the magic basket

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click for map!

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afer a loathsome day of transit in the loathsome capital of malaysia - a country that g and i both know and hate - we arrived at the airport to find that our flight to indonesia had been cancelled. "air asia apologises - next!"

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we managed to grab a flight to indonesia, where we then bought a domestic flight to manado the following morning, after a night of traipsing about town watching the jakarta youth doing burnouts with their motos in public places, and a few hour's sleep on a bench outside the airport while malaria-bearing mosquitos dined on our 'actually we've decided not to take anti-malarials this time' bodies.

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we were a day late to our little scuba diving resort of froggies on the island of bunaken near manado in northern sulawesi, where an abandoned ang was waiting for us!

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of course the reason that we had come to bunaken island was to celebrate g's big FOUR-O! the staff at froggies had even found out about it (not from me though?) and baked him a cake on the night - how wonderful! in a nice coincidence, gerard did his 40th dive during our trip too!

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days consisted of diving, eating and sleeping and not much else. i completed my open water diving certificate and then joined ang and g as we explored the ocean depths during the day, and lay about reading at night :)

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i did take a short break from the diving one day when, after having spent the afternoon swimming off the pier - an area turgid with human excrement - i developed high fevers, shortness of breath, and started spraying large amounts of liquid out of both ends. at the time i was sure that i was going to die, despite having my own one-on-one doctor and red-bearded nurse, but in retrospect the whole smelly drama turned out to have just been a great way to lose some excess weight.

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so back to the diving - because unlike ang and g, this was actually my first time. initially i gazed in awe at all that surrounded me - this new universe under the waves. after a couple of days (it may even have started in a creeping sort of way on my second dive) i started to get a funny sort of feeling. i would be hanging there - weightless - 25 metres below the surface of the sea, looking across at walls of coral, hundreds of different species of fish, turtles, sharks, nudibranch, sea cucumber etc etc thinking to myself "haven't i seen this before?". the weightlessness was cool, but i found the tanks bulky, and just wanted to throw them off and swim out alone with my snorkel and fins. that's right readers: i was bored. as much as i tried to deny it, listening to other divers recounting stories of what sort of fish they'd seen and exclaiming that they hadn't seen this rare species of turtle/shark/crab in over 500 dives and wasn't it amazing?, i realised that i just didn't give a shit. for me, the excitement of swimming is in the action. not hanging there weightless like an oil particle in an emulsion, but moving against the water, being tossed around by the waves.

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we did spend a few occasions just snorkelling - and that was cool. we got ot use our underwater camera that we had bought at aldi just before the trip and then returned for a full refund just after the trip after uploading all our photos. thank goodness for their no-questions-asked policy :)

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froggies has a francophonic customer focus - maybe the name is a giveaway. though there were a few dutch people in the first few days (the manager was an amazing polyglot and seemed to able to communicate with anyone in their native language), in the second half of our stay almost every single other person staying there was french. rude cunts. i have never been in a situation where you share breakfast lunch and dinner tables, not to mention a small resort with people who go out of their way not just to not say hello, but to avoid all eye contact or recognition of your presence whatsoever for your entire stay. it was as if we didn't exist, crowded as it had become! what the devil was all that about? when we finally made it back to manado after our trip, a couple of tourists came to talk to us about our experiences. i almost jumped with the shock of their casual friendliness after the silent treatment at froggies. shame on the french! honte à la france!

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at some stage during the trip i looked about at all the rude rich white people sitting around the resort, completely distanced from the poor village surrounding us, who had flown in from their comfortable lives and comfortable jobs in the first world for a few days to be hideously pampered ('because they deserved it'), and i realised with horror that i had become one of them. oh the shame! it was this more than anything that put me off -this lack of realness about staying at these resorts - and reminded me of the time when i was on the other side of the fence in cairo so many years ago. i have not abandoned you young ondrej! the heart that beats in your chest still beats in mine with the same passion, the same fervour!

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and though being served and having everything pre-planned left both gerard and i feeling uncomfortable (however convenient it was), there was one aspect of it that we just loved: the magic basket. on our first day at the resort we found a basket in the corner of our room - an ordinary wicker basket like any other. we decided to put our dirty clothes in there to store until we could clean them, but when we came back from diving on the following morning the basket was empty, and when we came back from diving in the afternoon the clothes had appeared on our bed, all clean and dry, tied up with a ribbon! it was a religious experience! close inspection of the magic basket did nothing to reveal its secret, but it kept working in the same way, day after day, no matter how much dirty laundry we chucked inside. if only we could have a magic basket at home in cremorne!

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and that was all. a few lazy days with lovely ang and the celebration of a big milestone in my lover's life, and it was time to get back to an increasingly hotter melbourne for what i reckon is going to be a ripper of a summer :)

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