Nearly shipwrecked on the way to Nusa Lembongan

Andy Hill

It was with a capricious, naive abandon that my girlfriend and I hopped onto a boat to go see our friends on the island of Nusa Lembongan off of Bali.

It was a more or less clear day on the island of Gili Trawangan as my girlfriend and I enjoyed our English breakfast on the beach and waited for our boat to begin to take passengers. We were heading off to the island of Nusa Lembongan, whose cultural affiliations lie with its nearby Bali whereas the Gilis are tied to Lombok.

We’d had a marvelous time on Trawangan, doing little more than shuffling about from guesthouse to bar to beach chair and back, jumping out of the way of horse-drawn carts (there are no motorized vehicles in the Gilis) and eating more prawns than we’d ever know how to catch.

We were waved towards an arriving boat, paid our check, and ecstatically presented our ticket to the man taking care of the boat business. Two of our dear friends were meeting us in Lembongan with two of their friends we’d never met and we were looking forward excitedly to three or four days of much mirth.

We claimed our little hard plastic bench towards the back of the boat and grinned at one another, stoked to be on another boat, glowing. The motor started up and off we were.

Something bizarre and unexpected then happened. What had looked like a serene sea while we were eating breakfast on the beach had become progressively worse until we were deep in the nightmarish tumult of an incensed sea-demon’s rage.

While rocking violently, the bottom of the boat was smacking the water every time it came back down from going over a swell. There was so much water being sprayed against the windows that it was impossible to see out.

Our fellow passengers looked increasingly terrified, and although I usually have quite a bit of good natured faith in these things, I began looking about for something to smash the window beside us in case the boat flipped.

And then, people began to wretch.

Soon a girl who worked for the boat company was walking around with an armful of thin, black, plastic bags for everyone, some grabbing at them quickly, desperately.  

The smell of vomit began to permeate the cabin. I couldn’t look at anyone who was about to vomit, in the process of vomiting, or had just vomited because then I would have vomited. My girlfriend was clutching my arm like a vice and I almost got up so we could stand near the edge in case the thing flipped.

I thought about all the times I’d read about these kinds of boats, specifically in Indonesia, capsizing, sinking, or catching fire. I was getting ready for the big one.

Someone missed their bag and vomit went all over the floor of the aisle near my foot. The boat boomed as it crashed back down to the water after going over a wave. 

Children screamed. 

A woman began crying. 

I thought of how many months had gone by since I’d spoken to my family, and the dreams I had of being old and happy with my girlfriend. 

Someone else ralphed just behind me. The air was thick with terror and barf and grief. 

And then, as automatically as it had started, the waves had calmed, the tempest had subsided, sea water stopped spraying against the windows, and the sun seemed to come out. We could see our destination, and it was comfortingly close, probably enough to swim.

The barf bag lady came around to collect them, disgustingly, in a large cardboard box, and tried to comfort us by saying “today not bad. Last week bad.”

Nyepi, an island-wide exorcism

Andy Hill

At the New Year in Bali, I was entranced by phantasmagoric effigies, the effluence of cultural panache, and the idea that the entire island might be rightfully cleansed of evil and banality.

As the afternoon lingered on I started to hear more cacophony from outside my bungalow window in Ubud, hunched over my laptop, pecking out more of my manuscript. As the peal of bells, gongs, and wooden chimes from roving Balinese orchestras finally ciphoned away all of my interest in writing for the day, I closed my laptop, locked the ornately-carved wooden doors, and trotted down to the street to see what this thing was going to look like.

It was the day before Nyepi, which is the Balinese New Year. On Nyepi, no one leaves their house, and at night, the curtains are kept shut lest the evil spirits travelling over the island see the light from below, and decide to take up residence thereby for the next year. 

Nyepi is the quiet day. No electricity, no lighting of fires, no cooking, and very little (if any) talking. Even non-Balinese such as myself are gently steered back to their guesthouses in the event that they ignorantly wander outside. At night on Nyepi it is very, very quiet, and very, very dark.

It is oddly similar to the British keeping blackouts so that the Nazi luftwaffen (another kind of evil demon) wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs during WWII.

However, the day before Nyepi is an entirely different set of circumstances. For the weeks leading up to the special day, neighborhood groups construct sometimes meters-high effigies of demons and other evil entities called ogoh ogoh, which are then paraded about the villages and towns, to be finally destroyed by fire at the end of the night in a chaotic and feverish island-wide exorcism. 

On my recent daily roaming and rambling through town I had been seeing these macabre and masterfully-created creatures, some small, some large, but all equally pored over by the young and old charged with their rendering.  

So it was with baited breath that I had been waiting until that evening, at around dusk, when these monuments of malevolence would be ushered about town in a literally magical parade.

Hundreds of tourists were already beginning to line up and down each street, iPhones in hand, charged for the spectacle. I found a well-placed perch in front of a shop and made excited conversation with several others around when the clanging of various gamelans came into earshot, and the throngs of witnesses began to cling tighter to the edge of the street.

