Banyu Hadi looks up. Looks up again. His face, still swollen from sleep, still dripping from the morning’s ablution, express many things in the next seconds. Consternation, first. The knit brow, the glance over his shoulder. Then the true facial acrobatics begin. Confusion, perhaps even awe. Surprise certainly, fluidly transitioning into wide-eyed, slack jawed, befuddlement; before cracking open in a wide grin of pure uncontrollable glee. Before he knows it, Banyu is running.

One hand holding his bunched up sarong the other pumping the air furiously. It’s 6am, still dark out, as he leaps a hen, ducks under a clothesline and splashes through a recently sowed rice field.

The terraces like hurdles under him, he runs. This is his moment to shine and he pursues it with singular focus. He punches through a thick cloud of smoke from a nearby garbage fire and leaps barefoot and bleeding onto the road. And not a moment to soon.

Before he can even catch his breath, he summons the last of his energies to complete this most crucial of once-in-a-lifetime missions. He screams at the top of his lungs: ‘Hello Mister!’

To Ceci.

Ceci who’s been up since the 4am call to prayer: 10 off-sync off-key muezzins, booming from megaphoned minarets scattered all across town. Ceci who is climbing up a 20% hill with her loaded bike, before sunrise, before breakfast, with 130kms of winding mountain roads before her.

Ceci who is not a mister.

She whispers, out-of-breath, ‘Hel-lo’.

What else is she going to do?

She cycles on. I ride up next to her.

‘Jesus, what was up with that guy?’

‘Just happy, I guess?’

It’s a happy country. You can set your watch by it. In fact, we could have left our watches at home. The math is really simple because it’s the exact same as the money conversion. One Canadian Dollar is 10,000 Rupiahs, just like one kilometre is 10,000 Hello misters.

‘Aguas!’ Ceci says in warning and I sprint ahead to hug the white line, just as a truck comes barreling past.

Through the thick diesel cloud trailing it, I can just glimpse a woman, her head stretched perilously out of the passenger window, her face tightly framed by her golden hijab, while its lower hem is loose, flying like hair in the wind.

‘Love you,’ she says and blows me a kiss.

Cycling through Sumatra is a manifold path. To think of it in terms of kilometres would be cruelly reductionist and, what’s more, unimaginative. First and foremost, we travel greeness. We spend 90% of our days cycling through remote communities nestled deep into mountains so impossibly lush with mega-biodiverse jungles; only interrupted, here and there, by rice plantations, terraced and curated like vast zen gardens. Green. Yes, yellow. But green.

Just as humidity saturates the air, making the immaterial material, heavy, breathable, palpable, unendurable; we bathe in waves of green, navigate its sinewy wavelengths, part its immaterial matter, its insubstantial substance, with our front wheels, like a knife through matcha tea, it saturates our senses and the soul knows no end of thirst for it.

‘Sabes lo que se me antoja?’ Ceci asks.

Having no clue what she craves, I answer, ‘Que?’

Which she takes to mean I didn’t hear her. So she says, again, ‘Sabes lo que se me antoja?’

This happens a lot. And it drives me absolutely pisang. It’s the wind in our ears, see?

‘Que!?’ I ask, maybe a little too loud because now I’ve gone and summoned up a bunch of ‘Hello Mister’ ‘Hello Mister’ from a nearby schoolyard.

‘Yes, hello, hello.’

‘A green salad.’ Ceci says. And it’s true, you see a lot of vegetables on the road, but the most you ever get is a measly slice of cucumber or cabbage on the edge of your Nasi Goreng.

The rest? Fried. But that’s beside the point, because now I’m stuck wondering if while I’m philosophizing in shades of green, Ceci is just salivating back there on her bike, imagining giant broccolis and kale instead of jungle.

We’ve been getting along very well, which is somewhat surprising. For us, on a trip? Absolutely. Our first trip to Asia? We barely knew each other. Our honeymoon in Cuba? We knew each other too well.

See, the same way there’s type 1 fun (enjoying it in the moment) and type 2 fun (enjoying it afterwards), I believe there’s a type 1 & type 2 love.

And Ceci & I? We’re the latter. Always have been. Our love is a type of rivalry, a contest of wills, if you will. We make it up as we go along, scrap over every spare inch in our relationship. Tethered together by the idea that we love each other, if not always exactly the act or even the intention. Ergo: Type 2. You know it’ll be worth it. In the end. A marriage really is an awful long time.

But here in Sumatra…

It has to be the green. Yes, yellow also. But green. It’s the way Sumatra completely inverts the normal ratio of cycle-touring. Here, it’s not the destination but the cycling that’s type 1 fun. Not just a means to an end. Hundreds of kilometres of streaming green and rustic villages and beautiful smiling people. While most destinations here are type 2 fun: dirty homestays by the side of a busy highway.

