Tidal Transitions – Manifesting Alchemy In The Bali Sea

View of the Bali Sea

It wasn’t until I saw a swallowtail butterfly fly in from the Bali Sea that I realised the interconnectedness of what I had witnessed. How anticlimactic that it took a butterfly to remind me of the Butterfly Effect!


I stood on a grass lawn with a small swimming pool a metre behind me and the Bali Sea five metres ahead of me. A patch of cloud lingered a few thousand metres above me. Yet, what left me perplexed was the thought: “How do you identify causation, when everything around you is cyclic?”

Counting capital in Bali’s capital

“Welcome to Bali,” the toddler with me announced, standing alongside the effigy of a Barong (a creature from a Balinese legend) at the I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport at Denpasar. I estimated the incidental expenses of the trip as I withdrew local currency at the airport’s automatic teller machine.

A reluctant beach bargain

Outside the airport, an overcast weather welcomes us. We passed many navigation signposts on the way. “Pantai” — the many green boards with white typefaces announced frequently.

What is “Pantai?” I asked our chauffeur friend.

“Beach,” he answered.

I don’t indulge beaches. So, when the question of accommodation came up, I voted for the forest. In the end, I negotiated with my kin for an even split between the forest and the beach. A reluctant compromise, which turned out providential.

The beach villa we chose was in the village of Purwakerti, Abang District, Karangasem Regency in the island province of Bali in Indonesia. Purwakerti was in the Amed region in eastern Bali, comprising many fishing villages and accessible diving and snorkelling spots. The Bali Sea was a paper plane’s throw away from the villa’s lawn. There was just a wall that prevented sea water from entering the swimming pool at the villa during high tide.

Purwakerti Beach in Amed, beside the Bali Sea
The Purwakerti beach at Amed

The sea communicates in patterns

We arrived at the villa on the fifth day of our trip, a Thursday evening in December. The next morning, I woke up at six thirty. It wasn’t until thirty minutes later that light appeared on the horizon. I made sorties to the back garden of the villa to see the traditional Balinese fishing boats, called jukungs in the local language. During these forays to the sea-facing garden of the villa, I watched the texture of the sea surface change. Something was happening to the surface of the water.

I saw patterns. Patterns of water ebbing. The oblique lighting of the morning sun accentuated these patterns. The patterns hypnotised me. Yet another pattern broke that hypnosis, this was fast-moving, unlike the slinking tidal pattern, this was more kinetic. Schools of fish were congregating, creating micro-patterns on the sea surface.

I saw a group of tourists going for a swim in the morning. Further away, I saw a diver practising for a dive. The previous evening, I had seen flotsam, mistaking them for sea-creatures. One looked like Nessie’s cousin.

Flotsam in the Bali Sea
Flotsam reminds of Nessie

“What an irony,” I thought as I looked at the jukungs far out in the sea. The fisherfolk were out fishing farther offshore when the troves of fish were frolicking in wading depth. Without further rumination, I went back in.

A jukung at sea

Transitions = lucky breaks

About a quarter hour before eight, I was still inside the villa attending to family duties, when a transition played out. I realised this change only after I analysed the ensuing events of the morning.
We seek stability in life when the most opportunity is in transitions. It took a tidal transition and a pod of sea mammals to remind me of this.

At a quarter past eight, as I readied to descend into the swimming pool. I looked at the sea hoping to spot jukungs returning with their catch. One, two, three, I counted in quick succession. One, two, three, I counted again. No, this was not flotsam, not diving students. There was no doubt: I had just witnessed a pod of dolphins. They were porpoising towards the Purwakerti fishing village a few hundred meters from the beach villa.

The dolphin pod

Idling at Purwakerti while the boats were out at sea

The Purwakerti fishing village has a beach dissected by an artificial terrace built upon a seawall. The beach was empty, as the jukungs were out at sea. Village dogs scampered about the southern end of the Amed beach at Purwakerti. Like any canine subaltern, they only looked forward to their benefactor’s safe return home. A light rain started, slanted by a persistent sea-breeze. The dogs were not deterred. It took lightning and thunder to spoil their play.

