Indonesia Island Hop
Java
MY WATCH ALARM went off at five thirty in the morning. I was in a small, windowless room. It took me a minute to remember where I was.
It was the first of April, 2005, and I was in a small layover hotel inside Singapore National Airport. Everything was very neat and orderly. The lack of windows and the bright fluorescent lights contributed to a sense of disorientation. Yesterday I had woken up in Seoul.
By eight o’clock, I was in the air. It was a short flight over the straights to Jakarta. The Singapore Airlines flight attendants, all women, brought around steaming, tightly rolled towels. The attendants were all very young and wore blush and Chinese-style dresses. Their nails were painted the same shade of hot-pepper red. Breakfast was good, and I sipped green tea and watched the sun rising over the water to the east.
Soekarno-Hatta International Airport was teeming with people. The variety of dress, language, and skin color was dazzling. Before passing through customs, there was a large sign hanging from the ceiling. It read, Drug traffickers will receive the death penalty. I stopped and took a photo.
It was hot. I met Suranto outside in the bright sun. He was very friendly and looked almost pained to hear that my bag had not made the transfer and was still stuck in Singapore. Not to worry, I said. It would come tomorrow; besides, I like to travel light.
We took a cab into town and talked along the way. Had I been to Indonesia before? No, never. How long would I stay? Just one week. What sort of work did I do with Volunteers in Asia? I ran exchange programs. He told me about his graduate studies in linguistics, about his new baby boy, and about his desire to move back to the country.
"Jakarta is crazy. We Indonesians call it “The Big Durian”. It stinks, but people come anyway because they think there are jobs here." He was hoping VIA would purchase a house outside of the city, maybe even in Yogyakarta, where the field office could be located.
The traffic was dense, and it was only one o’clock. We came to the VIA field office house where Suranto lived. His wife was inside preparing food. Her head was covered with a shawl. She wore glasses and had a gentle, intelligent face.
We ate lunch on the floor and played with Suranto’s one year old son. Then Suranto said:
"This afternoon there is a celebration at a nearby pesantren. There are many tsunami orphans from Aceh living there, and I’ve been helping translate for some people who are making a documentary about the tsunami. Should we go?"
We took Suranto’s scooter, and I rode on the back. The neighborhood was a dense warren of narrow streets. Some houses were fairly new and modern looking, while others were decidedly makeshift. We stopped at a street market for produce and had a soda. The colors were brilliant.
We arrived at the pesantren. A pesantren is an Islamic boarding school. This school, Suranto explained, was run by a prominent political family. The current head of the school was a woman named Ibu Tutti, a former minister in the government.
We entered into a large entry room. We were greeted by Ibu Tutti and two of her brothers or cousins; I don’t remember which. She was short and stocky and wore a dark shawl. The celebration, I learned, was for her birthday.
We passed through the room and into a large courtyard. About one hundred and fifty children and teenagers were seated on folding chairs. They all wore white, and they were watching performances of dance and song. About a dozen girls were doing a lovely and graceful dance. Suranto leaned over and told me that it was an Acehnese dance. Most of the children present were orphans from the tsunami.
Two young boys took the stage and sang a song. They had incredible voices that carried great emotion. A man in a Hawaiian shirt then took the microphone, and within short order, he had the crowd in uproarious laughter. He was a well-known radio personality originally from Aceh, and when he started light-hearted dance, several boys leapt up from their chairs to join him. Then he pulled me over as well, and I followed along as best I could to the great amusement of the crowd.
After the performances, I sat at a picnic table and talked with some of the young people. A group of teenage boys wanted to know what California was like. They taught me a few words in Bahasa Indonesia. One boy was very quiet and serious. I later learned that everyone in his immediate family had been killed in the tsunami.
I sat with a girl named Fatma. She was only fifteen, but she had a lovely face that bespoke a maturity born from hardship. Her English was quite good. She liked to study literature and wanted to attend university. We spoke for only fifteen minutes, but her quiet strength greatly moved me.
It came time for us to leave. I said goodbye to the children and we paid our respects to Ibu Tutti. A few years later, I learned that many of the orphans became very unhappy with life at the pesantren. About seventy of them ran away. Some of the orphans came back, but others did not. I do not know the specifics, but it made me sad to hear this news. I sometimes wonder how the students I talked with are and what they are doing today. I wonder if Fatma is studying literature at the university. I wonder what has become of the quiet and serious young man at the picnic table.
