Notes from Bali - Part 1
Bali initial impressions, climbing an active volcano and staying at a strange resort
Barong, in Balinese mythology, is a panther-like character, that’s the king of spirits and the leader of all that’s good. Rangda is the demon queen. Their battle, the Barong dance, is the eternal battle between good and evil.
Tourism in Bali is a Barong dance in itself - a battle between all that’s good and the bad.
Before I visited Bali for the first time I was picturing:
A tropical paradise
Strange and exotic temples
Digital nomads furiously typing away in cafes
Instagram influencers furiously shooting reels
Surfy beaches
Most of it was true. But I had attributed a layer of serenity to the whole thing which, in hindsight, was an illogical assumption. Given that N and I pretty much stuck to the standard tourist circuits of the island, the Bali we encountered was steamy, dusty, and chaotic but when you can put in the work presents parts that are dreamy and serene. However, I’d have to visit again to go off the beaten path a little bit to really see the quiet paradise side of it.
Kumbakonam, but with a hipster island vibe
The first thing you notice in Bali is not the lush tropics, the temples, or the sunkissed beaches. It’s the traffic. Barely five minutes from the airport and we’re stuck in a traffic jam on the road. Some old trauma bubbles to the surface. Memories of Bangalore.
“Traffic is terrible?” I venture to the driver tentatively
“Yes. This is still ok. Not too bad,” he shrugs.
We are barely crawling. At least, in this case, the cab driver had the AC on. No one is honking. In Bali, every road is a single-lane road. It’s like the people on the island built temples, houses, and shops and forgot to build roads. It seems as if all the marauding tourists in their vehicles carved their own path through the civilization to create what is essentially a clogged intestine of a road system whose stomach constipation refuses to abate.
People speak English here a lot more than in Thailand.
The driver continues, “During Covid, it was empty”
“Must have been nice for a change,” I quip, thoughtless.
“Good for traffic. But…terrible for us,” he says
Well, of course. I mentally slap myself on the head. The island runs almost entirely on tourism. Tourists, for all the clogging of streets, dirtying, honking, and steady erosion of the authentic culture of the place, are what keep the economy running here.
In 2019, 6.28 million foreign tourists visited Bali. Bali’s population? 4.4 million. Bali hasn’t fully snapped back to its 2019 peak yet. In 2023 less than 2 million foreign visitors have visited the island. But sitting in the clogged streets you wonder how it was possible to fit 4 million more tourists on these roads.
The second thing you notice in Bali, after the traffic, is the sheer amount of culture and religion that pervades the place.
Temples and temple-like walls and structures are everywhere. This took me back to riding through the small lanes of Swamimalai and Kumbakonam with little temples coming up frequently and everywhere. My conclusion of Bali: Kumbakonam but with an international tourist island vibe if you can even conceive of such juxtapositions.
Strangeness of Ayung Resort
“Welcome to Ayung Resorts. You’re Ty..a..garajan and you’re nitya guru…vaa..yurappan”
I think we were blown away right then at check-in. Someone outside of South India actually pronounced our names with accuracy! This never happens. Everyone mangles the names - even people from our own country north of Vindyas. White people don’t even try. Asians struggle with it. The Balinese and the resort earned several points in our imaginary scorecard.
The resort itself is like the fever dream of someone who ingested high doses of Balinese Kratom.
At the reception a huge (must be like 10 ft) metallic ‘thinking man’ sits surrounded by various birds like cocks and ducks. Enter the lobby and you are surrounded by artifacts that range from traditional Balinese statues, large serpents, religious symbols, and finally a large egg-like thing that looks like something from the set of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
On a grassy lawn, there is a metal statue of a man on a horse playing polo. Near the restaurant is a tall statue of some leader which is very reminiscent very much of something Soviet and communist. A massive wooden Komodo dragon sticks to the wall on top of the balcony, eerily creepy. There’s Ganesha’s strewn all over the property and Balinese women. Lions and assorted creations are placed in the little lobby of the building our room was in.
There is such a cluster of random artifacts everywhere that the effect was like stepping onto the property on an island that belonged to some kooky billionaire. Or like stumbling into an ancient civilization's lost treasures.
