Brakes. Denpasar, Indonesia

I suddenly hear metal scratching on metal while braking. It turns out my rear brake pads are completely worn out and the steel base is grinding into the steel brake disk. Quite an unpleasant sound and fairly inconvenient as I just started a steep descent into the – aptly named – Sea of Sand on my way to Mount Bromo. This is the KTM Amritsar idiots still haunting me. I asked them to replace the brake pads with the spares I brought myself. This they obviously didn’t. No shock there. But that they kept the new spare pads is kind of surprising… I know, I know, I should have checked before leaving but was too busy shouting expletives at people…

Now, real bikers obviously mostly use the front brakes and I got some abuse from fellow bikers when I mentioned I needed new rear brake pads. Probably not a real biker then… But yeah, rear brakes are admittedly not the most important on your daily commute in Dusseldorf but Indonesia is a different kind of madness. Front brakes, rear brakes, boots scraping the tarmac, you need all the stopping power you can get here surrounded by mental and clearly suicidal drivers. Was actually considering buying an anchor for additional breaking power…

I have been completely accident free for the last 12,000km going through Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia but as soon as I hit Sumatra the carnage started. There are so many scooters and small motorbikes on the roads; it’s virtually impossible to avoid bumping into some. That’s not an issue, I had a couple of scooters drive into my bike and the KTM just shrugs them off. The only thing you hear is the screams of the rider and the screeching of plastic on the street. I don’t even stop anymore when I hear a scooter going down. If you can’t see a two-meter tall guy on a 350kg motorbike, you kind of deserve to kiss the tarmac…

It’s the cars though, which are the real danger. Like in many developing countries, the purchase of brand new sparkly car seems to come with a free lobotomy. People drive their cars like they invincible and expect all smaller traffic to yield for their mighty Japanese hatchbacks. I’m comfortable hooliganning my way through traffic and the KTM is very loud so my fellow road users usually hear and see me coming. Still, there’re the occasional skirmishes…

A dude drives into me and knocks my bike and me over while I’m waiting for a traffic light. He’s unapologetic and feels high and mighty in his Toyota Corolla. That is until I kick a dent in his door with my steel capped boot. He suddenly realises that there’s an actual person underneath that helmet and all the motorbike gear and he tries to get away. To encourage him to stop so we can make sure my bike is fine, I hit his windscreen with my helmet. He still doesn’t stop but the fear in his eyes satisfies me enough to let him get away. Lets be honest, nothing can damage the mighty KTM… A policeman who witnessed the whole fracas from nearby walks over and urges me to drive on, otherwise too much trouble. It seems more for him than for me. As I’m a law-abiding citizen, I get on the bike and drive off.

While overtaking a row of cars, one of the cars in front of my starts overtaking as well, just when I’m next to him, which forces me off the road at a fairly significant speed. I manage to stay upright and at the next intersection a catch up with the car. With a swift leg movement I smash his door mirror clean off his car. The guy is a bit startled by this sudden outburst of anger and meekly asks me why I did that. “Well, you don’t use your mirrors while overtaking so you don’t need them. I did you a fucking favour, no thanks necessary”.

Other minor infractions include drivers flicking their cigarette buts out of the window while I’m riding behind them (flinging a can of coke into their open window while overtaking them takes care of that), cars not giving you the right of way, people opening their doors without looking and a wide variety of people and animals crossing the road obvious to all the traffic. It’s these encounters that make me want to have all the stopping power I can get my hands on.

In Denpasar there’re a couple of bike shops and even a KTM dealer. After the KTM Amritsar debacle, I don’t get my hopes up and this turns out to be a good idea. They have zero spare parts for whatever KTM model… At the hugely impressive Deus Ex Machina shop/restaurant/hipster hangout in Cangu I find a guy who can grind down non KTM brake pads so they will / should fit my KTM. I’m not 100% convinced that this will work so try to find another way to get genuine KTM pads.

This is where the international biker support system comes into play. My mate Steven (with who I rode in Pakistan) buys the parts in Perth, handing them to a dude called Josh from another bike store in Perth, who takes the parts to Bali and delivers them to a Harley Davidson mechanic called Snake.

It’s at Snake’s place that I wait for the brake pads to arrive. In true Indonesia fashion the expected arrival time of the Josh character is prolonged with a couple hours, which I spent trying to install the tailor-made brake pads. These turn out to be not exactly tailored to my bike and only get into the right position with brute force and many, many expletives. Snake’s a large, bald headed, fully tattooed man, dressed in metal studded leather, skull & bones t-shirts and biker boots, who seems like someone with a quite colourful vocabulary as well but even he comes  and asks if I can tone down the cursing a bit.

Eventually the genuine parts arrive and I’m off again. With working brakes, lots of new mates, a couple of tall stories but without an anchor…