THAT EVENING, SURANTO and I went downtown to have drinks with Noriko Toyoda. The streets got wider and the buildings taller as we approached the business and government district. The traffic remained choked and snarled.
Noriko worked for the United Nations Development Program. We met on the ground floor bar of the big, boxy skyscraper that housed most of the United Nations offices in Jakarta. With her was a cadre of UN workers of various departments and nationalities. They all looked tired and overworked. We found a big booth, sat down, and everyone except for Suranto and me promptly lit cigarettes. It was almost nine o’clock, and they were just getting off from work. The UN crew swapped war stories of their latest dealings with corrupt officials or stretched-thin UN bureaucrats. There was a weary, collegial, gallows humor. I felt as if I had stumbled into a Graham Greene novel.
Noriko was about thirty. She was born in Japan and had grown up in the U.S. She spoke with a lilt of an accent that sounded more British than Japanese. I wanted to talk with her about Yayasan Dian Tama in West Kalimantan where she had worked for two years. Did she think Volunteers in Asia should start sending volunteers there again? Definitely. Did she think that they would be interested in partnering with VIA for a service-learning program with Japanese university students? Hard to say.
I could see her physically decompressing as she smoked menthol cigarettes and drank an Indonesian lager and apologized for smoking—it was a nasty habit and she should quit, but the work could be pretty stressful, you know. Why had she left NGO work? To work on issues at a policy level, and it was important and necessary work even if you sometimes felt like you were ramming your head against a wall, and she would keep at it for a while longer, at least, and then who knows. We ordered more beer, I told her and Suranto something funny that had happened to me in Korea, and we all laughed. For the next hour, the three of us talked lightheartedly and joked about anything and everything that did not pertain to work, and we had a very nice time.
I WOKE UP early the next morning so I could walk around the neighborhood. It was pleasantly cool. People were invariably surprised and curious to see a Westerner in this part of town. It was a poor area, but not desperately poor. Indonesians from all the islands were continuing to pour into the Big Durian as rural work dried up. The result, as always, was the “mutual poisoning” about which E.F. Schumacher wrote so incisively. The countryside is drained of its talent and its vitality. The city is inundated with a mass of humanity that cripples its capacity to provide sufficient infrastructure and services. The results are seen in sad and listless villages and in cities that grow like cancers in the most hasty, brutal, and haphazard way.
It was early, but the streets were stirring. I turned a corner and came upon what seemed like a birdhouse condominium. There must have been forty or fifty individual cubbies neatly painted red or forest green. Inside were pigeons.
I rounded another bend. There was a grandmother cleaning her porch while her young grandchildren played in the street. The youngest wore a purple basketball tank top and sat on a toy horse. I motioned to my camera to gain Grandmother’s assent to take a photograph of the boy. She nodded with enthusiasm. From that point on, all of the requests for photographs were from Grandmother. I finally waved goodbye ten minutes and thirty photographs later.
Like many of the poorer areas surrounding the city, this neighborhood suffered from inadequate storm drains. When the big rains come, the houses flood. On this morning, however, the sun was ascending and with it the heat. Floods seemed a distant concern. The quiet hours of morning were giving way to a growing chorus of scooters and children on their way to school.
West Kalimantan
INDONESIA IS COMPRISED of over seventeen thousand islands. The second largest of these islands, after New Guinea, is Borneo. It is divided between the nations of Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The Indonesian portion of the island is known as Kalimantan, and the capital city of the province of West Kalimantan is Pontianak. I flew from Jakarta to Pontianak on Garuda Airlines on the second day of April.
I was met at the airport by Tambuk Bow. Tambuk worked for Yayasan Dian Tama, an indigenous non-governmental organization focusing on rural development and conservation in West Kalimantan. He was solid looking and quiet, with a dependable, practical air about him. He drove me into town in an old Jeep and stopped at the Hotel Garuda. It was more upscale than I would have chosen, but I did not want to question his recommendation. I unloaded my rucksack.
"See you at eight tomorrow morning," Tambuk said.
"See you at eight," I said.
