Lorre Weidlich -- Hyde Park Foreign Affairs Desk
This is the latest in an on-going series of reports by Hyde Park's well traveled friend and neighbor, Lorre Weidlich. We now rejoin Lorre where we left the story unfinished in November...
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When I decided to visit Bali, I chose Ubud as the place I wanted
to stay. Ubud is the cultural center of Bali. Balinese performances
take place regularly and Balinese handicrafts are everywhere. Ubud
is also beautiful; everywhere are carvings and flowers. In the
morning, the Balinese put out offerings -- small containers created
from coconut leaves and filled with flowers and sometimes bits of
food. Everywhere, including my hotel room and the hotel restaurant,
there are decorations made from coconut leaves, with strips woven
and curled in different ways.
I spent my first day in Ubud wandering, enjoying the beautiful surroundings. Midmorning it began to drizzle, which only added to the atmosphere. And by midmorning, I had made my way to the Monkey Forest. The Monkey Forest is just that -- a small forest filled with monkeys, cute little guys that scamper around and play with each other, while the forest attendants toss them pieces of banana and sweet potato. Bali is the land of temples and the Monkey Forest was no exception. I wandered down a stone stairway to the first temple, a grotto containing a cistern of water presided over by three statues of deities, including Ganesha. Then I wandered up another stairway to the cremation temple. This included, to my surprise, a graveyard. Apparently bodies are occasionally buried until funds for a cremation are sufficient or the time is auspicious. The third temple, the major one, was interesting to me primarily as the site of my (first) monkey misadventure. As I walked from the entrance, one of those cute little guys snatched my dupatta and then began pulling on my churidar. It's not a good idea to touch the monkeys -- they bite -- so I remained still but began calling, in some amusement, for help. Someone came to my rescue and pelted the monkey with stones until it released me and I was able to retrieve the dupatta. That evening I attended my first Balinese dance at the Ubud Palace. The music was hypnotic and the dancing exquisite. This was only the first; I attended a performance every night I was in Ubud. The dances had different names based on subject matter (Gabor dance, Barong dance, Legong dance), but the style of dance was the same. Perhaps the best-known, the Barong dance focuses on the ubiquitous barong, A barong is a good but mischievous spirit in the form of a lion; each Balinese village has one. Two dancers take the part of the barong, one in front and one behind. The barong dances and then lies down with his paws outstretched. Then monkey comes out and dances, trying to tempt the barong with a banana. In the dance I saw, he picked a young boy from the audience and began grooming him, looking remarkably like the monkeys in the Monkey Forest. The following morning I got a call: "Are you ready for your trip?" I had arranged a trip to sights around Bali. I asked, "What time is it?". "9 am." "What happened to my 7 am wake up call?" So I got off at 9:30 without breakfast instead of 8:30 with breakfast. In the long run, it didn't matter, and when I returned at the end of the day, there was a basket of fruit and a note of apology waiting for me in my room. Because my trip was devoted to visiting temples, I wore a sarong and a sash -- required attire for temples. Balinese female attire generally consists of a sarong topped by an over blouse. I had bought the sarong the previous day -- a four-meter length of fabric. I carefully wound it around me and tied it at my waist and found I could barely move. I waddled along feeling like a mummy, wondering where I had gone wrong. The Balinese ladies seem to move quite freely. At one of the temples, someone offered to rip it for me so I could move more easily, but I refused in some alarm. It was, in fact, handmade batik.
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We covered an amazing amount of east Bali that day: 5 temples, a
palace, a scenic restaurant for lunch, and Bali's largest rice
field. The temple at Belul was a cave with an elaborately carved
mouth; inside were statues, including one of Ganesha. At Pejeng,
the focal point of the temple was a huge one-piece bronze drum that
represents the moon. KlungKung, a royal city, featured a palace with
statuary, a painted ceiling, and a cistern with lotuses. Besakih is
the mother temple, a complex of buildings built part way up the slopes
of Gunung Agung. Unfortuately, clouds obscured the volcano, but my
disappointment with that passed when we approached Kintamani for
lunch. The view of Gunung Batur, with black clouds clustered around
its top, and its crater lake was awesome. From there we went to Bangli
and my favorite temple, built in terraces up a hillside. The final
temple was Tampaksiring, known for its holy water, in which people
bathe for cures. I splashed some on my hip in the hope that the
artificial joint would be forgiving of the mileage I was putting on it.
My third day was devoted to seeing some of the handicraft centers around Ubud and visiting one of Bali's most beautiful temples, Tanah Lot. At Celuk I watched silver jewelry being constructed and purchased a broach in the form of a dragon. At Mas I learned about the woodcarvers' art. Woodcarving proceeds in three steps: first large chunks of wood are removed with an axe, then chisels are used to create the shape, then the fine surface work is completed. We also visited Batuan, the center of Balinese painting, both classical (that is, using a traditional style to depict typically Balinese subjects, like figures from Balinese dance) and contemporary, and we stopped in Batubulan to see the stone carving. My visit to Tanah Lot was one of the peak experiences of my stay on Bali. Tanah Lot resides atop a huge, flat rock on the shore of the Indian Ocean. Beautiful doesnÕt begin to describe it -- perhaps the best word is ethereal. The temple itself was not accessible, but the rocky shoreline has its own beauty. After exploring the beach and playing in the water, I entered the cave at the foot of the rock, washed my face and splashed my hip with holy water, and received a blessing from the priest there. I was completely happy with the water, the rocks, the adventure, and the pleasure of climbing and exploring. The following day was my last in Bali. I explored the Ubud Palace and the market and in the evening I headed for Oka Kartina for a wayang kulit performance. Oka Kartina turned out to be a gallery and I was an hour early, which turned out to be fortuitous. The young woman who co-owned it with her husband was a collector and dealer of antique and contemporary batik, and she offered me a cup of tea and spread out her treasures. I spent a pleasant hour looking over different examples and learning more about the process. I learned there are a variety of tjantings -- different size round ones, square ones, ones with several spouts. It takes real expertise to get good results with these -- the wax has to flow evenly through all spouts of a multi-spout tjanting and along all sides of a square spout. Batik was originally done with natural dye and synthetic dyes only appeared during the early part of the twentieth century. Designs show the influence of a variety of places, including India and China. The wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performance wasnÕt in the best facility (outside, with cats yowling!), but it was fun, because the puppeteer threw in occasional dialog in English to amuse the audience. The story was from the Mahabharata, one of India's two great Hindu epics. (Most Indonesian performances use stories from either that or the Ramayana, IndiaÕs other epic). The next morning I left Bali for Java. Ketut, one of my drivers, told me if I returned, next time he would show me western Bali. That is only one of many motivations to go back. My new retirement plan is to move to Bali and become a woodcarver. 
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