It's been a year and a half since I visited Indonesia, but I just looked back through my tablet and realized there were some journal entries I never posted from my travels. So, I'll be posting them here over the next few days. No, I'm not spamming, but frankly, I never did an "introduce yourself" entry and still don't know what to put in such an entry, so I'll post a few of my musings from my travels. If anyone cares to know who I am and what I'm about, these will offer a far better answer than a "hi guys, I'm so and so from so and so and I do so and so." I'll get around to a traditional "this is who I am and this is what I'm doing on Steemit" once that's done.
“When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,/
You understand now why you came this way.”
-Crosby, Stills and Nash “Southern Cross”
“All of my life I have searched for a land like this one! A wilder more challenging country I couldn’t design./
Hundreds of dangers await, and I don’t plan to miss one! In a land I can claim, a land I can tame, the greatest adventure is mine!”
-John Smith from Disney’s ‘Pocahontas’
The beach. Coconuts. The sound of the surf as clear blue green waves crash into white sand. Volcanoes on the horizon, their shadowy forms barely revealed by a misty pink sunset. And, of course, the Southern Cross. Those four legendary stars that can only be viewed from the half of the globe most people forget is even there until Crocodile Hunter reruns come on.
These are things that have drawn my mind, my fancies and fantasies, my whims and writer's wiles, for decades. It is easy to pinpoint the source of the spell. It was cast when I was six years old, first reading the instruction booklet of my brand new copy of the NES game Star Tropics (is that title one word or two?) with my mom. The game itself, and the instruction booklet, had all the right ingredients to spawn a romance with the faraway land of the South Pacific isles, where life is slower, the music is primal and zesty, and even the stars are different, and while the game itself stood out in my mind and probably had more impact on my development than a video game ever should, the longing for its otherworldly setting was stronger still. Somehow, the South Pacific has always drawn me. It has been the pole to which the compass of my heart has always pointed, absent any of the other romantic vices of the heart which can draw that needle as a magnet draws a compass.
And yet, if you had asked me five years ago if I would ever see it, I would have shaken my head and sighed.
I knew what I was doing when I planned this trip to this little Indonesian island. Part of it was just the pure and simple need to get away, just like every other tourist who comes here. The need to get away from, well... everything, especially just (and let’s put a fine tip on it, shall we?) from China. But there was more, and I have known it all along.
I came here to see if this was indeed going to be my next teaching destination. And what I have decided, surprised me.
It will not. Probably not, at least.
It will not be my next teaching destination, because it will be my last.
This is a prime candidate for the place where I would end my globe-trotting adventure (well, maybe not end it, but limit my travelling to vacations instead of a year here and a year there). This is a place I could see myself settling down and raising a family (In other words, it is everything that China, with the dimly possible exception of that Celestial City of Shanghai, is not). Everything about this little island (well, actually, that slightly bigger one whose lights I see across the strait; Bali) is a place that feels, paradoxically, like home. The city of Ubud, which looks at a glance more like a real-life Coralcola, for all intents and purposes feels like Waxahachie or Stonewall with palm trees. Well, palm trees and residents with more teeth, but I digress. I’m sure Indonesia has their own subspecies closely related to Recneckus ‘Muricus somewhere as well, but never mind. That little town of Ubud, a bit back from the beach, where time is measured by the peculiar mixture of roosters and mourning doves (seriously, neither of those two birds is anything new to me but it was a bit quaint to hear them both in one place) just seems so... well, in a word, perfect. Everything, from the set-up of Indonesian traditional housing (a stone fence around the family patch of land, with a hut for grandma and grandpa, a hut for each of the kids and their spouse, then a hut for any of the grandkids who are old enough to live on their own, each hut with a tiny little “yard” of their own only fenced off by whatever stone path or fish pond the residents make for themselves, all built around a common yard in the middle with a shrine in the Northeast corner), to the way all of the old folks like to sit around and paint, makes me think “you know, I’d rather raise kids here than in Beijing, and I’ll bet in about twenty or twenty-five years when mom has to move in with one of us kids (I’ll be damned if I’ll see her in a nursing home, and she’d probably beat all three of us with her walking stick if we even mentioned the idea when that time comes), she’d be quite comfortable here trading painting tips with the locals, swapping acrylic lessons for batik lessons.” Admittedly, the salary for an English teacher here isn’t grand so I’d need to build some kind of investment that yields dividends to supplement my salary a bit first, but I’m working on that. And yet, after spending a week surrounded by scenery that looks like something that I would have thought had to be CGI generated, after trekking up the side of an active volcano in the middle of the night just to watch the sun rise, then trekking down the volcano and hopping a speedboat out to a tiny little island barely 60 acres in size to watch it set from the beach, I don’t know how to say it without sounding cheesy, but the Lonely Planet manual got it right. This country really is the last great adventure on Earth.
Now, I’m trying not to look with rose-colored glasses. Even as I type this I’m also thinking “yeah, you had this same giddy feeling about China when you saw Shanghai for the first time. Love at first sight is just as deceptive when you’re looking at a country as when you’re looking at a woman.” That’s why I’ve been trying to look around while I have been here and say “what kinds of things are there that I would develop a cynical attitude about, given my innate pessimism?” It took me a week to come up with two: air conditioning, and decent WiFi connectivity. Neither of these is easy to find in Ubud, nor (seemingly) anywhere on the island of Bali with the possible exception of Denpasar.
Frankly, if it took a pessimist like me a week to come up with just those two, then that says a lot for this place.
Of course, there are other things to consider, and it is not possible to get a real feeling for what it is like to live in a place after only being there for two weeks, so I could be completely off the mark here...
But I cannot shake the feeling that for the first time in years, I’m... well... at peace. And peace, in a life like mine, is at a premium.