New Zealand trip diary - day 2

We both spent a few hours awake during the night, but then slept again, waking up permanently around 7.30 am. If we’re lucky, that’s all it’ll take to adjust to the new time zone (currently eighteen hours different, including local daylight savings time). Via the Urban Dog webcam I was able to see Ozu for the first time in some forty-four hours – he was sticking with the big dogs (often/usually he gets dominated and has to be relocated with the little dogs) and looking good. And of course by now I have a big backlog of website reading, although it hardly matters as much when we're on a trip (I wish I could more easily convince myself it doesn’t matter at home either – I’d save so much time, and be at least a little happier, if I never clicked on another story about US politics). The hotel wi-fi is pretty good, although it delivers a high percentage of failed “This page cannot be displayed” first serves; it's usually all fine on the second serve.

We had breakfast in the hotel and at 10.30 caught a ferry to Rangitoto island, about twenty minutes away. The island, per the literature, “erupted from the sea in a series of dramatic explosions around 600 years ago.” The crater's covered now in dense vegetation, but other parts of the island still have a desolate, barely-cooled look to them. We walked up to the summit, which took about an hour, and then took a trail to explore some lava caves (according to a woman we met around there, we missed the most impressive of the lava caves, but having overlooked the advice on the pamphlet to “take a torch!” we probably couldn’t have enjoyed it anyway). We then walked to the western end of the island, where there’s a little beach and a view of a lighthouse; we sat there and had lunch, and then walked back along the coast to the starting point. This took about four hours, all under a gorgeous blue sky; it was a high of nineteen I think (but often with a pleasant breeze). The last ferry leaves at 3.30 pm; I’m not sure what happens if you miss it (starting on December 26^th, for one month only, there’s another ferry that leaves at 5 pm, so I guess that’s the peak period). Near the wharf you find a few tiny houses; apparently there was a small community living there in the early 20^th century. I’m not sure if they’re ever occupied now, although they look like they might sometimes be (the telltale clue of a TV antenna on one of them for instance). The guardians of the island seem very concerned about keeping “pests” at bay, and at one point in the walk we encountered a little black spaniel wearing a “conservation dog” vest. As we were leaving we saw there were actually three conservation dogs, but from the little we observed them they seemed more interested in getting petted than in rigorous conservation work.

Between the island and the ferry journey we got many fine views of Auckland’s winding coastline today. In some cities, you feel the downtown core exerting a magnetic pull on everything else, but Auckland feels like the opposite, as if it would be easy to settle into your own little patch of beauty and then not worry about the collective shape of it all (this is just my fanciful impression of course – in fact it has the same escalating congestion problems as everywhere else; they're discussing building an underwater tunnel to replace or supplement the main commuter bridge). This was pretty much the emblematic vacation day for us – find some quiet corner of the world that we’d never have thought about unless we were here, and then walk ourselves into the ground (one could also go most of the way up the volcano on a tractor-pulled “road-train,” but it was heartening to see that of the several dozen people on the island today, only about six chose that lazy option). When we walked back to the hotel from the ferry terminal, we felt as settled in as if we’d been here for days. It doesn’t take long to start establishing little routines – for example, we stopped at the same snack bar twice today. But then, as we already noted, settling into New Zealand isn’t much of a challenge, if you’re from Canada. Just based on the look of the streets, the  population isn't as diverse as we have at home, although having said that, almost everyone we’ve transacted with so far – the various people in the hotel, the restaurant last night, in that snack bar, the cab driver from the airport, the ticket sellers in the ferry terminal – seems to be an immigrant of one kind or another.

In many or most cities, of course, you have your glamorous high-end stores on certain streets and malls, and your local no-name stores on others, but from what we’ve seen so far, in Auckland they most often all seem to be mixed together, so Prada might rub shoulders with some old timers getting by on selling pencils (I just made that up – it’s not an actual example), giving it an "all in this together" kind of feeling. Based on initial impressions, it’s a bit more expensive here, but part of that’s probably inevitable given the smaller population and the relative isolation. The wine at least doesn't seem to cost any more – I guess they have a lot of that. I think this is the first hotel room we’ve been in for a long while that didn’t have either CNN or BBC World on the menu, so maybe they don’t expect guests to care about world news. As noted earlier, I think there'd be some merit to that.

Anyway, Ally slept for a while when we got back, but I never did, and this is actually a breakthrough given my recent addiction to having a daytime nap. We wandered round a bit afterwards but ended up eating within a block of the hotel again, in a place called The Wine Chambers – Ally had risotto and I had more asparagus than I’ve ever seen on one plate, along with some other things. We shut that place down actually, but compared to last night, it seemed there was plenty of action going on elsewhere, none of it destined for us.

