| BALI STORY 2000 - Day 14. |
| Tuesday 26 September 2000. This is the sixteenth chapter of my trip diary. A line or two over eight pages today. Don’t even try to read it if you’re not patient. Day 14 Had a late massage this morning as I slept in till after 7. Late maybe, but still good. As I sit here now writing this I’ve just paused. I can feel the warmth of the air, hear the background ssssss of the waves running up and down the slope of the beach. I can hear the chatter as girls who are arriving even later than me exchange morning greetings with their friends before setting out their little offerings on the soft sand and completing their ritual with a sprinkle of water. I noticed that when Adi arrived with her bags of clothing she quickly sat down and helped herself to the aromatherapy cream to give herself a work over. She is a real ‘wild woman from Borneo’ until she does up her straight black hair. The mischievous spark lingers in the corners of her eyes, however, seemingly a reservoir for an occasional raucous outburst, which is surely a bit rude as the others break out laughing. A little shiver runs across my shoulders at the memory. Claire started and finished before me this morning, so Mistri simply moved over to my right side, joining Wayan who is on my left. They chirped away softly to one another and I seemed to be only distantly aware of their kneading and probing. Turning over, when the time comes, is always at least a problem, and sometimes nearly impossible without help. They always giggled like schoolgirls when the mind is off somewhere and the muscles won’t coordinate, but they always assisted firmly, putting wayward limbs where they wanted them. At one stage this morning I sort of opened my right eye and found it was firmly focused on the three hair stubbles at the end of my nose, shaved off three or four days ago. This was not a pretty sight but it slowly dawned on me that I didn’t have my glasses on, and even if I‘d had them on I couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, that my eyes focussed at a distance of about two inches and an angle of 60 degrees. I contemplated this for a while with my eye closed and, when I re-opened it, there they were, still in sharp outline. In case my eye was going to stay where it was I closed it again and tried to ignore the situation. The connections in the mind must do strange things to muscles when everything is relaxed. The knots didn’t hurt so much this morning so they must have been loosening up a bit at least. Wayan brought us pineapple again and smiled when I immediately opened the bag and began to eat a piece. The ‘Adelaide’ T-shirts which we brought over for them have evidently been taken by husbands or sons but this doesn’t seem to matter to them, so why should it matter to us, if we have helped the family then we have helped them too. This morning, for the second time, an exercise team came along the beach. All males, I think (my eyes aren’t what they used to be), about 30 in number, dressed in more-or-less matching dark blue shorts and sweatshirts. They came jogging down the beach in a rectangular formation, turning to run backwards every so often. At the front of the Bali Bintang they stopped to jog on the spot for a while before changing into stretching exercises and one-on-one strength movements that were reminiscent of an army squad from the films (movies). After about 5 minutes of this they re-aligned their rectangle, about-faced and raced into the sea where they dived under and repeated the beach exercises in thigh-deep water. It was all very light hearted as they tried to resist the waves and burst into unrestrained laughter as one or another was toppled over into the surf. Eventually they ran out, re-formed again and jogged off into the distance towards Kuta. When I first came to Bali twenty odd years ago groups such as this were a common sight very late in the afternoon. If I remember rightly each village had a marching squad which competed in inter-village championships. There seemed to be an emphasis on physical fitness as well as marching, and martial arts movements were also practised. In hindsight this sort of thing could well have been encouraged by the government as a form of preliminary training for future enlistment into the armed services. One afternoon on the beach in front of the Inn there was a group of children, aged from 6 or 7 years up to early-mid teens who were engaged in similar marching type exercises. They were all carefully presented in coloured uniforms of trousers or skirts with jackets buttoned up the front and epaulets on the shoulders. After exercising as a whole group, they broke up into smaller units to practise different skills of combat style exercises with sticks or marching manoeuvres. It appeared all very military and not a little frightening. Peter the kite man was on the beach when we returned. He too remembered me as I have regularly bought his bird kites and boat kites for friends. His kites are beautiful works of art. They are carefully hand crafted with every detail expressed skilfully. Cheaper copies of his works are available at most markets after a while but they lack the detail that Peter put into his