The Hippie Trail Saga: 13: Magic and Mystique in Bali
TRAVELS IN MY DISCOMFORT ZONE
Chak ke-chak ke-chak ke-chak! Chak ke-chak ke-chak ke-chak! Chiiaat! Chiiaat!
Bali’s monkey-chant dance is rap music at its primitive finest. “Tari kecak” brings to life the ancient drama of the Hindu Ramayana epic in a trance ritual featuring more than 100 bare-chested men, clad only in sarongs. Seated in concentric circles around a coconut-oil lamp, hands and arms raised above their heads, they sway hypnotically while chanting like frenzied apes — Chak ke-chak ke-chak ke-chak! — then intensify their rhythmic movements and voices throughout an hour-long performance.
Some of the dancers, I was told, were in a stupor. That wouldn’t have surprised me; Bali’s fabled magic mushrooms (best eaten at sunrise in omelets, I was told) can do that to a person. I only knew that I was instantly en-tranced merely by my presence here. And therein began my lifetime love affair with Southeast Asia.
I had been in Third World Asia for barely 24 hours before I responded to the percussive strains of a traditional gamelan ensemble. I followed the music to a small temple in the seaside village of Kuta Beach. The sun was just setting as the bonang player put his mallets aside and the dalang, a central figure as narrator of the drama to come, took his place.
The simian murmurs began softly, almost unrecognizably so, but slowly grew to a crescendo. A nearby attendee explained to me that the “dancers” were vanaras in the service of the virtuous Prince Rama and led by the famous monkey general, Hanuman. As their tempo and volume increased, they would soon become crucial to the story.
“It’s not my first rodeo,” she chuckled, as she explained more: Rama and his bride, Sita, were wandering in the jungle when Sita saw a golden deer and asked Rama to bring it to her. In fact, it was a rakshasa, a demon, that had taken this enticing form to separate the couple — allowing Sita to be kidnapped by the evil King Ravana. After a long ordeal, during which Ravana attempts to subdue Hanuman with fire, Rama comes to Sita’s rescue and vanquishes the demon leader.
Without Hanuman, Rama never could have defeated Ravana. And without the blessing of a Balinese Hindu priest, the great ape probably would have succumbed to flames. At least to the Balinese people, the priest’s blessing was very real, transporting the Hanuman dancer into a dream state. He emerged unscathed and, it would seem, free of pain from his immersive fire dance. Walking on a bed of coals would have been nothing compared to what I saw, or perhaps thought I saw.
Embracing spirits
That Bali is a Hindu island in a sea of Islam was not lost on me. It was evident from the first afternoon I arrived at the Denpasar International Airport from Darwin and bundled myself into a crowded bemo (shared taxi). I was dropped at a Kuta Beach losmen (guest house) that a young airport tout promised me was owned by his family. They were animist Hindus, as are most others in Bali.
More Muslims live in Indonesia than in any other country, including those of North Africa and the Arab world. The Quran came late to this 17,500-island archipelago, which extends over 3,100 miles west to east from the Indian Ocean to the island of New Guinea. Traders and merchants didn’t establish the first foothold until the 13th century, more than 600 years after the prophet Muhammad revealed his sacred truths. But as early as 1400, the Hindu-Buddhist Mahajapit Empire had begun to collapse. (Its great ancient monuments of Prambanan and Borobudur remain standing in Java today.) By the 16th century, Islam was entrenched in what became known to Europeans as the East Indies. Today Muslims number more than 240 million.
Bali, removed from the main trade routes, became a refuge for Hindu royalty fleeing conversion to Islam. Today 85 percent of the island’s population of 4 million professes to Balinese Hinduism — celebrating the Hindu trinity of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, showing reverence to the Buddha and bodhisattvas, and embracing the spirit world through traditional animism and ancestor worship.
The losmen was fine. It was simple but clean and comfortable, with spirit shrines inside and out, a Boy Scout-style DIY outhouse, four walls and a bed. There was no sheet, but a new sarong doubled as my wrap-around evening wear when I wasn’t sleeping in it. Instead of a muezzin waking me for morning prayers, I had dogs and roosters to do the job.
After three full days, I began to develop a routine: Get up and hike a couple of hundred meters to the beach for a swim amid surfers and water snakes. Return to the inn for a cold shower, dumping a bucket of well water over my head. Wander over to the local café for a breakfast of world-class black rice pudding with fresh fruit. (I never forgot to say “Terima kasih: Thank you very much.”) I kept my appointments for one-hour, full-body oil massages from a wizened old granny of superhuman strength. Then I hung out with my fellow travelers Herb, Paul and Ian.
