Covid-19 wretchedness: Bali closes beaches, including Uluwatu, Padang, as island emerges as likely virus hot-spot; Amputee surfer arrested in northern Sumatra, deported!

The Indonesian jackboot comes down, hard…

If, as the saying goes, good news travels fast then, it must follow that the wretched moves with the swiftness of supersonic air travel.

In Bali, a Frenchman, seventy-two, has died while riding his scooter. Locals thought he’d had a heart attack. Covid.

A British woman, fifty-two, died in Denpasar hospital. Covid. The doctor who treated the woman is Covid poz.

At an Uluwatu guesthouse, paramedics were called when a young tourist from Kazakhstan was found wheezing and gasping for air. His wife, who had an abnormal fever, was also taken to Denpasar hospital.

So far only seventy-one people on the island of four million have been tested. And those tests have to be sent to Jakarta, with a week turnaround on results.

It ain’t a recipe for containment.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Hindus will be celebrating what’s called Nyepi or the famous Day of Silence today, pushing back against the Indonesian government’s call for social distancing.

The Bukit peninsula has closed for biz, the Uluwatu lineup resembling a 1950s version of itself, empty of surfers.

“Respect, go home or die,” is the motto from the never-shy-of-coming-foward Balinese.

(Who can forget the “anti-Communist” slaughters of 1965 when “Bali’s eagerness to kill was so great and spontaneous that, having initially provided logistic support, the Army eventually had to step in to prevent chaos.“)

And on the remote northern Sumatra island of Simeulue, which ain’t short of epic set-ups, surfers have been forcibly removed from resorts by masked soldiers and deported back to whence they came.

Alex Wakey, a one-legged surfer from Jersey (I know, I know, there’s a joke in there somewhere, a t-shirt to the writer of the best amputee gag in the comments), was staying at Aura Surf Resort when the army came “flexing their stupid lack of logic.”

“The world gets a cough so officials throw people out of places that are them fit and healthy, hypocritically tell us to lock ourselves away while they don’t,” Alex wrote to me while en route home via Qatar. “We’ve collectively used this planet as a bus bin and now wonder why it’s clearing the decks. People being all kind words and recipes online when we know they’ll go back to being selfish cunts the second they can walk the streets again. Nature is changing humans; just a shame it can’t change human nature.”