Golden Day

Was today the best day ever?

With a few notable exceptions such as our wedding day, yes, I really think it was.

Bali, you put me off at first with your traffic and your tourists (yes, I know I am one) but now you have won me over. Well and truly.

There is no special theme or point to this entry. I haven't tried to contrive any. I am simply going to tell you what happened. As straightforwardly as possible (for me). Because it was AMAZING. It was twenty two and a half solid hours of amazing, in fact.

At two am our car comes for us. It will take us to the foot of Mount Batur, an active volcano in the heart of the island which we will then, hopefully, proceed to climb. We flop into the car and promptly fall asleep.

We wake up in a dark carpark a little way from the foot of the mountain. There are other tourists milling about but we are the only ones with our own guide. Our guide, who looks extremely young even in the pitch black of the unlit parking ground, introduces himself as Wahyan (pseudonym) and takes our bottles of water and the four eggs which our driver has handed to me and which I have already managed to drop once. Thankfully it was in the soft black sand (once boiling lava) which cascades down the mountain and collects at the foot, rather soberingly in exactly the formation it made when it was erupting. Even so the guide and M both give me a look as I fumble to pick it up again and hand it rather hurriedly over to our guide.

We start off immediately, leaving the other groups of tourists in our wake. Presumably they have to wait for the other 45 members of their party. We are the lucky ones.

We stride rather smugly down the 'path' of soft black sand, illuminated only in patches by our torchlight.

It seems very easy but I know, remembering the walk to the lighthouse in Penang, better than to mention that so soon. And we haven't actually reached the foot of our climb yet. We are still on the flat.

I am wondering what I will be like on the climb. Not what it will be like. What I will be like. (I am self obsessed, remember?) There are mixed reviews of this climb on the various websites. Some say it's a doddle and that a child could do it - others that it is hell on earth, requires specialist equipment and climbing experience and no one should attempt it unless they are super fit. But what is 'fit'? I am fit by many people's standards, by others (for example the unsweatable, unflappable M) I am a wobbling wreck. I'm not sure what kind of an experience to expect.

We walk. Our guide points out the plantations of onion, chillis and vegetables growing in the fertile volcanic soil. This is just a small part of his day. When we get back down he will go back to work in the fields. He may look young but it's not a child's lifestyle. He, I rather suspect, really is fit.

And as for me? Well I am  none the wiser as to my objective fitness level, but the climb, though exhilerating and challenging, really is OK.  When we come off the flat and climb I breathe a little harder but continue smugly striding and, as it gets progressively harder and we begin to scramble up and around rocks and slide slightly on gravel I am enjoying myself. The stride becomes ever more smug. And it's blessedly cool. I haven't been at this comfortable a temperature since getting off that first flight. I haven't been this dry. I am sweating as the effort increases but the sweat is doing what sweat is supposed to do and cooling on my skin when I pause. Rather than being a constant hot dribble, like candle wax melting, leaving a nastily viscous layer of slime on my skin.

Our guide leads us to quiet places every now and then to rest. Obediently we do, but gratifyingly I  never actually feel I need to. Later i wonder whether he is actually just a brilliant guide and it is because of these frequent, short lived pauses that we are not feeling the need to pause more.

Frequently now, because we have caught up with some tour groups who started the climb earlier, we are passing groups of floundering, panting tourists, mostly women. They are, without fail, either asking their guide tremulously how much further or whether the climb gets any steeper, or swigging water and collapsing melodramatically onto the nearest rock.

"What a fuss" I think smugly, striding past.

Actually, I have a lot more empathy than that. How many tines has that been me in a company of people who all seem to have been born doing some form of extreme sport and who are waiting, somewhat impatiently, for me to inch my humiliated body forward enough to be roughly 'caught up'. Or at least within sight. I know the feeling well. But even so. For some reason, something in the terrain or the light or the temperature or the time of day has rendered me the 'fit' one. And I am grateful to life for this. That it never quite pigeon holes you. There is always an opportunity to be something else.
 
As we climb we come across a small 'temple', (more what the west might call a small shrine).

"Excuse me." says our guide, "this is a temple. And so I will pray."

With that he removes his backpack, sits down cross legged in front of the temple and bows his head. We keep a respectful distance and I try to do a respectful silence to match it  but its all just a bit too exciting and I keep trying to point out bits of scenery or stars to a frowning M in a whisper. I have never been able to appreciate anything without wanting to show someone. Snorkelling, in which you have to view amazing things but can't speak or make eye contact, half kills me. Literally. I spend so much time turning my head to try to see M and consequently dipping my breathing tube in the water I end up swallowing half the natural habitat I am supposed to be so calmly viewing.

