The plague is rife in Indonesia and systematically under-reported. The health minister recently accused unspecified regions of reducing testing to acquire green zone status, while one citizen science project suggested deaths were at least three times higher than the official numbers, and a recent seroprevalence study found that, in September and November, Bali’s official case numbers were out by a factor of 53.

Cases among the foreign community on Bali rarely appear in the official figures, let alone get passed to tracing — I know, personally, of more than ten cases which never seemed to be recorded, and, ironically, the only case which tracers did follow up was a false positive. A good friend knew two foreigners who died of Covid: neither troubled the rosy official statistics. In fact, when the travelling Covid doc who’s working 16 hours a day testing foreigners at home endeavoured to report some of his weekly caseload (usually around 12 to 15 positives) to the authorities for follow-up, the powers-that-be weren’t interested.

All of which is to say that, after three close encounters with folk who tested positive soon after, and three weeks’ dutiful self-isolation, plus god knows how many encounters with folk who opted not to test, were asymptomatic or neglected to call me, not to mention quite a lot of social kissing and mask-off restaurant/bar socialising, I was feeling fairly bullish about dodging the plague. Then I started to feel tired.

My eleventh swab test of the pandemic and, as the fluid dropped onto the test strip, it lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yep,” he said. “It’s positive.”

Initially, I have to say, Covid felt like nothing. I was a little tired, so I had a nap— but I hadn’t slept brilliantly the night before. I had what felt like the beginnings of a sore throat, which I put down to napping with the air-conditioning on. And so I duly went ahead with the evening meet-up I was planning.

The next morning, I woke up feeling tired, and the sore throat was definitely A THING. Thinking it wise to test before heading off to yoga, and potentially infecting class and teacher and closing the studio in a one-woman super-spreader event, I messaged the Covid doctor. My eleventh swab test of the pandemic and, as the fluid dropped onto the test strip, it lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s positive.”

He recommended rest, Vitamin C, Vitamin D and zinc. I retrieved my pulse oximeter from the last person in my circle who’d had Covid, who kindly donated a small can of oxygen and recommended a Chinese medicine, then stocked up on vitamins and paracetamol from the HaloDoc motorbike delivery pharmacy and ordered the Chinese meds on Tokopedia. And then I started the WhatsApp of shame, messaging everyone with whom I might have been in contact while infectious, plus cancelling all engagements for the next 10 days.

Another friend with whom I’d been on a very jolly day out that weekend had the same symptoms, enabling us to establish the likely source of the infection. And so… I waited.

This sorry state of affairs, replete with daytime naps and defined by an absolute inability to focus on anything, continued on and off for a full two weeks.

As places to get a mild dose of Covid goes, Bali has many advantages, at least for the privileged. A huge range of delicious food options are available on GoFood at a swipe; the HaloDoc pharmacy app delivers within the hour; and plenty of doctors do house calls.

By about day five, still with no symptoms but brain fog, a persistent sore throat and a need to sleep a lot, I was feeling quite bullish about my prospects. Despite a friend’s recommendation of rest, I was doggedly doing small quantities of exercise twice a day, and feeling good about that – not really noticing that 40 minutes’ gentle exercise and perhaps an hour or two tending emails and completing the little work I hadn’t deferred tended to be the sum total of my daily activity.

By about day eight, I was very tired of the sore throat, which woke me up in the night, and generally ready to get well again. On day ten, the plague doctor returned and confirmed me negative for Covid, and in celebration of my newfound freedom I had a reasonably active day. The next day, ignoring the fact that my legs, after walking 5,000 steps, ached as though I’d been hiking in the Himalayas, was positively action-packed: I did some work, took a taxi for lunch with a friend, and joined a family group chat.

On day 12, I struggled to get out of bed. Legs ached, throat ached, my brain was fogged, and I was absolutely knackered. This sorry state of affairs, replete with daytime naps and defined by an absolute inability to focus on anything, continued on and off for a full two weeks, although the sore throat did disappear on day 15.

I am sorry to report that, while roughly 80% of folk with Covid report reduced appetite, this very much did not apply to me. I did, however, find the consequences of drinking wine almost unbearable.

Is this long Covid, I hear you cry? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s just a pretty standard case of mild Covid.

If there’s one recommendation I’d give anyone who has mild Covid – and I’m very grateful I only had mild Covid – it is to take it easy. My natural tendency is to power through things – and, given I’d successfully lost a lot of weight and gained a tonne of fitness, I didn’t want to neutralise those gains (although I did give the diet a rest).

To be honest, I only really recovered after a week of reduced physical activity and it’s only now, six full weeks after testing positive, that I am sleeping a sane amount and feel ready to attempt my old exercise schedule. (And, boy, has my fitness fallen back!)

Is this long Covid, I hear you cry? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s just a pretty standard case of mild Covid. While some people I know who’ve had it have been back on their feet within a week, friends have reported not feeling back to themselves for “some weeks”; the NHS guidance says that “most people recover after a few days *or weeks*”; and the list of long Covid symptoms all seem rather more dramatic than “feel a bit feeble and can’t really exercise”.

But, despite being the sort of mild case I’d expect as someone of a healthy weight, under 50, with no relevant pre-existing conditions, Covid was unpleasant. Dealing with isolation and the subsequent social limits imposed by fatigue has been draining; I’m way behind on a personal project I’ve been working on; I’ve lost a stack of income through delaying projects and failing to chase new business; and, of course, there’s the magical possibility of longer-term health issues that can occur even with mild cases.

I’ll be getting vaxxed in a few days, and, while no vaccine is 100% effective, I’d firmly recommend others do likewise.

Image by torstensimon from Pixabay

The post Frankly, I Wouldn’t Recommend Getting Covid appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I’m sure Pak Kiko would be an excellent healer, if you shared a belief system with him. Although I understand from Made, who is no longer the housekeeper, having taken an exponentially more lucrative gig in America, that he’s not quite ready to unleash his powers and go full balian as yet.

The reason my abstruse and thoroughly expat-ty domestic arrangements are relevant is that today Pak Kiko saw a snake.

You could say this was an occupational hazard for a gardener in Bali, particularly one who works in a garden beside a river and therefore full of tasty frogs even before you tuck into the fishponds. You might even be correct in this. But to explain the true meaning of the snake, I need to explain the ghosts.

When, as I understood it, a blood sacrifice was required, Made thought I should check with the landlords.

I’ve touched on the ghosts en passant, I believe. We have the normal-for-Bali pair of a good one, in the kitchen, and a bad one, in the garden, a situation that is, I fear, not helped by our position on a river down which the ashes of the dead may sometimes travel.

Neither Zac nor I can see the ghosts. In fact, only Balinese Hindus are aware of them. But our bad one is particularly bad, apparently. As proven – I believe in its entirety – when Pak Kiko dreamed about a ghost lady with a strangling snake in the garden.

The reason our bad ghost is so evil remains TBC. Made at first believed the issue was that our landlords had failed to hold a ceremony to appease the earth goddess before digging holes for the fishponds and the pool. I went so far as to get estimates from a Hindu priest to undo the insult to the goddess, but when, as I understood it, a blood sacrifice was required, Made thought I should check with the landlords.

After agonising and negotiation, the upshot of this thoroughly Indonesian theological conundrum ran roughly as follows…

Our landlords are Christian. He started out as a Balinese Hindu. She’s from Toraja, so has been a Christian of the buffalo-sacrificing variety since birth. So, naturally, they had a Christian ceremony to appease the earth goddess when the pool and ponds were dug. (Being a priest in Indonesia must, one feels, be something of a shock to the system, not least because this is not the sort of problem the travelling missionary expects to encounter in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.)

The Balinese landlord explained they weren’t averse to having a Hindu ceremony on top of the Christian one if that seemed important, but they’d rather not have a blood sacrifice. The Torajan landlady – and Torajans are famously canny businesspeople, due to the fact that they spend most of their lives and income paying for buffalo sacrifices and clan houses so anyone who escapes the village has to be as hardnosed as hell with an Einstein IQ – pointed out that a Christian exorcism is exponentially cheaper than a Hindu one. (All a Christian exorcist needs is a bit of holy water, a bible and some incense, while the cost of the Hindu exorcism included a budget line for a truck to transport the offerings.)

After agonising and negotiation, the upshot of this thoroughly Indonesian theological conundrum ran roughly as follows. Only Hindus can see the ghosts, but the house is Christian, so the ghosts may well be Christian. We should, therefore have the ceremony in the religion that is most important to the household. Since Zac and I, the only non-ghosts resident in the home, do not have a religion and cannot see the ghosts we can’t participate fully in an exorcism either Christian or Hindu. Therefore, we should leave the ghosts to do their thing and get a Christian exorcism as and when we see them.

And so the ghosts removed themselves from my list of things to fix around the house and became a fact of Bali life. They are, unless you’re poor Pak Kiko, rather unobtrusive. Neither Zac nor I have ever registered anything untoward. In fact, it’s for all the world as if they’re not even real.

A large, green snake in a tree didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded rather like a bamboo viper to me, though I know nothing about snakes.

I think, though I may well be wrong, that many Balinese have been a bit on edge after the earthquake, which comes uncomfortably close to the Nyepi New Year festival. Incense definitely hung heavier in the air than usual the morning after the quake.

So when I returned from school with Zac to see Pak Kiko in the garden staring fixedly into a tree with the long handle of the pool-cleaning net in one hand and a spray bottle of pesticide in the other, I wasn’t unduly concerned.

“How are you?” I asked him in my resolutely rubbish Indonesian.

“There’s a snake,” he said, looking tense, sweaty and grey.

“Oh,” I said, squinting up into the mango and not seeing anything. “What’s it like?”

“Green and big,” he said, frowning.

A large, green snake in a tree didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded rather like a bamboo viper to me, though I know nothing about snakes. More to the point, Pak Kiko didn’t think it was good either.

“OK,” I said in rubbish Indonesian. “There’s a man who will come and get it.”

Pak Kiko seemed relieved. “Zac,” I yelled through the locked door behind which my spawn appeared to be celebrating the start of the school holidays by sitting beneath a headset definitely not revising for his imminent IGCSEs. “There’s a snake in the garden.”

“OK,” he yelled back, and pulled the blind down.

A tense 40 minutes passed, during which Pak Kiko watched the snake move from different locations in the mango tree into another mango tree, up a palm tree and back again.

I dialled Bali Reptile Rescue, the charity which exists less to protect people from snakes than to protect snakes from people and which helped us out when I found the cobra in my bedroom a while back.

An Indonesian lady answered. I handed the phone to Pak Kiko who described the snake and explained our address, then I explained the address again, then I texted it. (You can live in Bali for decades and still get lost. It’s not an island that’s set up for navigation.)

A tense 40 minutes passed, during which Pak Kiko watched the snake move from different locations in the mango tree into another mango tree, up a palm tree and back again and I, but for a few minutes when I thought a patch of congealed sap was a very small and extremely somnolent serpent, could not see a goddamn thing.

I went out the front to check for reptile rescuers, rang the reptile rescuers, looked up the road for reptile rescuers, rinsed and repeated. Finally, having only got lost once, the cavalry arrived: two Indonesian girls, one wearing flip-flops over socks by way of foot protection, equipped with snake forks and a large white bag. (I suppose this is a step up from the towel traditionally used to protect against rabid animals.)

That’s interesting, I think. Clearly the snake man has found some young local people who share his passion for reptiles and is training them up to continue his good work. Because, believe me, snake-wrangler is not a job that anyone should take without aptitude or at the very least enthusiasm. (And, yes, I know Indonesia is a developing country, but my point still holds.)

Neither of them could see the snake. Pak Kiko pointed it out, then pointed it out again, but it remained elusive. I realised, with a mild sinking feeling, that only one out of four of us had now seen the snake, and that one was the person who had had the dream about the snake lady in the garden. Oh Bali!

“Do you have a ladder?” one of the girls asked, as the three of them stood, hands over foreheads, squinting up into the mango, silhouetted like something from an Eastern Bloc flag-raising sculpture or perhaps an early 80s expressive dance troupe.

Of course we have a ladder! Not a very long ladder, not a very good ladder, and more step-ladder than the sort of telescopic affair that’s really needed to climb our substantial trees, but a ladder nonetheless. At last! I could be useful!

To do anything more would suggest that I’m unreasonably withholding a perfectly good, if rather, umm, shocking, 1990s Chinese factory reject washer-drier from someone who currently does the whole family’s washing by hand as well as working two jobs.

The ladder had moved into the store room because, after the tap came off in my hand the day of the earthquake, flooding the junk area, I had emptied the area of all junk and moved non-junk to the storeroom. Well, apart from the junk which Komang, the helper, or Komang #2, her cousin who was fixing the roof, wanted (and, yes, the roof leaks often, and, yes, there are a lot of Komangs in Bali: in fact, Pak Kiko is also a Komang). They couldn’t, however, take any of it as it wouldn’t fit on a motorbike, so we’re still housing a broken bed, a broken washing machine, and a broken TV.

I am, frankly, concerned about the washing machine as Komang #1 is Made’s cousin, Made has already lost one cousin (quite possibly another Komang) to a badly wired washing machine and I am fond of our Komang. But I have uttered my warnings, if not exactly articulated them, and to do anything more would suggest that I’m unreasonably withholding a perfectly good, if rather, umm, shocking, 1990s Chinese factory reject washer-drier from someone who currently does the whole family’s washing by hand as well as working two jobs to put her son through high school.

This post will answer all your questions, so back to the ladder. Rather than being in the junk corner, this was not only in the storeroom but actually locked in the storeroom. This is because Zac had left his keys behind one day, so I’d left my computer in Zac’s room, locked the two rooms containing anything of value – the storeroom and Zac’s room – and left the windows open so Zac could break in. (At over six foot, skinny and spectacularly supple, he can climb through the most extraordinary openings.)

Of course, because Bali, and because crisis, the storeroom door refused to open. I tried a range of approaches. Despite knowing damn well which one was the storeroom key, I even tried several keys. I pulled the handle a little, pushed the handle a little, yanked the door while pushing the key, pushed the door while retracting and turning the key, for all the world like a queen on his wedding night.

At this point, with three Indonesians still looking for the snake in the garden, and waiting on the ladder, the lock began to come off the door. Sensing a rapid deterioration into farce, I yelled frantically for Zac.

“The screw?” I said. “The screw that has come out of the door handle,” my son said slowly, as if talking to a developmentally delayed child.

“Can you mend the door?” I asked, helplessly. “I need to get the ladder out for the snake people and the door is locked.”

To his credit, Zac inquired neither why the ladder was in the storeroom nor why the storeroom was locked. “Where’s the screw?” he said.

“The screw?” I said.

“The screw that has come out of the door handle,” my son said slowly, as if talking to a developmentally delayed child.

I found it on the floor. “I have a screwdriver,” he said. “Let me have a go.”

Fixing the door handle didn’t make the door any more receptive to the key. “How about you just take the whole thing off?” I asked. “That couldn’t make matters any worse, could it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

I ambled off into the garden, where the girls were still looking for the snake and Pak Kiko was still pointing it out. “You have good eyes,” I said amiably, in rubbish Indonesian.

Christ! Taking the lock off, I realised, might make the door unopenable except by taking the thing off its hinges. Further, due to overspending on a weekend’s diving, we were on the verge of breaking into the emergency coin jar and certainly in no position to hire a locksmiths.

