by Kim Dinan
Brian and I sat down sheepishly in two of the plastic chairs. I felt a bit intrusive and out of place, but an older man with teeth like crumbling tombstones pulled Brian into conversation, and I relaxed a little. Before me, the dancers bucked and spun, every movement of their bodies in control, right down to the fluid motion of their fingertips.
Nearby, a group of young women weaved banana leaves into offerings, and a holy man chanted with the band. Kids chased each other, men laughed, and the older women gossiped, I was certain. People were content because they belonged to each other. No one seemed to notice me.
Brian’s conversation ended, and he turned to watch the dancing. I gestured at the man with tombstone teeth. “What were you guys talking about?”
“Well, it was hard to communicate since I don’t speak his language, and he doesn’t speak mine, but the gist of the conversation was that people, at their core, are good.”
“You discussed that big important topic with hand gestures and grunts?”
Brian shrugged. “Yeah. And the funny thing is I’m pretty sure I understood almost all of what he said.”
On the drive back to our guesthouse, Nyoman glanced at us in the rearview mirror. “Did you have a good time at the temple?” he asked. I had been staring out the window, watching the bright-green rice paddies zoom by, building up the nerve to give Nyoman yellow envelope money as a way to say thank you for bringing us to the temple.
Brian spoke up. “Yes, it was beautiful. Thanks for having us.” We’d not seen the waitress who’d invited us since our brief encounter with her upon our arrival, and during our visit I kept wondering why she had asked us there. I’d been expecting to pay some kind of fee or to give a donation, but there had not been a chance. Finally, I just chalked it up to friendliness.
Nyoman nodded into the rearview mirror and then pulled his car to the side of the road. He swiveled to face us in the backseat. “I’m an artist,” he said, reaching into the passenger’s seat and handing a box filled with paintings of intricately drawn scenes of Balinese life back to us. “Buy one,” he said flatly.
So this is why we were invited to the temple, I thought with a rising sense of disappointment.
Brian took the box and began awkwardly flipping through the paintings. They were beautiful, and I knew Nyoman was just trying to make a living, but I suddenly felt trapped and manipulated. I also felt a little guilty. Wasn’t the cost of Nyoman’s painting worth the price of admission to the temple?
“Ah, we don’t really have room for a painting,” I told Nyoman as he eyed me in his rearview mirror.
Nyoman pretended he hadn’t heard me. He swiveled 180 degrees in the driver’s seat and reached between us. His thick, tattooed arm shook the box of paintings. “Look at them all,” he ordered. “There is one in there that is right for you.”
Brian handed the box to me and I pulled out a black and white drawing of three men standing in a field, bent at the waist, harvesting rice. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll take this one.”
“Good choice,” Nyoman said.
After I paid him, he steered the car back onto the road. My good mood soured. I’d decided to give Nyoman yellow envelope money, but then we’d been pressured to buy a painting, and now I wasn’t going to give it anymore. Why, when I was exchanging money for a painting, instead of just giving, did the interaction feel disingenuous? Was it just because Nyoman was pushy?
We arrived back in the busy tourist section of Ubud, and Nyoman dropped us at the same grocery store he’d picked us up at a few hours earlier. We said good-bye and walked back toward our guesthouse feeling hoodwinked.
We slept through the hottest part of the afternoon and woke as the moon appeared. Before falling asleep I’d propped Nyoman’s painting on the bedside table, and I turned to look at it. It was beautiful, maybe even more so in the muted light of dusk. But I resented it.
We found a noodle shop hidden far off of the main road where we could eat in peace and took a seat at a small, wooden table out front. I was happy to be away from the harassment of touts and the overtly Western stores disguising shopping as New Age spiritual enlightenment.
“I think I have a serious case of culture shock,” I said to Brian. “I expected Bali to be more like India and Nepal than the U.S., but it isn’t, and I wasn’t quite prepared to reenter the Western world.”
“Agreed,” Brian said. “Bali is not what I expected.”
“Even that thing with Nyoman. Normally something like that wouldn’t bother me, but for some reason I’m so irrationally pissed about it.” I looked out toward the quiet street. “I expected to pay to go to the temple, and I like the painting Nyoman forced us to buy. I’m glad we have it. But the way we got it just makes me angry.”
“He was just trying to make a few bucks,” Brian responded. “It’s hard to fault him for that.”
“Maybe I just need a few days to adjust.” I crossed my legs beneath the table and looked out into the quiet night. My eyes fell on the shop vendor across the street. From the metal rim of the awning that hung above his shop swung a dozen tiny birdcages stuffed with colorful songbirds.
From our table I could hear their sweet singing. A wave of rage swelled inside of me. I wanted to run over and fling open all of the miniature doors and shove the shop owner inside of the cage instead. During our travels I’d seen many suffering animals, and all of them had affected me, but for some reason this injustice infuriated me more than the others. What was wrong with humans that we thought it okay to keep animals born to fly trapped in small cages for the sake of our entertainment?
My skin felt itchy. I stared at the tiny birds in their tiny cages and wanted off of this damn island. “I don’t want to stay here any longer,” I blurted to Brian.
