Exploring Bali’s green heart

"Не все эгоисты талантливы, но все талантливые люди — эгоисты." Всеволод Михальцев

Breakfast in Ubud, through a rainbow-wash of spring rain. All the temples and cafés stripped-back and steaming, all the town’s dogs wading about with hair slicked like otters. The moment it stops, instantaneous renewal. Sun swelling out the streets with light. Little pale lizards darting from wet stone to wet stone. Tables on pavements being reset with iced coffees sweetened by a dash of condensed milk. All cleansings, rebirths – all supremely Ubud, the town in the high heart of Bali known for its landscape of voluptuous foliage. Sacred waters. Artists, healers, river valleys. Pools with an impossibly perfect pH.

Exploring Balis green heart

Pool at COMO Uma Ubud

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

As I wait for my ride at noon beside a crossing along Jalan Hanoman street, all life is turned fantastically outward in a town that feels like an intricate temple site. Everybody living and moving amongst the courtyards and platforms, pavilions and antechambers at a perpetual catch-up. An international picnic. Always, the smell of cooking pork. Squabbling, golden children demanding the satay being griddled on byres along pavements, unwrapping rice in banana leaves like presents, and triumphantly scooping peanut sauce toasted with chillies out of oily bowls.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences.

A couple of Catalans carrying wriggling newborns and tree-rubber yoga mats hover at the junction, talking about the Costa Daurada. Hipsters suck on herb-spiked matchas, wearing rough beanies like Steve McQueen in Papillon. Exquisite Swedish teenagers with plump skin baked the colour of raspberry rummage in bum bags for change. A busker attempts John Coltrane for a woman in mismatched shoes who might have just walked out on her life with one suitcase. Jet-lagged models. Stabs of red hibiscus.

Exploring Balis green heart

The palm trees and terraces of Tegalalang

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

Someone born here told me that one day in the mid 1980s he noticed a strange and unusual thing: a lone camper van parked in fields by the old bridge full of sleeping young Australians in wetsuits. Since then, there has really been no end to the visitors, everyone increasingly drawn from the sticky hotels in Seminyakand Canggu.

They gather here instead, inside great cloth pyramids thrown up in rice paddies, for acoustic bio-resonance sessions and vinyasa flow. Frowning hot-deskers run businesses out of open-plan bamboo co-working offices on the road along the forest, where every bank or bar down the crammed boulevards is a salon for foot rubs or vipassana meditation. Grizzled ex-soldiers having backpacked here, dazed, since the Gulf War, hug it out on the streets after tantra hatha. All the taut-muscled self-improvement gurus; all the prophesying voices and flotsam and jetsam drawn to tropical Asia, buying carvings of Durga with a tongue of fire, while traffic jams of scooters blare under gigantic pule trees dripping in vines.

Exploring Balis green heart

Hammock at Rumah Hujan Villa

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

Within an hour of being here, I thought: I have to leave. But I kept finding reasons not to. For the breeze can blow fresh from the north-eastern slopes of mounts Batur and Agung in the ochre and lilac distance, reminding you that this is an uplands town. Sometimes, a white mist creeps down the lanes with the sombre damp of aCumbrian autumn. In legend, the mountains of Bali were created so the island’s people could live in an airy place, under skies of rare flowers, where snakes manifest as falling stars.

And so one weekend I drive north, towards the mountains, with my friend Bawa to visit his mother, juddering in a dented car beyond the art shops and abhyanga massage huts on the edge of town. We stop to let pass a procession for a festival of the full moon. ‘Tat twam asi, tat twam asi,’ sing a long line of celebrants carrying offerings. ‘I am you and you are me.’ Green tangerines and sotong fruit, tobacco and matches, fried jaje, or sugar-cakes, moulded into figurines of priests. A village toddler wearing leopard-print leggings holds a quivering duck.

There are no official wise men amongst the procession from this particular temple, says Bawa, because many are already present in spirit, their bodies unseen. Balinese Hinduism has deep-rooted overtones of animism, touches of Buddhism and Shaivism, cults of the underworld – a knotty assimilation, everything eventually organised to compliment the sympathetic temperament of the people. Most days there’s some kind of celebration: marriage and funeral rites, the hoisting of temple ornaments and parasols, demigods, protectors, antagonisers. The pure of heart sometimes walk on hot coals that redden and blacken, and then redden again.

Exploring Balis green heart

Temple entrance

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

It’s Sunday, and along the roads families are out together for the day, stopping at cafés for suckling pig and immense neon-coloured crackers, like party crisps for giants, sold in bags at stalls next to petrol in old vodka bottles. Brooms and Calor gas, hair combs and wild vanilla. Bottles of arak, the local hooch, that will knock you out though it is the inculpable colour of apricot squash. Knobbled bushels of passion fruit, yellow as gobstoppers, and little fritters of eel, each tenacious creature caught with a bamboo pincer at sunset when they come out to swim. Just beyond Bedugul – and the floating temples at Lake Bratan – our road thins and quickly winds up into dripping high jungle.

