After last year’s family farewell to Bali, leaving it to the Russian wise guys and the Javanese upper middle class after 50 good years, I find myself digging up so many good memories from the Island of the Gods in my search through old Brine columns that I have to share a couple.
After all, it’s not every day a column turns 700!
Sleepless on Batukaru (2015)
Strangely unable to sleep in this most peaceful of places, I got out of bed in the middle of the still night and stared into the night sky above the terraced rice paddies, listening to the soundtrack of frogs standing sentry over the gurgling waterways beneath the simple bungalow.
As if the starry sky, unimpeded by man-made light, was not beautiful enough, I saw, for the first time in perhaps 40 years, the dance of the fireflies above the sawah, first a loner, then a couple, then a group carving graceful arcs before flying too high and blending into the starscape. I was mesmerised, and I thought immediately of our friend Lelia Lewis’s poetic description of the rustic heaven she found here in the 1950s: “It was a peaceful, beautiful island. You didn’t have the malls or the hotels back then. The flutes that you’d hear at night, those liquid notes … and oh, the fireflies! We’d go out walking in the dark night, knowing each of the few vehicles that might come by, and you’d just see fireflies and the stars.”
You would still see fireflies in Bali when I arrived 20 years later, but today there is almost nowhere far enough away from the sprawl to detect the island’s secret, magical, natural world. Johnny and Cath Blundstone’s Bali Eco Stay, high in the foothills of Mount Batukaru, is “almost nowhere”.
I have waxed lyrical about the Blundstones’ little piece of paradise in these pages before, but five years since Noosa’s friendliest waiter, his bride and young son Huey came to rest at the end of the road, and four years since I first wrote about them for the Australian media, I am back to see how the Swiss Family Blundstone is coping with the splendid isolation.
The short answer is very well, thank you.
Bali Eco Stay opened in 2010, with Mini, a lovely lady whose family own the land the Eco Stay leases, taking over the running the small restaurant just above the few bungalows scattered around the rice terraces. As I reported back then, the biggest single investment in this resort was not the infinity pool with floating bar but a Pelton wheel hydro-electric generator to enable the Blundstones to power most of the lodge from the adjacent waterfall. The lodge is still not quite totally off the grid, but the new generation of solar that doesn’t require direct sun should get them over that hump.
Huey has discovered that being Jungle Boy is not always all that he had hoped, but he is coping well, and enjoying home schooling with an English tutor. All in all, life on the mountain is good, very good. And quiet, very quiet.
Bali Eco Stay is simply exquisite, and exquisitely simple. I’m going back in a few weeks to sit in a corner and write all day, then watch the fireflies all night. Can’t wait.
Medewi’s melodious morning call (2017, 2024)
Secret Spot West remains invitingly rural. I can sit in the infinity pool sipping a sunset beer and look out over an endless untouched coastline (apart from scattered fishing villages) stretching towards Java, visible across the channel.
I remember the first time I saw this wave-rich coast, back in 1974 as we bounced towards Java on the “express bus” packed with chicken-toting locals. We spied waves as the road dipped onto the coast at Soka, and there were enticing glimpses of reef set-ups through the palm trees for the next 20 kilometres. But for the next six years, with so many perfect waves going unridden every day on the Bukit peninsula, there was no need to mount a mission.
I can’t recall if it was the arrival of the Brazilians or the Japanese that made us start to think it was time to tuck our boards under our butts and point our motorbikes in the other direction, but I do remember parking them at a roadside warung and running excitedly down a track to a Muslim fishing village with a long, rocky point to its left.
We are back in Medewi, West Bali, for the waves, which are good, sizey, clean peaks up on the point which allow you time to get your bearings before the long left hits the middle section and you race down a high line for safety if you’re a senior surfer, or you stall for the barrel if you’re a hot young local.
Although there’s not much to excite along the Pantai Road that leads to the point and a small but good tourist hotel either side of its end, there is so much going on in this fascinating village. My old friend and longtime Bali resident Matt George described it best:
“Far behind you, from the tiled minaret of the unfinished mosque above the narrow highway which is swollen with careening, bleating, overloaded trucks, the Adzan brays over a fuzzy megaphone. The strident five-minute public call to the Islamic faithful that kicks off five times a day at Medewi, the first at 4:15am. The cry of the Adzan describing such a foreign sound in Bali and a reminder that you are at the singular surfing Muslim enclave on this Hindu island.”
On our first morning in Medewi last week I was woken by the Adzan and lay in our bed at the Bombora Surf Lodge contemplating the strangeness of that plaintive but melodic wail until the first grey of predawn signaled it was time to wax up and get out there.
