Friday August 17, 2018
7:15 a.m. Room 46, Hotel Fajar
Bireuen, Sumatra

I’ve definitely stayed in worse places than the Hotel Fajar. In fact, the hotel itself is really large and has a lot of facilities, such as seating in the lobby, tables and chairs outside, a parking area in the rear courtyard, water dispensers, and a drinks cooler. However, I opted for the cheapest room at 120,000 rupiah, and it is very depressing. It’s just dank and dirty and old and unmaintained. There are thick layers of cobwebs and dust and dirt over everything. The walls are stained with smears of blood (from mosquitoes or bed bugs or something else, I don’t know). There are no windows. No air con, of course, just a ceiling fan. And there is WiFi, I’m told, but it doesn’t make it into this room. The bathroom is a disgusting mess and has one of those open drains from which the giant cockroaches pour forth. I almost feel sorry for the things as they have to live in those drains. But I still stomp on them when I get the chance. I’ve only managed to trap and stomp on two so far. I’ve left both their smushed bodies on the floor so that the ants can have a meal. It gives me a sordid pleasure to watch their bodies being torn to pieces and carried off by the ants.

All of this is compounded by a factor of ten by my illness, which continues unabated. I’m approaching three days of non-stop pure liquid diarrhea while eating nothing at all. This feels unusual. My stomach problems come in all shapes and sizes, but I don’t think I’ve ever had this fire hose of liquid diarrhea for this long. And for it to be so consistent even after a three-day fast is very unusual. I started Googling my symptoms, as one does, and nothing was helpful. With the severity of the liquid diarrhea, I started to wonder if I’d contracted cholera, but the symptoms don’t really match. Cholera would be much more severe and involve lots of intense vomiting, cramps, fever, etc. The foul-smelling diarrhea could indicate giardia, but I don’t have the associated burping of rotten egg smells. That leaves your basic bacterial gastroenteritis, but I’ve had that multiple times, and my symptoms don’t match that either. So, I don’t know what it is.

Googling all this has its funny and confusing sides. It’s funny, because as usual, I can’t really find any listing that matches exactly what I have. The weird thing is that it is just liquid diarrhea with no cramping at all. In the midst of this horror, that is the good news. Had I had my usual intense stomach cramps all this time, I’d have been in very rough shape, and I certainly couldn’t have done any cycling. But I feel no pain at all. I just feel the diarrhea knocking on the door wanting to get out, so I go to the bathroom, try to stomp on a cockroach, squat down, and fire hose it out. Then I go back to bed and wait for the next installment. I had some pain at the very beginning, but I think that was because my stomach was still full and my intestines were full to bursting. Since then, it has been pain free other than a twinge in my knees from squatting for so long and so often.

The Googling is funny also because of the information that I come across. I see a lot of talk about NOT taking antibiotics, not self-diagnosing, and how a few rushed trips to the bathroom aren’t a problem, and how these things clear up all by themselves. And then they’ll say something like if the diarrhea persists for ten days or longer, consult a doctor. TEN DAYS!! I’ll be dead in ten days if this keeps up that long. Of course, the recommendations for not getting diarrhea are just as confusing and funny. By the time you add up all the things they say you can’t do (eat from street vendors, have ice in your drink, etc), the only conclusion is that you have to stay home. You can’t go to Indonesia. Simply the experience of being in Indonesia is all those things.

Despite still being sick, I was feeling fine in the morning yesterday. In fact, with my fasting and reluctance to drink, there wasn’t much in my system to expel. There was so little that I even thought the illness had run its course. So I packed up my bike and I left from Meureudu.

I was very glad to finally leave Meureudu. My only wish was that I had left an hour earlier. With the illness, I was moving a bit slower. I wanted to make sure that I was capable of cycling. I forget the time, but I think it might have been seven o’clock when I cycled away from the hotel. It was nice and cool and pleasant. But when the full heat of the day eventually kicked in, I began to wish I had left at six and had an extra hour of that cool temperature to cycle in. My plan was to grab a bottle of cold Sprite at the convenience store as I left town, but the convenience store wasn’t even open yet. That was a disappointment.

I was able to ride down a local road for the first hour or two of the morning, and it was a nice ride. My illness wasn’t troubling me at all, and the scenery was beautiful. I reflected on how Google Maps and the modern digital age made this route possible. I had satellites high above me that were tracking my phone’s position and telling me exactly where I was. In the old days, this would have been impossible. I had to stop quite a few times to consult Google Maps to see which way to turn as I followed these roads. No paper map would have even had these roads on it, and even if they did, the map wouldn’t have been any help navigating them. I would have had no choice but to ride on the highway.

