Bali High

It's 5:15pm friday afternoon Bali time, 11:15pm thursday nite back home. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine & chemistry I managed to spend most of both flights in dreamland. The downside was that I didn't sleep a wink last night after checking in at the hotel. It was a very long night of channel surfing as I flipped the dial between BBC News and several really cheesy Indonesian TV dramas. Think Bolliwood films without the dancing, without the music & singing, add transparent martial arts effects and you start to get the idea.

Today was spent getting my bearings, taking care of business, changing dollars into rupiah, visiting my village here and fighting an extereme case of jetlag. The sun is less than an hour from setting over the Indian Ocean as I type from Legian Beach where the beautiful people are slowly dragging themselves off of the sand and into the cafes for the cocktail hour. The island is busier than I have seen it in years, at least since post-bomb #1. Traffic is madness, urban sprawl is sprawling at an exponential rate since last year, while the infrastructure is still for the most part in a very sad state of disrepair.

Still, it's good to be here. The surf is crashing with head high close-out sets at low tide. My main man & chief fixer, Ida Bagus Adi, picked me up this morning as we did our business in town then headed up the coast to Tegalmengkeb to check on the progress of the rice harvest in my village here. Stopping at our favorite warung & eatery on the way back to town, we gorged on balinese roast suckling pig, rice, jackfruit soup & a lawar made of unripe papaya. Four hours later, I still haven't had the runs and life is good. Back at the hotel, two drunken aussie gals were singing Fleetwood Mac songs at the top of their lungs as they finished off their 5th glasses of the potent palm liquor Arak for the afternoon.. Songs from "Tusk" were on the playlist.

The internet connection here is slow, so I will not attempt to upload any pics from the day's outing. Maybe tomorrow...