Crikey Mate (Cycle-touring in Australia 2016)
The Hand (Cycling in Bali, June 2014)
Crikey Mate
(Cycle-touring in Australia 2016)
My husband Steve and I are on the east coast of Australia, just south of the Sunshine Coast and about 700 miles from where we started in Sydney. Unfortunately, we only have ten days left before we must return to the UK. Cycling in Australia is, as everywhere, a mixed bag but we’ve loved the parts where we’ve found quiet roads to ride off of the main A1 highway. Sadly, opportunities to do this have been in short supply over the last week and it’s how we’ve ended up on route 6: also called the Steve Irwin Way, named after the famous tv wildlife presenter. Although it isn’t a main road, on this day: the start of the public holiday weekend, the traffic is awful.
I don’t like to pigeon hole people but in more ill-tempered moments, I’ve come to regard Australian drivers as on the whole, far less well-disposed to cyclists than their European cousins. Exhibit A: despite its popularity as a holiday destination and Australia’s love of all things sporty, there was not one single bicycle lane on the entire Gold Coast; a place I can only compare to riding in the middle of London, sans any cycling infrastructure. Exhibit B: (the year we made our trip), there is still no legal requirements in Australia for drivers to give cyclists plenty of room as they overtake and never has this been more evident than on route 6. It has only one (not particularly wide) lane in either direction and unfortunately no hard shoulder either. So, every time someone overtakes us, they don’t follow the sensible approach, i.e., slow down and only overtake when nothing is coming the other way. Oh no. Australian drivers simply squeeze between us and the oncoming traffic whilst maintaining the maximum 100km an hour speed limit. Passing only half inch from my elbow, I am feeling decidedly uncomfortable with their behaviour.
After fifteen miles, we’ve had enough and pull into a rest stop. Steve leans his bicycle on a picnic table and pulls out his Garmin toy, declaring, there must be an alternative to this shit show of a road. Using both Google maps and Garmin, we find one. Half a mile up the road we turn right and join a blissfully, traffic-free road. It isn’t even a proper road; more a rutted track but since we have expedition bicycles: mountain bike-touring bike hybrids, it isn’t a problem. The track runs through the huge state-owned forest of Beerburrum, which is basically cash crops of pine trees with a few native trees dotted in between.
Our track heads east and we realise it must soon cross the main highway (in this part of the country the A1 is now the M1, meaning we couldn’t have ridden on it, even if we had wanted to), and then continues on the other side. We are hoping it will go all the way to the Sunshine Coast where we have a hotel booked for the night. But our plans soon go awry. It seems that there is a discrepancy between where Google and Garmin tell us to cross the motorway. First up, we try to follow Google’s advice but disappointingly, there is no bridge across the motorway, neither under or over it. We can see where the track starts again on the opposite side but if it was ever possible to cross the highway, it certainly isn’t now. There are six lanes of traffic: three in either direction, and despite standing there for over half an hour, there isn’t a single break in the holiday traffic. Not one. Disappointed, we instead try crossing where Garmin recommends. Unfortunately, as we soon find out, this route involves trespassing through somebody’s farm and then crossing under the road in… no word of a lie… a drainage pipe (which is big… but still not big enough to fit a bicycle through it. We’d have to crawl through it on our bellies.) Ridiculous!
Neither one of us is keen to ride the four miles back the way we came so after a lengthy discussion, we decide to hell with it, we will just cycle up the motorway. I know, it was naughty. But it is only a mile and a half to the next junction and from there we can re-join the Steve Irwin Way. We take a deep breath and set off. There isn’t much of a hard shoulder. There is a bit of a gap between the white line on the side of the road and the grassy embankment that drops down on our left so we ride between the two. The bit of road nearest the embankment is rather rutted but it occurs to me that if I cycle on the ruts, it will at least leave a bit more room between me and the overtaking traffic. There’s a bit of a step up on to this rutted part so I stop, so I can haul my bike up on to it. Trouble is, I haven’t realised that Steve is right behind me and he hasn’t realised I am going to suddenly stop. His front wheel knocks into the side of my rear right pannier.
