Beginnings

Getting into Bali proves difficult. All it takes is a simple: "Can I see your exit ticket, please?" and all your carefully laid plans are undone. Or rather, the fact that you didn't carefully make any plans. That was half the charm.

"You don't know when you're going to be leaving Indonesia?" says Immigration Man incredulously. "Why didn't you know about this rule? Don't you have friends to tell you these things?" He's annoyed now, but it's the annoyance of a man who is going to let you in eventually, as long as you play your part, which in this case is meek, slightly startled, inoffensive woman. It's probably easier to do if you're not wearing a Ramones t-shirt.

As a solo traveller, the odds are almost never in your favour (certainly not financially - a single room for 90% the price of a double? Thanks). As a lone female you have to put up with even more. But there are occasions when, faced with some part of the bureaucratic process, the official will give you the once over, ask: "Is it just you? Oh... go on then," and wave you through, onto that plane you're stupidly late for, into that open bar on NYE and, on this occasion, through to Bali without an exit ticket. Or maybe Immigration Man just likes punk rock too.

I share the car to the hotel with the Canadian Graham and Geordie; one outgoing, bouncy friendliness, the latter quiet, brooding and beautiful. Men who travel in pairs on the road are often like this. It is as though there is not enough personality to go around and characteristics must be shared. G&G compliment each other beautifully, and I'm quite keen on their unit by the end of the ride.


G&G

Making friends on the road can be a delicate process. A day and a half without an English conversation renders you quite ill with verbal diarrhea, and thus seriously off putting to potential drinking partners. A certain amount of judgmentalness is called for, but not to Heathers proportions. Weigh up the other party quickly. If I go for drinks with this girl, is she going to spend the entire evening talking about her A level results? Do these people who want to have dinner with me have any idea of the value of the local currency? If I go to bed with that guy I just met, is the outcome going to be mutually beneficial?  (You should have answered: Yes, No, and, obviously, No again.)

In the dorm, I take off my Proper Shoes and put them in the bin. Tights, which seemed quite the thing in Tokyo, suddenly lose their appeal in 36^oC heat. I peel them off, almost snow-blinded by my white wintered flesh, and hit the strip with the boys. Sadly, it leads to the infamous Kuta district, which is the Costa del Sol of choice for the less discerning Australian chav. Huge lobster-pink men, either shirtless or mercifully covered with a singlet, line the streets swigging bottles of Bintang, the local brew. Hawkers force henna tattoos, fake Ray Bans and massage fliers on us. They touch you as you go by. Dry fingers trail down my sweating neck, tracing the line where their necklace or earrings will hang. Techno trance blares from empty superclubs. We fall onto the beach and pay to sit in chairs in the full strength of the midday sun and drink warm Bintang. For Hindus, Bali is the "Island of the Gods." I stare out at the rough sea and try to switch my brain to Holiday Mode. I'm not there yet.


Night falls as hemlines rise in Kuta

Partings

They cry so beautifully in mascara in the movies. An elegant trail of black, usually down only one cheek. A solitary tear. There is a Hollywood glamour about the thing, as glassy-eyed starlets passively allow their surroundings to crumble.

I'd stopped writing anything at all a few days before the move. That always means something's wrong. It was too much pressure every time I opened a blank page. Write your future. Prove it to yourself that you are making the correct decision, in elegant, confident prose. Such a waste, not to write at least something. But there was too much stress and shittiness that saw me fail financially, geographically and emotionally. Watching my possessions dwindle down to what could be posted or carried. I send a washing machine to the wrong friend's house and someone else mistakenly gets a microwave. I didn't want any of my deposit back anyway.

In the end, it is the note I write to M that opens me up again. She is supposed to be coming with me to the airport, but lies sleeping feverishly in bed while I pack. I sit down to write the kind of goodbye that is too rushed and written in scratchy pencil and conveys only 2% of what you love about the person. But it makes me cry anyway, by myself and then onto her white duvet as I lean over her wakened body and crush it with a hug. She tells me off for crying: tomorrow it will be sunshine and sea and men again and for all the tomorrows I choose.

