May 1, 2015
The adventures continue: Photo, photo!
Tom patched up his puncture in the morning and we continued on the track which had become even more difficult thanks to the overnight heavy rain. But we made our way along the muddy, rocky trail and reached a river that was traversed on a clever floating pontoon that used the strong current of the river to lever it across. We stopped and ate breakfast at a simple restaurant on the far bank. I dried out my tent and did my best to wash at the edge of the fast flowing water, while Tom, who’d taken a shower the previous evening remember, just sat and smoked a cigarette.
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As promised beyond the river we reached a paved road and Tom whooped and cheered with great joy as our tyres rolled smoothly for the first time in days and we had finally escaped the labyrinth of palm plantations. Now we were passing through a village and suddenly there were people everywhere, most of whom shouted out greetings to us as we passed. There was a busy market and we stopped, me going to buy food and leaving Tom taking all of the attention as he was quickly surrounded by what I would describe as a cheerful mob. Once I had the vegetables we battled our way through the crowd and onwards, still being saluted by everyone we saw. Then Tom, evidently a sucker for a pretty face, stopped suddenly in response to a cute young girl’s request for a photo with him. Inevitably as soon as we stopped we were surrounded again, although this time one of those that did was a man who could speak English. His name wasn’t, but for this story will be, Rahib. He worked as an English teacher and he told us that everyone was excited because they didn’t see many tourists here.
“When was the last time you saw a foreigner here?” I asked.
“Actually,” he paused , thinking for a moment, “actually, never.”
After chatting for a few minutes we said farewell and cycled onwards, past more waves, more “hello misters,” but we hadn’t got very far before the girls who we had just posed for photos with overtook us on their motorcycles and stopped at the side of the road to ask us to stop and pose for more photos with them. We obliged, and then tried to continue. The girls again passed us, and then Rahib on his motorcycle too, and then they all stopped, and we stopped again, and this time Rahib invited us to take a rest and sit with him outside his home and meet his family.
Of course meeting the family soon turned into meeting the whole neighbourhood, and we sat on a bench on the front porch as twenty or more people stared, taking it in turns to line up for photos with us. Rahib showed us how to make a musical instrument by rolling up a leaf and blowing on it. ‘Toot, toot’. It was crazy, the attention we were drawing, but the atmosphere was wonderful. This was a remarkable place to be.
We weren’t making much progress, but we eventually managed to draw ourselves away and get back to cycling. Once again the girls were following us on their motorcycles and I turned the tables, crying out “Photo? Photo? Selfie? Selfie?” and whipping out my camera to snap photos of them as we rode. And then all of a sudden there was a loud bang from in front of me and Tom came to a sudden halt.
His tyre had suffered a blow out. We pulled off the road to inspect the damage, as the girls suddenly lost interest and disappeared. He pulled out the inner tube and found a very large rip in the side, suggesting that he had probably pinched the tube between the tyre and the rim when he’d replaced it that morning. It was a tough one to patch but, in what appeared to be a stroke of remarkable good fortune, there was a motorcycle shop across the road that could do a professional job of patching it for him.
Whilst that was going on I was left to entertain the crowd of spectators that had obviously come to see what was going on, although of course when Tom came back and sat down on his chair to replace the fixed tube all of the attention was back on him. A woman came up to him through the crowd carrying a young baby. “Photo with my child please sir?” she asked, passing the youth towards him. Tom reached out his arms to take the baby, who then turned his head and saw Tom for the first time. I can honestly say I have never seen a look of greater distress on any human being than I saw come over the face of that poor child at that moment, and a blood-curdling wail of sheer horror and terror pierced the air. The mother pulled the baby away from Tom and carried him off to his nightmares. “That happens a lot,” Tom sighed.
Unfortunately, Tom’s tyre still wasn’t holding air, and he then noticed that the tube was also broken around the valve. This was a disaster because, being around the valve, it was effectively impossible to patch safely. Tom also didn’t have a spare tube with him. He had a chair, and a Kyrgyz rug, and two doll’s heads, a guitar, a slinky, and a stuffed panda, but no spare inner tube. Even worse, he had 28” wheels and I had 26”, so even my spare tubes were of no use. It was a difficult situation, and Tom refused to trouble the motorcycle shop again, but instead tried to patch the valve with one of his own glueless patches, something which I considered to have a zero per cent chance of success. For the first time I saw Tom getting a little stressed and he asked me if there wasn’t something I could do to distract the crowd for him. It seemed he might have finally had enough of all the attention. I knew just what to do. I walked a little bit away from him, pulled out my camera, and cried “Photo, photo!!!”
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Whether or not putting a glueless patch around a broken valve could have been a success or not was soon rendered a moot point anyway when Tom discovered that the sidewall of his tyre had also been badly damaged in the blow-out. Of course he also had no spare tyre, and so his chances of riding onwards were effectively over. He was going to need to take a lift at least as far as Langapayung, but there were no trucks going along this narrow road, only motorcycles. So I volunteered to cycle back to Rahib’s place and ask around for someone with a pick-up.
Unfortunately Rahib was no longer there, which had me reduced to sign language and drawings to try and get the message across to other people as to what I needed. I actually felt bad about having to ask for help from a motor vehicle, even though it wasn’t for me. There was something about doing it which felt like I was conceding a vulnerability in my chosen method of transportation, even though it could have been avoided had Tom been carrying a spare tube and tyre. But eventually I got the message across and a man was found with a pick-up truck who agreed to take Tom to Langapayung for a small fee. I cycled back to him triumphantly.
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So I was alone again as I cycled the twenty kilometres to Langapayung. There were lots more greetings and requests for photos of course, even without Tom, but I got away with stopping as little as possible while remaining polite. Just before Langapayung I reached a more major road which crossed Sumatra, and no longer were we going to be traveling through such remote areas. Tom and I had agreed that, although the past few days had been an outrageous adventure, our progress had been so slow that we would never make it up to Medan on time if we tried to take the very small roads all the way, and so from this point on we’d take the bigger roads. Or we would if Tom’s bike could be fixed. Langapayung was worryingly small, and didn’t look very much like it would have a branch of Evan’s Cycles. I cycled all the way through it, saw no sign of either Tom or a bike shop, and then stopped at an Internet café to try and work out how to locate him.
I need not have worried. No sooner had I typed him an email asking where he was than he arrived outside the Internet café, on his bicycle again. He had managed to find a new inner tube, but not a new tyre. The man in the bike shop had managed to jimmy a piece of rubber between the busted tyre and the rim though, which Tom seemed happy with although the tyre still bulged out in a precarious manner that had me wincing. I would not have felt at all confident riding on it, but Tom was unfazed, and so we cycled onwards, together once more.
Before calling it a night we stopped for some food at a restaurant, where the young waiters and waitresses insisted on posing for photos with us. It may have been the case that these photos were quickly uploaded to social media websites, for when we went to leave the restaurant 20 minutes later a great cavalry of students arrived on motorcycles, apparently already aware that we were there, and themselves now requesting photos. Tom, who had admitted he was starting to get tired of all the constant attention, did his best to hide. At least he did until he saw that most of our admirers were cute girls, when he reappeared, pearly whites at the ready.
There were more dark clouds as we searched for a good camping place. Everyday seemed to follow the same pattern in terms of the weather, with rain coming each evening. We found a decent palm oil plantation away from the villages and I quickly ran around to get the tent set up and get everything inside as fast as I could. I made it just in time before the downpour hit. Tom was still wandering around outside.
“I’m taking a shower,” he yelled.
Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 40,279 km (25,013 miles)
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