“Don’t let them go without me!” she warned, stalking her photographic prey.
She didn’t have to go to the shore for her pictures, however. Her subjects were being brought to her, each turtle borne upside down on the shoulders of a man who walked with it easily up the sloping ladder to the top of the bus and there deposited it neatly.
The last two turtles were too large to be carried by a single man. These were slung from poles and brought up to the road by two men each, who shoved them inside the bus where they just filled the aisle and made an excellent footrest for the passengers, who sat in long seats facing one another. At last we started.
Once we were rolling, we passed beautifully irrigated rice fields, villages with walled compounds, and temples which looked centuries old, with carved elephants or boars guarding their narrow gates. Everywhere we saw evidences of the rice harvest: rows of workers in the fields, seemingly bowed over beneath the weight of huge mushroom-shaped hats as they cut the ripened grain; men and women carrying sheaves to be threshed, the men with two full shocks swinging from each end of a pole across the shoulders, the women with a single, larger bundle balanced on the head.
Throughout the Balinese countryside women apparently have not heard of the regulation, promulgated in Java, that they must be “properly clothed” or, if they have heard of it, they pay it the same attention that the Balinese, through the centuries, traditionally have paid to the directives of their alien rulers: they ignore it. In the dooryards the lovely bodies of the women, clothed only in a sarong of patterned batik, moved in graceful rhythm as they bounced an upright pole first with one hand, then with the other, to thresh the grain which had been spread on mats to dry.
In Den Pasar we got off at the wide dirt lot which is the bus terminus and transferred to a doh-ka, the pony-cart-for-two which is the picturesque means of travel through the city streets. The driver whipped his tiny horse to a gallop, the plume of bells on its head jingled merrily, and in no time at all we were deposited in front of the Bali Hotel, where Minnetta was waiting on the porch.
She was far too travel-wise to be living at the Bali Hotel, however. Already she had found lodgings, at one-fifth the tourist rate, at a small Balinese hotel on a side street. That night Barbara stayed with her there and, on the way back from seeing the rest of us off at the bus terminal, she managed to get herself completely lost. Through this happy accident she made the acquaintance of Igusti Rai Suwandi, a charming young Indonesian of Ted’s age who had been studying English in school. Rai (Igusti, we learned, is a title of caste and not a proper name) was happy to show Barbara back to her hotel and practice his English.
“Tomorrow I come again,” he promised. “I will meet your son. I will show him many things. If he will come by me for two days I will show him fete of young girl who become big.”
This event, which took place in two days, turned out to be the coming-of-age ceremony for a young cousin, and Rai invited our whole family to attend. At the appointed time he took us to the outer courtyard of his “oldest brother’s wife’s father’s home.” We found it overflowing with milling tourists from the Bali Hotel who were busily taking pictures of suckling pigs turning on a spit and lovely girls passing through from the street to the inner courtyard with trays of food on their heads.
Our hearts sank. We had hoped for more than this, colorful as it was. But we needn’t have worried. Rai led us through the crowd, up some stone steps, through a narrow doorway in the brick wall, and down to the inner courtyard—and another world. All about us were open buildings with thatched roofs, their floors raised above the ground. Each of them was gaily decorated with lengths of bright cloth, flowers, and woven palm leaves. The guests, sitting cross-legged upon the floor of each pavilion, were all wearing native Balinese costume—magnificent sarongs of red or green or blue cloth with designs of gold thread and turbans of batik. They eyed us with curiosity and reserve and, for one horrible second, I wondered if Rai had brashly invited us without consulting his elders. Almost immediately, however, we were greeted warmly by Rai’s brother, who told us to make his home our own and led us to one of the detached buildings which had been, apparently, assigned to us for our own use.