A Tight Corner

Eating cold fried eggs and soggy white bread in the convent, under the scrutiny of a spreadeagled plastic Christ and an increasingly baleful Pope, Z and I await the return of our dead motorbike from the bowels of the volcanic valleys below this highland town.

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.