Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 142 - Ubud Bali may be the ideal size for an island. It would take about four hours to drive across it which is not very long but long enough. It is surrounded by the sea, as the better islands tend to be (looking at you, Canvey Island). You'd pass beaches and waterfalls and exotic birds singing in the tropical trees. Bali has a volcano. It is dormant which is the preferable kind in general. It has a smaller island next to it to fight over with it's neighbour, Lombok. If you want globalised tack then you've got Kuta in the south. If you want the opposite then pick a town whose name you can't pronounce and go there instead. I came to this conclusion on the back of a scooter I had hired. On a quiet road of decent quality a scooter is an excellent place to do some thinking. It unshackled me from the timetables and whimsy of others. I'd saddled my horse and pointed it to the horizon, stetson angled against the beating sun. Yes, I am basically saying I'm a cowb...

Day 138 - Ubud My preconceived ideas of Bali were wrong. And right. I'd flown in two nights ago and found the first town, Kuta, to be exactly as I expected. A broad, well-trodden beach. Stalls selling t-shirts with text on them like 'I'm not gay but $20 is $20', 'The Man, the Myth, The Legend', 'I hate women' - that sort of thing. There were Australians roaring at each other in bars, their mullets a symbol of humankind's idiotic social nature. Cold beers and cheap massages. Cheap beers and cold massages. In fairness those last two things soothed my irritation at the rest. If you can't beat 'em...they're not your wife as one of the t-shirts might say. There wasn't an incandescent anger at Kuta's market-driven miasma though. Or at the taxi driver from the airport who kept whispering at me conspiratorially that picking up another passenger would lower the price. I wasn't sure why he treated that like a secret. I understood bet...

Day 135 - Borneo Drifting along with not much of a plan suited me down to the ground, my itinerary was a grass stalk in the wind. But I'd covered some ground as well - Thailand, Laos, Malaysia. At the bottom of the Malay Peninsula Southeast Asia shatters into 25,000 islands and land borders become a foreign concept. Except on Borneo. Consulting my not-much-of-a-plan I'd flown there. The Malaysian part of the island accounts for about a third with the rest belonging to Indonesia. The idea was to see some Orangutans then nip over to the border to my next new country. While crossing the border was possible onward travel to the rest of Indonesia seemed to unavoidably involve a change at Kuala Lumpur where I had just flown in from. Despite the time and cost efficiencies of them I'd tried so very hard to avoid flights on this trip. There had been the two Australia flights which were necessary given the distance, the flight over Cambodia and the flight to get me to Borneo, so, f...

Day 131 - Malacca Someone always has it worse than you. If there is someone telling you that then they have, statistically speaking, a 99.99% probability of being right. It's not always a great deal of comfort as a person's suffering is uniquely their own but it is unimpeachably true. It's true unless you are that one person who has it worst. And if you are then you have my woefully inadequate sympathies. The person that caused my bus to Malacca to make an unplanned stop wasn't that person but he did cause me to stop feeling sorry for myself. He'd eaten something that didn't agree with him and, despite what was no doubt a considerable period of clenching and hoping, he could hold no longer. The driver pulled the bus over to the side of the motorway grudgingly accepting that a disrupted timetable was better than disrupted upholstery. The unfortunate guy whose bowels could take no more probably couldn't think of a worse situation in which to empty them. Car...

Day 124 - Perhentian Kecil And so, what cure for a broken heart? (tiny, plastic violins strike up) Distance - I was 438km from Kuala Lumpur Sun - it beat down Sea - ...onto the glistening blue waves Sand - over there between the land and the sky Sex Scuba - my name was on the board I'd arrived on the Perhentian Islands mid-morning after a little 14-hour bus journey. And nothing much tends to happen on a scuba island mid-morning. The dive boats are out and anyone too hungover to make the early dive had yet to surface. I wandered into Ohlala dive shop and found it deserted. Deserted that is except for Ben. He bade me sit down, made me a coffee and inducted me into his friendship circle (though current attendance was two). Now this wasn't me finally losing my grip on reality and conversing with an unimaginatively named alter-ego. Or if It was I had at least made him Dutch for some variety. And if you want to go down the road that all 'reality' is somewhat the p...

Day 123 - Kuala Lumpur I have too much time to kill, too much time to think. Walking the city I find my path bending back towards The Step Inn yet debating the idea all the way. There was no-one sitting outside to catch me in my door-stepping madness. Its infatuation and it'll pass but in the moment it masqueraded as eternal love. Nice to be reminded that I have it in me if nothing else. Maybe I should have got the early bus but it was expensive and I wanted to save money. And, to be honest, to hold onto the slim chance of a farewell. But it's never coming. And that is the truly sad thing here. Everything else was fixed but it didn't need to end like this. I'm less certain of my decision to send that message than I was yesterday because the consequences are now fully realised. It's hard not to imagine how things might have been if I had held back. What was the purpose of it? The purity of of honesty seemed unimpeachable as if that were justification in itself. It...

Day 120 - Kuala Lumpur Which animal would you be? The people round the table sip their beer, pass the joint and give their answers, A dragon I say. A goat she says. I the dragon, she the goat. If anything it feels the opposite right now. The next question comes, What makes you cry? It's turned into a an ice-breaker session at her hostel, People that want to be together but can't be My answers have gone from silly to soppy in a single bound but it was a reflexive answer, true and without guile. The irony of it hit me later. I'm going to bed she says. Pity, I think, I enjoy her company just that bit too much. Room 302 she says. In case it's easier to stay. Easier? Christ, I would find it very easy to stay. She has a boyfriend, I reluctantly know that. How easy would it be to know that and go anyway? I have another beer to consider my options and really, truly, to stop myself haring up the stairs after her. I sip and rationalise. It's probably nothing, j...