Amed

Amed

Blog entry number 1

Monday 22^nd February

Travelling is challenging

The end.

 

Actually, it’s stunningly beautiful here in Amed, Bali. We are on the East coast where the weather is very dry and hot. It is low season at the moment and the end of the rainy season, which didn’t officially begin this year ( El Nino?)

We are staying in a family run place called Eka Purnama Bungalows. In an attempt to save money, I insisted we all squeeze into a one room cottage with a fan for $50 per night.

Saving money sucks! We have moved to the air-conditioned family bungalow with 240 degree views of the sea.

We are still under budget and the only people staying which seems quite bizarre considering the 3 people hovering in the kitchen waiting to cook us something. We are still full from breakfast but I feel like we should order some more food? Maybe a beer?

Down on the pebbly beach below our accommodation there are hundreds of out-rigger fishing boats that have recently returned from an early morning fish. It looks beautiful down there but I’m too hot to move out of the shade.

We have allocated the day to connecting properly with Jasper and Louie’s teacher Rosie and getting started on our blog. So far, the wifi here is not working, the kids are hot and tired and I can see why so many people just give up on the correspondence option.

I feel a strange mixture of home sickness (I suppose for our normal routines and the company of friends); I worry that we won’t be able to sustain the energy to be away for so long and I worry if Roger and I don’t stop drinking Bintang we may blow our budget and there won’t be food for the children.

I suppose we will find a balance.

After a couple of days we have settled in. It is incredibly hot and we’re spending a bit of time making the most of our air-conditioned room.

George, an American and his Balinese wife Iluh are really cool. They seem to have a few language issues where George shouts at her and she rolls her eyes at us, but it’s quite entertaining and they are both real characters. They have a 12-year-old daughter, Iona, who is away at school during the week but we spend an evening with her sharing photos.

We are still the only guests and the staff (who I think are paid 30,000 rp (about $3.50 a day) are looking busy sweeping, mostly right outside our window which is kind of nice because we’re a bit lonely too!

There is some pretty good snorkelling to be had in Amed. The water is fairly clear and the coral and fish better than we expected considering the amount of rubbish in the water in Bali.

Just below the Eka Purnmama Cottages is a WW2 Japanese shipwreck where we can snorkel.

The pebble beach itself is so covered in fishing boats that it makes it hard to move around.

The village next to the cottages is quieter than the main tourist strip of Amed. It is the cremation point for the eight surrounding villages and on our third day, a huge procession of people with baskets on their heads with offerings and food, make their way past our house to the village. There follows the body on an elaborate bamboo structure and a group of musicians with Gamelans and bamboo flutes.

The body may be cremated immediately if the family can afford it or the body buried and exhumed at a later date, probably with a group of other bodies and cremated in a mass cremation on the beach.

Perhaps that was why the snorkelling was a bit cloudy!

George, our host at Eka Purnama told us a story about being invited to exhume the body of Iluh’s grandfather which turned into a mass exhumation. Because he and Iluh’s grandmother had not had a proper wedding ceremony, they had a wedding before his cremation! I think I would have flagged it had I been her, but such is the deep spiritual belief of the people in Bali.

The next day we got a driver to take us sightseeing for the day.

We visit the Lempuyang temple which has a series of temples over 1000 steps. We make it as far as  the first and largest one on three different levels. It is so quiet with virtually no other tourists and we spend a couple of hours with our guide, sitting in the shade discussing spirituality and reincarnation.

Jasper is a bit irritable today and we tell him he will probably be reincarnated as a mosquito.

Gede is a beautiful soul who explains to us the steps in his daily meditation, the chant he uses “Om Namah Shivaya” (The Five Sacred Syllables: The Om Namah Shivaya mantra has five syllables: na-mah-shi-va-ya (sometimes called six syllable mantra by including Om).  Among other things, these five represent the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space. Thus, the Om Namah Shivaya mantra leads awareness in the reverse order from manifestation back to the source from which manifestation arose.

I think I’ll try it.

108  times a day.

We went from Lempuyang to Tirta Gangaa (which means “water from the Ganges” and it is a site of some reverence for the Hindu Balinese. It is also specifically the name of the water palace built by a Balinese Raja in the 1940’s.

The water gurgles out of a grotto above the gardens and feeds firstly, two beautiful cool fresh water swimming pools then flows out into the rest of the gardens. We felt the coolest we’ve been since arriving in Bali, swimming in that beautiful pool.

The only downside was an irritating Balinese guide who went through a series of accent imitations (Australian, Cockney, Queens English) until he arrived at an awkward South African /Kiwi slang that made me want to swim underwater.