Java II - Stinky Fruit and the Rock Star Treatment

Idiot Croft - Tomb Wanker.

I now know how it feels to be Brad Pitt. I’m not handsome, rich or talented and I haven’t seen Angelina Jolie naked – at least not with my eyes open – but, thanks to an ancient temple in central Java, I do know what it’s like to be totally and utterly conspicuous.

           Our minivan dumped us outside the Borobudur temple complex and the driver led us into the foreigners’ ticket office, where we paid ten times the local price for entry. It was still less than $10 and for that we got a coffee in an air-conditioned room with a plastic scale model of the temple. In a worrying sign that I’m going to be one of those annoying middle-aged men that you don’t want to sit next to on a plane, I looked at the model and said.

            “Gee, it’s smaller than I expected but at least it’s air conditioned.”

            The armed guard minding the coffee urn didn’t so much as smirk – tough room. Bewildered, I walked into the wet, hot afternoon and through mounds of plastic souvenirs so awful I almost bought something just to show everyone how bad it was (but then, maybe that’s what they want you to do). The place was going off, in an eleven hundred year old Buddhist temple kind of way, with cameras whirring and kids clawing at ancient stupas. As soon as Alicia and I walked into the throng, we could feel stares. We were two out of four whiteys in the joint and it probably didn’t help that I was wearing stupid blue ray-bans and that Alicia’s hair is so blonde that she can be used as an emergency distress flare if thrown high enough in the air. In Australia my 5’9” is considered borderline Oompa Loompa but here I was the tallest person around.

After an hour my smile was so frozen I could have hosted a game show.

Due to a horror of being tanned, most fashionable young Indonesians wear long sleeves and jeans, although it’s generally well over 30 degrees. Looking around we saw that a lot of the gaggles of teenagers wore hoodies with ‘Study Tour’ written on them. It wasn’t long before the first teen was pushed into our path by her friends.

“Make photo?” She asked shyly. We agreed and the next hour was a procession of gigging high school kids yelling “Mr, make photo, where you from?” At one point they actually formed a queue. A couple of kids even asked for autographs although I think they were just as unsure why they wanted them as we were. Some of the kids spoke pretty good English and we learned that Borobodur temple is a well-known spot for school groups from around Java to ambush friendly foreigners in order to practice their English. This was actually part of a school assignment for some of them.

This happened in many parts of Indonesia, mostly with young men wanting to get pictures with Alicia who is so slim and fair you can actually read a playing card through her in a very bright room. When asked, most of them said that they wanted to take the photos back to their families to show off the pretty Australian girl they met. Imagine that, photos of Alicia and me stuck on walls in fishing villages and jungle towns in obscure parts of Indonesia – weird. I’m going to start doing it to people from Tasmania when I get home, just to freak them out.

The crowds at Borobudur temple.

             I guess I should tell you about Borobudur temple. First let me say that religious buildings just don’t do it for me. I’ve got nothing against them, there are just too many of them – like McDonalds restaurants and Collingwood supporters.  If I see one more medieval cathedral, I’ll vomit and if I’m shown another brightly painted Chinese temple, I’ll set fire to it. You always feel like you have to be respectful and reverent.

“Ohh, doesn’t Jesus look particularly like Eddie Vedder on that cross,” or “Wow, the shade of red they’ve used on that dragon’s tongue is quite…red,” you whisper.

But something about the temples in South East Asia is really beautiful. Maybe because they’re crumbling and being slowly consumed by jungle, reminding you that no building, religion or empire can outlast nature, or maybe just because they’re covered in pictures of a chubby smiling man who reminds me of John Belushi. Whatever, they’re cool.

            Jakarta is know by some as ‘the big durian’ which of course is an ode to ‘the big apple’ and, as we found out on the slow train from Yogyakarta the following day, may be the most apt (and clever) nick-name ever. Anyone reading who hasn’t been to Asia will probably be mercifully unfamiliar with this hateful fruit. For much the same reason as weapons-grade plutonium and the music of David Hasselhoff, I believe it is illegal to import durians into Australia. Because – and there’s no way around it – they smell like a gypsy’s foreskin. It’s just awful – sickly sweet and cloying with a hint of rotting flesh.

Soon after we pushed our way onto the train and found a seat the lady behind us cracked her first durian. From where I was I couldn’t see her and I honestly thought the seat must have been occupied by a dead pigeon covered in apricot jam. For most of our 6 hour trip she slurped and swallowed this olfactory equivalent of a leper’s underpants while I stuck my head out the window and quietly gagged. 

Yogyakarta - the least ugly city in Indonesia.

            The view out of the window was quite beautiful in parts with rice paddies and stretches of steep jungle broken by small farms and wooden huts. That is until the train got anywhere near a city or big town. With the possible exception of Yogyakarta, Indonesia must have the ugliest cities in the world – dirty concrete streets between dirty concrete buildings and drains clogged with plastic bags and rubble. The more I see of South-East Asia the more obvious it becomes that huge areas of one of the most beautiful parts of the world have been irrevocably and unarguably ruined by the people who live there.

