We set off for our fake American road trip across Bali, me and this cool young Indonesian musical genius in exile, the back of our car filled with guitars and beer and the Balinese equi-valent of American road trip food—fried rice crackers and dreadfully flavored indigenous can-dies. The details of our journey are a bit blurry to me now, smudged over my distracting thoughts of Felipe and by the weird haziness that always accompanies a road trip in any country of the world. What I do remember is that Yudhi and I speak American the entire time—a language I hadn't spoken in so long. I'd been speaking English a lot during this year, of course, but not American, and definitely not the sort of hip-hop American Yudhi likes. So we just indulge it, turning ourselves into MTV-watching adolescents as we drive along, razz-ing each other like teenagers in Hoboken, calling each other dude and man and some-times—with great tenderness—homo. A lot of our dialogue revolves around affectionate in-sults to each other's mothers.

"Dude, what'd you do with the map?"

"Why don't you ask your mother what I did with the map?"

"I would, man, but she's too fat." And so forth.

We don't even penetrate the interior of Bali; we just drive along the coast, and it's beaches, beaches, beaches for a whole week. Sometimes we take a little fishing boat out to an island, see what's going on out there. There are so many kinds of beaches in Bali. We hang out one day along the long southern California-style groovy white sand surf of Kuta, then head up to the sinister black rocky beauty of the west coast, then we pass that invisible Balinese dividing line over which regular tourists never seem to go, up to the wild beaches of the north coast where only the surfers dare to tread (and only the crazy ones, at that). We sit on the beach and watch the dangerous waves, watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean's blue party dress. We watch the surfers wipe out with bone-breaking hubris against the coral and rocks, only to go back out again to surf another wave, and we gasp and say, "Dude, that is totally MESSED UP."

Just as intended, we forget for long hours (purely for Yudhi's benefit) that we are in Indonesia at all as we tool around in this rented car, eating junk food and singing American songs, having pizza everywhere we can find it. When we are overcome by evidence of the Bali-ness of our surroundings, we try to ignore it and pretend we're back in America. I'll ask, "What's the best route to get past this volcano?" and Yudhi will say, "I think we should take I-95," and I'll counter, "But that'll take us right through Boston in the middle of rush-hour traffic . . ." It's just a game, but it sort of works.

Sometimes we discover calm stretches of blue ocean and we swim all day, permitting each other to start drinking beer at 10:00 AM ("Dude—it's medicinal"). We make friends with everyone we encounter. Yudhi is the kind of guy who—when he's walking down the beach and he sees a man building a boat—will stop and say, "Wow! Are you building a boat?" And his curiosity is so perfectly winning that the next thing you know we've been invited to come live with the boat-builder's family for a year.