Liberty in Bali

Bali is underrated, almost protected – like a secret. Inexplicable in words – a smile is the most commonly used expression use to elucidate the feeling. Go with whatever plans you want, stay there for more than a week and you’ll come back a changed person. Changed for the better.

It’s the best of Kerela meeting Goa with a whiff of the Himalayan air. It’s the warmth of your neighborhood with princely luxury of Rajasthan; the architectural splendor of Tamil Nadu with the hand crafts of Madhya Pradesh. It’s the land that looks and feels so much like India, that you actually become comfortable. It’s the Indian in me that can’t help but seek familiarity.

Once it got all cozy we went on to find something that was unnerving. And so we did.

Liberty was a cargo ship that lasted the two World Wars and was last used to carry railway parts and rubber from Australia to Phillipines. The ship had seen a lot, life bustling with energy and the preparation to end it all for the ‘enemy’. There would have been cooks & engineers, atheists & believers, fathers & sons on the ship. There would have been those that feared and those that ran out of homes leaving unfinished chores. There would have been dreams and plans, stories and gossips. It was being steered by the same old humans made of flesh & blood.

As a tourist attraction, Tulamben was marked on the North East coast of the mainland map. It was a diver’s haven with corals and untouched sea life. The land hosted a variety of plantations thanks to the fertile volcanic soil of the geography. Easy to reach with a short swim on rounded stoney sea-bed, the wreck is intimidating. Stuck vertically with it’s nose down metres into the sea bed, it was towed and then firmly found it’s place here in the 1963 eruption.

What’s now home to many a life is actually a tomb of war. Many lives were lost here, most in defending it, some in attacking it. They all had reasons and a family to feed back home. It’s unnerving to see the structure with dark depths as you peek in. The scary glimpse of human ambition. The gash in the history that diluted blood and dreams to give relevance to this spot on the Google map. There are a hundred other explored wrecks across globe on the explorable sea bed. And it is intriguing as it is daunting to attempt these but our curiosity takes us places.

If you leave the visuals of the death aside, it is a marvel of nature. Rusting iron has become breeding ground for coloful Flora and has many tiny families living all through the dark corners of this mammoth ship. There is music of silence on this ship that settles you. There is proof that there is no death; only life after life in the bigger picture.

There are still bigger fish eating smaller ones, small fish defending themselves with swim patterns, lazy turtles that float past, algae families and coloful corals that toil earnestly to make the site beautiful. For it’s doesn’t matter what size the life lives in, it lives with a single purpose – that of going on.

Bali changed me.