‘Shit’ I think as I feel myself toppling off balance and put my foot out to steady myself but find nothing except empty space. There is an awful split second when I feel myself suspended in mid-air and then over I go, head first down the bank. At first, I don’t expect to fall far but the embankment is steep and the momentum means I go head over heels several times, with my bicycle coming too. I fall right down almost to the bottom of the embankment before finally coming to a stop.
The first thing I become aware of is a searing pain in my left ankle which has twisted at an angle that ankles aren’t designed to twist in. Then Steve is by my side, trying to pull me to my feet; for a second, he is more concerned, I may have landed on a deadly poisonous snake or spider, but I am too paralysed by the pain to move.
‘My ankle’ I wail as Steve tries to console me. And we stay like this for at least five minutes whilst the holiday traffic passes above us on the road, unaware of the mishap going on below. And then I burst into hysterical laughter. Despite the pain, I am not above seeing the funny side. I wonder if the people who work in the traffic management centre have CCTV cameras trained on this section of motorway and if so, are they sat in their control centre hundreds of miles away, hooting with laughter at this comedy gold moment. Steve laughs too. And then I’m sobbing again with the fresh waves of pain.
After perhaps half an hour, I am finally able to stand and we scramble back up the embankment. Despite my injury, we have no choice but to keep going. To begin with we walk, or Steve walks and I limp but not only is this incredibly slow going, we notice a car has also slowed and is driving along behind us at walking pace. We can’t work out what he’s doing. Is he trying to protect us from the traffic, something I doubt since he’s just making us more of a hazard, or is he some nut case following us with bad intentions in his mind? Either way, we don’t like it.
‘Let’s just ride. I’ll be okay’ I say. So, we get on and ride and thankfully, the stranger pulls around us and gets on his way. We ride the next mile and a half until we can get off of the motorway. And then we continue to ride the next twenty miles to our hotel in Marcoola with me trying to use mainly my right leg with which to pedal.
When we final reach our hotel and check in, I take off my shoe and sock and examine the damage. I have a lump on my ankle about the size of a golf ball which is still visibly swelling before our eyes. Oh, crikey mate. And what’s really odd is that once I’ve been sat down a while, I find I can no longer bare to put any weight on it; how on earth I managed to cycle twenty miles with such a badly sprained ankle is still a mystery to me. All I can think is that the adrenaline from my fall was some how blocking the pain. What is clear to me is that our cycle tour is over; no way will I make it to Noosa Heads where we were hoping to finish. What is also clear is that we now have a problem. We are only checked into our hotel for the one night and because it is the holiday weekend, our hotel is all booked up and we are unable to extend our stay here. Unfortunately, we find that this goes for every other hotel and campsite in the vicinity. Shit. The lady on reception suggests we may find accommodation if we are prepared to travel away from the coast but seeing as I am unable to walk or cycle… I have the nasty sinking feeling that we will be reduced to sleeping on the beach for the rest of the weekend.
To cheer us up, Steve goes out to find a takeaway curry and some beers. Neither of us have eaten since breakfast. As he goes, he thankfully thinks to check at reception on the off chance they have had a cancellation and blow me: by an extraordinary stroke of luck, just as Steve is asking one receptionist this question, the other receptionist is putting down the phone to a caller who has just cancelled their stay for the weekend. A few minutes later and it might have been too late. We are saved, and in those three days we manage to buy a pair of crutches for me and then hire a car to take us and our bicycles back to Brisbane for the flight home.
The Hand
(Cycling in Bali, June 2014)
I had ridden in hot places before: the deserts of southwestern USA and the northeast of Thailand but Bali was something else. A mere 580 miles from the equator, I spend my first few days stumbling around the streets of Denpasar in a heat induced stupor, trying to adjust. I hadn’t known what to expect from Bali before I came but I can’t deny I am unmoved by Denpasar, and in particular the Kuta beach area where my hotel is located. For all its amazing beaches and the fact that I am here on this ‘exotic’ island, its vibe is more Benidorm then southeast Asian; painfully honed to attract and cater to the maximum number of tourists, the only difference being, the vast majority of visitors here are Australian rather than European, but the set up is the same. So far as I am concerned, Bali will be the easy bit: the place I can melt into the background amongst the other tourists and adjust at my own pace. Here, English is widely spoken and the beer cold and I am intent on finding someone with good English to teach me a few Indonesian words before I cross to the much lesser travelled island of Java.
