The Lost Girls (44 page)

 

H
ow old are you?” asked the petite Balinese woman who'd introduced herself as Nyoman, while pouring me a cup of coffee. I was sitting at a restaurant table in a garden courtyard. Wide leaves protected me like a parasol from the already hot sun.

“I'm twenty-nine,” I answered.

“Are you married?”

Not that question again.
Instead I smiled and said, “No, but I have a boyfriend at home in the States.”

She looked relieved that I wasn't wandering this earth completely unattached. Family is the thread that binds Balinese society together, with each member shouldering specific roles and duties according to gender and birth order. The eldest brother, for example, traditionally plans all the religious ceremonies not only for his own wife and children but also for his younger brothers' families. It's the women, though, who make the offerings to the gods in those ceremonies.

And the impression I'd gotten was that the Balinese preferred doing most things together, from the crowds congregating at the
warung
s (traditional family-run restaurants) every afternoon to the packs of housewives wandering the markets together each morning. A lone woman traveling without a husband must have seemed like a lost soul. Many islanders deemed it their duty to relieve me of my solitude, as they struck up a conversation whenever I'd separated from Jen and Amanda.

After a little more than a week in Kuta Beach, we'd only just arrived in Ubud, Bali's cultural center. The girls had chosen to linger in bed that morning, but I'd been too excited to sleep and wanted to explore the town, which was bordered by chartreuse-colored rice paddies and flanked with art galleries.

“Are you married?” I asked Nyoman.

“Yes. I live with my husband and his family, and we have two sons,” she answered. Balinese women typically move in with their husband's relatives, living in a compound that also houses his parents, his brothers, his brothers' wives, and their children. She likely also worshiped his ancestors at the family's temple constructed inside the compound walls. I wondered how long I would last living in such close quarters with my in-laws.

“You look at menu, and I'll be back,” said Nyoman. I was relieved that the menu offered English translations for dishes such as seafood omelets, fried rice topped with an egg, and vegetables in coconut-milk curry.

Songs spilled from an invisible speaker like a metallic stream of wind chimes, gongs, and cymbals, known as Balinese gamelan music. Sipping my coffee, I watched Nyoman stand in front of a stone shrine at the edge of the courtyard. She lit a stick of incense and waved it around as if in prayer before placing it inside a bowl beside a pile of bananas. The smoke billowed skyward and married with the scent of frangipani, jasmine, and gardenia.

The small acts of daily devotion performed by the Balinese captivated me even more than some of the major monuments of faith—from the temples of Angkor Wat to the ruins of Machu Picchu—I'd seen in the past year, maybe because seeing people actually worshiping made faith seem more tangible. When I'd first arrived in Bali, I'd tripped over the piles of flowers, coconut leaves, rice crackers, and incense dotting the roads and sidewalks. They appeared too beautiful to be trash but too random to be sacred, and I'd heard nothing about them while studying Hinduism at the ashram in India. So I'd approached Herman, who had been sitting on his steps as usual, to ask what they were.

“They are called
canang sari
—offerings to guard against the evil spirits and bring luck from the good spirits,” Herman explained matter-of-factly.

I'd since discovered that the Balinese practice Hinduism with a nature-worshiping twist. They believe that the world houses both good and bad spirits that can be kept in balance with rituals such as fruit offerings, dancing, and paintings. To stay in harmony, the Balinese believe, you have to keep good relations with the spirits, other people, and nature. I felt a surge of warmth and protection while watching the Balinese housewives communing with the divine every day, placing offerings at family shrines. And regularly stumbling upon those homemade piles of devotion reminded me I was wading through an island of believers.

After making her offering to the spirits, Nyoman approached my table, balancing a steaming plate of fried bananas. “It's a gift for you to taste,” she said.

“
Matu suksama
[thank you].” The caramelized sweetness tickled my tongue. An elderly woman hobbled over with a baby cradled in her arms.

“This is my husband's mother,” Nyoman said. “She watch my son while I work, but I must feed him now.” One of the perks of living with your in-laws is built-in day care. For what communal living lacks in privacy, it makes up for in cooperation, cocooning family members with the security of not having to struggle through life's challenges alone.