It could first be seen over the heads of the crowds, approaching from over a hundred meters down the main road- a three meter high, flying, bearded, red-faced, furious, snarling demon bouncing gently back and forth as the lumbering teenage boys carrying it on a cross-hatched bamboo platform struggled to keep it straight. A fully mobile gamelan orchestra marched in front, announcing the approach of this foul-faced malignity.

The energy in the crowd was palpable, fun, expectant. As the being approached, looming ever larger, children quieted, adults held glowing cameras in the air, and applause erupted as it passed in front of us. There were more to be seen on the horizon down Jalan Raya, and I crouched and watched as several others bobbed and menaced past the mesmerized crowds.

The sun was beginning to creep past that liminal and strange stage of twilight into darkness, and I hopped to my feet to see what was going on in the football field in the center of town, where many ogoh ogoh were to be eventually gathered.

I grabbed a bottle of Bintang off of an old toothless woman selling them from a cooler on the sidewalk, jog-walking through the crowd’s crevices towards the pitch. Many more of the beastly figures with their attendant walking orchestras were slowly lumbering down each street big enough to fit them, with several men on either side carrying long, upright bamboo poles in order to escort each ogoh ogoh under each low-hanging tangle of power lines strung across the road.

When I got close to the football field, the crowds had gotten dense, and I could see that many of the evil effigies I had seen travelling down Jalan Raya had ended up there. Thousands of people milled about, aghast at the towering implements of this ceremonial seance, under the lapis-lidded South pacific sky.  

My favorite ogoh ogoh was a gigantic slobbering bull, standing perhaps four meters high, replete with speakers bellowing horrific snorting and squealing sounds, flashing red eyes, paper-maiche ejaculate dripping between its legs, and steam pouring out of its snout in petulant bursts. It was a symphony of psychosis sent south- the demonic direction towards which the evil spirits were being coaxed.

After many of the ogoh ogoh in the village were arraigned in the football field, they were impossibly herded back out through the packed streets, twenty-piece gamelans and all, towards another large open area across Jalan Raya where they were ritually destroyed in a pyre while thousands cheered and jeered their symbolic cleansing from this small, peaceful island.

It was with exponentially more fascination for Balinese people and culture that I finally wandered back to my room, made sure to extinguish every light, and slumbered off to a expectantly evil-free New Year. 

The delightful little beach town of Amed, Bali

Andy Hill

I clumsily wandered into the village of Amed on the eastern tip of Bali, shocked to find a place on the Earth in which I wanted to grow old.

I never really get too jazzed your typical ‘tropical island paradise beach’-type places. Sure, Koh Tao in southern Thailand is absolutely, untouchably gorgeous. The Gili islands off of Lombok are pristinely laid-back, see through water, coconuts-lying-around-everywhere, bastions of bucolic beauty.

I just never felt at home in those places. As much as I tried to soak up the vibes, creak from side to side in a hammock, drink fruity cocktails and feign interest in bizarre-looking pieces of coral to be found in the sand, I still just couldn’t get it.

Then, on a little solo jaunt around Bali, hitchhiking and hopping on and off creaking, rusted public buses packed with chickens and ancient women, I made it all the way around the coast from Singaraja to a little town I’d heard about, Amed.

After getting booted from a bus on a small road about fifty meters from the sea, I began walking down the road in the direction the old ladies had pointed me towards. I was going adjacent to the beach, which was on my left, and on my right, flat, forested plains quickly ended with mountains that jutted out of the ground perhaps one or two kilometers away.

They were wild and verdant, green. There were little plumes of smoke rising from some parts of the mountainsides, which seemed to go straight up.

Behind me, the biggest and most sacred volcano in Bali, Gunung Agung, rose from the shoreline with ponderous slopes and a commanding yet gentle summit.

It was stunning.  

Something strange happened: I felt right at home. For the first time in my life, I longed to see myself as an old man in Amed, with a little shack up in the mountains, wrapped in a sarong and tending to my drying sea salt while chickens and goats wandered about.

I wanted to wake up every morning and see that coast, with the volcano framing it to the left and endless beach to the right, always held from behind by wall-like mountains that seem to protect the tiny village from the encroaching demons of KFC and night clubs.

I found a tiny little room on the beach for $6, a ‘secret price,’ according to the young kid who gave me the key. I was able to locate a small, reused plastic water bottle full of homemade rice whiskey, which I sipped with lemon juice while sitting on the beach cross-legged, watching the sun descend into the sea, until the equatorial constellations rose up over me.

The next morning, I rose early and creeped out onto the little road along the beach. There were little roadside stands here and guesthouses there. To my right, mist hung in the trees along the slopes of the richly green mountains, occasional roosters saluted the morning, and the smell of the ocean and small coconut fires wafted in and out of my sensorium.

I felt completely at home, and I long to go back.