Across Sumbawa on a Bike

After our bad break with the surfing, Z and I hunker down in our sterile boudoir to discuss what to do about Sumbawa, given we are here now.

One of the things these last couple of weeks – by far the most stressful and challenging in well over a year of travel – has taught me is that if you are going to combine work, travel and unschooling, you do need to plan around internet.

“OK,” I say, trying to sound perky. “Well, this hasn’t worked out. So let’s get to Sumbawa Besar, which should be big enough to have hotels with internet . . .”

“It’s got a population of 57,000,” Z says. “It’s hardly ‘Besar’.”

“Whatever,” I say. “I say we bomb up to Sumbawa Besar. Spend one day using the internet and chilling out, then a second exploring the palace and the tombs, then get across to the other side of the island as fast as we can and get the boat to Flores.”

This sounds like a plan. And, as we wind up the beautiful volcanic bays on the west coast, through shrouded hills, past stilt fishing villages, orchards, harbours and mangrove flats, over rivers swollen by the rain to great clashing canyons of chocolate water, yet with horned cattle grazing unperturbed in their shallows, it feels like a plan, too.

It’s a clear day, the roads are decent, and we make good progress. And, when we come to a strip of karaoke bars that indicate the outskirts of Sumbawa Besar and the approach of relative civilization, we are both feeling pretty good.

Sumbawa Besar is, indeed, a small town, with little to it but its market, the sultan’s palace, some tin-roofed mosques, and the galaxy of administrative offices and military posts that befit an island’s second town. But it sprawls, low-rise, for many miles.

We are told there is internet at the Transit Hotel, a swep’up business grade hotel. As we grind into their carpark on a filthy motorbike clad in even filthier denim, faces streaked with road dirt, the staff in their neat Nehru jackets seem, well, politely discombobulated.

I’m prepared, at this point, to bust our budget for the ease of in-room internet. “No internet today,” says the girl on the desk. “There is trouble with the internet.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Well, that’s a waste of time,” says Z.

We head into town, where a cluster of more or less cheap hotels gather on a fast one-way street, and go first to Lonely Planet Indonesia’s top pick for ease.

Z surveys the grimy bedheads, stained sheets and filth-scarred sinks in their $20 rooms with dismay.

“This might be the best we get,” I say. “We might just have to settle for this.”

“No way,” says Z. “Don’t you know by now that if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters they will, eventually, produce Lonely Planet Indonesia?”

‘Tis true that none of Sumbawa’s central hotels will be winning any awards for cleanliness – one that does look pristine is full — but the Dewi does at least have big rooms, hot baths and Indo TV. Better still, it is equidistant between a sign advertising internet and a sign advertising laundry.

We find an eatery down the street and chow down on soto ayam, the spicy egg and chicken noodle soup that is an Indonesian street food classic.

It’s a particularly unglamorous side of extended travel that nobody tells you about, the mechanics of laundry and internet. Our wardrobe is, but for our smart outfits, firmly in need of, if not complete fumigation, certainly a wash.

The first laundry I find tells me it’s “full”.

Sumbawa Besar is -– no question -– a very friendly city. Every few paces, as I trudge with our plastic bag of more or less fetid possessions, I am greeted with a cheery “Hello Mister”.

As Z observes, “If I have to have one more conversation about David Beckham or the Royal Wedding, I will scream.”

I have completed four full conversations about the Royal Wedding by the time I find a laundry that will take our mouldering wardrobe. I get Z up and begin the quest for breakfast.

Breakfast achieved, we head to the sign advertising internet, which now sits outside a private home. The ibu sends us back down the street, to one of the grubbier warnets I’ve seen in Indonesia. Geriatric computers squat on low tables in depressing booths behind which one sits cross-legged on dirty lino.

We plug our laptops in. The connection doesn’t work.

“It’s a good connection,” says the girl, in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary.

We fiddle around endeavouring to connect for half an hour or so.

She pulls out the cables and replugs them. “I don’t think this lady knows anything about the internet,” says Z.

We try again, using their computers. After thirty minutes more of stress-filled clicking, and nary so much as a flicker of email, I realise it is past noon, and the window for work and Mathletics is narrowing.

“OK,” I say. “I think the internet is out all over town. So we can either drive all over town looking for working internet or give up on the internet for the duration and just get the hell off this island.”

“Let’s get the hell off this island,” says Z. “Sumbawa is a hellhole.”

We return to base by way of a bakery, and embark on an epic marathon of 30 Rock, peanut brittle and steamed buns with palm sugar and coconut filling. I would quite like to see the Sultan’s Palace and the megalithic tombs, but I think it would be unwise to push Z on this point.

I am optimistic that we’ll make good progress the next day, hopefully as far as Bima, the island’s first city, which might leave us able to make the boat the day after if we start for the port at 6am.

There are several reasons for my optimism. Firstly, the road is a major highway, a wide strip of dark yellow on our map, which means it should be in reasonable nick. Secondly, the road was good during the initial stretch.

And, thirdly, Lonely Planet Indonesia goes out of its way to state that “the road across Sumbawa is in great condition”.

