Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  In its most exalted state, Bali had long been renowned as a place for falling in love. A local boy who wished to capture the heart of a maiden would traditionally turn to witchery, collecting from a shaman a moon coin or an amulet or a love potion compounded of the saliva of a snake and the tears of a child. Another might stare all night into the flame of a coconut lamp on which he had imprinted the image of his beloved. Even casual visitors to the island often found themselves entranced here, caught in one of those Shakespearean zones of magic in which young romantics lose their heads, and later their hearts, and stumble, by the light of an uncertain moon, into the presence of a divinity. I first got wind of this when an English friend of mine visited Bali for a brief vacation, and fell, almost instantly, into the arms of a German, with whom she enjoyed a fantasy week of love in thatched cottages and postcard sunsets on the beach. I myself met a shining Pre-Raphaelite from Munich who seemed to be moving under a similar spell, and came back each year in memory of her first and finest boy friend, a gentle Indonesian. And almost every foreign writer on the island, from Hickman Powell to Jacques Chegaray, had, sooner or later, found himself playing Ferdinand to some enchanted nine-year-old Miranda, recording his worship in flowery prose and sunstruck diction. On my very first night in Bali, as I watched the sun drop into the sea, an Indonesian girl came up, and sat down beside me, and said, not glibly, but with an eerie, penetrating intensity, “I had a dream last night. I found two flowers and put one of them in my hair. That flower was you.”

  Most of the midsummer night’s dreams in Kuta, however, were a good deal more down-to-earth. Every evening, the place looked like Duval Street in Key West on a Saturday night, or Santa Barbara’s lower State. For as soon as the sun went down, all the beautiful people came out of the woodwork to trawl—beefy men with sunglasses propped up in their hair, freshly turned blondes in halter tops and miniskirts. Here, it seemed, was the poor man’s Club Med. In one café, a tall sandy-haired guy was zeroing in on an English girl just off the bus, and telling her that he was an artist who lived in the hills, she might find it interesting to look at his canvases. In the snackbar of my losmen, two good-looking rogues just released from a British public school were agreeing to meet up with a pair of jeunes filles from Paris. Inside Madé’s Warung (today’s special: French pâté), a bearded hipster was saying to a girl from Santa Cruz, “You stay in Kuta? You know, if ever you have any problems, I’ve got a bungalow …”

  And though Balinese girls still had about them a faint air of noli me tangere, the local boys were fully welcomed into the Bacchanalian roundelay. In Sex Pistols T-shirts and Mohawk cuts they whizzed through the narrow streets on unmufflered motorbikes. At Wayan’s Tavern, a leather-jacketed local biker slouched up to the bar with one Australian mama on each arm, while a curly-haired Italian girl in a Vogue T-shirt sauntered off into the night with a cigarette in one hand and a Balinese boy in the other. Along one dusty Kuta lane, a small space had even been set up for longhairs to strum listless guitars under posters of Mick Jagger and share their smokes (for a price) with foreigners, the whole crowd of them looking red-eyed and vaguely poleaxed. The third most popular T-shirt in Kuta said “Bullshit. I had a ball in Bali.”

  IF FOREIGN VISITORS had turned Kuta into a free-for-all Aussie singles bar, they had turned Sanur into a luxury retirement home. In Kuta, the guesthouses were bandaged with surfing decals; in Sanur, the shops in the sunny hotel arcades were decorated only with the reassuring blue-and-white badges of American Express. In Kuta, it was the locals who sported T-shirts that said “Maui” and “California”; in Sanur, it was the tourists.

  Once famous for its priests and demons, Sanur had been among the first of Bali’s areas to be colonized: both Margaret Mead and the German painter Walter Spies had lived here once upon a time. These days, however, the most famous sojourners in Sanur were Mick Jagger and Magic Johnson. Sanur, in fact, had been turned into one of those super-costly super-resorts where guests could get away from it all—Bali included. It was one of those pieces of exotic property where tourists could close their eyes to the world, and pretend that they, or it, no longer existed. The prototype of all the sky-scraping pleasure palaces was the ten-story Bali Beach Hotel, set a ten-minute walk from the main road, down a sweeping, beautifully landscaped driveway. In its quiet green gardens, Hausfrauen lay on deck chairs, copies of Stern and Der Spiegel protecting their faces from the sun.