I rushed back indoors. Zac was patiently screwing the lock back on. “Yeah, I realised that wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said.

Everyone who works at the property thinks I’m stark staring bonkers because I have long, animated conversations with my computer and appear to spend all day every day frowning, muttering and typing.

Out in the garden, the girls had finally identified the snake, so in came Pak Kiko, with the relieved air of a man who knows people have stopped thinking he’s mad. “The ladder, ma’am,” he said. (Indonesian as a language is hot on terms of address and hugely status-conscious in the way it uses said terms.)

“The door doesn’t want to open!” I exclaimed. “It can’t be unlocked!”

I gave the key one last despairing twist. It turned, smoothly and seamlessly, and the door opened. I’d say it swung, but it graunched and a bit of the facing almost fell off. My point is that it did not behave like a door that has been stuck shut.

I should add, here, that both Pak Kiko and Komang have watched me Skype chatting for the duration they have worked here. It was only after I mentioned to Komang that I was talking to my mother, and pointed to the computer where the voice was coming from, that I think she realised I was not insane. I then made a point of explaining the same thing to Pak Kiko, but I’m not sure he’s entirely got it yet.

I don’t know what they think I do on the computer all day, but they seem to find my habit of talking directly to it quite alarming. (That’s not helped by the fact that, like a lot of self-employed people, I can occasionally mumble when reading things to myself or totaling numbers.)

Which is a long-winded way of saying: everyone who works at the property thinks I’m stark staring bonkers because I have long, animated conversations with my computer and appear to spend all day every day frowning, muttering and typing. The door, perhaps possessed by the kitchen ghost, only served to enhance that perspective.

But apparently we weren’t finished. Oh no. That would be too easy. The ladder had been fetched so the snake needed to be retrieved.

“What snake is it?” I asked, out in the garden, still untarnished by sight of said ophidian.

The girl presented us with our second copy of the reptile rescuers’ handy guide to the snakes of Bali: we’d lost the first. “It’s a vine snake,” she says. “Not dangerous to humans. A pit viper is bigger. This is a thin snake.”

An hour or so in to the saga, I considered this job done, not to mention, the second everyone vacated the property, gin o’clock. “Thank you,” I said. “Would you like a glass of water? Or some tea?”

But apparently we weren’t finished. Oh no. That would be too easy. The ladder had been fetched so the snake needed to be retrieved.

Despite the fact that everyone involved now knew it was harmless and it was, at a minimum, five metres up a goddamn mango tree. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve crawled through a snowmelt waterfall rather than go too close to the edge of a drop, and at Everest Base Camp muleteers paused entire trains to let me count my way across swaying suspension bridges.

After years of more or less artless pruning, the mango tree in question – we have five – has taken on the shape of an inverted capital ‘L’. I am scared of heights so have endless respect for people, be they window-cleaners or guys who have summitted Everest eight times, who can brave them.

Blimey, I think, as the girl in the shoes shimmies up the ladder and inches her way across the bar of the ‘L’, I couldn’t do that for all the world! Wow.

The chick with the flip-flops hovers below with a large white bag, Pak Kiko keeps his eyes fixed on the snake, and shoe chick pulls out the snake fork and reaches up. Wow! I think. These girls are really showing the snake man a thing or two – he must be super-proud of his new hires.

The second she lets go of the branch, it all falls to pieces. “I”m scared of the snake,” the girl exclaims, in English. “I’m scared!” She looks like she’s going to cry.

Unfortunately, she is now more than her body’s length away from the top of a ladder, so freezing is not an option. Nor is dropping, as she’s more than three metres above the ground.

I recognise the symptoms of someone who’s scared of heights spazzing out, as we acrophobes technically put it. I’ve crawled through a snowmelt waterfall rather than go too close to the edge of a drop, and at Everest Base Camp muleteers paused entire trains to let me count my way across swaying suspension bridges, so I’m thoroughly au fait with THE FEAR. I also identify an absolute clusterfuck in the making.

“ZAC!” I yell, beginning to drag our beanbag loungers into position below the tree so she’s got something to land on if she falls. She could break a limb, I realise. Or even her neck! “ZAC!”

“It’s OK!” I say to her. “Please come down. It’s not a poisonous snake so you don’t need to catch it. The most important thing is that you don’t hurt yourself.”

The lack of venom in the snake and the lack of snake-catching chops of our saviours may be connected. Triage might have identified our household with its puny vine snake as the perfect practice arena for trainees.

As we coax her down from the tree, rather like firemen wrangling a kitten, it dawns on me that, perhaps, the lack of venom in the snake and the lack of snake-catching chops of our saviours may be connected. Triage might have identified our household with its puny vine snake as the perfect practice arena for trainees.

As the girls head off on their motorbike and a visibly relaxed Pak Kiko heads for home, I can’t help but wonder. Will he ever come back?

Has this scenario quelled his fears of the snake lady in the garden by living out the dream with a happy ending? Or is it a sinister precursor of snakes to come that indicates there is more to be worried about further down the line.

I lack the linguistic facility to ask him and I very much doubt he’d tell me anyway. If he doesn’t show after Nyepi, I guess I’ll give Made a ring. But first…. Gin o’clock.

The post I Think We Just Hit Peak Bali appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

This morning, we had a corker. Quite how much of a corker it was, as, for that matter, exactly where it was, remains TBC. The US Geological Society has it at 5.5 and somewhere near Keramas on the east coast; the Indonesian BKMG has it at 6.4 near Uluwatu down south. Anyway, it was what we pro journalists call “too goddamn close to my house for comfort”.

Further, as I visited a real live seismography centre at Krakatau. I’m going with the Indonesians, their 1950s seismographs, their 1990s computers, their proximity and their experience over the Americans and their fancy tech. Plus, it’s a big number.

I was “working”, which is to say on Twitter, when it hit. And hit it did. We get a lot of 5.-something earthquakes here and they’re a pretty ambiguous experience. There’s the odd ripple in the fishpond, a sense that your stomach just shifted a few centimetres sideways and back again, and a general feeling of seasick insecurity and hungover malaise. Nothing, in short, to write home about, which is why I haven’t, although I’m sure Sartre would have done a lovely job of it.

Holy cow, I thought, either that cat that nests up in the roof has really put on weight or someone’s driving a bloody mining vehicle past the house.

This morning’s earthquake started with a bang. Now, I am not sure whether there actually was a bang or I retrospectively invented a bang to rationalise the sensation that an elephant was leaping around in the roof. On balance, I think something heavy probably fell in one of the neighbours’ houses.

Anywise, the elephant jumped on the roof, and the walls began to shake; the windows, which have many panes, took up a gentle percussive tinkling. Holy cow, I thought to myself, being a little slow on the uptake of a morning, either that cat that nests up in the roof has really put on weight or someone’s driving a bloody mining vehicle past the house. The floor began to shake more vigorously. Reality dawned.

Zac, being sixteen, sleeps with his door locked. Being sixteen, he can also sleep through pretty much anything although not, I am pleased to note, his alarm. “Zac!” I yell. “Are you OK?”

Silence. Panic bites. How can anyone sleep through this? The bloody house is flamenco dancing. The windows are its jingling castanets. There are WAVES, not ripples, in the goddamn swimming pool.

If this carries on, I think with sudden dread, the house could come down. And why in god’s name is he not responding?

“ZAC!” I yell, pounding on his door with an open palm. “ZAC! WAKE UP IT’S A FUCKING EARTHQUAKE!”

“Uh?”

“It’s an EARTHQUAKE! We need to GET OUT!!!!”

My spawn emerges, floor still shaking, in his underpants, with the bewildered and rather aggrieved air of someone who just can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

Unfortunately, none of our furniture is designed for hiding under.

And then it clicks. We look around the room. I’m not particularly up to speed on earthquakes but I do know that you’re supposed to get under a table to stop things falling on you and stay away from glass. Unfortunately, none of our furniture is designed for hiding under.

Our beds are solid-frame. The Suharto-era furniture we’ve inherited from our landlords includes an ugly teak table with one central leg below a circular base – better than nothing, but hardly going to help if one of the palm trees or mangoes in the garden comes crashing down (the papaya fell into the pool after a previous earthquake, so I’m aware of the risks). The grotesque and spectacularly uncomfortable teak sofa might fit some of Zac under it, but not me.

And, umm, that’s it. We look at each other and discuss.

“Should we go into the garden?” Zac asks.

“Trees!” I say, although I’m thinking that trees are likely better engineered to cope with earthquakes than the typical Indonesian building, even a single-storey one like ours. “What about hiding in a door frame?” (This is, gentle reader, terrible advice, about as bad as it gets after taking shelter under a chandelier.)

“Hmm…” says Zac, who actually does earthquake drills at school, which consist, I believe, of getting under your desk and covering your head then filing out in an orderly fashion at an appropriate time. “I guess.”

Normal service resumes later, as I go to turn off a dripping tap, the whole thing comes off in my hand, and I have to switch the electricity off at the mains as I cannot find the stopcock.

And with that the shaking eases, the windows stop vibrating, and the pool calms down. It will be a while before the birds, which stopped singing as they do at total eclipses, start up again, and quite a long time before I, personally, stop shaking.

I’m back on Twitter, trying to find out if there’s a tsunami warning and who knows what about the earthquake (answers, no, no one and nothing), when the Bag Lady rings on WhatsApp.

“Yes!” I squeak excitedly, picking up the phone and feeling suddenly soigné. “It WAS an earthquake! It was a REALLY BIG earthquake!” We agree to meet for coffee and a chat. The boy seems spectacularly underwhelmed.

It’s almost a relief when normal service resumes later, as I go to turn off a dripping tap, the whole thing comes away in my hand, and I have to switch the electricity off at the mains as I cannot find the stopcock.

The post My Teen Can Literally Sleep Through an Earthquake appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

All of which was most odd since, feeling a little under the weather, I hadn’t consumed huge quantities of booze and had paced myself solemnly with water. It was, further, inconvenient, as that day I was due to collect Zac from the airport – after a school hols sojourn encompassing Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK – and meet friends in Chinatown.

Still, as a lapsed Catholic I believe in suffering through anything that’s self-inflicted and quite a lot of stuff that’s not. And, even if I didn’t, I could hardly abandon my spawn at the airport, or fail to meet up with friends we hadn’t seen in six years and who were even checked into our hotel.

“Do you feel cold?” I asked at the airport, pulling my cardigan around me, as Singapore’s besotted fondness for A/C struck home quite bitterly.

“Not really,” said my spawn, who, despite having failed to manage his sleep on his flight back from the UK, seemed much livelier and healthier than I.

Odd, I thought. And, curiouser and more curiouser, the chills continued to bite even in the steamy surroundings of sunny Singapore.

“I’ve either got the world’s worst hangover or I’ve got dengue.”

“Sorry about this,” I said feebly to our friends, as my action-packed schedule for our sojourn in Singapore – the new National Gallery! Haw Par Villa! One of the best bars in the world! – shrank down to a shivering hobble through Chinatown to Maxwell Food Court for Hainanese chicken rice at Tian Tian. “I’ve either got the world’s worst hangover or I’ve got dengue.”

Dengue, AKA breakbone fever, is an occupational hazard of living in the tropics. Around 100 million people go down with it every year, with symptoms ranging from a mild flu to internal bleeding and death by way of something highly painful and extremely debilitating.

Knowing me, however, they assume I have a hangover. And, to be frank, having heard gory tales of precisely what dengue does to you from sundry Old Asia Hands, I don’t feel quite ill enough to be diagnosing myself.

My bones ache, sure. I probably have a temperature, though I don’t have a thermometer to check. I have the mother of all headaches. But I don’t have the searing pain behind the eyes and, although my appetite is off, I have yet to start puking my guts up. Further, chills smack more of flu than dengue.

In fact, with my cardigan firmly wrapped around me, I even manage to go for two sedate local beers, before curling into the foetal position around 8pm and shivering myself to sleep.

The flight passes in a miasma of sweats and chills, interspersed with copious quantities of water.

There are few things less relaxing than transiting through an Asian airport – indeed, any airport – with non-specific flu-that-might-be-dengue-oh-for-god’s-sake-woman-man-up-and-stop-being-such-a-hypochondriac. Mercifully, Zac happily carries my tote bag, whose several kilos seems rather beyond me, and is happy for me to sit down and rest every few hundred metres.

At this stage, I’m still thinking it’s a bad flu, but am wondering whether I might be diagnosed with something more sinister at an airport, and refused admission to one country or other. And I fear that if Indonesia bounces me back as being too sick to come in, Singapore certainly won’t have me either, leading to a potentially nightmarish – and financially crippling – unscheduled return to the UK.

I decide not to sit down, and hope not to shiver, or sweat excessively, when in line at immigration. The flight passes in a miasma of sweats and chills, interspersed with copious quantities of water – the first line treatment for dengue, like that for flu, is basically drink water and take paracetamol (not aspirin or Nurofen, if you’re reading this for medical advice, which you shouldn’t as I AM NOT A DOCTOR). The mysterious leg ache won’t go away, and AirAsia’s minimalist legroom policy doesn’t help for not only is it a bucketshop airline, it’s a bucketshop airline with a target audience significantly shorter than me.

At Denpasar, we pass immigration quickly, which is a relief since collapsing in an immigration line would not be a good look, and I slump in a corner while Zac sorts his bag out. I deliver a not-bad-in-the-circumstances performance at haggling with Denpasar Airport’s toxic taxi touts and my aching legs, my jetlagged spawn and I finally return home.

That is, I concur, rather dengue-esque, and also a feature that Old Asia Hands on their second or even third bout of dengue recall with a certain gory relish.

Some people, I admit, might have gone to the doctor at this stage. But guidance with flu is to sit it out for the first three to five days unless something hideous happens, my temperature is only 38.5° (101.3°) against an expected 40° (104°) for dengue, which, even with my reptilian normal body temperature of 36.4° (97.5°), makes me figure I’m just not that sick. Further, Facebook tells me there’s a flu bug going around our neighbourhood.

Then my eyes start aching. When I move them, it starts to feel as though someone’s running sandpaper between the back of my eyeballs and my brain. That is, I concur, checking the NHS list of dengue symptoms for probably the twentieth time, rather dengue-esque, and also a feature that Old Asia Hands on their second or even third bout of dengue recall with a certain gory relish, rather as if reminiscing over grim toilets or that time they got captured by bandits.

I decide to see how I do after the day in bed I should have had the day before were I not scheduled to escort Zac from Singapore to Bali, order takeaway, and proceed to projectile vomit pizza all over the bathroom like an out-take from the Exorcist.

But for the puking, the next day passes remarkably well. My temperature drops. The aches seem to recede. I binge, contentedly, on longform.org.

In fact, I’m even ready to contemplate doing activities with Zac for the remainder of his school hols – we have ex-Bali friends over from England and plans for diving etc – and, even if I don’t feel like getting out of bed, it feels like the flu bug has gone.

On the morning of day four, the roof falls in. My joints ache so much I can’t get into a position to sleep and come quite close to crying with pain and frustration. My temperature rockets back up. The pain behind my eyes progresses to cheese-grater levels and I can’t seem to get around it by moving my head not my eyes as I could on day two. I start vomiting water, which worries me, both since dehydration is a real risk and since I’d like to keep my paracetamol down.

