Hoisting it onto the scales at check-in, I clocked the 33 kg flashing on the electronic screen before the clerk did, and surreptitiously planted my foot beneath the box slashing the record of its real weight by 8 kg. The magnitude of its shabbiness was matched by that of its weight, and we had easily maxed out on our baggage allowance. My bike box might have been the rattiest, most unwieldy thing in Bali airport, punched by holes and flailing tape. A train of oddballs shuffled past our airport seats, bedecked in enormous sunglasses, leather singlets, backward caps, dishevelled in their now-inapt party garbs, broken insomniacs nursing rum hangovers. Instead then we flew straight to Jakarta from Bali, and our departure airport was heaving with the bedraggled human remnants of the island’s famed hedonistic side, one we’d ducked.
There are temples and volcanoes to gawk at, but mind-boggling population density brings smog, gridlock and the quintessentially Indonesian shout-a-thon we’re beleaguered by.
Java is home to 115 million people, all jammed together in a land the size of England.
A travelling life is glutted with swings and dives like this, and tomorrow is always a mystery worth turning up for. It fascinates me - the violence of the contrast, forged by fate. I rub my bites from the fire ants, still fresh. I pop another morsel of Javanese cuisine into my mouth and think of how, that night, our bellies churned with hunger after another snack-dinner of MSG and salt under the guise of ‘noodles’. Just days ago we made a go of slumber on the earthy floor of a tumbledown plywood hut, layered with fire ants, where a panicked chicken had the run of our recumbent, rigid bodies. Sitting next to one of Jakarta’s most eminent food critics, at one of the city’s finest restaurants, I dredge up a memory from the week gone.
0 kommentar(er)