  One bright morning, I spent several hours trespassing on the hotel’s private beach, lost in a transcendent stillness. There was not a single vendor as far as the eye could see. Not even a single surfer. No bathers in the beautiful, surfless blue. Nothing, in fact. Just two thatched umbrellas, the ocean and me. Sanur was one of those yawning resorts by the side of the sea where nobody actually enters the water because the hotel swimming pool is a few yards closer.

  Naturally, the hotels in Sanur did consent to make a few concessions to their surroundings. The staff wore sarongs, sugarcane juice was served at the poolside bar, statues of tutelary deities were set among the trees. But the Bali Beach Hotel had the quiet discretion of a well-trained servant; it took pains not to intrude on its master’s daydreams. And it took every precaution to ensure that he wouldn’t miss home. “A holiday in Sanur,” said an Australian travel brochure, “allows the freedom to sample the various styles of cuisine and freedom developed in response to the demands of international tourism.” Customers, in other words, were given the luxury of imagining themselves in Jamaica, the Costa Smeralda or Cap d’Antibes: discos, nightclubs, twenty-four-hour coffee shops were as de rigueur in the super-structures of Sanur as the lizards and mosquitoes that came free of charge with every room in Kuta. Sanur was the place for people who wished to travel 6,000 miles in order to lie down, take dips in a pool and enjoy a good burger any time of day or night.

  Best of all, the Sanur-toriums ensured that their guests need never leave their premises. The Bali Beach Hotel provided a tenpin bowling alley, three swimming pools, a mini golf course and a regular eighteen-hole course (even though the village already boasted a course set inside a volcano that had been named one of the top fifty courses in the world). It also had two stages for the performance of nightly dances so that guests need not leave the grounds in search of native culture; the native culture would come in search of them. The hotel also went out of its way to sympathize with the needs of the Balinese; its Cultural Department still organized tours around the grounds for awestruck local villagers.

  THOSE WHO WERE set on finding “the real Bali,” however, forsook the beaches of both Kuta and Sanur and flocked together off the beaten track to Ubud. Here hotels were set among the rice paddies, and restaurants built atop dreamy lotus ponds. Ubud had a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and shops with names like Tantra, Arjuna, Yoga and Nirvana. In Kuta, the used-book stores were stocked with Harold Robbins and John Jakes; in Ubud, they were bursting with Huxley, Wilde, Castaneda and Anaïs Nin. And the visitors in the Ubud streets were chipper sexagenarians, Pan-like boys with headbands around their black curls, well-preserved Century City executives in sarongs with pretty young companions by their side and French women in their late thirties in search of something exotic. Ubud was one beautifully designed gift shop with wind chimes all around.

  Ubud was also the capital of the so-called Theater State, Bali’s government of, for and by the imagination. For years it had been the haunt of Bali’s artists from abroad and at home; the Dutch painters Hans Snell and Arie Smit had put down their roots in this tropical Big Sur many years ago and, more recently, the place had attracted such contemporary heroes of the arts as Iggy Pop and David Bowie (not to mention, as the ad for one hotel eccentrically boasted, Koo Stark). Electricity had come to Ubud only in 1975, but, within a decade, the place had filled up with artists’ cooperatives run by craftsmen from Switzerland and New Age settlers from Seattle. Ubud was the place where students of Bali came to learn the gamelan or master the steps of the legong dance or acquire some other precious talent tha
t would go down well back home in Marin.

  The minute I arrived in Ubud and got off my bemo (the small pickup truck that serves as Bali’s only form of public transportation), I was greeted by a radiant little charmer who offered to sell me some sarongs. Her name, she said, was Madé Sri, she was ten years old and her school had finished for the day. My name was what, and where did I come from? I told her, and we talked some more and then, chattering brightly as she went, she led me off to the Lotus Café.

