I can't remember if I've written about this before - I probably have, sometime like, oh, I don't know, right after it happened. When I had nothing but free time and a computer was like a blazing beacon of modernity amongst everything else. However, often just the sight of my computer sitting on our our flowered saggy mattress, which itself sat starkly in the center of a white tile floor, jarred me out of whatever third-world reverie I had been in. I would constantly be coming home wanting to write about this or that: the sheer number of perfect seashells I would unavoidably run over with my motorcycle on the beach; how the jungle would look blue in a certain kind of sunlight; how it felt to get a sea urchin spine out of a finger joint - and then I'd walk in the door, go up the stairs, hit my head on the landing ceiling that was obviously built by and for midgets, and see my computer. And everything would rush out of my head. Jungles and sea urchins and seashells could not peacably coexist in my brain with Macintosh G4 laptops.

Well, if I wrote about it once, I'll just write about it again. This time it will be colored by time and memory and everyone can have fun comparing the two stories to see how my unintentional lies build and build as I get further and further from them. I mean, if sea urchins and G4s can't coexist in my brain, how is this story going to fare against an office full of two-way radios, first-aid kits, and giant flatscreen computers? Probably not well.

But in any case, it was sometime in the one season that Jayapura has, indistinguishable from all the other hot, humid days full of posturing distant clouds. All I know is that it wasn't during our massive water shortage (Christmas, roughly). It was a Saturday. Or a Sunday. I wanted to go up to the Jayapura City sign (imagine the Hollywood sign, but neon [is the Hollywood sign neon? I've seen it probably thousands of times and still can't remember] and up on one of the jungled cliffs that surround the bay, faced outward, to welcome boats, not cars) and draw the view in pastel. I'd done it a few times before, but it was one of those blue jungle days and I wanted to take advantage of that.

Nick didn't want to go. Lately he hadn't really wanted to go anywhere, unless it was out of the country or at least to another province. He wanted to 'relax', which to him meant playing the guitar horizontally on the couch in the living room until he felt hungry, and then eating eggs and Indomie, and then maybe fixing his vegetable garden that everyone kept running over with motorcycles.

I never did feel completely at ease traveling by myself around Jayapura. I did it, because I had to, but I never felt 100% safe. As I think I've mentioned before,

(A quick interjection: I'm at work and was just offered a plate of 'Chinese noodles'. I microwaved them, took a bite, and... MIE GORENG. Exactly. Spices and everything. Now there is something that can peacably coexist with this story. If I had ever grown to like mie goreng, I'd ask where he got it, but as it happens, after a six month period of having it every day, once every year or so is quite enough mie goreng for me, thanks.)

my anxiety was muffled there. Lots of potentially super dangerous things happened to me, or went on around me, while I was there, and I never really felt it. But I also never really didn't feel it. I preferred to have Nick with me to diffuse potentially creepy situations, which bothered me the most out of any other 'danger' there. Malaria, whatever, bird flu, fine, Indonesian army marching in the streets with guns aloft, okay, border guards in PNG deigning only to let us in when they felt like it, sure. But getting into harmless confrontations with men on hills who were trying to make me pay them Rp. 30,000 for parking in a public lot? No. I did not like this. It was personal. I had to look someone in the face while they were looking me in the face, trying to dupe me. Such things unsettled me.

So I usually preferred to take Nick (despite the fact that he was actually worse at dealing with these kinds of situations than I was. More often than not, his wallet would open and out would fall Rp. 30,000 before I could open my mouth to argue or raise my hand to snatch the wallet away). But this time I couldn't, and I really wanted to draw this blue-jungled view (blue-jungling was an oddity, as it required a precise percentage of cloud cover) and so I went alone. I got on the motorcycle and navigated the winding, steep, muddy roads that led to the cliff, passing families frying rice in their yards, countless makeshift ping-pong tables, chained up dogs, and pickup trucks full of vegetables. It was a difficult road; steep, and hairpin turns that were especially threatening with someone on the back. I enjoyed the freedom that came with not having to worry if I was going to tip a passenger off the back every time I turned the wheels.

At the top, I parked my bike in the lot outside the chain-link fence of whatever high-ranking government official lived up there (we never did figure that one out). There was one other bike there, and the owners were over on the other side of the sign: Indonesian teenagers holding hands and comparing school notebooks. I waved to them and climbed over to the front of the sign, sitting just below the spread of the 'Y' in 'CITY'. (Here you can see the backwards 'CIT' of city as it appears from up there. For the life of me I cannot find any pictures on the internet of what the sign looks like from the actual city.)

I'd been drawing for awhile, had about half the bay done, when a Papuan man came and sat down next to me, which wasn't unusual - people would just come sit next to us and start talking all the time. Although I miss that now, and wish it wasn't so socially unacceptable to just start talking to people you find interesting, back then I was just extremely in I-need-to-be-alone mode. He wanted to see what I was drawing. I showed him. Delighted, he pointed to my paper, pointed to the view, pointed to the paper again, all the while chattering excitedly and way too fast for me to pick out more than a few words at a time. Then he pointed at my notebook in such an insistent fashion that I realized he wanted me to give it to him. When I did, he flipped to a new page, grabbed up a few pastels, and started tentatively drawing what looked first like a crescent moon, then like a horseshoe with nails sticking out of it, and then like a bracelet with horns, and then a bracelet without horns, and then, finally, it looked like what it was, which was an illustration of his home island of Biak with some (relatively) giant boats sticking out of the port!

By this time I was pretty delighted as well, his mood being contagious, and mostly by gestures we talked about the different things there were to do on Biak (fishing, eating, fishing and fishing, as far as I could gather). As we were flailing our arms madly about, footsteps approached, we looked up, and there were... bules!

Aside from the teachers at our school I think I had seen two bules in Jayapura since I'd arrived, and this was towards the end of our trip. Once was in passing, on a motorcycle, and another was coming out of a bookstore. So this bule encounter - two bules! At once! A couple! Standing right next to me! - fully doubled my bule count, and thus totally shocked me. I froze, and the man next to me kept talking and gesturing and laughing - I mean, one bule, three bules, what's the difference, right?

They were British or something. "Hello," they said.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," said the Papuan man.

"Hello," said the three Indonesian men who had appeared around us a few minutes earlier to watch us draw.

The next thing out of the British couple's mouth was not at all something I expected. I expected, like, 'How are you?' or 'Where are you from?' or 'Enjoying the view?' or something similar, but what I got was, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

"What?"

"Are. You. Okay?"

"Uh... yes?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes?"

"Can we help you out?"

"Um... no." The question mark had now disappeared from my voice. It had taken me that long to realize that they were asking because it looked like I was being threatened by a bunch of big bad locals.

"Okay, then, if you're sure," they said... and turned around and left! They didn't even stay to enjoy the view - which, by the way, was stunning, blue and bright, and it didn't even smell like burning trash up there! I'm not trying to knock them too much. I mean, they probably really thought that I was in danger and they wanted to help me. But, shit, the men could have shown some signs of menace at least. As it was, we were all just having a big hippie art circle.

Now, none of the men around me understood English, as far as I knew then or know now, but they weren't stupid, and the couple hadn't addressed them at all. And after they left, it wasn't the same anymore. Everyone kept turning around to see if the couple was coming back, and sort of looking sideways at me like maybe I had wanted to be saved.