On Twitter, where I’m whining, as is my wont, Mr Travelfish (an Old Asia Hand who’s had dengue twice to date) wonders, not for the first time, whether I would like the number of a doctor who does house calls, including blood tests for dengue.

I think about the economics of this for a while. Then I think about the alternatives, of actually getting up and sitting in a taxi – because there’s no way I can ride a bike or even sit on a motorbike taxi – and waiting in a doctor’s surgery or a hospital, and call Dr Ari.

He arrives. I describe my symptoms. He nods. Apparently, it sounds like dengue. He gives me some tablets that stop the puking, although don’t bring my appetite back, and takes two vials of blood. One is to establish whether I have dengue. The second is to establish whether my platelets have been so ravaged by it that I need to go into hospital.

I send an only marginally compliant Zac off to the cashpoint for money, and then off a second time for more money. For I have, in contravention of my own best advice, allowed our insurance to lapse. Sod it, I think. I’m probably being melodramatic. Or a hypochondriac. I almost certainly don’t have dengue, and if I do, it’s obviously a mild version.

He’s definite. I can’t go in the morning. I need to go to hospital tonight.

Time passes. Zac games. I order him takeaway and drink some Vitamin C. Early in the evening, Doctor Ari rings me back. My platelets are well below the 100,000 mark (a normal range is 150,000-440,000, and mine are 81,000) and I need to go into hospital. He’s found me a bed at Kasih Ibu.

“Do I really need to go tonight?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “We don’t know what level they will be at tomorrow. If they were above 100,000, you could stay at home, but they’re not.”

I whine a bit, but he’s definite. I can’t go in the morning. I need to go to hospital tonight. The problem with dengue, you see, is that if platelets drop below a certain level, generally 20,000, it can kill you pretty quickly if you’re not in a hospital with access to platelet monitoring, blood transfusions etc. (Some stay at home and monitor their own platelets until they reach a level they determine requires hospitalisation. These people are made of sterner stuff than I.)

I post a message in my rare blood type Facebook group mentioning that I’m going to hospital with low platelets and asking people to keep an eye out for a call from the docs. (Bali uses beer fridges to store its blood, and blood groups that are only a bit rare in Europe can be very rare in Asia, so rare blood group donations are requested as and when needed rather than kept in stock.)

I am most annoyed. Bastard mosquitoes. How the devil could I have been so blasé about mosquitoes? And, further, why did I ignore my own advice and let our travel insurance lapse?

There is one issue, of course. What on god’s earth am I to do with Zac?

The strange thing is, at this juncture, I’m not feeling all that bad. I’m quite capable, for example, of packing my little holdall for the hospital and carrying it to the taxi, although I can’t be fagged to change out of my nightie as I’m only going to be wearing it anyway. The leg aches are less awful, the headache is a bit less drilly, I’ve managed to train my head to move in place of my eyes, and the drugs mean I’m not puking: I haven’t eaten, but, hell, I think, I can do with losing the weight.

There is one issue, of course. What on god’s earth am I to do with Zac? At 15 and nudging six feet he can fend for himself given adequate funds for a day or even several, being perfectly capable of ordering takeaways, ordering taxis and, for that matter, going to the shops and cooking for himself, but it’s not going to be very nice for him.

His most regular sleepover buddies, further, are off the island, as is the Bag Lady, to whom I already owe about a gadzillion babysitting tokens after I asked her to put him on a flight which then refused to take him then switched my phone off while on a sleeper train in China (long story).

We discuss and conclude that he’ll stay at home this evening, and the ex-Bali friends will come over the next day to supervise. In the taxi, the mother of a schoolfriend with whom Zac stays over – with whom I have yet to have a proper face-to-face conversation – calls, heroically volunteering to have him for as long as it takes. She has four kids, she says, and staff, and will pick him up tomorrow. Whew. She is a saint.

The staff present me with a distressingly large though in theory perfectly reasonable cost estimate for a projected five(!)-night stay.

The hospital might be expecting me, but that doesn’t mean it has a bed ready. My vital signs, all encouragingly robust, are taken in the casualty area, and I’m hooked up to a drip. I am already regretting my lack of unread books, if not yet feeling self-pitying about visitors.

The staff present me with a distressingly large though in theory perfectly reasonable cost estimate for a projected five(!)-night stay (23 million IDR, or over $1700 US). I sign a bunch of paperwork, order dinner despite the fact I have no appetite, and put down a deposit for my treatment.

It’s my first time in an Indonesian hospital, although Zac had day surgery to remove the plate in his arm at Sanglah. Though not as sheeny-shiny as the more foreigner-focused places, which can run you $3000 for a five-night stay and drugs (not necessarily the right drugs, either), it seems on a level with a small private hospital in the UK. That’s to say: better than the NHS, lightyears behind the Hong Kong extravaganza where Zac’s arm cost $20,000 to fix and several centuries ahead of the facilities in Tsagaanuur, Mongolia.

All the rooms are private, which provokes a rash of financial panic, but Doctor Masyeni, who’l be looking after me, is a tropical medicine specialist who does a lot of dengue (there’s a lot of it about on Bali). Further, this is where the Bag Lady got treated, as well as sundry other Bali bods, so probably a good place to be. And, further, I’m in no condition to go touting my arse around town looking for quotes.

“Two and a half years?!” she says. “And you haven’t had dengue yet?”

My room has a telly, which is nice, but they haven’t fronted for the better cable movie channels, which is less good. I have my very own bathroom, into which to drag my IV stand, and one of those beds that goes up and down electronically, which would be rather fun in a childish way were I not so pathologically enfeebled.

Doctor Masyeni appears and examines me. We discuss how long I’ve been in Bali. “Two and a half years?!” she says. “And you haven’t had dengue yet?”

“Well, actually, I think I may have done,” I say, explaining the mysterious flu bug in Bangkok which had sickened both me and Zac and which dengue researchers we met on a beach in the Philippines identified as likely a mild bout of dengue.

Dengue is worse the second time, apparently. You can get it up to four times as there are four strains. And, for anyone who’s ever been told that dengue mosquitoes bite just during the day, they bite at night as well.

We discuss whether mine is a Singapore dengue or a Bali dengue and conclude, regretfully, that it’s likely a Bali dengue. I resolve to be more sensible about mosquitoes.

I suspect that only a person who is on the mend could actually hold down even a soupcon of green slime.

I settle into the tedious routine of mid-range hospitals everywhere: crack of dawn breakfast, 6am blood tests, twice-daily vital signs, 9am cup of tea, noon lunch, afternoon tea, etcetera. I Skype with my parents, Skype chat with Zac, WhatsApp with the Bag Lady and the Bag Lady’s sister, who promises me papaya leaf juice.

Papaya leaf juice is, among the Bali expat community, generally held to be a fantastic dengue cure-all when it comes to getting one’s platelets back to a level where folk will let you out of hospital, although Dr Masyeni winces and says there’s been no research when I mention it.

Even when mixed with guava juice and lime juice, the taste is quite spectacularly vile – bitter, with backnotes of slimy compost. On the other hand, my platelets need a hand. Following a course that’s fairly typical of the disease, they drop and drop until they’re at 26,000, close to the level at which a transfusion is typically given, and levels are being tested every 12 hours, not every 24.

An unsightly rash pops up across parts of my body. They’re petechiae, the nurse explains, or bleeding into the skin, which causes me (and my folks in the UK) to self-diagnose with dengue haemorrhagic fever, when what I’ve actually got is dengue fever with haemorrhagic features.

I start on the juice, glugging great mouthfuls of it with my nose held, in between forcing down hospital food, and, that evening, my platelets start to rise. Should I have dengue again, I’ll take it again, even if, rather churlishly, I suspect that only a person who is on the mend could actually hold down even a soupcon of green slime, and that the relationship between chugging a bottle of green slime and rising platelets is therefore correlative rather than causative.

Around teatime, around $1200 poorer and with platelets still resolutely below 100,000, I make my way downstairs, call a taxi and head home.

By the morning of day 4, I am super-keen to leave, what with the bill rising and all that. My platelets have increased a second time, although only to a smidgin over 50,000, and I’d like to be excused rather than hanging around waiting for them to get to 100,000.

I explain to Doctor Masyeni that I have no insurance and am covering this out of my own pocket, and can I please, pretty please, go home now. She says she’ll check my blood again at 12, and if it’s still rising I can leave, though I’ll need to keep an eye on my levels.

And so, around teatime, around $1200 poorer, with platelets still resolutely below 100,000 but mercifully relieved of my IV, I make my way downstairs, call a taxi and head home.

Dengue recovery can mean two to three months of utter enfeeblement and general wussiness, occasionally accompanied by throwback aches and pains, and can lead to post-viral fatigue syndrome.

Given that much (although not all) of my income requires me to be on my feet and moving, and all of my income depends on me being able to think straight and type, I’m hoping it’s not going to be that long. The school fees don’t pay themselves, you know and, if you don’t have insurance, the hospital bills don’t either.

Oh, btw, if you’re looking for travel insurance, World Nomads will cover you no matter how long you’ve been out of your home country, though you’ll likely need a residential address (check the Ts & Cs).

Thanks to John Tann for his Mosquito image on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

The post Dengue Is Not My Bitch appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Not least because much of my work requires sitting still in one place with reliable internet and, you know, writing stuff. Not to mention answering questions from editors, invoicing, chasing accounts departments, pitching other stories to keep the throughput running, and so on.

But – for I have many faults but a lack of optimism is not one of them – this only dawned on me as the eclipse chase wound into its final phase and I ducked out of a cooking class to take a call from an art director in Singapore.

“So…” I said, tentatively. “I was wondering if we could actually push this freediving story until I’m back from China, now that it’s moved forwards an issue.”

“Well,” he says. “We can if you want, but I’ve actually got an underwater photographer booked for Tuesday. No, really, we can if you want…”

Bugger. Not only have I got a freediving course lined up, there’s some stupidly well paid underwater photog giving up two undoubtedly lucrative days to take photos of… well, moi. Underwater. Cancelling at this stage would be highly, highly unfair on the photographer, a minor pain in the arse for the people comping me the course, and a complete clusterfuck for everyone at the mag.

Bollocks. Or, as they say in France, noblesse oblige.

We’ve technically been travelling together for the last ten days, but as he’s had three mates along our interaction has been largely restricted to grunts.

You see, at my advanced age, there are certain prerequisites before having one’s photo taken, particularly given the art director’s brief includes full page shots of, ummm, me. Underwater. In a wetsuit.

Ideally, preparation for a shoot would include, but not be limited to: losing 10 kilos (or at least doing some sit-ups), Botox (no judgement unless you’re my age or older, puhlease), mani-pedi, wardrobe rethink and “doing something about my hair”.

As it is, I only have time for one and a bit of the above, and so I message the Bag Lady, who is between places, so using mine as I’m not going to be in it very much and then she can “babysit” Zac while I’m away, and ask her to arrange a hair cut.

She’s been trying to persuade me to go blonde for a while now, on the grounds that it would look cool and youthful. I’m open to this partly because I spent many happy years as a bottle blonde prior to travel but mainly because I now have several undeniably grey hairs about which SOMETHING MUST BE DONE OR I WILL LOOK OLD and plucking them out ain’t cutting it any more.

If I book a flight for 3pm, I figure, I can get my kit packed up, hair blonded and my sorry arse on and off the plane just in time to catch the last public boat to Gili T. And, gulp, promptly freedive to 10, or even 20, metres.

And so, I say a fond farewell to Zac – we’ve technically been travelling together for the last ten days, but as he’s had three mates along our interaction has been largely restricted to grunts – and gear up for the hair cut. The Bag Lady gives me some handy direction on what people who are cool wear on the beach and lends me a very chic black shirt dress.

“You’re going in the WATER?” she says, waving a directive hand at her assistant. “Well, yes,” I say. Has my social secretary not communicated this?

“It’s for a photo-shoot, right?” says the VERY cool blonde who runs the salon, as her assistant pastes the first of a series of chemical layers onto my hair.

“Yeah,” I say brightly. “I’m doing a story on freediving in the Gilis, and they’re sending an underwater photographer along, so I wanted to…”

“You’re going in the WATER?” she says, waving a directive hand at her assistant.

“Well, yes,” I say. Has my social secretary not communicated this? Goddamnit. Anyone would think the Bag Lady had a life of her own. “There’s pool work tomorrow and then the ocean after that.”

“You can’t go in the pool tomorrow,” she says. “Your hair will go green. You’ll need to wear a swimcap.”

It is a little after 10am. My flight leaves at 3pm. I’m not sure a swimcap is going to look very good in the photos, but it’s too bloody late now. We have started, so we’ll finish.

“Is there anyone who can get you one?” she asks. “I got mine from Galleria. It was about $30.”

The Bag Lady asks at the pool. They direct her to a sports shop in Canggu.

In the absence of Made, who mystifyingly would rather earn $2500 a month, accommodation and meals found, in the States than work for me for 100,000 IDR per half-day, I’ve acquired a friendly ojek driver named Dewa. Dewa lives round the corner, has plenty of initiative and can be trusted to go off with large sums of money and come back with the item it was supposed to purchase. I call him. I’m in the salon, I say. He’ll arrive in a minute.

The pasting resumes.

“Don’t look now,” says Cool Stylist Chick. “There’s a reason we don’t have mirrors at the washbasins.”

It’s a pleasantly social place, the salon. A friend of the Bag Lady who I’m hoping to adopt as my friend too swings by, and we chat about diving. My hair passes the point of no return – ginger.

And Dewa materialises. I give him 400,000 IDR. He looks at me as if I’m bonkers. And, to be fair, gussied up in a robe, waving wads of cash around, I must be some way past normal-for-bule and heading towards full-on-lunatic gila. “You are giving me 400,000 to buy a swim hat?” he says, in the slow, cautious tones of someone unwillingly interacting with an imbecile.

“No,” I say. “I’d like you to find one in a local shop. But if you can’t we might have to go to a bule shop and pay bule prices. It needs to be plain black.”

The light of understanding dawns, and off he trots.

Time passes. He returns. “They don’t have in Canggu,” he says. “Maybe I should go to Denpasar?”

“Yes,” I say. “Please go to Denpasar.”

It is 12 when the first layer of chemicals is removed, or almost exactly three hours before my flight departs. “Don’t look now,” says Cool Stylist Chick. “There’s a reason we don’t have mirrors at the washbasins.”

At this point the chap who runs the chopper store down the road enters the salon and doubles up laughing. “That’s a new look!” he says. “Bogan orange!”

“You do look a bit like Donald Trump,” says my (well, the Bag Lady’s) dive friend.

Oh great. Dewa returns, bearing a swimcap which has cost him all of 40,000 IDR. I pay him 100,000 for being honest about the price and a new layer of chemicals goes on. A travelling friend swings by to catch up.

“How long would YOU say to the airport on a bike from here?” I ask Cool Stylist Chick’s equally cool boyfriend, who oh-so-evidently drives way faster than I do.

It’s not, by the way, that I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of freediving in the Gilis. The reason I pitched the story is that I want to try freediving (yeah, possibly not in the Gilis, but that’s supposed to be one of the better locations in the world, and it’s not only on my doorstep but on the airline’s route map).

