A Dumb Tourist Doing Nothing in Bali

As a destination, Bali has a lot to offer The Intrepid Traveller.
For the Adventuresome there’s the famous surfing, or the climb up crepuscular Mt Batur to watch the sunrise. Then there's the white water rafting, or perhaps jungle trekking either on foot or by elephant. The Anthropologist could immerse themselves in village and rural life, living among the locals in a homestay or hostel. The Aesthete could head inland to Ubud, the acknowledged capital of silversmithing, woodcarving, batik and dance, while the Gourmand would have their pick of places offering Balinese cuisine and courses in cooking it.
My Darling Beloved and I however, are not Intrepid Travellers. We are Dumb Tourists. We came to Bali to do precisely nothing, and to do it in comfort.

Choosing the precise location for our lethargy was an exacting task, consisting of finding a hotel that actually had a vacancy. It was mid 2005, not quite three years after the bombings and the New Zealand and Australian governments had issued yet another advisory against travel there, yet the hotels were booked to capacity. In the end we chose the Le Meridien hotel at Tanah Lot, at the western extreme of the tourist triangle which stretches from there, along the south coast to bland and expensive Nusa Dua, as well as inland to Ubud. Tanah Lot Temple, with its traditional pagoda-like structure, is located on a rocky outcrop just off the shore and was built back in the sixteenth century, though the stalls and hawkers and eateries that line the cliff are a more modern phenomenon.

We ventured down to temple itself only once, the day after we arrived in Bali, at 10 in the morning when there were no more than a dozen tourists in all, figuring the experience would be more enjoyable before the daily invasion of the tour buses. Kids swarmed us like mosquitoes, trying to sell packs of postcards for 20,000 Rupiah - about 3 New Zealand dollars - each. The postcard scenes were local but the spiel was universal, the exclamatory and economical broken English aimed exclusively at the hard sell:

"Mister, mister! Postcards! Good price! You buy!"
"Ple-ease Miss! Must sell! Need money!"
"Really good pictures Sir! Look!" waves cards in face "You like! You buy!"

After buying a couple out of pity we spent the next half hour shooing them away. While Indonesia is hardly a third-world nation, economic recession has hit it hard and life was not what exactly what I would call easy. Selling postcards on commission to tourists was the school holiday job for most kids.

That evening, from the comfort and peace of the hotel, we watched the same children go to work on the guided tourists arriving for the golden hour that is the Tanah Lot sunset.

Every morning the hotel posted a list of activities available to the guests. Most of these were far too Intrepid Tourist for my taste, which tended towards long periods next to the pool with a colourful drink at hand. However it would have been silly to come all that way and not venture out the front gate, so my Darling beloved and I booked a couple of massage sessions at a health spa in Seminyak.

Seminyak is, to my mind, the best place to stay on Bali. The beach here curves in an unbroken arc all the way to Jimbaran Bay. It is fringed by hotels, palm trees and a profusion of the sort of frangipani that are sold in pots at garden centres for three figure sums back home. Back from the beach, Jalan Seminyak is lined with mostly air-conditioned shops selling everything from tsotchke, to elaborate woodcraft, to silk and batik, to high end fashion. The streets are narrow. The only traffic law being obeyed is the law of inertia. There was the constant sound of car horns, yet none were sounded in anger. Back home these would be the perfect conditions for road rage but here, nothing is any trouble and everything is done with grace and good humour. If the Balinese do not have a local word for sang froid or mañana, they'd better make one up.

Our taxi trip from Tanah Lot however, reminded me why I'd preferred not to leave the hotel.
Driving in the countryside involves two speeds: walking place or flat out. The vehicle of choice is the scooter, and they are more often than not comically overloaded. The countryside is intensively farmed and rice paddies take precedence over infrastructure, which means the road tips and corners without warning and actually seems to narrow through the villages as it squeezes past the homes and shops crowding right up to its edge. They measure following distances in millimetres here; I missed dozens of photo opportunities because I couldn't pry my white-knuckled fingers off the passenger's door grip. Believe me, when we arrived in Seminyak for our massages, we were ready for them.