Back to the prayer. He spends quite some time doing it. This was not a quick formality. And once more I wonder why we don't do more of this in England. Or, more specifically, in the Christian faith. The idea, of course, is that you are speaking with God all the time in your head, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. So you don't need a shrine or a specific time of day. Which is fine. If you're genuinely that perfect. Personally I forget. Life. Stuff. It crowds in and absorbs me. I don't think about God let alone talk to Him. Unless something goes either very wrong or very right. Then He gets a thanks it am entreaty. It must be pretty unrewarding for Him. As far as I know both the Islamic and Balinese Hindu faiths also believe you can talk to God anywhere and should do so as often as possible. But they have a shrine or a prayer time set aside to remind them. The ritualistic, movement element of the Islamic prayer is for exercise and focus. The Hindu shrine acts like an icon to look at and, once again, to focus. Because let's face it, even if you've got so far as to sit down and settle in for your chat with your deity, the mind wanders. Or you fall asleep. Are these faiths which knit specific prayer rituals into their daily existence simply more realistic about their human frailties?

Oh yes. I was supposed to just be telling you what happened. Straight. Apologies. I really cannot help but pontificate.

We reach the near summit. There are a lot of tourists here now. Largely flaked out. We stop because our guide has told us to.

"Yeah," I hear someone say, "the Swedish girls down there are finding it hard. Vomiting and stuff."

"There is MORE?" says an American girl, incredulously to her guide, "seriously?"

A little way along a group of people are doubled over, catching their breath. We were short of breath in the tougher parts. But even so. I am beginning to wonder if we have done a different climb. I am doing, even if I say so myself, a rather good impression of the unsweatable, unflappable M.

"This" says our guide, "is very good time."

We have been told the climb takes two and a half to three hours. We have done it in just over fifty minutes. There is another twenty five minutes or so worth of very steep climb to get to the very top.

"You can do it in about ten" predicts our guide rather happily. "Shall we begin that part now?"

We do. In fact it takes us about twenty. It's very steep and requires concentration and balance. Possibly it is this which has managed to distract me from either the effort or the fear. I do like a cerebral challenge. Rather more than a physical one. Though I'm not actually that gifted at either.

We sit on a bamboo bench, sipping hot drinks which someone, amazingly, has hauled up to the top to sell to the tourists and stare out over the view. We look down on a lake shimmering in the burgeoning sunlight, the sky streaked pink and orange in jagged white cloud.

Our guide points out coffee and fruit plantations among the green of the mountainside. We look at the ominous black streaks of lava sand and patches of red lava rock. The last time this erupted seems to have been in 2000, though it was not such a devastating disaster as the initial eruption in 1924. Periodically, seismologists close this volcano because it is showing signs of likely eruption.

"Are you afraid?" We ask our guide when he points out his village, nestling by the lake beneath the volcano.

"No," he says, "because there is warning - maybe even a month before. We would leave."

There is a pause.

"But we would lose our house" he adds, calmly.

He points out another village a little way along.

"Sometimes we climb the hill in between" he says, "and visit that village. It is traditional and we like to see how they still weave and make craft."

So the Balinese themselves are tourists of their own culture. And the people in the villages we would have called 'traditional' are travelling to see the real thing. I think, not for the first time, how very little you understand a country just by travelling to it. How little you probably understand even your own.

We ask if our guide has ambitions to travel after he makes a casual comment about Malaysia.

"Would be hard for a Balinese" he says without ruefulness, "work is hard and it expensive. But also every day there is a celebration or ceremony. I have a lot of friends and they have birthdays each 6 months. That is a lot. And there are others."

Too many ceremonies to leave. And not even a concept of potentially missing one. Is it restrictive? Claustrophobic? Do young Balinese resent it? Wayhan doesn't seem to. Its a matter of fact. Maybe the Balinese don't feel the need to travel. They have work and their religion is mixed in with  their play. Who needs other countries? Who needs TV? Or am I just another wide eyed tourist?

 Our guide has taken our eggs some fifteen minutes before. Now he approaches us again.

"You want to come get eggs?" He asks.

