Chapter 17: Oh what a funny sad world we live in

Karen and I eventually dragged ourselves out of Amed, and set out for Lovina on the northern coast of Bali. We stopped in the village of Thirtagangga, with unparalleled views of rice paddies sloping down a pretty valley, and went for lunch at Puri Prima Bungalows, where my best friend Ruth and I stayed nearly 10 years ago. The proprietor of the bungalows at that time, Mr Ngurah, was an older Hindu Balinese man who’d lived for many years in Jakarta, where he worked as a banker, and he had a son overseas, in London I think. One night Mr Ngurah and I stayed up talking late, about art, politics etctera and then he changed the topic and blew my mind wide open with astonishment, when he accurately and perceptively read my soul. He talked about the deepest issues in my life, and made some encouraging noises about what to do about them. Then he got up and went to bed. Naturally, I’ve never forgotten the old man since, and I wanted to see if he was still around. The Puri Prima looked the same, and Mr Ngurah was still there, though unfortunately in Denpassar for the afternoon, so I didn’t get to see him. But that I guess is the working of fate, and I was glad to have paid a visit and to have discovered that he is still there, talking to travellers late into the night.

Then, around the volcano base and, climbing, climbing up the slopes until we hit Penelokan and Kintamani, which are little villages perched on the rim of this huge volcano cauldera. The views are beautiful, but it’s hard to enjoy them because Penelokan is peopled by some of the most aggressive and unpleasant hawkers you are likely to find anywhere in the world, save, of course, for Morocco. If you had been outside Bali’s second holiest temple Pura Ulun Danu Batur on the morning of 9 May you would have seen a sight to make your blood curdle; a big Western man (me) shouting loudly at a small diminutive Balinese woman, who was kindly trying to place a holy sash around my waste so that I could enter the temple. But appearances are deceiving; she was not only a fearsome hawker, she was also a demon, and she was aggressively manhandling me with the sash even as she was demanding an absolutely outrageous sum for renting it. Karen came up with the brilliant theory that it’s the fiery volcano which works its way into the temperment of the people in the region. We quickly learned to do a very fine Lucy Liu from Charlie’s Angels Impersonation (No, no, No! No, no, no, no NO!) At certain points I thought the hawkers were going to intercept our slowly moving jeep and wrestle it to the ground. We were going to stay in Kintamani, but we decided to press on to Lovina Beach, a supposedly chilled out backpacker beach resort in the north of Bali.

All I can say about Lovina is that it is a Hole of Note. We did go for a lovely massage at Agung’s Massage, and at one restaurant a beautiful sulfur-crested cockatoo in a cage delightfully put his head close down to my hand so that I could scratch his head behind his crest. If a cockatoo could purr, this one did! But Kintamani and Lovina put Karen and I in a philosophical frame of mind: Why is it that tourism inevitably destroys the very things which draw the tourists in the first place? Beautiful scenery is replaced by ugly hotel blocks and cavalcades of tour busses. Natural beaches are replaced by litter and sewerage. Wonderful culture is replaced by dances performed by bored youths in hotel courtyards for disinterested tourists eating crappy food. And most egregiously of all, peaceful kind friendly people are replaced by demonic hawkers shouting inches from your face, “You want buy sarong? Good price!”

In Lovina, however, I was once again reminded that not all human pests are of the local variety. Indeed, there is great danger – GREAT DANGER – in talking to other tourists. I innocently said hi to a 40-something American man at breakfast one morning in the restaurant of the homestay where we had put up for the night. Big mistake, and I mean BIG. I suppose the bandana tied around his neck in some faux-safari look should have been ample warning for me, but I was groggy, not having had my coffee yet, and so I was not fully alert to the dangers. But did I ever become rapidly aware. For the next hour, he bombarded us with details of his “first indigenous experience” with some villagers near Amed, and described picture by picture each photograph he took. Then he tried to draw for us a houseplant he had at home which was flowering, purely on his own initiative. (I have an interesting plant at home, that’s close to flowering, here, let me draw it for you, it has leaves that go…...). Then he showed my some prose he’d written on “fishing for tourists” a time-honoured, if somewhat clichéd topic, but his prose was excruciating. We asked for none of this. In fact we were stone silent pretty much the whole time. Anyway, once we had shook this pest – probably the only time Karen has ever been joyously glad to hear Liam SHRIEK out at the top of awesomely powerful little lungs in a crowded restaurant “Mummy, I need to poo!” – we hightailed it out of there, and headed west. Go west young man, when the going gets tough.

