“Will you come to our church service on Sunday?” asked Mr Daniel.

“Err… erm…” I hesitated, looked for an excuse, couldn’t find one. “How long is it?”

“Oh, only two hours.”

I only had myself to blame. That’s what you get for making yourself at home in a little-visited Sumatran town like Bagan Batu and doing a passable interpretation of the second coming. And I had made myself at home, waking up in my cheap hotel, breakfast at the café next door, wander the 200 metres to the school each afternoon, pose for a hundred photos, wander back again. The days passed and it started to become a routine. I was building a life here.

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Then one day I left the school and was walking my usual route back to the hotel amongst the dirt and litter at the side of the busy main road when I heard someone call my name. I looked up, surprised to hear it, and peered into the restaurant where the voice had come from. Then I got a real big surprise. Peering out at me from below dim lights was the familiar face of Mr Muchsin. The very same Mr Muchsin that I had stormed away from 150 kilometres away back in Dumai. What in the world was he doing here?! The only explanation I could think of was that he had come to find me. He’d tracked me down to seek his revenge. ’Oh sh!t, I thought, ’It can’t be Friday the 13th again already, surely?’

“Mr Muchsin! What are you doing here?” I said, stressing his name very loudly and clearly, so that any witnesses to my murder would at least know the identity of the killer.

“You! Why did you write bad things about me on the Internet?” Mr Muchsin asked angrily, mouth still rather disgustingly filled with fried rice. I quickly worked out that he was referring to the feedback I’d recently posted on his warmshowers profile which really wasn’t that bad. All it said was that Mr Muchsin was not a cyclist and he didn’t understand what cyclists need (i.e. water).

“As soon as I saw it I knew I had to find you. I was told you were here. I’ve got a lot of contacts.”

“Well, that’s a bit scary. But the feedback system is for other cyclists to read before they decide to visit you. I only wrote the truth. You didn’t want to give me water, after I’d come to help you.”

“I don’t need your help!” cried Mr Muchsin, which seemed rather a strange statement for someone who had requested my help to make.

So we had a bit more of a back-and-forth, during which I did my best to explain the warmshowers website to Mr Muchsin, and Mr Muchsin did his best to simultaneously shovel food into his mouth and shout at me.

“How dare you get mad at me in my own home?”

“Yes, I’d like to apologise for that actually. I was out of order and I’m sorry.”

“You see, you don’t understand Muslim traditions! You don’t know about Muslim-“

“Oh shut up. I’ve been to a lot of Muslim countries and I’ve received incredible hospitality everywhere that I’ve been, apart from at your house. I’m sorry for getting angry. Goodnight.” And with that I stormed off angrily again. Well, I wasn’t in his home this time.

It was on the way back to the hotel that I began to rethink things. This guy had found out where I was really rather quickly, and he’d tracked me down, making a 300 kilometre round trip just to tell me to remove a slightly negative reference. He was quite possibly a criminally insane psychopath, and I was suddenly very aware that I was all alone in a foreign country. I felt nervous for the rest of the walk, paranoid that any of the motorcycles that whizzed past might be a Muchsin hired hitman about to run me down. Wait a minute. Muchsin. Much sin. Ah, the clue was in the name all along. Textbook Hollywood villain name. I quickened my pace and it was with some relief that I made it back to the safety of my hotel room and double-bolted the door, or at least I would have done if there had been more than one bolt. This movie was finally living up to its billing. I had a criminally insane psychopath on my tail and I was just a little bit scared. Now, I had to ask myself, what would Ryan Gosling do?

It’s at this point in the narrative I should point out that I don’t actually really know who Ryan Gosling is. When I cast him to play me in the movie it was based on the fact that girls always swoon when they hear his name. I don’t know any of his movies and I don’t think I’d recognise him if he bumped into me in the street.

So asking myself what Ryan Gosling would do was a bit of a dead-end. What else was there? Come on brain, think! But before my brain could think there was a knock on the door. A terrifying knock at the door. I looked around, but there was no other way out of my simple room. I was trapped. Then came the voice, the terrifying, terrifying voice at the door.

“Excuse me mister, photo? Photo?” It was a small child.

“No!” I cried out. It was surely a trap. What else was there? What other way out of this predicament? Ah, wifi. The Internet. Good. I went on warmshowers, deleted the feedback, and wrote Mr Much-sin a grovelling apology. Well, I thought it might be time to be a little diplomatic. At least until I was out of the country.