A morning walk around Bambu Indah, a bag of rubbish, and a surprisingly good reason to carry a spear. There is a route around Bambu Indah that we have walked for a very long time.
Cynthia and I have been exploring this part of Bali for decades, and one of the nice things about walking the same roads over and over is that you get to know them. You notice when the papayas are ready to pick, when the frangipani comes into bloom, or when the Ayung is high after a night of rain.
You also notice the rubbish. Plastic bottles in the grass, food packaging caught in the drains, bits of waste that had travelled down from somewhere else and ended up along the road.
We think quite a lot about materials at Bambu Indah. What can be grown, what can be reused, what can be composted, and what can simply be left out altogether. Banana leaves become plates, papaya stems become straws, and there are plenty of other small decisions like this around the property. So when you walk outside and find a plastic bottle in the landscape, it is hard not to notice it.
That is how the Trash Walk began. The idea had actually been around before we started doing it at Bambu Indah. Peter Barge, who was living and working in the Green Village community, had become frustrated by the rubbish he encountered on his walks between Green Village and Green School. He came up with a simple pointed tool that allowed him to pick things up without having to touch them, and suddenly collecting rubbish while walking became a much more practical proposition.
There is something slightly ridiculous about walking down a Balinese road carrying a long spear, which may be part of the reason it works so well.
You see a plastic bottle, you spear it, drop it in the bag, then you carry on talking.
The bag was designed by Jaclyn Hodes of AWAVEAWAKE, and it makes a surprisingly big difference. It is an over-the-shoulder bag that sits across your body, so you can keep walking and collecting without having to stop and carry a sack around in your hands. The spear and the bag have become a little system, and once you get into the rhythm of it, you can cover quite a bit of ground.
The best thing, though, is that the walk remains a walk.
You can talk about what is happening at Bambu Indah, something you have been working on, what is growing in the garden, where you are going next, or whatever else comes up when you have an hour together and nowhere particular you need to be.
Over time, the walks have become something we do with the Bambu Indah team, with friends and with guests who are curious enough to come along.
And people get competitive. Not officially competitive, of course. Nobody is keeping a scoreboard, but once you have a spear in your hand and someone three metres ahead of you has just spotted a bottle that you missed, suddenly you are paying rather more attention to the roadside than you were five minutes earlier.
You also start to see the place differently. Walking the same route repeatedly makes you notice where rubbish collects, what gets caught along the riverbanks after heavy rain, and which things seem to turn up again and again. You notice the relationship between the roads, the rice paddies and the Ayung, and you start to understand how quickly something thrown away can become part of the landscape.
That is probably one of the reasons I like the Trash Walk.
There is no big theory required. You don’t have to spend the morning talking about the global waste crisis or solving the world’s problems. There is a piece of rubbish sitting in front of you, and you can pick it up. Then you keep walking.
What’s meant to be a chore has turned out to be a genuinely fun morning out. There is usually a good amount of conversation, plenty of fresh air, a bag that gets heavier as we go, and the slightly strange satisfaction of looking back at the road and knowing that it is cleaner than when you arrived.
And there is breakfast. At Bambu Indah, we have decided that anyone who comes back from a Trash Walk with a bag of rubbish deserves to be fed.
So bring your spear, fill your bag, and come back to the River Warung for breakfast.
We’ll provide the equipment. You just need to come for the walk.
