Cycling Around Bali
March 2nd, 2007
The road is a river, awash with monsoonal rains. The midday sun has darkened to a candle of light and thunder resounds like cannon fire across the sullen Bali sky. “It is God’s music,” Wayan assures me from inside the shelter of his roadside stall, and for him the weather is indeed a divine blessing. I am the first traveller in months to stop at his store on the outskirts of the city of Gianyar, marooned here in my sodden clothes and with my mythically deep tourist pockets.
I order a second drink and another stormy hour passes. Out in the bitumen stream, a prehistoric bicycle splashes past, its rider bared to the rain but for a pair of saturated trousers that cling to his grasshopper-thin legs. Such stoicism shames me, huddled as I am in the comfort of this temporary asylum. I make my farewell to a disappointed Wayan, who assures me I am both strong and crazy, and head back out into the rain and onto my own dripping bicycle. “You are like…Neil Armstrong,” Wayan proclaims, though he means Lance Armstrong since I’ve just told him of my intention to cycle around Bali.
My journey had begun in Denpasar just a few hours before. If there is safety in madness it is here, cycling in the turmoil of Bali’s largest city. Traffic spins as wildly as a centrifuge, trucks, cars, motorbikes, pushcarts, dogs, pedestrians and chickens doing as they please. It’s disorder that’s accustomed to disorder, Asia condensed to a small island, and my bicycle barely registered in its mind. I was just another pothole or chicken to be driven around.
Horns sounded without end, but within an hour I’d learned to ignore them, their language more foreign to me even than Indonesian. They seemed to say nothing and everything – hello, watch out, move aside, good luck or, simply, I have a horn. Trucks lumbered by but only one came near to hitting me, a truck
….. I was finally attacked, a pair of mutts salivating over my legs.
named God Bless II that almost blessed me head-on.
Denpasar sprawled east to blur into Gianyar, the roadside an unholy alliance of temples, urban rice fields and stores advertising Playstation rental and the machismo of cigarettes. Quickly it became apparent that the beaches, volcanoes and lush rice terraces that monopolise Bali’s tourist image would not be the cyclist’s reality, fading to secondary status behind the endless string of village life. Each time I stopped for a rest motorbikes pulled in alongside, asking the question I’d answer dozens of times each day. “Where you go?” Any reply would suffice. Sometimes I’d name the next village, city or tourist attraction. Other times I’d get bolder. “To the moon,” I told one motorcyclist in Gianyar, delighting in my new kinship with Neil Armstrong. “Very good, sir.”
To the continued accompaniment of God’s thunderous tune I turned inland at Gianyar, onto the fertile slopes of Bali’s highest and most sacred volcano, Gunung Agung. Settlement and the road snaked up the volcano and into the former royal city of Bangli. Billed by one local book as the ‘Cinderella of Bali tourism’, Bangli is bookended by great temples: the lurid afterlife threats in the relief carvings on Pura Dalem Penunggekan; and Pura Kehen, the island’s second-largest temple, stepped into a hillside above the city. Kehen is tourist central for Bangli, yet almost every one of the souvenir stalls at its edge was shuttered. That night, I would be the only guest at either of Bangli’s two hotels. “Bali many problems,” a man at Pura Kehen’s entrance told me in broken English. “Bomb.” And so began another discussion that echoed through my days on the island: the Kuta bombing.
Not once did I dig at Balinese memories of the blast but they lay scattered and exposed like rubble. That night, I heard music in the street below my hotel room – guitar, tambourine and wonderfully raucous, harmonising voices. Balinese songs broken by a recurring rendition of La Bamba.
I wandered outside and sat on the kerb to listen. Within minutes I was invited over for a beer and a song. “Three years ago Bangli had many tourists, but now there are none,” one of the singers explained, his face hardening like stone. “Fuck Ambrosi. Fuck terrorist.” Fuck terrorist, the others sang. The same words followed me from conversation to conversation, village to village. English-speakers or not, it seemed that everybody knew this one fervent statement.
