I woke up in my rather rough room in Pangururan with a fairly difficult climb ahead of me. I didn’t have perfect facts at my disposal, but according to the Plotaroute website, I would need to climb 1,500 meters (4,921 feet) before I made my way out of the caldera of Lake Toba. That gives another idea (if one were needed) of the vastness of the volcanic explosion that created Lake Toba in the first place. I don’t know if the figure of 1,500 meters seems like a lot. It appeared to be a lot to me, especially when I factored in the steepness of Indonesian roads. As in the Philippines, the roads are pitched so as to take full advantage of the internal combustion engine in first gear at full throttle. I had already been reduced to pushing my bike up steep roads in Indonesia on many occasions. It actually became the norm when faced with almost any incline. And it wasn’t just that it took a lot of physical effort to pedal the bike up slopes that steep. Even if I could do it, I worried that so much pressure being applied would snap the chain. And on top of that, pedaling the bike in first gear resulted in speeds as low as 3 or 4 kilometers per hour. An average person walks that fast or faster. So what is the advantage of cycling when it comes with the risk of snapping the chain? And I learned very quickly that there are advantages to pushing the bike. I was able to take in the details of my surroundings even better than when cycling. Just as cycling is preferable to riding a motorcycle because you hear and see so much more and can interact with your surroundings, walking is preferable to cycling.
I had been informed at my hotel that the princely sum of 200,000 rupiah which I had paid for my room included a breakfast. I would often skip such a thing since I could never figure out the exact timing of this breakfast. There was always a lot of confusion surrounding this breakfast, and I couldn’t be bothered trying to deal with it. Plus, I would want to be on the road before this breakfast was prepared, and it might turn out to be lukewarm tea and a single stale bun. But at the Tiga Besar Hotel, they were quite clear that the breakfast was at 7 a.m., and they were quite clear that it was served in a big restaurant just across from the hotel lobby. I decided to build my departure around that and have the breakfast.
The breakfast was not elaborate in any way, but it was better than the average. It consisted of a plate of fried rice and a cup of hot tea. But the kind women at this hotel also brought me a big jar of local crackers and a plate of bananas. With all of that combined, it was a good breakfast, though I could have put away two more plates of that rice. I was content to leave it at that for this morning out of concern for stomach problems on the road. In addition, my life of leisure had led to a (for me) significant weight gain, and I saw no disadvantage to being hungry on the road and forcing my body to turn to its fat reserves for energy.
I was fairly happy with how I organized my luggage for the day. As I had experimented with, I packed up my trailer and pannier bags and then I placed the large stuff sack with my sleeping bag, sleeping sheet, and mosquito net on top of the trailer. This trailer has three straps across the top that are used to tighten the bag. These are placed there specifically to pull the sides of the trailer bag toward the center and keep them from rubbing against the tires. These straps weren’t designed to hold luggage, but I saw no immediate problem with placing a stuff sack under them and then pulling them tight. It slightly changed the angle at which the straps pulled on the bag’s material, but I didn’t think that would have any kind of detrimental effect. I supposed that piling stuff on top of the trailer messed around with its center of gravity and could make the trailer prone to tipping over. But I didn’t see that as a problem. I had never felt this trailer ever being close to tipping over even on the tightest turn at the highest speeds I reached. Plus, the stuff sack on the top actually pressed down into the trailer quite a bit and became quite low. It wasn’t like it was perched high in the air. The luggage bag is made of Cordura. It’s not a stiff structure, so it sags down. I was so happy with this new technique that I began making plans to add my tent and sleeping pad to the top. The two stuff sacks containing my tent and my sleeping bag were always the two bags that I placed on top of the front and rear pannier racks. Placing them both on top of the trailer like that seemed like a natural progression. The only problem that I could see was that the rain cover that comes with the trailer would not be able to fit over these two stuff sacks. So if it began to rain and I had to put on the cover, I would have the extra step of removing the camping gear and placing it on the rear rack. Whether this would all work out or not was not clear. (I’ll have much more to say about that as this story progresses.)
