The Ubud Handbook « It's Silly Season Again in Ubud ~ Renting a Scooter, and Crashing it, on Bali
The anatomy of a motorbike accident on Bali.
A captive, performing monkey wearing an Evel Knievel costume pretends to crash his Harley Davison motorcyle during a street performance in Java, Indonesia.
Photograph © 2018 Ubud High.
I'M WAITING FOR a friend on Jalan Suweta in Central Ubud. Three young Scandinavian women are at the side of the road clinching a deal on their new scooter rentals. They mount, and look non-plussed as they hunt for the ignition. The rental lady demonstrates how to switch their motorbikes on.
It really doesn't bode well.
Two of them seem to get the hang of it and disappear into the main road. The third pauses at the junction with Jalan Raya, looks to the right and left, and forgets one crucial thing: if you give an automatic some gas and don't hold onto the brake with your left hand, your body flies backwards and your right hand turns up the throttle even more.
It's a G-force thing.
She tears into the traffic. She can't stop. She narrowly misses hitting a car head-on, swerves past a mum on a 'bike and slaloms across the road as she tries to stop the 90-kilo motorbike with her feet, duck-style. Before she hits anyone – it's a miracle she doesn't – she falls in a bad-sounding heap of bent metal and smashing plastic. A group of Balinese rush to pick her up before the cops see her.
She's almost crying – more out of shock and shame than injury.
But a small hole in the side of her leg starts to bleed, and keeps bleeding, and a widening pool of blood circles her right flip-flop before snaking its way into a dusty gutter. The rental lady has arrived on the scene after hearing the screams. She keeps looking at the tourist's leg, and then at her scrapped motorbike, and back at the tourist's leg.
If you want to injure or kill yourself on Bali, jumping on a scooter with no experience is a tried-and-trusted method. If you've never ridden a motorbike before, don't do it here. If you don't hurt or kill yourself, some other innocent bystander may well be on the receiving end of your madness.
© 2021 John Storey. All Rights Reserved.
Other Tales of Getting Around from The Ubud Handbook
The Other Side of the Coin ~ A Balinese Motorcycle-Accident Victim
IBU KETUT'S LATE. She's normally at my house by 10 in the morning: I'm the second job of the day. After me, she'll spend another eight hours cooking in the kitchen of a five-star Ubud hotel to support her seven children.
It's a great life if you don't weaken.
She starts sweeping, and I notice she's limping. There's a spreading bruise and an angry graze running past her knee and onto her calf. She wants to carry on cleaning: I sit her down and ask her what happened.
She's shy; I press...
[ ... » Read on... » ]
Surviving Bali on a 'Bike ~ Tips for Keeping the Rubber on the Road
CHRISTINA IS A SAVVY 60-year-old American who's come to Ubud to set up nest. She's never ridden a motorbike before and has already fallen off twice in two weeks.
– "I've just learned how to turn left," she says, "without feeling as if I'm going to tip over..."
[ ... » Read on... » ]
Statistics for Road Traffic Accidents (RTAs) and Deaths on Bali from 1996 to 2020
CHECK OUT the statistics for checking out on Bali's roads over the last 25 years.
[ ... » Read on... » ]
© 2021 John Storey. All Rights Reserved.
The Last Pic
Portrait of the Day
Portraits from Bali by Ubud High
A beggar from Muntigunung on the streets of Ubud in Bali, Indonesia.
Portrait by © Ubud High.
© 2021 John Storey. All rights reserved.
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Bali's Street Art
Street art, graffiti and murals for the masses – the most public of Bali's urban art scene hidden in plain sight on the walls of Canggu, Ubud, Seminyak and Kuta.
➤ Bali's Graffiti Artists & Street Murals in the Wild...
The Ubud Handbook
THE UBUD HANDBOOK ~ Your free guide to living in Ubud and Bali in an online nutshell.
Religion Matters
∞ The Tale of Ganesha the Globetrotter ~ Bali's Elephant-Headed Hindu God
‘First stop on Shree Ganesha's round-Asia tour was a spell in Buddhist Tibet with its strong tantric leanings – a convenient spot to re-invent himself as Vinãyaka, and then as the dancing red Nritta Ganapati – before a full-blown alter-ego revamp as the scarlet, twelve-armed Maharakta Ganapati. Now, Maharakta Ganapati was unusually fond of skullcaps filled with human flesh and blood – and this we might charitably put down to a bad trip.
After all, what happens in Tibet stays in Tibet...’
∞ An American Calonarang ~ Trance & Possession on Bali
‘To cut an all-night story short, the mask was donned by a dancer who fell into a deep trance. But instead of staying in the temple, he began to run. And run. He became violent and uncontrollable. He ran for four kilometers down the road – the crowd scrambled after him. He ended up in a cemetery just past my house, and in the dead of night began to do frenzied battle with unseen foes...’
∞ 'Nyepi' ~ Bali's Hindu New Year, and the Day of Silence ~ Melasti, Ngerupuk, Ogoh-Ogoh & Manis Nyepi
‘If previous New Years' Days have seen you waking up with a crippling hangover trying to remember what you did the night before, maybe it's time you headed to Bali in March. Nyepi – the Balinese Day of Silence, and the start of the Hindu Saka New Year – is a day, a night and a day you'll never forget....’
