April 19th: Rest Day in Ubud
Day 188
With a little research online I found a bike shop in Ubud. Cher and I walked the 2.5 km to get there, hoping that this wouldn’t be another false lead. The bike shop was there. It was a local bike shop and a hive of industry. In the small gated entryway, 3 men were assembling, disassembling and painting bikes. With heaps of used parts they allowed me to scrounge around until I found an old mountain bike tension shifter. They found another one and for 22,000 IDR I had some parts to at least give Cher more than 3 gears.
Back to the hotel, I hooked it the new shifter and was only able to get 7 speeds out of it. But 21 gears is better than 3 and Cher seemed quite happy with it. Even though it was probably from the 80’s, it was easier on her small sweaty hands than her twist grips. I would really like to find a pair of bar end shifters for her, but I had been in at least a ten shops and haven’t seen a pair.
We also met a lovely couple, Joe and Marilyn, from Christchurch who were attracted by our trikes, they assured we would have no problem in finding local people hosting us for the night. We walked around the town together and coincidentally ran into a royal wedding ceremony.
Our friend Topi, whom we met on the ferry from Batam to Jakarta was also in Bali, and he was staying at a hippie community boarding house right around the corner from us. Cher spotted him on the road as we walked back to our hotel from the bike shop and flagged him down. It was good to see him again. Some people you just met somehow feel like you’ve known for years and Topi falls into this category. He had just returned from Gili Meno, a small sparsely populated island off the coast off Lombok that Cher and I will visit as soon as we get our Indonesia visa extension. We invited him over and utilized our porch and finally got to be the noisy tourists sucking down big cold beers. Much to my relief, the Finnish can get loud when they drink, so I wasn’t the only noisy American.