PUSHING MY BIKE FROM PANGURURAN TO THE TP PKK COFFEE SHOP
The town of Pangururan is on the edge of Samosir Island. Part of the lore of Samosir Island is that it was never technically an island until a channel was dug between it and the mainland. Up until then, it was more properly termed a peninsula, just as Tuktuk is not an island but a peninsula on Samosir Island. I don’t know why the channel was dug, but now to leave Pangururan, I had to cross over a bridge, and I got the chance to view this channel that created an island. It was not impressive at all. I think it barely deserved the term of a channel. It was more like a shallow ditch. But there it was. It had water in it, and I left the island of Samosir and found myself back on the much, much larger island of Sumatra.
The initial climbing I was faced with was not that extreme, and I pedaled along without much problem. I wouldn’t call it easy, especially with a full touring load, but I never considered getting off the bike and pushing it. I even felt relaxed enough to play around with shooting some video, and I mounted my old Canon point-and-shoot camera on the handlebars to see if I could shoot some video and record some thoughts as I cycled along. I had done this a bit while in Tuktuk, and though the image quality was terrible, it was somewhat interesting. However, that was done without a handlebar bag, and I was able to place the tripod securely right in the middle of my handlebars, and it was somewhat secure. Now with the handlebar bag occupying the center of my handlebars, I had to somehow place my tripod on the far left or right side, and I could not get it stable. It wobbled all over the place and rattled. Plus, the wind was so strong that it blew out the microphone. I couldn’t hear my voice at all in the videos that I recorded. On top of that, the two batteries I have for that camera don’t hold much of a charge anymore. The camera shut off within a few minutes, and that was that. The contacts in the camera are also all corroded, and if the camera vibrates at all, the batteries lose contact and the camera shuts down even if the batteries are fully charged. I really should throw that camera away. I’ve kept it because it was useful from time to time for video because it is so small and light and I don’t have to worry about it. But now it is just extra junk that I don’t need. I should toss it.
I couldn’t say how many kilometers I covered in this fashion, but I climbed up and up and up and I got some beautiful views of farming valleys and Lake Toba itself. I stopped often to take pictures and take in the views. I had no idea where I was going to spend the night, so I had no particular destination in my mind, and I simply relaxed and let the day take its course.
Eventually, however, I reached a point where I could not pedal at all. At the time, I thought this would be just a short incline and then I’d be able to mount the bike again, but that never happened. Once off the bike and pushing it, I hardly got back on until I reached the very top of the 1,500-meter climb. At first, I felt silly pushing the bike. It’s silly enough from the local Indonesian perspective to be riding a bike in the first place. The people did not, as did some Filipinos, laugh so hard that they fell down when they saw me. But there was certainly a lot of astonished looks and laughter. Adding to that was the inability on their part to understand what was inside my trailer and other bags. The only time an Indonesian would have that much luggage would be to transact some kind of business. They’d be carrying goods from one spot to another to sell it. And a lot of people assumed I was pulling a trailer of stuff for sale. Even when I listed the myriad contents – camping gear, clothes, food, water, computer, camera lenses, tools, spare parts, stoves, pots and pans, shoes, flip flops, toiletry kit, etc – it made little sense to anyone.
I was so aware of the ridiculous figure I cut that at first, I’d try to pretend that I was cycling. The slope was so steep that I could walk only a couple of hundred steps at a time anyway before I had to stop and rest. And I would time those rests for when a car was passing. Then when people looked out the window at me, they’d see a cyclist who had stopped cycling just for a moment to drink some water or take a picture rather than a ridiculous foreigner pushing his bicycle up the entire mountain. As the day passed, the roads got steeper and steeper, and I was reduced to fifty steps at a time maximum. I spent long hours pushing my bike for fifty steps, counting them off as I went, and then pausing for a rest to allow my heartbeat and breathing to get down to normal levels. Then I’d take another fifty steps and rest. And at times, it took all the physical strength I could muster just to make those fifty steps. I was pushed to my very limits to make just one step sometimes. Sure, part of that was the excessive weight I was carrying on my bike and trailer. But most of it was simply the insane gradient of these roads. The days of cycling became so difficult, in fact, that it was a blessing that I never really knew what lay ahead. Each morning, had I known what lay ahead of me, I don’t think I could have mustered the strength to leave. It’s astonishing what you can endure when you deal with it step by step as the challenges appear. But if you saw all those challenges clearly ahead of you all in a row, I don’t think you could face them. It’s better sometimes to be ignorant.
