Catherine Wheeler: Bali’s viper charmer

Trisha Sertori ,  Contributor ,  Ubud   |  Thu, 11/05/2009 11:19 AM  |  People

Courtesy of Jenny Bigio

Green pit vipers of Bali as garden guests are highly preferred to the grumpy bears of Canada’s wilderness. This makes perfectly good sense; bears can rip your legs off for entrée and finish the rest of you off as mains. Green pit vipers tend just to nip.

Canadian born Bali resident and writer, Catherine Wheeler, or Ibu Kat as she is better known, has experience of both. Her cousin was killed by a bear when still a youngster. Wheeler’s been terrified of the great beasts ever since.

Her annual trips home to visit her sister are fraught with nightmares of meeting up with a Bad Bear during her early morning forays into the orchard in search of fresh apples. Bears also enjoy a good apple. Her sister Robin is very comfortable with bears and howls down a mother and her cubs out of her apple trees, hoping like hell these are Normal Bears, not Hungry or Bad Bears.

When asked who stands around chatting with bears to check out their psychosis levels, Wheeler replies “Rural Canadians do. I just run for cover. I’d much prefer to meet a snake.”

That wish is often granted in Wheeler’s dense tropical garden on the edge a steep ravine in the heart of Ubud. The writer’s garden is a veritable green viper papaya pit. When the vipers aren’t laying eggs all over the place it is the papayas taking over, she explains.

According to Wheeler, there is a papaya planting ghost running around, she says she wakes up daily to find another hundred or so have sprung up in the garden where she planted everything except papayas. “But they are delicious,” she chuckles, tossing another papaya stripling over the cliff to join its cousins. None have ever appreciated the move, writes Wheeler in her delightful, whimsical, informative, utterly charming book, Dragons in the Bath, of her life in Bali.

Wheeler was recently speaking at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival about her book and other topics dear to her heart – there are many and they all revolve around her passions of a healthy earth, healthy community and her raucous garden.

Better known as “the farm”, Wheeler’s garden has at various times been home to Bali pigs, ducks, geese, chickens, doggies, Lace monitors, frogs, toads, civets and any other stray creature that feels in need of a good lie down after a night’s hunting. And of course, the green pit vipers of Bali.

“I have asked them [the vipers] to stay out of the house. I was cutting back the hibiscus the other day and I happened to notice a green viper wrapped around one of the branches I had just trimmed. I asked him, very politely, to just stay there while I took viper, branch and all to the undercliff and let him go,” says Wheeler, who would not have been half so pleasant to a bear.

Reading Wheeler’s book is like speaking with the woman herself or to put it the other way around, speaking with Wheeler is like reading her book – it is a seamless match. Both the book and its writer are totally engaging.

Wheeler arrived in Ubud not long after the Asian financial crisis. She had spent a decade working across Asia writing for a Canadian project and Canada’s Financial Post. “I interviewed everyone from rice farmers to Cabinet ministers. Sometimes I would be in three countries in a 24-hour span,” says Wheeler of the whizzing pace of life when she was based in Singapore.

When the wheels fell of the Asian economy, Wheeler said she knew she should head for Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur for work, “but there was this little voice in my head whispering Ubud.

“I first came to Ubud in 1969, 40 years ago. I am now settled here, hopefully forever. When I came back to Asia in 1990, I started to come here as a tourist. Then in 1998 everything went pear-shaped. I told myself I should be practical. But that little voice kept whispering Ubud. I did not know the language, couldn’t work here, but that little voice reeled me in. Moving to Ubud was the best decision I have ever made,” says Wheeler over tea poured from her grandmother’s silver tea service.

While Wheeler’s decision to settle in Indonesia has made her more content than she has been in her life, Indonesia has also gained from her move.

Wheeler has assisted in establishing a Rice Intensification System (SRI) in Bali and developed a recycling program called Eco-Bali Recycling. She is also teaching 500 students in a nearby school how to recycle their litter and waste, as well as currently assisting a foundation supporting deaf children create a deaf sign language manual so parents can better communicate with their children. Through the Rotary Sunset Club, she has helped rice farmers access a mobile rice mill that keeps many additional hard-earned rupiah in their pockets and has written dozens upon dozens of funding proposals for many foundations to carry out important social works. Currently Wheeler has her sights on Bali as a center for carers for the elderly, ill or disabled who may choose to retire on the island.

“One of the projects I am very interested in getting started is changing the focus of kids going into tourist schools. Tourism is such a very fragile economic base, one bomb and its over. What we are increasingly seeing in Bali is older people coming here to retire. There are a number of women in their 70s and 80s in Bali. I can see a very promising niche coming up for carers. I would like to see role models going into schools and talking about nursing and learning English. With these skills, they world find excellent employment with Indonesians and expats,” says Wheeler, pointing out there is a worldwide shortage of English-speaking nurses.

Helping people is what brings Wheeler joy; she says living in a town like Ubud, where most people know each other, makes seeing the solutions to problems far easier than in large cities.

“Because we are living at the village level, the grassroots, we are sitting right in the issues. We are not at arms length, so we are pushed to find solutions for our staff or neighbors or ourselves. It’s really seldom if living in a city and we see something wrong that we can do anything to help. But at the village level you are sitting in it. You can do something,” says Wheeler.

On arriving in the archipelago, Wheeler embraced Indonesia, and for her championing of the environment, farmers, the disabled and the country have embraced her right back.

Wheelers’ book is a must read for anyone planning to live, or even holiday, in Indonesia. It explains perfectly, and with true appreciation, the idiosyncrasies of Indonesian time frames, the ease of house building, how to build a garden without even trying, how new residents can assist the island’s poorest native inhabitants, protect the environment, manage magic and get on housemate terms with green pit vipers.

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