Ah adventure, how you feed my soul! The last few nights in Seminyak were defined by the band of jugglers and fire spinners that came to stay with Aaron and I. Three women and one man showed up in festival clothes and dreads, with stories of travels in India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Bali. Three slept in the queen bed I'd been sprawled across in sweaty sleep all the other nights before, while I captured the one solo bed in the whole house. :) We took them to the beach and they put on a show before the rain came, gasoline and fire and rain, with a modest audience sticking it out until it was just too wet. I put two on my bike and teetered our way back to the house.
Dancing with fire
The next morning I ran out to catch some waves and found myself up against myself out there. On further self-examination (my favorite hobby, sorry surfing), I realized I was plain scared. Scared of the waves I had to get past tumbling me and adding to my small collection of boo-boos, scared of drowning, scared of catching the three foot waves I was frantically paddling towards. I spent an hour and a half talking myself into staying out there, learning how to paddle stronger, learning how to get under and over waves, and ultimately not riding one of them satisfactorily.
My conversation with myself sounded a bit like this: "Why the f**k are you trying to learn this sport? You've given it a good shot, just go home and deal with the shame of giving up." and "Come on, just keep paddling, go under that wave, and get out there. Turn your board around and get this one. Just one good ride." Needless to say, the other surfers out there gave the muttering chick a wide berth. I came back with an attitude of defeat, disappointment, and a promise to go out again that afternoon.
I ended up finally getting my Indonesian drivers license too. A quick motorbike ride to the Polisi station, I wandered into a back office and was approached by a young, remarkably good looking police officer who basically held my hand through the whole process. I filled out some paperwork, sat and waited, relayed the same information to a man behind a computer, sat and waited, carried paperwork into the photo area, sat and watched the process since no one spoke English. When I got my picture, I knew to sign here, left thumb, right thumb, look at camera. I walked out with a card (pic coming) that said I'm living at Queen Tandoor Restaurant and from "Amerika". Sweeeeeeeet.
My afternoon session wasn't happening though, the surf way too small and too short. It's approaching the new moon and that means a specacularly low, low tide. The evening was chill, with a homemade meal by the fire crew, excited to have a kitchen to play in, another attempt at spinning on the beach again interrupted by a deluge characteristic of the tropics. This time I put Kira on the back on my bike holding all of the gear that shouldn't get wet and put my poncho over her as I tried to see through the rain splashing and streaming over my face as we raced home.
I was up for hours after work coughing in bed and even today it seems that the cold or virus or whatever is going to be insistant on more rest. I woke at 6:30am, made coffee, checked my bags, and at 7am, Aaron and I were riding our bikes out of the west beach community of Seminyak, north of Denpasar, and veering north finally into the mountains of Bali. We were in a hurry to meet up with Aaron's work crew for a project we were going to do for the ________. This meant that I drove past a million photo-worthy scenes without being able to stop to capture mountain, temple, chicken, trees, ceremony, motorbike as minivan, etc. It was over two hours, the ride, until we pulled into a market bustling with people and trash everywhere.
We met up with the crew and the motorbike ride managed to get far more interesting at this point. It was curvy, mountain roads, climbing almost straight up at points, around tight hair-pin curves, and finally we hit the parts of the road that had been flooded during the rainy season. I found myself driving through soft sandy-gravel five inches deep - a difficult feat on a motorscooter. We finally arrived in the village, high on a ridgeline overlooking two mountains.
He loved his picture when I showed it to him
Village meeting
Village Meeting
tools
The houses here were one-room affairs, brightly painted and stacked tightly with narrow passage ways and stairs. Your neighbors are your family, your friends, and practically in the next room. Small dark doorways revealed wood-powered kitchens and small children peering out with huge eyes. A couple of the older women stripped down bamboo on the steps, deftly carving off even strips to be dried atop bamboo-woven covered water cisterns running through the center of the village. Everyone had painted their houses bright colors with flower and patterned adormnents. Men were building a house in the center, shouting and laughing at each other, all too eager to have their picture taken. I wandered through the town and chatted with folks as I snapped photos. Across the valleys, large clouds rolled through the mountains and valleys, appearing and disappearing the dense forests.
