'Cat Tracks: The Road to Bali ... Sensory Overload ... and Lunch With Made....

Reception Area, Four Seaons Jimbaran Bay, Bali 2004I

In 1952, when I was six years old, I saw the movie The Road to Bali, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, the sixth of their seven Road pictures. It was wonderfully funny, in the style of the times, employing puns and parody, singing and slapstick, thoroughly entertaining the audience. I watched the film at the old Palace Theater, a place inextricably entwined with good memories of Childress and childhood, and felt an immediate "pull" toward Bali and the beginnings of a lifelong conviction that one day, some day, I had to go there. Fifty-two years later, I did. And it was everything ... and so much more ... than I had dreamed.

In October 2004 we left San Francisco on an overnight flight to Hong Kong, where we spent six nights before flying on to Bali. After landing at Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar, we were met by a car sent by our hotel, the Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay. Fortified with cold water and chilled face cloths, we settled in to observe this new place, fascinated and utterly charmed by the sometimes incongruous but delightful blending of East and West.

After registering in the lobby, open to the air on all sides and appearing magically suspended between earth and sky, we were assigned our own small villa, the standard Four Seasons Jimbaran accommodation. It was an enclosed compound with high walls, entered through an outer wooden gate painted in colorful Balinese style, leading to a courtyard, an open-air sitting pavilion (where we took most of our meals at the hotel), a picturesque terrace and a bungalow containing sleeping and bathroom facilities. Our villa overlooked the beach and the bay, and we loved the private plunge pool, whimsically accented by a Balinese stonework representation of a frog spitting water into the pool. (Despite how it may sound, it was serenely beautiful.) A luxurious bath had been drawn while we were checking in, the tub filled with floating pink and white frangipani. Just outside the dressing area there was an outdoor shower protected from view, surrounded by vines and flowers, and we enjoyed it a la Balinese (meaning au natural) every morning we were there.

Villa plunge pool overlooking Jimbaran Beach and Bay, Bali 2004

We spent the rest of that day walking the lush grounds of the property, imbibing to sensory intoxication the almost unreal beauty, growing comfortable with the intense feeling of spirituality which permeates the island's atmosphere. In our bungalow that evening, while looking through the hotel's information booklet, we learned that all of the landscaping and selection and placing of the stone representations of Balinese gods and animals had been the inspiration of a "gone native" Australian originally named Michael White, now a citizen of Bali known as Made Wijaya (MAH-day WEE-ji-ah).

White had been an architecture student in the summer of 1973, crewing on yacht sailing the fabled South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. When the yacht called at Bali, White was so charmed by the place that he literally jumped ship, swam ashore and found an Indonesian family who would shelter him and teach him the language in return for his giving English and tennis lessons to their children. We commented on what an interesting fellow he must be, and then fell asleep with the waxing moon outside our French doors marking a shimmering, ghostly path across the bay to the lights of Denpasar.



Tanah Lot at low tide, Bali 2004

Just before dawn the next morning, our driver Sundara (who would be with us throughout the trip, and with whom we had many conversations about Balinese lore and religion) was waiting to take us to Sanur, where we watched the sun rise in shades of pink and cerulean and gold over a a breakfast picnic (including mimosas) on the beach. Later we spent time at Nusa Dua, totally mesmerized by the crystal clear turquoise waters, lulled into somnolence by the sussurous lapping of small waves upon the white sand. Then we drove to Tanah Lot temple, watching as the temple, glowing spectrally and backlit by the setting sun, was totally cut off from land at high tide.


Yahn and Friends at Tanah Lot

On the morning of our third day, I set out for whitewater rafting on the gorgeous Ayung River. Yahn had chosen to pass on this particular adventure since there was (according to the hotel) a slight walk into and out of the river gorge. So, leaving Yahn and the driver, and outfitted with crash helmet (!) and paddle, I set off with the group. The "slight walk" turned out to be (seriously!) 600 steps down ... steep steps in some places. About halfway on the descent to the river, I began having second thoughts and asked our guide just how much farther it was to the pontoon boats. He assured me it was only a few more steps ... which is accurate, I suppose, if one counts a few as a few hundred. The trip on the River itself was spectacular, under the canopy of the luxuriant tropical rain forest, running the entire spectrum of shades of green and interspersed with bursts of brightly hued tropical flowers ... wild orchids, birds of paradise, roses, jasmine, marigolds, lotus, hibiscus, torch ginger....

At the end of the river run, I disembarked the raft and looked up with a sinking (!) feeling as I contemplated the 600 looooong steps that would take me back to Yahn and Sundara. Still, with no choice other than taking up residence under one of the massive banyan trees, which the Balinese believe represent immortality, I set out and eventually found myself back at my starting point. By the time we returned to our hotel, I was almost immobilized, the muscles in my legs knotted and swelling. The staff was most solicitous, and so sweetly apologetic that they had not told us just how difficult the climb might be. We had not been in our villa for more than an hour when the hotel manager dispatched a skilled masseur with healing oils, along with a bottle of champagne and a huge assortment of hors d'oeuvres, all gratis ... such a thoughtful and much appreciated gesture.

