22 – Fishing Harbour in Idirayeuk
Wednesday August 22, 2018
5:00 a.m. Room 102, Khalifah Hotel
Idirayeuk, Aceh, Sumatra
(250,00 rupiah/$16.50 US a night – expensive; air conditioning; private bathroom; TV; nice bed; but the room is old and cramped and crowded)
When I left from Lhokseumawe, I had two possible outcomes for the day. One was to ride around sixty kilometers and find a hotel in a random town along the way way. The other was to ride one hundred and five kilometers and spend the night at a hotel in Idirayeuk. I really didn’t want to ride the full one hundred and five kilometers, but that’s what I ended up doing.
I left relatively late. I think I started turning the pedals at seven a.m. The forecast was calling for rain, but though the skies were overcast, it was not raining. Nothing much happened for most of the day. I turned the pedals and turned the pedals, and that’s kind of all I did. When I reached the mid-way point, I looked for hotels, but I couldn’t find any. Google Maps listed a couple of strange places. But the listings looked like mistakes to me, and the local people all insisted that there were no hotels at all in that town. And so I kept riding.
There are no mountains and no big climbs on this side of the island, so I was able to keep up a relatively fast pace, and despite riding a fair distance, I arrived in Idirayeuk at around two p.m. I knew about three hotels in this town. One was very expensive, and I didn’t bother with it. One was mid-range, and I visited it first just to get a comparison. And the last one, the Wisma 88, was the local budget option. And that was where I wanted to stay.
The mid-range hotel, the Khalifah, is where I am now and where I ended up staying. I didn’t like it when I saw it. It was an old hotel. It had clearly been considered quite grand when it opened decades ago. But now it just had the memory of the glory days and felt dated and old. Nor was it welcoming. There was no obvious place to enter the hotel, and I just had to pick a doorway at random and go in. I walked through some hallways and lobby areas, and I eventually found a woman that worked there. She gave me the usual confused look that said she was wondering why I was there.
Things turned out okay because after the usual chaos and confusion, they managed to produce a woman that spoke some English. I think she was part of the family that owned the hotel. She said that she was visiting from Jakarta. She was also confused about why I was there, and I had to explain that I was at this hotel because I was interested in a hotel room for the night. I’m not entirely sure why I always have to explain that.
She then walked me to the front desk, which, for reasons I can’t explain, was located at a remote end of the hotel near a set of locked double doors. It felt like the side entrance where garbage gets picked up rather than a main entrance. And why have the front desk beside locked doors?
I found out that the cheapest room they had cost 225,000 rupiah. And if I wanted a room on the ground floor, it would cost 250,000. I looked at the room, thanked them, and left. The Wisma 88 was just a short distance away, and I went there next. I went inside and found two women sitting at the front desk, and they informed me that the hotel was closed. It’s a big holiday here – probably the second biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar. So you’d think they’d be open and even bring on extra staff to service all the people that will be traveling during the holiday. But for some reason, that wasn’t how they rolled. They closed.
I had no choice but to go back to the Khalifah if I wanted to spend the night indoors. I took a room there despite the confusion of checking in. No one seemed entirely sure on how to do it or what to do with me. Despite my better judgment, I tried to ask a question about the rooms. They listed a Standard room and a Superior room. Both cost 250,000 rupiah. So I wanted to know what was so superior about the Superior room. Seemed like a reasonable question. And I wanted to know which they had shown me. Was I getting a Standard or a Superior? Not surprisingly, I got no answer to any questions despite the woman from Jakarta speaking good English.
I have tons more ideas floating around in my head, but I can’t handle typing on this keyboard right now. The space bar appears to be broken. I guess this computer is yet another victim of the heat and other bad conditions. Then again, it has survived quite a long time. I’ve used it a lot. And it has endured some pretty bad conditions.
Speaking of bad conditions, I have to say that nothing much has changed from my Ethiopia cycling days as far as my hands and arms are concerned. Right now, I have almost zero feeling in two of the fingers on my right hand. Both my right and left arms were numb yesterday. All of my fingers would go numb while riding, but feeling would come back later. But it’s been so bad that certain fingers stay numb the entire night. I have to wonder if I’ve just been riding on a bad bike all these years. Is it the wrong size for me? And I’m thinking about trying out different handlebars. I’m thinking that butterfly bars might help. But I don’t want to invest a ton of money in having to modify the stem and other components. My bike is enough of a hybrid monster as it is.
My plan is to spend two nights here. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I want to grab my camera and go for a walk around the harbor. I spotted lots of interesting boats including one that is under construction. You can see the exposed skeleton made up of thick beams, and I want to take some pictures of that.
