Monday, January 23, 2023
8:18 a.m. Room 4, Tengkong Kost
(SPOT ON 91950 Guest House TekNong Syariah)
Bangkinan, Sumatra, Indonesia
It’s a bit late in the morning for me to be having my fingers on a keyboard, but that’s because I’m going to spend another day and night here in Bangkinang. I won’t be cycling anywhere today. I’m still quite concerned about my left knee, and I’m going to give it another 24 hours to rest. And the weather report is not great. There has been heavy rain for many days now, and the forecast is calling for more heavy rain today. However, when last I checked, the forecast predicted slightly less severe weather starting tomorrow morning. It’s funny, though, how the closer to the day you get, the worse the forecast becomes. For example, when I checked yesterday, the forecast called for heavy thunderstorms with a 99% chance of rain for today, which is Monday. But then on Tuesday and for the rest of the week, the chance of rain stood at around 20%. That was a very positive sign for getting back on the bike starting Tuesday morning. However, when I check now, the chance of rain for Tuesday morning and the rest of the week is now 60% to 75%. And that always happens. From a distance, the forecast is often quite optimistic. Up close, it suddenly nose dives into extreme pessimism. I wonder if that is a function of weather-predicting technology or is that human nature somehow creeping into the system? We can be optimistic from a distance and then quite pessimistic close up. Perhaps we have built that tendency into our technology.
I haven’t consulted any kind of medical professional about my knees. I honestly don’t see any point to doing that. I don’t have much faith in doctors, and I don’t think there is anything happening with my knees that requires a doctor. They wouldn’t be able to tell me anything that I don’t already know. They’ll just poke at my knee and I’ll tell them that nothing hurts right now. It only hurts when I ride my bike. And they’ll tell me to stay off the bike and rest. And that is what I’m doing now anyway.
I think one of two things is going on. The first option is that I just strained my knees. I came out of the gate too fast. I haven’t done any cycling for years, and all this sudden cycling just strained them. Evidence for that comes from the fact that my right knee was in a lot of pain and now it is fully recovered. It just needed time to get in condition and adjust. That indicates that my left knee could eventually do the same thing. Being right-handed, everything on the right side of my body has always tended to be quite a bit stronger and more durable than anything on the left. The second option is that I’ve developed a type of arthritis in my knee joints. Based on everything I’ve read and all the medical YouTube videos I’ve watched, that is the most obvious diagnosis other than just strain.
One concern I had was that this pain in my left knee was the result of actual physical trauma. I hear a lot about athletes suffering a torn meniscus, an ACL tear, and various other types of cartilage and tendon and ligament damage. I’ve looked into all of those, and it’s pretty obvious that none of them relate to my situation. I have none of the symptoms of a torn ligament or torn tendon or cartilage damage. What I’m experiencing is something else entirely. My best guess is that I’m experiencing severe strain placed on the tendons. Tendons connect muscles to bones, and the pain I’m feeling seems to be localized in that kind of area. The pain is not inside my knee but more around my knee in general – both above and below. And that indicates that I’ve put too much strain on my tendons too fast.
Despite all the rest days I had in Pekanbaru and now in Bangkinan, it’s clear that I’m still not fully recovered. This room in Bangkinan has a squat toilet, and when I use it, I can feel a lot of pressure being placed on my knees. I don’t normally feel that kind of pressure or discomfort. This has only happened since I started this bike ride. And because of the pain, I struggle to get back up once I squat all the way down. This is not normal for me. If I was fully recovered, I would be able to pop back up without any problem. So I suspect that when I do get back on the bike, the pain will return in some form and at some level. The question is how quickly the pain will emerge. Will it begin as soon as I start riding? Or will I be able to cycle for ten, twenty, or thirty kilometers before the pain kicks in? The wild card here will be elevation, because any cycling from this point will involve a lot of climbing. That’s a bit unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do about that. The one remedy I have at my disposal is to ride very short distances each day.
And because of all these long delays, I’m starting to develop a new overall plan. I’m going to think about it some more today and make a decision soon. This plan involves extending my time in Sumatra by flying in and out of the country and starting over with a new 30-day visa-on-arrival, which would give me the option of a second 30-day visa extension for a total of 60 more days. I didn’t want to do that. My original plan was to spend only 60 days in Sumatra and then be back on the ferry to Malaysia. However, I’ve barely done any cycling on this trip so far, and it would feel like a waste to invest all this time and effort in bringing my bike to Sumatra and then just turn around and go back without doing any cycling. It’s starting to feel like the only way to salvage this little trip is to extend it with a visa run.
