After a long, rain-filled day, I arrived at the ocean. I saw a small path that led to the beach, and I turned my bike down it. I had cycled enough for the day, and I was thinking about where I might be able to set up my tent for the night.
When I got to the beach, I found a group of about twenty men all sitting on the sand and enjoying a hot cup of coffee and plastic bags of sticky rice with a sweet sauce.
They invited me to join them, and I quickly put down two cups of coffee and three servings of this delicious rice. I had the idea that this would serve as my lunch and dinner for the day, and I wouldn’t have to eat anything else through the night.That would make it a lot easier to set up camp. I didn’t mind going a bit hungry because, as I said, I had some extra pounds around my midsection that I wouldn’t have minded getting rid of.
I don’t know why the men were drinking and eating together. This could have been a social occasion for someone’s birthday or a wedding. It could also have been connected to the launching of a new boat. Or it could be something they do every time they bring in the big fishing nets. My guess it is the latter, because after the coffee and rice were finished, the men lined up along ropes and started pulling in fishing nets. This was done in an interesting way. I assume that the nets were placed far out at sea by boat. But then they developed a system of pulling in the nets by hand from the shore. They simply strung ropes several hundreds meters long from the nets to the beach. The men would tie a loop of rope around their waist. This loop had a toggle on the front, and this toggle would attach to the long rope going out to the net. Once five to eight men were on each rope, they would lean backwards and then slowly walk backwards pulling the net to the shore. This had to be done very slowly because the nets were very heavy and a long distance away. When the man at the back of the rope was a certain distance from the water, he would unhook his toggle and then walk to the front of the line and reattach himself to the main rope. This would go on for a long time until the net was finally pulled to shore.
The arrival of the net was greeted with a large expression of happiness. This surprised me because these were fishermen, and, presumably, they did this every day. Yet, people cheered and smiled and laughed, and men and women poured in from the village on foot and on their motorcycles to grab a share of the fish and bring them home to prepare them for dinner. The bulk of the fish, however, remained inside the net and lying on the sand for a long time until they were eventually packaged up with ice and loaded onto a truck.
I can only guess at the complex economic relationships at play here, but it makes sense that someone relatively wealthy actually owns the nets and the boats. And that person gets most of the fish. And all the men – young and old – who pitched in to pull in the nets and pick up the boats and heave them into the water would be entitled to some small part of the catch as their payment. Perhaps money changed hands, perhaps not. I certainly didn’t see anyone getting paid and I didn’t see anyone keeping records of who did what. In fact, the division of labor seemed totally random. Some people would be working relatively hard while others would be sitting around doing nothing. Then a working person would just quit and disappear or go sit down in the shade. Someone sitting would jump in and start helping a crew that they had nothing to do with until then. Had someone spoken English, I would have asked about how this worked, but there were no English speakers among them.
I expected that after some time, and word of my presence had spread, that a local teacher or other educated person would come down to practice their English with me. That is the usual pattern, and this person would then be able to guide me as I made my way through this society and negotiated for permission to camp and that sort of thing. But this time that didn’t happen. My local contact ended up being a young man in bright red shorts and a stylish haircut. He became my contact person not because of his English ability (he spoke none) but because he was the friendliest and the most approachable and seemed the most interested in spending time with me.
I had quickly made up my mind that I would try to spend the night here in my tent. I had made some casual friends and been welcomed already. It was a very beautiful spot, and it was a perfect combination of wild and private and part of a village. I had a reasonable expectation of being able to set up my tent and sleep there with some privacy while at the same time perhaps being able to find food and water in the village and maybe even a bathroom.
In particular, I had my eye on a big roofed structure about a hundred meters up the beach. It was the perfect sort of place to put my tent because the cement pad would be smooth and somewhat clean and the roof would protect me from the elements. When I felt the time was right, I turned to the young man in the bright red shorts and asked him in a combination of Indonesian and sign language if I could camp there that night. The key concept here was using the Indonesian word for tent, “tenda”, and pointing at the trailer attached to my bike. Red Shorts immediately understood that I had camping gear in the trailer and that I wanted to stay there. He indicated that that would be fine.
I wasn’t 100% confident that I now had solid permission. After all, Red Shorts was young and clearly not an elder of the village. He had no real authority. But the atmosphere was so casual and people were so eager to have me around that I didn’t see any problem with sleeping there that night. The only real problem, I thought, was that people would be too friendly and I would not get any privacy or time to myself to set up camp.