But since we spend 60% of our waking hours on the road, steeping in green, there’s at least a 60/40 chance that that’s exactly what makes us get along so well. The green. Don’t even google it. It’s therapeutic. Like eating salad. Or Ireland.

Cycle-touring makes you spend a lot of time in the in-betweens of a country. The road in between destinations and the destinations in-between destinations of note. And these in-betweens often make or break a trip.

Which makes Sumatra, oddly and despite it all, one of the best destinations for cycle-tourism.

Every single day in Sumatra, we arrive wherever we arrive, not caring that the only ‘homestay’ (quote unquote), is by a busy highway, by the mosque, by the way there’s only cold water, and you shower by the bucket; we are still so inwardly full of green that it doesn’t even feature. Yes Ceci, like a salad… but inside.

Not that green is the only dimension we travel. Although certainly the most rejuvenating.

Cycling through Sumatra is also traveling through the counterpart to greeness: Pollution.

Plastic. Plastic everywhere, in every body of water, streams, rivers, lakes, ocean. And if we travel shades of green, we spend about as much time traveling  shades of grey. Smoke from burning garbage, charcoal cooking fires, white gas from motorcycles, black from diesel trucks, clove cigarettes. Grey. Slowly desaturating the wonders of the worl—

‘Hello Miss!’

Ceci frowns, glances over her shoulder. Confusion.

‘Did you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘Did you hear…?’

‘I know! I was asking: Did I hear what?’

‘What?’ It’s the wind… Also, you know what? I like the wind. Indonesia is just a really really LOUD country.

Then, all of a sudden, despite the 10 mosques screaming at once, the motors, honks, lato-lato, the yells of ‘howariu’ or ‘what is your name’ or the more philosophical ‘who are you’, or ‘where is your name’ or ‘howareyoufrom’— we hear it again:

‘Hello Miss!’

‘That!’

We turn a corner startling a flock of school children walking home, all clad in those traditional Muslim school uniform that makes your heart melt. The little girls with their little hijabs like penguins. The little boys with their little kopiahs like, well, little boys with little hats.

‘Hello Miss!’ ‘Hello Miss!’ ‘Hello Miss!’ ‘Hello Miss!’

To me. Looking me square in the face.

Wide-eyed, slack jawed, befuddled; Ceci and I look at each other.

Every single person in that village. Only that village. Of the hundreds of thousands of Hello Misters we get every day all over Sumatra. That village was a Hello Miss village. Now, I ask you: Just how does that work? How does even Hello Mister work? How is anything that unanimous? Must be the green. Or genetic.

Ceci cycles up to me, face cracking open in a wide grin of pure uncontrollable glee.

‘They’re saying it to you.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’

🚴🏼🚴🏼‍♀️💨

 

Rosy pig, baby Labrador.

I look down.

‘Sorry you had to see that little fella.’ I say to the little knit piglet figurine perched on my handlebars. A parting gift from Ceci’s sister, Dani. He’s a little less pink with every deluge we cycle through. But it’s in keeping with the theme. Pigs & mud are like me and Ceci, they stick together. And besides, we’re cycling Sumatra in Monsoon season, so what you get is what you’re going to get.

Rosy pig, baby Labrador.

Another one? The billboards in this region of Sumatra are a bit cryptic. In fact, most of the restaurants around here either sell B-1 or B-2. Whatever that means. And something called Pangang.

I look back at Ceci.

‘Did you see the—‘ but I see her lips ready to say ‘Que?’ So I wag my finger. ‘Never mind!’

Ceci’s handlebars also sport a knit figurine, knit by her sister. Hers is a mouse. Tikus, is its name—Indonesian for mouse. Or rat. We’re not sure.

Google translate’s offline app is a bit like ordering Bakso (Meatballs), it’s a bit of a spin of the wheel. But at least with Bakso, if the provenance of the meat is a total mystery, the colour is always consistent. Pale grey. Whereas google translate is as inconsistent as… as… anyway you get the idea.   

As inconsistent as Ceci’s digestion. There, that should do it.

The food in Indonesia is like one of those bad lovers that’s sweet and playful at first, only to later grow bitter, moody even, and vengeful, at the very end. For Ceci, anyway. For me it’s like being married to Ceci, a risky proposition, but always 100% worth it.

Anyway, you know what is consistent?

B-1. B-2.

Rosy pig, baby Labrador.

Pangang.

Is there something there?

‘Hello mister!’

‘Hello, hello.’

I look at my watch. Click open gmaps on my phone.

‘Mierda,’ I say signalling for Ceci to pull over. ‘We missed the turn 7kms ago. The gps in North Sumatra doesn’t track, so we have to combine its written directions and the kilometres on my watch. But since we have to reset gmaps every time, it changed routes on us. It wants the highway way while we want the mountain way.

So now, the day is 135km instead of 120km because, of course, we backtrack. Have you met my wife? The mountain way has 2,258m of elevation gain. My watch said 60km & 400m of uphill by then, so… needless to say the day was about to acquire a whole lot more susu. So we did what we do best, put our heads down and searched for that sweet spot between type 1 and type 2 fun.

