Story World Research in Amed

I’m beginning my fourth month in lockdown here in East Bali.

It could be worse.

My visa expired two months ago, my passport expires in two months and the US consulate won’t renew it.

The slimeballs.

Blame it on the virus.

Here in Amed, the shortage of money has destroyed the tourism industry. Nobody is starving, but the tourists are as good as gone.

The average monthly wage in Bali is a meager 140 dollars.

No one in Amed has fallen ill or died from the virus, but I suspect that a kind of herd immunity has developed among the population.

I can’t prove that.

Testing is a foreign concept here.

I stumbled into a wedding in Culik and was a guest of honor.

You could eat all the food for free.

Social distancing and the wearing of masks were not compulsory.

What’s for eats?

Chicken satey with bumbu cagang: skewered chicken nuggets with spicy brown peanut sauce.

How about another favorite?

Tekwan: spicy fish ball soup with noodles and vegetables swimming in it.

A real treat is Terang Bulan: stuffed pancakes with a sweet peanut filling.

Jemeluk Bay has been officially closed, but not to those with pluck.

It is a paradise for snorkeling and diving.

An underwater Disneyland.

I hired a boat and jumped off.

It was like being in a huge aquarium without walls.

My ocean dream exploded with wondrously bright colors and ghostly movements.

Brown-green turtles, blue starfish, and yellow butterfly fish were everywhere.

There were also rabbitfish, raccoonfish, batfish, cowfish, and parrotfish to be seen in abundance.

Small schools of unrecognizable blue fish looked almost fluorescent.

The coral bundles were spectacular.

Corals are not rocks, but animals that form colonies with a common skeletal shell.

What a difference a year makes.

One year ago today I arrived in Sri Lanka.

Now I’m in Bali.

I started writing the first draft of Zone Girls just before the Easter bombings that devastated the tourism and real estate industry in Sri Lanka.

Now I’m about to finish the first draft of Zone Girls in Bali as the coronavirus wreaks havoc on the tourism industry here.

If I had waited just one week longer, I would have been denied entry to Bali.

I’m just one step ahead of the virus.

Drum roll.

Global markets are imploding and the world is being sucked into a nasty lockdown of unknown duration.

Domestic travel in Indonesia is becoming increasingly difficult.

My visa expires at the beginning of May and all other countries in Asia have closed their borders.

California is the only port I have left and I will probably be forced to self-isolate if I end up in SFO or LAX.

But hey, life could be worse.

Bali is beautiful, exotic, and enchanting.

My hotel near the beach is empty, except for the staff and the Australian owner, who is flying home in two days and will be put up in a hotel for two weeks when he lands in Melbourne.

My luxury hotel only costs a few cents on the dollar.

There are no more tourists in Amed Beach.

They have all fled, except for me and a few long-term expats, who refuse to leave.

Virus cases in Indonesia are on the rise and the mortality rate is a whopping 10%.

But I suspect the death rate will drop as soon as the thousands of untested cases become known.

So far, only the worst cases have been smoked out.

Drum roll.

I live next to Mount Agung, a living and sacred volcano whose daily moods cast a spell over me and provide wild and constant inspiration.

Especially at night, when lightning illuminates the towering silhouette of Mount Agung.

The food is cheap and delicious.

Eighty-seven cents for a buffet plate.

For fifty cents you can wash it down with coconut juice.

The days are scorching hot and humid, but there’s a pool where you can let off steam.

The lush green landscape is intense.

Gecko lizards serenade me at night with their guttural roars.

A two-day festival called Nyepi has just come to an end.

It’s a Balinese day of sacred silence.

No lights or electricity.

No work.

No going out.

No entertainment.

A lockdown within a lockdown.

The Australian owner asked me to draw the curtains so that the security patrols couldn’t see any light in my room.

The day before the lockdown, the locals paraded a group of demon statues depicting many villains that need to be excommunicated from daily life.

The main demon is Ogoh-Ogoh, whose effigy will be burned after the lockdown ends.

The primal energies of the island are fierce.

Yesterday, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake shook my room.

Life is never boring in paradise.

In these days of crisis, it’s important to stay on top of things.

The virus epidemic of 1918 killed 100 million people in eighteen months.

Six hundred and fifty thousand Americans died in just three months.

The second wave of the virus was so horrific that a healthy person died within twenty-four hours after showing symptoms such as a violent cough, high fever, hallucinations, and a blue of the lungs when pneumonia set in. The victim’s lungs were flooded. It was like drowning in your own fluid.

Pretty creepy.

Ogoh-Ogoh could have been on a rampage.

Global GDP shrank by five percent.

Ouch.

A mini-depression had set in, but in three years the Roaring Twenties began, triggering a global boom and unleashing unimagined amounts of new wealth.

So keep this context in mind.

C-19 isn’t nearly as bad as the horror double whammy of 1918: pestilence and global war.

Climate change will eventually challenge us to the extreme, but that’s still a good thirty to forty years away.

That’s not much consolation, I know.

Smile at me.

I’ll be in touch from Amed, Bali.