The combination of durian-stench and rubbish-choked rivers had put me in a less-than-perfect frame of mind to experience the tropical wonders of historic Jakarta. But that’s ok because there are none. It’s terrible. All the character and history of a supermarket loading dock combined with the cleanliness and order of a junkie’s moustache. Add to that the fact that it’s Islamic and therefore annoyingly difficult to get a beer, and you’ve got a pretty good candidate for the world’s biggest crap-hole so I was as surprised as anyone to discover that I really liked it. There are no real tourists in Jakarta, just backpackers passing through. The only other westerners are crusty old expats who slink from bar to bar wearing sunglasses and smoking imported cigarettes. I guessed they were probably involved in trafficking under-aged sex ivory, whatever that means. Alicia thought perhaps the oil industry, but I refused to believe they could be that evil.

I liked the big durian because it really didn’t care about me. Tourism in this huge city is an incidental thing. No one offered me tours or motorbike rental or eco-elephant jungle treks because there’s just nothing to see. We were free to just wander the city, choke to death and be run down by tuk-tuks wherever we chose. It’s a place to fly into, grab some under-age sex ivory and get out again. And that’s what we did – get out, I mean, not the other bit. 

Prambanan - another, pointier temple near Yogyakarta.

Java I – Jibbed!



The aftermath of the recent eruption of Mt Merapi.

Ok, so here’s the thing. I’ve never fallen for a scam while travelling, I mean except for the usual ones like, “Coober Pedy’s really worth a visit”, or “Adelaide is actually quite lively”. But on the whole I’m vaguely proud of the fact that I can usually seem to pick a bullshit artist – takes one to know one and all that – so when the ‘professor’ in Yogyakarta who had ‘studied in Sydney’ and was donating the profits to ‘victims of the volcano’ wanted to give me a ‘special last-day discount’ on the Batik art he was hawking, my oldest-trick-in-the-book-o-meter should have been on DEFCON 5.

We had spent the previous two weeks in Bali, where the locals are too friendly to rip you off, and Lombok, where they’re too high on mushrooms to remember how, so perhaps I can be forgiven for being a little gullible. Also, the previous couple of days had consisted of spending 6 hours waiting for a flight from Lembar on Lombok to Suraybaya on the eastern end of Java with Lion Air – who are shit – and then spending a night in Surabaya – which is the city equivalent of Lion Air – then catching an all-day, stinking-hot train to Yogyakarta. With 135 million people, Java is the most populated and developed island in Indonesia and it feels like it – a traffic-clogged urban sprawl of sweaty people and belching trucks. Just seeing it out of a train window was tiring. It was time for some culturally responsible souvenir therapy. 

The 'professor' and I in Yogyakarta. Should have punched him while I had the chance.

            Batik art is a form of traditional Indonesian painting which is very time-consuming, very skilful and usually done by people in jungles with bits of wood stuck through their faces. All of this work produces a fabric of usually vividly coloured fabric that looks almost exactly like what MC Hammer made his pants out of in 1991. In addition, it is perhaps the only form of fine art in the world that can be safely ironed, a fact which impressed me inordinately at the time. In hindsight, I realise that your average oil painting just doesn’t wrinkle in the first place.

            After what I thought was some pretty shrewd bargaining, we were the proud owners of a couple of rather nice Batik paintings, and it wasn’t until I spoke to yet another ‘professor’ (no wonder Indonesia’s so poor, there are 200 million professors and only 27 people who can grow rice) on the street the next day that it dawned on me that we may have been duped. It turns out that there is a legitimate, government-run art gallery that only opens twice a week and sells exactly the same paintings for a quarter the price.

            Shit.

            To cheer ourselves up we thought we’d spend a day in a minivan with two French people. We didn’t know there would be French people when we booked the tour. Otherwise, of course, we wouldn’t have gone.

            Yogyakarta is known largely for two temples nearby, Borobudur and Prambanan. Borobudur is an immense tiered pyramid in the style of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Bagan in Burma, all of which were built over 1000 thousand years ago, while Prambanan is a complex of pointy Hindu temples which sometimes liven things up by falling on people.

            An even older bigger pointy thing near Yogya also kills people – Merapi volcano – and we would be going to see that first. The minivan headed out of central Yogya and into the hills. On the outskirts of town we began seeing evidence of the recent eruption. Bridges were washed away and at one point the road was still being excavated by barefoot workman with wicker baskets and shovels. Where the road had been re-cut through the grey drifts, the van passed between 6 foot high walls of ash. This grey sludge had mostly been washed down the river from the mountain that was lost in cloud, still 20 km away.            

The higher we walked up the mountain the worse the devastation became.

            We continued climbing and entered an area of cool misty hills, jungle and rice paddies. In the few years before the eruption this area had become the sight for eco-resort hotels – the launching point for hikers and local tourists looking to escape the lowland heat. It was beautiful, but everywhere there were traces of the eruption – gardens smothered by the toxic ash, grey mud in the fields. As we got nearer the top the trees began thinning until there were only dead silhouettes looming out of the mist and by the time we got as far as damaged road would let us, there was no green left at all. Near where we parked were the remains of four motorbikes that had been caught in the pyroclastic flow and welded to the asphalt – their frames bent and every piece of plastic and fleck of paint blasted off them – and we were still several kilometres from the top of the mountain. 

