Tuesday, March 8, 2016

6:50 a.m. Wismah Idola, Perdagangan, Sumatra

I could have and probably should have gotten up earlier this morning. I was awake around 4:30 and probably well-rested (since I went to bed early), but I was enjoying my comfortable air-conditioned room too much, and I stayed in bed until later.

I’m awake now largely because of the strange habits of truck drivers. It’s the same around the world. The long-distance truck drivers generally travel in groups, and they all stay at the same hotels. Then in the morning, one man is given the task of making sure everyone is awake and ready to go. It’s a good system except for the one flaw that they can never remember what rooms they are in. So they knock on the wrong doors all the time and shout loudly. In my case, one guy opened the door to my room, walked inside and turned on the light. He stood there and stared at me in bed for a couple of seconds—confused—and then turned around, turned off the light and left. He never said a word. I had thrown the latch on my door, of course, but I guess it didn’t catch or was too loose. In any event, the guy just walked right in. It’s better than the alternative, though. Truck drivers the world over also like to get drunk, and they come back late at night and again can’t find the right room. Then they stumble into your room drunk and loud and crazy or they bang on the doors and shout a lot.

I appear to be in relatively good shape considering that I cycled for 60 kilometers yesterday in extremely difficult conditions. The one injury I’m noticing is to my elbow joints. They were quite sore yesterday, and as I sit here on my bed with the computer on my lap, I find it painful to lift my cup of coffee to my lips. This doesn’t surprise me. My joints have been getting less silky smooth in their operation the last few years. It was quite painful yesterday to rest my arms on my handlebars. But other than that, I seem to be okay. I was careful about applying sunscreen (for a change), and I didn’t burn to a crisp as I would normally have done. And nothing else seems particularly sore or strained.

The plan was to ride to a town called Lima Puluh and spend the night there. It was about 40 kilometers from Kisaran. People said there were no hotels there, but I figured I could always find someplace to stay. If not, I have my tent. As it turned out, there WAS a hotel in Lima Puluh. I found it quite easily. My experience with that supports my theory that local people are the worst when it comes to providing information in countries like Indonesia. My friend Al had asked his good friend—a policeman in Lima Puluh – and this policeman had said there was no accommodation at all. When I arrived in Lima Puluh, everyone told me there was nothing. No hotels. I was speaking to a large group inside a shop about this when one person spoke up and said that there was a hotel. She pointed vaguely down the street and indicated it was on the left. I cycled there and found a long type of strip mall. I asked a couple of people in this strip mall, and they all said there were no hotels in Lima Puluh. But when I got to the end of the strip mall, there it was – a clearly marked and very large hotel. Plain as day. So even the businesses that were sharing commercial space with the hotel were not aware of its presence. That seems impossible, but I encounter this poor local knowledge all the time.

Finding the hotel didn’t help me out that much. I’m not picky about conditions. I didn’t mind that this hotel was a dump. It was practically abandoned, and the rooms were dirty and uncared for. The problem was that despite being a total dump, they charged high prices. My wonderful room in Kisaran in a professionally run hotel offering tons of services including strong Wi-Fi and a private bathroom and room service cost $8 Canadian a night. This hotel in Lima Puluh was charging $25, and they had none of those services. Their cheapest room – a disgusting one with just a bare mattress with a stinky and dirty bathroom down the hall – still went for $12.50. So based on a lack of value, I decided to give this hotel a pass and see if there was something better on offer. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that I should continue cycling and cover some more ground. My goal was to get to Siantar by the next day (today), and there was a rumor that I’d be facing steep climbs. So I didn’t want to leave myself with a very difficult final day. Instead of being overcharged for this terrible room, I could just keep cycling, eat up some more kilometers, and then stay in my tent. As it turned out, I got lucky and I didn’t even have to do that.

My luck came in the form of a chance encounter with a large group of men and women sitting in plastic chairs outside of a type of government office. They saw me cycling around Lima Puluh checking the place out, and they waved at me and called out a greeting. On impulse, I turned my bike around and pulled in for a chat with them. They pulled up a chair for me and plied me with some delicious fried snacks. I think they had had some kind of a lunch meeting, and they had leftovers. The best was a type of fried banana. Very tasty. When I left, they gave me a huge bag of these fried snacks. I had it for dinner last night, and it will be my breakfast this morning and probably my lunch, too. Hopefully, it doesn’t rampage through my digestive system.

