Bali Expectations

In a desperate search to find something good in Bali we hired a car.  Our first stop was Ubud, the "spiritual capital" of the island.  This was a tiresome bumper to bumper crawl through what seemed like an endless strip development of temples, stonemasons and furniture shops.  Ubud was OK and the temple monkeys were as honest as the other locals in wanting to get something from the stream of tattooed Australian tourists.

On our last day I took a drive further afield to the rice fields around Jatiluwuh.  By this stage Sue was in bad need of some quality beach time, while I still wanted to find the Bali that I feared existed only in my head.  It was a long drive through the strip developments until I broke into more open country and saw a complex jigsaw of small rice paddies, houses and coconut groves in rolling and unbelievably green hills and valleys.  On the road I passed columns of brightly dressed local women balancing large bowls on their heads.  I stopped at a tourist cafe in the heart of the Jatiluwuh rice paddy fields and photographed the scene.  On the table opposite was a large loquacious Australian lady of a certain age and a bored and polite young Balian man.

"This is my thirty second trip to Bali, always at the same home-stay near Ubud.  Kuta? If you want my opinion they should have exploded more bombs in that shithole." she snarled.

After six days we were glad to get the plane to Singapore, but why was Bali such a disappointment?  I suppose because I had "expectations", not something I'm usually too burdened with.  Partly these were a product of the song "Bali Hai" from the musical "South Pacific", which actually has nothing to do with Bali but sounds as if it does.   "Bali Hai, Bali Hai, your own special island, come away, come away …".  Bali is also associated with the ethereal sound of the gamelan orchestra, which to my ears is the music of the spheres.  Finally, years ago, maybe at the time of the Bali bombings, I saw a clip of a Bali news programme with two presenters dressed in brightly coloured gowns and turbans, like captains making a broadcast to "the Enterprise" from an alien starship and from that time on the idea of Bali as an impossibly exotic and unreachable paradise was fixed in my mind.  Sadly, the real Bali has banished this fantasy and I wish I had never gone there.