Giggling kids climbed all over the ruins of this house as their parents posed for photos.

On 25^th October 2010 the volcano cracked the shits and in the next month killed 353 people and completely wiped away several villages. People 30 km in Yogya hardly saw the sun for months and the falling ash killed crops and choked rivers. The whole area now is grey sludge broken only be skeletal trees and sections of houses sticking out of the toxic ash.

            And souvenir stands, because the whole thing had been turned into a tourist attraction. Old women sold cans of coke to panting Chinese tourists climbing the ruined road past charred brickwork. Someone had built a noodle stand. People asked strangers to take photos of their families in front of the melted remains of a 1970s television set in the blackened ruins of someone’s lounge room. The names of the dead from each village were printed on glossy signs displayed in the information hut. It could have been an advert for Pepsi. The girl working there told said there were 47 people killed and one still missing in this village alone. Then she asked me where I was from – she wanted someone to practice her English with.

The whole thing was strange and a little wrong. Like having sex at a funeral or enjoying yourself at a Maroon 5 concert. After the sombreness of Mt Merapi I needed to be mobbed by pretty young Indonesian girls for a couple of hours.

Luckily we were on our way to Borobudur temple.

Night time in Yogyakarta.

Lombok – Rastas and Rats

Near Kuta, Lombok

Indonesia is not a country at all. It’s more like a jungly European Union, but with a pleasing absence of Belgians. Sure they have a notional currency and a central government in Jakarta. They even share a language, at least nominally, but all the major islands may as well be different countries. Java is rich, developed, populous and a bit straight – like Germany; while Bali is hot and beautiful with great beaches and too many tourists – a tropical Spain. We weren’t to know it as the old car ferry chugged into the port town of Lembar, but Lombok is Italy. Stunningly pretty with great food, it has the worst roads and drivers in South East Asia. The horse and cart, called a ‘clip-clop’, is still the cheapest form of transport which gives the place a medieval feel and – just like Italy – the locals are all mad as radishes.

            Our weary party scrambled off the boat and into a busted-arse mini van which bounced us up the island’s only highway north past the capital, Mataram, and into the coastal resort of Senggigi. Well, I say ‘into’ but the driver actually dropped us ‘near’ town at his mate’s travel agent/restaurant. After half an hour politely refusing offers of hotels, tours, scuba diving and motorbike rental, I loudly requested him to drive us into town like he’d been paid to. The guy looked like I’d punched his mother but finally loaded us back into the van and roared the kilometre into town. Perhaps because I am actually an 8 year old boy, I take endless joy in insulting non-English speakers who annoy me in Australian school boy slang.

            “Thanks, knob jockey.” I smiled as we unloaded our packs from the bungee-strapped rear door.

Dolphins playing in the bow wave on the way to Lembar

            One of my many flaws as a traveller is that I am irresistibly attracted to places with silly names – I will go to great lengths to get a photo next to a sign saying ‘Delicate Knobby Rest Area: No Camping’ or to tell someone I’m on Pho Quoc (pronounced poo cock) island – and something about the name Sengiggy just rolls off the tongue. Also, it’s on Lombok which, if you’ll remember, is where Roger Ramjet and the American Eagles live [Note – During my extensive research (snort) I learned that Ramjet actually lived in Lompok. But then again, shut up]. So anyway the fact remains that just having a silly name does not a holiday destination make, as anyone who has been to Whycheproof knows. 

 Get your proton energy pill on here

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hn8BpUrzn8&feature=relmfu 

           

 The problem with Senggigity (as I came to call it) is that it has 9,000 hotels, 14,000 restaurants and 17 tourists. This meant that our group of 5 – which represented 29% of the tourist population – couldn’t walk up the street without startled-looking restaurant proprietors scattering stacks of plastic chairs as they careened towards us screaming “Hello please! You eat. Good food. Happy hour…” at our retreating backs and the driver of every motorized vehicle on the island screeching to a halt 3 millimetres in front of us imploring us to come to “good hotel. Cheap, cheap”.

The little guesthouse we found was no less disgusting than the last 5 we had seen but it was hot and getting late so we quickly dumped our bags, got changed and walked through a deserted 5-star resort to the town’s beach. 

A bit of man love between Stef and I

The Lonely Planet gets bagged a lot among jaded backpackers for sometimes not updating prices and for the occasional inaccuracy but I think it’s generally a good thing and by far the best guidebook around. So when they described the beaches around Senggigi as being ‘hard to top’, I can only think that their correspondent was either stoned or Scottish (in Scotland any beach that you can walk on without losing a facial extremity to frostbite is considered idyllic). The sand was brown and the sea grey. The only other people on the beach were shady-looking guys selling cigarettes, bracelets and marijuana. Swimming out through an invisible slick of rubbish and oil, Stef and I were attacked by stingers and sucked a hundred meters sideways by the fierce current. By the time we’d wiped off the worst of the diesel and tentacles my watch read beer o’clock.

