All good things come to an end. At least to those with the onward urge of riding motorcycles in foreign countries. So, this morning we loaded up our bikes and headed off to places we’ve never seen before. This is our thing. This is what we do.

It was 80km up the coast. Distances are weird here. In Australia, I’ll ride 80km to get a cup of coffee. Here, it’s an enormous distance at the edge of perception. Partly that’s because the island itself is only 150km east to west. If you do bigger distances, you run out of island quickly. Plus, because the traffic is unexpected, with the centre line more a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule, it’s difficult to get up to highway speeds. All you need is to be doing 110kph when you round a corner, and you’re confronted by a gaggle of school children on bikes or an old man putt-putting along on an ancient scooter. So, you ride at slowly. You look at the roadside stalls and the markets and the people. You avoid the motorcycles and the trucks and the cars. And you dream of continuing this forever.

The road down to the Permuteran Coast is non-tourist Bali. There were people working away at their lives, schools educating excited young people, mosques calling the faithful to prayer. It felt like the sort of travel I did in the 1990s. Or maybe that’s just that I’m older now, and I hearken back to a time when I could take a month or six weeks off to just travel. I wish now that I’d ridden motorcycles more when I was young, but that’s ok. I do it now.

In an early dalliance with Alzheimer’s, I forgot to put the GoPro on, so we do not have footage of this road. You’ll have to put up with my descriptions of windy, dusty roads, the call of the muezzin joining with the growl of traffic, blue beaches to our right and jungle mountains to our left. All kinds of vehicles wound their way along the road. Indonesia does not have the most eclectic group of road vehicles I’ve ever seen. Those particular honours go to India and Egypt. But there’s a wider range than the relatively uniform vehicles of Australia. Particularly, there are all types of vehicles, particularly on this part of the coast, from sleek 2022 Yamaha NMaxs overtaking everything to ancient Honda C70s idling along the road with the speedometer open showing a tangle of wiring. We rode along, contemplative, happy, content.

We arrived at our hotel in the mid-afternoon, which was pleasant enough. It covered the basics. It kept the rain off and had somewhere to poop (outdoors, to Dalma’s delight). As added luxuries, it had a gorgeous pool, a hammock, air conditioning and a multitude of geckos. We took advantage of all these facilities, and then went out for lunch (discovering, in the process, Rejak, an Indonesian chilli fruit salad). On our return, Dalma had an open-air semi-clothed massage by the pool while I read old books I haven’t had the luxury to read in many years. Occasionally, I looked up at the tropical beauty, and meditated to my mantra: “we still have six days, we still have six days…”