At first I thought it was Emily taking photos. Then I realized she was showering inside. The flash went off again and I realized it was silent Bali lightening illuminating the sky. It went on all night popping up occasionally in every direction.
Lightening was one of the things that captured my love for Bali. On my first visit, I watched clear, perfectly formed streaks of lightening touch both sky and water as I sat on the north shore of Bali on New Year’s Eve.
On flights between Bali and Singapore, I have seen many towering columnar clouds with raging lightening wars between them. It makes the skies of Indonesia feel mysterious and mystical – as if the Hindu gods are playing out the Ramanyana to be viewed by travelers from the windows of an A330.
Something about lightening makes a warm Balinese night perfect.
So do the sounds of geckos calling to each other out back, the bats flying through the fruit trees and the chingchoks (little geckos) jumping around inside the recessed lighting on the front porch, feasting on mosquitos. Go chingchoks!
In the still of the night in the rice terraces, Bali is timeless.
In the middle of the stillness, came the sound of a machine droning in back of the house. Emily’s shower was breaking the still of the night as the modern and the traditional collided. The fantastic water pressure in our shower – the best shower we’ve had this entire trip – comes from a water pump.
Despite the tremendous technological advances that have swept through Bali in the past ten years – ATMs, satellite television, cell phones, broadband Internet, PDAs – most of the island has no pipes or sewers.
Hundreds of years ago, Balinese built a system of aqueducts carrying water from the volcano region to almost every inhabited part of the island. Besides bringing water vital to human life, they were concerned with irrigation of their largest and most important crop – rice. Even today, Bali’s largest product is rice and although most of the island is covered in rice paddies and terraces, it produces barely enough to feed Bali. With tourism and land development, sometimes it isn’t enough and they import rice from Thailand.
Since the aqueducts were built long before roads, you can’t always see them while driving. However, in places here and there, they line up, particularly along the road leading down from the mountains to the north shore and also, along one of the roads near our house.
These stone waterways are recessed into the ground and at times almost unnoticeable due to the rice fields and overgrowth around them. But keep a close eye to where they widen or streams combine and you’ll see a piece of old Bali – people bathing in the streams of clean water.
The Balinese are particular about how the aqueducts can be used. Never for waste elimination, and not for washing anything other than people and clothes. The water is supposed to be clean since, after all, they drink it too.
The water flows from mountain springs and lakes over long distances in open and uncovered canals, making it not-so-suitable for drinking in the opinion of the average foreigner. There’s absolutely no chemical treatment of it. At the same time, it comes out of the faucet clean and clear. I’ve never seen chunks of dirt or…anything…. Still, we stick to filtered and bottled water for consumption.
Despite making the water less appetizing, I’ve always had a fascination and appreciation for the Balinese water system. Not only is it gorgeous, but it was designed to distribute water to everyone on the island during times when most of Europe and Asia had nothing of the kind.
More interestingly, it’s a system that people remain happy with today. It still does the job. Aside from pockets of the north-western part of the island, there’s not a village that doesn’t have running water and not a rice paddy or farm field without proper irrigation.
The Balinese take water distribution extremely seriously. The recipients of water from each part or section of the aqueduct system have a regional water council. These often include representatives from many villages over a significant stretch of land. The councils ensure everyone seeking water gets it and that the person at the top of the hill doesn’t unduly hog the water or cut anyone’s supply.
Water may pass through people’s lands, but it remains community property. It is also part of their heritage – a birthright for the Balinese. They continue to adapt it to modern needs, but the original infrastructure remains in place and working daily.
Although I dread power outages because they also result in an instant loss of running water and am never thrilled that our waste water all goes into a secret septic tank somewhere on the property, I don’t mind when the drone of the water pump breaks the peace of the evening.
In fact, a little smile comes across my face. The water pump is a small price to pay to be able to admire more than 600 years of tradition from the side of the road. All it takes is a little pumping to keep the chain unbroken and to prevent a tradition from being antiquated. The sound means one of Bali’s oldest, most practical and beautiful achievements remains valid, relevant and meaningful in today’s technology-driven world.
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