Alicia practicing her scooter riding on the quiet roads around Kuta

I only know of two places worse than Senggigi at 4 in the afternoon and one of them is Senggigi at 7 at night. (The other one is Belgium in case you’re wondering.) We picked an empty restaurant from the 17 million other empty restaurants purely on the basis that the staff didn’t scream “Nasi Goreng!” at us as we walked past. Halfway through our chicken curries and Bintangs, the coolest dudes on Lombok set up some busted old instruments and started playing slow, loose reggae. Unamplified except for a booming old bass guitar and a twangy Les Paul, they belted out Marley and smoked cigarettes. There were more musicians than customers and I got the feeling that they would play even if we weren’t there. Some of them were clearly stoned on the local mushrooms that grow wild on the hills all over Lombok – the drug of choice in this largely Muslim island where alcohol is reserved for tourists and the small Catholic population.

They started taking requests and soon we were all up dancing around like tools. The band invited me up to play and, after as much reluctance as I could feign, I grabbed the beaten-up old Les Paul and played the only three songs we all knew. A toothless guy grinned at me as he played bass and a head-nodding Rasta with a cigarette hanging form his lips belted the bongos. We played a bit of 12-bar and worked tunelessly through a Guns N’ Roses song book and then, being far too white and soulless, I ruined a few Wailers tunes. At one stage all nine of us were on stage belting out Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’. Their guitars were completely impossible to tune (as is my voice) and after a coughing fit during the high part of ‘sweet child ‘o mine’, I called it quits. The guys told me that their Indonesian-made guitars cost about $50 new and the bass amp was just an old stereo receiver and woofer stuck inside a box. That they were able to get such a great sound out of them was amazing.

It was a great night in the worst town in the world and we hummed ‘no woman no cry’ as we waded through drug dealers, pimps and wild-eyed hoteliers back to our guesthouse which, as Jen and Nynke soon found out, was rat infested.

So out of place

We temporarily parted ways in the morning. Alicia and I hired a scooter and rode 4 hours through the rain to a little town on the south of the island. Kuta, Lombok (as it is always known to avoid confusion with Kuta, Bali) is a surfing Mecca and some people rate the waves here as the best in the world but the only way to get to them is to hire a long-tail fishing boat in the surrounding villages. At around $30 a day it’s fairly expensive for one person. And the weather was bad.

These were the excuses I gave Alicia but there was also the fact that the waves break a kilometre offshore over coral reefs, which I heard one surfer describe poetically as “shallow as fuck and sharp as shit”. Even from the beach hundreds of metres away they looked sketchy and I’m a rubbish surfer. Also, I have the arms of a 12 year old girl. I don’t mean in a creepy dismembered-and-hidden-under-the-floorboards kind of way you understand, I just have arms like novelty drinking straws. I decided to give it a miss. You might say I woosed out. So what? Wanna fight about it?

Shut up.

Surfers rent these fishing boats to get to some of the best waves in the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Hn8BpUrzn8&feature=relmfu

Nusa Lembongan – Arak Attack

 If you find Bali too stressful and its beaches not quite up to scratch, you’re probably from Tasmania and have an anxiety disorder. However if that is the case, there is an island between Bali and Lombok where you can settle those nerves you frazzled from too much sitting on the beach watching coconut palms by, um, sitting on a different beach watching some more coconut palms. It’s called Nusa Lembongan.

The ferry from Sanur on Bali’s east coast was a 30ft long outrigger with a little outboard motor and bench seats. Just after dawn it putted toward the open beach and grounded in the sand offshore. 30 locals and half a dozen sleepy backpackers waded barefoot to the boat and lurched aboard. Alicia and I, along with the other foreign devils, took advantage of the cool morning sun and climbed onto the roof. Leaning against my backpack, I spent a couple of hours looking at the slow glassy rollers pass under the bright blue wooden outriggers and strumming my ukulele (I know what you’re thinking but that is NOT a euphemism. I actually have a ukulele and frankly you should get your mind out of the gutter). 

See.

            We sailed through the morning sun over coral reefs, past white beaches and pastel-coloured fishing boats before running onto the beach in front of a little fishing village – the only town worth the name on the island.

On the boat we had met an Austrian guy called Stef and a San Diegan, Eric, who told us about a hotel that had been recommended to them. We decided to tag along for a look but the hotel had ignored Eric’s phone booking and had no rooms left. Strangely for an American he didn’t call in an air strike and we each found separate digs right on the beach for under $10, making vague plans to catch up for a beer.

When the tide is out acres of farmed seaweed is harvested and left to dry on the beach.

            Lembongan is an island paradise – pretty beaches, world-class surf breaks, good rooms, cheap food, cold beer and friendly locals. There are no cars on the island and the roads are really footpaths, mostly dirt. Eric, Stef, Alicia and I hired a couple of scooters and surfboards for a few bucks a day and spent four days surfing, eating, drinking and tooling around. By the end our little group had turned into 8 or 9, with Dutch Nynke, Norwegian Jen, the three Germans – know only as ‘the three Germans’ –  and a Canadian guy who we knew as ‘that American guy or whatever, maybe he’s Canadian, who might be with that German girl with the funky hair’. It would have been quicker just to ask his name I guess. After nearly a month on the road first by myself and then with Alicia, it was great to hang out with some new people and Stef, Eric, Jen and Ninke would prove to be great company as we spent the next week or two giggling our way around eastern Indonesia.