Eventually, I stopped caring what anyone thought of me, and I simply accepted that I was a dude pushing a bike with a trailer up a volcano. I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought of me. That was my new identity and I pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed as the hours went by. The goal that I eventually settled on was a tantalizing spot on Google Maps marked as the Coffee Shop TP PKK and, a bit further on, the Menang Pandang Tele scenic viewpoint. I knew that the TP PKK coffee shop was not going to be a Starbucks with air conditioning and nice bathrooms. In fact, there was a better than even chance that it didn’t exist at all. But a goal that vanishes was better than no goal at all, and I kept the vision of this coffee shop as a carrot dangling ahead of me, giving me the strength to carry on.
It was quite late in the afternoon when I spotted the legendary TP PKK ahead of me. And it was sobering to note how little distance I had covered in an entire long day. I had left at about 7:30 in the morning, arrived at around 3:30 in the afternoon, and I had covered a mere 20 kilometers. At that pace, I was never going to even come close to reaching Banda Aceh before my visa expired. I began wishing I had not delayed my departure from Tuktuk for so many days after getting my visa renewed. I had clearly underestimated the difficulty of this journey and overestimated my ability to undertake it.
I was greeted at the TP PKK with the usual excitement and laughter as I pushed my bike into the wide, rocky parking area around it. I was approached by a couple of young men who wanted to take pictures with me. We posed for pictures, and then I pushed my bike toward the coffee shop itself. I had no idea what I would do there, but I figured at the very least I could have a cup of coffee, sit and relax.
The coffee shop, was, of course, not a coffee shop at all. It had nothing whatever to do with the image that pops into your mind when you hear the English words coffee shop in Canada. There was no building with windows or doors or anything like that. There was no counter where you approach a pleasant young lady to place your order for a cafe latte grande from a sign on the wall. There was no cash register and no tray of mints and no leave-a-penny-take-a-penny dish. Instead, there was simply a group of rickety tables and chairs underneath a crude sheltering roof. And to the side was a small shack where the coffee was made and some snacks and drinks were put out on display. Beside that was another shack that served as a kitchen. And behind were the outdoor latrines with the typical squat toilets and big containers of water for flushing by hand. One of the latrines was even completely open on two sides (no walls) so that you could view the beautiful mountain scenery as you took care of nature’s business. However, whoever built it this way clearly did not have the view in mind. When you situated yourself properly on the squat toilet, you weren’t facing the view at all. You were facing the other way. The effect was not to present a beautiful view to you but to present your quivering behind to the entire world.
I ended up spending the night there in my tent, and, as always happens, I became fascinated with the economics of the place. The TP PKK may have fallen far short of a western-style coffee shop in terms of appearance, comfort, and amenities, but it far exceeded it in terms of the services and products it offered and the economic life that buzzed around it. It was the typical place I’ve found all over the world that would require months of study to figure out how it worked. Just what I witnessed in the 14 hours that I was there would provide enough fodder for a solid dissertation in economics and community relations.
To start with, they sold not just coffee but also snacks, drinks, full meals, local delicacies, baked goods, and Lake Toba souvenirs. It was run and owned by a small family, and I quickly learned that the friendly woman I initially spoke with was the mother. The young man that made me my coffee was her son. He worked at this place full time and drove a fancy motorcycle. A much younger boy (who found everything I did exquisitely funny) was also this woman’s son. The father of this family was a coffee farmer, and I never met him. I instantly sized up this place and its tempting flat land as a place where I could spend the night. It had all the key ingredients I needed – flat land for my tent, a latrine (though missing some walls), and water. With this in mind, I tried to find out some details, such as when they closed. I was looking forward to having the place myself so I could relax and set up my tent and do all the hundreds things I needed to in peace and quiet.
That dream was soon squashed when they told me that this place stayed open 24-hours-day. That seemed odd to me until I realized that other than serving passing travelers, their main function was as a truck stop. The huge trucks that lumber up and down Indonesian roads non-stop use places like this as their home away from home. They do everything there. They get their meals. They use the bathroom. They get water. They wash their trucks. They rearrange their loads. They charge their phones. They take naps. They meet their friends and talk. And, as most pertained to me, they slept there at night. Every night, the relatively large parking area filled with trucks, and the drivers would congregate around the tables and drink and laugh and tell stories and then sleep in the cabs of their trucks. So my dream of privacy and peace and quiet were completely shattered.
