My resort was a little ways off from Mas Village. It was about a fifteen minute walk to where I was studying, which wasn’t bad, and then beyond where I was studying, Mas continued for a little. There was only one road that went through Mas and my resort was on that road.
Mas is historically the woodcarving capital of Bali, which, for some reason, is carved in stone.
Every morning, after breakfast at my hotel (coffee, mixed fruit juice, pancake, no egg, fresh fruit), I would walk out onto the sidewalk and turn left. I would then start walking straight down the one road of the village, picking my way past the wood statues and furniture that is spread along the sidewalks in order to entice tourists.
The buildings that were not wood carvers were usually shippers, so the tourists could send the furniture home. The shop owners were always very nice, saying hello, waving, asking how I was, where I was going, and smiling, even after I had been passing for ten days they still asked me where I was going.
When I wasn’t weaving past the wood, I was stepping over open holes in the sidewalk or giving wide berth to the dogs and chickens that ran the streets. The dogs were generally indifferent, more content to scratch themselves rather than look at me, however, some of them, particularly in the afternoon, would see me coming, lift their heads, gather their legs underneath them and start barking, and after I passed, they often started loping after me. I wouldn’t have been offended by this, except I found that young children were scared of me, and babies would cry at the sight of me.
A large part of this was the fact that I was the only person walking down the sidewalk on any given day. People would sit or stand in front of their stores, but in terms of getting from point A to point B, everyone used a motorcycle or moped. The street was congested with traffic all day; mopeds, motorcycles, and trucks roaring by. Sometimes the mopeds were stacked with three or four people, children riding between the driver and the handlebars, babies sitting on their mother’s lap (mothers riding sidesaddle).
My walk to the mask maker was about fifteen minutes and the kids at the resort were all amazed that I walked every day. They said that I must be very strong. The downside of the walk was that, as the only person walking and as an obvious oreng asing (foreigner), people (usually men) riding down the road on mopeds would pull over and ask where I was going and if I needed a ride. I would answer in a non-committal “I’m just walking” and point in the direction I was walking. Other people would pull over and pull small sculptures out of saddlebags or messenger bags and say “One dollar, one dollar.” I would explain that I only had rupiah and they would say, “Ok, Ok, 100,000 rupiah,” which is a little more than 10 dollars. Usually, I would explain that I was not interested and by the end of my time I had perfected the silent shake of the head coupled with the wagging of my index finger in a way that expressed my disinterest as soon as they made their initial proposal (a useful expression I learned from my father). Some of them were cunning, though. One guy, shortly after I had arrived, stopped and showed me the same sculptures that everyone else was showing me (which were beautiful and intricate, but I wasn’t ready to buy souvenirs yet), in trying to convince me that I wanted it, he had me hold it, when I tried to give it back to him, he refused to take it, continuing to talk to me and try and haggle a price. I finally had to put it down on the ground in order to get away. Shop keepers would introduce themselves and shake your hand and then not let go of your hand and start pulling you into their store.
Down the road a little more variety began in the storefronts, there were one or two restaurants and some convenience stores. The only way to tell from the outside which ones were convenience stores was that they were plastered with cigarette ads, usually Pall Mall.
If you kept going, you could find some banks, cell phone stores, and mechanics. There was also a garage where kids could go in and play playstations.
The statues that I first saw in the hotel continued all over the village, it was rare that a strip of shops didn’t have some kind of statue out front.
(Here you might be saying, “what is that penis in the middle of this?”)
(It’s ok, it’s just a guy’s nose and teeth…right?)
It was even rarer if they didn’t have small bamboo trays of flowers, vegetables, and incense left out each day, offerings to the gods (Bali is about 85% Hindu) for good business, that around lunchtime become food for the dogs and chickens.
Around lunch I would go out and continue walking away from the hotel. There was a museum that I stopped in, intrigued by the sculpture out front and the picture that was featured prominently in the window. The sculpture is called Exodus.
I would keep going until I got to the grocery store, walking past a mass of students who were getting their lunch from a pushcart vendor. One day I passed the charred corpse of a dog in a gutter. I would reach Delta Dewata, the grocery store, and I would get a Pepsi Blue and some Cheetos Nets and eat them outside the store.
Then I would start on the walk back, stopping by a small restaurant to get some decent lunch, usually chicken (they only made fried chicken), piled on top of rice, cucumber, and spinach(?) with chilis on the side and shrimp crisps. The banner outside the place had a picture of shrimp, some kind of fish, pig, and chicken, but one day, when I was in the mood for shrimp, I asked for it and they told me they only had chicken, the other food was too expensive.
My meals rarely cost more than 10,000 rupiah or about 1.25. The food in all of the eateries was displayed in the window and in the other places I ate, they would bring me over to the window and ask me what I wanted and I would point and they would serve me right out of the window.
I have no clue of what most of it was, but it was all pretty good.
One of the places had an Indian head up on the wall (Native American head) and it was interesting because if you looked around the wood carvers, there was an unexpectedly large amount of carvings of Native Americans (Amerindians).
This of course is because the largest business in Bali is tourism, but it seems a shame that they feel the need to co-opt another culture when theirs is so rich and vibrant already.
One of the things that struck me about the village from the very start was the punk quality of the youth. In punk terms, they would be described as “Punk as fuck.” They would be walking down the street with shirts touting the bands Rancid, NoFX, and more. There would be stickers on the parked mopeds with these bands, too. Rancid seemed the most popular, earning the honor of a graffiti recreation of the cover to “Out Come the Wolves” in a garage.
Almost everywhere I looked I would see constant reminders that “punk never dead.”
Wondering where this came from, I eventually found a small store that had its door covered in stickers.
I tried going in, but the door was locked, so I went to the pierced and mohawked kids next door who were watching me and I asked them what the store was.
“What is this store?”
“No Inggris”
“*pointing* This, this…*shrugging*”
“*shakes head*”
“*pointing*…Punk?”
“Yes, yes! Punk!”
They went to get the owner who let me in. The 50 square feet of the store was mostly taken up by clothing, but in a display case they had a few cd’s, belt buckles, pot pipes, and bumper stickers.
I bought a CD, Rockiller compilation #1, featuring such bands as Criminal Asshole, Cosmic Terror, Gather Rebel, Kubu Riot, Cyber Machines, and Jaloer Hijoe. Kids pressed into the small store, amazed that some tourist had taken an interest in their little rebellious culture. Though I don’t know for sure, as I didn’t travel the island much, I think that the punk culture was relatively unique to Mas, they were against trendiness and they had the ability to be because of a lack of tourists, over the course of my two weeks there, I probably saw less than 12 other white people, whereas in Ubud, you couldn’t walk down the street for the tourists stopping to look at every little storefront.
Mas
Ubud
And simply because I didn’t know where else to put it, I couldn’t walk past this tiger:
without thinking of the Ghetto Tooth Fairy:
Shortly to be embedded below is a video (two parts) of my walk from my resort to where I was studying. I took this video with my casio Exilim and I was holding the camera at my chest, so it is a little like the Blair Witch Project (a lot like it) and could cause motion sickness, but can show where I was. Much of the stuff I talk about in this post is not obvious in the video (the first video particularly) for a number of reasons. The road becomes much more trafficked about half an hour after I go to work, which is why the street looks relatively low traffic. There were not many people out the day I took this (it might have been a weekend), and the storefronts, etc. don’t start until I’m actually in Mas. Beyond my place of study the holes in the sidewalk occur more often.