Matthew Spong's online journal

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2008-05-14T08:07:38Z

16:52 I washed myself with medicated soap this morning. Smelled like sulfur all day. More brimstone than rotten egg, thankfully. #

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It's a full life

2008-05-03T00:51:41Z

2008-05-02_0740.48_Full_life.JPG
Originally uploaded by mattspong

carbonunit @ 2008-05-03T08:48:00

2008-05-02T22:59:49Z

I got to work on Friday to find one of these waiting for me on voicemail. It wasn't very effective, because I had a long message, and I only heard the end of the recording. I thought it might have been one of our technology suppliers returning a support call, because the hissy phone line sounded like an overseas call.

Anyway, the other guys in the office told me what it had actually been, and we started talking. My cow-orker (who shall remain nameless) piped up and told us that he had actually heard of a similar scam involving email! Yes, it appears that there have been instances where people were sent email which claimed to be from a friendly party, with an attached photo or game, which was in fact malicious software! Of course we were all shocked at this disturbing news. Still, his CV claims he has about 10 years experience of IT support, so guess he must be right. Sigh.

Bali music

2008-04-10T22:34:05Z

I took a minidisk recorder to Bali and recorded as much music and ambient sound as I could. Unfortunately my stereo microphone plugs directly into the unit, and it picked up the sound of the motor in quiet moments. Still, I managed to capture the louder music perfectly. Click the links below to download and listen, average size of files is about 50M.

2008-03-04_Night_market.mp3	Walking around the night market. Scooters arriving and departing, indopop playing from a music stall, hungry kittens, fish being chopped on a block, knife sharpening machine, people talking.
2008-03-04_Kuta_Melasti.mp3	People bearing offerings, walking in procession along Kuta beach. Massive gamelan orchestra accompanying a priest chanting over the PA.
2008-03-05_Ubud_Melasti.mp3	Dozens of dump trucks full of people with offerings, most with onboard gamelan and flute orchestras, gunning up and leaving Ubud at the start of their journey to the sea for the Melasti ceremony.
2008-03-05_Ubud_temple.mp3	Recorded on the street between the main temple on Hanoman street and the banjar. The gamelan orchestra is playing in the banjar, the chanting priest and his bell are in the temple across the road. Slow and mysterious.
2008-03-06_Ogoh_Ogoh.mp3	Highlights from the Ogoh-ogoh ceremony. People arriving, the priest blessing the monsters, the start of the procession, and several ogoh-ogoh, carried by chanting men and accompanied by gamelan bands, go past. Good stereo effects, very exciting!
2008-03-07_Nyepi_rain.mp3	Tropical downpour on Nyepi day. You can hear some children playing in the background.

Horrible dream

2008-04-08T23:01:44Z

I was a clinical psychologist attached to the execution of a psychopath mass murderer. The prisoner was a composite of Hannibal Lector and Genesis P Orridge. He was basically Genesis, only he had pursued a life of crime and killed hundreds of people. Nether the less, I still respected him for his writings and musical output.

He and I, and several guards and doctors and other officials, were enclosed in a special execution suite, like a house without windows and with a time lock on the door. The method of execution was poison pill. At the set time, a guard would read the charges and sentence, and he would hand a poison pill to the prisoner to swallow. Later, the time lock would open and we could leave.

He was nervous but not remorseful. As his psychologist I was trying to help him come to terms with his fate. I talked to him constantly, trying to explain that there was no other choice, he had to take the pill, there was no escape. He listened but didn't seem to agree, he had a smug air that revealed he had a plan.

The fatal hour arrived. We gathered in a small chamber. The prisoner sat in a chair, we surrounded him. The head guard read the sentence, and the doctor handed him a small clear capsule and explained that it contained a painless poison that would kill him within 15 minutes of being swallowed.

He seemed to be listening impatiently, and before the doctor finished explaining the effects of the pill he interrupted him and said "Okay, okay, I understand." He took the pill in his hand, then, turning to the head guard, he handed him the pill and said in a strange flat tone "Well, I guess you better take the pill now." To my horror the guard swallowed the pill, and nobody else seemed to notice. They reacted as though the prisoner had swallowed it. I realised he had hypnotized everyone else and they were under his control.

Bali 13/3/2008

2008-04-08T01:33:14Z

Starting to wind down now. Having a pool, and being in the less than fascinating confines of Seminyak, calmed us down. I was starting to get a bit sun burnt, although it was different to the sunburn of my youth, the sun is less harsh than the Australian glare, perhaps the humidity, the water vapour tunes the frequencies so they do less damage.

It was time for the DVD shops. These are a Bali institution. Indonesia's lax copyright laws mean open slather on most foreign movies and music. Shops jammed with wire racks full of DVDs in flimsy plastic envelopes can be found in any tourist location. You can buy legal titles, some of the shops make a show of promoting them. They are marked with holographic labels and cost about twice what the bootlegs cost. The bootlegs range in quality from filmed-off-screen with audience members walking in front of the camera and unintentional laugh tracks (usually the most recent releases) to sophisticated double-layer copies of the release DVD. Most are single layer copies of the DVD, often with the stereo soundtrack and all extras removed, so you have to put up with the 5.1 sound which I hate. The titles are all popular, very few really interesting ones.

Since last time we went to Bali they have started carrying a lot of TV shows. I picked up a few movies and a lot of TV, some Alias, some South park and Tales from the Crypt, amongst others. The cost per disk was generally 10000 rupiah, or $1.20. No bad. One other advantage of these shops is they have serious aircon, so wasting time browsing their racks is a matter of survival sometimes.

After trying a few shops we caught a taxi down to Geneva, which is basically a giant retail barn which carries all of the tourist tatt in concentrated form. Every horrible hand-woven place mat or wickerwork lamp shade or sheep bladder beer coaster was there, strewn on miles of shelves. The good thing was, they all had fixed prices. I believe the best tactic for your Bali souvenir shopping would be to make notes of the crap in the shops, then go to geneva, so you don't have to deal with the stupid haggling and blatant rip-offs. The prices can be higher than the low quote from a street stall, but they are always lower than the starting price.

My senses were overloaded, I started to feel nauseous from the avalanche of handicrafts surrounding me. Plus it wasn't air conditioned, and the lacquered and treated natural products were out-gassing their solvents in the enclosed space. I begged off, and ran outside and caught a taxi back to the hotel.

The threatening clouds were stacking up on the horizon again, and this time they meant business. It started to rain, the serious buckets-of-water tropical rain that hurts your head. I took my DVDs upstairs to the media room and started to watch them. Thunder and lightning and the drumming rain drowned out the sound.

Suddenly there was a simultaneous flash like a magnesium flare and a huge cataclysm of thunder. The power failed, the TV went off, and I realised that Michelle was standing just inside the gate, trapped under the overhang by the deluge. I fetched the umbrella and went to help her.

The power came back on in about 15 minutes, and we watched the storm fade away to nothing. Soon the sun returned and started vapourising the standing water, filling the air with steam again. The cooling effects of the storm were soon gone.

When Michelle's mother and her partner went to Bali last, they had their photos taken in a studio wearing traditional Balinese costume. Of course Michelle wanted the same. I was reluctant, for various reasons, not least of which, a pudgy white guy looks ridiculous in the traditional garb of a race of graceful brown dancers. But to make her happy I agreed, and we caught a taxi down into the heart of darkness, Kuta. There we located the studio, and found a small room with sets, backdrops and various chairs and racks of daggers and kris knives. It was run by a husband and wife team, who quickly took Michelle aside and set to work, applying the kohl eye makeup and rouge, and wrapping her in a sarong and crowning her head with a pressed metal dancers head dress, the kind with small peacock feather adornments on wires which quiver and dance every time you move your head. Next, the grabbed me, kohled my eyes, wrapped a band around my chest with a kind of rope belt, added a sarong, and pulled these weird sharks-fin arm and wrist bands on. Then they moved us around the room, posing us in an assortment of carved wooden chairs and doorways, pulling our limbs into various traditional poses.

The pictures turned out okay, although I still find the whole idea ridiculous. I was too tall for the backdrops so a picture frame tends to intrude in the top of many of the shots. Don't ask, you will never see them.