This concern turned out to be very real as when I finally rolled my bike over to this sheltering structure, just about everyone on the beach came with me. Not only that, I wasn’t the only one to appreciate the shelter this structure provided. It was already the designated parking spot for all motorcycles, and it was the place where people came to sit, smoke, and hang out. As I got closer, I realized that this structure was the local fish market, and it had long, wide cement platforms on which people would pile up their wares for sale.
As it turned out, I did not set up my tent for a long time. There really was no need because it was too early to go to sleep. And it would have been a circus because of the number of people hanging out with and around me. I simply took a seat on the cement platforms along with everyone else and chatted with people and waited for evening to come. This felt like the best strategy because there was still the possibility that an authority figure would come and tell me that I couldn’t stay there. And there was the possibility that a better option would come along. So I didn’t want to put up my tent and unpack all my gear and then be told to move somewhere else. It was better to just wait until later and see what happened.
It wasn’t the most comfortable period of time for me because I was exhausted from the long, hard day of cycling in the rain. I had been soaked through by the rain and then soaked by sweat so many times that I was a bedraggled mess. I had gotten up quite early that morning, and I desperately needed some sleep. And my body desperately needed to lie down. Yet, I could do none of these things, and I had to force myself to be a part of the group and answer questions as best I could and take pictures with people and that sort of thing.
Another problem was that I could have used a bathroom. I had asked Red Shorts if there was a bathroom near this roofed structure and he said that there was. He pointed it out to me when we got there, but it wasn’t what I was expecting or hoping for. The best option would have been for a typical Indonesian squat toilet with a door and a big tank of water. But this were just three low cement walls with a well inside. I wasn’t sure how this qualified as a toilet until I saw that men would go back there and then pee against the wall. Other men – those who had just come out the sea – would go back there and throw a plastic bucket on a rope down into the well and raise up fresh water that they rinsed themselves with.
This was promising for me in that at some point, I would be able to take a bucket bath and clean myself a bit with fresh water. But I wouldn’t really be able to do that until dark or until everyone left. It’s not like I could strip down naked and go back there and start hauling up buckets of water. Perhaps more of a concern was that I felt an impending need for an actual toilet. I was feeling quite bloated and uncomfortable, and this bathroom was really just a giant urinal. There was nowhere to take a dump. This is a constant problem for me because I have such irregular and sometimes disastrous bowel habits. If I knew what was going on with my body, I could have just asked Red Shorts if there was a toilet nearby that I could use, and I’d go there, take a dump, and be done with it. But it isn’t that simple with me. I never know when the need will suddenly appear or how long I will be in the toilet. I kind of just have to hang out in the vicinity of a toilet and have it ready in case of emergency. With me, it is almost always an emergency. All I could do in this case was endure the bloating and hope that when darkness fell, I’d be able to go off into the nearby bush and take care of business when it became necessary.
Things got a bit frustrating as time went on. I suppose that’s my fault because I never really took control of the situation. Even if I had that kind of take-charge character, I wouldn’t have known how. In this situation and with a near 100% language barrier, it was difficult to sort things out. As things stood, all I could do was sit there and hope for the best. I became optimistic as people would get up and leave and the large crowd surrounding me would dwindle. But then a new group would show up, and they would have to take selfies with me and ask me the usual questions. There seemed no end to these new shifts.
My one move would be to set up the tent and then crawl inside and refuse to come out again. That was the only way I could have taken control. But this was a near impossibility because all my gear was still soaking wet. Setting up camp was going to be a very difficult process, and I had no idea how I was going to go about it. It would be complicated enough setting up camp normally with an audience this size. To do so while having to take care of all the wet gear looked to be disastrous. If everything was dry and everything was regular, I could take the minimalist approach, which is what I did at the truck stop. I simply left everything in the trailer that wasn’t completely essential. I put my sleeping pad, sleeping sheet, and bag of clothes (for a pillow) into the tent, and that was about it. My plan was to simply crawl in there and go to sleep. There was no need to unpack anything else. But after the disastrous experience with the rain cover, I would probably have to take everything out of the trailer and somehow spread it around inside and outside the tent. I’d have to string up a laundry line. I barely had any idea how I would do this if I were by myself. To do this with a huge audience looked very difficult.
