It's been a busy week, hence the lack of blogging. Last Monday, we had some visitors to our little place in Bali. Chris, Phil's stepbrother and a friend, Tobi, had been travelling in Thailand and stopped by to check out Bali for a week.
It's so nice to have some new people to spend time with, especially when they are as fun and easygoing as Chris and Tobi. They came to surf, which is something I hadn't attempted yet. Actually, despite staying 300m from Legian beach and walking on it every day, I still hadn't gone in the water. Not once. We did snorkel in the sea on the Gili Islands but I hadn't been in the sea in Bali yet.
So I was keen to spend a few days on the beach. Sadly for Tobi, a nasty spill on his motorbike in Thailand left him grazed, bruised and unable to get wet. He took it in pretty good humour and the alternative of lying on a sunbed on the beach under a giant umbrella wasn't too bad. So we spent much of last week lying on the beach or on the water, bodysurfing and boogie boarding. A very relaxing way to spend a week. We did other stuff too, including a to-die-for seafood dinner one night during which we all ate delicious tuna, salmon and white marlin sashimi to the point of exhaustion, but beaching was a major theme.
And now we're in Darwin for the week, renewing our visas and slowly dying from the heat and humidity... It's probably not that much hotter than Bali, but it feels massively warmer. So far we've fed baby crocodiles and hand fed fish in the Harbour. We're staying in a hostel for a couple of nights which is a slightly uncomfortable blast from the past. The hostel itself is clean, has a pool, a spa, a huge outdoor deck and a bar. But our room is actually a double bed with a single bunk bed over the top. Mind your head! Actually, it is fine here. Just been a long time since we were last in a hostel.
Whenever I visit a new place, I always wonder whether I could live and work there. I think it's a kind of security thing - just in case i ever make a horrible mess of life in Melbourne, there are other places I could live. It actually doesn't take too much to make the list - I think I would be comfortable living in lots of places - Most of the UK (London only if I had/ was making loads of cash), Holland, Germany (once I learn to speak German), most of Europe actually, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bali (so long as I never had to work) - to name just a few. And every Australian capital (yes, even Canberra) but Darwin I'm not sure.
It is a gorgeous setting for a city with the harbour and lots of green spaces but there is a weird menacing vibe hanging over the place. I've never lived anywhere with a significant Indigenous population, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Now that I'm here it seems such a sad situation - most indigenous people I've seen just vibrate hopelessness. There is a general look of dejection so complete that it makes me want to cry. While I have no doubt there is infinitely more to the situation than the several dozen people I've seen, what I have seen is really disheartening. Today I saw an indigenous man sitting on a bench in Coles, being told off by the Coles manager because he had taken some meat out of the fridge and damaged it. The manager told him that it now couldn't be sold, that he needed to pay for it and if he couldn't, he would have to call the cops. The man didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't answer, didn't try to make a run for it. Nothing. He just had a vacant stare that somehow managed to convey that he'd been here before, knew he'd be there again and just did not have the energy or the will to do anything about it. On our first night, another indigenous man threw a can of beer at my feet. It burst open and sprayed all of us. Without thinking, I said, "thanks, mate" (yeah, ok, sarcasm is never the answer). The guy was sort of a little angry. "You c&@&t$", he yelled after us. But he was mostly deadened, vacant, lathargic about the incident. It's so far outside my usual experience I don't know what to say about it all, except that it made me feel really sad.
Something that didn't make me feel sad was seeing a group of four hare krishnas on our last day in Bali, walking along the beach and singing. Hare Krishnas are always so happy, although these ones looked decidedly unhappy. Phil's theory was that while the rest of us take holidays in order to have fun, perhaps the hare krishnas need to take a holiday from being happy all the time. Makes some sense to me. Must have been a particularly religious week in Bali because we also saw a Buddhist monk. Or possibly fake monk - our friend Kenny warned us in KL that monks who ask for money are fake monks because real monks only ask for food. I still gave "fake monk" some money. If he was a fake monk, he'd certainly gone to a lot of effort to dress up!!
We're back to Bali on Friday - it will be nice to be back, but in the meantime it's nice to be back in Australia, even though it is very different to home in Melbourne!
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