First Leg. Second Thoughts?

Struggling to get off the ferry, I begin to wonder whether my wizard wheeze, to ride a motorbike through Indonesia to Papua with my ten-year-old son on the back, was really quite the blinding idea it seemed when he and I discussed it.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on an Indonesian or Filipino ferry, but if you have, you’ll know that if there’s one thing more challenging than getting on the things, it’s getting off the bl**dy things.

You see, they disgorge everyone, people, vehicles, all together, in one unruly scrum through one single hatch.

Families hand children and bags over the stairwell and surge through the opened hatch as lorries, buses and a hideous horde of motorbikes school like fish in a dark and toxic cloud of fumes.

It’s terrifying as a pedestrian. As a newbie motorcyclist making one’s ferry debut, it is, frankly, plain embarrassing.

Especially when you are positioned to be first off, they’ve stacked all the bikes together and no one can untangle their bikes until you’ve worked out how to untangle yours, and you then have to weave through a fog of vulnerable road users, feeling like the ultimate touron…

And then your child, who –- because you are not entirely stupid — you had trialed with 5 hours on a motorbike in a day before purchasing said vehicle, starts complaining of butt ache.

The ferry had its highs and its lows.

Highs? The sunbeds on the top deck, looking over to Nusa Penida, that first view of the Lombok coast…

That wondrous sense of being on the move, the lull of freedom in a rocking boat.

Low?

Now, the safety record of boats in Indonesia is, well, not the finest, even by Asian standards.

Boats go down all the time, sometimes with horrific loss of life, and there are never, ever, ever anything like enough lifejackets to go round.

Ergo, whenever junior and I embark on a ferry, we always sit at deck level or higher, and I snaffle two lifejackets so we can use them as pillows and, well, y’know, be prepared.

On this ferry I am challenged for the first time for this, admittedly bizarre, activity. “They’re for emergencies,” says the guy.

“I know,” I say, playing the mummy card. “But my child is up there and there aren’t any lifejackets up there.”

I’ve had to descend two levels to find the cabinet which contained all of, ooh, 15 jackets. This, obviously, is not an activity one wishes to attempt on a sinking ship full of panicking non-swimmers, especially with a child in tow, not to mention the fact that they wouldn’t be there when we got there.

After a lot of gesticulating, and a minor, polite tussle, we get to keep the lifejackets.

But it is, well, wearing.

Not what one wants after two hours on a bike following waking early with a gin hangover after a farewell ‘do’ so spectacularly cocked up it resulted in Facebook messages headed “Madness” and emails asking “are you alright?”*

The plan was to spend one night in the capital of the island of Lombok, Mataram, extend our visas the next morning, then pootle down to Kuta, the surfing and beach paradise in south Lombok, with a couple of leisurely stops en route.

I had figured that, after 3 hours on a bike, plus 5 hours on a ferry, plus unspecified time hanging around the port and a further allowance for getting lost, with a riveting morning of visa hell to add to the previous day’s Indonesian driving license hell, my travelling companion might appreciate an upgrade from our usual $10 accommodation budget.

Then I could also leave him with the digital babysitter while I tackled the vile miasma of paperwork and pointlessness that is an immigration office in Indonesia without a whinging, bitching, pint-size critic on my case.

The prospect of a hotel with wifi, international TV and a pool was quite sufficient to bribe Z out of his slough of despond and, for that matter, butt ache, particularly once it was clear that he wouldn’t have to get up when I did.

He planned his morning out in loving detail. It would begin with a 9am wakeup call so he could game, in bed, for half an hour, before his painstakingly itemised breakfast was delivered to the boudoir at 9.30 on the dot.

He would then consume it in bed.

(Presumably while gaming. I didn’t ask.

So at least one of us had a day that went to plan.

I will say only that, if you’re in Mataram, the Hotel Raya Lombok, at c. $50 including breakfast for two, is not only the best hotel in town but a fine place in which to sit with a dictionary and a furrowed brow figuring out 8 different pieces of Indonesian-language paperwork.

After my fourth and penultimate trip round Mataram’s one-way system, in a bright blue poncho, on a motorbike, in the p*ssing rain, to immigration, it became clear that we would need to spend another night there.

It was only the keeper of the purse-strings (me) that had the slightest qualm. Quite a large qualm, in fact.

But the next day things turned round, as they do, with the serendipity you sometimes get in overland travel.

The boat journey between Hindu, long-touristed, Indonesian Bali to predominantly Muslim, less-touristed, Indonesian Lombok is much more of a cultural shift than crossing many European borders.

