Bali Tourism soars through Ex-pat Offerings

By Brian Blum

Her name is Rucina, but everyone calls her “lower caste woman married to upper caste man.” Rucina Ballinger is one of an estimated 10,000 Western expatriates living in Bali.

Originally from Indianapolis, Indiana, Ballinger first landed on this tiny island in the middle of Indonesia some 50 years ago while studying for a degree in dance, religion and folklore, and wound up marrying a Balinese man from a royal family (hence her extended nickname).

Her husband, Anak Agung Gede Putra Rangki, passed away a few years ago, but Ballinger has stayed put in a village near Bali’s arts and culture capital, Ubud, where she has two sons, a couple of daughters-in-law, two grandchildren, and three dogs.

These days, Ballinger leads what she calls “spiritual and cultural adventures” for visitors looking for something more authentic beyond the white sand and surfer hangouts of Bali’s balmy beaches. She also rents out space in her family’s home on Airbnb; the place is just a 15-minute walk from the Yoga Barn in Ubud, she tells prospective tenants.

While many of Bali’s expats have come to chill out or seek enlightenment, Eat Pray Love style, others like Ballinger have brought Western-level quality and services to the tourism industry.

From high-end culinary schools offering hands-on cooking classes to vegetarian and raw food restaurants and, in Ballinger’s case, insider expeditions to temple ceremonies far off the track of the bumper-to-bumper buses and mini-vans that have transformed Bali – and Ubud in particular – from a sleepy island into something resembling Bangkok without the edge.

Ballinger certainly has the chops to deliver: Besides her royal bearing, she wrote the book “Balinese Dance, Drama, and Music” and is well-connected with Bali’s art community. She will proudly tell you the story of how she became the first non-native Balinese to serve as a kelian istri (head woman) in her local hamlet.

My wife and I joined Ballinger for a week of exploration from her base in Ubud.

Our first stop was visiting a temple festival in the small, isolated community of Tunjuk, an hour’s drive from Ubud in the Tabanan Regency.

It was well past dark as we arrived. However, there was still enough light to show off the traditional Balinese clothing Ballinger had dressed us in before the journey – for me, that included a batik sarong, sash, headdress and sandals borrowed from Ballinger’s son, two sizes too large. (I had only brought closed-toe shoes – a temple etiquette no-no.)

As we entered the temple compound, we were met by a burst of alien sounds: a gamelan band warming up in the distance, the hubbub of hundreds of revelers being sprinkled by the priests with holy water. More familiar were the smells: stands selling a variety of sizzling sate (chicken and pork fried on a stick) and sweets made from sticky rice caramelized to a rubbery consistency and drizzled – as is seemingly everything edible in Bali – with palm oil and coconut flakes.

Beyond the food, there was a large area where seated prayers were taking place; a corner with the largest “offerings” we’d seen on the island (the gods apparently prefer Coke and Fanta along with their star fruit and papaya); and a tent where the evening’s performances were to take place.

Gamelan Performance

The evening included the aforementioned gamelan performance (to our untrained ears it sounded like synchronized xylophone playing) and several Balinese dances, including a stunning rendition of the Oleg Tamulilingan (or “Bumblebee”) dance by a girl who turned out to be all of 12 but whose delicate and exacting hand and eye movements were the polar opposite of pop star excess back home.

We were back in our temple finest a few days later when we were guests at a Balinese wedding in Sading, Badung. All are welcome, Ballinger insisted. “Just bring an envelope with about $10 per person in cash to cover the meal.”

The food – consisting of sweet and sour fried tempeh, steamed broccoli and spinach greens, white rice, and a very un-Balinese cup of vanilla ice cream with a wooden spoon – came out buffet style after the ceremony, which stretched on for hours without, to my Western sensibilities at least, any clear beginning, middle or end.

Ballinger maximizes her position as a bicultural, trilingual Western woman in Indonesia. After her initial visit as an undergrad in 1974, Ballinger returned a year later and, in 1985, met the man who would become her husband. (She subsequently converted to Hinduism.) Being married to a local and able to speak Balinese gave Ballinger an inside track on cross-cultural experiences, something she is happy to share with her clients.

She has even gained a smidgen of local fame as the first foreigner to become a kelian istri of her husband’s banjar of 72 families, responsible for organizing all the ceremonies of their village for a year.

It’s a demanding job, and it comes on top of the already intensive requirements that regular Balinese women have in preparing the daily and ceremonial offerings, which are placed anywhere there is a “transaction.” That could be at the entrance to a temple or store. We once saw one offering plate on top of an ATM. Ballinger estimates that offerings-related tasks can take up to 30% of a woman’s day.

