| HOME Doggy Style Archive On the Road Holidays Doggy Style Blog Novel |
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Part
I |
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Here on Bali people only have one of four names: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. Which one they get depends on the order in which they were born. This must make life hell on teachers. |
I’m sitting on the veranda—what you and I call a front
porch—in the middle of some rice paddies just south of Ubud, a
city on Bali. The fields are brown, for which my landlords have
apologized profusely, but that’s because they were just harvested.
The fields, not the landlords. I’d asked that they spray paint
them green for my arrival but as I learned quickly, many things are
easier said than done here.
The fields are full of ducks. Thousands of them. They’re eating leftover rice at the bottom of the paddies. When they’re done here they’ll be taken to another set of fields to continue dining in style. To the ducks a rice paddy is an All You Can Eat buffet. Well, as long as you don’t mind choosing between uncooked rice, uncooked rice, and uncooked rice.
It wouldn’t be
surprising. After all, here on Bali people only have one of four
names: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, and Ketut. Which one they get depends on
the order in which they were born. If there are more than four
children in a family—and if you’re any sort of Balinese there
will be—they start over with the fifth child being Wayan, the
sixth Made, etc. Girls and boys both receive the same name, though
when they need to be formal they put an “I” in front of it to
indicate a male and an “Ni” to indicate a woman. |
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The flight felt a lot
like being on the 45-Stockton bus in San Francisco riding through
Chinatown except I had a seat, the plane didn’t lurch every twenty
seconds, and I didn’t have old Chinese women knocking me out of
the way to get on board. |
To
complicate life, they don’t have last names. And, for reasons no
one’s been able to explain yet, the first-born is sometimes called
Gede, the second-born Kadek, the third Komang, and the fourth, well,
he or she is shit out of luck because it’s Ketut, whether they
like it or not. Thus my landlord is Kadek and so is his sister who
comes by every day to place the offerings.
Although the rice paddies are brown now, they won’t always be that way. Mindy and Kadek say that during the six months I’ll be here I’ll get to see the workers plow, plant, nurture, and harvest a rice crop. Did I say six months? Yup. A couple of months ago
I saw a posting on an email list I get (www.craigslist.org)
about some cottages on Bali that were being offered cheap for
long-term lease. Well, cheap by San Francisco rates, where annual
rents equal the gross national product of, well, Bali. I answered on
a whim. You see, since leaving the east coast 3½ years ago I’ve
been house-sitting, subletting, and petsitting. I’ve been a modern
day nomad, traveling with a laptop instead of a tent. I’ve spent
most of the time in the San Francisco Bay Area, but also in L.A.,
Oregon, Hawaii, France, and Michigan, taking road trips when I
didn’t have a place to stay. But I’d never stayed in one place
longer than two months, and that was in France last year (see:
A Mad Dog in Bretagne). I’ve
been in one city longer, but over a six-month period I might have
stayed in eight or ten different places. So you can see how the idea
of a year was scary. |
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The airport architecture gave me a glimpse of things to come while that stupid song from South Pacific kept running through my head. It could have been worse. It could have been “Mambo Number 5.” |
My
younger brother and a couple of friends suggested that six months
might work better. Or at least not make me crazy. Ah, they know me
well. The landlords said okay, I made the arrangements, and the next thing I know I’m standing in line at San Francisco International Airport realizing that I might just be the only non-Asian on the flight. As it turns out I was being silly—there were at least four other white people. It felt a lot like being on the 45-Stockton bus riding through Chinatown in San Francisco except I had a seat, the plane didn’t lurch every twenty seconds, and I didn’t have old Chinese women knocking me out of the way to get on board.
Since the plane left at 1:30 A.M. I slept. When I woke up it was breakfast time. We had a choice of frittata with bacon, croissant, yogurt, and fruit or congee with shredded pork, 1000-year-old egg, other stuff, and fruit. I got the congee since I felt adventurous and wanted to fit in. I think I was the only one on the plane who did. Fifteen hours and 6,450
miles later I arrived at Chiang Kai-Shek airport in Taipei. You can
really tell a lot about a country by how they greet you when you get
off the airplane. In Hawaii they smile, put a lei around your neck,
and you know your stay will be pleasant. In Taipei they do things a
little differently. The first thing you see when you get off the
plane is a big sign that says: “Drug trafficking is punishable by
death in the R.O.C.” Now that’s what I call a drug policy.
My nearly all-Asian flight gave way to an overwhelmingly Australian immigration line. Apparently all planes arrive in Bali between 2:05 and 2:15 every afternoon. I went through customs, declaring my cell phone since the form said “portable phones” were illegal to bring into the country. Not that my cell phone will work here. The United States, thinking free enterprise is more important than common sense, is one of the few countries that’s not on a compatible system with the rest of the world. Come to think of it I shouldn’t have bothered declaring it at all—as far as I know paperweights are legal to bring into Indonesia. As it turned out it didn’t matter because the customs agents were way too busy enjoying my moustache to worry about whether I was bringing anything I shouldn’t into the country. Mindy was waiting with a sign that said “Selamat Datang Mr. Mad Dog” (think: Aloha). As we walked outside the heat and humidity smacked me in the face. As I wiped the sweat from my jet-lagged brow I thought to myself, “Did I say six months?”
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Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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All this must make life
hell on teachers. I mentioned this to Mindy, Kadek’s wife (and
also my landlord), and she told me about a time she was out
somewhere, saw a friend, called out “Wayan!” and half the crowd
turned around. On the other hand, though, it can make a mother’s
life much easier. Instead of having to call ten different children
in for dinner she can just yell out four names and the whole brood
comes running.
After a couple of hours
chatting with two Americans who were separately heading to Nepal,
one for three months and one as the start of a year-long
around-the-world tour, I got on a plane for another five hours and
2,375 miles. And slept most of the way. When I looked out the window
we were taxiing down the runway at Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar,
Bali. The airport architecture gave me a glimpse of things to come
while that stupid song from South Pacific kept running
through my head. It could have been worse. It could have been
“Mambo Number 5.”|
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