GEEO Bali and Komodo Google Earth Presentation

USA

Today I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to Indonesia through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

Southeast Asia

Indonesia is part of Asia, the largest continent on Earth. More specifically, it sits in Southeast Asia—the region south of China and east of India that includes countries like Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Roughly one in twelve people on the planet lives in Southeast Asia, and it has some of the most densely populated places in the world.

Indonesia belongs to a part of Southeast Asia sometimes called the Malay Archipelago. An archipelago (pronunciation) is a chain or cluster of islands. This one is the largest in the world, with more than 25,000 islands spread across the sea between mainland Asia and Australia.

These islands sit on the sea routes connecting China and India, so for thousands of years, traders, sailors, and travelers passed through constantly, carrying goods, languages, and religions with them. Almost everything about modern Indonesia was shaped by that traffic.

Indonesia

Indonesia (pronunciation) is made up of roughly 17,000 islands, about 6,000 of which have people living on them. It straddles the equator, and it is longer than you probably imagine: if you laid Indonesia across a map of the United States, it would more than stretch all the way across the country from the Pacific coast all the way to the Atlantic. (Try it yourself using The True Size Of…)

Indonesia is also the fourth most populous country in the world, behind India, China, and the United States. About half of all Indonesians live on a single island, Java, which is one of the most crowded places on the planet. Indonesia is also home to more Muslims than any other country—roughly 87% of Indonesians practice Islam—and to more than 700 languages.

That diversity is reflected in the country’s official motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, an Old Javanese phrase usually translated as “Unity in Diversity.” Holding together thousands of islands and hundreds of language groups as one nation has never been easy, and it is one of the central stories of modern Indonesia.

For roughly three hundred years, most of these islands were controlled by the Netherlands and called the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch wanted the region’s valuable spices, like nutmeg, cloves, and pepper. Japan occupied the islands during World War II, and on August 17, 1945, two days after Japan surrendered, a nationalist leader named Sukarno (pronunciation) declared Indonesia independent. The Netherlands fought to take it back and finally gave up at the end of 1949. Indonesians still celebrate August 17 as their independence day.

Indonesia is in the process of building an entirely new capital. The current capital, Jakarta is a huge, crowded city, and it is literally sinking—parts of it have dropped several feet in recent decades. The government is constructing a replacement called Nusantara on the island of Borneo, the biggest island in the middle of the country. Nusantara is planned to officially become Indonesia’s political capital in 2028, with final full completion of the city targeted for 2045.

Bali

Bali is one small island in Indonesia, but it is one of the most interesting, with over 4 million people living on it. While Indonesia is overwhelmingly Muslim, Bali is not. Around 87% of Balinese people practice Balinese Hinduism, a religion found almost nowhere else on Earth. It grew out of Hinduism that arrived from India by sea more than a thousand years ago, and then blended with much older Balinese traditions of honoring ancestors and the spirits of mountains, rivers, and trees. The result is related to Hinduism in India but is genuinely its own thing.

One idea sits at the center of it: Tri Hita Karana, which means roughly “three causes of well-being.” The three are harmony with the divine, harmony with other people, and harmony with nature. You can see this idea show up over and over—in how farmers share water, how villages are laid out, and how temples are built.

Bali is sometimes called the Island of the Gods, and it has an astonishing number of temples—well over ten thousand, from enormous complexes down to small family shrines in the corner of a courtyard. Almost every Balinese household has one.

Once a year, Bali observes Nyepi (pronunciation), the Balinese New Year, also called the Day of Silence. For twenty-four hours, the entire island stops: no traffic, no work, no lights, no shopping. Even the international airport closes. Imagine your whole state going completely quiet for a full day, once a year, on purpose.

Denpasar

Bali’s capital and main city is Denpasar, and flights arrive at Ngurah Rai International Airport. I Gusti Ngurah Rai (pronunciation) was a Balinese officer who led fighters against Dutch troops trying to retake Indonesia after World War II. In November 1946, badly outnumbered and surrounded near the village of Marga, he and his men refused to surrender and were killed almost to the last person. Indonesia named him a National Hero, and his face is on some of their money.

