’s never considered in the minds of others:
“Should I really be here?”
Along with the overt obscenity of lounging at infinity pools while locals break their backs working in the fields over the fence, there’s the issue of environmental sustainability, and Bourdain raises the more reflexive question that any would-be traveller should ask themselves before hopping on a round-the-world flight: if you’re just going to come here to do the things you would do at home, then why bother?
Is there a right or wrong way to travel? You could argue that there is, and there are certain principles one should adhere to, though like everything else in life it’s all relative. The only ones worse than the tourists with no self-awareness are the snobs who judge people for how they travel, or live. Often these same people are the ones who think they’re doing the world a favour by travelling with their wonderfully self-declared open-minds. Outside of flagrant acts of disrespect, there’s no right or wrong.
All you can do is push yourself a little more towards your destination, look a little bit past what you know each time – in doing so you learn a bit more, and can look for a little bit more from where you stand.
“One only sees what one looks for. And one only looks for what one knows.”
– Goethe
All anyone, anywhere, is looking for more than anything, no matter who they are or what their background is – or where they’re coming from – is respect.
One of Bourdain’s local guests suggests that like the spiritual otherworld, tourism is neither good nor bad but both, and the question should be not whether it should exist, but who would you like to have visit your country, and in what manner?
The Island of Gods and Demons
Bali is known as “The Island of the Gods”, but we are told that where there are gods there must surely be demons too, and humans inhabit the spaces where there’s everything in between heaven and hell.
There is always some heaven, some hell, and life is fluid.
There is no right or wrong way to travel. On my trip to Bali I got exactly what I intended to do: I had a holiday. I was surprised – and, to be honest, delighted – with the hipster Aussie cafes selling acai bowls, avocado brunches and posh coffee. I did yoga on a terrace with a load of other holiday makers. I ate gourmet burgers and drank at bars with other westerners. I also ate at Balinese buffets, Balinese restaurants, Balinese food stalls. When I travelled around a bit I stayed in local guesthouses, got local taxis, ate from local food stalls and restaurants. I accepted my place as a fleeting tourist, someone who travels precisely because it makes you aware of your own ignorance.
Visit temples. Eat food. Relax. Read books. Talk to people. Take photos. Sleep. Drink. Repeat.
These are the list of things you do. But even if all the things on your list fall exclusively under the heading of ‘locally authentic’ or ‘tourist tat’, and if you were to declare these things to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they are still just exact points on the infinite spectrum of light and life that makes up your trip. The vast majority of travel happens in between the things you do, in the space you inhabit in between the things on the list. At the end of the day the only thing joining those dots is you. Whether you deem yourself to be living the ‘real’ experience, or travelling authentically or respectfully or sustainably, is down to what you do in the spaces in between.
On reflection maybe it would have been nice to push my boundaries a little bit while I was in Bali. I sampled some of the local culture and that was enough. I would love to go back, and now as I hover over the Indonesia on the map the thought of hopping from island to island by boat is tantalising, of slowing down and enjoying what I came across. But you have to be honest too, and at the time I honestly didn’t care about any of that. Choose your adventure and make your peace with it.
‘Next time, next time’, and you must live as there will always be a next time, while you also live as if there’ll never be a tomorrow.
The space between heaven and hell will always be a paradox.
It can also be mighty relaxing.
As Bourdain’s eye-patch toting dinner guest – a British ex-pat who’s been in Indonesia since 1965 – reminds us all from the shores of Nusa Penida (Lembongan’s big brother, the next one on from Ceningan),
“I’m enriched by being here, but I’m not from here”.
The show ends with a funeral, a burning body on a beach, and the admiring observation that the Balinese “see things that we don’t”.
These dimensions between heaven and hell, between good and bad, and who are we that are enriched by our experiences in places we’re not from to say what is heaven and hell, what is good and bad? Especially when it comes to the actions of ourselves or of other foreigners and travellers.
At the end of the day, whatever your or my views on travel, its effects, its purpose and what people ‘should’ be doing when they go to another country, when I look back on my three years in Asia, a time which could be overwhelmingly described as ‘chaotic’, a time of constant novelty and change and transition and alienation and camaraderie and loneliness and euphoria and heaven and hell and all the spaces in between, those two weeks I spent in and around Bali in the summer of 2017, were probably the two most relaxing weeks of my life.
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Brilliant....I could picture being there.....