Today we have booked a tour which includes a guide to take us on a trek through the rain forest and around the two lakes, Lake Buyan and Lake Tamblingan. This also includes passage across Lake Tamblingan in a dug out canoe and then a three course lunch at the restaurant which organises all this, say at the top of the mountain, with a view over the lake. What could be better? Food and nature. Our twin passions.
We set off. Our guide takes us down paths in the rain forest so steep and overgrown that there are point when there is literally not ground beneath you feet. It is magical. Above us the sunlight is almost shut out by the debsiy of the forest, but manages to filterits way through in patches. There are leaves and vines and trees half eaten away by the parasitical embrace of other trees, there are strange red bulbs which signify wild ginger, non edible by humans, and there are a myriad of other worldly plants, flowers and fruits.
"Don't touch a leaf that looks like that," warns our guide, pointing to a perfectly innocent looking long narrow leaf, directly after I have been grabbing at armfuls of grassy undergrowth to steady me as I slither and trip my way down the step paths, "will slice your hand open."
Ah. OK. Good to know. I stop clutching at grasses.
"Are there many animals in this forest?" asks M amid the ensuing carnage that is me trying to get down the path on two feet as opposed to my head.
"Yes" replies our guide, "there are porcupines and ant eaters. And wild pig. And snakes. And sometimes monkeys. But is very hard to see them."
Indeed we don't see any of these. And over time it becomes clear that the real threat in this forest is not the animals, but the plants.
"Do not touch this tree" warns our guide, "you will itch for a week."
"Do not touch this. Is poisonous." He says of a leaf that looks to me exactly like every other leaf in the forest.
"This!" He says, a few steps onward, "do not touch. Will hurt skin."
I stop touching anything in the forest, which is seeming alarmingly similiar to that island in the Life of Pi which is steadily eating itself and its occupants. Even so, by the end of the day, and as I sit writing this, I have a small red mark on the inside of my arm which has just recently stopped itching. I believe that a plant, somewhere in the forests managed a crafty little sting as I passed it. Thankfully I don't remember the guide saying anything about the plants being fatal, but I am monitoring its progress. If it gets worse or goes green or starts painting the inside of my arm with the faces of the people the plant ate for dinner yesterday, I will tell you.
The climb down through the forest has been fairly treacherous, especially in the light if recent monsoon rains and I am startled to learn that when our guide was a child he would walk this way every day to school. It was a two hour walk. In certain seasons, he tells us, it was especially dangerous, given the strong winds and mud slides which can afflict Bali.
"But you weren't scared?" I say, thinking of the child's ability to simply take such terrors in its stride.
He looks at me askance,
"Yes!" He says, "of course I was afraid!"
After more scrambling and some stops because I am trying in vain to capture the rather terrible beauty if the trees growing on other trees, the carcass of the old, smothered tree preserved and entwined with the roots of the interloper, using a phone camera, we arrive at the foot of the mountain and the shore of the lake.
The water is like a mirror of glass it's so still and, in the distance, slowly crossing it, we can see the tiny shape of a dug out canoe, being paddled to meet us. Rising upon either side are the lush green vegetal mountainsides, a wispy haze of cloud winding leisurely around the top. When we get into the canoe, literally a couple of hollowed out tree trunks attached by three planks laid at intervals across them to act as seats and as bridge to the far side, we are each given a paddle and begin the slow and immensely peaceful journey across the lake. Bali has been called a paradise by so many people before us and we have been a little baffled at times, given the noise and air pollution and the incongruity of the raging traffic. But now, here, moving unhurriedly across the lake, turned emerald green by the landscape around it, towards the tiny village huddled at the foot of the mountain just at the corner of it, I think that yes, this is it. This is paradise. I begin to daydream about living here, writing my novel at the side of the lake. I imagine my parents coming to visit me, greeting them in my canoe and proceeding to row them, casually across the water.
"Yes this is it," I would say, airily, as though I had personally invented it, "this is where I live."