I had some time to explore Pontianak, and I cannot say it had much charm. The streets were wide, and crossing them was a test of wits and agility. I stopped for a mango at a fruit stand. I did not have a knife. My eating of the mango was not artful, and I waited for the juice to dry and rubbed my hands together rapidly. Then I poured a little water on my palm and rubbed them again.
I found an Internet café run by an older Chinese man. I wondered how it felt to be an ethnic Chinese living in Pontianak. Indonesia had convulsed with anti-Chinese violence in 1998 in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Chinese Indonesians were scapegoated for the resulting unemployment and food shortages, and things got vicious. Some estimates have as many as fifteen hundred ethnic Chinese killed in that period. Pontianak had a large percentage of Chinese—almost ten percent of the population—and had seen its share of violence. There was nothing to suggest this unpleasant recent history in the scene at the Internet café.
I rented a computer for one hour. All around me were young teenage boys playing online video games, yelling back and forth to one another. In the corner an older boy was looking emotionlessly and unabashedly at pornography. I sat down and went about the slow work of typing emails on a foreign keyboard.
I TOOK AN early walk and then checked out of the hotel. I walked outside a few minutes before eight and found Tambuk waiting with the Jeep.
We stopped at Yayasan Dian Tama’s office on the outskirts of town. There were ten or so staff in the office, and they all seemed cheerful. A few asked me how Jeff was doing. Jeff was the last VIA volunteer to work with Dian Tama back in 2002-03. I had read his reports and spoken with him a few times by phone, but that was all I knew of Jeff. I assured them that he was working for a foundation in Chicago (fact) and that he was doing very well (speculation). Does he still play soccer? Jeff loved soccer. Remember how much Jeff loved soccer? The staff slipped into pleasant reminiscences of Jeff.
Tambuk Bow asked me if I wanted tea, and I said that I did. He brought it to me, and I sat down. An older gentleman who had been on the phone came to me and introduced himself as Pak Don, director of Yayasan Dian Tama. I stood and shook his hand. He was jovial-looking and round-faced.
"So, you are going to Toho?"
"Yes," I said.
"Toho is beautiful," he said. "Much better than Pontianak." He wiped his glasses on his shirt. "Much better than Pontianak!" Dian Tama is working so that villages like Toho can survive.
So much is changing, he said. The rice farmers start selling all of their crop to the cities and the middlemen and they become more and more dependent on the money economy. Growing rice, growing only rice, becomes the sole focus, all of these other things don’t get emphasized, and the communities start to deteriorate because people aren’t sharing as much and they’re buying a lot of the things they used to make for themselves.
As the farmers become vulnerable to the price swings of the market, they start trying to maximize their yield, and the land gets depleted and unproductive because it’s pushed too hard.
Pak Don paused. Explaining what was happening to the villages had removed some of the joviality from his face. He looked me in the eye and said: "We try to keep Toho strong so it can continue to stand on its own two feet."
Soon we were on the road. Joining Tambuk and me were two other Dian Tama staff. There was a quiet young man who sat with me in the back seat. And there was Lorenz, who was not at all quiet. Lorenz looked exactly like the actor Peter Lorre from the film Casablanca if Peter Lorre had been born Indonesian. He was affable and earnest. All along the drive, he pointed out anything that might be of interest to me. Every time he and Tambuk spoke together in Indonesian, Lorenz would turn around afterward and paraphrase what they had discussed.
We headed inland to the east. As soon as we exited Pontianak, the landscape was lush and beautiful. Around noon, we stopped for lunch at a small shop. There was just one table. We had rice and peanut cakes and the small, dried, silvery fish I liked. Afterward, Lorenz asked if I had tried such-and-such. He had mischief in his face. Tabuk laughed, and I knew I was in for some sort of cultural initiation. I said no, I had never tried such-and-such, but let’s have some. Tambuk rose and returned with four small, steaming cups. They smelled of hot, strong alcohol. The surface looked oily. Tambuk and Lorenz were smiling conspiratorially and looking at me with expectation. I took a big sip, and it was quite horrible and strong and salty. I grimaced. My three companions laughed and Lorenz patted me on the back.
"That will make you strong!" Tambuk said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"That’s a local specialty," Lorenz said. "Rice alcohol with pig fat."
I raised my glass and said here’s to the local specialty and finished my glass to impress them. There was more laughter and more pats on the back. We paid our bill and were back on the road.
