My dear friend Emma Young is writing a new book following her wonderful debut novel The Last Bookshop, and as part of her research she asked for people to share the story of how they met their significant other. The most wonderful thread ensued on social media, everyone feeling a love-tinged sense of nostalgia when thinking back to how they met their significant other.

Matt and I have been married for ten years this year, but our love story began so much earlier. Inspired by Emma’s call-out, I wanted to write it down, because it all began right here, in Bali …

It’s September 1999 and I was 19. My best friend Jules and I had embarked on our first overseas trip to Bali after finishing high school. We had heard from seasoned travellers about the magic of Kuta and the party and surf scene there.
Just a day after we arrived we coincidentally ran into two French surfers we had met the previous year in southern France and we organised to have a couple of drinks together that night.

The Apache Reggae bar (you won’t believe this – it still exists!) offered a bit more of a laid-back vibe amid the pumping techno tunes of Paddy’s and the Sari Club, both of which were the scenes of the unspeakable Bali bombings just three years later.

A live band was playing Bob Marley classics at the two-storey venue, which was dark and really sweaty. I wore a blue Hawaiian-themed surfy skirt, oh did we Germans dig surf apparel, and I remember sweating a lot in my polyester top, wishing I had worn a singlet. Arms on shirts do not work in Bali.

We were swaying to the music a bit and I remember those French blokes being boring. I think Kuta back then is what Canggu is now, a cauldron of beautiful people from all walks of life and nationalities, out for a lawless, unforgettable time of fun and debauchery.

I thought ‘damn it I’m in Bali, I want to meet people’, and got up and started to move through the sticky crowd. Up on the balustrade, I saw a really tall, quite pale guy with floppy sunbleached hair.

He looked a bit odd among the muscly, stocky surfy dudes, dancing topless with their singlets tucket into the backs of their bord-shorts. He was with a guy at least a head smaller than him who was so white-blonde, his sunburned red face was framed by non-existent eyebrows and lashes.

The tall guy was so graceful in his movements and his smile was really kind. Lots of guys walked up to him, high-fived him, and stopped for a chat. He seemed to know everybody. The locals, the Brazilians, the Euros … What was with this dude? How does he know everyone? I drew a smoke from my packet of Marlboro lights and embarked on the oldest line in the book.

“Do you have a lighter?,” I asked him.

His kind eyes rested on me and then he turned to his stocky blond mate and said: “I don’t, do you Jack?”
Jack obliged and that was it really, the tall guy proceeded to watch the live band down at the stage.
I hung around for a few minutes longer, waiting for them to pick up the conversation, but nothing.
So I walked back down to the boring French guys and Jules.
A while later the pair turned up at our table and Tall Guy politely asked if they could join us. I later found out Jack DID pick up on what I put down and encouraged Tall Guy to join Jules and me.

Tall Guy of course was Matt, and I just remember there was instant chemistry, and we talked all night. I found out about his family and three brothers, the family dog that had recently passed away and this place he came from – Perth.

Jules and I were laughing as we recalled how our high school Engish teacher would pronounce it PerFFFF and while we had heard of Sydney, we knew preciously little of this place of deserts and cowboys.

I encouraged Matt to teach me surfing (we are at it again now – future blogs on this will follow) but our budding romance was almost cut short by my then-wonky English skills.

After a day we had spent together he asked politely “shall I walk you home?”, to which I replied “oh, you mustn’t walk me home.” Every German reading this will know the mistake I made and why.

What I had wanted to say was “you needn’t walk me home”.

I was a bit surprised when he actually didn’t walk me home, I had only tried to be flirty!

Jules quickly cleared up my bungle, and asked why I had suddenly been so curt. I kicked myself, because now Matt certainly wouldn’t come past again to see me. And, just imagine: there were no mobile phones!

Luckily I remembered where he lived. So the day after, I bravely dropped by and knocked on his door.

His Spanish friend Julian opened, explaining Matt I was not in, but eagerly assuring me he would deliver the message I had come past.

Sliding doors, but Julian saved the day and he did come and see me again.

We ended up spending the following six weeks together, staying on way longer as planned, caught up in a timeless rhythm of sleepless nights and sundrenched beaches.

After Matt’s school friend Johnny arrived we became a formidable quad-couple, hooning all over Bali in a ramshackle Suzuki Jimney, laughing and screeching at Johnny’s hair-raising maneuvering of the insane traffic.

We stayed at Padang Padang which in the late 90s was no more than a single bed and breakfast across the road from the surf spot.

We languished on the straw mats in a warung hidden in the Uluwatu cliff wall before any hotel or beach club had made its way there, we took a nutshell to Nusa Lembongan, long before fourth-daily speed boats frequented the island or any hotels had been built there.

We drank Bintangs with two constantly tipsy Brits who ran a TV on a generator with the sole purpose of playing the English Premier League football in their beach shack ‘bar’.

And we partied. God, did we party up and down the main drag in Kuta while staying in the vermin and surfer-infested magnificent hell hole that was Suka Beach on Poppies II.

Back then, a new world had been cracked open to me, a world away from striving to get into a good university, starting a ‘career’, ‘getting ahead’, and ‘working on my resume’.

Returning to my life in Germany seemed ludicrous. I will never forget the howling cry when I awoke back at home, on the other side of the world, without the heavy humidity, the cock-a-doodle-do of a nearby rooster, the smell of poo and incense, and – most of all – without Matt next to me.

The rest is – as they say – history, and tells a story of a lot of back and forth between continents and two very VERY young people who just kept it going. Who kind of grew up together until I moved my life to Australia.

To say I never looked back would be lying…I’m deeply cognisant of what I left behind. And I never stop missing my lovely family and my best friends. But despite the heartache of having two homes, I feel truly blessed for the turn my life took, that one sweaty night at Apache Reggae Bar.

Bonus vintage photos