10:30 a.m.
Room 102, Hotel Griya Arida
Banda Aceh, Sumatra
Well, I am relaxing in luxury. Luxury, I tells ya.
I ended up booking a room at a place that would normally be quite outside my budget. But I started with the thought that my dirty, horrible hovel at the beach cost 200,000 rupiah. That was my starting point. And while I was investigating hotels near the bus station in Banda Aceh, I found the Griya Arida. And a room there was going for 280,000 rupiah. There was another place nearby for 200,000, but the Griya Arida had some advantages. For one thing, it was a fully modern place, and the room was the complete package: big, tons of furniture, nice bed, nice bedding, air conditioning, private bathroom of course, WiFi, towels, soap, shampoo, toothbrush and toothpaste, and drinking water. Best of all, the rooms were on the ground floor, and I could just roll my bike inside. I also had the thought that paying the extra 80,000 for a nicer place might make it easier to ask if I could store my bicycle. (I’ve already done that, and they said no problem.)
When I first arrived at the Griya Arida, I was a bit disappointed. Pictures can be deceiving, and though my room is everything I hoped it would be and more, the hotel building itself is a bit less impressive than it looked online. I thought there would be an actual lobby, but the lobby consists of a tiny desk pushed into the space next to the stairs. With such little room, my hopes for storing my bicycle dropped somewhat, but that sort of worked out. They said they can put my trailer behind the desk, and the main caretaker or manager of the hotel said he could put the bicycle in his room. At first, he said I could just leave it in the parking lot. It would probably be safe there since the place is gated, but who wants their bicycle out in the rain for three days? The man and the two boys that I was dealing with didn’t speak much English, but with Google Translate, I got my ideas across, and things seem to be working out.
I was also willing to pay a bit more because I knew I would be arriving early. In fact, had I left at my usual time, I would have been here by 7:30. I was a bit more sensible than that, and as I was dealing with some stomach problems, I took things a bit slower in terms of my departure, and I arrived here at the hotel by around 9:30 or 9:45. And the ride was much easier than I expected. I had visions of the same kind of cycling horror that accompanied my time in the big city of Medan. But it was much easier approaching Banda Aceh. And this hotel is a bit on the outskirts, so I didn’t have to deal with any of the heavy traffic of the actual downtown area. I don’t plan on going downtown today. In fact, other than meeting Aan for coffee later, I don’t plan on leaving this room. So even though it is far outside my budget, I will have access to all the luxuries for the entire morning, afternoon, night, and then tomorrow morning as well before going to the airport. It’s actually the beginning of a lot of luxury, because I am staying at the relatively upmarket Rainforest Inn in Kuala Lumpur for three nights. And then I’ll end up staying here again for one night on my return. It’s kind of crazy. I haven’t had a tough enough time and nor do I have enough money to justify that many nights of luxury in a row, but that’s how things worked out, I guess.
Saturday August 4, 2018
6:00 a.m. Room 101, Griya Arida
Banda Aceh, Sumatra
As predicted, I barely left the room for the entire day and night yesterday. I assumed I was going out to have coffee with Aan, but I guess I misunderstood what he said, because that never happened. Instead, we made plans to meet this morning before my flight.
All of my messaging with Aan occurred, in fact, during the one time that I did leave my hotel room. I realized that I was going to run out of data on my phone last night. Actually, I had five gigabytes left, but the seven-day package I had purchased was set to expire. (I hate big companies.) I was going to just not bother getting more since I was going to be in Malaysia for three days. But I realized that I would need my phone the next morning to communicate with Aan and to order a Go-Jek for the airport and maybe other things. And it would be nice to have data on my phone and ready to go when I landed back in Banda Aceh on Tuesday.
This hotel is not on a commercial street. It’s in a very quiet neighborhood, so I was a bit worried that getting more credit (pulsa) for my phone would require a long walk and lots of hassle. But it worked out pretty well. When I left my room, I saw the man who I’d spoken to about my bicycle. He was working on the lawn, and I approached him to confirm the whole bicycle arrangement, work out the timing, reserve a room for my return, and exchange contact information. I was surprised and pleased to find out that this man was the owner of the hotel. He had the air of a gardener, so I wasn’t sure what to make of him at first. But since he was the owner, I felt that I could trust him more, and it meant he had the authority to make these arrangements. Plus, he had originally said that he could keep my bicycle in his room. I was worried that this would inconvenience him. I pictured the gardener living in a closet-sized space already half-filled with rakes and shovels. But, in fact, the room he had pointed at was an entire house – his house. I had to walk around this house as I left the hotel grounds, and I saw that it was quite large, and it had a long, wide cement driveway, and there was a beautiful car sitting in a car port. So I think he could make room for my bicycle pretty easily.