The roads became narrower and were no longer paved. I began to understand why we were driving a Jeep. When we arrived at Dian Tama’s center just outside of Toho, everyone was ready to be out of the car.
It was beautiful and shaded. The sun was still high, and I imagine it was hot above the canopy, but it was very pleasant in the shade. There was a big wooden building up on stilts. The porch was so large that the building itself seemed to exist on behalf of the porch.
Four people were sitting on the porch, and they stood when we arrived and walked down to greet us. Two young men offered their hands and introduced themselves as Ronald and Tutey. They were biology students from the university in Pontianak, they said. The other two were young women, and the older of the two was genial and confident with sharp eyes. Her name was Amadu. The other woman was quite young, maybe in her teens. She stood back and Amadu introduced her as Mimin. She was from Toho and did not speak English.
Lorenz, Ronald, and Tutey, and I went on a walk while the others caught up on business over coffee on the porch. We stopped at a series of large outdoor kilns. Yayasan Dian Tama was experimenting with different types of wood ash and charcoal to use as supplemental fertilizer so that farmers would not be so dependent on chemical fertilizers. We continued past a communal pigpen for the village and then came to an office stacked high with pamphlets and posters—public health materials that Dian Tama distributed throughout the region.
We walked along a trail through the forest. Ronald pointed at a tree and asked me if I knew what it was, to which I replied no, I did not. He beckoned me closer and, squatting at the base, pointed to a stream of thick white sap flowing into a halved coconut shell.
"Rubber," he said, smiling.
I put my finger in the shell. Sure enough. Rubber.
We came upon a wooden lookout tower about seventy feet tall. We started to climb and were soon above the canopy. There were butterflies loping about as we sat on the simple platform. We sat very quietly for a very long time and watched the sun’s descent. I looked out over the marvelous sea of green foliage.
It was so peaceful and so lovely that it seemed impossible that logging of both the legal and illegal variety was eradicating landscapes such as this at a monstrous pace throughout Borneo. Furniture and chopsticks, I thought. What kind of trade off was that? Lovely, complex, unique, irreplaceable, resplendent ecosystem for furniture and chopsticks. Remaining habitat of world’s surviving orangutans and Malaysian sun bears in exchange for furniture and chopsticks. Sure, there were corrupt timber barons with political clout who were behind a lot of it. But there were also the farmers between a rock and a hard place, struggling to feed their families. And there were those who had been “transmigrated” during Suharto’s time and beforehand onto land that was unsuitable for agriculture. In these circumstances, who would not cut down an ironwood tree if it meant a year’s income and food on the table?
I gazed upon the canopy, marveling at and grieving the absurdity that economic “logic” and human appetites would swallow this place up, swallow it up and spit it out and leave in its place sad and barren stubble or a palm oil plantation.
I was heavy with these thoughts, and that evening I was quiet. After dinner Tutey played his guitar while the others sang along. I sat on the porch and listened. I turned in early and found my way inside the mosquito netting by flashlight. Such a beautiful place, I thought. What an absurd thing that we were going to destroy it.
THE MORNING WAS bright and cloudless. After breakfast, Lorenz and I rode into Toho to visit three or four local families. At each house, we came in and sat on the wood floor. Our hosts invariably brought us coffee, thick and black and sweet. Lorenz would make small talk and perhaps give them one of Yayasan Dian Tama’s public health posters. Then he would turn to me and say, with the large and earnest eyes of Peter Lorre: "Is there anything you’d like to ask our host?"
There was no one home at the second house, so we walked around back. Lorenz called out and there was a reply. We walked into the trees and down to a stream. Alongside was a man of about thirty. He was mixing rubber sap with some sort of acid to make latex. He mixed and churned and kneaded, and it looked as if he were making a huge loaf of bread. He and Lorenz were good friends, and we stayed a long while.
That evening, we visited the local government official. His was the only house we visited that day that had electricity. His wife served us tea instead of coffee. The television was on, and official portraiture covered the walls. I was tired. I think Lorenz was tired, too, and not much was translated. I took away the sense that the official was a good man with a challenging job that I did not envy, and that to be appointed to such a post in the interior of West Kalimantan was probably not the highest aspiration of a government bureaucrat.
