Ubud - So much to do, so little time.

Ubud turned out to be more--and less--than I expected. I did some digging and discovered a cool looking place called "Nick's Homestay" where the rooms were about $15 per night, and went ahead and reserved two nights.

When I checked out of my hotel, a very happy coincidence occured. A couple of gymnasium teachers from Berlin came downstairs to check out only 60 seconds after I did. Just after I walked out the door, one of them darted into the street and caught me. It turned out they were going to Ubud as well, and the manager had figured out we were headed to the same place and suggested we could split transportation. Anke and Nadine were both late twentysomethings with the pragmatic sensibilities of the German but hair bleached blonde by the tropical sun. Anke had been to Bali before, and Nadine had been to Thailand. They'd gone to Thailand a couple of years ago, so this time they decided it was Anke's turn to play guide.

They were making up the plan as they went along, even more so than I was--they didn't even have reservations in Ubud yet. It worked out well though, because they had heard about a tourbus company that ran a regular cheap shuttlebus to Ubud, keeping me from having to take the slow, cramped public Bemo all the way there, which was my original plan.

Instead we split a Bemo three ways just to get us to the Perama stop. We nearly adbucted a couple of middle aged Australian women on the way.

To understand a Bemo, imagine a sort of miniaturized, VW Van. Now take the normal seats out and put a bench down each side, and a little tiny sliding bus style door for an entrance/exit. The things can seat perhaps 7 people, comfortably, three, if they've got luggage. I had meant to take a picture, but I forgot before I left Bali. So, here's a link.

The near-abduction happened because the Bemo system is complete chaos theory at work. It's intended as a flexible light bus system. Each Bemo is totally independent, and the driver negotiates fares with passengers sortof like a taxi without a meter. There are Bemo stops but no-one uses them for anything. Bemos wander down a sortof generalized path, and when you see a Bemo, you wave it down. If it's not going the direction you want, but it's empty, it'll be happy to change course immediately to suit your whims. If the destination you have is off his general area, he'll go there too, for an extra cost. A typical Bemo ride (say, a couple blocks), if he's already heading that direction, will be 1000 rupiahs for a local, and 2000 or so for a Bule. Hey, you're bigger and you've usually got a huge-ass backpack, so there's some logic to the racism.

The Bemo we flagged down had been empty, so we'd just told him where we were headed and he'd said "sure", then taken off down the main road through Sanur. A few blocks later he picked up a couple of Australian women who apparently thought that the Bemo was running a normal route (see above: there is no such thing as a normal route). Thankfully, just before we went past the last place they could climb off to go to Sanur beach, they looked around with startled expressions and said "Where are you going?" to the three of us, as if it was our fault that we were using the Bemo system the way God intended. We explained, and they jumped off at the next intersection.

Perama tours turned out to be a tiny bus terminal that was basically just the space on the street in front of a convenience store. We paid 60 cents each to the Bemo driver, and then bought a couple bottles of water and were pleased to discover that there was a bus arriving in ten minutes. $4 later I had a ticket to Ubud.

When the bus came, there was no queuing system, and your ticket was a paper receipt that they made out basically just to pass the time, from what I could tell, since no one ever looked at them if you looked like you'd talked to someone at the desk. So when the bus to Ubud came, we jumped up like good travelers, hauled ass to the bus, and started climbing in, behind the couple of people that beat us there. We hadn't really realized that the bus as almost completely full with people coming from other locations (like the Airport and Kuta beach) also headed to Ubud--there were almost no seats left. The twenty or so poor blighters who'd been sitting around waiting for the bus for who knows how long were now behind us, confused, and we were standing on the steps of the bus while the driver looked at the three of us for a moment, looked at a huge pile of luggage in the front two seats, and said "Ok, I can take. . .three more. The rest. . . there's another bus coming."