Ze Germans had been there for a week already and told us about a little warung, or food stall, run by a lady called Maria where they got all their meals. Maria worked there mostly alone; taking orders, cooking, clearing up and running food for up to 10 hungry backpackers. She became known as ‘Indonesian Mum’, and when she wasn’t open (I guess she had to sleep sometime) or the tiny restaurant was full, we all became quite frazzled and disorientated.

“But… but what will we eat,” could be heard muttered in three languages.

Stef's surf lesson. Great waves but my 12-year-old-girl's arm made the 200m paddle hard work.

A few days before we met him, Eric had lost his bank card in Bali. He had to wait for a new card to be sent from the States and until then he had only a handful of cash to survive on. This temporary destitution coupled with the short-term alcoholism common to backpackers in the tropics is the only semi-sane reason hindsight can provide for the fact that on our second night on Lembongan we found ourselves drinking Indonesian petrol wine.

We’d had a local spirit made from rice and coconut called arak at a restaurant earlier and were impressed by both its price and effectiveness so Eric found a little store that sold it for a few dollars per litre.

“Arak?” He asked.

The old lady lounging behind the counter shrugged. She turned, slung a red jerry-can onto the bench, put a funnel with a gauze mesh into an empty coke bottle, splashed in a quantity of cloudy liquid, took some cash from Eric, smirked and disappeared. The drunks across the road laughed so hard they choked on their reefers and an old lady walking past made the sign of the cross and shook her hands at us.

I’ve had Vietnamese Shiraz and Thai whisky. I’ve been drunk on Korean rice wine. As a 16 year old I made my own Ouzo in a saucepan and mixed it with warm Fanta. Once I even tried American beer. But none of them ever came in a container that met marine safety design regulations and had ‘Petrol Safe’ stamped on it. Expectations were not high.

We retired to the hotel and found a glass. Think of a coconut husk blended with cheap gin and filtered through the exhaust of a two-stroke lawn mower and you’d be about half way there. Even mixed with orange juice it was shit. In the name of scientific inquiry, anthropological observation and tightarsedness the six of us managed to get through about half the bottle over the next few days – enough to prove its short-term effects but not so much to experience its presumed long-term effects, like gum disease and insanity.

Eric, Nynke and I. The local mechanic gave me this haircut which may be why I appear to have started sniffing glue.

A couple of days later the surf died off and we had to admit the arak had beaten us. It was time to leave. After some wheeling and dealing six of us – Stef, Eric, Jen and Nynke, Alicia and I – secured cheap seats on the daily supply boat back to Bali. The boat brought fresh food to the resorts and usually came back empty save for the occasional traveller too poor to get the tourist speed boats. The fact that the boat was a pink canoe wasn’t pointed out to us but the ride to Kasumba was pretty uneventful, if cramped. From there we caught a little open-doored van, called a bemo, to the public ferry terminal in Padangbai. Eric had to stay there to wait for his new bank card in the post. We hoped to catch up in Lombok in a few days but later heard that he had waited a week in sleepy Padangbai before giving up and getting some money wired to him.

The rest of us bought tickets for the public boat to Lembar, Lombok. Dolphins played in the bow wave of the old car ferry and when we arrived late afternoon we each felt vindicated in spending an extra 6 hours travelling to save $20 on the speed boat.

Besides, we’d had an authentic travel experience. Man.

The little pink canoe back to Bali.

Bali – Just Like it Says on the Packet

Alicia and I arrived in Denpasar airport at stupid o’clock in the morning of 16^th Feb. Uniquely for immigration officers, ours appeared to communicate only in Robbie Williams songs. He sang ‘Angels’ as he stared into my eyes, smiling manically. By about mid second verse he had, in perfect 4/4 time, stamped my passport. I wanted to thank him but I didn’t speak boyband. 
              Surely, I thought to myself, the guidebook would have mentioned if Indonesians communicate only through awful pop music. It would be like living in Glee. I’d become resigned to the fact that I’d have to hammer a biro into both of my ears but when I asked the customs guy where the nearest ATM was to the melody of ‘Let me entertain you’, he backed away slowly and whispered something urgent into his walkie talkie. Thank God.
        

A pesky cigarette seller on Kuta beach.

            In a taxi to Kuta beach, we got talking with an Aussie lady who had spent the last four months sailing a yacht around South-East Asia. Apparently the Indo Classic yacht race leaves Darwin every September or something and a whole bunch of tanned people blat around various islands. Before I left I had been trying for months to find out if it was possible to get from Darwin to Indo by sea and an hour after landing I was being told how easy it was to get a gig crewing one of these yachts. Typical. Still, I probably would have had to wear white shorts and learn how to pronounce fo'c's'le.

In a fun reinterpretation of the role of a taxi, our driver dropped us off near Kuta and as we walked around a corner and saw the dirty grey curve of sand stretching into the smog, I could see the driver’s point. I wouldn’t want to get too close to it either. We skipped through a layer of broken flip flops, plastic bags and mangy dogs until we figured it was time to find a room. A night divided between Darwin’s street-front beer gardens, the departure hall of the international airport and a spartan budget flight had left us foggy-headed.

