Bali in 2025

Thursday, 1 May 2025

Recently I suggested that I hope I never have to go back to Bali. I simply never want to sit through another hour of Balinese gridlock. The traffic is impossible, insufferable, intolerable. When you get to your destination you basically do not want to leave. A quick trip from the coast to Ubud up towards the hills? Forget it. Even a quick trip from your beautiful valley-side accommodation on the edge of Ubud into the town itself can be an unpleasant experience. It’s certainly unlikely to be ‘quick.’

Unbelievably there is a project to connect Ngurah Rai Airport – the Denpasar Bali airport – with the beach strip – Kuta, Seminyak, Canggu – and on through Denpasar up to Ubud. It’s the Bali Light Rail Transit (LRT) project, phase one for 2028, the whole thing by 2031. We can only hope. There‘s even a project to build a whole new tourist development including an international airport in the north of Bali.

▲ Pura Dalem (Temple of the Dead), Ubud

Meanwhile it’s a pity to be swearing off Bali because so much of it is downright beautiful, like Ubud’s Temple of the Dead, beautifully lit at night when dance performances are held.

◄ Noted Baris dancer Anak Agung Gde Anom Putra dancing the Baris Tunggal at the Pura Dalem – the Gamelan Semara Ratih is one of the island’s premier gamelan orchestras. A gamelan ‘comprises metallophones, xylophones, flutes, gongs, voices, as well as bowed and plucked strings. A hand-played drum called Kendang controls the tempo and rhythm of the orchestral piece.’ It’s absolutely the iconic sound of Bali and gamelans don’t come any better than this one. It’s a big gamelan, everything looking very slick and professional and they clang into it big time. I was impressed. There was also one women – playing a flute or some other wind instrument – amongst all the men. The dancers are just as impressive as the gamelan, again thoroughly professional with wonderful costumes and dancing with great energy.

▲ Barong, Gamelan Semara Ratih, Pura Dalem, Ubud – the performance featured a series of dances including, of course a wonderful Barong, the lion-like mythical creature which symbolises all the good spirits and is danced by two men.

◄ 6-year-old Baris dancer – the evening concluded with this young Baris-dancer-in-training, a positive sign that Balinese culture is definitely still a work in progress.

▲ Kecak dance, Uluwatu – during my Bali visit we also caught the popular kecak dance at Uluwatu, right down at the south-west corner of the Bukit Peninsula which marks the southern extremity of the island. This is definitely a tourist performance, it tosses everything else in, including a fire dance to finish things up.

◄  chak-a-chak-a-chak notation – the kecak or monkey dance features an assembly of ‘monkeys’ who provide the chak-a-chak-a chant backing to the story, culminating in the monkey god Hanuman aiding Prince Rama in his battle with the evil King Ravana. Fortunately a few days earlier in Ubud a Balinese trio had coached our group in how to perform the chak-a-chak-a-chak of the kecak dance, dividing us into groups to perform the contrapuntal melodies.

▲ Periplus Bookshop, Ubud – our Bali gathering was hosted by Singaporean publisher and bookshop entrepreneur Eric Oey. There are 50 or 60 Periplus bookshops in Indonesia, all owned by Eric, none of them franchises, and they’re the biggest market for English language books in the region, much bigger than Thailand, Malaysia or anywhere else. The name comes from a classical era 1st century AD Greek guide to the Red Sea ports.

▲ rice paddies, near Penestanan, Ubud

Our visit started at the wonderful Kappa Senses resort just outside Ubud and one morning I set off for a walk with Ibu Sumadi of Bali Bird Walks. We went to her village, Penestanan, on the edge of Ubud, visited the village banjar (you’d call it the town council in the west) to have village life, business and organisation explained to us and then visited her family house/compound. There are 23 people in her extended family, lving in assorted houses around the family temple. A walk through the nearby rice paddies looking for bird life and all the interesting things growing there reminded me, yet again, that rice is beautiful, as I definitely discovered working on my book Rice Trails in Bali back in 1999.

▲ Bali Hai catamaran from Benoa Harbour to Nusa Lembongan,

On the Bali Hai catamaran our party day-tripped to Nusa Lembongan island. Make your final approach to Bali from the east and you’ll fly over Nusa Penida and Nusa Lembongan islands. Our vessel departed and arrived from Benoa Harbour and back in 1972 Maureen and I sailed out of Benoa Harbour on the New Zealand yacht Sun Peddler, a trip which took us 16 days to reach Exmouth on the North-West Cape of Western Australia. Docking in Benoa Harbour this trip I noted an inter-island ship from Pelni, the national cargo and passenger shipping company of Indonesia. Back in 1972 Maureen and I arrived at Jakarta on the classic Pelni ship Tampomas, sailing from Tanjung Pinang, just south of Singapore. I’ve travelled on other Pelni ships in subsequent years.

▲ Iron Fairies, Seminyak

A steam-punk Australian subterranean mine – Iron Fairies is as utterly weird as the name perhaps suggests and with décor and design which must have cost a fortune.

 

We’d eaten very well at our two Bali hotels – Kappa Senses in Ubud and Desa Potato Head on the beach in Seminyak – and there had also been a very traditional royal dinner at the central Puri Saren Palace in Ubud. But modern Bali also features some very cutting-edge restaurants where we enjoyed lengthy tasting menus and the ministrations of celebrity chefs like Blake Thornley at Mozaic in Ubud. From Amici in Seminyak we’d continued right out the back to Iron Fairies. Our Bali culinary circuit also took us to Copper Kitchen and Uma Cucina in Ubud and to Teja in Uluwatu. Thank you Eric Oey, our host at all these fine dining establishments.

▲ Beach Club, Desa Potato Head – décor at Desa Potato Head’s Beach Club at Seminyak is also ‘interesting.’ Ditto for the 5000 discarded plastic flip-flops harvested from the beach and assembled in the ‘Lost Soles’ art feature in front of the club by Liina Klauss.

▲ beach from Savaya Beach Club, Uluwatu

Looking from the Savaya Beach Club it’s a long way down to the beach below. This was a part of Bali I was less enthusiastic about. Who is the clientele, Russian gangsters I mused? The Bukit Peninsula has seen huge tourist development in recent years – it’s another Balinese last frontier – but unlike so much of the rest of Bali the Bukit Peninsula is extremely dry. So dry that there’s a constant shuttle of water tankers grinding up the hill to the peninsula, trucking in water for tourist showers and swimming pools. Despite which my bottle of water was confiscated by security at the entrance to the club, presumably to ensure I bought their expensive mineral water from the bars.

▲ wrist thread, Kappa Senses

As I arrived in Ubud this ‘symbolic Tridatu bracelet, consisting of three-colored threads (red, white, and black) representing the Trimurti, the three manifestations of God: Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver), and Shiva (the Destroyer) … a symbol of devotion and often worn on the right wrist, representing a connection to the divine and a reminder of the cyclical nature of life’ was tied on my wrist at Kappa Senses.

Usually I’d have discarded it by now, but American publisher Bill Newlin and his wife Maureen, departed Bali a day before me, flew to Singapore and then departed from there on a flight back to San Francisco. A message arrived from Bill: ‘Our plane last night was aloft for two hours before it turned around and headed back to Singapore (oil leak); after a night at a hotel downtown we’re back in the airport lounge, ready to try again. We’re still wearing our bracelets from Kappa Senses, who knows what might have befallen us without them?’ Good advice I thought and mine is still on my wrist too, 40 days later.