The Roosters That Sit Out by the Road Each Morning
Walk down the lane a little after seven and you will pass them before you understand what they are. Three or four bells of woven bamboo, set out on the grass at the edge of the road, each one about knee-high. Inside each bell, a rooster. Copper and black and bottle-green, standing very straight, watching the morning go by.
Nobody has forgotten them there. They have been carried out on purpose.
In Balinese villages, a man’s roosters are a daily companionship. Every morning the cages come out of the family compound and go down to the roadside, so the birds can sit in the early sun and watch the world: the motorbikes, the school kids, the dogs, the woman with the offering tray. It keeps them alert, people say. It keeps them calm. You will often see their owner crouched beside one of the bells, lifting the bird out, smoothing its feathers with a slow flat hand, ruffling the neck, setting it back. He is in no hurry at all.
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A walk down the lane, a long lunch, the rice fields in the last light of the day. We will send you a three-day Ubud rhythm built around the moments most visitors walk straight past.
Then there is the bathing. Some mornings a rooster gets a careful wash with a splash of water from a bucket, and then it is put back in the bell to dry in the sun, feathers fanned, looking faintly offended. And there is the crowing, which you already know. It starts before light and is passed from compound to compound down the lane, the same lane that later wakes in second gear.
Many of these birds are kept for tabuh rah, an old blood offering that belongs to certain temple ceremonies. It is part of Balinese life rather than a show for visitors, and nothing you are expected to seek out. What you will see, if you look, is the gentler side of it: the pride, the patience, a grown man talking quietly to a bird in a basket.
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On a staffed villa Ubud stay, ask the team about the roosters on your morning walk. Someone will know whose they are, and someone will probably have a story. It sits nicely beside our notes on the ducks that cross the lane at six and the man who walks up the coconut palm.
A small thing worth doing: slow down when you pass the bells. Nod to the man beside them. He will almost always nod back, and often he will smile, because you noticed what he is proud of.
By ten the bells are gone again, carried back inside the walls. The lane goes on with its day, and so do you.
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