“No one wants to be kelian,” she jokes. “But the fact that they trusted me is quite an honor.”

Ballinger suggested that we venture beyond Ubud and visit Bali Asli, a cooking school and gourmet restaurant set amid verdant rice fields and a lush jungle on the eastern end of the island in the foothills of Mount Agung. Bali Asli is a 30-minute drive from the village of Candidasa.

This unique cooking school is owned and operated by expat Australian Penelope Williams who built the facility in traditional bure style – open on all sides to the elements. (That goes for the bathrooms too which open out onto the rice fields, a true “loo with a view.”)

Williams’ school, which opened in 2011, has streamlined the classroom process, such that students spend most of their time mashing, stirring and frying, and very little on the painstaking process of cutting up the myriads of vegetables and spices required for Indonesian cuisine – they’re all provided pre-prepared in plastic containers that appear almost magically as soon as they’re required.

The result is a kind of cooking “lite” class that nevertheless resulted in the best Indonesian food we ate during our stay. Our repast included the requisite sate, along with mie goring (Indonesian fried rice), bumbu kacang (peanut sauce – always my favorite, now I can say I know how to make it, too), pesan be pasih (spiced fish fillet grilled in a banana leaf), and tumtahu (spiced tofu, also in a banana leaf).

Because of its location, most classes at Bali Asli also include some sort of activity – ours began with a two-hour trek through the palm trees to a local village to identify the ingredients we would later use in the skillet. We also got a chance to try a very sweet, alcohol-rich wine made of the daily drip from the plentiful palm trees.

Bali Chocolate

Not far from Williams’ school is Bali Chocolate, run by Charles Esposito, another expat, originally from Miami.

Known locally by the whimsical moniker of “Charly and the Chocolate Factory,” Esposito lives above his factory in a funky handcrafted building that looks like a Balinese “teepee” with enormous eyes for windows.

We tried a somewhat bitter concoction of chocolate drops and a “crunch” bar that mixes in local rice. Everything’s organic and touched up with just a tad of that ubiquitous palm oil. The earnings are enough to allow Esposito to surf regularly while providing a modicum of employment to residents from the nearby villages.

Esposito had been working as a product designer for novelty gadgets back in the U.S. When he tired of toys, Bali beckoned, and he swapped kid concoctions for cocoa beans in 1998.

“Come, you have to try this!” Esposito urges us after we’ve sampled a chocolate drop from the tasting plate. “It’s my ‘Chair of Enlightenment.’”

Ostensibly just a wood and rope swing, it’s also the largest and tallest such contraption we’d ever seen. You have to climb up a rickety ladder onto a raised platform before holding on for dear life as you sail on the broad wooden plank through the trees and nearly – or so it seems – across Lombok Strait on the way to the neighboring island.

Expats like Esposito, Williams and Ballinger have brought a level of sophistication, sensitivity to Western needs, and professionalism that makes Bali one of Asia’s easiest destinations for exotic travel. Whether you come to eat, cook, dance or swing, there really is something for everyone in this Indonesian tropical paradise.

Going to Bali?

Flights: There are many ways to fly to Bali’s Denpasar Airport, but few are direct.

We used Bangkok as our stopover, but you can also fly via Singapore, Hong Kong, Delhi, or Taipei.

If you are doing a layover, then your least expensive option is to catch an AirAsia flight for the rest of the trip (book via the airline’s website).

Accommodation: Our base in Ubud was the family-run Permana Cottages, a three-star place with a fabulous view overlooking the rice patties but without many other amenities. If you’re looking for more luxury, Ubud has over 1,600 tourist accommodations of varying levels.

Tour planning. Rucina Ballinger books tours and cultural guiding experiences from https://rucinaballinger.com/. Her Airbnb home for rent is here: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/4669419. More information on the Bali Asli cooking school can be found at https://www.baliasli.com.au/. You can read about Charly and his chocolate factory at https://www.nowbali.co.id/charly-and-his-chocolate-factory/.

Visas. Traveling to Bali from the U.S. requires a 30-day visa which you can purchase in person on arrival or – better – in advance online.

Brian Blum writes about travel, politics, culture, technology, and business. His latest book, Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Oil, Big Auto and the World, tells the story of electric car infrastructure startup Better Place, which burned through nearly a billion dollars before going bust. More at www.brianblum.com.