Monday, August 20, 2018
7:00 a.m. Room 10, Wisma Pase
Lhokseumawe, Sumatra

(170,000 rupiah/$11 US per night; big room; big bed; furniture; TV; air conditioning; nice bathroom; clean; modern; quiet; fast WiFi and strong cell phone reception)

From the time being seven in the morning, it’s clear that I am staying in Lhokseumawe today. I had a fair amount of trouble cycling the sixty-five kilometers to get here yesterday, and I don’t want to risk problems by just continuing on right away. Besides, I love this hotel room, and there look to be some interesting dock areas in Lhokseumawe to explore.

It was a good idea to leave early yesterday since it was dark and cool for quite a long time. And when the sun rose, the temperatures quickly climbed until they were almost unbearable. I was still on my illness fast (five and a half days of no food), and it seemed to be finally having an effect. Whether it was the illness or the lack of food I don’t know, but I felt feverish and weak. I felt wrong. I also had an attack of that weird deep skin bruising. This time, it was on the soles of my feet and on my toes. Last time, it was the palms of my hands that were affected. It’s such a strange condition because it is so random. There is never any cause. The only correlation I can see is one between stress and outbreaks. And there is no pattern or logic to what part of my body is affected. In this case, it was only the sole of my left foot and one toe. When a toe is affected, it can be really bad. The toe swells up and feels like it is going to explode, and it is next to impossible to put any pressure on it. It hurts too much. Luckily, I was cycling and not walking, so I could still get along.

The worst problem, however, was that my right knee started to hurt. This is a fairly consistent issue with me, as well. And I have no idea what causes my knees to hurt or not hurt. It just happens. Luckily, the problem doesn’t seem to affect cycling. I can pedal just fine. The problem is walking. When I get off the bike, I have to swing my right leg through the air perfectly straight and I end up walking like Frankenstein’s monster. I lurch.

I stayed on the main road for the first part of the morning. There were no small roads available, and even if there were, I couldn’t have ridden on them because it was too dark. I needed to stay where there was some light. And this time, I had a flashing reflector light on the back of my bike, so I felt safer. I wrote before that all the lights on my bike were smashed. But I’d forgotten that I bought a new flashing red light. It was buried deep in my main tools and spare parts bag. I had forgotten that it was there until the other day when I was looking for something else and I stumbled across it. It’s a good thing I had it because my Black Diamond headlamp has completely given up the ghost. It won’t work at all, and I wouldn’t have been able to use it as a rear light as I did in the past.

Once the sky had lit up enough for me to leave the main road, I found a beautiful country road that was full of surprises. The biggest and most pleasant surprise was that it ran right beside a railroad line. This wasn’t indicated on any of my maps, so I was startled to see it. It wasn’t a busy railroad line, of course. I saw one small passenger train the entire morning, and that was it. I did pass a series of small railway stations. They were very quaint, and the road I was on had to jog around them in perfect squares.

This road and the railroad tracks were also running very near to the ocean, and I could hop across the tracks and go check out the beaches and the fishing boats whenever I saw a convenient road or path going there. I passed a lot of traditional wood-fired brick kilns and fish farms and other interesting things.

Life got far less fun when I had to rejoin the main road. There was a lot of traffic, and the sights weren’t nearly as interesting. On the positive side, there was often a wide shoulder, and I could ride there safely. I’m a bit worried that the conditions will remain like this all the way to Medan. When I scan Google Maps, I don’t see very many country roads that I can take. I might be forced onto the main highway a lot.

 

I went over the distances involved yesterday, and if I want to stay in hotels, I will likely be forced to complete seventy to a hundred kilometers every day for six days. That shouldn’t be a terrible hardship, though. And there could easily be other hotels in between these places that I just don’t know about. And there is always the camping option to break things up.

I’m not particularly sold on the town of Lhokseumawe yet. It doesn’t appear to have any of the charm or rural feeling of Bireuen. It feels like any other ugly Indonesian city. Its main claim to fame is that there is a long stretch of beach nearby, and a lot of beachside restaurants have opened there. I came into the town along that road. I actually wanted to stop and take a rest at one of these places, but I ended up riding by all of them. There wasn’t a single one that felt inviting. Nor did I have any confidence that I would actually get a cold drink in any of them. It’s not like they went even the tiniest step out of their way to entice customers. They all just looked ramshackle, random, and old and worn down.