work. The feathers on his kites, for example, have each part of the feather individually painted whereas on the market version the feather is made by one stroke of an almost dry brush. He greeted me warmly with the little touch on the forearm that seems to be so often used by Balinese when greeting friends. He wanted to show me his new Dragon kite with its long waving tail. There is little wind this morning so the kite hangs limply on a post stuck into the sand. It is a development of his bird kite and each scale has been individually rendered on the built-up three-dimensional body, carefully formed from bent bamboo slivers. The carved head has its mouth agape with a blood red tongue hanging out, waving in the slight breeze. The long, flexible tail is carefully detailed, as are the spread legs and talons on the trailing edge of the wings. The colours are vibrant shades of blues, greys and pinks with darker accents. It is an arresting work of art, not just a kite. He has also further developed the boat kite this year by the addition of a noisemaker that is also available as a stand-alone item in a larger size. The noisemaker is an ingeniously constructed, miniature football rattle type of thing, driven by a tiny windmill about 75 mm (3”) in diameter at the front of the boat. The main axle of the windmill is solid bamboo, carefully rounded and a bit bigger than a pencil. At one end it is split into four quarters and cross pieces to support the sails of the windmill were pushed into the splits. Short lengths of tightly fitting plastic tube slid onto the axle from behind and in front of the cross arms to contain the splitting. The axle was fitted through holes made across a rectangular frame fabricated from bamboo about the size of the ends and sides of a matchbox. A carved bamboo ratchet wheel was pressed onto the axle behind the front bearing hole withn this rectangular frame. Onto the teeth of this clicked one end of a sliver of bamboo about the size of a match, held in the centre by a twisted rubber band strung across the middle of the frame. This is much like the arrangement of a Spanish Windlass that farmers use to tension the diagonal supports on old farm gates. The other end of the bamboo sliver bears lightly against the paper skin of a tiny drum, about the size of a cotton reel, mounted in the rectangular frame at the opposite end from the windmill axle. This sliver is flicked back and forth by the twist of the rubber band each time a tooth of the rotating ratchet wheel picks up the end and then releases it as the tooth passes, letting the other end tap down onto the drum skin. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Rising in pitch as the rising wind turns the sails faster. The sails that drive this mechanism are brightly coloured silk triangles, (not cotton, as you will later find in the markets no doubt) glued around the cross arms. The trailing corner of the sail is held into an aerofoil shape by a very thin sliver of bamboo forming a square around the ends of the cross arms, and holding the sail corner loosely back near the next sail arm. Now if you can picture that then I must be a brilliant word artist! Complicated you think? It certainly is, and to be not only created but also constructed by a delightfully gentle ‘third world’ man on the beach is even more brilliant. Here my notes are again stained with the purple juice from the skin of a succulent mangosteen. I remember the juice from the flesh also dribbled out of my mouth and down into my chin whiskers, necessitation a wash-up over the bathroom basin. Yuk! How do I stand this? Later in the morning I walked down to the breakwater south of the Inn’s beach and spent an hour talking to three fishermen casting out into the rough water surging around the end. They all have telescoping rods, one a recognisable ‘Daiwa” rod and reel combination, the others of a brand which I did not recognise. They used live prawns for bait, kept alive in an insulated esky type box fitted with a battery-powered aerator clipped over the edge and bubbling away into the water through a porous stone. They used a single hook at the end of their line and a running ball sinker stoppered about a metre (3’) from the hook. The water is very cloudy as it is stirred up in the swirling current around the end of the breakwater and they are at pains to cast beyond this without flicking the bait off the hook. I would have used the floats that they have in their bamboo basket to get the bait out into clearer water, but they scorn my suggestion and, chastened, I shut up and just watch. Their bamboo basket was a work of art. It was obviously made purposely to fit over the top of the railing post, holding it up not only within easy reach, but also to stop it being washed away in the occasional wave that rans over the top of the breakwater. Bamboo is certainly a versatile material in this region of the world. Its use has been developed into an art form, over centuries I suppose. I asked them if they ever used berley, or ground bait as some know it, but the concept was hard to get across. I think they eventually understood what I meant, but the idea of throwing stuff in for the fish to eat without putting a