A visa run is a tricky thing right now. In the past, I wouldn’t give it much thought. I would simply book a flight to Kuala Lumpur as the simplest and cheapest and most convenient option. However, my experience with immigration at Port Dickson indicates that the mood might have changed in Malaysia. If that is true, then I might run into trouble either flying in or flying out of KL. And that might lead to more trouble when I eventually try to enter Malaysia through Port Dickson again on the ferry. If I hadn’t already purchased my ferry ticket from Dumai to Port Dickson, I would take the ferry to Malacca instead. That would at least avoid my having to encounter the same tough immigration officers that I dealt with in Port Dickson. Now that I think about it, perhaps that is a good idea anyway. Perhaps I should simply buy a new ticket and take the ferry to Malacca instead of returning through Port Dickson. I hadn’t thought about that option until right now, but it seems like a good idea. I’d lose the money I paid for the original ticket, but it isn’t that much. According to the information I have, a one-way ticket to Malacca costs about $25 US. And doing that would avoid the hard-core immigration officers at Port Dickson. Plus, it would be a new experience. I’d be on a new boat, and I’d be arriving in a new city. I’ve been to Malacca before, but it was decades ago, and I don’t remember anything about the place. And assuming that my knees are in good condition by that point, I could then ride my bike around Malaysia as I work my way back towards Kuala Lumpur. I could perhaps follow the east coast, depending on the weather at the time.
The more I think about this plan, the more I like it. The idea would be to continue my bike ride up to Bukittinggi and spend as much time as possible there. And then when my visa gets close to expiring, I would take a bus down to either Padang or Pekanbaru and take a flight to Kuala Lumpur. I’d spend a few days there and then fly back to Padang or Pekanbaru and then take a bus back up to Bukittinggi (or hitchhike). And then I can continue my bike ride. Of course, this is assuming that my knee will allow me to cycle.
There’s a chance that when my flight lands in Kuala Lumpur, immigration won’t let me into the country. But if that happens, I assume they would just require me to book a flight to another country. I could then book an onward flight to Bangkok or Singapore right out of KLIA. And then I could fly back to Indonesia from there. At least I assume that’s what would happen. I’ve never been denied entry into a country at immigration before, so I don’t know what the standard procedure is. But the only thing a person CAN do is fly to a different country, right? So they have to allow you the opportunity to just turn around and fly out of that airport, right? Perhaps I could just fly right back to Indonesia and not enter Malaysia at all. I’d be fine with that.
It looks like I’m talking myself into this plan. And that means that I will have to book a flight to Kuala Lumpur soon. I just have to decide if I want to fly out of Padang or out of Pekanbaru. The flight costs are roughly the same from the two cities. It’s a bit cheaper out of Pekanbaru, but not by a great deal. From both cities, a round-trip flight to Kuala Lumpur would end up costing roughly $185 US once you add in all the taxes and other fees and services. It’s funny how you always start out with an idea of how cheap a flight is going to be. And you talk yourself into a plan based on that base price. But once you dive into the system and start to actually book the flight, the cost suddenly goes up and up. And it usually ends up being quite a bit more expensive than you expected. It would certainly be a lot cheaper to take the ferry, but I don’t think I can risk that from an immigration point of view. I think I’ll be lucky to enter Malaysia one more time by ferry. And I need to reserve that luck for when I go back with my bicycle.
It’s looking like Padang would be the better option despite being slightly more expensive. My guess is that Padang is a much more pleasant city than Pekanbaru. It is also much closer to Bukittinggi. Pekanbaru is five hours from Bukittinggi by bus. Pandang is about two and a half hours away by bus. And if I book a flight out of Padang, I would have the option of riding my bike down from Bukittinggi to Padang. I wouldn’t have to go by bus. It depends on whether I want to leave my bike in Bukittinggi and return there after my trip to Malaysia. But at least it would give me the option. I wouldn’t have that option with Pekanbaru.
The alternative to this crazy plan is to simply leave Sumatra when my current visa extension expires on February 14. But that’s only three weeks away. And I would need a week or more of that just to cycle back to Dumai. I would reach Bukittinggi just in time to turn around and go back. To be honest, that isn’t that terrible a plan. I wasn’t planning on spending more than 60 days in Sumatra to begin with. I’ve been here quite a bit in the past, so it doesn’t have the excitement of a new place. Everything feels very familiar, so I doubted I would enjoy more than 30 or 60 days. I was hoping that the simple fact of cycling would keep the experience fresh and exciting. But with my knee problems, the cycling hasn’t come through for me.
