Cucumber Love

            Sea cucumbers are strange enough when they sit on the ocean floor, doing normal sea cucumber things.  The sea cucumber family is a diverse one, with wide variation in color, pattern, texture, size, degree of firmness, and what I think of as slime factor, a personal numerical rating system that frequently proves useful when dealing with underwater creatures.  Some sea cucumber traits are universal, though: long, sluggish, poop-shaped bodies slowly undulate along the sand, slurping up algae covered detritus and reforming the detritus into long strands of pearl necklace-like poo that winds along the bottom.  Weird. 

            There is a species of sea cucumber here that is one I have not seen elsewhere.  This guy has a mottled cream and brown body with large dark leopard spots.  He also has pointy white spikes that stick up at regular intervals.  They look dangerous, but are actually just as soft as the rest of his body.  A member of the cucumber genus commonly called the lion’s paw, he sports a series of short, dark, feelers that protrude slightly from the underside of his ‘head’ when he locomotes and feeds.  Looks like a whole row of little feather dusters waving around underneath the front part of his body.  Big guy, maybe two feet long, fully extended.  He’s a common sight on the wrecks.

            Here’s the decidedly uncommon part.  I was ending a dive today on a wreck that is settled on its side, just cruising along the high side of the hull on my way back to the Odyssey.  Next thing I know I’m the Muad Dib surrounded by spice worms, except they are only two feet long, and I’ve never even been to Arakis.  (Frank Herbert is rolling over in his grave right now, and not just because of how thoroughly disappointing all the sequels to Dune were.)  But seriously, that’s what it looked like.  Materializing in front of me in the murky water are seven or eight of these sea cucumbers, all but the last six inches of their cylindrical bodies held erect, vertical from the wreck, swaying slowly to some unheard echinoderm tune.  It looks like they all just decided to skip several rungs on the evolutionary chain and walk upright.  Or at least dance around a bit. 

            When I carefully moved amongst them, I noticed that they were all giving off a milky white fluid from a pore on the backs of their heads, and it was then that I realized with a combination of horror, amusement, and maybe just a little bit of titillation (hey, I live on a boat in the middle of nowhere), that I had stumbled into the middle of a full blown group groping gamete gooing echinoderm orgy.  I try not to think about the embryonic larval spawn fry hatchling krill spore supersaturated sexually active stew in which I work, yet here I was in the middle of it all, front row seat to the love fiesta taking place amongst these striving, earnest creatures.  Even as I watched, two more cucumbers quite literally reared their ugly heads and joined the party, broadcast spawning for all they were worth.  How much more simple would life be for humans if the entire act of courtship, relationship, and mating consisted of walking into a bar, spewing gametes all over the place, and leaving?  How much more complex?  Something to ponder as I bumped air into my buoyancy compensator and slowly ascended away from the undulating cucumbers and their fertile love cloud.  They were still going strong when I lost sight of them, and good for them, I say.  