We didn’t have the deepest of conversations, of course. One man served as the de facto interpreter and interrogator and I was asked the usual questions about where I was from, my name, my age, why I wasn’t married, and all that stuff. In the midst of the interrogation, I tossed out some questions and statements that I hoped would lead to information that would help me on my travels. Even though I knew about the hotel in Lima Puluh, I still asked about accommodation. It was kind of a sneaky ploy on my part, because once they knew I was searching for a place to stay, there was the possibility that someone would offer me a room in their home. I also managed to sneak in a reference to my tent and camping gear inside my trailer. By doing so, I was laying the groundwork for possibly setting up my tent on city grounds and camping.

They didn’t seem to know about the hotel in Lima Puluh, but one of them said that there was a hotel in the next town up the road toward Siantar—a place called Perdagangan. I had been wondering about that myself. On Google Maps, I had seen a cluster of buildings built around a fork in a wide river. It looked like a much more interesting place than Lima Puluh. In the back of my mind, I was working on a plan to cycle there. If I was going to sleep in my tent, I figured I might as well go for a more scenic place than Lima Puluh. My informant told me that there was a losmen (hotel) in this town. He said it was called the Idola. He typed that out for me on my smart phone. I find that I can’t understand what people are saying because of their accent, particularly when they provide names. It’s better if they type them out.

This made sense to me because during the day, I had actually seen a couple of hotels along the highway. And the road to Siantar is also the road to the Lake Toba area. Tourist attractions like Lake Toba tend to lead to the construction of hotels. I figured there might be hotels along the road. And there was so much truck traffic on the highway, I figured there had to be accommodation along the way for the drivers. Truck drivers usually stay in cheap places. In Ethiopia, the small hotels I found catered to truck drivers, bus drivers, and other local travelers. It made sense there would be similar places here.

After taking some pictures with the people at the government office, I packed up the food they gave me and got back on the road. It was still relatively early. I had left Kisaran at 9:15 and I’d arrived in Lima Puluh at 12:30. It was now around 2:00 or 2:30. This new town was only 10 kilometers up the road. It would take me an hour to get there, and that would leave me more than enough time too look for a place to stay and get settled. I had high hopes for the Idola. My understanding, whether correct or not, is that a losmen is cheaper than a hotel. And they kept calling the Idola a losmen. So I hoped it was budget accommodation. There was no guarantee of that, however. Something else I’ve noticed is that people here have different ideas of what is cheap. It’s a strange phenomenon considering that the local people tend to think of all foreigners as super rich and they think of themselves as very poor. Yet, when it comes to the type of travel one does on a bicycle, the opposite is true. I have a very tight budget, and my idea of cheap accommodation is often very different from that of the locals. This never makes sense to me because local people will usually refer me to very expensive hotels and restaurants while calling them very cheap. This is kind of what happened with the Idola.

While chatting with the government folk, I asked them if the Idola was expensive. They said no, no, no, it was very cheap. In my mind, I was hoping for simple no-frills lodging. The reality turned out to be somewhere in between. I found the Idola very easily. Arriving in this new town, you cross a bridge over a wide river. Then you turn left up a steep climb and that brings you to the main street. It was much busier and much drabber and dirtier than I expected. I have to say that there is little to recommend these Indonesian towns and cities. They are generally ugly and utilitarian. Lima Puluh and this new place were among the worst that I had seen. I know that if you stayed longer, you would start to uncover the charm of the place, but on first arriving, it did not make a good impression. I rode my bike down the main street slowly. I was looking for the Idola as well as for other businesses that might come in handy. Quite soon, I saw a big sign on the main road that read “Wismah Idola”. I believe the word “Wismah” means business or company. The sign indicated that the Idola was +/- 200 meters down a narrow lane. I smiled at the +/-. It was a nice touch.