I thought we were finished with visits, but we stopped by one more house. The coffee was brought out by candlelight. The farmer was thin and humble and very quiet. Even when Lorenz asked the farmer questions and the farmer answered it remained quiet. I cupped the glass of thick, sweet, muddy coffee in my hands. There was just the single lit candle illuminating the room. The dark seemed so tranquil and soft after the government official’s television and portraiture.
LORENZ WANTED TO take me to his home village. The next morning, we ate breakfast and said goodbye to everyone on the porch. I told Amadu that I would recommend to VIA that we send another volunteer to Toho. She was happy.
I slung my big blue rucksack onto my shoulders and climbed behind Lorenz on his motor scooter. I held tightly to the handles beneath the seat as we sped off.
Soon, we were in a broad valley full of brilliant green rice fields. We stopped, and Lorenz spoke with an ancient, sun-worn farmer that he knew. The farmer had a small handful of remaining teeth and a ready, cavernous smile. I took his photo and shook his hand.
We continued through the next village. The women were all out in front of the houses, threshing the previous season’s rice on great tarps and blankets. The atmosphere was almost festive.
My arms were starting to tire from the jostling of the bike on the uneven road. It was so beautiful, and the wind on my face was so exhilarating, that I did not mind the discomfort. Before long, we arrived at Lorenz’s home village. It was a Dayak village.
The Dayak people are indigenous to Borneo. Since the time of the colonial Dutch, transmigration programs have encouraged Javanese and others to settle in Borneo, much to the chagrin of the Dayak. Most Dayak are Christian, another occasional sticking point between them and the predominantly Muslim Javanese.
We parked the bike, and a crowd immediately formed around us. Everyone was happy to see Lorenz.
"This is my cousin-brother," Lorenz said, smiling. He had his arm around one of the throng. "And this is my other cousin-brother." He put his other arm around the second cousin-brother.
There were some moments of involved conversation with the first cousin-brother. At length, Lorenz turned to me with excited eyes and a wide smile.
"There will be a wedding! Tonight you can attend a Dayak wedding!"
We walked up a hill and into the village. This was no ordinary village. On the left side of the road were small, individual houses. On the right side was one enormously long structure. It was wooden and built on stilts seven or eight feet above the level of the road. It must have been four hundred feet long. I later found out that such buildings are the traditional dwellings of the Dayak people in that part of Borneo, and that they are called longhouses. As far as names go, longhouse is exceedingly accurate, if not very creative.
Everyone knew Lorenz and most everyone was Lorenz’s cousin-brother. We ascended the steps of the longhouse to the big porch that ran the entire length of the building. It was almost dusk and it appeared to be social hour. Children played with large wooden tops that they spun expertly with lengths of string. A group of three old-timers were sitting atop a table and chatting. We joined them. Had they grown up in the longhouse? I asked through Lorenz. "Yes," the most talkative one said. They had been friends for eighty years. "Don’t exaggerate," another said. "Only seventy-eight years!" He laughed a great and toothless laugh.
The old-timers were wonderfully entertaining, and it was dark by the time we left them to find Lorenz’s grandmother’s home in the longhouse. She was heating water over a wood fire. She served us some coffee and food, but Lorenz cautioned me not to eat too much—there would be plenty of food at the weddings. While we were talking with the old-timers, we had been invited to two more weddings. I did some quick math and marveled that in a village of five hundred people, 1.2 percent of the population happened to be getting married on the night of my visitation.
We only made it to one of the ceremonies, but managed to hit all three receptions. At the third reception, the bride and groom sat rather quietly and formally in chairs at the middle of the room. Friends and family sat on the floor against the wall all around the room. Rice cakes and fruit were passed around, and the woman next to me told me the name of each item slowly two times and smiled at me. When we left the third reception, the bride and groom stood and nodded at me. The groom said "Thank you," in English. For my part, I said Terimah kasih and wished them well through Lorenz, who had been disentangling himself from conversation with several cousin-brothers. The new couple sat down again, and the talking and circulation of rice cakes continued unabated.
I DO NOT know who the Dayak equivalent of Montezuma might have been, but the next morning I was the target of his vengeance. I might have found more humor in the situation if I had not known that a bumpy two-hour trek on the back of a motor scooter awaited me that afternoon.
We spent the morning with Lorenz’s parents and siblings. I sat on the porch and found myself entertained by a trio of adolescent wild pigs that had selected the front yard as the site of a battle royal. With little yips and great seriousness of purpose, they charged at and bounced off one another.