New Zealand trip diary - day 1

We left Toronto at 2 pm on Sunday, and between the traveling time and the time change didn’t arrive in Auckland until just after 5 am on Tuesday. We’d been enjoying telling people this in advance because it sounds so daunting, but we didn’t expect it to be too bad, and it really wasn't. We flew first to Vancouver, so that's easy, and by the time we’d walked to the other gate it wasn’t much more than a half hour wait. The flight to New Zealand was thirteen hours, but we both slept for a large chunk of it. We were in “premium economy” which got us more leg room, a better washroom-per-passenger ratio and nicer food – the first two made it worthwhile. I watched two somewhat obscure, non-timekiller category movies during the journey, a documentary about Robert Altman and I Origins; Ally watched Norma Rae and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  As on every flight now, I ended up reading much less than I’d expected to (I've been storing up material for over a month), but there’s plenty of time ahead. Overall, it confirmed our approach – the more you can transform the duration of the flight into specifically useful time, the easier it goes by (reading this paragraph over, I see that I’ve already used the term “time” six times - and there’s another one - so that was obviously the preoccupation of the day).

Getting through the airport was easy, although we were quite surprised at the apparent paranoia about bringing in illegal fruit and other contraband – our bags were sniffed by three separate dogs, as well as being put through an X-ray machine. After a mostly nondescript twenty minute drive, we got to our hotel, the right-downtown Hotel DeBrett, at around 6 am, too early to check in because the place was full. We left our bags and just started walking. The same thing has happened to us before, most recently in Singapore just last year, and in retrospect usually provides one of the most memorable days of the trip, in that we assimilate a big central chunk of the city almost before we’ve fully realized we're here. That’s exactly how it went today – by the time we returned to the hotel, shortly after 11, we’d already covered (albeit superficially) virtually the entire standard downtown tourist map. The hotel is just a few minutes from the waterfront, and we went along there first, circling back into the middle of the city and then along the waterfront in the other direction, circling back a second time, walking through the centre to Albert Park (dominated by some astounding trees, as thick and contorted as an entire history of suffering), then to the Sky Tower which dominates the downtown skyline. We went up the Tower to the viewing platform on the 62^nd floor, then returned to the hotel. They still couldn't let us check in, but even at 11 am we’d already done just about enough for one day (at least in the absence of a shower, a proper sleep etc.) so we sat in their library space for an hour or so until the room was ready.

During those five hours, we were at various times both underwhelmed and overwhelmed – underwhelmed because Auckland for the most part seems like a pleasantly ramshackle city that at various points reminded us of any number of previous destinations: the waterfront is in the course of being reclaimed and generically spruced up; isolated buildings (or, by this point, often just facades, stuck onto or squeezed between ugly glass towers) embody the colonial past, occasionally reminding us of somewhere like Bermuda (where, similarly, otherwise run of the mill streets are often decorated by enormous exotic-looking trees); some of it is strenuously modern in the global corporate way (the logos of 3 of the big 4 accounting firms jumped out at us within five minutes, and by 7.45 am we’d ticked off all four); other parts of downtown are rather ugly, with entire blocks looking as if they’ve spent years waiting for demolition. All of this, at the same time, is overwhelming, because it’s in a place about as far from home as you can be. Walking through the morning rush hour, with its mess of buses and impatient pedestrians and all the rest of it was almost exactly like the sensation of doing the same thing at home, and even though you know that’s the inevitable result of globalization and of people being more the same than different, it still seems surreal and even unnerving, given that no one (as far as we know) has consciously coordinated the similarity.

At around 9 am, we stopped for a snack in a café attached to an old rundown theatre (there are quite a few of those) where Barbra Streisand was playing on the speakers – we shared a bacon and egg pie and had Christmas cookies (Christmas is as prominent in the stores here as it is at home, which feels even more premature given the climate). This was at the corner of Queen and Wellesley, both equally prominent street names in Toronto (although they don’t intersect there). It was already getting quite hot by then – apparently we’re lucky as the weather has been lousy in recent days. The view from the Sky Tower was pristine and as impressive as all such aerial landscapes; from up there it all seems much more coordinated (and hence more beautiful) than it does when you’re in the middle of it. The Sky Tower itself though largely embodies tackiness, being attached to a hotel/casino/entertainment complex with the clear intention of lulling visitors into spending all their time and money there without ever going anywhere else.

Once we got into the room, we slept until 6 pm. It’s a large, very pleasant second-floor room with a nice view of the street – it's also right across from an office building though so we’ll probably generally have the curtains drawn. We went back out and wandered round, mainly exploring side streets, many of them with the universally rather flat downtown-after-everyone’s-gone-home feeling. We have an enormous selection of bars and restaurants within a few blocks (although mostly with similar menus, all including lamb of course) and none of them seemed to be busy tonight. We chose a place called the Chancery Bistro, which had a big TV screen tuned to lawn bowling on the sports channel. This, at least, would never happen at home! I had fish; Ally had vegetable fritters. We’ll have lamb one day no doubt. We were asleep again not long afterwards.