Construction
village
temple
Good satay
Skillz
Village
When I rejoined Aaron, he was in an intense meeting with several of the villagers, possibly half of the town had shown up in a community building decorated with a bunch of painting by one of their own. Everyone sat on the floor, a woman served out tray after tray of thick Balinese coffee, and the men smoked, joked, and debated passionately with the _____ guys. I sat next to kid section and several of the young teen boys engaged me in simple conversation, practicing their surprisingly good English.
tree project
young man at meeting
young man at meeting
When the meeting ajourned, we all headed down to our bikes and trucks and gathered up the tree-planting gear. We walked to the place agreed upon for planting and a couple of the men started digging holes for all of the young tree starts. I noticed the same two guys were doing all of the work while the rest of the men and teens talked, pointed, and sat around. It seemed like the many jokes I'd heard about how many men it takes to dig a hole in the US (two to dig, seven to watch, etc). I figured I switch it up a bit. I asked for the shovel and started in on a hole. After that, it was on, every guy there wanted to give me pointers, provide relief, and then the dig party really started. I got shovel time only twice and the trees went in a hell of a lot faster.
valley mountain mist
flower in garden
rotary project
Digging
Aaron was pretty disappointed with the whole process. Apparently the two month plan had just gone to hell and everything he'd been trying to do had been diminished into an "example" for the community. Trees were being planted helter-skelter in less-than-ideal locations, potentially causing more work for the community instead of the direct benefit with minimal work he'd planned for. He did a nice job of sucking it up after realizing his arguments and points weren't going to change what was happening, but it was like watching a piece of his heart get ripped out as all of his expertise and desire to help was discarded like so many ramen packages on the ground.
I had the advantage of taking photos, listening into all of the conversations, and observing this village and how folks here lived. There are a bunch of community improvement projects in this village. Large signs proclaiming the ______________ "helping others help themselves" were hung at stratigic places and the results of their work were everywhere. There is the organic garden at the top of the ridge with cherry tomatoes rotting on the vines and bolting lettuce. There are small solar panels sticking up from the corregated metal roofs, and log/beehives hungs from the rafters. The water systems supported a flush toilet campaign in a village without good drinking water, and the health services portion of the campign weighted all of the babies but didn't write down the numbers.
In the meantime, the villagers were a smiling, tight-knit community, with chickens, pigs, ducks, cows, and even a horse wandering through the barking dogs and steep steps. They were welcoming, friendly, and hopeful, going about their lives in the usual way and doing their best to accomodate the many different improvement ideas and projects that had been introduced. When we'd arrived, Bang was there too - teaching music at the small school house and everywhere we planted we were accompanied by the strains of "Let it Be" by the Beatles played on a myriad of recorders, a few guitars, and the occasional drums.
Aaron has taken on a brotherly protective stance with me that I'm mostly just grateful for and this day was no execption. Bang has decided he likes me. This is despite the conversation I had with him about his girlfriend (wife?), my lack of interest, and how we're not dating. When we all went to leave, Bang was pretty insistent that we all travel together, that we meet up and party that night, and would lean over occasionally and whisper that he missed me. I was wondering when we'd hung out enough to warrant "missing". Aaron always stepped in, kept me close to him, and I let him handle it. For those of you thinking, "Rebecca, you really should handle that stuff on your own," it goes through my head too.
The next 15-30 minute bike ride was through the worst roads I've ever seen. Like Superman rescuing Lois Lane's car from the pothole I just skirted kind of roads. Between gravel, boulders, small cliffs, and water-filled potholes, it took me a while to transverse the short distance to the East Bali Cashew processing plant. Up on a hill overlooking two mountains and the northern coast all of the way to the Lombock volcano (whoops, three mountains), the plant is an open-aired affair bustling with women workers sorting, splitting, and peeling cashews. The resulting nuts are sweet, complex with flavor, organic, and delicious. The owner, Aaron (yup, I'm up to three Aarons), is a down to earth guy with a wry sense of humor, good grasp of the Indonesian language, and single-handedly trying to start up a business that supports him and his wife and all of the people around here who desperately need work, healthcare, etc. http://eastbalicashews.com/
Cashew Aaron
All parts used - shells for fuel
koi pond
maintainence
all offices have a window
simple yet effective
Aaron checks out the cashew
straight from the flame
maintainence
circle of cashew
All parts of the cashew are reused here as well. Nothing is wasted. The shells power the flames that cook the cashews, the steam from the cooking cashews is then fed into huge food driers that hold trays of coconut shreds, bananas, pineapples, and the nuts themselves. All of these products are then combined into exotic flavorings to coat the cashews or the granola I feasted on this morning (chocolate banana cashew granola!?!? Heaven). We walked around on a tour of the hows and whats, the workers chatting over long tables of nuts as they process this product that has up until now has been shipped to India mostly for processing. Only 20% of the local cashews are processed where they're grown, cutting out thousands of jobs from the folks who need the jobs, living under the cashew trees.
Aaron is well-liked by his people and we ended our tour by walking a few hundred meters to a house of one of his workers. The family was celebrating the birth of their daughter and a handful of us sat on a mat on the porch. They live in a cluster of buildings, complete with a cow, chickens being shooed away, and a bunch of chatting company at the moment. The wife handed the newborn baby to her proud husband, who held his new daughter as his young son and shy toddler daughter clung to his side. The wife fixed us all sweet tea and crackers sprinkled with palm sap and stood by her parents, watching the group of us hang out for about an hour in the fading light. She pipped up once to discuss when she was going to come back to work and how she would work out feeding the baby.