There are beautiful, jewel-coloured mosques, the call to prayer ululating. A myriad, party-coloured pony-carts, with stocky little ponies in gorgeous head-dresses.

Scarved women in wonderful, spangled fabrics. The languages you hear are the five dialects of Sasak, as opposed to the three dialects of Balinese.

There are karst hills surreal and conical, studding the landscapes, great expanses of vegetable gardens, buffalo basking in mud, baby goats knock-kneed at the side of the road.

I’d seen all this, of course, as we headed from the ferry port at Lembar to the capital, and marveled at it, but the impending nightmare of navigating a one-way system in a strange town with a baleful child and a one-page street map from the guidebook, followed by a day at immigration, had, well, clouded my vision.

This day the sun was warm, not hot. The skies were blue. A lovely day to ride. We stopped at the little market of a small town called Ubung to admire the pony carts waiting to take folk from the market.

We overshot the village where the women weave multiple threads pre-dyed in stripes on incredibly complex looms to create the style of cloth known as ikat.

Whatever, I thought. We’ll get another chance.

On the outskirts of the green and sprawling town of Praya, we stopped at a roadside place for coffee and fizzy pop, and were welcomed as friends. And then we came to Penujak.

Past the market, and the ceremonial space folk were decorating for a wedding, with Sasak music jangling out of giant speakers, we saw a sign, in English, saying “Traditional Sasak Pottery”.

We pull over. This is one of the joys of a motorbike, over a car, that you can stop it anywhere.

“We’d like to see the pottery being made,” I say, in Indonesian, to the ibu who runs the store.

And she takes us through the earth alleys and shacks that make up the village, where women make pottery in their homes, fighting cocks crowing, fat pigeons weighted down with stones around their necks being fed up for the pots, washing drying on the woven walls…

And we see the women working their clay. “The women make them. The men sell them,” she explains. “It has always been this way.”

Z, as a pyromaniac, wants to watch some being kilned. I ask her.

She takes us back to the shop and hands us over to her friend, who hoiks her four-year-old son onto her hip, and shows us a kiln filled with rice husks and ready to burn, giant coil pots, sitting on their wheels.

We stop at her friend’s house. “You want to learn to make pottery?” she asks Z.

And so we sit, on the craftswoman’s stoop as she presses and slices her rounds of clay, and Z, our new friend and her little boy make turtles and whistles shaped like dolphins out of clay.

It’s a lovely moment. Pure serendipity. No cash, or purchase, required (though I give her son some pocket money).

She’s happy that we’re interested, that is, honestly, all.

We wind our way back to the shop. The ibu isn’t bothered whether we buy — she’s sat with friends assembling parcels of rice and veggies for the wedding — but I thank her and press a small note into her hand.

I hope it was the right thing to do. (In a small town in Kintamani, Bali, where we rousted a coffee farmer away from his lunch by asking at the store whether anyone had a coffee farm we could see, he was mystified by the gift of money.)

“Would you like to come to the wedding?” they ask.

I would, of course. Z is keen to get to Kuta, and the beach. So we regretfully decline.

“Would you like to eat something?”

Again, I would. I know Z wouldn’t.

Again, I respectfully decline.

And then out they come, from the house next door, all the wedding party, in sequins, spangles, and bright makeup, including the groom.

“I wish you happiness,” I say, in rubbish Indonesian. We watch them progress up the street, then hop on the bike and amble on our way.

It’s an amazingly good road out of Penunjak. In the glory days of the Dubai economy, UAE developers bought a lot of land down south, and this tarmacked four-lane highway is clean and fast for a few kilometres at least.

We stop for lunch at a café in a village named Sade, with thatch-rooved Sasak houses and marketplace that feel created for the visitor, watch dogs fighting in the street.

And then we cruise the last five kilometers into Kuta.

It’s a magical beachside landscape of deep, sweeping bays with white sand beaches, vertiginous hills framing secret surf breaks, some barefoot bars, a couple of surf shops, yet bullocks, goats and chickens foraging by the beach.

We scope a few places. Z picks out one he likes.

And I realise, as I drive the bike up muddy footpaths, across cattle pastures, on the fringes of the beach, that I’ve gone local with the motorbike.

We can go anytime, anyplace, anywhere…

Our first mission? To learn to surf.

It may take longer than expected.

But hell, we’ve got time. And we’ve got wheels, too.

*: The madness is a long story. Honestly, not as bad as it sounds.