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Island of the gods, guardians and peripatetic primates

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Peculiar pre-match entertainment for a Cats-Tigers clash when you’re kicking back peanuts and Bintangs in the Bali mountain jungle town of Ubud.

A dozen or so Barbary macaques parading alongside the bar – upside-down infants clutching their mothers, cocksure males trooping the colour – suggested a peculiar cheer squad on the march. Perhaps not that peculiar in Tigerland, though.

Oh, sorry, I take that back but it’s been said now. Maybe I can’t.

Bar staff have abandoned the traditional shanghai slingshot deterrent favoured by hotels for coloured laser beams, which seems to be taking the fun out of things. When you’ve been hissed at, spat on and tackled by the little blighters and their rabid claws, sympathy levels for primates aren’t high.

The lasers send them scarpering, non-violently. My remonstration to a staffer about new tech over old tech is countered with: “Monkeys are sacred, they’re guardians of our temples.”

Oh yeah, that’s right. If only they stuck to the temples and off the hotel balconies spooking the tourists.

Peripatetic chimps are far from the only organic entertainment on offer on the Island of the Gods, though. Look closely around the place and you’ll find all sorts of oddities.

Think tourists buying satay sticks and sausages to feed stray dogs. Café tables and chairs washed out to sea by the incoming tide. Hawker knock-offs three times more expensive than home. Locals eating with ducks off the same table. Girls in dental floss bikinis practising yoga in front of beachside diners. Missile-like fireworks blasting out to sea as Boeings come out of the sunset to land in the shadow of giant deity statues.

Then there are plantain squirrels whipping through the jungle foliage, giant snails, luminescent black and yellow centipedes, koi pond fish feeding frenzies, dragonflies galore, fighting cocks, masterful bird mimics.

  

Art’s everywhere you look. In religious offerings, in signs, sculptures, gardens, temples, carvings, buildings, shop fittings, traditional clothing, masonry, paintings, furniture … absolutely everything.

Construction’s going on everywhere, too. Jackhammers next door, pile-driving down the river gorge, massive refits to old hotels, including one opposite the ‘quiet’ room I booked.

I’m especially drawn to a giant carapace bamboo structure rising from a paddock smack in the middle of Ubud. Workers line up for a 15-minute rev-up from the boss before I wander over, stupidly barefoot on the hot black bitumen path, to reconnoitre proceedings. A tall lean bloke introduces himself as the property owner, says the double-shelled, thatch-roofed design is going to be a yoga studio.

Good bet it might draw a bit of attention, too. It’s been whipped up by bamboo’s wunderkind architect, Pablo Luna  – known for blending Bali’s tri hit karana philosophy of harmony between people, nature and spirituality with environmental, sustainable and biomimicry principles into his work.

It’s a fair matrix. Almost as cross-pollinated as his background:  a Chilean-born architect of Peruvian/Lebanese heritage who studied in New York before taking his work to Indonesia and South-East Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico, India and Chile.

No doubt it will slot right in with Ubud’s wealth of health and wellness practitioners. No shortage of anything in that jungle; from soothing didgeridoo drones through fusion vegan iterations to breatharian starvation rackets, propped by a multitude of souls seeking happiness, self-awareness and more Zen in their lives. For all the healing they provide, I think Lomotil’s somehow got the jump on them.

The real thing about somewhere like Ubud, and the broader Bali, is the island itself and its natural geographical attributes. A mountain bike ride, a handful of temples and waterfalls, maybe some whitewater rafting, a few palms and a rice terrace or two are about the extent of things the punters will investigate outside the insane gridlock of Seminyak and Canggu.

 

Which is a pity. I’ve had a dog-eared topographical map of the island for a while now, a bright green-coloured thing of valleys, mountains, volcanoes, precipitous gorges, rivers, lakes – a surveyor’s paradise, or maybe nightmare. Contained within its cartographic swales and saddles are a trove of ridiculously stunning tracks and defiles, villages, waterfalls, panoramas, rivers, ravines, coastal outlooks, islands to ponder, jungle …

I’ll be happy to keep ticking off place names for next decade or two given half the chance. If the bloody monkeys don’t give me rabies, that is.

Travel bites: Euphoric redemption in Bali

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A downward dog-led economic recovery is probably not what you’d expect to counter the Covid/volcano/earthquake/tsunami-led tourism recession of recent years in Indonesia’s Ring of Fire.

For one thing, yoga fanaticism, spiritual con artists – think breatharians and didgeridoo healing – were around before the ongoing flight cancellations of late.