If only I was capable of being honest with myself, I could admit that I am in no way prepared for this tour and gracefully give up now before even attempting to ride 700 miles across Java to Jakarta. I don’t know nearly enough about Indonesia to be doing this alone, much less on a bicycle. I don’t know what sort of tourist infrastructure they have in Java but I do know the roads are notoriously chaotic and the island as a whole is pretty mountainous. I am totally unfit, unprepared and the weather is hot enough to fry an egg on the ground. But I am not willing to give up on my dream… not yet anyway. In all of my internet searches over the last few months, I’d only found the one blog: written by a couple who’d cycled across Java two years ago. I’d clung to the passages in which they’d praised the Javanese people for their hospitality and hope pathetically that this will also be the case when I show up: a lone, British female cyclist. To boost my confidence, I sit outside my hotel one night being eaten alive by mosquitos and book all my accommodation for the next 3 nights: the time it will take me to reach the Java ferry in the northeast of Bali. There. Done, I think. No backing out now.
On my final night in Kuta, as the effects of my third beer take a hold, I finally visit the previously taboo subject of why I’ve chosen to make this trip now when I am so unprepared,and I narrow it down to two reasons. First is the more illogical: I am going to ride to Jakarta because I believe it will be easier than cycle-touring in China… which was what I happened to be doing this time last year. When I say easier, what I mean is that since the Indonesians use Roman Script, it at least gives me hope that I will understand their road signs. Plus, their words are easier to pronounce; in China, no matter how many times I practised, no one ever understood my attempts to speak even the most basic of words such as hotel, which way? or noodles. I am also deeply reassured to find Google maps working here: thanks to China’s pesky government policy of blocking American apps and internet pages, it was useless and my paper maps weren’t much better: for most of my China tour, I had to guess as to which way I should head.
But my main reason for launching headfirst into such an ill-planned expedition is another sign of how reckless and detached I’ve become since my mother died of cancer two years ago. I had cared for her at home, as per her wishes and I had spent those last few weeks of her life, so afraid I was doing things wrong or making it worse for her. When she finally passed away, as heart breaking as it was, I took a vague comfort in the fact that her suffering was now over. In a strange way, it was also a release for me. Without the worry and fear, I thought that at least now I would be able to start grieving and processing what had happened, but it was not meant to be because just three days later, my father suffered a stroke. The upshot of this was that it fast-forwarded the development of his (unknown to me at the time) dementia at an alarming rate. Dementia: a one-way ticket into a dark chasm of confusion, which obliterates all sense of logic and reason and is terrifying to all those involved. Dementia took away my only remaining parent at a time when we needed each other the most and imprisoned him in his own disquieted reality. My father would forever be visible to me but forever just out of reach.
It is therefore safe to say, my emotional pain over the last few years had eroded my sense of reasoning and whilst a cycle tour of Indonesia had always been on the periphery of my plans, in a box labelled: ‘might make a good trip sometime in the future’, that I chose to make it now when I was so physically and emotionally unprepared, proved how far I had strayed. I wonder now if maybe, in some sort of twisted way, what happened next was fate intervening to make sure I never took this ill-thought-out trip.
Before leaving Denpasar, I rode down to one of the money exchange shacks on the seafront which have the most favourable rates, unaware they are also the favoured hangout for bag snatchers who must love being able to watch and pick out their victims according to ease: lone woman… check, riding a bicycle… check, big wad of cash in her bag… check, check, check. When did I dumbly begin changing up and carrying large sums of cash on me? When I began travelling several decades ago, traveller’s cheques where the order of the day but as the years went on, it got harder and harder to find places willing to cash them in. Since paying for everything on a card incurrs high charges with every transaction, over the past five years, and mainly travelling with my now ex-husband Sam, he had insisted that changing up large sums of cash in one go was the least costly method of paying for our holidays. It sounded daft to me but perhaps buoyed by the fact nothing bad had ever happened on our tours, I had become more and more complacent and since we went our separate ways, I had continued to adopt this method without really questioning it.
