Southeast & Subcontinent Drifting: If you like being the boss Bali is the place for you.

[This entry is past due, the blog runs rancid. But you can’t be picky in Southeast Asia, you swallow what’s served. Besides, I can still make out most of what I wrote down on paper napkins a couple weeks ago during breakfast one morning, minus a few tea stains. So into the worldwide web it goes.
Paige (a college student from the States during a description of her one month stay as the only Caucasoid in a Balinese village): “…my host family was crying. So was I. Like, I’ve never cried that much in my life. The host-mom called me her fourth daughter. I couldn’t go to sleep last night with all the emotion knowing I was going to leave in the morning. It was harder than it would be to leave any friends or even family.”

[I respond with lame sarcasm relating to her affection for her host family exceeding that for her own.

Paige: “You know, yeah, I think you’re right. My real parents don’t know how to love like they do. My mom is kind of a bitch.”

If you like being the boss Bali is the place for you. [PART ONE]

Malaysia, even peninsular Malaysia without considering Borneo, can be an incredibly diverse traveling experience. In ten days one could snorkel with sea turtles and green blue-spotted stingray in the Perhentian islands, sit awake all night in a hide hoping a herd of rhinoceros are in the salt-licking mood in Taman Negara, the world’s oldest rainforest, and finally, now a soggy-sweaty mess of your former self, escape to the Cameron Highlands for mountain trekking and tea plantation tours. Sure, to please the wife you’re going to have to exit KL’s (what hip travelers, of which I’m not included, call Kuala Lumpur) monorail in the Golden Triangle area, home to some of the planet’s fanciest shopping malls, complete with roller coasters, bowling alleys and Burberrys, but at least you’ll get to take in the Petronus Towers, formerly the world’s tallest skyscrapers. Glass and concrete caste into sophistication and class, when the twin towers illuminate in the evening one observes in awe.

Just don’t tell anyone turning on a few lights excites. Friends and family, they already find you plenty lame without the confession.

If this itinerary isn’t adventurous enough for you then, while walking through the Suria mall--it sits in the shadow of the Petronus Towers--turn the Platinum Visa card over to the wife. The one with no limit. That’ll get the heart rate up.

Unlike the metropolises of Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, KL lacks Asian-mystique. Globalization at its monotonous best, locals line up out the doors of KFCs and McDonalds’ while tourists search for authentic Malaysian cuisine. It’s a city that could be mistaken for one on the California coast if it weren’t so clean, cheap and efficient. Oh, and the population looks a little different.

Yet even a visit to a KFC holds something of interest. A dietary indiscretion, a First World reminiscence, I sit down with a bucket of chicken as a young Indian girl does the same. My knees hitting the table underneath, my slouched back stooping over the tray to shovel processed potatoes into my mouth while her body contorts into a bench seat in perfect meditation posture, legs crossed, feet on her knees, her spine erect yet relaxed. Seemingly in harmony amongst the impersonal chaos of fast food.

While traveling you’ll visit some of the world’s most beautiful, most holy, most exotic locations, but often what interests most is discovered where you’d least expect it. Like between bites of coleslaw containing chemicals more hazardous than those found in a can of paint thinner.

Asians are thin for two reasons. (That was either one of writing’s worst transitions or the oddest, maybe both) (1) It would be awfully uncomfortable using the squat toilet if overweight, impossible if severely obese, and (2) to better cram themselves into public transportation during rush hour. I know what it is to be a canned sardine. A big toe still bruised from the monorail’s sliding doors, might I suggest a few trips to the psychologist for that nagging claustrophobia before visiting the cities of Southeast Asia?

There’s only slightly more breathing room on Bali, Indonesia’s Kuta Beach. With world-renowned surfing breaks and world-renowned models it’s a hectic product of hype.

“Where you go, boss?” “Boss, give you cheap price, ‘kay boss?” “Please boss, you say yes, come on boss.” Kuta touts may be Earth’s most irritating. Vietnam’s win in sheer numbers, but Kuta’s overcome the deficit with persistence and the use of the most annoying title known to man. “Hey big boss man, what you want, taxi, beer, weed, eh, I bet you want girl, eh, boss?”

