A long and eventful day: Tom finds some alcohol

May 2, 2015

We woke up in a waterlogged palm oil plantation and headed back to the main road. Tom seemed unusually keen to put in a long distance and cycled a fast twenty kilometres straight off the bat before I caught him up when he took a break in a fly-infested shop. Whether it was a fly-infested shop before Tom arrived I couldn’t be sure, but certainly I think a fair few of the flies decided to follow us as we left. Neither of us were smelling too good by this stage, but soon afterwards I spotted a modern gas station. The good toilets here offered a first chance for a proper wash since we’d left Bagan Batu. That didn’t interest Tom of course, who had already zoomed on past, but I had to stop. There was a good bucket shower inside and it felt so good to pour that cold water all over me and scrub myself and my clothes clean.

Think you know this well-known Indonesian brand? Look again.

About the closest you want to be cycling behind Tom when the wind is blowing

Is it me or do I look a bit out of place in this one?

When I caught Tom up again it was in a town, and I found him sharing a coffee with a policeman. It was a friendly policeman and he had the most fantastic pistol in his holster, straight out of the wild west it was. I got my camera and took a picture of the two of them.

“Can I take a photo of your cool gun please?” I asked the policeman.

“No, no, no.”

“Oh, it’s okay, don’t worry, you can see it in the one I just took anyway.”

Honestly, he is a real policeman and that is a real gun

We were soon on a flat stretch of road that was very busy with motorcycles, cars and trucks, but if we had thought that being on a more populated road would mean a decrease in the attention we would draw then we were wrong. People were constantly shouting out to us, either from the side of the road or from the window of passing vehicles or the back of motorcycles. “Hello” they would cry, or “What is your name?” or “How are you?” but by far the most popular thing to shout was “Hello mister!!!” This was usually quite fun for about the first ten minutes of each day, but started to wear a bit thin on days like this, with the busy traffic and the hot sun, although full marks go to the woman who provided some variety, by crying out to me as loud as she could “Hello Mrs!”

Then suddenly from nowhere a motorcycle whizzed up behind me and skimmed past my right shoulder incredibly close. It literally could not have been any closer without hitting me. I was shocked and shouted out in anger. The male driver turned his head to face me, sneering, and stuck his middle finger up before speeding off. It was a horrible moment. It seemed like he had done it on purpose. Maybe he was mad because there was a photo of me next to his girlfriend on Facebook or something. Either way it was a scary experience and I upped my speed to try and catch up with Tom who was off ahead of me again. Before I could make up the ground another motorcycle blared its horn behind me and did the same thing, flying right past my shoulder. This time there was no other traffic passing and there was so much space there was no need to do it, and the beep confirmed he’d seen me. There seemed little doubt it was deliberate. I was by now very unnerved, it seemed like these kids were setting out on a stupid and potentially deadly game of ‘scare the foreigner’.

I caught up with Tom as quick as I could and told him what had happened. He hadn’t had any such troubles, although he seemed so oblivious to road safety it was questionable whether he would have noticed the bikes anyway. I was still a bit shaken as we stopped in a bus stop to take a break and eat some cookies. Inevitably some women on motorcycles immediately stopped to have their photo taken with us. I wasn’t in the best mood for it now. In fact I felt like a zoo animal. One of the women grabbed my cap right off my head and threw it down just to make her photo better and I realised that these people really didn’t care about us at all. I suddenly hated being in this situation. The constant attention was so draining. I felt trapped. All I wanted to do was escape somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, where people didn’t try to kill me. All I wanted was to be ignored.

Fortunately the road soon started to climb into the hills and there was no longer very much habitation along it, which meant fewer people and fewer motorcycles. There were still some people, however, and when Tom saw a group of men sitting drinking a strange pink liquid on a bench near to the road he wanted to stop and investigate. It was a homemade type of alcohol made from a local palm tree and we were invited to take a seat and try some. Tom certainly didn’t need to be asked twice.

I remembered what he had told me about his alcoholic tendencies as we both took a sip of the fermented drink. It really didn’t taste at all nice but whilst I scrunched up my face and shook my head, Tom took the bottle and poured himself a big glass. I noticed that the alcohol was on sale by the side of the road, either in old 500ml water bottles or in larger bottles that looked like they once contained motor oil. ‘Who would want to buy alcohol in an old oil bottle?’ I thought to myself as I sat around with the local drunks. At least hanging out with Tom was introducing me to a side of the country I’d otherwise not have seen. He finished off his glass and then poured himself another one. This was soon followed by another. And another. Oh dear.

Eventually we said goodbye to the men and cycled on, Tom going ahead again. One kilometre up the road and I found him stopped. He was next to another man who was selling the same type of pink alcohol at the roadside. And Tom was buying himself a whole old oil container’s worth of it. Oh dear oh dear.

We started to climb up into the hills but there was some light rain and we were both quite hungry, so we decided to stop and have some dinner in the shelter of a roadside restaurant. The waitresses in the restaurant were cute girls and so the attention that our arrival inevitably brought was not entirely unwelcome this time. Once again we had to pose for dozens of photos and even after the photoshoot was over one of the girls kept on taking photos of me across the table.

“How many photos of me do you have now?” I asked.

“Twenty” she replied.

“Do you really need twenty photos of me?”

“I love you” she stammered.

“Oh. It’s a bit soon for me. Do you think we take things a bit slower?”

