Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer Read Free Book Online Page B

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, or guesthouses. Bali, in fact, had become for Australians what Greece is for many Europeans, the Bahamasfor New Yorkers and Hawaii for those in the Far West—the most convenient paradise island on their doorsteps. Every day brought planeloads of pleasure-loving Aussies streaming into Kuta, fresh from the streets of Perth or Darwin.
    And a kind of Darwinian devolution had, so it seemed, been the result. For most of these visitors were not, as a rule, the kind of visitor whose pleasures were subtle or understated: they were mostly straight-ahead, no-nonsense blokes, bikers and surfers and bruisers and boozers who were rough and ready for fun. All they wanted were some basic good times—great waves, cheap beer, pretty girls. Thus Kuta had become their raucous home from home, a boisterous playground for piss-ups and pick-ups and rave-ups. Sure, Prospero’s isle might be full of angels and artists, but it also had room for some drunken Stephanos and Trinculos.
    So “Captain Good Vibes” stickers had been splattered across many of the village surfaces, and Perth badges attached to many a local breast. Koalas and kangaroos peered out of shirts and shelves, and around the tiny desk in my guesthouse, the Lasi Erawati, the number of surfing decals totaled 170. The most popular T-shirt in town said “No, I don’t want a F——ing Bemo/Postcard/Massage/Jiggy Jig.”
    A glossy photo in my five-year-old guidebook cited Doggies restaurant as an “Antique setting: the only place with a Disco.” By now, however, Doggies itself was an antique, since almost every place had a disco. And one local bar offered “Aussie-style steaks,” another “special Aussie H’Burger with the lot.” One sign promised “Suci’s Aussie Breakfast” and another “Waltzing Maltilda Sarongs.” “Real Cheese and Vegemite Sandwich Eating Competitions” were held at Casablanca, and “Bintang Beer and Coke Drinking Contests” at Madé’s Tavern. The drinks in the pubs were called, at their most delicate, “Bali Kiss” and “Love Potion” and “Dirty Mother.” And the second most popular T-shirt in town announced “Bloody Good Tucker: Kuta, Bali.”
    Kuta, then, had all the rowdiness, and all the unacknowledged sadness, of every beachfront holiday camp jam-packed with people looking around for the good time they had promised themselves; it had all the skin-peeling bustle of Cape Cod in the summer, say, or Corfu, or Cancún. In Kuta, red-faced couples held hands, touched sunburned knees under the table, asked thewaiter to take pictures of them in their tans, lost themselves in long kisses on the streets. This was fun time, the visitors said, and the first thing to do was break all the rules—native customs or no. Get drunk. Get high. Get laid. This was such stuff as dreams are made on.
    In its most exalted state, Bali had long been renowned as a place for falling in love. A local boy who wished to capture the heart of a maiden would traditionally turn to witchery, collecting from a shaman a moon coin or an amulet or a love potion compounded of the saliva of a snake and the tears of a child. Another might stare all night into the flame of a coconut lamp on which he had imprinted the image of his beloved. Even casual visitors to the island often found themselves entranced here, caught in one of those Shakespearean zones of magic in which young romantics lose their heads, and later their hearts, and stumble, by the light of an uncertain moon, into the presence of a divinity. I first got wind of this when an English friend of mine visited Bali for a brief vacation, and fell, almost instantly, into the arms of a German, with whom she enjoyed a fantasy week of love in thatched cottages and postcard sunsets on the beach. I myself met a shining Pre-Raphaelite from Munich who seemed to be moving under a similar spell, and came back each year in memory of her first and finest boy friend, a gentle Indonesian. And almost every foreign