Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050989&l=dab27&id=1101094
My first morning in Lovina (a tiny fishing village on Bali's north coast), I needed to find a phone to call my mom, but there was none to be found in town. But this woman who ran a laundry shop said her daughter could drive me to a phone about 2km down the road. I asked her "Barapa?" (How much?), but she said I didn't have to pay. I insisted on paying, and gave her 4000R (~40 cents) that I had in my pocket. She gave it to her daughter, and the girl gave me a ride down the road.
But when we reached the shop with the phone, the phone was out of order, and so the girl handed the money back to me. Wow. You have to understand that after two years on Wall Street and a month in India, I’d learned that no one ever gives you anything for free, and that no one is to be trusted. This flew right in the face of that. This poor girl was giving me back my money because that's what she thought the fair thing was to do, despite the fact that she had nothing to gain by doing it and would most likely never see me again.
I refused the money, of course, but that's the moment that the gentleness, justice, and civility of the Balinese people first struck me.
Later that day I was eating lunch in a restaurant in town and a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten approached me trying to sell me some jewelry.
“Tidak, terima kasih” (No, thank you), I said.
“OK, you want to go on boat trip to see sun rise?”
“No, no boat trip.”
“You want to go on boat trip to see dolphin?”
“No, no dolphin.”
She furrowed her brow, attempting to think of something she could sell me.
“You want to go fishing?”
My eyes lit up. She had found my weakness. “How much?” I asked.
“Um, maybe you pay Rp 100,000 ($10) for two hours?”
“OK. Can I go tomorrow morning?”
“Um, you stay here, I check.”
The girl returned fifteen minutes later and took me down to meet the fisherman who would take me out the following morning. His name was Mardy, he spoke no English whatsoever, he lived in a hut on the beach with his family, and his most prized possession was his boat, which resembled a dugout canoe and had bamboo pontoons to keep it from flipping over. I liked him immediately. We agreed to meet outside his hut at 5am the following morning.
That night, I went to a bar across the street from my guesthouse. Five people were there, and two of them were locals who were playing American music on their guitars. The two guys hardly spoke English, but they knew every word to the songs they played. I had a blast singing along.
The next morning I met Mardy and we headed out to sea in his boat. As we puttered along, the sky grew lighter, and in a few minutes I was watching a spectacular red-orange sunrise over the island. This place is as close to paradise as anywhere I’ve ever seen.
Soon we dropped our lines in the water and began bottom-fishing for snapper. Every once in a while we pulled on the lines to see if we could feel anything on the end, and if we did we pulled the line in, wrapping it around an oil can as we went.
Yes, that’s right—oil can. Needless to say, we were not fishing with rods and reels. Mardy and I each had hand lines with a hook on the end of them, and that was about it. But the fish didn’t seem to mind, and within the hour we had fifteen small snapper in the boat.
But I was getting bored. Surely there were bigger fish in the Bali Sea than this. So I played a few minutes of charades with Mardy and finally managed to communicate that I wanted to try for something bigger. We picked out one of the smallest snapper, attached it to the hook, and dropped the line in the water.
Within five minutes, we had a seven pound mahi-mahi on the line. I pulled him into the boat, and Mardy’s eyes lit up—I don’t think he was used to catching fish this size. I wanted to try for more, but Mardy pointed to the gas tank and then to the shore, and I realized that spending any more time fishing would mean running out of gas before we made it back to shore.
We headed back to Mardy’s hut and cleaned the fish, and then he handed the filets to me. Surprised, I handed them back, insisting he should keep them, but he wouldn’t accept. Finally I took one of the filets and handed him the rest, and we had a deal. We agreed to meet again the following morning to catch more “besar ikan” (big fish), and I headed to the restaurant across the street from my guesthouse and ate my fish for lunch.
The following morning Mardy and I were able to communicate a bit better, as I had picked up some Bahasa and he had learned some English. But we still got hung up on concepts like “How are we going to catch the bait fish? With a net? With hooks?” and “What kind of fish just jumped out of the water?” Mardy started at me blankly: “How? Kind?” These were not words he knew.
Fortunately my charades paid off eventually, and I learned that we’d catch the bait fish with small hooks, and that the fish that jumped out of the water was similar to a barracuda (actually, in Mardy’s own words, it was “a barracuda same same but different”).
We managed to catch a couple mahi-mahi that morning, but the two largest fish we had on the line came off before we could get the fish into the boat. Wondering what happened, I took a look at the hooks we were using and realized that the barbs had long since rusted off. No wonder fish were falling off the line. Back at Mardy’s hut, I gave him Rp 50,000 ($5) and told him to buy new hooks before the following morning.
I spent the afternoon with two travelers who were staying in the room next to me. Their names were Noella and Michael, they were from Canada and Belgium, respectively, and they had met in India. The three of us got along quite well, and that afternoon we hung out by the pool, and then I went snorkeling with Michael. Unfortunately, the reef in Lovina is rather non-existent, so we didn’t see many fish, but on our way back up the beach we did manage to get a pick-up soccer game going with some of the local kids. After a few minutes of running on the soft sand, Michael and I realized what poor shape we were in, and at the end of the game we collapsed into the ocean in exhaustion.
I spent an hour in an internet café that evening talking to my mom over Skype, and the conversation turned to the various Indonesian political issues I was learning about, notably the various separatist movements that were going on. As I got up to leave the internet café, another tourist noticed my shirt (a Green Day t-shirt that said “American Idiot” on the back) and said, “Hey, American idiot!”
Before I could respond, the owner of the internet café stood up and said, “Actually, he’s just the opposite. Hi, I’m Dino, and I couldn’t help but overhear your phone conversation just now—you seem to know quite a lot about Indonesian political issues.”
I talked to Dino for a while about my recent interest in Indonesia and in writing, and he suggested that I attend the Ubud Writers Festival the following week. It turned out that Dino lived in Ubud and owned a couple internet cafés in other towns throughout Bali. His wife, who is originally from Germany, was apparently plugged into the writers’ scene in Ubud, and he offered to let me meet her if I came to Ubud for the festival. I immediately decided to attend the festival, and I promised Dino I’d give him a call as soon as I got to Ubud next week.
That night I ate dinner with Michael and Noella and told them stories from my two days of fishing. Michael seemed especially interested in my tales, so I invited him to come along the following morning. We headed to bed early, as we planned to fish first thing in the morning and then catch a minibus to Kuta.
The final morning’s fishing trip with Michael and Mardy was the most successful of the week. The new hooks worked beautifully, and we caught seven mahi-mahi (and had two more large ones hooked before the line snapped). Michael and I had a blast, but by far the happiest member of our party was Mardy when we took only two filets of fish and gave the rest to his family. Michael and I ran back to the guesthouse, gathered our belongings, and jumped in a minibus bound for Kuta.
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