The people behind us seemed taken aback, but also couldn't figure out how to say "we were here FIRST" since they had wound up behind us when the actual bus arrived. One of them said, in an Austrian accent laden with concern "but, we're meeting people in Ubud." The Bus driver waved his hand with the characteristic nonchalance of all islanders and said "it's ok, another bus here in ten, maybe twenty minutes. It hasn't left Kuta yet, because of a cremation. . ." (more on that later) ". . . so, twenty minutes, maybe half an hour."

It's just a hunch, but I'll bet it took those poor bastards another hour of waiting before they heard anything about the bus.

So it was that we got the last three seats on the bus to Ubud. The bus had four doors, one for the driver, and three on opposite side. The driver waved Anke in and had her sit in the last empty seat, then had me close the main door for the big stepwell entrance, then he took the giant pile of bags that had been filling the two front seats and just dropped them all into the stepwell. The door latch held (I had hilarious visions of it failing midway there, but my bag was on bottom so they weren't that funny at the time) and and Nadine and I clambered in through the drivers seat, over his completely stripped steering column (nice, huh?), to grab those last two seats.

When we arrived in Ubud, Anke and Nadine followed me to Nick's to check the place out, and loved it, so they stayed there as well. Nick's was magical, on a couple of levels.
For one thing, you remember that island from Pirates of the Caribbean? The one that can only be found by people that already know where it is?

That's Nicks. It's the platform 9 and 3/4s of Ubud.

I had an address for the place, and it was conveniently located on the same street were the Perama tours bus let us off, so we walked down the street, waving off the occasional "massage?" and a steady stream of its male counterpart, which is "transport?"

Every Balinesian male between the ages of 19 and 50 is in the transport business. Men on the side of the road with no car, no apparent means of acquiring a car, and no shoes will ask you if you need a taxi, and if you say no, the traditional response is "tomorrow?" in a sortof hopeful but forlorn voice that says he feels obligated to say it, but has no real expectation that it will ever work.

So we ignored them for a while, and eventually the numbers decreased past the number I had written down.

This bothered me, because we were three people, all on the same street, all looking for the same sign, and we'd apparently walked right past it. This meant it either (a) didn't really exist or (b) I had the wrong address or (c) was going to be a bitch-and-a-half to find.

We walked back carefully towards the last building number I'd seen that was above the address, and finally located a sign for Nick's. Let's be clear. It just said "Nick's Homestay" and gave information about how amazing it was. It possessed no arrow, and appeared not to be near any building that might be the homestay.

That was, until you widened your perspective a bit, and considered that maybe this ridiculously tiny Alley next to the sign was actually (despite no indication that it was) the way to Nick's. I shrugged, and clomped off down the alley. Anke expressed surprise to Nadine with a gesture and sound I caught out of the corner of my eye, and they followed me.

When you went down the alley, up some steps and further down this alley, you came to a small faded red and white sign that said "Nick's" and pointed to a half-closed metal gate.

Going through the gate was like stepping through the wardrobe. Around the corner was a little Balinesian style gazebo, and just past that a beautiful little reception hut, surrounded by birdcages full of tropical birds. Cockatoos, Parrots, and I don't even know what else. I even saw a very neurotic looking woodpecker.

With the exception of sleeping and bathing, all of Nick's takes place outside. There are sets of little buildings, each building contains two bungalow style rooms, and faces another little two-room building across an open green courtyard of tropical trees and close cut grass. Each room has its own special balcony space, with chairs and a little table.

In addition to a really lovely included breakfast (Banana toast--which I can't really explain except it was like a hotpocket, where the outer surface was toast, and the insides were warm banana--and a bowl of fresh papaya and pineapple, plus coffee), we discovered later that they also brought us our own carafe of afternoon tea, just because. Both of these things take place on your balcony. You wake up, go outside, sit down and enjoy the pleasant view of birds and trees, wave to your neighbors as they sip their coffee, and sooner or later someone wanders by and asks if you'd like some breakfast. So you say yes, you rather think you would like some breakfast please, if it's not too much trouble, and then they just bring you a tray made of pure win. It made me understand the appeal of being rich enough to have servants at your beck and call.