Still, setting up my tent was clearly my only option to assert some control. Chances are that as I began the process, Red Shorts would ask if I wanted to go to sleep, and I’d say yes, and maybe people would take the hint and start to drift away. That brought up the issue of where to set up my tent. This is never a simple decision. There are a hundred dangers lurking, and it is very easy to make the wrong choice. As I sat there with my fan club, I contemplated my options. The roofed structure was actually quite large, but much of the back area – the most sheltered area – was occupied by the large cement platforms. The front area was more open and inviting, but it was currently full of motorcycles. And, as I came to understand, this is where the fresh fish from the ocean were packed up in large boxes with ice. So the cement floor there smelled heavily of fish. I did NOT want to come out of this experience with a tent that smelled forever of fish.
That left the space at the back between the lines of cement platforms. There was still a fairly heavy wind and a risk of more heavy rain, and from what I was witnessing, it looked like that spot offered the most protection. I was just working up my energy to get up and start setting up the tent when a new visitor arrived on his motorcycle, and, instead of parking it with the others, he drove right through the crowd of people and parked it in the exact spot where I was going to put my tent. I settled back down with a sigh. Now I’d have to wait for him to leave before I could get started.
Then more disaster struck. The heavy rain that I was dreading arrived. It was the storm to end all storms. The wind blasted through like a typhoon wind and the rain came down in heavy sheets on an angle. It appeared that I could not catch a break. We were okay underneath the shelter, but obviously no one was going to leave while this storm was underway. In fact, ten or twenty people joined us as they rushed from the beach to the shelter to get out of the rain. Despite the ferocity of this storm, we were remarkably warm and dry under the shelter as long as we stayed toward one side. Because of that, I still held out hope that sleeping in my tent there would work out in the end.
But then more complications set in. Water ran off the roof and fell at the edges. But in certain points, it landed on the cement floor of our shelter. To my horror, these rivulets of water turned into streams and then into rivers, and they all ran toward the center – right where I planned to put my tent. Quickly, a small lake formed there. In a way, this was a good thing. Had I put my tent there as planned and the storm (or storms) came during the night, my tent would have been flooded. So it was good to know about this potential danger in advance.
Luckily, I had one more option. It wasn’t clear this would work, but it looked promising. And this option was to set up my tent right on top of the cement platforms where we were all sitting. These were like very large benches, and to my eye, they were just about the same width as my tent, and they were raised a couple of feet off the floor. If I put my tent on top of one of these, I might have the best of both worlds. These platforms were clean and dry and sheltered.
My group of admirers had also been thinking about where I could put my tent, and there was some discussion about how this part of the floor was now a small lake and that part was open to the wind and that other part stank of fish. No one could really agree about the cement platforms. Not having my experience with camping and not knowing the exact nature of my tent, they didn’t know whether my tent would fit there or not. To the inexperienced eye, it looked far too small. But I knew just how narrow a modern tent was.
At this point, I started to get offers and a lot of pressure to go stay at the house of one of the young men around me. In other circumstances, this would have had some appeal. But as things stood, it was too late, too dark, too windy, and too rainy. Had this offer come two hours ago, I probably would have at least checked it out. But to roll my bike out into the growing darkness (even if the rain let up) to go to a strange house didn’t seem wise. I’d be losing my independence completely. All the time I’d been sitting there, I had been planning my next day, and my goal was to get up as early as humanly possible and hit the road at dawn. I would need all the time I could get to comfortably reach my next destination. If I was inside someone’s house, chances are I would have to stay up late being a good guest. And it would be very difficult and awkward to simply wake up at 4 a.m., have a cup of coffee, pack up and leave. And who knew what this guy’s house was like? I certainly didn’t, and there was no way to find out in advance. Perhaps we were talking about a tiny shack with six people sleeping on a dirt floor. There would be no hope of unpacking my trailer, and I’d lay there all night worried about the mildew and mold growing inside it. Even if his house turned out to have large open areas (which was very unlikely), did I really want to take all my worldly possessions and spread them out unguarded? That didn’t seem wise.
There was actually a lot of pressure applied to have me go to someone’s house. But I stuck to my guns and said that I would sleep in my tent here. I had a dozen reasons I could have given, but, of course, I couldn’t explain my reasons to them in Indonesian.
