Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
A little-visited village illuminates the fabled island's mundane treasures.
Apr 19, 2000 | Deplaning at Denpasar Airport in Bali, Indonesia, with a battered suitcase and in torn, bedraggled jeans, I must have appeared badly in need of help. Five solicitous tourist guides converged as one, offering aid -- mainly in the form of inexpensive sightseeing tours to the familiar tourist haunts of Ubud, Mas and Tjeluk, where paintings, woodcarvings and jewelry await spenders big and small.
To one of the more persistent guides, I explained that I was "in search of the real Bali." His knowing smile indicated he had heard that one often enough.
But several days later he must have decided my interest was genuine and my capacity to rough it hardy enough. He sought me out at my hotel and asked if I would like to accompany him on a visit to his family's village on the island's south coast, about 40 miles from Denpasar. He warned me that it was not easily accessible and was inhabited entirely by his relatives.
The following morning at the Denpasar "bus terminal" -- a traffic jam in the middle of an empty lot -- Sudjana and I, surrounded by 40 other passengers, squeezed aboard a little ramshackle coach. We jammed in seven across on rows of wooden benches. This included one person on each row perched on a footstool crammed into the aisle. When the two barefoot conductors finished stowing the last of the bunches of bananas, bundles of batik, cages of fighting cocks and passengers' bicycles onto the roof, someone shouted, "Ajuk djalen!" ("Hit the road!"), and the bus rattled off.
We headed for the town of Tabanan in the central highlands below Bali's volcanic mountain range, passing indelibly green expanses of rice fields and forests of bamboo, banyan and betel palm. Roadside ditches were thronged with naked romping children and bare-breasted women scrubbing piles of laundry. All along the route of our "banana run," passengers and their rooftop cargo flowed in and out in a noisy scrambling at dozens of stops. Only Sudjana and I sat fast, finally reaching Tabanan, an interminable hour later.
From the lady fruit hawkers in the town square, we learned that our connecting bus had already left and the next one was due in four hours. The women provided further cheery news that the road ahead was open only as far as the next town. Sudjana left me to sample the local jackfruit and mangosteens while he went off in search of alternate transport.
He returned with a jeep and driver whose toothy grin spread even wider when he realized I was too impatient for lengthy bargaining over the fare. Price agreed on, we climbed aboard and continued our journey.
Luckily the jeep had a canvas top that saved me a number of times from being launched skyward as we bounced along the craters and cobble-strewn remnants of the washed-out or, should I say, washed-up road. I wondered how much worse the closed road ahead could be if this one was still considered navigable.
At the next town, Kerambitan, a road barrier of bamboo stakes plus the district officer, with whom Sudjana conferred on the steps of the police station, confirmed that the only way of proceeding farther was on foot.
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