Water, hops, and Bali

I failed dismally to find the beach, but I refused to stop even for a second lest I appear interested in something someone had to offer. Instead I just walked until I thought I couldn’t cope with the heat much more, and was almost out of water, and walked straight back. The shouts of “yes boss” kept coming, interspersed with the odd fauxstralian “g’day mate” with an Indonesian twang.

Battery died on my phone so I went back to my room to get a bit of juice, and watch some TV before getting some food. But instead I fell asleep until midnight, and then failed to get back to sleep. Go go jet lag Darren! So I watched a comedy Irish creature feature called Grabbers, starring the bloke from Coupling who looks like Martin Sheen, the plot of which is “a village full of Irish people get pissed to destroy a killer octopus thing”. Odd. The dialogue “5 nautical miles” was subtitled as “8 kilometers”, which I found strange. Then I watched a Louis CK gig, to remind me of Tom. And then I fell asleep.

Normally I don’t dream much, though travel sometimes brings it out in me. On one trip over here I had recurring dreams about North Korea. In Paris I’d dreamt that I could fly, in fact everyone could, and I had an airborne argument with Wooj and Arnold about whether Behemoth are a black metal band or a death metal band, and whether black metal is shit. In Bali, however, I dreamt that I was at a gig seeing Gwar supporting DOA, in a school hall. When the stage lights failed during the second song, a mass fight broke out amongst the 30 or so people in attendance, which included Jesse Pintado from Napalm Death and his girlfriend. It turned nasty and people were handing out bottles to use as weapons. After a while the carnage calmed down and I realised I’d lost my phone, so started hunting for it. There were loads of iPhones on the floor, but it took me a while to find mine - I was repeating “40% more bacon, 40% more bacon” to everyone. Then I thought I saw Calum, and woke up, a bit freaked out by this bizarre and vivid nature of it all.

Fell back akip pretty simply, only to wake up less than half hour later to a massive explosion sound, a siren going off outside, and a power cut. I’m not sure what happened, or even whether the explosion was real - I have exploding head syndrome, which is a real actual thing. Go look it up. There didn’t seem to be any real urgency on display by the guy cleaning the pool, so I assumed there wasn’t a bomb or anything, and very shortly the siren stopped, power returned, and my heart rate fell back to normal.

Spent the whole morning debating with myself whether I should leave the hotel that day, maybe do a tour. I was already way too late for a full day tour, but there were a lot of half day tours available which start any time between 2pm and 3pm, in particular ones which involve going to see spectacular sunsets. And, I had a shitload of currency I could have done with spending especially as it wasn’t enough to bother changing back to Aussie dollars or British shekels. There was a half day tour to a monkey forest, a temple, and then one more temple for sunset - so at 2pm I went down to reception and said, am I too late to get a driver to take me to see monkeys and the sunset? They said no, it would be fine, go get a beer while they sort it out.

He was gonna turn up at 1530, which seemed fair enough since I was only doing 2 out of 3 attractions. And I had no clue about where these things were, and trusted them. The bloke ended up arriving a bit late, but off we went. Chatted a bit about football, cos he was a Liverpool fan. But he didn’t seem very chatty and it got a bit quiet as we drove. And drove. And drove. And drove. Turns out it was a bloody long way.

I got to see a fair bit of Bali’s internals. The residential areas were littered by temples, which seemed to be at the start of little gated areas. There were massive amounts of craft shops, mostly stuff made of wood, which confused me - I’ve seen enough episodes of Nothing To Declare/Border Security to know you can’t take wood into Australia, and since every tourist here is Aussie…

Also, it’s election season, by which I mean every 20 yards there was a giant billboard with a picture of a man displaying fine millinery, asking for the vote. Like those ham faced David Cameron photos from 2010, only these guys hopefully aren’t total cunts.

Drove back to the hotel, another hour or so. I have no idea how you are meant to fit three attractions into one afternoon, even starting at 1400. Apparently this wasn’t even bad traffic, and it’s definitely low season. Still never mind - I did see what I wanted, just not for very long. Still hadn’t seen a beach though.

Back at the Vira, Friday night was in full swing. This meant a really, really poor cover band covering Australian music like Men At Work and AC/DC, presumably to fix the homesickness all the Aussie tourists must be suffering in this alien environment. And they covered it badly. Very, very badly. But the worst was their version of Nothing Else Matters, which for some reason they played twice. I was almost put off music for life. Jesus.