Villla Kevin

Buduk

Peanut stretched out into the middle of the cobbled lane basking in the hot sun completely unbothered by the passing motorbikes that needed to slow down and swerve around him. For a canine, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Hollywood actor Wallace Shawn. Wolfie and the other Bali dogs who claimed the territory along Jalan Nakula travelled in various packs resting during the day and hunting for small rodents in the rice paddies in the afternoon. At the end of the lane was a collection of newly built, ex-pat owned, villas including the Villla Kevin of which Wolfie had become a full-time resident. There was a small plot of land next door that Mathieu, Wolfie’s dog-daddy, owned and where workers from Singaraja were bivouacking while Mathieu’s villa on the far side of Nakula was under construction.

Mathieu and I met in 1999 playing varsity soccer for McGill University where we played three seasons together. After graduation, our lives took us in different directions but we stayed connected through social media. We reconnected in Singapore in 2020, where he had been living for the last 15 years when I travelled through. After graduating with a degree in engineering, Mathieu turned down job offers and left Canada for Australia where he lived in Melbourne and worked in restaurants and took other small jobs to make ends meet. When he talks about first setting foot in St. Kilda, he had the strangest feeling like he was supposed to be there. It was as if cosmic forces had aligned all of his stars and placed him precisely where he was supposed to be. He settled in the area and stayed there for five years. Mathieu graduated from McGill with a 3.95 GPA. He could have had any job out of university that he wanted. Back then he had a girlfriend and they were already starting to make plans and talking about getting married and raising children in St. Lambert where they were both from. Mathieu was too young and too free-spirited and walked away choosing, instead, to see the world. He looks back now at that first love of his, and that time, and admits that that was his shot at a normal, quiet life. Mathieu’s father bought, restored, and resold classic cars at automobile shows around North America and one of Mathieu’s first jobs was as an errand boy for his father on their various tradeshow trips. Mathieu’s mother ran a flight school on the south shore of Montreal. She was that spirited and progressive lady of the 1960’s that broke the glass ceiling in a male-dominated profession. In his early twenties and making the most of working and living in Australia, occasionally Mathieu vacationed in Bali in his downtime as well as travelling back and forth between Australia and Canada. At one point, he bought an old jalopy and drove it all the way along the coast up into northern Queensland where it finally broke down and where he ended up selling the car for a few hundred bucks which was enough money to buy a flight back to Melbourne.

One of the restaurants Mathieu worked at was a high-end place that brought high rollers and fancy rich folk. One loyal customer took a shine to Mathieu and recognized his earning potential. Mathieu had a sharp mind, solid math skills, and street cred. He knows how to talk to people and make them feel valued and safe. This particular customer brought him on board to manage a portion of his investments which was Mathieu’s gateway into portfolio management. Eventually, Mathieu was brought into a company where he developed a reputation for making astute financial investment decisions and for having an unparalleled sense of customer service. It was these opportunities in the finance industry that prompted his move to Singapore. The 2008 financial crisis brought upheaval as, after doling out bonuses and staying afloat for the better part of a year, the firm Mathieu worked for decided to cease operations. Mathieu was never going to be out of work for very long and had suitors from various other firms but decided, instead, to start up his own firm with one of his associates where they now handle portfolios for a small group of investors spread out through the Far East.

The main living area of Villla Kevin sits under a thatched roof ceiling that is almost 10 meters high. Along the back wall are the kitchen and cooking island and counter. Owned by friends of his from Australia, Villla Kevin was always meant to be a temporary stay for Mathieu while his own villa was being built. He converted one end of the living area into his workstation which consisted of a simple table supporting a power source and various computer monitors. There was a TV on one wall with a handcrafted wooden coffee table in front and surrounded by beanbag chairs. The pool ran the entire length of the living area and one could easily prepare lunch in the kitchen and walk right over to the pool and jump in for a dip. There were bedrooms on either side of the living area one of which was never used, one was converted into a storage and office area, and the other was Mathieu and Tika’s master bedroom.

Tika is a 21-year-old Muslim girl from Batam. Batam is an island 10 kilometres across the straight from Singapore and it is common for young Indonesians to hop onto the ferry to Singapore to party which is how Mathieu and Tika met. Their first encounter was friendly and innocent but they kept in touch and then the pandemic hit. The financial markets got volatile and Mathieu and his firm had to weather that storm. Mathieu was shaken up in a car accident and around about the same time his long-term relationship with a local Singaporean disintegrated. When Mathieu took the opportunity to enter Bali on an investor visa to build his villa, it was as much to fulfill a personal dream as it was to escape the stress and toxicity that had piled upon itself in Singapore. There would always be responsibilities there, but Mathieu felt it was time to prioritize his mental health. Tika, on the other hand, was going stir crazy in Batam. Living under the strict, watchful eye of her devoutly religious mother, she reached out to Mathieu and asked if there was enough room in the villa to help her escape and shed her hijab. Mathieu is a facilitator of dreams. His life revolves around asking his clients what they want their life to look like and then strategizing how they can make that happen. That mentality spreads into other areas of his life and, if he could help Tika’s 21-year-old wild and free spirit make the most natural expression of itself, he would do what he could. They did not spend long occupying separate bedrooms. Tika is adept at leveraging the power of social media and helps with the marketing arm of Mathieu’s company Selama Lama Perfect. Up the road lives a half Japanese, half Filipino, neighbour named Maya who mostly surfs but who also runs a business selling sarongs and scented candles. Tika has a half dozen side hustles running at any one time, but using one of the villa’s rooms as her office and as storage to help with Maya’s business is one of her main sources of income.

Tucked away into the far corner of the lot at Villla Kevin was my little bungalow. It was nothing more than a bedroom separated from the rest of the villa, but it had an en suite with a shower, toilet and sink, and Mathieu set up a small table and chair for me if I wanted to be able to work in privacy. Ten months earlier, I had packed my rucksack with long pants and sweaters anticipating a long and cold northern winter that had failed to materialize. By now, everything I owned was tattered and I threw away all of my long pants knowing I would not need them in the heat of Bali. In Tirana, I had had the foresight to purchase a pair of shorts that, along with a handful of t-shirts, were the only wearable pieces of clothing I now owned.

I learned in those first few days that Tika and I were from different worlds and that Mathieu, despite his occasional transformation to Quebecois over the telephone whenever he spoke to his mother, had become an adopted son of the Far East. Still groggy and suffering from jetlag, the spider the length, and half the thickness, of the whole of my outstretched fingers hovering over the bed, was impossible to ignore. Bali was unfamiliar territory and, in my heart, it was between me and him. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone to snap a photo and then slipped off my Havaianas. The spider spun a strand and began to descend to a few inches up from where I was expected to rest my head at night. I stealthily approached the spider with my Havaianna in hand until it was at arm’s length. It twitched suddenly and my eyes rolled back as I swung at the wall with all of the fury that I could muster. I felt the sticky crunch of the spider’s body between the wall and my flip flop as I swung again shooting its body over to the corner of the bungalow. Grabbing at the roll of toilet paper, I sent the spider to its watery grave hoping that he had no friends and that I might be able to sleep through the night. In my mind, I had vanquished the enemy but, when I went back into the villa to share the story with my friends, Tika was on the verge of tears. I showed her the photo that I had taken so that she could see how threatening and menacing my foe was. Oh, my God! She cried out. So cute! Tika reminded me that the spiders that might nest around the villas are completely harmless and that they make nice pets. When I mentioned that one of the neighbourhood frogs or geckos were more likely to make a loving pet, the skin of her mocha-tinted cheeks turned pale and she fled to her bedroom. Such was the chasm between our respective sensibilities, that a spider capable of rearranging the furniture on its own seemed cute to her, but a frog was terrifying.

