Bali Tales 1973

I had been in Bali, or more precisely, Kuta, for just a few hours. I was approached by a French guy wanting to know if I wanted to buy some dope. My instinctive reaction was to say no. He said he was leaving Bali that night and had more dope than he could use and would give me a very fair price. I still said no!

But there was plenty of dope to be found and I think we spent a lot of time stoned there. I honestly don’t remember. But there is photographic evidence of something lifting the mood and providing bloodshot eyes in photos like this:

And this:

The blond woman in this photo was from Melbourne. Her name was Alison and we decided to enjoy a magic mushroom omelette together for breakfast. I have very few memories of what happened after that. I seem to remember lying on the beach with her and on a whim I decided to go off for a wander elsewhere – somewhere off the beach and into the jungle. I have no other memory of that day until she came to my losmen later that night. She was as red as a beetroot and really angry with me. She had fallen asleep on the beach and got very badly burnt. She said I had just left there on the beach. That was true but in that addled state I doubt whether I was able to join the dots and think that maybe I should stay with her or wake her up, or make sure she didn’t get burnt or something. Anyway – not very chivalrous on my part. I blame the mushrooms.

The Western looking guy on the bed behind me in the first photo above was an Australian guy called Michael. He was ostensibly in jail for possession of marijuana, but as you can see he was out and about and enjoying himself. He said he could basically do whatever he wanted as long as he let the police at the local station know where he was, and returned there each night to sleep. A nice cosy arrangement!

Years later back in Australia I was browsing through old photo albums with my friend, Narelle, and she was really surprised to see a photo of her friend Michael in my photo album. Turns out she’d known him in Sydney years earlier!

It was de rigeur at the time to hire a motorbike and go riding around the island. For me, and for many young travellers I suspect, it was the first time I had ridden a motorbike. You did have to show an international driving license and pay the hire fee but after that you were free to hoon off around the island. So we did.

My brother Damien and I. It was a mixed experience. Obviously ripping down the road in a foreign land with the wind flowing back your hair and all that was exhilarating. But not even that thrill of youthful freedom could hide the embarrassment as you passed through villages and ruined their rural silence. No matter how slow you went you were this noisy interruption to their peaceful existence.

The high/lowlight of this day out on the motorbikes was on the way home. No doubt feeling a lot more confident by now I was doing a fair speed on a long flat piece of road between villages then boom – a large unseen by me pothole jolted me back to earth. Almost literally. I wiggled and waggled across the road for some way trying to keep the bike upright and just managed to stay on the bike and on the road. Damien had been riding some way ahead of me and was waiting in the next village and getting worried. He had seen the pothole and I should have been there by now….  He was as relieved as I was to see I was still in one piece and we continued back to Kuta without further incident.

During my time in Bali I became friendly with a German guy called Peter. He taught something or rather at a university in Berlin and was a very jolly guy and I guess we smoked several joints together. One time we were sitting in a restaurant when a few other German travellers came in. He briefly chatted with them and I was amazed just how much his character and tone appeared to change when he spoke German. All of a sudden here was this very serious guy who was speaking quite assertively. When his focus returned to our table and he resumed speaking English the jolly happy-go-lucky Peter instantly returned. It was one of many instances over the years when I saw how the language people spoke influenced who they were.

I always felt sure that Peter and I would meet again one day but alas it wasn’t to be. It was many years later that I found myself in Berlin looking for him with nothing with his name to go by. My friends in Berlin said his surname was a strange one – Wucherpfennig. In English it loosely translates as ‘miser’. Nor was it a common surname but hours of searching phonebooks and lists of names of academics in Berlin universities yielded nothing.  

My chosen route home from Bali was via Timor and Darwin, and that turned into quite a tale of its own.... (to be continued)

 

En Route to Bali 1973 - Singapore/Jakarta

 

In 1973 Singapore didn’t allow people with long hair to enter. So my brother Damien and I were ceremoniously sheared among friends in Perth before our departure on an A.U.S. flight. AUS stood for Australian Union of Students and everyone on board was a student enjoying cheap student fares so you can imagine the party like atmosphere .

I passed the haircut inspection after having to turn a full 360 degrees twice to allow the customs officer to closely inspect my hair, but lingered to see how one of the more senior passengers (he was probably all of 30) with very long hair would get through. He had tucked all his hair up under a hat. He was asked to remove his hat and at that point he immediately started demanding in a very loud voice that he would like to speak to someone from the Australian embassy. He just kept repeating this over and over and eventually he was allowed to enter Singapore with no haircut!

This was my first visit to Asia. I was 19. Singapore had not yet gone through its economic boom time and the streets between Changi airport and the city were lined with poverty. People dressed in rags living by the side of the road; rickety market stalls lined the route, noisy dirty traffic flew past without any apparent order. It’s that assault on the senses that many Asian nations offer first time visitors that nothing can prepare you for. I remember staring open mouthed at the chaos unfolding by the side of the road as we made our way to the hotel.

That aside, the party atmosphere continued on at the student hotel most of us were booked in to. We roamed between various rooms where the alcohol and marijuana was flowing. One of the rooms belonged to the senior hippy guy who had bluffed his way through customs and who was now sitting on his bed naked and cross-legged rolling joints like an Indian holy man. There was a sudden moment of panic when we get a call to one of the rooms that the authorities were coming up to investigate. People scattered back to their own rooms and all the marijuana was quickly flushed down toilets, and windows opened to allow the smoke out.  Smoking and possession of marijuana in Singapore in those days was even more serious than having long hair! It turned out to be a prank - one of the students had just decided to freak everyone out with the fake phone call. It worked. It killed the mood completely.

