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From a geographic perspective, last year’s trip to Iceland was the weirdest place I’d ever been. From a sociological perspective, Bali I think is the most foreign I’ve encountered.
I feel like my brain is full to bursting with details that aren’t going to all stick. It was exhausting, by the end of the trip, the constant negotiation of differences. (Not that it requires much negotiation on our part – the Balinese are accommodating to a fault, to the point that I was constantly trying to be sufficiently aware because they weren’t going to tell me I was being a jerk or disrespectful.) But deeply, deeply fascinating. One of the things I love about travel is the increasing awareness of the many good but different ways there are to live, and also the many universals across all people (ranging from the fact that two year olds speaking any language will be delighted to have a bun, to the fact that subsistence agriculture is increasingly economically unsustainable but charging tourists good money to do a bad job of working your farm is a great business model whether you’re an apple farmer in upstate New York or a rice farmer in Southeast Asia).
Things that were expected:
- The landscape is predictably gorgeous. Not dissimilar from Hawaii, only way, way more flowers. There’s the coast, with scrubby trees and expansive mangroves and glorious sunsets from beaches and cliffs. There’s the mountains, with plunging ravines and waterfalls and towering massive banyan trees. There are tons of wildflowers and even more cultivated ones. All the tropicals you’d expect, from bougainvillea to orchids to ginger, but also magnificent versions of everything we have in our backyards at home – zinnias, begonias, coleus. Amaryllis growing out of the ground. Enormous pride taken in even tiny gardens, planted and tended with more care than many professional gardeners at home. So many plant nurseries on the side of the road, more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Everything grows, so they grow everything. Backyards include all the fruits – passionfruit, jackfruit, mango, banana, coffee, chocolate. So. Many. Coconuts.
- Not unlike Hawaii, there are chickens everywhere, too. They keep them in wicker baskets, but they also run free, along with feral-but-friendly dogs and cats. And ducks. Lots of ducks.
- Unbelievably friendly and hospitable people. To the point that it feels a little awkward. (We did our best to tip well.)
Things that were less expected:
- I knew that there were a lot of temples. I really did not wrap my head around how many temples. Every house has its own temple – elaborate, beautiful ones. In modest houses, the temple is larger than the house itself, and considerably more beautiful. Then every town has a grand, magnificent temple. And then there are the special temples at specific places. But it’s literally a temple every hundred feet in populated areas, often even more dense than that. Each temple is decorated in incredibly detailed, elaborate stone carvings. Most have temple guardian statues.
- Where there aren’t temples, there are just plain statues of the gods. Unbelievably massive, magnificent ones. In the center of most roundabouts. On the sides of streets. There’s a jawdroppingly massive skyscraper sized Vishnu down near the airport, in a country where it’s forbidden to build buildings taller than the coconut trees. It looks like an alien spacecraft come to earth. You can see it in the distance hours away.
- The Balinese are incredibly routinely, matter-of-factly religious. It’s just woven into daily life the way I imagine Christianity might have been in like, medieval Europe. Every day starts with an offering (I think it’s required three times a day?). They make this pretty little baskets out of palms, fill them with four colors of flowers (very symbolic, still don’t understand the explanation), add a stick of lit incense, and then add whatever is appropriate for what they’re asking for. This isn’t a private ritual – there are little baskets left absolutely everywhere, in the middle of sidewalks, on every doorstep, in great piles at every crossroads. You just step around them. The air always smells of frangipani and incense. There are very few walls, though, since they don’t really need them, and so the incense is always pleasant, not horribly overwhelming like it gets when people light it at home.
- The Balinese are also incredibly routinely, matter-of-factly artistic. They’ve got a bunch of Artists, but there’s also just a huge amount of art built into everyday life. All those carvings are done by relative locals. Each town has a specialty. This one does stone carving, that one wood, that one silver-working. Ubud is known specifically for painting. And as you drive down the ordinary roads, many people make the front of their house a small workshop or store. So you’re driving through a random tiny third world town, and every third house just has someone sitting there in a pile of wood carving the most incredibly elaborate beautiful wooden doors you’ve ever seen. If you go through the door behind the workshop, you’ll find their temple, and then their little house, and then a backyard with their cow. Their rice paddy is down the path a bit.
- They love kites. It’s good karma, a way for the spirits to watch down on the rice paddies. I think. There was an overwhelming amount of information, all of it accented, and to be honest, I only understood half of what we were told because we were told so much. But there are kites flying everywhere, and they’re gorgeous.
- Their primary crop is tourists at this point. Most of the ambitious kids go to school to study hospitality. There are tons and tons of native crafts that are for themselves but they’re happy to sell, but there are also tons and tons of crafts that have clearly sprung up because tourists like them. All kinds of gorgeous clothes that scream “white people in Bali” that the natives wouldn’t be caught dead in. (They all wear sarongs, of less loud prints than they sell to the tourists. Women almost all wear these really beautiful lace tunics that are incredibly flattering but still modest, which I didn’t see for sale in a single tourist area except the airport at the end. I kind of wanted one, but it felt weirdly culturally appropriative. I bought gorgeous batik white-people pants instead.) There are these cool vases that drip over a tree root, that are absolutely everywhere for sale and not part of any native décor. Same thing goes for the tile platters and the penis bottle openers. Oh, yoga and smoothie bowls are totally not Balinese. Most of the spa treatments, too. But Westerners eat that stuff up, so they produce it in great quantities. I’m reminded of the trdelnik in Prague.