The place was paradise until about 7 AM. Then, if you were a morning person, it was still paradise. However, if you like to sleep late, and prefer that you are not disrupted by the crowing and chirping and screaming of two dozen bored birds just waking up themselves, it's probably not so great, actually.

I loved it.

The first day in Ubud, after we'd been shown to our rooms, we dropped off our things and went our separate ways. I was headed to ARMA, the Agung Rai Museum of the Arts (an Acronym which ironically doesn't work at all for the Indonesian translation of that phrase). My mother had suggested to start my search for my Grandmother here.

Allison Christie is my mother's mother.

In the 1990s, she came to Bali to paint. This link will show you one of the results of that trip. I was young enough that I didn't learn the details, and I haven't sat down with my mother and learned everything that was involved. Somehow, I know that her work might have wound up on some of their postage for a while, and also that she was (at least for some time) on display in one of the Museums. That museum was probably in Ubud, since it's the art center of Bali.

To make a long story short, I was not able to find her work in Ubud, but the search was really enjoyable. I visited the Puri Lukasi fine arts museum, Museum Neka, and the ARMA (where my mother suspected her work had been). At ARMA they called the manager, and he said that he did not believe Allison had ever been on display there. It's possible that she was, but only temporarily. The primary source of the paintings in ARMA is the Agung Rai private collection, so it's possible her work was displayed briefly as part of a rotation and then sold, or moved into storage, or more likely it sits in Mr. Rai's estate somewhere, maybe directly over the fireplace, I have no idea.

Museum Neka and Puri Lukasi did not have any of her work on display, nor where they able to answer questions about whether she might have been there in the past, but visiting them did let me sample the best art museums Bali has to offer. Neka is the best of the three, in my opinion, for both diversity and quality of Art, though ARMA was quite beautiful and Puri Lukasi has the best traditional Balinese art selection. There is another museum in Ubud I was hoping to check, named "Semi Wati" which is a collection of only female artists, but I was not able to make it there. Perhaps her work is being displayed there now.

In the day and a half I had available to me, I made a thorough check of all three museums. I enjoyed perusing all the art involved very much in the process. This wasn't just because every third painting ever made in Bali has exposed breasts in it, either, thank-you-very-much.

The Balinese are very gifted mimics. In the 30s and 40s a couple of Dutch and German painters and artists came to Bali, partly to escape the war, partly to escape darker parts of their own personal lives. They brought with them painting styles the Balinese had never really encountered before, yet you can see within just a generation the young Balinese artists, by mimicry at first, had mastered many of their techniques. By the 1950s and 60s, the Balinese were experimenting with impressionism and starting to play with light and reflection that aren't seen anywhere in the native art prior to that point. In the 70s and 80s, they'd already hit their stride as surrealists and done a fair job on pop art--remarkable since so many of their best artists had never been off the island. Their wooden sculpture is some of the best I've seen, anywhere in the world, seeming to transcend carving entirely. My friend Dylan (the best carver and wooden sculptor I know) would have loved the chance to see some of this work.

Anyway, their art is beautiful, patient work, and well worth studying. As an added (ahem) perk, there are quite a few breasts involved, so that's cool.

As a break between museums, I had some time for two other activities. The first was to visit the Monkey Forest. Monkey Forest is actually a temple set back from Ubud on the other side of a deep wooded ravine. Traditional sculptures lead to beautiful stone bridges over 30 meter drops into swift-flowing streams. It feels almost like stepping into the forgotten world from King Kong.

Oh, it's also chockablock full of monkeys. The little blighters are everywhere, and they're not likely to go anywhere, since every day dozens of white tourists flock to the forest, where they pay $1.50 to visit the monkeys, and another $2 for a handful of bananas which they can then feed the monkeys (I got half a bunch for $1). In exchange, the park is actually staffed not only with people to keep the place clean, but also with trained "monkey experts" to rescue tourists who wind up in a tight spot, or to feed the monkeys the bananas if people get too scared to do it themselves.

