Bali Hash House Harriers 2

“Yes! We Want No Bananas”

The banana selling Ibu Ibu came out in force at the Taman or Obyek Wisata in Tampaksiring, near the Presidential Palace last Saturday. The huge car park contained large bright pink, lime green and canary yellow Mercedes tourist buses with The Transformers, The Red Hot Chile Peppers and Carlos Santana and his fret board respectively emblazoned on their sides (of course, why not? Better than Hello Kitty and Celine Dion) behind which every so often the fruit bearers would disappear momentarily, regroup, then come back at us with a vengeance hoping we had forgotten we’d just told them we didn’t want any bananas, or that we’d forgotten what they looked like. These were no ordinary, mild mannered, gentle, smiling, benign banana Ibu Ibu. Heck no, these were some rambutan totin’ super insistent, incredibly aggressive banana Ibu Ibu who were not going to take “no” for an answer in any language and who used every approach in their arsenal just short of martial arts to close a deal, finalize a banana transaction, not excluding, I might add (ahem) nasty comments and sarcasm.

My navigator suffered this at the hands of one particularly virulently disposed member of the banana sisterhood after breaking down and purchasing a small selection of rambutans from her, all but one of which proved to be infested with worms. The rejoinder to his complaint was in Bahasa Bali but sounded like it might have been “So whaddya want for ten thousand Rupes, Buster, a Banquet at Windsor Castle?” So much for after sales service in the pisang and buah selling sorority of Tampaksiring. They were driving us, well, bananas. But after all, these ladies were just trying to make a living like all of us.

Anyway, there we were gathered at this particular acre of asphalt, fruit stands, handicraft toko, warung and inexplicably adorned, nuclear colored tourist buses from Java, to enjoy the Waitangi Day run. This was set by three decidedly Non-Kiwis in the persons of Spook, Cane Rat and Organ Grinder - not a flittened or mingled vowel between the three of thum. Un fict, there was neery a Zullender in the untire githered throng. (Just a note here if you haven’t seen the “dick varnish ad” on You Tube, track it down, it’s hilarious, to everybody but Kiwis I guess. Excerpt: “I had a hundred people on my dick the other night and there’s no scuffs or scritches on ut innywhere”.) The hares unilaterally decided to cancel the Waitangi Treaty, give everything back to the Maoris and get on with the run.

And it was a beauty. Consisting of a short, medium and a long we were decidedly in scenic foothill territory with pretty damn good to astounding views straight off the bat and regularly all the way through the run. Although it wasn’t exactly as advertised by stand-in Kiwi, Cane Rat, who characterized it as “mostly flat” (if you were Sherpa Ten Sing, or Sir Idmond Hullary) and though we were sent up an early, cruelly devised check back consisting of perhaps 50 asphalt steps that went straight up and had us (me, specifically) leaning on our knees and gasping, we forgave them, generously, their sins because it was so consistently bloody good. There was PLENTY of paper, possibly a surfeit of the stuff for good weather conditions, but as the weather turned on us like a rabid mongrel, later (or Australian Labour or Liberal Party stalwarts) it was just as well it that it was as abundant as it was. I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out if this was a serendipitous cock-up or an inspired piece of planning on the hares’ part. There was virtually no rubbish on the run (except for the paper) and the view of the Presidential Palace above us on the on in was spectacular.

Somebody told me there was an actual working cannon in the grounds of the P.P. How about that? Just recently I read there was a guy who was so much in love with Key West in Florida he had his ashes blown out of a cannon on a promontory into the ocean. Presidents of Indonesia because of religion and culture don’t get cremated, and I don’t think it would work very well blowing any corpse at all anywhere out of a cannon, though I’d like to be proven wrong.

Back at the car park it started pissing down in in a seriously Old Testament manner. If the sheer volume of water was any indication, any amount of Gods were having purple conniptions and hissy fits simultaneously. The banana bruisers had taken their rotten rambutans and moldy mangosteins and done the disappearing trick along with the Day-Glo buses and the other vendors who no longer had the sales ardour to stick around in water up to the Plimsoll line on their flip flops and persue non-existent local and buleh tourists, and tight fisted Hashers. We stood around in disconnected groups under dripping umbrellas sipping dejectedly on beers and watched most of the Hash evaporate as well. A few attempts were made to crank up a circle but the whole affair seemed doomed, until with the suddenness that we old hands should be used to by now but still aren’t, the rain stopped almost dead, just after sunset.

Things seemed a lot jollier all of a sardine and it wasn’t long before the remaining hard core drinkers were warbling tributes to sheep appreciators all over the world in order to honour Kiwi Day in the usual time honoured fashion. There were a few virgins and visitors still loitering as well, one of whom told the joke of the day: How do you get a fat chick into bed? Piece o’ cake. This kind of behavior continued until keg beer and bottles were dregs and less. Inevitability descended, but to those who didn’t hang out long enough, to absent Kiwis and departed friends: yes, there was a circle and yes, it was a pretty good one, though abbreviated in numbers and length. The show must go on, as must the Hash.

On on to Margarana War Heroes Cemetery next week.

J.B.