Friday, January 27, 2023
9:00 a.m. Room 4, Tengkong Kost
(SPOT ON 91950 Guest House TekNong Syariah)
Bangkinan, Sumatra, Indonesia
Another day and night in Bangkinan begins. I don’t have big plans for the day except to do a cycling test. I went out for a short test ride yesterday, and I came out of that test with a bit of an idea. When I got on the bike, my left knee felt pretty good. And that could easily be because I’ve been resting and off the bike for a full week here in Bangkinan. It felt good at the start of the ride out of Pekanbaru, too. And then the pain kicked in after just twelve kilometers.
However, on the test ride yesterday, I noticed that shifting my foot position on the pedal seemed to relieve some awkward pressure on my left knee. And I started to think that perhaps the real culprit here is my new sandals. I went on a bit of a journey in Kuala Lumpur trying to replace my sandals, which were falling apart. I had my heart set on some simple but lightweight and durable Teva sandals. And I simply couldn’t track them down. And out of a kind of desperation, I just bought the only sandals I could find, which were somewhat bulky and unwieldy department store sandals. At the store, I thought they fit, but I have a long history of buying clothing of all types that end up being too small or too large. And these sandals ended up being far too large. They’re really wide and really long and the soles are really thick. Even walking around is a bit like having rowboats lashed to my feet with rubber straps. And I noticed that the soles gripped my pedals in such a way that they can’t move. And they’re so wide that my feet get pushed out to the side – more to the side than is normal for me.
As I did my test ride yesterday, I played around with forcing my left foot into different positions and it seemed to have an effect on how my knee felt. And then I went back to the homestay and changed from these sandals into my flip flips. And then I went back out riding while wearing the flip flops. The flip flops are much thinner and narrower and shorter. They actually fit my feet, and I was able to tuck my feet in closer to the pedal arm. And I suppose I could be imagining it and this could be wishful thinking, but it seemed to me that my knees felt better as I rode.
Oddly enough, as I was doing this experiment, I rode past a shoe store here in Bangkinan, and this store had sandals on display near the street. I stopped to look at them with the idea that if I could buy real sandals that were much smaller and slimmer, I’d pick them up. However, the ones that were on display were surprisingly large. They were a size 43, which is supposed to be the equivalent of a size 10 in US/Canadian sizes. But they seemed much larger than even that. They were just as large if not larger than the sandals I bought in KL. And this started an amusing interaction with the woman running the store.
In my videos and other places, I often tell stories of having difficulty communicating with people and getting information. And people leave helpful messages and comments telling me that I should use Google Translate. Obviously, I already know all about Google Translate. It’s not like these people are telling me something I don’t already know. I’ve been using Google Translate for a very long time, and I use it every single day. It’s a normal tool of my day-to-day life. However, I find that it has a very limited utility. It helps me in very specific circumstances and even then only in a limited way. It is certainly not the miracle communication cure that so many people seem to think it is.
In this case, I used Google Translate to ask this woman if she had this sandal in smaller sizes. This didn’t strike me as a particularly difficult question. I didn’t think it was open to much miscommunication. At a shoe store, the #1 question a salesclerk would get all day every day has to relate to shoe sizes. People might want to buy a certain style of shoe or sandal or flip flip, and they would ask if they have this particular item in a smaller or larger size. And I used Google Translate and sign language to ask this woman this question. Did she have this sandal but in a smaller size? And I don’t know why this should be, but nine times out of ten, when I use Google Translate to ask simple questions like this, it doesn’t work. The other person normally has no idea what I’m asking. And this woman was no exception to this rule. She kept pointing at other sandals in the store. And these were all size 43 as well. I shook my head at those and used Google Translate and sign language again to indicate that I was interested in THIS particular sandal. But I needed it to be smaller. I even put it on and showed her how it was much too big for my feet. And I used my hands and Google Translate to communicate the idea of smaller. Smaller size.
