Southeast Asia, Take Two

After 22 hours on the bus, five hours at the airport and a midnight flight, I land my butt in tourist Bali at 2:30 am. Ubud, to be exact, a little further inland than boom-boom surf and party central.

There are three kinds of people here:

1. Super rich people after super cheap holidays.
2. People who like to believe they’re 100% holistic and culturally appropriated. (These folks can be found wearing botique “yoga wear” in raw food organic vegan cafes.)
3. People who have no idea what the hell they’re doing. As in, first-time travelers or folks who show up to a country without a plan. (That would be me.)

Despite not really feeling like I’ve arrived in Indonesia (okay, I can’t read half the street signs and motorbikes swarm everywhere), somehow I’m not all that bummed about being here as a base to figure out my next month. There are cheap massages everywhere I look. There’s some half-decent food and really decent prices (read: $2 scoops of charcoal-bamboo or dragonfruit-cinnamon gelato. $1.50 for the best cappuccino of my life, made from beans eaten and pooped out by wild tree cats). The people-watching is spectacular (did I mention the fancy French woman in designer clothes who gave me a death glare because I couldn't hold it together when I noticed her toddler licking the giant black dick-shaped bottle opener she was bargaining for in the market?) Also, I may or may not have watched Game of Thrones on the big screen at “The world’s first organic vegan cinema.”

The internet is fast. Also: my hostel is built out of old boats. Seriously.

I could have done way worse.

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On my third night, one of the town’s temples puts on a three-part ballet. Dozens of men perform music without instruments in chattering concert as dancers bring legends to life.

At one point a man carrying a pony-sized horse puppet, grassy mane and tail swaying around him, scatters a flaming mountain of coconut husks across the courtyard with his bare feet, only to have others sweep them back together… three times in a row.

The night before I leave, I watch one of the most mesmerizing blends of music and theater and puppetry and dance I’ve ever witnessed. Somehow, although you never see the dancer’s face, masks and movement exude emotion like I’ve never felt before, as if they can see through you into your soul. The ballet performed by the women is so precise, and so intricate in its finite movements, you become wholly drawn into every minute movement of the finger and widening of the eye.

Whoever the kid is who plays the monkey? He’s become the monkey.

Tension fills the entire room as a mystical monster faces off with four men wielding keris.

Oversized puppets blaze with color and mirrors and crowns and braided fur and two-meter tongues. Round eyes pop from polished, painted wooden masks. Rather than looking tacky, somehow everything simply becomes more mystical and entrancing.

And then I walk out into the night and really realize, I’m in Indonesia.