I still had some hope, though, as the afternoon progressed. I dumped my trailer and my pannier bags in the restaurant area, and then I rode my bike the half a kilometer up the road to a scenic lookout point. There wasn’t much of interest there for me, but I took some pictures of the view and then had a meal of a bowl of noodles at a little shop and read a book on my Kindle (I’m reading the novel that inspired the movie “A Quiet Place”). When I got back to the truck stop, another member of the family had shown up. This was the high-school-age daughter. She was the only one of the family that spoke English, and she was eager to talk with me and practice her English. She was very nice (as were all the family members), and I passed the remaining time of the day sitting in a plastic chair occasionally chatting with her and just watching all the activity around me.
It was funny that every time I thought I had figured something out or learned how the place worked, I’d find out that I was wrong. I seemed to misunderstand everything. For example, I was told clearly that this place was open 24 hours a day. That kind of made sense because even the shop and the kitchen area had no front walls or doors. There was no way to lock up anything. At night, anyone could just waltz in and take all their food and everything else. But then, as the sun started to go down, it was clear that the entire family was packing up to leave. The had a home in the nearby farming village of Harian, and the mother and the daughter and the young son were going there. The older son was getting on his motorcycle to go down to Pangururan to hang out with friends and do whatever young men do in the evening. That would leave me in this truck stop all by myself. I was VERY pleased about that, and I was quick to assure them that I had no trouble being alone and that I wasn’t scared.
We had earlier discussed the best place for me to put my tent, and to my delight, we settled on a space right between the tables but underneath the big roof. That meant I would be sheltered from the inevitable rainstorm that would hit during the night. I set up my tent with the entire family in attendance, and they had a lot of fun taking selfies. Everyone wanted to come right inside my tent with me and take pictures from in there.
Once I was set up with my camping spot for the night, the family left, and I was able to truly relax and start to wind down. My plan was to crawl into my tent and go to sleep as soon as possible. I needed to be horizontal as fast as possible, and I wanted all the sleep I could get to face the rest of my climb out of the caldera the next day. The peace and quiet enveloped me like a cozy blanket, and I looked forward to a delicious night of solitude.
However, that did not last long. In all the discussions of the arrangements for my staying there and putting my tent in between the tables under the roof, the family did not tell me about one important detail. They did not tell me how, at night, the parking lot would fill with trucks, and the truckers would gather around those tables – all of them within a foot or two of my tent – and eat and drink and laugh and smoke and generally hang out. I don’t know what the financial arrangements were, but these truckers also helped themselves to anything they wanted from the shop. They fired up the stove and cooked noodles and chopped vegetables and boiled rice and made coffee and charged their phones and played loud music. They basically made themselves at home even though, technically, the homeowners weren’t even there. I can’t imagine what they thought of the tent and the bicycle. The truckers had all shown up after the family had left and after I had crawled into my tent and lay down. So I was inside this thin nylon shell lying naked on my Thermarest mattress while all around me there was social bedlam.
I assume that there was an official arrangement between the truckers and the family. There is no way they could just help themselves to the eggs and coffee and other food and cooking supplies and then sleep there without paying something. But throughout the night and then in the morning, I saw nothing to indicate that any records were kept of what they consumed, and I saw no money change hands. Perhaps it is a monthly or weekly arrangement? I don’t know, and it was too late to ask about it. When I was hanging out there in the afternoon and planning to camp there in my tent, I had no idea that I was about to be at the center of truck stop social life.
The chatter from the truckers and the music and activity didn’t actually bother me at all. I was so tired from pushing my bike up that mountain that I was glad just to be lying down, and I was quite content whatever my surroundings. I even managed to fall asleep from time to time and I felt quite good and refreshed by the time I unzipped my tent at around 5 the next morning. I was the first one up. I even beat the truckers, and I washed up, used the latrine, and packed up my tent and other gear before even the first one climbed out of their truck’s cab. Once the first driver emerged, he went to all the other trucks and beat on their doors and shouted at the other drivers that it was time to get up. Perhaps he was the designated alarm clock for the group. If they were surprised to see the tent gone and a funny-looking foreigner tinkering with a bicycle, they didn’t show it. We were just men on the road together getting together to face another day.
