We’ve been meandering across Indonesia and around Timor Leste at a more or less leisurely pace these last few months.

We’ve covered well over 5000k on our not-so-trusty Honda Vario with its skull and crossbones stickers, including some truly atrocious roads.

A testimony to butts of iron and a general resilience that Z feels “has definite bragging rights. Not many ten-year-olds travel 5000k on a motorbike”.

And now, all of a sudden, we have, well, stuff to do.

Z needs to fly to Brisbane to see his father, a process that I sincerely hope will go more smoothly than our last attempt at flying him as an unacccompanied minor.

I’ve booked my ticket out of Bali to Singapore, where, as I did in Sydney, I’ll be bar reviewing and generally earning money. Z will fly in from Oz to meet me there.

Our China mission, perhaps by way of Laos to see friends, arrange visas and generally hang out, and certainly by way of Penang, is beginning to loom on our horizons.

So, for that matter, is Europe. We have tickets booked back to the UK for Christmas, and a loose plan to roadtrip slowly down to Spain in January.

But before any of this, of course, we need to get out of the Ijen plateau and into Bondowoso with ourselves and the bike in one piece.

And feeling the bike’s leaden, dragging resistance every time I try to accelerate sufficiently to get us up the hill, that’s looking increasingly less likely.

My core problem with the bike, I have learnt, is that I basically have no idea how it works.

Each time it complains I parrot to Z what a succession of Indonesian chaps have told me:

“There’s nothing wrong with the engine. The oil just needs to work its way through…”

Even as I say it, I don’t really believe it.

Just outside the village of Sempol, we pull over to rest the bike.

“Look!” says Z, pointing at a small pink pool that is forming in the dirt. “We’ve got a leak.”

“Oh sh*t,” I say. “We’re leaking oil. That isn’t good.”

“I know it’s not good,” he says. “I think you should sell this piece of junk for the most you can get for it the SECOND we get back to Bali.”

“And how do you propose we get around Bali, then?” I say. “Sell this and hire another one?”

“True,” he says. “I’m actually really looking forward to Dad’s ute. You know it has AC?”

Now, Indonesians are lovely people.

And there are few parts of the world where a woman and small boy standing by the side of the road inspecting a stationary vehicle will not spark offers of assistance.

When Z was four, or thereabouts, another lemon I had bought (this one on four wheels, not two) blew a gasket on the motorway in December.

As we sat on the verge awaiting the breakdown truck a guy pulled over, raced back down the hard shoulder, checked we were alright and insisted that we take his blanket.

Anywise…

In due course a guy transporting his family and a hefty load of pig fodder on a motorbike that’s been customized into a sort of impromptu truck comes past. Slowly.

“What’s the problem?” he says.

“That,” I say, pointing. “There’s oil leaking.”

“Not a problem,” he says, confidently. “Can you drive it?’

“Yeah,” I say.

He starts the engine. “There,” he says. “Not a problem. No problem with the engine.”

“Well,” I say to Z. “I guess the guy was right. We just need to allow the oil to work its way through the system. I just thought it would have done that already. We’ve driven 30k.”

A little further along, we stop for — what else? — coffee, at the Arabica plantation, where a shell-shocked looking Dutchman informs me that it took him over three hours to drive the road from Bondowoso in a car and that he wouldn’t recommend it.

“Ah,” I say, cheerfully. “You wait till you get to the road to Banyuwangi! Ha!”

“Yeah,” says Z. “Now, that’s a REALLY bad road.”

We wind up through rubber plantations, coffee plantations, tall avenues of standing trees.

Our progress is, well, stately…

Even with the accelerator maxed, the bike is refusing to do more than 20kph on even the slightest incline, and I don’t want to max the accelerator in case the engine overheats on me.

We reach a sign. 50k to Bondowoso. 24k to the nearest village worth identifying. At our current pace it will take us over three hours to make Bondowoso and there’s not a lot of traffic on the road, which means that if we break down, we’re stranded.