In Indonesian, terima kasih (pronunciation) means “thank you.” In Balinese—which is a separate language, spoken alongside Indonesian—people say suksma.

Jatiluwih Rice Terraces & the Subak

If you drive inland from the city, you will pass over hills and through rice terraces like the ones at Jatiluwih (pronunciation), where the hillsides have been carved into hundreds of stepped, flooded fields that follow the curve of the land.

This is called terracing. On a steep slope, rain runs straight downhill and erodes the topsoil as it goes, so farmers cut the hillside into a staircase of flat shelves that hold a shallow pond of water needed to grow rice. Volcanic ash from Bali’s eruptions has made this soil very rich, which is why rice grows so well here.

But the real achievement is something called the subak (pronunciation). Water flows downhill from lakes high up in the mountains through tunnels and canals to reach the fields—which means the farmer at the top of the mountain controls whether the farmer at the bottom gets enough water. To keep that situation stable, Balinese farmers organized themselves into cooperatives, also called subaks. Each subak is a democratic association: members meet, vote, decide together who gets water and when, and share responsibility for maintaining the canals. Water schedules are coordinated through the water temples, so the system is agricultural, social, and religious all at once. It has been running for over a thousand years.

In 2012, UNESCO named this landscape a World Heritage Site. UNESCO is a branch of the United Nations, and a World Heritage Site is a place recognized as so important to all of humanity that the world has a shared interest in protecting it.

Ulun Danu Beratan Temple

Nearby on the shore of Lake Beratan sits Pura Ulun Danu Beratan (pronunciation)—pura simply means “temple” in Balinese. It was founded in the 1600s and dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of lakes and rivers.

The temple is famous for its tiered pagoda-like towers that appear to float on the water. Those towers are called meru, named after Mount Meru, the sacred cosmic mountain in Hindu tradition. The number of tiers are always an odd number and indicate the status of the deity the shrine honors.

Even though it is a Hindu temple, there is also a Buddhist stupa at the complex. Hinduism and Buddhism arrived in these islands together along the trade routes between China and India, and in Bali they never fully separated. Balinese Hindu temples often contain Buddhist elements.

This is not just a beautiful religious building. Lake Beratan is one of the mountain lakes that feeds the irrigation systems we just discussed. The goddess of the lake and the water in the rice fields are, in Balinese thinking, the same subject.

Munduk & the Twin Lakes

Two other lakes nearby, Buyan and Tamblingan, are known as the Twin Lakes. Both fill part of an ancient volcanic crater (so does Lake Beratan).

The village along the ridge of the ancient volcano is called Munduk (pronunciation). It is surrounded by coffee and clove plantations. In the early 1900s, Dutch colonial officials built rest houses here to escape the heat of the lowlands. A few of those buildings still stand along the main road, reminding visitors how Bali spent decades under foreign rule.

These islands were once the only place on Earth where clove and nutmeg trees grew, and European countries fought wars over control of them. The spice rack in your family’s kitchen is a result of that history.

Banjar Hot Springs & Singaraja

Down on Bali’s northern side, rainwater soaks into the ground, is heated by the volcanic rock below, and comes back to the surface warm and faintly sulfurous at Air Panas Banjar—the Banjar (pronunciation) Hot Springs. People have bathed here for centuries. The water pours into stone pools through carved spouts shaped like naga, the serpent-dragons of Hindu and Balinese mythology that are associated with water and the underworld.

The hot springs are just down the coast from Singaraja (pronunciation), Bali’s second-largest city. Singaraja was Bali’s capital for over a century; the Dutch made it their administrative center in the 1800s, and it held that role until 1958, when the government moved south toward the new airport and the tourists.

Beji Temple

Just east of Singaraja, in the village of Sangsit, stands Pura Beji, traditionally dated to the 1400s and one of the oldest temples on the island still in use.

