Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 152 - 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 tha...

Day enough? - Gili T Bali isn't quite the only island of sin and blasphemy within Indonesia's borders and the fact I was off to another one was entirely coincidental. The Gili Islands are three little specks near Bali (but nearer Lombok). Gili Trawangan is the party island, Gili Meno is quiet and romantic and Gili Air is a mix of both. Eschewing self-inflicted romance or halfway houses I booked my passage to Gili T. Without any motor vehicles to speak of, seriously horsecarts are HGVs here, it was a tonic to Ubud's buzziness. Speaking of tonic if you are having some with gin be cautious as counterfeit spirits have been known to be sold on Gili T. The methanol in them can turn you blind and it is just not worth losing your sight for a drink as unenjoyable as a G&T. Better to stick to natural products I say. As I passed a beach bar I was beckoned over and thought it worth a look. I'd been yearning for some levity since Laos so gave the barman my money. Pedro was a ...

Day 143 - Ubud Six days in Ubud could be considered excessive for a traveller on a timescale such as mine. I wasn't here to align my chakras in a wellness retreat so time was essence-y. But the traveller grapevine had thrown up a tantalising possibility. Just like the rocket festival in Laos I couldn't pass up the opportunity to experience something actually authentic. In this case the funeral of a local notable. He had been a major and, crucially, quite popular. This popularity ensured it was no simple coffin for him. Oh no, his earthly remains would be deposited in a big cow. Then set on fire. These are good things I was informed by the landlady of the guesthouse where I had been permitted to return. It was good to be back with a friendly crowd where everyone got along well. Well except that was for two lads. One was Ukrainian and the other was, no prizes for guessing, Russian. The chill between them was like a Siberian winter or like the bitterness in a Ukrainian house who...

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...

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...

Day 118 - Tanah Rata And as soon as I was inside I knew something wasn't right I let out a laugh through a grimace...I graphed. I'd met Cory the day before on my way down to the Cameron Highlands. They are, as the name suggests, highlands. They are not, as the name suggests, where Ferris's friend fled after wrecking his father's 1961 Ferrari GT California. They are, in fact, a fief of Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton and Malaysia. 'Call me Dave' he says to his friends. Dave and his family come here in the summer so the children can have luge lessons while he screws, serfs and eats pigs. Or some combination of those verbs and nouns. The temperature cools as you wind your way up to the tea plantations that blanket these hills and the air provided a nice respite from the coastal swelter. Resolved to find more ethical pursuits than the ex-Prime Minister I'd booked on a walking tour. Rainforest stills covers two thirds of the area and, while the forest here i...

Day 113 - Georgetown Blues, oranges and pinks smeared the sky and a purple haze hung over the fields. The sun was rising slowly over over Southern Thailand and creating a scene of such delicate beauty that Turner could have painted it. It was just before 6AM and, sat in the vestibule of the the train, I could watch through the open door my time in Thailand running out. The train was hurtling (well, kind of) towards the Malaysian border and country number five. I'd contrived to miss my ferry off Ko Tao three days prior due to mixing up the arrival and departure times. One of the more burdensome aspects of solo travel is not having anyone to check your working out. It was a fuck-up and I may come to regret it more than I did at the time but it's also travel and pleasant chance often arrives after unforeseen events. The train gets me to Hat Yai and from there it is a bus over the border. As someone from Great Britain you can only really appreciate the wonder that is the Schenge...

Day 105 - Bangkok Bangkok...shit, I'm in Bangkok. Again. Economy of time necessitated that I skip Cambodia, the planning fallacy would not be defied in the greater scheme of things I had to admit. Economy of money necessitated that I fly back to Thailand's capital. I suspect that I'll never love it no matter how much time I spend there. Too big, too hot, too many stones that have been turned. peek-a-boodha With only a day to pass though I could suffer it one last time, tiny violins strike up. Wat Pho has a 46 metre reclining Buddha and while size isn't everything it was enough to get me through the door so I could wonder how they got it through the door. Stopping by Penguin Café Bar afterwards I found the alley leading down to it mysteriously blocked off. I crossed to the other side of the canal to get a better look. The owner was sitting on a concrete bollard watching a film crew bustling around his joint. He hadn't learned English in the 90 days since I was last...