I like big bikes, I cannot lie

Last weekend, Nenga and I found some nice scrap metal, I headed over to CBS to turn it into a briquetter for the charcoal we made last week. I probably should have took some in-the-process pictures, but my hands were dirty and I was trying to do the thing and be social and... Anyway, here it is, in all it's glory.











Isn't it special? More about it here.

We're really getting along, the CBS folks and I. We laugh and joke, alternately working for a bit and then sitting down for a minute of chitchat. They trusted me to know how to use and not to break their tools -which I didn't- whew! They didn't even try to teach me to do anything, they just assumed I knew how to do it. It looks like I still remember all this stuff-- last time I stick welded was a year ago.



















Ketot working on a carburator? carbuerator? carburetor. I asked him how long he's worked on bikes for, he said more than ten years. I asked him if he knew everything about bikes. "Everything? Naw," he said modestly, "but engine, yes."





















Pande, I learned from Komang, either means blacksmith or is a blacksmith name. And true enough, he showed me a part that he made by melting down an old aluminium thing and pouring it onto a damaged bike part. This formed a new part of the frame, that he could drill out to make something to replace the old damaged part.

Komang is amazing as usual, and I watched her make prayer offerings from coconut and banana leaves, using long splinters of bamboo as fasteners. She works so incredibly quickly and with such agility and precision, making wonderful 3D shapes from these long, thin leaves. No pictures, unfortunately. You'll have to trust me.



















Pande also showed me the upstairs room of the shop, where they've got a small lathe, and a drill press they converted into a small mill by using a movable table.





















He showed me these crazy hubless wheels: the rim (with the tyre on it) runs on a track formed by these little wheels that are mounted on these metal disc/rings. The disc is then connected to the bike's fork.











He also showed me this super mega chopper tricycle that he and a friend are building. This thing is off the chain! I think they built this thing from the axle up, bending their own tubes for the frame and everything. Pande says the transmission came from a VW bug.

I'm really happy that I get along with these guys so well after hanging out with them just a little bit. I feel like their wide eyed little cousin. They offered me a taste of some balinese palm wine. It tasted interesting, but was not very strong tasting for how milky white it was.



I really want to communicate with them better: their English is so much better than my Indonesian. I need to get my act together!

Summertime

The latest from Kopernik

gado gado

This week, with the workload ebbing slightly, I got up to these adventures:



1. climbing
After a terribly difficult time tracking down their contact information (I think I'm spoiled by how easy the internet makes everything), I finally got in touch with the Gibbon climbing club.

I rode my motorbike from Ubud to Kuta to climb on Monday evening. This took an hour, and the traffic was crazy. The roads were swarming with motorbikes weaving all over the place. I eventually figured out a strategy: ride slow, drift to the back of the pack of bikes, where the families with five people on a bike are, and ride just close enough to the person in front that nobody tries to cut in, but far enough away that there's some stopping distance.

I made it to Kuta alright, and met Dani and Ika at a climbing wall in Kuta after only an hour of getting lost in the city. Ika is a tiny woman who is a deceptively good climber. Dani used to be a forest ranger (?) or something like that and now teaches climbing full time. I climbed a bit, and talked to them a lot.

The neatest thing I learnt was that the Indonesian government created a national climbing federation, and sponsors a climbing team from each district in the country. It also built facilities in quite a few of the regions. I met Dani and Ika behind a firehouse, where the government had built a 20 metre (60 foot) wall, a 15 metre wall, and a bunch of smaller boulder-walls. Pretty awesome and pretty out of character that the Indonesian government would do this.

We got along really well, I'm going to try to go climbing on some real rocks with them this weekend.



2. green school
Ewa and I visited green school, an alternative / startup school (grades K-12 (!!)) in Bali, that is built almost entirely from bamboo, and emphasises experiential-over-theoretical learning. They are currently working towards IB accredition. Central to their mission are a set of scholarships: one fifth of their student body is Balinese children on full rides.

The school is also designed to have a low impact and great environmental awareness -- kids learn about cultivation, planting fields of rice and vegetables, and study the ecosystem that is all around them and often walks or flies right into their classroom. The school is also design to be a redistribution system, charging full tuition for most, to subsidise Balinese students and programs for local schools and kids, and raising money for similar ends by selling incredibly beautiful bamboo furniture and bamboo houses, to rich expats, for designer-brand prices. That's fine by me!

John Hardy, founder, says his idea is for these Balinese kids to completely skip out on the traditional streams of education, come out green, go to the best schools for environment and public policy and urban planning, and come back to fix Bali and Indonesia. It's an interesting idea that will be proven with time. The architecture here is just stunning.



