We caught a taxi back to Seminyak. It was quite late, and we were hungry. We started walking down Dynapurna road looking for a restaurant. The gay nightclubs were packed, we passed one which was open to the street. Statuesque young men dressed in red jockey shorts gyrated slowly on the tables within to Arabic pop music. Several aging pedophiles sat on a low wall across the road watching the spectacle, firmly clutching the hands of their catamites. We hurried on. Further, and I passed a vacant lot, full of the ruins of concrete walls and overgrown with weeds and several bushes. A small tree had fallen or been pushed over at one point, it lay on its side near the split bamboo fence which ran along the front. One of its branches which stuck straight up in the air was waving at me. I stopped and watched. In brief bursts this isolated branch with it's tuft of wilting leaves was waving at me, thrashing back and forth extremely rapidly, then stopping, then starting again. I looked carefully for any sign of a swinging monkey, or a rat, or some other animal agent which could be causing this, but there were none. There were no air-conditioners on the walls of the nightclubs which sandwiched the lot between them, and I even checked for hidden wires, reasoning some tricky local was having fun with me. Nothing. It was waving by itself.

Michelle caught up with me and we watched it together. It started to spook us out. This small thing, easily missed, but inexplicable. I approached the bouncer outside the nightclub and asked if there were any animals or an other reason why a tree branch in the lot next door might be waving at me. When he understood what I had seen, he said not to worry, it was only a djinn, or ghost. It was just trying to annoy me, and I should just walk away and leave it alone.

I turned and walked back. Michelle was still watching, entranced. I explained what the bouncer said, and we reluctantly walked away. The branch frantically waved goodbye.

We settled on an Australian themed restaurant called the Bush Telegraph for dinner, curious to see what they came up with. It was a pretty cosmopolitan menu, full of pizzas and German wurst and nachos. The waiter spoke a carefully cultivated Aussie accent, a valuable asset for the tourist trade. We struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who seemed highly amazed that we were even willing to entertain the possibility that it had, indeed, been a "djinn" or ghost. We told him about a few of our own experiences, and he sat down and started to tell us the most amazing stuff.

Djinns are small ghosts, not human spirits but more like animals or elementals. The serve no purpose. The branch wasn't a warning or a sign, in fact, in everything he told us, ghostly activity seemed refreshingly free of ulterior reason or motive. They just are, like other natural phenomena. He said we should return the next day, and the tree would most likely be gone. We did, and it was. Djinn used to rarely be seen before midnight, but because of the bright lights and activity all night in Seminyak it was more common than before to encounter them as early as 10PM. He hinted that they were actually rather annoyed that humans, rulers of the day, were selfishly encroaching on their night hours as well.

Apparently there was a good ghost sighting in his village on Nyepi day night. He had been unable to go to sleep, until he heard the sound of the Pecalang patrol passing his house. This reassured him. The next day, he went to find out who was on patrol that night to thank them. It was a couple of his friends, and they told him about a ghost they had seen. After passing his house, they continued down the road, leaving the village, heading for a Y intersection, where they would take another road that returned to the village. At the dark intersection they discovered a troup of 3 dancing girls, in full costume, but with their hair piled over their faces, running slowly through the traditional gestures and steps in absolute silence. They turned around and returned by the same path they had left.

This lead to discussion of cross roads. All cross roads are highly charged with mystical energy in Bali, that is why they always have altars and statues and many ceremonies make use of them. I thought, but didn't say, that the way the Balinese drove, and all the deaths that must occur in accidents at the crossroads, it was no wonder.

He gave us some advice: when you are out walking or driving at night, and you see a ghost or apparition of some kind which is blocking the road, stop and wait. If in a car, bip your horn. If the spectre moves off the road, you can pass, but if it doesn't, don't try and drive through it or touch it. That means it's a warning, and you should turn around and return straight home.

Back to djinn. They were much more common in the old days, before electrification. His mother had often seen bright lights which would glow from exactly halfway up the trunk of a palm tree. They were "stupid", they were not intelligent. In return I told him what little I knew about strange lights and similar phenomena from around the world, like the Min Min lights in Queensland, and the naga fireballs on the Mekong river in Thailand. He seemed pleased, up until then he had felt that Bali was the only place in the world where these things where known about and not dismissed as superstition.

Bali 12/3/2008

2008-04-03T01:54:26Z

We had to deliver the Katana by 8AM to the rental place in Kuta. The owners assistant rolled up precisely at 8 and inspected the body for dings. No new ones, so we were in the clear. They got a half full tank of petrol too. When we rented it there was barely a cup, just enough to make it to the station for a fillup. All our driving hardly burnt a single tank, we half filled it when it was almost empty and that's what we returned to them. Distances in Bali, in Asia in fact, seem much further than they really are. There are no good highways and bypasses and the difficulties of the journey are what we use to estimate it's length.

Vehicle rental is one of the big tourist side industries in Bali. Most surfers prefer the scooters with the special U-shaped racks on the side for their boards. Cheaper and easier to park. Despite the convenience of the Katana I was glad to see the last of it. No more wincing every time someone shaved our sides, no more frustrating seeking of parking spaces. We stepped out onto Jalan Legian. Every single taxi that passed slowed and waited for us to hail them. Even when you don't want them, especially then, they slow and honk and try to catch your attention. We hailed one, with aircon, and asked how much he would charge us for a ride to Denpassar. 50000 rupiah, which was decent, about $6AU.

The road to Denpassar avoids all those boring pretty rice paddies and trees. There is a deep and wide irrigation canal running alongside, crossed by "bridges" which are just bundles of lashed bamboo poles with no rails. There are rows of handicraft factories and warehouses and wholesale outlets for all the tatt, and the things the locals really need, like stainless steel water tanks - like giant food cans, usually mounted prominently on your roof, for gravity pressure household water. The omnipresent household temples and altars mean there is a thriving industry in casting cement pagodas and those ornate corner bricks they feature. Not for tourists, too heavy for export. There were large stalls with a huge range of decals of lightning bolts and rude sayings in badly translated English, for your scooter, to distinguish it from all the rest. Plus the Bali equivalent of all the things your average western culture delights in. Scaled down and hand made for the local market. So, instead of giant tyre malls, you have a shed with stacks of tyres, new ones for sale and more old ones being patched and re-vulcanised on a forge with a blower made from an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner.

Denpassar is the biggest city on Bali. Historically, Singaraja, on the North coast, was the capital. The Dutch administered the whole Sunda group from there when Bali was a colony. I don't know why Denpassar grew so large. It isn't on a navigable river; it isn't close enough to the harbours, or the airport, which it pre-dates. It is kind of central, in the middle of the populated part of Bali. The North is dominated by the volcanos, and the west is vry wild and undeveloped.

The buildings closed in, and we knew we were close. We were heading for the big markets, which occupy two buildings like multi-storey car parks on either side of Badung river. As we approached the bridge the driver started quizzing us, in the usual way, trying to line up a job trucking us back to Kuta, but we told him we would find our own way. The pressure gets a bit annoying some times.

He let us out just next to the bridge on Gajah Mada over the Badung. The heat was like a hammer. Despite the mug Michelle burrowed bravely into a nearby fabric shop, full of hanging bolts of cloth and not even a fan to move them around. How she bears it I do not know. I crossed the bridge and checked out the markets. One of the buildings was being renovated, even from a distance we could see it was deserted, covered in scaffolding and dangerous overhanging boards and piles of bricks. The other one was thriving.

As we approached, down Sulawesi road, the touts started their eternal hassling. Outside the market building were the flower stalls, selling mostly flower heads, of purple "bachelors’ buttons" and carnations and marigolds, for offerings.

There was also a mobile classroom thing, a van decked out with signs and a travelling library, all about bird flu. Trying to educate the locals not to suck the mucus from their sick ducks beaks with their mouths, as they sometimes do.