Nope. All I want is a boss-free five minutes.

“Okay, boss, uh, how much rupiah you pay for dat?”

I don’t know. What’s the going rate for sanity?

Keep drifting.

KL's Petronus Towers

Petronus Towers in early evening.

Hindu cave-temple outside of KL, the name of which I forgot.

Bali's Kuta Beach

“Just keeping it real in second-person.”

-My answer to a Danish blog-reader’s question, ‘Why do you write this way?’

If you like being the boss Bali is the place for you. [PART TWO]

Bali’s Kuta Beach makes you crazy. Unbelievably, even more than you already are. The locals never leave you alone. They want to sell you sunglasses and sarongs and ‘authentic hand-crafted Balinese power necklaces’ and wooden beer bottle openers carved into penises. They want you to buy ice cream and alcohol as you try to enjoy a sunrise you are no longer able to because of constant pestering. And if you do exchange rupiah for any of these things--a beer bottle opener for mom, a hops-and-barley-ice-cream float for breakfast--they want you to buy another one. Did they mention they have a family to feed, that they have to pay to put their six year-olds through school? Oh, they did? Twenty-seven times in four minutes? Did they mention you were the boss? What’s that, you lost count after a hundred and forty-two.

This is the point where that vein on your forehead turns into a python. It coils around your cerebellum. It constricts. All the sudden that 7 a.m. beer sounds inviting. So does amnesia. So it’s no wonder you walk a couple miles up the beach to less frenzied sands. In your defense, when you sat down the only people in the area included a single sunbathing female and a family of four building sand castles.

The Balinese gentlemen, he was so friendly and informative. Better yet, he wasn’t trying to sell you anything. You were getting a free education on the island’s history and cultural traditions when he put a hand on your knee, when he brushed sand off your stomach. No problem, while in Southeast Asia public intimacy between couples is frowned upon it’s common to be touched by the same sex. Male friends are often seen holding hands, females will massage each other.

His hand brushes your crotch. Must have been an accident.

“Ah, you must be surfer, yes, nice body,” he tells you, winking. “You like this beach?”

You look around. Now the only people you see are Caucasoid and Balinese males slathering each other with tanning oil.

An East-Euro accent informs you that you have “nice balls” as a man-thong walks past. You close your splayed legs. You get up. You decide to go for that beer after all. You buy an ‘authentic hand-crafted Balinese power necklace’ to refocus your chi. Yes, yes, the boss will take two.

Ubud, Bali is a setting for the book-turned-movie Eat, Pray, Love. You’re not a Julia Roberts fan, she’s not disheveled enough for you, so the only thing you now know about the plot is that, for whatever reason, it brings a lot of single women to Ubud. They’re looking for love. Yes, there are plenty of women that hopelessly quixotic. You do your best James Franco impression. You find out acting like you’re an actor who’s not acting is exacting.

Come again?

Where Kuta is for surf, sun and I-thought-they-only-looked-like-that-in-magazines models, Ubud is the cultural half of Bali’s Caucasoid-run-amok duopoly. Full of temples, art museums, rural community handicrafts, and Balinese dance traditions revived to extract rupiah from tourists, it’s fun and engaging. The monkeys of the Monkey Forest Sanctuary embody both adjectives and add one. Cunning. They run around you, climb up you and, as you’re giggling, pickpocket your peanuts. You’re just glad they’re not interested in passports and debit cards.

As you examine the artistry of Balinese sculpture--it’s the first time you’ve ever seen a demon-boar holding a terrified pregnant woman up by her hair--a monkey tugs on your shoelaces. Another ascends all the way up to your shoulders. Somehow you just lost the water bottle that was in your hand. Train a couple of the furry dudes to a covet cash, let them loose in a First World subway station for a few hours, and there’ll be enough dough in the cookie jar to retire early, to send all three kids to an ivy league graduate school, and to make a Bali transition to Ubud where you can perfect that James Franco impression.

You’re pretty sure he played the love interest in Eat, Pray, Love. Then again, you were pretty sure humans evolved from monkeys. As they eat your peanuts and drink your bottled water it’s clear it was a regression.

Keep drifting.