Chapter 1 - Let’s Get Home

The Home Coming

Arriving from the Ngurah Rai airport, the noises and smells of Kuta, once foreign and unwelcoming, now gave way to a new sense of coming home. Shop vendors closing their stores, greeting us with a smile, we walked in the dark back lanes to our hotel, where we checked into our usual room. The staff welcomed us back like long-lost friends...Welcome Home.

We had returned from Malaysia with our official working visa stamp, yet still had to process the visas at the Bali end. This all had to be done in Denpasar, so we would be staying in Kuta to finalise the process before returning to the village. We are nearly there. Although glad to be back in Bali I wanted to get back up to the village. Nyoman’s phone kept giving me a message that the phone number was not active, no one was answering the hotel phone, and The Uncle had forgotten to pop into the hotel to check for us what was going on. It’s doing my head in, this is not learning patience, this is worrying. Argh, I wish there were more than five people in the whole village that had phones! Is the village okay? Did a volcano erupt? Do we have more children?

We headed out to our usual local warung for a late-night dinner and a few drinks. The staff greeted us with smiles and questions on where we had been. We ordered a large beer before a menu was even brought out.  Beer would help make the weekend pass, that first sip of Bintang beer past the lips was like mother’s milk. Gone were the days of wanting a wine, okay, they were not gone, just substituted. Bintang beer was now the chosen nectar; previously I could not stand beer, now Bintang could be intravenously dripped into my body and I would come alive. I do patience much better on beer.

The Arrest

The lawyer had us meet his agent at the Immigration office in Denpasar, at 8.00 am on Monday. An old building with a lot of activity, a lot of noise, and not much organisation. 

We spent most of the morning just sitting and waiting, occasionally being asked to go to a desk where an Immigration officer spoke to the agent, stared at us, and then sent us back to our seats. Hubby and I sat patiently in the non-airconditioned waiting area people watching, observing foreigners who spoke the language fluently as they went from glass window counter to window counter. The glass-fronted counters, framed in cheap wood, designed for the obviously Indonesian average height, meant Westerners were bending down and trying to shout through the small gaps in the glass, while they passed their files through to the officers behind the counters. The foreigners looked like giants trying to peak into dollhouse windows. The Indonesian officers’ chairs sat too low to reach the counter and they looked unimpressed that they had to stand up to take each file. Hubby commented that one day we should be able to do this process ourselves. Really? It all looks a bit crazy in here, even if I did speak the language fluently. 

Our agent continued the morning going in and out of cheap wood-panelled partition rooms, where cigarette smoke bellowed out with every door-open, and then he would disappear to who knows where. I found him when I braved the toilets. He was out the back having a cigarette and chatting to a bunch of men, right in front of the ladies toilet. With my audience looking straight into the washbasin area of the toilets, I held the stall door with a broken lock closed, while attempting to hover over the dirty seat. I brought my own toilet paper; I’m so pleased I did. Although, I should have also brought a toilet seat. 

After three hours of what seemed to me like achieving not much, the agent came over to us and told us to follow him to the police station in Denpasar. Um? What have we done wrong?

As we parked the motorbike in the car park of the large police station, a girl from the lawyer’s office approached us and told us to follow her. The agent quickly took off, as though he had somewhere to be, or he was too scared to be in a police station. 

We obliged and followed her into the large building and down various corridors, then into a large room out the back. The room, with only small windows, high along one wall, was brightly lit by large fluorescent lights that had lost their plastic covers. Wooden desks filled the room haphazardly, piles of files overflowed on the desks and onto the floor next to each desk. It reminded me of a school building, where students had shuffled their desks around on the last day of school. Each desk had an overflowing ashtray and just enough room to read a file, but no computer. A few police officers stood around chatting to each other, ignoring our presence. We were ushered through the maze of desks and files to one wooden desk, where the files and ashtray had been pushed to one side, to clear enough room for an ink pad and two fingerprint cards. Um? Seriously, what have we done wrong?

We were both fingerprinted with the assistance of a police officer pulling at our hands and rolling our fingers on the card. I looked at the calm Indonesian girl from the lawyer's office, whom we had followed so trustingly, and she smiled back as though nothing was wrong and this was all normal. Did someone tip you off that we bribed a God with fruit?

Hubby was then handed a piece of cardboard with a number on it and ushered to a wall where he was told to hold the card up and stand still for a photo. OMG, we have been arrested! Painted on the wall was a height chart, and they had to guess Hubby’s height, as it did not go higher than 190cm.  My turn, height chart not a problem for me, apart from the fact that I have grown two centimetres. While having my photo taken the electricity went out, the room went quite dark and a female officer took my arm and started to pull me towards a door to an outdoor courtyard, into the bright sunlight. Hubby was escorted by a male officer. We were both spun around a few times while a police officer surveyed our bodies from top to bottom. I looked at the girl from the lawyer’s office and she told us that they needed to put all identifying features, such as tattoos or piercings on the police record card. Well, now we have finger tattoos, this stuff is not coming off.

We were then escorted around the corner to an old sink to wash the ink off our fingers. Phew, I thought as I had a female cop and Hubby had a male, that when they put on the surgical gloves, we were going to have a cavity search. 

Standing at the sink waiting for Hubby to wash his hands, I surveyed the dry and dusty courtyard and noticed two small cells with iron bars.  I guess that is where we are sleeping tonight.