Then we took the plunge. Imagine a car park, the kind often attached to a supermarket, a rundown multi-level concrete shell. Then, subdivide it with partitions made from cyclone fence and rough wood planks. Add tables, crammed together with hardly any space between, overflowing with baskets and piles of chillies, powdered roots, dried tobacco, teas, mummified fish, rices of various colours, strange matted bundles of green sprouts, curled sticks of cinnamon and spiky star anise, curries, more chillies, plastic packets of coffee and dishwashing liquid, sundry smallgoods and nostrums, vials of snake oil and powdered bats wing, dangerous looking religious artefacts like rough caste Buddhist thingies and whatsits, and those spiky tridents that Hindus put in their altars. Threading this maze of stuff, hundreds of small people, crowding into every space, flowing like blood through a tumour.

As soon as we climbed the stairs outside and stepped in out of the blinding sunlight, and were accosted by this avalanche vision, we were also targeted by some more parasites. One immediately started the interrogation: "What are you looking for? Do you want t-shirts? Knives? My sister has knives, top floor, very good." We ignored her and plunged in between the stalls, separating to try and lose her. The market touts have a simple scam, which we discovered last time we were there. They insert themselves into any transaction between westerners and the stall holders. To the westerners, they claim to be guides, helping you avoid scams and get good quality. To the stallholders, they offer special inflated prices, because they claim they are experts and can negotiate massive rip-offs. Their payoff is a cut off the excess price. They also try and drag you upstairs to particular stalls who favour them. Last time I bought a bundle of Chinese coins threaded on twine, or at least I thought that's what it was. A one-eyed woman who was our "guide" that time made me drop the one I was holding, disappeared into the crowd, then returned with a cheaper example. Which turned out to be mostly slugs punched out of sheet metal, with real coins only on the end of each roll. You can see one of these specimens at the end of this vid, who was following me through the stalls.

Funnily enough, we soon realised that the one-eyed woman was there, arguing with our personal parasite, who seemed to have dibs on us, or thought she did. We took advantage of the fracas to get away for awhile and check out the fresh meat section in the basement. This is the most sickening thing imaginable. The floor is cement with occasional patches of broken tiles, slippery with blood. Blood runs everywhere, mixed with water and detergent and fatty oils. The stalls have tables made from concrete blocks, each is an altar to meat, piled high with raw offerings. Unidentifiable slabs and straps and strips of red meat, interspersed with bowls full of incredible gristles and giblets and tripes or brimming with blood.

Damn, it was tasty! There were fish and poultry as well, but the meat was the star attraction. I'm just disappointed there were no identifiable heads.

By this time the bitch-fight was over and the one-eye was hanging back, her sister had asserted her right to exploit us. We did our best - every time she pointed one way, we went another. Every time she talked to a stallholder, we turned away. I was looking for knives in particular, the rough made carbon steel knives they sell here. They didn't seem to have any, just masses of strange cooking implements hanging in rafts from the ceiling. Strainers and specialised rice-cooking pots and steamers. The parasite really ruined it for us though. Every time we looked directly at some item or even went near a stallholder, she would dart forward and start barking at the poor merchant trying to arrange her cut before we even saw what they were offering.

Here's an example. One stall had boxes of Steatdler pencils, 2B. I asked the price, the girl jabbered, and the stallholder said, 100 000 rupiah, about $12. Later, while she was occupied, I found another stall with a similar box of pencils. The price, 10 000.

Finally we had enough. We exited, without investigating the higher floors. I believe it might be possible to arrange a bodyguard, next time.

Down the road we crossed Jalan Hasanudin and drank some iced tea in a warung. A police officer and his cronies were eating lunch, watching a daytime talk show on TV. The hostess was an awesome trannie in an evening gown. Her guests were comedians, playing obvious archetype yokels, like the guy with the huge Pancho moustache wearing tight shorts sitting with his legs spread wide like an uncouth 70s cricketer. She was making them eat disgusting food, like durian and fermented fish.

Michelle was bushed, so she returned to the villa. I wanted to explore further, so I set off up Hasanudin, across the river again. I walked through a motor district, lots of shops selling seat covers and dashboard fans. Around the corner, and I saw something interesting, a shop selling heavy metal t-shirts! Just my luck, I'd planned to seek out some Indonesian music, the real thing the kids listen to, not the gamelan. This store turned out to be just t-shirts and patches, but they pointed me towards another, across the street in a rotten deserted arcade, called Slash Rockhouse. They also sold mostly t-shirts, DJ satchels and other accessories, but they had a small stack of tapes and CDs in the corner! The shop was run by a shy young dude who seemed surprised to have a customer. He played a few CDs for me, and I bought them. They were decent. He then directed me to an even larger music shop around the corner, where a crew of equally shy and peaceful metal dudes sold me more CDs. The contrast, between these metal dudes in their modest shops, and the rest of Bali's aggressive tourist exploiting machine, was incredible. I've never appreciated the soul-cleansing power of death metal as much as then.

The bands I like best, after returning home and listening in peace, are Koil and Burgerkill. The rest were mostly middle-of-the-road derivative hard rock. These two stand out a mile.

I'd almost come full circle, so I turned the next corner and returned to the markets to see if my knives had magically appeared. Funnily enough, they had. A man had a basket of them outside on the street, and I picked up a nice chopper and some large and small knives, and a sickle for good measure. Then I checked out the nearby live poultry stalls, just to tempt fate and the risk of bird flu.

With my bags full of various kinds of death I caught an un-air-conditioned cab back to the villa and jumped into the pool. After washing the concentrated salt off I helped Michelle who was trying to confirm our tickets. She called the Bali offices of Garuda, only to be told our tickets were stand-by, the flight in 3 days was booked out, and we would be lucky to get on. She kept trying to argue, but each time they checked it came back worse, until it looked like we would be walking home. In the end I called Garuda in Perth, Aus, and the guy there quickly checked our tickets, explained that they were not standby, they were industry fares which means we are firm booked but first in line to get bumped off the flight if another flight gets cancelled. And, since the flight was less than half booked anyway, it would take 2 or more cancellations to even delay us by one day. What a relief.

I jumped back in the pool while Michelle went out for more shopping. The mezuine call sounded all afternoon from the nearby mosque. Perhaps they were practicing.

That night I cooked the best food we had on our whole holiday. Really, Indonesian food is pretty basic, mostly stodgy stews and soups of rice and chicken chilliefied with sambal sauce. What I did was, pan fried the sirloin steaks we bought at Bintang supermarket, also sliced potatoes, and topped them with shitake mushrooms fried quickly in the left over butter and grease. The meat was amazing, grass fed wild cow like I dimly remember from my youth, somewhat tough and chewy but in an entirely good way. It reminded Michelle of an earlier trip when she stayed in Lovina beach, on the north coast. She invited a young friend to a steak dinner in Kuta, which he ate by biting a corner of the meat and sawing off the bite with the knife.

carbonunit @ 2008-04-02T12:09:00

2008-04-02T02:17:52Z

Michelle's mum Pam had to rush to hospital this morning. She's had a long-running pain in her abdomen, and it got much worse this morning. It appears to be a urinary tract infection. She'll be on some serious antibiotics.

Bali 11/3/2008

2008-04-01T04:29:56Z

It's the last full day we have the car, so we feel we need to use it. Neither of us has been down into Badung, the large pendulent lump which hangs below the man mass of Bali by a thin isthmus or bombora or whatever, the flat neck of land where Kuta and the airport are situated. We decided to head for Uluwatu, to see the famous temple on top of the cliffs.

In the morning the villa staff came and a strangely giggly girl made us breakfast, bacon and eggs. She also made us french toast, although this turned out to be toasted French bread. The pool cleaner had a mustache.

Once again we drove the dangerous Ngurah Rai, down past the airport, and further South. We turned off to have a look at Udayana University. It wasn't impressive. The campus mainly consisted of paddocks, strangely Australia looking paddocks, with sedimentary rocks and pale soil with gravel in it. The roads were very badly kept, as bad as we ever saw them, and the villages were obviously mostly student share accommodation, very poorly kept and run down. All together, it had the atmosphere of an abandoned bomb testing range, with more live dogs and even a few humans wandering listlessly around. Even the poorest village in the rest of the island is constantly swept, with those bundle-of-sticks stoop brooms they favour, but not here. Uni students, lazy everywhere. The actual facilities were widely separated buildings clearly sign-posted as the department of animal management or agriculture or other practical subjects, very backward and run down, and it explained why most wealthy Balinese send their kids to Australia or Singapore for their education.