It’s fine though. Give me quirky any day over well-crafted and boring.
It’s in a forest. It’s beautiful. And most importantly, the food is amazing. The Nasi Goreng is delicious. The tea time snacks are fun.
Customer service is platinum-grade. The waiter at the restaurant the next morning calls us by name and chats with us for about five minutes. We were kind of mind-blown by the hospitality of the place.
Fantastic place.
Mt. Batur
2 AM. The alarm rings with that shocking intensity that only happens at the time of the day when the only sounds are crickets, howling dogs, or the hum of the air conditioner (if you happen to be in a hotel room). It’s the kind of alarm that makes you instantly regret any decision you made sometime in the past that has committed you to waking up to this alarm in the first place.
The thing is we wanted to be on top of Mt. Batur watching the sunrise at 6 am or for the elevationally inclined, at about 5400 or so ft above sea level. Of course, our trek would start at a cozy 3200 ft, leaving us a little tourist’s climb of about 2200-2300 ft before the sun came up.
A question naturally arises. Have we never seen a sunrise before? What makes this sunrise so unique is that we were willing to be woken up at the time of the night when spirits roam free. There are no satisfactory answers.
Just in the last three years, we’ve been lucky to watch many sunrises including the one over Angkor Wat huddled with other jostling tourists, the one where it was a crimson ball of fire rising over the crags of Phang Nga Bay in Koh Yao Noi right from the hotel room and the one in Halong bay as the air went from cool and crips to blazing hot in a matter of thirty minutes.
Why then work so hard for a sunrise?
I could give you an Instagrammable quote about how struggle makes things sweeter or just confess that sometimes when one hits the age of 40, one attends to the crisis of age by doing stuff like this. More importantly, you cannot go to a place like Bali which is so pockmarked with volcanic eruptions and not even climb one. The Wikipedia page on ‘mountains in Bali’ is listed alphabetically and Mt. Batur at 5400 ft isn’t even the biggest or the tallest. Mt. Agung stands the tallest at 10,000 ft nearly twice as the little brother Batur.
So, there we were, awake at 2 a.m., contemplating our life choices and being driven towards the starting point of the trek - an hour’s journey through the deceptively desolate little Bali lanes. Eventually, we entered a dusty road and reached a clearing where five other jeeps were parked.
There were about 8 to 10 other trekkers, similarly groggy-eyed, but unlike us, well prepared with jackets for potentially the frigid blast at the top of the peak. A single, spare toilet had been built there, in the middle of nowhere. We met our guide who on looking at how we were dressed did two things:
Instructed us to rent a jacket
Asked us if we had ever trekked before
As I tried embellishing any treks we had done to look good in his eyes (for whatever reason god only knows), a lady with rental jackets appeared and both of us got overkill of a jacket - mine looked like something Hugh Hefner would have worn had he been poor. But renters can’t be choosers.
This was a private trek in any case and off we went, me, N, and the guide to make the trek. Off we went and after fifteen minutes, puffing in exhaustion and sweating under the large Playboy jacket I asked the guide if we were halfway to which he said we were yet to even hit the mountain and we were still on the road.
In any case, with multiple breaks and my focus narrowed down to just the idea of one more step up the steep slope with loose volcanic rocks, we made it to the top with time to spare for sunrise. It was only 5.30 am when we reached the peak where the guide brought us sandwiches, a tall glass of coffee, bananas and some chocolates. The views were pretty heavenly and the wind was cold and the jackets suddenly made more sense. We watched the sun light up the clouds below us and in the distance, Mt. Agung and Mt. Abang stood like taller sentinels.
Mt. Batur, despite being Bali’s most active volcano, stayed silent beneath us and about 100 or more other tourists at the top. Batur has erupted twenty times in the last two hundred years and it last erupted in 1963.
It’s overdue.
To be continued….
Could be Worse,
Tyag
In the next part
Leveraging skills learned in India for the lawless driving in Bali
Kecak dance, people-watching, and boorishly drunk American women
Ubud vs Seminyak - Eat pray love or love drink and whoo whoo?