Unfortunately, I did find myself back on the highway at some point. The local roads going in my direction ceased to exist, and I had to take the highway the rest of the way to where I am now: Bireuen. The traffic got quite heavy, particularly as I entered the town. The traffic was also non-stop, which made it nearly impossible to cross the road at any point. And I needed to cross the road in order to find hotels down the side streets.

The first hotel I checked out was the Hotel Fajar, and I took a room there. From my research on Google Maps, it looked to be on the cheaper end of the scale and it had rooms on the ground floor. It was also very close to the main road and the bus station. I was thinking about taking the bus to Takengon to see that mountain town, so being near the bus station was a benefit. But being a bus station hotel probably also has its disadvantages. Hotels near bus stations tend to be the worst hotels in the world. That’s just how it works.

The moment of my arrival wasn’t promising. The woman at the hotel’s front desk did not respond to my smile, my cheery hello, or my folksy self-deprecating charm. She just looked at me with a sour face and then called over her shoulder to someone else. Another woman came around the corner, and when she saw me, she gave a look of intense and pure disgust. “Oh, great! A stinky, hairy foreigner,” she seemed to be thinking. I did not feel welcome.

Things got better when this disgusted woman called over a young man, and he showed me one of the cheapest rooms. I was very pleased to find out that the room was on the ground floor. That made me disposed to take it. I saw that it was a dive and that it had no windows, but that didn’t scare me off. I’m used to dives. I think it’s overpriced at 120,000 rupiah, but there’s nothing I can do about that. The room was large, had two beds, a working fan, and good water flow. I didn’t investigate it beyond that, and I agreed to take the room.

I wasn’t sure what Disgusted Woman would think of me wheeling my bicycle and my trailer through their lobby and into my room, but I just did it. Unpacking went as usual. There was a bit of trouble at first when I couldn’t find an electrical outlet. I couldn’t find one anywhere, and I started to get annoyed as I contemplated going to the front counter and telling Disgusted Woman that I needed a room with an outlet, and then having to pack up and move. But then I found one hiding on the wall behind a curtain.

It was about this time that I suddenly realized I was still sick. I hadn’t been bothered the entire day, which is something of a miracle. I guess that’s the good news. The bad news was that as soon as I moved into my room, I found myself constantly in the bathroom again. I quickly counted the days left on my visa, and I concluded that it was possible to stay here for two nights to allow myself another day to recover. Squatting in the toilet and stomping on cockroaches, I was in no mood to leave again the next morning. In any event, the next day (today) is a big national holiday. It is their independence day. I don’t know if that means there would be less traffic or more traffic, but I didn’t want to find out. Not traveling on a big holiday is always the best idea.

I spent the evening reading a book and feeling frustrated at the world in general. The biggest frustration was that I had gotten the password for the WiFi but the signal wasn’t strong enough in my room. Even worse, the thick concrete walls of this hotel and the fact that my room is buried at its heart also seems to mean that regular cell phone signals can’t get through either. I can barely get a connection on my phone. So I was cut off from the outside world in general. On top of that, my Kindle is so badly faded that I have to use a flashlight to even begin to make out the letters on the screen, and my flashlight gave up the ghost completely. This is a practically new, very expensive Black Diamond headlamp. And it started to fail recently. And yesterday, it wouldn’t work at all. I spent a long time switching batteries and doing all the usual things you do to try to make something work. I failed to fix it. Why does everything suck and everything break?

Saturday August 18, 2018
4:20 a.m. Room 46, Hotel Fajar
Bireuen, Sumatra

I have done very little in this town. I wanted to ride my bike down to the waterfront and check it out, but I didn’t do that yesterday because I was still sick in the morning. And then I had a social engagement in the afternoon. So I could stay here today, ride down to the waterfront, satisfy myself on that score, and then leave tomorrow. We’ll see how I feel by the time I’m done typing here.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about yesterday. I made one short foray out into the town. I was surprised at the number of greetings I got and how strong they were. People here were very interested in me as a foreigner. Part of that is that there are a number of transportation companies dotted about this area, and they all thought that I must want to go somewhere. So a lot of people asked me where I was going. They all assumed I was going to the tourist island of Pulau Weh (Sabang) near Banda Aceh, and they all wanted to take me there. Others were just being friendly. Unfortunately, no one could speak a word of English, and there was no actual benefit to be had from all this friendliness.

My intent on this walk was to find some antibiotics. I wasn’t that crazy serious about it. I thought maybe I should start a course of Norfloxacin or something, but I didn’t really want to. In any event, I went out looking. I found one big pharmacy, and they didn’t have any antibiotics at all. By then I was already so overwhelmed by the heat that I’d had enough, and I just turned around and went back to the hotel.