“Z,” I say. “I think we need to get this bike looked at. I’m going to turn round and head back. They’ll have a bengkel in Sempol.”

Freewheeling on a motorbike, if you’re ten, and even, frankly, if you’re not, is almost as fun as freewheeling on a bicycle.

We race down the winding mountain road, the wind on our faces, the bike lunging forwards on the open stretches. We cover the ground that took us so long to ascend in a few adrenaline-fuelled minutes, using the engine precisely once.

Down a dusty side street we find the bengkel, a repair shop where anything that can be fixed is jerry-rigged into functionality for a cost, generally, of around 25,000 rupiah.

It’s a wooden shack tacked onto the front of the mechanic’s home, decked with a dangling array of well-used parts that might come in handy one day and adorned with a selection of small children, richly coated in oil and grime.

I explain the history of the bike. He runs the engine. “No problem with the engine,” he says.

“Oh,” I say.

“You over-filled it,” he says. “Change the oil and it will be fine.”

The road to Bondowoso is pretty chewed up, to do justice to the Dutchman, with swathes of it reduced to the sort of chunky scree that is extraordinarily easy to slew on on a bike.

On one stretch, in fact, a local chap, who has, like all the locals, steamed past us as I painstakingly navigate the scree, comes off his bike.

He looks, well, irritated. Picks up his bike. Checks it for scratches. Dusts off his hands. And gets back in the saddle.

Us? We make it into Bondowoso, and a business hotel with swimming pool and wifi, and alternate between pool, learning and work for the next couple of days.

En route from Bondowoso, we find a rest cafe that has not only a real live flying fox but also (drum roll!) quadbikes.

Z’s driving style on a quadbike, like his karting style, tends to the sedate. He poddles happily and proudly around and around their track… races down the flying fox… scrambles up their assault course…

We spend a night in Kalibaru, at a place with a spice plantation and dairy farm on site, its charms rather mitigated by the presence of a number of tour groups.

We spend another night at the port town of Banyuwangi.

And in the morning we’re ready.

Ready to go back to Bali.

To go back for what feels like our last hurrah in a place that, to both of us, is one that feels like home.

To say goodbye to our bike, to Indonesia, to Bali, to this leg of our adventure, to the places that have such familiarity, the rhythms of life we understand, the language we can cope with…

For me, it’s a wrench.

For Z? He’s just superstoked to be seeing his dad.

“You know, Mum?” he says proudly. “This will be my FOURTH time flying as an unaccompanied minor.”

The post Our Last Hurrah appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Going overland from Bali to Papua on a motorbike, with the nipper, was supposed to be an adventure.

Now, I’m a realist. I’d expected there to be lows.

But I hadn’t expected the kind of grinding tedium of more than a week of visa hassles followed almost instantly by a broken bike.

We’re on a travel downswing, no question of it. And to add a whole new level of joy to proceedings, I’m sneezing like a b.i.t.c.h.

Yes, travel is fabulous. And yes, it is wonderful to travel the world, work nomadically, and have quality time with my son. And, yes, we are incredibly lucky.

But it really doesn’t feel that way right now.

A calls me from the base of the convent driveway. The chicken bus which is transporting our defunct bike from the village where it has spent the night is approaching the repair shop, where his brother, F, is waiting.

We hurry down with him to meet it.

As the conductor, a passenger and our lads lever our poor bike through the narrow doorway, nuking one of our mirrors in the process, it dawns on me that the repair shop looks, well, uncontroversially boarded-up.

“It’s not open,” I say, roughly at the same time as a Greek chorus of bus passengers make the same point.

“There’s a Honda dealer,” someone suggests, serenely unbothered by the route variation.

“Great!” I say. “Let’s go to the Honda dealer.”

Z, the boys and I scramble onto the bus, over the bike and into the aisle, I hand over another 10,000 rupiah, and the bus reroutes through town towards the Honda dealer.