When I first came to Indonesia, everyone was using BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) to stay in touch with people. But everyone has switched now to WhatsApp. WhatsApp confuses me to an extent, particularly in terms of adding new people to your account and telling people what your account is. But when I met Aan, he did something that helped a lot. He has an iPhone, I think, and he didn’t understand how to do anything on my Android-based phone. We had trouble trying to add him through the WhatsApp app. And he said that the normal way to do it, and the best way, was simply to add him to my phone’s contacts, and then he would automatically pop up in WhatsApp. I had a vague idea from before that it could work this way, but my understanding was that it flowed in the opposite direction – I’d add someone to WhatsApp, and then that person would get added to my contacts. (I’ve never really understood contacts on Android phones.)
The owner of the hotel gave me the hotel’s business card, and he pointed to the first number on the card. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but I opened up the dialer on my phone, clicked on the New Contact icon, and then I added the name of the hotel plus that phone number. And, poof, that was it. He popped up in WhatsApp. I guess WhatsApp automatically scans the phone numbers in your contacts list and if it finds one that has a WhatsApp account attached to it, it adds it.
The confusing part comes when you have someone like me who changes their phone number all the time. So I can’t give my phone number to someone and have them do the WhatsApp thing automatically. That’s because when I created my WhatsApp account, I had a Malaysian SIM card and a Malaysian phone number. That SIM card and that phone number have long since been deactivated, but that phone number continues to be my WhatsApp account number. So even though the hotel owner could just give me his active phone number and that automatically ties in with WhatsApp, I would have to give him two phone numbers – my actual phone number plus the phone number attached to my WhatsApp account.
I’ve already gotten a bit mixed up because when I bought my second phone (my backup emergency phone) I wanted to have my WhatsApp account on that phone as well. But it doesn’t work that way. I had to create a second WhatsApp account with the phone number from that phone’s SIM. I ended up with two WhatsApp accounts, and both are attached to phone numbers that don’t, technically, exist anymore. It’s confusing. And if you officially change your phone number, you lose all your contacts in WhatsApp. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that WhatsApp is a way to stay in touch with people. At least with Facebook and Facebook Messenger, once you are connected, you stay connected forever. It doesn’t matter what device you use or how many phones you buy or how many times you change your phone number. The phone-number-based system of WhatsApp seems like a major disadvantage.
However, I successfully added the owner of this hotel to WhatsApp, and I was happy about that. That means that we can communicate easily if there is a problem with my bicycle or if I have trouble getting back into Indonesia. Then I went to the first little home-grown corner shop I saw along the street outside the hotel, and the owner of that shop said that he sold Telkomsel pulsa. He didn’t have a sign or anything indicating that to be the case, but I knew that lots of people sold pulsa as a little side business. For me, it hardly seems worth it, because they charge 2,000 rupiah as a commission for each sale. In this case, I wanted to buy 100,000 rupiah of credit, which is about $9 Canadian. I needed that much because I wanted to buy a data package that lasted for 30 days. The man had credit on his phone, and to sell me that, he simply transfers it from his phone number to my phone number. Then I pay him the 100,000 plus 2,000 in commission. That’s the equivalent of 18 cents Canadian. Even in Indonesia, 2,000 rupiah isn’t a lot of money.
There was initially some trouble, and I got very frustrated with Telkomsel again. The problem is that I’ve never been able to turn off my phone’s ability to spend my pulsa when I run out of data. As long as I have data, my phone just uses that to access the Internet. But the second I run out of data, it switches to using my credit or pulsa. I’ve tried everything to stop it. I turn off mobile data. I put my phone in airplane mode. I’ve turned off my phone. But nothing helps. If I don’t have data, the Telkomsel app switches over to using pulsa, and 100,000 rupiah will disappear in minutes. It’s astonishing. It’s like watching a bathtub drain – the money just pours out.
Therefore, I have to be very careful to buy more pulsa and spend that pulsa immediately on a data package while I still have data left from the previous package. It’s a whole Mission Impossible thing. If I don’t have any data left, then Telkomsel starts draining my new credit the very second that I buy it. In this case, I wanted to buy a data package that cost 99,000 rupiah. So I purchased 100,000 rupiah in credit to cover that. BUT I have to move fast. It has happened many times in the past that I bought 100,000 rupiah of credit, but by the time I managed to click on the buttons to buy a new data package, my credit has already gone down to 90,000 and I can’t buy the package anymore. The second I buy credit, it just starts draining away. It’s crazy. I can’t keep credit in my account and use it later to buy data. It’s just gone. I’ve tried to talk to Indonesians about this, but I have never gotten anyone to understand me. The best they can do is tell me to turn off mobile data. But, as I said, that doesn’t help.