In the afternoon, I went to a coffee shop to meet a young local woman who had contacted me through Instagram. While I was in Banda Aceh, my new friend there, Aan, posted about me on his social media. And because of that, a lot of local people know about me and have contacted me through Instagram. It’s amazing how much of a difference that has made. This woman knew Aan, and she sent me a message on Instagram and asked me if I wanted to meet. I said sure.

By the time the dust settled, I guess it went okay. Considering my growing if not fully established anti-social nature, you could even say it was a big success. One problem was that we arranged to meet at 4:30. And that’s fine, but I clearly have a Jekyl and Hyde personality. I’m friendly Mr. Jekyl in the morning. That’s when I am full of energy and enjoy meeting people. By the time the day starts stretching into the late afternoon and evening, Mr. Hyde starts to emerge, and any social engagement starts to feel like a chore.

At the very nice coffee shop, I ordered a delicious ice latte. The whole meeting was worth it just for that. I ended up having two of them because it was so good. And our conversation went okay. Her English was good, and she seemed comfortable being with a foreigner. I’m guessing that I freaked her out a little bit because I have so many intense thoughts in my head and I never have a chance to let them out. And they all come pouring out. I think the things that I want to talk about are a bit much when a stranger just wants to meet and chat. I try to stop being so serious, but I can’t do it. Even when I think I’m being amusing, I’m probably not. I was talking to her like I was talking to another Westerner, and that probably isn’t the right thing to do. For example, I was trying to be funny about this horrible hotel room, and I made a joke out of the giant cockroaches pouring out the bathroom drain and how I would have to chase them around and try to stomp on them in my flip flops. But there isn’t a lot of nuance in Indonesians when it comes to their relationship with the world. So all she probably heard was me saying that Indonesia was a dirty country and it was full of cockroaches. I talked about how horrible this room was and how horrible the staff at the hotel were, and I did it an amusing fashion. I eventually worked my way around to the point that I don’t really mind how bad the room is. At least it gives me a story to tell. It was the standard point of view of a budget person like me. A person who comes to Indonesia but goes to Bali and stays in a villa with a swimming pool has a more comfortable experience. But I have better stories. But she had no idea what that meant. She would go on holiday for comfort and pleasure, not stories.

And I got the feeling that she wanted to meet me mainly so that she could help me as a tourist to find comfort and pleasure. She wanted to give me lots of ideas of places to go (waterfalls and famous places), and I have zero interest in any of that. I didn’t encourage any of that, so I kind of cut the legs out from under her. If she can’t go into a long list of this or that tourist attraction, what else can she do? I think she was startled in that she expected to meet a foreigner and help him see the sights. And she ended up with a foreigner asking about the economic realities of Indonesian construction workers and whether they owned their own homes or rented.

I asked her lots of questions, and I learned that she graduated from university with a BA in economics. Her first job was as a waitress. But one day one of her customers asked her if she wanted a job at his hotel. It was an office job keeping the books. She wasn’t a trained accountant, but he said that she could do it easily. And she took the job and she has been there for three years. She works six days a week and gets Saturday off. And she gets three holidays a year at the end of Ramadan. And that is her biggest problem with the job. She doesn’t get enough vacation time to do anything. She doesn’t even get a two-day weekend to go on short weekend trips. Her dream is to travel around the world – to have a job where she can go to other places and have more free time.

And that’s about it. I don’t have much else to say. To go or stay today?

Sunday August 19, 2018
4:20 a.m. Room 46, Hotel Faraj
Bireuen, Sumatra

I ended up staying in Bireuen and stomping on cockroaches for another day. I think it was the right decision. While it was still cool, I got on my bike and rode down to the beach area. On the way, I met a group of men with bicycles. They were some kind of local bicycle club. We took pictures together and that was interesting, but that was about it. Not one of them spoke any English despite their age and the fact that they seemed educated and somewhat wealthy. At least they were wealthy enough to have the local version of a nice bicycle and cycling clothes.

I enjoyed cycling along the beach very much. I took lots of pictures of fishing boats and beach scenery. The most interesting moments came as large flocks (they might properly be called clouds) of bats flew by overhead. They were large bats – perhaps a meter or more in wingspan.

I had a moment of extreme frustration when my Motorola phone refused to take any more pictures. It said that the internal memory was full, and that I had to delete some files to make room. This made no sense because while in Kuala Lumpur, I had uploaded over a thousand pictures to SmugMug and deleted them from my phone precisely so as to free up room. And I had removed the complete archive of a dozen podcasts. In fact, I have 26 gigabytes of memory available. So what was the problem?