Beji is a subak temple—it belongs to one of the farmers’ water cooperatives—and it is dedicated to Dewi Sri, the goddess of rice and fertility, who is honored across Bali and Java. Farmers come here to pray for their harvest.

Northern Bali has a soft pink sandstone that can be carved in extraordinary detail, and the gateway to this temple is complete covered with carvings of flowers, vines, demons, and curling serpents, with almost no surface left smooth anywhere. The carvings are recut every few generations, because the weather gradually erodes them, so the temple is both very old and continuously renewed.

Sekumpul Waterfall

One of the most impressive waterfalls in Bali is Sekumpul (pronunciation). It has several separate cascades, some around 250 feet tall, dropping into the same narrow jungle canyon. The waterfall’s name roughly translates to “a group” or “a bunch,” which is a very literal way of describing what you’re looking at.

Visitors often reach the waterfall by hiking from a nearby village through rice terraces, coffee groves, and durian plantations. Coffee in Bali has a complicated side. Bali produces kopi luwak, sold abroad as the world’s most expensive coffee and made from beans that have passed through the gut of a small mammal called an Asian palm civet. Farmers once gathered these beans from wild civets that wandered into the plantations. As demand grew, many operations began caging and force-feeding civets, which animal welfare groups have documented as cruel. It’s an example of what can happen when a small local tradition becomes popular on the global market.

Mount Batur

One of the most dramatic landscapes in Indonesia is at Mount Batur, where an enormous “bowl” holds a lake, a black lava field, and an active volcano. That bowl is a caldera (pronunciation); a caldera isn’t a giant hole blasted out by a volcanic explosion, but instead forms after a volcano empties much of its underground magma. With that space now empty, the ground above loses its support and collapses inward. The outer Batur caldera is roughly 8 by 9 miles across and formed about 29,000 years ago. A second, inner collapse happened around 20,000 years ago. Lake Batur, Bali’s largest lake, fills part of it.

Growing inside that inner caldera is Mount Batur itself, 5,633 feet tall and still active, with recorded eruptions going back to 1804 and activity as recently as 2000. Travelers can hike to the summit in the dark to reach the top at sunrise, and when the sun comes up you can see across to Bali’s highest and most sacred mountain, Mount Agung (pronunciation), the mountain on the left.

Agung’s eruption in 1963–64 was one of the largest volcanic eruptions anywhere in the twentieth century, killing well over a thousand people and burying farmland in ash. It also began while Balinese Hindus were preparing a purification ceremony held only once every 100 years on the slopes of Mount Agung to balance the cosmic forces of good and evil. Agung erupted again in 2017–2019, closing the airport in Bali for several days.

This volcanic activity occurs in Bali because Indonesia sits on the Ring of Fire, the horseshoe of volcanoes and earthquake zones tracing the rim of the Pacific. Earth’s crust is broken into huge moving slabs called tectonic plates, and where one plate is forced beneath another, rock melts and rises. About three-quarters of the world’s active volcanoes sit along this ring, and Indonesia has more of them than any other country—along with some of the richest farmland because of it.

Penglipuran Village

Penglipuran (pronunciation) is one of the most intact traditional villages left in Bali. A single wide stone lane runs uphill through the center, and on both sides, every household entrance is an angkul-angkul—a small roofed gateway. They are all built to the same design, at the same height, and from the same materials. Beyond the village is a protected bamboo forest that the villagers have maintained for generations and use for building.

The village layout follows the Balinese principle of tri mandala, three zones ranked from most sacred to least: the village temple at the top of the hill, family compounds in the middle, and the cemetery at the bottom. Sacred is uphill, toward the mountains. In Bali, “up toward the mountain” and “down toward the sea” are the basic directions people give.

Water Temples

Nearby is a water temple called Pura Gunung Kawi Sebatu that is set in a jungle clearing and fed by natural spring pools. The water in the pools is clear and full of koi.

