The last two weeks have been quite busy, with my sister having arrived on the twenty third and leaving only late last night. I have had more time to talk than I usually do, and far exceeded my one hundred spoken word limit that I had grown rather accustomed to on my own. I also had plenty of time to think, as much of the time together was spent seeing Bali on the back of a motorbike. My greatest thoughts have always been in transit. I wonder, as I reflect on this phenomenon, if it is these thoughts that keep me desiring perpetual motion?
I will reflect more on some of the thoughts I had these last two weeks. But now I want to summarize why I have been so quiet lately, as I spent the time with my sister wandering Bali.
Friday: After keeping myself awake until a half an hour past midnight, I made my way to the main road near my hotel and picked up motorbike transportation to the airport. Not feeling too social, and anticipating my sister’s arrival, I plugged myself into my iPod and cruised to the terminal, then waited an hour or so for my sister to clear customs. “Ca-caw,” I cried when I saw her approaching through the glass doors, and I held up my handmade sign that said the same. In all of our travels together, this simple expression has allowed us to find each other.
We arrived at the hotel around two and, having walked through the crowded streets containing the Kuta clubs, we were both too restless to sleep. So we wandered the streets for a few hours, catching up quickly on recent events and exploring the emptiness in the night that is usually so crowded and chaotic during the day. We ended our wandering around four and managed four hours of sleep before the alarm went off to begin her first day in Bali.
Saturday: My friend Komang joined us at our hotel, bringing his wife, Ayu, and son, Krisna, and we rented a motorbike. Afraid of driving, among several other reasons, I gave the keys to Ayu and she took my sister on the back of her motorbike, while I joined Krisna on the back of Komang’s bike. We cruised out of Kuta and eventually made it to Sanur, to the ocean’s edge, where an island-wide kite competition was taking place. The strong offshore wind kept large and magnificently crafted kites suspended in the air indefinitely as the judges critiqued them according to their standards.
After the morning in Sanur, we traveled to the Bali Zoo just outside of Ubud. It began raining, making the motorbike transit interesting. But we did not care about the rain. It was the experience of spending time with friends, doing things that the average visitor to Bali would not think to do. The five of us wandered the Zoo for a few hours, taking a handful of fruit and vegetables to feed various animals along the way. I paid $3 and was given a metal pole with a piece of raw chicken on the end and reached the chicken through a metal cage to feed a grown male lion. My sister fed the lions a different way, by placing a pig heart on a rope that was pulled out over the lion’s den. We also fed deer, goats, camels, monkeys, various birds, and my favorite, an orangutan named “Jacky.” Part of the experience of feeding Jacky was learning that the Indonesian meaning for “Orangutan” is roughly translated to “Jungle Human.” If you’ve never paid close attention to monkeys, I challenge you to see how eerily similar we are in structure and behavior to these furry little friends.
After leaving the zoo, Komang took us to his apartment, a small room just big enough for a mattress, mini-fridge, and television. With great enthusiasm, the four of us sat on the ground and shared a meal of rice and satay, marinated pork on bamboo skewers, while Krisna danced around the room picking up various toys to keep himself entertained. We talked about the day, and the Indonesian way of life. This was a big deal for me, spending time with my friend in his home, and I was grateful for the opportunity to again see Bali from a different perspective than most.
We returned just in time to catch a sunset at Jimmy’s, my afternoon hangout on Kuta Beach which consisted of a couple coolers of Bintang, the local brew, and two dozen lawn chairs.
Sunday: I dropped my sister off to get pampered at my other friend’s salon, where she had her first Balinese massage, manicure, and pedicure while I wandered off to the beach with a couple other friends. When the pampering was done, my sister joined us at the beach and we rented an umbrella and lived like tourists for a few hours, except for the company of four local girls who were friends of my friend. It was a lazy day that ended rather uneventfully.
Monday: Another lazy day at the beach, though full of rain. Since my sister was going to be surfing off and on all day, and because we were both at the beach on Bali, we did not mind the intervals of rain. So we spent the day surfing, drinking beer at Jimmy’s, wandering the beach for lunch and other snacks, and enjoying life. My sister did very well on her first day learning to surf.
Tuesday: We hired a driver to take us through the Bukit, the southernmost end of the island known for its surf breaks up and down the coast. We first headed to the east side of the island to try and catch a few waves before the wind kicked in. But by the time we got there, just as the sun was rising, it was already too late. Taking our time to eat breakfast, we enjoyed our time there and then headed to Uluwatu, perhaps the most famous break in Bali. I have written another piece to describe the incident that occurred there. See a future blog.
From Uluwatu we headed up to Padang Padang, Bali’s other famous world-class break, which was currently hosting a surf contest. The surf was pretty much flat this day, so the contest had been postponed until another swell moved through. My sister got her first encounter with Balinese monkeys, which were taking it easy on the beach, poking their fingers and laughing at the tourist monkeys also lying on the beach.
From Padang Padang we headed to Dreamland to spend the rest of the afternoon surfing, sunbathing, and relaxing. My hopes were that my sister would be able to surf the sandy break. But again, there were no waves here. So we sat in the sun and relaxed until I could not take it anymore and I decided to paddle out anyway. After two hours of sitting in the sun I caught two small waves that were barely large enough to hold me up, and I called it a day. Exhausted from the day, we made it an early night, bought some drinks and movies and stayed in the hotel.
