Solo, Java, Indonesia
So here I am in a Hotel Ibis in Solo (formerly Surakarta), Indonesia. Ibis is a reasonably nice European hotel chain, which in Indonesia is priced like a shabby small town motel in Canada — meaning, several times our normal budget of $10 to $20 a night.
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Our room looks European. It’s slightly smaller than is reasonable, so all of the furniture has a decidedly vertical orientation. The bathroom is also very European; the fixtures are all very modern, the showerhead is aimed at the hair of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Dutchman who is not here, and the bathroom is small enough that if someone (Erin) opens the door while you’re showering, you can’t get out of the shower until she has fully closed it again. But all in all, the room is very comfortable, except when the air conditioning is set to 13 degrees, like it was when we arrived.
As happy as I am for this tiny European vacation in the middle of my Indonesian trip, this isn’t where we planned to stay. I am fairly convinced that this is the only hotel room in the entire city that wasn’t booked last night. And it’s not just Solo where the hotels are slammed; we can’t find anything available for the next several days in Jogjakarta either. Today we called at least 15 different hotels listed in our guidebook, and they were all full. This is an especial problem because we can’t stay here anymore — tomorrow, the Hotel Ibis Solo is fully booked.
This problem isn’t caused by a massive influx of foreign tourists. I think I saw three white people today. It just turns out that the period between Christmas and New Year’s is when Javanese people travel around their island. I had no idea.
I suppose I should have guessed that Javanese people couldn’t be as happy and friendly as they seem to be if they didn’t take some vacation time at least once a year. Everyone needs a vacation. I just had no idea that they all took their vacation in the same places I want to go to and at the same time.
It also seems odd that that time is governed by the birthday of our Lord, Jesus Christ, whose mother was a Virgin, and who died on the cross for our sins, amen, because most of these people aren’t really into JC, the sufferin’ saviour. From what I can see, the locals here do most of their praying under domes surrounded by loudspeakers mounted in tall towers that erupt into wailing song early each morning. I guess what I’m saying is, they’re Muslims. And for Muslims to plan their holidays around Christmas is, to my mind, unconscionably weird.
Erin and I left Bali on the 27th of December, partly to escape the coming New Years’ rush. I know I didn’t tell you guys, but the decision came suddenly. I had assumed that we would stay on Bali — Erin writing, me adding to my giant earwax ball — until New Year’s at least, but Erin got bored of writing and decided that we would leave Bali the instant I felt well enough to leave.
You see, I had been sick. My mind knew we were in the tropics, but my body missed Christmas at home, so I developed myself a really good cold, with a fever and everything. One day I got so chilled that I went for a walk in Bali wearing a hoodie. The other tourists thought I was nuts.
Anyway, Erin got sick of writing, and I got sick of being sick so the very first instant that I felt like I could get on a bus without dying, I did, and we left Bali. I got into a taxi and then into a bus, then a boat, then an economy-class train for six hours (a special treat) and then a pedicab and then another bed. Then Erin and I got up at 2:00 AM to climb a volcano to watch the sun rise, then Erin lost her awesome camera but had it returned to her by a man who only wanted $30 as a reward, and then we got into another economy class train for nine hours and got to Solo, Java, Indonesia, where we got the last hotel room in town.
Just before the economy class train pulled into Solo, Java, Indonesia, we met one of the most irritating and friendly men I’ve encountered on this trip. He was friendly in an aggressive, nearly bullying way, demanding that we answer his questions and refusing to leave us alone, no matter how much our body language (and later, our mouths) told him we were exhausted from being in the 9th hour of a train journey on a day when we woke up at 2 AM to climb a volcano.
Thrusting his wispy Muslim beard into our faces, he demanded to know what our religion is, and when we told him none, he demanded that we explain to him why so many westerners he met said they had no religion. Then he asked whether it was true that there were many devils in the United States. Devils? I asked, and he smiled and his eyes got wider and said, yes, devils, he had seen men flying across the sky on TV, was this not a fact? I wanted him to fuck off so badly that I nearly told him so.
When the train pulled into Solo, he tried to arrange a cab ride for us and finally, I was able to convince him to fuck off, telling him that I wanted to look at the train schedule before leaving the station, and that we were perfectly capable of arranging our own cab. He apologized for annoying us, we assured him he hadn’t annoyed us and that it was nice meeting him, he left, and we proved to be utterly incapable of arranging our own cab.