I poured sweetened condensed milk into my coffee and watched the whiteness swirl into the blackness, creating the shape of a blooming lotus flower.

It was the balancing of darkness and light that seeped into every crevice of life in Bali. I could only hope I'd be able to demonstrate the same balance myself—on a bike. I'd read the roads carved into the hills surrounding Ubud made for picturesque rides with sweeping views of the rice paddies. Besides, I wanted to see what life was like outside town and figured pedaling around would let me cover more territory than I'd be able to
by jogging. “Do you know where I could rent a bicycle?” I asked Nyoman when she returned.

“My husband's brother rents them. If you walk Monkey Forest Road, you will find them parked.”

After finishing up my breakfast, I paid my rupiahs, pushed back my chair, and wandered outside. The storefronts's paintings were awash in primary colors and textures splashed across hundreds of canvases. Painters sat on the steps in front of their shops, fluttering their brushes with the soft touch of a butterfly's wings. Even the concrete walls bordering the maze of alleys were decorated with art like mounted tie-dye, transforming an otherwise mundane space into something beautiful. Shadows moved across the walls. I looked up to see clouds blowing across the sun and noted that the air smelled heavy, like rain.

Not wanting to linger with a downpour threatening, I easily found the line of parked bikes among the rows of art galleries, organic food stores, and meditation centers. For $2, I had two wheels for the day.

Sliding onto the banana seat, I slung my purse strap across my body diagonally so it wouldn't slip off. I felt like my childhood self, hopping on my bike to seek out the secrets of foreign lands: the school playground, the church parking lot, my grandmother's garden. I was free again, belonging to no one.

With the wind tickling my ears and making my eyes water, I pumped my feet, mud from the tires speckling my legs. I rode away from Monkey Forest with its divine divas awaiting gifts of bananas. I passed a temple at the edge of town whose stone pillars were crisscrossed with carvings and shaded with palm fronds. I rode up a steep hill, past houses where children kicked balls around in the yard, stopping to yell “Halloooo!” as I approached. Men lounged on the front steps of their thatched-roof houses, eating balls of rice with their hands. Women carried jugs of water, laughing together as they walked.

I pedaled faster and faster as the sky darkened, trying to outride the rain. I'm free, I repeated to myself with every breath. The houses grew farther apart, and the rice paddies transformed the landscape into a layered green wedding cake. Palm trees dotted the grassy shelves, and a river ran through it all.

I'm free.
Children's laughter poured from a lone compound, and I turned my head to see a woman placing a stick of smoldering incense inside her family shrine. I pedaled faster.

BOOM!
Thunder exploded a few seconds before lightning tentacles formed glowing fissures in the clouds.

A sane person would have turned back toward town to avoid potential flash floods—especially when biking in a foreign country where she had no idea where she was going and no one else had any idea where she was. Instead, I was compelled to surge forward to beat the lightning. I tightened my abs and pushed down on the pedals so fast that the world melted into streaks like the tie-dyed paintings I'd admired in town.

I'm free.
Raindrops fell, washing away the sweat streaking my forehead. I can do anything, go anywhere, I thought as I crested a hill and started to pick up even more speed on the descent.

What are you going to do when you get back?
Stephany's question blew through my mind like a cold draft as the world breezed by.

I'm free
.

Steph had also asked, while we were walking home from an Irish pub, giggling and sweat-soaked from dancing on her final night on the island, “What really made you go on the trip?”

I'd offered my standard answer. “How could I
not
go? I had two friends willing to travel the world with me and a little savings in the bank. It wasn't really a choice.” I saw her examining my face out of the corner of my eye, sensing she wasn't entirely buying it.

“Yeah, but you said you were happy with your job. And it sounds like you're totally in love with your boyfriend—you don't even look at other guys. And you
live
with him in a cute apartment. Seriously, why did you decide to leave for an entire year?”

