Monday, March 7, 2016

6:30 a.m. Hotel Cahaya Asahan, Kisaran, Sumatra

Just a quick note to start my day. Today, I plan to ride to the town of Lima Puluh. It’s only about forty kilometers away, so I think I have plenty of time. However, I’d like to get on the road relatively early in the morning. Ideally, I’d already be loading up my bike and leaving. But since this is only day two of my actual bike ride around Sumatra, being awake and drinking coffee at 6:30 is pretty good. If I’m on the road by 9 o’clock, that is still acceptable. It’s not clear if I’ll actually spend the night in Lima Puluh. I thought there would be some kind of hotel there, but I’ve gotten information that there isn’t. And since it is the largest town between here and my destination of Siantar, that means there is no accommodation at all between here and there. If I were in shape, I’d ride the full distance to Siantar today. It’s about 90 kilometers. But I don’t think I’m capable of that right now and keeping my sanity. Physically, I could do it. But I wouldn’t be very happy about it. And there is the issue of steep climbs. The route from here to Lima Puluh is flat. But once I reach that town, I’ll be turning west and heading toward the mountainous interior of Sumatra. I’ve heard horror stories of just how steep the roads can be, and the road to Siantar might present some challenges.

I’m going to Siantar because there is an immigration office there, and I need to apply for a visa extension on Wednesday. My current visa expires on Thursday. So I have two days to get to Siantar. That’s cutting it tight, but it should be okay, especially since I already got sponsorship papers from Al’s wife. Siantar is the second largest city in this province of Sumatra, so that should be interesting.

I spent my day in Kisaran mostly relaxing and getting caught up on busy work. As I wrote earlier, my short ride from Tanjungbalai to here in the hot sun really did me in. I was pretty beat up—physically and emotionally. It was a good idea to just hang out here and relax in my nice room. I fiddled with my gear from time to time and made small repairs and adjustments. For example, I keep breaking one arm of my glasses. I did it again the very morning I left from Tanjungbalai. So I had to superglue them back together again. I need these glasses to be able to read maps and such things as my eyes get worse and worse. Such a pain.

I only went out for one short walk around the city during the entire day. I’m sure there were lots of interesting areas to explore, but I didn’t have the energy to do that. I didn’t even break out my real camera. I just brought my smart phone and snapped a few pictures here and there. I also stopped at a small roadside eatery for a typical Indonesian meal called bubur, which translates roughly as porridge. It’s rice porridge, and you can have it with lots of different additions. I had the chicken bubur, and it was pretty good. I like simple meals like that. The problem is that they are not big enough to constitute a full meal. I’d have to order two or three of them to feel really full. The bowl of rice porridge came with vegetables, some kind of crackers, diced chicken, and a boiled egg. It cost $1.20 Canadian.

My local friend Al went to a bird singing competition in Lima Puluh in the morning. Later in the day, I sent him a message asking how it went and he said that his birds won both first and second place. That’s amazing, and it puts a solid three million rupiah or more in his pocket—about $300 Canadian. That’s a lot of money here. Al invited me out for dinner with his wife to celebrate. They came to my hotel at around 7:45 to pick me up in their car. Then we drove to their favorite restaurant. I forget the full name but it had the word Bamboo in it. So I’ll call it Bamboo.

Bamboo was a good place to eat. It was an open restaurant. It’s not like a restaurant in Canada where you walk through doors into a building. Few places are like that here. Instead, it’s like a big roof with no walls over a big area containing maybe twenty tables. It wasn’t that busy when we were there. A waitress came to our table and gave us menus. She smiled a lot and was very friendly to me. I was a bit tired unfortunately. I find I often get tired at night, and I can’t enjoy things as much as I’d like. I’m much better in the morning. But it was still enjoyable.

Al and his wife took over the ordering. I just put in a special request for some plain rice and a piece of fried or baked chicken. I was hoping to have an easy meal. I didn’t want to be challenged by crabs and clams and lobsters and who knows what monsters of the ocean. Seafood is generally considered a treat, and they serve it to guests. Yet, I dislike seafood. But things worked out well. The plain rice was just plain rice as ordered. The chicken turned out to be an entire platter of delicious boneless chunks of chicken wrapped and cooked in banana leaves. I could eat that every day and be happy. There was also a delicious vegetable soup. The broth of the soup was very thick—more like a sauce. It reminded me of a Chinese dish. There was also a plate of fantastic tofu with a tasty sauce and veggies. It also seemed like a Chinese dish to me. So I was in heaven, and I ate my fill. The only challenging dish they ordered was a platter of clams. I’m not a fan of clams, but there was so much other food that it wasn’t a problem. In fact, they ordered so much food that it was a bit of an effort to finish it all. As always seems to happen, Al and his wife finished their meal before I’d even started. I’m a slow eater. And I also had a delicious fruit smoothie made from a fruit I didn’t recognize. It had white flesh. We translated it into English and it came up as sour sop. I’d never even heard of it before. Then again, I’m not a fruit expert.

When the meal was over, Al drove me along the route I’d need to follow to leave Kisaran and get to the highway going to Lima Puluh. It is a pretty big road, so I don’t know how much fun it will be. But on the way, I’ll be passing the largest mosque in Sumatra. It is one of the sights of Kisaran, so at least I will be doing my duty as a tourist. I always feel bad about that. Local people keep plying me with suggestions of all the beautiful things I should see and all the beautiful sights I should take in. Yet, I’m more interested in trivial details. For example, I’m more interested in just walking around this neighborhood than in going to see the big mosque.

Al’s wife also had a fairly typical reaction to my plans to cycle to Siantar—she was horrified by it. She kept coming back to that topic and how hot and difficult and dangerous it would be to ride my bike. She kept suggesting other ways of travel – “Why don’t you take a bus?” and things like that. I tried to get across the idea that even though I plan to ride my bike to various places, I have no particular interest in the places themselves. I’m interested in the places in between. Sure, if my goal was to see Banda Aceh, I could just go there. But that’s not the point. Even so, when people bring this up, I find it saps my energy. When ten people in a row go on and on and on about how terrible it will be to ride a bicycle, I start to believe them and I lose my motivation. I’ve come across this phenomenon many times. If you hang out with people from Canada or the US or Europe or Australia, you get encouragement. They will talk about how amazing it is to travel by bicycle, and you feel full of energy. But when you hang out with Indonesians, you get nothing but discouragement. They feel bad that you will be sweating and struggling up steep mountain climbs, and they really want you to abandon this mad plan and take a bus instead. After a while, I start to see their point.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01