Call Some Place Paradise, They Start Hacking It Up

You might wonder where I’ve been. On the other hand, you might not.

Well, high among the places I never expected to visit--along with Shangri-la, Siberia, Tibet, the Cape of Good Hope, the headwaters of the Nile--was Bali.

I didn’t even know where it was when I had the opportunity to go there. Like a lot of Americans, I figured it was some place out there around Fiji or Tahiti or Western Samoa.

It isn’t. It’s down there at the bottom of Asia. Indonesia.

Oh, I had the travel poster notion of it all right. Swaying palm trees, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, running her hands through Bob Hope’s hair; beachcombers (Cary Grant?) waiting for the copra boat, Walter Huston and Joan Crawford in “Rain.” An island invented by Somerset Maugham.

I thought you could only get there by island packet or whaling ship or outrigger.

Actually, you get there in a Garuda DC-10. It’s got an airport like LAX. You don’t have to live in a little grass shack. You can live in a Sheraton with marble floors and swimming pools and a lobby open to the trade winds. Your back yard is the Indian Ocean, but there are no copra boats out there, only the yachts of millionaires where once the prowling destroyers plied the waters in search of enemy submarines.

It’s a Third World country, but it is populated by the happiest people this side of an office Christmas party. Either they’re born with smiles on their faces or they just thought of a joke. I never saw so damn many teeth in my life. You’d think everyone just won a lottery.

You expect it in the luxury hotels or on Garuda, Indonesia’s own airline, but when you get it from a traffic cop--well, you know you’re not in New York City. Even the thugs are polite.

If the people are nice, another indigenous group--the monkeys--aren’t. When my lovely lady, Linda, and I went out to tour a Hindu shrine that was populated by more monkeys than I have ever seen outside a cage, one of them suddenly decided to leap on her.

I thought for a moment he was going to carry her up the Empire State Building and I would have to call out fighter planes to get her back--but all he wanted was the bottle of water under her arm. He got that and uncapped it and began to drink from it in a matter of two or three seconds. It usually takes me abut 10 minutes to open one of those sealed water bottles, so you can see how far down the animal scale I am.

The monkeys are natural-born thieves, probably the only ones in the animal kingdom, we found out. They steal earrings, wallets and cameras if the spirit moves them, then they climb trees with their booty and taunt you to come after them. If they ever get guns, they’ll rob trains.

Darwin would probably not be surprised, but if they ever learn to drive a car, they might make the Mafia look benevolent. I was surprised they weren’t wearing snap-brim hats or tattoos.

It’s a 17-hour air trip to Bali, but Garuda breaks it up with a pit stop at Biak on an old World War II air strip and it’s like landing in the 19th Century. There aren’t even any roads in Biak. Not a McDonald’s or an ATM in sight.

The Balinese are creative people. They can take two bamboo sticks and play Beethoven’s Fifth for you. Or they can take a chorus of bird cages and make more music with them than filling them with canaries ever could. Everybody in the country can dance and even their funerals look more like Mardi Gras than laments. They can carry anything this side of a locomotive on their heads. Give them a piece of wood and a chisel and they’ll carve a Picasso for you.

But into this Paradise, the tourist, as usual, is bringing his own destructive baggage--the disease called golf. I mean, these people are happy, smiling, right? Wait until their first triple bogey for all the money. You won’t see a set of teeth on that island for months.

You see, the tourism count to Bali, or Indonesia, generally, is only about 15% American. They know how to correct this--golf. Don’t forget, we’re a people who bring golf clubs to the moon. So, the Balinese built golf courses. They even have one inside a volcano.

I went to Bali to get an award from the Publishers Cup group, a collection of, mostly, Asian and European golf publishers and editors.

I was high gross in the tournament, and if you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to tell you. Suffice to say, I hit my usual number of “Did anyone see where that wents?” But golf, like the common cold, has now been brought to Bali. Even the admiral who runs the country is a devotee.

They probably have the only caddies in the world who never heard of Jack Nicklaus. From the level of golf they’ve seen, they probably think 100 in the final round would win the British Open. Except, they’ve never heard of the British Open.

They don’t deal in yardage. Or footage. You half-expect them to say, “Hit it up there by that second tiger.” Or, more likely, “fifth dog.” I never saw so many dogs on a course. I thought they were shooting a Disney movie. If you want the breaks on a green, they tell you “hook putt” if it breaks left or “slice putt” if it breaks right.

I got out of there just in time. I was beginning to carry things on my head--like my computer and a bunch of bananas. I found myself trying to smile--and my face couldn’t handle it. I got a wood carving of a garuda bird--a mythical creature, half-eagle, half-shrike, a fitting icon for a golfer. I lost a couple of boxes of golf balls, my temper and confidence. But if I learn to smile, it will be worth it.

I just hope those monkeys never learn to play golf.