YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Feels good. Really good.

For those of you not aware of the schedule, we have arrived in Bali. In fact, we completed our final cycling leg Tuesday morning, and have been kicking back and cutting loose solid for the last 48 hours. OK, so maybe we slept a bit. Or perhaps we slept a lot, but honestly I think we earned it.

As Two Beat mentioned, the time between full posts has been very long, which does a lot to dull the emotional intensity of many of the things you've all been hanging on the edge of your seats to read about. I'll try now to give a bit of a blow-by-blow account of the final stages of the trip, and what we've already managed to get up to now that we have some excess energy to burn off.

We had our first genuine rest day in Solo, the day we spoke at the high school. By genuine, I mean that our total altitude gain was less than 1km, and in fact it may even have been close to zero if Intan's dad hadn't convinced us to visit what turned out to be a truly spectacular waterfall. Definitely a great way to relax and recover.

It came as a surprise how little the rest day did to help repair our legs. I know for my part at least that the burning agony of any kind of height change whilst walking around had remained relatively unchanged. It may also surprise, however, that this really doesn't seem to have too much of a negative effect on cycling ability. Starting off is all kinds of painful, but once the blood gets flowing to your legs and you find a rhythm everything feels better, and if you're really lucky you may even feel good enough to enjoy the scenery.

Fortunately our legs actually improved in the following days leading up to our final mountain, Semeru. This was our biggest yet, and required two days to complete. It was a relatively light hike on the first day, which we completed in around 4 hours of walking, with a lunch break in the middle. We managed to dodge the rain, which was nice - a large group of mostly girls who were also doing the hike were not so lucky. We were quite worried about how much of a hard time they must have been having, and were going to have, but were later to discover that many of them were not climbing the volcano, only hiking to one of the camps.

Unfortunately, Two Beat came down with a nasty bit of fever/flu/something, and had to sit out the summit ascent. I suppose I should say sleep out, because the walk to the top began for me and Matt at 3am. We reached the summit at about 6, and it was one of the most spectacular views I have ever been lucky enough to experience. During the climb, before sunrise, we could see the lights from cities and towns surrounding the mountain. After first light civilization became much harder to see, so that the landscape appeared almost prehistoric, complete with Bromo, a very active volcano, smoking in the background.

The hike back from base camp to the crew was unpleasant, despite a spectacularly beautiful turn in the weather, because we didn't bring enough water. We did have a large variety of seafood flavoured chips, but they really were no substitute for fluids.

Then began our final three days of riding. Two Beat, who was still feeling quite sick, described the situation quite accurately when he pointed out that previously, we weren't sure if we had it in us to complete our journey, so we had to ride. Now that we're so close, we know we can do it, so what's the point? This became even more the case when we arrived on Java's east coast, and began riding down to Banyuwangi. Why were we doing it? We were AT the eastern coast, and all that remained was to reach our self-selected, arbitrary stopping point.

But make it we did. Fortunately, the ocean wasn't particularly close, otherwise our bikes may have been cast out to sea in celebration. As it happened, just getting off them for the last time was enough.

Now on to Bali, and good times for all. Our first full day we spent at WaterBom; similar to Adventure World, only with superior slides and far less people. We also visited Uluwatu Temple, where we watched the sunset. I thought that this was one of the more relaxing and beautiful places I have been to. The mood was only occasionally broken when one of the local inhabitants attempted to steal things from you - we saw one monkey try to take the glasses right off a woman's face. I would like to digress here about how perceptive monkeys are about whether you are paying attention to them, as tested by Two Beat, but I really should finish off.

Yesterday we went jet skiing, and by previous jokes about the instability of some of our group members came back to haunt me. Whether it was the prophecy of the bikes and the ditch coming true, or revenge for my comments about his mental state, or just that I am the one who is unstable, I managed to come of the back of a jet ski that Two Beat was driving, and rather badly bruise my rib. Irritatingly, it hasn't left so much as a discolouration, so all of my moaning and groaning seems a bit over the top, but I promise you it really did (and does) hurt.

Now it is Saturday, and we are preparing to end what has definitely been, from my point of view, the holiday with the greatest number of ups and downs, both in mental state and in altitude.That said, if you ever get the opportunity, I would strongly recommend this style of holiday. The pleasure to be had from working so hard to achieve a goal really can't be properly expressed in this blog. Hopefully the relatively few posts we've managed to put up are, if not always strictly positive, at least sincere enough to inspire some others to try something similar. I look forward to reading your own posts about whatever it is you decide to do :-)

Signing off,
Smokin' Mike