At long, long last the time came to set up my tent. There were still a lot of people around, but it was getting very dark, and I had no choice but to take advantage of the last bit of remaining light and get set up. Considering everything that was going on, things went remarkably smoothly. For one thing, my tent just barely fit on the cement platform at its widest end. It tapers from head to foot, and the foot part fit just fine. And at the wider head, the tent was just wide enough that the tips of the tent poles fell off the edge. But that was okay. One problem was that since my tent was sitting up in the air on a cement bench, there was no way to tie it down and no way to peg out the two vestibules. This was a problem because the wind could easily blow the tent away. I had to set it fast and then pile a bunch of heavy gear inside to keep the wind from sucking it up into the atmosphere. It was also a problem because without the vestibules, I had no safe or accessible place to put the trailer. The trailer is obviously far too big to fit inside the tent comfortably. That is one big disadvantage of the trailer. However, it is a simple matter to roll it right beside one of the tent doors and fit the vestibule over it. It is fortuitous that it works out this way so well. Since the trailer is inside the vestibule, it is protected from the elements by the tent fly and is also protected from theft. And from the inside of the tent, I have total access. I just have to unzip the tent door on that side, and the trailer is sitting right there like a giant suitcase.
With no ability to set up the vestibules, I had to leave the trailer sitting outside on its own and it would be vulnerable to thieves. One flaw with this trailer is that there is no convenient place to thread a lock. I could put a lock through the wheels, but technically that does nothing because the wheels pop right off with a push of a button (though it is highly doubtful than anyone would know this other than me). And the way the frame is threaded through the Cordura bag, there is no opening anywhere through which to put a lock. So I can’t just lock it to my bike.
As I started to unpack, it quickly became clear that everything had to come out. At first, I started to take out the wettest objects and I laid them out on the floor of the tent in such a way as to maximize the drying and to keep them out of the way for when I sleep. I was picking and choosing which were the most important things to take care of. But as time went on, I realized that everything was wet, and I might as well put it all inside the tent. I just went about it methodically and took every single bag and every single object and lay them in a long row going around the edges of my entire tent floor with my sleeping pad occupying a narrow space in the middle. I would essentially be sleeping inside a nest of all my possessions. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t a terrible solution.
Most of my friends stuck around for this exciting process, and I felt quite foolish as more and more objects came out of my various bags and had to be spread around inside my tent. I know that these guys had no frame of reference and weren’t judging me, but I felt like a complete amateur. Had everything been dry and clean, I could have put on a display of my regular camping efficiency. I’m nothing if not organized and systematic. But with the conditions as they were, I was making it up as I went along. Every time I dug down into my trailer, I found some new problem – some new item that was soaking wet and needed to be dealt with. My entire system was thrown into disarray and I had no idea what I was doing. I kept finding new problems that had to be considered. And then I had to string up a laundry line and put up all my wet clothes. It was a giant disaster, and I had the added pressure of a large audience keenly watching my every move.
But, finally, the task was complete – at least the initial stage – and I could make moves towards climbing into my tent and saying goodnight. From the point of view of my audience, it was still early. Through sign language and basic words, they encouraged me to go with them to get something to eat, something to drink, and to play the guitar and sing. But I had no plans to eat anything. The rice I had had when I first arrived on the beach would get me through the night. And I was so uncomfortably bloated that I did not want to eat anything anyway. The night was going to be difficult enough as it was.
It was a relief to be inside my tent and lying down despite the mountains of gear that were piled up all around me. I felt good that I’d taken the time to bring everything inside and spread it out like that. I hate to think what would have happened if I’d left it in the trailer with the zipper closed and locked for security all night and then cycled the next day with it closed. I might have created a mildew perfect storm that would have haunted me forever.
The night from that point forward was far from a period of uninterrupted rest. In fact, I might have been awake longer than I was asleep. I had a lot of things to do. For one, even though I was inside my tent, I hadn’t washed up or taken any kind of refreshing shower. There was too large an audience for that. So once inside, I waited until I felt sure everyone had left, and then I re-emerged with my towel and toiletries and flashlight in hand. It was time to face the urine-soaked area of the well.