In Bangli the night never stilled and I slept fitfully. Dogs fought in the street, roosters called impatiently and people rose to begin their long days. Finally, so did the sun, etching Gunung Agung black onto the dawn sky, its peak almost 3000 metres above the city. That day my punishment would be to contour across the mountain’s ribbed slopes, riding a rollercoaster of lava flows towards the island’s east coast. My reward for this effort would be to disappear into the verdant folds that held some of Bali’s most attractive rice terracing. Cattle ploughed the terraces and workers stood from their river baths, immodest about their nudity, to wave as I passed. “Where you go, sir?” they’d call, and I’d just point ahead. On through this terraced country seemed as good as anywhere. The road crested at around 600 metres above sea level, the rice fields suddenly behind and below me and a tropical cornucopia ahead. The forest thickened and filled with rambutan, papaya, banana and salak, the Balinese ‘snakeskin’ fruit that would virtually fuel my journey. My panniers became heavy with fruit, a decided anchor for what would become a difficult next day.
My plan for that day was to reach the once-burgeoning east-coast resort of Amed, only 14 kilometres from where I slept in Tirta Gangga. It could have been so easy. Instead, I doubled back and turned onto the little-used coastal road that rounded Bali’s eastern tip. Fifty kilometres later I’d be cursing the most trying day of my journey. I joined the coast at Ujung, site of an elaborate water palace, its pools now more popular with local anglers than tourists. From here the road pointed up, not following the coast at all but ascending onto the slopes of the volcano Gunung Seraya. Through Seraya village the road climbed 200 metres, sweat pouring from my body in the relentless humidity, making me wetter than I’d been in some downpours. The money in my pockets turned soft with moisture. So much for the luxury of the coast, which I sighted only through breaks in the forest, glimpses of gorgeous, faraway shores and tiny villages as remote as the Sea of Tranquillity.
Word spread along the road of my slow passage and children ran from their homes and schools to wave and call. I was cheered, jeered and even horse-whipped by one importunate boy, but always – as had become customary – I was called ‘sir’.
On I climbed, the road narrowing to a pencil line, devoid of almost anything but foot traffic. The landscapes changed – cornfields replacing rice on these drier, steeper slopes – and so did my welcome. Young children suddenly ran from me, scrambling terrified into the cornfields. Babies wailed and dogs scattered…what sort of strange place was this eastern tip of Bali that dogs ran from cyclists and not after them? It was as though I was a pioneering tourist on this far-flung nib of land, but I clearly wasn’t. In an instant my name changed from ‘sir’ to ‘pen’ and ‘cigarette’ as children and youths shouted their demands for handouts. On uphill stretches of road they ran alongside the bike, keeping pace, yelling, screaming, threatening at times. For two hours I shook my head at almost everybody I passed, my mood becoming as black as the beaches to which I was heading. At Amed’s edge I passed a final group of youths, my head down to avoid contact, but still they turned to stare. “Have a nice trip,” one called and waved me on. The words hit me like a cool wind, blowing off my sweat and anger.
In Amed, fishing and tourism appeared to have struck an uneasy balance. Here, as yet, it had been impossible to replace island reality with the sterility of a resort strip. Fishermen’s hovels lined the beaches, little more than roofs without walls, their toilets cut into the sand, awaiting the flush of high tide. Fishing boats were stacked so thickly that the beaches beneath might not have existed and pigs, not touts, sniffed after strangers on the beach.
My flirtation with hills over (for now), I woke to a day of blessed flatness across Bali’s north coast. The volcanoes became scenery rather than cruelties, and greetings seemed to ring from every home – ‘Hello, sir’ – and from unseen workers in fields. Even the constant crowing of the fighting cocks caged at the road’s edge began to seem like salutations. People tested the few English phrases they knew – ‘Thank you, yes’; ‘I love you’; ‘How you going, bloke’ – and one corn farmer ran from his field, insisting I take his photo. “One thousand rupiah,” he demanded once I’d done so…a 20-cent modelling fee. He asked for my shirt and my watch also but didn’t even shrug when I refused. He waved me on with a smile. And in the spa town of Air Sanih, a new greeting: ‘You want girl?’ I pedalled on, though it had been my intention to stop the night here. (Andrew Bain)
Source : www.travelintelligence.net
Entry Filed under: Bali Tourism News
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