Damien and I were planning to head to Bali in Indonesia. This involved flying to Jakarta to catch the train through Java and then a ferry to Bali. The flight to Jakarta was not a student flight. I was seated next to a seasoned traveller who had been to Jakarta many times and wasn’t impressed that his work had brought him back there. He called it a hell hole and said that if I thought Singapore was bad I hadn’t seen anything yet. How right he was. There are moments in your travelling life that you never forget. My first steps outside Jakarta airport was one such moment. It was absolute mayhem. A mass of people and traffic and noise in a chaos impossible to comprehend. As we stood trying to work out how to get a bemo (taxi) I noticed a man lying in the gutter – barely clothed and quite still. He could easily have been dead. And the traffic flooded past just inches from his head. No one appeared to notice. Or care. The opening lyrics to a Neil Young song played in my head: “old man lying by the side of the road…. don’t let it bring you down…. it’s only castles burning….”

By the time we reached our accommodation for the night all the women in the bemo were crying at what we’d seen. They guys I guess were crying on the inside. I know I was. Jakarta was extreme culture shock. I think we spent a couple of days there. It’s all a bit of a blur. It taught me so much in such a short time. I have never felt the desire to return.

Our next adventure was the train across Java en route to the island paradise of Bali.

Bits of Life

I’ve always written. From the age of 7 I kept a daily diary. Admittedly my first entries at that age were fairly scant on detail. Whole days could be summed up thus: “Got up. Went to school. Played football when I got home. Went to bed.” Marvellous economy with words 😊

Fast forward 25 years to life on the inside - a Dutch winter on the third floor circa 1986. I was struggling with feeling captive – I had to live in a Dutch winter to realise how much of an outdoors person I was. In desperation I took to writing my life story to pass the time. And I think I did a reasonable job of writing about my life from birth till the time I left school.

Browsing through long forgotten corners as one does in this time of COVID I came across a copy of it. What struck me was how much detail it contained that I have completely forgotten. So here’s a tip – don’t leave writing about your life till too late. You DO forget things as time passes.

Two snippets:

DAMIEN LEAVES HOME (1966)

We moved back to Adelaide and went to live in a house that none of us liked very much. It’s only real asset was its proximity to the school Shaun and I would go to, and Celine’s college. The house was a small insignificant affair where we were to live for just a few months. Leaving the country had been a hard decision for my parents to take, and was made even harder by Damien’s departure for life in a monastery at the ripe old of age of sixteen. He would be living in Sydney, some 900 miles away. Now Damien and I had had little to do with each other over the years, save for times when I hassled him enough for him to lose his temper with me. And yet the strangest thing happened on the day he left for his new life far away. He departed from Adelaide airport and I don’t remember saying goodbye to him. However I do remember very clearly this overwhelming feeling of sadness coming over me as I gazed out at the plane he was sitting in before it drew away from the terminal. I withdrew from the crowd of people who’d come to say goodbye, climbed up on a small wall and stood looking at the plane and cried silently and secretly to myself. Maybe I had just picked up the obviously heavy emotional vibes that were floating around (my mother was distraught), but it’s almost as if I knew that day that there was an exceptional bond between us that I’d only just discovered, and that I’d miss him very much. It was a turning point in my relationship with my big brother; from that day on I felt closer to him than any other member of our family.

SCHOOLBOY REBELLION (1968)

CC image: Lawrence Jones

We would as a matter of course heap shit upon our parents for being too strict, or not letting us do what we wanted when and where we wanted. These parent slagging sessions were important for gaining respect within the group - it showed that you were a rebel. Teachers too of course were prime targets for this kind of shit slinging. Things came to a head at school one day when this thin pale looking character wearing a darker suit than normal joined our class in the middle of a Science lesson. He turned out to be a recently arrived English immigrant who was as it happened a little more advanced than the rest of us along the road to rebellion. He was right into pop music, played guitar and wrote his own songs and poetry, and was willing to speak his mind in class. He made a great impression on all of us. His style of rebellion was bolder, more direct, and came with intelligence. It wasn't long before we all clamoured to be his friend and were proud to be seen to be his friend. The school’s response to this new figurehead was to try and isolate him from potential disciples. Any group that was hanging around him in the playground was split up by the teacher on yard duty. In fact the teachers seemed to have isolated a potential core of troublemakers that counted about 10 kids with the English lad, Michael D, at our head. We were not allowed to mingle in the school ground in groups of more than two or three and at least my parents were warned to discourage any close friendship with this new disturbing influence. It was silly really. We were already on our teenage rampage before he came along. All he did was give it focus.

Michael and I became close friends. Basically it was a friendship forged through hours of listening to and talking about pop music. We spent hours on  sunny afternoons in darkened rooms listening to Cream, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, Vanilla Fudge et al and extolling the virtues of these our new idols. I remember telling Michael one day on the bus to school that I had bought my first ever record: Love Is All Around by The Troggs. He was suitably impressed. He had seen The Troggs perform in England - or so he said. It was always a point of discussion just how true were the many wonderful stories he used to tell.