Monday, February 13, 2023
7:02 a.m. Room 204, Reddoorz
Bukittinggi, Sumatra, Indonesia
Here is my question for the world: When will it stop raining? And I don’t mean today or this month or this year or in Sumatra or in Malaysia or in Thailand? I mean in my life, ever? Why does it rain all the time everywhere I go? Why does it never stop raining? Will it ever stop?
This sad diatribe is on my mind this morning because I’m in the middle of making arrangements for storing my bicycle and trailer and gear while I fly to Malaysia. The arrangements are turning out to be more complicated than I expected, and at some point this morning, I will have to ride my bike about nine kilometers from my guest house to a home on the slopes of the nearby volcano. And I woke up to the sound of rain. And the rain is getting more and more intense as time goes by.
It’s not a huge problem, but it’s an annoyance. And it’s a particular annoyance because I had to do some fancy packing and rearranging of my gear to figure out what to leave here and what to bring with me to Malaysia. And with that repacking, all of my careful waterproofing kind of fell by the wayside. I really wish I had ordered another raincover for this trailer before my trip. But I guess I can be forgiven for that oversight. That raincover never was very effective. But it would have been better than nothing.
And I didn’t need this added complication of the rain. I was already feeling annoyed with myself for, once again, making my life so complicated. I never intended to be in Indonesia for so long that I would have to leave the country to get a new visa. But through unfocused planning and unavoidable poor health and knee failure, that’s the situation I find myself in. And once more, I’m doing the ridiculous thing of leaving a bunch of stuff in one country in storage as I go to another country. That turned into a total disaster the last time I did that with the appearance of the pandemic and border closures. And here I am risking it again. I thought that, if everything went smoothly, it wouldn’t be so bad this time.
My original idea was to leave my bike and trailer at my hotel. And I felt optimistic about that option. Thinking back over all the hotels I’ve stayed in in Sumatra on this trip, I could have left my bike at all of them without much or even any trouble. And I set about choosing a hotel in Bukittinggi that maximized my chances of being able to do so. And, yet, this hotel in Bukittinggi, the one hotel that I need to be able to store a bike in, is the one hotel I’ve come across that can’t and won’t do so.
And that led to seeking out alternative arrangements. Luckily, someone that I met here in Sumatra offered to let me store my bike at their house. The drawback to this arrangement is, as I said, that this house is nine kilometers away. And the person who made the offer doesn’t actually live in the house. The house belongs to their family in general, but someone else lives there. In fact, the person who is helping me with this arrangement doesn’t even live in Bukittinggi. He lives in Pekanbaru and is currently in Padang on business. Today, however, he is driving from Padang all the way to Pekanbaru, and he will be passing through Bukittinggi, and we have been making arrangements to meet at that house when he is passing through town. Therefore, he will tell me when he is going to leave Padang, and then I will have to time my departure from this guest house so that I arrive at this house at the same time he does. I’ll leave my bike and trailer there and then he will drive me back to my hotel downtown.
I don’t really know anything about what this house is like or what the arrangements could be for storing my bike and trailer there safely. I’ve just been going on the assumption that my helpers understand what is involved. I’m assuming that they wouldn’t have made the offer to store my bicycle and trailer there unless there was a convenient and safe (and clean and dry) space available. But as I’ve learned over the years, you really can’t make that assumption. Arrangements like this can go wonky in a dozen different and unexpected ways. I find that local helpers often think differently than I do. It’s like when I was speaking to the Travel Gulamo guide and he offered to show me a place where I could put up my tent. And when I asked him when he could show me this place, he said that he could show it to me tomorrow. And I never quite know what to do in those situations. I was clearly looking for a place to put up my tent and camp that night. It wasn’t like I was planning ahead for a camping trip in the future. I had ridden my bike up to him with all my camping gear, clearly searching for a campsite for that night. And then he offers to show me a place the next day. How could he NOT understand that showing me a campsite tomorrow wasn’t going to help me? And I never understand how or why these confusing things happen. I can’t understand how they don’t see that.