New friends
Raised in Cleveland, schooled in Washington, D.C., educated in hard knocks as a male escort in Japan, Herb Campbell was introspective, erudite, given to self-doubts and second guessing. He embraced his discomfort zone despite what his better judgment suggested — in other words, he was my kind of friend. In his late 20s, he was already balding. I should not have been surprised that, later in his life, he became a shrink for the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s gone now. Oh, the stories he might have told.
Ian Cottingham and Paul Hyslop were on an extended term break from their graduate studies as medical research fellows in England. Dark-haired Ian was tall, serious, intellectual. He wore a bemused smirk as often as a smile. Blond, long-haired and athletic, Paul was more exuberant than his friend, as quick with a joke as MacGyver was with a solution to a problem.
It wouldn’t have been a party without Bret Lundberg, my friend from Queenstown and the Blue Minx. While I was making my way through Australia’s Northern Territory, he had shaved off his beard and flown into Bali, where he was staying nearby at Legian Beach. He now looked less like Fidel Castro and more like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.
I made introductions. Our posse quickly learned where we were welcome, where we were not, and where we had to read the signs. (My favorite, outside a Balinese temple, read: “It is forbidden to enter women during menstruation.”) We began to spend time with local artists and craftspeople, appreciating the fine work that went into woodcarving, silversmithing, and elaborate paintings. Brothers Wayan and Nyoman led us to an open area where villagers were engaged in some sort of construction project. Their great-uncle, they said, had passed away a few days earlier. It was time to celebrate his death with a cremation ceremony.
A festive farewell
Uncle Gede had lived a good, long life. He would be honored with a ngaben festival to assist his journey to the afterlife. Already his body had a temporary home within the family compound, bathed and dressed in colors to please the spirits, and placed inside a coffin that took the form of a lembu, a sacred cow. Vibrant floral arrangements, fruits and sweets surrounded it. Gede’s sons and nephews, meanwhile, were building an intricate bade, or cremation tower, of seven tiers, a statement that he was a man of prestige. (Priests may earn nine tiers, royalty the maximum eleven.)
The funeral came two days later. We joined the thousands who followed the colorful procession down Kuta’s main street to the community’s largest temple. The bade and lembu, borne atop bamboo platforms by dozens of strong young men, led the parade, accompanied by scores of dancers and a gamelan orchestra. An earthly soul needed a joyful send-off to assure its smooth transition to the spiritual realm.
I made myself small and shimmied to the front of the crowd. Not until I was positioned just behind the priest did I realize he was about to sacrifice a chicken and a goat. I was close enough to smell the creatures’ fear as their blood began to surge. Dorothy, I thought to myself, you’re not in Kansas anymore. Then the lembu was set aflame. Soon I was staring in morbid fascination at the now-carbonized corpse held aloft by wires in the underbelly of the crispy critter.
When the bade was likewise burned, the party mood diminished and the crowd dispersed. The ashes, I learned, would soon be scattered at sea, representing the cyclical nature of, well, nature. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The soul, once released from earthly restraints, could now merge with the universe to be reborn in a new form. Bon voyage, Uncle Gede.
Defeating evil
A couple of weeks in Bali can be all-consuming, from the music and drama to the intensity of religious fervor. I hoped another dance performance might reunite me with a world of sanity.
Our new Balinese friend, Wayan, was itching to give us a tour of the island, from Klungkung to Ubud and Besakih to Gunung Agung, the great volcano at the heart of the land. He got us a great deal on a week’s rental of a half-dozen motorcycles. We would leave the next morning.
So that evening, Herb and I went to see Barong, a mythological lion who is, in Balinese legend, the king of the spirit world. As the keeper of all that is good, one of Barong’s superpowers is his ability to protect humans from evil, in the form of the demon queen Rangda. Their dance symbolizes the eternal struggle between good and evil. If my friends and I were about to challenge remote Third World roadways, we’d want to do it with the blessing of a superhero.
The Barong dance-drama pivots on magical trance and the use of krises, deadly daggers with long, wavy blades that have been symbols of Javanese and Indonesian culture for more than a millennium. The climactic battle begins with Barong skipping along to gamelan rhythms, playing with monkeys while showering in holy water thrown by a priest. Rangda, meanwhile, casts a dark spell on the soldiers of the local ruler, compelling them to turn their krises upon themselves. Barong and the priest shield the soldier-dancers with a spell of their own, making them invulnerable to the deadly krises. Enraged, Rangda attacks Barong. But she has already lost. She runs away and, for now, evil is defeated and the celestial order is intact.
Whew! OK, Herb. We should be good to go for another week.
Tremendous story. It's good to be educated about a culture half way across the globe that I knew nothing about.