Going down to breakfast, I find the band playing to breakfast crowd. Enrique invites me to get my guitar and join them. Thankfully my guitar doesn’t have a pick-up, otherwise there may well have been some booing from certain sections of the audience. I do however sing a few songs, a couple of slow numbers one of which was a Rod Stewart number, and then a (considering the time) non-sequitur rendition of ‘Wonderful Tonight’ for Jen. This is not my usual type of music, but I am getting used to being a crooner. While the band play some punchier numbers, Scottish Widow Helen and pistol Pete get up to do some dirty dancing, Pete stripping off his shirt. This has been the most memorable and enjoyable breakfast party I’ve ever been to, although it may well be the only one.
Today we have a thirteen hour bus ride to Bali. The coach driver is unusually aggressive even for these climes, operating by the right of way rule of biggest is best. On several occasions, he pulls out to avoid an obstacle or to overtake regardless of the traffic facing us, causing many vehicles to swerve away. At one point he comes close to running over a cyclist. I am sitting uncomfortable in a front row seat, not just because in the likely scenario of a crash I would probably be thrown through the window, but also because my seat neighbor is a fast man forcing me to face into the aisle. I have a sleepless journey.
For the final part of the journey, the bus gets onto a ferry and we have a well needed break from the rollercoaster bus ride. On the ferry, we can see a group of boys, mostly teenagers, but one boy who must be about seven, swimming off the pier to the side of the boat. They swim up to the boat and start climbing the ropes up onto the upper deck on which we are standing. On the deck they ask for money, offering to entertain us by jumping off the deck, which is at least thirty feet high. As we don’t want to encourage anybody to jump from these heights, nobody gives them money, but they have to jump anyway as the ferry starts to leave the port, including the six or seven year old.
The sun sets as we travel the channel to Bali to stunning effect, and I am relieved to have sea air breeze to freshen me up after the bus ride. However, the final part of our journey sends me stir crazy because, after reaching the coach’s final stop, we then have to cram into mini-buses. I am expecting to have to travel like this for twenty minutes or so, but it takes another hour before we reach our hotel, by which time it is midnight.
We are staying in Kuta, a capital of debauchery for mainly Aussie twenty-somethings, and we have arrived at the peak party hour. Re-fuelling on a McDonald’s, Caz comes over from the beach opposite saying she has just seen a naked couple come out of the sea looking for their clothes. With Belgian Sam waiting at the hotel for the keys to the room he is sharing with Caz, she decides instead to come with Dan, Brian and I to explore the club lined streets a few blocks back from our hotel. This just makes me feel old though, as I can’t stand the cacophony of noise congregating on the street, each club booming out its wares, the combined effect being quite tortuous. Having said that, I think it was better to be outside than inside any of these clubs. We sit down for as a quiet a drink as we can muster. On the way back to the hotel we are offered a whole range of drugs by various people, the most alarming being Rohypnol, the date rape drug, which was offered to Caz for some reason.
Kuta is the site of the night club bombing of 2002, which killed over two hundred people. We passed the site of the bomb on the way into the town. It is now a memorial site, but the near surrounds have clearly not changed their character since then.
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