Buduk is a little village in the Badung regency close to Mengwi. It is tucked several kilometres inland from Batu Bolong and the popular tourist beaches of Changgu and Seminyak. Raya Buduk and Raya Dalung collide with one another creating the crossroads that run through the centre of downtown village life. Villas like Villla Kevin are interspersed between temples and branch out along a maze of streets and small cobbled roads surrounded by rice paddies and palms. The lowlands on the south of the island that surrounds Denpasar, Bali’s most populous city, feel as if they stretch on forever. There are main streets that trucks can use, but there are no highways. From Buduk, there is no direct route to anywhere and streets are always crowded with traffic. Within a few days of my arrival, I had rented a motorcycle for a month and getting accustomed to the beautiful and terrifying journeys through Bali’s streets was a project unto itself. Certain routes require inordinate reserves of patience and making a right turn just about anywhere takes nerves of steel.

It had been a year since I was last on a motorcycle, but I quickly got the hang of it. Indonesians are more adept on a motorbike than they are on foot and locals refuse to walk anywhere. I had reached a point where my own ability to control the bike had not completely caught up to my confidence. In the first few days, I had gone on trips into heavy traffic to Denpasar and up the coast as far as Balian Beach. On one short trip to the fruit sellers on the main road, I turned into traffic to perform a U-turn. Not wanting to inconvenience anyone, I attempted to perform the maneuver quicker than I was able and slammed on the accelerator pitching myself forward without having completed the turn. The motorbike went hurtling over the curb on the far side of the road launching me into the air and onto a construction site. I was more embarrassed than hurt but, as I was only wearing flip flops, the accident tore off one of the nails on my foot and scraped up my shins. It required a visit to a clinic that charged a small fortune for nothing more than an antibiotic and dressing the wound. For those who witnessed it, it was the same old story of a clueless foreigner getting themselves into trouble and falling off of their motorcycle. For me, it was a good lesson that inconveniencing traffic travelling in both directions is par for the course in Bali. Everyone wants to be first through the intersection, but no one wants to get hurt so, if you just block the way, they will stop.

When I first arrived in Bali, all of Indonesia was open. The only restriction was that travellers between Java and Bali needed to provide a negative PCR test. I had dreams of travelling up to Borneo to see Orangutans and taking the motorcycle on a journey over to Lombok and on to Sumbawa and back. Though the accident proved to be a setback to those plans, other factors would eventually interfere.

Sports

Half a world away, the Montreal Canadiens went on a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup final and Euro 2020, which had been postponed by a year because of the pandemic, was also getting underway. For us as fans, it became a sporting maelstrom. Not only did the Canadiens stave off elimination against the Toronto Maple Leafs, but they also breezed past the Winnipeg Jets and then, against all odds, eliminated the heavily favoured Las Vegas Golden Knights. With the time difference, games would begin at 8 am. We would find a stable internet stream, grab our cups of coffee, slide into the bean bag chairs and watch the games in the morning while happily delaying the start of our workdays.

As long-time Montreal Canadiens fans, Mathieu and I took our overseas support to the next level. Because of the pandemic, supply chains around the world were becoming increasingly unreliable so we knew that anything we ordered online, and that had to ship internationally, would risk arriving much later than expected. Few Indonesians have heard of the Montreal Canadiens, the NHL, or even ice hockey. It was easy to find the Canadiens logo online and send a digital copy to one of the clothing stores near Denpasar. We got in touch with a printer who turned around enough t-shirts for Mathieu, Tika, me, some of our friends, and a few other characters from our village who might have stopped by the villa while the games were streaming.

Enjoying Euro 2020 proved the bigger challenge as group games of the round-robin began at 10 pm and ran until 7 am. I was well past the age of having the stamina to work a full day and then rally into the wee hours of the following day for any interest no matter how passionate I was. I managed to catch a few of the 10 pm games and satisfied myself by watching the highlights of the later games the next morning.

Mathieu was half English so he had some stake in it as long as England were in the tournament. I would make a special effort to get up for the final, but committing to a 3 am wake-up call for nations I had no connection to seemed a bridge too far. I told Mathieu that if he was motivated enough to wake up at 3 am to watch England play, then I would get up with him. After England beat Germany, Mathieu got fully invested and was stopping by my bungalow to rap on the door and get me up and we watched his Three Lions dispatch Ukraine without breaking a sweat.

In those early days watching the hockey games and tracking the Euros, I would take some time each day to go on a fruit run and take a daily dip in the pool. Pomelos and snake fruit were the fruits of choice until the season turned and mangoes became the preferred 3 pm snack. For busy workdays, Mathieu introduced me to Kratom. What is it? I asked. It’s a bit like coffee, he said. He went on to explain that it was a plant grown mostly in Borneo that wasn’t illegal to consume in Canada but was illegal to sell. His description gave it some intrigue, but my initial impression was that it was something akin to Matcha or Yerba Mate. There are several varieties of Kratom in colours on a spectrum between white, red and green. Enthusiasts assign qualities to these colours along the spectrum offering benefits including increased energy, mood, pain relief, relaxation, stimulation and focus. Depending on the blend and its derivation, your Kratom may offer you more or less of these benefits. Kratom comes in powder and its delivery method depends on you. Some people blend it into their morning smoothies, but Mathieu preferred to boil hot water and make a tea out of it adding a couple of spoonfuls of local honey. At first, the Kratom seemed to offer me a shot in the arm of motivation and an unconscious willingness to power through the doldrums of the workday. Further research revealed, however, that a common description for Kratom is a “heroine cocktail”.

When it comes to fitness, I need to get there by accident. Some athletes are dedicated to the process and will put themselves through all manner of torture to gain an edge on their opponents. In post-peak life, regular physical exercise becomes a matter just of keeping our penis visible without having to bend or adjust flaps of skin or other body parts while looking reasonably svelte for the women in our lives. I am like a Labrador – if I’m not chasing a ball or fetching a stick then I’m just napping. Mathieu always had a better work ethic on the pitch than I and it manifested into midlife. In Singapore, he played regularly with a couple of local clubs and in Bali, he had a surf instructor and a personal trainer to keep him active in the spaces of the workday. By the time the Canadiens were facing the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup final, Mathieu brought in Klement, a local Balinese, to run us through the paces and punches of boxing. It was a lot of jabs, hooks, uppercuts, skip rope, squats, shadow boxing, planking, and jogs to the end of the lane and back.

