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.
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