But sticking your bum in the air in a steaming, oxygen-depleted environment in an idyllic jungle mountainside has its merits. And that taps into the Balinese economy in a reasonably big way.

You’ll lose weight, to dehydration. You’ll feel euphoric, to heat frustration. You’ll feel achievement, to the weight-loss euphoria.

For people who in their youth might have frequented the booze-holes and fleshpots of Legian and Kuta, smoking dope and scoffing magic mushrooms, it’s probably kind of redemptive. Or something.

It’s neat to fly for six hours to buy a sense of spiritual tranquillity amid a deeply religious Hindu community surrounded by natural and human disasters of a scale unimaginable to your average clueless Aussie.

But con artists, faux spiritualism and healing, yoga fanaticism and Australia prices are once again the norm in post-Covid Bali.

This is across Bali. The idyllic mountain and inland villages and towns of the beautiful Indonesian island. Not just the Legians and Canggus with their booze-riddled churls and phone-addicted narcissists.

The latter remain tide-recycling rubbish tips with fancy hotels years as before ago. It’s surfing and ocean swimming where Bali belly comes from these days, as often as anywhere else.

Up in the hills, by contrast, the palms and bougainvillea, the paddies and river gorges, are ever-increasingly frequented by travelling souls seeking spiritual succour and purpose in a steaming, sweating contortion. It’s a downward dog redemption against their Western follies and prodigal excesses.

Limbo: Jungle bars, volcanic interruptions

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Above: OzPost’s Mt Elephant volcano stamp issue

Volcano watch wasn’t exactly what I’d planned. Things were meant to be more of an exploration mission. A search for faces, places, swimming pools, sort of stuff you do in the Bali tropics.

Ideally, it was going to be a search for jungle bars.

Something in the treetops, or nestled into a river gorge cliff face, maybe on the edge of python-riddled rice terrace. Bit of lazy exploring. There was a hippy Geelong expat I hoped to track down in one.

Things went sideways, predictably enough. The expat had gone to God, hanged himself in bankruptcy, I sadly learned. One bar I tracked down was riddled with sculptures of 200 rampant monkeys, and I mean rampant. Some artisan presumably had an awkward time explaining to the missus what he’s been doing at work. “Making LGBTI anthropoids for the tourists, darling.” Hmmm.

pH levels in the first swimming pool bar left me tingling at antihistamine level. Eyes red and skin itching for days. First mates I made in a bar, sideways on margeritas — and I’m guessing lithium, too — were great fun but also looking for a political argument, no matter how many times I agreed with them. Others were paranoid.

And then volcano ash grounded all the planes in and out of Bali.

Struck me the book I was reading, a biog of explorer Hamilton Hume, who ventured into Geelong back in 1825, with his arch-nemesis William Hovell, was a good pairing. Things didn’t go quite as planned for them, either.

Thought they were at Westernport Bay. Hovell wasn’t the greatest navigator, of course; sunk one ship and ran another aground while working as a sea captain. How he got the exploring gig’s a good question.

Not that this intrepid pairing made it to the extensive volcanic areas immediately west of Geelong.

It was up to subsequent pioneers to discover the dormant volcanoes Mount Duneed, Mount Moriac and Mount Pollock right next door. Over time, the count expanded to some 400 volcanoes on an explosive arsenal across western Victoria.

About a dozen have blown their stack in the last 20,000 years or so, a minor blip in geological terms. Thing is, according to experts like Melbourne Uni’s professor Bernie Joyce, a fresh volcanic blast could erupt any time. In blip terms, we’re overdue for one.

Bernie nominates Anakie as a likely site. Yikes. Moreover, he says disaster services aren’t prepared for it – nor, I suspect, are tourism operators who might find visitors to the Great Ocean Road kept at bay by volcanic ash.

Volcano limbo is a curious thing, you know. Distracted as I was from my boozy-exploring terms of reference, I found myself tripping over all sorts of unexpected things.

People mainly. Frenzied taxidrivers, Hindu temple pilgrims, a sitar-playing prog-rocker, a failed businessman hiding out, kids in rockstar apartments, parachutists and BASE jumpers, lonely Eat Pray Love devotees, mad Aussie footy fans.

Not a one of them cared a bugger-me for the volcanic ash flight crisis. Stay there, go home, all the same to them. Nothing they could do.

Go figure. Looking for a rainforest bar and you find some nonchalant breed of couldn’t-care-less fatalism instead. Worry you die, don’t worry you still die.