It’s just that, right now, after a ten day epic including four separate flights and two nights sleeping on concrete, and with a flight to Malaysia on Thursday, I’d rather be loafing around my lovely home, not to mention redoing a bathroom which has had the sink hanging off the wall since January because it took a while to come to terms with our landlords about a contract extension and then I pissed off to East Indonesia to see the full solar eclipse (thoroughly recommended, fwiw).

Further, one of the reasons that I want to try freediving is that it scares the merry shit out of me.

At 12.45pm, two hours and 15 minutes before my flight is due to leave, my hair is still a rather Tweetie Pie yellow. “How long would YOU say to the airport on a bike from here?” I ask Cool Stylist Chick’s equally cool boyfriend, who oh-so-evidently drives way faster than I do, but I’d like to feel good about my prospects.

“30 minutes?” he says. “Maybe 45?”

Another layer of bleach to lift the colour, then toner. My little backpack is in the corner, ready to roll. I settle the bill in advance.

“We should do a treatment,” says Cool Stylist.

“Can we just leave it on?” I say, clutching my phone as if holding a clock is going to make time go slower.

“Yes!” she says. “That’s actually one of the best things you can do for your hair.”

At 1.40pm, with an hour and 20 minutes to go before my flight allegedly departs – it is Lion, so, I figure, will probably be late – I whack a helmet over my newly blonde and rather oily hair, forget the Bag Lady’s cool shades, and head to the airport.

I spend a while stuck behind a bike carrying two workies, tools, a long ladder and an impressive tonnage of cement which gives it the width of a small car.

I’d like to say I ride like I’ve got the devil on my heels but a) I realise I haven’t changed the oil for a while so the bloody bike could die on me at any point and b) I’m so rabid with neurosis I decide it’s better I only overtake in spaces you could get a London bus through.

If I miss this flight, you see, I’ll likely a) have to spend the night in some fetid swamp at the port for Gili and b) miss the opening explanatory video of the course, with a photographer there primed and ready to shoot. The first would be unpleasant, the second unprofessional.

Traffic is, of course, spectacularly shite: Sunset Road feels more like gin o’clock on Saturday night than lunchtime on a Monday. My cautious approach means I spend a while stuck behind a bike carrying two workies, tools, a long ladder and an impressive tonnage of cement which gives it the width of a small car.

But I negotiate the scary roundabout to the airport OK – unlike the other roundabout I frequent in Bali, this one vaguely adheres to European-style rules of the road, except when it doesn’t, and on a bike I rather prefer the herd approach. In fact, I make it to the airport’s motorbike parking a full half hour before my flight is due to leave.

There’s no way I’m going to manage to get the bike into one of the two-storey parking lots, find a slot, wheel it into the slot (which involves lifting the bloody thing up several times), get out again and still make my flight. So, figuring it will only be there two nights, I dump it down an alley with several other bikes (all of them still in possession of key moving parts) and jog-trot, fatly, to the airport.

I race to Gate 3. This is my fifth visit to Bali airport in the last three weeks and the scenery is getting old.

People are very forgiving when it’s obvious you’re desperate. I race to the front of the Lion Air queue, mumbling “Sorry” in Indonesian, barge in front of the people who are currently checking in, present my receipt from the Lion Air counter at yesterday’s airport and wheeze, “My flight leaves at three!”

By the time the check-in lady finishes labelling the couple’s bags, she has my boarding pass ready to go. “Go straight to Gate 3,” she says, in Indonesian.

There’s a queue at the security desk. I barge to the front of it, apologising. “My flight leaves at three!” I say to the people at the front.

The guy checks my boarding pass and waves me through.

I race to Gate 3. This is my fifth visit to Bali airport in the last three weeks and the scenery is getting old.

And, quelle surprise, my half-hour flight is running half an hour late.

“Speedboat 500,000,” the tout says. “No share boat.” “I take the share boat,” I say. “300,000 for the share boat,” he says, with eminent consistency.

Needless to say, I miss the last public boat to the Gilis, leaving me at the mercy of the speedboat touts and sundry scum. Howevs, I am an old hand at this and, further, my Indonesian is by now quite convincing, at least, in short bursts.

“You want private boat?”

“I want the share boat,” I say, forging my way to the beach and enquiring of sundry Indonesians whether they’re waiting for a boat, which of course they are because this is not a beach anyone sits on for fun at twilight.

“Speedboat 500,000,” the tout says. “No share boat.”

“I take the share boat,” I say.

“300,000 for the share boat,” he says, with eminent consistency.

I can see there are four bicycles, at least 20 Indonesians and a mound of sacks of cement awaiting the share boat. I locate the captain. Rapidly, we acquire critical mass.

“100,000,” says the dude, giving it one last shot.

“No,” I say. “50,000.”

And I’m away, to Gili T, an island which can be a sybaritic paradise if you have the funds to stay in the nice bit, and is otherwise one of my least favourite places in Indonesia after Jakarta airport and Senggigi.

We are warned off both alcohol and COFFEE. COFFEE, I tell you. COFFEE.

I make it to the free dive place just in time to catch the video, and the photog, and slump down in front of the video endeavouring to look natural while also holding my stomach in. As a strategy, this has mixed results, not least because the stomach-holding intensifies my unBotoxed frown.

Further, I can’t help noticing, reviewing the photographer’s shots of me studiously copying down stuff about scary things like Shallow Water Blackout and the Urge to Breathe, that my hair is so bright it almost matches the neon bits on my dress. This dress is not one of the ones the Bag Lady has certified as cool but in fact one of the ones she described, in a moment of wine-infused honesty, as “cheap and tarty”.

But whatvs. We are given a list of things not to eat that increase mucus – this is, I will learn, because you need to pop your ears like a demon when you’re freediving and the last thing you need is earwax – and warned off both alcohol and COFFEE.

COFFEE, I tell you. COFFEE.

One more time. NO COFFEE.

I am aiming for a long, lean profile in the pictures, which is difficult when you’re ten kilos heavier than you should be.

“Have you ever done underwater modelling before?” asks the photog, later, while I’m still flushed with the pleasure of a) not being the oldest person on the course b) not being the heaviest drinker and smoker on the course and c) being MILES better at popping my ears than anyone because scuba.

I look at him to establish whether he’s taking the piss. He appears not to be. “No,” I say. “It’s my first time.”

“OK,” he says. “There’s some hand signals, like look at me, look to the camera – I’ll talk you through them.”

Oh god.

I’d hoped that this freedive course would be a golden opportunity to give up smoking (again). In fact, I still believe a freedive course, when not combined with underwater photo modelling and endeavouring to hit deadlines while your poor oxygen-deprived body is howling for a nap, would still be an outstanding way of giving up smoking.

I had also believed we’d be taught how to stop your diaphragm doing that thing it does when your body believes it’s running out of air. But we’re not going to be taught that. We’re going to learn how to master the power of our minds to make it not matter any more. Oh bollocks.

Further, I am annoyed we don’t get the super-long, super-cool freediver fins. I am aiming for a long, lean profile in the pictures, which is difficult when you’re ten kilos heavier than you should be. Freedivers wear their weights below their stomach, so they can do diaphragmatic breathing, which means my beer gut will be on full display, so I was really hoping for long black fins that could merge with my wetsuit for a long, thin profile, at least when seen from a distance.

There could quite well be pictures of me running across eight pages of the magazine, which has invested quite heavily in getting the photog to come along (considerably more heavily than it has invested in, well, me, but that’s showbusiness). Ergo: not looking fat matters. Or, as a lady photo editor from a renowned British tabloid once said to me à propos of an interviewee, “Well, if she’s rough as a badger’s arse, what are we going to do then?”

It’s extremely difficult to replace a swim cap on your rapidly yellowing hair when you’re hanging off a buoy with one hand in the middle of nowhere, waiting your turn to go down a rope to, well, also nowhere.

I manage to keep the swimcap on for the pool session, at which I think I do quite well, probably because I regularly swim several lengths underwater at home anyway and I know I can go up to the surface at any point, although our teacher, a cultivated chap who moved from the museum world to Gili T and free diving, has this weird thing about stopping me from looking where I’m going.

Out at sea, it’s rather more difficult, not least because there’s more chop than would be ideal. It’s hard to do relaxed breathing through a snorkel when the sea keeps coming over the top of it, and it’s extremely difficult to replace a swim cap on your rapidly yellowing hair when you’re hanging off a buoy with one hand in the middle of nowhere, waiting your turn to go down a rope to, well, also nowhere.

I’m annoyed that all but one of the people who were clearly going to be worse than me are now out of the group. I’m also annoyed that I’m not allowed to look where I’m going. I need to tuck my chin under and follow the line, just look at the line. It’s really quite counter-intuitive. I want to look where I’m going, even though the only place I’m going is down.

Anywise, I manage to go hand over hand down the rope to about eight metres and sit there for a bit. Eight metres doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s easily as deep as the roof of a two-storey house. Also, I feel quite relaxed. Although not as relaxed as two of the guys on the course, who are hanging out at ten metres as if they’re in the front room watching telly. But one is a surfer, therefore used to being under the water in environments so much more strenuous than this one that they’re basically trying to kill him.

And then I go back to base and hit two deadlines on crappy internet while fending off mushroom vendors. Go me!

The guy who runs the joint and regularly descends to over 100 metres – that’s around the height of St Paul’s Cathedral – somehow manages to do both scuba and freediving, but I’m quite attached to breathing.

By the next day, I’ve already decided I prefer scuba. (The guy who runs the joint and regularly descends to over 100 metres – that’s around the height of St Paul’s Cathedral – somehow manages to do both scuba and freediving, but I’m quite attached to breathing.)

Which isn’t to say the day goes entirely badly, not least because I’ve abandoned the swimcap on the basis that my hair can’t possibly get any more yellow than it has. In fact, I even manage to tuck my chin into that weird position – which also helps my earache – and fin down to ten metres. I’m also very pleased we have a yoga class in the morning, because I am bendy, and I figure there’s a fighting chance of me not looking like a complete spaz in the shots.

But, because I am working, and the photog is working, and we both need to be out on the 3pm boat and want to take some natural-looking shots of me snorkelling Gili T’s splendiferous coral before we make the boat (splendiferous was in my special invisible sarcasm font), there isn’t time for me to exactly pass the course. Ahem.

Doing something to write about it can often be very different from doing it (as I’ve observed elsewhere). Sometimes that’s in a good way: I only managed to paraglide without (much) fear because I needed to get a shot of Zac paragliding with me for a magazine story. As with this one, I’d pitched that as a way of getting over my fears.

Sometimes it’s in a less good way. Here, I was more focused on noting the details of learning to freedive, observing what was happening around me and getting the shots the magazine needed than on actually learning to freedive.

Yet, as I hop on the boat and bid farewell to Gili T, I’m actually pleased: I’ve conquered a fear to a degree, I can stay underwater, looking relaxed, with no air, for longer than I’d thought possible, and should anyone drop a diamond ring into waters 10 metres deep or so, I’d have no concerns about going to look at it.

And then it dawns on me. I’m going to be at home for under 24 hours, before heading out again, at least one of which hours will be spent de-yellowing my hair. And all I have for this bigass China trip is a list of stories and deadlines, with no plan of campaign for how to get from A to B. And China is, I am beginning to remember, a very, very large place.

This is, I figure, a learning experience. To be filed under NEVER-AFUCKINGAIN.

Thanks to Bro Jeffrey Pioquinto SJ for Bleach.

The post How Not to Be a Travel Writer, Episode 97 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

This is the blessing of metal objects, which, in our house, includes the motorbike, the bicycle and both laptops, not to mention sundry phones, cameras, dive computers etc. You don’t need a priest – and, given it emerges our ponds, house and swimming pool were blessed in the Catholic faith, not the Hindu faith (so suck on that, river-borne ghost lady with the snake!), it’s probably unwise for us to invite one. Folk perform Tumpak Landep at home, then go to temple afterwards.

Made, the housekeeper, does our Tumpak Landep when the time comes around (as well as leaving offerings in the garden whenever she comes because…. well, I guess, better safe than sorry, what with the scary ghost lady and all).

But why, you might ask – though ONLY if you haven’t lived on Bali – why would any culture possibly evolve a religion that needed to bless all the metal objects in a household every seven months? Particularly in an era before electronics?

BECAUSE ALL OF THE THINGS ARE BROKEN, ALL OF THE TIME. Or, as Zac and I say with increasing regularity: “Because Bali.”

Having no water is not quite as desperate a scenario on Bali as it might be in Blighty, since we have a swimming pool from which to fill buckets to flush the toilet, or wash up, and, as only a raving lunatic would drink the water in Bali, we have 20-litre containers of drinking water lying around.

After our little volcano delay in Kuala Lumpur, we arrived back in Bali last Sunday. I had spent considerable time and energy, and a surprising amount of money, mending things before we went away, not to mention while we were away, so I thought it might be some time – at least a fortnight, or perhaps even a month – before anything broke again.

This was, shall we say, optimistic.

On Monday morning, we had a power cut. When we have a power cut, we have neither water nor internet, because our water comes from a “bor”, which I thought meant a well, but may in fact be something different, like a borehole. (I haven’t lifted the stone up to look because I’m scared of what I might find, and anyway it would probably break a critical bit of string.)

Then the power came back on, which was nice. So did the internet, and so did the water. Excellent!

And then the water stopped. Bugger.

Our house rules in future will include “no feeding wildlife and definitely no animals in the house”.) Did I mention I miss smoking, btw? Or that I am a cat person?

Now, having no water is not quite as desperate a scenario on Bali as it might be in Blighty, since we have a swimming pool from which to fill buckets to flush the toilet, or wash up, and, as only a raving lunatic would drink the water in Bali, we have 20-litre containers of drinking water lying around the kitchen, plus if we get stinky enough we can always hop in the pool.

But it was enough to take the edge off my already volcano-frazzled equilibrium.

And, when I turned to find a stray puppy, tail wagging optimistically, not just through our gate but actually in our living room, where persons unknown had doubtless been feeding him while we were away, imbuing him with the unfortunate belief that he lived here, breathing didn’t cut it. (And, yes, our house rules in future will include “no feeding wildlife and definitely no animals in the house”.)

Did I mention I miss smoking, btw? Or that I am a cat person?

I shoo. He wags. I yell. He looks hurt, then carries on wagging. I wave my arms at him in the direction of the door. He retreats into a corner. I throw a shoe in his general direction. He looks hurt. I go to pick him up and physically remove him. He bites me. I throw a shoe at him for real. He whimpers and scrambles through the window.

Insufficiently caffeinated, absolutely nicotine-free, and in an epically foul temper which (spoiler alert!) has yet to dissipate, I scroll through my phone, in which it seems every third number is a Javanese workman with a specialism in patching up broken things, and come to Indra.

Indra, the guy who keeps our air-conditioning, fridge and water pump running, is so popular due to his reasonable prices and long-lasting-by-the-standards-of-a-nation-that-fixes-most-things-with-blue-string-and/or-plastic-bags repairs that he now has a mini-repair empire. He sent two guys over to deal with the water pump.

They arrived only a few hours later, which was great. And when they left, the water was working again, which was also good.

A few bule oh-so-cunningly negotiate clauses in which the landlord agrees to fix broken things, apparently under the belief that a clause in a contract is like a big pair of pincers to extract cash money from the landlord’s wallet, or at least enforceable in a court of law.

