THE INDONESIAN SPICE ISLANDS

24 July 2023

"This Kashmiri dish is a very famous traditional dish. My friend's kashmiri wife cooked this for us in the 70s and the taste still lingers. We are going to cook this dish this week and thought of sharing it with you all. If u dont have  garam masala use your own garam masala. Zafrani garam masala is not available in Doha but i am getting it fm Kochi this week. But always manage with substitutes."

I do have garam masala. Perhaps not Zafrani, but Bali. 

The best spices come from The Spice Islands,. These are the dozens of tiny rain-soaked forests, luxuriant, verdoyant, volcanic islands on the equator pretty much, that make up the Indonesian archipelago of the Moluccas, aka the Maluku Islands if you prefer. 

Today, you can buy these spices in Dewata and Bintang supermarkets and the very best brand is Nox.

Until the 1700s, all the world's cloves, nutmeg, and mace (which is the powdered skin of the meg nut) came from here, though noone knew this as the Arab traders had kept this secret since the 4th century.

Then came Vasco da Gama on his famous voyage in 1497, round the Cape to India. The Portuguese proceeded to figure out where these Arab spices were coming from.

It is said that local people planted a clove tree each time a child was born, thus through the generations, through practise and custom, man (which includes women) and his destiny were wedded to the forest.

But the Dutch, who eventually took over the Moluccas in the seventeenth century, in order to limit supply and raise wholesale prices, tore down the forests except on Amboina and a few other islands, making cloves worth more than their weight in gold! ... But also making mad the native Polynesians. 

Slowly slowly, the spice was cultivated in other parts of the world - Brazil, the West Indies, Zanzibar ... and today you can buy cloves for your Sunday pork roast with crackling, and your apple pie & custard, in Sainsburys and Tesco.

The British when they colonised converted the people to Christianity, taught them English, introduced them to the latest hot playwright, left behind the rule of law and strict accounting principles. The Dutch by contrast left the people as ignorant as they were when they found them. You have only to compare Singapore or Malaysia with Indonesia....but the latter are fast catching up!

More than that, the Portuguese took great risks in order to discover the Spice Islands and along the way going round the Cape they got lost and found the new world, full of red Indians - Christopher Columbus sailed West across the Atlantic, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue; and Magellan did the world's first luxury cruise round the entire globe, returning East across the Pacific.

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BALI CULTURE

16 July 2023

The lady first on the left is my landlady. She looks younger than she is, a lot younger, maybe it's the yoga, she is very busy but always hugely relaxed and friendly. ✓

Naben (a Balinese cremation ceremony).  This was remembering my landlady's grandfather, back in her village. Again, many cremated at the same time, they pool their money to reduce costs.

Different colours for the different families, a family cremating its loved one.

I have to say that Indonesians enjoy a unique dress sense, with wonderfully clashing patterns and quite startlingly contrasting colours.

The women are built with big firm breasts and buttocks; which compares with women from Siam central Thailand who enjoy slimmer figures.

Bali is Hindu, but a sizeable Muslim population too. I can definitely say that Islam has a focus on simplicity and the next world, compared with this rich Hindu culture of stories, customs, rituals, art and sculptures, and a highly distinctive architecture.

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WEATHER IN BALI

1 July 2023

Bali is year-round warm and humid, as it's a tropical island just south of the equator. Ubud is inland and very green and a bit cooler at night, around 29°C and for me 20° as A/c is on ha ha.

Higher up or further North you go, the cooler it gets. Kintamani, Mount Batur, climbing the Campuhan Ridge before sunrise...all ok (I don't walk in the dark, nay nay). This morning, I was halfway up the Ridge, it was around half six, what I thought was a mist thickened up into a pasting and I walked carefully back through cords of water to my bedsit.

Streets and buildings suffer from the humudity and rain, paths and pavements are uncertain at the best of weathers, so no need to risk wet slippery surfaces. ... the local lady in that Cautionary Tale was most unwise.... hospitals here have special rates for tourists.

Summer and autumn is the dry season and the busiest; otherwise winter and spring are wet. Normally at least. 

Monsoon is supposedly Nov to April. I can remember on 1 Oct 2022 I left Bali on the first day of the monsoon. Ditto 27 Sep 2019. 

Best months are April, October and November. 

Rainiest December, January and Feb, with Jan the wettest.

May is the hottest.

August is the driest and coolest.

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NABEN - A BALINESE HINDU COLLECTIVE FUNERAL

30 June 2023

You have to attend and talk to local people before you can understand what otherwise seem to be bizarre local customs and rituals at a Hindu Bali funeral, called a "naben".

Cremation is believed to drive off evil spirits linked to greed or excessive desire, allowing the person a second chance following his or her rebirth. It is a purification of the soul.

However, I am told that the cost of an elaborate cremation ceremony in this country is too high for an individual family to bear alone.. 

And so grieving families must wait for a large number of people to pass away (this is all true) and then they share the costs at a collective cremation.

So what about the bodies while they are waiting, piling up somewhere?

So here's the strange part... If a person dies, they're buried first, buried in the ground. Over time, the numbers of dead and buried build up and a year later, sometimes as long as five years later, the bones are dug up and burnt at this collective cremation ceremony called a Naben.

Yesterday's naben concerned fifty local people who had died these last two years. One was a member of the king's family, so following the rules of the caste system, he received a luxury funeral and was kept separate from the ordinary castes. His pyre has nine levels, as you can see in the photo, which are ordinal points on the compass that attest to his high birth and assist his navigation to the next world.

Someone asked me what the attendees do at a naben - "do they just sit around?".

As it's only the long-buried bones, there's really not much to disagree with at this ceremony governed as it is by ancient ritual, evolved and tested over time; but if it's a freshly dead person there's the flesh as well which bubbles and squeaks as the air and grease is burnt out, an experience for those present that even elaborate ritual cannot easily calm and dignify.

On this occasion yesterday, along with the bones of the elderly long-time buried and exhumed, there was a 17 year old boy killed just last week, in a scooter accident most likely. The family had kept the body of the boy in their home, temporarily preserved in formalin. 

They use a gas burner, as in any crematorium, and the pyre is as much for display as those electric log fires. One of the organisers keeps the decorative border watered to keep up the appearance and stop the flames from spreading.

Wailing or any dramatic scenes of grief are not permitted by the etiquette because this would be to question the god's calling time on one of his faithful followers. It is the same for many beliefs.

The body of this boy took a long time to be reduced to ashes, the hissing and spitting of the fire accompanied the sadness and tears of his stricken parents, family and school chums. Each comforts themself alone, head bowed quietly in hands.

COMMENT

Horrific and quite touching all at the same time. I had some bacon in the pan behind me as I read this. It was hissing and spitting. I think it will go to the doggy this morning.

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