Below, rice paddies on shining, descending plateaus are green and perfect as billiard tables. Long-tailed monkeys sit about the pitted tarmac with their hair madly stuck out all over. ‘Never look a monkey in the eye,’ warns Bawa, with owlish sincerity, fiddling with the fading radio signal. A crackle of Dangdut music: songs about women who love bad men and just can’t help it. ‘Arrest me!’ the lyrics chime out, over and over, as the morning deepens, ‘Or I might steal his soul.’

Bawa first left his remote northern village at the foot of Bebetin mountain as a teenager, to find work in Denpasar and eventually Ubud. He’d studied so hard in preparation, he would wake with a face thick with soot from long nights spent at his books by a guttering paraffin lamp. Climbing mangosteen trees after school each day, he would imagine the south. ‘I needed to know,’ he says, ‘of whatever lay beyond.’ He laughs, ‘I’m such a dreamer.

Exploring Balis green heart

A palm-shaded pool

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

Avocado trees swelter in the forest; coffee, too, white turmeric, and clove. Ginger plants with powerful roots the size of your thumb that you can boil into a head-lolling syrup. Trumpets of flowers lean into the car, and prehistoric ferns. And when we stop for a while at a temple in Bebetin where Bawa used to pray as a child, he shows me stone carvings of jewelled feet, swirling sprites, fragments of limbs and bodies, hands carrying ferocious swords. Moss covers everything, so the whole edifice seems living. One chiselled effigy of a woman in a panelled dress has hair so primly curled she could be on a medieval pew in Cornwall. How old? I ask, and Bawa shrugs. Bawa doesn’t know how old his mother is either. But then, neither does she. Time simply does what time will do.

Exploring Balis green heart

Umbrellas in the rice fields

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

It’s not easy being a town renowned for culture and healing on an island with already so many fanciful definitions. Island of Peace. Island of a Thousand Temples. Arcadia of the East. Ubud, so descended upon, so fluttering with flyers for the ‘Solo female travellers network’ (there are very few if any attacks on women visiting Bali) and ‘Alchemy of breath’.

This place is full of gurus in love with saving people, declaring on the great aliveness of the universe. One day as I’m standing looking at a poster for a talk on ‘The alkalising effects of oat straw on the nervous system’ along scooter-crammed Jalan Dewi Sita street, I think of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, taking the waters for her health at Bath, wondering which concert to attend, which improving lecture. Through the open gates of a house nearby I see a stone frieze of a hunter catching a topless angel at a river, stealing her sash and revealing her nakedness so she can’t fly away. On a TV in the courtyard a teenage boy and his grandmother watch a popular show in which the contestant with the most virtuous heart wins a new house.

In the café at Tukies Coconut Shop (unmissable, and a stone’s throw from the famed cocktails at Hujan Locale) the only sound, for a while, is the hum of a drowsy bee. Until sixty-something Kadek, who has a house next door, starts down the street with a long bamboo spike to ease down fresh frangipani blossom from high trees, for the early evening offering at his family temple.

Exploring Balis green heart

A temple ceremony

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

Afternoons, weeks, a childhood, can pass like this, negotiating over and over the seductive knot of streets and shops, and faces. It can be impossible; a whirlwind of flies in the dog days, when everybody talks with nostalgia about how beautiful it used to be here, how green and unruined and cool. But Ubud is always vivid. And in the fields and valleys of the Bangli regency south of Mount Batur especially you can still find things that seem profoundly removed from any documented present.

One day, sworn to secrecy, I’m taken to a cleansing ritual in a hidden dell up a frothing river where I clamber for an hour along waterfalls, my fingers grasping for purchase, feet slipping off time-smoothed boulders, alongside a family from Jakarta, who’ve come especially to submit their toddler for a blessing. The child yells and kicks while a priest leads us in the dark through newly spun spiders’ webs. On the river bank, a pig’s spine has been strewn after a night sacrifice. Water pounds, blood knocks in my head from the effort – the surprise, and intensity. When I eventually return to where I’d started, on a stone promontory sits the yawning temple dog, and by its side, a praying mantis, Disney-green and glimmering like a nugget of peridot.

Exploring Balis green heart

Rice paddies

Jack Johns and Owen Tozer

For a few hours after that, I don’t think I have ever felt better in my life. Or seen things so close up. I stumble back down the lanes of Ubud, passing the children’s karate team all chatting with ceremonial dancing girls waiting to give a performance under pounds-weight of costume jewellery, their headdresses grand and jutting as chandeliers. Past the men playing chess surrounded by cages of furious cipoh birds, and the American ex-flight attendant, who sits outside Naughty Nuri’s BBQ all day, slowly drinking Pisco Sours and reading crime novels until his ancient golden Labrador shambles to its feet to lead him home. Women carry baskets of eggs and incense on their heads, turning circles and talking under a sunset as crimson as a fantasy of vengeance that flickers over a thousand stone demons dressed in skirts of chequered cloth, slung with bruised garlands of orange marigolds.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences.

Like this? Now read:

The best time to visit Bali

The best time to visit Bali

What to pack for Bali

What to pack for Bali

Canggu, Bali: an insider guide

Canggu – Bali’s beach hotspot