I was almost a year removed from the last time my heart rate got over 100 bpm and I was sucking wind within a few minutes. The longer our training went on, the sun got higher in the sky and moisture in the air clung to my skin. By now, my hair and my beard were long and thick and there was nowhere for all of that sweat to go. That intensity proved to be a jolt to the system. Still, the next day I was up at 3 am to watch England come from behind to defeat Denmark and advance to the Euro 2020 final. Until then, Denmark had been on their own little Cinderella run. Christian Eriksen, Denmark’s talisman and star player, collapsed in Denmark’s opening group game. Suffering a sudden cardiac arrest, Eriksen nearly died on the pitch in front of 14,000 Danish spectators at the Parken Stadium in Copenhagen and live in front of the whole world. The entire sporting community took notice. Only a couple of hours after the conclusion of that semi-final match, the Canadiens were set to play in game 5 of the Stanley Cup final. Instead of going back to bed, I drank some coffee and decided to open my laptop and get some work done and power through until puck-drop. By midday, I hit the Kratom to keep me going so that I could charge through until the evening. Since the diagnosis from the Acibadem Sistina in North Macedonia, the condition of my own heart had never been too far from my mind but was also something, as abstract as it still was, that I never wanted to let slow me down. That afternoon I got a dose of the reality that my body might have some limits. I was seeing stars. I could rationalize to myself that I had not had enough restful sleep that night, but this felt more akin to not having slept for 36 hours. I had consumed the Kratom hoping to feel more focused on my work, but I could not sit still. I could not even sit. This was the sensation of feeling simultaneously exhausted and restless. I was twitching nervously and felt consumed by the things I needed to do but could not get myself out of my bean bag chair. This was not chest pains but it was a debilitating sense of helplessness from needing to move and having not a single ounce of strength to do so. No work got done after consuming the Kratom. I felt like I was dying.

There was only one remaining 3 am wake-up call a few days later without any physical training in between. The Stanley Cup playoffs came to an end and life and my condition returned to normal and I was able to sleep soundly and train within my limits, staying comfortable, and not feeling like I was going to pass out. I made a couple of efforts to reintroduce Kratom into my life, but we never had the same relationship after that fateful day and eventually, I understood that I just needed to eliminate it from my life completely.

Savaya and Forever Bali

To set up his Indonesian company, Selama Lama Perfect, Mathieu took over the management of a pair of villas located in a new development at the southern-most point of the island in Uluwatu. Major hotel chains like Hilton and Hyatt were making their way into the area and the Forever Bali Villas were a pair of high-end luxury villas that had already planted their feet into this prized real estate. Forever Bali’s main living area overlooked an infinity pool with the coastline in view behind it. The main dining table extending from the kitchen toward the pool area was capable of seating at least a dozen people. There were two second-floor bedrooms, three main floor bedrooms, a separate living quarter below the pool, a series of rooms acting as small offices, a healthy-sized home gym, a ping-pong table, a kitchen staff, cleaning staff, and on-call masseurs. When open to visitors pre and post-pandemic, it went for a cool $1500 per night. Mathieu was the man in charge but he had left day-to-day operations of the villa in the hands of Oshar.

Oshar was born in Australia but had lived in Indonesia most of her life and spoke perfect Bahasa. Before the pandemic hit, she had fallen in love with a Nigerian named Felix. Mathieu had been instrumental in providing the job opportunity for Oshar and also sponsored Felix’s work visa and helped them to be reunited after he had been forced to return to Nigeria a year earlier. Having returned to Bali at the start of 2021, they had started up their own restaurant called Afrokana Bali. Whenever Oshar would visit Villla Kevin to go over finances and marketing details, she always brought us small meals and treats from the restaurant. Oshar and her new husband each had children from previous relationships. Oshar also regularly volunteered at the local Balinese prison and had become the legal guardian of the young child of an American inmate serving a ten-year sentence for murder that she had befriended. Their home was crowded and filled with grit and chaos with each day spent just trying to make it through to the next – but there was a lot of love. Mathieu, in his way, lent support where and when he could.

Mathieu and I had aged enough to become enamoured with rekindling old friendships like ours but Tika was still young enough to be concerned with making new friends and there were always droves of people stopping by the villa for parties or to just hang out and relax, have a drink, or smoke some dope. The villas in Uluwatu represented a unique opportunity for us all to visit another part of the island and change up our routine. Mathieu had no problem hiring the staff that serviced the villa to bring a bunch of us out for a luxurious getaway weekend.

Savaya is a nightclub built into the cliffs on the south side of Bali that overlooks the sea. It is an impressive place for nightlife enthusiasts and partygoers from all over Bali make the trip to this corner of the island to drink and to dance with hopes of going home with a friendly stranger. One weekend, Savaya hosted an African rhythms night at which Oshar and her husband were allowed to set up a booth and serve food from the restaurant. It was a chance for Mathieu and the rest of us to kill two birds with a single stone – support Oshar, Felix and Afrokana Bali at Savaya and live a night of pure luxury at the Forever Bali villas.

Zili was exploring his homosexuality as well as going through the process of getting over his previous relationship with a boy who was returning to his native Vladivostok. Zili had recently become an apprentice at a tattoo shop and occasionally used Villla Kevin as a base to practice his tattooing on his friends.

Zee worked online as a content provider for various websites. She had a covid scare when her most recent lover, a girl from Sweden, tested positive days after one of their trysts. Zee and Zili were close friends and, with such a profound platonic love for one another, had experimented with heterosexuality on each other. I tried explaining to them that there was nothing inherently wrong with experimenting with sexual orientation but that, if the goal was to test out whether they could enjoy it, the experiment required at least half of the tandem to be fully invested in the paradigm. By the time we were heading out to Uluwatu, Zee was working on a half-Indonesian girl named Mia who was the sixth and final guest at the villa.

In the early afternoon, we sat out in the sun by the pool while Tika, Zili, Zee and Mia drank beer and cheap spirits and listened to music on a small Bluetooth speaker. Shortly after nightfall, we all sat for a catered dinner of local Indonesian dishes like gado gado, nasi goreng, mie goreng, and barbecued seafood. Everyone then retreated to their rooms to adorn themselves in their finest, I still in the only pair of shorts I owned, before we all squeezed into the Katana and headed out into the dark winding roads to the nightclub. Mathieu and I sat in the front watching for every unexpected twist in the road as Zili and the girls sat in the back singing along with the top 40 hits blaring on the radio.

The steady repetition of the bass emanating from Savaya’s DJ stage could be heard for a kilometre in every direction. In order to avoid drawing attention to their lack of compliance with government safety orders, guests of the nightclub were forced to surrender their cellphones so that they could not take pictures or tag the nightclub lest the government get wind and shut the place down or slap it with fines. Entrance was by reservation and our little group was escorted to a lounge chair next to one of the bars overlooking the water where we were served a bottle of cheap rum, mixers, and a bucket of ice.

Indonesians work as ushers, bar staff, and security but the paying crowd was mostly a mix of Americans, Europeans, Russians and a smattering of bohemians, hedonists, and Instagram influencers from every corner of the globe. Getting to Oshar’s booth meant crossing the dance floor and navigating a labyrinth of sweaty drunken bodies.

I made the chair by the bar my cozy little nest and stared out at the stars. Bali had everything. Stunning beaches, soft dewy air, good food and affordable living – but I was realizing that it was not my idea of paradise. There was nothing especially Indonesian about Savaya. In fact, other than its location, it was distinctly not Indonesian. As a foreigner in Bali, you could get anything you wanted and for a fraction of the price that you might pay anywhere else. The result is that Bali is very discovered and much of what made it so appealing in the first place has been lost to the tidal wave of visitors hoping to find what no longer really exists. Even with the pandemic wreaking havoc on tourism, it was crowded and disorderly and catered to every vice. The gurus and spirituality that attracts so many people feels pretentious and manufactured. In the search to find one’s self and live in the here and now, disciples are more likely to find a community or more followers, than they are to achieve any sense of enlightened connection with the source.

