Sorry for the Group Email

We woke up early in the morning in Lovina beach. For once it wasn’t for a godawful coach ride and boat trip, but for a swim with the dolphins.

Less a swim, I suppose, than a touristic hunting trip, in which we loaded four people into our boats, joined forces with twenty other boats and spent 45 minutes chasing the dolphins in the bay. Dolphin spotting, you see, is a spectator sport in northern Bali but, for what it’s worth, the dolphins didn’t seem to mind, and it was the first time I’d ever seen them in the wild.

From Lovina we drove back to Bali, again arriving at night, again navigating from our awful tourist map and a Maglite. It was here that we bade Thorsten and Vicky, our fleeting German friends, farewell, and they headed to Singapore and Dubai.

Again, we spent a few days in Bali, sunbathing, swimming and surfing, the last of which I remained terrible at but greatly enjoyed.

Our hotel was one of the worst we’ve seen. When we arrived to look at the room (which, admittedly, cost a little more than US$5 a night), the landlady tsked as she kicked three dead cockroaches down the stairs, their spindly legs stabbing upwards into the air as they skittered down the steps. In the room, the outflow pipe from the sink was broken, and every time we ran the water it cascaded onto the floor, unleashing with it a small number of tiny maggots which squirmed on the ground and a nose-wrinkling smell not unlike rotten eggs. In the end we resorted to placing a bucket in the sink every time we ran the water and then emptying the bucket into the shower, which smelled marginally nicer. The bedclothes were changed every day, but I began to suspect the fresh bedclothes were simply those from next door, in a kind of circular cleaning process.

It didn’t particularly matter, of course, because we were hardly there. We ate out at hearty restaurants, we went to the beach, and we dodged the attention of a thousand touts.

A note on touts

The tout is not uniquely Asian. Pushy salesmen exist in every city in every country in the world. But in Asia, and Bali in particular, the tout is a clever, calculating thing. We became familiar with what we dubbed “The Transport Dance”, in which a man on the corner of the road shouts, “Transport?”, and mimes as if he is steering an out-of-control juggernaut on a twisting Alpine road. We were shouted at from shops and stalls. Once, we were waiting to cross a busy road, and a taxi driver pulled up in front of us to see if we needed a ride. I can’t believe that these tactics work much: most people in need of a taxi are aware of their need for a ride before they actually see one, surely?

It can be difficult to remain tactful in these circumstances.

The worst ones, though, are what the Lonely Planet dubs “Instant Friends”. These are the people who waylay tourists in public places with titbits of trivia or, “Where you from?”, with the eventual hope of leading the tourist to the nearest shop/hotel/travel agent, from whom, of course, they will receive a commission. The Instant Friend is unscrupulous. We were told that sights we were on our way to see were closed when they weren’t. Buses that we were certain were running were inexplicably not. Some hotels were dangerous, but of course our new Friend knew one that was safe. We became, eventually, hardened and cynical to the approaches of strangers.

We eventually left Kuta – we had just under a month to explore Indonesia, and we were off to Lombok, an island lying around 30km to the east of Bali.

We tried to hire a car. Indonesia is unlike most other countries in that driving on a British license is illegal – you need a full-blown international license sponsored by the RAC or AA. This was well and truly on our list of things to get hold of before we left, but, like spare ink cartridges, continually dropped to the bottom of the list until we were on the plane to St Petersburg.

Getting hold of an international license in Bali is hard work. You need to head to the regional capital, Denpasar, where you can get hold of one for US$50.

“Or you could just go to Oscar’s,” said a passing Australian.

Oscar’s is a bar in Bali. Not, it has to be said, a particularly fine one, judging by the pictures on the walls of wrinkled Australians clutching at young Indonesians. But it was there that a phonecall was made, a man appeared, and five minutes later we had a borderline-presentable international drivers’ license, complete with official-looking stamps and apparently issued in Basingstoke.

“If you have a problem with this, you’ll be the first person if three years,” growled our new friend.

It was, I suppose, not a particularly fine idea. Getting caught with a fake license would invalidate our insurance and land us in potentially spectacular trouble with the notoriously-unforgiving Indonesian police.

Still getting caught without one would be expensive: the fine for not having an international license is US$500, and we’re not ones to travel undocumented.

“And remember to wear your seatbelt,” he drawled as we left. “That’s a 1,000,000 Rupiah fine.”