I should have known the answer, or else why
had
I traded my 401(k) plan for credit card debt, my closet for a backpack, and my bed with the man I loved for a different cot every night? Amanda wanted to jump-start her travel-writing career, and Jen was escaping a relationship with the wrong man. Me, I was in it solely for the adventure. Or so I'd told myself.

I'm free
, I repeated my mantra, pedaling faster still. Stephany couldn't travel for a year because she was tied to her husband. Nyoman would never be able to go on a bike ride in the middle of the day, because she had a job to do and a baby to care for. I was tied to no one. I was free. And I was alone.

I heard Elan's voice echo in my head as my tires turned over pebbles in the road. “I'll miss you, Hol.” I remembered how happy I'd been, laughing as he spun me around in the snow on that Boston sidewalk. I thought about how safe I'd felt on those nights when we'd fall into our bed but stay up talking until the sky turned from black to gray. I pictured the way he'd helped me slip into my loaded backpack for the first time and then watched me from above on our patio as I climbed into a cab on my way to the airport to begin my journey.

Then, quicker than a lightning bolt shooting across the clouds, I didn't want to be free anymore. I didn't want to travel through my life alone.

Swish, swish,
the sound of the pedals slicing through the air undercut the sound of the rain pelting the ground.

I'd picked up so much speed that I'd finally stopped pedaling and put on the brakes, sending my bike into a near tailspin. Along with drinking the water and flashing expensive electron
ics in public, biking rural roads in a rainstorm sans map was probably listed as a Lonely Planet warning about what
not
to do when traveling.

Before my bike could sail into a ditch-turned-river, I regained my balance. At the same moment, a sliver of sunlight cracked through the clouds. The rice paddies were iridescent, rhinestonelike raindrops studding the greenery as if the spirits had taken a BeDazzler to the landscape.

I slowed enough to put one foot on the ground and then turned back in the direction from which I'd come.

 

NORTH ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND
MARCH

S
ix days after we flew Garuda Indonesia to Bali, one of the carrier's planes overshot the runway in nearby Jakarta and burst into a ball of flame. While 118 people escaped the wreckage (including one Australian cameraman, who unbelievably rescued his gear and started shooting footage for Sydney's six o'clock news), 22 passengers weren't so lucky.

Needless to say, none of us was clamoring to get on another Garuda flight in order to continue our journey, but we didn't have much choice. Even if we could get a last-minute refund, one-way fares to New Zealand on a different airline would have cost as much as our last six flights combined. We had a choice: either carve out a spot in Bali's thriving expat community and stay on the island forever, or bite the bullet and get our butts on the plane. A passenger in line behind us had an optimistic take on the situation: “The week after a crash is the best time to fly. At least you know the pilots won't be sleeping on the job.” We didn't feel comforted.

Fortunately, the trip was blissfully uneventful. We arrived just after dusk, checked into a windowless dorm at the Auckland Central Backpackers hostel, and proceeded to enter a sleep coma
until the alarm of one of our dormmates went off just after 7 a.m. Jen and Holly barely stirred, but I couldn't convince my brain to doze off again. I yanked on a pair of running pants, laced up my ultragrungy trail sneakers, and sneaked out of the room.

I wasn't prepared for the full-force blast of early-morning brilliance outside the front door: the sky was so saturated blue and cloudlessly dazzling, it almost hurt my eyes to stare into it. The sun was rising through the city skyline, and Auckland's wide streets were starting to fill with early-morning commuters. A bank's digital clock flashed the temperature, 17
C—about 68
F. I'd emerged into one of those impossibly perfect early-autumn days that makes you stop, draw a breath, and feel humbled that you're alive and able to experience it (particularly when you've been a Garuda passenger).

I didn't need the map I'd stuffed into my windbreaker to find my way to the waterfront. As I moved past the shipping containers at the industrial port section just north of town and emerged along the peacock blue waters of Judge's Bay, I felt my steps lengthen and my body pick up speed. About a mile in, I realized that I'd actually forgotten to turn on my iPod. Why bother now? I'd heard every song and every playlist a gazillion times before. There was greater novelty in the silence.

