Bali: Humidity and Hawkers

"You want transport??? Taxi??? No??? Maybe tomorrow, ya? Maybe you want need taxi tomorrow???"

"Tidak. Maaf." Indonesian for No, Sorry. The trick seems to be to say the words in Indonesian without breaking stride or making eye contact and never saying anything else or turning, no matter how much they follow you and continue shouting about how they have transport available. And they will follow you for a good 20 feet sometimes.

I blame we tourists for being lazy and accepting the transport rather than using our quite functional feet and legs, thus encouraging this crap.

Some of the taxi drivers slash currency exchangers slash sunglass dealers aka all-around husslers aka every local male on Bali are a little more clever, subtle you might say.

"Hey, where you from?"
"California. The States."
"Oh, America. I like America. My friend is from Boston."
"Oh. That's awesome. You're from Bali?"
"Yeah, my whole life. I make my living here making handcrafted necklaces. I'll show you. Not to buy, just to look."
"Uh, that's alright." He will have already pulled out his bag of necklaces by now.
"See? Beautiful, ya? Only 50,000 rupiah, because you are from California."
"No, tidak, I'll pass. I don't need a necklace. Have a good one, selamat tingal."
"Wait, wait, ok, final price, good price, 30,000 rupiah!" I walk faster.
"Okay, I'll go broke, but 20,000." I really don't want a crappy sweatshop necklace, even at $2 US. Neither does Ciara, so to avoid getting into about 50 of these conversations a day, we have to largely ignore the seemingly friendly queries by locals about where we're from and our names. It's frustrating, because the best part about travelling is meeting the locals, but on Bali, the locals don't see us as people, but as sources of money. I have had a couple of decent conversations with locals, seriously, two, and even those two ended, after 5 minutes or so, with them attempting to make money off me. One guy offered to show us a trail through some rice fields. Ciara mentioned that we had no money, and he left us to fend for ourselves immediately.

But that's just the bad part. The good parts are the crazy winding shittily paved alleyways and streets and crowded markets and cheap food and beer and kids playing and chickens and dogs and old people living in the same house and massages for $4/hr and awesome beaches and soul-touching sunsets over black sand beaches and being shown how to play weird Balinese instruments under the tutelage of an old fogie who possessed very little English to accompany our far shittier Bahasa Indonesia and wandering through rice fields during a thunderstorm and adjusting to the many oddities of being far far from home and my usual comforts. I think it'll only get better, and so far, it ain't too fucking bad.