The final way to look at is one of equivalent value. I don’t know if I invented that concept or if there is another name for it, but the idea of equivalent value is that you look at the time and money you would spend on a certain experience and then imagine what else you could do with that money. At the moment, I’m considering spending close to $200 and investing a number of travel days so that I can stay in Sumatra for another 30-60 days. But for almost the same amount of money, I could fly to the Philippines out of Malaysia. Or I could go to Vietnam. It’s one thing to think about spending money so that you can stay longer where you are. But it can be helpful to look at the situation from the perspective of what else you can do or get for the same amount of money and time. I suppose the concept of opportunity costs fits here. That’s an economics term that describes what I think of as equivalent value. If you focus on one business activity or opportunity, it means that you are also losing the opportunity to do something else. You have to factor that concept into your decision making. It might cost me $200 to stay in Sumatra. But the decision also costs me the opportunity of doing something else and going somewhere else. That’s an opportunity cost. Doing one thing costs you the opportunity of doing something else.
In thinking about my own plans and this rather disappointing trip to Sumatra, I’ve ended up doing a relatively deep dive into the travel adventures of another YouTuber called Kristian Hansen. I found out about this guy through a comment that was left on one of my videos by another YouTubing couple based in Sumatra. Their channel is called Exploring Sumatra with Agung and Carly. I believe Carly is from New Zealand and Agung is from Indonesia. The two of them met in Indonesia and got married. And they are now living somewhere around Lake Toba in Sumatra and posting YouTube videos about their life and travels here. And they left a comment on one of my videos. So, I started watching videos on their channel, and in one video they happened to meet and then spend a day with another YouTuber, and his name was Kristian Hansen. I assumed from the way they talked about Kristian that he was a famous YouTuber, and I went to check out his channel as well, and I learned a few things.
Kristian is from Denmark and before he started making YouTube videos, he had been living and working in Jakarta at a good expat job. I think he spent five years at this job in Jakarta, and from what I see, he had an excellent salary and lived a fairly luxurious expat life. He was living in a high-end apartment complex and earned enough money to save up quite a bit while buying nice things, including a KTM 390 Adventure motorcycle. And then he got the idea to embark on a big motorcycle trip from one end of Indonesia all the way to the other end. This involved big changes in his life: He quit his job, gave up his apartment, got rid of all his possessions, and spent a year planning and getting organized. He also started a YouTube channel, and he hoped to document his journey on YouTube and hopefully develop a social media income that would fund this trip.
I find doing deep dives into people’s travel adventures to be fascinating. I like to see how they go about planning these trips and how they think about them. It’s interesting to get that perspective because it gives you a tool for understanding yourself. It’s easy to lose track of your own identity and interests just in general. You often don’t really see yourself clearly in life, (the good and the bad) because you just take your own personality and life for granted. And you’re too close to yourself to see yourself clearly. To fully understand and appreciate your own nature, you need something to contrast that with. And learning about someone like Kristian Hansen and his trip is like having a flashlight to shine light on your own life and kind of see it clearly. You need that contrast to truly understand anything.
Luckily for me, Kristian put together one video that was kind of a 30-minute behind-the-scenes look at all his planning and preparations. And through that video, I got to understand where he was coming from. His YouTube story, as he tells it, begins in January of 2021. On January 4, 2021, he had 161 subscribers for his YouTube channel. And then he spent the next year building up his YouTube channel, planning his trip, getting sponsors, networking, and shooting videos. I found it interesting how deliberately he went about this. It’s so different from what I’m accustomed to. I think he must have been aware of popular YouTube travel vloggers, especially moto-vloggers like Itchy Boots. And that became the model that he followed, and everything he did was designed to achieve that kind of social media presence.
I’m quite different from that, of course. I tend to just live my life and record what I do in journal form – warts and all – whether that’s in pictures, in a written journal, or now on video. And I’ve sort of been living this exact same life for decades before YouTube even existed, before the Internet existed. I’ve done bicycle trips and backpacking trips and lived overseas long before it ever occurred to me to have a YouTube channel. For most of my life YouTube didn’t even exist. And even when YouTube was created, I had no idea for a long time that people were travelling and recording their trips on video. Plus, I tend to think of everything in terms of simple journal-keeping. I don’t set out to record anything because it will look amazing. I don’t choose activities because they will appeal to a YouTube audience. I just record whatever is right in front of me and whatever it is I’m actually doing. I like that approach. I like the behind-the-scenes approach rather than trying to portray some kind of romantic and somewhat false image of what my life is like. Finally, I’ve never had any money. I’ve always lived a very limited kind of life on the road because I’ve never had much money. I entered this world back in the days of poor backpackers trying to live on $5/day. And I’ve never really graduated from that life.