The canines deterred me from the south side of the beach

A mobile hawker with a colourful pouch and a tattered straw hat plodded with short deliberate steps. She carried a thermos-flask. Soon the beach would pick up activity with tired seafarers, some hauling their rich catch, and some burdened by the futility of their effort. A hot beverage would lighten the load for both kinds of seafarers. The hawker knew that, and therefore had no hesitation negotiating a steep drop from the platform to the black sands of the beach. I followed her, then stopped discouraged by the dogs, who were only displaying their true nature of vigilance. I retreated, shifting my attention away from the hawker towards a gazebo with a group of idling men.

A hawker with fish and flask

Gazebos are common near the beaches of Bali. I saw one on the Melasti beach in Amed, and three on the beach at Purwakerti. The presumably slacking men—there were three joined by another a quarter hour later—sat there with a pack of cigarettes. They lounged, oblivious to my intrusion. It benefitted my surveillance; like a gecko on a rock, I moved uninterrupted.

Idling men at the gazebo

“It was strange that in a village where everyone seemed driven by purpose, there lay a threesome with seemingly no purpose at all,” I pondered. My mind experienced the tumult I saw in the waves. A real bolt of lightning knocked off the metaphorical gavel I held in my fist. I stopped judging.

Reeling in the boat, hauling in the catch

A small-sized jukung listed thirty meters in the sea. Contrasting this traditional vehicle, an abandoned speedboat lay in the foreground atop the granite seawall. Does a single speedboat for a dozen jukungs and four score out in the sea indicate an absence of motorisation? No. The fisherfolk in Purwakerti, as at other fishing towns in Bali, have blended technology with their traditions. The crab-like jukungs are now propelled by outboard motors. The seafarers, with power at their stern, have decoupled their fishing schedule from the tidal cycles. A solitary angler helms the minor jukungs. Upto three deckhands pilot major jukungs, predominantly used for net fishing.

An odd speedboat among the jukungs

Side note: I was so fascinated by the jukungs that I manifested them in the Netherlands. I found a jukung and the ancestor of the jukung from the Polynesian islands in the Wereldmuseum, Leiden, Netherlands a fortnight after my Bali visit.

The polynesian ancestor of the Jukung in the Leiden Museum

A minor jukung appeared on the northern part of the beach. It cruised briskly ashore. A winch operator prepared a line, one end attached to the motorised winch and another end with a hook. A beachhand laid the hook on the wet and grey volcanic sand, just out of reach of the swash. Parallel bamboo skids lay half buried in the sand. These poles reduce the friction between the boat hull and the beach sand.

The bamboo skids transported me back to the 1980s Marina Beach in Chennai (then Madras). While a lot has changed in fishing technology, a lot remains the same, like the bamboo skids.

Bamboo skids on the beach

The skipper of the jukung cut the power, the jukung drifted ashore, the nimble beachhands leapt onto the surf and hoisted the curved boom of the outrigger. One beachhand snapped the hook to the outrigger. The winch operator engaged the gear. The jukung was back ashore. I scrambled down the rocks to get a closer look at the catch.

The winch operator reels the boat in
Reeling in the jukung

Meagre earnings and abundant satisfaction

As I reached the boat, I saw three figures split in three directions like a drop of mercury disintegrating on a marble floor. It was abrupt, I didn’t have time to switch my camera lens to a wider focal length. My eye caught a common denominator in all the figures, each held half a dozen silver sticks. One woman rushed into the kitchen of a local eatery on the beach. The second, a man, carried his bag of half a dozen fish towards a pickup truck loaded with styrofoam ice boxes. A stubby fishmonger, a lady in her fifties and the last of the trio, loaded her handful of fish into the polyethylene basket she carried on her head.

A woman takes her handful of fish

The fishmonger melted away towards the fishing village after selling her first stock at the gazebo atop the seawall. The men of inaction were not men of indecision. They went back to idling after their brief transaction. Their vigil ended, the village dogs lolled on the beach. The irksome rain, which blotched my camera lens, had paused. The wind abated. The sea calmed. The waves subsided. Everything remained in its place in the frames I shot.

