Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Our boat trip was set to depart from Lombok, the island directly to the left of Bali. This meant that we would need to stay in Lombok the night before the trip in order to get an early start the next morning. So the day before the trip started we set out early for our ferry across the Bali Sea.
Although Mount Batur has been active as recently as the year 2000, its last major eruption was in 1968. In the 47 years since, Mount Batur has been (mostly) dormant. What does that mean for us? It seems to be the general consensus on Bali that this means it is about due for another eruption. So naturally, we decided to climb it.
I was pretty infatuated with the island already as we navigated the labyrinth of strange, narrow, mossy alleyways to our ‘bungalow’ accommodations for the first night in Ubud. I was pretty fed-up with the island 2 days later as I trudged through the crowded, dirty streets looking for a motorbike in Kuta. I'm pretty sure that everyone hates Kuta. But then I was back to liking the island again later on as I road a motorbike along the winding mountain roads on the less developed Northern side of the Island.
I had been briefed on what to do in this situation and it played out more or less how it had been described to me. The policeman asked for my registration and license. I obviously don’t have an international driver’s license so he’s got me there. He sat me down in their police station and scolded me as a shook a small booklet full of prices and descriptions of various fines in my face.
I haven’t been working weekends for the past 6 months for just a short little trip so I shrugged and blocked out about 3 weeks. I have known that I wanted to do something a little bit crazy so I had been brain-storming things I could do during Tet for the past few months. So without further adieu, here’s the plan.
I write this article to let you in on some of the issues you can have interacting with foreigners whilst you are abroad. You meet an interesting mixture of people when you are traveling, and in spite of their differences, the usually have one thing in common: extreme personalities. Another issue is that there are nearly always cultural differences that can muddle interactions. To make matters worse, many people living abroad are scared, stressed, or thinking that they are beyond the reach of consequences, so they will do extreme and selfish things from time to time.
There was a huge, black SUV stopped in the middle of the street. There was a mysterious white powder all over the shattered windshield. The rest of the vehicle was already very badly dented, as if a crowd of people had attacked it. There was an angry mob gathered around around the drivers seat door. Something was happening there.
Before going into this museum I was vaguely aware of most of it's contents but I had never been forced to really consider any of it or face what America has actually done in this country. I'm not very political so I can have the tendency to be lazy in this department.
On Christmas night, two friends and I walked into a bar in District 1 to have a beer and play a game of pool. This was maybe not the most traditional activity for Christmas night, but at least we had each other. I was the last to arrive at the pool table on the third floor of this bar because I had been distracted somewhere en route. When I walked up the stairs I was handed a pool stick and introduced to my teammate: a random guy in the bar. His name was Leonardo.
Is there even anything to do in Vietnam for Christmas? Asia has definitely bought into Christmas for the pure commercialistic value of the holiday (check out below if you don't believe me) but does anybody here actually care? It was the evening of December 24th and though some light Googling I had happened upon some vague information about Christmas Eve festivities at or around Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the city. So we got in a cab and told the driver to head over!