Squeaky Wheel

On my flight from Jakarta to Singapore, I was unwilling witness to an act so heinous and misconceived that it boggled my mind. I shake with rage as I write this, flashing back to the incident. As soon as the seat belt light was off, the stewardesses (flight attendants? air hostesses? sadistic villains?) began moving purposefully around the cabin. Their first act, before the normal drinks, meals, pillows, or reading material, routine was to pass out plastic bags of squeezable squeaky toys to every child on the plane old enough to grasp the proffered parcel with a chubby fist. I am going to give you a minute to digest that one. No, really, take another second. Squeaky toys. Children. Airplane. It was like watching someone pass out copies of The Bell Curve to a plane-load of right wing talk radio hosts.
So wrong, on so many levels, that I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just wade in and start flailing. First, the packaging. You can’t find a plastic bag anymore that doesn’t have a choking hazard, this bag is not a toy warning printed on it, and here they are passing them out to children. Each bag is sealed by a folded piece of cardboard secured to the plastic with ummm…two metal staples? Here ya go, kiddies. Hey, if you are having trouble getting it open, just use your teeth, okay? Not that some of the toddlers receiving the bags were old enough to even have teeth, mind you.
As to the toys themselves, and I say toys because there were more than one in each bag; yeah, two squeaky toys per bag, one for each under-aged fist to ensure stereo irritation from every child. Anyways, what’s the first place these toys are going to go, assuming the kids aren’t already choking on the plastic bag or the staples? Into their pieholes, of course. I’m all about exposing kids to germs to encourage a healthy immune system, but I guarantee that whatever filthy sweatshop these toys, made of snacklicious low grade petrochemical ingredients, came out of did not have children’s health in mind during production, packaging, and shipping.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m no crusader for child safety and probably wouldn’t flinch if the stews were passing out sleeping pills, bourbon bottles with rubber nipples affixed, or rolls of duct tape for the kids. I must know, though, what criminally shortsighted corporate buffoon seeking in-flight entertainment solutions for the younger crowd hit the send key on the shipping order for SQEAKY TOYS? Please note a characteristic lack of capitalization, underlining, and italics in past entries and understand that if I were relating this story in person, I would be screaming the above words. Whoever made the decision to take the annoyance public at the ‘approve the distribution of noisemakers to children at the beginning of a two hour flight’ policy meeting must be willfully malicious, deaf, a direct descendant of Torquemada, or, at the very least, terminally myopic.
Somehow these toys made their way down the pipeline, though, the orders passing across the desks and the toys passing through the shipping channels of a whole army of people who didn’t give a second thought to the end result. Eventually boxes of squeaky toys made their way aboard planes and into the hands of stewardesses, the people responsible for not only your comfort during the flight, but your safety and, in the case of emergency, even your life. Bad omen if they lack the judgment to realize that handing out irritants to kids is the wrong call. Who’s to know if the sky hostesses make the conscious, sane choice not distribute the noisemakers? They have plenty enough autonomy to simply not pass them out, right? I doubt there is some sort of sophisticated distribution monitoring system. Warehouse guy: “Hey, you need another case of squeaky toys?” Head stewardess: “No thanks, all good here. Not many kids aboard lately.” Simple. But no, smiles all around and here you go, junior, something to annoy us all with for the duration of the flight. You can’t tell me that even the most jaded, inured, stoic flight attendant can tune out a ruckus that sounds like ten litters of puppies set loose in the toy section of the pet store. What’s next, handfuls of Flinstones shapes amphetamines to ensure that the brat behind you will be kicking the back of your seat for the duration of the flight?
As a last resort, we can surely depend on those directly responsible for the children’s safety and public behavior, right? Thank goodness for the good judgment of parents, gatekeepers and guardians of not only their offspring but those who their offspring’s behavior may impact. Right? If my flight is any indicator of the present state of parenting, our future generations are doomed. I always considered parents who bought their children toys with loud sirens, speakers, cymbals, and bells to be masochistic, but it’s their choice to turn their own homes into aural chaos and call it cute. Keep it at home. If someone was cruising the aisles passing out whiskey and fireworks, you wouldn’t let your kid have them, would you? So why noisemakers? Why? Parents of the world unite under a flag of decency, common sense, or, at the very least, respect for the sanity of those exposed to your children’s antics. Squeaky toys for my toddler on a trans-oceanic flight crowded with innocent strangers? No thank you, stewardess. So easy, so logical, so obvious.
Ever get into a situation where a lifetime of moral habituation and pack behavior tendencies prevents you from committing an act that, stripped of its sociopathic underpinnings, makes a lot of sense? If so, then you will understand the vivid technicolor detail of my whole flight-worth of fancy visualizing a hunt for everyone responsible for the manufacture, sales, purchase, distribution, storage, and dispersal of cheap squeaky toys on airplanes .

Scooter

            There’s something inherently terrifying to me about motorized two-wheeled vehicles.  Owners and enthusiasts cite the freedom of the open road and the wind through the hair, but every time I think about riding one I imagine the freedom to get clobbered by an SUV or have my tenuous grip on the machine broken by a fall, leaving me to decelerate slowly on the skin of my face or quickly against a curb or parked car.  The lightweight cousin of the motorcycle, the motor scooter, is especially frightening to me: underpowered, insubstantial, tiny.  Travel to any European capital or paved third world country with tourists and it is obvious that my temerity is not widely shared. 