hook in it seemed worse than a waste to them I think. About noon. Back to the Inn, the room, the pool, the cool, and then lunch. The S A Café wins out because it is only a short walk and if we can get into the side bale again it will be nice in the early afternoon breeze. Phil will, predictably, have his favourite triple decker cheese burger with two Bintangs. I have to go to lunch too, as I seem to be the only one with a supply of money left. I wont be having a hamburger though. Even the thought seems obscene when there are so many tasty rice and vegetable dishes to choose from. Perhaps Gado gado today? My mouth salivates even now as I type this. It is not to be however as I am tempted by the Sate Kampur, a plate full of eight sates bedded on shredded cabbage accompanied by a bowl of rice topped with slices of tomato and cucumber on a lettuce leaf. This, with two Bintangs and an aqua cost A$6.55. Claire had a triple burger and shared the beers that were icy cold, at least to start with, and came with handle glasses straight out of the freezer cabinet. Neither of us could eat any more when we were finished so my earlier thoughts, about reducing the content in some cafes, certainly do not apply here. Scot, who was up and about again, and Chris did the surf shops over for the latest fashion trends in teenage clothes. We would probably have an extended ‘show and tell’ when they return. A little bit about nothing much until you have to do it. To open a coconut first remove the fibrous husk if this has not already been done. On the inner shell you will see three faint lines in shallow depressions running from top to bottom of the ‘nut’. These lines are spaced at fairly even distances around the circumference. Hold the nut in the palm of your hand over a receptacle, to catch the water, and tap on each of these lines in turn. One of them is a fissure line of weakness and, as you tap on this particular line, the nut will simply crack open in your hand. After lunch I strolled down the beach and was again approached by an old man who had given up trying to sell me things, or so I thought. We talked about the weather, the beach, the fishing, kite flying and other nothing-much things. Eventually, out of the blue, he asked me if I’d like to go for a ride around the reef. Well, I had wished that I’d done that on several occasions, so we began to settle on a price. After starting at Rp300,00 for an hour trip we eventually agreed on Rp80,000 because I thought that was about all I’d got left after lunch. He went off to get the boat and I went off to get my wallet, a couple of towels and my swimming goggles just in case. When I returned to the beach he was nowhere in sight but after a short wait ‘Capt. Wayan’ poked its bow around the end of the breakwater and pulled into the beach. ‘Capt. Wayan’ is called a ‘jukung’ in Indonesian (I think), or a ‘prahu’ in Balinese. It has a single, central, wooden hull about five or six metres long (15’ – 18’) and about 600 mm (2’) wide. This hull has a rounded bottom, carved from a half tree log, and built up on the sides with a couple of flat planks fixed on edge to the top edges of the trunk part. There are two arms extending across this hull, lashed down to it firmly with coloured polypropylene cord or small rope. The outboard ends of these beams have curved timber pieces similarly lashed on to the straight cross pieces and droop down towards the water surface. Their tapered ends pierce long, slightly curved poles of bamboo, also lashed on, which serve as outrigger floats, giving the whole craft great stability. Planks fixed across the central hull form seats for crew and passengers. In the old days, when the boats were still commonly sailed, the bow was carved into a stylish representation of a sword fish head with round eyes, gaping jaw and a long bill. As outboards have replaced sails the carved bow has also begun to disappear. This year, on the beach at Tuban, I saw a flat-bottomed boat made from sheet plywood covered with a fibreglass skin. I found myself wondering if this was really progress. The old man hopped out and beckoned to me, introducing me to the driver in the stern, holding the tiller arm of an incredibly old 25 hp Suzuki outboard. He also introduced me to the young lad in the bow, whose job it would be to point out all the just-under-the-surface coral outcrops to Captain Ahab (Captain Wayan really maybe?) in the stern, as it was almost the bottom of the tide. The speed of the current over the reef increased tremendously as we approached the only opening in the reef through which we could pass. The passage out is not straight at this height of water and I began to recognise the necessity of the sharp-eyed lad in the bow who held out right or left hand to guide us through. The group of surfers we passed near the end of the passage seemed content to sit on their boards and talk as we passed. The water was too low to surf over the end of the reef where small waves built up and broke into foam almost immediately. I recalled one surfer coming back through the grounds of the Inn a day or so past, dripping blood along the path from his shredded leg and thigh which must have been the result of an encounter