Most astoundingly though was that this wasn’t even my biggest mistake that morning. It wasn’t even that I didn’t distribute the cash amongst pockets and panniers straight away, but left it all in my rucksack to sort out later. Nope. My biggest mistake that morning was that I didn’t fasten my rucksack to my handlebar basket.
*
I hated riding through Denpasar almost as much as I’d hated staying in it. By my reckoning, I had to cycle about 20km before I’d leave the city behind and I already knew how bad the traffic would be. From my short stay in Kuta, I had learnt that trying to cross the road was akin to planning a military operation; for some reason the thought of actually stopping for pedestrians was an alien concept to Balinese drivers and I lost count of all the times I had witnessed old women or children risking life and limb, forced to sprint across the road in between swathes of traffic to reach the other side whilst the Balinese drivers simply blasted their horns at them and sped up.
The only pleasant part of my morning is the first couple of miles, as I ride along a pedestrian only beachfront track. I pass mile upon mile of hotels, all with their own private beaches. I hadn’t even realised the extent of the tourist industry in Bali. This is a very popular place for Australians and Europeans to come to surf and to relax and to fry in the sun and the Balinese to come and make money from them. Meanwhile, back on the roads and I see the real Denpasar where the Balinese live their lives as they go to work and to school. Riding in the city is a slow process because of the high number of traffic lights and my morning is a frustrating round of starting and stopping every few minutes and always, always I am hemmed in by the thousands of mopeds that swarm around the city. This dance goes on for hours. I am aiming for the junction where Bali’s main hospital stands and where, I will make a left turn, finally joining the road that will lead me out of the city; only I still can’t picture this happening. Yes, I’d seen the tourist brochures that depict scenes of Bali with its clear open spaces, paddy fields and gorgeous beaches but at this moment in time, it feels as though this conurbation will continue on and on, right around the island. But despite my cynicism, there are some promising signs that I am nearly through with Denpasar. Is it just my imagination or is there less traffic lights now and is the traffic finally moving faster? Yes, I believe it is. By my reckoning, I am only a mile from the junction with the hospital and a mile from freedom.
But I never make it to the hospital. Another half mile on and the traffic queues are all but over. I no longer have to keep stopping and starting and I am no longer hemmed in by all the motorcycles… and bag snatchers can now make a quick getaway. I take no notice of a moped overtaking me closely. It is just one of a thousand that has already passed me that morning. But this one is different. This one comes with an extended hand. For a split second, I think it is someone waving to me in a friendly greeting, but suddenly I realise that this hand is reaching for the rucksack in my basket. Instinctively, I reach out too, stretching to grab at it but I miss it by half an inch: I am a second too late. In slow motion I see my bag being hoisted into the air and the moped accelerate away. I see whoever it is with my bag, holding it up high and waving it with a victorious, mocking fist… and then it is gone. Instinctively, I voice my objections to this injustice committed against me, holding up my middle finger at the moped rider tearing away and screaming “Fuck you” at the top of my voice, hoping he will at least see it in his mirror, but both he and my words get lost in the traffic.
I come to a halt on the side of that dusty road and try to take stock of the situation but I can only feel the fury. How dare he do this to me. I want nothing more then to find this moped rider, drag him off his bike, smash his head into the tarmac and stamp on that hand of his. But since I haven’t even seen which way he went; I know there is no chance of finding him. As I stand panting in the heat, my anger slowly abates and the reality of my situation begins to hit me in sickening waves.
‘He has my passport.’
‘Oh my god, all my money and credit cards were in that bag.’
‘Shit, my malaria tablets.’
‘My kindle with the twenty books I lovingly and painstakingly chose for this holiday are all gone.’
