Who dares wins

Day 151 - Mataram

Mataram is a dry beige. The human eye can detect more shades of green than any other colour. I can detect none in this place. The map is unbroken by cafés or bars or communal space. Except for this karaoke joint I've found which is so dire it is a visceral illustration of the dearth of other options. The viscerality is is primarily provided by the people doing karaoke and their selfish intrusion on my reflection. There are little rooms for the purpose (karaoke not reflection) but the walls are no match for the singers. Their vocal incompetence is fired through the solid matter and into my soft tissue like neutrons in a nuclear chain-reaction. I feel my basic cellular structure being ripped apart and I think I'll have developed ear cancer within six months. Also the beer is 100,000 rupiah, or, £4.20 a bottle. The final straw was the lack of WiFi. This was a particular issue since, as of five days previously, my phone was doing a fine impression of a phone that didn't work and my only connection to the rest of the world was through a laptop. It had taken a tumble off a bunk-bed onto a hard floor in Ko Tao and now it seemed it had rung its last. Its bell also tolled for me as it is 2023 and everything is made immeasurably easier when travelling by having a phone. It wasn't the lack of a phone that brought me to this awful bar in this awful city though. A few days ago I had walked out of my room on Gili T and in the bright sunlight across the courtyard stood a familiar face. I'd known Alex since the Perhentian Islands three weeks ago and so, in travel terms, she was an old friend. We spent a fun few days snorkelling with turtles and motorbikes, cinema on the beach, sunsets and an interesting proposition. Since we had gone our separate ways my forward-planning had inevitably suffered. I wanted to take 'The Komodo Tour' which was a three-day, 350km boat trip from Lombok to Flores in the east of Indonesia. So did everyone else. There were no spaces available for several weeks and several weeks I did not have. When I bumped into Alex on Gili T she told me she had a ticket for a tour leaving in 10 days time and so did her friend Claire. But Claire was having doubts. By the time the tour finished her visa would be expired. So in those 10 days she would have to get from Gili T to the passport office in Mataram, hand over her passport and wait. Wait for a process that might take three days and might take three weeks. No passport = no tour. She ummed, she ahhed. As it happened my situation mirrored hers but I decided that fortune favoured the bold and eventually bought the ticket when she decided to sell. Fast forward to Mataram passport office and it was now the 31st of July, five days to the tour. Claire's prevarication had shaved precious days off and my confidence was ebbing. Nonetheless I donned the colourful trousers they provided to hide my haram legs and and completed the paperwork of an inefficient but relatively well-defined process.

Come back in three days.

Well that sounds positive.

Alex had taken herself off to another of the Gili islands at this point so in lieu of appropriating her travel plans I appropriated her friends. Not just Claire but also her ex and current boyfriend Jon, his brother Nick and their sister Liv. They were a welcoming bunch but I got on especially well with Liv while we were on Gili T, so that was my, if you will, 'in'. They'd come to Lombok too and we all now headed for Kuta in the south of the island. If Kuta on Lombok isn't twinned with Kuta on Bali a mere 120km away then tricks have been missed. The sun shone in Kuta, unfiltered by the fine particles of despair that choked Mataram's dismal air. It was a bright and cheery town, untroubled by industry, where people mainly came to surf. The group were holidaying so dorms were out of the question. I acquiesced to a nice hotel room for the sake of, um, group unity. We hired scooters and bombed around the countryside stopping at beaches and bars as we fancied. And then, one afternoon, after a roar of engines there was quiet in the hotel courtyard. They were off to another part of Lombok and in my path, again, lay Mataram. And, hopefully, a visa-extension. There had better be, the tour starts tomorrow.