Wednesday August 15, 2018
6:30 a.m. Room 10, Kana Wisma
Meureudu, Aceh, Sumatra

Well, I’m afraid it is that time again, the time for a graphic account of being very ill. This has been a very bad one so far, but I also got a bit lucky. The lucky part is that I made it through the entire day of cycling and getting a hotel room and getting a meal and getting drinking water before the illness really hit. And, through no choice of my own, I ended up with a room with a private bathroom. I tried very hard to find a cheap room with a shared bath, but none of the hotels here had that kind of room. So even though I didn’t want to pay for it, I got a room with a private bathroom for 150,000 rupiah. And I ended up being VERY happy to have that bathroom. I’ve spent most of my time in there.

I couldn’t imagine what my day would have been like had the illness struck in the middle of the day while riding. I’d have been screwed. I even rode down to the beach area of this town with the intention of finding a camping site. Now I’m very glad that didn’t work out. I was also lucky in that I started to feel really bad and weird just as I was about to have a big spaghetti dinner. I’d boiled the spaghetti, and I was about to drain it, add the spaghetti sauce and eat it, but I had this strange sensation in my abdomen. It was a very odd one. Something was clearly wrong. I stood above my spaghetti for a minute or two and wondered if I should risk eating it. I didn’t want to go hungry the entire night. But, if past illnesses were anything to go by, I did NOT want to add any more fuel to the fire in my digestive tract.

 

I say that because somewhere weird has been happening lately. In the old days, when I got sick, the sickness was present from top to bottom. Everything from my stomach to every inch of intestines was a roiling bacteria-infested hot zone. But lately, something different happens. Whatever valve is between my stomach and my intestines now closes tight. It locks up tighter than Fort Knox, and nothing is allowed to pass from my stomach into my intestines. This effectively creates two separate disaster zones with different symptoms and different pain. And anything that I eat or drink just goes into my stomach and stays there. Even as I am desperately emptying my intestines into the toilet and howling with pain, the contents of my stomach stay fixed. It doesn’t move on, so my body can’t expel it. So I was very glad that I didn’t add a couple pounds of spaghetti to that nasty mix. With the valve sealed shut, the only way for the contents of my stomach to get cleared is by vomiting, and I hate vomiting. It tears me apart.

As far as graphic details go, there are two important details. The first is that this was pure liquid diarrhea. It was essentially brown water, and it blasted out of my butt with what felt like the force of a fire hose. I don’t usually experience that kind of illness. And it didn’t come in huge volumes at a time. It came in like eight ounces at a time. A cup of this horrid liquid would make it to the exit, and I’d have to waddle to the bathroom as fast as I could and squat down (it’s an Asian toilet) and spray it out like I was watering a garden. Then I had to clean up before returning to bed. Twenty minutes later, another eight ounces of liquid would be knocking on the door and I’d have to rush back. I couldn’t get rid of it all at once.

On the positive side, I wasn’t in nearly as much pain as I usually am. I was in pain and I wanted to die, but not, as I usually do, die instantly. I figured I could wait until the morning before I died. So the pain was not up to its usual standards that would have me rolling around on the cold, wet floor moaning, curled up with my eyes shut.

This process went on for the entire night. And I was as weak as a kitten. I couldn’t do anything. My legs and arms were like noodles. All I could do was lie down on the bed and wait until the next time I had to rush to the bathroom. And this went on for hours. I swear I must have lost thirty pounds in liquid.

 

The second horrifying detail has occupied the last hour or hour and a half. I was woken up by the usual five a.m. call to prayer from the many mosques in this neighborhood. I had been bitten by a lot of mosquitoes during the night, so I took an antihistamine to reduce the itching. And this antihistamine really makes me sleepy. In any event, I lay there on the bed listening to the call to prayer, and I felt a sudden urgency down in the nether regions. But I was so tired and so weak that I just couldn’t get out of bed. I’d also put up my mosquito net during the night and fighting my way out of it seemed like so much hard work. So I just lay there for a few minutes with my butt clenched as I pondered going to the bathroom. Unfortunately, at some point I actually fell back to sleep. And I woke up to the horrific sensation of fire hosing diarrhea all over the bed and all over my body.

