The Long Way Round
Well I wanted to write but you know how it is. First you want to write about one thing but then another thing happens that prevents you from writing about the first thing and you know that you need to get off your arse and write about both things and while you’re procrastinating about that another thing happens and suddenly you’re a few weeks down the line and you’ve got plenty of work to do but not enough time to do those previous things even though you really want to but you’re busy doing other things. Then the task becomes a chore and finally it’s a dark and brooding behemoth which you have locked up in the dark dungeons of your subconscious with all of the other things that you’d much rather not think about. So, knowing that there are many other things that have happened recently that I want to write about, I have decided to arm myself with a sharp sword and descend into those crepuscular depths, unbolt the dungeon door, careful not to disturb any of those other forgotten creatures, and cut this particularly irksome monster down to size.
I left you in the jungle, I believe; cut, torn, bleeding and bedraggled from the leeches, poisoned ivy, sharp foliage and frothing rivers. And so deserving a well-earned rest I met up with Anne & The Steves, that popular 80’s band, and we headed off to Sulawesi for some relaxing tropical beach-time on the equatorially straddled Togian Islands. On the way we encountered poison fish; Anne almost becoming a statistic to that deadly aquatic foe as she battled the toxins that threatened to finish her, and the friends that abandoned her to an almost certain lavatorial death. We narrowly avoided being part of a sadistic tribal funeral ritual in which the deceased are bewitched into walking the steps to their own tombs. We flew in Cessna’s and traversed treacherous mountains with mysterious local guides, became cargo on freight boats and battled the ferocious South China seas in speed-boats with only the flying-fish for company. On the Togians we dived ancient wrecks, escaped drowning on numerous occasions, drank heavily with a crazy and outrageously French dive-master, conspired with butterfly-breeding botanists and increased our chances of cirrhosis considerably. On the journey home we waded through human effluence, were held prisoners in the homes of desperate natives with fish-heads and became objects of derision in remote hospitals where two thirds of the Steves had three ear-infections between the two of them. All of which was thoroughly pleasurable.
On return to Medan I did battle with the evil manager of my school who tried to threaten and bully me into missing out on two weeks pay. He rued the day, as did the furniture in his office. I fought space and time in order to escape the demonic forces of Indonesian immigration; my passport having an adventure of its own as it clocked up a few thousand extra air-miles than myself. But, finally, I took a last becak ride through the crummy, tumbledown, smelly, polluted and crammed streets of Medan, jumped on a plane and left the place.
I landed in Singapore, the world’s biggest shopping mall, exchanged my lunky old laptop for a more travel-friendly one and headed off to Kuala Lumpur by train. It has always been a dream of mine to take a first-class cabin on an overnight train; I think I’ve just seen too many Alfred Hitchcock films. And so it was my intention to do just this from KL to Bangkok, unfortunately I was thwarted by the several hundred other people who had booked every available space on every train for the next three days. Instead, I flew to Bangkok for a week of debauchery, sight-seeing and visa arranging before heading off for Hanoi to meet Nathan who is on a six month tour of South East Asia.
My somewhat broad and vague plan had been to meet up with Nathan, travel down through Vietnam with him and look for some work along the way. However a combination of circumstances kept us in Hanoi for two weeks, not the least of which was the 8p beer. We loved the city; look upwards and you see the beautiful old French-colonial architecture, look down and narrowly avoid the object-laden moped that’s aiming for you amongst the rest of the demonic, incomprehensible Vietnamese traffic that fills the narrow streets of the Old Quarter. Sit on a plastic chair outside the cheap Bia Hoi (fresh beer) shops, wearing colonial or Red Army helmets and watch the frenetic and character-filled city pass-by. Spend a Christmas morning shuffling past a dead guy (Ho Chi Minh). Take accidental and thoroughly drunken trips in Trishaws to brothels. Have your genitals groped by whores on mopeds. Because…. we did.
In the moments of lucidity between bouts of drinking in Hanoi, I had time to reflect on my situation. I was wearing all of the clothes that I owned and I was still cold. I was unable to get a work permit in Vietnam or Thailand because I don’t possess a degree (apparently this is in an effort to cut down on the child molesters who come to get jobs in schools in these countries. As we all know, kiddy fiddlers don’t have university degrees). I was thinking of going to China but it would be even colder there. I was running out of money. I had left some very good job offers in Medan. I had left a good business opportunity in Medan. I had left a very beautiful girlfriend in Medan. I was missing Medan. Medan is hot. I realised that I was actually only travelling for the sake of it and I had further business elsewhere.
I caught a plane to Bangkok, took a train to Penang and then, unable to quite believe what I was doing, I caught a ferry back to Medan. I hurtled my way to the heart of the city, a very large grin spreading across my face as I closed my eyes against the grit and dust, choked back the stench of rotting rubbish and durian and listened to the relentless chorus of “Hello Mister” to the tune of ‘the call to prayer”. Home…
So here I was, back, to my astonishment, in Medan. I needed a job and somewhere to live. The first was easy as Medan is bereft of English teachers who can speak English and hide their alcoholism and many psychological problems from the students. The house would be a little more difficult. Luckily I had some Indonesian friends who were prepared to hunt around and find some for me.