            Away from the beach, Kuta was pretty much as expected – cheap rooms, overpriced restaurants, and poorly driven scooters carrying singlets, sunburn and surfboards through hot concrete streets. After an hour spent looking at rooms that were either too expensive or too revolting, we found a pretty decent one. Up high away from the worst of the heat, it had just enough grime and mysterious stains to let us know we’d arrived in Asia. We crashed out.

Watching the sun dissolve into the smog over a Bintang before tackling the Kuta clubs.

            The next day was spent surfing, drinking Bintang, and eating cheap fishy snacks on the beach. When the sun set and the beach emptied it was on to one of the trashy nightclubs to sample the jam-jars – basically some local spirits served in sports drink bottles with lids and inbuilt straws – and listen to some karaoke. Feeling a dangerous mix of adventurousness and boredom, I bought a roll of pseudo-ephedrine tablets which the swarthy man in the nightclub said were legal and would make me “strong for the drinking”. Well, how could I say no? To nobody’s great surprise, they just gave me a slight headache and a desire to leave.

We wandered through Kuta’s nightclub district, politely refusing offers of “marrywana”, “estassy” and “coke” from bare-chested, long-haired gentlemen reclining on parked scooters in front of the brightly-lit girly-bars and discos. The nightclubs were packed. Like neon rites of passage for every twenty-something Australian, half a dozen of these cheesy fun-factories boom their 5-year-old pop songs onto the street where groups of singing, brawling youths dance with the traffic. A hundred metres away is the monument to the 202 people killed by a suicide bomber at Paddy’s Pub night club in 2002. It’s very easy to imagine the chaos and panic of that night and if it weren’t for the group of blonde girls in bikini tops staggering past screaming Guns N’ Roses songs, I’d describe it as a sobering sight.

            In the morning we negotiated the hire of a scooter and headed north through the traffic snarls, glad to have seen this sacred sight on the banana pancake trail, but even gladder that we’d never have to go back. Well, except to return the bike.

Ubud is a seriously pretty place

            We spent the next three days zipping through the Balinese traffic over mountains, through rice paddies and jungle, and alongside black volcanic beaches. The interior of the island is just like you think Bali should be – green and friendly with people doing incomprehensible things in fields that, apparently, create food.

            We stopped at Ubud, where a monkey stole my water bottle (I’d rather not talk about it, thanks), and stayed in a great little home-stay with reassuringly monkey-proof doors right in the jungle. The following morning we got lost and cold finding a mountain road to the north coast. After our seventeenth wrong turn, we came to a misty village that looked like an Indiana Jones film set. Alicia wanted to stop to take photos but I though I heard a distant chant of ‘Kali Ma… Kali Ma,’ and as anyone who grew up with a VHS of Temple of Doom knows, that means you’re about to have your heart torn out. We jumped on my little pink scooter and roared (ahem) away. At this stage I should point out the odd fact that whenever I pay to rent a motorbike, what I get is a little pink automatic scooter. I have no idea why but I’ve come to accept it as an unfortunate fact of life, like death and Adam Sandler films. So we jumped on Daffyd (the only gay scooter on the island) and whirred down steep, windy roads to Lovina on the north coast, where Alicia got scared of a dog on the beach and I drank a beer.

            After a night in the sleepy east-coast port town of Padang Bai, I dropped Alicia off in Sanur and went solo to return Daffyd in Kuta. We found a room near the dock and bought tickets for the 7am ferry to Nusa Lembongan.

No time for love Dr Jones! This deserted village in the misty Balinese mountains was too spooky to stay at for long.

           

Mataranka to Darwin – God Love the Melon Pickers

The warm, clear waters of Mataranka Hot Springs, Northern Territory

Last year Alicia and I moved to the Victorian high country to do some pine planting. In winter. To say this was an ill-thought-out career move would be a gross understatement but while thawing in front of the fire in the Myrtleford hotel one night I had negotiated with an angry Belgian guy to buy all the camping gear out of his wrecked Ford wagon.

            “You give me ze rip off but I don’t care, take all zis shit.”

            And for $100 it was done. Tents, eskies, sleeping bags, cookers - a bargain. Fast forward 8 months and as I sat in the Mataranka pub watching the heaviest rain of the Wet season scour the campground, I knew that Pierre (or whatever his name was) had got his revenge. I had taken just under a week to travel the 3300km from Melbourne and I had camped nearly every night. And every night something new and interesting had happened to my ‘bargain’ tent. By now it was less nylon than duct tape and there were no pegs left to anchor it with because they were holding the poles together. Now I was deep in the tropics and it was not in ideal order to withstand the foot of rain that the tail-end of cyclone Yasi was expected to drop. I would need to get awfully drunk to sleep in that tent.