Therefore, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to ride my bike all the way out to this house in the rain after these complex logistical arrangements to meet this man and then discover that this house is so small that there is nowhere to put the bike, and perhaps they were thinking that they would just leave it outside somewhere under a tree. Clearly, that would not be acceptable, but I can’t assume that local people would understand that. Miscommunication like that happens all the time. And it always takes me by surprise in the moment. Afterwards, I’m not surprised, because it happens all the time. But in the moment, I’m always puzzled. There are things that seem so obvious to me, but they are often not obvious at all to local people that I’m talking to or dealing with.
The point to this story is that the arrangements for this trip and storing my bicycle were already a bit complex. Doing this only made sense on the assumption that everything goes smoothly. And waking up to a steady downpour just pushes the whole arrangement over the edge, and it makes me want to find the nearest volcano and throw my bicycle down into the lava-filled crater. It’s just too much trouble – like an anchor around my neck.
The other difficulty I’ve been facing is choosing a place to stay in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has always been an unsatisfactory place from the point of view of budget hotels. They don’t really have any. For those on a tight budget, they have a vast number of places offering the dreaded dorm beds. And those dorm beds, as horrifying as they can be, can still be expensive. And when you try to find any halfway reasonable place with private rooms at an affordable price, you generally come up empty. There’s nothing. I was on Agoda and Booking for what felt like the entire day yesterday trying to come up with even one reasonable option, And I still found nothing. Kuala Lumpur offers dorm beds and luxury accommodation and little in between.
A friend of mine was staying at a place with pods. And I was thinking that I’d just stay there. Staying in a pod is no fun, really, but they have the advantage of being cheap. They’re as cheap as a dorm bed, but they offer at least a bit of the privacy of a private room. And these pods appeared to have lockable doors on them for security of your belongings. The common areas and other facilities of the pod place looked nice in the pictures. And it is located on the 26th floor, which gives nice views of the city. Finally, my friend Jamie was going to be there. So I thought I’d take a chance on this place. I even went so far as to reserve a pod. However, it turns out that Jamie isn’t there anymore. He moved to a different capsule hotel. And when I reserved the room, I got a weird message saying that I had to send a message to the host and arrange to meet them at a certain time and place to check in or something. There was no front desk or reception. And this pod place was in a fairly awkward area to reach, and I wasn’t sure I could find it easily. With all these unexpected complications, I cancelled the booking. I’ll be arriving downtown relatively late at night at around nine p.m. and I didn’t want the added hassle of wandering around the city trying to find this host and trying to find the pod place. I figured I’d bite the bullet and pay more to stay somewhere nicer. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to find any kind of reasonable place, and I couldn’t find anything.
Of course, I have the Cojoy hotel at the back of my mind. I would love to stay there again. However, I could only afford that place last time because I was paying by the month and I got a special deal. Their normal room rates are a bit high for me. Plus, for some reason, they are not listed on any of the online booking sites. And I have no way to contact anyone there. Daryll made all the arrangements last time. And I feel like I have a certain amount of goodwill built up with them, but I don’t want to squander it on a short stay of just a couple of nights. I want to reserve that goodwill for when I return to Malaysia after my Sumatra trip is completely over.
I just checked Agoda briefly again, and I found myself going around and around in circles all over again as I tried to pick out a halfway decent option. There just isn’t anything that ticks the boxes for me. The problem, of course, is budget. If I had the money to spend on a nice place, there are tons of mid-range hotels around. But I’m looking for that low budget place that still offers halfway decent value. And it seems that they still have that ridiculous tourist tax at the hotels. I see people online complaining about that in their reviews. And that means even the low budget places become more expensive after you book them.
Anyway, I’m not in a great mood this morning. All I’ve done since I arrived in Bukittinggi is make ongoing travel arrangements. I’ve been booking flights and making bike storage arrangements and repacking and making plans for Kuala Lumpur. Plus, I’ve had to figure out how to get from Bukittinggi to the airport outside Padang. I’d already contacted a transportation company when I was in Payakumbuh, and made tentative arrangements with them. I couldn’t finalize my trip until I knew where I was staying in Bukittinggi. They pick you up at your hotel, and they need to know your address and phone number for the final reservation.