Power of the Pie

              I don’t know whether the pie was as good as it looked, and I wouldn’t have been an effective judge of that anyway, because I didn’t really like fruit, with the exception of bananas (of course), but this was an apple pie. At least we both agreed it looked impressive, for a pie - substantial and symmetrical and bulging. Matthew filmed it from several angles as I held it in my hands, and then we put the lid back on the box while we walked to the elevator bank. It was around 10.40 am – we’d planned to be there at 10.30, but there’d been a mix-up about the location of the pie shop. Either way, the lobby was largely empty, as we’d expected, and the guy behind the desk was looking the other way. We agreed we were ready. Matthew stood at the far side of the lobby, lifted the camera and gave me the go-ahead. I pressed the button and waited. A door opened on the south elevator bank, and then another – I let them go, because we needed to be facing north. It was third time lucky. Someone got out without glancing at us; no one else was watching. I entered the elevator, took the pie out of the box and placed it in the middle of the floor, then I pressed 42, the highest floor, and stepped out before the door started closing. I waited a second to make sure it was heading up, ran to join Matthew. “Good work buddy,” he said.

“I should place pies for a living. Open a pie placement business.”

“Learn about the real life of pie. All right,” he said, for the benefit of the soundtrack, “so the pie is on its way up to the fortieth floor.” “Forty second,” I interjected. “Forty second floor,” he said, “one floor for every, uh.” “For every step to the answer when you multiply six and seven,” I said. “For every crossing on Broadway on the way to Forty Second street.” “All right,” he said. “So now we wait to find out the answer to the question: what happens to an apple pie that gets sent up by itself to the forty second floor. And I will stick to my previously expressed opinion that an apple pie that gets sent by itself up to the forty second floor doesn’t come back. We may never know exactly what happens to it, but it doesn’t come back. Whereas on the other hand, my friend here…”

“I think it comes back,” I said. “Because we know no one’s going to pick up and eat a pie they find on the floor of an elevator. But also, people who work in office towers are lazy and complacent and they only care about their own asses. Unless it’s their job to pick stuff up, they’re just going to work around it. So unless we get unlucky, and the janitor, or whoever has that job…”

“,,,of de-placing the pies…”

“…yeah, unless the pie deplacement person happens to get on the elevator in the next few minutes, then it’ll just stay there, and eventually come back down. Pretty much in the same condition it went up in, because it’s not busy enough for anyone to accidentally step into it.”

“So this is an argument about human engagement,” said Matthew, “because basically, I’m betting that someone engages with the pie in some way.”

“And we’re both betting no one takes the pie for a bomb and hits the alarm.”

“No, that would just be in the Paranoid States of America.”

“Using an apple pie bomb in Canada wouldn’t carry the same symbolic resonance.”

“It would have to be a maple leaf bomb or something.”

“But let’s not get into the hockey team.”

We went on like that for a while, killing time. It seemed like the doors of all the other elevators opened and closed several times. We started to speculate it might have malfunctioned, and then debated whether the pie could possibly have caused that. “I don’t think elevators have any open machinery or anything that a pie could slip into,” said Matthew. “If they did, people would get their feet caught in there and every day would be a lawsuit.”

At least semi-seriously, I said: “Maybe they’re checking the security cameras. Maybe they’re watching us right now, waiting to take us down. We should get out of here.”

“Office buildings don’t have SWAT teams on-hand. All they have is that guy on the desk, and I’m pretty sure we can outrun him.” The doors opened as he said that. One man came out. He came out like someone who was used to being watched when he entered a new space. The creases on his suit were so sharp you could almost feel them against your face. He was carrying the pie. He took a few steps, stopped and stared into it.  A woman greeted him, as she walked past him into the elevator, but he didn’t respond. I could feel Matthew trembling next to me.

The man lifted up his head and roared - a sick, unleashed roar that shouldn’t have been possible unless a limb was being amputated or something like that, and although I could see he was still standing there in his immaculate suit that shimmered like a winter lake, his roar made me see blood spattering from all his limbs and onto the marble walls and onto the shocked people around him, even though I knew there was no blood, only noise. He raised his arms, in something between ceremony and compulsion, and then he brought his hands together and crushed the pie between them. A few small pieces flew, but mostly it remained between his hands, like the mangled flesh of some giant pus-veined insect. He wiped his hands on his suit, over and over, and his roaring became more like sobbing, but still so loud you couldn’t take it for sadness or even anguish. It was like a total rejection of himself and everything he’d ever known or seen or felt. The empty lobby somehow became full, with people simultaneously drawn to and repelled by him. “Oh Jesus,” I said to Matthew. “It’s too much. What the hell?”