But worst of all is the knowledge that my mobile phone is gone too; I can’t even call anyone for help. And now I am here, alone in a foreign country, without a single Rupiah to my name and no way of getting any. I can’t pay for accommodation. Or food. Or even water. (The tap water isn’t recommended in Bali.) And who the hell is going to believe that I am now destitute and in need of help? Horrified, I realise that once my two bottles of water run out, I am screwed. Never in my life have I felt so alone.
Then an idea comes to me. I remember seeing a police station not too far back. Could they help me? Acting quickly, I about turn and cycled back the way I have come and as I ride, the long list of ‘what ifs’ flash through my mind.
‘If only I’d been quicker, I could have grabbed a hold of my bag.’
‘If only I had fastened my bag to my basket. It may have dragged us both to the floor but I’d still have my belongings.’
‘Why hadn’t I distributed my money throughout my bags as soon as I’d changed up my Rupiahs or at least kept a spare credit card somewhere separate?’
‘Why am I such a fool and what the hell am I going to do now?’
I find the police station easily enough but as I shyly approached the four uniformed men who are sitting in the shade, smoking and drinking coffee, I already know how this is going to go. The men ignore me for sometime and when they eventually acknowledge my presence, they listen to my tale of woe with mock concern and make ‘oh this is terrible’ comments in voices that are fooling no one; it is clear they couldn’t give a shit. They give me some incomprehensive directions to a different police station where they say I should report this crime, and then they turn their backs on me. By this stage it is a struggle to not burst into tears. Needless to say, I can’t find this ‘other’ police station but I have another idea: I remember seeing a small building back on Kuta beach which had advertised itself as the Tourist Police. Surely, they will be able to help? I arrive back in Kuta nearly two hours later, but was once again, I am given the brush off and told I must report the crime elsewhere. What the actual fuck?
This time, I find this ‘other’ place and I am not turned away. Well, not straight away. This place is huge and maybe not surprisingly, is filled with other tourists who are also here to report robberies and other wrong doings. I am just grateful to be able to sit down in the air-conditioned room a while. I take a form to fill out, then sit obediently for an hour and a half until finally, a policeman beckons me into his office. He dutifully logs the incident on to his computer, noting down my details and exactly which items have been stolen and when we we’re finished, he tries to usher me towards the door.
‘But what do I do now?’ I ask, trying in my rising panic to put up a bit of resistance.
‘You go see your embassy’ he says waving his finger at nothing in particular before shutting the door in my face.
Well shit. I mean, I didn’t exactly expect there to be a free hostel where wronged tourists could eat and sleep for free and call home, but I had been hoping for a little more guidance. Why had I thought that? Why had I thought that an Indonesian policeman would care one jot about a foreign woman in trouble? He didn’t know I was alone and even if he did, I suspect he would think a woman had no business travelling on her own in the first place. I didn’t have a clue what I should do now. Was there a British Embassy here in Bali and how could I find out? Were there public telephones and is it possible to call them for free to find out an address? Whether or not there was, was immaterial anyway since I didn’t speak Balinese. And even if I did, with no access to google maps, I’d never find my way there through the maze that is Denpasar.
I hang around the police station for a while, causally asking some of the other tourists what has happened to them and more importantly, what they are going to do about it now, and from these conversations, two very stark facts emerge. Firstly, and thanks to a mutual agreement between their countries, Australian tourists are able to go to the Canadian embassy for help, right here in Kuta. Lucky bastards. I ask a few different people about a British Embassy but no one knows anything. But the second fact to emerge from these conversations is the real kicker: none of these other tourists are here alone. They all have friends or family with them who can lend them money and see them right until they get home. So, whilst their bag snatching event maybe upsetting and a bit inconvenient, it is in no way the total unmitigated disaster it is for me.
Outside of the police station, I put my sunglasses back on and begin to sob so hard that my whole body shakes. I don’t feel at all self-conscious about this because no one takes any notice of me. I make vague plans to spend the night on the beach, metering out sips of water and possibly stealing food from a street stall to help me survive. Could I sell my bicycle to raise funds? I already know the response I will get if I try to ask anyone for help. Fellow tourists will likely think I am a cad trying to scam them and the Balinese won’t understand. They simply do not understand the concept of being alone without friends and extended family to help and nor I suspect will they be able to grasp the concept that a tourist really has no money at all.
