The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  I thought of Dr. Jeff bouncing on his Pilates ball. What is a world without fat? To compare the fat of pudgy prawns to that of sizzling chicken bits, to sink into flavored fats tossed around in fatty woks, to suck up fats shot through with blinding-hot chilies, fats consisting of green blobs and oil slicks of reddish brown. Fats creamy as mashed tofu, fats floating on top of broths.

  I realized then that I was in a dire state of fat withdrawal. With the sudden intake of hot fat, however, I felt my whole body relax ecstatically. I took another tuk-tuk around town. The whole place was partying; in the cavernous lobby of the Hilton Hua Hin, bands of girls in tank tops danced to a wretched band. In the street, they came running after the tuk-tuk, waving madly. “You bad man, you come back now!” When I compared them to the pasty, anxious women locked up inside Chiva-Som, I felt only a twinge of sadness. Life is elsewhere.

  Such is the thoroughness of the spa system, however, that I could not escape a final reckoning at the hands of Dr. Jeff, a kindly soul all in all. On one’s last day, there is a weighing, an overview assessment, a progress report, and some final recommendations that one can take back into the real world. It is generally expected that over the course of a one-week treatment the average guest can lose three or four pounds if he or she exercises vigorously every day. And why come to Chiva-Som if you are not prepared to profit from it to the maximum degree? My final reckoning was therefore all the more disappointing insofar as we discovered that I had actually gained weight. A few eyebrows were raised and some hard questions were posed concerning the seriousness of my commitment to self-improvement, inner equilibrium, and intestinal rigor. I admitted that intestinal rigor was not really my thing. I could have gone on about the steak and the Volnay, but mentioning French food did not seem like an appropriate move. It would be taken as a death wish. Dr. Jeff looked at me with mercilessly compassionate, as if about to voice some dark suspicion.

  Instead, he merely asked, “Where do you go from here?”

  I told him I was on my way to Bali.

  “Lucky man. It’s a fabulous place. Many great spas on Bali.”

  “I won’t be going to any of them.”

  I was going, I said, for a rendezvous with the man who would be taking me into the heart of New Guinea.

  “Is that a very moral thing to do?” he asked quite reasonably. “I mean, visiting a Stone Age people like that? I would have second thoughts.”

  I did have second thoughts. What would be the truest reply to his question? That the premise of visiting a supposedly uncontacted people seemed, so far, both dubious and unsettling; that I knew Papua was bound not to be the Eden that many an ecological tourist must assume it to be.

  “It’s a tough place. We used to rule Papua New Guinea.” He spoke as an Australian, of course, and his voice went cool. “The diet will be good for you, though. Sago palms, isn’t it?”

  PARADISE MADE

  Denpasar has one of the most refined airports in the world, with the mood of a provincial museum blended with a singsong holiday camp. Its halls are richly adorned with displays of Balinese high culture; classical gamelan music is piped—not too loudly—into every available public space, creating a subconscious background atmosphere that quickly evokes girls dancing in gold headdresses and snapping their painted fingers. Mossy temples, you think idiotically, mystical shrines in the mountains, sacred volcanoes, a harmonious spiritual paradise. This eerie music is everywhere—on the elevators, at the immigration booths, in the luggage hall, and throughout the arrivals lounge. It sounds like a serpentine tune that is repeated over and over, a gamelan playing in tandem with a flute. You will find yourself submerged in this same tune everywhere you go in Bali, as if the island had to have a single respectable soundtrack to establish its mood. It is ringing in your ears by the time you have persisted into the parking lot and the heat of the equator bursts upon your skin. It is clear what the subliminal message is: we are an Island of Culture. Culture is what we do. We are Cultural. Refinement is the air we breathe. The word “paradise” is virtually everywhere. From one brochure:

  The island of Bali has long been characterized in the West as the last “paradise” on earth; a traditional society insulated from the modern world and its vicissitudes, whose inhabitants are endowed with exceptional artistic talents and consecrate a considerable amount of time and wealth staging sumptuous ceremonies for their own pleasure and that of their gods—now also for the delectation of foreign visitors!