Even after posing for four hundred photos in Indonesia I remained uncertain how to confidently pull off the two finger peace sign thing

Dinner was good. So good, in fact, that Tom had three dinners. As well as the girls some young guys turned up to meet us, and there were some older people around too. All in all it was a fun atmosphere as we laughed and joked and took photos. That was probably the reason for Tom suddenly declaring “You know what, I am going to get my guitar and we are going to have some fun with these guys and then we are going to sleep right there.” He pointed at the floor in the adjoining area of the restaurant, a sort of living quarters which half a dozen people probably already used for sleeping.

“Well, we can’t really just invite ourselves” I said.

“Sometimes it happens,” Tom shrugged, and walked off to get his guitar.

Well up until this point we had been very good at talking things through and making decisions together, but it seemed that now that Tom had a few drinks in him he was looking to call the shots. I didn’t particularly want to invite myself to sleep in somebody else’s home, especially because it was a potentially noisy restaurant, but I could see that it also had the potential to be an adventurous and interesting evening, and so I raised no objections.

So Tom came back with his guitar and we moved with the young guys into the small room that Tom had decided was where we would sleep. It had a rug covering it and so we removed our shoes and sat around while Tom began to strum the guitar. “What is that smell?” he asked, with no apparent sense of irony. It was my feet. They were a bit whiffy. My shoes had got wet when Tom had insisted we keep cycling in the rain, and as a result had made my feet stink. I ignored him, until a few minutes later he turned to me again and said “Seriously, Chris, can you go and wash your feet and change your socks?”

I got up, put my shoes on, and stormed off to sit outside and calm down. If anybody else had said that to me I would have apologised and probably gone to wash my feet, but from a man like Tom, a man who had made no attempt to wash himself in five days other than standing in the rain, a man who sat for two hours stinking up my tent whilst I sat by holding my nose and saying nothing, a man whose intoxicating body odour I had to put up with all day long, it was a little too much.

Tom came and found me and, after taking a seat next to me, asked me what was wrong. I was reluctant to say anything at first. Simple politeness dictated to me that telling someone that they smell bad wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But Tom insisted that I tell him, and so I did.

“Tom, you stink. You smell really, really bad. I find it hard being told that my feet smell, when the reason that they smell is because you wanted to keep cycling in the rain, and when there is nothing I can do about it. You stink all the time Tom.”

I was worried that this would cause an angry reaction, that it would lead to our first falling-out, but it didn’t. Tom seemed like an incredibly easy-going man, not likely to be drawn into arguing. “Yeah, I know that I stink” he said, “I was only joking about your feet. I know I’m a stinking guy. I don’t mind.” And he then went on to give a slightly drunken speech about how important it is not to worry about what other people think of you, which I interpreted to mean “I know I smell bad and I just don’t care.”

Well at least we had that out in the open, but I decided not to spend any more time that evening with Tom, and whilst he played guitar with the boys I sat in the restaurant and talked with the girls and the older folks. I wanted to distance myself from Tom, particularly when we saw him sneaking the bottle of alcohol that he’d bought earlier into the room. There was a noticeable hush in the restaurant when he was spotted, because of course these people were Muslim, meaning that they didn’t drink alcohol, and Tom was clearly not only going to be drinking it himself, but passing it around to the young guys. I saw the disapproving looks from the elders and really didn’t think it was a cool thing to be doing and I wanted no part of it.

Instead I decided to try and get some sleep, and asked if I could my tent up at the front of the property. It wasn’t an ideal location, being next to the parking area and within earshot of the restaurant, but we were on a hill and finding anywhere else to sleep in the dark would be difficult. So I put it up and tried to sleep. I hoped that the restaurant would quieten down past eleven but it didn’t. There was so much noise. If it wasn’t the trucks pulling up on one side it was the loud television set on the other, or one of the girls singing in the kitchen. It was so frustrating trying to sleep with so much noise. I wondered when things were going to quieten down as midnight approached. Then the television stopped and the lights went out, finally. But a moment later there was the loud whir of a generator starting and the electricity was back on, with the television, as loud as ever, now competing with the generator for most annoying noise. I tried sticking my fingers in my ears but it was no use, there was no chance of sleeping. It had been a long and stressful day, I really didn’t need this.

Past midnight I began to realise that this was an all-night truck stop, and the noise just wasn’t going to stop. At one o’clock when a motorcycle pulled up and beeped it’s horn I gave up and climbed angrily out of my tent. I pulled it down and packed all of my stuff back onto my bike. I couldn’t stay here, I just couldn’t, I had to go and find somewhere else to try and sleep. I went to find Tom to tell him. Of course he was sound asleep on the rug.

I cycled back down the hill in the dark, frustrated, exhausted and annoyed, until I found a little bit of space that would do. It was next to a stall which meant that someone would probably come by early in the morning, but it was likely still the best I could get under the circumstances, and I might get at least a few hours of sleep. I put up the tent, threw my things inside and collapsed, exhausted, onto my sleeping bag. Finally I could get some rest. But just as I was drifting off, bzzzz, right by my ear. I reckon there are very few things in life more annoying than the dull drone of a mosquito when one is trying to sleep, but given the stressful nature of the day, it was really the last thing that I needed. I switched on my torch and searched the tent for the irritating creature. This took some time, because my torch was not very good, and the mosquito proved rather good at hiding. But I had to find it, otherwise it would torment me for what was left of the night. Then, finally, I saw it sitting on the edge of the tent and with one swift movement squashed it flat. Good. Now I could at long, long last, get some sleep. It was gone two in the morning, but I laid back down and began to drift off into beautiful dreams. And then, right next to my ear: bzzzz.

Today's ride: 65 km (40 miles)
Total: 40,344 km (25,054 miles)

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