  I walked inside the large wooden hut to find Wyndham Hills music on the system, elegantly framed prints about the walls. Outside the main building was a garden the size of a football field, with a temple next door and a lotus pond at its center. Above the pond was an open sunlit pavilion just big enough for a single low wooden table. I went out to the pavilion and reclined on some of its pillows, and moments later, a beautiful damsel brought me a sky-blue pot of strong Earl Grey tea and some orange poppy-seed cake on homemade crockery the color of the sea. I lay back, opened my copy of Ada and thought I had landed in aesthete’s heaven.

  Yet as I stayed longer in Ubud, I found that it was sometimes hard to smell the frangipani, so strong was the perfume of artiness. One of the village’s main landmarks, for example, was the gaudy palace erected by the Spanish artist Antonio Blanco in honor of the great Spanish artist Antonio Blanco. One day, I walked up to its front gate and pressed a bell. After a few moments, an aged Balinese gardener opened the door. As soon as I paid the admission fee, he informed me, I could walk all around the house, inspect the paintings and savor the poems of Antonio Blanco. If I were very lucky, I might even enjoy a meeting with the Artist.

  Paying up, I made my way to the two rooms that contained Blanco’s artwork. The vast majority of the canvases represented Balinese girls dancing or Balinese girls nude; some showed Balinese girls dancing in the nude. Yet these, I gathered, were as nothing next to Blanco’s greatest creation—the life of an artist he had fashioned with his Balinese dancer wife. This was brought home by the poems that had been placed between the paintings, lovingly handwritten and dated by the artist. The verses, written in English splintered by design or necessity (it was impossible to tell), were mostly a Dali-rious collage of sixties buzzwords, cries of artistic defiance and épater le bourgeois belches. Their theme was best summarized by the one in which Blanco declared that anyone who met him could bask in “my warmth and serenity” and drink in “the ambience of MY GOODNESS.”

  The popular response to these surprising effusions was ecstatic. “You need ask no questions—the answers are all there,” wrote one visitor in the guest book. “To laugh, to cry, to live,” was the compact assessment of another typical Ubudite. “The two people here have created together a most delicious feast of exotic, tender, beautiful, pensive, meaningful, reminiscent morsels,” reported an American lady. “Yum.”

  A German had been moved to exclaim, “Love is life and life is spirit,” and an even more Delphic fellow to cry, “No arts, no views, no position, no subject, no zoo … only the world we all create.” But my favorite appraisal was the considered opinion of the savant who declared, simply, “Ubud, ses cheesecakes et ses plages.”

  None of this, however, prepared me for my audience with the Great Man. As I walked into the third of his galleries and began looking around, I noticed, suddenly, that He was there—an elfin figure in a beret, perched on a wooden chair with an aphorism on his lips, and a cigarette too. I began basking in his warmth and serenity. He began quoting prices.

  Before he could start talking discounts, I tried to deflect him. “Ubud must have changed a lot in the twenty years that you’ve lived here.”

  “Ah yes.” He sighed extravagantly and showed me his profile. “But I … I am a romantic. I think only of the old Bali. It lives in my heart. I”—he paused—“I am a dreamer.”

  Silence.

  I drank in the ambience of HIS GOODNESS.

  “And what,” he began absently, to break the extended silence, “do you do?”

  “I write.”

  “Ah.” He paused approvingly. “It takes an artist of real genius to create a cavalcade, to create a story of many generations. It takes a great risk to create such a cavalcade. Many fear such a challenge. But I, I am reading a novel now—it was made into a movie, I think—by just such an artist.” I held my breath. “His name”—he paused—“is Sidney Sheldon.”

  AND AS EACH of the three tourist havens had grown more bloated, each of them in time had spawned a kind of shadow self, an annex-town that had materialized by its side to cater to the overflow. As Kuta became overcrowded, the surplus had spilled over into Legian, one mile to the north. By the time I strolled through the once quiet village, there was little to be seen except a fledgling Kuta. Norm’s, Don and Donna, Diane, Ed’s and Ned’s (“An Aussie Type of Pub”). The Bali Waltzing Matilda, Koala Blue, Surfer’s Paradise. Next to Bali Aussie was the New Bali (serving “Aussie and Chinese food”). For its grand opening, the place promised cockfights and all-you-can-eat orgies.

