Bali Tourism News

Paradise not yet lost in Bali

October 6th, 2008

By Wang Yong

“CLICK! click!” three scampering little girls yelped at us in great joy as we wandered about a village in Ubud, central Bali Island, last month.

Two were six or seven years old, and the eldest was about 12. They sat by a short wall of brick and clay as my wife and I entered their village, a few steps from our hotel, Royal Pita Maha. The fancy hotel is located between a cliff and many villages in the true sense of the word - villages that are insulated from urban “civilization”.

The girls were so shy that they kept a distance from us while they tried to catch our attention with their crisp sounds of “click! click!” We were not sure whether they wanted us to take a picture of them. The moment I raised my camera and waved it to them in a gesture of inquiry, the girls burst into giggles and rushed with a light foot toward us. Now we knew what they wanted. I gestured them back to the wall ready for a shot.

“Click!” went the sound of my snapping camera. “Come, have a look!” I shouted. The minute they saw their own images in my digital camera, the girls giggled, grinned and ran away, their chubby and tanned faces covered by their hands in shyness. Their eyes brimmed with joy. Their happiness was a click away.

We took some steps further into the village tucked in lush greenery. We peered into the courtyards of some households which reminded me of my childhood when I had great fun with my late grandmother collecting for sale chicken manure in our backyard. Although I lived in a city, city life in the 1960s and 1970s in China was not greatly different from rural life as industrialism had yet to take hold.

My thoughts were wandering to the beauty of rural simplicity when I heard another yelp of “click!” The eldest girl was calling us again. This time she had invited another three girls, all of her age, to enjoy the encounter. Word must have spread about us. What a pity, then, when I found my digital camera overloaded. I had taken more than 1,000 high-resolution pictures since I arrived in Bali from Shanghai in late August. In disappointment, I smiled to them and said sorry. They smiled back politely and fluttered away with glee, nonetheless, along the rugged road of soft earth.

We returned to Shanghai at dawn on a red-eye flight, leaving behind the fragrance of tropical flowers like plumeria rubra and the luxury of the Royal Pita Maha. The smells and views will fade away with time, but what cannot and will not go away is our memory of those village girls for whom happiness was only a click away.

British philosopher Bertrand Russell discovered this spirit of simple joy among ordinary Chinese people when he visited China in the 1920s. In 1922, he wrote: “It seemed to me that the average Chinaman, even if he is miserably poor, is happier than the average Englishman, and is happier because the nation is built upon a more humane and civilized outlook than our own. Relentlessness and pugnacity not only cause obvious evils, but fill our lives with discontent, incapacitate us for the enjoyment of beauty, and make us almost incapable of the contemplative virtues.”

He further wrote: “But those who value wisdom or beauty, or even the simple enjoyment of life, will find more of these things in China than in the distracted and turbulent West, and will be happy to live where such things are valued. I wish I could hope that China, in return for our scientific knowledge, may give us something of her large tolerance and contemplative peace of mind.”

Whether Russell would say the same if he was alive and visited China today, I am not sure. Way down the road of industrialism, China is a far cry from what it was in Russell’s time. More and more people have abandoned “contemplative peace of mind” in their pursuit of material pleasures in the labyrinth of cities or, to borrow from American writer Scott Fitzgerald, the Valley of Ashes.

Part of Bali Island is bordering on the Valley of Ashes, too. Walk in the central business area of Kuta, southwest of Bali, and you will choke on car emissions despite cleansing sea winds. Tourism has a price. But overall, Bali is a rare reclusion from the modern craze for urbanization and industrialism. And Bali is more than an island of coconut trees and rice paddies and Hindu temples. It is an attitude.

This attitude, or the contemplative peace of mind, defined almost everyone my wife and I met in Bali, not just those rural girls living around Royal Pita Maha.

One day we dragged our feet along Desa Kedewatan, the road leading to our hotel, after we had lunch at a faraway restaurant called Bebek Gengil (its nickname is “dirty duck,” “bebek” meaning “duck.”). The road to Desa Kedewatan was in a deadly traffic gridlock as two big trucks running in opposite directions blocked the narrow road, resulting in a long line of cars and mopeds. No one honked. Most drivers were quiet, some smiling to passengers.

A driver whose truck was full of pigs grinned to me in amusement after he heard me saying aloud the world “pig” in Balinese: Babe.

For almost half an hour as we walked and watched, every driver was nice to each other. No honking, no complaining, no yelling, no spitting, as you so often see in Shanghai and many other so-called metropolitan cities the world over.

When I bought things at the gift shop of KiRANA Spa, a joint venture between Shiseido and the royal family of Bali, the sales ladies - Balinese trained by Japanese - were all smiles. When I wanted to buy a tea set, one of the ladies brought out 10 sets for me to choose from. Even if I didn’t buy a thing, they were happy. You don’t have this service in Shanghai, especially when you look like a small potato.

If the Balinese ladies at KiRANA Spa were good because of Japanese training (which I am not so sure of), our driver, Wayan Sumadi, was good because he was Balinese (”Wayan” means “the eldest”. Sumadi was the eldest son in his family.) He never lured us to any shopping center or restaurant in which he had an interest. He went anywhere we desired. When we wanted to go to Bamboo Corners for lunch in the Kuta area, he asked local people for the restaurant and took us all the way to it, although he was paid only for driving, not for being a gourmet guide. In some scenic spots where banana vendors turned aggressive, he helped fend them off before they approached us. In case you need a driver in emergency, here’s his phone number: 081-239-07762. He drives a mini Suzuki. His English is tolerably good.

Bali is not free from the “obvious evils” Russell mentioned, but my short stay in the island south of the equator gave me pleasures unknown to many modern urbanites. In Ubud, the artistic center of Bali located in mountains, many art shops are closed at 5pm. No one tries to maximize profits the way a typical capitalist does. Had the Balinese embraced brutal capitalism, there would be no poor villagers - hundreds of them °?- living near such a gorgeous hotel as Royal Pita Maha.

Source: http://www.shanghaidaily.com

Entry Filed under: Bali Tourism News