Bali - IV: The bike ride

Basically, they drove us up to the top of a volcano, put us on mountain bikes, and pushed us off the edge.

Yes, there were roads involved.  Sort of.  But if you cataloged all the dangers that one can encounter when on two non-motorized wheels, and then added five or six of them together at once, and then multiplied by, say, the equivalent of the exchange rate between the Indonesian Rupiah and the US dollar (currently 13,700 to 1), you might have a sense of what this bike ride was like.

I don't even know where to start.  Yes, it was beautiful.  I think.  I mean, there were two or three times when I looked up long enough to see that it was neato to be doing this in such an exotic location. Most of the time, however, I was clutching the grips of the bike tightly, hoping the grabby brakes wouldn't pitch me over the top, and watching the broken and treacherous road get worse, and worse, and worse.


As background:  We had no idea what we were doing.  The birthday boy, whose idea it was, had done this a few years ago when he was here.  He and his friend had asked the nice hotel if they could take a nice little bicycle ride and then the nice hotel gave them nice little beach cruisers and a nice little Balinese tour guide and they went out on nice little paths through the nice little rice paddies for about an hour and it was really lovely and relaxing and fun.

This was not that.

First we drove up to the top of the island.  That was kind of cool.  Up and up and up.  Through beautiful little villages and rice paddies and past temples.  Until we really couldn't go up any further.  At this point they dropped us off at a place where they served us snacks "to make us strong for the ride."  We should have actually paid attention to that.  Or, maybe, instead of obsessing over whether the WiFi worked, we should have asked a couple of questions about what exactly was going to happen on this bike ride.

Instead, we decided to not touch the deep orange items (carrots? very dark mangos?), or the room temperature banana fritters (hot: great, cold: meh).  We did drink the bottled water that they provided, which provided us at least one tick in the "not extremely dumb" column.

There was a moment that was a little disturbing around this point.  This when the birthday boy said "Just so you know... I have no idea what we're getting into here."  At this point he revealed that all he had really done was tell our house manager that we wanted to take a bike ride.  All he knew was that someone was going to pick us up and then we were to ride bikes.  End of research.

Okaaaaay.

When we were done not eating our snacks, not logging into WiFi, and not learning what it is we were about to do, we took a picture of the volcano across the way and then went outside.  A bunch of bikes were lined up.  Mountain bikes.  Which was, you know, fine.  I mean, I'm a trained badass cyclist. I figured this would be a walk in the park for me, right?  What could be so different?

HA HA HA.

Here are the differences between a road bike and a mountain bike: besides the basic configuration, just about everything. Because the whole point is different.  A road bike, with its narrow highly inflated wheels is lean and sleek, engineered to slice through time and space with minimum contact with very smooth, clean pavement.  A mountain bike has wheels that are wide and gnarly.  It is engineered to bludgeon its way through time and space, pound through the mud and gravel, grind up rough dirt paths, and chew up all obstacles in its way. 

Whole different beast.  The point of which was, as far as I could tell, enduring the bumpiest and gnarliest of roads, sliding through gravel, barreling downhill as fast as possible, and living to tell the tale.

The problem was that I didn't really know what my bike was able to chow down on, and I didn't really know how well maintained it was, and I didn't really know how well it did on gravel, or broken pavement, or grass, or dirt, and when we weren't off road dealing with those things... it was Indonesia.  Traffic driving on the left side of the road.  Motorscooters whizzing in and out. Trucks.  Chaos.  Remember all that?

"Um," I asked our guide after we were on the road about 4 1/2 seconds.  "Are we going to be on the road the whole way?"

"Sometimes yes, sometimes no!" he answered cheerfully.

Suddenly the quality of the roads became very important to me.  The best Indonesian pavement looks a whole lot like clumps of asphalt slapped together and then indiscriminately jack hammered into strange archipelagos of occasional street.  Actually, at some points it looked a lot like no street at all.  We'd be riding down the broken and patched road and it would deteriorate more or less randomly until we were having to wend our way across the rivulets of smoothness, hoping our wheels wouldn't catch in the places where it broke apart and throw us off.