He didn’t respond, preoccupied with zooming in and staying on the man’s face. I heard someone say: “That’s Tony Sirotta,” and when the addressee seemed to question this, “I’m telling you it is.” I thought I knew the name but I couldn’t place it, and anyway, I was watching a man obliterate his name and all that went with it. He started to smear the pie on his face and his hair. I think there were some words somewhere in his hell-toilet-flush of noise, but I couldn’t make them out. Matthew had taken a few steps forward; at least one other person was recording it on his smartphone. “It’s not funny,” I said. “Switch it off.” “In a second,” he said.  He stepped closer again. Then the doors opened on an empty elevator, and a man pushed Sirotta into it. He pressed the button, motioned needlessly for everyone else to stay back, and the doors closed on both of them, cutting off Sirotta’s screams in mid-retch. The crowd dispersed quickly, leaving behind some strands of laughter and pity and bemusement, and some scraps of pie on the floor. Matthew walked towards the scraps and zoomed in; then he put down his camera. He exhaled. “There you go,” he said. “Someone engaged with the pie.”

I was Googling on my smartphone. “You won’t believe this,” I said. “That guy was a big shot. Former CEO of….” I scrolled down. “I don’t know what all these names are but it’s probably one degree of separation from the entire one per cent. We just spoiled every expensive suit in Canada, basically.”

“So maybe he couldn’t stand the sight of food that normal people might eat.”

“I don’t think we can put this up on YouTube. Not the bit about us planting the pie anyway. I mean, the consequences. The consequences could be. I don’t know what they could be.”

“They could be mind-enhancing,” said Matthew. “Maybe it’s a message about breaking through. Forget marching and setting up tents. You need to disrupt them on their home ground. Like introducing one tiny virus into the software. If it’s done right, everything melts down.”

“We’re not anarchists. We’re just looking for an easy way to score some YouTube hits.”

“Yeah, instead of working. That’s why we’re anarchists. The modern kind.”

Someone came with a mop to clean up the pie. An ambulance pulled up outside. “Let’s just go,” I said. Matthew resisted, so I said I’d leave him there; then he came with me. We walked to his place, about twenty minutes away. I kept searching for Sirotta’s name on Twitter and checking the local news sites. I didn’t see anything until we were in Matthew’s place and he was uploading the footage to his laptop; then I saw a tweet about Sirotta being rushed to hospital, and then retweets of the same thing over and over, interspersed with occasional expressions of goodwill or, more rarely, ill will. I drank a beer and fell asleep for a couple of hours. When I woke up, Matthew said, “Get ready for this. He died.”

He had to say it several times until I got it. At that point they hadn’t released a cause (later on they said it was a rare condition amounting to a cascading shutdown of his vascular system). We lit a joint and sat there turning things over. We didn’t think we’d done anything illegal, unless leaving a pie in an elevator amounted to ‘reckless endangerment” or “depraved indifference” or one of those conceptual TV show crimes, which – even at this time of fear and paranoia - we agreed seemed like a stretch. It seemed to us the pie had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We decided to do nothing until we were forced into it. It took us several more joints, and several beers, to reach this conclusion, but we were still happy with it when we talked the next day.

We met up at his place again and looked at all the news websites, and even signed up as temporary subscribers to some of them so we could click on all the Sirotta stories. They all danced around what had happened, referring to a “breakdown” or to “becoming unwell” while he left the office. We watched the business channel for the first time in our lives, but they just stuck to tributes, and to speculating about who would fill various roles he’d left open. We searched YouTube, but nothing turned up there. Still, we knew the wheels might take a while to turn. Police might be scrutinizing the surveillance videos, blowing up our faces in readiness to release them to the media, analyzing the pie and doggedly checking out every pie vendor within a five mile radius. We decided not to go out that day, which was easy because neither of us had anywhere to go, except that we were running out of weed and beer, so Matthew volunteered to go out and deal with that. Although I knew it made me seem like a clinging girlfriend or something, I texted him at five minute intervals to make sure he was still moving freely.

We slowly eased back into our normal routine over the next few days. Sirotta was buried. They ran out of things to say about him. We never saw any mention of the pie. Matthew thought they were suppressing it because they didn’t want to admit a titan of business could be brought down by such a trivial trigger; he said they hushed up things like that all the time – albeit usually sleazier things, he said, like sex orgies and murders – for the good of the markets. I wished I believed something so heady and elevating, but I thought they just didn’t care. The king was dead, and it had a sound medical explanation. It probably struck people as odd he’d found a pie in the elevator, but it wasn’t worth pursuing. If it was hushed up, it was just out of kindness or rectitude. All we’d done was to add to the category of things that one could tastefully choose to ignore. When I was feeling down – and that’s where I was a lot of the time now – I thought maybe the shunned pie was the symbol of my entire presence in the world, except that I wasn’t even leaving scraps for a janitor to clean up.