The town itself hasn’t revealed any charm either. It’s the same as every other town. On the positive side, I tracked down an acceptable hotel. It’s probably twice as expensive as I’d like, but there isn’t much I can do about that. Outside of the two or three tourist towns, this is what hotels cost. And this is the standard you get. There are no budget single rooms for people like me. So I could wander all over the town and look at every hotel, but chances are I wouldn’t find anything suitable for my budget. The best I could hope for would be to drive the price down to maybe 120,000 rupiah, and the room and the place would be a nasty hellhole. But this hotel’s standard room has air con, a TV, a nice bed, furniture, lots of space, and really nice bathrooms, and those rooms cost 150,000 rupiah. I ended up with a room that costs 170,000 per night because the cheaper ones were not clean or ready yet and they were on the third floor. This room, for 20,000 more, was ready to move in and it is on the ground floor. So I took it.

 

Tuesday, August 21, 2018
5:30 a.m. Room Whatever, Wisma Pase
Lhokseumawe, Sumatra

My day in this city came and went without much fanfare. A local guy got in touch with me through Instagram, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop at 11:30. There was the usual amount of confusion about that, but it worked out. Before that time, I got on my bike and rode around the waterfront area. I’m not sure what the deal is with this area. It’s an enclosed chunk of ocean seawater. I’m pretty sure it’s artificial, but perhaps there was a natural start to it. As it stands now, a road goes around it entirely. It wasn’t easy to find the access to this road, but I found it and I just rode around it slowly while snapping pictures. The water was used for fish farms, so I could take a couple of pictures of those with a large local mosque in the background. The water was filled with garbage, so there was nothing scenic about it. The skies were also grey and there was little light.

The young man that I met with was one of the most online people I’ve ever encountered. He was so plugged in to social media that the real world – like me – didn’t really exist anymore.

Later on while thinking about what happened, I came up with this description of it: In normal life, you might have coffee with an interesting person.  And then afterwards when you run into your friends, you might tell them about it. You have an experience, and then you talk about it later.

This guy was so involved in the talking about the experience on social media that he didn’t have any time left to actually have the experience itself. In fact,he invested a huge amount of time BEFORE the meeting with me was scheduled. He told his friends that he was going to have coffee with a foreigner, and all his friends sent messages to him asking him to ask me to answer questions, provide inspiration, and pose for certain types of pictures. And when he met me, he spent all of his time on his phone. All of it. He never stopped. His conversation consisted of him scrolling through the messages on his phone, stopping at certain ones and then asking me to record a video message in answer to the questions his friends asked. He took out a piece of paper and wrote my name on it and a Hello message to one of his friends. He asked me to hold up this piece of paper for a picture. It was identical to holding a number in a criminal mug shot. Once he finished with all the pre-coffee requests and messages, he started sending out new messages to tell everyone that he was having coffee with this foreigner. We hadn’t talked about anything or done anything yet. But as far as he was concerned, it was over. He’d taken perhaps forty pictures and five videos of me. And that was what he wanted. He’d ordered a coffee before I got there and barely touched it. So we didn’t even have coffee.

I was good-natured about it all, of course. The poor guy was extremely nervous. Other than standing in line with a foreigner in a bank one time, I was the first foreigner he’d ever met. I didn’t want to give him a hard time and ruin his first meeting with a foreigner.

I did manage to ask him a few questions about himself. I learned that he was twenty-three years old. He had just graduated from university with a degree in business management. He’d been looking for a job since January but has had no luck. He said that in Indonesia it is impossible to get a job unless you have a contact in the business. Unless your uncle works at a big company and hires you, it is difficult to get a job, he said.

His father is also unemployed, and the whole family of six children and two adults is being supported by the two eldest children. I never did find out what their jobs were. His father used to be a ferry captain on the route to Pulau Weh (Sabang). I found that amusing because I’d had so much trouble trying to find information about that ferry. I thought that it made sense that he lost his job considering that none of the passengers showing up at the ferry dock could buy a ticket for his ferry or even get information about when or if it went to Sabang. I did not say that to him, though I wanted to.

And then, not surprisingly, he started looking at his watch. A minute later, he said he had to go. He said that he had to go visit a friend in the hospital. I was rather bemused because I felt like I had just gotten there. And I had just gotten my second coffee. When I showed up, he was drinking an ice cappuccino. I asked him if it was good, and he said that it was. So I ordered one, and it was awful. It was made with a powder from a sachet. So I ordered an ice latte next, and that turned out to be made from real coffee and real milk and it had lots of ice. And it was served in a nice tall glass. It was great. But as soon as it arrived,he said he had to leave. So I had to chug it down. It was an odd experience, but I enjoyed it anyway. It’s always interesting to meet someone from the town you’re visiting.

 

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