And she kept pointing to the other sandals that were all the same size. Finally, she went into her store and did some looking and came out with other sandals – other styles – and they were all size 44 and 45. They were larger. I tried again to tell her with Google Translate that she was going in the wrong direction. I didn’t want larger sandals. I wanted smaller sandals. It was kind of a miracle, to be honest, that she even had size 43, 44, and 45. That’s the equivalent of sizes 10, 11, and 12 in Canada, and those are very large. Normally, my problem is that I can’t find clothing or shoes that are big enough in Asia. All the sizes are far too small. But I appeared to have stumbled on a treasure trove of sandals and shoes for Indonesian giants. And I could not get this woman to switch gears and present me with a size 42 or 41.
People who tell me to use Google Translate to solve my problems also have this idea that I can get the other person to use Google Translate to talk to me. This woman was telling me things in Indonesian, but I had no idea what she was saying. And the idea is that you get the other person to speak into your phone and have Google Translate type it out in English. And that would be fantastic if the other person has any idea how to do that or even understands what it is you want them to do. And quite often, that just isn’t the case. And it can work if the two of you are sitting down and have lots of time to work out a system. But this is often not realistic in the real world. On a busy and noisy street talking with people who have never used Google Translate in their life, it’s not easy to get them to understand how to do it. And they just won’t even try.
Even finding a human translator usually doesn’t work. I had that experience with the police officer at the Ameera. He appeared to speak English and to understand me, but he never understood or was able to convey my question to the hotel manager or get any answers for me. And while I was at this shoe store, another woman came by, another customer, and she spoke English. And she offered to help me. But even with her help, I wasn’t able to get across the simple idea that I wished to try on THIS type of sandal but I needed a smaller size. I have no idea what she and the shoe store woman talked about, but they had a long and detailed discussion, and we went around in circles for a long time, and we never made any progress. I don’t know why this happens, but it happens all the time.
In the end, it didn’t matter. The sandals I was looking at were cheaply made, and I doubted that even if I were presented with the correct size, I would have bought them. The straps and Velcro and other things were very suspect. And the soles were thick and clunky, very much like my unsuitable department store sandals. For my experiment, I needed streamlined sandals – very narrow ones. Of course, this could all be a pipe dream. I don’t have my old Adidas sandals to compare these new ones to, but perhaps those Adidas sandals were exactly as wide and put my feet on the pedals in the exact same way. And I never had any knee problems when cycling with those sandals. However, I do remember being able to move my feet around while wearing the Adidas sandals. I could shift their position. These department store sandals seem to attach to the pedals like they are welded into position. They won’t turn or twist in any way. There is something about their tread and the thickness and width of the sole that locks them into a certain position, and they won’t budge.
In terms of more technology stories (assuming you can call sandals a type of technology), I can report one success. Though it is also a failure at the same time. I’ve been facing this problem with WiFi and uploading or downloading anything. Cheap hotels have terrible or non-existent WiFi. My budget forces me to stay in these cheap hotels, and then I struggle with doing anything online. It’s extremely frustrating. And one solution (though a dumb one) is to just use mobile data. That’s a dumb thing to do because by the time you pay for all the mobile data you need, you end up spending more than if you had stayed in a more expensive hotel to begin with, one with good WiFi. Here in Bangkinan, I’ve been burning through tons of mobile data. I keep putting money on my phone and buying data package after data package. And I don’t know where the data goes. And most of the time, nothing has been happening. I’ll have 15 gigabytes of data ready to go, but then the videos never upload. I’ve had one video sitting at 61% for what feels like days. And no matter how much I struggled to get a better mobile signal, it would not move beyond 61%. What I’m doing is using my mobile phone as a hotspot. And I connect my laptop and tablet to that hotspot. Both indicate they are connected to the signal from my Galaxy S10+. But nothing happens. Nothing uploads and nothing downloads. I’ve been fighting with this for the entire week here in Bangkinan. But then this morning, I remembered running into similar issues long ago, and I realized that on my phones, I have to force the phone to actually use mobile data by turning off regular WiFi. On my phone, I was using mobile data and I had hotspot turned on, and all my devices were connected to the phone through the hotspot. But, apparently, the hotspot was not using mobile data. It was trying to use the TekNong Homestay WiFi signal, which has no download/upload speed at all. It’s essentially dead, but it’s still there. And this morning, I turned off WiFi on my phone completely. And