Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. October 2-9, 2011.

Utterly spoiled by relaxation and enchantment, and because I wanted to see the two big lakes in the mountains on the way, I traveled to Ubud by private car too. Salit wouldn’t accept my attempts to bargain via text message, so Komang called a friend of his with a car, who gave me a discount since I was a pitiable solo female. Chatting, we drove fast up into the hills, eventually stopping to look at Danau Tamblingan and Danau Buyan, the twin blue lakes. Mist weighted the mountains. Some guy displayed a depressed-looking iguana on a pedestal and some gigantic bats wrapped tightly in their wing leather, trying to block out the sun. We drove through Bedugul, beloved for its strawberries, and stopped by a fruit stand, from which a Muslim woman tossed me a flat of lovely little berries and a branch of passion fruit for 20,000 rupiah through the window. I ate fruit and elaborated upon French vs. American social services for my driver, who had asked about it after I’d begun responding peevishly to his persistent volley of personal questions that are, after all, considered polite in Bali. I was irritable. It was time to settle down, so I was happy for this week in Ubud, and the two full free days I’d have before the writers and readers festival began.

You meet so many people in Ubud. Tuti, who runs Sunarta House, where I stayed my first few nights, with her family, and who quelled my crankiness by talking about food with me for a long time. She’s a vegetarian, but still goes to the morning market at the center of town to buy chicken for her husband. She told me about it, then I went the next day and we even recognized each other in the crowd. At the market, women sell flowers and their petals for offerings, segregated by color, each hue in its own basket. Women pre-make offerings for families who work outside the home to use in their temples. There are flats of eggs in stacks, fruit and vegetables, dried herbs and creatures in sealed plastic bags, just-cooked food steaming, stacks of silvery fish, a smoky area full of meat. Out front, people are plucking more chickens, and I hear the volley of roosters crowing from all over, and a steady chopping, and a broom, an old man, a child. All day they prepare satay and minced salads. When I found a copy of the UWRF program, I showed her my photograph in the author section and she excitedly showed her sister, who was dressed in a hot pink sarong outfit.

Terry, an older Australian man I met when I walked up Jalan Kajenguntil I reached the rice fields, which are tall and green, occasionally interrupted by the bamboo armatures of big houses being built. The path went on and on, paved with nice dirt, an endless flatness I’d dreamed of in Sumatra. I passed a few white men walking dogs and some tough Balinese women carrying heavy loads on their heads. The sky was blotched grey and heavy, with a peachy swath beneath the clouds. I turned back. A man was bathing in the irrigation channels, lowered into the water. I bought a young coconut from a woman who hacked it open with a few precise strokes of her machete. There were two middle-aged women speaking French sitting on the tarp, so I sat on a bench until Terry ambled up with his beagle on a rope that was a leash. The dog is called Bruce, and lives in a cage all day because the family Terry rents his room from are afraid he’ll be stolen. The coconut was massively full of water, then the vendor extracted long curls of the meat and returned it to me in half the shell. Terry and I had dinner and I got tofu rending, which was spicy and full of lemongrass and good vegetables. T described his duties at the house, which include plucking masses of chickens and ducks for the upcoming house dedication ceremony, said he has no plans to leave and wasn’t sure how long he’d stay. Bruce must go mad for the hunt everyday from the smell of blood all around and the blood in the ground.

