KeithInIndonesia: Bali Days

Ok, I'm remiss on posting to my blog, despite best intentions. It's been a long but exciting last 10 of so days. Bali is a paradise, but it comes with a cost, for sure, that affects both the people and the place. There's a clash between rampant development and traditional people and a clear impact on the local ecology. There are 240 million people in Indonesia, close to the population of the US, and there are 17,OOO islands. 120 million of those people live on the Island of Java in three huge cities, the largest being Jakarta. There are some other big cities, but nothing compares to Java. Just as a measure of the growth in wealth here, Indonesia is currently importing 800,000 motorbikes a month. That's almost 10 million a year. Asia is ascendant, but its not all good.

Bali has 2.5 million people, but many a clustered in a few cities near the coast, and the interior is made up mostly of smaller villages where people are closely related and farming, religion, and landscapes are intertwined. Each house has a temple where people daily make offerings to their ancestors. The temples are always in the NW corner of the compound and are large and elaborate with several shrines and altars. Each rice field, owned by a family also has a temple in the field. Each village has a much larger temple complex, also spatially located to the north (if you are on the southern side of the island, the import point is that it must be towards the mountain). These are used for community and larger ceremonies which are frequent (more than one a month). There are also much larger temple complexes located at prominent points like at the base of the mountains and by the sea. These are more pilgrimage destinations for events, or just when people can get to them. All these different layers are intertwined and have related meanings. For examples, the organization of water management, allocation and labor to keep the rice-production system in place intimately tied to the religious order and hierarchy. There's a good book by Stephen Lansing called "Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali" that goes into much more detail.

Anyway, heres some pictures from my visits to friends houses in Bali, some household temples, and some larger ones. At the end are a couple pictures from my few days by the beach, surfing. Bali has some of the best waves in the world, so this was not to be missed. Next, I'll post on my trip to Komodo and Flores, wonderful islands to the east of Bali and centuries away. As I write I'm sitting in a rustic cafe in Labuanbajo, a small funks fishing village overlooking a stunning bay. It's hot and noisy and full of strange smells.