We follow him up and over the ridge so that we are looking down into one of the several craters of this volcano. A little way down, around it a wooden walkway for the wide eyed tourists, it is seeping sulphur steam. I have climbed an active volcano before, in Japan. Though I think I took the chair lift up that time. There was a man with wire baskets into which the tourists would put eggs and he would dip them into a hole in the side of the crater and bring them back up minutes later, sulphurous black and boiled - and dole them out again. I expect something similar to this. Instead our guide expertly leaps and slides his way down, leaving us to pick our way rather more carefully and then picks up a pile of grass and leaves to reveal, nestled inside a small crevice in the mountain - our eggs. For some reason I really like this. The fact that the eggs look so much like a nest, the fact that he has hidden them this way and so they are secret eggs, the sheer specialness of it all. No one else has eggs. They have picnic breakfasts prepared by their hotel. Once again I am so pleased we didn't choose conventional hotels and hostels for this trip. It may be easier but sometimes it's so easy you miss out.

After we have eaten our eggs we take a walk around the crater ridges, giving me another opportunity to marvel at my sudden lack of wimpyness. The ridges are just that, at points sharp and with sheer drops either side. I may not match our guide's convincing impression of a mountain goat, but I am gamely clambering about with none of the familiar rising panic and frozen fear I often feel at heights. Am I going all Brad on us? (See 'The Joy of Doing Nothing')

"Sometimes people don't like this" says our guide, "they are crying."

I rather shamefully say "really?" as though I cannot imagine how such fearfulness would be possible. As though it is not always a hairs breadth away from being me.

Shameful as the smugness is (especially as I know there have been many occasions on which knowing that everyone else wasn't completely unruffled would have made life a lot easier for me), the newfound bravado does continue. Apart from a slight wobble when our guide points us down a sheer drop and says

"Do you want to climb down to see the sacred cave?"

(It turns out he is joking and you can get there via a rather less direct route) I remain not only unflappable but really quite exhilarated. When our guide suggests, seriously this time, that we 'surf' down the mountainside on the black sand, I do. And with quite done enjoyment.  Though I become rather more careful as soon as the terrain, in turn, becomes rather more rocky.

By the time we reach the bottom I am fizzing with the rush that follows a successful exertion, and desperate to go to the toilet. The men have received themselves conveniently against a tree. There is no such convenience open to the fairer sex. I could have gone in some undergrowth but for most of the way it's patchy, and there's always a good view from the path winding above. The mountain, being considered a holy site, cannot be desecrated with such indiscretions as portalaloos.

We tip our young guide and then tip ourselves back into the car, where, once again we sleep, though I am still a little too excited for proper unconsciousness.

When we wake again we are at the hot springs. Walking into the hot springs complex we are greeted with a swimming pool like series of paved pools with clean, naturally heated water and flanked by statues and fountains. Plunging into the nearest pool I prop myself up on the side, rest my face on my arms and contemplate the view over lakes and mountains. The air, up here, is still blissfully cool.

And it's not over yet. When we finally decide to emerge from the hot springs, our driver having neither indicated nor fussed about a schedule, we are conveyed to our own privately curtained 'room' in an outdoor spa and pummeled, scrubbed and then coated in yoghurt. I gaze down through my little head-hole, watching ants saunter lazily around on the paving stones, frogs croaking, gekkos chattering, birds singing and I think I really might be in heaven. I cannot even hear the traffic.

Tipped out of our massage beds and into a flower bath, if you please, M surveys the floating petals around him and considers whether it might be a threat to his masculinity. We decide that it isn't. We decide that today is a 'golden day' ('golden' being a classification we once made up to describe a particular Christmas which seemed especially perfect). We also decide that is Valentines Eve Eve Eve Eve and therefore it is perfectly appropriate for us to be wallowing (literally) in such luxury.

After some amazing food, (and a rather ignominious start in which the waiter asks whether we have been to the monkey forest because I look so sweaty. Nope. Just the spa. This is how I look every day in Bali. Unless we happen to be up a mountain.) we head for our hotel. The lovely lodgings associated with the Agung Rai Museum of Art.

And they are even more beautiful than I remembered. Surrounded by leafy greenery, through which stone statues peep, with a running stream into which some beautifully crafted lizards delicately puke water. We bump, (though admittedly we do stalk him a bit) into Agung Rai again and he buys us a drink and tells us about the ceremony at the temple in town.

We need no further encouragement. We don our borrowed sarongs and head straight there.

