Wednesday, January 25, 2023
8:16 a.m. Room 4, Tengkong Kost
(SPOT ON 91950 Guest House TekNong Syariah)
Bangkinan, Sumatra, Indonesia
I’m hoping that today will be my last day in Bangkinan. I’ve allowed my knees a good, long rest, and if they aren’t ready to tackle a bit of cycling by now, perhaps they never will be. And spending this much time off the bike almost guarantees that I will attempt to extend my stay in Sumatra. As I wrote earlier, leaving now would feel like I’d wasted all the effort that went into getting here with my bicycle. I’m here now, and I might as well take advantage of that. There’s risk involved, and it will cost a fair amount of money to fly in and out and start over with a new visa. But I think it will be worth it. I’m thinking now that if I leave tomorrow morning, I will have enough time to ride all the way to Padang to catch a flight. My original idea was to base myself in Bukittinggi and then I would leave my bike there and take a bus down to Padang and a bus back up to Bukittinggi, but that adds a lot of complications. I think I’ll plan on riding all the way down to Padang. Today is January 25, and my visa expires on February 14. That gives me twenty days. I think it’s time to commit to this plan and book that flight. It’s a risk to book that flight before I even know if I can continue cycling. Perhaps I should wait for a couple of days just to make sure. Do the smart thing for once.
Yesterday was not an eventful day. In terms of cross-cultural experiences, it could have been, but I wasn’t in the mood. What I mean is that I could have gone out exploring the town and whatever attractions it offers. But I didn’t do that. And when I went out for some food, a few people approached me and I could have spent time hanging out with them. One man was an English teacher, and he invited me to go with him to his school and meet his students. On another day, I might have gone with him. When I was in Sumatra before, I had a lot of encounters with English teachers, and it was a regular thing to be invited to schools to meet their students. At that time, Sumatra was new to me, and I was eager for any experiences, and I spent a lot of time at elementary schools and even meeting with older English students from universities to be interviewed and help them with their projects. But, as with everything, after you’ve done this lots of times, the novelty wears off. And I’ve spent a lot of time in my life being a professional paid English teacher. I think of it as my job. All of these invitations to visit schools ends up feeling like doing my regular job for free. And I never found teaching English to be easy. It’s a difficult and draining job for me. I was thinking yesterday that if I happened to have my camera gear with me, I could have gone. And then we’d both get something out of the experience. This teacher would be able to give his students a treat, and I would be able to film the experience to share with other people on YouTube. But I hadn’t gone out with any cameras. I had just ducked outside to grab some lunch, and I wasn’t mentally or physically prepared for a big cross-cultural experience.
Another man approached me after I said goodbye to the teacher, and if I had been willing and in the mood, I could have shared a lunch with him. He wanted to practice his English, and he wanted me to go with him to a nearby restaurant where he was going to have a meal. He wanted to introduce me to some local dishes and have a conversation. Again, on a different day and had I been in a different mood, I would have taken him up on his offer. But I declined. I was not in the mood for company. And I was definitely not in the mood for an hour of the usual biographical questions about my life.
A funny thing is that something specific triggered this sudden anti-social mood on my part. And it’s another of my pet peeves. The English teacher was one of those men that never listens. He would ask a question, and then when I’d barely started to answer, he just cut me off mid-sentence and started talking again. I was making an effort in good faith to answer all the questions he was throwing at me. But he wouldn’t let me answer. As soon as I started speaking, he opened his mouth and started talking himself. He did not even try to listen to anything I was saying. And he did this every time. And I got so annoyed that I just stopped trying to answer. And when he invited me to his school, I politely declined. I couldn’t imagine the stress and frustration of spending a couple of hours with this guy.
The second man approached me within seconds of my saying goodbye to the English teacher, and this second man was also a bit unusual. There was something off about him. It was pretty obvious he was a bit of a character just from the way he was dressed. It was quite odd. He was wearing black dress pants and a white dress shirt with a wide black tie. Nobody here dresses like that, and I asked him if he was going somewhere special. I was wondering why he was dressed so formally, as if he was officiating at a funeral. And he told me something that seemed to have something to do with politics, but I didn’t understand what he said. And then the way he spoke and his mannerisms told me that he was not quite right in the head. And after being talked over by the teacher so much and getting annoyed, I wasn’t in the mood to be subjected to an avalanche of personal questions from this fellow in the black tie.
In many of these situations, I think of it as a transaction. I don’t enjoy the encounters as a rule. The people I meet all ask the exact same questions, and our conversation will not be enjoyable for me. And I’m not thinking specifically about Indonesia here. This happens in most countries that I’ve visited. I tend to not have conversations with local people. Our conversations are more like interrogations as they ask me for all the personal details of my life. However, I will answer all these questions if I think I will be able to get something in return. And what I usually want is information. Therefore, I will subject myself to one of these interrogations if I think that I will be able to get questions answered in return. I always have a ton of questions about things I see around me and the life of a town like Bangkinan. I just want to know how things work. And if the person I meet seems like they might be able to have that conversation, I’ll engage with them. But it was clear that the teacher would not be a good partner for this transaction. He was not the type to even have a conversation. He wouldn’t hear a word I said. And this second man in the black and white clothing was clearly living a bit in a world of his own, and I don’t think he would have been able to answer my questions either.
