The road is a river, awash with monsoon rains. The midday sun has darkened to a candle of light and thunder resounds across the sullen Bali sky.
'It's God's music,' Wayan assures me from inside the shelter of his roadside stall, and for him the weather is indeed a divine blessing. I am the first traveller in months to stop at his stall, on the outskirts of Gianyar, marooned here in my sodden clothes with my mythically deep tourist pockets.
Out in the bitumen stream, a prehistoric bicycle splashes past, its rider bared to the rain but for a pair of saturated trousers that cling to his grasshopper-thin legs. Such stoicism shames me, huddled as I am in the comfort of this temporary asylum. I bid farewell to a disappointed Wayan, who assures me I am both strong and crazy, and head back out into the rain and onto my dripping bicycle.
'You are like ... Neil Armstrong,' Wayan proclaims, though he means Lance Armstrong because I told him of my intention to cycle around Bali.
My journey began in Denpasar a few hours ago. If there is safety in madness it is there, in the turmoil of Bali's largest city. Traffic spins like a centrifuge, with trucks, cars, motorcycles, pushcarts, dogs and pedestrians doing as they please. It's Asia condensed to a small island, and my bicycle barely registers in its mind. Horns sound without end but within an hour I have learned to ignore them. They seem to say nothing and everything: 'hello', 'move aside', 'good luck' or, simply, 'I have a horn'. Trucks lumber by but only one comes close to hitting me, a truck named God Bless II that almost blesses me head-on.
Denpasar sprawls east to blur into Gianyar, the roadside an unholy alliance of temples, urban rice fields and stores advertising PlayStation and the machismo of cigarettes. Each time I stop, motorcycles pull alongside, their riders asking the question I answer dozens of times each day: 'Where you go?' Any reply will suffice, usually the next town or village.