Robin sat bolt upright in bed in the dark. "Doesn’t the damned noise ever stop?" she wailed.I woke from a sound sleep and gazed across the room at her in puzzlement. We were staying in a comfortable guesthouse on the estate of Thai friends north of Chiang Mai. The secluded property had been landscaped into a huge park and we were the only guests. "What noise?" I asked.The overhead light went on with a snap. My sister gestured indignantly. "All that noise! It hasn’t stopped since we went to bed."I came into focus. The dogs were barking down by the pond. A couple of testosterone-driven roosters were facing off on the patio downstairs. A radio blared in the staff quarters across the grounds. The night watchmen were gossiping by the gate. In the distance a loudspeaker tolled the merits of the local political candidate. The usual orchestra of lizards, bats and other night creatures patched the holes in the fabric of background noise. I hadn’t heard any of it.Robin lives on a remote homestead in British Columbia where the sound of a single cricket in the night is enough to wake her. She, like so many others, had come to the Asian countryside with the romantic expectation that it would be quiet and peaceful. Big mistake. After several decades of living and travelling in Southeast Asia, I think it must be the noisiest region on earth. You quickly learn to tune it out or you keep travelling until you get to somewhere really quiet, like the Australian Outback.Unlike the dour North European stock from which so many of us derive, the Asian in general is neither quiet nor solitary by nature. When I lived in Singapore my colleagues were horrified that I would sleep in a big house all alone. They told me that they would all sleep in the same room, for company. It’s the same in Bali; no one lives alone if they can avoid it. And being with others means conversation, laughter, cockfights, cooking, radios and the other noisy adhesives of Asian society. Noise is reassuring.
Bali is not quiet, as any traveller here soon learns. There’s a trick to letting the chaos knit itself into a complex curtain of white noise that you can push aside at will. Even in my town of Ubud there is traffic noise, the honking of horns and, increasingly, the roar of outsized tour buses. The ubiquitous motorcycles tear up the air day and night. A tapestry of bells, gamelan and chanting weaves its way through the constant baying of dogs. Wherever water gathers, there is soon a quorum of a noisy frogs. Roosters play a special role in the daily cacophony. A couple of particularly muscular specimens welcome the day well before first light on the wall that separates my bedroom from the neighbouring compound. I stopped hearing them long ago but some of my houseguests never learned to tune them out.
A friend lives in the rice fields above Campuan in a compound guarded by a local dog he rescued from starvation and abuse. Petal demonstrates her gratitude by barking at intruders, as one expects a responsible dog to do. One day the furious face of a new neighbour appeared at the gate. She had come to Bali to write a book, she announced, and couldn’t work for the noise of his barking dog and the landlord’s roosters. Oh dear. It’s either going to be a very short book or it will have to be written in a diving bell off Uluwatu.
The background noise is so constant that only during the silence of Nyepi can you hear creatures whose subtle sounds are usually lost to us. If you sit very quietly in the garden on Nyepi you’ll hear the grass move as a skink slinks through it, the whisper of dragonfly wings near your hair, the drone of a giant bee hovering in the thunbergia. You can hear what is really going on at ground level. Without traffic and the sound of human voices, the volume of birdsong seems amazingly loud. I wonder what we’d hear if there was Nyepi in Jakarta or Surabaya?
The same travellers who complain about noise in Bali put considerable energy into tracking down the perfect guesthouse way out in the rice fields, far from the disturbance of traffic and other tourists. Then they turn on their CD players and add their own dimension to the curtain of background noise from the cows, chickens and ducks.
To me, Ubud is a haven of peace compared to Denpasar. But even the decibels of Denpasar seem reasonable compared to those of Singapore. This is a city where you can get into trouble for tossing a tissue on the sidewalk; that is recognized as pollution. But your high-rise neighbour downstairs may jackhammer the tile from his floors with complete impunity until the fillings are shaken out of your teeth, as long as he stops at 5 pm sharp. The concept of noise pollution is in its infancy. It’s not unusual to flee an apartment made hellish by jackhammers a few feet away only to find the same thing going on in the street, with pile drivers banging into the ground in the next block. Roosters and temple bells seem very acceptable in comparison.
Robin continued to complain about the noise in Thailand for the two weeks we were there. Finally we made our way south by rail from Chiang Mai. About midnight the train paused by a tiny station, its unlit platform deserted. Behind the station a radio played from a parked car, keeping the lonely night at bay in its halo of sound for the slumbering driver. Robin glared at me accusingly. "It’s company for him;" I apologized. Maybe I’ve been in Asia too long…
She still doesn’t understand why, when I stay at her house in British Columbia, I can’t sleep for the dense silence of the forest.
