Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  Meanwhile, things are turning feral at the house. People are running out of clean clothes and we’re living on prawns the size of newborn babies. A couple of nights ago, someone’s boyfriend was arrested for possession of a Class A drug. He also assaulted a cop. Someone else’s wife locked him out of the house and he spent the night under a palm tree where he might easily have been killed by a falling coconut. I stripped three gears in the car and I’ve got malaria. The blonde says it’s a hangover. Nobody can say for sure because the symptoms are almost identical. I might not make it out this time.

  A BALLIE GOES TO BALI

  When temperatures drop to nine degrees in Cape Town, you know it’s time to make like a swallow and duck. My endothermic brain is not designed to function in low temperatures. I have bear blood. Hibernation is a means of conserving energy during times when sufficient food is unavailable. I have been living alone for some time. Sufficient food is constantly unavailable. But when snow starts falling up the road, my hypothalamus, an easily startled creature at the best of times, shrivels to the size of a peanut and my autonomic nervous system goes to hell in a hand basket. That’s when I know the moment has come to shake off the metabolic depression and emerge from beneath my waffle-stack of monkey-fur duvets, get into my Arctic fox jocks, thermal vest and Gore-Tex onesie and head for the travel agent.

  Airport trolleys aren’t designed for surfboards and airports aren’t designed for surfers. The board either keeps falling off or blocking your view and the layout of OR Tambo is such that if you arrive from Cape Town and are travelling on to, say, Bali, you might want to bring a pup tent and camp between domestic arrivals and international departures because the distances are so vast and the signs more convoluted than our government’s foreign policy.

  I remember, from a fairly young age, promising successive girlfriends and even wives that one day we would live in a treehouse in Bali. I must have seen something in a surfing magazine. By the time I eventually got it together to go to Bali, a week ago, I found myself fresh out of girlfriends and wives.

  Solo travel isn’t my first choice. Not because I get lonely, but because it’s so much easier to have someone else looking after the passports, filling in the forms, getting me out of the bar and to the gate before the plane leaves and so on.

  Long-haul flights are great if you’re Patrice Motsepe or Nicky Oppenheimer. But if you’re me or you, flying 10 hours from Joburg to Hong Kong with your legs around your ears, being charged R80 for a beer and threatened with death if you smoke anything at all, then flying another five hours to Denpasar in Bali, isn’t all that great.

  At 3pm the androids of Cathay Pacific marched down the aisles pulling down the shutters on the windows. In under a minute, the plane was plunged into darkness. People fell asleep immediately. It was like putting a blanket over a parrot cage. Not being a member of the parrot family, I insisted on maintaining my regular schedule of afternoon drinks, sundowners and several nightcaps. The droids seemed happy to comply. Well, maybe not happy. But the alternative wasn’t something they wanted to deal with.

  Before I flew out, CNN was showing pictures of chaos at Denpasar Airport. It looked like the fall of Saigon. Thousands of Australians stranded because their girly pilots from Perth were too scared to fly through a bit of volcanic ash. The backlog had been cleared by the time I landed. Maybe it hadn’t. I got the feeling Denpasar Airport is jammed year round with Aussies desperate to get in or out.

  Waiting to pick me up were a couple of expats who’d been in Bali long enough to think they could get away with wearing the kind of straw hats that nobody but ancient rice-pickers would dare be seen in. They strapped my board to the roof of their tarnished gold car and handed me a Bintang beer so big I had to hold it with both hands. I guzzled greedily and begged for more.

  Bali at this time of year offers my kind of heat. There’s very little difference between sea and air temperature and it doesn’t vary much between day and night. This means you can sleep in the ocean if you have trouble getting back to your room. Anchor yourself to a rock unless you want to drift off into the chokka fleet in the Badung Strait and end up on a French tourist’s dinner plate.

  Let me say right upfront that the Balinese people are lovely. They are genuinely friendly and show no signs of wanting to murder their tourists. Having said that, if Dante’s vision of hell had not stopped at nine circles, the 10th circle would have been traffic on Bali. I suppose it’s no different to Bangkok, Hanoi or Phnom Penh, but I wasn’t expecting quite this level of mayhem. This is, after all, known as the Island of the Gods. What manner of merciless gods would allow huge trucks from Java to barrel down the same narrow road as a family of five on a spluttering underpowered Yamaha? Then again, it is men who create gods, so I suppose anything is possible.