I find that memory and file management on Android phones is full of bugs and problems. At the very least, it’s not intuitive. In the past, I’ve deleted tens of gigabytes of podcasts, and yet it doesn’t free up any memory. The podcasts will be gone from my podcast app. But the files themselves don’t actually get deleted. This also happened with the SmugMug Android app. I stopped using that app because any picture you put on your phone via this app stays on your phone even after you delete it. The podcast and picture files are still there taking up space but just hidden. I have to use special programs to track them down and delete them manually one by one. And that is a risk because I could accidentally delete system files that I need.

 

(No, not birds. Those are bats in the video.)

Afterwards, of course, I went online and started my usual Google research to try to fix the problem. And I ran into the usual situation. I find all these instructions online about how to manage the memory and storage on my phone – a Motorola Moto X Play – but none of it makes any sense. The Help file will say something like “Go to Settings, Apps, Memory Storage, and then select X or Y.” But none of these options actually exist on my phone. When I go to Settings and then Apps, there is no menu option called “Storage.” All the things they tell me to do just aren’t there in the menu. Period. It’s very confusing.

The only logical explanation has to do with how my phone treats the SD card. With a Motorola Moto X Play, you can use an SD card as portable external storage or have it merge with your phone’s internal storage. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. For various reasons, I decided to use my SD card as part of the phone’s internal storage. The 64 gigabytes of memory on my SD card simply gets added to the phone’s 16 gigabytes of internal memory, giving me a total of 80 gigabytes. And the phone just uses that memory for everything.

But when I check, I see that 15 of the 16 gigabytes of regular internal memory is used up. And just 39 gigabytes of the 64 gigabytes of SD card memory is used up. And I think my phone’s camera app looks at the regular memory and says that it is full. It doesn’t register that there are 25 gigabytes of memory available on the card. So it tells me the phone is full.

And when I do the online research, the Help files say that I just have to go to the camera app, select Storage, and then tell the app to store images on the SD card. And that would be great except that when I navigate to the camera app, there is no storage option in the menu. I can’t select it because it’s just not there. So, what gives? As usual, what gives? I hate the tech world sometimes.

Aside from my technology troubles, the bike ride to the beach went very well. That whole area of Bireuen is very beautiful and very quiet and peaceful. I’m glad I went down there and experienced it. This whole coast trip has been interesting. In my mind, I had equated it with the west coast of Taiwan. Sumatra is geographically very much like Taiwan. It has mountains on one coast and a wide flat plain on the other. And the vast majority of the towns and people are on the flat plain. In Taiwan that means that traveling down the east coast is a wonderful experience and traveling on the west coast is boring and consists of little more than urban sprawl and highways. I thought Sumatra would be the same (though with the east and west switched), and that’s why I wanted to return via the central mountain range. But the flat plains along the coast of Sumatra have proven to be very interesting and very beautiful. I think the experience of cycling here will prove to be more interesting, in fact, than going through the mountains would have been.

After I returned from my ride and rested in my room for a while, I went back to the coffee shop where I met the local woman. I sent her a message saying that I would be there in case she was interested in dropping by. At first, she said she was interested, but I later got a message saying that she had to go to work. I have to admit I wondered if she was lying just to avoid another blast from my overworked brain.

My main reason for going to the coffee shop was to get another ice latte. But I also wanted to sit there so that I could use my phone and computer. Inside my room at this hotel, I have neither WiFi nor cell phone access. So I’m cut off. At this coffee shop, they have strong WiFi, and lots of tables with electrical outlets. So I sat there for two or three hours and did a ton of computer stuff. I even got back on the downloading train and downloaded most of the new season of Orange Is the New Black.

And that was pretty much the end of my day. I returned to my hotel with three bottles of some kind of lemon tea. That, plus my cafe latte, was my entire caloric intake for the day. I still don’t dare eat. I’ve reached a full five days of a near total fast. I don’t plan on eating anything today either. The plan is actually to leave on my bike. I’ve had enough of this nasty hotel room. I’ve gotten all the stories out of it that I’m going to get. Now it’s just nasty and boring. The next big city is called Lhokseumawe. From Google Maps, it looks like there are lots of hotels there. Wherever I end up, it will be better than here. I think it is only fifty-seven kilometers from here to downtown Lhokseumawe.

I think I’m going to get on the road as early as possible. There is no point just sitting in this room waiting for anything. It’s five a.m. right now. I’m going to start getting ready. Should be on the road around five-thirty. It’ll still be dark, but I’ll be on a larger road at the beginning, and there should be enough light from buildings and other things.

Time to go.

 

Tags: Bireuen, Hotel Fajar, Indonesia, Meureudu, Sumatra