But always, remember where you are, dear soul. This isn't gay ole' Paris. This is Bali. No romantic comfort here. Not on the swash-buckling side anyways, the eleven dollars a day side, the three dollars a meal side. No kitchens, no AC, no refrigerator, just sweat stroking heat through the night and the day, even with the fan on. I doesn't even oscillate.
It's difficult to think sitting perfectly still when you feel the beads squeezing out over your brow, feeling your arms and your back turn moist in the shade. You can barely wonder how the local villagers manage with sweatshirts on walking around selling trinkets, hand-crafted wood pens, boot-leg DVDs, and what have you. Or else they're breaking up rocks, setting stones, always building, building, building. In the morning and the late afternoon and at night even by light. This place is a wild place. An untamed frontier.
There's an abandoned half-finished bar at the top of the cliffs overlooking all the peaks at Uluwatu. You can see it from the water saying "RESPECT LOCALS" and "ULUWATU STREET BOYS" in big bold black letters. It's covered in graffiti, everything from mystic looking symbols to threats and warnings to "wet pussy for free" to #liau. A crooked rail's cemented to the floor among the clutter of loose sandstone and rebar and broken glass, between the bar and the stage, and there's stairs going up to the roof. There are no outside walls, just support columns, but that's the way it's meant to be, that's how everything is here in Bali.
It's usually where I check the surf from if I want to surf Ulus, and it's here I found myself in the late night/early morning with two friends in their mid-thirties, Kellie and Robbie. Aussies. Not a couple, just friends themselves. Kellie's a tall, tight bodied sexpot with hair that's long blonde, perfect handfuls for breasts, full handfuls, no bra, and big blue doe eyes. I'm pretty sure we both wanted to fuck her.
I'm pretty sure she knew it too, but she stayed the straight line between us, relishing in the moment, and we talked and talked. If you're wondering, yes, we were drunk. Quite plastered really, with empty Bin-Tangs and half-packs of Samporenas scattered about. This was after a dinner party at Kellie's, she lives here.
She's on that journey of independence. Not to give, to our chagrin (more Robbie's than mine I imagine, I'm too drunk at this point), but to speak sermon on it. A full moon sexual innuendo, legs bend laying down. Knees touching, twisted to one side so her cut-off denim shorts pull tight and her perk bra-less breasts push through a loose singlet. Her hands run with her hair past closed eyes as she tells all the things that women want.
"We're not having sex," she says.
But at sunrise she takes me home to the shower. Robbie sleeps on the daybed.