By some act of divine intervention, my stomach woes subsided for the duration of the ride to Pontianak. Lorenz and I, shouting to one another above the wind and the drone of the motor, discussed programming ideas. Mostly we were silent. As we neared the coast, the sky became gray and a light drizzle began to fall. I was sad to be leaving this vibrant little part of the world so little changed by modernity. All too soon, we were back on the impatient streets of Pontianak. We pulled up to the Hotel Garuda. I thanked Lorenz for all he had done and all he had shared with me. I waved as he drove off. I checked into my room and suddenly realized that it felt very nice to be alone.
Bali
THE NEXT MORNING, I flew from Pontianak to Denpasar on the island of Bali. I took a taxi to Ubud. Ubud is a beautiful place, the taxi driver assured me. You must see the monkey forest, he said. I liked him immediately, and we talked for the entirety of the hour-long drive.
I found a cheap hotel just off of Monkey Forest Road and took a walk. I was surprised by the sheer volume of tourists. Signs in front of the art shops were in English, German, and Japanese. Most shops had small and beautiful offerings of incense and flowers by their entrance, evidently a manifestation of Balinese Hinduism. I bought some postcards with frogs and birds and rice fields on them, and settled in to write at an open-air restaurant on the main street.
I ordered a twenty-two ounce bottle of Bintang lager, the first alcohol I had imbibed since the local specialty on the road to Toho. The beer benefited from the comparison, and it was refreshing to drink a cold beer in the heat of the afternoon. I was quite absorbed in the writing of postcards, and when, at length, I finished, I looked up and noticed the restaurant was empty.
"Would you like another beer?" The waitress cleared my empty bottle.
"Why not?" I said.
I was feeling very content from the beer and from my thoughts having been with loved ones for the past hour. The waitress brought another Bintang and filled my glass.
"Are you from Ubud?" I asked. I had that inclination towards conversation that I sometimes get after writing.
"No," she said. "I’m from a village about thirty minutes from here by motorbike. I came here two years ago to study tourism and earn some money."
A Japanese couple entered the restaurant. She seated them and returned to my table.
"Do most young people leave the villages?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "Most of them want to leave as soon as they get a motorbike. Or they leave so they can make money to buy a motorbike." She had a very soft and pleasant way about her.
"Do you miss the village?" I asked.
"Oh yes. I go there on my holidays. My parents live in the village. It is very beautiful. But there are no jobs, unless you want to be a farmer. But farming is hard work, and it doesn’t make much money. Most young people would rather work in tourism and ride a motorbike."
"What about the dances? Do people still do the traditional dances?" I asked.
"Oh yes. My brother does the dancing. He is very good. Do you know about the dances? You should see them before you go. But the ones in the hotels are not so good. You should see the dances, but do not see the ones in the hotels."
I sat for some time and watched the steady flow of people walking up and down the street. I paid at the register, and the young man there struck up conversation. I asked him where I could go for a nice walk in the countryside, and he said just go north on Monkey Forest Road and you will go up a hill—it’s very nice to walk there. He said his name was Wayan. In my head, I was very amused, but I did not let on. In my three hours in Ubud, I had already seen four or five shop signs that heralded “Wayan” as the proprietor. Wayan’s Locksmith, Wayan’s Souvenirs, and so forth. Must be a family name, I thought. I imagined Keenan Ivory Wayans and Damon, Marlon, Sean, Kim and all the other Wayans siblings from the early nineties comedy show In Living Color feeling right at home here and wasn’t it funny that Borneo was full of cousin-brothers and Bali was full of Wayans? That is when I knew that the two bottles of Bintang were having an effect. "Thank you, Wayan," I said. "Have a nice evening."
I ASKED ONE of the innumerable “transport men” with motorbikes on the street where the post office was.
"Very far," he said. "Half-hour walk." I will give you a ride.
It was a small town and I doubted that anything was a half-hour walk. So I said no, thank you, I would take the walk. It took me eight minutes to get to the post office.
In the big field at the center of town, a soccer game was in full swing. I sat down to watch atop a concrete wall behind one of the goal posts. It was an exciting game, and this supported my theorem that an inverse relationship exists between the enjoyment one experiences in watching soccer and the amount of money that the players are paid.