The word “rusak”, which the locals use of the road, does not enter my vocabulary until the road suddenly turns to rocky, rutted dirt about 30k into our anticipated 250k drive.

“How far is the road like this?” I ask, after we have jounced boneshakingly for 10 grindingly slow kilometers or so.

“As far as Dompu,” says the lady. “It’s ‘rusak’ until Dompu.”

Dompu is 150k or so away from here. Surely she can’t be right?

Patches of tarmac alleviate the misery.

But, as we break for lunch in a surprisingly sweet eatery set on stilts in the shallow water on the rocks of a pretty bay, I realise that she is, basically, right.

In the mountains, the road is being rebuilt. Perhaps widened, too? It’s hard to tell. Every few kilometers, machines are digging chunks of rock out of the cliffs and grinding them to gravel. In one place, a steamroller is laying tarmac. In many places, men are leaning on shovels and pickaxes, in the manner of people about to do something important.

Some spots are still made, or part-made. Elsewhere, the road is, well, dirt.

Dirtbiking on a small automatic bike with bags and a passenger is no fun at all. Constant steering to find the least rocky/muddy/bumpy path leaves my arms and shoulders aching. The road requires total concentration: I’m so busy with the potholes, I can’t really spare any focus for the view.

“We need to stop now,” says Z. “The juddering is making my stomach muscles ache.”

Because it’s no fun being a passenger on a juddering bike, either.

As the shadows begin to lengthen, I revise our destination for the day back from Bima to Dompu.

We are juddering up a winding coast road with vertiginous views over gorges to the sea, when I see a cluster of trucks and bikes stopped up ahead. We join them.

A bulldozer and digger are scooping away at the cliffs and the road, which is, essentially, a pile of red mud. “A car went off the hill,” explains a lady.

If it did, it took half the hill with it. By the time the bulldozer and the digger have tamped the mud down to a state where it is, by Indonesian standards, drivable, it is almost dark. We have, according to my calculations, 40-odd k of bad, mountain road to drive till Dompu.

I head down the steep, winding roads slowly. Even when the road is made, it’s scary.

“I was in Australia for two years,” says our saviour, a guy named Salep who, on being asked for directions, is escorting us to a hotel in Dompu.

“Oh really?” I ask. “Where in Australia?”

“Jile,” he says.

“Jile?” I say. “I don’t know where that is.”

“Jile,” he says. “Me, some guys from Pakistan, some guys from Afghanistan, some guys from Sudan, we go to Australia, but they catch us.”

“Oh,” I say. Salep has no hatred for the West. He’s a nice guy, keen to help, despite two years of his life spent in a detention centre just because he hoped for a better life.

His wife and baby daughter hop on the back of his bike, and I follow them through the darkened streets of Dompu until we reach a large, clean, brightly lit hotel, rich with the scent of spicy Padang cooking. (It’s the Rinjani, if you’re passing through.)

“Thank you,” I say, making the wai. And he goes on his way.

“How long have you been in Sumbawa?” the old man at the desk asks.

“Four days,” I say.

“Are you going to Lakey Beach?” he asks. “Many tourists go there.”

“Ummm,” I say. It seems rude to explain to this lovely chap that all I want to do right now is get the hell off his island and onto Flores, and that neither of us are equipped for the lethal surf of Lakey Beach. “Maybe.”

Shaking with what I think is Parkinsons, he pulls out the registration card and a pen. I put my next destination as Lakey Beach.

The north-eastern corner of Sumbawa is surprisingly beautiful, especially once we’re through the city of Bima.

Mountain gorges, stepped rice terraces, offshore islands rising conical from calm seas, waterfalls and rustling streams. It is a genuinely pleasant ride, and we make good time.

Not far from the port, we are winding through the hills when the road disappears into a flurry of landslid mud. Men with their shirts pulled up to cover their faces emerge from the woods.

“You give money,” one says, in Indonesian.

This is not a good moment. An old man at some point before Dompu, the night before, had warned me about bandits in the wood, accompanying his warning with a throat-slitting gesture.

Then I see the sawn-off mineral water bottle in his hand, with small notes. I fumble for a small note and hand it over (the larger notes are concealed behind). I figure he is collecting to mend the road.

“Osama Bin Laden is still alive!” he says. “Osama, Osama, Osama!” he adds, with a demoniac grin.

This seems, well, a little unnecessary.

It is only when we are safely on the boat and watching the news that I realise that the chap is not a dedicated fundamentalist, just simply commenting on current events, the assassination of Osama by Navy Seals.

We negotiate a second landslide, with more money-collectors, then cruise through the little port town of Sape, past clip-clopping horse carts, to a clean hotel.

Here we await the 8am boat which will take us from Sumbawa, through the turbulent waters, heavy swell and treacherous currents around Komodo and Rinca, the islands of the dragons, to the Catholic island of Flores.

As we look at the sea, there’s a real sense of achievement. This is the third island we have driven across. Coast to coast. And Flores, like Lombok, has a lot to offer. Incredible diving. Natural waterslides. Crazy stone villages, mad rituals, and, as Z says “It’s Catholic. So that means beef and pork.”

And beer, I add, mentally.

Things, it appears, are looking up.