I’m on the Indonesian party island of Bali, having just come back from a few days island hopping to the east.

It’s nice to be back in the relative comfort of Bali, which to me at the moment seems like New York compared to the very remote towns and villages I’ve just come back from. If you’ve read my other story ‘Penniless and stuck on Flores’ you’ll know I’ve had a somewhat harrowing last few days and have just checked into a guest house in Kuta having travelled by boat and bus pretty much non-stop for about two days.

During that journey home I kept seeing in various places a pretty, blonde girl with a very distinctive red and white polka dot dress on. It was almost like the little girl with the red coat on in Schindler’s List. On a boat with about 80 people onboard she stood out a mile. And every time I saw her I’d be transfixed. And now, just to make things even more strange, I’ve just walked into reception at my guest house and there she is again. We smile at each other like we’ve both seen each other before and I approach her for a chat.

Her name is Tone from Norway, she’s cute as a button, has lovely blonde almost white hair, speaks perfect English with a cute accent and has typically Scandinavian immaculate teeth, so, plenty to look at in the head department, but god damn it I can’t take my eyes off her tits! Trying my hardest to look her in the eyes I’m invited out with her and her travel buddy Trine who are going out for a meal in town to meet a few Swedes, which I accept, curious to find out more about Tone.

There was about 10 of us altogether all sat round a big table in one of those typical Asian type bars that serve basic, cheap food and play Hollywood films on a big screen 24 hours a day. Most of the time my new friends are speaking Swedish / Norwegian amongst themselves of which clearly I don’t understand a word, but to be honest, I’m just happy with the company and still quite relieved to back on Bali after my island hopping trip. So I just sat there, drank my beer, smoked my ciggies and was quite content listening to them talking gobbledygook ….. and taking the odd sneaky peak at Tone’s tits whenever I could get away with it.

Even though I told her a hundred times that I didn’t mind them talking to each in their mother tongue Tone said she felt guilty about me not being able to join in the conversation that evening and asked me if I would like to go out with her the next day to make it up to me. So we made a plan to meet the following evening.

Next evening I meet up with Tone who unknowingly to me has also brought along Trine too, but thankfully after the meal Trine realises she’s a third wheel, makes her excuses and goes back to the guest house, leaving me and Tone to hit the bars of Kuta.

Kuta is the Ibiza of Indonesia. With long party streets filled with bars and nightclubs mostly aimed at Aussie holiday makers and backpackers, serving goldfish-bowl size cocktails with straws and the usual shots and shooters. Tone and I did a pretty good pub crawl going late into the night only ruined by one young local who probably saw how pissed we were and started to unzip Tone’s money belt whilst distracting us with something. We caught him in the act and I give him a right good slap around the head, so he ran off into the night.

It had been a really good fun evening with Tone for sure, but we’d drank quite enough for one evening so we stumbled our way back to the guest house for one final beer by the floodlit pool and had a quick skinny dip. I remember lying on one of the sun-loungers looking up at the clear star-lit night sky, sipping my beer and having a bit of a fumble with this buxom, blonde-haired Scandinavian beauty contemplating just how good life can be sometimes.

It must have been about 5am or something by the time I got to my bed that morning and as is tradition with me after a heavy night of drinking I woke a few hours later fucking dying. The room would have been stinking hot with no air-con other than the usual loud-as-hell and totally ineffective little fan in the corner of the room. I had nothing to drink in the room and you couldn’t even drink the tap water, so I was truly screwed. And I was so ill that I couldn’t even move never mind go ‘all the way’ to reception to get a drink so I chose to just lay there slowly drying up like a prune with a massive headache, praying I would sleep it off.

I woke up again hours later. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was probably afternoon. The headache had subsided a bit, but I still felt pretty groggy and felt like I’d only had a couple of hours of kip. It was around about this point I remembered that I was supposed to be meeting Tone for breakfast, but I’d clearly missed that by a long way, so I slowly got up, tried to wash some life back into myself with a cold shower and proceeded to neck about 5 cans of coke when I eventually crawled to reception.

When it felt like I was on the verge of coming back to life I slowly wandered my way down to the beach front on Kuta, where I lay down my towel, got some Alice Cooper tunes sorted on my Walkaman and hoped the sun would bring some more life back into my dying body.

After a bit of a snooze and about a dozen more cans of Coke I started to feel a bit better and even felt like a bit of a swim. After a quick dip I even found the courage to do something I’d never tried before, which was boogie boarding; a sort of half-sized surfboard you lie on and surf on the waves. It looked easy enough I thought and the waves didn’t look that bad where I was. Further down the beach was clearly very different, the waves were much bigger and they had flagged off a large section of the beach for some sort of professional surfboarding competition where quite a lot of people had started to gather to watch.

As a beginner anyway I kept myself to my end of the beach and was really quite enjoying myself in the light surf. When I started to tire a bit I thought I would swim out beyond the waves and just lie on my board for a while and bob around in the sun. It was lovely.

