Bali keeps it real

In most countries I’ve been to, a tour guide shows me through a beautiful temple, or the ruins of an ancient society, or a church that exemplifies culture and history.  Leaving those places, one is almost always confronted with the reality that the modern descendants of those ancient societies don’t live in anything that remotely resembles to iconic buildings being showcased.

Go to Southern Venezuela Roraima and you’ll tour traditional villages with typical round thatch huts of the Pemon indigenous people, just yards away from the squat concrete zinc-roofed shacks where the Pemon people of today live. The countryside of northern Italy is littered with beautiful castles in various states of repair or disrepair, none of which represent a real housing option for the average person who lives there. The historic center of famed Salvador de Bahia in Brazil boasts cobblestone walks, ornate churches collapsing under the weight of gold adornments, while bahianos live in drab concrete apartment blocks and dress themselves up in stiflingly hot 19^th century garb in to lure tourists into paying them to take pictures.

Bali is the only place I can remember going where this is not the case.

Balinese living conditions are a genuine reflection of the culture that the island puts on display, the culture that attracted and ultimately charmed me and Isa. This was most evident to me on the drive from the airport at the south tip of the island up to Ubud. The two lane road winds past mile after mile of ornately decorated compounds, some in slight decay, some in sparkling condition, many in construction. At first they looked to me like former tourist operations that had fallen on hard times. It took a few days for me to realize that this is where people actually live in Bali. The Balinese style Hindu family compounds are areas at times the size of an entire city block with elaborate doorways made from beautifully carved Balinese teak wood perched beneath stately porticos. Eye-catching black concrete statues of Hindu gods adorn the outer walls of the compound. They so closely resemble Hindu temples that to the untrained observer it’s often difficult to distinguish between the homes and the places of worship.

Inside they’re split up into individual rooms where a husband and wife might live, along with small shrines and common areas for cooking and eating, and possibly some green space with grass or planted flowers.

The eldest couple in the compound always lives on a platform higher than the rest. Drive off the tourist drags of Ubud and you’ll pass block after blocks of housing compounds like these.

The local economy of it also fascinates me. The statues are made from ground-up volcanic rock that comes from lava seeps in the environs of Bali’s volcanoes. Along the roads outside of Ubud, yards are filled with piles of rock that have been taken from quarries and are resold or ground up to make concrete or blocks that can later be shaped into statues. You’ll also see artisans all over the place carving up teak would to be made into door. It helps that Balinese have a centuries-old traditional of stone and wood carving, obviously logical given their surroundings.

Anywhere you go in Ubud you’ll see small offerings set outside businesses, usually made up of small bamboo boxes filled with flowers or fruit.

By the middle of the morning most of them have been kicked out of the way by pedestrians or run over by motorcycles, but this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. This again feeds back into the local economy. Visit the Ubud market and you’ll find dozens of vendors selling flowers and bamboo boxes for offerings. None of this seems like it would be possible without the constant injection of Australian and American tourist money, though they do appear to do a remarkable job of keeping the money within the neighborhood.

The combination of toney resorts and upscale hotels that promise idyllic walks through the real live rice fields creates a two-track economy that I don’t see surviving forever. A tourist group rides bikes past a field where a dozen women standing under scorching mid-day sun to harvest rice by  shaking it off the grain, hauling away rice stalks to be used for cattle feed. Mean stalk through mud in stocking feet to plant rice saplings one by one, while ducks poke through the fields in search of stray grains, fertilizing the crops with their manure in the meantime. It’s got everything to stir the environmental passions of modern urban foodie types (yes, like me). Local production at a small scale using natural fertilizers, without pesticides and based seasonal consumption of produce. Then again, it’s not me squatting over in the mud under the noon-day sun. If I were, I’d probably be thinking about doing something else.

Like perhaps a job like our jovial guide Nyoman, who enjoys laughing and sharing indiscreet jokes – “I get married early, because I have accident. Not wearing helmet.” After giving me terse answers to my peppering of reporter-style questions, he opens up when it comes to this subject.

He grew up on the north side of the island. His dad is a rice farmer who not him not to follow in his footsteps. “He say learn English, get good job, then you no work in mud.”

Nyoman did just that, and now entertains tourists, rides past rice paddies, drinks coffee and cracks jokes. Babysitting tourists is no day at the beach, but it seems to beat the alternatives. Rice fields are one of the attractions of the place that ground Ubud in reality and distinguish it from the Spring Break-ville scenes to the south that could just as easily be Playa del Carmen in Mexico or Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. 

Evoking that simple agricultural existence is in part faux commoditized spirituality, but at the same time makes Ubud into a real place. “I think this will remain because of tradition,” said Nyoman. The eldest son of a Balinese family stays on the farm and helps take care of the parents, he points out. I still wonder how this two-track economy can stay alive when farmers tell their sons to become tourist operators. Once that rice field has been plowed under to make way for a new hotel, where will people like Nyoman take tourists like me? The balance between real-life farming existence and show-and-tell tourism is what makes Ubud a good spot to get a bid of both. Not clear to me how long that balance can last. Best to take advantage of it now.