Thoughts...

So today we moved, a simple enough task yet every move involves a step into a not so drastic unknown. Each place you stay becomes somewhat familiar, and each week spent there gives the false impression that you’ve become intimate with the layout and familiar to the people. All such thoughts are mostly false impressions, but may have a ring of truth in that you really do keep your eyes wide open when you travel and so are more aware of where you are, or if you’re driving a scooter, you better have. The road to and from your home, what you come to call your home, if even for a night, feels like the 103 from Halifax to Chester, you gauge time by the corners and the trees. Though here you gauge them by the corners and the cows, little family stores and Circle K’s. All the while hoping that you remember the next pothole around the next turn and which turn is a hairpin and which one is a lovely sweep that reveals the joy of driving.

I say joy with mixed feelings as fear, excitement, white knuckles and a sore back are all part of it. One can easily imagine why so many foreigners get into accidents. They start to believe that they (and here I’m including myself) can drive like the locals, not only can they, but they should. Yet one needs only to look at the fourteen year old passing them, with their five-year-old sibling holding on, to understand their experience far out weighs your own. No matter how many hours of highway or city driving you may have under your belt back home, be it car, bike, or motorbike you are unlikely to ever possess the confidence and grace on two wheels that the barely post-pubescent rider who just past you on a blind curve, at night, and continued threading the needle between two small dump trucks ahead of you possesses. That said, one can hope and one should hope. Madness doesn’t do it justice in either direction. There is something altogether other about the driving experience here and I’m sure to find even more ‘other’ as this trip progresses. I think I read once that Bali is the land of temples. If this isn’t true it should be, only a faith in a higher power gives sense to the road and its ways, and there are temples on almost every Balinese property that can afford one to drive the point home.

So we moved, and are much happier for it. A little further from the beach, no sounds of crashing waves, but hopefully my dreams will be a bit more sublime than surreal. I’ve only been here ten days so far, but you can pack so much into a day when each and every one begins at dawn. Sometimes months would pass at home and if one were to ask me what I did I would be at a loss, sure I had completed some task, created at least one new memory but standing there, trying to recollect it, I would feel the continuation of continuation. Maybe the same can be said of all people at certain times but the contrast between the now and the before is stark. A good friend said to me before I left on this eight month long trip, “what can you remember about the last eight months?” Not much I replied. Exactly, he said. Simple and true yet there is such comfort in the familiar, but who doesn’t know that. All I’m saying is that it’s so nice to have that taken away, at least for a little while.