Gunung Batur and the Danish

It was so early in the morning, my gut felt raw. I slowly awoke on the endless fast motorcycle ride to the trail head. I told the driver to slow down, and he said I was like a little girl, then I told him I've already flipped over in a car and I thought Indonesians were crazy drivers, he repeated I was like a little girl again. As a group of four we headed up the grassy slopes of Batur. Towards the top, the sun soaked the far sky in a deep purple, then a dark red dye. The colors looked stark behind the primeval black mountain lines before me.

The guide boiled an egg for me on the hot volcanic steam fissures. And I chatted with a blind Japanese girl that I had met several days before at a dance performance. She was blind but had gone to Mongolia to do anthropology research on the people there... she was interested in people who had lost their heritages in the era of modern technology. She loved to travel, and wished to quit her job for its sake. I was amazed how she had picked up English by just talking to her friends. A month prior, I had met a girl in Central Sulawesi who stopped going to high school because she couldn't afford glasses. She was blinded financially and paralyzed intellectually. And now I was talking in English to a blind Japanese girl on Batur's summit about the sociology of Mongols!  She then told me of her short trip to China. Having lived in outer Mongolia for months, she was extremely dirty. All her laundry and bags were dusty.. and the Chinese felt sorry for this blind person was so dirty and destitute. When the Chinese asked where she was from, she would reply "Mongolia" jokingly. A dirty destitute blind woman had lost her way to China.

We decided to take the long way to the bottom. Circling bright and yellow and red rock active ash pits, hazy sulfuric smoke would occasionally smother us. Then we literally skied down a huge black ash slope to get to the bottom of Batur. I first started talking to the Danish hikers as we skied down. Ole, an investment banker from Copenhagen was hilarious. He broke the ice by joking "this is the first time i had to pay to climb a mountain." As we slid down, he yelled "hold on to your tits and glasses!" He would always reply in a deep voice, 'ok ok'. when we emptied out our shoes of ash, he joked he wore his flimsy slippers to hike Batur to release the ash with ease. We hitchhiked in a big transport truck used for moving stones back to the trail head and their car. The Danish offered me a ride to the northcoast of Bali. It was interesting learning about the navy seal-NYC marathon running harvard graduate Denmark prince, the standup comedian elected to parliament, the Dane's unusual economy which has no raw goods, and dirty Danish expressions like pic un fisa (dick and pussy) "When you're a 14 year old boy, you yell "pic un fisa" into the girls' locker room and run. Ole took pictures of me cause he couldn't believe I only traveled with a half-full backpack.

While looking for a hotel, they left their wallets and passports on top of the car. And when they peeled out of the parking lot, their wallets fell off the car-- never to be seen again. They scanned the road, parking lot, trash bins, sewers.... to no avail. Ole remarked he could write a book about the contents of Indonesian trash dumps and open sewers. They then had to go to the police station, immigration office, and Danish consulate in South Bali. With my Indonesian, I was able to explain to the police what had happened, "they left their passports on the car, and for some reason, when they drove off, they fell and were lost....