But after a few months of that, I was near Bay Street for a job interview, one mid-afternoon, and I decided afterwards to return to the pie shop. It had been bothering me that I’d never even tasted the damned pies from that place, and I thought maybe it’d help if I did, even though I didn’t expect to like them. I bought the same kind of apple pie, in the same kind of white cardboard box with a see-through lid. I carried it home through all the suits and the professional legs and the index-linked talk. And I swear that every ten or so paces I took down Bay Street, someone looked up from texting, or threatening, or whatever, and saw the box, and saw the pie in the box, and then looked at me carrying the pie in the box, and I swear that when they looked at me, I saw solid, heart-of-the-matter fear in their eyes. And then I tilted the box slightly so it was more visible to people coming at me, and I swear it amplified the effect, making people falter, and forget their place, and swerve out of any space I might make ripple. It lasted until I was leaving the financial district, and then it faded, and I was among people who didn’t see anything special about a guy carrying a pie in a box.

So then I felt much better, even though I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t end up eating much of the pie, because the crust was too heavy for my taste. And ever since then, whenever someone talks on TV about “slicing up the economic pie” or deploys some other kind of pie-dividing imagery, as people occasionally do, I always think they’re afraid of the pie, and they want to kill it before it kills them.

 

 

 

 

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 12

Someone said to me Singapore airport might be the best in the world, and it seemed that way today; we strolled out of the hotel and to the check-in counter without having to take an escalator or elevator or anything, and the whole process took about ten minutes. As airports go, it’s a cousin to the mall I described yesterday – enormous amounts of shining empty space, which somehow connotes classiness. Our flight to Hong Kong was easy too. Skewing to the lighter end of the film menu this time, I watched Gambit with Colin Firth (screenplay by the Coen Brothers, but I don’t think it was ever released at home). It was an easy changeover, and we got to Toronto almost an hour ahead of schedule, which confused us a bit because they never even acknowledged the fact, let alone boasted about it! My plan to watch my nine and a half hour Holocaust documentary – which still seems to me as though it should have worked – fell laughably short: I arrived home with about seven hours still to go. But at least I finished all my reading material. We both got a reasonable amount of sleep on the way and got back feeling, once again, that it had been about as painless as a whole day’s traveling could ever be.

Some people might think it’s an odd formula, to spend more two whole days, more or less, in transit, for the sake of eleven days or so of experience. But we’ve never worried about that. The eleven days are transcendent – you remember them forever, they shape you in ways you can’t define; they’re high on the list of how you sum up your life achievements. Any annoyances of the travel days are soon forgotten, and anyway, it’s not all wasted time - you can still read, watch movies, do other things you’d want to do anyway. We thought this was an astoundingly full trip. It didn’t have the spiritual aspects of our trips to Africa or Israel say, but now we can add another major city to those for which we possess a pretty good internal map (on the last evening we strolled around with total ease and sense of our bearings, which is a wonderful feeling to have, for somewhere that so recently was just a name on a map). And we'd had so little sense of Singapore before we went there – without seeing for yourself you can’t anticipate either its stunning, vast modernity on the one hand, nor its diverse pockets of beauty on the other.

And then we got to learn something of why Bali is such a hallowed destination, but also to obtain at least a sense of what that image simplifies and misses out. And we stayed in two of the very best hotels we’ve ever stayed in – they may even be the very top two if we thought about it. So the trip was an enormous success. Not a cheap one though, as I’d indicated before – for Singapore in particular we couldn’t even imagine how it would lend itself to any kind of tight budget.

Well, to wrap up. the biggest delay of the whole trip, probably, came in waiting for a cab at Toronto airport (maybe it’s because the film festival is starting). But then the roads were emptier than we might have expected, so it all evened out. Our place looked great. We went out for a drink that night, and slept in a bit the next morning, which I think was enough to fix any body clock issues. We went to the market and then I got Ozu, who was deliriously happy to see me, and pretty much ran all the way home. And so, as I like to, I end with an image of our happy dog.

