1) I spend my first four hours in Bali on my bum in the airport, talking to a man who tells me he and his wife have flown 25 hours just for the mangosteens. Our legs are stretched out, we’re sitting against an uncomfortable wall, and security keeps checking if we’ve left. He is waiting for his wife, and I am waiting for Ed. I’ve spent the last few few months in India, but the sign-holding crowd outside the gates scare me still. We wait a glass apart. His wife is on the 1.30pm flight, and Ed arrives at 1.45pm. We run out of conversation, and I draw my legs up to my chest, reach for book. He hums listlessly. A suspicious security guard stops to inquire why two well-dressed travellers are sprawled on the floor – I try to give him advice about seating in airports, but he waves himself away once he realises my companion is American and not to be disturbed. Wife & kid arrive after we spend the last hour talking about them: it feels like a blind date, she is taller than I imagined, the kid’s accent has a slang I did not anticipate. I feel short and Asian. They leave a happy family, and I am left on the floor. Ed arrives an hour and a half later, running with all his 3kg of worldly possessions, running right into me. We do what we always do at the airport: an awkward backpacked cuddle, my face in his shirt and my hand in his hair, new lengths to measure time by.
2) We spend the next four days getting acquainted with sleep and this new island. Everyone warned us that the road conditions were dire, that it takes forever to go anywhere. Half an hour after trudging out of the airport in our refusal to take the expensive airport taxis, we find ourselves in a metered one, laughing with wonder at how clean the streets are.
3) We are exploring the crevices of this island on a motorbike. There is nothing finer. We eat the heat, the dust. My skirt always rides up. Our helmets set to constant bump, we putter up volcanic mountains and then down to the blacksand sea, circling pasar senggals at every town for the smoky meals. When we ride at night I shiver, my hand under his shirt for warmth.
4) In the next four weeks, we come face to face with the climbing mafia in the black lava rocks of Danau Batur, take long walks through fields of tomatoes and chilies, wake up to ridiculous vertical fields in Sideman. We see at least a hundred rooms. We sneak into the holiest temple at Besakih, then get caught in an instant karma storm and tyre puncture after. I fret about angering the gods, and Ed rides hard. It rains every day we’re on the bike, so we arrive drenched at every new destination. In Banjar we soak in filthy pools of hot springs, in Seririt we tackle gigantic bakso balls. In Munduk we run for shelter, and a kind waiter bundles me up in sarongs, for we are unprepared for the cold. Occasionally we worry about the bike, and whether we are pushing it too hard and too fast over mean terrain.
5) The inevitable happens on our way to Candikuning – our bike breaks down on the steepest, roughest, broken road. It is raining, and I have a fever. We push, and shove, and walk, and run. The road is endless and its curves infinite, we roll downhill with the bike, then heave our way up. Midway we stop, grey clouds between our fingers and over our heads. My heart is beating through our bag in my back, I’m shivering, there are two men with parangs staring at us from a distance – and he pauses to say, “Weify, we’ve got a good life”. We stop for a moment and squint through our glasses, our raindrop patterned vision. The world that stretches out under us is green and grey, and then sea-coloured if we look far enough.
6) Things I’ll never own: terracotta birds, men that melt, a paddy field. On New Year’s eve we find the silt of Sanur shifting between our toes, our clothes drying on our back. That night we have our first fight, and all I can hear are the explosions overhead. It sounds like war, like kin turning on each other. It doesn’t stop for at least two hours. The next morning we flee early to the nearest island, Nusa Lembongan, through with these sullied streets and dirtied skies.
7) How can millions flock only to the south? What of the durian forest, the cackling ladies of not-nearly-Kusamba? The family and their cow in Air Sanih, the babi guling waiting on the road to Singaraja at 9am? The interiors, the potholed roads, the kids smoking in internet cafes?
8) 2011: I fell in love with a boy with dirt under his fingernails and tangles in his hair. His name is Eddy, and we met at the border of India and Nepal. Five hours before that I could have fallen in love with a wanderer studying the effects of the moon on agricultural farming, but as we walked into Nepal, I found my rusty haired boy leaning against a ramshackled wall reading a book. We blinked and smiled and he put his arm around me and my too-big bag with unpracticed ease, and the farmer seemed to understand and move away. Later that night, we got into a bed too big for us and curled up with months of waiting heavy in our palms, his against my belly. Our elbows must have formed two right angles. I’m not sure how we fell in love; maybe me with the bright green circle next to his name, maybe pegged to the memory of sea-salt and a craggy Arabian sea shoreline where we had first sat like children another year ago.
8) Our last few days are the first few days of 2012. We wake up in a wooden house with white sheets and an incredible view of a turquoise sea we’ve chased. It is a $10 dream, straight out of an urban backpacking legend. All we do is read in bed and cycle occasionally, our bodies in constant sprawl. No more chasing discovery, no more brambly adventures. We spent the year negotiating too much distance and too many borders, and it is finally good to just be in bed watching the rains blowing everywhere but in.
