Building swings.

Tania picks me up from the building site, I mean Tasha's house, and we don't hang around, heading off as soon as I've located my missing pack of strawberries. They're not as good as Scottish strawberries but they're pretty decent considering they were grown in the heights of a tropical island.
On our way back we stop off at the house of one of Tania's friends. I say house but it's more of a manor. He is an artist from Sumatra and his sixtieth birthday is only a few days away, to celebrate he is hosting an exhibition of his work spanning the last thirty years or so, and it's on display all over the house. His art is very abstract, flowing circles, colours and shapes reminiscent of leaping waves or lithe dancing forms. A few of the pieces I am impressed by, and could stare at for hours, but most do little for me. The thing I enjoy the most is the tiled area around the pool, where he has painted great arcs and swirls of colour onto the ground. We go for a swim as the sun sets in the long pool that lies between the house's two elegant white wings, then set off for home (Tania's home, though I feel like I'm going home too).

Tasha's, see what I mean?

Remember this guy....?

It's evening and the roads are quiet, we hurtle along leaving the motorbikes far behind. Or so we would think. A scooter pulls up beside us and slides forward into the open road ahead. It's a girl, casually doing at least a hundred kilometres an hour like it's not a big deal. Her music is in and her hand is in the air, dancing as she goes. Another bike speeds past and approaches her from behind, a young man. He draws beside her and says something to her, most likely flirting or goading based on his expression, he pulls in-front of her, intentionally getting in her way. She throws him a look of contempt and leans forward. She shoots ahead and swerves around him before he has a chance to think. She accelerates into the distance and is gone. He is forced to fall back, too afraid to pursue, defeated and humiliated. We like this girl.
Tania hits the accelerator and we too fly past him, in our car we quickly catch her up, we wind down the windows and cheer and whoop as we pass her. At the next junction she pulls up beside us. She can't be more than sixteen, and there is something about her that I haven't before seen in anyone here. There is a spark in her eyes, a fire, like a hunger to live life to the full, to explore, to experience. She grins at us devilishly. Tania leans over me and starts up a quick conversation in Indonesian. Half way through a sentence the lights turn green and we surge forwards together, she zips around us and fades into the dark. We catch up with her at the next traffic light and the same thing happens. We continue this way for a while and Tania invites her back to hers, as she only lives in the next village along.
It turns out this girl is working in a truck garage in Denpasar, and her parents make her drive home to the country every day. She has dreams of becoming an aeronautical engineer, or even a pilot. In school the children all had to say what they wanted to be, she stood up and told them her dream and was laughed at, derided. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she continued to pursue her goals regardless of what other people said, and ended up getting offered a scholarship in Indonesia's best engineering school. Unfortunately her mother is refusing to let her accept, as the school is on a different island, so she could not come home every day. Beyond that she is a girl, so she will most have to get married soon, and once married there is no time for women to work.

Here, in a family, it is the women who do everything. They do all the cooking and cleaning yes, but they also do the farming, the carrying, the weaving and producing of goods. Old ladies so shrunken and shrivelled their features have vanished into their faces trudge along with bundles on their heads that I doubt I could even lift. The men, in my experience, largely sit around, often drinking.
Beyond this, the women are tasked with the role of making the offerings for the gods. Each offering is made up of a little woven basket containing incense, flowers and some food (normally chocolate bars still in their wrappers, and maybe a mound of rice and some crackers or rice cakes), and they are put out all over your property four times a day. And on ceremony days, which happen exceedingly often (there has been one each time I have stayed at Tania's) the number of offering needed is phenomenal.

On a normal day the women of a family will spend a good few hours making that days offerings, but to prepare for a ceremony they will spend days, I think about three or four, doing nothing but making offerings. In some ways there is something very nice about them, walking through Tania's mini jungle and seeing little baskets of flowers, incense wafting across the path before you, is truly special. But if you consider the sheer number of them, and that each one will likely also contain at least one plastic wrapper that will be left on the ground, and plenty of food to attract the rats, they are not so pleasant after all. The men on ceremony days sit around, always drinking.
But back to this wonderful, intelligent, feisty girl. As far as her family is concerned, she is completely unable to leave to attend engineering school. How will she marry a Balinese man if she doesn't live in Bali? How will she make offering to keep the gods happy? Tania pays someone to do hers for her (apparently that's allowed), as she has no time or interest, but this girl wouldn't have money to do that. After she leaves, Tania has a determined look on her face, and I suspect that she is planning to take a hand in the matter.