Walking out of the train station, we were adopted by a man who had both a lisp and the impression that he spoke English. He decided that he would arrange a cab for us and it took me at least ten minutes to understand that the low, low price he was offering was $50. We were unable to deal with the cab driver without the help of this middleman, so we left and found pedicabs who would take us for $2.
Being both overweight and overburdened with luggage, Erin and I decided to be nice to our cab-pedalers and ourselves and get two cabs. At first it was fun, being slowly but peacefully pedaled through the nighttime streets. Halfway across the city, though, my cab got a flat and slowed down, and lost Erin’s cab in the traffic. Then, riding around on one flat tire, my pedicab driver got lost. It took me about six undirected, wandering blocks realize that we had only told the one driver our destination, and the reason my driver seemed so confused was that he had no idea where he was supposed to take me. Finally, I told him where I wanted to go and he took me to the hotel where Erin was nervously sitting in her pedicab, wondering when or if I would show up. The hotel was full.
We went to a second hotel, this one, where they told us that not only were they full, but every hotel in town was full. Then they said they’d try to figure something out, and we sat our filthy, sweaty, volcano-hiking and economy-train-riding bodies on their nice lobby couches and waited. Erin took a shit in their pristine lobby toilet. Then the receptionist told us they had a cancellation, and we were in. We showered, flopped down on our beds and turned on the TV, and BBC World News told us that a few days ago, Hamas felt it would be a good idea to fire rockets at Israel, and Israel responded with their usual subtlety. Now the whole Middle East is up in arms.
On this end of Asia, we’ve got confused Muslims going on vacation for Christmas and booking all of our hotel rooms. On the other end of Asia, we’ve got some other Muslims (less confusedly, but no less inconveniently) fucking up whole countries where we hope to stay.
And God fucking help you if we decide to go to your town. First Bangkok and their crazed souvenir-toting revolutionaries, then Mumbai and their hotel-occupying gunmen, and now this. Erin and I are the fifth and sixth horsemen of the apocalypse. If we even book a ticket to your city, war, famine, pestilence and death will put you on their itinerary. If we even think about a place, in some way it will get fucked up. I swear, the whole reason Vancouver has been under three feet of snow for the last few days is that Erin got homesick over the holidays. Watch the news for Jakarta — I’m sure that sometime in the next week it’s going to get hit by a volcano or get buried in ten feet of dogshit or something equally awful.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Fish Fear
Candidasa, Bali, Indonesia
I ain’t afraid of nothin’, except for fish, dogs and entropy.
I don’t jump out of my seat when I watch horror movies. Generally, I identify with the protagonists so little that I can’t wait for them to feel the bite of the chainsaw’s teeth. If a horror movie is on TV, I spend most of my time either laughing at the idiocy of the thing, or shaking my head in disgust. Consequently, I don’t watch horror movies.
If I want to give myself a good scare, I have to choose between fish, dogs and entropy. Entropy is omnipresent and inescapable; I am always terrified of it, so it offers no novelty. Dogs smell bad, and so do fish when they’re above water, so the only way to give myself a good fright without offending my olfactory sense is to go underwater and expose myself to the terrifying menace of fish in their natural habitat.
But I’m not sure why I would do it. I’ve gone bungee jumping and skydiving before, which gives you a good, clean fear. Intellectually, you know you’ll be safe, and you get an exhilarating rush of adrenaline while you’re falling. Going underwater to hang out with fish provides no exhilaration — only sick, damp, claustrophobic fear and the nauseating certainty that over an infinite timeline, something down there would eat you or sting you to death.
So why the hell would I do it? That’s what I was asking while I was sitting in my mask and flippers, looking down at the rectangle of water between the outrigger and the canoe.
Candidasa’s beach has washed away, so all of the locals know for certain that if you’re here, you must want to go snorkeling. It’s one of the things that is done by every tourist that comes through here, and somehow the certainty of the locals transferred over to me and I knew that I, too, would go snorkeling.