Bali has a lot of water temples, and they are truly unique. Water that comes out of the ground at a spring is considered holy—tirta—and a temple is built at the source to receive it, bless it, and pass it on. Priests distribute holy water from these temples to households and to the subaks downstream. A water temple is a shrine and a piece of public infrastructure at the same time.

The most famous one is Tirta Empul (pronunciation), founded around the year 962. At this temple, worshippers move along a row of carved stone spouts in a long rectangular pool, bathing under each one in turn in a purification ritual called melukat. The Balinese story attached to the spring says that a king named Mayadenawa poisoned a stream to destroy the god Indra’s army, and that Indra struck the earth to release a spring of clean water that brought his soldiers back to life.

Ubud

In Bali’s interior, the city of Ubud (pronunciation) is considered the cultural heart of the island. It sits among rice fields and river gorges, and its name comes from the Balinese word ubad, meaning “medicine”—the area was known for the medicinal plants growing along its rivers.

Ubud’s royal family spent generations supporting artists, and in the 1930s a group of European painters settled here and worked alongside Balinese artists. A distinct modern Balinese painting style came out of that exchange, and the town is still full of studios, galleries, and workshops for woodcarving, silverwork, and weaving.

One of Bali’s best-known art forms is gamelan (pronunciation), the traditional orchestra of Bali and Java. It is made up mostly of tuned bronze gongs and metal-keyed instruments played with mallets, plus drums and bamboo flutes. Gamelan music sounds like a shimmering, hypnotic wave of percussion and ranges from a calm, flowing stream of sound to a fast, explosive burst of rhythm.

Traditional Balinese dance is also very special. The dancers hold a low stance and use sharp, precise gestures with their fingers and eyes, flicking them to punctuate the music. Children start learning how to perform the dance at a young age from family and neighbors.

The Sacred Monkey Forest

On the edge of Ubud is the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, known in Balinese as Mandala Suci Wenara Wana. It is about 30 acres of dense forest containing three temples dating from around the 1300s, with enormous banyan tree roots draped over the stonework.

It is also home to well over a thousand long-tailed macaques (pronunciation), living in several separate social groups called troops with their own territories inside the forest. They are wild animals, not pets, and they are extremely good at taking things. Sunglasses, water bottles, phones, and hats disappear regularly. Visitors are told not to make eye contact, not to smile with their teeth showing (a threat display in macaque body language), and not to carry food.

Staff feed the monkeys sweet potatoes, papaya leaves, corn, and cucumbers. Visitors used to be able to buy bananas to hand out, but it went badly—the monkeys got overweight and more aggressive—so visitor feeding was stopped. Feeding wild animals almost always changes their behavior, usually for the worse.

The forest is not a zoo. It is temple ground, and the monkeys are part of what makes the place sacred rather than an attraction added to it for tourists.

Candidasa

Candidasa (pronunciation) is a quiet town on Bali’s eastern coast, sitting along the sea with a freshwater lagoon covered in lotus flowers. It has been a fishing village since at least the 1100s. Before it took its modern name it was called Teluk Kehen, or “Bay of Fire,” and Cilidasa, which means “ten children.”

That second name comes from the temple on the hillside above the lagoon. Inside is a statue of Hariti, a goddess shown surrounded by ten children. Balinese couples climb the steps to pray there for a child of their own. Hariti is originally a figure from Buddhist tradition, where she began as a demon who stole children and, after being taught a lesson by the Buddha, became their protector instead. In this temple, she sits alongside a shrine to the Hindu god Shiva.

Candidasa is also an example of how quickly a coastline can be changed. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the town became popular with visitors, people quarried and blasted the coral reef just offshore to make lime and cement for the hotels and guesthouses that the visitors needed. The reef had been acting as a barrier, breaking the force of the waves before they reached land. Once it was gone, the surf hit the shore directly, and within a few years the golden-sand beach that had drawn everyone in the first place had washed away. In the 1990s, hotel owners built around twenty T-shaped stone walls out into the water to try to hold the sand in place, with mixed results. At high tide there is still barely a beach in some stretches, and a large restoration project is under way to rebuild the shoreline.