The cafe there also bakes the best brownie I have ever tasted. From someone whose sweet tooth fell out early in life, this is very high praise.






















3. mepantigan
I've started doing Mepantigan, a very young martial art (7 years) founded by a gentleman named Putu Witsen. He also teaches other martial arts and outdoorsy stuff at green school.

Mepantigan is great. It's got elements of other fighting styles in it, but focuses on throws and prohibits striking. Fighters wrestle in muddy mud pits or rice fields (where landings are soft), and are applauded for aggression, politeness and friendliness (!!). The folks who do it are all swell.

Mepantigan as a dramatic art incorporates painting, music, firebreathing, acrobatics, comedy, you name it. People love this stuff. Someone once sponsored Putu to go to Denmark once to teach and perform.













This is what it looks like. I'm not in that photo nor did I take it, but I'll do my best to do either of those things soon.

So far, it's great. I've done Mepantigan twice and am getting the hang of being safely thrown (quite fun actually), and safely throwing a person to the ground (Putu says I need to be more aggressive. That figures. The other thing I'm really terrible at is making warcries of effort when throwing someone, which is encouraged, which everyone else does really well).

Rolling in mud is the perfect thing to do on a hot day. I feel like a water buffalo: content.

ramah kelinci

Life trudges on
A shadow following me
It's a cute bunny

These Are The Vistas

The Balinese countryside is stunning. I spent a fair bit of time on the back of a motorbike this weekend as Nenga and I tried to hunt down some scrap metal to fashion into a briquetter for the charcoal we made.











I was completely shocked by how magnificent Bali is. And so big and spacious. I think my sense of scale and size is completely skewed (for islands anyway) from growing up in Singapore (how do they fit all this stuff...on an island??).

I'm surprised how beautiful rice fields can be. I imagined them as the kind of thing I'd shake my fist at and curse people for ruining the landscape, but they're just so small and well arranged and green. People wade in them and work all day. They have a certain honesty to them, you know?











It made me wonder if farmers wake up to their rice fields, that spread from around their house to the place where they meet groves of trees, and see beauty, or do they wake up to their rice fields and see a day of back breaking work?











I clumsily shot a stack of photos from the back of the motorbike while speeding through the countryside. Some turned out okay.











People here are big into kites. Everywhere I went, I would see a sky full of them. It doesn't look so good in pictures, but it's amazing to see in person.

Ides of things

What in the blazes am I actually doing here?

This and that...

High on diesel and gasoline

Talk about pleasant surprises, I was walking down the street the last week, actually looking for a place to buy a SIM card, in a part of town I'm never in, and happened upon a shop called CBS: Cempaka Bali Sakti, translated roughly to Magical (a certain type of) Flower Bali.







<-- that's a cempaka









I like the name, because it's cute, and because it's more than a little misleading. CBS is really what the cool kids say when they mean Ubud Custom Cycles.





check out this bad boy!





Ketot was the first person I talked to there, he's a hefty, mongol looking fellow with a sparse Fu Manchu beard. Pande is a scruffy, scrawny guy with a mini pigtail and faint bleached highlights in his hair, and Komang is a tough (and tiny) woman, the owner's cousin, who Ketot and Pande both introduced to me as their boss (which she denies emphatically).

CBS does a lot of standard repairs, but the staff and clients also have a penchant for custom bikes of all kinds: choppers, street bikes, you name it. CBS is the womb and the nest for the coolest motorcycles in town, and may be the only one of its kind in Bali. I've got a bunch of photos of them but no bandwidth to put them on the internet. I might do a flickr thing when I'm back in Singapore.

The mechanics are always laughing and smiling, and I can feel the sheer enjoyment that they have in working on bikes. They also chain smoke, and have little regard for other shop safety. That said, they are really instinctive and talented hack mechanics and are very skilled and quick with tools and techniques, and with improvising tools and techniques.











Pande cutting a piece of metal with great precision, he's really good with the angle grinder. He's also cutting straight through the metal and into the floor (I guess that's just his style)


I spent a whole afternoon talking to them, taking pictures of them at work, and refusing cigarettes.













Kid riding Pande's crazy wasteland chopper bike. The gearshift lever is between his legs, rather than under his left foot where it is on most bikes. That's Komang in the top left.







Grinding down the ends of spokes so they don't poke the tube and cause flat tyres




















After the first guy gets hit in the eye by a fleck of hot metal (don't worry, he's okay), he hands over to Ketot, who wears eye protection and has no problems with shooting sparks across the workshop



Pande welding on the monster bike.







There's never a dull moment here.