Anyway, we arrived near Pemuteran, and just chilled out for three days at a lovely seaside cottages; we couldn’t really swim in the ocean however because of the outflow pipes from multiple fish farms near by, but the place had lovely views and a pool and a very limited menu (rice, tuna, beer, coffee, banana, pineapple were about it). I went diving near Pula Melanjan, and had a wonderful wall dive where I saw various super brightly coloured nudibranches, three lion fish, fantastic soft coral and two massive blue lump-headed wrasses. After just one dive, however, my ears are toast, and I’m going to have to ration my diving very sparingly in the future, recognizing that I just don’t really have the ears for it. I wrote the first draft of what I hope will be a wonderful short story about love found, lost and then returned. Liam has discovered his sovereign will, and is exercising it in the most fearsome autocratic fashion, ignoring all orders or requests for good behavior, and shrieking when he doesn’t get his way. And yet, he remains totally charming when we play, full of fun, curiousity and life. He’s such a Guy, fascinated by cars, trucks, mobile phones, dirt, water, and best of all motorbikes. In Lovina we’d turn our eyes for just a moment and then find Liam many meters away, sitting on the curb with his thumb in his mouth amongst a group of lounging Balinese motor cycle dudes. He wants to drink my beer too.

Sad, awful, tragic news. We leave Pemuteran and I access my SMS messages. A whole host of them come through, and the last one is heartbreaking. Mark Norrie, the friend of Keith and Harry’s whom I met in Ubud, and who had me over to dinner at his house just 10 days ago, has killed himself. William and I knew that he was depressed by not having a job, but neither of us thought that it was this severe. And yet, I feel that I ought to have known. It is senseless, tragic, shocking. I don’t feel like staying in Bali anymore. Mark, where ever you go now, travel in peace.

Chapter 16: Ow-ee!

Oh my God. What are these huge bites on my ass?

Chapter 15: From Club Med to Amed

I go to Ubud where I am instructed by my Johannesburg friends Keith and Harry to contact a friend of theirs. Mark is a Canadian from Winnipeg, an avian zoologist, who has sensibly been living in Bali for the last 5 years. I try to ring Mark repeatedly and all I get is an unintelligible answering machine message in Bahasia Indonesia with a background musical accompaniment which sounds like a gamelan orchestra on dirty speed. Eventually I reach Mark – his mobile battery was not charged – and we meet up for lunch. He is accompanied by a South African friend named William who breeds exotic parrots near Durban. I click nicely with William; he is my favorite kind of South African man: witty, learned, independent, sparky, and passionate about what he does. One problem: he has a boyfriend. Damn. He knows most of my South African friends – those of you on this circulation list who recognize yourselves, be warned, I know everything! William takes me and my friend Karen and her 2 year old son out to the magnificent Bali Bird Park, where William tells us everything about the immense variety of cockatoos and parrots. He’s worried that he’s boring us, but he doesn’t realize just how interested I am in natural history and zoology in particular. I think about why it is that William ended up following his passion of zoology, while I rather abandoned mine. When I hold a palm cockatoo, I’m totally hooked by the bird bug. The cockatoo is a huge bird with a charcoal gray serrated crest of feathers (like a palm tree) on its head and bright red cheeks of skin. He gently clutches my two outstretched fingers with one foot, while using the other to hold a cob of corn, maize, or mealie (depending on where you live.) The palm cockatoo keeps one eye on me and then eats the corn, using its beak and tongue to gently eviscerate one kernel at a time. I’m absolutely sure that I want one. And they only cost $12,000 a pair or something like that. Mark throws a lovely dinner party, at his lush house in Ubud. I talk to tons of interesting people. We have to be careful in the garden because the coconuts are ripe and so are dropping lethally from the trees. Mark’s cooks make the most fantastic Indonesian food. I eat until I’m within a shade’s whisker of exploding. And then I have some more. Two of Marks’ guests, French jewelry designers living in Bali, invite me, Mark, William and some of the other boys over for dinner the next night. I suspect sexual intent, but I go anyway, figuring that there is safety in numbers. Their house is beautiful at night. The lit pool looks like a glowing aquamarine jewel set in the shadowed lawn, with the silhouettes of huge palm and banana trees all around it. Bats are flying around everywhere, and the frogs are croaking. There are vases and vases of papyrus and tuber roses everywhere on the terrace where I’m drinking chilled rose wine out a beautifully beaded silver goblet. I get heady, but I’m not sure if it’s from the wine or the scent of the tuber roses. I wonder where the photographer from Tatler is. William leaps in to the rescue and takes tons of photos, promising to send me some so that I can show friends that I don’t always sink to the bottom.

