Days 67-68: Bali - Island Of Temples

Days 67-68: Bali - Island Of Temples - Part 1

March 14, 2024

We spent the last two days exploring just a small part of Bali. Although it's the best known of the 17,508 Indonesian Islands - it's not even the largest. We only covered a small portion of the south-east and south-west of the island. Our general impression is that you can't even swing a cat without hitting a temple. They are everywhere! (Note to our animal-loving readers. The cat expression refers to a swing of a cat o'nine tails - a whip used for punishment aboard British navy ships. It has nothing to do with whirling a feline in a circle!).

Bali has a long history, going back over a million years. Bali and Java, the neighboring large island, only have a small sea channel between them. Over the millennia, the two islands have been connected many times. This part of the world gave rise to Java Man - referring to our ancestors over a million years ago, and not Silicon Valley executives. Local civilization continued strong until the Dutch arrived in the early 1600s and slowly claimed what we now call Indonesia as its own.

Bali is unique within Indonesia as it is predominantly Hindu instead of Muslim, so there is a strong Indian influence within the culture. This served it well, as, unlike so many other islands colonized by Europeans, the people resisted the annoying outreach of missionaries and remained true to their faith. There was also a strong tribal infrastructure headed up by 12 kings. The bloodlines of the kings still exist, as do the royal families, although they are not recognized by the government.

The island's primary economy is tourism - thanks to a weird historical quirk. In the 1930s, anthropologists like Margaret Mead, as well as artists and musicians, all spent time here. Their accounts of the island and its peoples created a Western image of Bali as "an enchanted land of aesthetes at peace with themselves and nature." Western tourists began to visit the island. The sensuous image of Bali was enhanced in the West by a quasi-pornographic 1932 documentary, Virgins of Bali, about a day in the lives of two teenage Balinese girls whom the film's narrator Deane Dickason notes in the first scene "bathe their shamelessly nude bronze bodies". Under the looser version of the Hays code that existed up to 1934, nudity involving "civilized" (i.e., white) women was banned but permitted with "uncivilized" (i.e., all non-white women), a loophole that was exploited by the producers of Virgins of Bali. The film, which mostly consisted of scenes of topless Balinese women, was a great success in 1932 and almost single-handedly made Bali a popular spot for tourists.

So - what did we do on Day 1? Well, Regent canceled our excursion as there was a conflict with a large RTW party they were throwing that night. Undeterred, we walked off the boat and grabbed a taxi/tour guide to take us around part of the island for the day. Serendipity. It worked out great! We took in a Buddhist temple,

A local village Hindi temple (We had to wear a bright red sarong),

Went shopping at a Batik store (handmade / woven clothes), toured a Balinese house, visited Celek (the silver capital of Indonesia),

Got a close-up of a rice paddy being farmed. This guy was working barefoot, with a retinue of about 20 birds (you can see a few behind him) ready to gobble up any bugs or worms he turned up with the plow. It was motor-driven, but still looked like a tremendous amount of work.