Day three at Club Med and time to get out and see the island. I’d wanted our first excursion to provide an overview of Bali life, so opted to spend the day in the company of a local guide, driving us around the island and showing off some of its hidden secrets. Well… kinda. To be brutally honest, the places he took us fell largely into the ‘meh’ category, but that didn’t mean it was a wasted day because we saw a whole lot of Balinese life and culture from the car, and got our money’s worth firing 10 hours of questions at our willing tour guide.
Our itinerary included visits to two Hindu temples (95% of Balinese people are Hindu, whilst every other Indonesian territory is largely Muslim); we saw lakes, a waterfall, and what we were reliably informed are the largest paddy fields in all of Asia.
As seems to be customary with this kind of tour, our guide had some ‘friends’ who we were introduced to throughout the day on the off chance that we might want to spend some money with them. So I can now say I have tried durian (think this one must be an acquired taste), jack fruit (pretty tasty – not unlike pineapple) and snake skin fruit (tastes quite like an apple, but looks more like a lychee once it’s been peeled). Later, we sampled Luwak coffee – pretty tasty, though I think it’s label as the world’s most expensive coffee is more to do with the mystique of its unconventional ‘manufacturing’ process than anything else!
Throughout the day we had a number of authentic – and not so authentic – wildlife experiences. We saw (and most emphatically heard – these guys are LOUD) cicada, some enormous (by British standards) spiders, Balinese deer (in a cage), the civits who help make the Luwak coffee, and… in the less authentic category, got up close and personal with a fruit bat, a python and a bearded dragon named Bob. At the rice paddy, we saw heron who I first assumed must be something more exotic because they have a differently-coloured head to their European cousins. We also saw macaque monkeys (wild, but very much part of the tourist economy), and huge numbers of pet dogs, several of which seemed to enjoy playing chicken with our car!
Prior to our visit, Bali had been described to me as a third world country. Perhaps that is true from the strict dictionary definition, but from what we have seen and heard today, it feels like something of a success story. Family structures still exist and are strong, wealth seems to be fairly well distributed, the welfare and education systems work, the road network is decent and the police not entirely corrupt. It’s still a fairly cheap place to visit (and they DO, especially from Australia and China), but the days of Bali being the choice for low-cost, exotic weddings might be numbered because prices are beginning to rise.
By most standards, our tour guide – Mully – has led a pretty interesting life, and we were nosy enough to find out quite a lot about it! Describing himself as the ‘bad boy’ of the family, Mully got just three months into university life before falling for the attractions of a steady income. After a short spell waiting tables in a hotel, he landed his then dream-job working for Holland America and spent three years as a waiter on cruise ships, firstly doing short hops between Vancouver and Alaska (where he worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week) and later doing 99-day ’round the world’ cruises where fewer passengers meant slightly more down time, and a chance to see the world. More recently, Mully worked briefly as a marketing manager for a hotel chain, before getting bored of office life and setting himself up as a full time, self-employed tour guide.
At risk of proving just what a geek I can be, the most interesting thing we learned about Bali today is how the island is divided, firstly into 9 divisions, with each region divided into villages, and each village into 8 Banjars. A Banjar is basically a neighbourhood, where everyone knows everyone. Each Banjar has an unpaid head whose many roles includes that of postman: if you want to send a letter to anyone in Bali, you simply address it using the name of the intended recipient, and of their Banjar, village and region. No street, no house number and certainly no postcode.
Wow, that fruit bat is seriously huge! I think they’re also called flying foxes aren’t they? Now I can see why.
Yes pretty huge. Not surprisingly – given the amount of weight they’re holding up for hours at a time – his claws were pretty sharp too!