Journal
Singaraja and the north coast: the Bali that was the capital
Singaraja was the capital of Bali for about a hundred and fifty years. The Dutch took Buleleng in 1849, ran the island from here, and it stayed the administrative centre until 1953 — which means the north coast has an entirely different visual history to the south, and almost nobody photographs it.
It is roughly three hours from Denpasar over the mountains, or a long coastal run round the east. That drive is why it stays quiet. The tourist economy of Bali is arranged along a strip in the south, and Singaraja is on the wrong side of a volcano from all of it.
A different island
The thing that surprises people is how little it looks like Bali. Buleleng was a trading coast long before it was a Dutch province — Bugis sailors from Sulawesi, Chinese merchants, Arab traders, Javanese Muslims. The old port quarter has a Chinese temple, a mosque and a Balinese temple within a few hundred metres of each other, and the architecture is colonial-commercial rather than ceremonial.
Bali is around ten per cent Muslim, and a disproportionate share of that is here. In photographic terms it means the north coast gives you a version of the island that contradicts every stock image of it, which is either a problem or the entire point depending on what you came for.
The old port
Pelabuhan Buleleng, the old harbour, is no longer a working commercial port — the container traffic goes elsewhere — and what is left is a promenade, a monument, some fishing, and a lot of nineteenth-century warehouse frontage in various states of collapse and repair.
It photographs best very early. The fishing boats come in around six, the promenade fills briefly with people exercising, and by eight the light is gone and so is everyone else. The Ling Gwan Kiong Chinese temple by the harbour dates from the 1870s and is still in use.
The markets
Pasar Anyar is the main market and it is enormous — a multi-storey building plus the streets around it, which is where the real activity is. It starts around four in the morning. By seven it is at full pressure and by ten it is winding down.
It is a working market rather than a tourist one, which means two things. Nobody is performing for you, and nobody has any particular reason to accommodate you either. You are in the way. Being in the way politely, in one place, for a while, is a better strategy here than moving constantly.
Lovina, honestly
Lovina, ten minutes west, is the north coast's beach-tourism strip. Black sand, calm water, and a dolphin-watching industry that puts thirty outrigger boats onto the water at six in the morning to chase pods around the bay.
The dolphin trips are worth being clear-eyed about. They are the main economic activity in the area, they are extremely popular, and the pursuit of the animals by that many boats is not defensible on welfare grounds. As a photographic subject the boats are more interesting than the dolphins anyway — thirty jukung fanning out across flat water in the dark, then converging, is a genuinely strong image and does not require anyone to be chasing anything.
Lovina itself is a quiet, slightly faded strip of guesthouses and warung, and the beach at dawn — fishermen, boats, people walking — is one of the more photographable stretches of coast on the island precisely because it is not spectacular.
Inland and west
Brahmavihara-Arama, above Banjar, is Bali's largest Buddhist monastery. Built in the 1970s, terraced up a hillside, with a stupa and a replica of Borobudur's reliefs. It is quiet, working, and about as far from the Balinese-Hindu visual vocabulary as you can get while still being in Bali.
Air Panas Banjar, the hot springs nearby, are carved stone pools fed by sulphurous spouts. Busy on weekends with local families, which is what makes them worth photographing.
The waterfalls — Sekumpul, Gitgit, Aling-Aling and a dozen others — sit in the hills between the coast and the Munduk highlands. Sekumpul is the big one and involves a serious descent. They are heavily photographed and the pictures all look the same, for the straightforward reason that there is one place to stand. If you go, the interesting material is the access economy around them: the guides, the ticket booths, the motorbike shuttles, the families picnicking.
Working the north coast
The light is harder here. The coast faces north, so you get sun on the water for most of the day and no clean sunrise or sunset over the sea. It is hotter and drier than the south — Buleleng sits in the rain shadow — and the middle of the day is genuinely punishing. Work early, stop, work late.
Distances are long. Singaraja to Lovina is short; Singaraja to the waterfalls or up to Munduk is an hour of climbing road. Do not plan to combine the coast and the highlands in one day and expect to photograph either properly.
Fewer people speak English than in the south, and more speak Balinese as a first language. A few words of Indonesian go further here than anywhere else on the island.
It is not set up for you, which is the whole reason to come. There is no photographic infrastructure, nobody expects you, and nothing is arranged. That is either the appeal or it isn't.
Why it repays the drive
Most bodies of work about Bali are made within twenty kilometres of Ubud. The north gives you the same island under different economic and religious conditions, photographed by almost nobody, three hours from the airport. The pictures are not automatically better. They are simply less likely to be pictures somebody else already made.