            Though American motorcyclists split lanes and edge their way to the front of the line at stoplights, there is nothing to compare their behavior with what goes on in the above mentioned foreign tourist areas and European cities (Rome, anyone?).  In such places it seems like there are as many scooters as people and that at least two thirds of them are on the roads at any given time of the day or night.  They race along streets and alleys, merge indiscriminately, and, in the case of Indonesia, drive on the wrong side of the road (Look right! Look right!).  Maybe not the wrong side, but certainly not the right side.  The right side here being the left side.  Left being right and right being wrong.  Right?

            I’ve always thought that the folks who rent scooters on vacation are asking for trouble.  Everyone’s met the ubiquitous drunk guy in the foreign bar, scooter victim drowning his road rash sorrows in beer, great devastated tracts of raw weeping flesh glistening wetly in the light as they struggle to scab despite alcohol induced blood thinning.  Such sights are enough to keep me away, far away, from the temptation of riding.  Give me a metal cage with four wheels that, despite retarding my ability to commune with the freedom of the road, will not tip over when I lean to the side.  Something substantial, something that won’t leave the other party in the accident wondering if he did in fact collide with someone, or if that brief sensational oddity was just a bump in the road.  When I wreck, I want people to know I’ve been there by some other means than a trail of gore on the pavement and a scuff-mark on a plastic bumper that can be mostly buffed out with judicious application of spit and light scraping with the edge of a fingernail.

            Fear of physical injury is accompanied by a loathing of the hustle involved with third world rental processes, damage claims, and the potential for wreckage resulting in protracted out of country legal and remuneration battles, possibly while strung up in a sketchy medical clinic.  Rental paperwork is a joke.  The ways to get into financial, legal, and bodily straits are myriad, and that has always slammed the lid on any romantic notions of foreign scooter rental.  Plus men just look so effeminate astride them.  (See photo.)

            So I’m zipping up and down the winding roads of coastal Lombok, taking the hilly curves as fast as I dare, pushing hard and leaning into the turns, barely thinking about the fact that the slightest miscalculation on my part, or something as uncontrollable as a patch of sand, gravel, or oil could put me down into oncoming traffic, and you know what?  It’s fun.  Really fun.  This is what I have been missing.  A way to throw caution to the wind and let a combination of factors outside my control, along with reflexes, judgment, and skill, mine and my fellow motorists’, decide my fate.  At speed. 

            It started innocently enough.  I just needed to get down the street in the town of Sengigi on the west coast of Lombok.  I had several errands to run and was looking to arrange a ride with the hotel.  The fellow suggested I rent a scooter.  Sengigi is a small town, spread out, with only one major road and no major traffic.  How dangerous could it possibly be?  I decided to wear a long shirt, pants, and sneakers to give me all the extra protection a layer of cotton can offer to someone decelerating on the pavement from cruising speed to a dead stop on his ass.  They had only automatic bikes, so no clutching or shifting involved.  I pulled up my skirt, strapped on a helmet, tucked away my better judgment, and roared away.  Maybe I didn’t roar.  These contraptions mostly putter unless you are climbing a steep hill; then they whine.  As I pulled onto the street I was thinking about the ill translated rental agreement I had signed.  Was I accountable for the first $250 worth of damages or everything over $250 dollars? 

            I almost gave myself the opportunity to find out as I merged into traffic.  (Look right!  Look right!)  Escaping unharmed, I focused all my attention from that point on staying upright and alive.  The bike was forgiving and peppy, and it is interesting to note how quickly one graduates from being a nervous amateur to a foolishly overconfident amateur.  Testosterone is a powerful drug, and nothing encourages its production and distribution, from personal experience, like motorized vehicles and firearms.  Thankfully no firearms in Lombok, or other motorists might have been tempted to use them on the goofy white boy cruising as far into the slow lane as he could. 

            Other than the challenge of merging in intersections (Look right!  Look straight!  Look left!  Look out!) and passing slow moving vehicles, there was nothing to it.  Well, there was the road construction.  And blind curves.  And livestock.  And Muslim mosque-goers leaving worship   And playing children.  And horse drawn carts.  And dogs.  And vendors.  Okay, there were a lot of nerve jittering obstacles and impediments, but they were all secondary to the feeling of freedom I felt while taking in the view.  I spent the next few days cruising around the countryside, pausing at all sorts of scenic spots to do tourist stuff like take photos, play with monkeys, eat grilled corn and fresh fruit shakes, wander around on deserted beaches, overlook bluffs, and explore empty hotels on scenic property with eager staff killing time until tourist season.  Each activity was enriched by the fact that there was a little red scooter waiting by the side of the road to putter me away on the next leg of the adventure.  Or roar.  Yeah, roar.