It is wonderful to be back here, all her rooms are full and I am sleeping in a spare room in the house. On my first night back I sit around the table with Tania and some of the guests chatting. Oddly, they are all Dutch, which is great. Dutch people are great. Two of them, who I instantly get on with, have just come back from spending the better part of a year in Papua in a small and remote community. There they were doing wonderful work, Wiljanne was helping a group of mothers who desire a better education for their children to set up a school and was training them how to teach. Theo, who studies discipleship, was teaching them how to apply their faith to their lives. This included many, many things, not least of which was teaching them, now this may sound strange, how to live in a loving relationship

In Papua there is a huge problem with aids, largely spread through husbands engaging in extra-marital sex (perhaps rape, but I'm not sure), and the cause of this is their belief that pregnant women are unclean, so even their husbands cannot touch them. One of the many things then, that Theo was trying to do, was to teach them that you can love and cherish your wife to the point that you would not want to have sex with someone else. That you can spend time together, and have a relationship that extends beyond producing children. It is so bizarre to me that that is a thing you would ever have to teach, but it is a sad fact that it is.

All the Dutch are very eager to get involved in helping out around the place, and Theo has the idea that he'd like to build a swing for the children. Me and Bas (another Dutchman) eagerly offer our help. The next morning is spent searching for an appropriate spot, a search that at first seems fruitless. There are some perfectly spaced coconut trees right at the front of Tania's garden but unfortunately her wall and many large plants get in the way. We consider building the swing over the wall and putting in some sort of ramp, but that would be too elaborate, not to mention dangerous. Then Tania comes up with the suggestion we have been waiting for. We break through her wall and uproot her intervening garden.
We saw an appropriate length of wood and drill holes though it. Bas, our resident rope expert, works out all the knots we will need. He comes up with an ingenious method of fixing the rope to the swing that involves weaving the rope back into itself, and while him and Theo are working on that I head out and work on mosaicking the Earth Benches some more with a lovely Iranian / Indonesian couple who are also staying here. Once the swing is ready it is time to knock through the wall. With the help of shovels and crowbars, we make light work of it. All the plants we uproot are saved to be planted elsewhere, and the body of the wall itself is crushed and trodden on and becomes a new dirt path into the property.
Theo and I scale the two trees and machete ridges into each one to give the rope extra purchase, then we send Bas up to work his knotty magic. And we have a swing. A superb, ocean view swing, suitable for one adult or multiple children (two adults at a push), ideal for stand-up swinging. It is an instant his with the children of the entire village, and soon there is an extensive waiting list. Today is a ceremony day, so the whole village is out by the sea, watching us and chatting, gambling and eating. It feels like a mini festival.

That night there is more of the same, beer, company and good food. I sit out by the waves, talking with Theo. We discuss going home, and how we will feel, how we will have changed. Despite reservations, we are both very much looking forward to it.

And so it begins.

'My' bench is the one of the left.

Isn't that impressive!

Swing view.

The next day Theo, Wiljanne and I go snorkelling, there is pretty decent reef only twenty meters off shore. It is wonderful, I love snorkelling. I get a glimpse into a completely different world.. Fish the colour of lightning dart in and out of cathedrals of coral. Majestic Angel Fish drift serenely across the ocean floor. Tiny orange Clown Fish peek out from the waving tendrils of anemones. I dive down and swim through canyons and crevasses, fish swirling around me. Unfortunately there are no turtles, one of the few things I really wanted to see that I have not yet seen. I am running out of time, I vow to go snorkelling more often.

In the afternoon we all visit the water palace that I went to last time I was here, an opportunity to reclaim lost photos! On the way we stop at a village that makes cloth for tourists. They also have some cockerels that they have dyed various colours, I have no idea why. But we do find an elaborate swing / Ferris wheel that we decide we will have to build for our next project.
The first time I came to the water palace I was alone and it was abandoned, blue skies and afternoon light providing the perfect photos. Today, due to the holiday, it is completely packed, and the sky is a thick blanket of bright cloud. Nevertheless, it is a lot more fun with company, and we play on the stepping stones and take silly photos. A couple are here getting their pre-wedding photo's taken. The perfect location at the worst time.
The open building at the end of the gardens is set up for some sort of party. There is a band and dancing girls, all waiting for something. It turns to be the birthday of some presumably very rich white man who walks up the main pathway to great fanfare. A white object buzzes through the air, a drone, recording the whole event. The man and his five guests sit down for dinner at a table that frankly looks like it came from a cheap wedding. A tiny table of white people (apart from his wife who I think was Balinese), alone in a large pavilion, serenaded and served and entertained by an entourage at least twice the size of their own party, videoed by a flying drone. Meanwhile all around the edge the locals who are spending their holiday here stare on at the flagrant display of wealth in their midst. I think I speak for my whole party when I say we shared their disgust.