The next couple days were a blur, and seemed to be on repeat of Monday, with the exception that on the afternoon of one of the days my sister had an encounter with my surfboard that resulted in her having a severe bloody nose. We managed to make it out of the water and to the lifeguard station before she became too dizzy to walk. I threw my board to the ground as soon as we left the water, not caring if someone would take it or not, just worried for my sister. The lifeguards were surprised at how much she was bleeding, and instead of treating us there, walked us to a small hospital a few blocks away. Over the course of the next hour or so, a kind Balinese doctor helped slow the bleeding, cleaned up the mess that had become my sister, and provided us reassurance that she would be OK. Covered in blood myself, I surprisingly had not panicked as I would have had it been my blood. I just knew that I had to take care of my sister, and that nothing else mattered.
In walking back to the beach to grab our things from Jimmy’s I found that my surfboard was untouched where I left it, an amazing thing about Bali that would not exist in most other places in the world. When I returned to the hospital to check on my sister and to pay our bill, the doctor kept telling me that the money did not matter. “We first take care of her health, then we talk money.” Another profound revelation about the way of life on this beautiful island with its beautiful people. While the country is poor and most people live in poverty, they have more character in them than most of the people I have met back home. And he was right, with time my sister was feeling well enough to leave, and after running to an ATM for cash, money was never an issue.
We took it easy the rest of that day and into the next, when we had another trip planned with Komang and his family. We were going to his village, about a half an hour away from a town called Singaraja on the northern coast. This would require another motorbike rental, a four hour trek across the mountainous center of the island, and a bumpy ride through countryside back roads. We ran later than we wanted, but eventually made it to Komang’s childhood home, which his parents had abandoned in search for more stable work. Farming a small plot of land in the hillside was not enough to keep them alive in their village.
We woke early the next morning, after sharing another meal and a liter of arak on the floor of the main room, had a breakfast of fried bananas and rice cakes, and headed forty five minutes to Lovina, where we caught a traditional boat ride out to sea to chase after dolphins in the bay. To my surprise, there was probably around fifty boats full of tourists doing the same thing. Since we left Kuta earlier the previous day, I had not seen white people. Where we were, deep into a jungle village, there was no telling when the last white people had visited. But in Lovina, the people vastly outnumbered the dolphins and, after a beautiful sunrise and salty air in our lungs, we headed back to Komang’s village.
We walked the narrow streets a few hundred yards to Ayu’s parents’ house, abandoned in similar fashion when her parents moved to Ubud in search of work. There, looking over the sloping hills full of tropical vegetation and farmlands, one of the neighbors climbed a coconut tree and cut three coconuts down for us to share. As a trade, he cut three branches from the tree to take back to his home to make rope from the leaves. Money had very little use this far deep into Bali.
We drank the coconut milk and scraped its flesh from the inside before getting on the motorbike again to head back toward Kuta. We made several stops at waterfalls along the way, trekking a half an hour through the jungle and rice fields to find them, and one stop at a lake in the middle of the mountainous center of the island. Taking lunch there, a bowl of noodles, lumps of meat, vegetables, and soy sauce, we gained enough energy to survive the cold of the higher elevation and made our way back toward Ubud to visit the Monkey Forest. I had been there before, on my first trip with Komang, but I wanted my sister to have the opportunity to meet the monkeys that had changed my opinion on how much I liked them. I think after a half an hour or so of being chased, climbed, and screamed at by the monkeys, my sister also lost her interest in monkeys. Still, it was a nice place to spend some time in conversation and to take a break from all of the riding.
With one last stop at the famous terraced rice fields of Ubud, we caught another sunset on the back of a motorbike cruising through the rice fields and coconut palm countryside. In darkness we crept through Denpasar and eventually back to Kuta. Exhausted, we made an early night of it, knowing that the next morning would be the last for my sister.
We shopped the next morning, buying the things that could not be captured in memory, and making gifts for our friends. In the short time that my sister had been in Bali, she had been immersed in its culture more than most will in several months of living there. My friends had become her friends, and all of us together had become family. It was difficult for both of us to cope with her leaving, but as “they” say, all good things must come to an end.
Not wanting to leave the island with a bad taste in her mouth about surfing, the last thing we did with the remaining daylight was to get back in the water. My sister wanted to catch her last wave and overcome the fear that had most naturally resulted from the accident a few days earlier. I was proud of her for her desire to get back in the water, and though I cringed as she paddled after every wave, she finally caught the wave that would make her trip worth every minute. The sun was just barely hanging above the ocean, its reflection on the ocean bleeding into the colors of the sky, and she had done it. She had caught her last wave, and a tingle raced through my body as I was so proud of her for doing so, and I was starting to think about the fact that my last wave would only be nine days later.
I dropped my sister off at the airport around midnight, after a few last drinks with friends at the restaurant I frequented, and watched through the glass as she passed security and received her boarding pass. She came back to me to give me the thumbs up that everything was all right, and we communicated stupidly through the glass, making sure that the last picture each of us had of each other was a smile. Then the moment passed, we both turned and walked away, and I did not look back. I have learned in traveling to never look back in parting. All it does is to prolong the inevitable separation and make it that much more difficult. So I found transportation back to Kuta, again on the back of a motorbike, and a day that had begun with such great company ended alone as I walked the dark alleyways back to my hotel. All that was once crowded and full in my room felt empty. I spread my things back over the second twin bed, preferring to look at them than at thoughts of my sister no longer with me.
The next morning I woke up alone and struggled to get used to the fact that I was again on my own. I found breakfast at a local restaurant and tried to plan my day. Unsure of what to do, and forgetting the routine that I had before my sister arrived, I did the only thing I knew to do. I walked to the beach and put my toes in the sand and let the water rush up over my ankles. A few hours later I found myself paddling out over the reef just minutes before sunset. Again the colors of the sky blended with those of the ocean and I did not care how long it had been since I caught my last wave. I was where I needed to be – where I was supposed to be. And again, I breathed, and I realized where I was and that I was alive…
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