Darwin Vindicated

Proof that humans did evolve from apes; some of us never even got beyond the fauxhawk hairstyle.  Pity, that.

Hardly Sell

Someone could make a bundle translating Fisher and Ury (apologies for mangled spelling) into Indonesian. The people selling goods and services in the tourist areas I’ve visited over the last few months could use a little Getting To Yes. The towns are full of myriad salesmen, hawkers, vendors, massage peddlers, taxi drivers, moped renters, and tour guides. Everybody’s here except the kid with and a grubby handful of chicle! and ten sombreros on his head.
They all have an admirably aggressive approach, often more respectable for enthusiasm than effectiveness. Standard opener is to announce the good or service on offer in a sing-song voice with rising interrogative inflection at the end: “Massage?” “Transport?” and “Sarong?” are three pretty common ones. There’s a friendly approach designed to establish rapport before the sale: “Where you from, what you name, where you stay, how long you stay in Lombok?” are all pretty common, so common in fact that I vacillate between wanting to hang a sign printed with the answers around my neck and pretending I am deaf and mute. From here the openers get a little more esoteric. A bizarre one: “What can I do for you?” to which my bitten off reply would be, “I’ll let you know when I want something,” if I weren’t a constant model of politeness. The deaf mute angle counts as polite, right? Once on a street in Sengigi I got hit with a metaphysical opening line, not what I was expecting from a watch salesman: “What are you looking for?” My all time favorite come on though is when a vendor approaches me and just gives me an enthusiastic “Yes!” No clue how that’s supposed to loosen my wallet, but I like a positive sales attitude.
Another motivated aspect is how the salespeople will take any opportunity to sell. They stride the beaches and the streets shilling their wares, hitting up pool and beach-goers, those lounging or eating at a restaurant, strollers, bicyclists, you name it. They will wait on the beach until you come out of your room for breakfast and then shill. Again, marks for enthusiasm.
After the opener, though, things go downhill. If you don’t show immediate interest in offered wares or interest in conversation, salespeople may repeat an offer a few times or stand there and idly look at you while you try to eat or walk or take in sun or swim, but they soon lose interest and let you off the hook. If you don’t respond, they may move on, or they may open up a massive avenue of defeatism that would make any used car salesman cringe: “Maybe later? Maybe tomorrow?” Now come on. What kind of entrepreneurial spirit and go-getter attitude is that? How can you let someone off that easy? Only slightly less hard nosed is when they start reducing their opening price before you show any interest in what they are offering, much less muster the energy to haggle. You haven’t even made like you were cared and they are already diving for rock bottom prices. Special prices. Morning prices. Evening prices. Friend prices. All prices swooping towards cost just to get you to react.
Clearly Tony Robbins or some other self-improvement sales technique specialist would make a killing here teaching folks to be closers. Maybe a little hard sell Glengary Glenross attitude is in order, though I am afraid I would be tempted to use the set of second place steak knives on vendors more pushy than the ones here already.

