Another, with tobacco stained teeth and blood shot eyes asks me to marry him.
"How do you say 'No thank you, men are trouble' in bahasa?" I ask Adik.
Laughing, she translates it for me and soon everyone else is laughing too.
Wavi tells him, see, she's too smart for you but he insists he will be no trouble at all.
"The one's who say that are always the most trouble of all," I say climbing onto the back of an ojeck. The gathering follows us down the shady alley to the main street where they stand waving and calling "Selemat jalang" and "Hati, hati" as I wave goodbye.
I promised Wavi's wife I would try to come back and visit. I told her I would miss them and the village. Driving past the fields with their mountainous backdrop, I realize I meant it more than I knew, I really am sad leaving the fresh air and good people behind.
"They're all full," says one of Adik's friends from high school who happened to be passing by and has stopped to wait with us and catch up on old news. He tells Adik he wants to marry me but he doesn't know English.
"Sounds like the perfect marriage to me," I say. Adik looks confused. "Well, think about it. You'd never have anything to fight about if you can't understand each other." She laughs but after she translates he just smiles, looks at me then at the ground.
When we finally get on a bus it's already completely full and they're handing out plastic stools for the rest of us to sit in the aisles. They charge us an extra $20,000 rupiah, blaming Christmas but it's really bule tax. It takes about an hour to get to the ferry and by the time we're standing on the ferry deck it's already dusk.
I spend most of the half hour ferry ride posing for pictures with groups of Asian teenagers. I have reached a level of exhaustion beyond anything I've experienced before and with at least another four hours of traveling ahead of me this is the last thing I want to be doing. Smiling requires a herculean effort, a few times I don't think I managed to pull it off, and all I want is to sit listening to the waves and taking in the view.
When we reach Bali we have to walk through a customs checkpoint before getting back on the bus. I stand for the first two hours of the trip because there are even more people on the bus now, and not enough plastic stools to go around. A handsome young man in a leather jacket offers me his seat but I decline saying I've been sitting a lot lately, which is true, but mostly I feel less claustrophobic standing above everyone than squished in among them.
When the person in the aisle beside him gets off Leather Jacket wards off the other passengers scrambling for the seat and insists I take it. We fall into a conversation I find difficult to follow above the roar of the engine.
"You like Indonesia?" Yes.
"You like Indonesian men?" Yes, they're very gantung, I lie politely. Truthfully, like anywhere in the world, the odd one catches my eye but few are interesting enough to be worth the trouble.
"Maybe you find husband in Indonesia?" I sigh, which he mistakes for romanticism rather than weariness, and offer my stock response, One never knows.
"Maybe I can be your husband?" I laugh and hope he'll leave it at that but I spend the next half hour trying to politely spurn his advances until he accidentally mentions his wife.
"You have a wife?" I say, happy to turn the conversation to talking about his wife and family.
But he expounds instead on his unhappy marriage. His wife who, like the wives of so many poor beleaguered men, is a horrible woman, mean and doesn't understand him. They married too young and now she's so busy working he hardly ever sees her. In fact, it's not like a marriage at all.
"Sounds like a normal marriage to me," I say wryly.
"Really?" he says.
"Yeah, in fact almost every married man I meet has exactly the same story, no matter what culture I'm in."
I try to text my mother and then pretend to sleep but he keeps touching me, his hand wandering first to my knee and when I shift my leg out of reach, my arm. I shake it off and say no, but he is also pretending to not hear me.
I finally switch places with the man beside me who has eked out a small space for himself by wedging himself between me and the child sleeping next to me while balancing on the edge of the seat and leaning on the bus driver's seat in front of him.
"You look tired," I say, "let me sit there for a while."
Leather jacket moves then too, so we have more space, but in the taxi on the way to the hotel Adik tells me he moved next to her and spent the remainder of the trip trying to get her number.
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