One mutual friend

I realize that I have a new friend. This is a friend who helps me to find joy in life, who helps me appreciate each moment intensely. A friend who, occasionally, makes me laugh but, more often, makes me just stop and marvel, with insufferable and aching happiness, at the mere fact of being here in this moment.

I've always known about this friend, but we really got closer than ever last year. And, even though we've never gone on a very long trip together, or became super intimate, we have gotten to be on pretty good speaking terms. 

I think about this friend a lot. And even though many people would not want this much proximity, I've realized recently that I am very grateful for our new relationship, and indeed am proud to say that we are close.  Or, close enough to be interesting, while still remaining comfortably distant.

So, on this day of giving and receiving gifts, I would like to say thank you to this friend, for all the things you have taught me, and for all the priceless wonders I have experienced since getting to know you a little bit better.

I look forward to continuing a long relationship with you, as comfortably distant as possible without losing contact. I look forward to getting your updates frequently.  I don't want to be in an exclusive relationship with you yet, but I do want to share what you've given me with everyone I know.

Mostly I hope the gifts that you have given me can be received by everyone, in some way.  On this day of all days, as we huddle close with our friends and family, I look at the sparkling and defiant lights and think of you as we move through the darkness of winter.


 

Bali - IV: The bike ride

Basically, they drove us up to the top of a volcano, put us on mountain bikes, and pushed us off the edge.

Yes, there were roads involved.  Sort of.  But if you cataloged all the dangers that one can encounter when on two non-motorized wheels, and then added five or six of them together at once, and then multiplied by, say, the equivalent of the exchange rate between the Indonesian Rupiah and the US dollar (currently 13,700 to 1), you might have a sense of what this bike ride was like.

I don't even know where to start.  Yes, it was beautiful.  I think.  I mean, there were two or three times when I looked up long enough to see that it was neato to be doing this in such an exotic location. Most of the time, however, I was clutching the grips of the bike tightly, hoping the grabby brakes wouldn't pitch me over the top, and watching the broken and treacherous road get worse, and worse, and worse.


As background:  We had no idea what we were doing.  The birthday boy, whose idea it was, had done this a few years ago when he was here.  He and his friend had asked the nice hotel if they could take a nice little bicycle ride and then the nice hotel gave them nice little beach cruisers and a nice little Balinese tour guide and they went out on nice little paths through the nice little rice paddies for about an hour and it was really lovely and relaxing and fun.

This was not that.

First we drove up to the top of the island.  That was kind of cool.  Up and up and up.  Through beautiful little villages and rice paddies and past temples.  Until we really couldn't go up any further.  At this point they dropped us off at a place where they served us snacks "to make us strong for the ride."  We should have actually paid attention to that.  Or, maybe, instead of obsessing over whether the WiFi worked, we should have asked a couple of questions about what exactly was going to happen on this bike ride.

Instead, we decided to not touch the deep orange items (carrots? very dark mangos?), or the room temperature banana fritters (hot: great, cold: meh).  We did drink the bottled water that they provided, which provided us at least one tick in the "not extremely dumb" column.

There was a moment that was a little disturbing around this point.  This when the birthday boy said "Just so you know... I have no idea what we're getting into here."  At this point he revealed that all he had really done was tell our house manager that we wanted to take a bike ride.  All he knew was that someone was going to pick us up and then we were to ride bikes.  End of research.

Okaaaaay.

When we were done not eating our snacks, not logging into WiFi, and not learning what it is we were about to do, we took a picture of the volcano across the way and then went outside.  A bunch of bikes were lined up.  Mountain bikes.  Which was, you know, fine.  I mean, I'm a trained badass cyclist. I figured this would be a walk in the park for me, right?  What could be so different?

HA HA HA.

Here are the differences between a road bike and a mountain bike: besides the basic configuration, just about everything. Because the whole point is different.  A road bike, with its narrow highly inflated wheels is lean and sleek, engineered to slice through time and space with minimum contact with very smooth, clean pavement.  A mountain bike has wheels that are wide and gnarly.  It is engineered to bludgeon its way through time and space, pound through the mud and gravel, grind up rough dirt paths, and chew up all obstacles in its way. 

Whole different beast.  The point of which was, as far as I could tell, enduring the bumpiest and gnarliest of roads, sliding through gravel, barreling downhill as fast as possible, and living to tell the tale.

The problem was that I didn't really know what my bike was able to chow down on, and I didn't really know how well maintained it was, and I didn't really know how well it did on gravel, or broken pavement, or grass, or dirt, and when we weren't off road dealing with those things... it was Indonesia.  Traffic driving on the left side of the road.  Motorscooters whizzing in and out. Trucks.  Chaos.  Remember all that?

"Um," I asked our guide after we were on the road about 4 1/2 seconds.  "Are we going to be on the road the whole way?"

"Sometimes yes, sometimes no!" he answered cheerfully.

