I'm typing this up starting on Sunday night. I've done so much recently that I want to start to get it down before I forget, and I'll most likely not be able to post this until Wednesday. Tuesday is Nyepi, which is sort-of-kind-of the Balinese new year celebration, and the day before is a huge celebration. On the evening before Nyepi, the streets turn into a sort of raucous party, and people parade around ogoh-ogoh that the boys have spent the last month or so making (I think I explained them in a bit more detail last post). During the day, they make offerings to the demons (Balinese believe in a balance between good and evil, and bad spirits must also be respected). The day after (which is Nyepi), the opposite happens. In order to convince the demons that Bali is uninhabited and therefore uninteresting, the entire island shuts down (and I mean entire: even the airport is closed). People can't leave their houses, drive, work, or use electricity. (Although people fudge the rules here and there -- last year, my teacher Mirah went to her neighbor's house to hang out for half an hour or so, something that's technically forbidden.) So basically, with all the hubbub, I won't be getting to an internet cafe anytime in the next couple of days.
Back to the beginning of the excursion. Two Saturdays ago, we met up with a handful of students from Udayana University in Denpasar who major in English, and headed to Ary's (the academic director) village in Tabanan. On the way, we stopped at a semi-organic (it aims to be organic but is still in the transition phase) farm in Batukaru. Unfortunately, the lecture there wasn't very good because a lot got lost in translation (which is a frequent problem), but the farm was beautiful and we got an amazing lunch.
After the farm, we headed to Desa Munduk Pakel, the village. We were going to stop driving partway there and walk the rest of the way through the sawah (rice fields), but before we had a chance it started raining buckets and thundering, so we drove the whole way there. By the time we arrived, the rain had decreased to a little more than a drizzle. When it finally stopped, we hiked up to the sawah to check it out. Then it was back for dinner and to meet our homestay families. Mine apparently was the family of Ary's first husband -- scandalous! (No, really, divorce is quite uncommon in Bali.) We also got to play gamelan that evening.
The sawah near Ary's village.
A lot of the villagers ride their motorbikes up to where the road stops,then walk the rest of the way. This was around sunrise.
The next day, we headed into the sawah to get our hands dirty and to help Ary's father in their fields. We spent an hour or so hoeing the flooded sawah that will be planted sometime in the future, breaking up dirt and grass clods and smoothing it out. To smooth it out, you walk on the mud you've already hoed, so within minutes we were all pretty dirty. Then Ary's father declared that we'd done enough, and our work ethic clearly devolved. Within about ten minutes, most of us (some of the Balinese girls, and a couple of the guys, ran away) were covered head to toe in mud that we had slung at one another. (I unfortunately don't have pictures of this, but hopefully Ary will post some soon and I can direct you to them -- it was pretty ridiculous.) Once we tired of throwing mud, which is to say once being hit with mud no longer made a person any dirtier, we started racing. I don't know if any of you have ever tried to race through water or snow, but it was kind of like that, only harder -- the bottom of the sawah is slick with mud and if you're at all tired, you'll face plant. After the races, we got to drink and eat some young coconut and then go bathe in the river, something we did every day after that. Then we had some class, ate dinner, and played more gamelan. I eventually figured out the smaller bronze instrument (it looks sort of like a xylophone), but I'm still not coordinated enough to play the faster parts.
The next day -- I think it was Monday -- we went on sort of a salad walk through the forest. We started out in the village garden, picking ginger root, galangal, a sour fruit (the name of which I've forgotten), and coffee beans. Then we walked through the forest, finding all sorts of things. I don't remember all of what we picked, but a few that I recall are turmeric, water spinach, lemongrass, and plant called bongkot that looks like really big lemongrass and tastes kind of like artichoke. When we finished, we went back to Ary's house and made the most amazing sambal (sort of a spread/relish of chopped vegetables, usually mostly chilies) I've ever eaten. (And I have the recipe, so if you remind me when I'm home I'll make you some!) After lunch, we learned how to make bowls from coconuts. After that, we had free time, and I conducted my first field interview with a man who told me a folktale and answered all sorts of questions about it. (He also seemed a little confused about why I was asking him to tell me a children's story.)
On our last full day in the village, some people went hunting with Putu, Ary's son. (I passed. Everyone should be surprised.) Then, in the afternoon, we got to watch a cockfight, which was at the same time fascinating and horrible. The older men in the village run it, and they're all these totally laid-back guys who pass the time between fights gambling on dominoes. The cockfights are designed to be bloody -- cockfights are illegal except for ritual purpose, and the ritual purpose is to spill blood in sacrifice -- and the men tie knives to the rooster's foot before the fight begins. (Sometimes one bird will get two knives, one on each foot, if the owners of both birds agree beforehand that it's otherwise at a disadvantage, i.e. because of size.) Then the fight goes on until one of the birds can't stand anymore. The losing bird becomes food, and the winning bird earns its owner a fair sum of money.
