Anturan Village
Share Article The narrow road to the deep north in Bali dropped into tight hairpin turns and thick vegetation. High forests became jungles and green valleys.
Anturan is twenty kilometers west of the bustling port city of Singaraja where the Dutch established a port exporting slaves to grow tulips back home.
150 families lived a simple existence, and unlike many Balinese communities, depended on the sea. The Balinese believe sea demons inhabit waters around their island.
Anturan homes are stone and thatch. Wealthy families live in cold concrete habitats with tiled roofs.
Blue, red and yellow outrigger canoes carve black sand.
Small reed thatched huts near shore provide shelter from a blistering sun. Men repair fishing nets turning nylon into knots. Women tend fires, nurse babies, clean, cook and gossip.
A guesthouse has twelve clean inexpensive rooms. A restaurant provides Nasih Goring: white rice, chilies, egg, thin yellow noodles, cabbage, vegetables and nondescript pieces of meat washed down with water. A local shop sells batik clothing, soap, washing powder and cheap Japanese Zen garden bamboo toothbrushes.
Word machine traces sun as Icarus flies with Phoenix.
Men offer 5 a.m. boat trips out past the reef to watch schools of educated dolphins.
Waterfalls hot springs and a Buddhist temple.
Smoke from cooking fires curl into coconut trees as twilight spreads along the shore. Children talk and play in sand. Men prepare boats and lanterns for night water journeys at 6 p.m. Boats drift into oceans, dancing yellow and white lights against black sky. Women place burning incense sticks in sand praying for a safe return.
Baby chickens follow a mother hen. Piglets slurp boiled rice and water mixed with coconut skins from a trough.
I teach children how to whistle. They teach me basic Bahasa language.
Mumpi is dream.
Gadis chand is beautiful girl.
Anturan is quiet by 9 p.m.
Roosters crow at 5. Pink dresses sky. Gray turns blue water. Thick southern forests and mountains lie hidden in low white clouds. Rice paddies are a dark green. A young girl breaks sticks for a cooking fire before shoveling rice out of a large black pot. She feeds her baby sticky pancake-like bread.
Ten boys haul in a fishing net cast in a wide semi-circle. Hand over hand they draw the net tighter as sweat streams down dark laughing faces and bulging thighs. Fishermen return, women unload fighting sardines into bright plastic buckets overflowing with silver protein.
A man from town buys the fish. Fishermen sit in shade watching women haul fish, stacking buckets onto each other’s head carrying them to trucks and motorcycles for markets.
I wander up the beach to find a clean swimming area and investigate another guesthouse. A woman hauling a heavy bag practices broken English selling cotton fabrics and carved teak demon masks.
“Cheap morning price. Buy from me, slow business, no sell today. Want a watch? Hey! You look at my shop? Sarong? Transport? Tickets to the dance tonight?”
A local man asks where I’m from.
“I am from heaven. Down to have a look at paradise.” He hustles the periphery offering me a prostitute for $22. I decline.
“I have seven wives, one for each day of the week. They wait for me in heaven. I need to save my energy for them.” He intuitively knows the importance of good karma in this life. He doesn’t want to return as a lower life form and disappears.
I escape hot black sand into clear cold water.
Mountains palm trees along shorelines as land arcs east along the coast.
In the afternoon I visit a warung food stall stocked with sweets and meats. The kitchen is a 10’ x 15’ bamboo thatch room in front of a concrete shop-home with an open woven reed kitchen door. In black sand bricks stacked two feet high form a stove. Fuel is broken twigs, small sticks and dried branches. A wok bubbles water, grease and spices cooking a chicken a fine dark brown. Another brick stove holds a pot of boiling fish.
A long flat prep area for cutting, slicing, sitting, talking and meeting is under bamboo shelves with woven thatch holding glasses, pots, pans and a basket of ingredients.
Intense smoke escapes through reed cracks. Kindling is added to cooking fires.
A bundle of sticks outside the door is the forest in micro bits, multiplied by daily requirements of 150 families.
Outside the kitchen two girls pound rice and banana into a powder using heavy round pieces of wood the size of baseball bats. They pummel the mixture in a smooth round large stone pestle in a rhythm of beauty and music maintaining a consistent vertical movement, hands overlapping, rising and descending, pausing to sift grains and add fresh material.
One girl coughs and spits in the sand.
They finish pounding, leave and return with water in five gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The chicken is finished. An old woman arrives for the fish. Bananas are sliced and fried, children buy sweets and people stare at a foreigner.
I practice intricate Bahasa tongues composed of nine levels of usage depending on the status of the person being addressed.
Young boys play with a toy tank and a colored bubble maker improvising group games. Kids do chores and play with brothers and sisters in a microcosm, a community in a world of communities.
As above so below.
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