Stawberries, Unicorns and the Orchid Man

En route to Jakarta I had one free day in Bali, and I decided to go back to the botanical gardens in Bedugal that I had visited in 2001. Bali was my first port-of-call (reached after a month-long voyage from Phuket), and I have since fixed on my unsteady description of my great grandmother’s rose-gardens to the man who tended the orchid collection as an early attempt to negotiate how I fit in Southeast Asia.

On Monday morning I hopped a bus with the idea of checking out the orchids and seeing the orchid man. Heading due north, Bali’s auto-parts and wholesale decorating stores gave way to rice fields. Climbing higher, foggy slopes replaced the rice paddies. In Bedugal, I got off at the market amidst sturdy ladies in sweaters moving baskets of wet cabbages and corn on and off minibuses.

Bedugal was as I remembered: a little dour and rough around the edges, up high in the volcanic mountains. While I warmed up with a cup of ginger tea and a plate of fried noodles, it started to piss rain. Undeterred, I bought a small umbrella and a half-kilo of mangosteens and headed off for the botanical gardens.

There really is not much else to the story. I ate the inevitably ununicorn-like* mangosteens under a shelter and then walked around for two hours in a massive, cold downpour. Everything was slippery, dripping and Jurassic. I made it up to the orchid house but it was closed and empty. No orchid man.

I walked back into town past small fields of carrots, Brassicas and, of all things, strawberries. The only thing I could think of was Snow Falling on Cedars and the strawberry farms in the cloudy Pacific Northwest. Strange to see strawberries on a wet Balinese volcano; strange for me to be wandering around alone up there in the rain.

After some concern that I had missed the last bus out of town, I clambered into the back of a microlet and we sputtered back down towards Kuta - the sunshine surfer capital of Bali. I was cold and I didn’t mind the steamy, close heat of bodies or the smoke from my neighbor’s clove cigarette. That night I slept hard.

* Tantalus: Mangosteens (see bottom photo) cannot be imported into the US. In a rapturous New York Times food article I read before coming heading to Timor, a chef said tasting one was like “Seeing a unicorn.” Way too much build-up for any fruit.





Note: Top photo, a sign for the Balinese 'Rosela.'