Most of Badang was geologically quite different to the main island, enough that I wouldn't be surprised if it was much older than the rest. It might actually be an isolated chunk of Australia which crumbled off the edge of the continental shelf, which runs almost all the way up to the island chain. There is a trench just off the southern edge of Indonesia, and this is a source of political conflict over the oil deposits there, whether they lie in our territorial waters or theirs (or East Timors). Perhaps the volcanos which created Bali also split it off the rest of the Australia plate, or maybe it was already an island and Bali reached out and touched it. I saw pasture unlike any else, sparse close cropped grass with scrabby weeds and low trees, just like in inland NSW, where the rest of Bali is lush and verdant and incredibly productive. It was the only place that seemed to specialize in grazing, which would be a waste of space anywhere else, and the only paddies I saw were on isolated hillsides and immediately around villages Of course, they don't have the amazing water supply running off the volcanic cones that the rest of the island has so that could be a factor.

After cruising around the campus awhile, we headed North to Muaya beach, on the edge of Jimbaran Bay. The water was creamy pale blue, under the towering distant clouds and fierce white sunlight. A few surfers were trying to do something with the lazy dumpers which were rolling in, breaking right up the beach and flowing in amongst the tables and chairs of the restaurants. The whole of Jimbaran Bay is lined with white sand beach, and the beaches are lined with seafood restaurants, desperately waiting for the tourists to return. they used to be busy, but fear of terrorism has swept most of the yanks and brits away, leaving just us, the Japanese and the Europeans. I've actually heard people say stuff like "serves them right, they killed all those people" and it makes me sick that people can be so stupid. How can you not know that the bombers behind the attacks in Kuta and Jimbaran were from Java, the much larger island to the west of Bali and the administrative centre and capital of Indonesia? Bali is over 90% hindu, whereas Java and most of the rest of Indonesia are muslims, with the exception of Flores which is Catholic and Irian Jaya which is animist. So the restaurants wait, and wait, slowly rotting in the sun. We stopped at one threadbare example, with flapping canvas awnings over their wooden tables and deck chairs, and had a lime juice while watching the horizon. Distant fishing boats cruised back and forth, mostly full of tourists on day trips. They used to be catching the fish for the restaurants, landing their catch fresh on the beach where you could select which fish you wanted and take it to your favourite joint to cook and eat it.

Next we headed south again, along the Raya Uluwatu. We passed more ogoh-ogoh sitting propped up in village squares, and saw many cattle and even goats and sheep. One fascinating sight was several sheets of krupuk drying outside a house. Krupuk are the original shrimp cracker. Those foamy crisps they serve at the local Chinese restaurant are a faint memory of the real thing, which are hard disks like translucent plastic which fry up into huge plate-sized objects like deep sea sponges. The real krupuk are delicious, perhaps the result of all the fly footprints and road dust?

The road ended in a random carpark, surrounded by stalls selling tatt. Michelle stayed with the car while I rented a yellow sash at the entrance of the temple grounds, but I wasn't fast enough. A parasite attached herself to me, a fast talking woman, who declared that she would be my "guide". All the most popular attractions on Bali are spoiled by these people, and this is one good reason we usually avoid them. It might be possible to bring a local guide, perhaps a taxi driver, and explain that you would like him to pretend to be your guide and keep these hassling jerks away. She also declared that the local monkeys were dangerous, and she brandished a large stick supposedly to keep them away. They did seem larger than the ones in Ubud or elsewhere.

While my "guide" did everything she could to establish her dominance over me, the standard con artist technique, insisting I go this way or that, look here or there, I wandered down the long stone staircase to the clifftops and the incredible view. The azure sea broke clear and slow against the bottom of the cliffs. The crumbling white cliffs meandered away, rising up to my left to the temple itself, which looked surprisingly uninspiring, especially considering the heat and the company.

My erstwhile guide started pumping me with questions - where was I staying? How long? Where was I going after that? What was my name, what country was I from? You must never answer them, because they use the info for various scams. For instance, they sell your name and hotel to a tour company, who then call you and try to talk you into going on one of their tours. Or, they come and try to collect your luggage claiming that you have booked into another hotel. After enduring her chatter for awhile, I declared that I had had enough, and strode back up the stairs to the gates. She followed on behind, panicking, as I quickly undid the sash and handed it in at the entrance. She was really upset, chattering loudly with the grinning men who manned the sash/sarong rental stall. She couldn't collect a fee, because I hadn't seen the temple. It was gratifying. I would encounter more like her the next day in Denpassar.

Bali 10/3/2008

2008-04-01T02:35:07Z

It was our last day in Ubud.

Ketut brought breakfast, a bowl of fruit salad and a banana pancake. Not bad, included in the hotel price for a total of 75000 rupiah a day, which is about $9.

I gave him some extra cash in a cigarette pack. Nyuman does very well for himself with the hotel, now largely populated by yoga aficionados from the local school, and his family is well off, but Ketut does most of the real work, and has to commute such long distances.

It was sad to leave, but we had a villa booked in Seminyak, near Kerobokan where stupid old Schapelle languishes. Apparently you can actually get in to see her, as long as you bring some supplies to give her and a suitable bribe for the guards.

A last wander around beautiful Ubud, including a visit to the monkeys in the Monkey Forest down the bottom of the village. These little guys have a reputation for being thugs, so I kept my distance.

Then we fired up the jeep and hit the road. plotted a course south, avoiding Denpassar (which Michelle fears) and heading for a coastal highway called the Ngurah Rai By Pass, which seems intended to link Denpassar with the port at Padangbai to the east and the airport to the south.

We moved fairly quickly at first. After the green lushness around Ubud we soon entered the dusty industrial villages which swirl around Denpassar, the Bali equivalent of the western suburbs of most Australian cities. Everything was made from grey cement (which is called semen, to our amusement, watching giant trucks full of SEMEN passing by) and very messy, plenty of trash choking the byways.

The Bypass itself was a nightmare. It was a four lane highway, but the lanes were just suggestions, or at least the other drivers thought so. We tried to keep in the outer lane, but found that many large vehicles tried to pass us on the verge, kicking up lots of gravel. In the end we drove mostly down the centre line, where they could pass us on whichever side they chose. It was "Tetris for keeps" as a wise man once said. On our left were the mangroves, thick jungles much larger than the Australian variety. There seemed to be villages built on stilts over the water, rickety buildings with bright red tile roofs. The swamps have been filled in in places, for industrial parks, the major power station which must be oil fired, there was no coal infrastructure and being right on the bay they could get oil from tankers. (My father was an engineer for Pacific Power, so I notice these things). There was a lot of new building going on, with major machinery, things Michelle never saw in Bali before, post hole diggers and pile drivers and the like. The work gangs were still the same, mostly women, balancing large pans of blue metal on their heads. They al seem to like wrapping t-shirts around their heads, my theory is it overheats their brains and induces a state of heat stroke which numbs the pain of the job.

To make things worse, I made a navigation error. I thought our destination was below the airport and Kuta, when it was north east, so we missed the turnoff. We had to pass the airport, double back down streets completely choked with the thick midday traffic rushing home for siesta or to avoid the daily downpour, and rejoin the highway of Death heading north.

Finally we reached Dyna Villas. We had booked a 2 bedroom villa for the pool, but luckily for us they had upgraded us for free to a 3 bedroom villa with a larger pool. The villas are beautiful open-plan living spaces with enclosed air-conditioned bedrooms and surprisingly good kitchens. The bedrooms are spaced out around the compounds, making completely separate living quarters. The first thing we did once we checked in and the staff left was to strip off and dive into the pool. It was bliss! Especially as we needed the exposure to chlorine to correct our skin flora balance. Every time I go to asia I get some kind of skin problem, and it was starting to arise before we fixed it by swimming in chlorinated water. Usually I get heat rashes and jock itch but this time all I seem to have suffered after we returned home was a bit of acne on my forehead. It's unavoidable, part of traveling, being exposed to foreign bacteria and fungi in the air, spores and splashes from puddles.