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 11

We woke up early, to the rain; at around 6 am I think I heard a ceremony of some kind in the distance, although I couldn't tell for sure. We ordered our final breakfast and ate it on our covered patio table (as opposed to our other table, the one under the big umbrella...what a place...); then we packed and left. When we'd checked out, they gave us something from a local textile batik as a final gift. By chance, we had the same driver again, Agusta, but today’s drive was much more slow and functional (at least there were no shakedowns). I didn’t mention before how much garbage we noticed in Bali (especially in comparison to Singapore) – even on our emblematic walk through the ricefields. It’s a small thing, but a further reminder that unspecific notions of an island paradise (which I think is as much as most people have of it; it’s certainly as much as we had) can’t come very close to engaging with the reality of a place. In some ways, the West seems fairly tightly at bay here – we didn’t for example see the images of Hollywood celebrities that you see throughout Japan, and the usual brand names seemed fairly scarce (the Starbucks in the middle of Ubud looked rather out of place); I don’t think the locals brandish their cellphones as much as we’ve seen elsewhere. But there’s also a lot of noise and rubble and tumbledown houses and, from the looks of it, some very strained economic realities.

When we got to the airport, he handed us off to another Four Seasons person who happily steered us through the process. It’s not much of an airport for such a storied location – actually it feels more like a bus terminal (a new airport is under construction however). But I guess a steady stream of notable visitors pass through it, currently including the participants in the Miss World contest which is happening here shortly (we caught a glimpse of Miss Singapore, who I guess from a local perspective would be one of the most exciting ones).

In retrospect, it's possible I didn’t book this part of the trip very skillfully – I initially booked the Toronto/Singapore return flight and then as a separate exercise booked the return flight between Singapore and Bali, but I could have cut out the return to Singapore, most obviously by having us fly directly from Bali to Hong Kong, where we make our connection. But on examining the logistics, it probably wouldn’t have yielded that much either in terms of additional quality time nor cost savings. Anyway, it’s hardly necessary to stain this account by musing on such trivial imperfections.

And if we hadn’t done it this way, we wouldn’t have had our last night in Singapore. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza at the airport – you glide right into it from the terminal. It’s a very striking hotel, built around a large garden and swimming pool; our room also has a glass-walled toilet, the rationale for which is a bit difficult to grasp. At around 5 pm we took the subway system downtown – we’d never used it during our earlier stay. It was of course very smooth and handsome and stainless, even if we might have forgotten how long it inherently takes to use the subway.

We returned to the site of our first morning walk – Marina Bay and the Gardens by the Bay. They were much busier this time, filled with joggers in particular – we walked down to the bottom of the Gardens area, where the path elevates and gives you a stunning view of the city skyline as it gets dark. There were people hanging out, having picnics, taking formal and informal pictures, playing Frisbee. There’s an area of fountains which recalls the recently-developed spot at Sherbourne Common in Toronto where I walk Ozu most mornings – the difference is that in Toronto it’s the whole destination, whereas here it’s just a throwaway detail within a project of incomparably greater vastness. And it’s still being enhanced – construction workers were working on what seemed to be some high-tech (naturally) water and light show.

It’s impossible to convey the glory of the sightlines, albeit an imperial, potentially deranged kind of glory – for example, it feels like we’ve been able to view the Marina Bay Sands hotel, the one with the ship-like platform on top, from every conceivable angle; likewise the London Eye-type attraction. At the foot of the hotel there’s a reportedly vast casino, and near there a retail mall of what seems like just irrational grandeur, with a canal and boat rides through the centre. It feels like a city that just throws out absurdly overreaching ideas and then effortlessly does reach them, just to show it can. And while we’ve seen more than a few impressive urban waterfronts around the world, this one might be the most stunning, in its size and diversity and total command of its effects (equally impressive, if you go to the end of the Gardens and look out in the other direction, the waterscape is entirely different, crammed with industrial vessels, because along with everything else this is one of the world’s busiest ports).

The inherently absurd and yet hypnotic “Super Trees” were cycling through different light schemes and pulsing in tune to some suitably eerie but pulsating music. A little later we encountered something similar by the bay, with a crowd gathered to watch the water - as if without human intervention - generate flames and bubbles and colours and effusions in tune to a blaring soundtrack. It’s crass and airheaded of course, judged as a cultural performance, but certainly expresses a city possessed with easy confidence. We sat at a restaurant there and shared a pizza and a salad (so the culinary expeditions on this trip are over). And then we caught a cab back to the hotel. The cab driver chattered happily about the country’s continuing growth, how every citizen recently received some kind of $500 bonus, how the government plans to grow the population by some 2 million people in coming years, mainly by immigration, but of a kind veering toward the skilled and the committed. You can’t help thinking this sounds like a bubble that can only at some point catastrophically burst, but the way the city looked tonight, I think anyone would have mused about signing up…

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 10

Today we ordered room service breakfast for the first time, and as with everything here, it felt extremely rarified to be eating croissants and fruit by our pool. Even more than in other higher-end places where we’ve stayed, it’s evident how every detail of the way things are done has been worked out and honed and drummed into the system – the checklist for cleaning the room and for the evening turndown service (whether it’s a mental or physical checklist) must run to several hundred items. A lot of it must seem oddly abstract – to take one tiny example, every evening they fill a container up with ice, the next day they pour out the water and dry it out, the following evening they fill it up again, and so on forever. But I suppose even the most elevated jobs, if you look closely enough, are made up largely of rituals which only occasionally intersect with actual needs (this certainly goes for the accounting world!)

