May 3, 2015
Don't you wear underwear?: No need, no need
As expected I had visitors in the morning, even though I’d made the effort to get up at first light in order to take my tent down. As I was in the midst of that familiar process, still sleepy and irritable as a result of the previous night, an old woman who probably owned the nearby stall came and stood and stared at me. I smiled at her. She seemed cautious of me and so I did my best to connect with her in Indonesian by saying “Hello Mister.” She smiled back at least. Then a guy on a motorcycle stopped and stared gormlessly too. The start of another day in Sumatra.
I cycled back to the restaurant and found a groggy-looking Tom. He hadn’t been asleep when I’d last seen him at all, merely trying to sleep, and he now complained that he’d had a terrible night. Apparently soon after I had left they had put the football on the television and the level of noise had increased even further, meaning that Tom hadn’t been able to get any sleep at all. Well, every cloud has a silver lining I suppose.
I wondered what further delightful experiences Tom might have in store for me, and I didn’t have to wait long to be grossed out on this particular day. Before we could continue he first had to sew up a hole in his shorts.
“I was lying down there last night,” he began, telling this story with far too much glee, “and my balls were hanging out. I didn’t realise until I saw one of the guys staring at my balls. Ha Ha. I just need to sew up my shorts, man. Won’t take long.”
“Don’t you wear underwear?!” I asked.
“No need, man, no need.”
Anyway, he sewed up the shorts and then thought for a moment about whether or not to make use of the bucket shower he’d had access to for the previous fifteen hours.
“Should I wash?” he said to himself, “Nah, I’ll do it later. Let’s go man.”
And we were off.
But before too long we stopped to eat breakfast and there was a gas station across the road which Tom actually did go into the toilets of with the intention of washing, but I don’t think he had any soap and the tap wasn’t working very well, and somehow he came out smelling worse than when he went in.
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The day was surprisingly uneventful. We cycled uphill a lot, on more remote roads with a blessed reduction in attention from the locals. Plenty of shouts from passing cars along the lines of “Hello misterrrrr” and “How are yooooouuu?” which, coming from passing vehicles, rarely ever gave us the opportunity to respond, but far fewer photo requests. The scenery at last moved away from being palm oil plantations and we passed through natural rainforest as we climbed higher and higher on roads that at times reminded me of my final days in China cycling with Alex.
The tension that was in the air with me and Alex wasn’t replicated, however. Tom seemed to have forgiven me for calling him stinky, if it ever bothered him at all, and if, indeed, he could remember it. And for the first time there was no rain in the evening and we found a nice camping place down by a river where Tom excitedly ran around grabbing wood and constructing an impressive campfire with it. We sat by the fire that night, under the stars down by the river, and had a good chat. Male bonding, if you will.
Tom was clearly an expert at fire-building and incredibly for most of his ride across Eurasia he had been making one every single night in order to cook on (he’d only bought his camping stove in Malaysia.) Even in the desert he had made fires using not only bits of scrap wood that he collected along the road, but also, like the locals, animal dung. Tom was many things, and resourceful was certainly one of them. He was like a man of the wild, out here in nature felt like his rightful home.
I still wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to fit in on the cruise.
Today's ride: 70 km (43 miles)
Total: 40,414 km (25,097 miles)
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