Eat Pray Survive

Elizabeth Gilbert published her best-selling Eat Pray Love eight years ago. The "love" third of her year-long journey--following a four-month gourmand orgy in Italy and a four-month sweat-drenched meditation retreat in India--took place in Bali. According to Gilbert, Bali is a heavenly oasis of fantastical verdure, peace, and rural medicine men eager to tell your fortune and lead you to your heart's desire.

I now realize that the spot in Bali where she lived for four months was Ubud, an unspoiled, rice-paddied hillside paradise merely two hours away from the spot where we now sit, in Kuta.  Ubud seems to be eight years and a universe removed.

Because Gilbert made everything about Bali sound so damn easy and delightful, we were as unprepared for Kuta as we were for the Indonesian rupiah.  As a result, we are committed to staying here for three weeks, innocent as swans and slowly learning the ropes.

Picture the frenzied, thumping-neon zaniness of Pattaya, Thailand. Okay. Now, mix that all up with tattooed Aussie surfers (some of them wearing raw new tats swathed in Saran Wrap), bony late-middle-aged hippies with grey hair trailing down their leathery backs, and alleyways with haphazard sidewalk space that dwindles down to a footprint's width without notice, threatening to pitch you into the constant flow of traffic.

Shopkeepers here also have a disconcerting tendency to hurl water from their storefronts out into the street, just as pedestrians are passing by. And motorbikes bearing surfboards share a Zen-like right of way with each other and with those on foot. Store proprietors chortle when they see newbies startle and squeak at being brushed by such vehicles. The trick, I understand, is to walk with attitude, as if in the jungle, secure in the confidence that they wish to harm you no more than you wish to be harmed. Accidents are less frequent here than in Pattaya, after all.

This intrepid worker kept on mortaring a hole in the street, oblivious to motorbikes
brushing his shoulders. He no doubt believed the cone protected him well enough.

Kuta traffic jam, involving a jumble of motorbikes, a large truck (no longer visible), and a horse-drawn rickshaw.
Its stressed-out four-legged laborer relieved itself in the road, in which the two-legged laborer slid
about helplessly before moving on.  In case they needed it, a clinic wasn't far away.

Even the Kuta Post Office poses its own hazards. The local office is basically an open storefront with a chest-high counter where one steps up to make one's transactions. A large color poster on the wall warns you not to try mailing puppies or kittens. A single express-envelope mailing here costs $25 but is promised to arrive somewhat more quickly than the "maybe two weeks, maybe three weeks, maybe a month" time frame of normal mail. Mail deliveries arrive at the post office without warning, in great twine-wrapped plastic bales tossed with a loud thump off a passing motorbike, heedless of customers waiting at the counter. Here, too, attitude and trust are essential to one's safety.

This display, out front of the post office, is either a very blessed (note Hindu offering) pile of
packages en route to Australia or samples of how one's packages ought to be prepared. 

In Thailand are a wide variety of elaborately gilded, raised Buddhist shrines bearing such offerings as sandalwood incense, garlands of yellow marigolds, bits of food, bright-red fruit drinks, and whiskey shots, all designed to bring good karma. Taxicabs there have marigold garlands dangling from their rearviews. Bar girls drape their establishments with offerings, to ensure rich bar fines. All these are lovely--and completely nonthreatening.

A particularly elaborate shrine outside the Hua Hin Railway Station

Simpler flower offerings for sale

But here in Bali, one must beware of the seemingly harmless canang sari, Hindu offerings in baskets fashioned of palm leaves, which hold white, red, yellow, and blue or green flowers representing the major Hindu deities. These small sacrifices often also include incense, bread, candies, fruit, the intoxicating stimulant betel nut, and tobacco--thus the occasional rolled smoke or cigarette butt makes an appearance amid the other goodies. These ephemeral gifts are, daily, swamped and washed away by the shopkeepers' hurled buckets of water. By day's end, every tilted walkway turns into a treacherously slippery slope strewn with broken offerings, and new offerings are put out each morning, to appease evil spirits and trip up the unwary once more.

Rats especially delight in the candies, if not also the smokes and betel nut. They are probably higher than kites. On my first night here, I was greeted by one careless rodent who had been flattened in the road like Wile E. Coyote hitting a canyon wall. Later, I encountered more hyperactive cousins of his, skittering down the sidewalk into ragged cracks, then peeking out at me, whiskers twitching impishly.

After you spend a while there, with eyes wide open, every place on earth will show you its own charm.

"I could live here!" I exclaim, every time.