It was nasty. And getting out of bed without spreading this horror all over the room and all over everything was so hard. I had to somehow climb out from under the mosquito net (which was tucked in on all sides of the mattress), and keep it from touching the bed with one hand while with the other hand I was trying to pull up the sheet from the corners and gather it up so that I could take it to the bathroom and rinse it. And I had to do this fast because the diarrhea. was soaking through the sheet and getting into the mattress itself. And it was running down my legs and getting all over the floor as I moved around. It was the sort of scene that makes you ponder whether life is really that great. THIS was life. Our bodies are formed mostly out of liquid, and our stupid DNA sets us on a programmed course to live for seventy or eighty years and then we just dissolve back into liquid at the end. And all through life, we think it is about ideas and concepts and reading books and creating art. But in reality, most of the time, we are just this giant sack of wet flesh and all we do is consume wet stuff through one hole and excrete wet stuff through other holes all day every day. And when it gets out of control, we excrete a lot more of it all at once. That’s what it truly means to be alive. I get tired just thinking about it. I don’t know if all the lofty thoughts of beauty and philosophy can make up for the reality of our physical bodies.

It’s a hopeless exercise, but I can’t help but cast my mind back over the last few days and try to figure out what meal or what drink contained all this evil bacteria that my body is trying to purge. A prime suspect is all the breakfast snacks I had out in the middle of nowhere after I cycled away from my camping spot at the construction camp. I had a lot of those and a great variety of them. And the liquid creamy filling of one type seems like a perfect breeding ground for bacteria that hate me. But, honestly, it could have been anything. And I don’t even know how far back in time you have to go. If you have diarrhea now, when did the offending gunk enter your body? How quickly does it move through your digestive tract? Even if you are not sick, how long does it take for your body to process food? When you take a morning dump, is that dump from the meal you ate 12 hours ago, 24 hours ago, 36 hours ago, 48 hours ago? I don’t know. And is the timing the same for when you get ill? I think true food poisoning hits much faster. But something like this type of diarrhea probably follows a similar time frame to a regular meal, right?

But it could have been anything. I drink anything that is brought to my table. In the old days, all water was suspect. And I remember the standard routine was to freak out about ice. NO ice!!!!! But these days, all Indonesians drink purified water. It’s everywhere. So even if someone brings a glass of water to your table, chances are it didn’t come out of the river. You can probably trust that it came out of an actual bottle of purified water. And you can probably trust that the ice in your drink was also made with purified water. When I was in Sigli, I had two big glasses of pineapple smoothie that was made with fresh pineapple, water, and ice. Maybe that ice was contaminated. And in my room at the hotel in Sigli, there was actually a big plastic pitcher of water with two glasses. I didn’t even think about it. I was so thirsty that I poured out five glasses in a row and drank them down. But where did that water come from? How long was it sitting in that pitcher? I also had a series of bottles of local sodas, and these were all poured over big mugs of ice. And I haven’t even mentioned any of the full meals that I had. Any one of those meals of nasi goreng or mie pancit could have been the culprit. I just have no idea.

This illness means, clearly, that I’m not going anywhere today. In fact, who knows if I even still have a bike? I left it locked up outside the hotel in the parking lot last night. There was a weird vibe when I checked into this hotel, and I didn’t feel comfortable wheeling my bike inside and carrying it up the stairs. The hotel just felt too clean and too quiet and, to be honest, too controlled. And by the time evening rolled around, I was so sick that there was no way I could go down the stairs and outside to deal with my bike. I just left it there. Hopefully it is still there.

The trip to get to this town was pretty straightforward with a few small adventures sprinkled in. I was able to leave Sigli down a local road instead of going to the highway, and that was great. This road continued for twenty-two kilometers through idyllic countryside and villages before it joined up with the highway. I didn’t leave before dawn, but I still left early enough that I caught sunrise over this farming area, and it was cool and pleasant as I rode along. The highway was less interesting, but it wasn’t overwhelming in terms of traffic or noise. I tried a few times to get off the highway and take a local road, but all the local roads I attempted soon stopped being roads and turned into goat tracks and trails that ended at rivers with no bridges. Google Maps showed bridges, but none were there.

The last chunk of local road that I managed to ride on was a ten-kilometer stretch that led right into the heart of this town with the impossible-to-spell name of Meureudu. I knew nothing about the place, but I assumed from the number of hotels listed and the proximity to the ocean that it was a bit of a beach getaway town. And I was right about that. I was quite pleased with myself for taking that last stretch of local road, but about a kilometer before the town proper, I found myself staring at very large river with no bridge. There had been a bridge once upon a time, and there was a construction crew building a new one, but there was no bridge there when I showed up.

I continued to get a weird vibe from the local people. I mentioned that the men in this part of Aceh Province seemed oddly interested in my body in a sexual way. And men seemed harsher and more aggressive than in other parts of Sumatra. When I rode up to the river and stared at the place where the bridge used to be, a group of men stood around me in a circle and started laughing and joking in what felt like an unfriendly way. One man pointed at my trailer and he shouted, “Money? Money?? Money??? Dollar??? Dollar???”