with the sharp reef corals. Further out another group of surfers caught the occasional wave as we passed, but they all dropped off the back well before it crested and fell forward. Still further around the reef, towards the end of the airport runway extension, we passed through a long loop of perhaps eight or nine boats, similar to ours, which were trolling for fish. This would be about the location where I saw the boats as our in-bound plane approached for its landing two weeks ago. Their trolling speed seemed to be quite high compared to that which I would use in gulf waters at home. I guess that they were hoping to catch tuna or mackerel, the old man just called them ‘white fish’, but whatever they were they must be much faster swimmers than the snook we usually target. I hope to see one caught but none are. That’s fishing. In retrospect I am a little surprised at the relative calmness of the water here. There was a small wind chop of 200 – 500 mm (a foot or so), and this on top of a long, low swell of about a metre (3’) coming all the way across the Indian Ocean and around the bottom corner of Java. Not a drop of spray came aboard the boat, however. In a glass tank at the Dolphins Leather shop, and also at the S A Café, there are fine examples of Saratoga fish which are also caught in north Australian fresh and brackish estuary waters. They are a favoured target of that notorious has-been footballer and fish kissing gabbler who haunts the TV on weekends. These fish must be quite content to live in an aquarium as the one at Dolphins has been there for five years that I can remember, and they told me that it’s the same fish. No one, I’m sure, will be at all surprised if I report that, in my absence, the others had gone to the money changers and then intended to do ‘a bit of shopping’ before Happy Hour! I had another passionfruit and decide that they really are my favourite fruit, nice though others such as salak, bananas, pineapple and mangosteens may be. The passionfruit here are just a little smaller than a tennis ball, yellow-orange-brown in colour, with a softish eggshell like skin that you can break by pressing with your thumb nails. They are usually tied up in threes with a thin piece of vine when you buy them from Matahari’s. The taste is marvellous. Out of this world. If you’re lucky, when you open a ripe one by pressing all around the equator with your thumbs, the bottom half of the skin comes away cleanly, leaving a mound of flesh, juice and seeds standing up to be enveloped by your mouth. A quick suck and the whole lot comes out of the top part of the skin and you’ve got a gob-full of the most delicious taste – that’s if you can fit it all in your gob. If you can’t it just runs slowly down the sides of your chin and you have to scrape it up with your fingers and then lick them. Ahhhhhh! Bliss. I’m dribbling. It was Scot’s choice for dinner tonight as it was really his first full evening meal since he came over and shook off his jet-lag or whatever it was. He elected Kin Khao and no one argued, happy to go back again. We favour the upstairs area of the Kin Khao. Its open in the front and therefore not air-conditioned but, with a slight breeze blowing across what used to be a waterfall wall its not too bad. Soups are from Rp 20-32,000. (A$4.30 – 6.90.) Claire had Tom Kah Gai, spicy soup with chicken, mushroom and coconut milk and said that it was fantastic. Her Cordon Bleu tastebuds say it’s not chilli hot but lemongrass spicy and very tasty. She also reported that the Crispy Spring Rolls really were crispy tonight. My appetiser was Prawns in Crispy Pastry w/- sweet chilli sauce. Rp22,000, and the pastry really was crispy. Why can’t they use it on their Spring rolls? Maybe tonight they have. Is there a different chef on tonight perhaps? Hotter oil in the wok? Who knows. My main course was Special Khao Pad; fried rice, mixed vegetables and pork pieces. Rp18,000, (A$3.90). Lip smacking good. The Thai barbecue of pork spare ribs is Rp22,000. Grilled Beef w/- seasoning, herbs and chilli is Rp20,500. Prawns are Rp170,000/Kg. and fish is Rp50,000/Kg. Salads are Rp15-25,000. Maincourse seafoods are Rp22-32,000, curries Rp24-26,000, stir fries Rp15-26,000. Local beers (Bintang, Anker, San Miguel) are Rp14,000, (A$3.00). Australian imports are Rp15,000. Cocktails range from Rp21,000 to Rp26,000. Generally we are much more pleased than we were last time. The only exception is that one of our party complained that if another of our party was allowed to get too close to your potatoes with a fork in his hand before you had your last half potato it tended to disappear much faster than you could eat it yourself. 21.10.00 Yes the links are below. |
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| An earlier version of Peter's Bird Kite. |
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| Water Lily in the pond at the S A Cafe. |
| LINKS - On to Day 15? This is the day that Claire and I visit the orphanage at Tuka. We will never forget it. We find the Bali Rock Crystal deodorant, the Toilet Test emerges and disaster at Fat Yogis. Back to Day 13? Home Page for a change of pace? . |
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