When they were not on the dance floor, both Zee and Zili came to visit me privately on my chair, laid down next to me, and shared the concerns and the challenges that they were dealing with. Both admitted that there was something about Savaya that captivated them but left them feeling empty. Just being there staved off anxieties and fears of missing out, but it did not make them happy. Both had hopes and fears about the future that had been dampened by the pandemic. Beyond the havoc and uncertainty that the virus itself had caused, the situation left them feeling underserved and suspicious of authority and the generations that preceded them with the all-too-common refrain being: “what’s the point?”. Having lived through it, one’s twenties feel like too young an age to become cynical but that is also when it happens.

With my belly full of rice and shrimp skewers and Nigerian meat pies, alone and staring out at those stars with the breeze blowing softly upon me, I decided that it was time to put an end to this chapter of the story. Just getting to Bali and penetrating the Eastern Wall had been so many months in the making, and I had only been in Bali a matter of weeks, that I could not so hastily just run away. Leaving for anywhere was going to require a great deal of planning, but in my heart, I was ready to move on.

When the liquor had been drunk, we all headed to the dance floor for one last shake among the crowd and one last chance to be part of the experience. Afterward, we hopped back into the Katana and back out onto the road stopping at the Indomaret for salty snacks and hydration. Tika and the Z’s kept up their karaoke in the back seat of our own mobile nightclub where, unlike at Savaya, the locals outnumbered the foreigners two to one and where the script was flipped and Mathieu and I, the foreigners, worked as ushers, chauffeurs, and security for the local kids in the back.

Savaya was big and loud but had no face. It was in the quiet and gentle moments at Forever Bali, by the big chair under the stars, or in the Katana there and back, that we all became a little misfit family. Zili and Zee visited Villla Kevin almost daily after that night.

The Temple

Up the road from Villla Kevin, steps from where Mathieu was building his own villa, a major project that had been months in the making was nearing completion. With the support of the local community and with the help of donations from throughout Bali, our little village was about to complete its temple that was to hold its grand opening at the end of July. Made was one of the key figures in the village who had helped to spearhead the project – he was also Mathieu’s gardener who came in every other day to tend to the grasses and the trees that grew around the villa.

Made had spent over a decade working on American cruise ships working tax-free in international waters and sending the money back to his village. Because of the pandemic, he had been out of work for months and working for Mathieu was a way to make some extra money during these hard times. Not being able to travel also provided him with the opportunity to oversee the construction of the village temple.

Villla Kevin felt like home while having all of the luxuries of a hotel and Septi was in charge of its smooth operation. She would visit the villa at least 4 days out of the week to clean floors and toilets, make our beds, do our laundry, bless the villa with offerings, and make sure that we had adequate amounts of poor-man’s-gas for cooking and water to drink.

Anytime we crossed the village to visit the worksite, we would inevitably stop by the temple that was next door and where the ladies of the village gathered to gossip and lay offerings to the local deities. Half of the village had a job connected to Mathieu in some way so he was a popular figure in the area and we were always offered some of whatever was cooking in the adjacent homes. Tika was adopted by the local women as a sister to the village. Thanks to Tika, Villla Kevin became unique in its being a fully integrated household where, unlike most of Bali, the separation between locals and foreigners was unclear.

Bali is a misfit island within the archipelago. Indonesia is the world’s largest and most populous Muslim country with the exception of the island of Bali which is predominantly Hindu. As a result, even Indonesians who visit are viewed by the locals as outsiders. Most Javanese are tolerated by the Balinese but there is little love lost for the cosmopolitan, fashion-focused, café-centric weekenders who fly over from Jakarta. Tika, on the other hand, exuded all of the qualities of Bali’s low-key optimism and hedonistic spiritualism. She was embraced by everyone she met as the girl who left the kampong and connected both sides of Indonesia, both sides of Bali, and Mathieu and I to a different side of the foreigner’s experience.

There was a festive atmosphere around the village in the days and weeks leading up to the inauguration of the temple. The clanging of the gamelan rang out into the sky and could be heard across the rice paddies and in neighbouring villages around Buduk. On the day of the ceremony, Made loaned me a traditional saput dress and udeng to wear on my head. The temple was adorned with colourful banners and wreaths of flowers as the smell of incense filled the air. The holy men of the village wore elaborate costumes that represented their local deities as they danced and acted out traditional Hindu stories. Septi’s teenaged daughter, Putri, and her friends from the village performed a series of ceremonial dances. Meals, served in banana leaf dishes, were prepared for everyone who visited. We were honoured guests as every male in the village and the local prefects and holy men from the surrounding area huddled around Mathieu to get a photo. The players in the gamelan offered me a mallet and sat me at an instrument with a tuned array of metal gongs. Just do what I do, said the boy sitting next to me in broken English as I tuned my ears to the uncommon time, tempo, and arrangement of the music. I have learned the difference between a ticket and an invitation and, though there were many performances that day to celebrate the temple ceremony, there was nothing performative about the day. There was an authenticity about every ritual and even of our presence there. There was meaning in every act and word and gesture. To share in that experience was a profound expression of an uncommon exchange of respect and acceptance into the village.

Ubud

Up in the highlands, at the centre of the island, is Ubud. Smaller and less chaotic than the economic hub of Denpasar, Ubud represents Bali’s spiritual heart. Roads in this region, like the rivers, cut through the jungle and run in a jagged north-south direction up toward the lakes and volcanoes near Singaraja on the northern shore. Between the rivers and canyons are mazes of small communities of homes and temples and terrace farms. The island’s topography creates small waterfalls that slide down the mountainsides and join the rivers that empty into the sea.

These clear waterfalls are cleansing and sacred. Temples are strategically built alongside them and rituals with offerings and incense are a part of Balinese life. Families make the journey to visit the waterfalls and offer prayers. Tourists come to take part seeking to be embraced by Bali’s spirit. Businesses have responded and kiosks and restaurants have sprung up alongside each one.

Ubud city centre has become a foreigner enclave within the island. It is the one place in Indonesia where massage parlours and yoga retreat centres outnumber motorcycle repair shops. It is also the place to go to furnish your villa with handcrafted furniture, if you want to purchase a second-hand book to read, or attend a vegan Indonesian cooking class. The ex-pat presence here has deep roots and there are likely as many foreign-owned businesses as locally-owned ones.

I had gotten my confidence on the motorcycle back and, once the Euro and NHL playoffs were done, I made the trip up to Ubud for a few nights. Leaving the village, gave me the opportunity to finally explore more of the island. It was also as much a change of scene as it was to give Mathieu and Tika a few nights of privacy. I checked myself into a converted water tower that had an impressive view staring out over the jungle island toward Mount Agung.

I walked into downtown – the only pedestrian on the island – where I was immediately treated to a showdown between an ex-pat in his mid-fifties and a local Circle K employee. Both were shouting with neither able to understand the other. I, along with a small group of locals, looked on embarrassed for both parties.

Indonesia had become the epicentre of a new surge in covid cases and the government was beginning to crack down by urging locals to get vaccinated and by instituting a series of health measures aimed at slowing the spread. A lack of tourism had been a problem for over a year but was beginning to reach new heights. Police checkpoints had been set up at various intersections between regencies and rumours of foreigners being deported simply for not wearing a mask while travelling were spreading. With prey in dwindling numbers, predatory police officers were looking to extract whatever was left. I got stopped at a police checkpoint and was asked about my documents. When I could not produce an International Driving Permit, my license and passport were seized until I could pay a fine of one and a half million rupiah. It is common for foreigners to be stopped and charged with anything a cop can find to stop them and extract a bribe – usually, 100,000 rupiah is enough to stop them hassling you. When I explained to the group of patrolmen that I did not have 1.5 million IDR, they informed me that there was an ATM machine 10 metres away. Conveniently, the maximum amount that could be withdrawn from the machine was the exact amount of my fine. Not wanting to risk being deported I bit my tongue and paid them off.