I was, it must be said, a little picky. Each day my friend Reni would send her husband out on his motorbike to find some suitable places. He would then come and find me, which wasn’t too hard because I was always in the bar, and whisk me around the city to show me his findings. I would then poke around these places with a disapproving eye, shake my head solemnly at the proffered properties and repeat the whole process the following day. This went on for quite some time. They did, eventually, find a beautiful place for me. It was a large bungalow down a long, quiet lane and surrounded by Cacao trees. Excited by this new find, I sent Reni off to negotiate a price for me. Everything was perfect; the price was lowered substantially and hands were shaken. All seemed to be set until they found out that I wasn’t Muslim. No deal. I was seething with moral indignation at this religious prejudice and shook my fists violently at the sky, little realising the mysterious ways in which Allah works…
After a couple of weeks of house-hunting I was beginning to despair. I couldn’t keep declining the places that Reni and her husband were finding for me and concluded that I was going to have to accept the next property that I was shown. The trouble was that I had wanted to hold-out for THE ONE. The one that would feel right, the one in which I felt comfortable and could happily stay in for the foreseeable future. Luckily, the next one was it.
It’s ridiculous. It’s preposterous. It’s very big and very ugly. It’s a stunted mansion that should have been strangled at birth. It has two pillars and three balconies and very little in the way of taste. The bedrooms are small and the expansive living areas are open plan, bizarre in the extreme and lacking in any kind of logic. I have a bathroom with en-suite, another one just in case, a room set aside for a wardrobe, an office, a room that I think that I’ll have for a cinema, and several other areas of which I’m entirely unsure what to do with. In this vast expanse of space I have one item of furniture: a bed.
Due to a lack of funds I’m having to wait until my first pay-day before I can buy any furnishings and I’m spending my free-time erasing the mauve, yellow, orange, green and purple slap-dash paint-job with a clean, stark, bright white. Once settled I shall live a hermit-like Howard Hughes existence; holed-up mysteriously within my own mansion, ignoring pleas for interviews and doing strange things with soap.
Annual rent: £650
Medan is not a modern, twenty-first century city. Although it’s the third largest in Indonesia, it is unlike many of its counterparts around the world in that it is not dwarfed by gleaming, towering skyscrapers or severed by multi-lane highways. It is, rather, an uncontrollable contagion of towns and villages spreading outwards from the its once bustling port. Each one of these villages, or kampungs, is headed by a chief who looks after the interests of the local inhabitants. I live next-door to ours.
It’s customary for any new resident to call in and see the chief and his family and make their acquaintance, so not wishing to get off on the wrong foot as I had at my last kampung I arranged to meet with him. I especially wanted to make a good impression as Novi would undoubtedly be coming and going at the house, possibly even with wet hair, and since we weren’t married I wanted to make sure that there would be no problems. Unfortunate then, that my introduction to the chief, his wife, daughters and fellow residents was under much less formal circumstances than I had hoped.
I couldn’t make my formal meeting until Novi was available to translate; my Indonesian being a few thousand words short of barely adequate, and so in the meantime I busied myself with the daunting task of painting the mansion. Possessing no overalls or work clothes and labouring in thirty degree heat I took to the task attired in my only pair of boxer-shorts. One morning, as I was showering myself with white paint in an attempt to reach the high ceilings, I was disturbed by the sound of my front-gate creaking open and the excited chatter of several female voices talking over each other. I stepped back from my wall and peered out of the window to see what was happening. There were five or six of the local women-folk pointing and arguing at a seemingly random point at the foot of my garden wall. One of them caught sight of me and beckoned rather insistently.
One is supposed to dress modestly in Indonesia, and exposing one’s flesh is fairly unusual. However, I was covered in wet paint and being summoned rather urgently, so I popped my paint-roller down and rushed to the door and opened it. There was, by now, a bit of a crowd made up of women and children and at the sight of my near-nudity there was a collective flutter of titillated surprise. Ignoring this gasp, I marched down the steps and asked what was going on. The chief’s wife, managing to keep her eyes on mine from the height of my bare nipples, proceeded to unleash a barrage of unintelligible gibberish at me which may or may not have been Indonesian. Gathering by my stupefied look that she was not getting through to me, she began to make ‘ppphhsssssssing’ noises and throwing her arms outwards in seemingly random fashion. She followed this bit of Marcel Marceau by pointing at the ground where I saw a dirty broken dial barely visible above the ground. I must say, I was intrigued. I made the international sign of incomprehension and shrugged and pouted. Finally, her patience now replete, she grabbed my arm and pulled me through the now considerable collection of giggling women and children. Painfully aware that I was dressed most inappropriately for a wander through the village, I attempted a manful swagger; something that was tricky to pull off when being dragged along by an old lady almost half my size.
As we parted the entourage, a small voice piped up,
“Mr. Sexy…”
I was under no illusion that it was meant as a tribute to my white and soggy physique.
And they followed, all of them chanting “Mr. Sexy…Mr. Sexy…Mr. Sexy” amongst uproarious laughter and the slapping of thighs (not mine, thankfully), as I was led down the lane at the side of my house to witness a huge arc of water spurting out it. A pipe had burst and there was a lake forming beneath. The ladies had been trying to find the stop-cock in my garden in order to switch the water off. Luckily the chief arrived at this point, located the tap and stemmed the flow. The emergency was over, my ignominy was not. The chanting continued as I attempted a dignified retreat to the privacy of my now waterless abode.
It is now a month later and I am still being called Mr. Sexy.
