All I knew was that we weren’t getting on that bus. No security to speak of. No one checking ID or even asking names. I saw a man lounging near the baggage claim, an entrepreneur – an unlicensed cabbie – looking to pick up a fare, but he seemed to be focused on locals. He wasn’t even watching the Australians and Brits and a few Americans piling onto a hotel bus.
“You can get us to the hotel?”
“Sure. Forty Ringgets. I get you there fast.”
“I don’t need fast, but ok.”
If an attack was going to happen, and it seemed likely, it would be at any gathering point where a bunch of Westerners were bunched together. Like a bus. I wasn’t as worried about opportunists looking to kidnap people. The one-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks had just passed, the war in Afghanistan was ongoing, and the propaganda campaign for an invasion of Iraq was underway.
A series of terrorist bombings in the Philippines was making people nervous, Indonesia was a hotbed of fury and threats, but all of Muslim Asia was in an uproar against Western “imperialism”. The advisory was to not travel to certain countries. The American embassy here had been closed because of threats. They gave us the number for the Australian embassy in case something happened.
The driver got us to the hotel fast, almost on two wheels, and he never stopped or slowed down for anything. I appreciated his earnestness, but I didn’t want to be in a car wreck almost as much as I didn’t want to be in a bus bombing.
But he got us there. I asked him to pick us up in the morning and told him the time. The hotel was only a block or so from the jungle and it reminded me of another hotel in another city in another hemisphere in another decade. That hotel had been hit by a terrorist bomb targeting Americans who were meddling in Nicaragua at the time. History doesn’t repeat itself, they say, but it rhymes.
That was back when I was young and dumb. In 2002 I was older but probably still dumb.
“Don’t leave the hotel,” they said. “Isn’t safe for you.”
The Major League baseball playoffs were on the TV in English in the middle of the night, and the twenty hours of flights so far had my internal clock off kilter, so I really didn’t sleep. The Giants were playing the Cardinals, I think. There was an arrow on the ceiling that pointed the way to Mecca, and there were loud trumpet blasts when it was time for the call to prayer in the morning. The prayers sounded recorded and played across the city through tinny loudspeakers. The jungle came up against one side of the road that ran in front of the hotel and almost everyone got around on small motorbikes, even large families. The smaller children were extended in the air out past the back of the seat and held on tight to the bigger children, and we saw five on one tiny motorbike.
A man at the little restaurant where I got coffee told me that the biggest danger right now was the tiger who was coming into town and had dragged off some children. Men were off hunting the tiger. Too many metaphors.
Standing in front of the hotel and looking across the busy street to the shops and market stalls, I had a thought. I’d recently ended my time as the host of a pretty popular radio show that played in five major markets and on shortwave radio around the world. My co-host and I had spent some of the previous year, post 9-11, joking on the air about what we needed to say to get a fatwa put out on us. Now I was thinking that my co-host was safe at home in bed in Lubbock, Texas while I was standing there regretting things a little bit. The store clerks were straightening racks of clothing set out on the sidewalk and signs in English advertised cell phones and trinkets and the owners probably weren’t making any money because the tourists were all gone. They were probably as glad as I was that a bomb hadn’t taken out a bus last night.
There was the terror of the car ride back to the airport. Our driver had no respect for the sensible rules of traffic, or any apparent love for his life, but he got us there for another forty Ringgits.
Our flight took us over Bali, and when we landed in Perth the airport was in an uproar. People were gathered and sobbing and it was a circus. We had some trouble getting through security, but our friends were waiting for us on the other side.
“What happened?”
“They bombed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali overnight. A bunch of Australian footie players were killed. Over 200 people died, a bunch from Perth.”
“Woah.”
“They’ve been bringing burn victims and survivors here too. To the hospitals.”
“Americans dead?”
“Some.”
The Anaheim Angels won the World Series in 7 games. That was 21 years ago this fall.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website. Email comments to [email protected].