then, suddenly, my tablet came to life and started downloading a TV show at 2 MB/S. It went crazy fast. Clearly, it was now using mobile data. And my YouTube video upload has gone from 61% to 79%. Both uploading and downloading are now suddenly working. And I guess all this time, even though I had mobile data and all my devices were connected to my phone via a hotspot, it was all being funneled through the homestay WiFi signal. Occasionally, I remembered, downloading and uploading would spring to life and go really fast. And I realize now that that happened at the times when the TekNong Homestay WiFi was turned off completely. And THAT allowed my phone to switch to the mobile data. So I guess what I have to do is turn off WiFi completely. If I don’t, my phone will never switch to mobile data. I remember running into that problem once before, but then I forgot about the solution. And I forgot about it because it doesn’t make any sense to me. I just assumed that these modern phones are smart enough to switch back and forth between them. Why can’t you just leave WiFi turned on? Shouldn’t the phone be smart enough to switch to mobile data when there is no WiFi and then go back to WiFi when you have a signal again? Why should I have to physically turn off WiFi and turn on mobile data when I go outside and then when I return to the hotel turn on WiFi and turn off mobile data? It seems crazy. But that’s what I have to do. I’m up to 83% on my video file upload, and that is after days of being stuck at 61%. It’s costing me a fortune in mobile data to do this, but at least it is working.
I have another ridiculous technology problem as well. This one is really silly. I’ve been considering doing a visa run back to Malaysia or to Singapore. If my knee really is getting better or changing my footwear solves the problem, then I’ve been thinking it’s a good idea to kind of start this bike trip over from the beginning: fly out of Indonesia and then fly back in to start a new tourist visa cycle. I can get an additional 30 to 60 days if I do that. And as I was thinking about flying back to Malaysia, I started thinking about the fancy Touch’n Go eWallet that I set up in Kuala Lumpur. And I started thinking about my SIM card and phone number in Malaysia. And I started to think about where my Malaysian SIM card might be. That phone number might have expired by the time I get back to Malaysia. But it might also still be valid, and it is the number I used for the eWallet and everything else in Malaysia. It would be nice to keep the same number. But, then, I was unable to find this SIM card. I’ve been looking for it for two weeks, and I have no idea where I put it.
I can remember the exact moment when I put it away for safekeeping. I was at the Telkomsel office in Dumai getting my Indonesian SIM card. And the Telkomsel clerk opened my phone and removed the SIM card tray. My Galaxy S10+ is a hybrid phone, so the tray can hold two SIM cards or one SIM card and one MicroSD card. I had a MicroSD card in the phone, so I can only have one SIM card installed at a time. The Telkomsel clerk removed the Celcom SIM from Malaysia and handed it to me. I wasn’t prepared for that. I hadn’t thought ahead to where I would put that card for safekeeping. But in the moment, I had my wallet and my documents pouch with me. And I took the SIM card and I put it somewhere safe. And I remember thinking that I would need to retrieve this card when I returned to Malaysia. So I know I put it somewhere that was safe and hopefully made sense. Yet, now, I can’t find it. And I have looked everywhere. I’ve gone over my gear a dozen times at least and torn everything apart, and I have no idea where this SIM card might be. It’s just gone. And that drives me crazy. I mentioned in a video recently how life seems to be extremely complicated now and I often overlook small details. There are just too many things to do in a day. There are too many bits of technology to look after and keep track of. And here is another example. I assume I put the SIM card in a safe place. Or maybe I put it in a temporary spot with the idea that I would move it to a safer place later. And then I just forgot about it. But I can’t remember what I did. I’ve closed my eyes multiple times and replayed that moment at the Telkomsel office. I can picture it perfectly. I can see where I was sitting. I can see the desk in front of me. I can see the Telkomsel guy. I can see him opening the tray on my smartphone, and we talked about how it was a hybrid phone, and how I would have to remove either the current SIM card or the microSD card to make room for the new SIM card. And I told him to remove the Celcom SIM card, and he did so and handed it to me. I can remember thinking about where to put it. And I seem to remember reaching over to my side to grab my documents pouch with an idea of where to put it. I have all my ID and documents in a series of waterproof ziplock bags inside other bags, all neatly organized. And I assume I put the SIM card inside one of those ziplock bags. But I’ve gone through them all, and I can’t find it. I thought perhaps I had just stuffed it inside my wallet with the idea of putting it somewhere safer later. But I’ve gone through all the compartments in my wallet multiple times, and it’s not there either. I’ve looked everywhere for this SIM card, and I can’t find it. So at this point, I will have no choice but to buy a new SIM card when I get to Malaysia and start all over with a new phone number. I guess it’s not a big deal, but it annoys me that I was so careless.
