To side with another makes war. To struggle with oneself makes peace.
--two Indonesian proverbs from Stephanie's dictionary.
We continue to have a wow time here.
It is our last full day in Bali. We leave tomorrow morning for Thailand and the elephants. Today we go with Surya up to see two 'Water Palaces' (beautiful old houses with pools lived in by the former kings of this part of Bali) and tonight have a rijstaffel feast as a farewell dinner. Surya doesn't go to Thailand with us but will stay to work on a book about traditional Balinese medicine.
I love being at the beach and spent most of the first day we were here moving between the blue infinity pool and the ocean, both the same cool-warm friendly temperature that we never get in Oregon. It is hard to blog here, not much internet access! I'm in the hotel office, using their office computer which is sticky with the humidity and salt air. Walking from our air-conditioned room into the open-air bathroom (so pretty, with frog statues wearing flowers and a shower underneath the stars) is like walking into a steam bath. Hot hot hot and humid. But who cares, since the ocean is here and everything has been blessed a thousand times and the stars are bright at night. Here are some local bathers next door to the hotel.
Yesterday a snorkeling expedition out to an island where we hoped to swim with Manta Rays --!!!!--but they weren't there so we went to Crystal Bay and did ordinary magical bright-fish snorkeling. The 45 minute bright, bouncing boat ride over open sea on the way back was bliss. All of us had fun snorkeling; the divers from the hotel were very helpful, holding life-rings we could look through if we weren't comfortable in the deep water. I swam around until I had swallowed my share of seawater and seen a hundred kinds of fish.
In the afternoon we went to Tenganan, a village near here that some call an 'aboriginal' village although I'm not sure that's quite the word. It's built and run in a very old style, older than the rest of Bali. Water-buffalo patties in the street but I didn't get to see a real buffalo. Lots of cocks in woven cages, some dyed pink. What was powerful about this village for me was the quality of the craftsmanship. They still do double-ikat weaving--one of three places in the world (Peru and Nepal being the others?) where this very very labor-intensive kind of weaving is done, with intricate dying of the warp and the weft beforehand. We visited a weaver and watched her work, in her house hung with fabulous, museum-quality fabric. We also visited a famous letterer, a man in his 80's with big white eyebrows, no glasses, a huge smile and easy laugh, who makes lontar books (look this up in Wikipedia, says Surya), in the old Balinese script, on palm leaves using a knife and candlenut soot. The books are so elegant, and of course are rendering of sacred stories. We sang to him and he laughed with pleasure. We were singing in Indonesian but he thought we were singing in English. His wife, silent, also in her eighties, was still a striking beauty.
Villagers also make the baskets and basketwork we see everywhere, and some of it for sale was the finest, tiniest basket weaving I've ever seen. Almost everyone in Bali has a craft, evidently. If you don't carve masks, you paint or make baskets or dye fabric or weave or carve stone or do lettering or something!! but in this village the traditions of craftsmanship were beyond what I had seen before.
We had dinner by the sea at a Hindu ashram in Candidasa, with two little brown cows grazing on the lawn nearby. I petted the cows but they had food on their minds. We came back to get a mask and dance presentation by Surya, where he turned into some other people: an old man and a storyteller, in masks he had carved.
Is that enough for one day?
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