During my short trips through the area surrounding Ubud, it was common to see motorcycle driving practices that flew in the face of basic safety. I would consistently share the road with whole families of four or more people and their luggage piled up onto a single motorcycle or helmetless pre-teens barely able to stretch from the seat to the handlebars. They knew the routes around the patrols or could pass through unmolested by virtue of being born there, but my being shaken down just for the money, in light of all the repeated breaches taking place along every road throughout the island, felt needlessly punitive.

On the journey back to Buduk and Villla Kevin I was stopped by police again. My heart sank. I had come to Indonesia and to Bali to live as free as I felt was possible in the covid world, but the frustrations were beginning to boil over. Some of those frustrations, like falling off of the motorcycle and just having been away for so long from the things that I call normal, were of my own making. Others, like the rise in cases and newly imposed restrictions on travel between regencies, were out of my control. Regardless of who or what was to blame for my malaise, I decided that I had had enough of trying to find a way from one place to another in this new world ruled by a virus that seemed to derive its power by the will of God – the lone force that makes the limbs of humankind tremble. As I was getting stopped, I prepared myself to refuse to pay the fine.

The patrolman went through the same procedure as in Ubud and, when I failed to produce an International Driving Permit, my documents were seized and I was ordered to pay a fine. I explained how I had just paid the exact same fine in Ubud and that I was just trying to return to my village so that I could return the motorcycle and rectify the situation. Who knows how many other motorists, likely guilty of innumerable traffic violations, passed through the patrol while I was being questioned.

In order to legally manage his businesses in Bali, Mathieu had retained a local lawyer named Henri. It was Henri that was largely responsible for opening the pathway that got me to Indonesia in the first place and we trusted him. In explaining my story, I informed the patrolman that I would need to explain the situation to my lawyer hoping that Henri could at least explain how I was just trying to get back to Villla Kevin. I was desperately clinging to my cool. The patrolman either believed my story and took pity on me or, more likely, figured that I might present more of a problem than an easy mark. He had a change of heart and allowed me to travel through.

When I arrived back in Buduk and recognized the roadways and warungs of my little village I breathed a sigh of relief. Wolfie came running through the open door of Villla Kevin to greet me wondering where I had been for the last few days. It felt like returning home. I told Mathieu and Tika about my visit to Ubud and explained that it was time for me to go.

Escape

The vaccine rollout was gaining momentum in Canada and the reports reaching Indonesia indicated that cases were in decline and life was returning to normal. Indonesia was descending into its worst spate of cases since the pandemic began. All routes on or off of Bali were closed to unvaccinated travellers. Foreigners were barred from being vaccinated with doses prioritized for locals. The Chinese sinovac vaccine, available in Indonesia, was not recognized in Canada and could not get me home or keep me travelling. Stories sprang up about falsified vaccine passports as did a market for attestations of exemption from doctors.

In our village, a Russian girl in her early twenties died of Dengue Fever. There was a social media campaign to get blood imported all the way from Russia that could save her life but it did not arrive in time.

Villla Kevin continued to operate. My circadian clock got back on pace and, with the Kratom eradicated from my system, I got used to the workouts with Klement. Mathieu would pace around the pool with his arms folded behind his back while speaking into his headset performing his various business calls with investors and financial institutions – I had never heard the phrases due diligence and KYC used so often. I dug in and concentrated on my various projects pausing daily to swim and to collect fruit for the house. Added to my list of projects was finding a way back to Canada.

The price could fluctuate between $400 and $5000 depending on the time of year and the route travelled. The duration of the journey could fluctuate between as little as 18 hours to as long as 50+ and it was rare that a route would have fewer than two stopovers. Any one of those stopovers could compromise the entire journey because so much of the East was still closed off even to passengers in transit. We waited for two weeks on updates to covid protocols in Taiwan, the most favourable route at the best price, but the transit situation did not change along with other lockdown protocols and it became a non-starter. I could retrace my steps and go back to Turkey where flights were direct and travel was open but it would set me back several days needing to completely book a separate route from Istanbul to Vancouver.

We read all of the fine print and found that Japan allowed passengers to transit as long as they did not require a change of airport. We found a route through Narita with Japan Airlines for $1000 that could get me back to Vancouver. There were joint flights between Japan Airlines and Air Canada that could have got me back to Vancouver for less than $500 but it meant staying in Bali for another month and a half – who knows what could happen in that time? Though I was not pressed for time, my heart had already left. I sleep on every decision and gave myself twenty-four hours to let this one settle. The next morning, now committed, I went online to book the trip and the price of the flight had more than doubled. I had already extended my visa for another month so it just meant more waiting.

There wasn’t all that much to do in Buduk but soak up the sun and live a quiet life of peace while spending only a few dollars a day. For most people, my situation might have seemed like paradise but I became stuck in a singular mindset that was focused on returning to Canada and closing this chapter of my life.

I was a visitor in a welcoming country where I needed only to visit an office every few months and pay a nominal fee to extend my stay. With Mathieu and Tika, and Wolfie, and the steady stream of visitors to the villa, we were a happy little family and I was pressed by my housemates to explain myself and my reasons for wanting to leave. There were no immediate pressures and no major deadlines. Were it not for the pandemic situation and the promise of future travel to other parts of the world, I could have stayed happily rooted in Bali like a palm tree swaying in the breeze. But as that breeze blew through me, rustling the whiskers of the beard that had grown down to my chest and my hair now crawling down to the small of my back, I couldn’t help but reflect on just how far I had travelled. The world I had left behind twelve months earlier had changed. It had gotten older. I was in sunshine’s paradise with my dream of winter left long gone somewhere near Wroclaw but with the spirit of time turned cold and rigid like rigor mortis. Sweat slid down my brow onto the brim of my lips, brought on by the heat of Bali’s noonday sun, and I could taste the memory of those dark days and nights in the basement hotel room in Lulea and the damp of the cold shiver of covid – a lifetime ago. I was full of hope when my mother handed me her keys and I tapped Alphonso on the beak as I sped along the highway into the Fraser Valley. “I’ll be fine,” I told her, “we’ve been through the worst of it already. We are humanity – we move forward and there is no way the situation will ever be worse than it was in March.” I had been forced to swallow those words deep down having suffered through what had already killed a million and a half people, but I kept moving forward. They barred the route at Haparanda, but I kept moving forward. They locked the world down and had me wait a while by a safe harbour at the foot of the mountain in Switzerland, but I kept moving forward. Experts looked me in the eye and professed that my heart did not work right, but I kept moving forward. No more routes eastward were open. Mount Agung, towering over Bali island, symbolized the limit of my eastward journey and the end of winter.