As I feel in my pockets for a tissue to blow my nose, my hand brushed up against something. Oh my god… it’s my mobile phone. In all the panic, I had forgotten that whilst trying to navigate my way out of Denpasar this morning, I’d kept it in my pocket for easy access. I am so relieved it had not been in my rucksack after all… I have a phone. Immediately I call my ex-husband Sam. We’d been together five years before having a reasonably amicable break up the year before and at the time, we are still each other’s best friends. It is still early morning in the UK but he won’t have gone to work yet. Even though he is thousands of miles away, to hear a familiar voice is such a relief that I can feel my knees almost buckling. Sam listens and tries to comfort me as I sob down the phone. He is audibly shaken himself as he realises the severity of my predicament. We try to think of some options. He begins by telephoning the British embassy in London to ask their advice. It is all a bit confusing. They say he should wire money over to me using a Western Union facility and I will get the money almost instantly. But… to use this service, I need some identification before they will release the money to me. I don’t have any because my passport has been stolen. No I.D… no money.
We wonder if I could try checking into a hotel and have Sam pay for the room over the telephone but after trying this in a few places, we conclude that it won’t work because the staff don’t have the English skills to understand the request. I don’t blame them; it isn’t their fault I have gotten myself into this mess. As a last resort, Sam gives me his credit card number over the phone. I write it down, then go in search of a hotel with a vacancy. I find one which has a room available for the next two weeks and then comes the moment of truth. When the young man behind the desk produces the payment machine, instead of producing a credit card, I get out my piece of paper. He watches nonchalantly as I tap Sam’s credit card number into the machine. There is a tense moment and then the screen flashed up ‘card authorised’ and the little machine prints me out a receipt. Now, I am pretty sure that back home in the UK, this kind of thing would have raised a few red flags and may have even resulted in staff reported me to the police for suspected fraud but here, I had been saved by the Balinese’s’ lack of fraud awareness.
So now I have somewhere to stay, I also set up a tab at the hotel’s bar and a restaurant. I am not going to die of dehydration on a Balinese beach after all. I am safe. I close and lock the door to my airconditioned room and take a cold shower. Then I down a bottle of ice-cold water and flop on to the bed, my eyes once more spouting tears but this time they are in relief. Then I dry my eyes and go to the bar and get exceedingly drunk.
It takes almost three weeks to finally get everything sorted out so I can leave Bali and I couldn’t have done it without Sam. I will always be extremely grateful to him for his help. I barely leave my hotel in that time, except to walk to the beach every morning for a swim to take my mind off of this mess. There isn’t anything much I can do anyway since everything in Bali involves spending money which I don’t have. My hotel begins to feel more like an open prison to me and a few times, I have a panic attack: knowing without a passport, I am literally trapped in Bali. It’s almost like some sort of weird paradox where everyone else is on holiday and I am a prisoner. I cope by racking up huge bar tabs drinking beer after beer in the hotel bar of an afternoon and longing for the days to pass quicker. I read about a man who for some reason wasn’t able to pay his hotel bill and the Indonesian police threw him in prison for five years. My reoccurring nightmare is that when I go to pay my final bill, the staff no longer accept payment from a credit card number scrawled on a piece of paper and I too am thrown into a Balinese jail to rot. In my dream, the faces of the arresting officers are the same as the four who had sent me away on the day I was mugged.
The thing which frightened me most is the lack of control or options a person has once they’ve stepped out of the realms of ‘normality’. In my case, I didn’t have any money or any identification and suddenly there was no help or assistance available. It must be the same for those who exist on the margins of society, without wealth or an identity. Whilst I don’t wish to trivialise the dire situations people find themselves in by comparing my short-term problem with other more serious and long-term situations, I did get some sort of got an idea of the difficulties faced by those living in the margins of society. For example, homeless people with no money or permanent address or refugees fleeing their homes and having to leave everything behind. The hostility of red tape in this world and the lack of compassion is truly horrifying.
