Amy & Wim

Indonesians have a lot to deal with. Active volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, a corrupt government, disease, giant cockroaches, pollution, over population, poverty, tourist bombings, earthquakes and much more than you care to imagine.

All this is set in a dramatic, tropical, paradise-like landscape with mountains, monkeys, rice fields, and crater lakes. So you can well imagine that it makes an interesting, fun, and sad place to spend a month biking.

We chose to bike on the Sumatra island because we read that it wasn't as crowded as the Javanese island. What we didn't know was that all 40 million Sumatrans are linked together by one small overcrowded 2-lane "highway". Impossible to do by bike! For fear of death, we instead choose to head out with our bikes to the back roads of the country.

These "roads" ended up resembling riverbeds with giant boulders, or deep pools of mud, and we ended up biking most of the country at 5 km per hour (that is if we weren't pushing our bikes up hills or over huge rocks). Hoards of mopeds shared the road with us. Mopeds with restaurants on top, mopeds with large families pilled up, and mopeds with supermarkets attached. Their creativity was boundless!

Another challenge of biking here was that there are only inaccurate maps available. These maps are so bad that cities are connected with roads on the wrong side of the country. So, many times, we only had a vague idea of where we were going, and absolutely no clue how long it would take to get to the next village. You would think that you could just ask a local, right? Not in Indonesia. In a country where most people never leave their village, and there are no mileage markers along the road, estimations about distance often ranged from 10 to 200 km, or from one hour by bike to five hours by moped. We had to just pedal away and hope for the best.

As we went through little villages along the way, everyone said "hallo meeeeester", "howayou?" or "whereyougo?". Then, as soon as we stuck up a hand to wave or said hello in reply, hysterical laughter would break out all over the village. At first we thought that it was our fantastic new monsoon gear... but then they still laughed when we took it off. If we stopped for lunch, we had a huge audience. People found us eating with a fork even more exciting than the soaps they had been watching on TV! It was hard not to let all the popularity go to our heads.

Food is so cheap (0.5-1 euro), delicious and abundant that we have been eating out three times a day. The minute that you get an inkling of hunger, all you have to do is pull to the side of the road and ask for some spicy noodle soup. You just can't think too hard about where it comes from. This is because all of the water that is used comes straight from the river, and all used water goes directly back into the same river. This includes water for washing, for drinking, for cooking, and for the toilet. Often villagers could be seen down by the river washing dishes, showering, using the restroom, or collecting water for the kitchen. When eating out, it's better not to look at the map to see if their are any large cities upstream.

One evening, while drinking a river-tea in a hut near the river, a bunch of teenagers became all aflutter as they saw batches of fish floating by, belly up. They all jumped in the river to catch what they could for dinner. Someone up stream had been cyanide fishing. The locals reassured us however that cyanide only kills fish, and that we needn't worry about ourselves. I can say that we enjoyed our tea even less than usual that day.

Riding through the jungle is magical, with all of it's oversized life-forms, and the constant musical chatter coming from the trees. Along the way we often spot monkeys, giant lizards, big creepy insects, and of course there is an ever present cloud of mosquito's around Wim. Camping here in the thick jungle is impossible though, at least without a chainsaw.

Our hearts go out to the Indonesians, even though they laughed at us. They are gentle, honest people and half of them look like really cool rock stars. They really do deserve a functioning government and a better life.