Story of Bali, Indonesia

Each village has its market-place and some of the larger ones are attended by people from several villages in the area. One can buy all sorts of food and things: dried fish, live chickens, snacks, refreshments, imported items for homes, kitchen articles, incense, Perfume oil from fresh blossoms, thongs, toys, woven mats. and hats. It is a place to meet, gossip, and socialize, or just to-while away time in a busy festive atmosphere.

Early books and travel publications -on Bali pictured and described the island at the beginning of this century as a paradise boasting lush tropical landscape and graceful people, with an unreal emphasis on lovely young women bathing nude under falling water. The former is still very much, in evidence but the latter is less common. Although Bali is much more populated now than it was a half century ago, it remains incredibly scenic with vistas of terraced rice paddies, reflecting a myriad of colors from deep green to brown, and mirroring mountains, clouds, and palm trees, set against backdrops of palms, bamboo groves, and an occasional house with a grass roof.

A rice harvest is usually going on somewhere because of non synchronous planting and rice is harvested in the labour-intensive way by local groups of people, predominantly women, cutting the rice plants by hand, and carrying them on their heads to another spot for threshing against a board. The view from Colin McPhee and Jane Belo's house in Sayan, where Bateson and Mead stayed in 1939, overlooks a most spectacular valley of terraced rice paddies with a river coursing below. 'Me valley appears much the same as that described by McPhee in his delightful book, A House in Bali (1946), which also recounted the problems evil spirits caused to his house, a graphic portrayal of the beliefs and religion of Bali.

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