河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

(the first of a series of articles related to my trip to Java and Bali in Indonesia)

There are shops all around me but I have nothing to buy.

There is food and restaurants all around but I had lunch only two hours ago, and I'm supposed to be watching my weight so eating just for the sake of eating is out of the question.

There's a movie theatre but I've already seen one movie today and I'll already spend much more time sitting down today than is healthy.

My plane arrived at Bali at around nine pm. Once through customs, I exited the airport terminal looking for any sign of Isah, our helper. She was going to meet me there. It didn't take long to find her. She was standing at the end of the lines of hotel people holding up signs advertising the names of the guests they were there to pick up.

It was great to see her and she looked as healthy and vibrant as ever, if only not as slim as she was when she worked for us. I guess walking ten dogs four times a day really keeps the weight off.

Isah wasn't alone. Accompanying her on the seven-hour "kijang" minibus journey from her home to the airport were her husband-to-be, her twelve-year-old son and one of her nieces; a really nice bunch of people.

I don't know what time it is. I've been asleep for a few hours since arriving here this morning but can't be sure exactly how many hours. There's the sound of activity outside the wall that separates me from the markets next door, and there's the sound of hushed conversation outside in the living area. The family's up.

I walk out into the living area. Isah's flat is small. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living area all within approximately four hundred square feet. Under normal conditions, her mother sleeps in one room while Isah sleeps in the other. I'm not sure where her son sleeps.

I woke after only a few hours sleep to the sounds of activity outside the wall of my room. I remember walking through the bamboo matrix that is this town's markets just before sleeping. Covered by a roof of galvanised iron with patches of canvas, the markets were quite large. Before coming here, Ipah had warned me about the noise of the markets, worrying that the noise would prevent me from sleeping. She had nothing to worry about. I wasn't affected by the markets at all. Nor was I affected by the sound of motorbikes driving past the front door of her small flat on their way to the markets.

I got up from my bed and inquisitively looked outside my room into the family room of the flat. Ipah's mum was already up, sitting on a wooden stool outside the door watching people come and go. Ipah was up too; probably hadn't slept at all; preparing breakfast for her son and attending to the things she needed to do every day. It was five thirty in the morning and the world was up and active.

The bathroom was simple and very different to anything I'd seen before. A square room, tiled on all sides and on the floor. The front half of the small room; barely larger than a closet; was bare with buckets on the floor to one side and a drain hole on the other side. The left side of the back half of the room was the toilet, one of those squatting toilets commonly used throughout China. On the right side was a square water well, a brick and tile container of water, roughly three feet high.

There was no running water in the bathroom. Ipah purchased her water; used both for cooking and bathing; from a nearby public bathroom. Before I arrived, she had to carry the water from the bathroom to her home by bucket; two trips every day. During my stay with her, she purchased a hose and laid the hose down between her home and the public bathroom. Future refills would simply require connecting the hose to the public bathroom's water tap, filling up her well, and then paying the bathroom owner. It's entirely possible that this hose arrangement was only temporary, to be used while I and her other family guests were in town for the wedding. We'd obviously use a lot more water than just Ipah, her mother and her son.