Bali June 2023

 

After opening my first exhibition in May, Jacob and I took a break in June to fly to Bali with Jacob’s Dad and sister. During the flight I noticed a tiny black speck in the corner of my vision: a floater, like the dot of an ‘i’. It was only visible when I looked at the flat expanse of the great blue sky, and I wondered how long I’d missed it, staring at screens and in dark galleries? I forgot about it soon enough, when the cloud cover below the plane was broken by the tip of a mountain, and as the clouds cleared another appeared, and another.

We’d gone to Bali primarily for Mark, Izzy and Jacob to achieve their open water scuba diving qualification and for me to use mine in the clear waters off Amed (north-east Bali). The sun set about an hour earlier in Bali, and by the time we got to the dive centre it was dark and we were tired after a day of travel. We walked up the stairs to the communal garden where we were offered cold lime juice and water and we knew we were in good hands. The days that followed started with a cooked breakfast, more juice, beautiful dives in the morning and languid afternoons reading and lying down. I loved the regular rhythm and simplicity of it. 

Since I hadn't dived for over six months (when I qualified for open water diving), I took a refresher course with Nyoman where I went through a few basic theory classes with Jacob, Izzy and Mark and then some skills in the calm and shallow waters off Jemeluk beach. Unlike my diving course in Tioman, which frontloaded the theory and then had a few intense days of actual diving, the course Jacob, Izzy and Mark did with Adventure Divers interspersed theory and diving. On that first day we took a slow, wobbly dive around Jemeluk bay and saw lion fish, stone fish, goat fish, shoals of bright blue damselfish, angelfish, and in the far distance a small turtle, like a ghost. 

When you're underwater everything is silent, and you don't have the normal soundtrack of life shadowing each experience. No music through headphones creating an emotional tint, no traffic or city bustle drowning out your thoughts, just the white-noise roar of the sea drawing breath. That is what I love - so much peace.

On our second day I dived with Coco, a marine biologist from Sicily who was doing a course on coral conservation. This was my first boat dive, and we set off in a jukung (a thin, indonesian fishing boat) across calm waters under blue skies. Before we dived you could see the bright colour of coral through the surface of the water - it was so clear! 

We dived around Jemuluk West, passing coral that looked like large goblets or meadows or small antlers which fish darted in and out of. Diving is slow business; you fin along to keep yourself buoyant, not to move faster. To move fast would be to miss the world around you, and sometimes I would try to stop at one place, so I could observe a dancing family of clownfish or the lattice of a sea fan. 

My heart's wish had been to see a turtle, and I was happy on the first day to see the silvery image of one in the distance, but I was not prepared for the abundance of turtles on this diving day. We saw turtle after (hawksbill) turtle, close enough to see the algae growing on their shells and the wrinkles around their dark eyes. 

A very different sort of encounter occurred later on in the first dive. During the dive we finned near an unusual looking starfish. Coco pointed it out, and we stopped and stared as was the etiquette for when we saw something unusual or beautiful. This starfish was the orange of a highlighter, and had vicious looking spikes sticking out all over its body. After looking at it for a short while, our dive instructor took out the metal stick he used to point at objects and drove it through the fleshy middle of the starfish! I was shocked - Coco later said she saw my eyes go wide - and for the rest of the dive the starfish hung, impaled on the metal stick which the dive instructor held gingerly away from him. 

When we surfaced, Coco and the dive instructor explained that the starfish was a Crown of Thorns sea star - a carnivorous predator that feeds on coral. They aren't bad in and of themselves, but because many of their predators (larger carnivorous fish) had been overfished by humans, there are too many of them and they feed on coral. The dive instructor had impaled it - which wouldn't kill it, as these starfish are remarkably hardy and can regenerate when injured - to prevent it from further feeding on the coral. He also took pains to avoid touching it because they are highly venomous; they told me the story of someone who'd buried a crown of thorns star beneath a tree, and came back to discover that the tree had died! We left it in a sunny spot to dry out and die. 

On our last day we dived the Tulamben wreck. There were more divers here and visibility wasn't as good but it was an exciting day because it was the day Jacob, Izzy and Mark would complete the last of the three open water dives necessary to get their license! Swimming through the wreck was slightly discombobulating; things appear closer and larger in the water and so it would seem like the gaps in the ships hull that Nyoman swam through were impossibly small until we followed suit and wove through the wreck with no problem. 

The next leg of our journey was to Ubud, the apparent 'cultural centre' of Bali. In all honesty, I did not love Ubud and don't wish to return. It was crowded with tourists, so much so that when you walked the streets the few local faces you saw were shop owners, touts, or drivers, and this made me feel like I was part of a problematic part of tourism where a place becomes a contained for tourists and a home for its own people. What I did enjoy were the little things, like seeing the offerings placed on the ground each morning, filled with flowers, incense, and sometimes little biscuits or cigarettes. I think I was also feeling the after effects of the intensity of the past few months, and I felt teary and fragile on that day in Ubud.

 

So it was a relief to escape to Munduk the following day. Munduk is in the North of Bali, and we were hiking a mountain there. We met our guide, Nalom, who used to be a journalist and was inspired to set up his own travel company to provide a more authentic experience of Bali. He partnered with Komang, a village chief in Munduk, whose home we stopped by for breakfast (also where we met the sweetest little kittens.)

We were hiking Mt Lesung, which requires a local guide and so halfway through our drive there we stopped to pick up Putu, a pint-sized woman who we later found out was agile as a cat and could out pace us all on the steep and slippery slopes of the mountain. She pointed out coffee plants, avocado trees and all manner of plants as we walked. At one point, where I was clinging on to my hiking stick for dear life as we trod on loose soil and slippery leaves, Putu calmly stripped a single palm leaf off a tree, and after about five minutes of folding and weaving, had turned it into a hat! What a legend.

After descending the mountain we kayaked across Tambligan lake while the clouds threatened to pour above us, and had lunch under the shelter of a seven hundred year old tree. Before we kayaked, Putu explained the Balinese naming system to me. In Balinese families the first born child is usually called Putu, or Wayan, the second born child Made or Kadek, the third child is named Nyoman or Komang, and the final child is usually named Ketut. If more than four children are born in a family then the names just repeat in the cycle! This way, you'd know the birth order of a person just from their name. So our diving instructor was the third born child of a family, and Putu was the oldest child among her siblings.

The final stop before our long ride back to Ubud was by the entrance to a waterfall. We walked many steps down and got changed into our swimsuits and approached the water. "Is it cold?" I'd asked Nalom. "It's...fresh." he replied. I dipped my toes in and it was cold, but there was nothing for it but to wade in. Jacob took a few steps and dove in, whole body, emerging with the biggest grin on his face and his arms out wide. I took swam, frog style, for a little while, gasping with the cold. We took turns standing under the thundering weight of the waterfall, letting it pummel our shoulders and backs. Then we walked out, humbled and feeling, like Nalom said, fresh.