The fatally wounded tent. RIP

Luckily I was in the Northern Territory where it’s not considered a hangover unless you’ve woken up with someone else’s turd in you underpants. In the candlelight I ordered a beer and inquired about some food. The Irish bartender said that she’d see what she could do but with the power cut it would be hard. A very drunk man with a face so creased and brown he looked like a baseball mitt invited me over to his table and I got chatting to the residents of Mataranka caravan park. After a while it was obvious the power would be out for a while and the waitress cooked us all steak on the gas stove. One of the residents told me to park my bike in the bar and sleep in the ‘melon pickers quarters’. Somewhat to my surprise – especially about parking in the bar – the waitress agreed. So I spent the night drinking slightly warm beer by candlelight chatting to the three Irish backpackers who worked there and their boss who, late at night in a fit of drunken bonhomie, offered me a job. I slept in the melon pickers quarters – basically an empty backpackers dorm – and woke furry-mouthed in the morning to find that my tent had disintegrated. Sacre bleu!

I took a reviving dip in the natural thermal baths. The water was so clear I could see turtles swimming 6 feet below. A canopy of huge webs stretched across the pool, a brightly coloured spider in the middle of each. Eventually I packed my damp gear, dumped the sorry excuse for a tent in a wheelie bin, eased my aching body onto the bike and left for Darwin.

            And it rained. And rained. 600kms and 9 hours of constant, heavy, drenching rain. Big fat rain. Like riding through a waterfall. And cold. Honestly. Cold. I mean really. Deep in the Australian tropics and shivering like a bastard. Jesus. Sometimes I was down to 60kph in a 130 zone because the rain was streaming down my visor and the bike was skating and aquaplaning over unseen puddles. By the time I reached Mitchell St in Darwin, the backpacker-ravaged main drag, it was dark and I could not have been wetter. Dripping and shivering I parked illegally and walked into Melaleuca on Mitchell, the first backpackers I found. The tattooed girl working the night desk looked at me.

“Orright mate? Bloody ‘ell, you’re wet”.

See, I told you it had been raining! Near Katherine I stopped at Edith Falls. You can swim here in the Dry Season.

            I checked into a cheap dorm and waddled, clothes and all, straight into the communal shower. I did that thing that you see in movies that I didn’t think anyone actually did and sat on the floor of the shower fully clothed making contented moaning noises, like a half-drowned cat rescued from its weighted pillow case. I kicked a snoozing German out of the one free bunk and proceeded to stank the place up pretty good with my wet, mouldy motorbike gear. The four Germans in the room gave me haughty, disapproving glances now and then, but whether that was because of the smell or just because Germans do that kind of thing, I couldn’t be sure.

4000 overloaded kilometres at (relatively) high speeds on baking desert roads is a good way to bugger a rear tyre.

            Late that night, I woke to a sparking, smoking electrical socket in the ceiling. Turns out the water evaporating from my leathers strung all over the room, combined with ze Germans unplugging the air conditioner to charge their laptop, had caused critical levels of condensation to seep into the electrical socket. Woops.

            The next few days were spent trying to sell my bike before my flight out to Bali and drinking with various staff and residents of the hostel. I found out, somewhat to my consternation, that my new roommate Connor was one of the prime suspects in a series of shit-smearing incidents in the hostel toilets. I learned from the receptionist Lauren that a few weeks ago the former prime suspect, a strange kiwi vagrant, had been summarily beaten by outraged residents. Bowed and bloodied he had left. The following week, however, the arcane symbols had reappeared in the second floor mens loo. Connor himself blamed a copy-cat shit artist but the night cleaner – a 65 year old Geelong taxi driver, friendly in that edgy taxi-driver way – refused Connor’s conciliatory beer that night.

Our week in Darwin passed by in a blur.

            After a failed eBay ad, I had to go old-school and handwrite for-sale notices and post them (literally, not in a Facebook way) on the backpackers noticeboards in town to sell the mighty Nighthawk. I also posted on Gumtree.com as an afterthought and as I was losing weight at the local carwash polishing and cleaning the old bike in the million degree heat and hundred and thirty percent humidity, a young kiwi stoner called. He wanted to look at the bike. The next day I had $1600 in my hand and a skinny Auckland-born drug addict with no motorbike license was the proud new owner of the faithful steed that had bought me 4000kms through rain, heat and floods from one end of the country to the other – as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

            A couple of days later, Alicia flew in and we wasted a few hot, rainy days pleasantly tooling around Darwin, including one confusing night involving three drunken soldiers, an ‘entry only’ tattoo and the only gay bar in Darwin, upon which I see no reason to elaborate.

Very early in the morning of the 16^th Feb, after an all-nighter in Darwin to save on accommodation, we flew out on a $95 Air Asia flight to Denpasar, Bali.

Melbourne to Mataranka – Hot Hot Honda

A sweaty idiot at the Devils Marbles.

By 10am on the last day of January 2011, it had already hit 40 degrees in Horsham, Victoria. Beside the Western Highway sheep huddled together in the shade of the occasional gum tree, wheat crops swayed in the furnace wind and my Honda was getting hot. I parked outside a big Woolworths, took off my helmet and staggered into the air conditioning. 300km down, 3500 to go. Over a can of coke I looked at the bike. It leaned low over its stand under the weight of my pack and camping gear bungee-strapped to the seat. The paintwork glowed dusty red in the blinding light. It looked upset. 

The CB 250 was designed for commuters. It was small, light and economical. Only months before this bike had been plucked from a comfortable life carting an IT professional around suburban Melbourne – kept under cover and never carrying anything heavier than a Macbook Pro. Now it was carrying 50kgs of camping gear and a sweaty idiot from Melbourne to Darwin – right through the middle of the driest inhabited continent on earth – in summer. No wonder it was narky.