To understand why this happened, it is helpful to know what a coral reef is. A coral is an animal, not a rock and not a plant. Each one is a tiny soft creature called a polyp, related to jellyfish, that builds a hard limestone cup around itself. Millions of polyps build side by side and generation on top of generation, and the accumulated stone is the reef. Inside their tissues, corals host microscopic algae that photosynthesize and provide food for the coral, which is why coral reefs need shallow, sunlit water. When water gets too warm, a coral expels its algae, loses its color, and starves; this is called coral bleaching, and it is the primary threat facing reefs worldwide today.

The Wallace Line

Between Bali and the island to the east, Lombok, runs one of the most famous invisible lines in science: the Wallace Line.

In the 1850s, a British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace spent eight years traveling through these islands collecting specimens—about 125,000 of them. He noticed something that made no sense. The strait between Bali and Lombok is only about 22 miles wide. You can actually see across it to the other island. Yet the animals on the two sides were almost entirely different. West of that gap he found tigers, monkeys, squirrels, and woodpeckers—the animals of Asia. East of it he found cockatoos, honeyeaters, and marsupials―the pouched mammals of the kind found in Australia. The islands have the same climate, the same kind of forest, and are only twenty-two miles apart, but they are two completely different animal habitats.

Wallace drew a line on the map and explained it like this: During the ice ages, so much of Earth’s water was locked up in glaciers that sea level dropped hundreds of feet. Bali, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo on the west side sit on a shallow underwater shelf, so when the sea fell they were joined by dry land all the way to mainland Asia, and Asian animals walked across. In the same way, Australia and New Guinea were connected on their own shelf. But between the two shelves lies deep ocean, and the strait between Bali and Lombok drops far below any ice-age sea level. That gap never became land, so the animals never crossed. The islands where the two continental shelves meet form a transitional zone that biologists now call Wallacea, and it is full of species found nowhere else on earth.

Wallace is important to history and science for another reason. While he was ill with a fever in these islands in 1858, he worked out a theory of evolution by natural selection, and mailed his essay to Charles Darwin, who had been quietly developing the same idea for twenty years without publishing it. Their work was presented together that year, and Darwin published On the Origin of Species the next. Wallace is far less famous today, but he reached the idea independently of Darwin while in a tiny, stilted hut in Indonesia.

Labuan Bajo & Flores

One of the islands in Wallacea is Flores, which is the gateway to Komodo National Park thanks to its harbor and airport at Labuan Bajo (pronunciation). Not long ago, it was a small fishing village, but now it is a busy town full of boats, shops, and restaurants.

Flores is very different from Bali. It is drier, more rugged, and mostly Catholic rather than Hindu―a legacy of Portuguese missionaries who arrived in the 1500s. Even the name is Portuguese: it comes from Cabo das Flores, “cape of flowers.”

Flores is also the site of one of the most unusual discoveries in the history of human origins. In 2003, in a cave on Flores, archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of an adult hominid who stood about three and a half feet tall, with a brain roughly the size of a chimpanzee’s. The species was named Homo floresiensis and was immediately nicknamed “the Hobbit.” Its ancestors appear to have reached Flores and then, isolated for many generations on an island with limited food, evolved to a smaller body size—the same process that produced dwarf elephants and, alternatively, giant rats and giant lizards, in Indonesia. They were living on Flores as recently as about 50,000 years ago.

Komodo National Park

Komodo National Park was created in 1980 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991. It covers about 850 square miles of islands and ocean: three main islands and twenty-six smaller ones.

The first thing that surprises visitors is how dry it looks. Bali is green year-round, but these islands are golden-brown savanna with scattered palms and thorny scrub, closer to an African grassland than to a tropical island. The reason is because they sit in what is called a rain shadow and have a long, severe dry season. That harsh climate has played a large role in the evolution of the animals here.

