Non-Fiction Travelogue 7-06

CROC FIGHT IN BALI, AND MORE

HERB SIMONS (May 2004)

We are in Bali, beautiful Indonesian island, tropical paradise, just south of the equator, east of Java, west of Timor (East and West) and of Papua New Guinea, five hours by plane to Perth, Australia. More feminine than masculine, it beckons with flowers, birds, and butterflies of every color and description. Bright colors adorn the sarongs that men and women both wear and that can be purchased on the cheap by tourists like us.

Tourism is off 40% since the 2002 terrorist bombing of a Kuta nightclub, near Jimbaran Bay, where my wife Gayle and I are staying now. How sad for the locals! In a few days we’ll return to Bali Wisata Bungalows, on the Indian Ocean, leaving one nearly empty guest lodging for another. Incredibly, our magnificent hotel in Ubud was entirely empty one night, save for us and the hotel staff.

Bali’s tourism is off but its spirit is indomitable. The Balinese combine Hinduism and animism in a centuries-old tradition of intense religious commitment. Religion ties together family (ancestors included) and community, village and cosmos, people and their gods, human fertility and agricultural bounty, life, death and regeneration. Animism, including beliefs in white and black magic, seems a useful complement to Hinduism, with its ideas of karma and nirvana, caste and class. The Balinese live in a world of shared meaning, expressed in narratives, reinforced at countless ceremonies, exhibited in the great Temples of the Gods and in the Temples to the Gods that occupy a prescribed place in every home. A village rice harvest festival that we chanced upon featured a sitting gamelan band and a marching gamelan band, their rhythms no doubt familiar to the throngs that came out for the ceremony, but nonetheless impressive for the demands they made on the 15-20 drum-beating musicians to play as one at varying tempos with no obvious direction. The spectators, in clusters of young and old, boys and girls, men and women, shifted between attention to this or that procession and opportunities for gossip, play, or whatever. There were few, if any, signs of hostility toward the handful of Caucasians present, and this has been true of our travels throughout Bali. The processions, set against the complex architecture of the village temple, with its ornate stone carvings of Hindu deities, culminated in a solemn march to the Temple by identically festooned women wearing bright sarongs, and carrying on their heads ceremonial offerings to the Gods, arrayed cylindrically in layers, including one layer of eggs that managed to remain unbroken. All this was recorded locally on video camera—testimony to the social order’s adaptability to modernity.

Gayle and I have kayaked, swum, sunbathed, read, eaten far more than we should have, visited temples, walked above and below artfully terraced rice fields, bargained at markets, and stopped in at a rice museum, a butterfly emporium, a zoo, a preserved monkey habitat, and a rather odd reptile park, organized in maze-like fashion, as in a formal English garden, and featuring mammoth crocodiles imported from elsewhere in Indonesia.

And now it is time for my story. Clifford Geertz has written the classic anthropological essay, “Cockfight in Bali,” I here present its near sequel, “Croc Fight in Bali.”

We arrived at 4 p.m., too late for the reptile park’s 3:00 croc show. Too bad, for nearly all of the beasts seemed fast asleep. Even the park’s center croc pit, featuring a dozen or so of the reptiles, lay still, denying us our 55,000 ruppiah’s ($6-7) worth of action. Apparently sensing our disappointment, the ticket-seller, a very sweet-looking girl of perhaps 20 approached us in the guise of a personal guide, but with a special offer. For an additional 40,000 ruppiah we could purchase a live duck. There they were, she said, pointing to a cage of foul-looking fowl. Possessed of the live duck we could see the crocs spring into action, and she would assist us by tossing the duck into the pit.

Gayle and I were initially aghast at the proposal. Pay to have a live duck killed for nothing more than our pleasure? How horrid! We were shocked that the sweet young ticket seller would make such an outlandish proposal.

But then it began to make sense—to me, at any rate. Logic: Crocs gotta eat; ducks gotta die; crocs ain’t no fun when all they do is lie. Ducks cost ruppiahs and ruppiahs don’t grow on trees. Special croc shows call for special fees.

Gayle’s position remained rather Quaker-like. “I’ll pay the extra Rps as a donation to this clearly impoverished park, but I won’t look at the duck being fed to the crocs.”

To the extent that she understood it, our ticket-selling, duck-selling guide did not seem to appreciate Gayle’s logic. I did, but preferred a different order of compromise. “20,000 Rps,” I proposed as a counter-offer. “30,000,” she demanded with an air of finality.

In this immense reptile park I spied one other couple, down at the other end, by the giant lizards--called dragons. Perhaps they would be interested in splitting the 30,000Rp, I ventured to our guide. “Not permitted,” said the young girl, but Gayle and I pushed ahead in their direction anyway, only to discover that they too divided along gender lines.

But then their guide came to our rescue. In place of a live duck he would stir up the water in the largest of the crocodile pits with a palm frond. The crocs wouldn’t know the difference. And true to his word, the crocs sprang into action, offering us the spectacle of ferocity that I longed for and that Gayle could now enjoy. Had we been fair to the crocs in sending a misleading signal? Perhaps not, but we both agreed that crocodile deception was ethically preferable to the alternative we had been considering.

Note: Clifford Geertz’s “Cockfight in Bali” was offered as a metaphor for Balinese culture. “Croc Fight in Bali” is offered as a metaphor for us in Bali.

P.S. Today we saw a cockatoo

Or two,

And maybe even a few

Cockatoos.