It’s superficial to assume that the reason everything is broken all of the time in Bali is because it’s in the tropics. Admittedly, that doesn’t help. But, one of the main reasons everything breaks all the bloody time is that everything tends to belong to the landlord.

I don’t know what vintage our water pump is, but I’m sure it’s at least as old as the house. Which means that generation after generation of renters have patched it up, and patched it up, spending, cumulatively if not individually, very much more than the cost of a whole new water pump. Because that would then belong to the landlord.

Most Balinese rental contracts are fairly straightforward in this regard: “If it breaks, you fix it.” A few bule oh-so-cunningly negotiate clauses in which the landlord agrees to fix broken things, apparently under the belief that a clause in a contract is like a big pair of pincers to extract cash money from the landlord’s wallet, or at least enforceable in a court of law. Because who doesn’t go to court to make their landlord fix their 1990s Chinese-factory-reject washer-drier?

I understand, for the record that a typical timeframe between first telling a Balinese landlord that his/her fridge/toilet/air-conditioning unit/ceiling fan/water pump/pool pump/washing machine/garden lights/all of the above is/are broken and a Balinese workman arriving bearing blue string and plastic bags to patch it up for the next fortnight is three to six months of rage, high blood pressure and SMS excuses so surreal they are only borderline comprehensible in any language.

Hell, it took us the big end of a year to persuade our landlords that they might want to remove the broken washing machine as, really, we were quite happy with the laundry across the street, not to mention Made’s cousin recently died from faulty wiring and it did emit quite the voltage when you touched it, ta muchly. I don’t know when the pool cleaning machine that’s in our contract last worked but AFAIC, everyone who rents the place buys their own machine, uses that, and leaves the old, broken one for the next person on the contract, and – guess what? – that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Anywise, even by Balinese standards, I suspect the water pump may be on its last legs. I’ll ask Made to bless it, if it lasts till the next Tumpak Landep, that is. When in Rome, and all that.

As a bule, I am entirely complicit in this, because it is about a bazillion times easier to find the funds to inhale imported gin & tonic during happy hour at Old Man than it is to invest in a piece of household hardware that costs about the same as a round of 2-for-1 G&Ts.

I have yet to find a satisfactory solution to repairs in Bali. I do believe that Indra is genuinely good at his job: his repairs have a price:longevity ratio that’s rare on the island. Made’s father is excellent at odd jobs. I’m happy with both Agus and Agi’s MacBook repairs. Only one of the things Johannes the builder did over the summer has broken, and that only cost 5,000 rupiah to mend, so by Indonesian standards he’s a rockstar, although I did think we were going to fix the leaks in the roof by replacing some tiles rather than slapping a bit of rubber car flooring under the gap between the tiles, but then again, the roof’s stopped leaking, I didn’t pay for the tiles, and it’s not my roof, so….

During a previous week of rage – from memory, the items then broken were both toilets, my MacBook, the water pump and, I think, an air-conditioner – I took advice from Mr Travelfish to enlist Mr Fixit. It is true that both the cisterns of both toilets have not leaked since. It is also true that Mr Fixit gives you aeons to pay. But, it is sadly true that, at least with toilets as cheap as ours, I could have bought an entire new toilet for the price of Mr Fixit’s workmen making minor repairs to two.

The climate, I suppose, doesn’t help. In Bali, bizarre things go wrong – for example, our water tower was struck by lightning on Christmas Day (hell of a bang!), which shorted out both the modem and the phone, though mercifully nothing more expensive. Humidity isn’t good for stuff in general. Torrential rain does put the roof through it.

And still, on one level, I am genuinely pleased that folk in Bali, collectively, make the effort to repair things rather than just throwing them out to landfill. It’s green.

On the other, I feel that this attitude bears with it the acceptance that ALL OF THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN ALL OF THE TIME, except for the odd week or two between repairs. Things are mended beyond the point of reason, beyond the point of repair.

And, as a bule, I am entirely complicit in this, because it is about a bazillion times easier to find the funds to inhale imported gin & tonic during happy hour at Old Man than it is to invest in a piece of household hardware that costs about the same as a round of 2-for-1 G&Ts. Though, frankly, after a day of getting things mended in Bali you need those G&Ts.

Excuse me while I take a deep breath and sob quietly for a few moments. I am girding myself to relate the saga of the stove.

Oddly, given its predecessor was struck by lightning, we have also neglected to have the modem blessed. And, lo, just as, having fixed the water, I was gearing up to address the problem with the stove – an only-in-Bali farce that I can barely face summarising, let alone dealing with – the internet went down.

Refreshingly, it did this by way of adding a red light to the modem and ceasing to function, which makes a change from the standard method of slowing to a crawl that’s just enough to allow use of Gmail Offline and Twitter, AKA create sufficient glimmer of hope to stop one driving to a cafe with working internet and actually getting stuff done, meanwhile bewildering the few remaining Twitter followers who don’t have you muted by wondering how bad the internet can be when you’re on Twitter whinging about it for this much time.

Of course, nobody moves to Bali for turbo-charged wifi and Teutonic efficiency, but all the same it has been galling to be finally back from travel into a base where I can get stuff done and find everything bloody broken, again, especially the internet.

I generally turn broken things into a massive to-do list for Made, but, as it happens, Made has friends visiting this month, so would rather not have any extra work.

Excuse me while I take a deep breath and sob quietly for a few moments. I am girding myself to relate the saga of the stove.

He put the piece in his pocket and disappeared. Then his phone number stopped working. Agus, and with him our cooker bit, had vanished – conceivably all the way back to Java.

Unusually for an affordable Balinese rental house, we do not have a two-ring, tabletop movable cooker, but a proper cooker, that foreigners – particularly foreigners who were born in or before roughly 1920 – would recognise as such. It has four rings, and what could in theory be an oven except nobody, including Indonesian gas cooker menders, has ever managed to get it to work, and in fact, when we tried to make mac ‘n’ cheese in it after Agus – a different Agus – got it lit, it actually cooled down from the sauce stage.

Anywise, the point is, it is a cooker. And, like other things which are only used by bule and rich folk from Jakarta, this is an unusual, and, therefore, ludicrously expensive item. And, when it came to handing the house over to guests in the summer, our guests were expecting a cooker.

It is amazing, I will observe in passing, how minor problems that one can quite happily live with become urgent issues that must be fixed when contemplating accepting paying guests. One of these was that the metal cap on top of the burner on the largest of the four rings was so badly eroded that flames shot through the top of it as well as out of the holes in the side. To me this looked, well, normal for Bali. Through the eyes of a new-to-Bali paying guest, it might have looked positively lethal.

We summoned Agus, the gas cooker mender, who was also quoting to install a boiler and an eye-bleedingly expensive mixer tap which has already calcified. He sucked his teeth, said he could get a new one, but soldering might be an option. I, slap-happy after a visit from the money fairy and tired of mending things that could cost-effectively be replaced, said we’d like a new one, please. Agus put the piece in his pocket and disappeared. Then his phone number stopped working.

Agus, and with him our cooker bit, had vanished – most likely all the way back to Java.

Apparently, the cooker is an old model. No shit, sherlock. It is, in all fairness, a cooker whose like I have not seen anywhere, ever. It’s the sort of substantial affair I imagine being melted down in huge quantities to supply iron for factories during the Great Leap Forward.

You would think, what with this not being a sophisticated part – it’s a round bit of metal with some holes in it to let the flames come out, and that is, AFAIC, absolutely all there is to it – that it would be easy to find, or at least to substitute, particularly on an island as resourceful as Bali, where every single working part in every single piece of scrap is salvaged and resold.

You would, gentle reader, be wrong.

While I squawked feebly in fear, Indra put the part below the missing part, plus two other equivalent parts from the rest of the stove, in his pocket and disappeared, sucking his teeth, shortly before we went to Europe, leaving the cooker down to one ring.

On day 1, he updated Made that he’d had no luck, but was hoping for more joy with some of the better second-hand parts stores. On day 2, he updated that he’d keep looking and still had hope. Then he stopped answering his phone.

In Blighty, and living in fear that, at this point, I’d be forced to buy an entire new cooker for our guests, I got Made to hound him 24/7, promising money just to get the parts back, before we were back to our three-rings-out-of-four status quo.

Apparently, the cooker is an old model. No shit, sherlock. It is, in all fairness, a cooker whose like I have not seen anywhere, ever. It’s the sort of thing I imagine being melted down in huge quantities to supply iron for factories during the Great Leap Forward. I very much doubt it ever came in a range of colourways, and what I have seen of its interior indicates the sort of simple, robust design that is as indestructible as it is lacking in safety features.

However. It is a cooker. It has, or once had, four rings. All four of those rings once worked perfectly well.

Since the paying guests had stated cooking as one of their plans for their sojourn in our house, I asked Made to get a single-ring table-top cooker to bring our available cooker rings back up to four. Being Balinese, she considers this the same, if not better, as having a four-ring cooker. Qua bule, I do not.

Oh, yes, and the “metalworker” I was recommended on Facebook is not a metalworker but a kitchen fitter, who can replace the piece if he can find the part, which he can’t because it’s an old model, and is rather more interested in designing an entire new kitchen, which will look like something out of Wallpaper* until it breaks five days later. And probably even then.

I didn’t even bother to ring. I parked the entire bloody thing until Made got here in the morning, which she didn’t, because a blind girl in Karangasem had run away from school with her grandma and we need to find her, or, as we say in English, because Bali.

Mystifyingly, even workaday English products fail to work when they get to Bali, and I can’t understand why. I was very much enjoying my new cafetière, lugged back from Blighty at some considerable effort, when the filter and mesh bits at the bottom fell off after only three days EXACTLY AS THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IF I’D BOUGHT IT IN INDONESIA FOR TEN TIMES THE PRICE.

I fixed that, natch, because few things are more important than coffee. But clearly I fixed it wrong, because on Wednesday morning, as I stared blearily at the kitchen and decided today would be the day I finally sorted this sodding stove, and maybe worked out whether it was the internet, the modem, my MacBook or a virus that was causing that weird error on Google Chrome, the filter stuck a little, I pushed it down, and the brand new cafetière exploded all over the stove. In the course of cleaning it up, I cut my hand on some glass embedded in the sponge, and one of the shards is now embedded in a finger and showing every sign of going manky.

But I digress. Made and I were discussing what to do about the stove on Wednesday, as I filled up the kettle, when we both realised that the tap wasn’t running correctly, a problem Made described in her call to Indra as wah-wahing.

Every water appliance in the house is now wah-wahing, a sign, I believe, either that the water pump is about to die, or that we are about to run out of water, but something that should in any case be addressed as it might break other stuff, like boilers, or for all I bloody know the toilets (again).

One of Indra’s guys was supposed to come and look at it on Thursday. He didn’t. To be honest, I didn’t even bother to ring. I parked the entire bloody thing until Made got here in the morning, which she didn’t, because a blind girl in Karangasem had run away from school with her grandma and we need to find her, or, as we say in English, because Bali.

Or, as Zac said, “Liv and Rob don’t get here until next Saturday. I wouldn’t bother fixing anything until at least next Thursday, then we have a fighting chance of everything working until they leave on Monday.”

Most of the time, he will answer it, and come round, and mend things, unless it’s a problem with the mysterious Sentral, which I envisage as being some gigantic pyramid like one of the ministries in 1984, but is probably a pair of Komangs hand-knotting offerings to the internet gods in front of a 1950s switchboard.

On Monday, Indonesia turned 70, which was a public holiday. So you won’t be surprised to hear that the internet broke again, perhaps by way of celebration, on Thursday. I swear blind that there’s a cafe owner somewhere in Canggu who keeps cutting this sodding cable in Kerobokan, because I, for one, have been spending an absolute fortune in local cafes, and that’s with Putu from Speedy on speed-dial.

And, yes, that’s one reason we stay with Speedy, much as it fails to live up to its name, because I know the engineer, and have his number in my phone, and, most of the time, he will answer it, and come round, and mend things, unless it’s a problem with the mysterious Sentral, which I envisage as being some gigantic pyramid like one of the ministries in 1984, or perhaps the one in Brazil, but is probably a pair of Komangs hand-knotting offerings to the internet gods in front of a 1950s switchboard.

Anywise, none of this mattered, you see, because Zac and I were headed into Seminyak for a fancy weekend at his friend’s fancy 7-bedroom rental villa, which the family stay in every so often when they don’t have guests, which meant a range of exciting new people for me, and his mate, two laptops and a darkened room for him.

And so what if we got horribly lost in Seminyak, then got a flat tyre, then fought savagely over whose fault the getting lost was while we waited by the side of the road for half an hour while our friends tried to find us (we were about 300 metres from their house, because Bali)?!

You don’t get more civilised than outdoor bathrooms, lanterns dangling in the trees over the swimming pool, staff passing round nibbles, and Balinese fizz chilling in the freezer, while other staff wheel the bike to the bengkel and get it mended.

Their water went off at 7pm on Friday, and the civilised weekend away came to an undignified halt around 3pm on Saturday. Laugh? I almost cried.

When Zac heard hissing coming from the cooker, that wasn’t a cobra either! Just a gas leak!

I’m not at my best before coffee, which means that when one of the neighbour’s chickens took off from our cooker and flew into my face as I was attempting to make my sadly no-longer-cafetière coffee on Sunday, I screamed like a girl.

Still, at least it wasn’t a cobra, and Zac used his superior visual-spatial reasoning to chase it out of the door. Young chickens can fly quite well when they’re panicked. Who knew?! And, yes, I should have let him loose on the puppy.

Further, when Zac heard hissing coming from the cooker, that wasn’t a cobra either! Just a gas leak! Resignedly, I disconnected the LPG and switched to our reserve, single-ring stove-top cooker which does, for the moment, work better than the four-ring cooker, due to a) cooking things and b) doing so without danger of death. Further, it’s sufficiently cheap and flimsy that we can just chuck it when it stops working rather than waiting in for someone to patch it up, which will also make the garbage men very happy.

Better yet, nothing new broke on Monday, which was nice, and, in fact, come Monday evening, the lights on our modem went from red to green, and the internet went from “definitely not working, must go to a cafe” to “could possibly work if I wait long enough” to “oh god, I’ll spend all tomorrow harassing poor Putu, oh, no, wait a moment, Gmail Offline got a message, there must be something happening, I’ll just give this page five more minutes to see if it loads”.

Yet, although I started yesterday by stubbing my toe, thereby creating my own personal blood offering to the gods of broken things and trailing it all over the house, neither the internet nor the water have been fixed and the cooker currently squats in the corner of the kitchen like a giant heap of reproach. Because…

Because Bali. And is it gin-o-clock yet?

The post ALL OF THE THINGS ARE BROKEN, ALL OF THE TIME appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Further, the snakes we do have won’t kill you. The adder is mildly venomous, and can cause unpleasant symptoms for which the NHS recommends 24-hour observation, but that’s about as bad as it gets – and, further, adders are terribly shy.

Bali, what with being in Indonesia, and tropical, has all sorts of exciting snakes, including several that can and do kill people. But, to be honest, our time in Asia has left me kind of blasé about snakes in general.

We’ve encountered a fair few of the things, whether hiking, wildlife-spotting or just going about our business, and the couple I’ve seen in our garden have done the decent thing and skedaddled sharpish the second I wandered up to them. In general, snakes are far more scared of you than you are of them.

