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and card as a little goodwill token/bribe, to say thanks for not protesting. But we should have protested. It wasn’t healthy. I’ll never forget the day when I was surfing with Kimi and some friends on a popular little break just in front of the nuclear plant. I had an appalling reaction to what must have been chemicals in the water. Within minutes of being in the surf, my face blew up like a puffer fish, turning my eyes to slits. I was sneezing uncontrollably and the pain in my sinuses was so excruciating I thought they’d explode. I got out fast, refusing to ever surf there again.
    We lived a simple life in a very old and traditional Japanese house, which we shared with a couple of Kimi’s windsurfer mates. The amenities were so basic that they were remarkably similar to the ones here in Kerobokan, but the big difference is I kept them pristine and we didn’t have to share with fifteen others. We had an old squat toilet and used a bucket and ladle for showering, just like I do now. It’s almost like I had training.
    Though it was basic, Kimi and I loved our little house and enjoyed making it into our home. We had two rooms in the attic, which we spent weeks doing up, one as our bedroom and the other as a TV and living room. Being completely immersed in another culture, I felt free and creative and spent a lot of time painting. Kimi would drive me to Tokyo to buy canvases and paints to do oil paintings. I was also into painting glass bottles and asked every guest to our home to take a seat and paint a glass bottle, too. I had a big collection, which I displayed in the toilet in an optimistic attempt to distract from the toilet itself. The house was so decrepit that as soon as we moved out it was demolished.
    Kimi worked as a seasonal tea farmer and also as a surfboard-shaper in his mate Mitchi’s surfboard factory and shop. We all spent a lot of time hanging out there, usually before and after a surf. We lived to surf in those days, and I became pretty good a tit, easily dropping to one knee, doing 360s and catching the big powerful waves that came through during the cyclone season. I’d come to really love my boogie-boarding.
    At first I couldn’t get any work and spent the days cooking Kimi lunch and hanging out at the surf shop with him. I had two Western girlfriends who lived in the town, one from England, who was married to a pro windsurfer, and the other from Canada, who taught English. But generally it was a bit boring.
    Eventually I found a job at the town’s hotel. It was gruelling, as I started at dawn preparing breakfast and rolling up the futons, then cycled home for a quick lunch, before returning to help prepare dinner and roll out the futons. I also got some work doing seasonal farming for small farmers of strawberries, melons and tobacco. Kimi and I would spend days out in a field working with a team of really old, hunchback Japanese women.
    We lived frugally. Our rent was only $80 a month and surfing costs nothing, but we were always struggling to save enough money for air tickets back to Australia. Within the first two years of living in Japan, we came home about six times to renew my visa and see my family. We’d sometimes stay in Australia for a couple of months so I could spend time with my family, and I’d get a casual job. During these trips, we’d often drive down the coast for a week or two, just camping and surfing. Merc was still living in Bali during this time, so we sometimes took advantage of the Garuda stopover to drop in to see her.
    But immigration both in Australia and Japan were starting to give us a hard time when it came to obtaining our visas, and we were also getting tired of the constant expense. So it reached a point where it was either split up or get married. I hate saying it like that, because it sounds like we got married just for a visa, but the truth is we were really in love and neither of us wanted to let go.
    Kimi was five years older than me and had often said