The next day we stayed on the grounds of the hotel, basking in the sun and enjoying the hydrotherapy of the plunge pool. We had dinner at sunset on a promontory overlooking the water and the half moon necklace of flickering lights outlining the contours of the bay, with gamelan musicians playing in the background and flaming torches punctuating the spaces between carelessly scattered diamonds in an indigo velvet sky.



View from the terrace, Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay, Bali 2004

Sundara came for us the following morning and we drove to Ubud, the thriving, vibrant artists' colony in the interior of the island. The route took us through terraced green rice paddies attended by workers in conical straw hats, lending an ancient patina to the surreal landscape. At one point, we saw one of the rice workers, stripped to the skin (really ... all of his skin), cooling himself by pouring buckets of water over his head down the length of his body. He was a gorgeous man, a living bronze sculpture, totally unaffected and unselfconscious in his nudity ... and it was one of the most beautiful, natural sights I have ever seen. We reached for the camera, but the moment was already past. On reflection I believe that was just as well, because it would have been invasive and almost indecent to have captured him in such an unguarded moment. Some things are so intimate, even without intended intimacy, that the mind is the only appropriate keep for their repose.

In Ubud, we toured an art school, and Yahn enjoyed talking with and observing the students and instructors. Later, we bought an intricate wood carving done by Master Carver Sudana. (See Garuda..., published in the Short Notes linked blog on April 20, 2008.) Returning to the hotel that afternoon, we spotted a shop identified as Made Wijaya's gallery, and Yahn asked Sundara to stop the car. Yahn went into the shop and after several minutes returned, accompanied by a stunning Javanese man who formally extended an invitation to us to have lunch with Made the next day. As Yahn explained when we drove away, he had asked the Javanese if there was any possibility that Made might be in the gallery at some time during our stay so that we could meet him ... whereupon the Javanese picked up the phone and placed a call, spoke for a bit in Balinese, and then handed the phone to Yahn ... who found himself speaking directly with Made about art and aesthetics, leading to the invitation.

At noon on the next day, we arrived at Made's compound and were helped from the car by armed guards who escorted us inside the walls. In addition to his living quarters, the compound contains Made's several businesses and work space for his proteges and affiliated artists. Not surprisingly, Made has many wonderful stories to tell of his life and interests ... and we were thoroughly enchanted during the leisurely lunch of Ayam Bali (Balinese chicken) with rice, finished with homemade coconut ice cream. At Made's urging, we made immediate plans to attend the twice-yearly Full Moon Ceremony that evening. It is worth noting that unlike the rest of Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, the people of Bali (including Made, since taking residence) are mostly Hindu, with large dollops of ancient Balinese animism, which attributes souls and sentience to animals, plants and other entities.

That Full Moon Ceremony ... Purnama ... is an extraordinarily soulful and significant festival for the Balinese. Among its rituals and beliefs it is thought that bathing in water perfumed by frangipani flowers under the light of the full moon will wash away your sins, with the bonus of guaranteeing that you will remain physically attractive for another year. Purnama is also considered an auspicious day for planting to secure a good harvest.

The celebration proved to be one of our most unforgettable experiences ever ... singing, chanting, graceful and sometimes startlingly animated dancing, all performed by the almost generically beautiful Balinese ... the languid gesture of a finger, the delicate point of a toe, the quizzical but promising lift of an eyebrow and a flaring of the eyes, astonishing grimaces sliding into Mona Lisa smiles, displaying a range of emotion from seething outrage to cool serenity ... all illuminated and accentuated by the glow of torches, fires and the huge full moon ... exotic music, fragrant incense carried on the breeze, the offerings of flowers and fruit and water to Bali's gods.... We felt absolutely wrapped in sheer sensation through each successive performance and obeisance, full of wonder and tenable knowledge of our connection to the universe.

The ceremonies went on into the night, and later we sat up for a long time talking quietly about the things we had seen and felt. It was, simply, one of the most incredible, moving, deeply spiritual experiences of my life ... and if it did not inspire new beliefs from those I had already begun to hold, it did crystallize with almost Damascene clarity a vision of this world and worlds to come ... the perfect embodiment of an ancient dream manifest in living dreamscape.

I've said many times on the blog that I've been privileged and blessed ... fortunately I have also been determined, for sometimes we must be the authors of our own blessings ... to have seen many beautiful places in this world, to have had the opportunity to observe and come to know many diverse people ... but without a doubt, the most lovely, supernaturally gorgeous and quintessentially otherwordly place I have seen in this lifetime is Bali. It is truly deserving of the appellation "heaven on earth" ... and perhaps a "Preview of Coming Attractions"?

