People

I started the day with breakfast at Revolver. I remembered it as a laidback hippie surfer place – I even recognised Indonesian Snoop Dogg working behind the bar – but they had a doorman now, which seemed odd. It seemed less odd when I left and discovered a queue of people waiting to get a table, being expertly wrangled by the doorman.

Later I went to this place.

They had me at “Doughnuts”, not gonna lie.

Surfing is hungry work. As is being my selfie proxy. You wish you could bury your entire head in a mojito doughnut.

As evening started to fall I made my way up to Potato Head, where the ridiculously beautiful and the beautifully ridiculous meet to drink fine cocktails, watch the sunset, and loll about in an Instagramable manner.

From my people-watching:

- Creepy, potbellied Indian men unable to help themselves from standing too close, mesmerised, by almost naked Scandinavian girls.

- Two very large, loud and sweary Australian men who instinctively recognised that cheap beer wasn’t really the go here, and so ordered cocktails of Red Bull, vodka and lemonade: I wanted to implore them not to drink concentrated caffeine, and thus deny the world the chance to be free of them for eight hours a night.

- Chinese tourists not quite sure why they’re here, but stolidly grateful that they can now cross Potato Head off their Bali to-do list.

I watched the sunset with a watermelon mojito and some hummus and crudites, then left to make my way to my next venue.

Earlier in the day, I’d been chatting to a man who’d given me a lift on the back of his scooter, and he’d mentioned that his main job was as a singer in the bar/restaurant. I thought I might like to come and hear that, and he gave me the name and address. From what he said, I imagined something cheesy but harmless; an Indonesian version of a lounge singer warbling through ‘Quando Quando Quando’ while customers sipped cocktails and ate dinner.

I was wrong.

The first warning sign was that, technically, the bar/restaurant was in Legian, not Seminyak. Legian is a sort of demilitarised zone between sophisticated Seminyak and feral Kuta, functioning as a space to tire out wandering bogans before they stumble drunkenly into somewhere too nice.

The second warning sign was when I entered the venue and was almost pushed out by the wall of noise. Between overamplified music and shouting customers, it was like entering World of Tinnitus.

My new friend was a good singer, but his role was primarily a facilitator, assisting beer-swilling low-lifes to bellow the catchphrases to pub rock classics, with occasional episodes of fullblown… shudder… karaoke.

I was horrified by all of the following:

- A man walking about with a slightly stunned baby while some bogan drunkenly shouted most of the lyrics to ‘Sweet Caroline’ into a microphone. Normally I hate kids, but no baby deserves to have its innocent new eardrums irrevocably damaged by overamplified shitty music.

- A morbidly obese grandma, wearing a light tie-dyed sundress that hung down to her knees at the sides and back but rather higher at the front, thanks to her gut, exuberantly shaking what her momma and innumerable carbs gave her to ‘Mr Brightside’, or at least her grandson’s slurred rendition of it.

- The crowd enthusiastically laying into Smokie’s ‘Living Next Door to Alice’, which, like The Angels’ ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?” has acquired an F-bomb laden call and response over the years. The customers were roaring this into the microphones, while I was wondering, “Am I seriously the only one who notices that there’s a trio of 8 year olds at the next table!?” Although, to be fair, they’d already heard their father call someone a c*nt, so maybe this was just normal for them. Even so, there was one little boy who was cringing behind his menu and glancing sadly and nervously around himself, as if mentally fixing this scene for discussion with his therapist in about twenty years.

I made it through Attack of the Bogans: The Musical! thanks to a huge frozen margarita, three times the size of the one at Motel Mexicola and about half the price. That, and the fact that this titanic, drunken, screaming trainwreck was the best people watching I’ve had since I got here.