Sam continued to try to help me from his end. He asks the British embassy if he can pay for my new passport by bank transfer which I could then pick up in Bali; I would then have some I.D to receive funds at the Western Union branch. They say it is possible… but that I will need to provide them with two passport photos before they can process an application, and guess what… I don’t have any money to get passport photos done in the first place. No ID, no money… no money, no ID. Catch 22. I try ringing both banks I have accounts with: the Cooperative Bank and the Nationwide. I explain to them about the robbery and in no uncertain terms the trouble I am in and ask if they could send me a new debit or credit card to my hotel here. But both simply say they are very sorry but they don’t provide this kind of service. Next, Sam sends a parcel direct to my hotel. It contains two reading books and one of them has a credit card hidden in its pages so I can at least access money from an ATM. But the package seems to get lost in transit and in the end, Sam has to cancel the credit card for fear it has fallen into the wrong hands. It does eventually turn up at my hotel a week later but by then I can’t use the card because Sam is not able to un-cancel it.
Absolutely the worst thing during this time is when I ask a few fellow travellers at the hotel for some assistance. The very thought is demeaning and humiliating but since all I actually need is about 10,000 Indonesian Rupiahs (about 50 pence) to get some passport photos taken, I figure they may be willing to help. I try explaining my situation to them but they won’t even let me even finish because the second I mention needing money, they cut me off and wave me away as if I were the scum of the earth. Over breakfast each morning, I get on friendly terms with an older Australian woman at my hotel. After a few days, it occurred to me that instead of asking for money, I could ask Sam to wire some money here but addressed to her. Since she had a passport, Western Union would then release the funds to her on my behalf. But when I ask her, she instantly accused me of trying to involve her in a scam. (I’m not really sure how. Maybe she thinks I want her to receive laundered money or something, I don’t know.) But she refuses to speak to me for the rest of her holiday and avoids me like a leper. It is these events that sting me the most. I hurt to be accussed of trying to cheat others when really, I am just utterly alone and desperate for help. Would I have thought the same in their shoes? I don’t know. I like to think I would have at least have heard them out and weighed up the facts instead of simply dismissing them out of hand.
Eventually, after Sam has telephoned and pestered the British embassy every day for a week, they finally agree that he can wire some money to their office in Bali and they will allow me to pick it up, even without identification. I nervously cycled the ten miles there, wondering what might go wrong but when I get there, the woman at the embassy simply laughs and says: it’s not likely she’ll have two women called Sarah, turning up the same day on a bicycle and expecting to receive five hundred pounds. The relief as I ride back to my hotel with my money firmly and safely distributed amongst my pockets was palpable. Finally, I am an equal again. I am no longer destitute in a foreign country and I can now buy the things I need to get my new passport and go home.
The whole ordeal was not only distressing but also time consuming and very expensive. I never went to Java. I couldn’t get a refund on the flight I’d booked home from Jakarta and I had to buy another plane ticket home from Denpasar. I spent a fortune in that overpriced hotel bar and restaurant, but without cash, I couldn’t go anywhere cheaper to eat. And then there was the knowledge of how much of this ordeal was my own fault and how so many of my problems could have been mitigated if only I’d done things differently. I went to some very dark places in my head during those four weeks. Thankfully, all’s well that ends well, and a tiny part of me is curious to know how I would have fared if I hadn’t been robbed and I had indeed gone to Java as planned? Perhaps worse fates would have awaited me there, who knows?
So finally, here is a quick rundown of everything I do differently now. Please take this opportunity to learn from my mistakes. When I travel, I always keep my cards and money in separate places about my person and luggage and I don’t change up large sums of cash in one go. (Nower days I use a UK Post Office money card which is the best and safest way to pay for your holiday.) I always wear a secret money belt too, in which I fold up and hide away several hundred pounds or dollars’ worth of cash as a just in case. I always have a photocopy of my passport and credit card which I keep separately from the originals and I even carry spare passport photos too. I always make sure I have the address and phone number of the British embassy wherever I go. And I have now switched my card credit card company to one that will send a replacement card abroad should I need it. And finally, wherever I go, I always, always fasten my valuables bag to either to my bicycle or to my body.