Bungle in the Bali jungle

The Ubud taxi driver, earnest look on his face, repeated a hip-thrusting rutting gesture, asking me: “Last night, last night?”

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop. It wasn’t the salacious gesture it seems. He was actually inquiring about the night before’s earthquake — a seismic trembler, not a knee-trembler, if you’ll excuse the Indonesian.

Not familiar with quakes, I was thoroughly confused when I woke at 2.45 am Thursday to a massive rumbling — like a revving Mac truck right beside you – and a wall-sized glass window/door rattling fit to smash in its runners as if a cyclone was blowing.

I thought some giant machine or something was outside on the balcony. If you’ve even heard a Bali hotel fumigator in action, you’ll know what I mean.

“What the hell is that?” I asked my wife.

“It’s an earthquake, you idiot!” she corrected me. “Didn’t you feel the bed shaking?”

Frankly, I didn’t. It was the noise woke me. The rocking bed had probably assisted my slumber, which is a little worrying.

But the racket stopped sharply. All up, the rocking and rattling took maybe 15 seconds.

The next hour, however, waiting for repeats, checking Twitter for information, thinking tsunamis and volcanoes, worrying about family down on the coast at Seminyak, took maybe three.

My wife, eternal optimist that she is, said I was lucky it didn’t go longer because she would have been up and gone. With the passports. Bad luck if I wasn’t behind her. Every man for himself.

Comedians. Just what you need in a disaster zone, I suppose.

Like the rutting taxi driver. Funnily enough, his attitude contrasted markedly with that of the first taxi driver I’d engaged on the island, a week earlier.

That driver was filthy on the media for supposedly portraying Bali as a dangerous destination and scaring off the tourists.

“No volcano, no earthquake, no tsunami in Bali!” he railed. “That Sulawesi, not Bali. Fake media.” Oh dear.

“What about Lombok?” I quizzed him, referring to the 460 poor souls who died on Bali’s neighbouring isle in August, after a string of quakes. “It’s only 140 km away.”

“No more earthquakes on Lombok, all finished,” he insisted, which was bending the truth, given the 6.3 and 6.9 belters and 100-odd aftershocks and mudslides that savaged the island after the 460 deaths.

There was no telling him Bali was anything but safe. Even if it is in one of the busiest areas in the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire, where grinding tectonic plates cause virtually non-stop quakes, eruptions, tsunamis and underwater mischief.

Good ambassador, I suppose. But then maybe he’s just used to living in the red zone. It’s hard enough making a crust in Bali, working long hours seven days a week. No time for the luxury of worrying about volcanoes and quakes.

Which is all quite the contrast to the angst and anxieties of so many tourists arriving in Bali to throw themselves into yoga, meditation, cleansing, healing, breatharian and downward dog recoveries for the First World problems persecuting them.

It’s peculiar how they seem to think the prospect of natural disaster couldn’t or shouldn’t affect them. Or why immersing themselves in the crucible will fix everything. It is a bit odd, if you think about it.

I was gobsmacked by the fat Aussie stranded in Lombok moaning to the media how he was ashamed to be Australian because authorities hadn’t evacuated him fast enough.

The quake had thoroughly messed up his booze-up, the poor entitled princess.

Okay, maybe he didn’t know 400-plus had died, and thousands had been left homeless. And maybe I’m wrong, why shouldn’t you throw yourself into the Ring of Fire and expect a free ride home when it turns papaya-shaped?

Besides, maybe sticking your bum in the air in a steaming, oxygen-depleted environment in an idyllic jungle mountainside has its merits.

Who knows? You could lose weight, to dehydration. You could feel euphoric, to heat frustration. You could feel a sense of achievement, to the combined weight-loss euphoria.

For people who in their youth might have frequented the booze-holes and fleshpots of Legian and Kuta, smoking dope and scoffing magic mushrooms, it might even be kind of redemptive. Or something.

Certainly, from the Balinese perspective, the tourist search for spirituality taps into the economy in a reasonably big way. Likewise, the booze-hound’s search for Nirvana, too — they’ll sleep through anything.

WOMEN IN BOXES

Vale to Moi-Yo Miller, queen of the illusionistas in the Golden Age of Magic and a good old Skene Street dancing girl. She died recently at the age of 104.

Elegant, fairie-like half of Dante the Magician’s show, the biggest travelling show in the world of the 1930s and ’40s, Moi-Yo was arguably the world’s most mutilated woman.

She was sawn in half 11,800 times in her career. She was also eviscerated, hacked, chopped to bits and disintegrated. All part of the job.

Moi-Yo was also promoted by Dante as The Most Beautiful Woman in Australia after he discovered her in beauty/dancing contest in the early 1930s before whisking her OS for the next few decades. She learned to fold herself like a sheet of silk.

I met Moi-Yo at age 95 and again at 99. It’s an under-statement to say she knew her way around a camera. She was still beautiful and a year off her century, she wickedly touched her toes several times in rapid succession to show me she was still limber.

DID YOU KNOW?

If you’re heading toward the Ring of Fire, maybe for schoolies, you might be interested to know the biggest earthquake ever recorded measured 9.5 on the Richter scale.

It happened in Chile in 1960, killing 2000 people and causing 25-metre tsunami waves.

By contrast, the most destructive quake in Australia was in Newcastle in 1989. It killed 13, hospitalised 160, flattened 300 buildings and mangled 50,000 more.

It was felt 800km away. It measured 5.6.

SOLAR POWER

If you get the chance, poke your nose into the State Library in Melbourne where Geelong’s Hubert Opperman — once as famous as Don Bradman and Phar Lap – is part of its Changing Face of Victoria exhibition.

Like most cyclists, Oppy was a tough nut. Take the November 1937 day he peddled into Sydney to some 60,000 people on the tail end of an epic trans-continental ride.

It took him 13 days, 10 hours and 11 minutes to ride there from Fremantle. Officials couldn’t calm the crowd but they urged the wild throng of fans to, if nothing else, not slap Oppy on the back.

He was seriously sunburned.