Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 24 The Gilis

Verawati Katawijaya had escaped the life of a kitchen galley lackey on East Java. She used a broad chef’s knife to cut her rapist’s act short, and then she took his wallet home. Its contents bought her a satay cart on the streets of Surabaya, and then a Nasi Goreng shop in Perth. There she met Murray, and with the extra liquidity provided by his hashish import/export business, the two of them opened Wet Dreams, the second beachfront bungalow on Gili Trawangan. Murray blacked out and drowned a few feet below the surface of the Apnean Sea as he performed an ill-advised stunt involving hyperventilation. Vera became the sole empressaria of a small but promising business at the beginning of a tourism and construction boom that has slowed only for the few months following the 2002 Bali bombings in Kuta.

Nusa Tenggara Barat is one of Indonesia’s twenty-eight provinces, part of the island chain east of Java. Its westernmost island is Lombok, and west of that is the province of Bali. The Gilis—and there are three of them, Trawangan, Meno, and Air—are wooded atolls (or barely more than that) a few square miles in area, a couple of miles off Lombok’s northwest coast. The surrounding waters are clear as crystal, with seventy-five feet of visibility on a typical day, and ninety on the best of them in the dry season that lasts from April or May until November. As the beaches disappear beneath that transparent sea, they impart to it a palette of turquoises that deepens shade by shade until the shelf falls off abruptly at about fifteen feet. From a great distance offshore, a visitor would see the green fronds of coconut and banana trees waving in the trade winds, then a line of white sand, then the pastel hues, all floating in the deep blue of the 85 oF sea. Gili Trawangan, the largest and furthest island from Lombok, bears the shape of a pregnant kidney, its baby bump on the eastern shore just south of center. For those who care about coincidences, if you picked up Gili Trawangan and dropped it halfway around the world onto Great Salt Pond on Block Island, the fit would be nearly perfect.

Vera’s new chosen home had been a penal colony and agricultural development that failed the objectives of local governments and business interests. Circa 1980, a few of the participating families remained to fish and farm on their own. The island, the sea and teeming life below its surface, and a few traditional sailboats were the sum total of Gili T.

On a tip or a hunch, some adventurous tourists—not Hartmann-toting, not Louis Vuitton-carrying, and not Abercrombie and Fitch-packing tourists, but intrepid pot-smoking travelers—made their way to Gili Trawangan, stayed as guests in the homes of some resident families, and from there spread the news of an undiscovered, hard-to-get-to dive idyll. The spreading dynamics were not unlike that of the AIDS virus, involving exchange of bodily fluids—often in the case of the Gili news and always in the case of AIDS—and reliance on airplane travel for rapid crossing of national borders. With the perspicacity of the best Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Vera and Murray sensed the opportunity at first whiff. She sold off her Perth establishment to buy land from the original families, a member of which told me later, “Boss, if I knew what it would become, I wouldn’t have sold so cheap back then. But who knew?”

Traveling with a herd of twelve nus foreigners, Max’s first spring break began with a flight of three hours from Singapore to Ngurah Rai International Airport, south of Denpasar on Bali, then a taxi ride of ninety minutes or so to Padangbai, a midnight-departing five-hour ferry trip across forty miles of the Bali Sea to Lembar on Lombok, a three-hour drive to Bangsal, and a boat ride of under thirty minutes to Gili Trawangan. There the travelers deposited themselves four to a bungalow at Vera’s Wet Dreams and looked east across the half-mile channel to Gili Meno. From beneath the waters, blue coral glowed neon bright. No dentist’s office was ever so enticing. It was paradise, one of many, but paradise. “Fuckin’ ’Donesia!” became Max’s all-time favorite maxim.

There were strawberry daiquiris and mojitos and straight margaritas, or just cold Bintani pilsner, served on the deck of his bungalow while he dangled two feet in the tiled pool that been built to encourage mingling among guests. It worked. There was much mingling, and not just with the guests. Vera took to Max and installed him in Bungalow Zero, normally reserved for special friends.