  There are shrines everywhere. Outside every business, every home. Fresh flowers are laid, incense lit, prayers said. Several times a day. It seems to be working. I have yet to see a dead body – animal or human. Or even a fender bender, which doesn’t seem possible given that everybody rides and drives as fast as they can and nobody ever seems to give way. There is almost no hooting and no road rage. None at all. Perhaps they bottle it up and go off into the rice paddies and explode, but they don’t show it on the roads.

  The driver of the gold vehicle momentarily lost concentration while opening a Bintang with some kind of ring on his finger and we found ourselves down a side street.

  “Warung!” he shouted, slamming on brakes. I flung my door open and rolled like a parabat, coming to rest against a Bali dog who opened one eye and went back to sleep, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

  Warung, it turned out, wasn’t a warning of imminent danger. It means “local restaurant offering dishes that are mostly unavailable”.

  Equipped with menus and a brace of cold Bintangs, I noticed a temple across the street. There was a stone swastika at the entrance. There was only one thing to order. The nazi goreng.

  A BALLIE GOES TO BALI – PART II

  “Arak attack!”

  The cry came late at night in a dog-eared bar in a feral village called Amed. I went limp and dropped to the ground, which was easier done than said, and pretended to be dead. This was, after all, Indonesia – a country inhabited by hundreds of ethnic groups, volcanoes, elephants, tigers and Komodo dragons that can kill with one lick of their monstrous tongues. We might have been under attack by any one of them.

  From my position of pusillanimity, I could hear people shouting and the sound of bottles breaking, but nothing to suggest that heavily armed militants were taking hostages. The music switched from Marley’s “Mr Brown” to Tosh’s “Bush Doctor”. If I was going to die, it may as well be with a song on my lips. “So legalise marijuana …” I warbled softly. It seemed a good enough hymn to die to in a reggae bar on the raw east coast of Bali.

  A foot with painted toenails nudged me in the face. “Get up,” said my daughter’s voice. “Your arak is waiting for you.” Arak, it turned out, is a traditional spirit made from palm trees. It sounds harmless but get a bad batch and it’ll kill you quicker than a falling coconut. The lucky ones go mad or blind. Having arak is almost as hazardous as having daughters.

  What the hell kind of child foists arak on her father? The very best kind. It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been grateful to her. She and her handsome Belgian/Congolese/Namibian boyfriend and a couple of their friends who had been in Bali long enough to know how to defend themselves in the event of an arak attack clinked glasses and shouted incomprehensible rubbish at one another. Someone – it might have been me – ordered two jugs of the filth. It wasn’t long before three burly men with heavily tattooed biceps asked if they could join our table.

  “Sure,” I shouted. “But you Australian bastards had better not want to start any of your fighting.” The darker-skinned one said quietly, “We’re not Aussies, mate.” I recognised the accent. “You Scottish people are even worse than the Aussies.”

 
; It was like that moment in Saving Private Ryan when a bomb goes off and everything moves in slow motion and Tom Hanks can’t hear anything.

  “What?” I shouted.

  “We’re from New Zealand,” said the Maori. His heavy-duty buddy said something about beating South Africa. I know they’re our mortal enemies in rugby, or maybe it’s cricket, but I don’t know which country is top of the log. Or if there even is a log.

  To avoid having to talk about sport, I bought them a jug of arak. Things went sharply downhill after that. A word of advice. If you’re going to appoint a wingman, choose someone other than a Maori. Everyone loves a Maori. Not only the girls, either. Even James Small couldn’t keep his hands off Jonah Lomu back in ’95. And it’s obvious that Bismarck du Plessis had a bit of a crush on Keven Mealamu.

  On the dance floor, my wingman’s moves were a seamless fusion between the haka and the Kama Sutra. Mine were a cross between a malfunctioning windmill and Stephen Hawking out of his chair. I did get chatting to a beautiful young woman at the bar. When she told me she was Dutch, I said she owed me and my country an apology. Probably not the best pick-up line. Not long after, I lost a shoe.