Karen, her son Liam and I rent a car – well it was actually Karen and I who responsible here since Liam is only two and has not yet got his driver’s license – and drive from Ubud to the tiny mountain hamlet of Sideman. We stay in Lihat Wisah Pondok Wisata, the latter two words meaning homestay. They make me a tasty clear broth chicken and vegetables for lunch. We have a five-star view over a lush valley of green rice fields and palm trees. It’s very peaceful, except somewhere in the valley is the whining sound of a chainsaw. Fortunately, it soon ceases, and the green dappled light everywhere becomes totally hypnotic. We decide to do nothing. Off to the right of our shaded porch overlooking the valley, you can see Mount Agung, Bali’s holiest mountain. One day Karen and Liam and I drive out there, to Pura Besakih, Bali’s holiest temple. The so-called temple guardian manipulates my white guilt beautifully into giving him an extortionate tip. I find a lady who sells purple mangosteens - my favorite fruit in the whole world - and I buy four kilos to gorge on. I try to feed Liam a segment of the delicious mangosteen but a look of alarm steels across his face, as though he had discovered accidentally that I was secretly trying to poison him. In fact, though he’s a sweet little boy. And while he acted up dreadfully the first few days after I met up with Karen, he seems to have settled down nicely now that he perceives that I’m an additional playmate and not a threat to his relationship with his mother. We play great hide and seek in our hut; he loves to be frightened. Liam plays in the garden with the Balinese workers from the hotel. They are so wonderful, the Balinese, always ready to answer a smile or a hand held up in greeting with a huge smile in return. And all the Balinese men are interested in Liam as a person. I think that there are few places in the world where grown men pay so much attention and show so much interest in children, and especially in other peoples’ children. Sadly, while the Balinese may be wonderful to other people, they are not so kind to animals. There is a beautiful little bird in a tiny bamboo cage next to our hut. It is so bored that it does somersaults and side flips on its perch. It’s tragic to see, and we are sorely tempted to free it. Karen and I drag the mattress out onto the upstairs balcony and sleep in the open air. The moon is full and lucent. At 4 am in the morning I’m awoken very rudely by a cock that crows in rapid succession a series of extremely loud and scratchy cockadoodledoos about 3 meters from my head right outside our hut. I get up, go downstairs, and exit out the front door to find this cock and strangle it. However, it has cleverly hidden itself.

We leave Sideman and drive to Amed, thus making the full trip from Club Med to Amed. This journey is not just physical and geographic, but also conceptual and psychological, since we’ve come from the Golden Ghetto to Peaceful Paradise. For Amed is just a tiny village in the remote northeast of Bali. Near here is a village which sees so little of the tourist trade that the town elders erected on the beach a giant concrete statue of a swan in an effort to draw a few more visitors. In fact, Amed is not really a lot more than a collection of bamboo shacks on a beach of pure black volcanic sand, and a few dive shops. Our cabin at the Three Brother’s Bungalow fronts the water directly; it is five paces from my bed to the ocean. We can see now a different side of holy Mount Agung, with its perfect volcano shape in the distance. I slept out on the verandah of our bungalow in the light of the full moon, which laid a shimmering path of silver on the still night sea. Awaking before dawn I could see the clouds and the top of Mount Agung all lit a fiery rose colour by the sun, which from my perspective still lay below the horizon. Since I have arrived I haven’t worn anything other than my bathing suit. Yesterday I drank a large Bintang beer and felt terrible; perhaps it’s the formaldehyde, which the local beers are reputed to contain in large quantity. I eat fresh barracuda steamed in a banana leaf each day for lunch. I snorkel off the beach. I can’t dive because my ears and sinuses are still all infected. Karen is quite, quite fed up, I think, with my daily reports about the colour (yellow, streaked with gray), consistency (unbelievably viscous and gluey, maybe I should patent it), and volume (lots, lots, lots) of my snot, but I can’t seem to help myself.

