Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [12]
Despite restful sleep, we land in Hong Kong in a jet-lagged daze, barely alert enough to find Cathay Pacific’s large, luxurious Business Class lounge. After claiming two adjoining sofas in the nearly empty space—one apiece—Bill digs out his toiletries bag and heads to the men’s room. He washes his face, shaves, brushes his tangled hair, and leisurely thumbs through an airline magazine in a bathroom stall before returning to his seat.
“Good grief! Where’s your blazer?” Cheryl shrieks.
Befuddled, Bill looks at his bare arms and glances around our sitting area, certain it must be draped somewhere in the vicinity. Then he realizes he hung it on a hook in the stall and dashes back to retrieve it. Thieves, hooey. Save us from ourselves.
Late the same afternoon, almost thirty-six hours in real elapsed time after leaving home, our connecting Cathay Pacific flight arrives in Bali. It’s elating to emerge from the confines of a plane into the tropical sunshine, but our hotel driver—provided as part of our honeymoon package—deflates the mood by reminding us that the town of Ubud, our final destination, is still another ninety minutes away by car. When he drops us off at the inn, we’re little more than putty, eager to collapse into bed after an early and quick dinner. As we’re nestling into the sheets, Cheryl suddenly remembers our favorite American Airlines employee, the guy who helped us to get here. After bidding Bill sweet dreams, she says with a big grin, “And good night to you, too, my leg man Sam.”
BALI
MAYBE IT’S BAD LUCK TO TAKE A TRAVELING COMPANION on a second honeymoon. It certainly causes us grief in Bali, though it’s not really Flat Stanley’s fault—the only thing we agree on. “It’s all your fault,” Bill says adamantly to Cheryl.
“No, it isn’t. If you need to blame someone, it’s got to be that damn rogue monkey.”
Flat Stanley, a paper-doll replica of a children’s storybook character, refuses to take sides, an advantage of his difficulty in forming and expressing opinions. In Jeff Brown’s popular tale, Stanley yearns to travel but his parents can’t afford it. When he’s sleeping one night, a bulletin board falls on him and flattens him, leaving him capable of flying off anywhere he wants in an envelope for the mere cost of the postage. As part of a first-grade project in their school, our grandchildren send Stanley on trips with us in preparation for putting together show-and-tell presentations. For Riley, Cheryl took Stanley with her to New York, where he attended a special, hush-hush committee meeting of food professionals, and now, for Bronwyn, we’re escorting him around the world.
Stanley even carries his own bag on the trip—or more accurately, it carries him. His hotel room is our unisex purse, where he rests securely with our camera, cell phone, and tape recorder. The lightweight, compact bag slips easily across our bodies to foil drive-by purse snatchers, all too common these days on streets everywhere, and comes with steel-reinforced straps to prevent a thief from snipping it off of us. Stanley leaves the safety of his room only for photo ops to document his adventure.
Cheryl decides it’s one of those occasions shortly after we reach Bali. On a stroll through the Sacred Monkey Forest in Ubud, we’re admiring the ancient Hindu temples and the cute long-tailed macaques scampering constantly underfoot. The monkeys, who play heroic roles in Balinese religious epics, beg tourists to feed them, and many people oblige. Cheryl spots a group of successful supplicants gulping down bananas, stands Stanley in front of them a sensible distance away, and focuses the camera. Before she has time to snap the shutter, another macaque leaps from behind her and kidnaps Stanley, ripping him limb from limb and eating