It has flying pennants. Loads of ’em. Mechanics in pristine nylon uniforms, pitstop style. Neat signs.

Things, I figure, are looking up. And the mechanic speaks amazingly good English.

I don’t know if you’ve seen a motorbike being mended. But it’s sort of like peeling the wings off a beetle. There is no bonnet, as on a car, so you strip off all the exoskeleton – the seat, the gap for the helmet, the side panels, even the number plate, till you’re left with the naked machine. And then you take out each part, one by one, and hose them down to clean them.

“I think it’s the battery,” says the guy, after a few minutes.

This seems unlikely to me, given the circumstances of the bike’s demise, but I don’t like to argue with mechanics.

He checks. It isn’t the battery.

He breaks the bike down further. I feel a waft of sympathy for our poor bike, nude and violated, the skull and crossbones stickers that Z so lovingly affixed lying useless on the panels, its parts disassembling ever further into tubes and nuts and steel…

Our guy sucks his teeth, a sound I recognize as the universal language of mechanics everywhere.

He doesn’t quite say, “This is going to cost you, luv”.

He says, “No oil.”

And then he sucks his teeth some more for emphasis.

The mechanic continues his deconstruction, turning parts into smaller parts, piling up screws by the second. The other guys getting their bikes fixed have been and gone. It’s just me, Z and the boys.

“The piston is broken,” he says. “You ran out of oil and it needs replacing.”

“Oh,” I say. “How much will that cost?”

“No parts,” he says. “No parts here. No parts in all of Flores, I think. We’ll need to get the part from Bali or Surabaya.”

Oh Jesus, I think. That’s three or four decent sized islands from here, and I doubt they’ll be flying the parts in. “How long will that take?”

“Two weeks?” he says. “A month?”

My stomach sinks. “We can’t spend two weeks in Ruteng!” exclaims Z. “There’s nothing to do here.”

“No, we can’t,” I say. “Apart from anything else your visa will expire.”

We are, it appears, shafted.

“I can’t wait two weeks,” I say, despairingly. “Is there any way you can find a second-hand part?”

“You want a second-hand part?”

“Well, if it works…” I say.

“I’ll try,” he says. “Call me at 3pm.”

At this point, all I want to do is go to bed and hide until the problem goes away. “You want to come to our boarding house for tea?” asks F.

The last thing I want to do, right now, is make small talk with the boys’ mates at their boarding house. (Their parents are farmers, so like a lot of village boys they live in boarding houses in town during the school term.) It’s really sweet of them to offer. But I can’t face it.

“I want to rest,” I say.

“You can rest there,” he says.

Oh god.

I’ve paid them some money for their help today. Not that they asked. I think they did it from a sense of duty and friendship.

And it’s not about the money, anyway. It would make the boys’ day to bring back two real live foreigners to meet their mates. But I just can’t face an afternoon of stilted small talk.

Not for the first time, I’m seriously contemplating jacking this jinxed mission in, and getting out of Indonesia and into Laos, thence to China and Nepal.

Maybe I can get some sort of cash exchange for what remains of our bike, I wonder?

Z and I jump a motorcycle taxi back to the convent. “This is a disaster,” he says.

“Yep,” I say, sneezing liquidly into our last strand of loo roll and chugging back yet another antihistamine.

“Let’s work out some solutions,” he says, pulling out a pen, paper and – amazingly – a ruler. Leaning on his Beano annual, he draws up a neat little chart.

One column is headed “Solution”. The next is headed “Liability”.

“So, we can’t spend two weeks in Ruteng,” he says. “How about we go back to Bali?”

“I don’t want to go back to Bali,” I say. “The whole point of this trip is that we’re going overland to Papua. If we fly back to Bali, we might as well bail out. And we can’t do that, cos I spent north of a thousand dollars on the bike. I can’t just leave it here. I need to get it fixed. Or sell it.”