We had a late lunch at a seedy hotel down the road, where over-tanned mutton dressed in lamb bikinis swam slow laps in a warm looking pool, and a fat european man in a wheelchair got maudlin drunk on beer and made the bar staff play a tape of sinister French holiday music with lots of accordion. You could smell the presence of drugs and weird sex. After we escaped we visited the Bintang supermarket to lay in some supplies for the kitchen, including some cheese! Real cheese, not the Pizza Hut plastic you find everywhere else.

The rest of the evening passed in a daze, soaking in the glorious pool and watching a pirate DVD of Pirates of the Carribean in the media room.

Bali 9/3/2008 Sunday

2008-04-01T00:34:38Z

We planned on driving today, which is mostly what we did.

Ketut was back from his village, very tired after all the slaughter and not enough sleep. We gave him some of the Nescafe coffee mix sachettes, which I think he took mainly to be polite. The local coffee, Kopi Bali, is much stronger. They put finely ground coffee like Turkish coffee into a glass and pour the water on. If you want to get really wired you can skull the grounds. He pointed out some nice places to visit mainly to the north of Ubud.

We drove up a long loop of road that followed a ridge for several K until the intervening gully shrank small enough for a bridge. There were a surprising number of villas, rich dwellings with walls and security gates. The passing green, like driving through a giant salad, is intoxicating. I keep fantasizing about how to get the water back home, how to catch and store it. It seems such a waste to see the gushing rivers and canals flowing free, and no dams or weirs. It seems so alien to be in a landscape where getting rid of the water quickly is much more of a problem than coming by it in the first place. The soil is red and dense, sticky like plum pudding. I quickly built up clods of the stuff on my sandals when I stepped out to shoot the scenery.

I watched a man in the top of a coconut palm, pulling off the dead leaves and collecting a few nuts for his trouble. He didn't have any harness.

At one point I walked out along a berm in between two paddies, and realised the rice stalks were moving all around me. Ducks, bebek, were charging invisibly through the fields, vacuuming up the slugs and bugs, the ultimate green pest control, turning crawlies into delicious dark meat.

Further on, the road ran along an embankment above some small paddies, and I shot footage of a man smoothing out the mud before planting a new crop. he had driven his hoe into the stalk of a banana plant as a makeshift cultivator.

After we had our fill of greenery we returned to Ubud, then turned North again, up the road to Kendaran. There are still dozens of ogoh-ogoh propped up in the village squares. It looks like burning them is entirely optional. The roadside displays of handicrafts changed as we passed, from carved wood to woven basketry to a town of bone carvers. They had stacks of cow skulls, elaborately filigreed with a Dremel drill and then buried n manure to age them. There were signs saying "Deer - Cow - Mammoth" which surprised me, but Michelle explained that they often call elephants "mammoth".

Michelle is an excellent driver, and seemed pretty relaxed. I was getting the hang of navigating by this point. The trick is to learn how to compare distances travelled with distances on the map. Because there are no signs, and intersections might show two large roads meeting when actually it's a footpath meeting a highway, you need to be able to estimate exactly when you should be arriving at the next waypoint. This helps with backtracking too, which we needed to do often. Not that we mind, it always reveals more details we missed first time by. The only real problem was the gearbox on the little Katana, which is far too small and sloppy, or the pivot point of the lever is too high. Either way, Mich often had to deal with stalling halfway up a steep hill because she tried to change into 1st and hit 3rd instead.

After returning to Ubud for lunch, we headed out, East this time, headed for Klungkung. The maps often call this small city Semarapura, because there are dozens of Klungkungs around Bali, especially in the same quarter as the city Klungkung. They like to reuse their place names, like their person names. It didn't used to matter when a person rarely travelled more than a dozen miles from the village of his birth.

First we passed through Gianyar, another small city, which we hadn't realised was so large. Just past Gianyar we noticed a curious gathering of thousands of men in a large soccer field. There were dozens of soldiers in green fatigues and some braided generals or colonels as well. The civilians were all in ceremonial garb, sarong, headscarf and collarless white shirts. I thought it might be a political uprising, but then just down the road we passed a coffin. It was a giant white bull on a gilded platform, abut 3 stories tall. Balinese hindu cremations always involve these paper mache coffins, which can also take the form of coiled snakes, elephant fish and eagles. I think these are the totem animals of the 4 Balinese castes, and wouldn't be surprised if the bull coffin was reserved from a Brahmin funeral.

We arrived in Klungkung. As a small "city", the centre of town consisted of two major roads crossing, lined with 3 story buildings. We parked and stepped out into particularly airless and humid climate, protected from the cleansing breezes by the construction. Each tenement was supported by a ground floor of shops, fascinating SE asian shops. Flocks of swallows span between the buildings, feasting on heat-dazed insects.

Michelle dove right in, looking for her loud print fabrics and sundries for her dresses. I mooched around for awhile, and then started digging for stationary. Just looking at these places, I could smell it. I knew that out the back of these shops lay storerooms full of mouldering war-era stationary, typewriter ribbons, bottles of ink, nibs, and ancient journals of fine rag paper from the time when such things were widely available as standard office supplies. I love computers, but for some reason I'm obsessed with the technology they supplanted, such as Kurta calculators and those mechanical number stamps which advance one digit each time you use them. I knew they were holding this stuff, because of subtle clues - in shops one often saw such a ledger in use to record sales, or you might notice that the tags in a souvenir shop were obviously hand written with a broad-nib fountain pen. But, I also knew it would be almost impossible to get to the good stuff, because of the weird communication barrier. There is a strange misunderstanding which makes it almost impossible to explain to the locals that you actually want something old and worn in preference to something new and shiny. It's understandable when you realise that, being poor and frugal, they have to make do with what they can afford, and they themselves dislike the musty old gear they struggle with every day. If you have to use a smelly and dangerous old kerosene lantern for light because your village hasn't been electrified yet, you would shake your head at the ignorant foreign dilettante looking to buy one in your shop. You would also point out the fine selection of Taiwanese battery lanterns in lurid plastic colours and, should a fine old turned brass mining lamp accidentally be left on display, unhook it and take it away out the back where the horrible old antiques are kept, despite the protestations of the crazy gaijin.

Add to this the fact that Klungkung is far off the tourist trail, so they know absolutely no english. Luckily I found a basic Balinese/English dictionary in a school supply shop, but it didn't help. Knowing the correct word for "ink pen" doesn't make them think you are any less of a loony for wanting such a thing.

After wandering around and making thorough fools of ourselves, we had enough and headed back to Ubud. Looking back as we drove up the hill above town we realised we could see all the way across the Badung strait to Nusa Penida, the island beloved of surfers. We passed some villagers bathing in a roadside ditch, once a common sight.

That night we had dinner in one of the other nice restaurants which sprang up to compete with the Lotus. I decided to try the crispy duck, a legendary dish one often sees advertised as the special de jour. I thought it might be like roast turkey, with crispy skin, but no. It was a quarter of duck, dry roasted until it entirely resembled the tip of the wing of a barbecued chicken. It was like eating an Egyptian mummy.

Bali 8/3/2008

2008-03-31T22:22:41Z

Nyepi day was the climax of our holiday. Everything after that was a comedown.

On the 8th we shlebbed around Ubud, shopping and sweltering in the massive heat. I picked up some gifts for the folks back home, including a massive bronze an which looked exactly like the Zlanti Missfit from the Outer Limits episode. Also another lontar book, and some puppets and other things for my niece and nephew.

If you know me you know I hate shopping. Bali is in some ways a hell for me in that shopping is deeply embedded in the tourist experience. Michelle loves shopping. She loves wandering slowly from shop to shop looking at stuff. I like to go right to the source of something I need and get it quickly and efficiently. If I have to wander somewhere it should be an art gallery or forest. The only exception to this is street markets, which are like galleries of ideas for me. Still, I don't like t linger in the retail experience.