As I ran, I thought about Jen and Holly, either still asleep at the hostel or starting their morning rituals. By now I knew them almost better than I did myself—their personality quirks, their mood shifts, their penchant for silliness and capacity for kindness. They were my left and right arms, my compass and guidebook. We'd become the tightest of teams. Yet sometimes I wondered just how differently this trip might have gone had I—or any of us—chosen to go it alone.

Though there definitely was strength in numbers, being in a group sometimes made us less likely to reach out to new people. Or for well-intentioned strangers to connect with us. I was in
trigued by solo travelers, so flexible and autonomous, always bursting with stories of freshly forged friendships with locals who'd housed them, fed them, introduced them to extended families, and invited them to weddings. They had to work a lot harder to do all of the tasks that Jen, Holly, and I usually split up (nailing down train schedules, securing rooms at hostels, negotiating prices, lugging toiletries and electronics), but their trips ultimately seemed more rewarding for the challenges.

Holly had been a solo traveler at one point in her life; she'd backpacked alone in Costa Rica for several weeks after grad school. She pointed out that while traveling alone can be liberating, doing it for an extended period of time requires some seriously sharp instincts and a willingness, particularly as a woman, to take considerable risks. You couldn't always throw money at a problem by staying at a nice hotel or taking taxis everywhere. By necessity, you had to put your faith in strangers, so you'd better have a knack for reading people.

Despite the potential drawbacks, I'd been thinking more and more about the possibility of extending the trip past our predetermined end date and organizing an adventure somewhere in Australia—on my own. I knew that both of the girls, especially Holly, wanted to head home on time, but now that I'd finally made good on my promise to stop pitching articles and writing and just
travel
, rushing back to my old life was the last thing I wanted to do.

When I hobbled back through town forty-five minutes later (unlike Holly, I was in no shape for full-out morning marathons), I found myself smack in the middle of Auckland's morning rush hour. It was a misnomer, really, considering that nobody actually seemed to be in a hurry. Cute, closely shaven men in impeccably tailored suits strolled up Customs Street, while adorably accessorized women breezed out of Starbucks with to-go lattes in hand. People laughed and made conversation with
their friends or coworkers. No one stepped into the crosswalk until the signal instructed them to do so, and if they bumped into someone moving the other way, they apologized. It looked like an artist's rendering of some pristine, well-organized city of the future, a place where smartly dressed people look thrilled to be sharing communal spaces. Except this wasn't a sketch or a digitized model; it was the largest and most populous city in New Zealand.

 

Y
ou're kidding me. You actually
like
it here?” said our local Kiwi pal Carmi when she picked us up the next day in her gunmetal gray Toyota Marino.

We'd met the twenty-four-year-old in cyberspace after she'd stumbled upon our blog. When she learned that we'd be in New Zealand, she'd e-mailed to ask if we'd like her to play chauffeur and tour guide during our stay in her city. Our response: a unanimous “hell yeah.” We'd planned to stay in Auckland for only four days—long enough to spend some time with local friends of Holly's—but that was three days too long in Carmi's book.

“What do you like about Auckland?” she asked in utter disbelief.

“It just seems like such a
livable
city,” said Holly. After spending our first day exploring, we'd all been impressed by the sheer amount of land devoted to parks, paths, and outdoor spaces—not to mention the waterfront views. The city had been built on a narrow stretch of land threaded between two harbors dividing the Tasman Sea from the Pacific. Every bay and cove was filled to bursting with gleaming white boats, from tiny skiffs to yachts. It wasn't hard to guess why it had been nicknamed the City of Sails.

What we couldn't figure out was why the locals seemed to have such a neutral impression of their own hometown. They voiced
the same complaints as most other city dwellers: too much traffic, skyrocketing home prices, the fact that so much urban sprawl had developed in recent years. How could Aucklanders be so unaware of their city's awesomeness relative to everyone else's?

“Wait till you start traveling through the rest of the country,” Carmi said. “Then you'll see why you shouldn't have spent so much time here.”