Sounds like the law of the jungle. Instructional maybe. You could get eaten tomorrow. If you don’t get atomised when some mountain god cracks the sads, of course.

A Bali volcano, a witch queen and a palace mystery

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TRAVEL: DOUBT if living in the shadow of a Bali volcano is everyone’s cup of tea. Especially one that’s  properly blown its stack in ready living memory and poised to do so again any minute now.

When you’re a peasant farmer living a subsistence existence in eastern Bali your residential options aren’t many, though. Even so, the grey Gunung Agung, set to erupt again, 50 years after its last eruption — about 15 seconds ago in geological terms — is revered rather than feared.

The gentle Hindus living in the shadow of Agung believe it was formed from a fragment of the cataclysmic splitting of Mount Meru — the cosmological spiritual axis of the universe — by the god Pasupati. At 3140 metres in height, 10,000 feet or so, that’s a fair fragment.

Geologically, Agung is impressively known as a stratovolcano. Standing at its base, driving about in its penumbra, basking in the sun in the rice fields around it — however you interface with it — its omnipresence is undeniable.

Visitors arrive by bus, motorbike and chartered taxis to witness its towering attitude, many of them happily scoffing banana fritters for breakfast before launching into a bike ride back to Bali’s cultural heartland, Ubud.

Pea-green rice paddies, terraces and palms, villages and villagers, it’s all very picturesque. The bonus is bugger-all puffing because it’s all downhill, for the main part anyway. And at the bottom, there’s invariably a Bintang or two awaiting the desiccated pedaller.

And really,  who’s normally going to worry about a volcano in Bali? Ummm, yeah. Of course, the recently smoking Mount Rinjani on neighbouring Lombok was of concern, too, and with good reason. But it’s funny how it, and other ash and pumice-belchers in Indonesia, don’t generally stop the tourists or locals going about their business. Go figure.

First time I encountered Agung was 20 years ago, climbing a multitude of steps in the blazing heat at its Besakih foothill temple. Its impressive nature drew me back recently, as did the surrounding countryside with its glistening terraces, sighing palms, snake-fruit orchids, forests and humble villages. I’d forgotten the rocky, tortuous roads, which have improved markedly but with a commensurate increase in traffic.

I headed south and east in Agung’s shadow, searching for a royal water palace I’d once visited in Amlapur. My old photos showed exquisite stone sculptures, a multi-tiered fountain, terraced gardens, stone bridges — a gorgeous collision of colour, art and water fed by natural springs.

When my taxi ushered me to the site, however, I was bewildered. Nothing seemed the same. Not a skerrick. The buildings were unrecognisable, the entire shape of the water palace totally unfamiliar.

But the hydro-folly, which dates to 1919, was remarkable nonetheless. It boasts exquisite floating pavilions and carved stone walkways, palms and lotus ponds, flowers, grassy terraces, arches, statues, royal furnishings and photographs of its builder, the King of Karangasem, with all his 24 kids. Prolific bloke, that one.

It was built around a pool, the Kolam Dirah, once part of a punishment site for black magic practitioners and named for a legendary witch queen who fought it out with the king of what’s now East Java back in the 14th century. These days, the only detainees in the water palace appear to be dozen inquisitive and out-of-place deer kept coralled in pits. It’s considerably more salubrious than in the past.

Like the surrounding countryside, it was battered by the 1963 Agung eruption along with an earthquake in 1979, which all but destroyed the place. World Bank funding has helped restore the palace to its original glory and a steady succession of taxis and tourists keep the turnstiles clicking. Visitors can stay on site in villas if they so wish. With Agung to the north and the sea and Lombok’s Rinjani to the south, its outlook is spectacular.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure how I’d got it so wrong, though. This was not the water palace I visited at Amlapura before and, with precious little Balinese in my kitbag, no-one I met could understand my confusion or offer an explanation. Back in my hotel, at neighbouring Candidasa, I consulted a couple of dog-eared guidebooks and Dr Google before finally getting to the bottom of my mystery.

Turns out I Gusti Bagus Djelantik, the King of Karangasem, built not one but two water palaces. I was at the Taman Ujung water palace. The one I was missing was Tirta Gangga. Both of them are in Amlapura and only a few kilometres apart. My driver had simply gone to the palace he thought I wanted.

So go figure. Two of the things. I suppose it’s a kind of royal equivalent to stumping up a couple of cars for your teenage kids. When you’ve got two dozen fractious rug-rats, why wouldn’t you build two swimming pools? You can’t throw them in a volcano if they’re acting up, can you?

Then again, when you’re a king …

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