I couldn’t help smiling. Everything around me was/is exactly what I’ve been dreaming of. This right here is what I’ve been creating for so long. My house has expanding into this place. In Seattle, I was the only one wearing a bikini everyday, driving to the beach everyday, going out on the water everyday, making an effort to go watch the sunset everyday, sprinkling Indian Hindu decor around my house and choosing to live without care of time, no plans just spontaneous adventure. I am in Uluwatu and it seems everyone here is on the same page as me.
I sat on the beach with my paintbrushes and it didn’t take long to attract friends; a curious surfer-painter man came over to paint with me, then three children and their sweet mother, then a whole squad of Brazilians took me out to dinner. My mom always told me that if I wanted to make friends I needed to just go do the thing I enjoy and the other people who also enjoy that thing will meet me there naturally.
So why am I so delightfully surprised that I ate dinner tonight and everyone around the table (not just me) was covered in sand, wearing flippy floppies, bikinis, in love with the elements, totally away from the rest of the world content here ion this beach to stand for a long ass time and watch the sunset together until it was so black dark that we crawled through the cave with flashlights to get off the beach! (Phew, run on sentences are tasty sometimes.)
I’m less concerned, not concerned at all actually, about whatever was concerning me before. I am faraway and faraway feels good.
The air is perfect here, always touching me gently. I climb steep stone steps up the cliff to my surfer shack. For $35/night the shower doesn’t have water, there are no towels, the toilet paper was waiting for me in the living room and the view from the porch (out to the waves) is divine. It’s perfect. Im above the cafe and I literally couldn’t be closer to the beach.
Getting here, the drivers couldn’t understand where I was going. They kept looking for my hotel on the road and I kept telling them, “you have to drop me off here because I’m literally on the cliffs!” Haha The driver who took me south from Seminyak to Uluwatu dropped me at the top of the Uluwatu Beach road because his car couldn’t get down the bumpy broken dirt road any further. I was going to walk but a scooter guy offered me a ride. So me and this man and my three bags bumped our way down the rocky hill, avoiding white stone potholes. At the end of the dirt road, the scooter man dropped me at the top of the staircase and I carried my bags down to the “By the Cliff” cafe, above which my ramshackle room awaited my gleeful entrance. I couldn’t be happier m. I went from bougie to beyond basic. I feel more in my body here, simple with sand on my scalp and the waves in my ears…no traffic or humans in sight. It’s dark now and I’m waiting at the empty cafe for the Brazilian man to meet me. There are lights on the horizon…boats in the Indian Ocean.
The Buddha statue on the stairs keeps startling me, a creepy human form in the night just standing there. “Ahhh!!! Oh hello Buddha” lol again and again.
A speck of magic light flew across the sand from one end of the beach to the other. “What was that!?” O vaga-lume. I saw my first firefly tonight on the beach just after sunset … firefly in Portuguese: vaga-lume!
Love & Rainbows, Cha Wilde