Back to Bangkok. Again.

But...but...I just got here.

How could it have already been a month? Okay, 27 days. I'd planned on staying a month but then I'd gotten the news that my pal Lynne would be in transit through Bangkok on Saturday night. And I'd bought my AirAsia ticket to get back to Bangkok the day before she did. I'd leave ten days later, using the next stop on my round-the-world ticket to get to Australia.

My former home. Somewhere I'd be now if things had just gone a tiny bit differently. I wasn't sure I wanted to return.

A Month in Ubud

My month in Ubud was charming, relaxing, and involved a lot of monkeys.

Click here to view this video directly on Vimeo. Bigger too. 

A Month of Charm and Rice Paddies

My month in Bali was charming and relaxing—a great rest from my second trip around the world by local transport. It also involved a lot of bugs. Night would bring insects into my room—and they’d find their way through tiny holes in my mosquito net. Evenings in the rice paddies were cool so I didn’t need A/C, but I rapidly learned the value of screens.

No more bungalows without screens, I realized.

And sometimes there were frogs. Not in my mosquito net—maybe not even in my bungalow. Were they just below in the garden? I could never tell—such small frogs make such loud noises.

I also met several dogs over my month. A black dog roaming the grounds of the rice fields near my bungalow was precisely named Blackie, and the house dog at the organic Japanese deli across the road kept giving me his paw to beg for a taste of my lunch. But I was eating brown rice and radish. Is that dog food? I wasn’t sure.

Mom and Spawn

Here's a fine pair I spotted today down at the Monkey Forest in Ubud.

Shake Up

I was sitting inside at my desk, after having given up on the verandah post-breakfast. My coffee table wasn't the best spot to work over a laptop. The view was great but there was no way to sit on the sofa with the laptop on the coffee table for too long without starting to ache.

Suddenly, the dishes in my Bali villa rattled, like my kitchen did when I used to live on Avenue B and a bus would roar by every twenty minutes. Or at home in Jersey City when the group of young men on sports motorbikes would roar by, helmetless, on a hot August night.

But I was in the middle of a the idyllic rice paddies of Ubud, Bali. There wasn't a road within 100 meters. Everything that comes in to this compound arrives on someone's back or head. Not even scooters can zip back here.

Earthquake!

An Unexpected Trip through the Rice Paddies

Back I hurried out of my Bali bungalow at seven in the morning to get downtown to Casa Luna, the meeting place for my first day of volunteering at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

I’d put on my white official volunteer T-shirt in the morning, but it was drizzling rain out, so I threw an unofficial T-shirt into my bag to change into later. Today wasn’t a “dress nicely” day, but yesterday I’d finally figured out what to do about having nothing decent to wear in my round-the-world rucksack. I’d bought a nice top in town and then taken in my cotton travel skirts for pressing at the local laundry.

I’d tried to pay, but the laundry woman didn’t have change for my 20,000 rupiah note ($2.25). "No problem," she’d said as she handed me my ironed clothing late in the afternoon. "Pay me tomorrow."

Simple long cotton skirts are nothing special, but they’d have to do. I’d tried going all the way to Kuta for some shopping but hadn’t found anything but a $30 coffee press that was beyond my frugal means.

I’d also gone in for some hair color and to get my nails done. The nails had worked out all right, but the salon had lost running water for some reason, right about the time the hairdresser had to wash the color out of my hair.

Volunteer Orientation

Back in Bangkok, when I was frantically searching for information on how to find a reasonably priced bungalow, flat, or villa in Ubud for a month, I stumbled over this:

There is an annual writers festival in Ubud, and it was happening during my second week in Bali.

Well, howaboutthat.

I went to the website and nosed around.

Huh. They have some money.

They were flying in Alexander McCall Smith, Junot Diaz, and Paul Kelly (Australian folk-rocker famous in Oz—he just published a memoir).

But there were also a lot of people I had never heard of, and workshops along the lines of "turn your blog into a book contract" (Ha!). So I dashed off an email saying I'd be in town then and would be happy to be on some of the festivals panels if they needed people who can talk about comic books/graphic novels, blogging, travel writing, or parts of Africa and the Gulf.

Or New Jersey. Though seldom does my expertise in tent camping in New Jersey come in handy outside of my adopted home state.

I didn't hear back for a few days, so I went back to the festival website, did some searching, then dug up the director of programming's work email (okay, her personal one wasn't hard to find but that seems obnoxious), and sent the email directly to her.

Learning Vacation

I woke up early, a bit dazed from my previous night out in Ubud, Bali. I’d gone to a bar to see a literary event—a reading by a writer I’d never heard of. I’d been surprised to learn he’d lived in Cairo around the same time I had (I’d been there making comic books), and we had a mutual friend who still lived there. I enjoyed seeing his slideshow and hearing the host interview his guest.

The expat crowd here had turned out to be fierce, though. One of them took the speaker to task for saying there is a difference between the people of a country and their government (“because the people elect the government”), and another had made a speech about how the topic “What the Egyptian Revolution means to the West” wasn’t relevant to the primarily Australian audience.

Tough crowd, I thought, ducking out early to hire Nyoman—my regular motor scooter taxi driver—to take me back up to my perch above the rice fields.

This morning, I headed down the steep stone Campuhan Steps to the sidewalk into Ubud’s center again—on foot this time—to take a silver-jewelry-making course at a shop called Studio Perak.

I’d signed up for the jewelry course after I’d hadn’t been able to get into a course on Balinese cooking. I’ll take pretty much any class—I find the learning process engages my mind in nearly the same way that travelling does. I am more engaged by novelty and challenge than by destinations and cultural events. So for me, arguing with Congolese customs officials or trying to work out how to get around an illegal roadblock is more fun than going to the beach or on a cruise.