- Left –
- 24th & 25th May 2015
- Miles rode – 34 (54km)
Denny and I agreed to meet at his workshop at 8am on the 24th and he had said to his mechanic more than once not to be late. I arrived at 8.05 and felt slightly guilty, I’m English after all and punctuality has always been important to me.
This is Indonesia and time has a different meaning, at 9.00 am Arnold the mechanic arrived and laughed when I told him he was meant to be here at 8.00am, Denny turned up at 9.45am and when I said I had been here since 8am he looked a little embarrassed and said sorry. For the next hour he was on the phone to BMW Bali and did various tests. The regulator is ok and the consensus is that it may have been a dirty / bad electrical connection preventing the battery charging. The battery was put on charge and as it’s Sunday and they close early I’ll return in the morning with my fingers crossed.
On Monday morning I returned to find out the battery wouldn’t charge to the required level so I brought a new, smaller battery as this was all that was available. I wasn’t confident that the source of the problem was either understood or fixed.
The mechanics at the workshop took me on various trips to the port, hotel, restaurants & bike workshop, Denny and everyone who works for him was so helpful, yet again an unplanned situation develops into getting to know many people and becoming part of each other’s lives for a few days, these encounters give a great insight into the everyday life of people.
Thanks Denny.
It was about 4.00 pm when I had reassembled the bike and headed back to the hotel and by 4.30 I had decided to make a dash to the mountains as I wanted to visit Mount Kelimutu en route to Larantuka tomorrow. There is a ferry that goes once every week from Ende to Timor but there was such confusion regarding when and if it’s going anytime soon I had no real choice but to take the decision to ride the 280km to Larantuka to hopefully get a ferry from there.
The short ride of 50km to Moni in the mountains was some of the most beautiful scenery so far in Indonesia.