Suddenly the quality of the roads became very important to me.  The best Indonesian pavement looks a whole lot like clumps of asphalt slapped together and then indiscriminately jack hammered into strange archipelagos of occasional street.  Actually, at some points it looked a lot like no street at all.  We'd be riding down the broken and patched road and it would deteriorate more or less randomly until we were having to wend our way across the rivulets of smoothness, hoping our wheels wouldn't catch in the places where it broke apart and throw us off.

Of course, the better the road was, the more traffic it had.  Bali traffic.  Read my previous description.  Except now I was part of the food chain.  Oh, along with my first born son and one of my dearest friends on the planet.  About twenty minutes in I realized that -- on the remote chance that I didn't die or get crushed or get thrown or, at best, just tumble off the bike and break an arm or two  -- two of my loved ones most certainly would.

It was not relaxing.  What it was, was hot.  Hot and sweaty, but we were flying downhill so fast that it really only sunk in during those precious moments when we stopped to take a picture, or put the chain back on the bike.  I kept begging my fellow riders to remember to hydrate.  I know all too well how big a difference that makes on one's stamina, both mental and physical.  The ride people gave us water, which was fabulous, but at the rate we were sweating we probably needed to just install an IV drip and keep a continuous flow going into our bodies.  As it was... we were sweaty, and hot, and scared to pieces (at least I was) and eventually pretty dehydrated.

We did see some super cool things, I must admit.  At one point our guide took us off both the allegedly paved road and the honestly unpaved dirt road and we rode across a bumpy grassy field.  There was a makeshift stadium set up on our left, something that looked like a rodeo might be held within its perimeter.  And then ahead of us there was a large concrete stadium, very substantial and permanent.

This is where the cock fighting happens.  It's illegal to gamble, but it happens all the time.  The other ring was for ceremonies, which is how they claim legitimacy for the cockfights. It's a ritual blood letting and has nothing to do with sport.  Or so they say.  On the ground were strewn cardboard gambling cards and the trash left behind from a large gathering.  Our guide gave us a long description of how the cocks fight and it was both grisly and interesting.

After about two hours I asked our guide if we were almost done.  "Oh no," he said.  "But almost half way there!"  At this point we realized that this ride was going to go all the way back down to where we had started.  Down the hill that, by car, had taken about an hour to climb up.

And then the climbs began.

The ride was allegedly going to be all downhill, but pretty soon we were going up and down these steep rollers.  At this point I had a kind of neat "aha" moment. For most of the ride, I'd been having gearing problems.  Chain falling off, gears slipping, unable to move between gears on the front crankset.  I wanted desperately to convey to the guide that I actually did have a clue about how bikes work but... since I was was the one having all the mechanical problems, and since I was the one that was chronically 50 yards behind everyone else because I apparently was the only one aware of how ridiculously dangerous the whole endeavor was... I actually didn't have much credibility to draw from.  I mean, I looked like a weenie.  I took the downhills like, well, like a girl... praying the grabby brakes wouldn't flip me over the handlebars, winding me up in an Indonesian hospital.  I was slow, I was nervous, I did not have a happy oblivious smile on my face.

But... then this thing happened.  I figured out my gears.  And I realized that I could really motor up these steep hills once I got the hang of it.

Suddenly... I was kind of flying past my pals.  I was a weenie, for sure, going down... but a rock star on the way up. 

That part was cool.

Then there were the rice paddies.  About 3/4 of the way through this thing, the word comes back that "now our skills are going to be put to the test."  WTF?  I so did not like the sound of that.  But sure enough, we got off the road and went through a gate, then started pedaling down a very narrow dirt path, about 6" wide. On our right were rice fields, on our left was a ditch filled with running water, and the more rice fields. Little sheds housed a cow or two, and it was all, well, very Apocalpyse Now, frankly.  Extremely cool, but I was not happy about the path we were taking, so I almost immediately got off and started to walk.

Which, as it turns out, was the right thing to do.  Periodically, the path was interrupted by big gullies covered over by straw and bamboo.  One wrong move would land you in the ditch.  And... because what happens in the rice paddies stays in the rice paddies... I won't describe the full scenario.  But a couple of our merry band ended up needing some rescuing and, all in all, it was kind of a mess. One of those messes that you know will turn into a great story... as soon as it ends.

Which it did.  It finally ended.  24 kilometers (about 15 miles), over about four hours.  We all survived.  Our cuts and scrapes did not develop hideous tropical infections and need emergency amputations.  The bruises were survivable. The story value was immense. And the beer afterwards was, without a doubt, the best cold beer ever in the history of civilization.

Bali - III

And yet, there is no denying the contradictions. The polarities that are embraced include things that truly do offend my Western sensibilities.  There is a lot of garbage thrown about.  The landscape is littered with unfinished projects, piles of junk strewn every which way, mounds of dirt or concrete or rocks dumped in the middle of the road for travelers to navigate treacherously around.

