Bali ’99 – Magic Cave
On our first trip to Bali, we were told to bring $100 bills to exchange into rupiahs once we got there. Nice, crisp new ones. My friend Lynn Laumann kept bothering us by saying things like “I just use the ATM”, but these claims were dismissed as fantasies. Turns out, there are ATM’s all over Kuta for all your money needs. One night at about 1:30AM in the middle of a Larium insomnia binge, we pull out a good chunk of this funny money and cruise back to our hotel down a poorly lit alley. Now, I would never do this at home but here we are living in a haze, sweating and dizzy. Around the corner comes a crew of about 8-12 local guys with sticks. There are 3 of us, two of who don’t think twice about pounding the crap out of some surfer at their local La Jolla reef breaks. Oh, and me. I figure it is ‘over’ for our heroes. They just pass on by like nothing. What was that all about? I feel kinda ripped off so I turn around and toss one of our empty beer bottles at them. Time for some capitalist imperialism! Just kidding…
Where was I?
So the drill is this. You got a $100 bill burning a whole in your sweat soaked shorts and you want some rupiah so you can pay back your friends for covering you last night at dinner or whatever. What do you do? Easy. Along the street are endless signs listing the current exchange rate for your money. Simply shop around for the best rate and go for it. Unfortunately, it is a scam. A $100 bill gets you about 1,000,000 rp depending on the rate. They hand you a 2-3 inch thick stack of 5000 rp bills. There should be 200, right? Start counting. Invariably you are shorted about $25 at a minimum. Then you demand the rest and they say “no more” or some other lie. If you manage to get them to give you the rest, the best trick is after you have counted the stack, they offer to put a rubber band around it. They tap the stack on the table, we will call it the “Magic Table”, and they let a good portion of the bills fall off the back of the table into the drawer. Glenn visited about 10 of these places and could never get the true amount. We finally found an honest guy at the end of Poppies I who was above this treachery and I have been going there ever since.
So we head out to Padang Padang for our daily beating. The waves are up as usual and Ron is getting shacked, as usual. On one wave he eats it and loses his board. I mean really loses it. It is gone. The wave breaks in front of a jagged cliff with lots of rocks on the inside and some big caves with bats and stalactites, whole deal. But it is right there; 50 feet away so there should be only a minor inconvenience without some mystery. But it is gone. Whoosh! Ron gets to shore and tells his tale and grabs another board to go back out and look around. A helpful fisherman had pointed earlier and said his board was ‘over there’. Ignoring his earlier advice, Ron went deep into the cave, and looked over a mound and down a hole and found his board. As he passed the photogenic fishermen on the big rock by the channel that everyone takes a picture of, with 2 boards in hand, he says, “try hiding it better next time”. He grins. They scatter. I guess they sell the things back at Kuta for a pittance. Haven’t they heard of karma?!?…
Score: Team “Hee Haw 2,
Magic Table and Magic Cave 0.