My fears change over time. I used to be much more afraid of dogs than I am now. Events in my life — such as my brother getting a dog that is so happy and so stupid that you could beat him with a two-by-four and be certain that his only reaction would be to lick your hand — have lessened my fear of dogs. The constant presence of entropy has made my terror much less insistent over the years. I have no idea what happened with fish, but I am now more scared of them than I have been since I was a little kid.
When I was in Australia about six years ago, I screwed up my courage and went snorkeling and scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I have no idea how I did it. I think I was embarrassed that everyone else who was around, from old women to little girls, had the courage to do it, so I did it too — and I even enjoyed it a little.
The Great Barrier Reef is a vast, repulsive phantasmagoria of sea life. Every aquatic horror imaginable exhibits itself there, and I swam among them with a minimum of panic. I swam through clouds of fish, over reefs teeming with disgusting life, and seldom ever did I spin around in a panic to see what was swimming up behind me. In a moment of enthusiasm, I even chased after an enormous grouper fish, to get a closer look at its enormous face, like a nightmarish distortion of a human’s. It was only when I came face-to-cloaca with a jellyfish that was quivering horrendously at arm’s length from me that I panicked and swam for shore, vowing never to return.
I’m even more of a coward now. I wouldn’t even get in the water until Erin jumped in, had a look around and told me it was safe and deep enough that I wouldn’t touch anything with my feet. Once I was in the water, I immediately started to hyperventilate through my snorkel. A wave washed some water into that plastic umbilical between me and the habitable world, and I started to swim back to the boat.
I really wanted to get out of the water. There weren’t that many fish down there, and the number of creepy-crawlies was minimal, but still, it was awful. There was nothing down there that I wanted to look at. Nothing down there could do anything for me; I don’t even like eating fish, and the coral was just waiting for a wave to wash me into a shallow part, so it could cut my tender belly open. Sure, it was pretty, but what is beauty when compared to having your bones picked clean by prawns after something even more horrible ends your life in one of a million unthinkable ways?
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t feel like I could go immediately back to the boat. Our boatman spoke terrible English, and I could never make him understand what I was doing out of the water. We had about a 40% success rate when we tried communicating with him, and a 60% chance of having a misunderstanding — he absolutely always thought he understood what we were saying, but more often than not he would proceed to do the opposite of what we were actually asking him to do. If I got out of the water and told him why, it would certainly be embarrassing, and it might result in him thinking he understood that I wanted him to sail away and abandon Erin a kilometer offshore with nothing but her snorkel and the terrors of the ocean to keep her company.
Besides, I’d paid for the trip; I’d better at least make a token effort to enjoy the awful things that other people loved about the ocean. And Erin was having fun, looking at all of that stuff that is the antithesis of everything comforting and human in the world. It would be pretty disappointing for her if I made her experience all of that horror alone, so I forced myself to stay for awhile and look cautiously and incuriously around.
It felt like ages, but I think my willpower lasted for somewhere under half an hour. Three separate times I was unmanned by some part of the scenery and started thrashing my way back to the boat, but each time I forced myself to calm down and get my money’s worth of awfulness out of the experience. Finally, knowing I was on the verge of vomiting in fear, Erin told me that her fins were making her feet sore, so we should go back to the boat. I could have kissed her, but for the snorkels and the saltwater and all the terrible fish.
We escaped alive and sailed back and then rode our motos to a beautiful beach, where we played in the waves. In my mind, there are no fish at beaches, so swimming there is fun. Please don’t anyone try to convince me otherwise; I have a hard enough time enjoying beaches, what with all of the entropy of the waves crashing on the shore.
I ain’t afraid of nothin’, except for fish, dogs and entropy.
I don’t jump out of my seat when I watch horror movies. Generally, I identify with the protagonists so little that I can’t wait for them to feel the bite of the chainsaw’s teeth. If a horror movie is on TV, I spend most of my time either laughing at the idiocy of the thing, or shaking my head in disgust. Consequently, I don’t watch horror movies.
If I want to give myself a good scare, I have to choose between fish, dogs and entropy. Entropy is omnipresent and inescapable; I am always terrified of it, so it offers no novelty. Dogs smell bad, and so do fish when they’re above water, so the only way to give myself a good fright without offending my olfactory sense is to go underwater and expose myself to the terrifying menace of fish in their natural habitat.
