Jakarta and Bali Instead of writing updates, I have devoted untold hours to preparing the oft- promised, content-laden, photo-illustrated, new, improved website. Actually, it is ready to publish… except I can’t get it to go live. Some combination of low bandwidth, large graphic images, and my own ineptitude has thwarted my many attempts to make the new site available to you, the (largely disinterested) public. So I’ll ask you to settle for a page at a time and the occasional image until I can get over my resurgent technophobia. [Editor's note: This, perhaps obviously, has been overcome.] But we have been busying ourselves with other things, I promise. Just yesterday I returned to the dread Carrefoure department store. Carrefoure is the home of volume buying – there are many bulk items to be had, among which are the banks of televisions and stereos all tuned to different stations at maximal blare. While quick to supply the necessities to our staff, we have gradually learned that we’ve been remiss in supplying some of the comforts they expect when working for an “expat” household. So I picked up a small refrigerator, a rice cooker, a double-burner gas cookstove, a hot-and-cold water dispenser, and a few other items for the staff area. Some of these were already here, but they were part of our “survival package” – a selection of essentials the company provided to tide us over until we get situated. When our ship comes in we are to return the non-food items to the company warehouse. (Our shipment from Houston is expected on the 15th of August; I don’t know whether it’s come ’round Tierra del Fuego or if it was shipped from the west coast of the U.S.) So it was like Christmas for the staff yesterday as we unloaded all these various new appliances. That was just yesterday, 3 August. I should reach a little further back since I haven’t written anything since 21 July. That was the day we flew to Bali. Our departure was reminiscent of some British manor on Masterpiece Theatre. Nani equipped us with a hamper of traveling food, the bags were carried to the car, and the staff gathered on the front drive to see us off. We arrived in Bali at about 10:30p (it’s an hour later there) and were snug in our beds in the Bali Hilton International by midnight. Over the next few days Arianna took scores of pictures of the lovely hotel grounds, some of which I hope to one day put on the ding-dang new site. We spent Friday lounging and lazing at the pool or on the white-sand beach. This grueling schedule was interrupted by a quick parasailing venture. We went up individually for rather brief circuits of a small inlet – maybe five minutes each. It was the first time any of us had been airborne with a parachute, and we’ll do it again, I’m sure. The hotel grounds are dotted with statues, small to huge, incorporating the classical Balinese characters – fierce bird-beaked creatures, priapic monkey gods, and the occasional elephant-headed Ganesh. Some of the smaller of these are used as shrines by the hotel staff, who are often seen replenishing the small woven baskets at the foot of the statues with foodstuffs and incense. I skeptically took this to be a Hilton mandate to bring artificial local flavor to their hotel. But when we got out to the rest of the island and away from the concentration of five-star hotels, we saw the same types of offerings scattered everywhere. In fact, the taxi we booked for the day on Saturday had one such 4”x4”woven basket on the dashboard, another tucked under the windshield wiper, and another wedged into the “Teksi” sign on the roof. Although we had hoped to have a guide take us around, we were there on Saraswati, so the gentleman with whom we’d made very loose plans was too involved with his family to introduce us to the island. Saraswati is one of many Balinese days of homage — this one, we’re told, celebrating cleverness and book-learning. As such, we’re not sure which things we saw in our day of exploration were standard daily Balinese life and which were altered somewhat by the day of celebration and meditation. Folks have told us there is almost always some sort of celebration, festival, or special day underway there. En route to Ubud, a larger, inland town known as a center of the arts, we stopped off and signed up for a river rafting tour on the Ayung River. The tour operator’s office was close to Denpasar (Bali’s main town). Ubud and, beyond that, the starting point of our rafting trip are about an hour inland. I offer this information only so you’ll understand the logistics involved when I realized that I’d left my bag in the tour operator’s offices. About $350 in cash and traveler’s cheques, our digital camera, a post-rafting change of clothes for Alissa and me… all sitting on a bench in a small office by then 50 minutes behind us. The people at the rafting office ended up keeping the bag behind the desk and we picked it up afterward, but our shopping in the open market in Ubud was necessarily limited, and we have no digital photos of our day exploring interior Bali. The market was packed with colorful stalls stacked with bargains. We bought only a few trinkets, a sari or three, a couple of shirts, and such. Rafting was a real treat; we wound through deep, green gorges, shot through some minor but fun rapids, and passed among the picturesque, terraced rice paddies we’ve all seen in elementary school social studies textbooks. What we hadn’t bargained for (and what was curiously overlooked in the brochure description of the rafting trip) was the total of maybe 800 steps required to descend into and ascend from the valley/gorge. Some of us – no names please – felt the after-effects for days. I would have clipped a few photos of our rafting adventure to this write- up, but, you’ll recall, our digital camera was tucked under someone’s desk back at the rafting office. They had a cameraman in a kayak racing ahead of our three rafts and capturing our trip on video, but they wanted $40 for a copy of the film. We’ll make do with the memories (although we did buy a still photo of us plunging down a little four-foot drop). As we’d been told, Bali was a very suitable antidote to several weeks in Jakarta; we are already booking our next trip. This time we’ll not stay in a big-name, five-star international hotel on the beach but rather a smaller, perhaps villa-style inn of the sort we saw along the river in the interior. And when we go, we’ll make time to visit the volcano, more terraced rice paddies, and, of course, the sacred monkey forest. |