My YouTube video has reached 95% uploaded. Success! That makes me very happy. Of course, I’m burning through all the mobile data on my phone. I bought so many data packages over the last few days. Last I checked, I had 15 gigabytes of data. And now it is down to 4 gigabytes. And that will probably run out before this video finishes uploading. And I will have to put MORE credit on my phone today so I can buy more data. It’s too much. It doesn’t make economic sense. It would make more sense to put that money towards nicer hotels with functioning WiFi.
That’s something YouTubers seem forced to do, or at least end up doing whether they want to or not. I’ve noticed that anyone who tries to regularly be active with YouTube seems forced into a more and more expensive lifestyle in general. Maintaining camera gear, charging batteries, editing videos, uploading videos, and otherwise staying active on social media is not compatible with the cheap backpacker lifestyle. It just isn’t a good match. I watched another video from Kristian Hansen yesterday, and this video is a good example of that trend. The video is called Foreigner Explore BENGKULU, Sumatra Indonesia 🇮🇩 (The Story of Bencoolen). And I’m fairly certain it’s one of those full-on sponsored videos that has Kristian staying in a very fancy hotel (for free, I assume in exchange for advertising in the video) and going on a tour of the city with the local tourism board. He was staying at the Hotel Santika in Bengkulu, which is a large and somewhat luxurious chain of hotels in Indonesia. His stay there had clearly been arranged in advance. The video is full of staged shots, such as him checking in while uniformed clerks stand at attention and he is served fancy drinks presented on trays. This is being filmed from behind him, so someone else is holding the camera, presumably a hotel employee. And they prepared a fancy welcome cake in his room that says “Selamat Datang Kristian” in frosty lettering as well as a personal welcome letter from the hotel manager. It all seems a bit disingenuous to me. He says right off the top that he is very impressed with the room and the service at this hotel. But, obviously, he would be impressed with the service. The whole thing is an advertisement for the hotel chain, so the hotel would have gone out of their way to give him preferential service, the best they could offer. Pretending that this is normal customer service is a bit misleading. I could be wrong, I suppose. It’s possible that Kristian just booked a room here in advance on his own and paid for it and then got such amazing service that he decided to stay for a few days and record a video about the place. But that seems unlikely. With his business-sense, I’m sure this was all arranged in advance and his stay at the hotel was free. I’m pretty sure that if I went to Benkulen and stayed at this hotel, I would not be served fancy drinks by uniformed attendants at check-in. Nor would there be a fancy personalized welcome cake in my room along with a note from the hotel manager.
However, the point I was working my way towards is that successful YouTubers almost all end up staying in hotels like this. For one thing, YouTube viewers like seeing fancy, luxurious places. These videos about expensive hotels and expensive resorts are popular among viewers. And it just helps so much to be staying in a comfortable room where you can charge up all your batteries, get a good rest, have fast and reliable WiFi, and have lots of great food just waiting for you at breakfast every day in a nice restaurant. And he probably got his clothes laundered by the hotel. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course. Who wouldn’t want to live in comfort with all that technological convenience at your fingertips? It would be awesome.