Sitting pavilion, villa at Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay, Bali 2004

)O(

Catastrophes ... Clarity ... and Joss....

Chiara Smith, Amber Johnston, Zheng Mei and Yahn Smith, Forbidden City, Beijing, China June 1986

This week has been a microcosm of life itself ... up, down, good, bad ... fortunately nothing personally catastrophic for me ... and yet news from around the world leads me to reflect on the nature of fortune ... luck ... in a world where good planning and good intentions don't always ensure success. The terrible cyclone in Myanmar, the (literal) upheaval and unsparing destruction of thousands of lives in the earthquake in China, the tornadoes in the mid-section of the United States ... swift, dreadful things that suddenly end time and hope, brutally truncating what might once have been "the remainder of days" for people who imagined and planned for a future that didn't exist. I cannot help but think of how quickly, how irrevocably things can change ... not only in such huge calamities, but within the slender space of a heart-stopping moment, in the proverbial blink of an eye ... outside our power to change or ameliorate. Again, I find myself feeling grateful to the universe for the time and the times I have been given, for all the "good days" and for so much luck in my life....

I have felt the eerie, frightening power of an earthquake. The first time was in Denver, before I married Yahn. I woke up one morning, stretching slowly and sleepily, contemplating the day ahead ... and then without warning my bed (and the house around it) began to sway, then rock.... My first thought was an approximation of "What'na hell?" ... followed almost immediately by the certain, sobering knowledge of what was in fact happening. As I sat there, somewhat desperately and uselessly gripping the sides of my bed, I had a vivid mental picture of the house splitting in two, with me and the bed plunging from the second story to the concrete floor of the basement. Almost as quickly as they had begun, the temblors ceased ... but those were among the longest seconds of my life, still vividly recalled more than 40 years later.

I was in another earthquake, along with Yahn and our daughter Chiara and our niece Amber, at Lake Hakone in Japan in 1986, on our first trip to Asia. We had earlier seen the Great Buddha at Kamakura (a dream of mine since the age of nine) and had stopped for lunch at a little inn with a breathtaking view of serene Japanese gardens and the lake and Mt. Fujiyama in the distance. We had just been served when a large group of tourists was ushered into the dining room ... and the floor began to undulate nauseatingly. My first, confused notion was that there were so many "tourists" (not us! ... grin) in the group that they were causing the floor to buckle ... then again, on the heels of the first thought, I recognized the shaking for what it was ... an earthquake ... and we all looked at each other, flashing silent questions of "What do we do?" "Where do we go?" Yahn told me later that he was on the verge of picking up a chair and throwing it through a window to try to get us outside before the building collapsed, but just then ... the quake stopped, almost perfunctorily. It started, then it stopped. It was over.

After lunch, we continued our sightseeing in the area as if nothing untoward had happened ... still, when we caught the bullet train to return to Tokyo, I could not avoid some grim speculation about what might happen if there were another earthquake, or severe aftershocks, while we were on the high-speed train. I wasn't particularly frightened by the prospect ... my thoughts were more just curious ruminations about the possibility of having to escape (if we could escape) from twisted, smoldering metal if the train derailed. But then I was distracted by a group of Japanese schoolboys who were absolutely fascinated by Chiara's blond hair. They massed around her, pointing their cameras, wanting to take her photo. She looked at us uncertainly and said "What should I do?" I told her to strike a pose, grinning as I said, "They think you're Christie Brinkley." We got, and still get, a laugh out of that ... with Chiara's children loving the story of their mother's 15 minutes of "fame". And life went on....



Yahn, Chiara and Amber visiting the Great Buddha at Kamakura, Japan June 1986

For some reason, I've never been prone to panic in potentially hazardous situations. I remember a particularly bad car wreck in 1973, when I had to be cut out of the car, and being perfectly cognizant and calm ... albeit somehow detached, like I was floating above the scene ... while observing everything that transpired. Perhaps I've been fortunate that none of the "close calls" I've experienced actually rose to the level of "catastrophe". Or perhaps I have a fatalistic bent ... or at the very least, some innate sense that in some situations, I have little or no control over what will happen ... and panic is likely counter-productive.

Perhaps growing up in Tornado Alley, watching dark, black-bordered green clouds for signs of "wispy tails" stoked a respect for the power of Nature and other uncontrollable occurrences. I've been near (very near) where tornadoes touched down ... in Childress County and in Dallas and Houston certainly, once in Denver where I watched from a high rise office building as a tornado connected with earth and tore up Colorado Boulevard, only a few blocks away ... and once in Vernon, in 1983, traveling from Houston back to Denver. On that occasion, Yahn and I had just cleared Wichita Falls when we saw the dark, roiling skies ahead and knew we were in for something violent and potentially dangerous. As we were coming into Vernon, rain and wind and hail hit with a vengeance, buffeting our little car and rocking it from side to side. We talked briefly about whether we should forge ahead to Childress, but decided it might be prudent to stop and eat dinner there and wait out the storm indoors, so we selected a pizza place just off the highway ... a little A-frame building that we had passed many times when it had been home to various other restaurants.