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail Bird over dinner and took on some of his attitudes, detachment, and bemusement for the remainder of the evening. As such, I came across a bar that was all open sky and white paint on plaster like some transplant from the Greek isles. It was buzzing inside and out, so I took my bemused detachment, found a seat at the bar, and ordered a Bintang.
The bartender had handsome Balinese features and wore a white collared shirt. The clientele were nearly all Westerners and dressed very smartly.
Busy night, I said. Is it always like this?
He shook his head. "Tonight is the first night. Just opened tonight."
That explained the buzz and the smart dress, I thought.
"Who is the owner?" I asked.
He pointed to a couple—both blond, both dressed in white—that was putting on an impressive display of social multitasking.
From Netherlands, he said. Lived in Ubud eight years.
All the while it was getting more and more crowded, and my bartender friend was mixing drinks at an amazing clip while somehow carrying on our conversation. I was duly impressed.
I pulled out my journal and soon lost myself in writing, the chatter around me becoming white noise. Here I was in Bali, a model of success in terms of economic growth and harnessing tourism. The Balinese formula had been applied, would be applied, and was being applied wherever there were pleasant beaches and charming local color to attract foreigners and foreign money. Beach resorts would replace fishing huts and vast swaths of mangroves, especially now that Mother Nature had intervened with a tsunami that had given developers tabula rasa and governments an excuse to tell their own citizens it was too dangerous to build anything near the beaches—too dangerous to build anything except, of course, resorts. Money would flow in, and so would tourists, and the sons and daughters of fishermen and rice farmers would leave home to work in hotels and bars and ride motorbikes. The relentless logic of tourism would mine everything—culture, art, natural beauty—and find ways to package and commoditize it all. What you ended up with was a sort of Disneyland where everyone took on the role of either a cast member or a paying guest. There would be self-defeating efforts to offer “authentic” experiences that would become tragic parodies in short order, simply because authenticity defies this sort of reproduction. I stopped writing for a minute and looked around, not really looking, tapping my pen against the bar trying to remember something Alan Watts had said about all of this and—oh yes—I had written it down. It went like this:
"Our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content. The explanation is simple: most of our products were made by people who did not enjoy making them."
So, what was the answer? Good lord, what was the answer to all of this? The world was getting small fast whether you liked it or not, and the global economy was this huge wave not unlike December’s tsunami. It was crashing down on the Tohos and the cousin-brothers of the world and smashing them to smithereens before bringing them into the undertow and ultimately incorporating them into the wave itself.
The question fueling the process was not what is best for people and planet in a long-term and holistic way. The question was: what is the competitive advantage of this particular place, and how can that advantage be leveraged and maximized for a juicy short-term gain? What a crazy question we were trying to answer in living out our lives! Yet, this insanity was all but orthodoxy. Of course I saw it in myself—I had been marinating in it for twenty-six years. I saw it in industrial agriculture, and the results were appalling and sad and obvious enough. But oh! what blindness comes with the profits and productivity and power. How blind and impervious we have become to negative feedback! Isn’t this the part of the human condition that Sophocles was warning us about all those years ago through the character of Oedipus? This blindness and imperviousness to feedback? Was it really necessary to enact a Greek tragedy on a global scale? Did we have to destroy ourselves, our planet, and our heritage to be shaken of our illusions?
That was getting a bit inflated, perhaps. That was the ol’ mind racing from the micro to the macro without paying heed to traffic signals. I closed my journal and reentered the surroundings. The bartender was displaying his virtuosity, flipping tumblers, spinning glasses, and pouring liquor from impossible heights. He was playing for the crowd, and the crowd loved it, except for one German to my right. She wanted a drink, not theatrics.
The show stopped, and the German woman placed her order in a voice of exasperation. When the bartender did not understand, she repeated herself, slowly and imperiously, as if she were addressing a naughty six year-old. It was an ugly scene, more so for all of the cultural and historical baggage it lugged along with it. The woman got her drinks, and their arrival seemed to diffuse some of the tension. The bartender was a trifle crestfallen, and there were no more virtuosic displays forthcoming. Things started to slow down, and he and I got back into conversation—about surfing, I think. Soon, the unpleasant scene was in the rearview mirror and forgotten about, except for in the deep places where such things live inside of us.
