You wake up… well, you are not sure where you have woken up.
Your tongue is as thick as prop forward, your mouth as dry as a nun’s nasty. The beating in your head is akin to someone slicing through your brain with a tomahawk. The sun is already out, beating down with an intense laser like quality into those weeping axe wounds.

The room is not air-conditioned, nor clean, and there is the dank rancid smell of sweat and fear. There are condom packets everywhere. They are as empty as your wallet which seems to have had all of its essential components vacuumed cleaned. Money, credit cards, drivering license… everything you need in life is gone.

Trying to piece exactly where you are and how you got there just magnifies your migraine. You decided against a late surf, in favour of a few beers at happy hour at the hotel. Then there was jungle juice at 9pm, and then some seedy, expensive clubs at God knows what hour. You knew there was going to be waves today, but a few beers in the arvo couldn’t hurt could they?

Sure, there were condoms, but you sense that also, at times, there weren’t condoms.

You also remember some type of dog bite incident, a bar bill disagreement and a prostitute led negotiation. The latter led a scooter ride to a seedy part of town, and, well some other darker vaguer dirtier memories. Sure, there were condoms, but you sense that also, at times, there weren’t condoms.

The walk back to your shitty hotel is akin to walking through a thick wall of fire, just one punctuated by screaming traffic and t-shirt sellers. With no money, no cards, you have no water and no idea how your surf trip has ended up in the possibility of financial ruin and a deadly sexually transmitted disease.

But through intense will and sheer survival mode, you make it back to your tiled hotbox of a room. The beach out the front, usually offering one foot dribblers, even when the reefs are cooking, is now a four foot close-out. The reefs, fuck, the reefs, must be double that and off their head.

It takes five hours to get your life together, sort of, and finally ride your bike to the reefs. You paddle out with an hour of daylight left, and a tide on the wrong side of low, with a board too short for what is required. Trying to make up for lost time, you scratch late into a double up, but your arak slowed reflexes aren’t up to it, and you freefall, watching as the coral heads spike through the crystal clear waters. You feel the thud, just after you feel your board break. Getting in over the coral reef isn’t easy, what with what feels like a broken wrist and fire coral cuts over your whole back.

You finally make it back to the warung. You are sweating like a rapist, shaking like leaf. Your mind wanders through the list of possible tropical diseases, not to mention sexual ones you may have acquired. It’s another day in Indo, what else is there to do but grab a beer…