MOUNT BATUR, Bali, Indonesia — Mom’s shoes had her sliding most of the way down the volcano.
She’d bought new footwear ahead of our trip to Bali. This is one of the more foolish traditions in our family, and yet we all do it: buy new shoes a few days before a trip. It almost guarantees blisters, pressure points or, in this case, skidding out on kitty-litter cinder funneling down the trail off an Indonesian volcano we’d hiked up in the wee hours to see the sun rise behind Lombok.
Since the soles of Mom’s new shoes were apparently made of slick plastic instead of grippy rubber, she crashed onto her rump a couple of times before one of the guides started holding her hand through the steeper sections … until it all got to be steep, and he was holding her hand all the way down Mount Batur.
Since I’m more accustomed to hiking steep things and took my old reliable trail runners (but new flip-flops) to Bali, I cruised down the trail ahead of her. Every once in a while I’d pause to look back at my mom, Jill, and the young Balinesian man keeping her upright. Every time I’d stop, I’d turn to see them both smiling and laughing.
Despite the tough hike up and the spills on the way down, Mom was doing what she does — staying positive. She has a set of aphorisms that support her upbeat worldview. For example:
“This is easy — I sat on the hump, baby.” Mom’s sat-on-the-hump saying comes from her childhood. As the youngest of three, she was always stuck in the middle of the back seat in a time when cars had bench seats in the back with a bump in the middle. When Mom says “I sat on the hump,” what she means is that she can shrug off anything, from turbulence to tourist traps. Or lousy footwear on rough terrain on the other side of the world.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” This is something her grandma, a notoriously industrious woman, used to say (and something many people’s grandmas say). Mom’s grandparents cruised the country in an Airstream, and she often took off with them on summer road trips when she was a kid. I would say they created a monster, but I believe her wanderlust and complementary inability to sit still are partly learned but mostly innate.
“Fortunately, I’m blessed with a lot of energy.” See above.
But as a travel companion, here’s my favorite saying of my mom’s: “Oh sure, you know me: I’ll go anywhere.”
This is what Mom says any time one of us says we want to go somewhere. Lithuania, Amsterdam, Iceland, Bali — Mom’s in.
Don’t get me wrong, the mom alarm still goes off. The first time I mentioned that I wanted to go to Bali, she looked it up on the site and amended her “I’ll go anywhere” to, “hmm, there’s a travel alert on Indonesia.”
“But this is Bali,” I said. “Australians go there to party. It’s not like hanging out in Jakarta.”
The alarm didn’t last, of course, and we signed up for a yoga retreat outside of Ubud.
I wish I could say I’ve inherited all of this from my mom. I’m adventurous, sure, but she’s a better travel companion than me. I’m grumpy when I don’t eat. I’m a nervous flier. I get motion sickness on buses on winding roads, and I’m not afraid to whine about it. Maybe it’s because I was an only child until I was a teenager, so I never had to sit on the hump; I can only aspire to Mom’s indifference to it.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to sit on the hump during the entire 17 hours we spent in the air getting to Bali — Mom flies so often that she had enough miles for business-class seats to Hong Kong, for both of us. Which reminds me, she has one other saying, one coveted by all travelers: “I have status.”
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jennfields
