Matey's musings: August 2017

2017 is becoming the Year of Yoga. Having practiced yoga regularly for some time and feeling the overall effect to be very beneficial, we decided to try immersing ourselves fully in yoga in a place in which we could attend classes every day and have a different cultural experience as well. Captain has been keen to travel more in Asia for some time, but Matey’s abject terror of being poisoned by even trace amounts of the evil ‘flavour enhancer’ MSG/monosodium glutamate has made her wary of many destinations in Asia. (MSG is snuck into numerous Asian foods in sauces and the result for the unfortunately sensitive Matey is ugly: excruciating migraine pain and compulsive vomiting. Enough said!)

Bali has become a hotspot for yoga and it’s possible to find inexpensive flights from Cairns to Bali. Once you’re there it’s possible to live relatively cheaply making the prospect for boat bums on a budget tempting indeed. So, though both Captain and Matey had previously been to Bali (separately) a long time ago, and Matey at least had not felt it was a place she needed to return to, the notion of unlimited yoga classes for a couple of weeks convinced her to give Bali another chance. Being in a yoga-ish environment focused on health and wellbeing convinced her it might be possible to avoid inadvertently consuming MSG, and the resulting horror of poisoning.

The lower the expectations, the better the experience can be and the more pleasant the surprise when expectations are greatly surpassed. We both found Bali to be completely different from what we remembered. Matey had expected the (almost) constant flow of not-always-well-behaved tourists over many years to have had a negative impact on the culture and the attitude of local people to tourists. Yet she found the culture to seem relatively intact. Though we avoided ‘party towns’ and it may well be evident there, not once did she see exploited women forced into prostitution. Had we stayed in expensive resorts we might have found it more difficult to sample the local cuisine, but we still found this readily available. Though some unfortunate-looking dogs and cats were a sad sight (though not as sad and scrawny as she remembered from the distant past), the second most unattractive thing we saw was a McDonalds on the way back to the airport; at least some areas have managed to avoid the incursion of this high point of ‘Western’ cuisine. Needless to say, Bali hasn't avoided the scourge of plastic and the most depressing sight was the litter everywhere you looked, waiting for the rain to wash it out to sea to kill, injure and poison marine life.

We met travellers from a variety of countries, not just ubiquitous Australians. There can be many negative aspects to tourism, but it seemed there was perhaps a more positive side to it than Matey recalled. It was a revelation to observe a tourism economy can bring wealth without eroding traditional culture and values. The people we met were warm, friendly and apparently genuine. There seemed to be a happy balance between foreigners and locals. The locals appeared to appreciate the tourists and the business arrangement they had. We saw relative wealth and people that seemed content without desiring the lifestyles of foreigners. How sensible the Balinese people are.

Yoga bliss

The experience of immersing ourselves fully in yoga was as satisfying as the Matey hoped it would be. In a week-long inexpensive ‘retreat’ we did yoga twice a day, as well as eating delicious food prepared by a delightful, smiling chef who prepared a happy variety of vegetarian and vegan Balinese food. Here we met some great fellow-travellers down the yoga path as well as the lovely Balinese staff.

We also spent some time in Canggu, where we were able to choose from a variety of yoga classes all day every day, and tried some styles we hadn’t yet sampled such as Ashtanga and Aerial yoga. Ashtanga was physically challenging but very satisfying. Aerial was just good fun! As well as yoga twice a day we ate delicious healthy food from a range of ‘Western’ and local-inspired styles. It was not hard to eat well here, or avoid toxic MSG!

In fact, so good was our revised experience of Bali that we are going back!