I had no reason to suspect that the cute little girl who was the waitress at the only so-called restaurant on North Beach was a conniving cheat, but, well, I had only been in Indonesia for less than a week and didn’t know much about how things were on the tourist island I went to. I’d had the idea that I could relax there for a few days, even a couple of weeks, before moving on. I’d read about the island in Lonely Planet’s Guide to Southeast Asia, which described the island’s North Beach as a place to lie in a hammock and now and then hear a coconut go, thump, onto the sand. The dot-com company that I had been slaving away at for the past three years, ever since graduating with a degree in web design, had just gone bust, setting me free. For a week or more…
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