She explained that the North and South islands were jam-packed with extraordinary natural wonders of IMAX-worthy proportions. Rain forests, redwood forests, deciduous forests, electric blue glaciers, limestone karst, knife-edged mountains, bubbling volcanoes, deeply cut fjords, steaming sulfur pools, and crystalline beaches rimming aquamarine waters had all been crammed into a landmass smaller in size than Italy. A total of 4 million people live in New Zealand, a third of whom are in Auckland, which makes this a nation of small towns and one of the least densely populated countries in the world. You can actually leave your front door unlocked in most places. Sheep outnumber people ten to one.

“Hey, d'you guys think you'd ever try something like that? I've never been, but I'd heard it's sweet as,” said Carmi, pointing up at the Auckland Sky Tower. It looked distinctly like the Seattle Space Needle, except, according to our walking guidebook, Jen, it was 471 feet taller—the tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Sweet as what?” Holly asked, squinting up at the tiny figures leaping off the side of the tower in a feat that looked like BASE jumping with a rope instead of a parachute.

“Sweet
as
. It's an expression, and you'd better get used to it. Kiwis say it a lot.”

“Hey, Amanda, let's do it! Want to go this afternoon?” Jen asked eagerly, always ready to fling herself off something if it involved an adrenaline rush and bragging rights.

“Hell
to the no,” I said. Jen had been trying to talk me into doing some kind of famous bungee jump in the South Island, and I'd had a similar response. My days of seeking out crazy near-death experiences were just about over.

“Holly?” Jen asked.

“Sorry—at this point, I think my credit card company would decline me just on principle.”

“Okay, so now that that's settled,” Carmi said. “Where would you ladies like to go?”

“Oooh! I know! Let's go shopping!”

Holly, who anticipates visits to foreign grocery stores the way religious disciples look forward to their pilgrimage to Mecca or the Wailing Wall, requested that our first stop be the New World supermarket we'd passed on the way into town to check out all the unusual and exotic foods consumed by New Zealanders.

“Is she being serious?” Carmi asked me as Holly slid into the backseat.

“Completely. It's a borderline addiction.”

After a quick spin through the aisles, Holly purchased a few essential rations and we struck off to find some real culture in greater Auckland. We made it to most of the spots on Carmi's hit list, including the “superflash,” newly renovated Auckland Museum, Viaduct Harbour, and the Queen Street market, rocking out between stops to a mix of songs she'd created for us with local artists like Brooke Fraser, Dave Dobbyn, and her personal favorite, Fat Freddy's Drop.

“New Zealanders really
live
for music,” she said passionately. “We savor every song. And our bands can rival just about anyone else's in the world. We're good at making music but even better at celebrating it.”

As it turned out, Carmi was a wellspring of information about all things Kiwi. As we made our way to Mission Bay, a
beachfront strip of trendy restaurants and cafés, Holly peppered her with the same questions about marriage and relationships she'd been asking women the globe over: “How do people meet here? How old are they when they get married? How old are they when they have kids?”

Lobbing the answers back with the speed and precision of a tennis pro smacking balls over a net, Carmi kept us riveted with her revelations about New Zealand culture.

On gender roles: “After decades of proving that women are equal to men, relationships between guys and girls are very progressive. You'll usually see the men looking after the babies, putting them in prams, and taking them for walks while the mum goes off to work and earns the living.”

On meeting guys: “We definitely don't go on ‘dates' here like you girls do in the States. None of this
Sex and the City
stuff. It's not like a guy will come up to you in a bar and ask you out. You usually just meet someone through friends and get together. That's it.”

On matrimony: “You'll find lots of couples who've been dating for years and years and live together but don't get married. Marriage itself doesn't really seem to be as much of a priority as it used to be.”

Listening intently, we chewed on this information and filed it away for future reference. In the event that any of us ever defected from our New York lives in order to pursue a future in Kiwiland, this was exactly what we'd need to know.

 

L
ater that afternoon, Carmi dropped us off at the home of Nora and Eric, a couple Holly knew through a friend of a friend from high school. Even though they'd never actually met Holly, they'd already offered to let all three of us stay with them for a couple of nights.