In the cab through Yoyogi Uehara, I check my face in the mirror, and even in the dark, there is a smudged cloud under each eye, glassy and dazed. A gig is letting out at Shibuya O East, and the cab has to stop while we are thronged with goth lites in green hair. That morning, I'd gone to a photo exhibition in Ebisu, and it had seemed so exactly like a normal Sunday in Tokyo, with a matcha frappuccino afterwards, to celebrate the beginning of the summer. Nothing that gave the sense of an ending. On the bus away from the city there's "Little Red Corvette" by Prince, another questionable selection from the ipod to soundtrack this moment. There is no sense of release, only loss. Not even that, just nothing. I feel like writing about though, so things can't be so strange, but only in teenage melodramatic tones.

I look forward to descending into the flippancies of Travel Bitching, what I should have really named my blog. I know soon I will shrug off this emo mourning and I will want to write about the place I am in, beautiful men I latch on to and the heinous ones that take a shine to me. There will be mediocre sex and sunburn and lower back tattoos and banana daiquiris I pour into the pool when I get bored with them. The Romance of travel/adventure/exploration and solitude. There will be endless questions about Japan. People want to hear about green kit kats and false exoticism. Perhaps I will avoid mentioning it and let people think I have come from London. Nobody wants to hear my version of Japan while I am still sulking: land of instructions and some of the worst pizza I have ever eaten.

It would seem that a lot of people agree with me, as the flight is packed. The inflight magazine has an article on the Japanese cherry blossom, but I saw them a few days ago, on M's birthday, when she skived off work and we went and laid in Yoyogi under the first trees. So I don't need to read it. Finish. Tick.

Endings

Some things I will miss about Japan, Part 29c

• The chocolate peanut butter pie at that cafe in Sakuragicho that looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. But then, everywhere looks out over the big wheel in Yokohama. It's the cafe that plays Nine Inch Nails followed by Bob Dylan and then the Spice Girls. Unasked for western nostalgia, whisking you back to another time without permission. You need time to prepare when you go back.
• At school, that kid who always writes "Fin" at the end of all his journals. God knows where he picked that up from. I see him in the corridors, having walking-backwards competitions with his friends, and at lunch, hiding his vegetables in his neighbour's carbohydrate.
• The Toyoko line. You should really stand at the front of the train to get off at Kikuna, but you have a better chance of getting a seat if you remain at the back and walk up. I always forget to walk up. On the way to shows, I am that crazy girl in the corner, silently mouthing the words to my set, or out loud if I'm really worried. On the way to conversation lessons with salarymen, I prep with articles about sweatshop workers in China, floods in Bangkok, collapse in Europe. The Toyoko line home from Nakameg.
• Mimi, a ball of unaffected energy and unconditional love.
• Dean & Delucca, Marunouchi. Your coffee always gave me epiphanies.
• The tedious everyday minutia that added up to a life for me and I thank it for that. At the end, during the packing and the almost ritualistic binning, I am left with just a dress that I can't bear to part with because it's so special or the pattern is beautiful or that I was so happy in it, and a pile of notebooks attempting to document My Life In Japan. A ¥6000 package sent home, and a little bag for the road. This is a little or a lot or nothing.
• The urban, yuppie cleanliness and disposable income I'm going to trade for unemployed, wandering homelessness. In these final days, I wonder whether I should get some kind of trinket to serve as a trophy. This is what it meant. But this is when people are most vulnerable to getting tattoos.
• It's difficult to summarise an experience until you are well out of it. How this is not how life works for most people, who don't have the luxury of A London Phase, The Japanese Phase and endless Malaysian Days. Most people just continue on, from day to day, in the same place with the same things, not needing anything to reflect on/from. "Japan" as some finite experience, now finished and neatly tied with a bow at its fruition. It's ongoing. You aren't allowed to have several lives, or even two. You have to drag around the same lead character wherever you go, moving from plot to plot, with the same tired old flaws that occasionally lessen and improve.
• It began with 12 simple kanji. Tree. Power. Man. Soil. Car. Emergency Exit.
• To have all my hopes and fears either confirmed or pacified by spending time with all those other people doing exactly the same thing as me. Travel in the hope of finding a narrative thread.
• Talking with a British guy, in a bar in Tokyo, who hasn't been home in a while, and that look they give you that says: "Oh yeah....I remember what you British girls are like!" and suddenly my personality has currency again.