  At breakfast the next morning, a waiter asked me how the fishing had gone. I drooled gently into my mie goreng. “You catch any red snapper?” He laughed like an escaped lunatic and went back to the kitchen. I turned to my daughter for help. “He was at the bar last night. He’s asking if you scored. You know? With a woman?” Shamefaced, I looked down at my one shoeless foot. It had no answers.

  The young people wanted to go off and do the things young people do, which are pretty much the same things I wanted to do. “Take me with you,” I pleaded. “I can be useful.” They laughed and two hours later threw me and my surfboard out of the car in Balian, a surfing, yoga and crystal meth sanctuary on the west coast. “Good luck with the snappers,” shouted Captain Congo.

  An afternoon ride on my pathetically underpowered rented scooter up the coast to Medewi seemed like a good idea. I’d already had a cracking surf in the morning and was in the mood to eat prey and love. Medewi was 30 kilometres away. It took me over an hour to get there. The road is the main vein between Bali and Java. I was hoping to take in some of the local colour but all I saw was my life flashing before my eyes. It wasn’t pretty.

  I hit a roadblock just outside Medewi. Cops on both sides. I tried to hide in the cloud of carbon monoxide spewing from a truck packed with live chickens, but, as I drew level, one of them blew his whistle and pointed at me. One of the cops, not the chickens. A family of five, blind from arak and riding a bike made of compressed pangolins, almost hit the cop. He smiled and waved them on.

  A young Indo guy in civilian clothes sauntered up. He shook my hand and asked for the bike’s papers. Eventually I found them taped beneath the seat, where one would keep coded messages when one becomes a courier for the revolution. He asked for my international driver’s licence, which had stupidly left itself back in Balian. “Half a million rupiah fine,” he said, with a cheerful Indonesian grin. I went pale and clutched my testicles. “If you go to court,” he added. Ah. The option. There is always an option in humid countries. Let’s make it a hundred thousand and never mention it again. I fumbled for my wallet. He averted his eyes and backed away. “Pay the policeman,” he said. The cop was dressed like a war hero and didn’t seem open to haggling. I slipped him two 50-thousand rupiah notes and he melted away. There was no eye contact from either side. The civilian reappeared and asked where I was going, then smiled shyly and gave me directions to Medewi.

  “So,” I said, “I won’t get stopped on the other side of the road when I come back? I mean, I’ve paid my bribe … fine … right?” He shook his head happily. “You will pay again,” he said.

  “In that case, comrade,” I said, “I’d rather just turn around and go back to Balian.” Apparently this wasn’t an option. He insisted that I continue to Medewi and return in two hours, by which time the police would have packed up and gone home, presumably to thank the god of tourism for his beneficence on this bountiful day.

  Medewi has an ugly boulder-strewn beach patrolled by surly Muslim locals gouging the tourists. Faced with that road from hell, I guzzled a few beers at a warung with no soul. Two hours later, I was back on the bike. The roadblock had gone but the traffic was worse. Not worse as in jammed. There are no traffic jams in Bali. In this swollen river of cars, bikes, trucks and buses, you keep moving or you die. Back in Balian, I stopped at a building site and used a crowbar to unclench my sphincter.

  In the morning, I walked along a riverbank to the beach, paddled half a kilometre out into a warm sea, caught the waves of my life and watched the sun come up behind a forest of coconut palms. Perhaps I shall stay forever.

  A BALLIE GOES TO BALI – PART III

  My time is up on the Island of the Dogs. Gods. There are half a million of one and about the same of the other. The dogs and gods seem equally benign. The dogs lie in the middle of the road. When you hoot, they lift their heads briefly, then go back to sleep. The message is clear. “Just drive around me.”

  Two days ago I was attacked by a tiger. A small tiger. Okay, a cat. It was more of a warning than an attack. Don’t touch me unless you have food in your hand. Fair enough. I have known women like that.

  This has been a wonderful break. From what, I can’t really say. I write a weekly column. You’d think I need a proper job, not a break. But you’d be wrong. Wrong like Barong. In case you think I’m drunk and simply making up nonsensical rhymes, I’m not. Not yet, anyway. Barong is two parts lion and one part Pekingese. He is leader of the forces of good and the sworn enemy of the naked, child-eating demon queen Rangda. I’m on Rangda’s side.

