Ubud, I bud, everybody buds

Day 138 - Ubud

My preconceived ideas of Bali were wrong. And right. I'd flown in two nights ago and found the first town, Kuta, to be exactly as I expected. A broad, well-trodden beach. Stalls selling t-shirts with text on them like 'I'm not gay but $20 is $20', 'The Man, the Myth, The Legend', 'I hate women' - that sort of thing. There were Australians roaring at each other in bars, their mullets a symbol of humankind's idiotic social nature. Cold beers and cheap massages. Cheap beers and cold massages. In fairness those last two things soothed my irritation at the rest. If you can't beat 'em...they're not your wife as one of the t-shirts might say. There wasn't an incandescent anger at Kuta's market-driven miasma though. Or at the taxi driver from the airport who kept whispering at me conspiratorially that picking up another passenger would lower the price. I wasn't sure why he treated that like a secret. I understood better why he kept secret his inability to find my hotel among Kuta's small winding lanes though. Equanimity in the face of what seems to me to be life's constant provocations has not come easily of late. I can no longer remember a time when it did. There must have been a time though. A time before this insufferable anger. My recent life cannot have helped and is the whole reason why I am here. But I also wonder if I detect a far more ancient and deeply buried dissatisfaction. A mountain that, if excavated, would find thousands of shards of shattered pottery under the surface. Shards of bad luck, shards of bad choices, all still sharp to the touch. I hadn't brought my spade on this trip but I had brought my boots. It felt like I'd trodden the mountain down. Not flat but maybe to a moraine. And so with my aforementioned beer on the aforementioned beach with a hitherto unmentioned sunset I could celebrate that. I found I was no longer looking enviously at groups having fun or couples arm-in-arm. I've had those things to a greater or lesser degree on this trip and there's no howling, desolate landscape of loneliness now. You could say I was contented with solitude and also possessed a confidence that I could change that situation if I wished. It appeared that I had lost some greater part of my fear of people. And, just maybe, my fear of myself.

Colourful shrines line the road and kites fly high in the sky and Bali becomes unknown to me. The road to Ubud got me out of Kuta's death-cult tourism and into a greener land of infinite rice paddies and multitudinous gods. Bali is a Hindu island and a curious introduction to the world's largest Muslim country. Each home along the roadside seemed to have its own shrine, perhaps driven to build by the fervour of the minority. In fact, as I learned later, one of Bali's nicknames is 'island of a thousand temples'. Another nickname is 'island of the Gods' a clue that this is an island of religion as well as geography. Despite a thousand-year head start on Islam, Hinduism's presence had been reduced to a few smaller islands in the archipelago by the time the Dutch arrived in the mid-1800s. Ironically colonialism actually preserved a bit of culture by stopping the inter-religious wars going on at the time. They referred to this as an 'intervention', perhaps because 'special military operation' sounded too daft. And so 500 years down the line I can, with ease, get a beer in Bali. Yay colonialism. Ubud is regarded as Bali's cultural capital but if I thought it would be a zen antidote to Kuta I would be mistaken. Roads thronged with traffic, pavements with tourists. I began to wonder if the place was progressively generated as the bouji shops lining the streets never seemed to end. Expensive jewellery and silks dripped from display stands inside while banyan roots dripped down artfully crumbling edifices outside. The place was was affluent hippie-dom in a nutshell. Or in a lotus position. That demographic does, at least, tend to favour a certain, not-disagreeable, aesthetic which aids preservation I suppose. Exhausted by the forward planning that had got me to Indonesia I decided to phone a friend and copy their plans. I'd met Alexandra on Perhentian Kecil and fate/chance intertwined our paths again as she, too, was in Ubud. One of the town's most popular 'attractions' (a shudder-inducing word but I'd subcontracted my planning remember) is called Creyta.

It is a fantasy landscape of terraces and pools and swings. An influencer's wet dream. It was contrived certainly but all fantasy is contrived and, while I don't like contrived, I do like fantasy. So that's clear then. The best way to describe the place is that it is the result you'd get if you asked AI to draw you a picture of Bali and it forgot the drunk Australians. Ah, wait, there's some over there, never mind. Now I could fill this page with negativity about the place but:

1. It didn't really piss me off at all
2. Being constantly cynical in a cynical world is a draining and pointless pursuit

So instead I paid my money, slipped into a very long dress and had my friends take pictures of me on a swing.
Ubud hasn't been entirely plasticised though and the rice paddies that surround it still primarily exist for the purpose of growing rice. A day trip was planned. Alex and I first tried to visit the wildlife at Monkey Kingdom but the main purpose of the place seemed to be to showcase to tourists what shameless and exploitative little bastards they are. There really is nothing they wouldn't do to gratify themselves in plain sight. The monkeys were assholes too. I suggested we pull the plug on that idea and hit a couple of, hopefully quieter, trails on the edge of town. We took the most leisurely of strolls through the paddies. We strolled with Dan whom Alex had met in Penang. Travel for long enough in the same geographic area and you forms chains of acquaintance. It's rather nice to land in a new place , get talking to someone at the hostel and find yourself saying "oh you know X?, and you met them through Y?", "I met Y through X!" Nice unless you're a chromosome. Most conversations probably go like that if you're a chromosome. Dan was doing life right. He was/is an artist who had pitched up in Bali with a plan. His plan was to rent a flat/studio on the north coast of the island for a few months, paint some paintings, return to the UK to sell them and then repeat the process. There was no particular timescale for any of that or a certain number of paintings to produce. I bet he couldn't even guess what KPI stood for. Despite my ferocious envy of his life I am always heartened when I hear of someone that appears to have found a way to live life the way they want. And sure I may be putting a romantic gloss on it but he certainly wasn't turning a wheel ever faster that was rotating a chain linked to a cog that was driving nothing. There's that cynicism again, but now in Heath Robinson form.

The sun shone low in the sky and cast a loving light onto the fields. Green took on the fullest shade of vitality. The grass stalks moved gently in the wind and if I had the ears to hear it would be like a thousand strings tuning up in that wonderful, uncoordinated way before a classical piece. We sat on a low wall that divided paddies and watched swifts swoop low to catch insects. In the distance two young boys struggled manfully to get a kite in the air that was far bigger than they were. It was 2023 but it could have been 1923. Hell the scene had probably barely changed in a thousand years. I felt a timeless calm and wholly, joyfully in the moment. As the moon slowly rose to replace the sun even it was smiling.