My 5-Continent Midlife-Crisis Round-The-World Trip

December 2003

You can tell when the popular Kuta Beach ends, and the more upscale Legian Beach begins, when the whispering strangers stop trying to sell you underage Balinese girls, and instead merely offer marijuana and hashish.

That's really, sadly true.

The Bali you've probably heard about doesn't exactly match the Bali that's actually here. (At least, not if you go anywhere tourists normally go. More on that later.)

I have no idea what Bali might have looked like twenty-five years ago, before the tourism boom of the 1980s led to a massive shift in the island's economy toward servicing the wealthy English-speakers descending on this island of rice paddies. I have no idea what Bali might have looked like ten years ago, before the southeast Asian economic crisis of 1997 sent Indonesia's rupiah to lows from which it still hasn't recovered. I have no idea what Bali might have looked like three years ago, before terrorists blew up two Kuta cafes, devastating the island's tourism industry, possibly for good, judging from the ghost-town quality of the hotels and shopping areas in Kuta, Ubud, Sanur, and every other tourist area I visited.

I'm sure this must have been one heck of a nice place once. I hope it is again. It ain't now.

I should add in passing that drug trafficking in Indonesia is a capital offense. It also seems to be one of the main activities in Kuta. In a simple 20-minute walk down the beach on any given night, you'll see dozens of capital offenses attempted, right in your face, continuously, relay-race-style, one peddler breaking stride just as the next one starts in.

Nice rebuttal to the pro-death penalty deterrence argument.

(Yes, I know -- I destroyed my own perfectly legal medications before entering Malaysia, just to avoid any possible misunderstanding. Of course: I heard this a hundred times from actual cops and FBI people while doing research at CSI -- crooks usually don't consider consequences, which is part of how they get where they are in life. Law-abiding citizens do. So deterrence mostly deters people who don't need deterring, and not understanding that is why the deterred continue to think deterrence works.)

Kuta is also physically hideous. Picture the worst beachfront motel trap you ever saw in Florida. Then double the neon, replace half of the hotels with gated-security five-star palaces now in decline, close half of the other businesses, and grind the sidewalks into ankle-breaking rocks teetering on the very edge of careening traffic. Finally, populate the streets with girls on motorscooters offering oral sex, many of whom look disturbingly like Tiger Woods.

I always said no, since I'd like to be able to watch golf with a clear conscience.

The total effect was overwhelming -- sadness with a happy face, wall-to-wall electric poverty, the very worst in the human spirit rammed into your face with persistent enthusiasm. I was almost sprinting by the time I got back to my hotel.

By the time I got back to my room, I was crying. Honest. The sheer swarming desperation of these tourist-forgotten people wears like sandpaper on your soul every time you move.

So, I didn't move for the rest of the first night. Instead, I watched the Indonesian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which is surprisingly accessible, since Bahasa Indonesia is in Roman script. Try it yourself (I wrote down a few of the questions, since I figured you guys would enjoy playing along):

Karpent perang Boer War (1899-1902) terjadidi?

A. Ingriss
B. Afrika Selatan
C. Belanda
D. India

If you knew that the Boer War was fought in South Africa, and thus guessed B, you could have just won eight million rupiah.

That's less than a thousand dollars.

Damn, this is a weak currency. In fact, a million rupiah (in the form of a telephone gift certificate) is actually the consolation prize.

Damn, these people are poor.

Which is why I don't want to be writing what I'm writing. They need tourists. But I also can't lie about what I saw. I could, perhaps, pretend I never visited Bali. And I actually considered that option -- at least until the day I was briefly adopted by an entire smiling village, and thus found something encouraging, if still ambiguous in meaning. More on that later.

Back in Kuta for the moment, however: one thing I still don't understand is the consistent flow chart of criminal enterprise offered, as if all the shit peddlers had a meeting and are reading from the same script, verbatim:

"Hey boss! Taxi? Marijuana? Hashish? Pretty girl, very young?"

OK, somebody notify DARE: taxicabs are now a gateway drug, leading directly to the use of marijuana and hashish.

Secondly, if someone has turned down marijuana and hashish -- and is, in fact, walking away as quickly as possible -- how likely are they to suddenly stop, turn around, and say from ten yards away, "what's that? An underage GIRL, you say? Well, why didn't you say so?!?!"

I can't imagine this happens much. But the pitch always goes that way, word for word. Maybe it does.

As to the walking-away-rapidly bit: one thing I noticed everywhere in southeast Asia was that Asian faces almost always returned a smile on the street. And for whatever reason, I'm the kind of person who likes to smile at people and be smiled at. Which means I'm pretty lonely sometimes in New York or Los Angeles, and so I notice when people suddenly start returning my submarine-like face-pinging with a similar toothy display. And just as reliably, faces with European features almost never, ever smiled back or even made eye contact. This was true in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and every small town on the way. I don't want to stereotype, and I have no explanation. It's just what I'm honestly seeing, every single day.

