Last night we scooted around Ubud three up on Betsy, got some pretty funny looks 🙂

Do you think Katie is having a good time?

Lined up with all the bikes…

While the girls are in the shade.

After a few days underwater at Gili T we’re headed to Bali.

And here comes the ferry 🙂

Let us see it before you post!!

Sally waiting on the ferry

Half hour after we boarded the ferry to Sumbawa, Sal reminded me that there is NO BEER in Sumbawa…

As I ran off the ferry and back to the closest shop I heard the rumble of a group of big capacity bikes headed towards the pier, and there they were, about 10 Harleys and a few GS1200’s!!

I made it back to the ferry with some Bintang in hand, still in time for departure, and quickly made friends with the group, an organised tour mostly from Jakarta.  We chatted a bit about the ride through Flores, took some pics and then settled in for the 6 hour crossing to Sumbawa.

Which was predictably held up at the terminal for an hour, so by the time we got to Sape it was almost dark and we still had about 60km of very windy road to the next town – Bima to find a room.  Usually I’d love to join a group of guys on a ride, but the inclement darkness had me in a hurry so we said our goodbyes.

We arrived in Bima as darkness settled in, and tried a few hotels in town before one would let us stay.  Being told “full” at an obviously empty hotel has happened to us before in Indonesia, and we’re still unsure why.

There was a religious ceremony being held in the town square that night which made for an interesting walk around.  We knew that Sumbawa is more strictly Muslim than most of Indonesia, but seeing primary school age girls wearing a hijab was pretty strange.

Next morning we set off early hoping to beat the heat for the ride through Sumbawa.  We stopped at a little hut for a coffee mid morning, where Sal tried to make friends with a bunch of small rabbits running around the place…

“Sal they may have fleas…” i said as she scooped up the smallest one for a cuddle.

“yuk”

Back on the road and 5 mins later we buzzed through a town where there were 5 GS1200’s and an 1190 Adv parked on the side of the road, I confused them for the group we’d met on the ferry, and stopped to say hello.

“hi guys, where are the rest?”

“there are no more, just us”

“what about the harleys?”

“different group…”

“oh well, hey enjoy your ride, see you at the ferry terminal!”

We continued on for another hour before three of the bikes flashed past us as we rolled through another village.

Being passed by someone is not something that happens to us very often, and when it does it’s usually by a teenage kid on a local bike riding like his life depends on it, but being passed by 3 BMW’s hasn’t ever happened before.

I turned around and looked at Sal, she smiled… which I took as approval to join in, so we dropped a couple of gears and set off.

Now before anyone gets upset with me, we had been going very slowly at this point, proven by Sally’s comment later in the day

“you were going so slowly today was going to take forever, i was glad you sped up”

this is taking forever!

Ok so now we’re a group of 4 bikes snaking our way through Sumbawa, which was really fun.  So much fun that when my fuel light turned on about 25km before the road met the coast (and started to twist and turn again), I was a bit disappointed.

But we were all low on fuel, so the next Pertamina (fuel station) saw all of us pull up for a short break.  Before we knew it, we had a cold drink in one hand, and a slice of watermelon in the other.

“gift, lady first, take, drink!”

We sat and talked bikes with the guys for ten minutes as the other three of their group arrived before setting off again, bound for another roadside stop on the coast for lunch.

The next 30mins riding was rather spirited, but I managed to pick my way past all of the guys and shadowed a funny guy from Jogyakarta named Didier, who was the fastest of the group, for about 10km.  I showed him a wheel every now and then while trying (unsuccessfully) not to piss Sally off too much!

When we stopped at a little restaurant, Didier was wearing a broad smile and quickly suggested that he and I should leave the rest of the group and go out racing each other…

“ok no problem, but do you mind if I leave Sally here?” I asked a little tongue in cheek.

This was met by raucous laughter from the rest of the group.  We joined the guys for lunch, which they insisted on buying for us, grilled fish, steamed chinese broccoli and sambal, delicious and very generous!

The guys were great company, fellow motorcycle travellers with plans to visit Patagonia later in the year, so we had plenty to talk about.

After that we rode more or less as a group to the ferry terminal, where they managed to buy our tickets for us, refusing my attempts to work out who had paid, and how much it cost.

waiting for the ferry with our new friends

The group of Harleys we’d met the previous day were there too, so we made quite a sight, 30 enormous bikes rolling onto the ferry.