- Labor is super cheap. Food is comparable. So fancy cocktails at a fancy bar were $10-12. And a half hour massage including tip was…also around $10.
- I’d been prepared for heat and mosquitoes. And clearly they get them, especially given that every hotel and many of the restaurants had citronella spray with the soap and the salt. But it was actually more pleasant, temperature and humidity-wise, than it was last week at home. And I didn’t get bit by a single mosquito. Not one. Barely any bugs at all, actually. Just tons of fish and frogs and dragonflies, who I supposed were doing a smashing job of taking down the irritating insect population.
Things I’m not sorry to say goodbye to:
- Right now the exchange rate is about 14,000 rupiah to 1 USD. Which is not a super friendly number for doing math in your head, and really took some getting used to. Trying to figure out appropriate tips was NOT easy, especially because much of our stuff was prepaid and so we couldn’t figure out what the original price was and so couldn’t do a percentage. Prices are absolutely absurd looking, and the colorful money looks like play money. Very disorienting.
- Westerners can’t drink the water - our gut flora isn't adjusted to the local microbes and you can end up spending your whole vacation in the bathroom. You can’t brush your teeth in the water. You need to make sure your hands are thoroughly dried before you can touch anything. You can't eat fruit that's just been washed - it needs to be peeled. (Fortunately, nearly all the tropical fruits need to be peeled.) You need to be paranoid about ice. So we ended up going through enormous guilt-inducing quantities of bottled water, and I always still felt like I was rationing. Slightly dehydrated for much of the trip despite my best efforts. But we seemed to have escaped Bali belly, so go us.
- Most places had Western style toilets. Not all.
- The roads are very well paved but incredibly hair-raising. Except down in the south, everything is one car wide (with a comical center line that I think is only good for motorbikes, of which there are many). They’re incredibly twisty, like terrifyingly so, through the jungles, with massive drop-offs. Our driver often opened the window and reached out to tuck in the rear view mirror when we needed to pass a car going on the opposite side. We did not read in the car. Just sitting in the car invited motion sickness.
Basically, gorgeous, amazing, inviting culture shock. The people are falling over themselves to help you with the culture shock. But the amount of mother-henning is itself culture-shock inducing.
But so, so nice. Really, one of the most fascinating and lovely places I’ve ever been to.
I feel like my brain is full to bursting with details that aren’t going to all stick. It was exhausting, by the end of the trip, the constant negotiation of differences. (Not that it requires much negotiation on our part – the Balinese are accommodating to a fault, to the point that I was constantly trying to be sufficiently aware because they weren’t going to tell me I was being a jerk or disrespectful.) But deeply, deeply fascinating. One of the things I love about travel is the increasing awareness of the many good but different ways there are to live, and also the many universals across all people (ranging from the fact that two year olds speaking any language will be delighted to have a bun, to the fact that subsistence agriculture is increasingly economically unsustainable but charging tourists good money to do a bad job of working your farm is a great business model whether you’re an apple farmer in upstate New York or a rice farmer in Southeast Asia).
Things that were expected:
- The landscape is predictably gorgeous. Not dissimilar from Hawaii, only way, way more flowers. There’s the coast, with scrubby trees and expansive mangroves and glorious sunsets from beaches and cliffs. There’s the mountains, with plunging ravines and waterfalls and towering massive banyan trees. There are tons of wildflowers and even more cultivated ones. All the tropicals you’d expect, from bougainvillea to orchids to ginger, but also magnificent versions of everything we have in our backyards at home – zinnias, begonias, coleus. Amaryllis growing out of the ground. Enormous pride taken in even tiny gardens, planted and tended with more care than many professional gardeners at home. So many plant nurseries on the side of the road, more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. Everything grows, so they grow everything. Backyards include all the fruits – passionfruit, jackfruit, mango, banana, coffee, chocolate. So. Many. Coconuts.
- Not unlike Hawaii, there are chickens everywhere, too. They keep them in wicker baskets, but they also run free, along with feral-but-friendly dogs and cats. And ducks. Lots of ducks.
- Unbelievably friendly and hospitable people. To the point that it feels a little awkward. (We did our best to tip well.)
Things that were less expected:
- I knew that there were a lot of temples. I really did not wrap my head around how many temples. Every house has its own temple – elaborate, beautiful ones. In modest houses, the temple is larger than the house itself, and considerably more beautiful. Then every town has a grand, magnificent temple. And then there are the special temples at specific places. But it’s literally a temple every hundred feet in populated areas, often even more dense than that. Each temple is decorated in incredibly detailed, elaborate stone carvings. Most have temple guardian statues.