           By Bordertown the north wind was slowing progress badly. It was like riding into God’s fart. I was singing Cranberries songs into my helmet and the heat was so intense one of my nipples had melted off. I found the local swimming pool and rode straight off the diving board. Well no, I didn’t really, but it was tempting. My feet were so hot that when I walked through the kiddies pool it evaporated. The thermometer on the kiosk read 44 degrees.

I floated around gently steaming for half an hour and decided that my goal of reaching Adelaide early next morning wasn’t going to happen. I rode another couple of hours and set up camp in a truck stop 30 km from Coonalpyn.
 

Lunch and an oil change on the Stuart Highway

            A couple of big rigs were pulled up and as I wandered past to stretch my legs a driver got out.

            “Hot.” he said.

            I knew it was hot because he was exactly the 57^th person to tell me.

            “Must be shit on the bike.”

            Hmmm.

            “Good beer weather.”

            My ears pricked up. I knew these guys had fridges in their cabins. Was he going to offer?

            “Course I can’t have any in the truck.”

            Ah.

            I limped back to my hotbox tent and crashed out.

These rest areas are dotted all along the Stuart. They're not pretty but they are free.

The next day was much more bearable and I cruised the 250km to Adelaide, enjoying the gently winding highway through the Adelaide hills. On the long descent into town the little bike hit 130km per hour – still a record.

I picked up a new clutch cable and spent the day hanging out with my mate Stu Harvey in and around Glenelg. He has a CBR600 and it was great putting around the pretty beachside streets together without having my bag strapped on or my jacket cooking me.

After an unspecified number of Coopers Pale Ales and some very decent take away pizza I woke up shite and briny, ready for the ride up through Port Augusta and into the outback proper.

            I was grateful for the cooler conditions, although it was still mid thirties. Riding with my jacket unzipped and streaming behind me was the only way to stay cool, plus it was a bit ‘easy rider’ which is always good. I had left all my cooking gear and some extra camping stuff at Stu’s so now I was travelling without a backpack which was a vast improvement.

With a 12 litre tank I had to stop at every roadhouse. Petrol at this one was $1.95 per litre.

            Stopping at Port Augusta only long enough to fuel up and wash away the dregs of a hangover with some dirty fast food, I set off north – only roadhouses, road trains and dust between here and Coober Pedy. At Glendambo I stopped while a heavy thundery shower swept across the desert. I told the Vietnamese ladies working at the roadhouse that I had been to Glendambo twice in my life and it had poured rain both times. What are the odds? The barman told me that this time three years ago he had been here during a 12 day spell when the weather had topped 50 degrees every day.

“It was shit.” he said with a thousand-yard stare.

I was glad of the rain. These light showers in the desert were like welcome little bursts of air conditioning.

Dodging showers in the desert.

On a roadhouse TV near Woomera I had seen the destruction in Queensland caused by cyclone Yasi. Everyone said that the rain would hit Alice Springs in a few days. I had been doing about 700km a day because I’d heard that parts of the Stuart Highway flood easily and I wanted to get as far north as possible before the rain hit.

After two days riding through flat scrubby desert, eating roadhouse burgers and camping in rocky rest areas I had an early lunch in Alice. Palm trees whipped over Todd St mall as black clouds closed in. The wind had swung around to the south and cooled down, giving me a push straight up and across the tropic of Capricorn.

            200kms later I came around a corner to find a row of parked vehicles, their owners nervously eyeing the 300 metre wide river that had formed across Australia’s main North-South arterial. Grey nomads with caravans and wives named Shirley watched road trains and Landcruisers bash through the torrent.

            “Look Norm darlin’ let’s just go back to Alice. You know what happened last time,” said the Shirleys.

            A group of aboriginal men drove through from the other way in a beaten up EB Ford, one fella driving and the others wading through knee deep.

            “Deep, eh?” I said.

            “Yeah. Gettin’ deeper, too.” One of them smiled at me. “But you’ll be right, eh.”

            Yeah, ‘course I would.
 

The Stuart Highway north of Alice Springs. It was even deeper farther on.

            On my first day riding I had stopped at Kaniva in the Western District and taken to my motorbike boots with a Swiss army knife, hacking three inch-wide ‘air vents’ in each boot. Up until now it had been a great success, giving my feet some air flow and preventing my socks from evolving into complex life-forms. Now, however, I discovered a downside as I rode through fast flowing water up to my ankles, over the little bike’s brakes, chain and engine covers. Can that be good for it? I wondered, as my boots filled with water and the current tried to push me into a road train which had decided to cross from the other side at the same time as me for, I presumed, some sort of moral support.

That night, after nearly 800kms and 12 hours riding, I made it to Mataranka thermal pools. I set up my tent poorly and lurched to the bar to get a meal and a beer. Just as I got to the open-walled bar, the sky exploded. Water streamed off the roof and within five minutes the road was six inches deep. That was about all I had time to see because as I attempted to order a beer over the din of rain on the iron roof, the power cut out. Cyclone Yasi had got me.