Aaron, Aaron and I spent the evening trying various USB sticks to get internet and occasionally the signal was strong enough for me to get to gmail, but not go anywhere after that. Now it's a neccessity that I can't stay at Aaron's house on the ocean and I had to go hunting wifi in Tulomben at a hotel for the night. We drank macerated fruit liquior, they talked trees and business, and I cursed at my computer.
I woke tired, took a shower, headed to the beach, and saw a very different beach scene. Boats were lined up on a shallow, rocky shore. Salt processing stations set back from the boat areas featured large bamboo baskets, long half-cut palms hallowed out for the salt to dry in, and mud pit areas for the salt brining. It was also oppressively hot there, without breeze, and hazy. I didn't stay long, electing to stumble back through an impressive amount of plastic trash left over from the Nepi celebration from a month ago that the tide hadn't grown high enough to wash away yet. It's moments like that when I want to take a dip in the water, grab a basket, and start picking up stuff. For as much of an exception I've taken to the sheer volume of waste everywhere, I'm clueless as to where to begin, where to take it, the total amount of trash everywhere, and my state as one person. I want someone to come up with a good idea and the cash to get something started I can jump on to. Once I take a nap, that is.
A stiff cup of coffee later and we're back at the factory in full swing. Cashew Aaron talks about how the Bali government spends 20% of it's total income on subsidizing benzine fuel, the difficulties associated with grants and how free money has rarely yielded a truly successful business that employs people (he has over 130 people working currently). Across the road I see children playing with tires and sticks, a game I've only heard of from grandparents when describing a simpler life but have just now seen for the first time. Bali Aaron and I take a quick detour to check out the palm sugar production and over 200 meters later we're in the jungle and can't hear the clicking of the shelling machines any more. It's bugs and bird song we hear when we come onto a small homestead. A woman squats beside a wood-powered fire, feeding long sticks of gathered firewood into a nice fire on which a large wok sits, palm sap boiling down inside.
Her small boy hugs one of the chickens and lets me snap shots of him being ridiculously cute as baby chicks scatter around peeping at us. The two dogs bark for a while, but then settle down as Aaron and I learn from our guide how this process works. A few meters away a mother pig is tied tight to where she's napping. Her piglets are in a pen nearby and it's a little cluster of Babe's scattering under my lens. The family cow is tied under a shade through her nose in a way that has me cringing, but she's all too happy to eat the tops of the female palm fruit we feed her, settling into her fresh cut grass bed and munching away. There's a rythm to life here, a simple flow of fire and boiling sap, chicks peeping, the occasional cry of a rooster, the rooting noise of pigs and snoring piglets in an old tire, the smell of the cow, and the clouds that pass through this little valley aiming beams of light through the thick trees and plants. I settle on the ground and just be with it all as long as I can. All too happy to take a few pictures and watch the life around me.
Sap pour
Sunset at the factory
can't believe it runs
new
hot, still ocean
ocean mountain boat dog
salt
jobs for women
boiling sap
boy and his chicken
babe
A man walks up from the jungle with a plastic bucket full of sap. The top is surfaced with the flowers shaken loose as he climbed down from the top of a tall male palm tree. His hair is silver around a brown face and ready smile. He's ripped like a cat from scaling trees and draining them, selling the sap for mere pennies. The woman disappears into the house for a minute and come back out with a cake of palm sugar, the product of her many hours tending the fire under gallons of sap. She states that she sells the cake for 5,000 rupiah, or 50 cents each. Aaron buys one, despite her insistence that he take it as a gift. We learn how the sap has to be harvested carefully - the sap will ferment in minutes if left alone and has to have its pH altered when harvested. We learn what product is used, a kind of ash/lime mixture used for palm sap harvesting and for beetle nut production. The harvester demonstrates, pouring out a small amount into a bucket, swishing it around, then pouring the remainder back out. This is all that is needed for a gallon of sap to stop it from turning to arak.
Back at the factory I'm typing up this blog entry to be pulled away by lunch. It's served up in paper and held with a staple. We eat with our fingers, shoveling nasi, picking out the peppers, and putting bits of beans and meat into our mouths as we discuss NGOs. I'm pretty tired and wanting to work and sleep some. Aaron and I head out on our bikes, down some crazy roads, and finally end up on the one large road that follows the coast line. We find Tulomben and I ask around until I find a large room for $10 a night, and diving for both Aaron and I the next day for $85. Aaron splits to go back to Cashew Aaron's place and it's time for me to work.
****Side note - yes, the web designer JUST figured out how to put in LARGE pictures. :) You're welcome. And sorry.