I started this bike trip in Tuktuk, a small tourist village located on Samosir Island in Lake Toba. My plan was to ride north along the west coast to the city of Banda Aceh. This would take me through  the towns of Tapak Tuan, Meulaboh, and Calang. Then I would return either through the central mountains or along the plains of the east coast. My journey ended in the small fishing port of Tanjunbalai, where I caught a ferry to Klang, Malaysia.

When this bike trip began, I had already been in Sumatra for some time, so I was quite familiar with Indonesian food and life in Sumatra in general. For that reason, I don’t write a lot about that kind of stuff. All the excitement of my arrival in a new country and discovering new things had occurred months earlier. So this journal kind of jumps in feet first without a lot of preamble or discussion of the people and culture around me. I was mainly interested in seeing some new places along the coast and in testing out my new Radical Design Cyclone IV trekking trailer.