“Oh no!” he says, horrified at the financial outlay. “Well, how about we go somewhere else in Flores?”

“That’s practical,” I say. “We could hire a bike, tool around, and come back here. But that way we don’t make it to East Timor before your visa expires. Even if it’s only two weeks, we still won’t make it.”

I realise with a sinking feeling that I haven’t heard back from the East Timorese consulate about our visa application. So the visa run to East Timor is looking sketchy in any case.

As sketchy, I realise, as the prospect of a nation the size and level of development of East Timor having someone to answer its emails, even if its website does authoritatively tell you to apply for your visa online…

“So we need to go somewhere to get a visa?” Z says.

“Yeah,” I say. “We can either fly to East Timor and fly back here, which will cost a lot of money and leave us retracing our steps, which isn’t really the point of overland travel. Or fly to Bali, get a dodgy visa, and fly back here, which will cost a lot of money, and mean retracing our steps.”

“Oh god,” he says. “This really is a nightmare.”

“I’d like to go to Bali,” I say. “But we left there.”

“I know,” he says. “I miss Bali.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know you do.”

He has made not one entry on his little chart. “There’s just no easy solution, is there?” he says.

“Nope,” I say. “We’re fucked. Let’s just watch a movie and see what the mechanic says when we go to see him at 3 o’clock.”

Few of our films are convent-friendly, so we watch them with the volume very, very low. I drift off into a semi-dose, punctuated by sneezing fits and turbulent half-dreams involving long, long bike rides on rickety dirt roads.

The post A Tight Corner appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The sisters start their day early, in their cells up the hill, and long before dawn, according to the typed roster that hangs beneath a particularly dyspeptic portrait of Pope Benedict, they are up buying bread, preparing breakfast and cleaning rooms.

After more than four hours on a bike the day before, we’ve been planning a leisurely, butt-ache free day, to feature a walk to a waterfall and very little else.

But then at the restaurant last night, we met A, a sweet, keen kid, at school during the day, working nights as a waiter, and desperate to make it as a guide.

He shows us some pictures of villages, ripped off from a tour company in town. We talk about them. “And in Todo,” he explains, as the coup de grace. “They have a drum made of skin.”

“Skin?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Human skin.”

“Whose skin is it?” I ask.

Z is as ghoulish as the next ten year old, and his jaw is virtually on the floor.

“The king’s daughter,” he says. “An old Manggarai king, maybe a hundred years old or more.”

The Manggarai are the dominant culture in this part of the Flores highlands, and in the streets of Ruteng we hear more Manggarai spoken than Indonesian.

A is Manggarai, too, so, parking our desire for a day off the bike, we agree to meet tomorrow, to inspect the village of Todo, a rice field that looks like a spider web, and a waterfall.

“It won’t be too far, will it?” I ask feebly. “It took us a long time to drive from Labuan Bajo, and I don’t want to be driving that far.”

We are not, in fact, that far off, in fact, the 2000k mark, a milestone notable not only for the zeroes but because it means I need to get the bike serviced.

A calls me at 8am, an hour before we are due to meet, as we are finishing our breakfast. “I’m outside the convent now!”

“OK,” I say. “We’re coming down.”

At the gates, he introduces us to his brother. “This is my brother, F,” he says. “He will come with us today.”

Crikey, I think. Two for the price of one.

Not that we have agreed a price.

“So, today,” says F, who seems to have done some guiding, or at least watched a guide in action, and appears to be the owner of the motorbike on which the boys embark. “Our programme…”

I hate the word programme. I don’t know why. I guess it’s associated with bad guide experiences to me. And it also makes me feel like I’m on a coach tour.

“I think we could add to the programme some very interesting hot springs,” he says. “There are Japanese machines there making energy from the earth.”

This does sound interesting. But as we trundle down the convent’s steep driveway, I’m beginning to wish we’d just gone for a walk. On our own.

