Good Morning, Bali!

I arrived in Bali Thursday evening, where I was met by the hotel manager, Putu.  It was the first time I’ve ever come off an airplane and had someone waiting for me with my name typed out on a piece of paper.  I’ve always wondered who those people were, who had people waiting for them at the airport with their names displayed on pieces of paper.  I guess now I know.

It was about a 2-hour drive back to the hotel on the eastern side of the island.  I could tell it was pretty, even in the dark.  Trees 30 feet high lined stretches of the road on either side, their branches meeting in the middle to form a canopy overhead.  There were lots of tall, slender, ornate-looking bamboo decorations along the way, which Putu explained were for a recent religious celebration.

While Indonesia is the biggest Muslim country in the world, Bali is predominantly Hindu and known for its many beautiful Hindu temples.  There’s a water temple here, which Putu has promised to take me to when I’m ready.  I’m looking forward to seeing it.  Putu, by the way, means “first.”  Putu explained to me that, in Bali, children are named according to the order of their birth.  After the 4^th child, they start over again at 1^st.  When Putu told me this, I remembered that I learned about this once upon a time, but had forgotten it.

My room faces east, overlooking the ocean, and I woke with the sunrise on Friday morning.  The picture above doesn’t begin to do it justice – it was inordinately beautiful, as I suppose most sunrises are.  The hotel is situated about a 5-minute walk from the beach, surrounded by ocean from the northeast to the southeast, with a hill almost immediately adjacent to it to the south that eases up out of the ocean and continues to rise as it stretches west.  The hillside is dotted with little houses – local farmers who tend small plots of terraced land.

How they work in this heat is beyond me.  They all have chickens, it seems, and when one rooster gets to crowing, the entire hillside erupts in a never ending round of cock-a-doodle-doo.

The roosters seem to especially enjoy this early in the morning and at night.  It’s kind of amusing.  At dusk, when the white lights of the houses speckle the hillside in the fading twilight, the scene is very picturesque indeed.

Still jetlagged, I slept for about 5 hours Friday afternoon and wasn’t able to get back to sleep until around 2am.  On Saturday, I woke up around noon, got dressed, and headed upstairs for lunch.  The little hotel restaurant is located just above my room.  All the seating is outdoors on the covered patio, which has an incredible, unbroken view of the horizon from north to south and a delicious breeze.  As I sat there, drinking my fresh ginger tea and drinking in the view and the warm breeze, a smile began to spread across my face and I was overcome by what I can only describe as a sensation of pure bliss.  The last time I remember feeling anything like this was on my flight to Rio de Janeiro so many months ago.  It took me by surprise and made me laugh that I should find bliss in this way and in this place.  After all my fruitless clawing and grasping and clinging in search of exactly that…to find it here, alone, unemployed, on an Indonesian island…how could I not laugh?  How could I not appreciate life’s mystery and beauty?  How could I not be eternally grateful for my life?  For this moment, and for every moment that lead up to it?

TL;DR:  Finding bliss in Bali.