The Road to Seseh

Tika bought herself a retro motorbike so she could get around and look cool while she did it but it always needed fixing. Every once in a while she would head out into Denpasar or to Canggu to meet up with friends often leading to uncomfortable questions of whether or not she would be around for supper and Mathieu shrugging his shoulders with uncertainty. In Mathieu’s world, everything ought to be executed with precision. Packages arrive within an imprecise window of time and every slip in the schedule leads to a cascade of delays. She has a phone, he says. All she has to do is check in and let me know. It’s not that hard to project a few hours into the future just so I know whether or not to factor her into plans or not. Some nights Mathieu chalks it up to her age and some nights he chalks it up to her being Indonesian. The building of his villa is months behind schedule because of manpower issues, legal issues, pandemic issues, and the list goes on. Mathieu has spent weeks hunting down suppliers for various aesthetic details for the villa that would never cross my mind for even a single second like the style of the socket covers and cabinet hinges. For Mathieu, the devil is in these sorts of details and occasionally he cannot see that angels are in his stars and he has a life where he can build a villa in Bali – so what if Tika takes off for a night or two and doesn’t send a text message. Whenever anyone gets wind of the difference in their ages it is clear in their faces that they see it as an arrangement but as someone who lives in the bungalow next door, I know that they share a genuine connection. There is something about male pride that forces us to be coy about how much we earn and Mathieu and I dance around the subject on various occasions. I know that Mathieu makes more than I do (after all he’s the one that is building a villa – a prospect that seems so out of reach for me that I would never even consider it) and on several occasions, I wonder whether his salary creeps into the millions. Even if it doesn’t I often figure that, if he needed to come up with that kind of sum, he could. I think of his investors and, by eavesdropping on Mathieu’s various business calls, get wind of the kind of returns that they expect and, knowing what Mathieu does for them, figure at least of some of that must trickle down to him. Mathieu conducts meetings with the villa architect and the project manager as they discuss supplies, materials, and fees calculating each cent down to the #10 screws used to install the flooring. This results in spreadsheets detailing all of the costs that occasionally show up on one of Mathieu’s computer monitors. I try to run quick estimates in my head. Even factoring in that building anything in Indonesia would be cheap compared to North American or Singaporean standards, with the dollar equal to about 15,000 rupiah the numbers begin to creep into the tens and hundreds of millions and are so long and stretched that they become impossible to calculate from a quick glance. The building site is just a few mounds of foundation and piles of cement and rubble, but I’ve seen the architectural blueprints and can imagine its scale and I can calculate that Mathieu’s project is out of reach for the average Joe. If you ever want to know what kind of money a man makes, pay attention to what they try to control. A poor man talks about nothing but money and has absolutely no control. Their lives are disordered and they are so miserable that they can’t hold onto a single thought long enough to even replace the toilet paper when it runs out. The big picture items like housing and food are cobbled together ad hoc and all they can really focus on is the last time they had sex and whether or not they will ever have it again. Bills lapse and the debts pile up – I’ve been there. The comfortable middle class stops talking about having or not having money. Meals include protein, a vegetable, and starch. All of their bills are paid by direct payment and rent cheques or mortgage payments move from bank to bank with the stroke of a pen made years earlier. They own a few plants that they occasionally have to replace because they forgot to water them. They own things like shower curtains and ottomans and tea kettles and side tables that they bought themselves but any would do without consideration for style or special features. People who earn more than the average Joe prefer itemized receipts that they review instinctually. They have an opinion about ceiling fans and know what kind of wood their bureau is made from. They are early adopters of technology, get the best deals, remind you about the deals that they got, drink the top-shelf whiskeys, balance their vices with virtues like oat milk smoothies and regular exercise, have a standing appointment with their barber, and read as much as they watch TV. They are the paragon of control. Then you lose control when you climb high enough to be among the ultra-rich. That loss of control is complete just like the poor guy with no money. They think a banana costs a fiver (an amount of cash that they can’t even drum up because they are not accustomed to dealing with single digits). Everything they buy costs more than it needs to because they have decided that they want it so the price doesn’t matter. They eat strange, rare, foods for no other reason but that they are strange and rare (fresh abalone somehow gets incorporated into every dish) and where cooking for themselves is a bridge too far given their station. They drive (or are driven in) a car that is impractical to drive. They wear watches that keep time as well as any other but that cost vast sums of money that no one would spend on something so trivial as an ornament for one’s wrist because it is the 21st century and the current time is posted digitally somewhere at every 10 metres and the phrase, excuse me, do you have the time? has been phased out of existence. These are the four broad categories (quadrants) of wealth and control. It is visible on every store shelf like when it is time to buy a television from Best Buy and your choices are the rock-bottom-32-inch-made-in-Cambodia-knock-off-I-just-need-a-tv, the reliable 50-inch Sony, Samsung, or LG, their respective 8K 80-inch versions, or the niche brand with a name like Xydyntra that is also 8K and 80 inches but is triple the cost because its display contains a patented blend of rare earth minerals that can display 3 extra shades of violet not available on other televisions and will be personally installed by a once-famous, down on their luck, recording artist. When it comes to control, Mathieu falls into that third category. I ask him about all of these details that he concerns himself with, half pressuring him to concede that his energies would be better served elsewhere, and he reminds me of what happens when he is not on top of things. Have you seen the sign on the outside of the villa? he asks me. I had that sign put up and that’s when I learned that if you just say what you need and you don’t double and triple check then it’s just going to get buggered up. I ask him about what sign he is talking about and he tells me to go look at it. What are you talking about? I ask again and then he leads me out of the villa to look at it. Look carefully, he says. Do you see it? If you simply passed by and you didn’t care then you would never notice the triple curl of the cursive ‘L’s in the word “villa” but once you see it then that is all you see.

One of those Tika-less evenings, soon after I arrived in Bali, Mathieu and I headed out in the Katana and drove out to a nearby beach village called Seseh. By beach community standards, Seseh was a far cry from its neighbours in Canggu and Seminyak. There were no hotels, no multi-storeyed pubs, and no parties. At night, there was little to light the way but the moon and a few lights shimmering dimly through the palms. At the end of the road by the beach, there is a small temple and a few secluded villas. Down the beach, tucked into the jungle, is a small warung called Pantai.

The clientele is foreigners, but there are never more than a half dozen at a time. There are a few wood tables with tree stumps for chairs and a few palapas with squat, weather-beaten and half-broken, wooden tables and a few beanbag chairs. The menu is simple: a few salads, a couple of rice and noodle dishes, and French fries and other small snacks. It won’t ever earn a Michelin star but it’s a good place to sip from a coconut and listen to the waves crash on the beach. “Cheap and cheerful” is how Mathieu describes warungs like Pantai.

Mathieu and I visited the warung in Seseh a few times with Tika and friends, but mostly it was a place that he and I would go to talk or even just sit in silence. Wolfie would come with us and run up and down the beach until he would get lost because we weren’t paying attention. That little warung became a spot of familiarity and comfort – a home away from home.

Sometimes Canada would feel far away and, with all of the restrictions brought on by rising covid cases, Bali felt cut off from the rest of the world. It was illegal to travel without a vaccine and illegal for us to get a vaccine. The warung at Seseh became a place for me to go to clear my head and benefit from a change of scene.

There were days when I worried that the motorbike accident was due to my incompetence, but I later discovered that, though yes it was, it was a one-off. With the right frame of mind, riding around Bali is a joy and it is actually one’s sense of caution that can get in the way and make things unsafe. Besides the warung by the beach, the journey from Villla Kevin to Seseh became one of my favourite reasons to head out on the road.