Just as we entered the small haven, to use an old but totally descriptive line, all hell broke loose. The wind began furiously whipping the rain and hail against the windows, sending electrical lines into collision and throwing showers of sparks into the parking lot ... an amazing, literally electrifying sight ... so close. We sat down at a table and just after the waitress took our order, the owner came to tell us that he had heard on the radio that there was a tornado on the ground close by, and that we should watch him carefully over the next minutes. If a tornado was indeed headed for us, he would wave and we should then run to the back of the restaurant and go with him and his employees into the large freezer at the back, which he felt would protect us.

And so we watched him, but there was no signal. Just as the waitress delivered our pizza, we heard a tremendous roaring and a rumble ... followed immediately by the half of the A-frame roof on the other side of us peeling back and flying away in huge pieces. Within two feet of us, the rain was now pouring into what had been the other half of the restaurant, while we sat open-mouthed but dry in our booth. After sitting in stunned silence for what seemed like several minutes, we got up and walked toward the front of the restaurant ... where we saw the owner shaking his head, looking absolutely stricken and apparently incapable of speech. He motioned with his hand ... and then we saw that the freezer he had thought to use as refuge had been totally ripped from the restaurant, our putative safe haven utterly destroyed ... as we would have been, had we sought shelter there. And then quickly ... so quickly, like turning off a faucet ... the rain and hail and wind stopped, the setting sun cast a rosy, benevolent glow over everything ... and we saw our little car, sitting there in the parking lot as we had left it, totally undisturbed, not even pocked by the hailstones.

We sat down again to collect ourselves in the dry half of the restaurant, and ate some of the pizza mechanically (our appetites were pretty much gone by then) ... although I recall that it seemed at the time to be the best pizza I had ever eaten ... and then we left to try to make Childress before dark. All along the road from Vernon to Quanah, there were semi-trucks and cars overturned, and people standing around looking dazed. We would have stopped to see if we could help anyone, but the police and emergency workers were waving everyone through, not wanting those who were clearly all right to add to the confusion by stopping and milling about. We could not help but note that had we not stopped when we did, we would have been on that stretch of road when the storm hit. From Quanah on into Childress, there was no indication that there had been a storm of any kind ... no melting swaths of hail along the roadside, no rain puddles, no trees or limbs or trucks down ... just the peaceful, flat red-dirt countryside of that part of the Texas Panhandle.



Yahn, Chiara and Amber at Beijing Airport, June 1986


During the 20 years we lived in Houston, we experienced several tropical storms, and a couple of minor hurricanes, but nothing like the "big one" that climatologists and meteorologists have said is long overdue for the Houston area. I shudder to think what will happen when that occurs. The neighborhood we lived in, Montrose, close to downtown and higher in elevation than some parts of the city, had never flooded during storms as did many other parts of Harris County ... until Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001, which parked itself over Houston for days, causing terrible flooding, floating semis like toy trucks on the interstates, leaving 30,000 homeless and killing some 23 people in Texas ... including one woman who bizarrely drowned in an elevator as she attempted to enter the underground parking lot of her downtown office building to reach her car and get home to safety. On the worst night of the storm, when we did get about 3-4 inches of water in our living room, Yahn looked out the front windows and saw two guys going down the street in a canoe. But we were lucky ... a lot of people weren't.

I've never entertained the theory that I've been spared catastrophe for any reason other than luck ... "joss" as it's sometimes called in Asia. I have never thought that I am somehow more worthy of saving grace than that poor woman in the elevator, or the family just down the street whose house collapsed in the heavy rain and flooding.... "Stuff" happens ... without reason, without preamble, without appeal. Sometimes we are given warning ... sometimes not.

In the face of such uncertainties, we continue to dream our dreams, and construct our realities. If we are inclined to introspection and metaphysics, we often silently acknowledge that realities are frequently born ... and borne ... in dreams. If we seek to know and understand, we question the dream within the dream, examine the wheels within wheels, and contemplate the meaning and the trajectory of our lives in this world and the next. We comprehend that luck is a gift ... or karma ... but not a judgment....

This week has added light and shadow to the larger mosaic of my life; its chiaroscuro brings clarity to my mind, peace to my soul and serenity to my heart. And life is good....




Chiara and Amber at Jumbo floating restaurant, Aberdeen Harbor, Hong Kong, June 1986

May you have long life ... a questing mind ... and good joss....

)O(