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.