  It is even hotter than Bangkok. The Australian families are all around you, the children carrying their blow-up water wings and beach balls, and the Anglo-Saxon look is back in the foreground: tattoos, buzz cuts, cut-off shirts, hideous shorts. They clearly don’t give a shit about Bali culture, or any culture, for that matter. They are here for the beaches of Kuta and of Seminyak. And-if they have money—the Golden Triangle, a vast luxury hotel zone to the far south of the island. It is impossible that they can have any solid notion of what Bali is or was. For of all tourist destinations in the world, Bali is the most decontextualized. It has been rendered thus by the Indonesian authorities themselves, for it is Indonesia’s Golden Calf, its splendid money machine, the only place in this enormous nation that Westerners ever visit. The rest of Indonesia, after all, is Muslim and often radical, and the far east of it is Papua. Only Bali beckons the hedonist. And for Bali to be attractive, it must be contentless. “Hindu Disneyland,” locals will sometimes call it. The terrorist bombs that killed 202 tourists in a Kuta nightclub in 2002 and those in Kuta and Jimbaran in 2005 were an assault on this unusual fabrication—but the Bali brand, as one might call it, is so deep, so old, and so handsomely fashioned that it will take a lot more than a few jihadist bombs to shake it.

  I took a cab into Seminyak. It’s a languorous resort spread out along a busy beach, the south end of which is Kuta. Where Kuta is raucous, vulgar, and intensely youthful, Seminyak is a little quieter, its hotels made in traditional styles and often set back from the beach in perplexing complexes that look from the outside like temples. I had the fanciful notion of checking into one of these for a few days and, slowly acclimatizing to the heat, practicing with my fifty-pound jungle load on the beach every day. This would doubtless make me the local Robinson Crusoe type, bizarrely clad and wild-eyed, and I would probably be tailed mercilessly by the catamitic hustlers for which Seminyak Beach is so justly renowned. But I did not want anyone else to carry my pack in Papua, and to be able to offer myself this noble gesture, I would have to train. My idea was to get up at dawn every day and haul my pack down to the beach, then trudge down as far as Kuta and back again. Since Bali is only four hours’ flying time from Papua and on the same line of longitude, I assumed that this preparation would stand me in good stead. I could train my muscles and pores to accept a grueling regime.

  The Anipura Villas is a midlevel hotel catering to working-class German and Dutch tourists, who come in fairly large groups and bestir themselves little. For one thing, it is too hot; for another, the Anipura has a dreamy pool surrounded by frangipanis and with a view over rice paddies that appear through every crevice of Seminyak’s sprawling suburbia. Silhouettes of mountains came into view in the morning, before the rains came crashing down. The same flute and gamelan music played around the pool area night and day. A crippled Dutch man, the victim of some terrible industrial accident, was lowered into the water by his wife. The Balinese attendants watched them all impassively; they were too young for the Dutch tones to recall the former colonial master. Swimming there under the moon with no one around was cheaply beautiful, offering the seduction of obviously contrived illusions.

  At night, the main street that connects Seminyak and Kuta is a partially lit ribbon of tourist shops, bars, declining clubs, eateries, and Internet cafés. The Islamists have left their mark, however, for part of the crowds had been sliced away, leaving many joints empty and listless, a tout outside standing forlornly with a menu, pointing to a room of empty tables. Australian women still trawl the s
idewalks for male hookers, the so-called Kuta Cowboys, and Kuta is still something of a female Bangkok. Just as in Bangkok you see the hopelessly subpar Western man, sometimes in a wheelchair, holding upon his arm a cheerful supermodel, so in Kuta the loveless white woman finds her long-haired gigolo: the polite compassion of Asia. The long streets of T-shirt shops packed with swimwear look like a red-light zone until you get up close. There are healthy blond couples everywhere; the hustlers brush your arm lightly, with feminine hands, whispering something about dope and young girls.

  Before long, I was rising at the exact moment that the moon began to disappear and walking the beach with my pack. It was a long hike. Northward, it took me across shallow rivers cut into the sand, past perennial forest and private homes, discreet little luxury hotels and alleys bushy with flowers. To the south, the scene was more industrially touristy. Even at dawn there were hustlers strolling the sands, looking for men to pick up. In Bali, it seems, only the men sell themselves publicly for sex. At the Kuta end, there are volleyball nets, old masseuses in conical hats, gaggles of mopeds, and the infrastructure of what looks like a California beach city, culminating in a huge Hard Rock Café complex. Facing it there is a chilling revolutionary statue of the independence war hero “Jagarana” holding a pistol in one hand and a flag in the other, signed by one Professor Doctor Ida Bagus Oka—reminder that even Bali has a political history buried deep under its Western surfaces. By the time I got to Kuta that first morning I was shattered and took a motorbike back to the hotel. Eventually, I managed the return hike, followed all the way by the “cowboys” whistling and telling me how nice their cocks were.