If you live on a backpacker-style budget and stay at the TekNong Homestay as I am doing, things aren’t quite the same. Oddly enough, even this room at TekNong is quite luxurious compared to my past trips. I never had rooms like this when I was cycling in the Philippines or Ethiopia or Guinea or Cambodia. I certainly did not stay in rooms like this in Canada or the United States. In those countries, I couldn’t afford even the cheapest hotels and chose to either camp out or stay in youth hostels. Overseas, I could afford my own room at actual hotels, but these rooms were always quite basic and rarely had air conditioning or even a private bathroom. So even this room in Bangkinan, which is very rough compared to Kristian’s lifestyle, is a big change for me. The air conditioning is a luxury. And normally, even without the air conditioning, this style of room is not a problem for me at all. If there are tons of mosquitos in my room, I put up my mosquito net. When my clothes are dirty, I get out my folding laundry bucket and hand wash my clothes in the bathroom. I eat cheap meals at the side of the road. I have my own cookstove, and I’ll boil water for instant coffee in my room and cook spaghetti. When there is no bedding on the bed, I just use my own sleeping sheet and sleeping bag and even blow-up pillow. But when you are trying to shoot video and upload it to YouTube, the limitations of this room become a problem. The lack of WiFi and the lack of time in your day becomes a problem. And over time, even YouTubers who are accustomed to this lifestyle, gravitate towards nicer hotels that offer more. It just makes shooting and uploading videos so much easier. And once you stay in those hotels, you get the added benefit of a lighter load. You suddenly don’t have to carry so much gear with you. The hotel provides all the things you need, even food and water.
A funny thing, and a random cultural note, is that the family at this homestay has started to occasionally bring a little breakfast snack and a cup of tea to my room in the morning. That happened this morning thirty or forty minutes ago. And something always happens that puzzles me, and, to be honest, comes very close to annoying me. It annoys me because it’s annoying but also because I don’t understand what is going on. It happened again this morning. A woman knocked on my door and shouted something in Indonesian. I shouted back in English, something like “Just a minute!” I know she heard me. Sound travels through that door easily. I could hear her clear as a bell and my louder shout would carry to her ears no problem. And I know she can’t understand English, but, clearly, my shout indicated that I heard her knock and that I was coming. But instantly, she knocks more loudly on the door and shouts again. I shout back that I’m coming. “Just a second! I have to put on a shirt!” Of course, I’m sitting here on my bed basically undressed with my laptop sitting on my thighs and with all my technology strewn around me and a cup of instant coffee in my hand. It is going to take me fifteen seconds to put all this aside and then put on a shirt and go to the door. I’m doing all this as fast as I can. And this woman just keeps banging on the door over and over and shouting. And I’m shouting back loudly each time in response. And I’m getting more and more annoyed. It’s that classic movie or sitcom scene where some rude person keeps banging on someone’s door, and the person eventually shouts back something like, “Hold your horses! I’m coming. Just give me ten seconds, for Pete’s sake!!! What’s your problem? Shut up!! Quit banging on the door! I’m coming!” And then they throw open the door with an annoyed sigh and look.
And this happens here every time. Every hotel I’ve stayed at when one of the staff knocks on my door, they do the same thing. They just keep knocking and knocking and shouting no matter how many times I’ve shouted back that I’m coming. It’s not like it’s taking me ten minutes. I just need to throw on a shirt. I mean, do these shy young women want me to throw open the door shirtless and barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of small gym shorts or swimming trunks? I think they would be rather shocked at the sight of my hairy chest and hairy thighs. So I’ve got to at least throw on a T-shirt. That’s going to take ten seconds. Surely they can wait that long. Why keep banging on the door non-stop? Is it a cultural thing? And this morning, I got so flustered and so annoyed that I rushed to the door too fast, and I slammed my foot into my bike trailer and cut open my toe. This room is very small, and with my bicycle and trailer and other gear in here, I have to move carefully so I don’t trip over something. And with this woman banging and banging on the door, I got careless and misjudged my steps and slammed into the trailer with my foot.
On the positive side, the snack she brought me was welcome. This NOT being the Hotel Santika, I hadn’t had anything to eat since I woke up early this morning. And I’m normally fine with that. I don’t even realize that I’m hungry. But after one bite of this breakfast snack, I was suddenly ravenous, and I inhaled it. The snack was good, too. It was lontong, which I quite like. And the tea was very hot and heavily sweetened. I don’t normally have my coffee with any sweetener. My teeth are in such bad shape that it’s best to keep sugar as far away from them as possible. However, when I’m given a cup of tea like this and it’s full of sugar, I enjoy the novelty and the flavor.