The second surprising thing about Komodo is what is under the water. Komodo lies inside the Coral Triangle, a region of ocean spanning much of Southeast Asia. It is the most biologically rich marine area on Earth: about three-quarters of all known coral species live here, along with more than 2,000 kinds of reef fish and six of the world’s seven species of sea turtle.

The Komodo Dragon

The Komodo dragon is the largest living lizard on Earth, and it lives in Komodo National Park and nowhere else. Big males reach about ten feet long and 150 to 200 pounds. Local people call them ora, but Western biologists were not aware of them until around 1910, when a Dutch officer sent word of giant lizards on a remote island and a zoologist confirmed the report in 1912. An American expedition brought specimens back to New York in 1926, and the story of giant reptiles on a lost island helped inspire the movie King Kong.

Komodo dragons are strange animals in several ways.

• They smell with their tongues. They flick their long yellow forked tongues out, collect particles from the air, and press them against a sensory organ on the roof of their mouths. Because the tongue is forked, the lizard can tell whether the smell is stronger on the left or the right and turn toward it, and it can detect a dead animal from miles away.
• Its bite is venomous. Glands in the lower jaw produce proteins that keep a wound bleeding, which researchers confirmed in 2009 after decades in which scientists believed the killing agent was bacteria in its mouth.
• Its stomach stretches enormously, and it can eat up to eighty percent of its own body weight in a single meal.
• Young dragons spend their first years living in trees, because adult Komodo dragons will eat them.

How did they get to be so big? The older explanation was island gigantism: isolated on islands with no large mammal predators, a lizard could grow into the role. Fossil evidence published since then complicates that, however, suggesting the species may descend from large monitor lizards that lived in Australia and simply survived here after dying out elsewhere. Both ideas are still discussed in the scientific community.

Komodo dragons are in trouble today. The best estimates put the total population at roughly three thousand, with fewer than 1,400 breeding adults, and in 2021 the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the species from Vulnerable to Endangered. The threats are habitat loss, declining numbers of the deer they eat, and rising seas, since much of their low-lying habitat could be underwater within a century.

Pink Beach

On Komodo Island, there is a beach that is genuinely, unmistakably pink. There are only a handful of beaches like this in the world.

The color comes from the coral reef just offshore. Mixed into the ordinary white sand, which is itself made of ground-up coral and shell, are countless fragments of red material: pieces of a bright red coral, and the tiny shells of single-celled organisms called foraminifera (pronunciation), or forams. A foram is a single cell that builds itself a hard shell of calcium carbonate, the same material as chalk and seashells, and some species build red ones. When they die, waves grind those shells into red grains of sand that wash ashore and mix with the white sand. Red plus white makes pink, and the shade depends on the ratio.

Padar Island

One of the other big islands in Komodo National Park is Padar (pronunciation) Island. It is a thin, twisting ridge of dry volcanic hills, with curved bays cutting deep into the island from different directions. The beaches are different colors—one is pale, one is dark gray to black, and another is faintly pink—because each is fed by a different mix of eroded volcanic rock and reef material.

Komodo dragons once lived on Padar, but the island’s deer were hunted out and the dragons largely disappeared along with their food supply. In recent years, rangers have reported dragons on Padar again, apparently swimming over from neighboring islands, since they are strong swimmers. Whether a stable population is re-establishing itself is still being watched.

Overview

Bali and Komodo pack an enormous amount into small islands: rice terraces watered by a thousand-year-old farming cooperative, volcanoes and ancient calderas, and an invisible line where the animals of Asia transition to the animals of Australia.

A few themes emerged from our journey:

• Communal sharing: The subak system solved a hard problem—how do farmers upstream and downstream share the same water fairly? In Bali, they solve the problem through cooperation, meetings, votes, and shared rituals. It has worked for a thousand years.
• Living in dangerous environments: The volcanoes that threaten Bali are also what make its soil rich enough to feed millions. People here have not conquered that risk, but they have organized their lives around it.
• Biological diversity due to geography: Wallace’s line, the Coral Triangle, and the Komodo dragon all exist because of where these islands sit—in the gap between two continents and at the meeting point of great ocean currents.