Kiristian’s experience is quite different partially because he started his YouTube motorcycle adventures in a very different world and at a different time. With the example of other successful YouTubers to draw from, Kristian sat down with a whiteboard and a videographer partner and made deliberate plans. He chose a certain video style and specific video topics precisely because he knew they would be popular on YouTube. He made choices based on what would get the most views. And that’s a very smart business decision.
He also set out right from the start to incorporate sponsors and business partners. His website lists a couple of dozen companies that he has had deals with. And his planning and preparations videos were based largely on him visiting all these companies and getting all kinds of special gear from them for his motorcycle and his trip. I found all that fascinating because I also saw a tendency to adopt certain attitudes and themes in his videos because they suited the sponsorships. For example, when you plan a trip like this and are deeply embedded in the motorcycle culture, the idea of safety comes up a lot. And he adopted that as one of the themes of his trip. He said that he wants to promote the idea of rider safety in Indonesia. And that is an idea that is sure to find traction in this modern world that is absolutely obsessed with fear and safety. And he found a company that would supply all the latest high-tech riding clothing designed to protect a rider in the case of a fall, crash, or slide. By the time he was done outfitting himself for the first part of his trip, he was walking around in a full set of body armor. That isn’t my style, of course. He looked to me like some kind of alien insect-like creature or a character from a Mad Max movie about to step into the cage to go to battle with other similarly armor-clad warriors. I played hockey in Canada in my youth, and all that protective gear looked like he was wearing full hockey goalie gear on the outside of his clothing. I had to wonder how long it would take just to put all of that clothing on. It feels like it would take an hour to just get dressed. And then all that heavy, thick clothing and armor and riding boots and riding gloves must make it difficult to just walk around and move. I couldn’t help but think how awkward it would be to pull over to the side of the road to get a drink or take a picture or adjust the GoPro or do anything. And I had to wonder how hot it must be. I’m here in Sumatra in shorts and a T-shirt, and I nearly die from the heat every day. I’m drenched with sweat while wearing a T-shirt just from eating a bowl of noodles at the side of the road. I couldn’t imagine wearing all those layers and all that heavy clothing. I’d be dead from heat exhaustion before I made it from my hotel room to the motorcycle. And with all that protective gear and layers on, how do you even go to the bathroom? It must take forever to undress sufficiently to accomplish most daily tasks and then dress again.
So far, I’ve made it through the preparation videos on Kristian’s channel, and I just started watching the first couple of videos of his actual trip. He started from Jakarta on February 5, 2022, and he headed first to Sumatra. The overall plan for his trip was to ride through all of Indonesia from the farthest point in the west to the farthest point in the east. I’m not familiar with these names at all, but he chose as the name for his big trip Sabang to Merauke. I guess Sabang in northwestern Sumatra is the beginning point and Merauke in Papua is the end point. I think at one point he even mentioned wanting to pass through every single province in the country. But I’m not sure if he is sticking to that goal. Considering how professional he has been about marketing, I’m surprised he didn’t choose something with more familiar names. I don’t think most people would have any idea where and what Sabang and Merauke even are. Itchy Boots, for example, chose the name Patagonia to Alaska for her last motorcycle journey. Those names would be instantly familiar to an international audience. Sabang to Merauke wouldn’t quite ring the same bells. I thought he might be better off choosing something simpler, such as 10,000 Kilometers Across Indonesia! or something like that.
An interesting thing about Kristian’s videos on Sumatra so far is to contrast his clothing style with the people that he encounters. I’m thinking in particular of all that body armor. I just reached yet another scene where some local people on a scooter stopped to chat with him. This happens all the time, of course. And, as is extremely common in Indonesia, there were four people on that one scooter. There were two women and two small children all crowded onto that one scooter. And, of course, they were just dressed in their regular clothes with sandals on their feet, and none of them were wearing any helmets or gloves. In Sumatra, entire families routinely pile onto their scooters in whatever clothes they were wearing that day and go zooming around. And it’s a fascinating contrast to see all these people posing for selfies with this giant Danish man wearing body armor and heavy boots and heavy riding gloves and giant helmet.