Club Tropicana

Mark and I are frolicking on the beach, discussing how to retire at 35, and whether working the Tokyo host clubs is a viable way to do this. The Cherating branch of uber-resort Club Med, for rich, clueless package holidaymakers, is just around the corner and has beautiful deserted criminally underused beaches. It's all fun and jellyfish stings until the sun goes down and the tide cuts us off from our original beach. Containing all our money/clothing/livelihood.



There is nothing for it but to traipse back to Club Med, find someone in charge and try to get a cab home. Wet, half naked and without any money. What follows is a long, chilly, barefoot walk through the backwoods of the resort, until we reach a sewage works, confusingly adjacent to some chalets.

The polo instructor to which we explain our predicament is perhaps the least authoritarian person we could have found, but he seems bemused rather than affronted by our circumstances. And the trespassing. We are weary, dejected and ashamed. He leads us through the gilded marble halls, all executive lounges and gyms and gift shops. Finally, we hit the pool area, and I'm relieved to be dressed appropriately for the first time in about 3 hours.

En route to reception, PoloMan notices Mark's eyes flitting over a stray cocktail menu.
"Why not stay for a drink before you leave?" he suggests with gay abandon. I remind him of our crippling lack of funds, but PoloMan will not accept this as an excuse. It's an open bar, and we can just tell the staff we're staying here, should they ask. Not that they will.

PoloMan disappears to defile a rich, aging heiress, or whatever it is they do in Jilly Cooper novels and I turn my newly sparkling eyes on my companion.

"Jenny, do you really think it's a good idea to have a drink before we've sorted this out? We've still got to explain all this again to reception and try to blag a cab," says Mark, with uncharacteristic, and to be honest, quite unattractive, caution.

"Open Bar" is the magic password to all my secrets, and Mark is totally ruining my Club Tropicana fantasy. I may pretend to be a gritty, hardcore, authentic backpacker, but at the end of the day, my dream is to lie in a hammock and drink a Blue Hawaiian out of a hollowed out pineapple (umbrella/flamingo/sparkler mandatory), served by a pre-Hampstead Heath era George Michael.

I order two pina coladas, which seem to fit the ridiculousness of the situation, and soon we're lying poolside, marvelling at this reversal of fortune.
"One more for the road?" says Mark, finally getting into the swing of things.



Six cocktails later, we are sprawled in the bar, heckling the lounge singer (who claims not to know any Chris Isaak - he is lying), inventing malicious gossip about the guests (by this time in black tie evening wear) and testing the patience of the waiting staff, who clearly know what we're up to. We are those obnoxious drunken British people I usually try so hard to avoid on holiday, and the reason I will never visit Thailand.

There are supermodel types and over tired children who should be in bed and burly shouldered Dagenham-born managers with necks thicker than they are long. A horrid Essex fishwife screams at an exotic-looking European couple: "Are you taking pictures of my kids?"

I am in love with everyone and everything. I have ceased to worry about all my worldly goods, by now stolen or else washed out to sea. My primary concern is that I have allowed 27 years to elapse without ever having tasted the sweet, sweet nectar of a Brandy Alexander.

The lounge singer surveys all from the lofty height of his stall, probably thinking about that meeting he once had with Celine Dion's management, and regretting not taking the post on that cruise ship. He breaks into the Paul Anka version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, in a pathetic yet melodic act of defiance. It's time to leave, and I suspect the bar staff agree.

