Whether we live here or are just visiting, most of us see Bali from the perspective of a car window. It's not easy to go for a walk here. The rice terraces, ravines and forests are so temptingly near. how can we step into that world?
The Hash House Harriers are an institution in Asia. Established in Malaya in 1938 by a group of expatriates who enjoyed a cross-country 'paper chase', it's become a weekly event in 1500 communities world-wide. I'd heard it was the best possible way to see the real Bali. My first Hash found an eclectic mob gathered at a banjar near Tampaksiring. It was drizzling but no one bothered with umbrellas; we would soon be much wetter. Beer was already flowing freely at 4:30 on Saturday afternoon. Several of the regulars had brought their dogs. There is nothing quite like feeling a bump from behind, and looking down to find a big Rottweiler taking deep interest in your shorts. "Bindy likes you!" beamed her affectionate owner over his beer glass.
Participants ranged in age from small children to an elderly man with a trumpet. How hard could this be? The dress code spanned everything from tidy pressed shorts to rags, old T-shirts, bare chests, running shoes, sandals or even bare feet. There were a few terrifyingly fit young men in torn shorts and some exquisite Indonesian lasses in size 2 Lycra running outfits. Someone shouted instructions over a bull horn. We'd all start on the same course, which would fork after about 20 minutes to a long and a short course, each marked with shredded paper. A horn sounded, and we surged off into the fields.
Almost immediately we came to an abrupt stop at the edge of a steep ravine. The Hashers were making their way very slowly, one by one, down a precarious path without evident handholds or footholds. One impatient chap sought an alternative route and slid 5 metres straight down the face of the ravine, coming to an abrupt halt with his legs wrapped around a banana tree. Ouch.
By the time my turn came, the near-vertical path was the colour and consistency of semi-liquid chocolate. An inch of sticky mud already adhered to the soles of my sneakers. A dirty, very kind man standing at the bottom talked me down. "Turn around and face the cliff. There's a root near your right hand. Reach down with your left foot - there's a small foothold if you dig your toe in deep enough. Now reach down with your left hand and grab that branch" I now understood why no one was carrying a water bottle; both hands were needed for sheer survival. An extra one would have been very useful, as would longer legs. Finally I dropped into a fast-running little river and looked up in disbelief at the ten metres of sheer mud I had just descended.
There was no time to decide whether I was having fun yet. Most of the other Hashers were long gone. A small group of stragglers formed up and began to follow the paper trail. We waded up the river for a while, then someone spotted some paper and called "On On!" in true Hasher style before we swarmed up the sister cliff to the one we had just come down. One helpful gentleman nudged me up the steepest bits from behind while another hauled me up from above. Determinedly I scaled the wall of mud, no longer trying to keep my clothes clean. At the top was a barbed wire fence on which I managed to snag myself. We walked along a little ridge, then followed the paper trail down an even steeper cliff. I remembered that several small children were ahead of me and forbore to grumble.
The slopes were like slides, with glassy stretches where people had clearly let gravity take its course and gone down on their bottoms. I tried to avoid this indignity, but the choice was soon made for me as I lost my footing on a hidden root and cruised a few seconds on my right buttock. I couldn't understand how my companions managed to stay so clean. One had a little smear of mud on her neatly pressed cotton shorts. I was wearing about four kilograms of it. Soon we were single-filing along an old lava flow at the bottom of yet another ravine. Carefully we picked our way along the edge of a narrow fissure in the lava, about 3 metres deep with a fast-flowing stream at the bottom. Then we were away from the lava and wading up the river itself, carefully placing our feet in the dark brown water and hanging onto what vines presented themselves.
Our leader was a regular Hasher and intuitively seemed to know where the false trails lay. Often he would go off to sniff out the real trail while we others gazed around us in awe at a Bali the ordinary traveller would certainly never see. No sane person would consider these hidden glades accessible. There was a magic silence here. In the dimness of deep ravines ferns grew thickly out of living rock. Bamboos met overhead, screening the light. Here and there the sun filtered through, gleaming through leaves a hundred shades of green.
On On. We came to a village. The Balinese stared in bemusement at the filthy foreigners trailing between their houses, and indicated the direction the rest of the Hashers had gone. "Kami orang gila," I explained. They broke into big smiles and nodded in agreement. Crazy people. Yes.
Someone spotted a white smear on the grass that indicated where the long and short routes diverged. It should have taken us twenty minutes to get this far; we had been on the trail for almost an hour. But we were out of the ravines now and into rice terraces, following the trail along the narrow dikes separating the fields of ripening grain. Finally we came out onto a narrow road. Balinese back roads are a delight at any time, but just before dusk they are particularly beguiling. There was no traffic. We passed mossy temples, tiny shops and modest houses wreathed in alamanda. Whole villages gathered beside the narrow road at this time of day. The men smoked and stroked their fighting cocks. A couple of motorcycles cruised by, with three or four pretty children sandwiched behind a teenager, taking the evening air and grinning widely at our passage. The ibus were stripped down and bathing in the ditches by the road, soaping their hair, gossiping and giggling at the dirty tamu as we passed. One earthy old lady shook her breasts at the foreign men, laughing heartily.
The night crickets started to sound, bats swooped under the trees and the village dogs bayed at our passing. There had been no paper trail for some time, but we began to jog in anticipation of a cold beer at the end of the road. We were the last to arrive back at the banjar, covered in mud. The kids and old man with the trumpet had left us in the dust, but I'd seen more of the real Bali in two hours than I had in a year of living here.
To find out the starting point of the Saturday Hash in Ubud, call Naughty Nuri's Warung at 977547 or stop by to pick up a map.