  There comes a time, about twenty-four hours after your arrival, when Kuta fatigue sets in. It’s the Paddy’s Pub, the “Auld Lang Syne” played on electric guitars as if to compete with the piped gamelan music, the puppy-fat blond girls with beaded hair, the old women with massage licenses pinned to their hats, the McDonald’s offering Idul Fitri meals; or else the endless K Stores, the half-naked white men looking like convicts on a spree, with Chinese and barbed-wire tattoos on their shoulders, and the Bali Barrel surf shops and the Beer Gardens. It is not the Bali of lore, the land of villages celebrated by Jane Belo and Gregory Bateson. During the afternoons, I began taking long car rides along the southern coast, seeking an alternative to the resort zone. On a small island everything is compressed, even the countryside. As the suburbs of Kuta peter out, the road winds its way through semiarid scrubland of the Bukit Peninsula, blinding white as Spain, through steeply sloped forests with views of the sea and villages with a single warung with red plastic tables. In places it flattens out like a cactus desert.

  Bali’s tourist economy has been structured as a triangular affair comprising, to the north, the inland city of Ubud, and to the south Kuta and its outlying beaches such as Legian, Sanur, and Seminyak, and the more exclusive peninsula of Nusa Dua. The three “points” of this triangle correspond to three antagonistic types of tourism. Ubud was developed to attract better-educated travelers seeking contact with Bali’s classical heritage, while also indulging in exclusive spas; Kuta-Legian would draw in the mass-market beach crowd, and Nusa Dua would appeal to high-end sun worshippers seeking an all-inclusive, heavily fortified vacation in a megaresort along American lines. Bali needs all three, since tourism accounts for some seventy percent of its economy and employs one in five of the population. The Nusa Dua development was begun in 1973 with World Bank funding and was intended to draw off masses that might otherwise overwhelm fragile Ubud. All around this southern region, however, tourism has become the landscape, and vice versa. The villas perched high to capture the sea views and the elite miniresorts that think themselves far from madding crowds are packed into a setting that would be Homeric if they were not there, for here the flat beaches turn into a Mediterranean scene of tortured cliffs and metallic scrub. One road passes the surfer beaches whose repute rings loud in Australia, notably Dreamland but also, to the far south, Ulu Watu.

  Inland, the road goes through an extraordinary place, the future Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park. The GWK, though it sounds like a Soviet factory from its initials, is to be Bali’s largest ever tourist development, based according to its builders on “local wisdom.” There was nothing to be seen there now, but my driver explained that this giant park resort would one day boast the world’s largest sculpture, a 250-foot-tall figure of Vishnu, the Hindu protector god, riding on the bird Garuda. All this will be mounted on a 230-foot-tall pedestal worthy of Albert Speer. It is to be a national monument “sustainable for centuries,” just like Speer’s projects for Berlin, and like these latter might well never be built. Monumentalism and insecurity jostling together. A few miles on, the same could be said of Nusa Dua: it was like approaching a city-state separated from the rest of Bali by gates, police, and suburbs—in this case, the shambling town of Bualu, where the thousands of service workers for the hotels lived. It was a World Bank project—enough said.

  The megaresorts of Nusa are connected like the government buildings of Calcutta by sweeping boulevards framed by lawns and tropical gardens. An army of peasants keeps it all trim. The lobbies of the hotels are outrageous in scale, especially that of the Grand Hyatt and the Sheraton Laguna, though the Nusa Dua Beach Hotel & Spa boasts fragments of re-created Balinese temples. I thought of Lorbrulgrud, the capital of Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels, that great satire of travel writing. The Hyatt, I calculated at once, must be at least four glonglungs long and about as large as the king of Brobdingnag’s formidable palace. In fact, I have always wondered whether megaresort architects are also fans of Gulliver’s Travels, for they appear to have borrowed liberally from Swift’s inspirations. Floating cities, magical islands, palaces large as English counties, kings and queens living in absolutist madness. I wandered through the empty lobby of the Hyatt, grand as a Hearst castle, where a band played to no one, and then down to the lagoon pool that stretched all the way to a distant beach. Set amid this utopian sprawl, the hundreds of units rising on all sides did indeed seem like a Gulliverian metropolis, but with almost no one in it. A few Russian girls sat by the pool bar in curious bodysuits, smoking and watching out for their men. At the heart of this complex sits a thing called the Pasar Senggol, a kind of artisanal Balinese theme park that features a “night market” and food stalls. Artisans sit around chipping at sculptures and dabbing at traditional paintings, as if in a village square, while the stalls do their best to seem rambunctious amid so much sterilized order. The inhabitants of Nusa almost never venture into the rest of Bali, so the rest of Bali has to be brought to them, flute and gamelan music included. I settled in here awkwardly and got myself a plate of vegetable stew called gado gado and a beer. Couples drifted in from the beach, the hard faces of proletarian Northern Europe, cocky Slavs, a few timorous Americans who thought they were venturing into an enclave of genuine rusticity. On a dismal little beach, attendants were already straightening out the plastic sunbeds and the parasols.