The Idola was inside a big bright green building. I’m not quite sure what it looked like. It didn’t look like simple lodging. It did not look like a hostel. But it didn’t seem like a hotel, either. The entrance was just a tiny door with few markings. Inside, I saw a dark and unoccupied front desk. It was small and tucked away to the right, largely forgotten. On the left, I found a large room where three young women were clustered around their smart phones and giggling. I assumed they worked at this place, and I indicated that I was looking for a room. There was a little bit of confusion but not a huge amount. After a while, we made our way to the dark front desk, and they presented me with a laminated list of their accommodation. My heart sank a little bit when I saw the prices. They went up to 250,000 rupiah or more. The simplest room still came with a TV, air conditioning, and a private bathroom, so it cost 135,000 rupiah. That’s very good value, of course. For $13.50 Canadian, you’re not going to get a hotel room like this in Canada. But for my budget, it is a luxury. A tough cyclist would have moved on and pitched his tent, but I honestly couldn’t see doing that. How does one do that? I was in a pitiful state. My clothing was drenched in sweat. Absolutely drenched from top to bottom. I was leaving puddles as I walked around. My entire body was just a liquid mess. I was also covered in dirt and overheated. Physically, I was in okay shape, but I had still cycled 60 kilometers by this point, and I was a bit tired. I couldn’t imagine just crawling into a tent at that time of the day and just lying there sweltering and sweating. It would be different if there was a nearby water source—a clean river or a clean lake or a waterfall or a water tap – and I could rinse off and cool down, but there was no guarantee of finding something like that.

I asked to see the room, and the women brought me over to a second building. I was glad to see that the room was on the ground floor. That would make it much easier to bring in my trailer and even my bicycle. Certainly better than carrying everything up three flights of narrow and dangerous stairs like I did in Kisaran. I was also happy to see that the room came with its own miniature water jug and there was a full-sized water dispenser outside. So I wouldn’t have to go searching for water in the city. The air conditioner was a new-looking Samsung, and the room was already nice and cold with the air conditioner running. There was a big TV on the wall (though I never turned it on). The bed was a small single bed, but it was comfortable and had clean sheets. And the bathroom had an actual western style toilet. I’m not sure when I last encountered one of those. There was even a shower head in the bathroom. I didn’t use that, however. The water came out in a thinnish stream, and it was much better to just use the big garbage can and fill it with water and dump it on my head with a scoop.

After being concerned about paying for air conditioning when I didn’t really need it, I have to say that it has been wonderful to have. Quality of life goes way way way up when you are cool and dry. In all other places, just the physical effort of getting dressed leaves me drenched in sweat. It’s nice to be able to move around normally and not start sweating. Having a full bathroom is also nice. I instantly tore off my sweat-drenched clothes and dumped it into the garbage can filled with water. I rinsed it all out several times and then hung it to dry. It’s so much nicer to start the day with fresh clothes rather than clothes that are stiff with salt and dried sweat. Clothes also start to stink very fast when left in that condition. Rinsing it out makes a huge difference.

After I settled in, I went out for a walk around Perdagangan. Second impressions were no better than the first. It struck me as an awful place to live. Most of the town was built around the main road and there was a never-ending flow of crazy traffic, noise, exhaust fumes, and dust. I’m sure it has its charms, but they stayed hidden during my walk. I went to the bridge and looked at the river for a while. On my way back, I stopped at a fruit stall. A young man there offered me a seat. He didn’t speak much English, but he explained that he was a type of collector. After a lot of questions and answers, I figured out that he worked for a private lending company. It was like a bank but less formal—like a loan shark. It was his job to track down clients and collect the daily payments. The difference, he explained, is that when you borrow money from the bank, you have to make a payment once a month. When you borrow money from his company, you pay every day. (I assume the interest rate is higher, but we didn’t get into that. I also assume that if you don’t pay, you risk getting your legs broken by an enforcer, but we didn’t get into that either.) There was a simple system for keeping track of payments. Each customer was assigned a sheet of paper divided into numbered squares. Each square represented one payment. If a person had to pay the loan back in 50 installments, there would be 50 squares. While I was there, a person came up and made a small daily payment. The collector added the money to his thick wad and then tore off a tiny square of paper with the number 23 on it. He gave that to the man. This was his receipt. This would happen every day until all the squares were gone. Then his loan would have been repaid. It was fascinating to hear about how this worked.

Later on, I had another very interesting encounter. I ran into a young man standing in front of a house with a lot of bird cages out front. I stopped to look at the birds, and I ended up chatting with this young man for a long time over coffee. His name was Adi, and he spoke English well enough for us to communicate easily. He worked for a Swiss company that manufactured pesticides. He was in sales and marketing, and he drove around the countryside on a company motorcycle and sold this company’s products. I think he also handled payments and deliveries. He got the job straight out of college. I guess there was some kind of college system in place to connect graduates with potential employers, and Adi sent his CV by email to the company offices in Switzerland. He was hired, and the rest is history.

