Life Updates in the Balinese New Year

Bali's day of silence and my first time on a horse.

Well, hello there! Don’t worry, I am eventually going to get back to Japan. I’ve already started on Day 2 but life has been coming at us fast and hard these past few weeks.

As our second year in Bali comes to a close, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the island. While I haven’t hated it here, I haven’t exactly loved it. To tell the truth, I’ve never been entirely sure how I feel about it. Regardless, we committed to three years here so why spend a lot of time pondering and navel-gazing right? That has been my attitude since January when I decided to just lean in and stop trying to make sense of it. Lots of people like it here, so there must be something to it, right?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a short lecture on Balinese history. Maybe I mentioned that in an earlier post? Anyway, I found it incredibly inspiring and interesting. I think that is the first time I have truly been excited about spending time in Bali in a connected and cultural way.

Usually, when we travel there are historical sites I want to see. Landscapes too, but history is always the big pull for me. There is indeed a rich history here, but it is buried under layers and layers of crap. Everywhere you go oozes “Balinese culture,” but it’s a weird Western-facing reenactment.

Not that the Balinese don’t have their own strong culture that they faithfully adhere to within their own families and communities, especially in the villages. That is very real, from what I can see from the outside looking in. But in my everyday life, I sometimes have the feeling that I am living in a Bali-themed sideshow attraction.

Imagine if every waiter in every restaurant in all of America was relentlessly decked out in the same mass-produced Wild West apparel and decor. Or every single shop in Australia played nothing but relentless didgeridoo music. And everyone just kept patting themselves on the back about all the “culture.”

I’m probably being a bit too hard on Bali. I know lots of people here who have integrated into the community and built relationships and actual businesses that benefit real Indonesians. They do their best to respect and understand the culture.

But at the end of the day, I still can’t shake the feeling that all I’m doing is living in the Balinese version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Only this sideshow is often themed around spiritual enlightenment and self-care. Lots and lots of people show up here to see what Bali can do for them and not the other way around.

And there’s not a thing wrong with self-care or spiritual enlightenment, either. There are some very legitimate practitioners here. For example, it took almost two years, but I finally found somebody to deal with my broken body. He does traditional Balinese reflexology massage and I don’t even think he has a website. It’s just a word-of-mouth referral and I think he partly does this out of the sense that it is his calling.

God bless “Crazy Daisy” the bodywork practitioner who gets wimpy white ladies like me to pay her several hundred dollars for what amounts to assault. And I mean that sincerely. She’s doing something right because I think she quite literally ripped through layers of fascia that weren’t going to budge any other way. I can finally rotate my head more than 15 degrees and it’s all because of her.

My new guy is better, though. He’s determined to get that last little bit of neck dysfunction sorted out. He gets closer and closer every time. I’ve had this knot in my neck so long it’s a part of me. I’m actually a bit worried that when those bones and muscles finally slide into place they might unlock a portal to another dimension and suck in our entire universe like a black hole. Or that my whole body will suddenly fold up like the passenger seat of a two-door car. Or perhaps my head might pop off like it’s on a spring.

I digress. There are some extraordinary people here, both Balinese, Indonesian, and expat. Unfortunately, Bali also attracts a lot of weirdos who come here thinking that Bali is going to fix their lives like a real-life version of Eat, Pray, Love. It’s not at all uncommon for people to show up here and either stop taking or run out of their meds.

As an expat, there’s no social safety net here for kooky people. My hairdresser just told me a story about a friend of hers. This friend met a young expat man here who, unbeknownst to everyone in their expat circle, had stopped taking his schizophrenia medication. Suddenly he started showing up at her house and other places. I think they finally managed to get him off the island and home for help, but it was terribly sad and scary.

I’ve even heard stories about adolescents (at other schools) who are dumped out in villas and essentially left to raise themselves while the mother travels the world with various boyfriends. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can hide (or not hide) a lot of crazy out here. And there’s not a whole lot that anybody can do about it.

Unfortunately, we are in the middle of just this kind of situation. It’s almost so crazy that you can’t make it up. A woman here in Bali has become obsessed with Bob and it is causing us no end of trouble. It’s a very sad situation but it has now escalated to the point where it has become alarming. As so often happens with this type of unstable personality, she has now flipped and instead of being her star-crossed lover kept apart by fate, he is now the devil incarnate. Thank heavens we don’t have any bunnies to boil.