Instead of riding toward Buduk town, the route to Seseh involved heading toward quieter areas of the village where the rice fields opened up. Down a small incline, the road crossed a canyon river before you needed to turn toward the coast onto one of the main roads that head into Pererenan. There was never too much traffic until you hit town at the crossing that leads you to Tanah Lot. Bali’s charm is quickly sapped along this stretch that is littered with Pertamina stations, a Pepito, outlet stores, and warehouses until you turn onto the main Seseh road that eventually leads to the beach. The sky opens up along the main Seseh road. Every feature – palm tree, café, villa, temple – is sparsely laid out and it is possible to look out over the rice fields for kilometres in every direction to the volcanic mountains and clouds and clusters of palm forests off in the distance. The sea is still out of sight but here you can sense its presence. Breezes are free to sweep along through the watery grasses and they catch you as you glide along swaying over the gently sloping turns in the road. Ubud can go to hell. Canggu and Seminyak with their overcrowded beaches, ramen joints, and organic soap shops can join her. Denpasar, with its never-ending traffic congestion, its searing asphalt, and its unrelenting chatter I can barely find the strength to tolerate. I choose to dismiss all of Bali’s towering white-washed villas and their infinity pools that compete for the choicest view of sunrise and sunset. I have no time to waste with Savaya and its attention-stealing, alcohol-induced, emptiness. But on my motorbike, along this single stretch of road, with the wind in my hair, I believe that, even against my better judgment, maybe even I can fall in love.

Villla Kevin

The morning sky transitions from cobalt to indigo and the buzzing of the aircon fades into the hum of a brand new day. Roosters cackle and the work crew next door prepare their breakfast. The Bali dogs have begun to rustle through the grasses as I rustle and stretch out under the sheets.

I have grown accustomed to the dampness of the cool morning moisture that rests on the grasses between my bungalow and the villa during the night. I linger in the grass to feel the small pools of water fill the spaces between my toes. Wolfie, nestled into one of the bean bag chairs by the TV, lazily peers out at me through one eye as I reach down to rub his belly and his whole body stiffens out in a big morning stretch. I fire up the stove to prepare my coffee. The noises are still sparse enough on the compound that I can hear the whirring of motorcycle engines on the road that leads to Buduk town.

I make my paces back to the bungalow and almost spill my coffee dodging a frog hopping across the grass in front of me. I am thirteen hours in the future so I sit in bed, open my laptop, and go over the emails that have collected in my inbox over the previous day. Some need immediate attention, some can wait.

The sky has become its familiar shade of blue by the time I emerge from the bungalow again. Wolfie is still half asleep and barely reacts when I step onto the villa floor but, in the intervening hour, has switched from one bean bag chair to another. I setup my workstation on my side of what has become the Selama Lama Perfect Office 2.0 and open up the first project of the day. I figure I can push out a small set of deliverables by noon that would eat up a big chunk of what is on my plate and free up my options for the afternoon. I can hear the new age moans and incantations from Mathieu’s ritual meditation emanating from the store room. He is seated cross-legged, eyes closed, and hands placed gently on his knees.

Septi and Putri have their own set of keys to the villa and let themselves in by the side door. Septi waddles up the steps cradling a 20-litre bottle of water with Putri limping behind, a tank of poor-man’s gas dangling by her side. Hello! Good Morning! Septi calls out to me as Putri waves with a bashful grin. I remove my headphones and wave to offer a performative recognition of their arrival. How are you? I ask. A straight, Good, is the ritualized response we have settled on. Made’s water hose cranks on with a buzz as he begins trimming the palms around the villa.

Mathieu emerges from the storeroom and takes his place in his chair in front of his monitors. Hey, he says. Hey, I respond. He notices Septi and Putri and says hello and relays a few instructions. His fingers tap away on his keyboard, eyes shifting from one screen to another, as he reviews the various windows he has open and the details of various sets of spreadsheets. Klement will be here in one hour. You in? he asks.

Tika emerges from the master bedroom in her workout clothes. With all of the clothes that I had been wearing over the last year now sent to the trash bin, I have to borrow clothes from Mathieu. Kaiyu, Maya’s dog from down the street, knows where Wolfie lives and has trotted down to the villa on her own. Together, they tear through the villa upending furniture and undoing Septi’s hard work. Sometimes it looks playful and sometimes Kaiyu makes for one of Wolfie’s toys and he gets possessive so the lips curl back, the growling starts, and the fangs come out. Nobody intervenes unless they get too close to the computers. The small flowers and sticks of incense from the offerings that Septi has placed around the pool get scattered in every direction.

The sun is high now and I can feel it beating down on me in the alleyway. Mathieu, Tika and I do a circuit of rounds. One of us jumps rope with runs to the end of the lane and back, one of us shadow boxes, and the other bangs on the mitts with Klement who puts us through our paces. Jab… Jab… Jab, Jab, Hook, Jab… Uppercut! I feel okay but the gloves are a weight you don’t notice until you have to keep your hands up by your temples for three minutes straight – easy in principle, difficult in execution. I never press myself too hard. My heart is never too far from my mind. It being so hot and humid makes it feel like more of a workout than it probably is and thoughts of Christian Eriksen keep me from really pushing to my limit. We finish with push-ups and planks before I jump in the pool. After a quick shower to get clean, I get back to my laptop and back to work.

Tika has taken the motorbike into Denpasar to run errands and Mathieu is back at his desk with his headset on attending a zoom meeting with his business partner and a client. Mathieu looks down at his phone for a moment and then motions over at me to get my attention. There is a Gojek driver at the door dropping off various items for Maya’s business like material for sarongs, soy wax, beads, and moulds. The driver asks if I am Tika and I just say yes. He snaps my photo and I trudge various packages into the storeroom as Wolfie and Kaiyu slink out while the door is open and head off into the rice paddies. They won’t be back for hours but when they do return they will be half-covered in mud. There is always a half-hearted amount of concern when the dogs go off into the rice paddies because they disrupt the farmers who have a reputation for poisoning dogs who disturb their crops, but it seems even crueller to keep them confined to the villa. We never see it but there must be some violence that ensues whenever one of the dogs enters the fields because every time a farmer, distinguishable from their wellingtons and the sickle dangling from their waist, emerges from the field Wolfie goes into beast mode and needs to be restrained.

Noon arrives and I fry up some rice and vegetables for a quick lunch. Taking a break from my work, I watch YouTube videos with my headphones on because Tika has returned and is watching Breaking Bad on the big TV but I’ve now missed too many episodes to follow what is going on. Mathieu offers me kratom and I decline. With my belly filled from the food and my muscles turned to jelly from the workout, I haven’t the passion for the work that I did before the sun was up but I power through for another hour before I get my second wind and begin to feel antsy and need to leave to clear my head.

I ride off my route to stop at a nearby pertamini station. This is my regular fuel stop because I am terrible at removing and replacing the gas cap and the girl who works there has never once looked at me like I am completely incompetent. I ride into Buduk to Iwaka market to pick up lapis – a soft and moist layer cake that I enjoy eating with my afternoon tea. I ride by my favourite fruit shop where I used to buy pomelos and snake fruit but they have closed for the season. Down the road, a woman has a small trailer out of which she is selling mangoes so I pick up a few. I drop everything off at the villa, cut up one of the mangoes I had bought on the previous haul and that has ripened to perfection or is fully cooked as Tika likes to say. My previous project has finished its rendering process and I muster the energy to edit another video.

By three o’clock, the sun has had time to beat down heavily on the island but has begun its downward trajectory. There is still some of the best part of the day left and I would hate myself if I spent it all behind a computer screen. I hop back onto the motorcycle so that I can drive the Seseh road. I park and walk along the beach and look out over the waves. I still haven’t told Mathieu and Tika that I finally got the price I was looking for and bought my ticket back to Canada. I mull over how to break the news.

