Hell with Deepavali, it's Hari Raya time!

I keep wondering why I'm doing this. Adventure? Fun? Exploration? What is it that drives me forward (besides my bike) to find new experience? Two nights ago I wondered this all night long and fervently. I was camped out on a public camping beach among the piles of crap (plasic bottles, diapers, rags, styrofoam, more diapers) that the local brochures forget to mention. And as the sun began to wander toward the horizon and the crowd began to thin, I rode my unloaded bike up the road for dinner. Full and tired I got back to "camp" to see that the day crowd had given way to the throngs of the night. Hari Raya is a big holiday for Muslims as it celebrates the end of Ramadan. A really big holiday as it turns out. The beach was throbbing with people hanging out to the beat of a hyper-techno rave party. The sound track came from a car with a stereo system so powerful that the engine had to be kept on to power it. The kind of system that rattles your windows from blocks away. The kids in the car were parked next to a few tents with families who had small kids so I thought "cool, this will go on till 10:00, 11pm tops". I crawled into my tent and curled up with my book (thank you, Sheryl).
A tent is a strange, amazing, aural anomally that I think hasn't been fully studied. Sounds are amplified in unexplained ways. If you've ever camped out and heard rustling in the bushes or a twig break you know what I'm talking about. So by midnight as the pulsing beat seemed to be getting louder, mixing with the pounding waves and the people everywhere, I didn't freak out too much. Well, actually I did, but only because my foam ear plugs were totally ineffective and I could feel the sub woofer base in my chest. Crawling out of my tent I saw hundreds of people enjoying their national holiday a whole lot more than I was. Cars were lined up, headlights on, pointing into the surf, as families played soccer and laughed with their kids running around...little kids! Don't these people know what time it is? Don't they have to be somewhere and do something? Aren't they worried about how tired and cranky their kids (and me) are going to be tomorrow? Aren't they uptight and rule bound like me? What the hell is wrong with these people? Those were some of the nicer thoughts I had as the night was still young.
The fireworks were starting to come out now as it was officially hari raya (past midnight). These weren't the wheezy Singaporean ones I so wistfully remembered. M-80s we used to call them. Big booms all over the beach. Everyone had them and they were having a good time with them. Moving my tent had proven useless and I became resolved to a night of no sleep and surlyness. Too tired to read, the i-pod gave me some relief although the mixing beats from the car stereo and my earphones was weird. Having a tent up at the beach with someone lying (not sleeping) in it means one thing back home and I ethnocentrically thought this was universal. It usually means you keep it down or give them space or some other such polite gesture. Not so here as people walked by within a foot or so and laughed or shouted or lit fireworks.
I'm not sure what time it was when I noticed the thick smoke in my tent as I was too tired to check (and what difference did it make anyway)? There were fires all over the beach by now. At 4:00 am for some mysterious reason the hammering base beat stopped and I drifted off to a coughing shallow-breathed sleep. At six am and the music was back on in force (maybe they had to go fill up the tank) and I crept out of my tent stinky, sandy, smokey, and feeling amazingly horrible. The feeling that 'humanity was doomed and deservedly so, kill them all'...you know, that old chestnut. The irony of the having that feeling just a day after being helped by the 4 moped guys (and knowing that humanity was, at its core altruistic) wasn't lost on me and yet strangely, that didn't help. Rubbing my eyes I found the source of the smoke I'd been breathing. About 20 feet upwind was a family happily burning newspaper soaked in something that blackened the air. They were even cooking in that toxic goo. Smilingly sharing a breakfast of meat and rice. Wondering just how many years this night had robbed of my life I messily and hurriedly packed my gear as I thought about the 100km or so I was going to ride that day.