Getting a car proved to be harder than we thought. A spot of online research revealed that people have a dramatically mixed amount of success when it comes to taking rental cars off Bali to Lombok. Sometimes they drive directly on to the ferry with no problems. Sometimes they’re forbidden altogether, and sometimes there’s a mysterious and erratically-applied tax. I imagine the latter is the key to solving most problems. As Stefen, our new friend Thorsten’s brother, said: “There are no laws here. Only money.” Tales of police bribery are rife, and for the right amount it’s possible to escape just about any misdeed. More seriously, taking a car onto the ferry, assuming you can, cost the better part of US$70. We balked and bought a combined bus and boat ticket.

The journey took forever. We went via Ubud, a twist of irony given that we’d already been there two days ago, and then, two hours later, arrived in Padangbai for the ferry. It was here that we waited for two hours, until a large ferry turned up.

When the champagne was broken over its prow I imagine it was a pristine, ocean-going white ship, but the years had not been kind. Long streaks of rust coloured its sides and standing pools of seawater on its upper decks made standing and admiring the view hazardous.

The crossing took five hours, during which time we watched football on the TV. I don’t recollect who was playing, but every ten minutes or so, the signal would drop out and someone, usually someone in the front row of seats, would leap out of his chair and sprint up the stairs to manually turn the satellite dish on the upper deck.

We also read, caught up on notetaking and killed a good few hours trying to discover the most comfortable position for sleeping.

There wasn’t one.

When we arrived in Lombok we spent another hour in a minibus before arriving in Senggigi. We found ourselves a presentable, clean hotel for US$7, and went to bed.

Senggigi was virtually deserted. In the time we were there we saw countless hotels and restaurants that were entirely devoid of customers, yet thoroughly overstaffed. It was not unusual to see an empty restaurant with eight staff members lined up by the bar, waiting to besiege anyone hapless enough to glance at the menu by the bar.

Indonesia, and Bali in particular, you see, is in trouble. This is not apparent from Bali on its own, although you do get the distinct impression that there are slightly more hotel and restaurant staff than there are tourists. Bali suffered hugely after the terrorist bombs of 2002 and 2004; there was a 30 per cent drop in tourist numbers virtually overnight.

The blasts themselves were horrific. In 2002 just over 200 people were killed in terrorist explosions in Kuta, Bali. Most of them were Australian, and as the rather stark memorial in Bali attests, many were husbands and wives. But, after the explosions, Abu Bakar Bashir, the man convicted of conspiracy for the 2002 attacks, was convicted for a stunningly short two and a half years’ in jail. He’s already been released. The 30 per cent drop in tourist numbers following the bombings is rather unsurprising, and the upshot was that we had vast areas of Indonesia more or less to ourselves.

The next day we explored Senggigi. Like the night before, it was rather quiet, and there isn’t much to it – what shops and cafés there were were frequently closed, and there were few tourists. There were also fewer touts than in Bali, but because of the lack of tourists, the proportion of touts to Us was much, much larger. It was impossible to walk more than five yards without hearing “Taxi?”, “Transport?”, or the insidious “Where you going?”.

We met a group of teenaged boys on the beach. The leader of the pack stepped forward. “Where you from?”, he asked.

Our hearts were beyond sinking at this point. The trick with touts is to give a short, believable answer that doesn’t invite further questions.

“London,” I said, shortly.

“Can we talk to you for a bit?”

It doesn’t pay to be rude, of course, so we said yes. The boys, it turned out, were language students, on an assignment from their school to interview English-speaking foreigners and, if possible, get a short video of them. We answered questions about where we were from, who we were and what we did. Their English was excellent.

The entire time, though, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the invitation to a friend’s restaurant or a hotel. Anxiously trying to anticipate the inevitable hard-sell and planning what I would say to diplomatically dodge it.

But it never came. The boys really were language students. They didn’t want to sell anything, and as we walked away, I had a sudden, crystallising flash of clarity.

Aggressive, fibbing touts aren’t annoying because they’re in your face and constantly selling. They’re infuriating because they make you endlessly suspicious of everyone. Tourists in Indonesia have a somewhat-deserved reputation for rudeness, but it’s not because Europeans or Australia are genetically pre-programmed for shortness, it’s because weeks of conditioning against strangers leads to an inevitable disagreeability towards them. The touts that we met and hardened ourselves against meant that we were closed-minded to the boys on the beach – it was impossible that anyone might come up to us in the name of simple curiosity, wasn’t it?

Dave has perfected the Transport Dance. He’ll show it to you for a fiver. I’ll show you my pictures for free, though. Click here for the Flickr set.