This came with the usual problems. For one thing, just getting to the well without breaking my neck was a challenge. It was dark, and I had to navigate wet and slippery concrete walls with gaps between them. Once there, I had to find a spot to put my towel and toiletries kit that wasn’t soaking wet and filthy. It’s not like there were convenient hooks on the non-existent walls and non-existent door. And then, most important, I had to get a death grip on the frayed rope that was attached to the bucket. The rope was exactly as long as the well was deep, and if I lost my grip on the rope, I’d lose it and the bucket, and I’d have no way of pulling water up. It would be another disaster.
As I brushed my teeth and took my shower and even washed my hair, I quickly remembered the lessons I’d learned from previous encounters with buckets and wells. In particular, there is a technique to getting the bucket to fill with water. You can’t just drop the bucket from the handle. If you do that, the flat bottom of the bucket lands on the water and it just floats there or it just sort of tips over and you end up pulling up a quarter of a bucket of water. The trick is to throw the bucket down at an angle so that the edge of the bucket hits the water first and it slices deeply into the water. This effectively submerges the bucket and it is full to the brim when you pull it back up. I just had to make sure that I didn’t focus so much on bucket-throwing that I forgot about the more important holding-on-to-the-rope aspect of this operation.
I felt much better after my bucket bath, and I climbed back into my tent feeling like a new man. That’s another lesson I’ve learned from nights in my tent and in other difficult positions. Sometimes it feels like it is too much trouble to get out and take a shower or take a pee or take some action to make your position more comfortable. So you just lie there and do nothing and endure your sweaty body or full bladder or whatever it is. You feel like it’s not worth the effort. But when you DO get up and go take that bucket bath shower, you return within just a few minutes feeling fantastic. It’s like if instead of lying there for five minutes debating with yourself whether you want to bother taking a shower, you could have taken those five minutes, done it, and it would be finished and you’d be back in bed feeling so much better. Basically, just do it.
The next couple of hours passed with me lying on my back and thinking about the day mixed with sudden bursts of activity as I thought of some new way to organize my gear to help it dry faster. Or I’d think of something else to check to make sure it wasn’t wet and damaged. At some point, I fell asleep. I know that because I was woken up several times by the return of the savage storm. The first time a new storm blew in from over the ocean, I was almost panic stricken. I leapt out of the tent like I’d been shot with an electric prod. What new horror would this storm bring? Has the wind changed direction? Is my tent now exposed to the rain? With my tent fly hanging loose, would everything inside my tent now get soaked anew? Was my trailer, sitting out there on its own, getting wet? Was the clothing I’d hung on the line being blown away? Was my bicycle safe? With the constant stream of new Jurassic Park movies out there, the phrase “Life will find a way” was often in my mind. It’s a phrase I can relate to, but I would change it to “Water will find a way.” My experience with cycling or camping in the rain and with the typhoons in the Philippines and typhoons in Taiwan and with leaky roofs has taught me that water will get in anywhere it can. It’s unrelenting and unstoppable. You can build your dikes and your dams and your breakwaters. You can pile up sandbags. You can stuff towels under doors. You can do whatever you want, but water is going to get in anyway. It’s sneaky and slow and relentless. It will get past your defenses and it will destroy whatever you’ve got. Just ask anyone whose basement has been flooded what they think of water. That was how I felt whenever a new storm arrived, and every time, I got out of my tent and stood guard outside my tent. I was completely naked and, obviously, I didn’t care how wet I got personally. I walked around the perimeter of my camping area with the rain lashing down on my body and with water pouring down my face in sheets making sure everything was safe and secure. In this, I was quite lucky. I was lucky that I had stayed awake long enough to avoid pitching my tent on the cement floor. That area was a flood zone now. And I was lucky that the wind came from a consistent direction. With my tent on the cement platform on the opposite side from the rain, it stayed almost perfectly dry despite the world-ending level of rain falling around me. If I had to be out in that storm, I could not have asked for a better spot to pitch my tent.
I haven’t mentioned yet one of the most dominant characteristics of this night of storms. And this was a nearly deafening chorus of bullfrogs. There was a thick marshy area surrounding where I was camping, and apparently, it was bullfrog heaven. I never saw one of these monsters, but the sound emanating from them made me imagine creatures two feet across with powerful lungs. They were crazy loud and they were non-stop. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it. It continued throughout the entire night.