Lazyland

There are three islands called the Gilis that are a thirty-minute slow boat ride off the coast of Lombok. They are tiny, featureless blobs of jungle with a ring of beach and a sand path around them. You can walk around any one of them in a couple of hours, and they are close enough to one another to be an easy swim if it weren’t for a steady current that runs between them. Boats make regular runs from one to another, but there is no motorized traffic on any of the islands. All transit is done by foot, bicycle, or cidomo or clip-clop, two wheeled pony-drawn carts. In other words, the loudest noise you hear besides the engine of a passing boat or the roar of a diesel generator when the island power goes out, a frequent occurrence, is the crowing of the ubiquitous and accursed roosters. Idyllic.
Enriching this peaceful atmosphere is the pace of the islands, which is really no pace at all, a veritable standstill of relaxation that leaves one stuporously groping for the day of the week, the date, even the month. Accommodations are situated off of the beach path on each island, and range from huts to luxurious bungalows with all sorts of options in between. I stayed in everything from a shack with a mosquito net covered bed and a stand fan to a two story thatched bungalow with air-conditioned bed and balcony area upstairs and open air living area with hammock and day bed downstairs. Most of the places also have outdoor bathrooms, a constant joy in this climate, as you can walk outside at night and shower, in privacy, under the stars, surrounded by whatever landscaping and artwork is arranged in the bathroom. Pretty cool.
Accommodations are on the landward side of the island-encircling path, which leaves room for restaurant and lounge areas on the beach side. The hotels, if you can call them that, all have restaurants, and there are many independent restaurants and bars as well, each one with its own space on the beach for serving meals. You know those thatch roofed, open walled wooden stands with the raised flooring, the low table, and the cushions that you see on the cover of all those island living type magazines? That’s where you lounge here. You find a restaurant that looks good, you walk out onto the beach, ditch your shoes, climb onto the raised dais, burrow into some cushions like a pet settling down, start ordering mounds of food, cheap beer, fresh fruit shakes, and beach drink cocktails, then sit around and consume it while staring out into the water. Make a day of it: bring a book and some snorkel gear, periodically flop onto the sand for some sun or a swim, then loll back when you are finished for a read or a nap or another drink. The path is littered with beach huts full of folks doing just this. All day.
About the flopping in the water part, the tourist areas are concentrated on the leeward sides of the islands, perfect spots for snorkeling. El Nino and the dynamite fishing that, though curtailed in the last few years has still left its obvious mark, have decimated a lot of the coral in the area, but the snorkeling off the beach is still grand, largely for its easy accessibility to colorful, clear, clean, warm, shallow water that gives way between each island to an interesting drop-off; all boat traffic that moves through here does so at a slow pace, keeping an eye out for said snorkelers. Those inclined can book dives from the many SCUBA concessions on the islands. Some of the shops have pools and offer classes, and all have big wooden motorized outriggers that do daily dives to the intact reefs around the islands. Easy diving with crews that bust their butts to make the dives painless for the guests.
Each of the three islands has its own flavor. One is the party island, punching way above its weight in the party scene, with different bars holding parties on different nights of the week. Bottle flipping flair bartenders whip bottles of arak, the local palm distilled spirit around. Live bands play reggae and blues, and Djs spin dance favorites to take up the slack. Some devious bastard in the corner keeps throwing psilocybin into the fruit shakes. International crowds of rowdies howl at the moon. You get the picture and can probably understand why this is the island of choice among the tourist crowd. But there are two other islands, one very laid back and the other downright comatose in pace. And that’s on the leeward side where all the action is. Walk around to the windward side where the waves and the surf make the beaches somewhat less accessible and you will find empty stretches of beach and jungle interspersed with expensive looking private properties and accommodations that take advantage of the low traffic to offer those interested a place that affords perfect isolation and privacy. All with the ever-present thatch huts and hammocks for lounging and napping. No wonder they call this place Lazyland.

Sweeping Success

They’re serious about their sweeping in Indonesia. They do a lot of it. Seems it’s the first task on the day’s to-do list, and many’s the morning I’ve been awakened in Bali and Lombok to the whisking sound of some industrious soul hard at work moving dirt from one place to another. Most days I am awakened by the scraping noise of a broom or the maddening crow of a rooster. Not ideal, but superior to and later in the day than my alarm at work. They broom everything here. Tile, wood, concrete, stone, and bamboo floors. Even dirt. Yep, they sweep the dirt paths, yards, and roads in front of establishments for no other reason I can discern than to leave neat little broom tracks as evidence of a well-kept area.
They’re not using some sort of fancy store bought brooms, either. We’re talking about a bundle of sticks or reeds lashed together at the top. Think witches’ broom, minus the stick in the middle. Why minus the stick in the middle? You got me. The half stooped posture one must adopt to drag a bundle of foot long reeds around on the floor makes absolutely no sense. Unless there is some facet of broom technology I am missing that would not allow a handle to be incorporated into the middle of a bundle, it seems like you’d want to be able to stand up to broom, right? As long as you are taking the time to make a broom, for posture’s sake, tie a handle in there. Even hunch-backed, broom riding hags have a handle on their broom; not only easier to ride from a magical point of view, but, on a more practical level, it gives the hunch a break being able to stand up straight while tidying the front porch in preparation for the next set of children lost deep in the woods. Plus it gives a little leverage when taking a swing at a pesky rooster.