On the road

I started the morning by going to the only Buddhist temple in Bali, and proceeded to sketch it out of proportion.. the day only got worse when i ate some awful ramen for lunch. As i headed to the beach to clear my head, I encountered a group of mothers gathering and selling grapes. They offered me a seat under the shady trellises and started talking. Balinese hospitality. You can't refuse a gift. Before I knew it, I had eaten jambu, another bowl of ramen, and several bunches of grapes... They even offered for me to stay the night at their place. I started to become suspicious they had plans to marry their daughters off to me as they kept expounding their daughters’ virtues. Each new daughter seemingly arriving from the fields just in time to blush at their mothers’ claims on their behalf. I had to make my getaway. I told them of my plans to take off for eastern Java to see Mount Bromo volcano. With the day almost over, I apologized and said I had to leave. To get there, i took a bemo. Bemos are blue vans that pick passengers up on the side of the roads. They don’t have predetermined stops, they just drive around picking up paying hitchhikers. You pay your fare depending on the distance you travel. I couldn’t believe  my good fortune that the Bemo just happened arrive as i was making my escape. The bemo was rather empty and I sat next to a cook from Palliki, my intended midpoint destination on the way to Bromo.  She told me which hotel was the cheapest. But then the bemo started picking up more and more people...  eight SMP students with their buckets for planting, a man with a smelly chicken rustling in a rice bag, a police officer, an elderly man with a cane,  a woman walking her kid home from school... At one point I counted 14 people crammed into the tiny van making for an airless nauseating ride in a cramped vehicle. To make matters worse,  the driver would further prolong the agony by stopping so passengers could buy palm leaf-wrapped rice meals at the side of the road. 

By the time I arrived in Palliki it was dark and all the hotels were full. So i went into the desa (village) and bought whatever food from they had left in the shop-- boiled eggs, corn, rice, peanuts, and wafers. I was resigned to sleeping on the side of the street. This is the hazard of traveling without plans or reservations. Homelessness. My string of good luck had run out. I must've looked extremely pathetic because people started talking to me wondering what I was doing on the streets of their village. Then a young woman, Kadek, and her brother appeared. Hearing my situation, she offered me a room in her house. Some of the nicest people ever. As we sat on the floor, I showed them my sketches, and told my story of the 2 right slippers and the crazy motorcycle driver that called me a little girl. There, as the music played in the background, we sat cross legged on the floor trading stories... she told me her father died in a motorcycle accident, I told her about my studies of macaques, she told me about her town, I found out her birthday was just 1 day before mine. Cosmic connections and so on. In the back of my mind, i recalled Ole's impression of Indonesians. "These people are very primitive. Imagine the scene at the police station... there were 4 guys playing cards, 4 guys smoking with their shirts unbuttoned... ha ha." Straddling east and west cultures I could see Ole's point of view... but my sympathy lay firmly with the Indonesians and their kindness— a world Ole could never enter.  Kadek gave me her bed to sleep in. When I awoke, she walked me to the road past the scuba diving shop she worked at. I will never forget the surprise I felt when she reached out to hold my hand as we walked as if to wish me the best on my journeys.