Agusta picked us up again at 10 am and we spent six hours scooping up some of the emblematic sights of Bali. First we repeated our textile experience of the other day, except this time with wood carvers: you see a few carvers outside, working meticulously away, and then inside there’s a whole former forest’s worth of product. We bought what I think is the most expensive item we’ve ever purchased on a vacation – a handsomely carved and painted lion that should help keep evil spirits away (so there goes Ozu’s job). I must confess that as I write this, I’m not entirely sure it’s worth what we paid for it (even after the seemingly generous discount he threw in) but anyway, it’ll add to the variety of items around the apartment.

We then visited the Gunung Kawi royal monuments – a series of monuments carved into the side of a valley, at the bottom of a long climb of steps with further views of ricefields; accompanied by a temple and other monuments. It’s a large and fascinating sight, although as always, our engagement with the complexity and the history was merely superficial. As with everywhere in Bali that might be of interest to visitors, you pass a surely unsustainable number of small retailers along the way. The same was true for our next stop, Pura Tirta Empul. Although it has aspects going back centuries, much of this temple is more anchored in the present day – some sites were off-limits to those not actively praying, and a group of women (and one man) were standing in the bathing pools, where the spouts dispense holy water. At both these locations, by the way, I wore a sarong again, so maybe I’ll relent now and include a picture of that (even though the signs were very clear about needing to wear the sarong, some visitors nevertheless didn’t, for which I imagine there’ll be a huge spiritual price to pay).

Not that we needed him to, but Agusta said he was unable to enter the temples with us because he was in one of the periods when this is forbidden: these relate to childbirth, menstruation and (in his present case) the recent death and pending cremation of someone in the community. We drove to a look-out point from which to survey Mount Batur, one of the island’s largest volcanos, and the valley below. On the way up there we had to go through a police cordon, and when we asked about it, Agusta said it was just simple corruption – he handed over a folder which was rapidly returned, absent the money inside it. We ran into another one later on and on that occasion he didn’t even bother with the folder – he just slipped the money into the guy’s palm. I assume the amounts involved are small, but still, a sign it’s not all tranquil brotherhood here. He said similar principles apply in many government dealings. As a general impression, there was a somewhat rougher and more desperate air to more of what we saw today, and to the way we were approached by street vendors.

Shortly after that, a little dog ran in front of our vehicle and we felt the wheels go over it. Agusta was apologetic but made no attempt to stop. The dog was plainly too young for its owner, if he or she cared, to allow it such freedom, so I guess there is a mutually fatalistic attitude to these things. Still, given our enormous investment in the well-being of our own dog, it was a low-point to the day. Our next stop was at the rice terraces near Tegallalang – more magnificently scenic rice fields, except rising in fairly steep layers. We took the path that winds through them: as you move along, you’re regularly asked for a “donation” (which translates into around 50 cents) to enter the next stage. We followed that more or less to the point where the rice terraces turned into woodlands, and then went back. And then we returned to the hotel. I think I’ve adequately conveyed by now how things go from there! Except that Ally didn’t have a nap, perhaps because she was overly electrified by the book she’s reading (Barbara Kingsolver).

Back in Toronto, the webcam suggests that Ozu and the other boarding dogs slept in for Labour Day. We had dinner one last night at the hotel. At the next table was a Mexican couple who insisted on rejecting the menu and summoning the chef to specify their own meal in immense detail (for example, beef cooked “between medium and medium-rare”). It seemed to us both overwhelmingly pretentious and a denial of one of the great pleasures of foreign travel, but maybe I’m missing the more elemental joys of ordering people around. Once again (to acknowledge that we also are settling more into certain patterns of repetition as we get older) we drank wine outside our villa. It always sounds like there are frogs nearby, but we never see them. Sometimes I think it’s just water dripping. Ally had overdone it and, for the first time, went in before I did. So I had the night and the space and the wine and the frogs (or is it just water, or at best lesser insects?) all to myself…

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 9

Among our ongoing sources of amusement on the trip: my hopelessly untapped list of things I brought to do – a big pile of reading material and the DVD of the Holocaust documentary Shoah, all nine and a half hours of it (well, I’d wanted to see it for years, but kept putting it off because of the length – with two day-long plane rides, I thought this would be the ideal extended window, if admittedly not the optimum setting otherwise for a Holocaust documentary). At the time of writing, at least half of my reading material is still unread (and I’ll be irritated if any of that comes home because, of course, more will have accumulated in the meantime) and I’ve watched a pitiful 48 minutes of Shoah. Still, we have a lot more travel time in the near future. On the bright side, I’ve promptly written all these journal entries as I go along, and I’m about as up to date with web reading as I would be at home (we haven’t switched on the TV even once, neither here nor in Singapore).

