Dolphins and monkeys

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October 16
Miracles happen. I am on the bus to Lovina, I have my scarf and I have a marriage proposal to consider.
The night before I left Ubud for Mungwi, I met a young man in the street. He was looking for customers in the rain. Customers who might want to go rafting, be driven somewhere, that kind of thing. Not a rent boy!
He was very sweet. I told him I was from Monkey Island, he which is something I do to mess with the locals’ heads. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they look worried, sometimes they ask if that is in Holland.
This one smiled and said his name was Monkey Boy, no Hanuman the monkey god, no Nyoman, and next he’s telling me his life story and how his wife left for someone else. He doesn’t look old enough to be married, let alone deserted and I decided he could drive me to Dorothy’s. He even gave me a lift back to the guest house so I didn’t have to deal with the barky dogs in the street.
I was sure he’d be there next morning. He wasn't. Eventually his nice friend took me. When plans to return to Ubud fall apart, I think of Monkey Boy and we text him. No reply.
Next morning I am resigned to fretting in bus stations, but Dorothy says Monkey is coming to get me at 9am. This time he’s there. He keeps apologizing for not coming last time. Then he takes my hand and says he loves me and he wants a partner and ‘sex with feeling’ and he’s trying to kiss my hand and I’m trying to get him to put both paws on the wheel.
Then he says if I buy a painting from his friend he’ll take me to Lovina for nothing. Then he says let’s just go to Lovina. All of this gives me a pain in the gut. Much as I like the Monkey, I don’t want to go to Lovina with him. I tell him that there’s someone else, and I’m very confused (totally true, most days) and he says he’ll wait for me. Meanwhile, we collect the scarf, I get a bus ticket and then we go for a little walk where he tries to grab my bottom.
After that he disappears by the river bank for a few minutes and reappears saying he feels much better. I’m not thinking about what he was doing down there.
Then he drops me off at the bus office and zips away.
The trip to Lovina is slow and wet. We cross a mountain and the bus driver has to stop to wipe the windscreen because he can’t see through it.
We arrive and as usual someone finds me on the beach and takes me to a homestay-type place and it’s not bad and I book a dolphin trip with him. The good news is that the dolphin trip goes at 6am not 4am - yaay.
While wandering around I meet a local who asks me if I’ve booked a dolphin trip. He’s perched on his motorbike and seems intelligent. I quite like him, but I’m spoken for in the dolphin department. He’s a bit upset that the hotels get all the business and all the bookings, but it’s LP’s fault, because that’s what it says to do, so everyone does it. My guy wasn’t from the hotel, I booked with him because it seemed a fair thing to do. And it was easy.
Meanwhile, two girls I met on the bus come by and the disgruntled local asks them if they want a dolphin tour and they say they’ve booked one through the hotel and that kind of sets him off a bit and he just talks and talks and we are amazed by how much he has to say. We are laughing at him a little bit, mostly at his verbose indignation. No language barriers there.
I go back with them to admire the pool and the deal they’ve got. I have to see about bus tickets, so off I go again and run into our disgruntled friend who is still in the street looking for customers. We chat a bit more, I do what I need to do and come back to him still perched on his motorbike just as it starts pouring. He urges me to jump on, and we drive for 30 seconds to his friend’s place where we sit out the rain. The streets quickly become small brown rivers.
As most Balinese share maybe a dozen names, they have nicknames to avoid the confusion of everybody being called Wayan, Made or Agus. My new friend hates the French (“not to be trusted”), but somewhat ironically he is known as Pascal. He thinks this is a Dutch name, though I’d guarantee it comes from the land where brie and pastis reign supreme.
Turns out he had a Dutch girlfriend for many years, but she died in a road accident in the Netherlands five years ago and he’s been on his own since. He’s had three girlfriends in his life. ‘How many have you had? Ten?' he asks. I haven’t really thought about it, but ten seems like a fair figure.
‘When was the last one?’ he wants to know. I have to admit that the last one was six years ago. There hasn’t been anyone since - I never met anyone in London, certainly not with the stupid hours I was working. And British men mostly don’t seem to like women much anyway, and certainly not me, though possibly I wasn’t trying very hard. They all seemed so tiresome, so defensive and judgmental and ready to be unpleasant. Like my father I guess.
Pascal is a lovely bronzed colour and we do the inevitable skin comparison. My extreme whiteness is a perennial source of fascination in Asia. Pascal is interested but he doesn’t stroke my arm and yearn for my pale Celtic complexion like some have.
‘I don’t care about skin colour,’ Pascal says. ‘It’s what in the heart that is important.’ He looks serious when he states this, and I believe him. He smiles, but there’s an intensity behind what he says.
I agree to do a motorcycle tour with him the next day of the hot springs, Bali’s only Buddhist monastery and a waterfall. When the rain stops he tells me he has to shower but maybe he’ll see me later. I’m meeting the girls for dinner. He doesn’t press me to meet him, and to my surprise I’m a little disappointed. But I need to go to bed early.
We go to a restaurant full of waterfalls that has a live band, playing Gyspy Kings type music. People are dancing, but the band finishes by 8.30pm. We spend the rest of the night trying to recreate that high, and finally give up and go to bed.
Next morning I crawl out of bed at 5.15am to see dolphins. The sea is calm, the sun is rising - it’s all rather lovely. We glimpse a few leaping out of the water, then a storm erupts and we get rained on and sloshed by surprisingly warm waves and people head back before anything capsizes.
I am soaked and drip my way back to my bungalow. Ready for a colossal breakfast, I get a some fruit salad and have to buy peanuts. Everything - scarf, camera, rucksack - is wet. My hair is wet. My clothes are wet. Pascal turns up and I get on the bike and that helps me dry off.