  At around midday today the sea and air temperatures nuzzled up to one another in a steamy 27-degree clinch. I can’t understand why so many white South Africans are trying to sneak into England, a country so cold that in January everyone’s nipples fall off. Bali is far nicer. And you can get by on so much less. One sarong, two tattoos and a scooter. Free fish in the sea and coconuts in the trees. No violent crime because nobody wants to come back as a chicken satay. No shouting with angry face. Ever. An expat running a guesthouse out in the bush near an extinct volcano told me a tourist once raised her voice at the staff because something or other wasn’t quite to her liking. They burst into tears and ran home.

  I am on Nusa Lembongan, an island 30 minutes by super-special fast boat from the port of Sanur. I use the word port loosely. On this sultry wanton night of nights, I sit quite alone 154 steps above sea level in an eyrie in the skyrie. Bali steps, not normal steps. You virtually need pitons and croutons to scale them. Tiny people, giant steps.

  Eleven hours ago the loinfruit and Captain Congo hired a scooter, saying they were going for lunch. It’s now midnight. As a parent, I suppose I ought to be concerned. But I can hear waves crashing on the coral reefs far below and the cloying fragrance of frangipani reminds me of lost loves. Across the Badung Strait lights glitter on the fringes of Bali’s east coast. I have cold Bintangs in the fridge. It’s fiendishly hard to be worried about anything. Anything other than, while I sleep, having my face chewed off by the enormous gecko in the roof that makes a noise like a murderously lovesick waterfowl.

  Earlier this evening I went to a local warung. A warung is like our restaurants without the trained staff, dress code, coke-fiend manager, car guards, health and safety standards or food. My waiter was also the chef and quite possibly the owner. He was barefoot and bare chested. A pair of stained shorts clung listlessly to his hips. A gold chain dangled from his neck and his torso glistened like a freshly oiled almond. It wasn’t as erotic as it sounds.

  The kids showed up a day later and we moved to Nusa Ceningan, an island that abuts Lembongan in much the same way that Kim Kardashian abuts Kanye West. If you look at a map, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But you won’t, will you? You’ll just take my word for it. This is how cults are started. Unlike Kim’s arse, C
eningan is tiny.

  A suspension bridge made of wooden slats and dead rats connects the islands. Two scooters and a backpacker and there’s a traffic jam. It rocks and swings, which makes it sound like the coolest bridge ever, which it isn’t.

  On the map, there is only one road that goes around Ceningan. Sort of. On the scooter, though, there are dozens of roads that go around cows, roosters and very old women with baskets on their heads. Some people have an internal GPS. I have a sextant. This isn’t much use to someone who isn’t always sure if we’re going around the sun or if the sun is going around us and what the hell the moon thinks it’s doing, never mind Pluto.

  Getting lost is part of the fun of travelling. Unless, of course, you’re white and inadvertently find yourself travelling through KwaMashu’s K-section on a bicycle late on a Friday night. Also fun is dicing with death on a scooter with shot shocks on roads so broken that your coccyx weeps and begs for mercy.

  Taking off on a wave at a break called Lacerations and knowing that if you fall off, there’s a good chance you will spend the rest of the day picking coral out of your face isn’t ideal, but it certainly improves your surfing in a very short space of time.

  Heading back from the car-free islands into the mayhem of Bali’s Kuta and Seminyak districts, I felt the beast of road rage gnawing on the back of my skull. The traffic is insane. The government expects everyone to stay calm but at the same time will chop off your head if you’re caught smoking something to relax you. It makes no sense.

  On our last night we went for sundowners at a beachfront restaurant called Ku De Ta. I was searched before being allowed in. Security guards use a mirror to check beneath cars before allowing them in. It’s a club, disco, bar and restaurant rolled into one. It’s also a gratuitous flesh-fest of hot and heavy tourists hellbent on getting well and truly cocktailed. A Japanese girl was the DJ. She looked about nine years old. A small local beer was R60 and a bottle of Gordon’s gin cost R1 900. No wonder the place was blown up a few years ago.