There seems to be an odd protuberance below its diamond-shaped head, but it doesn’t look especially cobra-like. Not big enough, for starters. And aren’t cobras stripy? Or patterned?

I’m not entirely sure what I was looking for when I ambled, barefoot, as is the Bali way, from the verandah where I spend much of my time, into my bedroom. But it certainly wasn’t a snake. (Please do “insert” your own joke here).

Yet, there it is, a tiny little thing, not much wider than a marker pen at its widest point, and probably only 50cm long, coiled in the centre of my bedroom floor.

I pause. There seems to be an odd protuberance below its diamond-shaped head, but it doesn’t look especially cobra-like. Not big enough, for starters. And aren’t cobras stripy? Or patterned?

And then…

Well, then it rears up, looks at me with absolutely zero fear, and hisses.

Which is when, gentle reader, I back away quietly but extremely rapidly, and slam the bedroom door.

I have no idea, at this point, whether the snake in my bedroom is indeed a cobra – although its attitude strongly suggests it’s armed and dangerous – but the absolute last thing on my mind is photographing it and asking Facebook about it.

One of many, many mystifying things about the expat Facebook groups I frequent, partly as a source of information and partly – let’s be honest – as a form of digital blood sport, is the sheer range and variety of things which people will photograph and share on Facebook.

Mysterious rashes. Unsightly bites in inadequately manscaped areas, regions that oh-so-clearly rarely see the light of day and certainly shouldn’t see the light of social media, infections that clearly need the attention of one of Bali’s many doctors, or myriad pharmacists, rather than 30,000 strangers on Facebook…

And, more relevantly… snakes.

I have often wondered precisely what thought process leads one to shove a smartphone in a potentially lethal snake’s face and post on Facebook, rather than clear the area, stat. Having now experienced the strong, instinctual reaction which happens when a snake rears up and hisses, I am utterly mystified.

I have no idea, at this point, whether the snake in my bedroom is indeed a cobra – although its attitude strongly suggests it’s armed and dangerous – but the absolute last thing on my mind is photographing it and asking Facebook about it. My primeval brain is absolutely definite on the right thing to do in the circs, which is back away and shut the door.

I’m not QUITE sure what it is that makes me top my phone up in increments of 20,000 rupiah rather than spend, say, the price of a bottle of wine, and have phone credit for months on end, but I suspect it’s a misplaced sense of economy.

The next thing on my mind, of course, is Bali Reptile Rescue, whose splendid information poster I have sourced (like any good parent) and proceeded to bury in a pile of paper somewhere (like any good freelance writer.)

As so often, I am out of pulsa. (I’m not QUITE sure what it is that makes me top my phone up in increments of 20,000 rupiah rather than spend, say, the price of a bottle of wine, and have phone credit for months on end, but I suspect it’s a misplaced sense of economy.)

So I Skype call. Peter, the snake whisperer, answers. I explain.

“TEXT ME YOUR ADDRESS,” he bellows. “TEXT ME YOUR ADDRESS. ALAMAT. ALAMAT. ALAMAT.”

I text the details, pop to the shop, and buy some phone credit.

This will all be a little embarrassing, of course, if it’s just a humble tree snake, but I’m certainly not touching the thing, and I’d like it off the property for good. Ideally BEFORE Zac gets back from school.

It appears to be trying to escape. There’s a strange, wriggling block on the light that emerges from the crack between my bedroom door and the tiles.

There’s something remarkably discombobulating about sharing a space with a snake that may or may not be a cobra. I am, as is my way, failing to work through an over-ambitious to-do list, and am, naturally, compelled to share my unfolding drama on Twitter, where, somewhat to my disappointment, it fails to attract much interest.

Cobra dramas, like rabies dramas, are, it appears, ten-a-penny on Bali.

Time passes. Best practice is to keep an eye on the suspect snake, which I do, between failing to hone a pitch and failing to deal with email, and seeing whether anyone on Twitter cares about my possible, if very small, cobra. (They don’t.)

It appears to be trying to escape. There’s a strange, wriggling block on the light that emerges from the crack between my bedroom door and the tiles.

Oh fuck. I don’t know a great deal about snakes, but I do remember one Willard Price adventure where a tropical snake of some description – a mamba, if memory serves – flattens itself enough to squeeze through the gap in a car window.

Someone on Twitter points out that if it’s a small one, its mother may also be in the area. Perhaps a little belatedly, I put some shoes on, and endeavour to relax.

I mentally translate the time since the helper last came into pairs of dirty underwear potentially scattered across the floor, and resolve to be more tidy in future – a 14-year-old, male friend of Zac’s once observed of my boudoir “Don’t worry! Mine’s at least as bad as that!”

Peter, the snake man, seems remarkably unfazed as he rocks up on his motorbike, suspected cobras being all part of a day’s work for him. He’s 60ish, Australian and the living, breathing definition of an Old Asia Hand.

I’m terribly British and stiff upper lip. “Would you like a tea? Coffee? Water? No?! You sure?! Oh, yes! The snake! Yes, I’ve shut it in the bedroom. Over here. It looked a bit cobra-y, so I thought you might want to check it out. Probably isn’t, mind.”

Stood outside my bedroom door, as I mentally translate the time since the helper last came into pairs of dirty underwear potentially scattered across the floor, and resolve to be more tidy in future – a 14-year-old male friend of Zac’s once observed of my bedroom “Don’t worry! Mine’s at least as bad as that!” — Peter asks a few diagnostic questions. “What colour was it?”

“Dark green,” I say.

“Any pattern?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s very small, but, to be honest, the way it was behaving, I thought it was best just to get out, shut the door and call you.”

He removes a black cloth drawstring bag and two metal prong-y things from his backpack, puts his glasses on his head, and donning not so much as a pair of gloves, opens my bedroom door.

It rears up, hisses at him, and retreats into my jeans. In fact, if we’re technically accurate, it retreats into my jeans AND a pair of mercifully clean-seeming knickers.

I don’t really understand how people can feel affection for snakes (another friend of Zac’s has a pet lizard, which also mystifies me), but Peter clearly does.

“Oh, look at you!” he says to the snake, soothingly. “Aren’t you a beauty?”

Rather ungratefully, in my view, it rears up, hisses at him, and retreats into my jeans. In fact, if we’re technically accurate, it retreats into my jeans AND a pair of mercifully clean-looking knickers.

“So it is a cobra?” I ask, watching the, err, trousersnake from a safe distance yet emboldened by the fact that Peter’s a) right in the line of fire and b) not at all bothered.

“Oh, yes!” he says, enthusiastically. (Bali Reptile Rescue, while partly concerned with protecting people from snakes, is primarily engaged in protecting snakes from people.) “He’s a Javanese spitting cobra. About one year old.”

This is oddly pleasing. It would, I feel, have been embarrassing to have summoned the snake police for a perfectly innocent tree snake, or baby python, or whatever.

I recall, from my reading of his wonderful poster, before I lost it, what with not owning any Blu Tack and all, that spitting cobras are rather venomous. “Is the mother anywhere around?” I ask.

“Oh no,” he says. “They don’t stay with their babies. Not at all.”

Whew. Zac’s still at school, but we could really do without a bloody cobra’s nest.

The cobra rears and hisses. Peter seems more fondly amused by its spirit than disturbed by this in any way. “If it’s a spitting cobra,” I say tentatively. “Aren’t you worried about your eyes?”

The dance continues, Peter wheedling the snake towards the bag, rather as one might try to lure a cat into its travel cage.

“It’s a nice bag,” he says, soothingly. “Get in the nice bag! You want to get in the bag, don’t you? It’s a nice bag!”

The cobra rears and hisses. Peter seems more fondly amused by its spirit than disturbed by this in any way. “If it’s a spitting cobra,” I say tentatively. “Aren’t you worried about your eyes?”

Peter slips his glasses back down, and prods at the cobra with his metal prongs, encouraging it towards the bag.

It slithers out from under my jeans, and feints at the bag. “There you go,” he says. “Get in the nice bag! It’s a nice bag. You like the bag.”

The head goes in. The other prong goes under the tail. The bag comes up. And the cobra is in the bag!

Carefully, but matter-of-factly, Peter places the bag on the floor, shifts the prongs gradually down the bag to flatten it out and steer the cobra to the bottom of it, rolls it, seals it, and stashes it in his backpack. Job done!

“I removed four yesterday, and normally do about eight or ten a week. In fact, I’ve just come from Renon. There’s a nest in a government building there: twenty-six eggs, but I’ve only found eight babies so far.”

Out comes a replacement poster – I’m too embarrassed to mention that we already have one, but I’ve lost it – and Peter talks me through the treatment of snake bite.

In the case of a spitting cobra, which is deadly venomous, unlike the “bamboo viper” which is apparently a relative pussycat, despite expat lore, splinting and bandaging the wound and keeping it below heart level means you’ll retain consciousness for four to eight hours rather than the 30 minutes or so you have if you don’t treat it. (Which is, wherever you live on the island, easily time enough to get to Sanglah, the only hospital on Bali with antivenin.)

“So, do you get many of those in Bali?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” Peter says cheerfully. “I removed four yesterday, and normally do about eight or ten a week. In fact, I’ve just come from Renon. There’s a nest in a government building there: twenty-six eggs, but I’ve only found eight babies so far.”

“Oh,” I say. “So… Are we more likely to get another one now we’ve already had one? Or is it more a case of lightning never strikes twice?” (Our well was, literally, struck by lightning on Christmas Day – fun fact!)

“Well,” he says. “Your place is quite snake-friendly.” (We’re by a little river, opposite some woodland, and have a garden rich in undergrowth, a fish pond, a pool and a substantial complement of delicious frogs and geckos.)

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, I’ve seen a couple, but, you know, they looked like normal snakes and ran away. And they’ve never come into the house.”

“It’s the rainy season,” he says. “Snakes are just like people, really. They get cold and come indoors.”

Once a week, they do a run with the week’s snake catch, up to the national park in West Bali, near Gilimanuk. “There are bits of that park,” Peter remarks, with admirable understatement, “That you really don’t want to go into.”

Bali Reptile Rescue, it turns out, do quite impressive work. Once a week, they do a run with the week’s snake catch, up to the national park in West Bali, near Gilimanuk.

“There are bits of that park,” Peter remarks, with admirable understatement, “That you really don’t want to go into.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Oh,” he says. “We drop them a long way off the walking trails, in parts of the park that people just don’t visit.” (Top Bali travel tip! Stay on the trails in West Bali National Park.)

“What’s the biggest snake you’ve ever caught?” I ask.

“Well, the biggest one we’ve measured was a king cobra that was 5.3 metres long,” he says. (That’s some way over 17 feet, if you don’t speak metric.) “You don’t get them that size round your way, though.”

I shudder, and make him pace out the length. “It was mating. The other one was bigger, a LOT bigger,” he says, indicating a circumference the size of an enormous joint of beef. “But I looked at in the bamboo, and it looked at me, and I called my mate over, and we looked at it, and we just thought ‘nah’.”

So somewhere, out in far West Bali,a 6-metre king cobra is still roaming free. But, says Peter, when it comes to venom, size really doesn’t matter.

Bali Reptile Rescue are the absolute dons of snakes, not to mention monitor lizards if such things bother you. Anyone who lives on Bali should have their number – 0821 4638 0270 – and try not to lose their posters. You can donate to them using PayPal – just send donations to balireptilerescue@yahoo.com.

Oh, and I didn’t get a picture of the snake, which is a shame. The lead image, n396_w1150 is courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

The post So I Found a Cobra in My Bedroom appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

‘Hello!’ I say. ‘It’s Theodora. Do you have any news about Winnie?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The results are back and the vet will call you.’

‘But what are the results?’ I say, pulse pounding. Rabies is terrifying because it’s almost invariably fatal and it’s an unusually horrible way to die. Flashbacks of Winnie licking at my ankle, below the motorbike burn, and my hands go to my head and tug at my hair. ‘Is it rabies?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

Oh god. I double-check to see if it’s not a misunderstanding. ‘Is it rabies?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘So Winnie had rabies?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she says.

Aaarrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh….. I text the neighbour, who is off the island, and Made, and go into panic mode. I’ll see the other neighbours later.

I arrive on campus, wide-eyed with neurosis. ‘I need to collect Zac,’ I say. ‘The puppy that bit him had rabies.’

I’ve been fairly lax about Zac’s rabies shot schedule, as in, I’d been meaning to take him down for his last shot after school rather than doing the shots at the same time of day in the textbook fashion. With a definite diagnosis of rabies, I figure he needs it on the nail.

I arrive on campus, wide-eyed with neurosis. ‘I need to collect Zac,’ I say. ‘The puppy that bit him had rabies.’

‘Oh dear,’ says the girl at the desk with, I feel, insufficient concern. I am expecting this to be at least an occurrence worthy of some remark. (I’ll later hear the story of a neighbour who was surprised on his lawn by a rabid dog that raced out of the hills and took a chunk out of his thigh before the banjar hunted it down and killed it.)

For now, and new to Bali, it feels extremely scary.

I pace, with the speed of fear, to the joglo building in the grassy campus where Zac is having an art lesson, and pull him out, despite his protests about missing an important ICT assessment. Back on the bike, we whizz down Sunset to Siloam, and get Zac his final shot.

Then I ask the doctor about my situation. He thinks I should probably just continue the course, but he agrees it’s difficult with a definite rabies diagnosis and a potential exposure so long before treatment started, and gives me the name of a tropical medicine specialist at Sanglah.

This time, I have a child, someone who’s unusually dependent on me, and it feels extremely different. I am absolutely definite that I do not want to die.

We head to ChaTime for passion fruit juice, interspersed with frantic texts and calls from Made. Then we stop on the way back for gyoza at a Japanese joint and a serious discussion. It occurs to me, you see, that there’s a definite possibility – though hardly a probability – that I might die within six months.

I remember the last time I thought I could die, in a Mali hospital. I was nineteen, and child-free, running a high fever, sharing a room with a woman dying of TB, and pumped full of anti-malaria drugs that I knew could cause liver failure when combined with the anti-malarials I was on.

That time, I remember thinking quite clearly, as I watched the flies hop on and off the IV drip that was pumping me full of toxins, ‘Well, there’s not a lot to be done about that. That’s a shame. Oh well…’

This time, I have a child, someone who’s unusually dependent on me as a single parent, and it feels extremely different. I am absolutely definite that I do not want to die, and the notion that I could be forced to abandon my child in this fashion seems utterly, utterly wrong.

On t’other hand – if I have rabies, there really ain’t a lot I can do other than request the Milwaukee Protocol, the only treatment that might just conceivably have a vague chance of working.

I raise the question with Zac of what he’d like to do should I, ya know, happen to pass away, and where and with whom he sees his future lying. He gives me his answer, we pay up and leave.

Still, as a friend observes on Facebook (my Facebook ban isn’t working too well today), it’s probably better to be the bearer of bad news than to look like the neurotic newbie.

And now to the neighbours. Oh god, the neighbours.

Still, as a friend observes on Facebook (my Facebook ban isn’t working too well today), it’s probably better to be the bearer of bad news than to look like the neurotic newbie who mistook a perfectly normal puppy condition which leaves the dog hallucinating then in coma for rabies and worried the entire neighbourhood. Let alone one who had every intention of having a perfectly innocent dog shot just because she had bitten the puppy a week before said perfectly normal puppy condition coincidentally occurred.

