How much can you fit on one motorbike? Although you can’t see her there’s another child in the middle. So that’s four people, plus the cartons of water and the big package in the footwell, plus the other baggage!!

Holy cow, what is it with this trip? My injuries continue.

This time I’ve been bitten by a luwak, a Balinese civet cat. These are the animals that eat the coffee beans that pass through their gut and are collected from their droppings, to be packaged and sold at ridiculous prices.

A friend of my friend has a couple of these animals as pets and brought one out last night for us to look at. She asked me if I wanted to touch it and hold it. Like a fool, I agreed. “Don’t let it go”, she said, so I held it pretty tightly. But the thing fought like mad and sank its needle teeth into my left hand between thumb and forefinger. She took it back quickly and I rushed to wash the wound and try to stop the bleeding, which since I’m on anti-coagulant medication, was fairly profuse. All the while I was thinking “rabies?!”

The lady assures me that these are captive animals that have no contact with other animals so have no chance to pick up rabies. I hope she’s right. The puncture wounds have healed almost magically overnight and water still seems fine to me, so here’s hoping.

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OK, OK, stop snickering down the back. It’s some kind of vegetable, but we know not what. Who cares?

The civet cat lover is an interesting Russian lady, married to a Balinese artist and living here in Lovina. She does piece work, translating documents of all kinds from Russian to English, (and possibly vice versa?), receiving and sending the work by email. It’s hard work and doesn’t pay very well, but she gets a lot of work. Obviously she’s fluent in English and has picked up the local language very well. She’s a very nice person. I’ve met her here a few times.

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We’ve been told that the internet predicts another major earthquake at 11pm tonight. Whether that’s Eastern Australian Standard Time or Bali time we don’t know.

One of the Austrian guys living here is a geologist and his comment when told this is that this is the first time a scientist has been willing to put his name to a prediction such as this. Yup.