Adapted from an email.
Yesterday I went surfing. It started out the day before, when I was walking on the beach, just checking out the area. Kuta Beach is huge and I'd spent the first day just wandering around and seeing things.
That evening I made a deal with these local guys on the beach: 30,000 for the surfboard rental and 10,000 for lessons. You know they're always trying to sell you something. They had a half dozen surfboards leaning against some bamboo structure, and they all were salesmen. I could have walked over a hundred feet and patronized someone else, but somehow I ended up with these guys.
This woman was lurking around asking if I wanted a massage and I really wasn't interested, but by the time I had cut the deal with the surfboard guys she was convinced that I was going to have a massage the next day. (It's not like a sexual massage, this is pretty common on the beach, I've seen it in other places. There's lots of people and not too many jobs around here, especially for older women. Don't picture "asian beach bimbo", picture instead "asian washer woman".)
So I showed up pretty much on time, which always takes them off guard in this country. The first stint (10am to noon) was with this kid teaching me. I had the biggest surfboard they had. The idea is, if I could get the surfboard out there, then surfing in was easy. I got up to being on my knees.
This kid was somewhere in his teens, his lower teens. Pretty skinny, and just shorts on. I never saw any of these surf guys wearing shirts.
But the hard part was fighting the waves to get my surfboard back out again. They need ski lifts or propeller motors or something on these things. I'd wipe out like five times just getting out into the water. And these waves were pretty big, you know you sortof have a Zen experience where you "become one" with the foam, especially your nose and mouth and all connecting sinuses.
The good news was that I figured out why you can tumble in the waves with a surfboard and not have it smack you in the head. Both you and the surfboard are about the same density as water. Therefore everything is always moving in pretty much the same direction. There's no reason for anything to smack into anything else. (Unless your surfboard is on the crest of a crashing wave, and you are directly below it.)
Maybe if I wave my hands around some more I can make that a convincing argument. I'll have to get out my fluid mechanics book or something.
I was exhausted. I broke for lunch. I was beat. "Maybe you rrest. Waves too beeg now. Two o'clock waves get betterr." You know your sinuses can get only so full of water.
I learned why people surf with a teeshirt or a wetsuit or something on, because your belly gets really abraded. That's your contact with the board. That's the side of the board that they wax, for traction. And these guys were really bad at waxing: the surface of the board was all gunked up, like it was glue that was solidifying as it was being applied. It wasn't smooth at all.
Of course the massage lady was lurking around. "You get massage now?" I tried to blow her off but then I said, aw, what the hell, I'm a bit sore from all this surfing maybe I'll get a massage. So we cut a deal, I bargained her down to 35,000 rups for one hour. At the time I thought that was reasonable.
That's like two days wage for the average indonesian. Maybe a day and a half. Not sure.
But, you know, the "average" indonesian is like, you look out over the valley,
and there's all these rice paddys. And they're all flooded, with green sprigs sticking up all over.
Sparkling and picturesque, there's a whisp of fog or cloud aroud the high points that you can see.
Against the sparkle of the sun's reflection, you see a few dark figures stooped over the mud. Maybe wearing one of those cone-shaped asian hats for the sun, probably wearing simple wrap-around clothes. Ankle deep, maybe calf deep, splattered up to the thigh, but nobody cares, hey, mud is everywhere. Pulling rice sprouts out of the mud, or planting them back, I dunno, rice agriculture is very labor intensive. Wayan manages the flooding and the flow of water, the rest of the family, including Granny, work the field. That's the "average" indonesian's profession.
So I lay down to get a massage, and all of a sudden there's more things going on. This one woman is clipping my fingernails and stuff and these other two are plucking out my grey hairs. I thought, wow, this is a good deal. I should spend more time in third world countries. (So I'm trading off grey hair for bald spots - that's the way to look young.)
Then the woman doing the nails, she finished one nail, she had trimmed the nail, fooled with the cuticles, and put nailpolish on. Fortunately it was clear, not like pink or anything. Then she said to me "You like? I do all yourr nails. I do feet. Seventy tousand rrupiah."
WAYDAMINIT wait wait. I tried to bargain but I was sortof in the middle of a massage. At the same time, by lying down, my head was sideways and some of my sinuses were emptying saltwater out of my nose, all this fluid came out of my nostril, which is kindof gross, even though it's all just seawater, so you can see it was pretty hard to bargain agressively. The massage lady took it all in stride, though, she had more little towels in her stuff, I'm sure it was all pretty sanitary. I'm sure of it.
"No feet. I don't want my feet done. So what's that, I'll give you thirty." "Is forty. You get special deal only with hands and feet." Ok ok forty. The hair plucking women, I managed to bargain them down to 15 apiece. Some other woman was sanding down the tough skin on my heels. It was funny she asked if she could do it and I said yes but I wouldn't pay her anything. Later I ended up paying her ten.
So here I have these five women huddled around me. Hey these aren't foxy young beach beauties, caressing me with their naked bodies. These are sly middle aged women, scraping up a few rupiah for their half dozen kids, many of whom are somewhere else on the beach offering American soft drinks to European tourists at Japanese prices.
And there's a sixth
woman pushing on me to buy a teeshirt.
"Special forr you. Fifteen tousand."
"No I'm not interested. Tiduk. No. "
"You shirrt. How much it cost in Amerrica?"
And like a fool I'm talking to
her.
"No, I didn't get this shirt in America, I got it in Singapore.
See, right here on the label it says Made in Singapore."
I'm showing it to her, my shirt is off because of the massage.
"I paid eight
singapore dollars for that, what's that, like four thousand? No, look,
I don't even want a shirt. Too heavy. I have to carry this on my
back. I already have all the shirts I need." I was a captive audience,
I couldn't walk away, pinned down by multiple personal grooming practitioners.
And, behind her, as if I had any attention span to spare, was a precession of the usual characters selling whatever, watches, rings, ice cream, comic books, this one guy was selling some Balinese carved bow and arrow set with about a dozen arrows. All sorts of shit.
All in all it was not a relaxing massage. The whole thing added up to 115,000 rupiahs, which is like us$47, which is maybe what I'd pay in the states for just a massage, without the circus sideshow.
So I went off for lunch and to my hotel room to get some more cash to pay the massage ladies.
After lunch I got a smaller surfboard and a different teacher. This time it was the "owner", the guy who seemed to be in charge of the surf rental "agency". It was frustrating and I was getting tired, so they swapped and gave me a boogie board. A boogie board is the same idea as a surfboard, except it's much shorter and you just hold it out in front of you and you never try to stand up on it or anything.
I couldn't get it to work until I met this other asian guy, a guy named Arturo or something. I couldn't get a good lesson until I talked to someone I wasn't paying.
He lived, it turned out, in Oakland California, so we got along really well right off the bat. Perfectly fluent in English. He was "home" visiting his family right here on Bali. You know there's all sorts of asian people in the bay area, well, they fly home to see the folks. And here he was doing just that. Somehow I never thought I'd run into anyone like that, especially not in an australian tourist trap.
So Arturo had a boogie board and showed me how to use it. So I boogie boarded for a while.
Then I got tired, and left. I made hazy plans to get together with Arturo the next day, but we never saw each other again.
Still feel kindof sore the next day.
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