I was hoping one of these men would figure out that I could use some information. Okay, the bridge was gone. But what did that mean? I clearly wanted to cross the river to get to Meureudu. Did I have to go all the way back to the main highway and circle all the way around? Or was there another bridge just a short distance up or down the river? But no one helped me and no one tried to answer any of my questions. Luckily, I decided to hop off my bike and go take a picture of the non-existent bridge. And while I was standing on the shore of the river, I noticed that someone was ferrying motorcycles across on a makeshift raft. And it looked like I could just ride my bike down there, join the line-up, and get across. I assume there was a payment required, but it couldn’t have been much.

When I joined the lineup and got a good look at the raft, I realized that my bike with the trailer attached was not going to fit easily. It was too long. So I quickly detached the trailer and moved its wheels to the rear position so that it could be moved around easily as luggage. Once I had done this, a young man helping to operate the raft grabbed the tow arm of the trailer and started to roll it down the steep hill and toward the ramp onto the raft. I was instantly concerned about that. As I’ve said many times, when local people help me, it usually ends up causing more harm than help. This was the first time this kid was handling a trailer like that. I could just imagine a dozen ways that things could go wrong. And two of them did. For one, he misjudged how heavy the trailer was and how much it would push him from behind once he started going down the steep hill. It’s not like the wheels on the trailer have brakes. I saw him stumble and stumble again, and I thought both he and the trailer were going to right into the river at a run as he lost control. And then when he got to the ramp, he didn’t center the trailer properly. So he got halfway across and then one of the trailer wheels dropped off the side. The whole trailer started to pitch over and I could clearly see it going into the river. Luckily, a man right behind him grabbed the trailer and held it in place before it went all the way over. Then a whole group of men grabbed parts of it and they just hauled it back up. I breathed a sigh of relief. That could easily have gone the other way, and that would have meant a trailer submerged in the river and all the contents of my trailer soaking wet and all the electronics destroyed. There had been no rain, and I had not waterproofed anything inside the trailer.

The harshness of these men continued, and they all seemed to be laughing and jeering at me. Most of that was probably my imagination, but not all. And then they started asking for money. I assumed I would have to pay something for the trip. I assumed there was a set fee per person and then per motorcycle, and my bicycle would fall into the motorcycle category. Based on what things cost here and the very short trip, 5,000 rupiah would be about right. But a man got in my face and started demanding 50,000 rupiah. The other passengers on the raft were startled into laughter when they heard that amount. I never did see anyone else pay anything, to be honest. I seemed to be the only one paying, and they wanted such an outrageous amount. I offered the guy 10,000, and he happily took it.

 

When I got to Meureudu proper, I was surprised at how large and developed it was. It even had an Indomaret convenience store, and I bought an ice-cold Coke. This was before the illness had kicked in, and it was heavenly going down my throat. I had picked out a couple of hotels in advance on Google Maps. Neither was ideal, but they seemed to be the least fancy of the hotels on offer. I had high hopes for the first place based on the pictures I saw of it, but it didn’t really pan out. I did not feel welcome when I showed up, to put it mildly. People ran away and took a long time to come back. Finally, a younger man showed up, and he was kind of willing to work with me to establish some communication. We used Google Translate to ask and answer questions, and then he took me up to the third floor to show me the rooms that were available. All the rooms on the other floors were full. I was a bit dismayed at the thought of getting my bike and all my gear up all those narrow stairways, but that is par for the course. And I was further dismayed when I found out that the rooms up there cost 250,000 rupiah. That’s the normal price when you get air conditioning, a TV, and your own bathroom. But, as usual, I didn’t want any of those things. I wanted just a simple room with a fan and a bathroom down the hall.

I left without taking a room, and then I rode my bike all the way down to the ocean. I was curious what it looked like and whether there were any hotels down there and whether camping might be a possibility. The beach area seemed quite nice, and there were a dozen big restaurants and cafes there. No one was using them at that time in the afternoon, but they probably filled up in the evening when the sun went down. Riding up and down this area might have been very pleasant, but I had picked up a companion. An older man on a motorcycle pulled up beside me and the stuck with me like glue. He didn’t care that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying about anything. And he didn’t care that I didn’t want to go to any of the places where he wanted to take me. He just rode next to me and babbled and babbled and drove me crazy. I told him in Indonesian a half dozen times that I didn’t understand him, but he was not deterred. My dream of relaxing by the beach and getting my bearings was shattered. Eventually, I had no choice but to ride away and hope he didn’t follow me all the back into town.