The monkeys, for their part, seem pretty typical. Excitable, playful, difficult, cheeky, and photogenic as hell. They like shiny things, often stealing glasses or phones. They'll figure out what pocket you've got food in, if you brought any, and then if you're me, they will follow you around and stare at it. I get the impression that I worried them, I'm not sure why. If you're not so intimidating, they'll climb you and frisk your pockets until they find what they're after. When I arrived, one was sitting on a wall next to a young German lady and playing with the shiny beads on her skirt. Her boyfriend had jumped up to get a picture. She was obviously a bit freaked out but had the good sense to keep a firm grip on her bag, which was a good thing, because when he tired of the beads, he climbed into her lap and started trying to pry her small purse away from her. I'd just sat down on the wall nearby, and we were some of the first people there, so I pulled out a banana and at the site of that flash of yellow he flew over to me and took off with his new prize. The German couple thanked me, and the boyfriend laughed. "Saved by a banana!" and we wandered off in seperate directions.

I had fun taking pictures, but since it was so shady it was impossible to shoot on anything slower than 1600, I have to apologize for the colour quality.

Still, there's only so much monkey you can take, so I jettisoned the last of my bananas.

I did wind up with an entertaining picture in the process. I had fed an older monkey my penultimate banana, and when a young one showed up, I tried to feed him the last one. He wasn't paying attention to the fact that I had more bananas though, and because the old one was watching me while he ate, he managed to block the youngster and acquire BOTH bananas, one of which he immediately clutched in his feet to protect until he was done with the first. Oh well, I suppose that's how you get to be an old Monkey.

The only other thing I had time to catch was a Barong and Keris Dance and Gamelan concert. The Barong is a lion representing the good forces from the Balinese belief in magic, while the evil Witch Queen Rangda is his sworn enemy, representing the forces of evil. The tickets were $6, and the show was a little over an hour.

The Gamelan is considered a single instrument, but is made up of an entire orchestra of perhaps 25 players. These are split vaguely into three sections, a catch all for large percussion and some strings, a corps of people playing a xylophonelike instrument, and a corps of people playing small metal pots, tuned, I assume, by being filled with water or sand.

I grabbed a little video. The sound of a Gamelan is quite unique. Sorry again for the quality.


The show also included a demonstration of Legong dance. It's a traditional type of dancing performed by young Balinese women as part of ceremonies and celebrations. It's a really interesting form, with a stooped style that closely mimics that of a marionette, and hand motions that are so often stylized in the same manner that you begin to look upward for the strings and the godlike figure in the sky that must be controlling these pretty young dancers.

It ended with the Dagger dance--the evil witch queen puts a spell on the king's guard when they come to kill her, and they are forced by mind control to turn their daggers upon themselves. If you've ever seen someone bend a sword by pressing it's point into their own chest, this is one of the origins of that gruesome, fascinating trick. The legend says that the Barong manages to cast a counterspell, making the guards invincible to their blades, thus they stab and stab at themselves without result, and eventually collapse from exhaustion. A holy priest sprinkles water upon them to revive them, and the King's men, with the help of the Geruda bird and the Barong, kill the witch.

As for the Barong, anyone who has seen a lion dance will be familiar with the basic concepts. A Barong is apparently a cross between a lion and a giant dog, and he's one of the funniest, coolest things you'll see during the show. He's played by two dancers, one forming the front paws with his feet, and controlling the mask with his hands. The other is the rear feet, and controls the hindquarters with his hands. The Barong's mannerisms are playful and clever, and when he turns away he invariably shakes his hind end at the audience in an impertinent manner that makes me laugh. I managed to catch a little video here and there during the show.


Here's the Barong dancing.


And here are the girls.

The two days I had in Ubud were quite enjoyable, and I was sorry to leave so soon, but I wanted to get back to Sanur to finish up my writing before I headed to Thailand. Before I left though, there was one more challenge--climbing an active Volcano.