He looked like he’d been expecting me to say it. “Me neither,” he agreed.
The following day we shoved into a white minibus filled with other travelers and wound our way toward the coast. The world raced by outside of my window. Though the rice paddies had all been harvested for the year, they were still the most intense and luscious green that I had ever seen. The stone temples in the yards and on the sidewalks of every Balinese home were as common as suburban mailboxes.
I could see why this island had earned the nickname The Island of the Gods. Bali was a stunning place, but tarnished, I thought, from the influx of tourism. But I was a tourist too, of course, and I wrestled with that problem in my head. What made me any different from the thousands of vacationers that landed on the island? It occurred to me that so many of those vacationers never left home, even while away. They wanted the comforts of home repackaged in a foreign land. They had traveled to a different country, but they wanted to stay in a world they knew. Travelers wanted to enter other worlds. That was the difference.
The bus finally dumped us at the dock and swarms of fruit vendors gathered around us. “Pineapple! Snake fruit! Pineapple! Snake fruit!” They yelled like hotdog vendors at a baseball game. I bought pineapple and held it up each time a new vendor stopped to yell in my direction.
When we arrived a few hours later on Gili Meno, the quietest and least developed of three small islands off of the coast of Bali, I knew that we had come to the right place. We jumped from the boat onto the dock and stepped off the dock into warm white sand. A few people lazed around in open-air huts that were built out over the intense aqua blue ocean. Brian and I hailed a horse-drawn cart (there were no cars on the island) to clomp us the two miles to the beach hut we had rented.
Gili Meno was a haven of sand and shrubs. One could walk the circumference of it in less than two hours and, we learned quickly, there was nothing to do there. Within two days of our arrival we fell happily into a lazy, blissful routine. Each morning we’d wake early, claim a cabana on the beach, drink coffee, read for awhile, and eat breakfast. Then I’d go for a run, shower in the outdoor shower, drink a watermelon juice, and rejoin
Brian under the cabana. Repeat for lunch and dinner.
The highlight of each day came in the afternoons when we’d rent snorkeling equipment from a lady who owned a fruit stand next door to our beach hut. We had to make sure we arrived to claim our snorkels before 1:00 p.m., when she disappeared behind her stand for an afternoon nap in her hammock.
The ocean shone a soul-lifting blue, so clear that I could tread water and watch the disjointed image of my legs kick beneath the surface. With our snorkel gear attached snugly to our faces, we’d swim out about one hundred fifty feet from shore and hover above the most intensely beautiful underwater world that I had ever seen. Bright schools of fish darted below us. Yellow and blue and red fish but also schools of fish in a shock of florescent colors. One day we spotted an octopus, its spindly legs moving in divine slow motion from under the security of a rock. Past us, where I did not dare to venture, the shelf of the ocean dropped like an underwater cliff, plunging downward into a dark and deep crevice. When I reached this deep place I could feel the cold water rising from it, and I’d turn back toward the safety of the warmer and shallower sea.
We snorkeled for hours each day, the backs of our bodies turning red from the sun despite our liberal application of sunscreen. The indentation of our masks left pink lines on our faces well past dinner. They remained even after we watched the bright orange ball of sunshine dip behind the horizon, leaving a drizzle of pink and peach in its wake.
We could not seem to leave Gili Meno. Originally we’d planned to stay for just a few days, but we kept extending our trip. Sheepishly, we’d approach the owner of our beach hut to ask if he had availability for three more nights? For four? One day, I looked up from my journal to ask Brian if he knew what body of water we were on. He didn’t know. Such was the disorientation that our nomadic ability to go anywhere could sometimes cause. Eventually I asked our beach hut owner, who told me we’d been swimming in the Bali Sea.
One afternoon while out snorkeling, I spotted a sea turtle resting on the white crushed coral of the ocean floor. Screeching with joy into my snorkeling mouthpiece, I popped my head above the surface of the water to scan for Brian. But he floated too far away, his head submerged in his own underwater world, for me to grab his attention. So I put my head back into the water and glided over that amazing sea creature. She scooted along the bottom of the ocean, munching on sea grasses until she finally swam off toward the deep ocean and that dark immense of blue. She moved with such grace and ancient wisdom that I swear it was like snorkeling with the Buddha himself.
Brian and I also learned from our beach hut owner that Gili Meno rose from the water near the Wallace Line, where the Indian and Pacific Oceans met. The turtles liked to swim those ocean currents, and a great number of them came from as far away as Mexico and South America. Gili Meno was like the United Nations of sea turtles. All of them were endangered.
While out snorkeling the next day I searched like crazy for the sea turtle, and just when I began to give up hope, I spotted her again, or she spotted me. This time Brian floated much closer, and I waved him over. Together we bobbed there in wide-eyed meditation, watching the beautiful turtle move through the water. She knew that we were there but did not seem to mind the attention.
We bobbed and watched. She floated in the amniotic fluid of the sea. Brian lost interest and swam away, but I could not take my eyes off of her. Sea turtles had lived for over one hundred fifty million years. They’d survived and adapted to a world that had killed the red gazelle and the western black rhinoceros, the saber-toothed cat, and every single one of the dinosaurs.
