Of Ubud, coughs and Kecak

Rangda

So the holiday started a bit inauspiciously. We left with A feeling a bit unwell with a sore throat. What with all the swine flu scares, after a few coughs on the plane he received some suspicious stares, causing him to spray his throat assiduously with this throat spray he swears by. He started feeling better on the flight. Meanwhile he leaned lovingly close to me and was talking to me with his mouth inches away from my nose and mouth, as if just about to land me a kiss. While I moved backwards and asked him to pay attention and NOT share water with me on my flight by absent-mindedly drinking from my glass. I was paranoid because I’m really good at getting coughs and when I get a cough I start vomiting. Anyway, I got a cough.

Our second day in Ubud and I was coughing, vomitting and had a stomach upset. Couldn’t eat and a doctor had to be called from Denpasar, who recommended an expectorant! I grabbed the anti-nausea pills and said that’s all I need. Needless to say I vomited the first couple of those out as well. A, who rightly figured I had just acid in my stomach and needed to keep something down with the pills sat down with me at 2am and insisted I eat some bread dipped in water (a prisoner’s diet, but it was the only thing I could countenance). The last time this had happened in London, I was put on a drip, but he wasn’t having that in Indonesia, as we weren’t sure about the hospitals. It took an hour to get through a slice, and much glaring at A from me, but the bread did the trick with the medicine.

Me at the ornately carved Pura Taman Saraswati before the coughing became major:

This was the second time we had been in Ubud and both times I have felt slightly cheated being there. Last time I felt time was too short, it rained throughout, and A had a bad stomach. This time, the weather was good, we had some lovely hot hours (though it did rain-it always rains in Ubud, but they were brief tropical thunderstorms that clear up soon) but I had to waste time by falling ill. There was so much I wanted to do and see that I missed out on, including some temples and rice field treks. But there will be a next time.

Not that we didn’t do anything while in Ubud. We managed, among other things, to get to Batubulan and get some beautiful stone carvings of a Balinese Brahma and Vishnu (they look completely different from Indian representations) and watch some Kecak at the Pura Dalem in Ubud (a Pura Dalem is a temple of the dead. Pura=temple). About a hundred men chant “cak” in unison and a scene from the Ramayana is enacted by dancers. There is no musical accompaniment save for the human voices. Hanuman looks like a real, frightening, large, old bearded monkey. A bit more of the jungle than in our representations.

The performance was followed by a man dancing on burning coals. These performances used to be a part of trance/exorcism rituals, and I think they still are. But I wonder about things like dancing on coals. Is it still done because there is an audience?

Here’s a video from youtube of a Kecak dance:

I got much better and the holiday didn’t end here.

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