  The following day I drove up to Ubud. It’s an hour’s drive across the sprawl of Denpasar and up into the hills. The road is a remarkable spectacle, not because anything of the terraced paddies remains on view to either side of it but because it is lined on either side for its entire length by sculpture workshops and display rooms hawking every conceivable facet of Balinese tradition. There are Garudas, freakish Vishnus, mythological creatures, lintels, beds, carved tables, metal lamps, screens, kitchenware, temple altars, timber lion figures, entire ceremonial gates, and garden steles. For a moment, passing through the great traffic circles of Denpasar with their flocks of mopeds, you have a taste of the wider Indonesia, but toward Ubud the tourist rarefication sets in. It rained hard in the uplands, and I could barely see the first courtyard gardens and the drenched flame vines standing at the edge of Ubud’s famously photogenic paddy terraces. I took a hotel room off the road to Penestanan, which cuts right through the town, and in the afternoon walked down to the Tutmak Café near the central
football field to meet Kelly Woolford, Mr. Papua, as the expat Americans in Ubud sometimes call him.

  Ubud is more like an ad hoc settlement consisting of private arrangements than a town in the Western sense. It tumbles up and down ravinelike streets, infested with tourist boutiques and hundreds of hotels. It is filled with temple spaces where Balinese dance is performed almost every night, so repetitively that after a few nights you begin to take it as a three-dimensional backdrop that never goes away. At the Tutmak, however, the expats gather every evening as if escaping the doses of “Bali” that are meted out on every street corner. Woolford showed up in the rain, a waiflike man with one lazy eye and a gentle humor that was turned like a weapon onto his own condition—a forty-one-year-old exile living in a Hindu Disneyland and making a living taking wealthy clients on harrowing tours in the interior of Papua. Ubud, he said strenuously, had its advantages. The women were not American; the food was exquisite and cheap. There were worse places in which to anchor a wanderlust.

  We sat by an open window, the rain breathing on our faces.

  “Ubud is like a dollhouse,” he admitted. “But, you know, as a base for Papua, it’s the place.”

  Papua is a neighboring province to Bali, but there is not the slightest trace of it in Bali’s tourist spectacles or stores. Bali is centered uniquely upon itself. In part, this is because Bali plays a special cultural role in modern Indonesia—it is seen as a museumlike repository of ancient Javanese culture. This was the role that the Dutch colonial authorities gave to it, and it is the role that Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, also gave to it. His mother, after all, had been Balinese.

  Nevertheless, I suddenly felt closer to Papua. Woolford’s vibe was not Balinese or Ubud expat. There was a different look in his eye, which seemed to pierce right through me. He chain-smoked as we watched the rain pounding down on a soggy twilight football match. Despite a degree in criminology from Missouri State, he immediately brings to mind an American backwoodsman of centuries past, complete with shoulder-length blond hair and the remnants of a Missouri accent. Something marked him off from everyone else there, from every other expat type that I could see. The laughter that was not as loud, the gestures that were not as pronounced somehow, the drifting eye. He had spent a lot of his life in the Papua forest, pushing his endurance farther and farther as he found more remote regions that did not show up even on military maps or GPS topographies. Something made him go back serially over a period of fifteen years. These were brutal, primitive trips, more primitive in some ways than those of Lewis and Clark or the complicated expeditions launched into the interior of Africa in the 1860s. For Woolford journeys were solitary treks often made with a single tracker or guide, often his trusted Papuan friend William. They traveled light—a pot, a tent, a few bits and pieces. The two of them would take a canoe and vanish up a river system without weapons for weeks at a time. The peoples living far upriver on the northern coast of Irian Jaya were sometimes far off ethnography’s map and he had met peoples whose name no Papuan of his acquaintance could recognize and whose language was equally unrecognizable. As he related some of these marvelous ventures, I began to notice the childlike relish at the back of his voice, the love of tall stories and magical events. Papua was a place where the instinct for such things—the craving for them—could be indulged. It was “unfathomable, limitless.” It could not be tamed or flattened out, not even by the forces of the rest of the world, which itself was hideously flattened—as our prophet of globalization, Thomas Friedman, has suggested in an altogether more Panglossian spirit. If our world was flat, Papua was round. It had flesh and depth. Its savagery could not be reformed. It was the far side of the looking glass, a parallel world about which Indonesians and Westerners could make only strictly fraudulent images.