Neither set are around.

Made is frantic about her daughter. I try and reassure her. She has a family member who works as a nurse, and races off to see her.

And then my phone rings. It’s the vet.

But Winnie is (or rather, was) officially one of 30% of Bali dogs who bite a human, become neurologically sick, and do not have rabies.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Yes, they told me this morning.’

‘The sample has come back from the lab,’ she says. ‘It’s negative for rabies.’

‘NEGATIVE?!’ I say.

‘Negative,’ she says.

I am immediately infused with a rush of pure joie de vivre, sheer wonderment at being alive, rapidly followed by a crashing wave of toecurling embarrassment. Jesus! I need to tell Made! And the neighbours!

‘But what was it?’ I ask. ‘If it wasn’t rabies, what WAS it?’

She doesn’t know. It could be distemper, she says. A neural inflammation. Possibly from injury, possibly viral. But Winnie is (or rather, was) officially one of 30% of Bali dogs who bite a human, become neurologically sick, and do not have rabies – and some vanishingly small percentage of Bali dogs who are bitten by other Bali dogs, bite a human, become neurologically sick and do not have rabies.

And this morning’s ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ ‘yes’? Just the South-East Asian standard response to any question you don’t entirely understand. And, yes, I did know that, normally.

They’re insistent that this shouldn’t put us off getting another dog. It’s a typical new-to-Bali not-a-dog-person error, apparently, and an unusually unfortunate set of circumstances.

Made is hugely, hugely relieved. The neighbours are so phenomenally nice about the whole saga that it would be wrong to suggest this embarrassing debacle contributes significantly to our decision to leave Seseh (although, boy oh boy, it’s no way to meet the neighbours). They’re insistent that this shouldn’t put us off getting another dog.

It’s a typical new-to-Bali not-a-dog-person error, apparently, and an unusually unfortunate set of circumstances.

But we’re not sure.

Now that the panic’s over, there’s time to mourn for Winnie, who was a sweet little thing, and quite possibly not all right from the beginning. There’s time for flashes of horror at the thought of her head cold-freighted in a box to a government lab. There’s time for sorrow for the lovely lady who over-contracted our villa and her daughter, who’d been hoping Winnie would join them in America.

And there’s time for work. Work, between rural internet and the obsessive-compulsive Googling of rabies, has been suffering.

Zac and I decide that it will be a while before we even think about getting another pet. We haven’t really done very well at it to date.

The post Bali Stories: Winnie Part 2 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

That’s because most Balinese don’t have the money to buy surgery for granny, let alone their dogs, so by way of contraception they abandon female puppies and keep the chaps.

Our third attempt at finding a house in Bali landed us in Seseh, an absolutely dazzling seaside village ‘twixt Canggu and Tanah Lot, in a luscious-looking two-bedroom villa, a steal at around US$600 per month.

Further, it was an over-contract – in Bali, rentals are usually paid upfront, so if foreigners leave before their contract is complete, they sell the remaining months on their lease – so we didn’t have to commit for any significant time.

And our over-contractor was absolutely lovely – a cool, American single mum, and the first single mum I’d met in Bali. She had, in the way of dog-lovers moving to Bali, rescued a small army of dogs.

Made, the helper, was taking three to live in her village; two had been rehoused with fellow bule. And then there was Winnie. Gorgeous, floppy-eared, forlorn Winnie, who didn’t seem to know how to be a puppy at all.

Could we take Winnie and look after her until time came to ship her to the States? Well, yes, we could. That way we could try out both country living AND pet ownership, and see how they suited us.

You open the gate in the morning to let them do their dog thing with their fellow dogs – napping, mainly, with the odd bit of bottom-sniffing, bin-foraging and intimidating passing bule for variation.

Owning a dog in Bali, should you do it Bali style, is not a particularly strenuous activity. Bali dogs, as Made explained, ‘like to be free’. That means you open the gate in the morning to let them do their dog thing with their fellow dogs – napping, mainly, with the odd bit of bottom-sniffing, bin-foraging and intimidating passing bule for variation – and bring them in at night.

The Balinese do not walk their dogs, figuring that if a dog wants to go for a run, or investigate a neighbourhood, it will, which makes dog-walking a perennial source of tension between expats and their staff. It’s not at all unusual to see a sulky-looking Balinese riding a scooter at funereal speed, with a leashed dog scampering behind, with a general air of ‘If you insist on this insane project of making dogs walk places, for god’s sake do it yourself.’

Further, Bali dogs don’t eat dog food. They like chicken and rice, which Made would prepare. All in all, unlike high-maintenance Western dogs, Winnie was the kind of short-term pet that both Zac and I, even as non-dog people with zero puppy experience, could happily sign up to.

Even if she resolutely refused to play with her ball, or her squeaky toy, or show any interest in the sticks we desultorily threw, and seemed positively resentful about being removed from the beds. As Made put it, ‘She’s missing her friends.’ Yet having already inflicted two dogs on her long-suffering husband’s family, there was no space for poor, forlorn Winnie.

‘Is this your dog?’ asks a tanned surfer type who subsequently turns out to be my neighbour, rather accusingly, holding out an unusually limp and depressed-looking Winnie for my inspection.

I am fresh back from Malapascua, and grapping with the vicissitudes of rural Balinese internet, when the gate opens.

‘Is this your dog?’ asks a tanned surfer type who subsequently turns out to be my neighbour, rather accusingly, holding out an unusually limp and depressed-looking Winnie for my inspection.

‘Er, yeah,’ I say, guiltily.

‘The mother dog just went for her,’ she says. ‘Did you not hear it?’

While I can easily filter child noise and reflexively parse it for signs of distress, I have no ear for dog noise. I look at Winnie. She’s even more forlorn than usual, and there are two puncture marks in her neck.

‘What should I do?’ I ask, helplessly. ‘I don’t know anything about dogs. I’m just looking after Winnie until she goes to the States.’

We apply iodine, but there’s something weird about her neck – it’s oddly swollen, and she’s snuffling for breath.

It is decided that we should summon the vet. Or, rather, summon Made, who can inspect Winnie and decide whether the vet is required. And so Winnie is shipped off to Sunset Vet, the bule veterinarian of choice, while I hope against hope that she survives – I can imagine few things worse when it comes to dog care than the pet actually dying on my watch.

Winnie is even more forlorn than usual. She’s on medication, which we have to hide in her food. Probably relatedly, she is off said food.

On release from the vet, Winnie is even more forlorn than usual, and skinnier. She’s on medication, which we have to hide in her food. Probably relatedly, she is off said food. And, further, she is now of an age to require walking, says the vet.

Zac and I hold a summit meeting. We ARE, we decide, going to do this properly. We will buy a leash, and take Winnie for walks on the beach like a foreign dog. We will spend a small fortune on stupidly expensive pet food so that she gains weight. She might be born Balinese, we conclude, but Winnie’s lifestyle aspirations are firmly Western.

And so it begins. Winnie does not like her leash.

Nor does Winnie like going for walks. She’s terrified of the dog that bit her, a long-haired yeti-type creature that hangs out down our gang, who is, apparently, a sweetheart except where food is involved. I literally have to drag her out of the house.

Yet, the more we walk her, the more socialised she becomes. She stops and sniffs at other dogs – occasionally yapping at them, rather unnervingly. We interact with other dog-owners, like dog people. And, like dog people, when we find two stray puppies by the side of the road, we enter into the twilight world of Bali dog lovers and ring someone to pick them up.

And we bump into our lovely neighbour again. Which is odd, because at the sight of her dog, Winnie goes into a weird snuffling state.

‘That’s odd,’ she says. ‘It’s like she’s having some kind of fit.’

Oh god, I think. It would be just our luck to adopt the kind of dog that really needs a dog psychiatrist. ‘What should I do about it?’ I ask.

‘I think she just needs lots and lots of cuddles,’ she says.

OK. Zac and I can do that, surely?

One benefit of country life? You watch a lot of films when your only restaurant in walking distance is a small pizza warung and you’re the only customers.

One benefit of country life? You watch a lot of films when your only restaurant in walking distance is a small pizza warung and you’re the only customers. So Zac and I are happily immersed in a movie when Winnie jumps on the couch and starts running up and down it.

This seems both odd and unlikely to improve the cushions, so I pick her up and put her on the floor. She jumps back on, and pees on the couch.

This is beyond the pale, so Zac picks her up to remove her. Whereupon she twists in mid-air, bites him on the hand and races off to lurk in the bushes.

‘She BIT me!’ he says.

‘Well, she can’t have rabies,’ I say. ‘She’s already had her shots. Let me check.’

I dig out Winnie’s vaccination book. She has not had her rabies shots. She’s too young to start them. Bugger. ‘Did it break the skin?’ I ask.

‘No,’ Zac says. ‘Just dented.’

‘You still need to wash it,’ I say. ‘Really thoroughly.’

I Google rabies, the start of a search so thorough that for months Google is serving me ads for post-grad qualifications in tropical medicine.

We’ve had our pre-shots, although we’re not entirely up to date, so I’m more relaxed than I might otherwise be. Google tells me that the single most important step in preventing rabies is washing for fifteen minutes with soap and water, then dousing in iodine or alcohol. Zac does exactly that.

‘In Bali, we have a rule that if a dog bites a human and then dies within ten days there’s a 70% chance of rabies.’

The only sign of Winnie is the occasional rustle from the bushes, and the glint of green eyes in the darkness. This is not normal, I decide. Definitely not normal. And…. Oh fuck! She was bitten by a dog a fortnight before.

I ring Made to explain the situation, but she clearly feels I’m exaggerating. ‘Winnie can’t have rabies,’ she says.

‘Well, she’s behaving really oddly, and she did bite Zac,’ I say. ‘And remember, she was bitten by another dog.’

We to and fro, and conclude that Made will pop round in the morning to decide whether it’s Winnie or me that’s gone mental. Zac and I are fairly sure it’s Winnie, who is shaking and glinting in the bushes, but mercifully on the fearful, rather than the aggressive, side of whatever altered state she’s in.

It is not a restful night’s sleep for either of us, unsure whether we’ll be confronted with a slavering maniac of a puppy in the morning, or a puppy on the equivalent of an acid comedown, or even a dead puppy.

The vets arrive, armed with Bali’s most high-tech rabid puppy protection, AKA two tatty and rather tired-looking blue towels, and, in a neat flanking motion, extricate Winnie from the bushes.

It takes Made approximately three seconds of inspecting the terrified, disoriented, cowering, slinking, paranoid creature in the bushes to conclude that Winnie is mental and I am right, and ring the vet.

The vets arrive, armed with Bali’s most high-tech rabid puppy protection, AKA two tatty blue towels, execute a neat flanking motion, and extricate Winnie from the bushes. They know Winnie well, as much of her short life has been spent in and out of the vet with one ailment or another: like a Victorian child, she’s sickly.

‘Could it be rabies?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘In Bali, we have a rule that if a dog bites a person and then dies within ten days there’s a 70% chance of rabies.’

The vets depart. Made sets off on the bike with Zac to get him a top-up rabies shot at Bali Royal Hospital, which, according to her sister, has the appropriate rabies medication.

I am torn between the Scylla of not mentioning a potential rabies issue to a parent whose children play with a possible carrier, and the Charybdis of Winnie recovering and me looking like a complete neurotic freak.

If there’s an activity less conducive to productive self-employment than Googling rabies, I cannot easily identify it.

I hit the phones and receive a range of contrasting advice from sources as diverse as the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases and the expats’ fave clinic in Sanur.

It appears that Zac is more than likely to have full immunity but might not. Ideally, a titre test would be required. But they can’t do titre tests on Bali. So he should do the full course of shots, but not have Human Rabies Immunoglobulin, a substance so rare on Bali that it’s reserved for people who’ve been fully savaged by slavering dogs and anyone who’s just worried about a monkey bite or a dodgy-looking stray has to fly to Singapore and spend thousands of dollars (or ask their travel insurers to cover same).

Further, one of our other sets of neighbours have two small and delightful children who routinely play with the dog that bit Winnie. I am torn between the Scylla of not mentioning a potential rabies issue to a parent whose children play with a possible carrier, and the Charybdis of Winnie recovering leaving me looking like a complete neurotic freak.

In the end, I decide to do nothing for the moment.

Ignoring all advice from interested parties of ‘for god’s sake, get rid of the bloody dog’, Zac and I decide that we will go and visit her, and bring her a toy to play with while she gets well.

Made reports back regularly from the vet. Finally, it appears, Winnie is recovering. Ignoring all advice from interested parties of ‘for god’s sake, get rid of the bloody dog’, and breathing a quiet sigh of relief that I’ve mentioned nothing to the neighbours, Zac and I decide that we will go and visit her, and bring her a toy to play with while she gets well.

I delve deeply into the weird and wonderful world of dog psychology blogs (ladies! Gays! Get a load of this chap!), and Zac and I solemnly decide that we need to set boundaries and establish ourselves as pack alphas.

But, first, a toy for poor Winnie, who is, after all, only a puppy – and a much-loved puppy, with our over-contractor and her nine-year-old daughter still apparently awaiting her in America.

And so, we pootle into Seminyak. ‘Hello,’ I say brightly. ‘We’ve come to see Winnie.’

They seem a little surprised, but take us through.

‘Sometimes she seems to be hallucinating and becomes aggressive, other times, like now, she’s close to paralytic.’

Winnie is in a cage, in isolation, both food and water bowl untouched. She is slumped, emaciated, apparently comatose, with the nictitating membrane – a rabies signifier – covering her eyes. Zac and I look at each other, shocked. She is clearly extremely sick. Poor Winnie.

We are five days into the ten day wait for information.

‘So how is she?’ I ask, dumbly.

‘She isn’t drinking water,’ says the vet. ‘Sometimes she seems to be hallucinating and becomes aggressive, other times, like now, she’s close to paralytic.’

‘So you think it’s rabies?’ I say.

‘We don’t know,’ he says. ‘She definitely has serious neurological problems.’ And then he repeats the 70% rule.

I know, from Google, that the only way rabies can be diagnosed in animals is to cut off their head and take a sample from the brain. And so it seems best just to wait.

‘Today,’ he says, with a firmness that is most unBalinese. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s late. You should always start treatment as soon as possible.’

It is then that I remember the open wound – a motorbike exhaust burn, AKA a Bali tattoo, Bali kiss, or idiot scar – on my lower leg, and that Winnie has been licking in the vicinity of said wound. It’s now well over a week since any exposure.

I feel slightly sick. I only covered the wound after Zac pointed out that Winnie was trying to lick it and it was unhygienic.

‘You know she bit Zac,’ I say. ‘And she licked near an open wound on my leg. Zac’s having his shots, but I didn’t get any more for me, because I had a booster two and a half years ago, and now it’s been over a week since she bit me. Do you think I need to get shots?’

‘Definitely,’ he says. ‘You can go to Siloam, it’s just down the road.’

‘Today?’ I say, feebly.

‘Today,’ he says, with a firmness that is most unBalinese. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s late. You should always start treatment as soon as possible. Late is better than nothing.’