The next problem is how to find Reception. If we ask for directions, our cover is blown. Our cover at the moment is a large Club Med-embossed beach towel, really not made for two. There is some argument about which of us is the most naked, and who is more deserving of the lion's share. We snaffle some sandwiches from the buffet, in an endearingly naive attempt to clear our heads, and approach the counter.

Mark admirably avoids acting in that terrible way that all drunk people do, when they're trying to convince someone of their sobriety, and just end up seeming even more off their tits, and soon Reception Man has a cab for us at the other end of the phone line.
"And if I could just have your room number, Sir?"
Busted.
"Ahhhh, well, you see, we're not actually staying here in the literal sense..."
The receiver is replaced in its cradle. A business card is offered, with the number of some disreputable cab company, and a back door, the one reserved for thieves, charlatans and freeloaders, is indicated.

We race out into the night. Outside, a thousand palm trees are silhouetted against a brilliant purple sunset, and we decide it would be churlish not to engage in a melodramatic snog under the moonlight, but this is not one of those salacious blogs that deals in cheap thrills and titillation.

Escape seems almost within our grasp, until the cold hard flashlight of Security accosts us. We spin a so-incredulous-it-must-be-true tale about visiting friends, and now we must be getting back to our quiet sleepy village, now where did we leave our clothes again?

"Is that a Club Med towel, you're wearing, Sir?"
Mark is suitably appalled: "Do you know, I do believe it is!"
SecurityMan is not buying it, nor our chances of flagging down an unsolicited cab in this area at this time of night. Walking back through our quiet, respectable Muslim town in the throes of Ramadan, sporting the H&M Summer '11 Swimwear line lacks appeal, so when he offers to drive us back himself for the sum of Not Too Many Ringett, we do not complain.

Once more unto the beach, where I'm overjoyed to be reunited with my clothes and my keys and my very proper, very British, sense of shame and propriety.



I'm very glad to return to the dirt-cheap little treehouse. I have tasted George's man-made paradise and, while superficially delicious, it was bitter.

Textbook sleepy beach town

Lord of the Flies

In Cherating, I slum it for 5 nights. There is nothing to do, and it is glorious. I have my own little Malayan treehouse and did I mention there were bunnies?!

My bel de jour is Mark, my neighbour and fellow countryman, full of comforting, earthy Britishisms I haven't heard in a long time: pardon the pun; different kettle of fish; love you and leave you; and always a pleasure, never a chore. He has also fallen pray to the silent but deadly charms of Cherating, and has managed to rack up 8 nights there. He shows me the beach on the first day, and comparing it to other beaches, uses the word "desolate" twice, and favourably. This man should not be allowed to write guidebooks. Another beach, another huge jellyfish washed ashore. I'm desperate to touch it, but then Mark will have to pee on me, and I don't know him well enough yet.


Perspective, innit.

Later, I clamber over some rocks and find an even desolater beach, and while I'm sitting there, alone, writing about what a great beach this would be to kill yourself on, I'm interrupted by the waiter from breakfast. We both accuse the other of gatecrashing the others private thinking spot and a friendship is born. I tell him about last night's free room, and the kindness of strangers, but he doesn't seem surprised. In Cherating, this kind of behaviour is quite normal, as I'm to see over the next few days. Juan himself is super friendly and chatty. He digs a hole in the sand to uncover a rock to take my picture through, shows me some bracelets he spent the previous day making, and while he's tying one around my wrist, I ask how long it took to make.

"I dunno, I was so fcuking stoned!" It's then I notice his pupils are pinpricks. No matter. Any one who takes off their t-shirt for you to sit on, then brings takeaway Chinese and beers for a beach picnic, is all right in my book. He even picks up litter other people have left behind.


Juan. Peace pipe out of shot.

He chides me for not taking better care of my hair. Last night's shampooing has dislodged a thousand flakes of burnt scalp, and I feel it only right and proper to submit the evidence here.


On a side note, isn't my hair a dreadful colour?