The daydream, lovely as it was, fades a little and gives way to reality. We climb out of the canoe and walk through the little village. It's picturesque because of its setting and its diminutive size, but the rusted corragated iron roofs and crumbling walls speak not just of something better viewed from afar, but of poverty and hard work. Perhaps they would say that to own a motorbike, as opposed to a boat, would be paradise. To live the way I do, to work sitting down, might they say that was paradise? That's an open question. I dont know. They might not. But it's all very well looking at something which for you is a beautiful novelty, and assuming life would be wonderful if you lived like that all your life. Or even just for a year.
"We thought it was so beautiful. But they were starving." That documentary plagues me to this day.
Even so, as we resume our walking through the forest back up now, towards the top of the mountain huddled over the village, I cannot help but consider the reasons why people were/are so convinced this is paradise. Smiling, friendly Balinese people, children waving hello to you, hens pecking at your feet, roosters crowing, bright green forests and lush vegetation, still green lakes, colourful birds, coconut trees and fruit and coffee plantations, staggered rice fields and beautiful ceremonial arts and spirituality, not to mention the food or the brilliance of the coast line....
My thoughts are interrupted by an insistant animal noise that, at first, I assume is a monkey. And then we grow closer. It's coming from a little nest of puppies. One is crying continually, the others nestling together and apparently sleeping.
"Wow,' I say happily, carefully resisting my urge to reach down for them, in case the mother felt threatened, "I expect the mother dog has gone hunting."
"No." says our guide, uncharacteristically soulful, "these have been left here."
"They've been left? But..."
I half just being slow to catch on and half desperate not to hear the remainder, but our guides keeps explaining.
"These are all girls" he says, gently moving them with his stick to check. "People here not like girl dogs. So they put them here. Thet need Mother's milk. We cannot help them. They will die soon."
I cannot wrap my mind round this. But the basic facts are that if people own a dog and it has a brood of puppies, the girls tend to be taken away from the mother whilst still too young to eat solids - and abandoned for death. My mind goes crazy. Why? Why not let the dogs suckle and set them lose when they eat solids, so they have some fighting chance at making it through. Or abandon the mother with them, if you have that little regard for the animal, that you will kidnap her puppies. Or not have a dog in the first place? Or get it neutered? Or...
"In England," says M with some feeling, "a person who did that would be punished."
"Fined." I say angrily, "or jailed."
"Is there an animal rescue centre?" asks M.
The guide doesn't know of one.
In England the RSPCA would come and collect the puppies. And begin an investigation to bring the culprits to rights.
And suddenly I realise that this is part of England's paradise. That this cannot happen without a fuss. That there are laws to protect animals who are defenseless against us, that there are shelters and charities and societal disapproval. Because Bali, in my mind, cannot be paradise. There can be no paradise where this behaviour is normal. No paradise can be lastingly built on suffering.
In a society in which animal sacrifice is not only normal but commonplace, could the puppies at least have been put out of their misery swiftly? If they were not allowable as appeasement to the gods surely at least there are people in the vicinity who are comfortable with killing an animal who could do something quicker and more painless than death by starvation? Perhaps, given there was nothing we could do, should M and I have done this to ease the puppy's suffering? But I doubt either of us could bring ourselves to it. If you care that little, people of Bali, at least finish the job. If you care that little - don't take ownership of a dog. The litter of a stray dog is not yours to kill. (Though neither, incidentally, is that of your own).
We tear ourselves away and I hope against all sanity that a stray dog with puppies might somehow adopt them. We eat our lunch with our view.
I am not going to rant, (though I could) about animal cruelty and demonize the otherwise beautiful people of Bali. My point is that paradise is not in Bali. But neither is it necessarily in England. Or on Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia or Malaysia.
Paradise (at least the nearest you can get to in this world) has been split into little pieces and scattered over the earth. It is in the harmony of Penang, the vibrancy of Vietnam, in the courage of Cambodia (I'm not deliberately doing this alliteration thing - it just happened!), in the jungles of Langkawi and the beaches and relaxed attitudes of Thailand. It is in the tolerance of British culture, (bar UKIP), the healthy lifestyle of Sweden, the little pockets of natural beauty everywhere that have not yet been sullied in the grubby hands of humans.
You have to search for it and knit it into the weave of your life.
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