The fishmonger on the beach

Beyond the surface, the Bali Sea is rich

The surface of the sea displayed penury. The surface deceives. In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Santiago initially found the Sycamore Tree incapable of hosting the world’s riches. He didn’t look past the surface. At Purwakerti, in the Amed region, this seemingly life deprived Bali Sea, was teeming with bio-diversity, just a length of mooring rope away.

The Amed region, a 14-kilometre coastline in eastern Bali, hosts the healthiest coral reefs in the region. Some of these sites are just a swimming distance off the beach. Tidal movements increase fish concentration near the shore. These tidal transitions lay the breakfast table for species that feed in shallow water, like bottlenose dolphins.

Transitions invoke fear in humans who seek stability and certainty. Yet, it is transitions that bring out bountiful opportunities. Tidal changes churn the sea, disrupting schools of fish, ejecting flotsam. The Balinese, like Hindus across the world, associate this oceanic churn to beauty, fertility, and prosperity. The deity Shri Dewi, depicted holding a panicle of paddy and carrying a nectar-filled jar, delivers this prosperity. Tides form a natural cycle that levels the playing field for the ocean beings. Nature is all about cycles. Water cycles, Food cycle, Climatic cycles. Cycles sustain, for there is no end nor beginning— there is only perpetuity.

The human mind, which eternally looks for cause and effect, misses this nuance. There is no cause and effect, there are only cycles.

Dolphins put up a show at Amed

It was a cycle I was witnessing from the beachside villa, when I spotted the pod of dolphins. The sea was rising again, after the morning low tide of the day shortly before eight am. After a few minutes, they were gone.

The dolphins at Amed

Expectations create mirages

An hour later I fetched my binoculars. I was unreasonably avaricious. As I scanned the sea my echo-cardiogram was tracing a sine curve, just like the sea-waves. My heart drummed everytime I saw a movement on the sea-surface. This happened repeatedly. Once I saw a buoy, once a diver’s elbow, another time, it was a solitary log. These decoys toyed with my greed. They created sinusoidal cycles of their own, alternating between feelings of alacrity, banality, zeal, and apathy.

Egrets or omen-reading stones

A cluster of driftwood floating by caught my attention. There was an egret sitting atop, looking intently into the water. This egret, white in colour, hoodwinked me. I marvelled that an inland egret species had found an adaptation to feed offshore. Soon the white egret was joined by a slate-grey partner. Marvel turned into mortification – the white egret was an Eastern Reef Egret in a white morph. Reef egrets are not inland egret species by any means. The last time I sighted a reef egret was while snorkelling in the rain near the South Button Island in the Andaman island chain.

After minutes of deliberation atop the driftwood, the pair flew to a charter boat anchored 50 metres offshore. They sat atop the charter boat, white and dark blobs, like the omen-reading stones Urim and Thummim. As I tried to focus my binoculars on the eye of the egret, I saw the dolphin pod again rollicking behind the anchored charter boats. Likely, the pod I had sighted early in the morning. This time, I counted seven.

Reef egret in white morph flies into the charter boat

Dolphin whispering, a form of alchemy

I brought my 70-200 mm telephoto lens out. The dolphins vanished again. A 70-200 mm lens is a misfit for the situation at hand. I had carried the lens to photograph The Ramayana legong dance at the Ubud palace. The set up for the Ramayana dance was compact and well lit. The focusing distance to the dolphins shrunk the subject five times compared to the Ubud Palace dimensions. Given my windfall sighting, I could use a monocle, if that would get me closer to the dolphins. Or, could I get them closer to me?

Dolphins are communicative mammals. They were in a sea full of waves. Sound, thoughts, and prayers travel in waves. I had the message, the medium, and the audience: “Come closer.” “Thought waves.” “The dolphins.” I needed the alchemist.

