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.

Caution: Contents In Packet May Be Hotter Than They Appear

Had an interesting meal on Air Garuda Indonesia on the way over here. Well, the meal itself was not overly interesting, just an eastern hemisphere take on a hard to screw up easy to heat microwaveable all the stuff in cellophane and little plastic covered cups on a tray meal. The condiment packet, however, was something else. Foil squeeze packets in the U.S. are what, mayo, mustard, ketchup, right? Foil packets here are soy and something called sambal, with which many of you are doubtlessly familiar in context of the Vietnamese sauce that comes in the clear plastic squeeze bottle with the green top and the rooster on the front next to a bunch of indecipherable script. That is the general form that came in this packet. Another type of sambal is the relish made of fresh chopped chilies and garlic, a heavenly combination akin to molten catnip for me, but let’s focus on the packet. You just can’t get dangerous condiments in the U.S. unless you are actively searching. Stuff labeled hot, for the most part, isn’t. I guess someone’s worried about a taste bud damage lawsuit from an unwitting plaintiff. You can go on line and find hot condiments at places like www.burntheskinofftheroofofyourmouth.com (don’t bother trying this link). You can order extra spicy at most ethnic restaurants and you still won’t get hurt, unless you are at a Thai, Indian, or Vietnamese restaurant, in which case you could be in trouble. Point being, you have to go out of your way to immolate your taste buds in public in the U.S.
Thus imagine my surprise when I bit open the foil packet, identical to the one distributed freely to every man, woman, and child on the plane, squirted it on my rice, and went to take a bite, only sensing as I was closing my mouth around said bite that I might be in trouble when I detected a flaming tingle on my lips in the exact spot where I’d bitten into the packet. Too late, and curious now in a masochistic, I can handle hot way, I went through with it. It took me the rest of the plane flight to stop feeling sorry for my mistake. Yikes. After stripping off my fleece and sweating through the shirt underneath, taking the whole water bottle away from the startled attendant when she passed, mouth breathing like I was in my fifth hour of labor, and, I’m not afraid to say, shedding a tear or two, I finally managed to lapse into a semblance of sleep/unconsciousness that may have been my brain knocking me out from the pain or the endorphins clobbering me into a stupor, my dreams visions of pitchforks and eternal flame.
Last scene of the G.I. Joe cartoon moral of the story wrap up here, folks: Things are different outside the U.S. Not better or worse, just different, and it is these differences that make sitting on a planes and in airports for days at a time worthwhile.

Call to Prayer

I’m all about religious tolerance. People should be able to worship whatever form of the invisible man makes the big black yawning unknown more palatable to them. If it makes you sleep better at night, I say go for it. There are very real limitations to my tolerance, though. I feel about religion as I do about sexuality. Whatever you want to do behind closed doors or in the congregation of like-minded others, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone, go for it. It’s the part where folks shake their beliefs or practices in my face that I get indignant.
The varied and ancient religions of the South Pacific islands have, for the most part, been eliminated by generations of Christian missionaries. Now that the damage is done, I feel that many far-flung missions do good by providing medical care, food, and support to impoverished populations, even if it is in the name of a god the populations never wanted. The predecessors to these modern missionaries bug me. They traveled the world to foist their own beliefs on people with traditions and mythologies every bit as old and oftentimes older than the ones the missionaries were pushing. It isn’t cool to bedazzle and frighten people with technological superiority, then use that fascination or fear to tell the islanders their ancient religions were wrong and had to be abandoned in the name of Jesus, Sunday worship, and, the biggest insult in an equatorial climate, clothing. Not just any clothing these days, but polyester. We’re talking button downs and ties here, hideously patterned full rayon dresses with slips. Slips! When was the last time you felt the need to don a slip in 85 degree 85 percent humidity? Shipping in bundles of sweets and salty snacks, the modern day equivalent of glass beads or iron nails, is another popular tactic. Turns out Pacific Islanders love salty snacks and will bust up a whole altarful of idolatrous images to get at a bag of Doritos.
Nice thing about that virulently aggressive strain of rabid Christianity rampant in the U.S. is that you can ignore most of it. You never have to pick up a Coulter book. Mega church, mega money T.V. and radio stations can be bypassed with a finger twitch so quick as to be compared with the CNS bypassing reflex of touching a hot stove, an impulse so fast it never even reaches the brain. Doors can be politely shut in the faces of earnest youngsters fervently darkening the porch with fliers on a weekend morning. One can, with a bit of creative sequestering, pretend that half our country is not rabidly, blindly Christian to the point of refusing to even entertain the idea that anything but a literal, world is mere thousands something years old dinosaur fossils were put on Earth by God to give humans something to ponder on interpretation of the good book is fatally wrong to a degree that justifies holier than though persecution.
I’m in a Muslim country right now. Haven’t been here long, but the people have so far been beautiful, kind, outgoing, friendly, open, and accepting in the same way that many Christians who practice the best parts of religions preaching tolerance and gentleness can be. Sure it’s tough getting a decent plate of pork. Yes it is boring that many of the women are swathed from head to foot, even when they swim. It was indeed odd getting used to prayer rooms instead of smoking lounges in the airport. All that stuff is fine by me, except maybe the dearth of pig products.
Even heartland churches which erect massive crosses and billboards threatening the unclean with eternal purgatory don’t hold a candle, though, to a town full of mosques sporting loudspeakers mounted to the minarets. Timex needs to come out with a Muslim timepiece that chimes for prayer five times a day and has a Mecca seeking bezel, because this cat in agony wailing piped through roof mounted speakers is incredibly grating. First round starts before sunrise and last session isn’t until after dark. It’s worse because my hotel is in the crossfire of multiple mosques playing different versions of Mohamed’s “Torturing the Family Pet Concerto in the key of C”, the wailing strains vilely dissonating off one another like a children’s hands-on science museum harmonics demonstration where the kiddies can vary the tonal modulation on two speakers to create jarring, discordant patterns of sound. If I have to listen to this stuff five times a day, I’ll soon be ready to wield a Kalashnikov myself. Okay, it isn’t fair to participate in the current irrational American hysteria implying every Muslim is part of a violent cell just waiting for the phone to ring so he can grab a dead man switch and a vest of C4 and ball bearings. But listening to Muslim call to prayer five times a day will soon have me hankering for a bullhorn and a collection of Billy Graham sermons so I can cruise the streets at dawn. Keep your religions to yourself, people, and let a fellow sleep.