Why do people ride their motorbikes with their jackets on backwards?
What makes Bali such a wonderful place for me is that it is simply beaming with the bizarre. Sometimes, it is those little things which catch the eye, raise the eyebrows, and then you forget about it, no questions asked. Take the brawny tattooed men you may catch riding pink girly bikes complete with baskets, for example (definitely best not to ask).
One which I can attempt to fathom out is the unspoken clique of ‘jacket round the wrong way’ motorbike riders that hit the scene several years back. Basically, the jacket serves to protect the arms from the tropical sun, but why backwards? Have they lost a few buttons and can’t do it up if they wear it the right way round? Is it some sort of secret fashion code? The most likely reason is that it acts as a kind of windbreak; if this is the case, I’d recommend using the old newspaper up the t-shirt trick (especially if you’re up in the mountains!).
You see, locals view the world a little differently from us ‘guests’. The sun is something to shelter and hide from, not something to worship and soak in. In essence the back-to-front jacket mo’bike kids are the antithesis of the shirtless surfer mo’bike tourist. One wants a tan, the other is afraid of it. After all, if you’d spent millions of rupiah on skin whitening products, you too would stay out of the sun.
For most people here, the sun is something most people try to avoid: hanging back from the line at the lights if there is a shady tree nearby; building damp, concrete houses with no sunlight or ventilation; wearing clothes in the sea.
The ironic thing is that our skin can’t really handle the sun; we burn, blotch and wrinkle. But for some reason we can’t get enough of it. It’s a strange old ‘topsy turvy’ world...
Vaughan Hatch has immersed himself with Balinese culture, living with locals in Bali since 1997. He speaks fluent Indonesian and Balinese, and is unashamedly addicted to playing gamelan. A linguistic, archaeology and publishing graduate, he works for indOKiwi ‘linguistic and cultural solutions’ in Sanur. Email him on contact@indokiwibali.com or call (0361) 8427030 for further queries.