That day had somewhat of a theme to it, since in the evening we went eel hunting in the sawah. It ended up being more of a "follow the guy with the giant eel-catching-pliers and the bucket through the mud and try not to fall in" excursion, since there was only one set of eel-catching pliers and there weren't that many eels. Some of the guys went off to try to catch them with their hands and managed to catch one, which impressed the villager we were hunting with. The eels looked kind of like giant worms, and the next day they were fried up for lunch. Apparently, with the introduction of pesticides (which are used with abandon, since the government originally gave them to farmers for free), eels are rarer. It's problematic, because they used to be an important source of food.
On Wednesday, we parted ways with the Udayana students (which was sad -- they were really cool) and headed to Lovina, on the north coast, for our "spring break." Lovina is right on the beach, and it's near Singaraja, which was a major port town under the Dutch. Because it's easier to get to than the ports of south Bali, there's much more multiculturalism. There's a larger Muslim community there, and also a large number of Chinese people and Chinese descendants. That evening, we went to one of the major Buddhist temples in Bali. A few monks still live there, but not as many as there once were.
The next morning, we went to Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha (UnDikSha), the university in Singaraja. We met with the English majors there and had a discussion on interfaith dialogue, since there are communities in the Singaraja area that have both Hindu and Muslim families, something you see more rarely in the south. It was refreshing to have a discussion instead of a lecture, and also interesting to hear the differences in religious dialogue there. In Indonesia, everyone must declare a religion -- it's on your identity card -- so it's pretty central to daily life. In the mixed communities, usually Hindu people go to the big Muslim ceremonies, and vice versa.
That afternoon, we went to a Bugis village on the coast. The Bugis are Muslim fisherman, and so their customs are fairly different from those of the Hindu Balinese. (They also are the origin of the Boogeyman -- back in the day they were also pretty fearsome pirates and colonizers used to tell their kids they'd give them to the Bugimen. These people definitely didn't fit that description, though.) It's become a tradition that when the SIT students visit the village, they play music and we dance with the kids. I don't think I've ever met such cool kids. They were reluctant at first, but once we got going, they practically wouldn't let us stop. They also loved our cameras, and insisted we take tons of pictures of them and then show them. After we danced, we got to see their mosque, which they renovated just last year.
SIT students dancing with awesome Bugis kids.On Friday morning, we went with the UnDikSha students to Gitgit waterfall, near Lovina. The waterfall was huge, and afterward we (just the SIT students and Ary's son) took turns jumping off some rocks into a swimming hole of cold water. After that, we went to a Chinese temple, Klenteng, and then to lunch with the UnDikSha students.
The next day (sorry, have I bored you to bits yet?), we left Lovina for Kintamani, on the edge of Lake Batur. On our way, we stopped at Pura Ulun Batur, which is a temple that serves as the starting point of all of the irrigation networks and coordinates it all. Once we got to Kintamani, we had time to rest up before our early wake-up call the next morning.
At 3:30 on Sunday morning, we woke and got ready for our hike up Gunung Batur (gunung means mountain). On our way up, we met up with some Indian guys who were studying in Singapore, and hiked around with them. We got to the top just before sunrise, and had a breakfast of coffee and volcano-steamed eggs and banana sandwiches. (Yes, there is a small warung on top of the mountain.) After sunrise, we hiked around the caldera, then headed down. We were back at our hotel by 9 am, then had some down-time before we left to return to Bedulu.
So that's the round-Bali excursion. While I'm on my writing streak (it's now Tuesday), I figure I'll say a little more about Nyepi, which I am currently experiencing. Yesterday, in the middle of the day, there were big offerings in the street (with chicken sate as sacrifices -- depending on the village, the sacrifice can be as small as a chicken or as big as a cow). In the evening, the boys paraded around all the ogoh-ogoh in the center of the town, while a guy on a loudspeaker cracked jokes about them all. That went on until around 10 or 11 at night.
Today (which is to say Tuesday) is Nyepi, and theoretically everything's supposed to be quiet. It's been a kind of confusing day, though. There are four rules: no fire/lights, no work, no entertainment, and no traveling. When I walked into the bathroom this morning to shower, the light was on. Later, my Ibu was sweeping, and she told me I could wash my clothes (my teachers yesterday had told me I wasn't allowed to). I've been reading all day, and earlier my host sister-in-law was playing guitar to her baby. This morning, my Ibu told me I was welcome to do anything around the house, I just couldn't leave, and at night there couldn't be any lights on. Still, around 4:30 kids spilled into the streets and played for about an hour. When I asked my host sister-in-law why that was okay, she shrugged and said maybe they were bored. My Ibu added that I could go join them if I wanted to, I just had to be back inside in an hour. And now, I've learned that in my room, I can have my light on, I just have to have the shades drawn.
Definitely a holiday of contradictions. But a nice one at that -- I've spent the day reading, lying around, and getting some work done. After the flurry of activity that was the last week and a half, it was nice to have some time to myself with no real agenda.
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