I haven’t booked this room for another night through Agoda, so I will have to pay them in cash today. I don’t mind that, really. It’s just not as convenient. There won’t be anybody out there, and I will have to spend time wandering around the place and knocking on doors and looking just to find someone that I can pay. And they won’t have change, and it will turn into a time-consuming problem. It’s not like the Winstar where you can just go to the front desk and pay the on-duty staff. There is no front desk or office here, and there are no employees as such. It’s run by a large extended family. So, it’s so much easier to just click on a button on Agoda and be done. But until Oyo fixes their broken system in Sumatra, this will continue to be a problem. I’ve definitely reached a point where I will hesitate to book any Oyo hotels in the future. Unfortunately, nearly all the budget hotels are now part of Oyo. When I do Agoda searches for a hotel, I filter and sort the results to show the cheapest places first. And those places are almost always Oyo hotels.
Yesterday, I also spent time checking out more videos on the YouTube channel from Wandering Emma. On the surface, she seemed to be closer in style and attitude to me than someone like Kristian. Admittedly, as I wrote before, her videos almost all have titles and thumbnails trumpeting that she is doing things SOLO. Whether she is taking a train, taking a bus, having lunch, having breakfast, having tea, or just going for a neighborhood walk, she makes it clear that she is doing all of these things SOLO as a FEMALE. That always bugs me. It’s just one of my pet peeves about YouTube. But her trip isn’t nearly as organized or as professional and luxurious and calculated and managed as Kristian’s. She is simply wandering around and having typical small and unplanned adventures. She seems to be living in a world and living a life that is closer to my own. And I was curious if her videos would be engaging and interesting for me.
It turns out that I don’t really enjoy them, at least not so far. I guess I like what she is doing. But the way she shoots the videos loses my attention. She certainly has her own style. All the videos I’ve watched have her aiming the camera at herself the majority of the time. And she is holding the camera quite close, so her face fills up much of the video screen. And then it just stays there as she talks. There’s something odd about it. She is using a small Sony camera, I think, that has a flipout screen. Or she is using a smartphone sometimes. And her eyes are looking off to the side most of the time. The camera is quite close to her face, and it is aiming at her face most of the time, but she is looking past the camera at the streets around her.
As a viewer, I don’t like that. It’s strange. She’s not looking at the camera lens. She’s not looking at me. So I don’t get the sense that she is communicating with me. She is staring off to the side with a kind of confused and unfocused mannerism. Even when she is filming other people, she often doesn’t look at them. She looks at them on the video screen. So she is facing away from the people she is talking to and staring at her camera or smartphone. She is looking at their image on the screen rather than at them in person. And then she sort of turns the camera on a sharp angle so that her face is also in the screen a little bit just at the edge, and she stares at herself on the screen.
The audio is also very poor. I assume she is using the built-in mics on whatever device she is using, and I often have no idea what anyone is saying. It’s hard enough to hear anyone over the street noise of a place like Pakistan. And then she will find local people that speak English, but I would have trouble understanding their accent even with perfect audio. With poor audio, I have no idea what anyone is saying. But given all these problems, her videos and her channel are popular. Her videos are viewed tens of thousands of times, ranging up into the hundreds of thousands. And there are hundreds of comments on every video. So, what do I know?
Well, my video finally finished uploading. It went quite fast once I figured out that I have to turn off WiFi on my phone to force the hotspot to use mobile data. I had no idea that that was the problem I was facing. One thing I want to do today is go on another test ride on my bike. I’m going to do that right now. Perhaps I will mount a GoPro on the bike and record a bit of that ride and see what happens. If that ride goes well, I guess I can risk trying to ride the rest of the way to Bukittinggi. And I have to decide what to do. At this point, I could simply call a halt to my small adventures in Sumatra and turn around and ride back to Dumai and take the ferry to Malaysia before my visa expires. I’m sure my knee can handle that trip without much difficulty.
Or I can commit to riding to Bukittinggi or Padang and arrange to fly to Kuala Lumpur before my visa expires and fly back into Indonesia to extend my stay here. That is what I would like to do, but it’s a question of finances at this point, too. Do I want to spend that money to stay here in Sumatra longer or use it to do something else?