Where Are You From?

This is something you will hear in Bali at least once a day, if not ten times. It is the standard question that all Balinese people ask a foreigner. We ask them back, Where are you from? And they usually seemed surprised. They laugh and say Bali! Then they ask Where are you going? It is important to know where you've been and where you're headed.

Where are we headed? The beach! Yesterday began with a day trip to Padang Bai, about an hour and a half drive. We ate at a small warung, and the food was...you guessed it, amazing! We headed to Blue Lagoon beach, a resort right on the water. It sounded exotic, but it was basically a small guest house with a few hundred meters of beach. We left Elesa on the beach, situated in the sun with a book, and went to find someone to take us out in the boat.

Elesa heading to the beach to 'read'.

We got a driver and a small boat for about $15, and he took us about ten minutes around the bay to a spot that can't be reached by road. Hitoshi and I jumped in (thanks Jon for lending me your snorkeling gear!).

Here is Hitoshi on the boat, taking his magic Chinese medicine for an upset tummy.

There were plenty of fish, some crazy purple ones and long skinny ones. At first it seemed like the water was murky, but then we realized it was actually millions of tiny jelly fish. They were so small you could just barely make out what they were, and we just swam through clouds of them. I did see about two full grown ones as well, eek. We got out of their way quick.

Over all not too bad for snorkeling, except the coral had been completely decimated and was almost completely dead. I heard they only recently made floaters the boats can attach to, where before they would just drop anchor anywhere and pull up a bunch of coral when they left.

After we climbed back in the boat, we headed back. We passed Blue Lagoon, so I decided to hop out and swim to the beach to meet Elesa. It was fairly similar to the place we had just come from, so I'm not sure how worth it it was to rent a boat. Hitoshi came back and we hopped on the bike to head home. Here's a video of us driving down the highway.



There were mountains on the left and the ocean on the right. And Balinese beeping there horns all around us. They beep to say move over, we're passing, go ahead and pass me, look there is a monkey, hi grama, whatever.

On our drive home.

That night we went to see a Kecak dance. The Kecak (pronounced Ke-chak) dance was originally a trance ritual. In the 1930s a German painter named Walter Spies worked recreate it into a drama that could be performed for Western tourists.

In Ubud there are quite a few places that put on large Kecak dances, for large groups of tourists. We opted to head to the small village down the road from our house. With only 700 people living in the village, over 80 of them participate in the Kecak dance once a week. The story we saw was about the opposition of Prince Rama's Kingdom of Ayodya to the Kingdom of Alengka, ruled by the wicked giant Rahwana.

We were seated in front of the entrance to the small temple, and since there were only about 20 of us watching we all got front and centre seats. The dance starts with all the men coming out, wearing sarongs and topless. I hear in some performances there are 150 or more men, but in ours there were about 75. They had lit a large fire candelabra type thing, and they all sat in a circle around it. They were chanting, with one man leading the beat. Here are some of the videos Hitoshi took.










It was wonderful to watch, and I love that we saw it in such an intimate setting. It was a small glimpse of life in a village, where at least one in ten people come to participate in something together once a week. There are so many ceremonies and rituals here, and people are so tightly bound to their home.

For the first time I can see beautiful things about living in a small, tight knit community. Growing up in Lethbridge I felt so constrained and out of place. Granted Lethbridge is not that small, but it formed very solid opinions of small town life for me. I can see here, they know exactly what there place is in a tiny village, and they all support each other. They praise their gods, they raise their kids, they grow their food, all together. It was nice to have some of my long standing ideas shattered. That's why we travel, isn't it?