Somehow, on these days when we are in self inflicted exile, blogging and trying not to bankrupt ourselves too much, we are listless and unhappy. I suppose that follows. We have not, in any other country, had so stark a contrast. We have not had to go to such extremes of intense activity and absolute stillness. It's exhausting and not ideal, though this is hardly the fault of our lodgings and our lovely host. It's a location problem. Or a refusing to ride a motorbike problem. Call it what you will. The forced extremes create grumpiness in both of us on the days we are 'resting' and also drive us to extremes in our own perception of the situation depending on the hour if the day.
Low points occur:
- first thing in the morning, when M gets up to join me and I am buzzing from another fruitful session with Neville in the cool early hours - and appears to fall asleep when I read him an excerpt.
- late morning, when the strain of doing nothing except blog yesterday and today hit both of us and we begin to try to plan other trips, in my case obsessively, with mixed success, underlining the sporadic nature of WiFi here, and the fact that M has run out of credit on his Indonesian phone card.
- mid afternoon, when the heat builds up and becomes unbearable and we hide in the house which is only marginally cooler than outside, even with the air conditioning turned to its lowest setting. We both acquire a headache. Neither of us gets much blogging done.
The high points occur:
- in the early hours of the morning, when I write outside for three impassioned hours on Neville the Novel, and with only the birds for company.
- in the late afternoon, when the heat finally defeats us and we go out to face the traffic and try to find somewhere, anywhere, with working air conditioning. I am ready to simply hang around in the supermarket. But we find a place which sells doughnuts and iced coffee. It's depressingly western, especially in this, very local, area. But it's blessedly cool.
- in the early evening, when we return to find our host waiting for us to take us out with him to the beach. He drives us to a tourist beach in Kuta and yes it's covered in westerners, but they are cheerful westerners, rather than the grumpy bickering ones we personify today, and the view and the sunset is stunning. We have a beer (I break my self imposed teetotality because the occasion, for many reasons, seems to demand it) and we play word games and chat while the sun sets in front of us.
Mid evening, when we drive hone and see a ceremony at a nearby temple which gives us hope of possibly being able to stroll there later and catch some ceremonial dance and then our host sticks his head through our door and says "this air conditioning - it is not working properly. I will get someone to fix it."
(We had mentioned it before, but our host, thinking we meant that it was just a little slow on the uptake, explained that the wood cabins, with their gaps and cracks and heat absorbing wood, were hard to successfully air condition. He didn't realise quite how hot it was getting in there.)
And of course I haven't mentioned the fact that he dropped by earlier, with a little savoury cake he had picked up while he was out for us.
We have a great host. And maybe, just maybe, we could be cool.
Seems to me that the high points were all the important things. And the rest is just a little bit of tourist moaning.
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