Here I am in Bali meandering slowly through the village pathways in the hot humid air…. while you people are sleeping underneath the globe on the other side!
Bali is “sweet”. Smiles are genuine and friendliness is not false, their integrity seems an integral part of everyday life.
How can I describe the pungent incense purging the air, drifting down from tall, carved stone mini-temples, 3-8 Indonesian inukshuks in every family’s front yard?
There, wee bamboo baskets of flowers and a morsel of rice are set out each morning in solemn prayer.
Serious young men to old weathered women; they are not bothered as foreigner like us, look on in wonder. Even on street corners and doorways to shops, we walk around these simple offerings, feeling both chagrined at our lack of the something we so yearn to be filled. Their faith is a strange belief system taken so seriously yet with simplicity. They have a grace to accept all religions knowing there is but one God with many faces.
Bali, a land of green growth, terraced from mountain top down, fed by water siphoned off from the rivers, flowing into the rice paddies and out through the towns.
The roadways ribbon upward from the coast to the centre, crossing over bridges of irrigation troughs, rippling into the next paddy of never ending rice.
Markets, Ohhhh! I should have brought no clothes nor jewelry in my suitcases so there would be space to fill them up! They know how to tempt us with lovely hand crafted products overflowing from tables and shops on every street.
They bring their merchandise in every mode of transportation. A good 90% of the industry is based on tourism.
Motorbikes, more and more of them cover the road, a living stream of moving colour, with platforms on the back seat a meter wide and piled high with boxes and bags. Sometimes with a family of 4 all fitted tightly, or other times with 3 huge bags of rice tied on front and back weave in and out of the flow. How can they all stay balanced in such symmetry traveling 50 km’s fast?
Traditional dancers contort their hands in sensual pleasing movement of fingers and angled palms. Clad in gold helmets and crowns, and the black and white checkered sacred cloth, the men steadily chant. Feminine eyes blackened with kohl beckon us to join the drama as they portray the age-old battle of good and evil.
Bali is a place you won’t want to leave. It makes you take a deep breath of fresh air and a long sigh of contentment. All is well in this part of the world.
I wish you were in the rooms across the way and we could sit on the steps together and to plan tomorrow ….another day of adventure.
Grand Adventures 