But shopping is also deeply embedded in the Balinese lifestyle. The ubiquitous warungs are a good example. Even the smallest village will have a dozen tiny stalls selling a few bunches of bananas, a coupe of open packets of cigarettes, some tiny sachettes of coffee and powdered drink mix, and such household necessities as fly papers and sewing machine oil. Drink sellers with huge baskets balanced on their heads, full of mucky water bottles containing lurid strong cordials and coffee essences, walk down the streets, taping on a glass bottle to announce their presence. Carts and bicycles carry small charcoal stoves cooking meatball soup, bakso, and chicken soup, soto ayam. Everyone eats out, nobody carries lunch from home.

So I shouldn't feel as proud as I do that our visit to Bali included the worlds best totally enforced Buy Nothing Day. But it was sweet! It's such a contrast now to see Easter in Sydney, with pubs open on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, with only a token late start as a last remnant of the days when everything closed down for the holiday.

After touring the main streets I tried one of the side roads, a parallel village street running along the east side. Just a few hundred metres from the tourists, the locals lived in relative isolation. Wattle and daub houses, mud over chicken wire, chickens walking, many small sewing shops and workshops, not making artifacts and tourist trinkets so much as clothes and homewares for the locals. Most of the tatt is trucked in from villages which specialize in making it in bulk.

A storm was brewing. Tropical storms are awesome, huge towers of cloud that soar up and up like a nuclear bomb mushroom cloud, but much larger. You can see exactly how the hot, wet air from ground level has punched a hole in the stratosphere and is now surging upwards like a drop of milk sinking in a glass of water. Its deceptive, because they are so much larger than our local storms, they can loom over you but still be hundreds of miles away. I was sure it was about to drop gallons of water on me so I hurried back to the hotel, but it hardly rained at all that day.

After lazing around on our balcony all afternoon we visited the Lotus Cafe for dinner. This was once the only good restaurant in Ubud, a famous institution, and it's still one of the best. The owner seems to be a worried dutch guy, constantly fussing and micro-managing the staff. It was built partly into the grounds of a temple, Pura Saraswati, so they can't serve anything with beef. I had lamb kofta with flat bread. A party of noisy northern italians (speaking Italian, looking German) at a nearby table competed with the performance outside the temple gates, a rapid runthrough of the local dances and gamelan music.

Internet filtering and what to do about it

2008-03-24T08:59:10Z

Recently, after we returned from Bali, I noticed that some of my favourite websites were offline. Greylodge was innaccessible, as was Alterati, a sister site. They provide a lot of torrents of interesting documentaries and rare and fascinating stuff. Note that not only couldn't I browse them, but pings vanished and were never seen again.

But then, today I idly tried their addresses using a web proxy, and lo and behold, they were still online! This obviously meant that my internet provider, Pacific.net, was filtering them.

I don't remember them every telling me they were planning to do this, and I certainly don't agree with this shit, especially since they aren't filtering The Pirate Bay or the other major torrent sites. It suggests their problem is more with the contents of Greylodge's material rather than the bandwidth costs. That doesn't make it alright, I pay for the bandwidth in the first place so I have a moral right to use it for whatever I chose.

So, anyway, in this image you an see on the left Safari displaying the problem, and on the right Firefox displaying the solution. I downloaded and installed Tor, The Onion Router. It's meant to provide anonymity for whistle-blowers to talk to journalists, or for people in China to browse sites blocked by the Great Firewall, and it works pretty good for my purposes too. Once you install and run Tor, you add Torbutton to your Firefox extensions, and then Firefox farms off all requests to a network of Tor relays, who pass it along for several random hops before one of them retrieves the page for you, passes it back up the chain, and it slips past your net filter and into your browser.

Of course it is slower than straight forward browsing, but until I can change to a more honest and decent internet provider (which I will do ASAP), it works for the blocked sites. And, might I just add, Tor was coded by some of the dreamiest looking hackers I've ever laid eyes upon. I mean, just look at these guys!

Bali 7/3/2008 - Nyepi Day

2008-03-22T03:35:11Z

Nyepi day, the day of silence. No traffic, no bikes or cars, no fires. All I could hear was roosters, rice birds, distant children. We emerged to find a thermos of hot water and some fruit left on the balcony. Westerners are allowed to break the fast but not allowed out on the roads. Nyuman and Madam Ketut's children played cards quietly in the courtyard.

I peeked cautiously from the entrance to the path which leads to the hotel. The road was completely deserted of humans. Several dogs wandered past, comfortable, not spooked in the least, obviously used to Nyepi and happy to have the freedom to lie down and roll on the warm asphalt. The brook running from the rice padi down it's little channel seemed louder. I watched it, hypnotized. An endless procession of rubbish floated past, especially the palm leaf trays for offerings.

We spent most of the day reading on the balcony of our room, listening to the silence. Occasionally people wandered by, neighbors checking in. Sometimes they surreptitiously knocked on the side door of Nyumans warung and bought some cigarettes. His family weren't fasting either, they didn't cook but they ate junk food, biscuits and crisps. But the prohibition against motor traffic and outside lights was kept almost completely.

They were enforced by the Pecalang, religious police, who I was told consume a magic potion which renders them invisible to demons so they are permitted to wander the village, making sure people obey the Nyepi rules and also keeping an eye out for thieves taking advantage of the day.

Around midday I did hear an approaching engine, and rushed to investigate. It turned out t be two scooters. One carried a man and woman, the other a pair of Pecalang. Either one of the civilians was sick and being escorted to the doctor, or they had gone for a spin and were caught and being escorted back home.

At one point I looked up and caught a snake twined around the offerings resting on an nearby wall, probably waiting for some rice birds to come for the cooked rice. By the time I found my camera it had disappeared. Later, when Madam Ketut walked past, I (quietly) told her about the snake. She looked up and pointed it out, coiled around a nearby bunch of bananas on the other side of the rill. Of course, I realized, rice snakes can swim.

Later in the evening, a tropical storm poured down. The path was flooded, the drainage channel rose to it's rim, turned brown with mud. The clouds moved on, Madam Ketut emerged with a bucket and sluiced down the steps. In the padi fields the farmer appeared, tugging on his lines to wave the flags that keep the birds away. The grain is almost ready to harvest.

In the evening the darkness was almost complete. The only light leaked from shuttered windows, even the streetlights were switched off. The contrast with the previous day couldn't be greater. Michelle had been quite apprehensive of spending a day in boredom and frustration confined to quarters, but we both found it very refreshing. I wish we did the same thing for our customary holidays.

Bali 6/3/2008 - Ogoh-ogoh day

2008-03-22T02:45:14Z

Ogoh-ogoh day. I don't know if that is what this day is actually called, but today is the ogoh-ogoh ceremony and that is what we called it.

We left early, driving north-east in search of ogoh. Once we left Ubud the morning scenery was captivating. Padi fields swept right to the road like waterlogged lawns, groves of oil palms and coconuts, patches of red dotted chili bushes and yellow spotted beds of marigolds.

But we were hunting monsters. Ogoh-ogoh are large figures made from paper mache or foam over frames made from bamboo, wood, chicken wire and wicker. They represent demonic figures from the underworld, often taking forms recognisable from pop culture, or caricatures of westerners or politicians. On this day they hold a ceremony in the evening where they lash them to large bamboo frames, carry them around the villages, shake them, rush them here and there and generally animate them, and this is meant to convey the impression that a larger, fiercer and more powerful army of demons and spirits has invaded Bali and is muscling in on the territory of the local djinns and efrites. These, scared by the colourful new monsters, fly away offshore and regroup. When they return the next day, on Nyepi day itself, they find that Bali is now totally deserted. No smoke from fires, no people walking the streets, and the only conclusion left is that the army of super demons has eaten every soul and there is now no reason for a self respecting regular demon to bother with the place. So they obligingly fly away into the sunset, to bother some other island with less enlightened population, and in this way the Balinese effectively clear out the demons for another year.

That's one of the stories. Another is that ogoh are just meant to represent the demons themselves, and building them and putting on the display is meant to show the Balinese lack of fear of the demonic influences. What we saw suggests that, on top of this, ogoh-ogoh are pure awesome, the locals love to build them and the kids love to see them.

We found ogoh in every village.