She definitely hates me. I’m the one keeping them apart, after all, and trapped in this toxic and loveless marriage. (!!!) Since all this has unfolded, I’ve even gotten some strange and harassing things showing up online calling me a “slut” and so on. We are pretty happy to live in a house with high walls and a whole lot of security cameras.

So yes, as I said, the whole thing is really just very sad. Unfortunately, the takeaway here seems to be that it can be very dangerous to treat a sad and lonely person with kindness. There are people out there who will take simple courtesy and get all John Hinckley with it. (If you aren’t American, that’s the guy who shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.)

But, as crazy as all of that is, life goes on. We’ve been dealing with this for a few months now, and while it has certainly been stressful, we are still laughing and having fun and trying to do as much exploring as we can on our time off. It’s been hard because Anna’s school calendar doesn’t line up with ours during this half of the year.

In fact, Anna was off to Vietnam a few weeks ago on a school trip to Saigon. She was there to attend a drama festival. There were several international schools involved and she had a great time getting to know some new friends, mostly from Hong Kong. They have started a petition for her to move there!

All of this happened during Bob’s weeklong holiday for Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence and the first day of the Balinese new year. We missed Nyepi last year because we were in Yogyakarta. This year we wanted to stick around and see what it is all about.

It might be my very favourite thing about Bali. Everyone in Bali has to stay indoors without using any electricity for 24 hours. You really aren’t even supposed to use a candle. It’s total silence and total blackout. There are a few pecalang (like community police) that are posted outside to make sure everyone obeys. It is a very serious holiday and everyone is expected to observe the rules no matter where you are from.

The night before, the Balinese hold Ogoh-Ogoh parades. The ogoh-ogoh are gigantic papier-mache demons that represent different kinds of sins. They are paraded through the streets and eventually destroyed, usually at the beach. Here’s a little video of the ones we had at school. Marjorie is off in the distance playing in the gamelan orchestra that you hear.

These are just the little ones. The ones used in the actual parades are enormous. We had planned on walking down to catch the parade at the beach, but the weather had other ideas.

Not that I have a lot of experience, but the rainy season seems to have come later than usual this year. The evening before Nyepi there was an absolute banger of a storm. It felt almost apocalyptic. The sky got dark and the winds were howling like nothing I had ever seen in Bali.

We started to walk down to the beach fully aware that we might get soaked. But the rains didn’t start. Just wind and more wind. The tin roofs of buildings were flapping and rattling like they might fly away. Flags and awnings were doing the same. Signs were getting blown over. A few giant palm fronds started falling out of the trees, and one of the insanely overloaded power lines was swaying and sparks were flying from the boxes attached.

One big palm frond fell on Marjorie’s head, and that was our clue that we should probably go home.

The storm finally came in the night and it sounded like all hell was breaking loose outside. And the creepiest thing was that by midnight, all of the traffic was off the streets. Sort of like midnight after Mardi Gras when everything suddenly stops.

All through the night, this storm was raging. And aside from the storm, it was so quiet. Our new house faces a busy street. It is behind a high wall, but it can only do so much. We have constant traffic noise, twenty-four hours a day. It’s even worse at night because that’s when the idiots with the big exhaust pipes come out and go blasting down the relatively open roads.

When we woke up in the morning it was so still you could hear a pin drop. There wasn’t any ambient noise, because all electronics were turned off. It was surreal.

I immediately decided it was the best day ever.

We looked outside and there wasn’t a single person to be seen. But we did see a giant monitor lizard cruising down the street!

We spent the entire day reading quietly and working on puzzles. Ideally, you aren’t even meant to speak to each other, but we cheated a little bit and played some board games together until it was too late to see by lantern light. Even our lantern had to be kept out of sight as much as possible.

We were hoping to see some stars in the darkness, but the sky was overcast because of the storm.

It was enchanting to experience total silence. I wouldn’t have believed an entire island could cooperate in such a way. To me, that is what is special about Bali. Not the beach clubs and cheap spa services and people waiting on you hand and foot. I don’t know of anywhere else in the world that does something like this. A lot of people avoid travelling to Bali during Nyepi. I think it would be my favourite time to visit!

The other funny thing was that I actually missed the noise by the time we went to bed. Or rather, I missed having proof that there were other human beings out there. When something so noisy goes so silent, it’s very disorienting. It was reassuring to wake up the next morning to business as usual and noisy bikes blasting their way down the street.

Anna was with us for Nyepi, but left a day or two later for Vietnam. We didn’t have enough time to do a big trip and we wouldn’t have wanted Anna to miss it either, so we planned a short weekend getaway to the Gili Islands.