I felt deranged walking down the noisy streets in the center of town, so I started courting loveliness. I went to yoga, and we placed tennis balls between our shoulder blades and the floor. The teacher said that myofascial release drives old grief and fear out of our bodies so new grief and fear can fill those spaces. The studio overlooks the rice fields, and occasionally a sleek rat runs along the rail. Really, offerings decorate so many surfaces, and all day are gnawed away by rodents and small birds. I went to Bali Buddha and drank juice and tea, ate experimental vegetarian nasi campur, aubergine spread on wheaty, grainy toast, and an admirable attempt at enchiladas, and read the Jakarta Post and the international edition of the New York Times. I found a place called Manik Bali that made a pencil skirt to my measurements from hand-woven cotton for $30, plus $5 to accommodate my American-sized hips. I saw a young couple on a motorbike, a duck peeking from behind the boy’s legs and a cascade of yellow ducklings spilling from the girl’s lap. I went to a boutique full of clothes and scarves in bold colors and patterns called Divya, and bought a one-off red and black tea-length skirt cut on the bias. I talked about textile design forever with the owner, and he gave me a discount because I’m a writer in the festival and they were getting ready to a have a sale. For three days I repeated these things. I understand why people live here, could learn to navigate this place and avoid the maddening streets, sink into this fantasy full-time. But when the female expats and travelers I met said they could picture me in Ubud, I thought no.

My last night at Sunarta House, I decided to go to a Legong dance show at the palace. Legong is fantastic and completely bizarre. Every finger and eye twitch means something inscrutable to me, I think. The dancers are wrapped snugly in gold, with pink, green, or purple sarongs, and hair in lovely blobs or ponytails with frangipani flowers hanging off. They wear shivering headdresses of gold and flowers. They make faces like Blair Waldorf constantly, from indignant to enchanted over and over, a Gossip Girl marathon with gamelan, which is the greatest music of all time. There is a warrior dance where a dancer of indeterminate gender bugs hir eyes out and lifts different fabric panels hanging from hir outfit and steps forcefully with the same precision as the gold-wrapped dancers. Utter strangeness. At the end, there’s a frightening “mask dance,” reminiscent of Booji Boy, and the dancer barely moves at all. The audience seemed sedated. I wanted to stand and scream and cheer at every number. I thought about Balinese Hinduism and gamelan and dance forms developing here on this little island, somewhat isolated, and how the practitioners are serious and confident and very, very talented, and that people come from all over the world to enter it.

“That tights are not pants? Honestly?”

I was dead nervous about the festival. Before the first dinner I’d RSVP’d for,  I put on the red and black skirt and rushed down the wet sidewalk and its curtain of vines, feeling cinematic. I didn’t make it in time to be picked up for dinner, and on my way back, I slipped on a part of the sidewalk where water careens over a viney wall. A panel of sidewalk rose with my unbalanced weight and trapped my foot beneath it. A woman in leopard Birkenstocks saved me by lifting the pavement chunk. I think that if all us women alone in Ubud got together, we could rule the world.

I was late for the festival’s opening ceremony too, but was picked up by my ambassador, an awesome gal in pink glasses on a pink motorbike who told me I was prettier than my submitted author photo and whisked me to the palace. The festival was fantastic to the point that eight months on, I can’t really believe I was involved in it. It was a truly cross-cultural experience, and I learned and loved so much. My reading list doubled in size. You meet so many people in Ubud. An American expat couple who started an HIV clinic in Kuta and told me how the official HIV infection stats for Indonesia are radically underreported. Catherine, my brunette Australian analogue, who is a sculptor and a reader and leaves parties early. American expats who’d lived in Bali or Australia so long they’d lost all understanding of the nuance of the U.S. populace and our politics. Young Javanese women who talked so fiercely about their books that the English-speaking audience started applauding before the translator even started. A real surrealist who traipsed through the grocery store at Bintang Supercenter with me. A young Australian woman who’d just moved to Bali to write children’s books full-time. A gorgeous, glamorous Australian called Filomena who I met in a yoga class and proceeded to see every day thereafter until she returned to Seminyak. Her friend Stephanie, who confessed F. thinks she (S.) needs to lay off the white wine, and treated me like a friend. The congenial man who uncovered the CIA’s involvement with Indonesia’s 1965 coup, helped build Bali’s airport, and taught himself the language within a year of first moving to Indonesia, the sort of expat I would want to be. Maria, who has a great accent from somewhere I couldn’t place, and teaches alignment-based yoga very well, and is in love with it. A couple from Austin who recognized me from the festival program. At least 25 women who could be categorized as “Eat, Pray, Love ladies,” and each of whom is unique and inspiring and brave.