We whirl down Sunset at a rate of knots, screech into the parking lot at Siloam, and park in the nearest available space. ‘You can’t park here,’ says an official, with unusually un-Balinese firmness.

‘I need rabies shots!’ I jabber.

‘You still can’t park here,’ he says, then, softening. ‘This is where the dead bodies come in.’

It takes about 5 minutes to give me the shots, and 30 minutes for the doctor to explain why I’m on a different schedule from Zac.

In a brief phase of contemplation, I question quite intensely how I would live my life if I did have the rabies virus in my system, and if I did only have six months more on this earth. I leave a bunch of Facebook groups and resolve to spend less time on social media.

I’d rather have any number of dogs shot than a single child die of rabies, which goes to show, I guess, that I am not a dog person.

Back at base, Zac and I decide that it is now an appropriate time to tell the neighbours. As a way to meet the neighbours, ‘Hi! We recently moved in next door and our puppy might have rabies, and she was bitten by a dog your kids play with, and we’re only telling you now it’s too late to do anything about it,’ takes some beating, although they’re terribly nice about it.

‘Could it be distemper?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘The vet’s definite it’s not distemper, and she’s had her shots for that.’

‘But the dog seems like such a nice dog,’ he says. ‘She’s a good dog. They play with her all the time.’

I unleash the fruits of Google research, saying that there might be some dogs that are asymptomatic carriers. I promise that I’ll keep him updated. He asks intelligent questions about whether Winnie was aggressive.

Then we tell next door. They are not best pleased. ‘You’ll need to tell me if they do a round-up,’ she says. ‘Otherwise they’ll just come round and shoot every dog they can find.’

I haven’t witnessed one of Bali’s rabies round-ups, but, apparently, at the peak of the eradication campaign, dead dogs were piled high in the streets. On the other hand, I’d rather have any number of dogs shot than a single child die of rabies, which goes to show, I guess, that I am not a dog person.

‘Both my dogs died last night,’ she says. ‘Wha’?!’ I say. ‘Like Winnie?!’ ‘No, no, it wasn’t rabies. We think my neighbour poisoned them,’ she says, adding, to eliminate further doubt, ‘She’s Javanese.’

The next morning, Made calls, tearful. ‘Both my dogs died last night,’ she says.

‘Wha’?!’ I say. ‘Like Winnie?!’

‘No, no, it wasn’t rabies. We think my neighbour poisoned them,’ she says, adding, to eliminate further doubt, ‘She’s Javanese.’ (The Indonesian archipelago is a web of passionate hatreds between neighbouring islands: in Hindu-majority Bali, it’s Muslim-majority Java that cops it.)

‘We need to make a decision,’ she says. ‘Winnie is not going to get well, and it’s cruel to leave her like that. Plus, we need to know! My daughter played with Winnie! I’m so WORRIED.’

I enquire whether she’s called America yet. ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘She was so sad, I didn’t want to worry her.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll take the decision. It’s my decision, and I’ll take the blame, but because it’s you who’s talking to her, you need to break the news.’

‘Poor Winnie,’ says Zac. ‘I don’t like to think of her like that. Just a head, cut off, on ice, and in a box going to the lab.’

‘Nor do I, son,’ I say. ‘Nor do I.’

It can take up to three days for the results to come back from the government lab. And, as I walk down our darkened gang to our house, the dog that bit Winnie comes barking out of the darkness, accompanied by the neighbours’ dogs, Hound of the Baskervilles style.

I scream like a girl and leap in the air. I am, I decide, quivering, definitely not a dog person.

Read Part 2 here.

Various of you have expressed interest in reading some of the posts I didn’t write last year. So I’m going to put them up from time to time under the heading ‘Bali Stories’.

The post Bali Stories: Winnie (Part 1) appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Because I’m cheap, I took the slow boat. Because I’m an incompetent fucktard who shouldn’t be allowed within miles of a child, I switched my phone off and slept through the alarm. And because I’m jinxed, by the time I surfaced Zac was late for school, and the childcare gal had sent me 18 text messages, most of them from outside my house, then taken another job.

New in Bali, knowing few people, and being far too tight to hire an agency nanny, the only available substitute was her boyfriend, who I figured should be introduced to my spawn before, ya know, picking him up from school and looking after him for four days.

The dude can’t cook – not even mie goreng! – but Zac has a limited repertoire, sufficient to feed himself for four evenings with reasonable variety anywise, and he’s quite happy shopping for ingredients, so that’s all dandy.

The need for childcare derives from the fact that he can’t really get himself to school without a motorbike or a bitch of a walk, not to mention someone to shout him out of bed in the mornings. And, further, looking after himself in the evenings solo in a house that’s just been burgled while I’m on a different island for four days could be scary.

But I digress. Push comes to shove, instead of leaving Canggu around 8.45am to catch the slow boat 11am-ish and ride from Lembar to Kuta around teatime, arriving long before sunset, I’m leaving Canggu in a flustered-even-for-me mess around 4.15 pm and getting the 6pm boat.

The type of people who are interested in doing more than hanging out topless by a mosque on Gili T on a shroom comedown and wondering why the locals are acting shirty.

I’m a big fan of the Lombok slow boat. It takes five hours, but you don’t get seasick because it’s big, and travel lore states it sinks/catches on fire less often than private boats in these parts. (Top tip! Never Google “Indonesian ferry disaster” before boarding an Indonesian ferry).

Further, it’s a great place to meet Indonesian travellers, and Indonesians on their way home, and a genuinely nice class of bule traveller, too, the type of people who are interested in doing more than hanging out topless by a mosque in the Gilis on a shroom comedown and wondering why the locals are acting shirty. It’s also a great opportunity to practise my rubbish Indonesian, which is sadly neglected in Bali – I’ve even brought my dictionary!

I’m happy as larry, not least because the Sasak attitude to Ramadan is, like Sasak attitudes to much other stuff, relaxed. In contrast to the more rigorous Middle Eastern Islam, many believe you are excused fasting if you’re travelling, so the galley floor is awash in Pop Mie cartons, peanut shells and replete, snoozing travellers.

I’m chatting away to a new Balinese friend, who’s a bartender, a dude from Sumbawa who tells me they’ve finally fixed that godawful road, and some guys from Lombok, who think the Bau Nyale festival might have been and gone already.

This makes me rather nervous as I’m a Bona Fide Travel Writer on Assignment® and supposed to cover the fucking thing, and there won’t be much of a story if I get there after it’s happened, given I’m not Hunter S. Thompson or P.J. O’Rourke, either of whom could spin 10,000 words of deceptively effortless copy out of that sort of clusterfuck, and the client’s an inflight magazine so doesn’t want gonzo anyway, ta very much.

I’m modestly clad – loose trousers, and a long-sleeved cardigan over a non-spaghetti-strap top – and my handbag’s under the seat, so I figure I should be fine.

I mention my intention to get to Kuta tonight. “It’s too late for you to ride that road alone,” says my Balinese friend. “We’ll ride with you to Mataram.”

The wisdom of this sinks in, briefly. Yeah, it’s dark, I’m on a bike, I’m a woman on my own, yada yada.

And then it disappears. By the time Lembar harbour hoves into view, I’m fully caffeinated and fully geared for the blissfully enormous empty well-built road that whizzes for 60-ish Easy Rider kilometres across Lombok.

Also, frankly, the idea of navigating Mataram in the dark does my head in. I actually like Mataram for the same sorts of reasons I liked Tarakan, and like mid-sized Indonesian towns in general, but its charms are not immediately obvious to the casual observer.

It seems easier just to belt down to Kuta, given I know the road. I’m decently clad – South Bali short-shorts and tank top replaced with loose trousers and a long-sleeved cardigan – and my handbag’s under the bike seat, so I figure I should be fine.

The guys look solemn. They offer to escort me to the junction.

“Give me money,” one of them says. I look at him, vaguely surprised by the cheek of this. He’s about 12. Well, 18. “No,” I say, in my finest schoolmistress/mother of teen boy tones.

I lose them at one point, after they do a tight overtake between a lorry and an oncoming pickup and I then take a wrong turn. This is when I get my first indicator that Lembar-Kuta solo on a bike in the middle of the night during Ramadan is possibly not the best travel idea I’ve ever had.

I ought to note that my personal scale for really bad travel ideas is pretty high, running from hitch-hiking pre-apartheid South Africa solo to paddling my spawn down the Mekong in a skiff sans lifejacket via dropping acid on beaches patrolled by guards with guns. So this is definitely on the possibly-not-the-best scale at the moment, rather than actively bad.

My map falls out of my bike. I turn to retrieve it. A bike pulls up. Two kids get off. I pick up the map.

“Give me money,” one of them says, just as I stand up.

I look at him, vaguely surprised by the cheek of this. He’s about 12. Well, 18, or thereabouts. “No,” I say, in my finest schoolmistress/mother of teen boy tones.

They look equally surprised, and bugger off. Off I head, and find my white knights at the correct junction. (The map is less help than it might be as the road wasn’t built when the map was printed, so there’s all sorts of crap happening that’s not on the map, and anyway I’m rubbish at map reading, what with not knowing my left from my right and all.)

The guys bid me farewell. I thank them, profusely, and whirl off down that absolutely fucking wonderful open road. It is – fact fans – a two-lane dual carriageway, a rarity in Indonesia in general, and an absolutely gorgeous ride, day or night, because there’s rarely anything on it. In the warm, empty dark, I feel…

Well, I feel A.M.A.Z.E.! I’m on an adventure for the first time in what feels like absolutely bloody ages. And I have no one to answer to but myself. I can do exactly what I want, when I want! Stop where I want, when I want! Got wheels, got cash, can travel! Yay!

He’s on me, steering one-handed so he can grab at my upper arms, though not, mercifully, my breasts. I make a trial attempt to shake him, pushing the bike up to 100k or so, but it’s not happening.

It’s rising midnight when the guy falls into line about a metre to my right, and starts chatting, thereby revealing one of the disadvantages of being female on a motorbike, which is that you’re entirely exposed to passing sex pests, with neither windows to roll down or doors to lock.

I try and give him the cold shoulder, but answer the routine questions, “From London.” “Bali.” “Kuta.” “My husband? In Australia.” “Working.” “For the government.”

And then I make the mistake of looking at him. My first reaction is “Jesus, he’s a kid, he’s just being friendly, nothing to worry about here!” He has chubby cheeks and might, perhaps, be 21. He’s also shorter than me, not that that makes a great deal of difference.

I suspect he may read my expression of relief as a delighted response to his charm and good looks.

From this point on, he’s on me, steering one-handed so he can grab at my upper arms, though not, mercifully, my breasts. I make a trial attempt to shake him, pushing the bike up to 100k or so, but it’s not happening.

My bike can do a reasonable lick – I’ve never come close to maxing it – but his bike’s bigger, more powerful and manual. Further, he’s from Lombok so rides a bazillion times better than I ever will, and he knows the fine details of bumps and surfacing on the road, so there’s no way in hell I’m going to outrun him. He keeps up effortlessly, continuing the persistent grabbing and banter.

There is no one around. Absolutely bloody no one. A car steams past at about 140k on the opposite side of the road, and that’s it. But at least the road is lit.

I run a quick calculation which runs as follows: if he wanted to physically run me off the road and rape my bleeding corpse/steal my tasty-yet-cunningly-hidden electronics, he would have done so already.

What’s odd, here, is that I’m not scared. I spend most of my life in a state of brain-tingling, pulse-pounding neurosis, but when the shit does actually hit the fan, I’m strangely calm.

I run a quick calculation which runs as follows: if he wanted to physically run me off the road and rape my bleeding corpse/steal my tasty-yet-cunningly-hidden electronics, he would have done so already. Ergo, I can relax.

He is undoubtedly harassing – actively enjoying the fact that his attentions are unwanted – yet he’s also in a place where he can self-deceive that he’s just being friendly. Further, he may genuinely believe he’s in with a chance with this bule whore-slut who’s out on her own in the middle of the night with neither female companions nor husband.

By far the biggest risk to my safety, I decide, is that I try to outrun him, lose control of the bike, and find myself splattered all over Lombok’s finest tarmac, bleeding to death from internal fractures. Provided I don’t lose control of the bike, I figure, I’m actually fine.

Top tip for ladies! You can press a bike horn continuously for a good couple of minutes, and it only takes 5 seconds to recover once it falters.

This isn’t to say that the constant grabbing is pleasant. It’s pissing me off, and I’m worried about controlling the bike, so I use my lights and horn, which is all I’ve got.

For a bit I tail a stray car, flashing lights to signal help, but it’s going faster than I’m comfortable going on a bike, particularly with someone grabbing one of my steering arms at unpredictable intervals, and the driver shows no sign of noticing.

Then I use the horn to drown my suitor out, get him out of my face and just conceivably attract attention from the houses. (Top tip for ladies! You can press a bike horn continually for a good couple of minutes, and it only takes 5 seconds to recover once it falters.)

There is, still, no one around, although the road is well lit (splendid road! Recommend it, especially by daylight!). I’m concerned that if he tails me all the way down to Kuta, we hit a genuinely dark and creepy forest road, which is also windy and potholed in places, and my exit strategies narrow.

On the other hand, there’s nothing open, not a warung, not a hotel, not a roadside stand, most of the houses have all their lights off, and I don’t want to stop unless I see someone to stop BY, because he will read that as an invitation, and that could be disastrous.

So I continue, thumb on horn, and he continues grabbing at my arm, then falling back, then grabbing at my arm, then falling back and it’s all – well, annoying. Not scary, per se, just rage-inducing.

I have a tankful of gas, I’m pleased by how well I’m handling the bike, despite the mauling, and the second I see a fellow human being I will pull the merry fuck over.

“Evening, ladies!” I say politely, in my finest rubbish Indonesian. “Sorry but there is a man on a bike – big problem. Do you know where I can stay?”

After what feels like hours but isn’t, I see – hallelujah! – a group of women, on my side of the road, heading out to (I’m guessing) a pre-dawn feast in festival gear and festive mood. I screech to a halt and unleash my rubbish Indonesian.

“Evening, ladies!” I pidgin politely. “Sorry but there is a man on a bike – big problem. Do you know where I can stay? What can I do?”

There’s a hotel 5k down the road. They give me the name, and a description, and I stay chatting with them for a while until I’m confident my suitor has got bored and buggered off, and, frankly, even if he hasn’t, it’s only 5k more.

Back on the road, he appears to have given up, which is nice, though I have never been so pleased as when I wheel into the blissfully safe, guarded car park of an Indonesian business hotel.

And, further, I’m not bloody immortal, so I should probably exercise some basic common sense and take advice when it’s offered. Not rocket science, is it?

The hotel’s only available room is a junior suite, which in this neck of the woods – a part of Lombok which is clearly expecting a gadzillion international business travellers from the still-fairly-new international airport, drawn, of course, by Lombok’s thriving international business scene – means $50 for a table with a telly crammed in a corner by the bed and a dubious looking LAN point.

Whatevs. It’s clean. I’m off the road. And… They have beer. And wifi!

I chug two, head online to bitch and whine a little, then hit the sack.

The moral of this story? Some parts of travel really ARE different for girls.

And, further, I’m not immortal, so I should probably exercise some basic common sense and take advice when it’s offered. Not rocket science, is it?

Image credit: Motorbike by Beverley Goodwin on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

The post Different for Girls appeared first on EscapeArtistes.