First Impressions…

It’s a big bike. A very big bike.

A tall, chunky trail bike, so high my feet would barely touch the ground, its heavy-duty engine and muscular innards exposed, parked outside our hotel in the highlands of Flores.

“Oh my god,” says Z.

“What?” I say.

“It’s got EU plates!”

It has, indeed. Here we are, on the third island along from Bali, the fourth from Java, making our painstaking way on our little automatic bike across to Papua, and…

“They’ve driven it all the way from France!” he says.

“No way!”

“Look!” he says. “It’s got French plates.”

Our intrepid mission, from Bali to Papua on a motorbike, feels a lot less intrepid now, and as we head back to our room we speculate about the drivers.

“I suppose they could have shipped it,” says Z, thoughtfully.

We both, I think, are developing a nasty case of motorbike envy.

“Yeah,” I say. “But that would be expensive…”

“I reckon it’s her,” he says.

“Who?” I say.

He frowns and drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “The lady next door.”

Now, it is true that the lady next door arrived contemporaneously with the mean machine. But, well, she doesn’t look right.

She’s 60-ish, maybe late 50s, cropped grey hair, elegant in that French way, where even a check shirt, jeans and desert boots looks somehow crisp and freshly ironed.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Why?” he says.

Now, one of my pet hates, as a woman travelling with a child, is being stereotyped, and I don’t want to raise Z to stereotype either. So I don’t voice my reasoning.

I am, all the same, firmly of the opinion that a couple approximately my parents’ age – without a whiff of acid, tattoos or gnarliness — cannot be riding a big-ass trail bike from France to…

Well…

… Where the hell can they be going to?

Papua?!

A couple of days later, long before sunrise, we are cruising along the coast road looking for the port from which the weekly boat to the island of Timor allegedly leaves.

It’s slightly disorienting. Not only because it’s dark.

But because we’ve just left a major port town, Ende, with a vast natural harbour, and driven 10k or so back along the road we took from the highlands, and neither of us noticed a port the first time around.

By half past five, we’re on our second potential port of the morning. The jetty looks promising, but there are no boats and few lights. Plus, the road appears to be heading straight past it and up into the mountains.

Z and I are discussing the possibilities, when the big bike from the highlands appears in a blaze of headlights, zooms past us and hangs a left into the bush.

It is, of course, the French couple.

Both of them pristine, poised, in neat jeans, check shirts and desert boots.

And, yes, roughly my parents’ age.

They look, in fact, roughly as implausible a trans-Indonesia biking duo as we do.

In the queue of bikes at the gates, we get chatting. “Did you bring the bike from France?” Z asks.

“From India,” says the guy. “I drove it from France to India. Then together we drive it from India to here.”

“Except for Myanmar,” says his partner. “We had to fly over Myanmar.”

“You flew the bike too?” I ask.

“Of course,” they say.

That’s dedication, I think.

Though my mind is more on the ordeal ahead. The jetty is only 50 metres or so offshore, meaning that the swell which breaks on the sandy beach is at a serious height by the jetty, even on a calm day, and the ferry is swaying horrendously.

I do not like boarding Indonesian ferries on two wheels at the best of times. This is not the best of times.

We weave through the hordes of foot passengers and porters on the jetty up towards the metal ramp, where, unusually, a queue of bikes awaits.

“No, no, no,” someone yells. Hands stretch out to remove Z from the bike.

He will board on foot, for safety’s sake.

I can see why. The swell’s so heavy that the ramp scrapes and screams as it swings from side to side of the jetty. The piles of coiled rope which function as steps up are higher than usual, but the swing is so high at its peak that it’s still more than a foot above them.

I can see the sea through this gaping maw.

“Go, go, go!” the deckhand says. The guy in front of me guns his bike over the coiled rope, up the sweeping ramp just as it begins its upward swing, and safely into the ferry.

I’m next.

“Go, go, go!” he says.

Fear slows me down. The ramp’s already on the rise when I hit it, and I feel the lurch as the back wheel struggles to clear the gap. My instinct, stupidly, is to stop.

“Go, go, go!” they yell.

And I’m in.

Into a cargo hold ripe with exhaust fumes and fish jerky, swaying so irregularly that I’m lurching like a drunkard. Even with both feet down.

One of the deckhands waves me towards a corner. I swallow any remaining vestiges of pride and look helplessly at him. He takes my bike and wheels it into place.

The French guy, meanwhile, is parking his.

He does, I am pleased to note, look almost as shaken as I do.

Our new friends save us some seats in the, ahem, “saloon” of the ferry.

Normally on Indonesian boats there are two or three tiers of board platforms, generally with mats, out the back somewhere. You nab one, stretch out and read or watch movies for the duration. It’s quite a pleasant way to travel.

“Aren’t there any beds?” I ask.

“I couldn’t find any,” she says.

I do a recce. There are, indeed, no beds.

We will be in these seats for …

… Well, noone is entirely clear about how long the boat takes, but between 14 and 26 hours…

The girl five seats down from me is retching hoarsely into a plastic bag at a volume that I’d write off as implausible on a movie soundtrack.

Z has his head in my lap and is sleeping the sort of sleep that I have known to end in a geyser of chunder.

Françoise, as the lady’s name turns out to be, is also on the vomitous side. The trip looks set to plumb depths not seen since that cargo boat in the Philippines.

“Maybe it will be better once we are moving?” she says.

“I hope so,” I say, offering her an anti-motion tablet.

Yves and Françoise are headed to East Timor, like us –- to put their bike on the cargo boat to Darwin. They will follow it by plane.

“We want to do a desert road in Australia,” she says. “And then we end in Brisbane.”

Yves is retired: Françoise still wants to work. When he retired, he bought the bike, and drove it from France to India. She took a year’s sabbatical to fly out there and drive across the subcontinent with him.

What happens next? I ask.

“We are still discussing. Maybe we leave the bike in Australia and both fly home. Maybe we ship the bike home. Maybe he stays longer in Australia and I return to work.”

They’re loving the trip. And the freedom of later life.

Not least, I figure, because, as Françoise says, “He’s been driving a motorbike for over 40 years.”

Have you ever been stereotyped, or caught yourself stereotyping someone? Drop me a comment, and let me know.