Déjà vu: a flash flood of familiarity bursting through the secret sluice between our worlds. I’m sitting on a tiny tropical island that wears a golden ring of sand engraved by faint footprints being slowly blotted out by the sapphire of the ocean. I know this island well. I know where the sun sizzles the horizon at the end of play and I know where she washes the sleep from her morning eyes. I know its highest point, its longest route and its shortest way. Then this, is surely déjà vu? Non, Madame, Monsieur. I just believed my heart, and bullied my head to bring her here. Continue reading ‘Turning Circles’
Archive for the 'Indonesia' Category
A Thousand Glorious Times
Published July 4th, 2008 in Russia, Trans-Mongolian Railway, Tibet, Singapore, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China and India. 6 CommentsI’d seen him from a short distance, twelve months previously, he travelled alone aboard a plane to Moscow. He wore a dark tracksuit top zipped over a light t-shirt, and loose pale green shorts covered the knees he cradled by his chest. His hair sprayed out in loose brown curls beneath a khaki cap, highlighted by scribbles of grey. His pale thin lips lined a shallow smile, and his early morning eyes seemed glazed with relief. As his homeland slipped beneath a thin veil of cloud, he lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair, his lips parted just once to release his farewell thoughts: Let the journey begin, my friend. Today, he lay upright on the rippled white sheets of a double bed, in a simple, homely room on the island of Bali. Continue reading ‘A Thousand Glorious Times’
I concluded it was time to leave the city when a gay man insisted I meet his girlfriends back at his hotel room; It quickly transpires I’m in a brothel, one of the ‘staff’ sits her four year old son on my knee to act the puppet for her inquisitive line of questioning - read sales pitch. ‘Aldy, say: where’s you girlfriend?’, Aldy’s eyes find me like blameless beacons in the seamy smog ‘where’s girlfwend?’ he recites brightly through his chubby smile, ’are you maweed?’ ‘Howold are you?’ ‘Are you my daddy?’ I answered his questions with tickles, and a smug smile toward his mother. As I sat on the foot of the bed, I listened to my whereabouts for the last week of nights retold from a room full of ten strangers. ‘You were in this bar’, they said. That bar. Early night, that night. Shop. Internet. You spoke to her, shook his hand. Aldy’s hugs and handshakes were my only escape from the tumbling reality, so I smothered him with attention. He was polite and his hand was warm with innocence, in an inescapable environment that drifted on a river of love, but respect among kith was the ragged survivor of the rivers rapids. It had a story to tell. Continue reading ‘A Harlot and a Holiday’
Back when I was a boy - when war was settled by Thundercats, when all we had to play with were a Commodore 64, Sega Megadrive, a Spectrum ZX and a Gameboy, when Eclipse jeans meant u waz kool and Timmy Mallet got kicks out of striking the dumb kids with a big hammer - I stuck a pin in a map and announced to Chucky (my plastic-faced ventriloquist doll) that ‘I’m going to Java’. ‘Really? That’s great, I hope you have a wonderful time in Java’ we said ‘I will, Chucky’ I promised. In the years following my declaration, hair began to grow in strange places and my redheaded friend rarely uttered a word. The truth is, he became the victim of a number of violent beatings at the hands of my fiendish teenage friends and me, and in 1999 he was cruelly doll-napped and fatally run over - twice - on the quiet country road to my house by a friend’s Vauxhall Nova. Nine years since his assassination, I’ve made it to the Indonesian island of Java and in a cruel twist of fate, Chucky’s pinned me with revenge. Continue reading ‘Chucky’s Revenge’
It was a classic play. Some would say a suave snatch, others a seductive triumph. Each time I look back at the moment, I applaud and tip my crown in respect. I’m newly single, ‘off women’ and emitting that couldn’t-care-less, rough attitude that comes with unkempt hair, sparse stubble, a loose tongue and yesterdays t-shirt. I saw the way she looked at my friend, it was a look of assurance. Her eyes rolled him around and left me playing the dutiful observer in her royal court. As we turned to leave however, she revealed her bluff and made her move – on me. Jackie is a gorgeous redhead, typically passionate and playful. As my back was turned, she placed her hand assertively on my shoulder. She was guilty of intent, while I was innocent of any invitation. Within seconds she’d wrapped her legs round my waist, allowing her warm paunch to sink around me and tighten almost every one of my muscles. There was nothing I could do, other than the same as any English gent born of the eighties – I lowered her gently onto her back and into the classic Missionary Position. Voyeuristic photographers stood their ground but as I looked over her bust and brow, her devious play dawned on me. She was making him jealous. Him being an enormous, fully-grown and worryingly wild orang-utan. The authority of the Sumatran rainforest, and I was deep within his territory. Continue reading ‘The Flirt of the Forest’
The narrow bench was worn and hard, a metaphorical reflection of the staunch, motionless policeman sat opposite me. His face was blank, while mine was stained with two hours of anguish. NewsFlashTV flickered muted news on a small screen placed awkwardly high on it’s rusting bracket - forty police officers penning in two presumably unlicensed, understandably irate female street vendors to a frenzied counterattack. I drew on a Marlborough as I watched them hurl chunks of ice the size of rugby balls at the law, inside I was cheering them on. I took another drag. Who would I call first? His embassy, or mine? What would I tell his family? Would I be honest and tell them the locals left him there to die or would I be gentle and tell them of the numerous conversations we’d had about our travel highlights? At sixty-five, he was too young to die. At any age, he, or I, or you deserve someone to fight. I pictured myself at his wake, a young wisp of truth sat in the corner picking at pineapple sticks with cheese while whispers about my origin cornered stray rumours. ‘No Margaret, that’s the boy that was staying at the same place as…’ But then the phone rang, he was alive! The events of that day were rapidly laced in bitter truths. A day that began with me realising what the human body is capable of, ended with the stark reality of the capability of the human mind. Continue reading ‘Losing my Will’
The first time I simply traced my finger over the words on the screen, the second time I read the words aloud to myself. ‘We believe that terrorists continue to plan attacks, which could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers.’ I scratched the crown of my head and read on, ‘All airlines from Indonesia have been refused permission to operate services to the EU because Indonesia is unable to ensure that its airlines meet international safety standards.’ My left eyebrow sank while the right one arched into the furrows of my brow. ‘Indonesia sits along a volatile seismic strip called the ‘Ring of Fire’ and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis are possible.’ ‘Ring of Fire?’ And it burns, burns, BURNS… the burning… ring… of fire. I decided to skip the FCO’s warnings about Bird Flu; in fact I passed over the remainder of their heartwarming advice. I took a brief look at the LP Guide to Indonesia, and discovered that independent travel is interpreted as “Solo is Loco”, while their online forum is permanently headlined, “Indonesia: Is it Safe?” I read all of this, with a dog-eared e-ticket to Padang (one of the “top ten rainiest inhabited locations in the world”) poking out of my back pocket and forty-eight hours later I stunned myself, and landed. Continue reading ‘Spineless in Sumatra’
