Southeast Asia is probably the #1 destination for backpackers. It’s cheap, and it’s unique. Mostly because it’s cheap. In Indonesia, you can get dinner for two dollars, a t-shirt for three, and an hour’s worth of massage for a whopping six dollars. The exchange rate between USD and IDR is 9700. We round it up to a neat 10000 for calculation purposes, and sometimes get confused on the number of 0s when haggling for prices.
Not that we haggled too much. The disparity in buying power made it difficult to ask for cheaper prices, when a 6 hour tour has a listed price of $13. So often we just tried to hide our surprise and elation, and count out the hundreds of thousands of rupiahs, like when we found out that a full day diving trip including roundtrip transportation was going to cost us $70 per person.
We got picked up at 7:30 in the morning. The driver waited patiently as we finished our breakfast, and introduced himself as our diving instructor. I was slightly surprised, since in Thailand we didn’t see any native diving instructors. The drive was long, so we had plenty of time to chat. The driver was extremely polite, but we could tell his eagerness to talk. He spoke of his hometown, a small village in the northern mountains of Bali, where his parents still worked on the farm and the extended family lived in the family compound. He spoke of the difficulties of obtaining his instructor license and although he doesn’t say it, you can tell his sense of pride in his gleaming eyes. He spoke of the country’s politics and economy, with a hint of anger at the corruption and gentle acceptance that it would not change soon. He spoke of his dream of diving in other sites outside of Indonesia, as he’s never left the country. Too expensive, he said, to even go to somewhere as close as Philippines. He stopped at a temple for an offering, and taught us about his Balinese faith. Mostly he was just curious, to hear our stories of how we ended up in America, to confirm the tidbits of what he knows of the U.S. It always surprises me to hear how much other people knows about the U.S., and makes me ashamed at how little I know about everyone else’s.
We arrived at the site three hours later, where our instructor prepared all the equipment, and led us on a dive amidst the wreckage of U.S.A.T. Liberty, which has been laying in the shallow waters of the coast of Tulamben since 1942. It was our first wreck dive and we were more than intrigued. After the dive, the instructor again helped us clean everything up, and drove us back in torrid rain as we passed out exhausted in the back seat.
We said goodbye to him at the hotel and he graciously accepted our generous tip, which was no more than the cost of a cheap meal in the U.S. As I write this months later, I realize that I can’t even remember his name. What I do remember is his humility, his pride, his curiosity, his hope. And the smile that a picture wouldn’t do justice.
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