The spider web shape is sacred to the Manggarai people – or was until the Catholic missionaries got up into these hills a century ago — and it’s echoed in the rafters of their traditional architecture, too.

This web of rice paddies comprises one family’s land, and has an altar in the centre of it where, Catholicism notwithstanding, pigs and (on very special occasions) buffalo are sacrificed.

“Wow,” says Z, duly impressed. “It looks like a dartboard.”

And then we head off to the village of Todo, with the drum with human skin.

This is where I realise, yet again, that the volcanic activity that gives Flores its stunning beauty – sculpted gorges descending to turquoise rivers, lower valleys stepped in rice terraces in hues of gold and green – also makes it an absolute bugger to get around.

We head down a jungle road – made, but very narrow – that winds along a vertiginous gorge.

Ah! I think. The village is at the bottom of the valley.

We cross the river, ascend the other side of the gorge, and down again, to a beautiful, turquoise river. No village.

We go up. And down. And up again, an endless succession of hairpins, with the occasional truck coming down them to keep us on our toes.

I watch the kilometres racking up, Z sitting uncomplainingly behind me.

Christ, I think. Maybe I need to get the bike serviced in Ruteng, rather than waiting till Bajawa.

And there we are. High up, nestled into the side of a valley, the tribal house with its thatched roof that stretches almost to the floor, like a wigwam, towers over the surrounding hills and the village itself.

We pay our admission fee, sign the guest book and hire highland tube sarongs at the village gates.

The highlands of Flores, with their steep roofs and sacrificial rituals, remind me of the Tana Toraja, in Sulawesi. As in Sulawesi, Muslim evangelicals, traders, sailors and settlers brought their religion to the coastal regions and the ports, but the inaccessible highlands were left for a later wave of Christian missionaries.

And here, as in Toraja, where we watched a buffalo sacrifice, Christianity forms a fine patina over some very old beliefs. In front of the towering palm fibre roof, an ancient altar, decorated with cannons, stands. A megalithic causeway, grown over with grass, connects the sacred house, the jagged stone altar and an ancient tree.

“This tree is sacred to the ancestors,” explains F. “They used to make sacrifices here.”

I can’t help but notice that the firmly Catholic graveyard, its expensive tile tombs decorated with high colour portraits of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, sits directly behind the sacred tree. Where animals are still sacrificed, from time to time.

Even Z has to bend to enter the low doorway of the traditional house, where deer antlers hang from the central rafters, and quilts shield the fringes of the conical room.

“Who lives here now?” I ask.

“Two families,” he says.

“Are they descended from the holy man?” I ask.

“They are all Catholic now,” F says.

It feels, a little, as though they are squatting an abandoned church. I ask more questions. Nobody knows the answers. At least in this village, the core of the old beliefs appear to have been forgotten, though some rituals remain.

Some conversation passes in Manggarai. “They say it will be 500,000 rupiah to see the drum,” F says.

That’s north of $50. “No way!” says Z. “500,000 rupiah just to see a drum made of human skin. Not to touch it. Not to play it. Just to see it.”

It hadn’t really occurred to me that anyone might want to play a drum made of human skin, but then I’m not a ten year old boy.

“No,” I say. “That’s too expensive.”

“They wonder if you’d like to make a donation,” he says. “Maybe 50,000 rupiah?”

I feel, to be honest, that our $7 entrance and sarong hire is sufficient contribution to the economy of this village. We make our excuses and leave.

“Would you like to buy some ikat?”

No. I would not like to buy any ikat.

“How far is it to the hot springs?” I ask.

They confer with the villagers. “Maybe two hours from here?” F says. “The road is a little bit broken.”

The boys are sweet boys, good people with great hearts. They are also beginning to annoy me, especially as I wonder how many of these places they have actually visited prior to today.

“No way,” says Z, who has seen a few hot springs by now. “Let’s just get back to Ruteng. How far is Ruteng from here anyway?”