In this case, I was somewhat safe because I still had 5 gigabytes of data left from my previous package. So my phone shouldn’t try to spend my new credit right away. However, that data was expiring today, and I didn’t know exactly what time it would expire. I had to spend my new credit BEFORE my old data expired, or I’d lose all the credit. And when I tried to buy a new data package, I got an error message. It wouldn’t let me. And this can happen for a dozen reasons. It was annoying because I never know what the reason is for the error or how long the error will last. I end up in a small panic mode as I try to buy a data package over and over and over again. And if I continually get an error, I run the risk of my phone suddenly using up some of my new credit. And then when I finally clear up the error and try to buy a data package, I’ll find I don’t have enough money on my account anymore. I can’t help but suspect that Telkomsel does this on purpose. They know when you just bought new credit. And perhaps they automatically block any purchases of data so that they have a chance to drain that account and steal your money.
I’m sure that made no sense at all without experiencing it yourself. But, trust me, it is very frustrating and annoying, and another way that large companies rip people off.
Luckily, the error messages lasted only about fifteen minutes. In that time, I was messaging back and forth with Aan about our failed coffee meet-up. And after that, I tried again to buy the 99,000-rupiah data package, and I was successful. So I now have tons of data on my phone for this morning and for my return, and it won’t expire for 30 days.
This is turning into a relatively expensive visa run. The extra expense actually began when I first booked my flights. The prices for the flights were much higher than I was used to. I think it was about double the normal price. I found out from Aan that there was a reason for this. Starting today, there is a big festival in Banda Aceh. Apparently, this festival occurs every four years, and at that time, all the hotels are fully booked and the prices of flights skyrocket. That probably explains why the flights I wanted were all already sold out and why the tickets were so much more expensive.
And then my beachside bungalow was not the cheap bargain I expected. That was running me 200,000 rupiah a night. And that pushed me into staying in Banda Aceh proper, where I am now paying 280,000 rupiah. On the positive side, at least this hotel is worth every penny of that 280,000 rupiah. That’s the equivalent of $25 Canadian. For someone with a real Canadian income, this place would be the bargain of the millennium. It would be even more of a bargain, if, like a normal person, I had a companion. Splitting the cost of this room between two people would be amazingly cheap per person. Being alone in Sumatra is an expensive thing. Society here is not designed to meet the needs of single people.
And now I have the cost of getting to the airport and then all my costs in Kuala Lumpur. There is something about a visa run that makes me spend money. It doesn’t feel like normal time. It feels like a special occasion, so I will spend money on things I normally wouldn’t – such as on a hotel room with air conditioning and free apple-scented shampoo.
Over the last couple of days, I’d fiddled with my gear, and I think I’m ready to go. I paid for a checked bag on this flight, though it looks like I really didn’t have to. On past flights, I’d stayed in cheaper hotels, so I brought my sleeping bag and sheet and mosquito net. I’d also been in transit in places like Siantar, so I brought my stove and pots and cutlery so I can cook. This time, I don’t really need any of that stuff. The Rainforest hotel in Kuala Lumpur is mosquito-free and the beds are complete with sheets and blankets. I also won’t be gone long. So I could have gotten away with bringing just my computer, phone, and an extra T-shirt. But I’m still going to take advantage of my checked bag. It might seem silly, but I love having my electric kettle. It makes me very happy to be able to make a cup of coffee in my room in the morning.
1:30 p.m.
I’m at the airport in Banda Aceh, and it is a weird combination of super relaxed and confusing. It’s a very small airport, much smaller than I expected. And that means that my usual pattern of showing up really early may or may not have been to my advantage. What I mean is that I like to show up early and get ALL of the formalities out of the way fast. Then, when I have reached the final departure gate, I can grab a coffee and relax completely. But when I first showed up, I wasn’t even allowed to enter the airport proper. There are so few flights from this airport that the check-in counters weren’t even open. So I just had to wait outside on a bench. And when I was able to check in and check in my luggage, I was told that immigration wasn’t open yet either. It doesn’t open for another hour. So I am in a coffee shop and enjoying an iced coffee, but I can’t fully relax because I haven’t completed immigration yet. This is the one airport where it would be better to show up quite late.
I sent Aan a message early this morning to see if he was still interested in meeting up for coffee before my flight. It wasn’t that I was super interested in doing that. I just felt that if we were going to do it, I might as well take the initiative and set the time and duration. If I did nothing, I’d probably get a message from him at the very last minute and things would get all out of control and I’d be running late.