Kristian also outfitted his motorcycle in the same way. He had business relationships with a variety of companies in Jakarta, and they supplied him with all the latest cases and mounting systems and tools and safety gear. He was ready for every eventuality you can imagine. I actually watched all these gear-related videos, and he was two weeks away from leaving on his trip, and I thought he was all done. But then there was one more video about upgrading his motorcycle again, and on that one day, a special company added twelve more items to the motorcycle. I didn’t imagine that anything more could be added, but they added crash bars, high-tech lighting systems, and tons more.
I can relate to all of this, of course. It’s fun to plan for a trip and shop for speciality gear that you think you might need. I’ve done it myself, though never to that extent. And I also know that it’s easy to get caught up in it and go overboard. And I had a sense that by the time he was done, even Kristian felt like he had gone a bit too far. On the day that he left from Jakarta, his motorcycle and his clothing and all his gear seemed like way, way too much. The motorcycle (and his body) seemed overloaded and far too complicated. In fact, he crashed before he even got out of Jakarta. He crossed some railway tracks while it was raining, and the wheels slipped out from under him and he went down. And I think that was a result of his bike being so heavily loaded and awkward. It was just too much. In my experience, this tends to happen when you plan for too long. You end up preparing for every possible eventuality, and every week or every day, you add another item to your gear list. It gets out of control.
Personally, I feel like he would have been much better off forgetting about using such a big and powerful adventure motorcycle. He doesn’t need it for this trip. It took him a year to prepare this bike and all his gear, and the mind boggles at how much it all cost. And none of it seems necessary to me. He could have easily just picked up a cheap scooter secondhand, strapped a backpack to the seat behind him and left. He probably already owned a basic scooter in Jakarta. He could have been ready to go in a day or two, and it would have worked just as well as this motorcycle. In fact, I think a regular scooter is a much more suitable way to get around for what he wants to do. Much easier. Much less trouble. A scooter has more than enough power to go up and down the roads of Indonesia. That would be so much more fun. This powerful motorcycle and all the expensive gear seems to me to be a barrier between him and the world around him that he wants to interact with and record on video. A scooter would put him right in that world and it would be so much easier to explore.
But, of course, riding a motorcycle gives him entrance into that world of motorcycle-lovers worldwide. It’s a very romantic and exciting idea to be on one of these adventure-style motorcycles. It’s just that when you are on the smooth highways of Sumatra and staying in quite fancy resorts and hotels every night, the adventure motorcycle and all the gear doesn’t seem necessary. It’s like equipping yourself for the worst jungle trails and off-road craziness, but then sailing down smooth highways for a nice, luxury holiday. There’s an imbalance there.
I remember on all my scooter trips in Taiwan, I had the same feeling. The motorcycle culture is alive and well in Taiwan, and on the weekend, you’d encounter quite large motorcycle clubs touring around. Yet, those motorcycles seemed out of place to me. They rode massive and very expensive motorcycles. They had 1100cc engines and things like that. And in Taiwan, you could never get that bike up to speed. By the time you got it in high gear, you’d arrive at the far end of the country. There just isn’t enough room or any need for bikes that large. You could barely get out of second gear before you hit the first hairpin turn. And that was fine, because these guys on those massive, shiny bikes weren’t really about riding them. They just liked owning them and outfitting them and talking about them. And they’d wake up on Saturday or Sunday morning and ride their bikes fifteen kilometers outside of Taipei and then stop at a popular roadside coffee shop with a hundred other motorcycle riders. They’d park their bikes in the shade and drink coffee all morning and just hang out and chat with other motorcycle riders. And that was the point. The point wasn’t to ride the bikes anywhere. The point of this hobby was to be a motorcycle owner and hang out at coffee shops and talk about motorcycles and admire the motorcycles other people were riding. And these guys, too, were outfitted in full body armor from head to toe. They didn’t need any of that expensive protective gear, because they were barely riding the bikes at all. But it was part of the motorcycle culture to dress like that. If you dared show up at one of these motorcycle club meetings outfitted in normal street clothes, you’d be berated and beaten down and your head would be filled with every scary story imaginable about how if you crashed at high speed, you need all that armor so you can slide along the pavement and not be hurt. You’d have to defend your choice of clothing so much that eventually you’d give in and put on the body armor like everyone else. Safety gear is dogma for these groups even when there is no real need for it. It’s more like a uniform than a choice out of logic or necessity. You have to look the part if you are going to ride a motorcycle like that. I’m not a big fan of uniforms, which is why you won’t find me wearing the traditional skin-tight lycra of a bicycle rider. I don’t feel any need to look the part. I’ll just wear whatever clothing I would normally wear to walk around town.