“About one and a half hours,” says F. “We can go to Ruteng, eat lunch, then return to the hot springs.”

Z’s buttocks are not exactly well-padded. We’ve already spent a good three hours on the bike. And this was supposed to be a rest day.

The boys have been taking it in turns to drive. We, of course, only have one driver, which is me.

“Let’s just go back to Ruteng,” I say. “No hot springs.”

A gorge and a half along, we pause at a turnoff down another jungle road. “From here it is forty minutes to the hot springs,” says F.

“I think we should do it,” I say to Z. “It’s only forty minutes, and it would be brilliant to see an alternative energy plant.”

“If there is one,” says Z, still smarting from the drum.

“They have machines?” I ask.

“Yes,” says F. “They have machines.”

Some time later, as we turn up an utterly destroyed dirt road, juddering over substantial rocks, we pass a selection of huge aluminium boilers and pistons gathering dust at the side of the road.

“Look,” says F. “Here are the machines.”

“Ah,” I say. It appears that — not atypically for Indonesia — the alternative energy plant is a work in progress. “So there are no machines at the springs?”

“Yes, yes,” says F. “There are machines at the hot springs.”

Z wants to go back. I figure, given that we’ve come this far, we might as well see the hot springs. And, as an optimist, I do believe we still might get a fantastic hands-on learning experience at Ulumbu’s alternative energy plant.

We judder up the road, our progress grindingly slow. (One thing I’m learning, as we wend our way to Papua, is that we’d have been better off with a trail bike and the skills to use it than our little automatic.)

We judder down. And up again.

At the top of the gorge, we see great puffs of steam bursting from the ground, and smell the satanic waft of sulphur.

“Look,” says F. “Hot springs.”

“Oh god,” says Z, who has seen quite a few hot springs by now. “This is a complete waste of time. Let’s just get back to Ruteng already.”

I share his feelings. But there’s still a part of me which believes there just might be an alternative energy plant down in the gorge waiting to be explored. “I think we should at least check it out, given we’re here,” I say.

We wander down the hill.

The alternative energy plant is a building site. Albeit a rather steamy, sulphurous one.

“OK,” says Z. “NOW can we go back to Ruteng?”

“What you think?” asks F.

“I think,” I say diplomatically, “I think it will be very interesting when the machines are working.”

I take F up on his offer to drive my bike. Z piles on the back of the boys’ bike with A, who wobbles at speed towards the unguarded cliff edge, executing a tight turn with under a foot to go.

I am quite glad they are sufficiently ahead of us on the route down that I don’t have to watch. I’m also really, really keen just to get back to town and chill, before heading to the next town along, Bajawa, in the morning.

Ruteng is a pleasant little place. And the countryside is gorgeous. But it doesn’t really merit an extended stay.

On the main Ruteng road, I reclaim my bike. I am ascending a hill, for a change, when the engine strains, squawks and then cuts out.

Now, I’m not mechanically ept, but as a repeat purchaser of vehicles in the three-figure price range, I recognise, or think I recognise, the sound of an engine overheating and something serious, possibly terminal, going wrong.

I start the bike again. It goes a couple of hundred yards and then cuts out. The engine heat warning gauge isn’t illuminated, but then, given the bike is Indonesian and second-hand, I figure the only time that gauge is going to light up is if the thing bursts into flames and some come out of the dashboard.

“Do you remember when the Rover blew a gasket?” I ask Z.

“Yeah,” he says. It was snowing that day, Z was only little, and as we sat by the M11 awaiting assistance, a guy stopped, reversed back and gave us a blanket.

“I think the bike’s just blown a gasket,” I say.

The boys come back. “You want me to drive your bike?” asks F.

“No,” I say. “There’s a problem with the bike. I need a bengkel.”

