I Got Fined By Bali Police And Paid In Cigarettes

I have been riding scooters around Bali for twenty years. Sometimes with a helmet, mostly without, which is nobody’s fault but mine.

In all that time I had never once been pulled over, which given how much time Australian men now spend in Bali is either luck or a statistical miracle. Twelve hours into this trip, on a main road I could not name if you paid me, my perfect record went in the bin.

The officer waved me across, looked at my bare head with the weariness of a man who has seen a thousand of us, and started writing. I hold a valid Australian motorbike licence and have ridden most of my adult life, so the helmet was the only thing letting me down.

He landed on 1.25 million rupiah, about 100 Australian dollars, for the crime of enjoying the breeze in my ginger hair.

I told him I had no cash on me, which was true, and I assumed that would either end the conversation or make things considerably worse. He suggested we could go to court or they confiscate the bike. Neither was a good option on the way to a tennis game at La Liga.

It did neither. He pointed at the Circle K thirty metres up the road and told me to go and buy two cartons of Marlboro Reds, and he was very clear it was cartons rather than packets.

Twenty packs. Roughly 95 Australian dollars once you do the conversion, which as a piece of pricing sits suspiciously close to the fine he had just written down.

So I walked into a Circle K in the heat, bought twenty packs of smokes off the young shop assistant who asked, ‘are these all for you?’. I explained that, no they were for the police who demanded them as payment.

After walking back to the roadside like a man doing the office coffee run. Only then was I free to go.

Anyone who has spent real time in Indonesia knows a roadside conversation has two numbers in it, the one on the pad and the one you actually leave on. It applies well beyond Bali, including on the islands Australians keep flying past.

The variations are endless. A Japanese rider was filmed being stopped over his headlights and asked for a million rupiah. Another tourist got pulled down a side road near Ubud, was shown a piece of paper with a million on it, and walked away 200,000 lighter.

The advice from people who know better than me is to politely ask for a formal written ticket, a tilang resmi, and let the system do its thing.

The part I only realised later is that my 1.25 million estimate was optimistic. The actual helmet fine is closer to 250,000 rupiah, and the million figure usually belongs to riding without a licence, which was never me.

Take this as the warning I clearly needed twenty years ago. A local without a helmet vanishes into the traffic, while a tourist without one may as well be riding with a flag.

Bali has been vocal about tidying up badly behaved visitors, so wear the helmet Road Runner rental gives you, carry your licence and an International Driving Permit, and keep small notes in your pocket rather than an empty wallet and a hard luck story.

All the years getting away with it, and the bill came due in twenty packs of Marlboro Red bought off a kid at a Circle K who did not blink once.