- Where there aren’t temples, there are just plain statues of the gods. Unbelievably massive, magnificent ones. In the center of most roundabouts. On the sides of streets. There’s a jawdroppingly massive skyscraper sized Vishnu down near the airport, in a country where it’s forbidden to build buildings taller than the coconut trees. It looks like an alien spacecraft come to earth. You can see it in the distance hours away.
- The Balinese are incredibly routinely, matter-of-factly religious. It’s just woven into daily life the way I imagine Christianity might have been in like, medieval Europe. Every day starts with an offering (I think it’s required three times a day?). They make this pretty little baskets out of palms, fill them with four colors of flowers (very symbolic, still don’t understand the explanation), add a stick of lit incense, and then add whatever is appropriate for what they’re asking for. This isn’t a private ritual – there are little baskets left absolutely everywhere, in the middle of sidewalks, on every doorstep, in great piles at every crossroads. You just step around them. The air always smells of frangipani and incense. There are very few walls, though, since they don’t really need them, and so the incense is always pleasant, not horribly overwhelming like it gets when people light it at home.
- The Balinese are also incredibly routinely, matter-of-factly artistic. They’ve got a bunch of Artists, but there’s also just a huge amount of art built into everyday life. All those carvings are done by relative locals. Each town has a specialty. This one does stone carving, that one wood, that one silver-working. Ubud is known specifically for painting. And as you drive down the ordinary roads, many people make the front of their house a small workshop or store. So you’re driving through a random tiny third world town, and every third house just has someone sitting there in a pile of wood carving the most incredibly elaborate beautiful wooden doors you’ve ever seen. If you go through the door behind the workshop, you’ll find their temple, and then their little house, and then a backyard with their cow. Their rice paddy is down the path a bit.
- They love kites. It’s good karma, a way for the spirits to watch down on the rice paddies. I think. There was an overwhelming amount of information, all of it accented, and to be honest, I only understood half of what we were told because we were told so much. But there are kites flying everywhere, and they’re gorgeous.
- Their primary crop is tourists at this point. Most of the ambitious kids go to school to study hospitality. There are tons and tons of native crafts that are for themselves but they’re happy to sell, but there are also tons and tons of crafts that have clearly sprung up because tourists like them. All kinds of gorgeous clothes that scream “white people in Bali” that the natives wouldn’t be caught dead in. (They all wear sarongs, of less loud prints than they sell to the tourists. Women almost all wear these really beautiful lace tunics that are incredibly flattering but still modest, which I didn’t see for sale in a single tourist area except the airport at the end. I kind of wanted one, but it felt weirdly culturally appropriative. I bought gorgeous batik white-people pants instead.) There are these cool vases that drip over a tree root, that are absolutely everywhere for sale and not part of any native décor. Same thing goes for the tile platters and the penis bottle openers. Oh, yoga and smoothie bowls are totally not Balinese. Most of the spa treatments, too. But Westerners eat that stuff up, so they produce it in great quantities. I’m reminded of the trdelnik in Prague.
- Labor is super cheap. Food is comparable. So fancy cocktails at a fancy bar were $10-12. And a half hour massage including tip was…also around $10.
- I’d been prepared for heat and mosquitoes. And clearly they get them, especially given that every hotel and many of the restaurants had citronella spray with the soap and the salt. But it was actually more pleasant, temperature and humidity-wise, than it was last week at home. And I didn’t get bit by a single mosquito. Not one. Barely any bugs at all, actually. Just tons of fish and frogs and dragonflies, who I supposed were doing a smashing job of taking down the irritating insect population.
Things I’m not sorry to say goodbye to:
- Right now the exchange rate is about 14,000 rupiah to 1 USD. Which is not a super friendly number for doing math in your head, and really took some getting used to. Trying to figure out appropriate tips was NOT easy, especially because much of our stuff was prepaid and so we couldn’t figure out what the original price was and so couldn’t do a percentage. Prices are absolutely absurd looking, and the colorful money looks like play money. Very disorienting.
- Westerners can’t drink the water - our gut flora isn't adjusted to the local microbes and you can end up spending your whole vacation in the bathroom. You can’t brush your teeth in the water. You need to make sure your hands are thoroughly dried before you can touch anything. You can't eat fruit that's just been washed - it needs to be peeled. (Fortunately, nearly all the tropical fruits need to be peeled.) You need to be paranoid about ice. So we ended up going through enormous guilt-inducing quantities of bottled water, and I always still felt like I was rationing. Slightly dehydrated for much of the trip despite my best efforts. But we seemed to have escaped Bali belly, so go us.
- Most places had Western style toilets. Not all.
- The roads are very well paved but incredibly hair-raising. Except down in the south, everything is one car wide (with a comical center line that I think is only good for motorbikes, of which there are many). They’re incredibly twisty, like terrifyingly so, through the jungles, with massive drop-offs. Our driver often opened the window and reached out to tuck in the rear view mirror when we needed to pass a car going on the opposite side. We did not read in the car. Just sitting in the car invited motion sickness.
Basically, gorgeous, amazing, inviting culture shock. The people are falling over themselves to help you with the culture shock. But the amount of mother-henning is itself culture-shock inducing.
But so, so nice. Really, one of the most fascinating and lovely places I’ve ever been to.