Some villages had only one, others had 3 or 4. Some were traditional monsters, Barong or Rengdar, while others were weird postmodern things with mobile phones and syringes in their hands, and others were deeply disturbing nightmare images dragged up out of someone's personal hell. Some were set up in a banjar, which is the word for both a common space with a raised floor and roof used for a lot of social functions, and the mens group which builds and uses the banjar structure for various purposes. Some were surrounded by crowds, others were seemingly abandoned. There were kids ogoh, made by small hands, and highly finished adult ogoh with lights and sound effects. There were commonalities. Usually they were in a dynamic pose, with a foot raised for stomping, and a lot were flying, very dreamlike, caught in bullet-time poses attacking each other or falling from the sky. The colours were all maximum hideous.

I particularly loved this one, a rock dude with skater hair and Green Day tie and white laceups. This one is definitely the creepiest - what's it meant to represent? It looks like a skinned rabbit wrapped in a sheet. This one is a total caricature of a tourist, with his red skin, tacky gold jewelry, beer and ciggie, hairy eyebrows and under-arms, and plugged ears.

The local children were often hanging around, they were very interested in seeing the photos of their neighbors ogoh and getting into shot when I photographed their own ogoh so the kids in the next town would see them.

After passing through nearby villages Penestanan and Singekerta, we looped back to Ubud. Near the bottom of Monkey Forest road we passed these Tom and Jerry ogoh-ogoh. In general the Ubud ogoh-ogoh were better constructed and wittier, but we did like the rural ones which were more obviously hand made. The Ubud ones employed foam and rubber and more colours, while the ones in more isolated villages still used paper over basket and had weirder features.

Leaving Ubud again we headed north-west this time, up the road to Kintomani. This road passes through poorer regions, full of small workshops and stretched out villages balancing on the ridge the road passed along. Like a lot of Bali the terrain here is linear. The land slopes away from the volcanoes and rivers carve it into parallel ridges and gullies. The roads follow the ridges, and two villages on adjacent ridges might be able to see each other but have 100 kilometres of road between them, up or down to the next river crossing. The workshops seem to specialise from place to place. Here we saw mostly wood carving, and quite a bit of bone carving. The new carved cow skulls were everywhere, also the traditional carved femurs and soup bones were in many of the shop windows. The higher we went, the weirder the merchandise got. At one point there were ranks of Santa gnomes drying in the sun, while legions of Pinnochio puppets dangled from the rafters. I wish there were Santa Ogoh!

Further up in the foothills we stopped for a coke and a smoke at a warung. The old lady inside could barely walk. I took some shots of her stock, strange antique ointments and pomades lined the shelves. Outside a poster caught my attention, a cigarette advert featuring the most cyber iconography I've seen in a decade.

Along the road was a region called Tegallalang which has a famous gully full of rice terraces facing the road, a common stop for coaches full of tourists. This means there are zombies in the region - locals bearing carved wood and toys who seem to come from nowhere when you stop, they just appear exactly like in a horror movie. They shamble slowly towards you holding out their wares, and most disturbing of all, they make a kind of moaning, begging sound.

One man in this crowd spoke a little english. he had several carved soup bones. I tried to explain to him that we couldn't take them back to Australia, because of customs and the risk of disease. He asked bitterly "Then what can we make for you Aussies?" Good question. Throughout Bali we saw the same tourist tatt repeated over and over - baskets, wicker work place mats, counterfeit watches, silver rings and pendants, T-shirts and shorts. It was incredibly hard to dig through these mountains of crap and find the few lovely things, like silver pens. Of course supply follows demand, and most of the tourists stay in Nusa Dua or Kuta and only buy the counterfeit brands available in bulk there. One of the most disturbing things we saw this time was the Polo Ralph Lauren shops, strange pure white cubes of light dotted along the roads both in Kuta and Ubud, often within sight of each other, selling identical stacks of primary coloured polo shirts. Middle aged Jap tourists are mainly to blame for that one.

Here is a good example of Ogoh construction. The neck stump of the headless ogoh-ogoh shows the traditional internal structure, and the kids are spray painting a Barong style head made from foam.

It was getting close to midday, so we turned around and headed for Ubud. We thought the ceremony would start around 2PM, and we anted to park the car in a safe place, because the roads had to be cleared. In the end we spent a lot of time waiting, because the main festivities didn't start until 6.

While waiting we watched the other tourists, watching us. One interesting thing was, the yoga people were in hiding. A yoga studio has recently set up along the road, and a vegetarian cafe also which catered mostly to the yoga students, although how they broke even I do not know as they seemed to subsist mostly on pranah and superiority. We found them pretty cold, sitting cross legged on their stools staring at us as we passed, seemingly calculating exactly how unfit and unpretty we were compared to themselves. They wore hemp hippy pants with the waistband turned down, and it seems they were so enlightened that they disdained to notice the ogoh-ogoh at all because they vanished. Perhaps they were scared away...

As the afternoon wore away the villagers prepared slowly. One by one they carried out the monsters, now lashed to square rafts of bamboo for carrying. They started to line them up, running in size order down the street outside the temple. A couple of very young children had what must be the smallest ogoh-ogoh ever.

This was duly placed at the front of the procession. More and more ogoh were carried into position. The gangs carrying them sometimes had T-shirts with the names of sponsors, local clubs or cigarette brands. The younger boys had their faces painted and hair done in punk styles. The girls appeared, finally - ogoh-ogoh seems to be a male-only institution, but the girls formed a torch-bearing mob to lead the way. The priest and his homies brought out a portable altar and blessed the procession.

And then, finally, shambolically, with no signal we could hear, the procession started. It started mainly when several groups of the younger boys picked up their ogoh, then put them back down again. Gradually the groups holding their ogoh up outnumbered the ones still on the ground, and the gamelan started to play. I think they were waiting for sunset, and it was quite cloudy and hard to tell.

The ogoh-ogoh began to move. Their bearers shook them, pumped the platforms up and down so the frames would flex and the outstretched claw-tipped arms would flail. Some of the ogoh seemed to be sprung to make them more animated. They were extremely strong to take the punishment. The big ones were so tall that guys with long poles had to run before them propping up the overhead wires to let them through. Small boys rode their platforms to stabilise them. Flares were lit, bathed in hellish red light, the monsters started to turn on each other. There were fights:

It was the most incredibly awesome thing I have ever seen in my entire life. I can't think of anything to match it. Having stood up and dehydrated for several hours beforehand might have enhanced the spectacle somewhat. It was delirious, insane. Giant monsters lit by torches roaming the streets with flashing eyes, hideous nightmares with things bursting out of their bellies, atonal alien music banging out from al directions. Distant reports of fire crackers, the thudding of the wooden bells in the temples, all combined into a fever dream of weirdness.

We couldn't take it anymore. The procession turned up a side street, we knew it would go back up the hill on a parallel road, and then return down Jalan Hanoman to the Monkey Forest, a small patch of jungle at the bottom of the village. There they would burn the ogoh in the old Hindu cemetery. We took the opportunity for a quick bite before they returned.

When the procession finally hove into view an hour later, it was worn out. The younger boys followed their ogoh, carried by their fathers now, hoarsely chanting football slogans. They wearily carried their monsters past the turnoff and further down the hill towards the spooky haunted Monkey forest. Michelle was a bit nervous, she was bitten by a monkey once, but some locals told her they were all sleeping at this time of night.

In a clearing stood several concentric circles of little headstones, most incised with swastikas. The teams dropped their ogoh, patiently untied and removed the thick bamboo platforms, tipped the monsters off, then built a fire and burnt them. It was quite anticlimactic.

There was no ceremony, no big deal, they were just disposing of them. In fact, we saw dozens of ogoh-ogoh by the sides of the roads in the following days, so it may be the Ubud teams were burning theirs because we the tourists expected it. They didn't burn all of their ogoh either, some were saved on the local soccer field for days afterwards, by which time they were so damaged from kids playing on them they burnt them too.

We collected the car and drove back to the hotel. Kids were letting off firecrackers everywhere, and the wooden bells were thudding randomly across the countryside. These are essentially the same as wooden signal drums in Tarzan movies, only hung vertically in towers in the temples. They send out single pulses of sound which carry for miles.

