In Bali with Healers by Caroline Phillips
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The sign on the Balinese street points to the magic man’s house: ‘Ketut Liyer. Painter and wood carver. Medicine man.’ Ketut, eightysomething, is famed for carving wood and telling clients about their previous incarnations, present circumstances and future prospects. “How do you do?” I say. “Good news,” he replies. He has ten rice grains on his forehead, a lesser number of teeth and wears long grey hair and a sarong. “This stone in this ring…magic,” he says, displaying fingers with preternaturally long nails and big silver rings.
Ketut is sitting in his home in a compound in Pengosekan village where he lives midst small temples decorated with umbrellas and statues wrapped in gold batik. We sit on a reed mat under the frangipani tree. “You like a tiger animal, and you have lots of boyfriends,” he says, picking up a book made of palm leaves, passed down through generations of medicine men. (Reader, I’m married.) Ketut then says something in Balinese to Putu, my guide and translator. “You’ll have long life, probably live 115 years,” Putu translates gravely.
In past years, there may have been bombs in Bali, there may be the threat of further terrorism in this Hindu island in a Muslim archipelago, and the area might have been closed during Sars. But Bali is also known for being spiritual and magical. Most Balinese visit temples 200 times a year. They pray five times a day. There are endless ceremonies and festivals. And they live a life of rituals and offerings, in harmony with nature.
It’s a place where I see men chanting in a temple and running barefoot across a fire. Many believe that there are magnetic grids on the planet and that Bali is on a magnetic intersection that generates an extraordinary amount of energy and knowledge. Whatever, you can almost feel the magic in the air.
The Healing Massage
My next stop is Ubud, home to artists and a healer called Wayan Nuriasih in the Balinese Traditional Healing shop, which is also a restaurant. Consultations take place in public in her eatery with its bright pink table clothes and glass shelves of medicine. She wears an enormous smile, orchid in her hair and batik skirt. First she offers me lunch of the tasting menu (40,000 rs.) There’s turmeric juice (to cleanse the blood,) followed by ten dishes served on tiny plates and banana leaves: from seaweed (for healthy hair) to red rice (to reduce swelling.) All different flavours, textures and utterly delicious.
After lunch, Wayan stands by her restaurant shrine - where she holds incense, sprinkles petals and communes with the Gods. “I’m checking your sickness,” she says, as four chickens come in from the street and walk past my feet. Next Wayan scans her hand over my body in front of the Japanese tourists at another table – and, amazingly, offers diagnoses similar to the findings of my GBP 400 BUPA MOT-style health check done in London. Then it’s time for my healing massage: so three young men appear from the kitchen.
Suddenly I’m in a room upstairs with this trio of dishy kitchen hands rubbing my calves with uncooked rice and lesser galanga (like ginger.) Then they put coral leaves on my stomach (to cool its energy.) Soon the entire contents of a fridge are on my body. One man massages aloe vera into my hair (for strong tresses) and another paints egg yolk and coconut oil on my face (to get rid of wrinkles). Then follows the six- handed- massage with oil from Kemiri nuts grown in the Indonesian jungle and Sumbawa oil (said to cure all ailments.) You’d be hard pushed to get a better treatment in Champneys. It takes two to three hours and costs 300,000 rs (about GBP 20.)
A Part of Their Culture
Next day Putu takes me on a health-giving bike ride. We cycle past paddy fields, lush countryside and lychee trees. Past papaya and coffee plantations where a man wears a banana leaf on his head as a rain hat. We stop to crush the pungent leaves of a cinnamon tree as a family of four rides past on one motorbike, nobody wearing helmets, and the mother holding an open umbrella. Putu points out botanical, medicinal plants everywhere: healing is part of their culture.
That evening Wayan takes me to her witch doctor. We go down a lane, past a man wearing an ‘udang’ (scarf headdress) sitting in a ‘bale’ (tiny hut on a platform) playing a rindik (Balinese xylophone.) And down a dirt track past a woman preparing rice offerings for the Gods in banana leaf ‘bowls.’ In other words, I have no idea where we went. This time our doctor is a bare-chested man wearing a grubby white sarong and ceremonial hat. We put on sashes - to stop any negativity rising up in our bodies explains Wayan - and then kneel in front of the shrine to pray under the nearly full-moon.
Afterwards, there’s a heart-stopping moment. The doctor takes out what Wayan dubs his ‘sword’ – more of a rusty dagger, really – and presses its cold metal into my flesh. He doesn’t penetrate the skin. Apparently he and his blade go where the Gods lead him to negative energy. Wayan says it’s magic. I say it’s painful. A tourists’ advice brochure found at Bali’s Denpasser airport recommends the following: ‘If you have an accident, ring a taxi rather than an ambulance.’ Actually, you could call Wayan…
Hotel:
A boutique hotel with a to-die-for infinity pool overlooking rice terraces and the lush, tropical Ayung River valley. Set in a tranquil hillside retreat, the hotel blends the sleek lines of contemporary design with traditional Balinese architecture. Rooms boast garden terraces and cool al fresco bathroom and showers. Food is healthy and the menu extensive. The hotel offers a daily lifestyle experience from learning how to make Balinese offerings to visiting a Balinese astrologer. The hotel’s Mandara Spa offers traditional Balinese beauty treatments, including one with a ceremonial foot cleansing followed by a volcanic mud body treatment. Alila Ubud is just five minutes from the artistic community and healers at Ubud.
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