I am not used to people caring about my whereabouts especially when it involves being within close proximity. My desire to leave Bali has come up in conversation a few times over the last few days and Zili keeps asking me why I would want to leave. I explain, but I know that I am justifying the reasons as much to myself as I am to him. Mathieu understands better than anyone all of my reasons for going back but I know I am still going to find it hard to break the news. Over the last two months, we have had our share of deep and meaningful conversations. Everyone has had their life jostled off-kilter by the pandemic in some way and few have emerged on the far end better off, psychologically speaking, than they were a year ago. I have become jumpy and nervous. Should one of the dogs suddenly knock over a chair, it will startle me more than it ever would have a year earlier. I have discovered that any disturbance to the solidity of life has become profoundly more disturbing. We have interfered with our collective ability to roll with punches and altering the established dynamic at Villla Kevin is going to seem like a big swing.

Besides delving into the past, Mathieu and I had done our share of dreaming. Itsy, a puppy mill dog that Mathieu rescued some years ago, is still in Singapore and he is looking for even more reasons to go back. There have been dramas with the tenants at the apartment he owns which he could sort out just by showing up. Because it’s Mathieu, he used his apartment in Singapore to help out a friend who then requested that they also use it to help out a friend of their own. Eventually, everyone began to abuse Mathieu’s kindness. With vaccine uptake now allowing movement to citizens of the Far East, high-profile clients were planning to make trips into Singapore for meet and greets and strategy meetings. Mathieu was constantly mulling over a variety of different scenarios but what would prove to be the most compelling reason to return was still anyone’s guess. At one point during the pandemic, Singapore, a city that had been coasting through the pandemic relatively unscathed, instituted a 21-day quarantine period to mitigate incoming cases and Mathieu declared that that kind of absurdity was something he was not prepared to endure. He and Tika dreamed about getting away from Indonesia, even just for a little bit, to go explore Turkey on vacation and the prospect of travelling to Canada had even come up but for the problem of Tika’s citizenship and the red tape blocking her entry to the country. The perception of time passing had also become distorted by the pandemic. Mathieu could just as easily decide to do nothing. The business was still being managed and progress, at long last, was being made at the construction site. But standing pat, for however long, felt stagnant like surrendering to the world just passing you by and collecting barnacles instead of establishing roots.

In just a couple of months, I had manifested a beautiful and quiet little life in paradise and I was walking away. The lure to keep moving forward in a world that had seemed to have come to a hard stop was just too great. There was a part of my spirit, gazing out over the sea on such days, where I believed that if I gave into cynicism that my own reluctance to move on would drag the world back. I resolved to be at the front of any forward momentum preferring to drag the rest of the world with me.

With the afternoon waning and the colours in the sky shifting from blue to violet and magenta, I hopped back on my motorbike to make the drive back to Buduk. Weaving along the road between the palms, my heart was full of sadness knowing that this might be my last ride on the Seseh road. Similarly, my spirit was lifted by my suspicion that there would be other roads like it – beautiful open roads to paradise – and every chance that I would have to travel them a surge of nostalgia would well up inside of me allowing me to return to here, to this place, to this time, and to all that I left behind. Beautiful roads have that effect. Each one is a part of me, as are all those who rode them with me as our lives intertwined if for no more than a brief moment.

Arriving back at Villla Kevin I notice Wolfie sitting by the fire with the construction workers who are preparing their evening meal. Wolfie sees me driving up the road and hears me calling out to him, but the food is better where he is and so he pretends not to notice me. The workers love Wolfie, Agus they call him, but they know where he belongs so they lead him over to the villa.

Mathieu and Tika have gone off to Canggu to meet with friends for a drink. Still sweating from the heat of the day, I plop down onto one of the bean bag chairs and turn on the TV. I play shows that I have seen before because I don’t need entertaining but just need to turn off the circuits in my brain for a little while. There are other beanbag chairs available but Wolfie decides to flop down on top of me hoping that I will rub his belly.

It is quarter-to-eight when I hear the dinging of a bell off in the distance. The bakso man is right on schedule and I cry out at the top of my lungs to get his attention. Bakso! Bakso! Wolfie jumps off of me frightened by my outburst. I run to the kitchen to grab a bowl before I go running over to my bungalow to grab a few rupiah to pay the bakso man. I rush out into the alley without so much as grabbing my flip-flops and Wolfie takes this opportunity to run out into the rice paddies again. The bakso man fills my bowl with noodles and broth, bits of fried won-tons, and two fist-sized meatballs. Some people say that bakso balls are made from the dogs and the rodents that get caught in the rice paddies but it’s all conjecture. Even if it is true, they are delicious.

You can’t exactly buy bakso soup in Canada and, even if you could, it would cost fifteen dollars instead of a dollar-fifty. I stare into my bowl and suspect that this might be my last bakso soup for a while. I will have to learn to make it for myself.

It is the end of my day and I lack the enthusiasm to coax Wolfie out from the rice paddies. Mathieu probably wouldn’t care if I just did nothing but I refuse to be a bad guest and a negligent dog owner so I grab a couple of dog treats and track down Wolfie’s favourite squeaky toy. I stand out in the alley whistling and calling out to him. I would like to believe that Wolfie, after two months, sees me as above him in the Villla Kevin hierarchy and responds to my command, but I know that he simply smells one of his treats. His mistrust in me is evident when I refuse to surrender the treat before leading him through the gate into the villa and he begins to show signs of reluctance. His brain is smaller than mine but he is using all of it making the calculation of what it means to follow me back into the villa. It takes more squeaking of his toy and calling of his name to finally get him through the door but my persistence eventually wins out. In order to reinforce my mastery over him in my own mind, I command him to sit. When he complies, I toss him the treat and lock the villa door behind me. I have won, for now.

I sit back down by the TV as Wolfie paces around the villa. He stands next to me with a hangdog expression. I tap my chest and he hops on top of me again licking my nose as the rest of him falls limp and we both begin to fade into dreamland.

On another day, I may have gone off with Mathieu and Tika to Batu Balong for jagung bakar and to watch the sunset. Or Zili and Zee would have come over to drink cheap liquor, smoke pot, and work on tattoos with some other friends. Maybe Mathieu and Tika and I would have had a quiet night together.Mathieu might have boiled some shrimp heads for broth for tomorrow’s fish stew while I put together a meal for the three of us. Jimbaran fish market was far to go for fresh grilled fish and sambal, but it was hard to find better anywhere else. Occasionally we would rig up our own barbecue and grill what we could get our hands on from local surfer friends and fishermen. Maybe Mathieu and I would convince Tika to order a local dish we had not yet discovered on our own like Soto Medan and have Gojek just deliver it. There will be shadows of space forever hovering over that wooden table in Villla Kevin where the four of us – Mathieu, Tika, myself and Wolfie – sat together smiling in those moments we work so hard to make last forever.

My eyelids are heavy and I excuse myself from the table. Crossing the Villla over the grass that, during the day, has become crispy from the sun, I make my way over to my bungalow. The geckos squawking no longer concern me, but I make sure to check that there are no spiders hovering over the bed. I stare up at the ceiling fan and concentrate on the hum of the air-con. I cry small tears on the inside because it is time to go. I know that I may never revisit all of these small homes across the world and cannot know for sure when I will see again all those who made them more than just places to stay.