Homeward bound: 1 horse, 2 boats, 2 planes, too many cars, and a humbling farewell

I’m writing this dispatch from the Manila airport. If Dante’s ghost ever gets around to doing a sequel to The Divine Comedy, I think this place is in the running for the tenth ring of hell.

Sorry. I love to travel, and I love the Philippines, but as I write this, we’re twenty hours into our long journey home, and we’re looking down the barrel of a four-hour layover, followed by a thirteen-hour flight to Los Angeles. The only upside to this madness is that we leave Manila around noon Monday, and arrive in Los Angeles at eight in the morning also on Monday. Time travel!

Our journey home began Sunday morning on Gili Air, when a man with a horse-drawn cart came to pick us up and take us to the pier.

I tipped our driver, then tried to tip the horse, but that caused some confusion. Maybe there was a language barrier???

At the Gili Air pier, I spotted a 24-hour Halal shawarma stand that looked promising, but we didn’t have time to eat because we had to catch a small boat to Lombok.

Unfortunately, there were no shawarma stands at the Lombok pier, where we waited for a “fast boat” to take us back to Bali. But the really bad news was that the fast boat’s engine kept getting clogged by trash because humans treat Earth’s oceans like dumps. A boat trip that should’ve taken three hours ended up being closer to five.

The SS Not-So-Fast

Our flight from Bali was scheduled to leave at one in the morning local time, but since we’re flying Philippine Airlines, our flight was delayed for no reason at all. Thankfully, we had booked a hotel near the Denpasar airport, so we could shower, nap, and grab a bite to eat. Which is what we did, except that Christina napped, and I didn’t. But I did go for a swim in the hotel pool, before binge-watching the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of the World Cup in Qatar. If you’re wondering, FIFA is Latin for whataboutism.

Just before midnight, we left for the airport. I took a picture of the van that picked us up, but I’m not going to bother including it in this post because vans are the same the world over, unless we’re talking about Van Life on TikTok, which is a subject for another post.

ANYWAY, I sort of had this idea that this dispatch would include a picture of each mode of transport on our journey, but on the five-minute ride to the airport something profound happened, and now I’m going to tell you about that instead.

The man who came to pick us up at the airport was the father of one of our guides. Our guide, a man named Ocha, had wanted to take us himself, but he had a family obligation that somehow didn’t involve his father. Ocha said it was a birthday. His father said it was a wedding. There may have been a misunderstanding there. But that’s besides the point. The point is what Ocha’s dad said to us.

“I want to thank you for coming to Bali,” he said. “Do you know why I say thank you?”

I was going to say something along the lines of, because you have a beautiful island full of lovely people, and really, everyone should visit Bali because it’s awesome. But it turned out that Ocha’s dad was asking a rhetorical question.

“I say thank you because tourism is the only resource Bali has. We cannot grow enough to export. We do not manufacture. We are tourism.”

Comments like this were a recurring theme on our trip. Tourism is the number one industry in Bali. But Bali isn’t a wealthy place. Indonesia is a developing nation; in term’s of GDP per capita, Bali ranks 19th out of 34 provinces. The GDP per capita on Bali is about $10,600 per year.

Ocha’s father might’ve dwelled on the fact that Bali’s prosperity is tied to the people from wealthy nations who choose to vacation there. If I were in his flip-flops, I’d probably dwell on that, and let’s face, I’d be bitter as fuck. But he wasn’t going to dwell, and I couldn’t detect an ounce of bitterness. In fact, the only emotion I picked up on was gratitude—not the kind some influencer sells on social media, but rather the genuine article. Gratitude with a capital G. And I think what Ocha’s father said next explains where that gratitude comes from.

“My village had no electricity when I was young. No plumbing. In 1969, when America goes to the moon, the chief of my village rings the bell, and we go to the temple, and he tells us America is on the moon. And we all look up at the sky—WOW!”

As someone born at the tail end of the Generation X cohort, every Boomer I’ve ever met can tell me where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed and where they were, just six years later, when our nation fulfilled our President’s promise to go to the moon. Many of those Boomer recollections are moving, but none have moved quite so much as hearing about the moon landing from a man who witnessed a giant leap for mankind from an island in the Indian ocean that hadn’t yet made the leap into the twentieth century.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As we pulled up to the airport—a modern airport that puts LAX and Manila to shame, by the way—Ocha’s father made one last point about the distance he and Bali have come in the decades since humans first walked on the moon.

“For my parents and my brothers and sisters life is very hard. Very hard. I work at hotel pool. Hand out towels. Tourists teach me English. A tourist gives me a book to learn English. I learn English to make life better. I teach English to my son. His life is better than mine. That’s why thank you for coming to Bali.”

Actually, thank you, Bali, for having us!