We go to the Buddhist Monastery, which is very attractive because it’s very Balinese. I meditate for a short time and we walk around. Then it’s back on the bike. He tells me he spent the evening at the place we sheltered from the rain.
‘I didn’t see you there,’ he says.
‘I didn’t know I was invited,’ I reply. He leans back slightly so our upper bodies connect and he touches my leg for a moment and my body reacts in a way that it hasn’t in a very long time. In a way that I didn’t think it ever would again. It’s disconcerting, but kind of exciting. If Mr Scabby had done that I’d have pushed him off the bike.
At the hot springs he tells me about his desire to buy his own boat, but how hard it is to save money in the low season. I can see that this is bothering him a lot. Later he tells me that he would like to marry, but at 39, he is considered too old in Balinese culture. He thinks he’d like to marry a Western woman and spend some time in her country. He went to the Netherlands once to see the former girlfriend. It took him four years to save enough money.
That afternoon Pascal is helping a friend prepare for his wedding. He drops me at a warung, and asks if I’d like to meet him later for a drink. For once, I think I would. We arrange that he’ll come to my guesthouse at 9pm.
The afternoon is hot and I don’t do much. Walking down to the beach I find the girls and the guy with the fish who tries to get me in a secluded spot so he can declare his love and try to kiss me. I am more bemused than anything, especially as he had to ask one of my friends what my name was.
After dinner I get back to the guesthouse a minute or two after 9pm. I wait for Pascal. And wait. I walk by his friend’s place, which is dark. He never turns up and I leave Lovina with no idea why. The annoying thing is, I can’t stop thinking about this, and him.
The next day I wander around, fend off the guy with the fish again, have lunch, and depart on the 3pm bus. The guys on the bikes are pretty familiar by now, and one waits with me in the rain to make sure I get on my bus OK, but no Pascal.
The bus has aircon and blankets and plenty of space and wins the bus prize for Asia so far. At the ferry port the bus backs onto the boat and I don’t even get off. It’s a short stretch of water, though the ferry rolls around a bit. Eventually we dock, drive off and continue.
At 5.30am I arrive at the bus operator’s office and call Debby, my couchsurfing host in Yogyakarta. Very generously, she comes to pick me up. I probably should have gone to bed for a while, but we sit and talk and eventually I meander into town. I could go and see some temples, but instead I do more prosaic things like supermarket and train station and main shopping thoroughfare.
In the street I meet Edy the tour guide who wants to have drinks and take me to Borobodur. He gives me his number and when Debby says she wants to take me to Borobodur, I text him to say I won’t go with him. It’s the polite thing to do. Of course, the next day he rings to see what I’m doing, but that’s OK.
My host-to-be in Jakarta thinks I need a host in Yogya for some reason and I to and fro with Ndanda and she invites Debby and I to a couchsurfing meeting that evening. It’s really good fun - we sit on a mat in the street and there’s maybe 15 indonesians, and two foreigners (or bule) and we drink tea and chat. The people here are a revelation - so friendly and hospitable. And they like getting to know foreigners. As one jolly boy said: ‘As soon as we see a bule, the price goes up, but we all want to hang with them.’
The other bule notes that in say, London, no one in this group would rate a second glance for any reason, yet every single Indonesian we see knows that us white people are from the West.
Debby and I sleep late the next day and sit around most of the morning. We are definitely on the same wavelength there. Edy wanted to go to Borobodur at 6am, but we go at 1pm. Sunrise is overrated anyway.
Borobodur is impressive, though I was expecting a complex with lots of temples, a la Angkor Wat or Bagan. One big temple focuses things nicely. Then we are both starving, so Debby takes me to a warung where they do fabulous fish - they fillet it all, fry it, put it back on the fish skeleton and add sauce. It’s excellent. Debby is pleased I like it. She has problems with her stomach and isn’t that interested in food, so I’m glad we can share something she likes. I’m happy to go back there the next evening and eat it again. We have a huge meal and it costs less than 6 pounds for both of us.
Debby points out that trying to get across Sumatra by the time my visa expires would mean a punishing schedule of buses. She finds me a cheap flight to Singapore and I think this could work out better.
My final day in Yogya, I explore further, meet Edy again by accident (he invites me for dinner, but I’m eating fish) and deposit an average novel at a café in the backpacker area. Debby picks me up and after consuming more excellent fish, we meet her friend who runs a travel agency and takes clients to ‘hidden places’. May be a potential for a story here, no one knows much about Java. Bali gets all the attention.
LP - what Debby calls the Holy Book - says Java has an undeserved reputation for being dangerous and I would agree with that. I never really thought much about Java at all, but there was this belief that it could only be unpleasant after Bali. Someone once told me that Jakarta was really dangerous and I think I’d been nervous of it ever since. But apparently the worst thing about Jakarta is the traffic jams.
Then Debby and I go to the ‘people’s square’ near the sultan’s palace where locals gather to play games and ride brightly lit bicycles around the perimeter of the square. Debby and I play a game - I close my eyes and try to walk between the square’s two massive trees. I can feel people around me and hear Debby clearing the path. When she says stop I am about to walk into something large and immovable.
Then Debby says she’s never hired one of the bicycle contraptions, which can seat up to 5 or 6 people, and we pedal around, lights flashing. Some of the locals stare at the bule, but I smile at them and they smile back. By Western standards there’s not much going on - no smart bars or shows or flashy clothes, but there are snacks and drinks and things that glow in the dark and huge numbers of cheerful friendly people enjoying each other’s company. I like it very much.

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