Once I was back in town, I set off to find some other hotels, and I ended up taking a room in the first one that I stopped at. Most of their rooms consisted of the standard air con rooms for 250,000 rupiah. But after some intense pressure on my part, the woman at the desk came up with a fan room for 150,000. I kept pressing for the mythical 100,000 rupiah room, but if this hotel had any for that price, she wasn’t telling me about them.

My room for 150,000 rupiah is acceptable. It has two beds. The mattresses are better than average. There was a bottom fitted sheet on each mattress, and they were white and clean until I shat all over one of them. There is a fan on the wall and a fairly nice bathroom. This kind of room for that price is about as good as it gets for Indonesia outside of the backpacker towns. But it still felt overpriced to me. For one thing, the woman at the desk wasn’t exactly welcoming or friendly. She was too involved in her TV shows on the TV on the wall. They also did not provide a towel. The one chair in the room is a plastic chair. There is zero decor. The walls are just old concrete with a dab of whitewash. There is one electrical outlet on the far wall by the bathroom. The bathroom door is half shattered. The room does have the basics covered. It has a comfy bed and there is lots of water in the bathroom. And that’s great. That’s all I need. And I wouldn’t complain in the slightest if the price were 100,000 rupiah or 75,000 rupiah. But to jump up to the range of 150,000, I think there should be just a tiny bit more. A bit of pizzazz. A bit of flair.

Once I settled into my room, I set off into the city to fill up my Dromedary bag. I found a water depot and got eight liters of purified water for 3,000 rupiah. And then I even had a meal of mie pancit at a small restaurant for 14,000 rupiah. I didn’t feel quite right. I was aware of something going on in my gut, but it hadn’t really kicked in yet, so I wanted to have a meal.

After that meal, I returned to my hotel room and took a shower and very quickly started the routine of panicked dashes to the bathroom that continued for the entire night. And here I am. I just realized that this hotel has WiFi. But this wasn’t listed anywhere and no one told me about it, and I never asked, so I never got the password. I’ll have to do that when I pay for my second night.

I don’t know for sure, but I do think the worst of this illness is already past. I’m going to be sick all day today, and there is no way I can go anywhere except for maybe a quick trip to the convenience store for Sprite. (Sprite always soothes my stomach.) But I think I’ll be okay by tomorrow morning.

As for the remaining logistics of cycling, this illness truly sucked the wind out of my sails as far as cycling into the mountains is concerned. With the mechanical breakdown of my rear hub, my trip through the mountains was already in doubt. I was leaning toward just staying on the coast all the way to Medan and then Tanjung Balai to catch the ferry to Malaysia once more. And this illness is reinforcing that mood.

I had these wheels built by a very good company in Bangkok called BokBok, and I sent them a message yesterday. I wasn’t blaming them or demanding that they replace the hub or anything. I just asked them what they thought the problem might be. As I wrote about before, the problem is a strange and uncommon one. They replied right away, and though they didn’t offer up any solutions or answers, they did come through in a big way. The guy said that it sounded like the best thing to do was just replace the entire freehub, and they would send me one by EMS. I just had to give them an address, and they’d ship it out right away. That was amazing. The problem is that even if I had a new freehub right now, I don’t have the tools to take off the old one and put on the new one. I did some research online, and I don’t think I’ll come across any bike shops with the proper tools until I reach Medan, which is 450 kilometers away.

I also contacted a bike mechanic I know in Kuala Lumpur. He was much better about giving specifics. And he said he had encountered exactly my problem a couple of times in his career. And he said the cause was what I had read about: a pawl might have broken. And the piece of metal was floating around inside the freehub and occasionally getting stuck and jamming the freehub. Or, he said, sometimes the thing causing the trouble was a ball bearing that got loose somehow and was jamming the pawls.

Whenever I talk about this bike and maintaining it, I’m reminded of just how old it is. This bike mechanic said that these days most bike shops won’t even service the type of Shimano hub that I have. Nobody uses them anymore. Everyone uses sealed cartridge bearings, and they don’t want to bother with messing around with cups and cones and actual ball bearings. And the vast majority of modern bikes have disc brakes, 10-speed gearing systems or Rohloffs, charging hubs to run USB ports, and tons of other advancements. My bike is a dinosaur.

Anyway, time to do something else. First stop, unfortunately, the bathroom.

 

Tags: bike tour, Bike Trip, Indonesia, Meureudu, Sumatra