Rain, rain, go away: With the tools of his trade, Made Rai prays for clear skies – and gets them. JP/J.B. Djwan

Bali's spirit world is alive and well, traveling into the future alongside instant communications, Mars probes and moon tourism.

In modern Bali no major event is left to the risk of a wash out in the wet season; events here are still under the protective umbrella of the rain men of Bali, the pawang hujan.

Faith in rainmakers is nothing new. Many traditional societies including Native Americans and Australia's indigenous populations depended on the power of their rainmakers to ensure enough rain to flower harsh landscapes with the fruits, roots and vegetables needed for survival.

In the lushness of Bali's tropical conditions, it was the reverse: This ancient society counted on their pawang hujan to glide gray clouds away so the important aspects of religious life could be observed without flooding interrupting the procedures. Today the pawang hujan are called in by corporate clients and temple priests alike.

Made Rai is a cloud chaser who calls up the spirits of the world to drive clouds off into a blue sky distance.

Wizened with age, Rai has been holding back the clouds for the past 65 years or more. He calculates his age by the deaths of presidents, explaining through a Balinese translator.

"I was born before *former Indonesian president* Pak Soeharto. He died last year and must have been at least in his 80s, so I suppose that makes me around 90 years old," says Rai, who gets along surprisingly well with the help of his snake-headed timber walking stick. "I made this about 12 years ago. Ghosts don't like this wood and stay away."

Rai knows a lot about ghosts and rain chasing. He studied under one of Bali's greatest shamans back in the 1930s.

"I started training under Ida Made Gunung. He was the most powerful sakti *shaman* of the time. The only thing I really studied was how to move the rain," says Rai, whose face practically splits in half like a pomegranate, his wide grin unimpeded by his teeth lost over the years.

He points out every pawang hujan has his own method, arrived at through years of trial and error. Rai sets himself up with a range of offerings and an eternal flame before he gets down to the serious business of praying to his Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

"The first thing I do is make a spiritual fence around myself - that's the most important thing. Without that the bad spirits, or even lighting, can enter. Then I make offerings in holy places.

"This work can be really hard if, at the same time I am clearing the sky, a rainmaker is at work also. It's a war up there in the clouds then. I get tired when I have to fight a rainmaker or fend off evil spirits," says Rai.

Rai remembers one very black year, one of the wettest wet seasons he can recall in his almost century on the planet.

"Up here in Budha Keling it was dry. We had no rain, but down the road in Salan it was non-stop rain. They were to have a tooth-filing ceremony. That's a big event. Well, it just kept raining. The shops sold out of umbrellas. They called me to the house of the ceremony, Salat Perang Sari.

"I had to work hard - that was very heavy work and stressing. Well, it was the wet season. In the end all around that house it was raining cats and dogs, but over that house we had clear skies," says Rai of the rain chaser's power he had as a young man.

Rai is still called on to work with the wind and blow rain clouds away. His most recent job was working for candidates during the country's April elections.

"I was clearing the rain for the candidates when they were out talking to the people," Rai says, chuckling over the fact he got paid for the work.

"I don't charge to do this for most people, but if it's offices or the government, well, they can make a donation," says this tiny shaman, who has overseen the clear skies of more village celebrations than just about anyone else Budha Keling.

Where Made Rai is one of Bali's traditional pawang hujan, Made Warmana of Nusa Dua is its contemporary face.

Urbane and multilingual, I Made Warmana is hardly the chap you expect to find chasing down clouds in his spare time. But that's just what this gracious Balinese man does for company events, society weddings, village religious celebrations and just about anything else that needs a clear sky for success.

"I don't actually stop the rain - I just move the clouds away from events and to places that need rain," says Warmana, who is yet to miss a home run in the clear skies stakes.

"I have been doing this since 2000. That's nine years and it has always worked. In the wet season, I perform this rain shifting ritual at least once a day," says Warmana.

His success rate is impressive - the figures work out at four and a half years' worth of rain shifting - without spilling a drop.

While moving clouds about in the heavens may appear to be mumbo jumbo to outsiders, Warmana and his many hundreds of colleagues - and their impressive list of corporate clients - across Bali and into other parts of Indonesia, have no doubt of the rain chaser's value.

So powerful are the pawang hujan believed to be, they are sometimes called in during disasters. Warmana remembers last year's state of emergency in Jakarta when a fuel storage tank at a Pertamina holding facility ignited.

"My wife's family lives near that fuel storage center. Her family called and asked us to make rain. We meditated and soon it was raining over the petrol storage plant - the rain was not heavy, but maybe it was enough to help the situation," says Warmana.

"Recently in Tabanan I did a cloud clearing from a distance. They called me and said the clouds are moving in from the east. As in that case, I will sometimes clear clouds from a distance in urgent situations, but it is far better to be in the area where we can check the landscape and tap into the energy of the lands."

But there is a catch, he adds: "Everyone must have complete faith in this."

In a world that daily grows busier with the material elements of life over the spiritual, that may just be the toughest hurdle for the cloud shifters to clear.

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