This is a world with very few regulations.  Traffic and driving is the subject for an entire dissertation. The rules of the road seem to consist of just getting to wherever you're going as quickly as possible. Passing other vehicles is constant, and on the narrow roads we end up spending a high percentage of our time in the path of oncoming traffic.  Multiple passing is frequent; as we are passing a slow moving truck, a scooter will be passing us.  Vehicles doing the same thing are racing towards us simultaneously. At the very last minute, everyone tucks into their correct lanes and we are all fine.  Passing when cresting a hill and having no idea if someone is coming at us is hair-raising.

Then there are the motor scooters.  There are a gazillion of them, and they whiz by in swarms, passing, weaving, and occasionally just riding on the side of oncoming traffic (if there's no room on their proper side).  Motorcycles and scooters are the primary mode of transportation, and all the business of life is conducted while hurtling down the street on these two wheeled vehicles.

Miraculously, it does seem like there is a concept of helmets, but not for children who frequently ride along with their parents... school aged kids, toddlers, and babies.  Roger saw a woman breast feeding yesterday, no lie. Four people to a bike is common, with a toddler in the front, head propped against the handlebars, sometimes sleeping, and another one in the arms of the woman sitting side saddle in back.  And the bikes are used for commerce.  We drove behind the bike of a balloon vendor the other night, bringing his wares back home, surrounded by a bubble of inflatable paraphernalia about six feet wide and seven feet high, a tarp flapping around it, and his own body completely enveloped.  We saw a guy carrying a 12 foot long pipe on one shoulder. We saw suckling pigs in pannier cages. Entire vending stalls are carried on the back of bikes. The degree of danger and resourcefulness is staggering. 

Our driver, Made 2, listened to our stories about traffic tickets, greeting this weird new idea with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. Just no such thing in Bali.  Not even close. If a policeman stops you, it's not because of an infraction. It's because he wants to stop you. And he'll go away if you give him 50,000 rupiah. A policeman will stop a car full of tourists just because he thinks the driver is getting paid well enough to kick back something in turn. It costs money to become a policeman, the equivalent of $25,000 US dollars. That's a lot, even for us, but for someone in an economy with a median annual income of $3500 (in our currency), it's nearly prohibitive. Made 2 just laughed and said that's why they ask for money from everyone, to try to make up for how much it cost to become a policia in the first place.

The construction of our house, which was very beautiful, was completely erratic. Changes of levels everywhere.  Steps of a wildly inconsistent height. Electrical outlets with weird inconsistent logic that we had still not figured out after a week.  There was a three inch drop in our bathroom right in front of the sink. It took us days to train ourselves not to step backwards after brushing our teeth because falling backwards on the hard floor would have been, well, a bad way to end the vacation.

So how do I feel about all this?  Well, it makes me realize how many regulations we have in the United States, for starters. We have a LOT of laws for some things... and not enough for others. While we were gone, we heard about the tragedy in Colorado Springs, and a day or two after we returned, the shooting in San Bernardino occurred.

How to deal with all this?  I have to say that, as much as they restrict us, I am very grateful for most of our regulations.  There is a reason, unfortunately, that earthquake casualties are so high in certain parts of the world. The standard of construction is just higher in the states. And regulations sure come in handy when dealing with things like sanitary food preparation.

But, truthfully, I did not yet seen any sign of an accident in Bali in a week of being driven around a lot, nor did I see much body damage on the cars. Dogs wandered across these whizzing streets of chaos (leash-less of course), and managed to survive.  (At least some of them.)  Our driver said that people just work together in this process of driving.  They don't believe they own the road, or that they have any more rights than anyone else.  He said they are not... and searched for the word... arrogant.  There seems to be an understanding that everyone is doing this together and that it's not in anyone's interest to start owning your piece of the road.

I can see how restrictive and interfering all the regulations are on our daily lives.  It takes a whole machine to create, enforce, and litigate a society with so many regulations. It makes us a world of office worker bees, pushing paper and collecting fees.  It bloats us and is, in many ways and on many levels, oppressive.

In the end, however, I don't think it actually ends up being about regulations vs non regulations at all. If suddenly all road regulations in the US disappeared, I have a hard time believing that it would work as well in the States as it does in Bali. I think we are too attached to our sense of ownership over our own personal driving rights.  We hum King of the Road as we lay on the horn and flip off that asshole who dared to pass into our lane. We are individuals, and our right to get to our very important meeting is far more important than your right to get to yours.

I think it's about a bigger picture. I think that when people are more or less on the same page as a culture, as a cluster of humans living in the same region, with the same goals, then the rules and regs are not as necessary to keep order and sanity on the streets. I am beginning to believe that even the most sophisticated of gun control laws cannot eradicate the hatred and fear that is behind all of the unspeakable violence we have been witnessing.

In Bali, it's absolute chaos. But it kind of works.  Amazingly... unbelievably... it kind of works.  We could learn a lot from that.

More to come.