Anyway, that’s hardly the main priority on our daily agenda. I think today was the first day of the trip I woke up to daylight rather than darkness, albeit barely; Ally woke up several hours later, having been up for a while during the night. We caught the 11 am hotel shuttle into Ubud, and started walking in the opposite direction from the other day, toward the notorious monkey forest. Every source tells you to enter with care because the monkeys can be aggressive; anyway, we’d already had an adequate monkey-viewing experience in Singapore, so we didn’t bother. Even in the streets around the monkey forest though, you have monkeys blithely wandering about and sitting in the street, not worrying about the traffic or anything else, like the kings of the world. Maybe a few of the monkeys have been trained to act this way to attract the tourists, I don’t know.

We wandered the streets of Ubud a bit more, but it got repetitive pretty quickly. The town is usually described as an artist’s colony or suchlike, but we should have learned by now that this is inevitably code for endless stores, some of them perhaps selling items of quality and originality, but most just selling mass-produced crap, and as a whole offering no real incentive to investigate which is which. As you walk along, you constantly have to step around the little offerings of flowers and other organic material placed on the edge of the road, sometimes accompanied by the smell of incense (we occasionally came across them in Singapore too); the Balinese population is well over 90% Hindu, and maintaining these offerings and carrying out other rituals and ceremonies can apparently consume a large part of the day. Some people seem to invest more care into the appearance of the offerings than others do, although I guess they often get stepped on or otherwise mistreated.

Ubud also had the first signs of outright poverty we’ve seen on the trip, with women and their young children begging at the side of the road. There are areas of Bali where such a sight would likely be much more common, and some people think coming here is morally tainted unless you’re meticulous about how you spend your money. On the other hand, immigration has been swelling in recent years, most of it driven by job opportunities flowing from tourism, and it’s plain that the West itself has lost all practical interest in matters of ethical distribution of wealth. I wish I had a coherent formula for resolving these problems, but like most people, we just try to apply our instincts the best we can (probably far from ideally).

We found another trail, to the west of the one we’d taken previously, this one going along a lush river valley filled with coconut palms and studded with impressive homes. We passed many local kids, often paired off into couples, hanging out oddly close to the main path; our guess was that custom or parental decree or suchlike dictates that if you’re going to go on a Sunday afternoon date, you have to stay in plain sight (one boy at least seemed to be trying to persuade the girl to deviate from this, but without success). We brought some drinks at a little store along the way, and a group of women were trying to haggle about the price of water and orange juice (this seems to me a poor way of applying one’s instincts, just saying). After they left, the shopkeeper asked us where we were from, and then asked us whether the women she’d just been dealing with were from France, which I took to speak volumes about her impression of them. I told her I thought they were Russian, although I wasn’t sure.

We had a few more nice views of ricefields along the way, but it soon became somewhat less scenic, marked more by the noises and activity of everyday life (motorcycles, as always, being a big part of it), albeit always pleasant and interesting. Eventually it just turned into a road and didn’t particularly seem to be going anywhere, so we retraced our steps. We then visited the Blanco Renaissance Museum, dedicated to the works of artist Don Antonio Blanco, the self-styled “Dali of Bali.” It’s a helter-skelter collection, consisting primarily of skillful but unexceptional female nudes, and a lot of outright wackiness, such as collages devoted to King Kong, Mick Jagger and whatever else might have entered his head. More context might have been necessary to explain why this indicated the work of a “Maestro” rather than that of a mere regional oddity. Anyway, it’s always nice on a vacation day to mix things up a little.

We had a late lunch/early dinner at a restaurant that felt grafted onto the side of the gorge, looking down into the river. As usual, after a while, it was just us and the staff; in general, Ubud feels geared up for twenty times as many visitors as were there today (well, to be more precise, that’s true for the number of restaurants and retail outlets, but not as much for the width and condition of the sidewalks). We caught the last regular shuttle back to the hotel at 5.25 pm and spent the rest of the evening here. I curtailed my nap and Ally didn’t have one at all; around 9 pm, we ordered dessert, and instead of sharing just one dessert as we nearly always do, we ordered two and shared them both, so there you go, we’re losing all restraint now. And we drank some wine. We spent some time speculating about future trips we might take, which in no way indicates we’re done with this one yet.