Where the buffalos roam free
Durban POISON
IAM lying on Kuta beach, sweating heavily and pouring beer over my bubbling chest, while watching planes come in low over the sea every 10 minutes to land at Bali’s Denpasar Airport, each carrying its ungodly cargo of yawling Aussies, brawling Brazzos and jawling Saffers.
South Africans party hard when they travel to foreign countries. They are drunk and wrestling the taxi driver for control of the wheel before even leaving the airport parking. Maybe it’s just me. In my defence, he did seem to be going in the wrong direction.
I wasn’t aware that everyone in Bali drives in the wrong direction when setting off. Eventually, it all corrects itself. You just have to be patient.
I wasn’t being patient. I wanted to surf some of the best waves on the planet. As did half of Australia, a third of Brazil and two North Koreans who looked as if they’d paddled all the way from Pyongyang.
I’m on the island of the dogs for my son’s wedding. What? That’s not right. I don’t have a son. For a long time I thought I did. Then I watched a programme about parenting and discovered I’d been doing it all wrong.
The son I thought I had – the one with the high-pitched voice, girly mannerisms and disturbing penchant for flouncing about in heels and camo-print skirts – was, in fact, a girl.
She’s all grown up now and has forgiven me for the terrible things I did to her to get her voice to break when she was 14. Let us not even speak of the nights I dragged her out on pub crawls to teach her to drink and fight like a man.
“Clive,” I’d say, “drink up so that we may depart this filthy den and disturb the peace as boys have done since the dawn of time. Let us pillage this village.”
“My name’s not Clive,” she would say, before sashaying out into the night for a little trash talk and some light slapping. She was always rubbish at pillaging. That was a sign right there. But I was blind. Blind to reality. Blind to gender. Blind drunk.
But that was then and this is now. She’s 28. Or maybe 29. Definitely under 30. I hope so. If I’m wrong, I’m much older than I think I am and that wouldn’t do at all. She’s been living with a Belgian-namibian bloke for nine years and they’ve decided to get married. Having developed a pathological allergy to marriage, I was devastated.
“Why can’t you just keep living in sin?” I shouted. She said God would punish me, then we laughed and laughed because she knows there is no God. She got that from me. It might be my greatest accomplishment.
Counter-missionaries do incredible work. We are the unsung heroes of our time and deserve government funding.
Wilting from Bali’s humidity and Singapore Airlines gin, we hired a gold Toyota Kijang with tinted windows and hit the motorbike-infested roads.
Wherever we went, people darted us nervous glances and quickly got out of our way. I assume they mistook us for gangster pimps down from Java on a revenge mission. Or, knowing Bali, to restock their orchard garden.
The blue-haired loinfruit, Liberty, and her scraggly bearded ponytailed reggae-loving husbandto-be, Laurent, wanted to proceed directly to Ubud in central Bali where the nuptials were happening in a few days’ time.
“We don’t really need you there right now,” said Laurent.
“We can drop you at the coast if you like,” said Liberty.
I’m not very good at gauging when I’m not wanted. For instance, I stayed married for five years longer than necessary in both of my marriages. I am getting better at reading the signs and taking the hints, though.
She booked me into a oneroomed home stay in Canggu too far from the beach to walk with my surfboard, forcing me to hire a motorbike with board racks and thus dramatically raising the possibility of an early exit of the troublesome paterfamilias. I’m sure it wasn’t deliberate.
My wooden cabin was set in a tropical garden which instantly disappeared from sight the moment I stepped through the door. It’s the Bali way. Everything is perfect apart from one or two oversights. Like forgetting to put windows in the guests’ accommodation. Or placing the plug sockets on the ceiling.
The owner kept giving me cold Bintangs and when he decided I’d had enough he handed me the keys to a motorbike and a tiny helmet that gave me Shar-pei-face.
“You go old man’s bar,” he said, smiling happily as I veered off the road and into a rice paddy. I wasn’t delighted at the prospect of drowning my jet lag in a bar reserved for geriatrics, but the hard truth is that there really is no country for old men.
Turned out the bar was called Old Man’s. I don’t know why. I was always the oldest person there by far. The female clientele was abysmally beautiful and the men were okay if chiselled faces and tanned, ripped torsos are your thing. They all looked as if they’d been dipped into vats of cheap floating tattoos that randomly affixed themselves to different body parts.
A couple of days later the children returned to fetch me. Sitting in the back seat was my first ex-wife. I thought Liberty had been joking when she told me earlier her mother was coming. I thought she was simply trying to scare me to death in the hope of an early life insurance payout.
“Hello Gwen,” I said in the tone Seinfeld uses when he greets Newman. We’ve barely seen or spoken to one another in the past 20 years.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Just one? I have two Cambodian killing fields worth of bones to pick. I didn’t say that aloud, obviously.
Instead, I put my foot down and declared the holiday to be a bonefree occasion. She seemed to like the new assertive me and playfully rabbit punched me in the kidneys.
We were joined in the surfing village of Balangan by Ninz and Boontang, Cape Town friends of the bridal couple.
Ninz is an obsessive animal lover and within an hour she had the local Bali dogs eating out of her handbag. Boontang, who has a tattoo of their dog on his arm, had brought his board along, so we combined forces in a low-key war against the aggro Australian wave hogs, none of whom we could understand, no matter how slowly they shouted at us.
It can’t be easy co-ordinating a wedding that involves friends and family flying in from around the world and Liberty was spending a lot of time on her phone.
I don’t always recognise when people are stressed because I was born without a stress gland in my brain. So when I delivered one of my legendary one-liners, she deployed her mother’s eyebrows and stalked off.
Ten minutes later Laurent came up to me and said I needed to watch what I say. I suppose he was expecting me to lower my eyes, murmur an apology and back away slowly.
People think it’s only war veterans and acid casualties who have flashbacks. Not true. I lived through a time when vicious brutes like P W Botha tried to tell us what to do, say and write. Okay. I might’ve had a small flashback.
So there it was. A Mexican stand-off in Bali but with buffalos instead of Mexicans. The young buffalo was challenging the old buffalo for... I don’t know what buffalos challenge each other for. Forget I even mentioned buffalos. They probably shag their own relatives. Beasts.
But something ancient was happening as we stood there, eyeball to eyeball, the smell of imminent violence hanging heavy in the tropical air.
He was defending his woman. But she was also my daughter. I had known her since birth. I had been the defender, the protector, the provider. I gave her food and clothes and a love of books. I taught her how to drink and drive before she could even walk.
You don’t have this trouble with cars. You sign a transfer of ownership and that’s it. For years you might think fondly of that car and the places you’ve been together, but it’s no longer your car or your responsibility.
I’m not saying I think of my daughter as a car. That would be ridiculous. She doesn’t even have a licence. But, as Laurent made it very clear, he’d take it from here.
Not so fast, sonny. On Wednesday I get to walk Liberty down the aisle and give her away. No lobola, no charge. Until then, I’m ready to go the full 10 rounds.
Thing is, Laurent, you love my daughter. So let me rather buy you 10 rounds.