Since Adi spoke English, he was a wealth of information. I was struck during the day by the vast number of cars and motorcycles on the road. Our image of Indonesia is of a poor country, but if it is so poor, how can everyone afford such fancy vehicles? I’d heard bits of this story before, and Adi confirmed that almost no one owns their motorcycles or scooters outright. They can afford them because there is a very good system of credit available. They pay a certain amount as a down payment and then they pay monthly. And it is easy to get this credit. Everyone does it. Still, it seems difficult to afford. As Adi confirmed, the average salary is 2 million rupiah a month. Yet the payment on a motorcycle is 700,000 rupiah a month. That’s a big chunk of their salary. How can they possibly then cover rent and food and such things? The obvious answer is that most of them don’t. People here still live in tight family groups. They will live with their parents and an extended family and much of the costs of accommodation and food is shared among them. So it’s cheaper. They can’t afford to rent their own houses and buy their own food.

Adi also confirmed what Al had told me—that the vast windowless concrete buildings I’d been seeing everywhere were homes for birds. The nests of these birds are used in making bird nest soup, so they are quite valuable. It still makes little sense to me. These buildings are massive and numerous. It seems crazy to build such large structures for birds. But the economics must work out. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

We were sitting outside Adi’s home in plastic chairs while we talked, and the activity of the neighborhood swirled around us. It was very nice. He ordered two cups of coffee from a woman with a little stall on the corner. The coffee was typically Indonesian—extremely hot and black and sweet. I commented on the amount of sugar in Indonesian cuisine and Adi said that was why there was so much diabetes in Indonesia. I’d heard the same stories in the Philippines.

Going back in time a bit, the bike ride to get to Perdagangan was not terribly difficult, as I said. The hardest part was probably just leaving my room in Kisaran. I had to do a lot of packing and organizing before I left. That left me drenched in sweat at every stage, and I took constant bucket baths to cool down. I decided to try to carry the trailer down with the wheels and the tow arm attached. That would save me one trip, but more importantly, it would allow me to wheel the trailer from the room and down the hallways. If I kept the wheels off, I’d have to carry the trailer the entire time. By leaving the wheels on, it was a bit more awkward to carry down the stairs, but it was far easier to move it around.

When I bought the trailer, I was concerned about it fitting through doorways. I asked for all kinds of measurements in advance, and I was pleased that even with the wheels attached, it fit through even narrow doorways. It takes some muscle power to lift the trailer and hold it steady in your arms, but with the proper technique, it wasn’t that hard to carry it down the stairs despite the stairs being the narrowest and steepest I’d ever seen. One slip, and I’d be badly injured. I took it slowly and carefully, and my arms got quite tired by the time I reached the bottom, but I got there. Then I had the pleasure of just wheeling the trailer along the long hallway to the parking garage and attaching it to my bike. I had a padlock on the zipper, so I didn’t really have to worry about leaving it unattended while I returned for my other bags. That’s a key advantage of the trailer over pannier bags in my opinion.

Once the trailer was secured, I went back up to my room to get my two pannier bags and the three bottles of water. I took the time to take another shower and make sure I hadn’t left anything behind. I’m very careful about that, and I have a routine whereby I check the room over before I leave. That includes the bathroom, every wall, every hook, and under the bed. I usually even fold the sheets (if there are sheets) just to make sure that nothing was left on the bed or wrapped up in the sheets. It is extremely easy to leave valuable things behind, and I make sure that I don’t.

I put one pannier bag on my back like a knapsack and carried the second one plus the water bottles in my arms. That meant having to make only two trips from my room to the bike to pack up. And it meant that at no point was there a security risk. With pannier bags, it’s much more complicated. I’d normally have to make three or even four trips to carry all six bags (four pannier bags plus the tent plus the sleeping bag) and the water bottles and the bungee cords. It’s a bit of a disorganized mess. Plus, when I bring down the first set of gear, I have to attach it all to the bike. Otherwise, anyone could just grab a bag and run off with it. So I attach the pannier bags and strap on this or that other bag. But the bike is only partially loaded at this point, and if you don’t do it carefully and in the right order, the bike becomes unbalanced and tends to fall over. You really have to work out a system. Then I have to return to the room for the next load of bags. Meanwhile, the various unlocked pockets and compartments on my pannier bags are vulnerable to thieves. So I have to move fast. With the trailer, I’m more confident, and I can go back to my room for a more leisurely shower and final preparations. In Kisaran, for example, I could take the time to shower and then carefully apply sunscreen before I went down with my other bags. Using just pannier bags, I’d be nervous about taking so much time, and I’d rush and end up all hot and sweaty before I’d even gotten on my bike.