We were greeted with large glasses of something fruit-based and guided to our room. I was expecting gentle and soothing, and I don't recall it requesting anything that involved deep-tissue massage or somebody actually walking up and down my back. But walk they did, and I came out feeling like I'd done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Strangely enough, it was so good that I actually considered doing it all again. My Darling Beloved, who actually had red marks down her spine, dissuaded me: there was shopping to be done.

We walked the length of Jalan Seminyak. Twice. My Darling Beloved, who adores shopping, had a blast. I didn't. After the second circuit I decided it was time to eat.

Right on the beach at the western end of Seminyak is a restaurant called La Lucciola. Just why a restaurant serving mostly Asian cuisine and located on a Balinese beach has an Italian name I don't know, nor do I care. The food was exquisite, the sunset view was superb, and I discovered Bintang beer:
"And verily, the Almighty looked upon this island and He was pleased, and He gave the people a nectar sprung fresh from His Eden. And the people rejoiced and they named it Bintang."
That is my personal creation myth for Bintang. I realise I am now a blasphemer and am going straight to hell. It was worth it.
Somehow, we got back to the hotel. And the next day my Darling Beloved sought to punish me and my hangover by taking me shopping in Kuta.

Kuta is ground zero for partying backpackers - literally so back in October 2002. There is a Hard Rock Cafe and a Starbucks. Shops are either air-conditioned malls and supermarkets, or more crowded-in versions of those on Jalan Seminyak, or triple-sided concrete stalls arranged in rows along alleys shaded from the heat by strips of canvas. The streets of Kuta were so crowded as to make Jalan Seminyak look agoraphobic by comparison and are bordered, like most places that need to deal with tropical downpours, with wide and deep open drains which are a treacherous cross at the best of times. I would not be surprised to find the local hospital crowded on a Friday night with drunk tourists and their broken legs.

My wife was ready to haggle, and every encounter she emerged from triumphant, with a black-plastic-bagged purchase on her arm. As the day progressed and the air grew hotter, I took a breather near a construction site. A local man sidled up to me. His English was good but his line was the same as the children at Tanah Lot:

"Gidday Mate."
"Er. Gidday."
"You wanna buy a suit? My friend he makes good suits. Really good price."
"No thanks. Too hot for suits."
"What about shirts. He makes good shirts."
"No. No shirts."
"What about DVDs? "
"Nah. I'm fine thanks."
There was a pause. "You looking for massage?"
"No. Definitely not."
"Place just round corner. Guaranteed Happy Ending. I'll show you."
I know what he meant. The lackadaisical half hour backrub is more or less free. What you pay for is the Happy Ending.
"Sorry. Got to go. My wife wants me."
"Okay, Mate. Take my card." and he handed me a cheap green-on-yellow business card:

Dinky Di Enterprises.
Proprietor Mel Giv sen
Phone...

I don't know which disturbed me most; that he thought I was sad and horny, or that he thought I was Australian.

When my Darling Beloved finally exhausted herself we still had an hour's wait for the hotel shuttle. So we poured ourselves into a local bar, bought a huge, dew-encrusted pitcher of Bintang and watched the world go by. When the shuttle - firmly keeping island time -  finally arrived, we found ourselves sharing the journey back to the hotel with a happy but exhausted Australian family. The mother and teenaged daughter in the back row were vocal in their admiration for our shopping bounty. They wanted to know our tricks with haggling. We didn't understand.
We hadn't noticed, but there were three colours of plastic bag that stallholders used when they'd made a sale, and they were a local code. White bags marked the punter as complete novice, black and white striped bags meant they had a better idea of what they were doing, and black bags warned of an expert who haggled to the bone. My Darling Beloved's bags were all black.

Of all the things she bought, those black plastic trophies are what she values most.