Riding the Magic Carpet by Tom Anderson

Author:Tom Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

The situation was resolved by a small, primeval Lembonganese man, with cruel features, a grin that was certainly not the mark of happiness, and a home-made cigar stuck firmly between rotting teeth. He took a basket and placed it upside-down over the two birds. The effect was that both were able to draw on a second wind of energy, probably stimulated by fear and changed surroundings. After about half a minute of flying feathers, everything went quiet and the man lifted the basket up again. One-Eye had delivered a single fatal blow, against all odds, and was lauded like a big-time sports star as a result. The loser lay in the dust, a dark trickle of freshly spent blood growing into a pool around his neck. This would be One-Eye’s owner’s victory meal for the evening. But the real winner was the bird. By losing an eye and winning a fight at once, he was now guaranteed a healthy old age, free from having to fight again, or from ever getting eaten. One-Eye would recover to keep tired surfers awake in the afternoons for the rest of his days. Some sort of justice, I supposed.

Still, you’ll never begin to know what a relief it was to finally get away from the place and back to the familiar setting of the beach.

Despite a naughty afternoon wind having blown the waves to shreds, I had to venture down to the south of the island and a spot called Playgrounds – just to get the blood off my mind. Playgrounds wasn’t really living up to its name, though, and all I did was bob around for half an hour, catching nothing much, before heading in again feeling no better, or maybe even a little worse. It was probably no help that Scott was showing his new camcorder footage of the cockfighting when I got back.

‘If you think this is rough on the eyes, you wanna watch some of the dog-fights I filmed in Taiwan,’ he was saying. ‘That shit fetches a few dollars back in Oz.’

It took the rest of the day to get over the fights, and some of the evening too. In the end I could only be saved from my new demons by the purifying power of surf-fatigued sleep – which had been in abundance ever since my arrival in Indonesia. Thank God for surfing, I began to think, but fell asleep before thought formed any definite shape.

Mornings in Lembongan are made for the quintessential yawn-and-stretch, as you stumble up the sand to take in another day of paradise. In front of me an island went to work; Nusa Lembongan is a seaweed-farm-cum-surf-camp, and life there is ruled by the tide. At low tide the surfers relax while the waves drop off in size and start to close out, but the locals use that shallow water to wade out across the patchwork quilt of seaweed allotments beneath the lagoon. The seaweed grows well in Lembongan because of the Lombok Strait’s high salinity – a product of the low rainfall.

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