Well, I must have nodded off I presume. I opened my eyes to the gentle, hypnotic sound of water lapping against the side my board, I looked up and was horrified to see the beach was now quite some distance away; the tide having seemingly taken me out to sea. At this point I wasn’t too concerned, I flipped over on my board and started swimming my way back towards the shore. Now what no-one had mentioned to me when I hired this bloody thing was that Kuta is somewhat renowned for its fierce riptides and, as I was slowly finding out, my gentle front crawl swimming didn’t seem to be getting me any closer to the beach at all. In fact after about half an hour of non-stop swimming I don’t think I’d got any closer at all, all that had happened is that I had just moved further up the coast, but was still the same distance away.

It was apparent I needed to up my game, so my gentle front crawl turned into a more energetic front crawl and when that only seemed to make a modest improvement I started to swim faster and faster, which then started to make me panic. What if I don’t have the strength to swim my way back in? Firstly I’m not the world’s greatest swimmer anyway and secondly I’m not exactly at the peak of health today. The thought of me washing up in Darwin five days later was becoming a worrying, but more and more realistic possibility, so even though I’d been flapping around for about an hour already I now started to swim as hard as I could and thankfully it looked like I started to make a bit of headway towards the coast.

By the time I started to get relatively close to the beach I noticed that the rip tide had dragged me into the area that was black flagged for the surf competition. It’s only when you’re in big surf yourself you realise how big and powerful they are. Once I’d swam into the breaking point of the waves the first one hit me from behind like a brick wall had fallen on top of me, knocking the wind out of me and spitting me off my board. I wasn’t expecting it so I had very little breath in me before coming to the surface to grab some air. The board was still attached to my wrist so I slid myself back on top and just as I was about to start swimming again … BANG …. I was hit again. Tumbling around under the water you don’t know which was is up and which way is down, but when I surfaced this time I didn’t even have time to get on the board ….. BANG …. under I went again. If I wasn’t panicking before I sure was starting to now, I hadn’t considered this at all. I was tired, I was losing my breath and I now wasn’t making any further headway towards the beach.

The next time I came to the surface I clocked a surfer who was presumably in the competition calmly sitting on his surfboard slowly swimming past me. I took the opportunity for help and shouted ‘Excuse me mate can you help me to shore’. Now I’m going to presume at this point I look like shit, I’m tired, I’m hungover, I’m scared and in serious need of help, but this guy seems to think I’m pulling his leg, he just smiles at me and in his laid-back Aussie accent just says ‘haha yeaaaah nice one mate’ and swims by.

BANG …. down again …… now my board’s gone … the cord’s been snapped from my wrist. I haven’t even got something buoyant to hang onto anymore. I come to the surface, swim a few strokes …. BANG ….

…BANG again.…. I can’t take this much more.

I’m underwater. I can see the sun shining down from the surface in sharp rays. Then it all seems to go quiet. I think I had a moment of clarity where I realised this was maybe how it was all going to end for me. I’d been shot at and almost died in a car crash in South Africa, was stuck half way up a cliff in Cape Town, was chased up a tree by a black Rhino in Nepal, was almost blown up in Kashmir, was stuck in a volcano crater on Java and had a poisonous snake come in my room in the middle of the night in Mexico, but it suddenly flashed in front of me that my life looked like it was going to end drowning on Bali. At that moment I decided to make one last gasp attempt at swimming to shore. I swim to the surface, take in the biggest and for all I know my last gasp of air and started swimming for my life. Bang ……. gasp ….. swim swim swim ….. BANG …. smaller gasp ….. swim swim swim …. I haven’t got much air left ….. little gasp …… BANG ….. swim swim swim then one last BANG …… that was it. I had nothing left. Game over. Goodnight. I thought, I hope people know I truly tried to stay alive, that I couldn’t have done anymore than I did. I really didn’t want to die, but I stopped swimming, I didn’t even try to come to the surface, in slow motion I just turned from horizontal to vertical underwater, waiting for the inevitable final sharp intake of water …………. when …………. my toes touched sand!!!

I dug the tips of my toes into the sand and with all my heart, all my soul, and tried to walk on the sand in the direction of the beach. I could feel the rip tide pushing against me as I slowly inch by inch made a slight headway. Now I could poke my mouth above the water and take the odd breath in between the waves breaking which were slowly getting smaller. Then I could actually stand on the sand flat-footed and breathe at the same time. The rip subsided, the waves flattened out and when I finally got to the edge of the water I collapsed on the beach, totally exhausted, having been truly, truly just seconds away from death.

As I lay there in a few inches of water, half choking with seawater, half gasping for air, like a fish out of water, shaking like a leaf, my salt-filled eyes squinting in the harsh afternoon sun, it suddenly goes dark, someone is standing over me blocking out the sun. As I lay there, a broken man, having just stared death in the face and by a miracle having survived, I hear this irritated female voice say, “Where the fuck were you at breakfast this morning?!”