Between waves we lay on our boards, bare chests on slippery plastic, paddling to keep ourselves facing the shore, waiting. Salt water dripped into my mouth. Ryan flicked a lump of hair off his face. On the beach, our friends were waking up and moving into the shade of palm trees.

‘Paradise,’ Ryan said.

‘Let’s never leave this place.’

I wasn’t so upbeat by the time we got to the market. The sellers have no respect for hungover customers, and I’m sure they called out to us louder than usual for fun. My head thumped, and everything smelled terrible: a cocktail of fruit baking in the sun, petrol fumes and dog piss.

‘Keep it down, dude,’ I said to Komang, our go-to man for noodles and greens. ‘I’m right here.’

‘You want a beer?’ He grinned and banged a stick of bamboo on the bars of the cage at his feet, making his monkey scream. Next to him, an elderly woman squatted on the ground, arranging flowers on a woven tray. Without pausing in her work, she shouted in rapid-fire Balinese. From her tone, I figured she said something like, ‘Charge the foreigners double.’ A young girl stood beside her, as poised as a ballerina, holding a basket of bananas on her head, smiling at us. We were the morning’s entertainment, not for the first time.

After the beach, the market and the sweaty drive home, we opened up the restaurant and got back to work. I stumbled through Thursday, serving more fish and sambal than you’d think could come out of a shoebox kitchen. We set to drinking again after we closed. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. Maybe because I was stoned.

Just after midnight, Sal drove me on the scooter to Denpasar airport, winding and beeping through the usual puzzle of motorbikes, overloaded trucks churning out black smoke and beaten-up cars driven by toothless men. I’d rested my aching head between her shoulderblades and closed my eyes.

The plane was shutting its doors as I ran across the tarmac, shouting at the hostie to wait.

I’ll be in Brisbane for almost four weeks, the result of being nagged, repeatedly, by Abby to ‘come home’. Except Brisbane isn’t home anymore.

When I went to Bali I didn’t plan to stay for so long, but it turned out there was no compelling reason for me to rush back. I think if Abby visited Kuta she’d understand.

After I graduated from Queensland Uni I’d spent a lot of time reading about different parts of Asia. Abby said I should channel my interest into a job, so I dropped down to part-time work at the student union and enrolled in postgrad studies in Mandarin, not to please my unpleasable sister, but because I figured a second language might get me a job as a translator. Mostly, though, it offered another stream of girls to date. Not a terrible result.

When Ryan and Sal came back from Kuta for a month-long visit to appease their families (a great Australian tradition), we hung out. I stopped going to classes. I lost my job. The morning I got fired, I called Ryan. He said that there were other jobs and I shouldn’t stress out. But he and Sal are both from rich families, and the whole idea of working felt a bit optional for them back then. It still does. At some point Ryan will be expected to do something in law and Sal will do whatever it is she’ll do. But I went with them to our friend Jason’s house anyway. That day set me on the road to Bali.