Bali 5/3/2008

2008-03-19T09:46:36Z

Luckily the drain work in the gang outside the hotel hadn't yet encompassed the entrance, so after collecting our car we were able to load the luggage and leave. It was good to get out of Kuta, even if it meant driving in Bali.

When I worked in travel insurance for a short time just after the tech crash, our policies all had one thing in common - they didn't cover injuries sustained while riding a scooter in Bali or the Thai islands. Even driving a solid car is bad enough. There are traffic rules, occasional signs and even lights and signals, but really the only rule in Bali is, kept left. Everything else is negotiable, including "keep left" from time to time. The best way to describe it is, imagine walking down the footpath of a busy city street during lunch hour, then imagine you are all made of metal and walking around 40k/hour on average. Traffic lights are all dirty, the reds often have a greenish tinge caused by sun bleaching, and tropical trees grow quickly to obscure them, as well as the rare street name signs and arrows. Intersections usually have an altar in the middle, and instead of looping around this like a roundabout, you pass this on the near side, merging with traffic coming from the other way. Big trucks with massive overhangs of rice straw, or bundles of bamboo, sway as they wallow in the potholes, and other trucks overloaded with bricks or sand creep slowly on spreading tires and block the flow. The scooters squirt past them like blood cells in an artery dodging a clot, and even cars from miles behind us shoot past on the right when we get stuck behind one of these monsters and contemplate risking an overtake. The scooters often have two or three passengers, and Mich swears she saw one bearing five people! Not to mention luggage, Balinese are masters of balancing a watermelon or basket of ducks in their lap as they swerve through traffic, sans helmet, sarong flapping around their ankles, smoking a kretek and perhaps, now, talking on a mobile. Everyone just keeps darting forward when possible like packets in a router, taking shortcuts, splitting and merging. Even when the road is relatively clear you have to remain calm in the face of constant threat of collision. Slow down if a car or truck approaches on the opposite side, because a scooter could pop out from behind him just for a peek at the road ahead, in time to hit your fender. Really it's miraculous that we saw no serious falls or collisions in our whole trip, although we have every other time. The only police presence are officers sitting in booths at the largest intersections, keeping a bored eye on the traffic. They do nothing except watch out for tourists like ourselves. If you are a foreigner and make even the slightest mistake while passing through their intersection, they jump on their scooters, chase you down, scold you, ask for your license, and extract the 50000 rupiah bribe you are advised to tuck inside for this purpose. The only alternative is to pretend to burst into tears and embarrass the hell out of them as Michelle did once. Most of the normal police are very nice, but there are many Javanese cops who tend to be stuffed shirts, bulging out of their tight uniforms, corrupt as hell and looking for bribes.

Despite all this, the scenery is breathtaking, although you have to try and stop to take it in. Once clear of the urban areas the paddies merge, palm groves and gardens of flowers (necessary for offerings), small villages and isolated huts and temples vie for attention. Mount Agung, nearly 100k away, looms on the horizon, totally unlike anything in Australia. The paddies are fascinating in themselves. All stages of rice cultivation are happening at once, from the nursery seedlings, which grow in small corner patches and look as fresh and even as a putting green, to the nodding heads ready to harvest. Where possible they use mechanised cultivators, usually hand guided tractor barrows, but often the terraces are too steep or the fields are too remote or surrounded by palm trunks to get these in, so they still do a lot of hand tilling. All harvesting is still done by hand, using a sickle. Mostly they cultivate modern strains of rice, that mature in 6 months, bred from Chinese rice crossed with the local variety, but they still cultivate some heirloom Bali rice in isolated corners of their fields, grown out of phase with the rest to prevent cross breeding. They use this for their ceremonies.

One problem with rice is birds, and they use several strategies to deal with them. Not many scarecrows, for some reason. Usually they string lines across the paddies, and hang plastic bags and flags from them. Often you see a farmer out in his field yanking on the lines to shake the flags. In one field I saw a farmer sheltering in a small tin shed in the middle. Every now and then he would emerge and pull on strings leading to sheets of corrugated iron on poles around the edge. The strings lifted rocks which banged on the sheets, which scared the birds away very well.

Along the way we saw a number of ogoh-ogoh, the paper monsters, although Michelle didn't want to stop so I didn't take many pictures. The ones we saw as we pulled into Ubud were particularly fine, although in general, other the following days, we noticed that the ones from outlying areas tended to be more nightmarish and ghastly, if less finished.

We were heading for Ubud, an inland village which has become a tourist attraction because of it's artistic heritage. Ubud itself has long been famous for it's painting and wood carving, and the nearby villages specialise in silver jewelry and stone carving. Australian artist Donald Friend used to live there, studying the local art and painting an endless series of studies of naked boys bathing because he was a notorious whoopsie. Actually, to his credit, he is said to have refrained from interfering with them, and requested that his similarly inclined visitors did the same. He is largely responsible for spreading the fame of Bali and especially Ubud to the world at large. Michelle has watched the place grow from a regular village with a few hotels on the main street nearly 20 years ago, to a bustling town with dozens of hotels and far too many tatty shops now. Not that we can complain, we need and appreciate the facilities, like net cafes and decent beds for people taller then 5 feet. there are an especial number of young Japanese tourists there, and German students doing their wanderjahr.

Whenever in Ubud we stay at Chandra Asri, a small, cheap but very nice hotel with separate rooms, run by Nyuman and Madam Ketut. The local Manuel, Ketut, has become a good friend. I should explain about names at this point. Balinese names are rather common, and mostly signify what order you were born in. Nyuman means third born, and Ketut means fourth. Historically Balinese were very insular and rarely travelled more than a few miles from their village, so it wasn't an issue, but nowadays there are so many Made's and Ketut's and Ayu's it becomes very confusing.

Just after arriving I almost stepped on a snake. I kicked off my sandals and walked up the short path to the edge of the closest rice padi. Looking down I realised I was just about to tread on a small green snake frantically wiggling across the concrete path. Luckily it was just a "rice snake", which has stripes. The plain green tree snakes are the dangerous ones, apparently.

We settled down on the balcony with a nice view of the padi and had a chat with Ketut about the coming festivities. He mostly lives with his wives family in Ubud now, but he came from a small village about 20K from the summit of Kintomani, the large caldera volcano in the centre of Bali, and he will be returning there for Nyepi ceremonies. Mainly because there is another ceremony following Nyepi, one on a 30 year cycle, which he will be participating in. 50 men will take part, and it involves him sacrificing a large number of animals including some oxen, 5 colours of chicken, ducks, geese, goats and even dogs. Also a lot of coconuts, which from the sounds of it are necessary for almost all ceremonies. I remember the first time I went to Bali, we first discovered this hotel. Ketut wasn't married yet, and was frantically saving up for the large coconut sacrifice required for marriage. At least they could be eaten - these animals will be sacrificed on a beach with a large ceremonial sword and then left for the surf.

This is Ketut. In a week this guy will be chopping the head off a cow with a sword the size of a banana leaf.

He explained that it was okay for us as foreigners to have food during Nyepi day, but nothing cooked, and we couldn't walk on the main road. No external lights, but inside was okay. No music, and no noise. There are religious police, Pecalangs, men from the local banjar, patrolling the village to keep these rules enforced and to prevent thieves taking advantage of the peace and darkness. The Pecalang apparently take part in a special ceremony where they drink a potion which makes them invisible to demons! He advised us that the Ogoh-ogoh would begin the next day at around 2PM.

While Michelle checked out the shops I wandered around the village checking out the Ogoh waiting in the temples. I heard gamelan coming from near the Palace at the top of the village, and found a series of dump trucks loaded with people. It was the local Melasti procession, about to travel down to a beach somewhere. Actually I didn't know this, so I started out following them, recording the music and traffic sounds.

The ceremonies continued all day. Later in the evening we had dinner in a warung down the road from our hotel, and heard the gamelan start again, playing very slow and mysterious music, often just a ringing bell and chanting from the temple. While cars and bikes continued to drive up and down the main road between them, the gamelan played in the large banjar, and the priest conducted the ceremony in the temple across the road. Bats flitted around the streetlights like giant moths. Later still the wooden drums started, single sudden strokes clonking out across the fields, while a stream of locals in white poured up the main road to the large temple next to the Palace.