∞ 'Kajeng Kliwon' ~ A Very Bad-Hair Day on Bali
‘Kajeng Kliwon is the kind of day when anything that can happen will happen. It invariably does.
You have been seriously warned...’
Personal Stories
∞ Diary of a Market Girl
“When I had my sixth and seventh babies at the hospital – my twin girls – the doctor ordered me to have a Caesarian. And without asking me, he tied my tubes off as well.
I think he thought I'd had enough babies...”
Food Talk
∞ Durian ~ The King of Stink
“On the third bite,” says one hater, “it was as though I'd just eaten a diseased, parasite-infested animal with a bad case of rabies. I prayed I wouldn't be sick because I really didn't want to taste it again on the way back up...”
Culture Bites
∞ Cinema Paradiso ~ Bali's Seat in the History of Indonesian Cinema
‘Boobs and political censorship have never been far from the Silver Screen – in Indonesia, they're its bedrock. The silent flicks of Thirties' Bali sucked hungrily on the island's bare-breasted cabinet-postcard image that encouraged so many gilded tourists – and dodgy film-stars like Charlie Chaplin – to visit its sultry, forbidden shores...’
Getting Around ~ Bali 'Biking
∞ Surviving Bali on a 'Bike
“For me, some of the most dangerous people on the road are white people. I avoid them like the plague. You can tell the ones who are going to hurt others – the fixed grins, the hunched over the handle-bars, the wobbling around corners and shouts of indignation when they finally hit someone – because they have absolutely no idea how life and the road works around here...”
∞ It's Silly Season Again ~ Renting a Scooter, and Crashing it, on Bali
‘She tears into the traffic. She can't stop. She narrowly misses hitting a car head-on, swerves past a mum on a 'bike and slaloms across the road. Before she hits anyone – it's a miracle she doesn't – she falls in a bad-sounding heap of bent metal and smashing plastic. A group of Balinese rush to pick her up before the cops see her...’
∞ The Other Side of the Coin ~ Just Another Motorbike Accident on Bali
‘She starts sweeping and I notice that she's limping. There's a spreading bruise and an angry graze running past her knee and down her calf. She wants to carry on cleaning – I sit her down and ask her what happened.
She's shy; I press...’
Health Matters
∞ Let's Get Wet ~ The Rainy Season on Bali
‘Rule number one on a monsoon day? Don't get wet.
You may not realise that getting caught in a cloudburst or shower on Bali – particularly if you're on a motorbike – is the tropical equivalent of walking naked outside during a Prague Winter after a lukewarm bath.
It'll really slow you down. The shivers, hot-and-cold flushes, a chesty cough, diarrhoea, sneezing, stomach pains, a belting headache and aching bones are all at the top of the list...’
∞ Scorpions, Mosquitoes, Hornets, Poisonous Caterpillars... And Other Strange Tails on Bali
‘Nowhere is free from the tax of life. We all have to pay for our slice of Bali paradise – and this often comes in the shape of our biting, stinging, crawling, flying insect-cousins.
It's the downside of environment-sharing...’
Holidays from the Jungle
∞ The Heads of Trunyan
‘Agricultural, and unpractised in the dark art of handling international tourists, the aristocratic farmer-people of Trunyan have acquired a damaging reputation for aggression. Their unique tourist draw – a jungle-cemetery where bodies are left in the open to disintegrate underneath a magical banyan tree – is regularly shunned by travellers on the time-sensitive tourist circuit...’
∞ Lombok ~ A Line in the Sand
‘Ten meters away and the young man finally looks up – an inane, animal-like grin taped across his face as his girlfriend grips his porcelain butt and grimaces towards the empty blue sky. They disengage like street dogs, utter an invective in Russian, and stare...’
Tourism & Self-Enrichment
∞ Eat, Pray, Self-Love
‘My concentration's shot to pieces. The spaghetti keeps falling off my fork. She's on her third large beer now. She starts to say 'facking' even more, and is speaking so loudly that people passing on the street have begun to look her way, and she's spitting bits of ciabatta bread and tomato and fish into her friend's dinner...’
∞ From Ubud With Love
‘I'm staying at a cute, family-run bed-and-breakfast – a homestay – on Ubud's trendy Jalan Goutama. A young member of the homestay's family tours her compound, blessing it with incense and rice and flower-petal offerings in little hand-made palm-leaf boxes.
All is well in Bali's spiritual capital...’
∞ A Dutchman Goes to a Gypsy Fortune-Teller
‘A Dutch boy in Holland goes to a gypsy fortune-teller who tells him that he is, in fact, Balinese. Afterwards, his uncle visits the Island of the Gods and brings him back a wooden carving of a bare-breasted lady.
Lucky for him it wasn't one of those funny-shaped wooden bottle-openers that looks like a cock...’
∞ The Land of Self-Healing and Snake Oil
‘Shake out those Kundalini Awakenings with some HoopYogini™ and Bhakti Boogie® at the Yoga Barn. Celebrate The Divine Feminine with a splash of Shakti Dance. Puff up your lungs in a Sacred Breathwork Immersion Workshop®, insert a Jade Egg for luck at The Womb Temple™ and polish it off with some tantalising Manifesting And Abundance.
You know you're worth it...’
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Popular search terms:
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