Anyone who visits Ubud will meet many, many taxi drivers but some like him are very special.
After taking us to some amazing temples and teaching us about the jungle, Wayan took us to meet a magical cat who turns normal coffee beans into gold... well, gold made out of slightly less bitter coffee beans - with his own butt! Wayan tried his first cup of this delicacy despite living right down the road, and also because we forced him to.
Chelsea ... with some cat poo.
Roasting Cat Poo into delicious.
One of the most amazing parts of our trip was visiting Wayan's village and meeting his family. We shared dinner with Wayan and his daughters who taught Chelsea a few dance moves and then helped Tom pick out a fancy new shirt at the tailor shop on their property. We needed new duds because Wayan had (perhaps controversially) invited us to the village temple to attend an ancient Balinese Black Magic Ceremony.
Wayan taught us alot about Balinese religion and beliefs, educated us about his view of Karma and showed us a side of Bali that very few tourists or even foreign-residents of Bali ever see, it was an amazing and incredibly candid view of genuine Balinese cultural which we were very honoured to be a part of. But it was so overwhelming that the following is the best way we can describe the experience:
The ceremony was ... completely overwhelming and involved (pseudo...we think?) human sacrifice and dancing which went on for hours and then suddenly turned into mass histeria after midnight as the evil spirits called in to finish the job on the sacrafice possessed an innocent dancer who started speaking (screaming) in tongues and flailing about to be taken care of only by the highest priest. And then, again unannounced, a battle scene breaks out on the steps of an ancient mossy temple between a giant dog monster (a Barong) and a black magic warrior grandmother with a real sword (Rangda).
This whole time an Indonesian Hulk Hogan complete with blonde mullet and red bandanna has been screaming into a microphone at the demons to arrive to kill the person involved when all the lights are cut and the thousands of Balinese scatter as unannounced fireworks explode at the level of the tree tops and children start to wail and dogs are barking and ... the only two whities are in shock. The "body" has been ritually cleaned and is raced to the cemetery.
Dropping us off at our hotel as the sun was rising around 4:30am, Wayan gives us a friendly goodbye and suggests we drop him a line to find out how the man in the ceremony was doing "Dead, maybe sick or probably - maybe ok."
If anyone is travelling to Bali / Ubud please contact Wayan for any taxi or informal tour-guide needs that you have, and you might just have an experience that you could not pay money for anywhere else!
I Wayan Tagel (Ubud Tour Guide and Driver)
Phone: 081 338 664 812
Email: iwayanborneo@yahoo.com
And of course we couldn't write about guides without mentioning Dewa Nyoman Arsana who was the planner and host of Andrew and Lauren's beautiful wedding and everything that went along with it. Look him up on facebook with the same name to request hotels, airport pickups, any kind of planning!
Bali really is full of great people, and crazy spirits! :)
Chelsea, we've used Wayan Borneo as our driver in Bali four times now, and after our last trip in October our group of six set up a blog for him Here:
ReplyDeletewww.wayanborneo.blogspot.com .
We'll create a link to your narrative on the site, and we hope you'll add some comments there as well.
PS: the cat in question is a civet cat, which is actually not very related to house cats etc. A couple of people in our group tried that coffee too--more for the legend than the actual taste.