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Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I’m getting worried that it’s not happening. I don’t
understand why it’s not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have
stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but
Wayan hasn’t liked anything we’ve shown her. I keep telling her, “Wayan, it’s important that
we buy something. I’m leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know before I
leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a roof over your
head before you get evicted.”
“Not so simple to buy land in Bali,” she keeps telling me. “Not like to walk into a bar and
buy a beer. Can take long time.”
“We don’t have a long time, Wayan.”
She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of “rubber time,”
meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. “Four weeks” doesn’t really mean to
Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn’t necessarily composed of twenty-four
hours, either; sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s shorter, depending upon the spiritual and
emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes
you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.
Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to
buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is
also undervalued, but that’s a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali—especially in
Ubud—can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on
Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can’t
make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately
$25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly translating into English as:
“Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV”), and then you can build a little shop there
where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a
profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It’s senseless.
But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of eco-
nomic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as