the Bali List

The things I'm going to be missing in about 10 hours when I fly out of Bali:

• Driving motorbikes on sidewalks and going the wrong way down one way streets being acceptable ways to deal with traffic or navigational woes, and the general void of speed limits and driving rules
• Warung Indonesia
  
• "Hey boss! You want transport, motorbike, surfboard, magic mushrooms?"
• basically every surf break on the Bukit Peninsula, but particularly Balangan and Impossibles
  
• MBarGo, Skygarden, and other venues of Kuta's chaos-themed nightlife
• Never being more than 5 minutes from a surf shop
• My daily perusals of surfboards
• the people I've been hanging out with - Welsh, Irish, French, Swedish, South African, American, etc.
  
• Everyone smiles so much here! I haven't been home in almost 10 months, but I seem to remember smiles or general expressions of happiness are sort considered faux pas
  
• It's a strange thing to miss, but I've developed a bit of an attachment to daily injuries I seem to accumulate
  

Anyway, I couldn't have picked a better place to end my trip, though I am a bit relieved to have escaped unscathed from the last month and a half. Being in Bali kind of keeps you on your toes...there's this t-shirt that says something like "Indohazard: perfect hollow waves, sharp reefs, terrorism and bomb threat, volcano explosion, .." and some other stuff, but it's probably not an exaggeration...I mean, you take something slightly less than safe, like riding a motorbike, and then stack it on top of driving on the left in the middle of chaotic traffic, and then stack that on top of the fact that you're driving to surf heavy Indonesian waves that send a number of people away on crutches or with any sort of injury possible...and then you do this every day. I am definitely, definitely coming back here.