The Gili Islands are supposed to be beautiful. No motorised traffic is allowed and everyone either walks or rides bicycles. They are almost four hours away by boat, just off the coast of Lombok.

We had accidentally booked accommodation on Gili Trawangan. There are three “Gilis,” and Gili T is the one renowned for partying. And lots of magic mushrooms. Oops.

I was feeling a bit worried about this, but there were lots of family reviews for the little cottage we had booked. I guessed it couldn’t be that bad.

Turns out I never had a chance to find out. After our fast boat experience to Nusa Penida, I resolved to only book the higher-rated boats from then on. And even that didn’t matter in the end, because we got a message the night before our trip saying that all boats had already been cancelled for the next 24 hours due to rough seas.

They didn’t need to tell me twice. We immediately rebooked and found a great little place in West Bali National Park.

The boats stayed cancelled for several days. A few friends had their trips cancelled as well. We all consider ourselves lucky.

The people on the last boats to cross before everything shut down had horror stories. Passengers boarded their boats in the Gilis to make the return trip to Bali with blue skies and no idea there were rough seas ahead.

I heard about one boat that did the crossing with several feet of water sloshing around on the floor. The boat rocked so violently that the windows were often fully underwater. Lots of people were seasick and vomiting. One woman was travelling with her young three children and a nanny who couldn’t swim. She ended up making a pact with solo passengers seated near her, each of whom promised to keep one of her children afloat if the boat went down.

No, thank you.

So we will save our trip to the Gilis for another time. Instead, we enjoyed the very different vibes in the northwest of Bali.

For starters, the drive was fascinating. We were headed towards Pemuteran, near the island of Menjangan. Menjangan is a little island with fantastic diving and snorkelling. It’s also very near the port town of Gilimanuk. Gilimanuk is a stone’s throw (no literally, a stone’s throw) from the eastern coast of Java.

And there’s only one real road from Gilimanuk. That means we drove with all of the big transport trucks bringing building materials and new motorbikes and everything else you can imagine barrelling down the narrow roads. There’s not a passing lane or any accepted rules for traffic. Just a long convoy of trucks playing chicken with each other. With motorbikes weaving in and out. I almost can’t describe it.

This was our first time on this road, and we passed villages and towns in Bali that actually managed to look unaffected by tourism. There were no expats in sight! And these towns looked shockingly normal. One of them was tidy and quaint. Tree-lined streets and city parks. Still very identifiably Balinese and Indonesian, but just full of people living normal lives and not waiting hand and foot on tourists and influencers. It felt like a small town in the country somewhere, just self-contained and well cared for.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take many pictures of our vacation this time. I did get this video of another giant monitor lizard. That’s two in as many months.

The seas stayed rough until the very end, but we did manage to get a snorkelling trip to Menjangan in before it was time to go home. The water was a touch cloudy, but even so it was probably the most colourful coral I have ever seen. There were vivid purples and pinks. The current was so strong that you didn’t even have to swim. Just hop out of the boat and float down the reef. I’m so glad I have finally learned to put my face in the water. It never gets old seeing cool fish.

The most exciting part of the trip was our horseback ride. In my entire life, I have never been on a horse that wasn’t being led around by the reins. And I’m not even sure if I have ever been on something bigger than a pony.

Well, all things are possible in Bali! We booked a trail ride, having been told that all the horses would be guided. But there were five of us and only two of them. They put me on a big old horse, handed me the reins, and off I went!

The girls have had some small experiences with horses, and so has Bob. Overall, it went very smoothly. But Bob got a horse that didn’t like him. This is hilarious, because there’s not a living thing on the planet that doesn’t love Bob. His horse was super stubborn, and I was cracking up listening to the conversation he was having while riding along behind me. He even tried to feed his horse after our ride and the horse tried to bite him!

My horse was also stubborn. We were riding through some narrow paths in the forest, and he tried to push me off on every tree trunk and sticker bush and low-hanging branch he could find. Bob was cracking up too watching me get dragged through all the bushes. And then when we got back to the stables, I tried to swing my leg off the horse in one graceful motion, but my leg just kept going and I did a 360-degree turn in the stirrups, fell over, and took out the stablehand on my way to the ground.

Rare vision of grace and beauty. That’s me.

Bob has all of the good horse pictures. I was too busy trying to hold on. You will just have to use your imagination.

And that’s all for now. I’ve got to get back to some coursework, but I’m also excited to keep documenting Japan. Hope all of you are well and taking care of yourselves these days.

Best,

Sarah