Comedy Highlights Of Motorbiking Asia With A Child

I have a bunch of funny motorbike stories from our trip across Indonesia and Timor Leste that I never got time to write up. Here’s a few of them.

The Time I Drove Our Motorbike Into The Hotel Bar

On arrival in Dili, Timor Leste, we were kind of knackered. There’s something about a challenging border crossing followed by an hour-long wait until the bulldozers have finished making the road that does that to you.

So when the lights of our hotel appeared on the road we’d been following for a couple of hundred k, I turned right on in there.

A tricky ascent of the pavement, should, perhaps, have warned me that this really wasn’t a driveway. Yet, despite the howls from behind me — “NOOOOO, Mum, NOOOOO, that’s the bar. Wait! Wait! Let me OFF!” — I persisted, doggedly.

It was, indeed, the bar. “You alright there?” asked an Australian chap, as I reversed around the pot plants, my spawn cringing in the background.

Z’s observation? “I have NEVER been so embarrassed in my LIFE.”

The Time Our Indicators Broke

Z’s embarrassment threshold was further tested when our indicators broke a couple of days later. Timor Leste’s traffic police are remarkably effective, at least within Dili itself, and rather more expensive to bribe than Bali’s more flexible cops.

Which means that, within Dili at least, motorcyclists almost always use their indicators, a phenomenon I have not seen anywhere else in South-East Asia.

Rather than drive around town looking for a place to fix our bike, I approached the problem Indonesian style, and had my passenger do the work. “Turning right! Big wave! BIG wave!”… “Indicate left! NO! LEFT!”…

Given it cost less than three dollars to get them fixed, I’d probably choose that option in future.

The Corner of Doom

You don’t get to beaches this deserted on good roads. And learning to surf in Kuta, Lombok, entailed regularly ascending and descending a particularly tight, steep, scree-strewn corner that we called the Corner of Doom.

On our way back from a restaurant one day, some guys in a pickup truck were making their third attempt at an ascent, machine-gunning rocks as they did. They waved me merrily across the road, to a particularly vertiginous approach.

My anxiety intensified first by the imminent approach of their large, accelerating vehicle and secondly by a particularly curious audience, I panicked. Locked the front brake. And, umm, fell over, EXTREMELY slowly.

The next day I decided that our surf instructors could drive us to the beach instead. Ascending the Corner of Doom on pillion with my eyes tight shut, I heard a clank from behind us.

And, lo! My son’s instructor had tipped HIS bike over, EXTREMELY slowly, precipitating Z onto the scree for the second time in two days.

Corner of Doom 2. Poor Z? Nil.

The Lake of Farts

South-East Asia has some epically bad roads. But the prize for the worst road yet goes to…

The road from Banyuwangi to the Ijen Plateau in Java, where we had to be rescued by a friendly vulture after our bike refused to move.

The “adventure” continued when we were beaten back by beaten back by toxic gas clouds and learnt more than anyone needs to know about the role of engine oil in motorbikes…

The Time I Locked My Keys In The Motorbike

I might have come a long way since my learner driver fiasco in Cat Ba island, Vietnam, but sometimes I surprise even myself.

Locking your keys in a motorbike?

Is that even possible?

Well, yes. As I learnt in Timor Leste.

But All The Same…

Yet, here we are, after all this, about to motorbike around Central Laos, with our BFF, H…

Are we gluttons for punishment? Have we learnt ABSOLUTELY nothing?

Or is there just something about the total freedom of movement you get with a bike, and the dazzling beauty that surrounds you, that makes this option so appealing? Answers on a postcard, please.