Later still, I play cards with Mark, games I have forgotten how to play and games I haven't played since sixth form, including the longest continuous round of Shithead I have ever had without someone being called off to a psychology class or an oboe lesson. I like Mark because he doesn't try to tell me who or what I am, like some others have, or ascribe any false qualities to me. There is no attempt to get the measure of me. He's also kind to crazed monkeys. Yet even he, after barely two days in my company, in also in agreement that I talk too much. Why is south east Asia full of such bad listeners?


Mark has a flaky scalp too.


You know what all this nature needs? Branding.

Another day, Mark and I do an ATM run to Kuantan, the nearest one-horse town, full of MegaMalls flogging pirate DVDs and a delicious Indian restaurant, in which Mark crushes all my expectations by trying to get the measure of me based on the length of my middle and ring fingers. I tell him how disappointed I am in him. But apparently some things are impossible not to notice, like the way I look down, into my solar plexus, whenever I am thinking about something, as opposed to up and out like most people do. But surely all the answers lie within...?!

Crisis: all these people I've met and analysed and judged and turned into 140 word caricatures of themselves - have they all been thinking about and jumping to conclusions about me? Are they writing anonymous Phileas Fogg-style travelogue/blogs about the freaks they meet on the road too?

My solar plexus fails me. We are not in control.

Escape from paradise

A day and a night of the Hoo-ray Henrys proves more than enough, and soon I'm speeding for the mainland with a boatload of Abercrombie & Bitch beautiful people and an incredibly annoying Yank, decked out in American Apparel harem pants and a big stretchy v-neck showing off an indecent amount of man cleavage.

I spend an hour at the jetty at Kualar Besut, God's Armpit, awaiting a mythical bus. After 40 minutes of horn honking and staring, of which Jane Austen provides little protection, my reading is interrupted by a man on a motorbike. He informs me that the bus I am waiting for does not exist. He's smiling a little too hard, and further discredits his story by reappearing behind the wheel of a cab a few moments later. He will take me to a destination of my choosing for the bargain price of "wun-zero-zero!" I decline his offer (the bus will cost only 7) and retreat back into Regency-era Bath.


A View From The Bus Stop

Another 20 minutes. I give in and haul myself to the bus station. I'm greeted by a bevy of over eager bus drivers asking where I'd like to go.
"I want to go south" I whimper pathetically. They look confused. I take out my guidebook, turn to a map of the region and point downwards. They confer for some moments, and the head driver tells me to come back at 8pm, and they'll see what they can do.


Waiting for the bus (there are two more under the clock)

By 9.30pm, I'm being chauffeured by Mr Head Bus Driver in his private car, along with a woman and her young son. They are determined to track down a bus for us. I don't much care to where. I convince myself that Woman And Her Young Son are not in cahoots with Mr Head Bus Driver. They are not going to deliver me unto evil/the white slave trade.

At 2.30am, I'm ejected onto the highway at the sleepy beach town of Cherating. Arguably, most places are somewhat subdued at that hour of the night, but as I trundle my suitcase down the dark, empty, silent road, it feels particularly creepy. It does not help that there is a full moon.

The first hostel I try is set back into the woods some way. All is deserted. I come upon an open-air reception/lounge area, with 2 or 3 battered leather sofas I could, at a push, kip on for the night and be all apologies in the morning, instantly checking in and ordering expensive smoothies from the bar for the duration of my stay. But something about the place gives me the serious creeps. It's just too quiet and too dark and too surrounded by dense forest. Add a porch swing and it would be the set from The Evil Dead. A few empty beer cans and a recent banana peel look like they have been dropped, in haste, and will only encourage monkeys. I move on.

The only living soul in Cherating - a night porter, watching lesbian porn on youtube, with his feet up on a huge reception desk - gives me some vague accommodation info. He is not pleased at being disturbed, and sends me on my way. I let him get back to Tiffany and Amanda and set off once more.

