Home again home again

2:36pm Saturday July 18th, 2009

In the car heading home to Ubud. We had a mellow and uneventful remainder of our stay in Amed. We spent most of the afternoon sunbathing and then reading/napping in the shade and took the motorbike a few miles down the road for a forgettable dinner at a cute restaurant on the water. We had to get gas for the scooter and were sent across the street by the hotel receptionist to a little roadside store. For 60 cents US, we bought a liter of gas from a little girl who poured it into our tank from an Absolut Citron bottle and a funnel. On the way to dinner, we marveled at the beauty of the coastline, especially as the sun was setting, and I had to admit I was beginning to understand why people came to vacation in this region. The ride to dinner was only marred by the number of bugs we got beaned in the face with on the scooter, and passing two villagers carrying a huge pig tied to a long bamboo branch carried between them, squealing for its life. Almost enough to make me a vegetarian. We had the morning to ourselves before our driver came to collect us and spent a good portion of it by the pool and tangled in each other’s legs reading in the chaise lounge on the porch of our little bungalow. I’ve been picking up and putting down The People’s Act of Love by James Meek for the better part of the last year and I finally hit my stride with it while in Amed and then couldn’t put it down. I had read maybe a quarter of it over the last year and then read the remaining three quarters over the last 24 hours. A VERY good book. One of the best I’ve read in a while and it was a total sneak attack –I love when books surprise you and turn into more than you could have anticipated from them. Anyway, I’m sad its over, as I’ve now run out of fiction to read. Luckily, there are English book shops in Ubud. Once again, stark contrast to Senegal, where I was reduced to re-reading Eat Pray Love (and hating it less the second time around).

Our driver told us about a bombing at the Ritz in Jakarta yesterday which, I think, underscores some of the issues at play in 3rd world countries such as Indonesia’s and the influx of Western influence and wealth. Anyway, its very sad to hear so many people died, and for what?

We asked our driver about whether the hotels like the ones in Amed are good for the village or not. He said he thought they were good. They bring jobs, they bring people to buy the things they sell. Balinese, he said, don’t differentiate between white skin and brown skin –if you’re a westerner and you come and are respectful of the Balinese, you become family. So maybe my haughty dismissal of Amed’s false paradise as a bourgeois parasite on a poor fishing village was hasty. Maybe I’m just being pretentious assuming I know what the Balinese need better than they do, maybe they welcome the rich westerners. What do I know, really?

We stopped by the big Water Palace on the way home, a sprawling 500 year old temple made primarily of ponds and pools. CRAZY beautiful (also home to the wettest, grossest toilets ever known to man). You can pay 6,000 Rpa (about 60 cents) and swim in the large pools, which are black with algae and full of fish. If we weren’t so eager to get home and my leg were a little better, I’d have gone for it. Austin and I agreed it would be a perfect place to spend a day sunbathing and swimming surrounded by total beauty.

Looking forward to getting back to our sleepy village, familiar faces, better food, and some birthin’.