We make a slight false turn at first, and find ourselves in the impromptu market which has sprung up on the other side of the road to the temple, and are immediately accosted by a man trying to sell me a sash and M a head piece. Dissuading him takes some effort and we are left a little jaded. How quickly our fragile rebuilding of faith in Bali is dashed. How quickly we are made cynical. And also, how quickly are religious festivities made commercial. Bali may be arguably more spiritual, or more frequently spiritual, than some other countries, but it's no less susceptible to the associated money making.

We cross the road and enter, this time, the actual temple. It's huge, more a temple complex than a building, and festooned with bamboo and palm leaf decorations - and of course its inhabitants.

"A church is not a building," say most Christians if you give them half a chance to do so, "its the people that make it"

And it's true. True in the UK and true here. It is the people, dressed up in traditional long tops, sarongs and sashes, the men in white with their head coverings and tanned feet in brown sandals, the children, also dressed up and clearly used to the temple, treating it, innocently, like a second home. Everyone seems pleased to be here. From the oldest to the youngest and, that most cynical of ages, the teens. There's a dance being performed and people are watching, but this isn't just a social gathering using the excuse of the temple celebrations. There is immense activity, a continuous flow of people bearing elaborate and colourful offerings of fruit and flowers, in baskets or piled, inconceivably high and carried on the head, in and out of what seems to be the temple's inner sanctum. There are people burning incense at the various shrines (for want of a better word). They hold the incense to their foreheads between clasped hands and bow their heads in prayer.

We sit, taking our cue from the Balinese, and watch the dancing. Then, at some signal, there is silence. People process out if the inner sanctum, priests in robes, people carrying offerings and a slow journey is made which takes in each one of the many shrines or worship points (I have to work out what to actually call these). A priest flicks holy water at the shrine site. Someone waves and then plants a handful of burning incense sticks. Three men arrive, carrying, respectively, a goose, a hen and a silver tray of grain. Both birds are pure white. I am worried for a moment that I am about to witness some sort of animal sacrifice but Bali is not that kind of place. And I am rather of the order of the bepanama-ed Englishman, thinking all other races are savages even to think of it. In fact the men pause in front of each shrine, and hold their birds out to peck some of the grain, before each plucking a feather and scattering it on the shallow breeze in the direction of the alter. I have been unable to work out exactly what this means and everybody I ask seems confused by the question, but knowing that after each meal a part of the cooked rice (there is always rice) is given as an offering I suspect it is along the lines of sharing a part of your prosperity. Certainly that goes for the art, the flowers and the fruits. I am reminded of the, now more monetary centred, Christian principle of giving the first of your crop to God, roughly a tenth, known as tithing. Or of the Islamic principle that you should eat until you are not quite full, and give the rest to God. In each case it makes perfect sense. The God who gave you these things deserves first go at them. It's a way of saying thank you. And a way of acknowledging how little control you have over something like a harvest.

After a little while, and again, at some secret silent signal which everybody but me seems to understand, everybody turns to face the inner sanctum. And somebody works their way around the edge of the centre courtyard, where we sit, and bolts the doors. We make a rapid call to the hotel, with whom we had arranged a pick up. We delay it. And just as we hang up the phone, everybody falls absolutely silent.

There is a priest in the inner sanctum leading proceedings. I have no idea what he's saying but everybody listens, reverently, and I believe it's a prayer.

Then, at a word from the priest, everybody reaches into the colourful hand woven basket they brought with them, selects a flower and lifts it, trapped between their praying hands, to their bowed forehead. In unison. It's unspeakably beautiful. Both the act itself and the faith that it signifies. Another word and the flowers at lowered and, for the women, tucked into their hair. The same process is repeated, but now people are selecting small folded palm leaf offerings from their basket. Then incense. Then more flowers.

We are there for nearly a full hour, in this silent ceremony, breathing in the absolute quiet, even the smallest child observing it, and the sense of hope that goes so often with strong faith. We are two of only four western faces, in a sea of hundreds of Balinese. We are incredibly lucky to be here. We owe it to Mr Agung Rai that we have come to this temple at all. And somewhere, in the proceedings we know he is worshipping too, bringing his own offerings with his family.

We came, as do most westerners, to see the accompanying dancing. But in fact it is the prayer time, those silent flowers, which I know will really stay with me.

We go home. After a while, buzzing, too exhilarated by all we have seen and done, we finally consider sleeping. Its half past eleven. Twenty two golden hours. I don't know what more we could gave asked for today.