I think this is part of why I still have yet to meet a single fellow American on this trip. I'm sure they're here. They're also, by all appearances, hermetically sealed, even on the street.

So I promised myself I wouldn't let myself slip into that.

Then I got to Bali.

Sometimes it starts before you even wake up. I was blasted out of bed one morning at 7 am by phone call from a taxi driver from two days earlier, who had noted my name on my luggage and thought perhaps he might win a fare by calling me in my room shortly after dawn and beginning an aggressive sales pitch.

This guy is not only desperate, but resourceful. So you can admire that, and take him up on his offer, knowing that you're going to be milked like a doe-eyed Balinese cow from the moment you get in his cab, or you can hang up the phone. Either way, sandpaper on your innards.

It continues from that moment onward. Bali's small on a map, but even smaller on planning, which means it takes an hour by car to get from anywhere to anywhere. The only sane option is to hire a driver for the day, and force yourself to be comfortable with the whole swarthy-manservant native-guide deal. More sandpaper.

The traffic in Bali, I should add, perfectly fits the trend begun in Malaysia and amplified through every Asian stop since. The drivers aren't merely suicidal here, but often completely psychotic. A two-lane road with no guardrail hugging a precipitous cliff might still have room for three motorbikes, a bus, and your car, all side-by-side, as your impending Starsky-and-Hutch-car-rolling-kablam variety of doom lurks just inches away. And never mind the three motorbikes, a pickup truck, and two bicycles coming in the other direction. Pretty soon, fear (not to mention common freaking sense) overcome any vestiges of liberal compassion. More sandpaper.

And rest assured that your driver will take you not just to your desired destination, but to anything and everything along the way he thinks you might be interested in seeing. And at every stop, desperate smiling Balinese push silver and bamboo and batik and beads on you just as hard as the underage-ass-peddlers of Kuta. Either you spend money on stuff you don't want, trying not to resent the process, or you look at a poor person, probably with several children, and say "no," over and over, because one "no" simply has no meaning here. Either way, sandpaper.

This place is like Knysna (see the South Africa entry) squared. And finally, you just start shutting down. Or I did, anyway. See how much empathy you can still muster the third time you are aggressively offered a taxi ride while you are getting out of a taxi. Are these people even paying attention, or just calling out at tourist-toned skin randomly?

The only way I found even to get down the street here is to just put your head down, avoid all eye contact, and pretend the constant barrage of "hey boss" and "hey dad" and "hey mister" isn't happening. Just treat it all like a bunch of noisy, intrusive street lamps, stepping around the ones that try to physically block you, never making eye contact, and you'll gradually get to the pay phone and back. So now I'm as clenched-faced as the other westerners I've seen. And ashamed of myself.

Sandpaper, sandpaper, sandpaper. Your insides feel like they're bleeding.

I was actually relieved to see now-familiar headscarves on a group of Javanese (I think) women in the hallway of the hotel. Here, for a moment, were faces I knew how to greet, smiles I knew would understand my own, even if our faces, beliefs, and ways of life remained completely different.

Perhaps culture is an individual thing as much as a collective thing.

Or perhaps my a la carte approach to culture is a recipe for individual loneliness, and I'm just a good cook at the moment.

I suppose we might all realize this subconsciously -- that separation from your group, even when conscientiously chosen, is as traumatic as ostracism and exile. Maybe this might explain why large chunks of entire societies sometimes prefer mass psychosis to self-examination.

Speaking of psychosis, I just saw five minutes of Fox News Channel, which is on the cable feed along with tourist-friendly news channels from England, Australia, France, Japan, and Germany.

Only on the American channel: a curvy blonde in a leather skirt and go-go boots was tossing GOP-daily-fax questions to a uniformed Army general, whose responses were given neither thought nor rebuttal.

My hand to God, dear friends: I have yet to see anything comparably stupid in any industrialized democracy, anywhere on the planet. This is much closer to what state-run media look like, although few put quite the same premium on hot chicks.
Fox News is almost exactly what Malaysian state television would look like if the Koran demanded that all women show their legs.

Right this minute, America doesn't feel like home nearly as much as I wish it would.

Maybe what I'm feeling about America right now is part of why westerners have so romanticized Bali. The image I've always been given, by everyone I've ever asked, including people who visit, work, and live here, is of a peaceful, gentle people with a cohesive society that has lived and worked in harmony with nature and each other for hundreds of years -- the Shangri-La we all wish was possible for ourselves.

Never mind that it's rubbish. To begin with, the very idea that cultures are unchanging, much less able to be preserved intact in the midst of a tourist economy serving visitors from planetwide, is as insane as the Academie Fran