You promise yourself, just two days in Kuta before you go exploring the real Bali, you high- minded traveller, you. You’ll escape the cliché. The err... road not taken and all that.
But there they are, just as you expected. Eating ice-cream on the footpath, wearing their stomachs like turtle shells strapped on backwards. After three months in Indonesia the Australian twang smacks against your ears.
“Oh, that’s a bit exotic,” says one of them, hair dolloped in peroxide. The woman is pointing out a tie-dyed sarong. Her ruddy- nosed husband stares blankly. Squinting in the dusky sun, man and wife resemble Chinese lanterns- crumpled, pink blobs of dim light.
You cross to the beach from the Kuta Strip, no longer pulsing under the sun. You don't want to, but…