Still, the snorkeling is good. I’ve seen a moray eel, a giant clam, a whole school of inky black devil fish which seem to swim not with pectoral fins but rather by wiggling their dorsal fin, a deadly stonefish, surgeon fish (big gray dudes with a long rhino like horn coming off their foreheads), trumpet fish (the very long, very thin ones which swim just below the surface of the ocean), and a stunning array of colourful parrot fish, puffer fish, bat fish, black, yellow and white angel fish, and other fish too manifold to name. Also while out there I swam into a whole school of tiny flashing silver fish which extended for as far as I could see. I felt like I was swimming in flashing, scintillating bubbles. Then I came upon a cleaning station. This is where a couple of little eel-like wrasse set up shop on a piece of flat rock or coral to clean larger fish of parasites and dead skin. A big puffer fish comes along and halts by the station. He opens his gill flaps very wide for the little wrasse, who scoot right inside the puffer fish so that you can’t see them anymore! Everywhere, you can hear a chittering, grating, clicking sound in the water; it’s the fish scraping the coral and volcanic stones for algae. I have worn nothing but my bathing suit, morning till night, since we arrived. Yesterday I taught Liam how to put his head under water. Today he’s forgotten though. However, he still remembers the other trick which I taught him: how to go up to his mother, poke her in the stomach, and ask “What’s up with you?” We have abandoned our itinerary, and have decided to stay another day.

Chapter 14: Oh pull me again, and faster this time Uncle Peter

First time in my life I ever heard about a boat leaving early. I am hussled out of my room by the hotel staff at Mushroom Beach Bungalows, who shout “The boat is leaving, leaving hurry hurry.” It’s 6:30am, the boat is only supposed to leave at 7:00. Travelling in the developing world you get used to things leaving late, but every so often the tropics throws something new at you, like the boat leaving early. Thus, despite the fact that I’m unshowered, unfed, uncoffeed, I’m running down the beach, which has become all soft and mushy with the recent high tide, with a big duffle bag and a packsack slung over my shoulder. It’s very difficult and by the time I reach the boat I have worked up a healthy lather of sweat. I feel REAL nice. And all that is left is a seat between two old ladies who converse with each other through my head; they appear to believe it’s hollow, and from the ringing noise in it, I’m inclined to agree. People are spitting on the floor right by my feet. I think about parasites. (If you haven’t guessed yet, I am slightly phobic about parasites). Anyway, the reason for my frantic departure is that I have to get down to Nusa Dua, also called the Golden Enclave, which is basically where all of the luxury resorts are to see my old university friends Francis and Jackie and their ethereally beautiful two kids. My boyfriend and I were closest friends with Jackie and Francis in university, but after we graduated from university we all went our separate ways: they to Hong Kong and my by-then-ex-boyfriend and I to London (although not together: I went first, he followed me, but that’s another long story…). We’ve seen each other as often as possible over the years, but the last time now was in 1997. I am astounded. They are totally unchanged, and I’m convinced that they’ve been sipping from some Asian fountain of youth. I look closely for signs of plastic surgery but can see none.

Club Med is rather gruesome, though to be fair, Jackie did warn me beforehand that they play Vamos a la Playa at the poolside each afternoon, with guests lining up right on the pool’s edge to be led through a new – and utterly inane – dance. The predominantly French, Japanese, and Korean guests love this, and I speculate whether this is because their societies are so conformist that they can only let loose in some idiotic activity like this. I also saw during my tenure there (fortunately when my stomach was empty) a tall, gangly and yet also fat, hairy man in his mid-40s wearing a white singlet and a blue sarong, and it’s not working well for him. But the piece de resistance is the fact that he has had his hair plaited into tiny cornrows and each plait tipped with a blue and white beads. You think Venus Williams looks stupid? You have no idea.

