I’m staying in Nyuh Kuning, which translated means Yellow Coconut. This town is like a small town in Vermont, that is outside an artistic center like Woodstock, Vermont, and in this case, Ubud, the cultural center of Bali. There are farmers and tourist villas all intermixed and a downtown that caters mostly to tourists, with restaurants, spas, resorts, yoga businesses, taxi and motorbike stands wood carving shops, internet café’s, artist galleries and a small convenience store. There are also a few motorbike-carrying kiosks that sell hot meals or toys for school children. For the villagers, the tourist-centered businesses offer an alternative to rice farming. Even though 70% of Bali is rice paddies, the younger generation is not much interested in being a rice farmer and there isn’t enough rice paddies to go around anyway. There is also a pre-school/Kindergarten, an elementary school, a town temple, a performance area for gamelan, [Balinese orchestral instruments], a town soccer field, and farmers market every morning for two hours starting at 5 am. Did I mention the temple! Its worth mentioning twice. Every town has a least one public one and every family has one in their family compound. They all get used a lot. Temple offerings, processions and ceremonies are right up there with sleeping and eating. With all the gods that they must honor and all the parts of everyday life that needs to be protected from demons through offerings, it is almost a full time job.
Since the Balinese are so “artful, creative and serene” lonely planet, the aesthetic of the place is one of harmony and beauty. There is detail everywhere that in other places outside of Bali would be limited to the wealthier homes and towns. Where as in the States, most people couldn’t give a hoot for aesthetics, everyone here cares about it and has a talent for creating beautiful spaces with mostly natural materials. Carved wooden doors and archways, fountains, gardens, statues, walls with alcoves and decorative plaques and hanging textiles are everywhere. The resorts must be built to fit in to their sense of beauty and proportion. You hardly know that the tourist resorts are here, except for the signs out front. They are all built along narrow road/paths perpendicular to the main street.
And now for the sounds of the place. Every sound seems to have a short repetitive rhythm that perfectly reflects the ritualistic rhythm of Balinese existence. It is enough to drive a person to wear earplugs at night. I have mine in right now. This helps a lot. I haven’t slept much since I got here. Perhaps tonight will be different.
For instance, last night after three rice farmers ploughed their family plots with tractors just outside my window for 3 days and the carpenter next door hammered holes in the concrete walls of a new house for the electrical outlets for three days, I was kept awake by the thousands of different kinds of frogs that had been disturbed by the ploughing, and were now trying to find each other? Or were ticked off? They croaked without stopping all night till 5 am when all of a sudden the deafening noise stopped. Mixed in with the frogs there were the dogs barking, multitudes of insects buzzing, fireworks, roosters, (kept in baskets for cock fighting) and right before total darkness birds call out, temple priests bang a bong instrument endlessly, whistles blow, and gamelon “songs” are repeated over and over again. Each song is the same and lasting 2 or 3 measures. The Balinese don’t seem to mind or at least they don’t seem to notice. I spent the day yesterday at a resort pool down the road. The bar was next to the pool area and they were playing some Balinese music-always a gamelon played, a flute and a bamboo xylophone. This one CD played over and over again for six hours, each “song” sounding about the same. They were basically just a few variations that were repeated endlessly.
When I returned to the villa, Richard and Wayan told me that they had rented a villa next door to that resort last year and he was almost driven insane by that same CD. He said during the 6 months there, they played a total of two different CDs. Wayan, who is Balinese was unaffected by it.
I got the earplugs from Richard.
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