The turtle swam toward the surface for air and floated right by me. She seemed unthreatened by my presence. She passed by so closely that I stared directly into her green-yellow reptilian eye. I sensed a mild curiosity from her, like she’d seen something like me before but wasn’t quite sure what to make of me. She glided to the surface and popped her head above the water and I lifted mine. Her mouth took a gulp of the other world, my world, before she swam back down again.
It sounds crazy, but when she looked at me I felt connected to everything in the entire universe, like I was witnessing the divine in those ancient turtle eyes. It was a gift to float at the top of her world. It was, I realized, the kind of authentic experience that I hoped for while traveling. In order to better understand the world, I wanted an unmanufactured glimpse of lives that were different from my own and I’d found one, right below the surface of the water.
• • •
On the other side of the island Brian and I tracked down a turtle sanctuary where a local man named Bolong, one of the few people who lived on Gili Meno year-round, made it his life’s mission to save the endangered sea turtles.
Bolong had a small concrete office constructed right on the sandy beach and inside it a desk piled with literature about saving the turtles. Right outside of his office, a hundred baby turtles swam in open-air tanks. When we approached, a young woman introduced herself as a member of Bolong’s family. She explained that the sanctuary saved the turtle eggs from predators and then allowed them to hatch naturally, giving the turtles a better chance of surviving in the wild. Brian and I oohed and ahhed over the adorable little turtles, and the girl gave us a bashful smile, clearly proud of the work her family did.
She walked inside the office and came out with a sheet of paper that explained that the turtles were raised for one year before they were released to the sea. They were fed fresh, raw fish every two hours from sunrise to sunset, and Bolong and his team pumped water from the sea into the turtle tanks every three days. The sanctuary also cared for injured turtles, nursing them to health before rereleasing them. It was a lot of work for a small, family-run operation.
After their release, the turtles were under threat in many ways. They were caught for food, harvested for oils used in the cosmetic industry, and their shells were made into jewelry. They drowned in fishing nets and suffocated by ingesting plastic sea pollution that they confused as food. They fell prey to large fish, sharks, and killer whales.
“Man, the cards are really stacked against those little guys,” said Brian. “It’s amazing that any of them survive at all.”
But it was in their nature to survive. Bolong and his family, by sheer force of will, were helping.
Before leaving our beach hut for the turtle sanctuary, Brian and I decided to donate yellow envelope money to Bolong. The turtle I’d seen while snorkeling had made a big impression on me, and I wanted to honor her in some way. So we made our little pilgrimage to the sanctuary with the yellow envelope money shoved into the pocket of Brian’s swim trunks.
Brian leaned toward the girl and told her that we’d like to make a donation. She said, “Yes! Okay!” and explained that, in return, we would be allowed to name a turtle. It was a symbolic gesture, like naming a star, but I loved it just the same.
“How about Honeydew?” I suggested after Brian and I had lobbed around names for five minutes straight. It was the name of Michele and Glenn’s yellow lab that they had raised from a puppy into a guide dog.
Brian wrote Honeydew into a lined, spiral-bound notebook, and the girl handed me a receipt that I folded in my hand to save for Michele and Glenn. I could hardly believe it, but we would see them soon.
As I watched the turtles blow bubbles in their little saltwater bathtubs, I hoped they would make it into adulthood, through all of the circumstances and environments that made them vulnerable.
I thought about the turtle I saw while out snorkeling and wondered if someone like Bolong had raised her. Or maybe she was one of the rare few that survived incubation and hatched in the sand and then scrambled like mad toward the glistening sea, somehow surviving her vulnerable years to grow into the most magical and beautiful creature. Either way, of the millions of lives clambering from their place of birth to the great world beyond, she, against the greatest of odds, had managed to thrive. When you looked at life
like that it was all such a miracle.
• • •
We had to leave Gili Meno because, to the sadness of both of us, we could not stay forever. On our last night on the island, Brian and I sat under a beach cabana in the moonlit darkness, drinking Bintang and listening to the waves roll into shore.
Every time we left a place I felt nostalgic because I did not know if we would ever return again. Each new country, city, or island we traveled to taught me something new, and I always felt a deep sense of gratitude upon leaving. This was true even of the places I did not love and especially true of the ones I did.
Brian must have been feeling the same kind of nostalgia because he folded his legs beneath him and said, “Remember how scared we were landing in Ecuador? We didn’t know what we were doing, and there were all those policemen with guns. We didn’t want to leave our room.”
I laughed. “Yeah, and I wanted to give the cops some yellow envelope money.” I slapped my palm against my forehead. “What was I thinking?”
“You didn’t know. Hey, in India that would have been totally legit.”
“I wonder what we would think if we went back now?”
As I reflected back over our travels, I’d thought about that a lot. Would we still be as timid and afraid, with over a year of travel under our belts, as we were back then? We’d certainly come a long way since we first left home and learned that, despite exposure to seemingly endless grim news, people everywhere were good.