Still, Club Med is wonderful, I suppose if you have kids since you can park them in Kids’ Club, which is essentially a roaming full day babysitting service of outdoor activities like gymnastics, tennis, swimming, and archery. This last one sounded dangerous to me, but I didn’t hear of any toddler fatalities while I was there. But it’s wonderful to see Jackie and Francis again, and they introduce me to some very, very nice friends of theirs from Hong Kong. Also, I fall totally in love with Jackie and Francis’ kids from the word go. Dominic, 7, is a quiet intelligent little elf. He reminds me of myself at his age: skinny as a refugee, huge dark eyes glued to a book, fascinated by natural history. When he’s not reading he quietly observes the whole world. He tells his parents, “When I grow up I want to study sharks, if I am not too afraid”. I feel a special affinity for this funny little boy. Danielle, 5, is a totally engaging, funny, little performer. We go to the Hyatt one night because she wants to eat prawns and watch the Balinese dance. Jackie, Francis, Dominic and I are bored by the dance, but Danielle cannot tear her eyes away. The night is lovely and hot and we eat lobster and drink fresh squeezed lime and soda. The kids speak both Mandarin and English, and thus engender in me feelings of intellectual and cultural inadequacy, which are exacerbated when I discover that the kids of Jackie and Francis’ friends are completely trilingual in English, French and Mandarin thanks to their French father, Taiwanese mother, and English school.

All the kids are great. One shouts in awe at me, “You’ve got strong muscles!” and comes to tell me solemnly that he thinks I’m crazy after he sees my skydiving photos. For the duration of my stay I’m nominated as Uncle Peter. This role has special responsibilities, which I take very, very seriously. First: joining the kids in the search for crabs on the beach, and having to find the largest one plus other good animals. Second, being a locomotive engine in the swimming pool and pulling all the kids around on their floating mattresses (“Faster, Faster! Uncle Peter, Faster!”). Third, receiving at my door advance delegations from Dominic and Danielle whenever it’s time to go anywhere. They look up at me with luminous round eyes, “Come on Uncle Peter, it’s time to go.” Fourth, piggybacking kids down the lengths and breadths of Club Med’s corridors and hallways, jumping and whinnying like a rabid mule. It’s great fun.

I learn why everyone seems to be named Wayan or Made or Nyoman or Ketut. Basically the bottom two lower castes of the Balinese, comprising merchants and farmers and so nearly everyone except the Brahmin and the once-upon-a-time royal family, have a very simple nomenclature for their children. Whether male of female, the first child is called Wayan, the second Made, the third Nyomen, and the fourth Ketut. What happens if there is a fifth child, or a sixth? Well, the names are just used over again. Very occassionally you hear names like Putu and a few others, but these are rare exceptions to the general naming rule. I dunno, kinda takes your individuality away doesn’t it?

One day we go water skiing. Francis and I manage, rather inelegantly I must report, to get up on one ski but we barely manage to hang on behind the boat for two small circles of the bay, and collapse winded, with throbbing arms and sore knee joints into the water. Francis and I assure Jackie that once upon a time (a fabled era known as the 20s) we could water ski for hours at a time. To console ourselves, we go for lunch at one of the exclusive Aman hotels. It’s high on a hill and stunning. I realize that I love stylish expensive hotels, and with the Aman costing $500 plus per night I wonder – yet again - if it was altogether wise to quit the profitable world of investment banking for the penurious world of literary creation. So far, I’ve written one and a half short stories, and a couple of poems. I console myself about my Aman experience (which was to console myself about my water skiing experience) by hanging out at the Club Med spa – a quiet refuge from Vamos a la Playa by the poolside - where I have a lavender body wash, a Balinese coffee body scrub, a rejuvenating carrot moisturizer treatment, and a Banyan massage. Jackie and Francis and I hang out and talk of this and that and realize that we’ve been friends for nearly 20 years. That sends me running back to the spa for an avocado moisturizing facial. It doesn’t work.