Doing this deep dive into Kristian’s trip is related to how I enjoy the behind-the-scenes approach to everything. I like to know all the nitty-gritty details and logistics. And luckily for me, Kristian provides a lot of that in his videos. Part of my obsession with logistics comes from a certain insecurity, I suppose. I might see a YouTube video from a guy like Kristian going on this amazing motorcycle journey. And the scenery in his videos and the experiences in his videos might make me doubt my own experiences. Everything he is doing might seem better than what I am doing at any particular point. But all that glamor is often on the surface. And when you dive into the logistics, you better understand what is going on.
For example, there was a point when Kristian went back to Europe for a family visit. And right then, the pandemic hit and borders closed. He was stuck in Europe for four months before he could return to Indonesia. And he posted a bunch of YouTube videos in which he rode a motorcycle through Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Slovakia. That struck me as amazing and I wondered how he put that trip together and got his motorcycle and got the money. But then I took a closer look, and I learned that the entire motorcycle trip was only four weeks long. And he was able to use his father’s motorcycle. And then suddenly it all made sense. As soon as I learned that the trip was four weeks long, it changed my perspective. I no longer felt like this was something I’d want to do. I would have no interest in moving so fast through so many different countries.
That often happens to me. I’ll come across some story or YouTube video about a person who apparently went on this life-altering, astonishing, mind-blowing journey to some exotic location. And I’ll feel this sense of yearning about wanting to do that myself. And I wonder how in the world this person pulled off such an astonishing journey. But then you dive into the details and find out that the whole trip lasted one week or something like that. And a journey like Kristian’s might be similar to that. I’ve watched two videos of his trip on Sumatra so far. And on the surface, you might get the impression that he is on this major, challenging, and adventurous motorcycle adventure. It feels like what I have seen so far took weeks. Yet, it’s only been three days. He rode about 500 kilometers from Jakarta and then stopped at a really nice beachside resort in a surfing town. And he decided to stay there for ten days.
So, basically, after a full year of preparation and a lot of talk about embarking on the greatest journey of his life that will be full of danger and the unknown and risk, and buying every piece of high-tech adventure and safety gear known to the human race, he rides for three days on some smooth highway to a gorgeous beachside resort and spends ten days there just living the good life and relaxing. I think he spent his time surfing and riding on banana boats and eating endless good food at poolside and staying in a beautiful luxury room. I’m sure it was a wonderful experience, and I’d love to spend ten days at that resort myself. Who wouldn’t? But it seems a bit tame after the massive buildup that this journey had. Anybody could just hop on a bus and go to this town and stay in this resort. Anybody could take their beat-up scooter from Jakarta and ride to this place and relax at this luxury resort. You hardly needed a KTM 390 Adventure with all that gear to get there. It all seems like a LOT of effort and expense if your goal was just to have nice holidays at beach resorts.
I haven’t reached the videos from this part of his journey, but when Kristian eventually leaves from Sumatra, he passes back through Jakarta, and while he was there, the local KTM dealer upgraded him to a much larger motorcycle. They set him loose in the KTM showroom and told him that he could just pick out any bike he wanted for free. And he upgraded to a much larger and more powerful KTM 790 Adventure. And the outfitting of that bike with all the special gear started all over again.
Having written all that, I should say that he definitely has the right idea when contrasted with my current situation with a bicycle and a bum knee. If I could trade in my bicycle for a scooter right now, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t want a KTM Adventure motorcycle, but I’d love to have a scooter right now. At least on his motorcycle, he has already passed through a variety of gorgeous mountains and oceanside scenery and rice fields. On my bicycle, I have seen nothing beautiful since I arrived in Dumai. I’ve barely covered any ground at all, and I have seen nothing but the exhaust from trucks, plus cockroaches and the inside of bathrooms while sick in my cheap hotels. Had I picked up a scooter in Dumai, I’d have been all over the place by now and seen all kinds of beautiful scenery. But because of the bicycle, I haven’t really seen anything at all. I might see a lot of advantages in a simpler journey by bicycle or scooter compared to a big motorcycle trip, but my current cycling life isn’t very attractive.