Water? IMPOSSIBLE!: Back to the road

April 12, 2015

I planned to leave Dumai early on Sunday morning, but young Danny had been so keen to go swimming with me that I simply had to go with him before leaving. His house was just across the street and I went and found him and we headed off into town on our bicycles to find a nice hotel with a swimming pool. The streets were as chaotic as they had been the last time I’d crossed town, and it was a strange experience to step out of that and into the nice interior of a decent hotel. We paid a little money and went through to the outdoor pool, a modern place with fountains at one end that was well-maintained and entirely out of keeping with the rough-around-the-edges style that I had already grown accustomed to in Indonesia.

Now the reason why Danny was so keen for me to come with him was because he couldn’t swim, and he was hoping that I could teach him. And for the next hour I did my best to do just that. I felt like a father teaching a child to swim as I promised to catch him if he was in trouble, and then proceeded to watch his initial flailing, splashing, choking, almost-drowning efforts. His little arms were going around at a hundred miles an hour but his feet sank like a stone. “Danny you need to slow down your arms, let’s just try floating first, get used to keeping your feet high, that’s it, good, now focus on each arm movement…” I went on like this for some time, assuming the role of the heroic swimming coach, and with each effort Danny got better and better, until eventually he was able to complete one width of the pool. Now we just needed to work on his breathing so that he could go further. Unfortunately at this point a group of teenage girls from his school arrived and jumped in the pool in shorts and t-shirts which, once soaked, clung tightly to their young bodies and for some reason Danny suffered a serious loss of concentration, at least on the task at hand, and suddenly he mysteriously abandoned his interest in learning to swim and all hope was lost.

Back at the house there was a Japanese man who had arrived ready to take my place. It seemed like there were really a lot of foreigners coming here to volunteer, which would perhaps explain Mr Muchsin’s indifference towards me. Maybe once upon a time he showed tremendous hospitality to his guests but by now he had grown tired of us. I packed up my bags and just before leaving I asked him if I could fill up my water bottles for the road. Indonesians get their drinking water in large refillable twenty litre bottles which only cost a few pence a litre. I’d been allowed to get water from the house supply during my stay and I hoped that Mr Muchsin would at least be gracious enough to give me some water before I headed out to cycle under the hot sun.

“IMPOSSIBLE!” he declared with a face contorted in horror at the sight of my four bottles. “You can fill up one.”

Unfortunately I’m ashamed to say I rather lost my temper at this point, although it wasn’t really about the water. I was tired of Mr Muchsin’s attitude. He’d shown me very little hospitality and clearly had no interest in his volunteers, only in what his volunteers could do for him. Now, after I’d taken six hours of his classes for him whilst he swanned around and just came by at the end to collect the cash, he was reluctant even to give me water for the road. And he knew very well that I would have to pay considerably more to buy the smaller bottles of water in the shops.

“That’s no problem for you, though,” he smirked, “you being rich.”

I stormed off without saying goodbye.

You won't be seing this foreigner again, but maybe you should 've got one of them to proof-read your sign

The benefit that accrued to me by my irate departure from the English school was in that the busy and dangerous streets out of Dumai passed in a fuming blur without me even noticing them. The disadvantage was that by the time I calmed down I realised that I was completely and utterly lost. I’d wandered out into a peaceful rural/suburban neighbourhood that was so quiet I guessed I must have gone down a dead-end, but luckily I found a way out to a café which had wifi. With the help of some very friendly people here and the good old Internet I was soon back on the right track. I felt bad about having lost my cool though. It was not in my nature and was something I wished I hadn’t done. I never like to have bad blood between myself and anyone, whatever the circumstances, and it was a shame that I wouldn’t have the chance to apologise to Mr Muchsin for my behaviour. Little did I know it, but someday soon I would.

Shortly after I resumed, confident of my direction, I came to a fork in the road and once again didn’t know which way to go. Luckily a middle-aged woman called out to me from a nearby house. Simply asking which way I should go soon led to me being invited to take a seat in front of the whole family while my water bottles were refilled. The father was there, and a grown-up daughter who could speak some English, and a little grandma who sat quietly in her chair and just watched. They were a real Muslim family, and a fun one, as they laughed and smiled and joked constantly. Before I left with my spirits well and truly lifted I was handed a small bunch of bananas, harvested from their own backyard. Water and bananas - what kindness - and I didn’t even have to teach six hours of school classes.

"Hello Aunty, you won't believe who has dropped by! Come home quick! Yes, Yes, Grandma has put her underwear on her head again!"

Shortly after saying thank-you and goodbye to the family I reached the main road, my only onward option. It had a lot of big trucks on it, yet was narrow and in pretty bad shape. Think British country lane, but with M25 traffic. Under any normal circumstances, cycling on this road would have been an ordeal of considerable proportions for me, yet today I felt good. It was liberating just to be out on the bike again, and to be actually moving somewhere for the first time in three weeks. I had a great sense of freedom and joy, despite the road.

The palm fruit from which the oil is made. Most of the traffic was either trucks carrying the fruit, or tankers carrying the oil

I was passing through swampy marshland which somehow had still been almost entirely planted with palm oil, and to a lesser extent pineapple. There were houses every hundred metres or so, real stilt houses built up above the wetland. People frequently called out greetings to me as I rode and at one point a man clearly wanted me to stop, so I did, and he invited me up to his porch for a glass of water. Seemed like water was available everywhere, I needn’t have worried about finding it after all. The man whose company I presently kept lived in this little wooden shack with his wife and he told me that he had recently lost his job as a trucker. It was terribly sad to look at him and his wife, with their kind smiles, and think about how tough their lives must be now that they’d lost their source of income. Suddenly there was a load splashing noise beneath us.

“Fish” the man grinned.

Well, at least I guess they’ll always be able to catch supper.

Mid-afternoon I connected to the even more main highway, which was much the same as the last, only busier. There were lots of pineapple sellers along the road with chopped-up slices of what, according to my answers back at the school, was my favourite fruit, and so I stopped to buy some. Finding out the price proved impossible and so I handed the woman 6,000 IDR (about 30p) and waited to see what I’d get. As she loaded up the bag with slice after slice until it was overflowing I realised that I was going to be eating a lot of pineapple in the coming days.

The road remained narrow and busy but most of the truck drivers were quite patient. I was only run off the road a couple of times, which under the circumstances I didn’t feel like complaining about half as much as I felt like complaining about the much-more-frequent problem of the trucker air horn. Another potential difficulty was that with all the swampy land it seemed like camping was going to be tricky. So when I saw a dry palm oil plantation for the first time I wasted no time in peeling off into it to set up camp. It felt good to be pitching my tent again, good to be back on the road.

Today's ride: 49 km (30 miles)
Total: 40,024 km (24,855 miles)

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