Video Night in Kathmandu (6 page)

Thus Ferdinand and Antonio and Gonzalo all drifted around the enchanted island, each in his own private dream, each largely unaware of the others’ proximity, all watched only by their invisible hosts.

Bali’s most famous tourist community—cursed and coveted around the world—was Kuta. Fifteen years ago, the quiet fishing village had been the cheap utopia of bohemians in quest of rural hangouts and vegetable highs; watching a psychedelic sunset at Kuta was said to be almost as good as seeing Jerry Garcia at the Fillmore West or conversing with Buddha on a Himalayan mountaintop. And fifteen years ago, there had been only two restaurants in the area. The first hotel in Kuta had opened only in 1959; by now, however, the area was pockmarked with more than three hundred
losmens
, or guesthouses. Bali, in fact, had become for Australians what Greece is for many Europeans, the Bahamas
for New Yorkers and Hawaii for those in the Far West—the most convenient paradise island on their doorsteps. Every day brought planeloads of pleasure-loving Aussies streaming into Kuta, fresh from the streets of Perth or Darwin.

And a kind of Darwinian devolution had, so it seemed, been the result. For most of these visitors were not, as a rule, the kind of visitor whose pleasures were subtle or understated: they were mostly straight-ahead, no-nonsense blokes, bikers and surfers and bruisers and boozers who were rough and ready for fun. All they wanted were some basic good times—great waves, cheap beer, pretty girls. Thus Kuta had become their raucous home from home, a boisterous playground for piss-ups and pick-ups and rave-ups. Sure, Prospero’s isle might be full of angels and artists, but it also had room for some drunken Stephanos and Trinculos.

So “Captain Good Vibes” stickers had been splattered across many of the village surfaces, and Perth badges attached to many a local breast. Koalas and kangaroos peered out of shirts and shelves, and around the tiny desk in my guesthouse, the Lasi Erawati, the number of surfing decals totaled 170. The most popular T-shirt in town said “No, I don’t want a F——ing Bemo/Postcard/Massage/Jiggy Jig.”

A glossy photo in my five-year-old guidebook cited Doggies restaurant as an “Antique setting: the only place with a Disco.” By now, however, Doggies itself was an antique, since almost every place had a disco. And one local bar offered “Aussie-style steaks,” another “special Aussie H’Burger with the lot.” One sign promised “Suci’s Aussie Breakfast” and another “Waltzing Maltilda Sarongs.” “Real Cheese and Vegemite Sandwich Eating Competitions” were held at Casablanca, and “Bintang Beer and Coke Drinking Contests” at Madé’s Tavern. The drinks in the pubs were called, at their most delicate, “Bali Kiss” and “Love Potion” and “Dirty Mother.” And the second most popular T-shirt in town announced “Bloody Good Tucker: Kuta, Bali.”

Kuta, then, had all the rowdiness, and all the unacknowledged sadness, of every beachfront holiday camp jam-packed with people looking around for the good time they had promised themselves; it had all the skin-peeling bustle of Cape Cod in the summer, say, or Corfu, or Cancún. In Kuta, red-faced couples held hands, touched sunburned knees under the table, asked the
waiter to take pictures of them in their tans, lost themselves in long kisses on the streets. This was fun time, the visitors said, and the first thing to do was break all the rules—native customs or no. Get drunk. Get high. Get laid. This was such stuff as dreams are made on.

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 that 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.”