---------------------------------------------------------------- FROST WARNING #01 A STORMWATCH INFORMATION FRONT PUBLICATION ---------------------------------------------------------------- "WHAT TO DO ON A SLOW NIGHT IN BALI" or "EH YOU AUSTRALIAN, BOY?" [Mad Matt] Adelaide, So. Australia - Australia [ July 24, 1997 ] ---------------------------------------------------------------- [S.I.F. -- Frost Warning Contact Information:] WWW: http://www.cryogen.com/acidrain E-mail: [PGP Key Available on Request] REDISTRIBUTE/REPUBLISH FREELY IN UNMODIFIED FORM ---------------------------------------------------------------- Stormwatch Frost Warnings: G-Files for the dawn of the 21st Century ---------------------------------------------------------------- [Note from Jake Century: Hunter S. Thompson would be proud of our hero, Mad Matt, a Math & Computer Science student at University of Adelaide in South Australia. There are amateurs and professionals, and tripping in Indonesia makes you an instant professional. Hell, tripping ANYWHERE in the Third World makes you a professional, even if it's your first goddamn experience. I challenge anyone to beat this -- Try sucking down fat hits of DMT smoke from a crack pipe in East Timor in the middle of a firefight. Nothing short of this will impress me now that Matt has set the benchmark.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- Prologue: Before I start this story, I think I should set the scene some. And I should also point out I'm Australian. The events recounted below occurred a fair few years back, when I was at the tender age of sixteen. At the time my father was working for a small British oil company called LASMO in Jakarta, Indonesia. Himself, myself, and mother were living in Jakarta, and I was attending high school at Jakarta International School (JIS). JIS started as the American Embassy School back in the 70's, but went international in the 80's. They had 2000 odd students from Year 1 to Year 12 coming from 100 odd countries. Most of the students were, like myself, the children of expatriate workers, or the children of foreign diplomats. Because of its origin, the JIS academic year follows the American academic year. Thus each year in April we have a "spring break" for one week. This despite the fact that Jakarta is in the southern hemisphere so it's autumn in April, and Jakarta is in the tropics so there's no real spring, summer, autumn, and winter, only "dry" and "wet" (i.e. monsoonal) seasons. But anyway, my story concerns what happened one spring break. Now, there is a bit of a spring break tradition at JIS. Many students, mainly Year 11 and 12's, take the opportunity to head down to Bali for a week's holiday, free from their parents. Each year well over 200 students do the migration. So here's what happened when I did it. For those who are unfamiliar with Bali, I should lay some foundations. Bali is one of the hundreds of islands that make up Indonesia. It is situated between the island of Java (which contains the capital Jakarta and much of the country's population) and the island of Lombok. The main city in Bali is called Kuta - this is where almost all the tourists end up. The main tourist drag lies near the beach (named Kuta Beach, funnily enough). And before I forget - a word about currency. Throughout the story I will refer to the Indonesian rupiah (Rp), and the Australian dollar ($). At the time my story transpires (and it hasn't changed much since), the exchange rate was around 1500Rp = Aus$1 and 2000Rp = US$1. So without further ado: the story! Getting There: Most JISers fly down to Bali - it takes about an hour from Jakarta. Since I had a choice between flying down and not having much money to spend, or taking a bus and have a decent amount of money to spend, I chose the bus. Taking a bus through Indonesia can be a lot of fun, but that's another story. The bus takes pretty much spot on 24 hours - you leave on one day and get there about the same time the next day. It crosses from Java to Bali on a vehicular ferry, which is heaps cool. I have to admit I found the whole journey a little stressful. You see, my friends (who were flying down) had realised that they could give all their marijuana to me to carry down on the bus (much safer, nod nod nod). So I was carrying a fair bit, thus nervous much of the time. Luckily, I had the good sense to smoke a little of the weed on the way down, which smoothed things out. In Bali I was staying at a losman, which is the Indonesian equivalent of a cheap hotel. For 10,000Rp one could get a room that contained 2 beds, a small table, a small electric fan on said table, a single naked light-globe, a small cupboard, and off to the side was a shower/toilet room (no hot water). I was sharing it with a girl from JIS, so at 5,000Rp or $3.30 a night each - bloody bargain! Outside each room there were deck chairs and tables, and each morning the guy who ran the losman left you a