April 15, 2015
Have you seen Mr George?: He is a great man
I came up with a plan in the morning which, if not exactly in the realm of ‘cunning’, was at least one of my better ones. I still didn’t much fancy taking on that dangerous road but I had no idea how to get back onto the small roads and I certainly couldn’t live in the expensive hotel indefinitely. So I packed up my bags and moved a mere 400 metres down the street to a much cheaper hotel, where I could have a mattress on the floor and access to a shared bathroom for the princely sum of three pounds fifty a night. I booked in here with the intention of staying for as long as possible before I got either a) bored or b) fleas.
Incidentally I made the decision to move from the expensive hotel to the cheap hotel entirely by myself, which will no doubt have some of you wondering what happened to my accountant Alan. Well, after I paid for the cruise my sum total spend for the year had already exceeded the thousand pound limit which I had set myself, and given that Alan’s sole purpose was to prevent me from doing this, he recognised that he was a dismal failure and immediately offered his resignation. I accepted it naturally, because I couldn’t be bothered to write down every single thing I spent money on anymore, but I also realised that there was still quite a lot of paper in Alan, and so I kept him on in a sort-of note-taker role. So far he’d already proven very useful at collecting the email addresses of people that I never planned to contact again, and for scribbling down the word ‘tent’ in Indonesian.
I walked to the Harvard English Course at three in the afternoon to meet up with P - I’d contacted her again online and arranged for her to try again to introduce me at the school. It seemed that if I was going to be kicking back in Bagan Batu for a while I might as well try and do something useful with my time, like teaching young Indonesian children how many brothers and sister I have. She wasn’t there and neither was Mr Daniel, but this was a much bigger school than the one in Dumai and there were half a dozen classes going on with different teachers. Upon hearing of the arrival of a real-life actual native English speaker, one of the teachers quickly ushered me before her students for a bit of Q&A. The kids were quite young but it was fine, they were nice and it wasn’t long before I was whisked off to the next class, and then the next. Once all of the children in all of the classes knew what my hobbies were I was allowed to return to the front of the school, where I found both P and Mr Daniel. He was the course director, the owner and founder of the school. A gentle, softly-spoken man in his mid-forties, he greeted me in a kind and hospitable way that reassured me that I wasn’t going to be dealing with another Mr Muchsin here (there were biscuits.)
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It seemed that the Harvard English Course didn’t get many foreign visitors, but those that it did get had their photographs pinned to a noticeboard at the front of the school. In fact there were only three people in the photos. Mr Daniel confirmed it – they’d had only three foreign visitors to the school. In fifteen years. One of them was an older man with white hair and a big white beard who stood proudly next to a much younger Mr Daniel in the photo. “That’s Mr George,” Daniel said, “He is a cyclist too. He was here about seven years ago. Such a nice man. But when he left I tried to call him several times and he didn’t answer. I never heard from him again.” Mr Daniel looked sad. “I often worry about him. Whether something bad happened. I really worry. He was from England too. Maybe you can find him for me?”
“Oh, Mr Daniel. I don’t know. There are fifty million people in England. Do you know anything else about him?”
“He is a great man.”
“Anything else? What about his surname? George must be his first name, do you know his second name?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe Smith.”
It wasn’t much to go on, true, but I was determined to help this nice man and after saying hello to another round of classes I left the school and set about doing some serious detective work. My serious detective work consisted of a three-point plan - posting a copy of George’s photo to a cycling forum page, writing a message along the lines of ‘anyone know this man?’ and going to bed.
By the time I woke in the morning I already had the mystery solved, and believe it or not it was the man who I had only recently said goodbye to in Singapore who had the answer. Andy Peat, or as he would be known in Indonesia, Mr Andy, recognised George’s face from another journal, written by someone who had cycled with him in Thailand back in 2008. From that others managed to locate his surname (it wasn’t Smith, but it was close) and I put the final piece in the jigsaw by typing the name into the police database Facebook website. I wrote him a message and started flicking through his Facebook photos, and there he was, the man Mr Daniel spoke so highly of, middle finger raised to the camera and a snarl on his face as he marched at an anti-fracking protest. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a good idea for the deeply religious Christian Mr Daniel to see that. I clicked on to see what else I could find, and next came across a profile picture with some writing on: ‘I am against all religions, because they…’ Okay, I guess I had to make sure Mr Daniel didn’t see this.
I marched triumphantly back to the school that afternoon and quickly gave Mr Daniel the good news – the guy that he had worried about for the last seven years was doing just fine after all. I showed him some carefully selected photos I’d saved of George and even set up a short chat between them. All of which seemed to very much make Mr Daniel’s day. “How long was he here for?” I asked.
“He stayed here for one night,” replied Mr Daniel, “He is such a great man.”
This made me think about the people that I, and everyone else who cycle tours, meet along the way. What for us travellers might seem like just another trivial meeting, another stop on the road, a single night spent in some little town somewhere, can be something that the other person remembers forever. Seven years of worrying about a man who stayed for one night, it seems crazy, but it’s true. “He is such a great man,” Mr Daniel repeated for the tenth time, “And he is a Christian too. He stood in front of us and said a prayer for all of us.” I bit my tongue. Cheeky old bugger. But Mr Daniel had clearly elevated him to the level of some sort of saint, even after just a night. What was going to happen if I stayed here a couple of weeks and kept performing these kind of miracles? I watched as Mr Daniel typed another message to send to Mr George: ’Mr Christ is here at the school with us now.’
Might be time for a shave.
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