But I’m not sure why I would do it. I’ve gone bungee jumping and skydiving before, which gives you a good, clean fear. Intellectually, you know you’ll be safe, and you get an exhilarating rush of adrenaline while you’re falling. Going underwater to hang out with fish provides no exhilaration — only sick, damp, claustrophobic fear and the nauseating certainty that over an infinite timeline, something down there would eat you or sting you to death.
So why the hell would I do it? That’s what I was asking while I was sitting in my mask and flippers, looking down at the rectangle of water between the outrigger and the canoe.
Candidasa’s beach has washed away, so all of the locals know for certain that if you’re here, you must want to go snorkeling. It’s one of the things that is done by every tourist that comes through here, and somehow the certainty of the locals transferred over to me and I knew that I, too, would go snorkeling.
My fears change over time. I used to be much more afraid of dogs than I am now. Events in my life — such as my brother getting a dog that is so happy and so stupid that you could beat him with a two-by-four and be certain that his only reaction would be to lick your hand — have lessened my fear of dogs. The constant presence of entropy has made my terror much less insistent over the years. I have no idea what happened with fish, but I am now more scared of them than I have been since I was a little kid.
When I was in Australia about six years ago, I screwed up my courage and went snorkeling and scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I have no idea how I did it. I think I was embarrassed that everyone else who was around, from old women to little girls, had the courage to do it, so I did it too — and I even enjoyed it a little.
The Great Barrier Reef is a vast, repulsive phantasmagoria of sea life. Every aquatic horror imaginable exhibits itself there, and I swam among them with a minimum of panic. I swam through clouds of fish, over reefs teeming with disgusting life, and seldom ever did I spin around in a panic to see what was swimming up behind me. In a moment of enthusiasm, I even chased after an enormous grouper fish, to get a closer look at its enormous face, like a nightmarish distortion of a human’s. It was only when I came face-to-cloaca with a jellyfish that was quivering horrendously at arm’s length from me that I panicked and swam for shore, vowing never to return.
I’m even more of a coward now. I wouldn’t even get in the water until Erin jumped in, had a look around and told me it was safe and deep enough that I wouldn’t touch anything with my feet. Once I was in the water, I immediately started to hyperventilate through my snorkel. A wave washed some water into that plastic umbilical between me and the habitable world, and I started to swim back to the boat.
I really wanted to get out of the water. There weren’t that many fish down there, and the number of creepy-crawlies was minimal, but still, it was awful. There was nothing down there that I wanted to look at. Nothing down there could do anything for me; I don’t even like eating fish, and the coral was just waiting for a wave to wash me into a shallow part, so it could cut my tender belly open. Sure, it was pretty, but what is beauty when compared to having your bones picked clean by prawns after something even more horrible ends your life in one of a million unthinkable ways?
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t feel like I could go immediately back to the boat. Our boatman spoke terrible English, and I could never make him understand what I was doing out of the water. We had about a 40% success rate when we tried communicating with him, and a 60% chance of having a misunderstanding — he absolutely always thought he understood what we were saying, but more often than not he would proceed to do the opposite of what we were actually asking him to do. If I got out of the water and told him why, it would certainly be embarrassing, and it might result in him thinking he understood that I wanted him to sail away and abandon Erin a kilometer offshore with nothing but her snorkel and the terrors of the ocean to keep her company.
Besides, I’d paid for the trip; I’d better at least make a token effort to enjoy the awful things that other people loved about the ocean. And Erin was having fun, looking at all of that stuff that is the antithesis of everything comforting and human in the world. It would be pretty disappointing for her if I made her experience all of that horror alone, so I forced myself to stay for awhile and look cautiously and incuriously around.
It felt like ages, but I think my willpower lasted for somewhere under half an hour. Three separate times I was unmanned by some part of the scenery and started thrashing my way back to the boat, but each time I forced myself to calm down and get my money’s worth of awfulness out of the experience. Finally, knowing I was on the verge of vomiting in fear, Erin told me that her fins were making her feet sore, so we should go back to the boat. I could have kissed her, but for the snorkels and the saltwater and all the terrible fish.
We escaped alive and sailed back and then rode our motos to a beautiful beach, where we played in the waves. In my mind, there are no fish at beaches, so swimming there is fun. Please don’t anyone try to convince me otherwise; I have a hard enough time enjoying beaches, what with all of the entropy of the waves crashing on the shore.
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