thermos of jasmine tea. In the room next door were two other JIS girls, and in the room beyond that were two British guys who didn't go to JIS but knew one of the girls in the other room. No names will be given to protect the guilty. The Night Begins: It was our second night in Bali - we had all settled down in our hotels, were starting to find our way around Kuta, and were realising that the exorbitant price of alcohol in bars around Kuta meant getting pissed in a bar every night for the rest of the week was not financially viable for most of us. Here I should point out something about Indonesian liquor laws. Indonesia is governed from Java. Around 95% of Javanese are Muslim, and since it is against their religion to drink alcohol no one gives a tinker's cuss about under-age drinking laws (if they exist - I'm not sure). I should also point out one aspect of the socio-political environment in Indonesia. The entire country's economy is based around bribery and corruption to such an extent that the terms "bribery" and "corruption" are transcended in many ways. Now Indonesian police don't get paid much by the government (hint hint). One incident typifies my point. A friend was riding through Kuta on a moped (which can be rented quite cheaply - around $10 a day) without a helmet on. A cop pulled him over. This cop happened to speak good English, and he gave my friend (the son of a Canadian diplomat) a 10 minute lecture about law, order, social responsibility, and justice. When the cop had finished my friend asked "So, what's the price of justice these days?". "Fifteen thousand rupiah ($10)," was the reply. Back to the story. There we were, in a bar, drinking Bintang (cheap Indonesian beer) and various arak mixtures, wondering what to do with the night. Arak is Indonesia rice wine - kind of like Japanese sake. It's cheap (street vendors sell 300 ml bottles for $5), quite nice, and makes some wonderful mixtures. Arak madu (literally "honey arak") is arak with some honey and water. "Jungle juice" is arak mixed with grape juice. Great stuff. Someone said they had heard about a cafe in the backstreets where one could obtain magic mushrooms. You just ordered a "special omelette" or the "special drink" and you were served a magic mushroom omelette or a glass of mushies blended with ice and lemon juice respectively. Both cost 30000Rp ($20). They had some quite nice seafood there as well. So a group (eight of us) decided to troop on down there and get some magic mushrooms in us. I had an omelette and half a glass of the drink. It was, by the way, my first experience with hallucinogenic drugs, although I had been drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana for a while by this stage in my life. No one had any idea how strong they would be, so most people had from one to one and a half servings. Once we had finished the special food and some non-hallucinogenic snacks, we all trooped back to the main street where most of the bars were, so as to meet up with other groups of JISers. Now the walk back to the bars took about 10 minutes, during which time a few joints were passed around, and we had spent a good 20 minutes at the cafe eating, so the mushies were starting to kick in by the time we got to the particular bar we were going to meet some people in. The Trip: Now, from the time we entered that bar everything gets a bit hazy for me. So I will recount the events as best I remember. I was stumbling about the bar talking to people, noticing how colourful everything was, listening to the pumping music with my body, and watching the walls begin to breathe. One of the girls who had partaken of the mushies was starting to loose the plot. She was sitting at a table, head in hands, sobbing gently and occasionally moaning "Where are my friends," and, "Where have my friends gone?". Many of them were, as it happened, sitting around her, trying to comfort her. "Where are all my friends?" "We're right here!" "But where the fuck have all my friends gone" "Right here." And so on. I pointed out to her that in the morning she would be straight, but she was oblivious to the external universe and it probably wouldn't have helped anyway. What happened after that is fuzzy. I do remember some discombobulated dancing was done, but the next thing I clearly (relatively speaking) remember was the peak of the trip. Now, the bar we were in was like a giant pergola - big tree trunks holding up a large thatched roof. Around each supporting trunk a bench was attached with stools associated. I was sitting on a stool, my head resting sideways on a bench, observing the (rather distorted) world go by. I had no idea were my friends had got to, and didn't care. From this point on I had no real control over my body. It was a very strange state, and one I still have difficulty describing. It was kind of like an out-of-body experience, but I was still in my body, as it were. It was as if my conscious mind had taken