Okay, so I have this feeling of heaviness in my heart tonight. It could be the rich Italian soup I had for dinner giving me heartburn, or it could also have been the double episode of Ghost Whisperer I just finished watching. That show alternatively makes me want to hug my Piglets tighter or, you know, move to a quaint little town where (clearly) the entire population walks past the fountain in the centre of town seventeen times a day.
But none of that tonight. No, tonight we are going to change the subject. Hey, look over there! Something shiny!
Today I am somewhat jealous of an old school friend of mine who is, as we speak, in Port Douglas, Australia on the first leg of her honeymoon after getting married last weekend. Yes, I said first leg. As in, number one out of three. She’s in Sydney for a few days after this and then a ten day cruise to Vanuatu. Kind of beats our honeymoon - we took our two kids and went on a driving holiday around our state, visiting relatives. Par-tay!
I should point out, as a disclaimer, that we had originally planned to elope to Bali twelve months prior and had even arranged the dress, rings and legal paperwork, but after seeing the state of Kuta beach, in all its wet glory, we diplomatically elected to postpone the nuptials. The decision was made while sitting in an Indonesian McDonald’s, to be exact. And then we felt so guilty about thwarting the plans of our contact/driver/embassy helper person - whose fee was about $40 AUD but amounted to two months income for their family - that we hired him to drive us through the inland areas around Ubud, stopping off at this amazing Asian restaurant built off the side of a cliff. We ate on the open balcony, vivid flashbacks of every news segment we’d ever seen about collapsing platforms playing on a reel in our heads while we chomped down our twentieth plate of Nasi Goreng since arriving. The clifftop balcony looked out over a (long disused, thankfully) volcano crater. We were so high up there we were able to look down onto a few clouds. So all in all, the experience of an awesome meal in a breathtaking location trumped getting married amid mud and loud tourists. And they gave us wet towels when we arrived. They’re meant to cool you down but have you ever taken a 5 months pregnant, perpetually hot-flushing-and-now-in-an-especially-sticky-climate woman to a restaurant where you eat while experiencing the dizzying affects of vertigo? Yeah, neither had Talented Hubby. We both looked bewilderedly at the attendants for one or two or three hundred seconds until one of them mimed how to use it. We are klassy like that.
We travelled to Bali in March 2000. Before 9/11, before the Bali bombings which, 2 ½ years after we graced the rice paddies, killed 88 Australians at the site of one of our favourite drinking spots while we were there. Being that I was pregnant (are you doing the math? Stop now, your head will explode trying to keep up, trust me), I distinctly remember not being allowed to chug down a comically large beer stein full of some type of iconic Balinese cocktail with the other members of our group. I had a Coke. It even came in these quaint little glass bottles over there, the likes of which I hadn’t seen back home since, like, 1984 or something.
The food - oh good grief, the food! I’d just risen over that hump that is the first trimester queasies and was ravenously hungry all the time (which also explains why Boofah eats the way he does now). We had Nasi Goreng at almost every meal, frequented the same awesome little hole-in-the-wall (literally) restaurants several times and loved every single second of it. We would eat until we were stuffed, walk out of there only having paid about $7 AUD for two people, including drinks, and waddle back to our hotel to collapse in a carb coma (the rice, people. Rice everywhere. Yum) The only things I was forbidden to eat was any fruit that couldn’t be peeled first (so, no apples, but bananas were okay) and anything sold by a roadside vendor (which I wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole even had I not been pregnant. Mmmmm, deep fried chicken foot anyone? Yeah, didn’t think so) Oh, and the water. We had to use bottled water for everything, including to rinse our toothbrushes.
We stayed for ten days, 11 nights for a grand total of - get this - $811 AUD each, including flights and daily breakfasts. Admittedly, this was budget accomodation, but it had both air conditioning and a pool, absolute essentials for a mother-to-be in an equatorial country, thankyouverymuch. In the couple of years prior to our travels there had been some political unrest in East Timor, not all that far away, and as a result, travel to Bali and the surrounds became drastically cheaper. We spent the first 7 days aclimatising (and learning how to say ‘no’ to the street sellers in Indonesian) and it was another two days after that before we felt comfortable haggling for prices. I remember having a wonderful conversation with a miniscule Indonesian shop owner one day after she’d noticed I was sporting a baby bump. She had two children at home, and another on the way. She wasn’t as far along as me, she told me in her halted English. Either that or she was calling me fat. I grinned anyway and she rubbed my belly. Buddism is big in Indonesia, apparently.
The smell of the incense from the daily offerings the Indonesians leave outside of their homes and businesses is something that sticks with you forever. Even now, if I smell something even remotely familiar, I’m right there on Paddies Lane again, up to my knees in mud (it rained every single day we were there. It was so hot we didn’t care), trying to remember where the nearest Matahari’s department store is again.
It is sad to think of how the Bali Bombings in October 2002 changed the feel of the place. We obviously had no clue what was about to unfold while we were there and looking back into those pre-September 11 days it is easy to see how naive we really were. Tourism is what keeps the Balinese going. No tourists for a time after the bombings meant little or no income and so many Indonesian families suffered. Thankfully the lifeblood began to return to the place and tourists - most of them Aussie - began to return. There was (still is) a definite sense of ‘they won’t scare us away!’
Even though it has been a full eight years, I often find myself thinking back to that time. Even though the wedding idea fizzled I still consider Bali to be where we took our ‘honeymoon’ - we just mixed things up by taking it a full year before our actual vows. We eventually married quite close to home and followed up the next morning with hotcakes at McDonald’s and our now infamous Post Wedding Road Trip ’01.
So Kellie, as you’re kicking back these next few weeks of post-wedding excitement, sipping a cocktail by the pool on the deck of your sparkly cruise liner, ridiculously pre-children non-stretchmarked body soaking up the rays, I wish you the very best for the future you and Kevin hold.
After all, you could be sitting on perilously swaying balcony hanging over a cavernous abyss trying hard not to choke on your rice as you hyperventilate (*wink*)
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