Of course, the better the road was, the more traffic it had.  Bali traffic.  Read my previous description.  Except now I was part of the food chain.  Oh, along with my first born son and one of my dearest friends on the planet.  About twenty minutes in I realized that -- on the remote chance that I didn't die or get crushed or get thrown or, at best, just tumble off the bike and break an arm or two  -- two of my loved ones most certainly would.

It was not relaxing.  What it was, was hot.  Hot and sweaty, but we were flying downhill so fast that it really only sunk in during those precious moments when we stopped to take a picture, or put the chain back on the bike.  I kept begging my fellow riders to remember to hydrate.  I know all too well how big a difference that makes on one's stamina, both mental and physical.  The ride people gave us water, which was fabulous, but at the rate we were sweating we probably needed to just install an IV drip and keep a continuous flow going into our bodies.  As it was... we were sweaty, and hot, and scared to pieces (at least I was) and eventually pretty dehydrated.

We did see some super cool things, I must admit.  At one point our guide took us off both the allegedly paved road and the honestly unpaved dirt road and we rode across a bumpy grassy field.  There was a makeshift stadium set up on our left, something that looked like a rodeo might be held within its perimeter.  And then ahead of us there was a large concrete stadium, very substantial and permanent.

This is where the cock fighting happens.  It's illegal to gamble, but it happens all the time.  The other ring was for ceremonies, which is how they claim legitimacy for the cockfights. It's a ritual blood letting and has nothing to do with sport.  Or so they say.  On the ground were strewn cardboard gambling cards and the trash left behind from a large gathering.  Our guide gave us a long description of how the cocks fight and it was both grisly and interesting.

After about two hours I asked our guide if we were almost done.  "Oh no," he said.  "But almost half way there!"  At this point we realized that this ride was going to go all the way back down to where we had started.  Down the hill that, by car, had taken about an hour to climb up.

And then the climbs began.

The ride was allegedly going to be all downhill, but pretty soon we were going up and down these steep rollers.  At this point I had a kind of neat "aha" moment. For most of the ride, I'd been having gearing problems.  Chain falling off, gears slipping, unable to move between gears on the front crankset.  I wanted desperately to convey to the guide that I actually did have a clue about how bikes work but... since I was was the one having all the mechanical problems, and since I was the one that was chronically 50 yards behind everyone else because I apparently was the only one aware of how ridiculously dangerous the whole endeavor was... I actually didn't have much credibility to draw from.  I mean, I looked like a weenie.  I took the downhills like, well, like a girl... praying the grabby brakes wouldn't flip me over the handlebars, winding me up in an Indonesian hospital.  I was slow, I was nervous, I did not have a happy oblivious smile on my face.

But... then this thing happened.  I figured out my gears.  And I realized that I could really motor up these steep hills once I got the hang of it.

Suddenly... I was kind of flying past my pals.  I was a weenie, for sure, going down... but a rock star on the way up. 

That part was cool.

Then there were the rice paddies.  About 3/4 of the way through this thing, the word comes back that "now our skills are going to be put to the test."  WTF?  I so did not like the sound of that.  But sure enough, we got off the road and went through a gate, then started pedaling down a very narrow dirt path, about 6" wide. On our right were rice fields, on our left was a ditch filled with running water, and the more rice fields. Little sheds housed a cow or two, and it was all, well, very Apocalpyse Now, frankly.  Extremely cool, but I was not happy about the path we were taking, so I almost immediately got off and started to walk.

Which, as it turns out, was the right thing to do.  Periodically, the path was interrupted by big gullies covered over by straw and bamboo.  One wrong move would land you in the ditch.  And... because what happens in the rice paddies stays in the rice paddies... I won't describe the full scenario.  But a couple of our merry band ended up needing some rescuing and, all in all, it was kind of a mess. One of those messes that you know will turn into a great story... as soon as it ends.

Which it did.  It finally ended.  24 kilometers (about 15 miles), over about four hours.  We all survived.  Our cuts and scrapes did not develop hideous tropical infections and need emergency amputations.  The bruises were survivable. The story value was immense. And the beer afterwards was, without a doubt, the best cold beer ever in the history of civilization.