Walking into Tania's.

Nope, no idea either.

Our next project!

I couldn't help but feel it was going to attack.

The next day is one of those days. They days where people leave and you make promises of future meetings, never quite sure if they will happen. I sincerely hope that they will. Theo and Wiljanne are hoping to take a trip to Scotland this summer, in which case we will undoubtedly meet up. And if not I will just need to go to the Netherlands, which would be no great trial!
And it is not just them, the whole group I have spent the last few days with leave, the Dutch couple, the other Dutch couple and the Iranian/Indonesian couple. But I have a group of three girls from England and Wales to take their place, and we spend the day mosaicking benches, creating anchors and skull and crossbones, and it is a lot of fun. I love meeting new people from new places, and discussing similarities and differences in culture and language. But I also love it when it has been a while and I come across some fellow Brits. There is a shared sense of humour that is almost instantly apparent, and makes for easy and comfortable, for want of a better word, banter.

Tania drives the girls down to the south where they are going to spend a few days, before heading to the Gili isles just off Lombok (the next island along from Bali) where I will meet them. I decide to accompany them for the ride, and to pick up my passport in Denpasar. We arrive on a cliffside paradise overlooking a pale beach and an endless sea of Lapis Lazuli, and I realise I don't want to leave. Luckily I don't have to, I decide therefore to stay with my new friends despite having no possessions whatsoever apart from (very luckily), my swimming shorts and camera.
The next few days meld and merge into a haze of relaxation. We wander along the beach and swim in the sea, we have long breakfasts splayed out couches that overlook the beach, we draw and paint, we make bracelets, I write, thanks to a borrowed iPad. Some of the girls do yoga in the mornings on the beach, or in the evenings watching the sunset. I sit on our balcony and watch the surfers as the sun burns its way towards the horizon. A blazing white ball that seems to light the very sea itself, before fading to a deep gold and melting onto far off clouds, leaving them gilded with a thin line of light.

This place, Bingin beach, is apparently a haven for world renowned surfers, and based on some of the displays I watch from the beach I am tempted to believe it. One day we see another of the flying drones out filming the surfers in action. With these waves, I am not tempted to try it, but I do go for a few swims in the sea and that is disastrous enough. Imagine trying to clamber over seemingly flat but actually deeply pocked and ridged, sharp and jagged rock, without shoes, while constantly being pummelled by waves that will happily knock you down and sweep you back a few meters over said sharp and jagged rock. And then once you make it in the water you either have to try very hard to stay in roughly the same place or get drawn steadily further down the beach by the current and eventually make it out nowhere near where you went in. Despite all that, and despite never coming out not bleeding, it's a lot of fun.

One of our member leaves for home, via Thailand and military coups, the same morning that the rest of us head to the Gilis. She has had quite a n amazingly terrible time trying to make this journey, including two emergency passports and a multitude of un-taken and cancelled flights. We send her off wondering what else might go wrong, and get picked up by our boat company for our crossing. They take us to the port where Tania is supposed to be meeting us with all of my possessions that were last seen strewn all over her spare room.
We arrive and check in, and Tania is nowhere to be seen. The time ticks away and I try to decide what I would do if she didn't turn up. The girls had both packed small bags and were planning on leaving their suitcases with Tania. As the time to leave approaches they decide to put their bags in the trailer for the ferry, and my anxiety heightens. Despite having realised that I don't need my possessions there a few things that I really would like. Primarily my bank card, so I don't have to borrow and more from the Welsh. My laptop would be nice too.
Just as it seems all hope is lost Tania sweeps in. She hands me my small rucksack, packed with everything I might need for my journey, and my laptop and kindle in a lovely aboriginal printed laptop bag that I've never seen before. She puts my bag in the trailer that is about to leave for the ferry and, upon discovering that the girl's cases are in there (at the very bottom) demands that the staff get them out, the whole time chatting away at top speed in Indonesian. I hear her explain that there is no point in them carrying all their stuff around if they don't need it, she uses the world 'schlop' a lot. There is time for a quick hug then she is gone and we speed off to the ferry. It was all classic Tania.

Oh yes the kittens! Still very cute.

So that is it, in a rush, I leave Bali behind. I will be back, it still has my passport, but probably only for a day or two at the end. My last few weeks will be spent on Lombok, and how it will differ to Bali I have no idea. I have heard very good things though. And after Indonesia there will be one final week in Melbourne and then I will be home. What a strange thought. Strange, and yet also enticing.