Anyway, that struck me as an advantage to the trailer. Other people might not find it to be an advantage. I just tend to be obsessed with routines and efficient systems. I’m still getting used to the trailer, as evidenced by my experiences of the trip itself. For one thing, I forgot to move the wheels on the trailer. The trailer has two sets of axle holes. You put the wheels in the back holes when you use it as luggage. Then when you attach it to your bike and use it as a trailer, you move the wheels to the center axle holes. This means the weight is centered over the wheels and not resting on the tow arm and on your bicycle. I rode away from the hotel in Kisaran and went about two kilometers before I realized that I hadn’t moved the wheels. They were still in the back position. I did the same thing twice before—once when I left from my WarmShowers home in Klang and then again when I left from the harbor in Tanjungbalai. It’s not a disaster or anything. The trailer works just fine, but it’s better to have the wheels in the proper position. I assume I’ll eventually master that.

Riding with the trailer was fairly uneventful. It tracks well. I had to think about it all the time and be aware of it, but it wasn’t a huge problem. The bigger problem, I’ve discovered, is that when you turn to the right, the trailer has a somewhat large turning radius. If you try to turn quickly, the tow arm of the trailer hits the rear wheel. You have to make a very wide turn when you turn right. I kept forgetting that and getting in trouble. Turning left is okay. The way the trailer attaches to the bike, the tow arm doesn’t interfere with a left turn. But it does interfere with a right turn. That’s a very big flaw with this trailer. Unfortunately, with this design, it’s unavoidable. My old BOB trailer used an entirely different system, and you could make much tighter turns. However, it has a totally different design—one that is far less efficient in terms of balance and handling and packing. It also puts a lot of weight on the bike and is much, much more difficult to attach to the bike. It’s a trade-off that comes with the various mounting systems. There is one other mounting system that attaches directly to the seat post. I’ve never used one like that myself, so I don’t know what the pros and cons might be.

I was lucky in that it was a somewhat cloudy day, and I wasn’t roasted by the sun at all times. It was still hot, and I sweat the entire time. And when the sun came out, it was brutal. But it was bearable. I kept a hand towel on the handlebars and wiped my face all the time to keep the sweat out of my eyes as much as possible. I also stopped often to wipe down and have a drink of water and check over the bike to make sure everything was okay. There was a lot of traffic, and I had to keep as far to the side of the road as possible. There was also a fair amount of honking to deal with, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as in other countries. It was bearable, too. There was no possibility of listening to music or podcasts as I rode. Tons of people called out greetings, and I had to be able to hear them and respond or be thought rude. I stopped just once for a drink. This was at a small fly-ridden spot, and I had a delicious mango smoothie. Beyond that, I also passed by the largest mosque in Sumatra and I took a picture. I also passed very large rubber plantations. I stopped one time to check it out, and I took some pictures of the rubber sap flowing down through the cuts in the tree and then going into the buckets. It was interesting to see. I put a finger into the rubber sap to see what its texture was like. It was, as expected, very rubbery—it was smooth and slippery, almost like white Elmer’s glue.

And I think that brings me to the end of my story. Time is passing, and I have to get on the road if I want to make it to Siantar at a reasonable hour. I probably should have left long ago, but I wanted to type out this story in the comfort of my air conditioned palace. I’ve had two cups of coffee with my wonderful plastic kettle, and I’ve had a breakfast of the fried snacks that I got yesterday. There are still tons left.

I mentioned already the truck drivers that have been knocking on my door and opening my door. Well, another man came to my door and he seemed to be offering me a cup of tea. He was also either telling me that I could buy breakfast somewhere or he was asking me for money so he could buy breakfast. I’m not sure which. Then another man knocked on my door. I’d never seen him before and I had no idea who he was, but he wanted to take a selfie with me. We took one together just outside my door. Then I convinced him to go the lobby where there was bright sunlight, and we took a better picture there. A few minutes later, he returned and he appeared to be asking me if I wanted a massage. He was clearly making gestures that indicated a massage, but who knows what he really meant. As nice as a massage would feel, I was in the middle of coffee and breakfast, and I told him I wasn’t interested. It was a strange little encounter.

Well, time to pack up and see about covering the forty kilometers to Siantar. The original idea was to get there before 4:00. That’s when the immigration office closes. It’s 9 a.m. now. I should be on the road by 9:30, maybe by 10. Assuming the road isn’t too steep and hilly, I should be able to reach there by 2 or 3 o’clock. Time to shut down.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01