a back seat and was enjoying the view while everything went on automatic. Although cogent of what I was doing, it didn't seem like I was making the decisions. It's hard to explain. Anyway, I remember jumping up and following myself out the door onto the main street of Kuta - a thronging place of tourists (many drunken Australians), street sellers, prostitutes and pimps, bars, restaurants, mini-cabs, dust, and so on. It was down this street that I stumbled, my wide eyes staring at the demon faces of the people around me. I was rushing head-long down the sidewalk with no destination in mind, bumping into people, tripping over things. A real mess. I don't remember much of it - the stumbling, the neon lights, the whole world swirling with colours and geometric patterns. Were it not for the fact that what I call "me" was a detached observer at the time, I would have been quite paranoid methinks. The next thing I remember (quite clearly, actually) is lying in a gutter somewhere, throwing up, and rolling in the puddle of my own vomitus. It seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess. I wasn't perturbed at all by my vomiting - I don't even remember feeling sick. So when a bunch of tourists (British by the sound of they accents) stood over me and asked "Are you allright?" I reply, "Oh yeah. I'm fine." Retch roll roll. "I'm fine. Really!". I think they left after that. The Aftermath: The next thing I remember, I was straight. Frazzled, but straight. I was curled, almost in foetal position, around a pot plant that stood outside the door of some shop. Half my torso and one arm was smeared in vomit, and all of me was smeared in dirt. If I had had more hair at the time (shaved with single small braid coming out the back) then that would have been an absolute mess, no doubt. I had absolutely no idea what time it was, or where I was. The streets were deserted, so I was obviously well away from the main tourist area which parties all night. I walked dazed and confused down the street until I came across an Indonesian guy walking the other way. Luckily, I speak enough Indonesian to have a simple, halting conversation. I asked him what time it was. Three in the morning, he replied. It has been about nine o'clock when I'd taken the mushies. I asked him where I was. I gave the name of the place, which meant nothing to me. It turned out I was about 1.5 kilometres (1 mile)from were I had started out that night. The kindly and bemused Indonesian chap directed me to the beach, which I had to walk along for half an hour to get back to my losman. Epilogue: Some people would have been put off magic mushrooms for life by such an experience - but not your intrepid and fearless narrator, oh no! A few days later myself and two friends went back to that cafe (called "The Midnight Oil", for the record) and had some more. We each had only a single serving this time, and spent most of the night wondering around, looking at faces in the gravel, and dribbling shit about Life, The Universe, and Everything; and pulling at our faces (strange...rubbery...). I had a most interesting hallucination that night - saw my hand grow hairy, old, and wrinkled. The rest of my holiday in Bali was a bit of an anti-climax compared to those events, although myself and the two girls in the losman room next door hired out some mopeds for a couple of days and went hooting around to some of the wick surf beaches a few hours drive out of Kuta, and that was cool. Since the time of this story, my dad got retrenched from LASMO and we moved to Adelaide, South Australia, where he'd gotten a new job. Now, Adelaide, which is the capital of the state of South Australia, has hot dry summers and cool wet winters. Every winter, the hills around Adelaide (known as "the Adelaide Hills") teems with magic mushrooms growing wild. If you know what to look for (and I do! I do!) then magic mushrooms are free and plentiful each winter. Indeed, 2 weeks after moving to Adelaide (it was the middle of winter) some friends I'd made at my new high school invited me to go mushie hunting with them. But that's another story. Standard Disclaimer: I hereby disclaim any responsibility for other human beings. People - take your own drugs at your own risk (mileage may vary). I deny all knowledge; I was at a friends house and the cheque's in the mail. I was not the third gunman on the grassy knoll. I have never been abducted by aliens. I am not and never was a member of the Australian Communist Party. Batteries not included. PS! The alternative title to this piece is an inside joke. And not very funny either. ================================================================ FROST WARNINGS : (!) 1997 AD Jake Century / S.I.F. All copyrights on texts are held by the original author. Authors are responsible for their own content. Greetings to our readers in the future : 2007, 2017, 2027, etc.! ================================================================