Wednesday, February 1, 2023
7:44 a.m. Room 4, Tengkong Kost
(SPOT ON 91950 Guest House TekNong Syariah)
Bangkinan, Sumatra, Indonesia
My excursion to get money from an ATM was successful yesterday. I had a vague memory that the last time I was in Indonesia, I had good luck at the Mandiri bank, and I found a large branch of Mandiri here in Bangkinan and walked there. I was happy to see that there was a separate room with a line of four or five ATMs. The ATMs were not the best, I must say. It was nearly impossible to see the screen. And I had to bend way down in order to see anything or access the buttons. And the first time I tried to withdraw money, it wouldn’t work. I chose to withdraw three million rupiah, but the machine wouldn’t respond. Then I saw a message on the screen that said the maximum amount you could withdraw per transaction is one million two hundred and fifty thousand. That isn’t very much money. It’s the equivalent of $83 US. But that should at least get me to the next large city, and hopefully I will be able to get more money there. I suppose I could go back to this bank today and do a second withdrawal, but I’m nervous about making too many withdrawals close together. It feels like that would set off red flags back in Canada. It feels like something a thief or scammer would do. I prefer to space out withdrawals to avoid setting off the security systems.
When I stepped out of the bank and started walking back, I was greeted by a group of men sitting around a table and drinking something at a nearby cafe. One of the men signalled me to come over, and he asked me if I wanted coffee. There were three men at the table, and they didn’t speak much English, but I joined them, and the first man got me a delicious cup of hot and very strong coffee. It was so hot that I had difficulty even holding onto the ceramic cup. It burned my fingers. The coffee was black, and it came with a chunk of brown sugar molasses in a ziplock bag. The coffee was so strong that I thought it would benefit from a bit of sweetener, and I broke off chunks of the hardened molasses and put it into the coffee and stirred. The man who invited me then taught me that simply stirring would do no good. The molasses was too hard. I would have to use my spoon to slice into it and crush this chunk of molasses in order to mix it in.
These men asked me all the usual questions, and I used my phone and Google Translate to chat with them. And then after a while, they started posing for pictures with me. And some men at a nearby table got in on the activity and took pictures with me. I hoped to snag a couple of pictures for myself, and I gave my phone to one of the men. Unfortunately, he got mixed up by the two-second delay I had set on my phone, and he ended up taking pictures of the table and nothing more. I like having the two-second delay, but people aren’t accustomed to that and sometimes it confuses them.
I’d set off with some of my camera gear in my pannier bag, but when I walked to the bank, I didn’t have a GoPro in my hand. I wasn’t planning on recording the day. I ended up wishing I had just kept my GoPro out and ready, because some video of that coffee would have been interesting. With that in mind, I got out my GoPro for the rest of my walk, and I recorded a little bit at a nearby restaurant where I had chicken noodle soup for lunch. Once I got into the swing of recording video again, I decided to get on my bike and ride back to the river and the bridge. My plan was to approach the bridge from a different direction and hopefully reach it this time.
Based on what I saw on Google Maps, I was expecting a road of some sort to go all the way to the bridge. But it wasn’t like that at all. I had to turn off the road and go down a narrow trail. There were even rickety home-made bridges of planks to get across creeks to reach the bridge. And the bridge itself turned out to have no deck. Now it made sense that I never saw anyone going across the bridge either on foot or on a scooter. It would be impossible. The bridge consisted of nothing but the steel beams with nothing to actually walk or drive on. I wasn’t entirely sure if the bridge had been abandoned and was falling apart or if it just wasn’t finished yet.
After my visit to the bridge, I stopped at the streetside stand where I had had coconut juice before. I chatted with the woman a little bit while I was there. I started to wonder if she was overcharging me. When I first met her, I was having a glass of sugar cane juice across the street. And that juice cost five thousand rupiah per glass. And she told me that her coconut juice cost ten thousand rupiah a glass. And I’ve been paying her ten thousand each time I’ve visited. It seemed expensive, but that seemed to be the price.
However, when I left from there, I went for a short ride to check out the main bridge leading to downtown Bangkinan, and while I was there, I stopped at another coconut juice stall. This coconut juice was much better, was served in a large glass, contained actual strips of coconut, and cost only five thousand rupiah per glass. So it turns out that the first woman was charging me double the real price. It might have started with miscommunication, though. She sells two types of juice. She sells pre-made coconut juice that she ladles out of a container. But she also sells entire coconuts. When you buy the coconuts from her, she cuts them open expertly with a machete and then adds ice and a straw to the interior. The customer drinks the coconut milk directly from the coconut and then I guess can also eat the flesh of the coconut. And I think she charged ten thousand rupiah for that. When I originally asked her how much her drinks cost, she told me ten thousand rupiah, but she was probably referring to the entire coconut. But I ordered the pre-made juice. That cost five thousand, but I paid ten thousand because I thought that was the price. And when I handed her ten thousand, she just didn’t say anything and didn’t give me any change. In any event, she has definitely lost a customer. The coconut juice from the other was so much better.
I spent the rest of the day assembling the raw video from my first visit to the bridge and my visit to the soybean processing center. As I suspected, I shot way too much video. The raw video comes to about an hour and a half. My plan is to edit that video today and hopefully upload it.