Aan didn’t reply for a long time, but I finally got a message back from him, and we arranged to meet for coffee. He has a car, and he was going to come pick me up at my hotel. I could bring my luggage with me, and then I could leave directly from the coffee shop for the airport by Grab or Go-Jek. He would help me arrange that, he said. It was great fun being picked up in a car and then driven to a local coffee shop jammed with young men hanging out with their friends. As Aan explained it to me, the coffee shop has long been the main social center for men in Aceh province and Banda Aceh in particular. There were no movie theaters and no other places where they could go. (Tellingly, there was not a single woman or girl anywhere in sight either. All men and only men.)
I still have no clear picture of who Aan is. There were easily 100 men in this streetside outdoor coffee shop, and he seemed to know all of them. He was greeted like a movie star, and he moved from table to table shaking hands and making small talk and jokes. If there were babies, I’m sure he’d have kissed them. I asked him what he had been doing the previous day at work, and he said he was organizing a televised talent show of some kind on which he would be the host. This is the kind of work he does, and it is all done on a freelance basis. He doesn’t actually work at a physical office. These coffee shops are his office. He also said that he has political aspirations, and he uses his work and his relative fame to meet as many people as possible. He wants them to remember him and to remember his face when he someday runs for local office.
I have no idea what kind of income he has. He has a motorcycle and a car and his own apartment. And that requires money. But his car, as new as it was, was still just a KIA. It’s not like he is driving a new model BMW or Lexus. And he commented that the 280,000 rupiah per night that I paid at that hotel was a lot of money for him. It’s just hard to say if he is rich or not.
I enjoyed my time at the coffee shop very much, and it was a great pleasure to be able to ask Aan questions and get answers that I could sort of understand. His English was good enough for that, and he was comfortable talking with me. He wasn’t freaked out by spending time with a foreigner, as many Indonesians would be. I started thinking that I should arrange my time so that I could spend a few days in Banda Aceh upon my return. But that might not work out. For one thing, all the hotels are expensive. For another, Aan keeps telling me about this big festival that is taking place and how all the hotels will be fully booked.
I’m pretty sure that I have a room reserved at the hotel for Tuesday night when I return. My plans to store my bike at the hotel worked out very well. I got everything ready and packed away long in advance. And then at around 9:30, I sent the owner of the hotel a message on WhatsApp asking if he was at the hotel and if I could hand over my bike and trailer. He replied very quickly, and when I opened the door to my room, he was standing right there.
The original plan was to leave my trailer behind the desk under the stairs and put my bike in his house. But now that he’d adjusted to the idea of putting my bike in his garage, he just put my trailer in the garage along with my bike. I liked that idea a lot better than separating them. Once we got in touch, it was the matter of a few minutes to roll my bike and trailer across the lawn and into his garage. There were already two bicycles lined up there, and I just put my bicycle beside them and locked it up. The trailer went beside it and we were done.
While doing this, I told the owner of the hotel that I was returning on the 7th and would require a room. He told me when I first arrived that I shouldn’t use Booking.com for his hotel. It’s not a big deal, but he has to pay a 10% commission on every reservation. However, right after he told me never to use Booking.com, he told me that the hotel was fully booked the next day and the day after that. I tried to point out that his hotel being fully booked was the reason Booking.com was useful. If I didn’t use it and I just showed up, I wouldn’t be able to get a room. He didn’t seem to understand my point, and he continued to imply that I would have no problem getting a room on the 7th. I would have felt better if this assurance was accompanied by him writing something down or taking out a ledger and penciling in my name for a room, but nothing of the kind happened. So I just have to take it on faith that there will be a room waiting for me when I get back. I did everything I could on my part to make this happen. I even wrote it down on a piece of paper along with my name, phone number and email address. And I made sure to connect with him on WhatsApp. But that was as far as I could take it short of making a reservation on Booking.com. I would have felt better if he or one of his staff actually put pen to paper when I brought up my need for a room on the 7th, but nothing of the kind happened.
My time with Aan was another reminder of just how easy things can be when you have a relatively responsible local helper and guide. On my own, even the simplest of things becomes a huge challenge. Let’s say I wanted to get a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, even that can be a challenge. Where to go? How to get there? What do they serve? How do you pay? But when you hop in a car with a guy like Aan, everything just happens. It becomes effortless and enjoyable and you wonder what all the fuss was about before. And, to be honest, you start to wonder if the effort of being on your own is worth it. Riding my bike up the coast of Sumatra is a big adventure and it takes everything you’ve got to do it. But when you suddenly have a way into local society through a guy like Aan, you wonder if doing the tough man solo thing is even worth it. It’s like deliberately blinding yourself before going into an obstacle course. Why not keep your eyes open? In this case, why struggle to do everything yourself when a local can just snap their fingers to do it, and it is more pleasurable?