The shopping is now what my mate Jaydo calls Vogue Bogue which feels cool in a way curated destinations never do. The live Keroncong music at Seminyak’s Biku is joyful. And the people watching is elite.
Our hotel pool, second morning. A woman who looks like the stunt double for Cameron Diaz’s housemate Magda in There’s Something About Mary – uber real tanned, bleached hair turning yellow from chlorine – rasps into her mobile.
“I’m feeling shithouse. You dusty?” Her voice like a million packets of Stuyvos. “I had to get the ambulance for Indigo last night. Yeah, stomach infection. Nah, she’s right. I’ll text her later.”
Magda, a character in 1998 rom-com There’s Something About Mary.
Waiting for a happy hour mojito at the bar, I chat to a fella called Kurt. Everyone else is in a rashie and been in a good paddock. Kurt is Barry Manilow slim in a chino, loafer and plunging crisp shirt.
From New York, he’s been addicted to Bali since the ’70s. Says David Bowie wrote a song about him after they met on a beach.
One bloke poolside has wings tattooed on his back, a face you could bust a chair on it. My husband: “Contract killer.”
For days, the man plays tirelessly with his small daughter. Whizzes her in the water, plaits her hair, laughs as she uses him as a climbing gym. We call him Killer Dad and mean it in the best way.
Kate Halfpenny visits a memorial for passengers on Pan Am flight 812 which slammed into a Balinese mountain in 1974, killing her father’s cousin.
One afternoon we bump on a scooter down a narrow dirt road next to a black sand beach. Walk through a sun-dappled jungle to a memorial to those aboard Pan Am flight 812 which slammed into a Balinese mountain in 1974.
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Eight plaques. 107 names. 16 Australians. One: Halfpenny, Margaret. My dad’s cousin. A Melbourne thirty-something on her way home from a Hong Kong holiday.
It’s the strangest sensation, seeing my surname carved in the rare corner of Bali most tourists never know exists. Marking a tragedy that made global headlines. I lose it.
My dad was at the memorial’s opening 50 years ago. He brought back a painting of a jungle temple to remember the beautiful place Margaret died.
It hangs now in our lounge room. Maybe Bali has been in my heart longer than I knew. In 1994, I think I willed it to be awful. Now it feels like something close to home.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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