Kuta's different. If Uluwatu was a beautiful girl, which it in many ways is, then Kuta would be the shorter stubbier sister that drank too much and gave it up way too easy. She's fun, for a night or two, but's she's needy and most always tries to take advantage.
Our first foray into the big city was one of disgraceful disappointment, miscalculation, misfortune, and a lot of bending over and just taking it. We'd decided against our better judgement not to wear helmets. After all, we never needed them in Uluwatu. The roads down at the tip of the Bukit are a pretty even mix of helmets and free flowing hair. There's more sunglasses than helmets in Uluwatu. There's also next to no police. Anywhere.
Kuta's a different ballgame entirely though. I began to realize this on the highway halfway through Jimbaran where we were pretty much the only ones on the road without helmets. Kuta isn't a place where you want to stick out like a sore thumb, and we weren't in the city, off the highway but five minutes before a man in a yellow reflective vest and a funny hat comes running out into the middle of the street blowing his whistle and waving his arms to flag us down.
We pull over by his little booth and he asks to see our licenses so we show him, and he tells us to come sit on the bench in his little booth. He shows us a piece of paper, apparently with laws on it, and scrolls down with his finger to the lines about helmets and all I can make out is a word that looks like helmet and a price that says 500,000.
"No helmet," he says. And then he scrolls his finger more and says, "No license." The price by that reads one million.
Fuck. "We didn't know," we say, and in honesty, we didn't, but something tells me that's not going to matter. And, big surprise, it doesn't. He tells us he can either write us a ticket for not wearing helmets and not having international licenses, or we can just pay now for the helmets and not have to come back to Kuta tomorrow to show at court at 8:00 in the morning. We pay, gratefully, and when we ask for a receipt or a note or something in case we get pulled over again, he tells us not worry and just say we already paid. What a nice guy.
We were trying to meet up with Steve to go party and rage the night away, but we were already lost as all hell and had no idea where we were going. Steve said they were going to Seminyak for sunset so we asked the officer where that was as politely as one can after forking over 500,000 RUP. He pointed us down the road with a smile that only seemed half-condescending, but looking back, I'm suer he was fully laughing at us behind that smile because not a kilometer down we're stopped again at a stoplight, not by the light, but by a trio of officers this time with their own little booth and everything. By this time, the sun's already set. We pull our pants down once again and bend over, pay the fee, and turn our bikes back toward Uluwatu with our tails between our legs.