Another hostel, another refusal: the only room left, her best, is 4 times what I want to pay. Minutes later, the owner is calling me back from the road: a passing driver has taken pity on my plight, and has offered to pay for the room for me! I'm confused, overjoyed and exhausted, and led into The Royal Honeymoon Penthouse Guest Suite, which is the filthiest, mustiest hovel I have ever had the misfortune to spend the night. I'm handed a key, and can't help but wonder if my mysterious benevolent benefactor has been given a copy, but I'm too tired to be cynical.

The shower is so vile I do not want to get naked in it. But I must, I must take on my final challenge of the day and do battle with the enemy: my three-day-old, sand/sea/salt drenched, unwashed hair. I check the mirror. As feared, we have left the long, tousled, sexy beach waves behind long ago. I am The Evil Dead.

I can't sleep because the stench from the pillows is overpowering, taking on the smell of human excrement. In the morning, I will escape, I will find the Matahari Chalets, I will get a lovely rustic wooden hut with a veranda and writing desk over looking palm trees, with bunnies in a hutch behind my house. I will breakfast at a gingham table-clothed cafe. I will go on a moonlight firefly riverboat tour and it will be magical, and all this will a horrible, horrible nightmare of musty misery.

In the morning, all these things happen, and I find out the Scary Outdoor Sofa Hostel I almost crashed at is Haunted, and the locals Do Not Talk About It and No One Ever Stays There Ever.

But the beer cans! The banana peel!

Long Beach

Monkey juice

The other side of paradise houses a boorish collection of holidaying Eurotrash on a long strip of beach, imaginatively titled "Long Beach". I shack up at the Moonlight Inn, the only hostel on this side of the island run by a man in a bikini top, sarong and long dangly earrings. I check in and ask where I should go for internet access:

"Look for a place called 'Ladyboys'. It's about 200m down the beach" she says helpfully.
I take a long hard sip of my milkshake. "I'm sorry, where?"
"At 'Ladyboys'. You can't miss it." 

I stumble the requisite 200m and just as I'm wondering whether I haven't stayed on the boat a little too long and ended up in Thailand (we are tantalisingly close to the border), I find myself in front of the internet cafe, with the name across the top of the shop reading: "LazyBhoys".

Long Beach is full of arguing couples, families, the elderly and the infirm. It is no place for the discerning solo traveller. I use all my best shark hunting skills to scour the beach for lone men, and scout two very well dressed gentlemen with impeccable haircuts in matching crisp linen shirts, at dinner. My heart leaps then dies away when I notice their wine glasses are touching.

Eventually, I run into Vicky and Ollie-short-for-Oliviyaah, two girls I met in Langkawi, but did not befriend for obvious reasons. We share a shisha and some of their industriously smuggled vodka before being joined by three vacationing brothers from Kualar Lumpar. There presence is rendered tolerable only by the two bottles of Smirnoff they bring to the table, and the provision of a second shisha pipe.


A snake!!!

For the rest of the evening, filthy tourists and Malays try to bump n grind against us as we dance on the sand (with some difficulty) to my old friend, Rhiannah, and a song whose lyrics I shall repeat verbatim: "I don't mean to be rude, but tonight I'm going to be fcuking you." I've been away from western culture for some time now, but have we dispensed with metaphor altogether in the modern pop song?


Shiny Drunk Jenny

Vicky and Ollie-short-for-Oliviyaah are of that most particular brand of traveller, the trust fund fueled Gap Yaaah Backpacker, slumming it up for the sheer shit of it, all limbs and hot pants and vest tops. Turublee well off and coming from the better Home Counties, these girls have lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex them. I went to university with most of them. These girls have never heard the word "no". They do not clean up after themselves and leave their emotional messes in your lap because someone else will take care of it. They have framed photographs of their ponies in their bedrooms. They will tell you they once knew someone who knew someone who touched a black person. Just becoming aware of their almost total power over men and exploiting it ruthlessly.

And yet, it is these careless, obnoxious Jocasters and Tillys and Ollies-short-for-Oliviyaah who shall inherit the earth. The future is theirs and we are hopelessly lost in their thrall, revolving unquestioningly in their orbit.


On our gap yaah