First Day in Bali

So it is 4:48am Bali time on Monday.

I’m sitting in the mostly darkened restaurant of my hotel because it is the only place I can get WI-FI.

The first night I arrived I stayed in a very simple, cheap room for $20 that had a small deck overlooking these beautiful rice paddies:

There were fireflies at night! First time I’d seen fireflies.

And beautiful birds hanging out in the rice fields.  The view was incredible.

It was a cheap place and everything was perfect except…

there were about a million roosters on the property who did their little song and dance at about 3:30am.

And kept going and going…

So yesterday I spent about 3 hours trying to find the perfect quiet place thinking that would help me sleep and yet, now that I’ve found the perfect quiet place here I am up when everyone else is sleeping.

But that will be the next blog post. First I need to talk about the night I arrived. After I moved into the room with the view above.

Ubud has really changed since I was here 11 years ago. Flashy stores where once there were little street vendors and paved sidewalks in place of the dirt ones I remember.

It’s a bit sad.

I’ve had a bit of a hard time wrapping my brain around what I remember (quiet, charming) to what I see now.

I want Ubud to be what I remember.

And yet everything changes (especially off-the-beaten-path places darn it!)

So anyway, I was walking to dinner the first night that I got here (two nights ago) and I could feel myself feeling a bit anxious about eating dinner and having no one to eat with.

I could feel myself sinking into the space of I’M ALONE that I knew would hit me at some point on this trip but I didn’t  expect it to hit the first night.

The negative lonely spiral was pulling me down as I walked the streets that were once familiar but now built up and not so familiar.

I was missing the old Ubud: dirt streets with mud puddles. Now there are choppy cement sidewalks with huge gaps of space in between–if you don’t look down you literally could break a leg or neck. So instead of looking at all the new development I kept my eyes glued to the holes in the sidewalk and glanced up every minute or so.

I was walking around, getting hungrier by the minute and going into that downward spiral of ‘why am I here, why am I traveling, this is the stupidest idea ever, Kristin’ when I interrupted my negative thoughts by just choosing a beautiful airy restaurant. (There are so many wonderful places to eat in Ubud.)

I walk in and the wait staff sticks a flower behind my ear (Plumeria, my favorite!) and lead me to a table. There are 3 people in the restaurant sitting alone and I think how it would be nice if we were to all sit together but I’m feeling too shy to ask.

There is a man sitting at the table next to me. Very dapper, tall and thin man in his 70’s. We strike up a conversation and he asks if he can join me.

He’s Gary from Oregon and he travels to Asia for four months out of each year. He’s got a kind face and he tells me much about his life: growing up gay in the 1940s and how painful that was and then embracing his true nature over time and the freedom that came with that.

I thank him for sitting next to me and I explain a bit of the lonely spiral I was experiencing.

“Oh yes, I’ve been there. It is bound to come sometimes when one travels alone.”

We make a plan to eat dinner the next night at Cafe Lotus.

I can feel myself getting sleepy so I wish him goodnight and begin the walk back to my room.

“You want transport?” A million Balinese men ask me.

“No thank you, no thank you, no thank you,” I say over and over.

But then I realize my feet are killing me (why oh why didn’t I bring my Tevas and how in the heck could I get blisters in less than 24 hours of being here?!)

It’s starting to rain.

The downward spiral is coming back.

“You want transport?” a taxi drivers asks me.

“YES!”

I head for the door on the right and he smiles and reminds me, “You seat on the left.”

Oh yes, I’m in Asia where people drive on the left side of the road and where steering wheels are on the right.

“Where you want to go?”

I give him the card to my room.

We haggle over the price.

He says: “30,000 rupiahs.”

I say: “No, 20,000 rupiahs”

He wins. 30,000 rupiahs sounds like a lot but it is really only $3.

“I Wayan,” he says.

“I’m Kristin.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says.

He starts up the car and then asks: “You meditate?”

“Yes”, I say. I don’t mention that it is an 8-minute morning mediation that often has me squirming to be done.

“Meditation is good for the mind. Many people have the mental illness. They have money problems, family problems, they don’t know what to do. Healing mind, healing the heart is the only thing that helps the mental illness.

I born into family problem. Broken family. I feel sad. I feel, you know, the mental illness. I get quiet. I build my character, clean heart, clean mind. Every day many things I do wrong. I can count them on my hand. But I clean heart out at the end of the day. Is good. My God help clean my heart, remove mental illness. Many things happen, cause mental illness in peoples but the sadness come, it go away.

Like the sun rise in Ubud at 6:15 and sun in Ubud set at 6:15 in the evening, problems come and go as the sun rises and also sets.

Let go, as the sun lets go. Do the meditation and the prayer and you be happy.”

Wow, this is my taxi driver???!

He continues:

“I go to the high school. None in my family go to high school, but I go, very important to me. I have 2 cows. Tomorrow I cut the grass to feed the cows. I am a cowboy.”

“Do you have a horse?” I ask.

No horse. But 2 cows.”

He smiles and laughs and I laugh too.

We sit in his taxi outside of my room and talk about the Bhagavad Gita which he has on his dashboard.

“This is my Bible,” he says. “Too many people only thinking money, money, money-creates mental illness. We need money to be alive, this is true. But too much thinking about money creates the mental illness.”

I can feel his gentleness and goodness-this is not just in Wayan but in all of the Balinese men I’ve met so far. The men here are soft yet fully masculine too. They feel very balanced.

“Tomorrow I take you on a taxi ride to my village, around Ubud for 350,000 rupiah. Whole day tour if you like.”

I’m thinking that $35 is cheap compared to the value that I’ve already received from talking with him.

Tagged as: Bali taxi driver, Bali travel, Balinese men