The in-flight movies were a little more confused and off-putting.
If you want to get jazzed up for international travel...there are better ways to do it, but I'll be damned if those combined films didn't make some kind of impact on my psyche.
And thus I entered into the Bali airport. Naive. Ill-prepared. I noticed lines queuing up for visas, and the people in said line had in their hands a lot of carefully filled out paperwork that looked worryingly official. I had no paperwork, official or otherwise. Even worse, I didn't see any place to get these papers, and it was becoming more and more obvious (and alarming) that people had already been equipped with these forms when they arrived. Now, I'd had a brief glance at the wikitravel page for Bali, and didn't see anywhere about needing extra visa preparation before arrival. It seemed for the first time in history, a person had been led astray by a publicly-edited website.
Right when I was about to find a desk to ask if I could pretty please just get back on the plane and see where that takes us, one of the airport workers stepped forward and asked if I needed help. I mumbled something about needing an ATM, thinking at the very least I might be able to bribe, and maybe cry, my way through, but it turns out that wasn't necessary. I mean, money was definitely necessary, but the second I had cash-in-hand this airport worker was taking me straight to the front of every line in the place.
Before I knew it, my passport was all visaed up, and as I would find, cost me 10 dollars extra. I was angry at myself for giving in so quickly to the scams, but then I looked back at all the travelers still stuck in that monster of a visa queue, and realized no one had even looked at my customs declaration form (the only actual form I had on me), and things felt pretty okay. That is, until another airport worker offered to carry my bag, and then demanded another 10 dollars after lugging it a whole 20 yards, knowing that new arrivals would only have big bills. Welcome back to Southeast Fucking Asia.
I didn't yet have to deal with the headache of airport taxis (spoiler alert: fuck airport taxis), since one of the very few things I had done in preparation for the trip was booking a guesthouse in Ubud, which included airport pick-up. So that was nice, and I was able to relax for the ride north. Until, you know, our car was rear-ended.
Truthfully, things could have been going better. Such were my thoughts as I watched a couple women smile-yell at my driver for about 10 minutes, which he returned in kind.
Angry smiles at the ready.
There were also some more panicky thoughts when we got back on the road, and I spotted a motorcycle driver ahead of us with some manner of automatic rifle strapped to his back, but what can you do.
Seriously.
These things...they are definitely there, and are things.
After checking into my guesthouse and generally feeling relieved that my driver didn't also try to hit me up for money (instead, I would later find out his fees had been tacked onto my room bill), I met my neighbors: a pair of German girls on their way to the nearby Monkey Sanctuary. Would I be interested in joining them, they asked? If you like, you can recreate in your head the moment I decided to book a guesthouse in Ubud, instead of the more popular Kuta: it was exactly when I read there was a nearby Monkey Sanctuary.
Of course, after a single photo of these damn monkeys, my camera died. MOTHERFUCKER. I know, right? Eff that ess. So if you'll excuse the anachronism, I'd like to present some photos AND VIDEOS of goddamn monkeys that I took the following day, with camera fully charged and monkeys continuing to do wacky monkey things:
Like, hanging out.
And hanging out next to people.
And hanging out next to water.
And going fucking insane in the water.
And being adorable and also kind of sad.
And this one was my favorite: he was chewing on a (lit) incense stick that he stole from an offering box, and it looked like he was smoking.
Which was, of course, hilarious.
This was not what it looked like. Probably.
Yeah, that'll do. After we gave the sanctuary a moderate exploration, the girls and I part ways, leaving me to nap and eat alone like a leper, and them to, I don't know, go live lives separate from mine, never to be seen again. Somehow it snuck up on me how brief backpacker connections can be.
It is way too early days to already be feeling crushing loneliness. You gotta tighten up, Jamie. Also maybe keep the talking to yourself to a minimum.
I was also to learn that almost the entirety of Ubud closes by 10pm, leaving no nightlife, and me with nothing to do except watch old episodes of Rescue Me on the netbook and watch the lizards crawl around on my ceiling. Which is a thing in Southeast Asia.
Indeed, nothing but the Art FuckTory seemed to be open.
Welcome back.