Manifestation thrives in faith. Doubt kills it. Faith nurtures alchemists. Unwavering belief pushes seekers one step further to manifest their dreams. Sceptics lack that luxury. I looked around to find my alchemist. The agitated toddler squatting by the patio step caught my eye. I moved closer to investigate an apparent squabble. There was a dead fly, lying on her sand castle kit, she was goading a lifeless bug to leave her toys. I found my alchemist.

I pointed at the open sea and asked the toddler to state my message. “Dolphins, come close, Andy wants to take a photo?” She broadcast it with no hesitation. The clouds had cleared, the sun was approaching the zenith. The sea stayed calm. Even flotsam appeared still.

“It was just a wild shot,” I consoled myself on the failed toddler gambit.

Dolphin movements are a visual ensemble

And then it started, like the gamelan music in Ubud Palace. The gamelan is a music ensemble from Java and Bali. It is integral to religious and court life. The Ramayana Legong performance I saw three days earlier was set to the gamelan’s tune. The dolphin pod reappeared behind the moored charter boats. Slow rhythmic movements, increasing in tempo, followed by interlocking rhythmic patterns. The dolphin pod’s feeding movement was like watching the gamelan music visually. Slow undulating movement with the dorsal fins appearing above the water, an increase in speed, followed by the dolphins congregating in intersecting circles.

Gamelan musicians at Ubud Palace
The dolphin movement was a visual ensemble, like watching gamelan music

Experiences, not memory cards, create memories

The prayers worked, but another problem presented itself. My memory card was nearly full. I took out my binoculars to look for the dolphins one last time, before I fetched another memory card. Then, I saw what looked like an unusual bird with an unfamiliar flight pattern. Swifts were active on the shore earlier in the morning. But this flight pattern lacked the capricious decisiveness of the swifts; it was erratic. It flew shorewards and revealed itself. A Papillon butterfly – a Swallowtail.

“Not interesting, for now.”

I ran into the villa and returned with a spare memory card and saw a dolphin just 50 metres ahead, moving north. The pod had moved when I was inside. They were rushing back in the direction they arrived from, in the morning. They were showing more energy now, and appeared more athletic. I switched the memory card. It too was nearly full. I clicked a few frames and the card was full. And then two of the dolphins leapt out of the water together, one when straight up and another horizontally. They plotted the unforgettable shape of number 10 in arabic numerals. And, like that, they were gone.

Expatriating treasures from Bali’s capital

Two days earlier, I had met a gentleman who asked me to visit Lovina, a three-hour drive north of Amed, to see the dolphins. I saw the dolphins thirty seconds away from where I slept in Amed. Sometimes, we find treasures we don’t seek, other times we find treasures where we don’t expect to see them. Treasure eludes us when we don’t know what it looks like. On the contrary, we remain eternally rich when we see treasure in everything we perceive.

Two days later, I flew out of Denpasar airport richer than I had imagined when I arrived.

Anand Yegnaswami

Author

  • Andy

    Anand Yegnaswami (Andy) finds nature his ultimate muse—a boundless excuse to exercise his senses and engage his mind. The sounds of rustling leaves, the glimmer of sunlight on water, the rough texture of bark, the musky aroma of an elephant herd, and even the tang of salt in the air flip a secret switch within him. These sensory encounters spark a journey of inquiry that goes beyond mere perception, connecting him to a deeper, often hidden, world of ideas. For Andy, no observation in nature is too small or banal. A single ripple on a pond can inspire him to connect, reflect, and ultimately act. It’s this unique ability to draw lessons from ecological adaptation and natural harmony that defines both his creative writing and his professional life. As an emerging technology advisor, Andy bridges the gap between innovation and simplicity. His natural insights guide him in designing solutions that are not just efficient but intuitive—technology that mirrors the seamlessness of natural ecosystems. Through his travel writing, Andy invites readers into his world of wonder, offering a fresh perspective on how nature's rhythms can inspire creativity, balance, and clarity. His work captures not only the beauty of the world but also the boundless possibilities it holds for creativity.

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