  So too, as every last inch of Sanur had been claimed by a receiving line of thirty hotels strung along the coast, the government had decided to create a new high-rise resort a little farther south, called Nusa Dua. In 1985, at least eleven new hotels were being built in the man-made settlement, and by now there were 4,525 guest rooms in Nusa Dua, offering what one travel brochure called “an oceanfront setting in an exclusive atmosphere.” Nearly all of them were stocked with convention facilities and conventional facilities—squash courts, health clubs, equipment for wind surfing and, of course, theaters for the presentation of local culture. For a touch of imported romance, there were even horse-drawn buggies on hand.

  And as Ubud had become every traveler’s favorite place for avoiding every other traveler, more and more people, so it seemed, had decided to hang out in other funky towns such as Jogjakarta, in neighboring Java. Like Ubud, Jogja was still soft and accommodating enough to entice the kind of traveling party rarely seen in Southeast Asia: serious-looking Dutch or German couples reading translated editions of George Eliot, ethereal girls in peasant skirts traveling by themselves with flowers in their hair, whole families that had taken to the road. Murni’s, a landmark in Ubud, served up “Authentic American Upper Elk Valley Hamburgers,” “chili con carne a la Albuquerque” and “the best chocolate chip cookies east of San Francisco.” It also sold postcards, vases, exquisite books. But Lovina, a typical joint in Jogja, went one step further: it had 400 items on its menu (the spécialité de la maison was, bien sûr, guacamole), as well as filtered coffee; it provided free maps, English-language newspapers and a small library of European paperbacks that could be bought or traded; it posted notices on which Australian girls reported missing boyfriends; and, on its wall, it gave pride of place to a sign that exhorted: “Kefir Rehabilitates Your Health! Please, Drink Kefir every day and you will be healthy!”

  At five in the morning, as light flowed into my Jogja losmen, a German girl sat at the breakfast table poring over Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

  III

  Yet even as each of the resorts had stretched and stretched to accommodate the crowds, still the tourists kept swarming in, scattering north and south and east and converging like mosquitoes on one unvisited corner after another. And even though many a visitor treated Bali with the regretful solicitude one might extend to a lovely girl on the brink of adolescence—at once purified by her presence and somewhat terrified by her future—each year found new towns in eastern Bali popping up like insect bites. In 1984, the new haven of solitude was Lovina, the thinking man’s Kuta-Legian on the northern coast; in 1985, it was Candi Dasa, to the east, another place previously unmarked on the map, which had doubled the number of its losmens in just six months and began to report its first cases of thieving. One quiet place after another became a Quiet Place, whose most notable characteristic, after a while, was its noise; every area famous for being unpeopled fell before the consequences of its fame. The 6,000 touri
sts of 1966 had become 207,000 by 1985, and every other number had been scaled up accordingly. A shrewd local told me that he had purchased five acres of land for $25 in 1972; since then, the property had appreciated by 14,000 percent.

  INDONESIA, OF COURSE, had taken none of this lying down, and in Bali, as in parts of Java, it was hard not to feel that, beneath even all the surface changes, the place had lost something of its innocence to the West. Almost every time I walked down an Ubud or Jogja street, I was arrested by a cheery voice and then by a dazzling smile. Where did I come from? What was my name? Did I need directions? Where had I bought my T-shirt? Did I know the story of the Ramayana? Could I not stop for a chat over tea?

  Usually my interlocutor was a beautiful, slightly shady boy of college age with a ready smile and uncertain interests; a self-professed student or dancer, he nonetheless seemed to spend most of his days sitting around losmens, playing pool or taking Aussie girls for scooter-rides. And though perhaps he half hoped for money or a favor, my new friend usually seemed happy just to sit around chatting about the wonders of the West.

  The first topic to be considered was generally that of money: how much had I paid for my plane ticket, how much for the local bus, how much for a night in the losmen? The figures I delivered struck me as absurdly low ($8 for a twenty-hour bus ride, 60 cents for a hearty meal), but the Indonesian boys listened with the same fascination that I might have given to the tax returns of Howard Hughes or J. Paul Getty. Small wonder, perhaps. While I was in Java, the Jakarta Post advertised a dinner with Miss World in the capital that cost $4,000 a head; that was equivalent to twenty years’ salary for the average Indonesian teacher.