This crossing was quite short, 45 mins later we were looking at the terminal in Lombok, waved goodbye to all our new friends and set out to find a room for the night.

This part of Lombok is quite remote, so we were lucky to find a homestay just before dark and with no restaurants in the vicinity, the pasta, tomatoes and bintang we’ve been carrying since Flores were turned into quite a nice meal 🙂

I’m sorry but I cant remember all 6 names, (and I don’t think I can spell some of them), but Didier, Jimmi, Richard, Mesha and friends, a big hello and thank you to all of you guys, keep in touch and I hope you aren’t too cold in Patagonia!!

If you ever visit Australia come and stay with us in Adelaide!

[Show slideshow]

a few pics from Sumbawa taken from the helmet cam.  Sorry no descriptions, still working out how to do this!

I throw three gears at the bike in quick succession, 4 then 3 then 2… the motor makes that glorious sound that only a twin can make as it pops and growls under hard deceleration, with this much weight on the rear of the bike I can really use the gearbox to slow us down.

It’s making me smile, but this is another one of those uphill hairpins that Flores seems to have a monopoly on, so we get right back to first to make the turn, then it’s a short shift to second and we work back up through the gearbox again, not killing it, just riding the fat torque curve until it’s time to brake again for the next turn.

On a trip like this you cant ride like a lunatic, you can’t even ride moderately quickly, there’s always a goat, some roadwork, gravel or oncoming traffic just around the next blind corner so you have to be careful, so we always travel with plenty up my sleeve so to speak.

“chi va piano va lontano” is what an italian once told me in Africa, but then he quickly backed it up with “ma non andare troppo piano!”

(who goes slowly, goes a long way… but don’t go too slowly!)

That said – I’m having fun.  Fun… tinged with guilt.  For everyone of those hairpin turns that we roll into, I know that poor Sal on the back needs to hold on pretty hard not to fall into me, and given that we’ve been at this for about 5 hours now, I can sense that she’s getting tired…

Another turn, this one’s a little tighter than I expected so I need to brake right into the apex, which helps to turn the bike, but puts an awful lot of stress on the passenger… on the exit I tap Sal on the leg to say ‘sorry about that’, she take a deep breath and we continue.

Riding in Flores is about as good as motorcycling gets, particularly on a Sunday as everyone is at home, and the usual truck traffic is absent so we have the whole place to ourselves.  I’m tired though, and my left foot is actually hurting from all the gearchanges, so when we flash past a little hut with satchels of coffee hanging from a piece of string out the front, I make the “shall we stop for a coffee?” sign, and Sal gives me the thumbs up.

“Oh my god, how much more of this have we got left?”

“I think the worst (best!) of it is over…” I reply.

About 4 hours later we roll into Labuan Bajo, find a place to stay and skull a couple of longnecks of Bintang watching the sunset over the bay.

We’ve come from Larantuka in three days, that’s only about 550km  in three long riding days with no traffic at all.

Fantastic.

Before I speak about my bulging biceps I would just like to comment on deans last post re the boat trip. He did fail to mention that I get sea sick and a 14 hour boat trip was something I’d had to prepare myself to do (again) and the only comfort I had to get me through was the ‘vip’ ticket where I could basically just read, sleep and be cool…and not see the sea moving up and down….up and down…vomit.

So when dean insisted that it would be fine to spend 14 hours in a haze of cigarette smoke, on a steel chair/dirty floor with people and litter all around us I was not happy….furious actually. Luckily for dean I had some travel pills and wasn’t sick, and the sea water that was coming in about a metre from where we were sleeping didn’t touch us….and it didn’t rain…luckily…And we had blow up airbeds…lucky for me dean is a very patient, forgiving man and coaxed me out of my angry mood and we made it, it was an experience and I never want to do it again 😊

So, we have just spent the last two days riding the long windy roads of Flores…some beautiful scenery and lovely people with excited happy children and cute little kid goats…but the roads are so windy that i have spent the last two days holding on to the bike so hard that my bicpes are rapidly ripping themselves into form!I’m just hoping they don’t get as big as they did in the last trip but we have a long way to go yet! We are spending the nights at altitude so it is cooler which is great as it’s pretty hot in this part of the world at the moment! Tomorrow we head to Labuan bajo for a few days of diving…and tonight we are watching the MotoGP hoping for a win from Rossi…!