One of the beauties of Indonesia from a biking point of view is that very few villages are too small to have a bengkel, a little roadside shack where guys replace inner tubes, weld parts, inflate tyres and perform seat-of-the-pants jerryrigging operations that would undoubtedly be illegal in the first world. When we blew a valve on a tire the other day, we were barely 500 metres from one.

“We can go to the place where we bought fuel,” says F.

It is downhill, and the bike makes it. I am beginning to feel optimistic.

“I can’t fix that,” says the guy at the bengkel. “You need to go to Ruteng.”

“Ruteng?” I say.

We are 40-odd k and several steep gorges away from Ruteng. I begin to curse myself for having bought an automatic.

“Yes,” he says, miming turning the accelerator with his right hand. “Don’t do too much of this.”

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get the bike up the gorge without tugging the accelerator quite vigorously, but my options at this point seem pretty damn limited.

I check the coolant. It’s fine.

We make it about 3k before the engine cuts out. When I try to start it again, all I get is a gentle plinking sound from the ignition button.

The boys head back down the road. “Do you want me to drive your bike?” says F.

“No,” I say. “The bike is broken. Rusak.”

A gets on my bike, and presses the ignition button, turning the unresponsive accelerator.

Plink, plink, plink, says the bike.

A has another go, concern written across his face. I understand his anxiety. The kid’s only seventeen. This trip is a coup for him. At the same time, I am really, really irritated, and really, really wish he’d stop pushing that button.

“It’s not working,” I say through gritted teeth. “The bike is broken. I think we need a truck to take it to Ruteng.”

Within five minutes, we have a village full of helpful chaps around us, and seven or eight bikes pulled up at the roadside as the guys confer.

Z slumps on the grass verge with his visor down as, one after another, they press the ignition button. It plinks.

Someone gets the bike up on its stand and tries the kickthrough. It won’t move.

This is not a good sign. To me it suggests that the bike has a) run out of oil b) over-heated and c) fused or broken some critical (and probably expensive and/or rare) part.

“I know a mechanic,” someone says.

He calls him. “He can’t come out.”

“I think we need a truck to take the bike to Ruteng,” I say.

“There are no trucks today,” says A. “No trucks till tomorrow now.”

Of course, I realise. All the trucks in the highlands run regular transport routes – with the occasional special hire for ceremonies or weddings. Substantial vehicles don’t just lie around idle. Personal transportation is a motorbike, or nowt.

We flag down a couple of passing goods trucks. They’re full to capacity.

Then a bus comes along, a little school bus affair, like the chicken buses that run in the Guatemala highlands. The boys and the guys and the bus driver confer.

“So you leave the bike here,” says F. “It will be safe. They will look after it. Then in the morning, the bus driver will pick the bike up and take it to the convent for 50,000 rupiah, at 8am or 9am. This man is going to Ruteng, so he will take you with him.”

The guys wheel our poor, forlorn bike down to someone’s house, and Z and I pile on the back of our saviour’s bike.

It’s quite an impressive gorge that we ascend to Ruteng: misty, vertiginous, cloudy. If it weren’t for the fact that our saviour’s bike barely fits three people and struggles so much with the extra weight that I have to get off and walk the steepest and most degraded sections of road, it would actually be a pleasant ride.

I try not to think about our bike. I’m pretty sure the guys will get to Ruteng in one piece. And I’m really grateful to all these guys for going out of their way to help us out. There’s a real generosity and honesty there which is phenomenal.

But, the more I try not to think about it, the more I begin to realise that, while there’s a lot of Honda Varios in Bali, I haven’t really seen any automatics of any kind on the island of Flores.

There’s got to be parts, haven’t there? I mean, there have to be, right? This is a town with, ooh, 40,000 or 50,000 people, the biggest for several hundred kilometres. They’ll have a Honda dealer…

“Sometimes,” I say to Z, back at the convent. “I think the travel gods are against us right now.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And you know, if we hadn’t gone to the hot springs, the bike would be just fine right now.”

The post The Great Hot Springs Disaster appeared first on EscapeArtistes.