A funny thing is that over these days, I had gathered an audience of interested men at my usual mie ayam bakso place. This bakso stall sits in front of some kind of other business, and a group of men were always there drinking tea when I showed up for my daily bakso. And one man in particular wanted to talk to me. Each day, he would ask me the usual questions. He asked the same questions every day, as if he had totally forgotten my answers from the previous day. And he enjoyed this so much that he would ask me what time I would be coming back the next day. He wanted to make sure he was there at the same time so that he could sit opposite me at my table as I ate and ask me all those questions again. This has gotten so extreme that I’ve had to think about finding another bakso place. He might have driven me away as a customer.
During the rest of the day, I spent some more time watching YouTube videos from Kristian Hansen. I’m still finding that interesting, mainly because he includes a lot of logistical information. I appreciate that because it allows me to more fully understand the overall scope of his journey and the days themselves. And it helps me to understand him better, too. As much as I can relate to someone like Itchy Boots, I do find myself wishing she would include more specific information about what is going on in her trips. The video of the scenery she is passing through is nice, but I want more nitty-gritty details than she provides. And I’ve stuck with Kristian’s journey so far because he provides enough information to keep someone like me engaged.
I’m in the middle of a quite interesting video right now. It’s called SOUTH SUMATRA’s Mountains SOLO MOTORBIKE Adventure | Danau Ranau to Bengkulu. One of my pet peeves, of course, is the use of the word “solo”. I see it all the time on YouTube videos as everyone is going off on big “solo” trips, as if this is something amazing and to be admired. But something I appreciate is that Kristian specifies exactly where this day’s trip started and where it ended. And he included detailed and labelled Google Maps screenshots to show where he went. And I was able to go to Google Maps myself and see exactly which road he followed. And it was interesting to get this information because it told me surprising things about Kristian. What I mean is that I just had to take one look at that tiny, white, squiggly line on Google Maps overlaid on the terrain, and I knew exactly what he was getting himself into. It was perfectly obvious to me what kind of road he had chosen to follow. This could be an extremely tough road. It’s not something I would ever take on lightly. Yet, Kristian seemed surprised and taken completely unawares at how rough the road was. And he has been living in Indonesia for over five years and has been traveling on a motorcycle in that time. I would have thought he would fully understand what this road was going to be like. But he seemed to have no idea.
Another interesting thing is that given the condition of this road, you’d think that his powerful motorcycle and all his gear would have been designed precisely for this kind of mountain terrain and rough road. Yet, it seemed oddly unsuited to this terrain. The bike seemed too heavy and unwieldy to handle these conditions. And you’d think that Kristian would welcome these rougher road conditions as precisely what he was planning for and looking for in his journey. Yet, he seemed taken aback. He was surprised at the condition of the road and was rather unprepared for it and unhappy about it. Luckily for him, the road turned out to be far LESS rough than I expected. He could easily have run into much worse conditions based on what I’ve seen of roads like that. I fully expected him to run into a deadend and have to turn back. But he was able to complete the journey in daylight and make it back to the main coastal road and to a hotel he had reserved for the night. He wanted to get back there by a certain time because his previous video was going live, and he wanted to be online for that.
Later in the day, I started watching some videos from another travelling YouTuber. The channel is called Wandering Emma. I don’t know much about Emma as yet. I’ve learned that she was born in Scotland, but she spent twenty-two years living in the United States. So she doesn’t really speak with a Scottish accent. And she thinks of Iraq as her second home. So she must have spent some of her life there as well. It’s not entirely clear how long she has been shooting and uploading YouTube videos. The very first video from Pakistan on this trip says that it was uploaded one year ago. But those time notations on YouTube can be misleading. YouTube doesn’t provide exact dates, so it could have been closer to two years ago than one year. When YouTube says one year ago they might mean “more than one year ago”, and that could be anything up to two years.
Anyway, whether it has been one year or closer to two years, Emma has been to quite a few challenging countries. She has been to Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, and now Japan. And she has posted over 200 videos. That’s a lot. It’s too soon to say whether I will find her videos engaging enough to watch a lot of them. I started with a video she shot taking a big ferry boat from Dhaka to Barisal in Bangladesh. Someone left a link to that video in a comment to one of my videos. I enjoyed that Bangladesh video, but mainly because it showed a place that I was familiar with. I enjoyed seeing the docks of Dhaka again with all those massive river ferries. I was a bit disappointed to see that so many of her videos had titles emphasizing that she was doing this SOLO and that she was FEMALE and going to DANGEROUS places SOLO. I always find that kind of hype to be off putting and cringey in YouTube videos. But I guess it helps to get people to click on and then watch your videos. I’ve never understood the use of the word foreigner in video titles either. You see a lot of travel videos with titles like, Foreigner Tries Spicy Food or Foreigner Takes Local Train. Even Kristian’s next video in the series is called Foreigner Explore BENGKULU Sumatra Indonesia. Someone must have decided or figured out that putting the word foreigner in the video titles makes it more likely that people will click on it. But I don’t know why that would be. It just seems like a strange usage to me. I don’t see the point or the attraction. Perhaps for my next video, I should use the title FOREIGNER Rides Bicycle SOLO in DANGEROUS Sumatran MOUNTAINS!!