Bali, Beautiful Bali – and Indonesia!

8th March, 2019

I thought I had posted this, but then found it in drafts, so here you go. I suspect it may have fallen victim to Nyepi Day, about which you will be able to read more in the next blog.

Well, it has been quite busy here in Beautiful Bali. I have been snorkelling, which was fantastic, with lots of colourful coral and fish in lovely warm water. Unfortunately, my camera is not waterproof, so no photos, just lots of memories. But a lovely American called Justin came with me and did manage to snap this one! The coral is almost as fascinating as the fish with every shape and configuration possible, some like plants moving in the wind and others like an exposed brain. The fish were every colour you can imagine and were very friendly, especially when you throw some bread at them. They swim really close to you, but never seem to bump into you and you cannot grab one, assuming you wanted to. This made it a bit of a shock when something brushed my leg, which made me jump (not easy in water!), but it turned out to be a bit of plastic.

However, we did set off on another expedition with our taxi driver, Made. I should mention something here about the Balinese caste and names system. The former is more relaxed that its Indian counterpart, but it does impose certain restrictions and rules of etiquette. At the top of the tree is the Brahmin caste whose men are honoured with the title Ida Bagus and women Ida Ayu. Only Brahmins are able to be priests. Satriya are second, the descendents of warriors and rulers. Third are the merchants or Wesia and at the bottom are the Sudra, the common people. Sudra children are named for where they are in the family order with no distinction for male or female. The first born is Wayan, then Made, then Nyoman and lastly Ketut. If you have a fifth child, you start again! It must get confusing! We have had two taxi drivers and they have both been called Made.

Anyway, Made picked us up and we drove to our first destination, which was Taman Nusa Cultural Park, which is designed so that you can ‘see Indonesia in one afternoon’. This means that you get to visit about 60 traditional houses from all over the very varied country that is Indonesia. And very educational it was too. We started in the east in Papua, which, having lived in Papua New Guinea was pretty familiar.

We had a map of the park and made our way through it as though travelling through Indonesia, which gave us a good idea of just how large and varied a country it is, running from Papua in the east, through Sulawesi, Borneo (Kalimantan), Bali, Java and on to Sumatra in the west and that does not include so many of the other 17,000 islands. For reference, Indonesia is the largest island country in the world, is the 14th largest by land and the 4th largest by population at over 261 million.

I am not going to give you photos of every building we saw, but a select few are as follows:

All very interesting, but they also had some fun activities, such as doing what in our case was very dodgy batik and playing some local musical instruments and getting dressed up in some local costumes, so prepare yourself!

OK, stop laughing!!

A few last photos from the park..

We were due to head a bit further north to see a large temple or pura at a place called Bangli, but unfortunately the heavens opened and that was that. We had lunch and headed back since, as anyone who has visited the tropics knows, when it rains here, IT RAINS!!!

OK, I will post this and be with you shortly with the next one.