Motor City is Burning

I’ve been out all afternoon on a motorbike. Now I’m sitting on a marble balcony, sipping lukewarm beer, listening to the gregarious chatter of various European languages, all of which could only mean one thing — I’ve finally made it back to Southeast Asia.

It was a 36-hour plane flight to get from Rome to here. Or rather a 36-hour series of plane flights and layovers, including considerable time spent in the lovely Qatar airport, all of which meant that, thanks to the wonder of layovers and planetary rotation, we got to see the sun rise and set twice in one day. It’ll do a number to your head, that.

We arrived in Bali in a jet-lagged daze and promptly hired a cab for Ubud the so-called cultural center of Bali, halfway up into the hills that fall away from Mt. Agung, the volcano that dominates the southern half of Bali, down to the seaside somewhere south of Ubud.

Ubud was probably once a small village in the hills, but these days its more of a tourist mecca, thanks to some really awful western travel books that shall not be named. Ubud now sprawls out from the central crossroads up into neighboring villages pretty much erasing any discernible difference between Ubud and the dozen or so villages that surround it.

I won’t lie to you. Ubud is crowded, in fact, all of Bali is crowded, with traffic like I’ve never seen anywhere else in Asia. Snarled roads mean incessant horns and shouts are the primary sounds of Bali. Interestingly, Ubud isn’t nearly as crowded with tourists as I had expected, at least it wasn’t while we were there. During the days the streets would fill up with tourists on day trips from the resorts down south in Kuta and Seminyak, both about 20-30km from Ubud (if you want some idea of the traffic in Bali consider that a 20-30km distance will take anywhere from one to two hours by car or motorbike), but in the evening, after the resort goers were safely back beach-side, Ubud seemed nearly empty.

The traffic and congestion of Bali isn’t something you can blame on tourists, it’s mainly just the Balinese going about their lives. It made for hectic bike riding, at least until you could get out of the center of Ubud. There was a lot of choking on diesel fumes and waiting or weaving through, traffic.

Once I got through the two main intersections of Ubud the traffic mostly gave way and I had the road to myself, save other motorbikes and heavily loaded down trucks. The countryside around Ubud is well worth riding through, beautiful terraced rice paddies that spill down the mountain sides, glowing a verdant green in the evening light. Over the course of four days I think I rode about 120K, in one case halfway up the side of Mt. Agung.

The smoky wind alternates between choking and enticing as it whips about my helmet. But any choking is offset by the gorgeous soft twilight of the tropics, which kept me riding through village after village, each with it’s own craft theme. One village would be all stone work, concrete fountains, sculptures of Buddha and countless pots and urns. The next might be wood carving, intricate masks, totem pole-like sculptures and ornate arched doors. The best were the weaving villages, brilliantly colored fabrics flowing out of a dozen small stone buildings, all of them eventually making their way down to Ubud for sale.

But awesome as it was to be back on the Asian version of a motorbike, it wasn’t quite the relaxing riding I did in Laos and elsewhere. You can never recapture the magic, and I wasn’t trying…. Okay, maybe I was, but it didn’t work. regrettably Honda seems to have phased out the Dream in the last five years, replacing it with something called the Nitro, which just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But the bike is irrelevant, was always irrelevant. I missed my friends, especially because I just saw Debi in Paris. It just wasn’t the same riding by myself. Debi, Matt, where are you? There are roads to be ridden, locals with ten people on a bike to be humbled by. Six fingered men to be seen, by some.

It wasn’t the same. It never is. But you know what, it’s amazing anyway.