‘Babi Pangang,’ our homestay host says, later on, writing the words on a paper map. ‘Roast pig. A local specialty.’

‘Oh, that’s what that is!’ It feels, at that moment, like a deeper realization that it really is. We know Babi means pig because that’s what we jokingly call my handlebar piglet. But we’re completely worked. 10 hours on the bike in the sweltering heat really gorengs the brain. As a matter of fact, we just spent the last 20 minutes standing naked in the shower trying to pray (swear) some hot water out of a hot water tank, which after all is what it does, or what it should anyway, until, already half-showered with freezing water, it dawns on one of us to read the instructions printed in English on the hot water tank. Press button, then open tap. Oh…

‘Not to be confused with…’ our host continues. We’re wet, spent and hungry, having pinched pennies for the last 3 days because my Debit Card and ATMs are not on speaking terms.

‘B-1.’

We’re still in a daze at having seen orangutans in the wild only the day before (was that just yesterday?) and so even if this woman—spawn of Satan—won’t stop talking, delaying the moment when food meets the mouth in such a way as to fill stomach and legs; we can find it in our hearts to forgive her.

‘Which is dog.’

‘Which is dog, got it.’ I say, in such a tone of voice as to imply to Ceci: Howsabout we get the hell out of hell—

But when I look at Ceci, her face has melted like putty. Quickly, I backtrack, convinced that I’ve missed something.

‘B-2,’ I say. ‘Babi Pangang, Pig… roast.’

You see, it’s kind of like a tongue twister, but for the mind. You may think you’ll get it on the first try…

‘B-1… Oh.’

Dog. Sure. It makes sense when you try hard, like bleeding-from-the-nose hard not to think about it too too much. B-1. Dog. You know because, B-2. Pig. Also, because dog in Indonesia is… anjing. So, there. Doesn’t make you want to try B-2 though, does it? Collateral damage. Like when you lick your fingers, then touch the toilet bowl. It’s the opposite that’s gross. But the brain registers it the same. Needless to say the piglet on my handlebars is now called B-2. Ceci’s mouse is still called Tikus. And Ceci’s Labrador is still called Tikka. When she behaves.

🚴🏼‍♀️🚴🏼💨

 

Sometimes, before the bike is out of the box, your trip acquires a layer of spicy satay sauce that, for better or worse, will flavour everything to come.

At 8:30pm January 11th, the day before the trip, a knock on the door. We’re eating dinner in Ceci’s parents house in Mexico, an hour away from our ride to the airport, not expecting anyone.

‘Quien?’ I ask, heading towards the door.

‘Soy yo, Wili.’ Or Wali. Your choice, but his real name is Oscar, our star mechanic for the trip. I open up and he’s standing there sweating, a break/speeds lever in his hand.

Amigos, in Mexico, it means something else. Something closer to what most of the world would call family.

Since we last saw him, deeming my front derailleur lever beyond repair, Wili’s been searching all over Mexico City to find a functional one. Mexico City is more than 2hrs away by bus. There and back and there is 6hours. Plus the time to find the part, plus the chaos of Mexico, plus the time to fix it. And Wili was just one of so many friends and family who helped us pull of this mammoth of a trip! We are eternally grateful to you all.

Anyway, in case you think that was the spice, let me tell you: that wasn’t the spice. That was just the peanuts, the savoury part, the backbone of the dish.

This is the spice: Arriving at 12am for our 6am flight which ends up being a 9am flight, the USA immigration computer system having chosen this moment to shut down. Once in San Francisco being put on a flight 24hours later AND, listen to this: being refused food vouchers citing “Climate Reasons” for our delay. After 4 hours at 3 different counters with 8 different attendants, managing to be put on standby for an overnight flight to Singapore. It’s the January 12th by then, we’ve been up for 36 hours when, by some miracle, we make it on the plane. A further 16 hours later: Singapore. Without a boarding pass for the next flight. Not even a clue which sister airline, only that one of our bikes will make it through to Kuala Lumpur on its own. The other one? No paperwork. The airline forcing us to buy an exit flight from Malaysia, even though we know it’s not required. And all this while running back and forth like crazy people because our next mystery flight is boarding. Two hours after landing in Malaysia, we’re at the hotel, where they canceled our reservation because we arrived a full day late. We fix it, somehow, then it’s zip zoop put some pants and shoes on and off to the Indonesian embassy which is about to close for 2days; where I fail once more to acquire a 60day Visa (instead of the 30day VisaOnArrival).

And in case you think that’s spicy, it was nothing compared to the Korean food we ate before going to sleep, a full 65 hours since we last touched a bed. Ay ay ay!

1) Spicy Korean Food 2) Wili & David working on Ceci’s bike. They’re shy…

🚴🏼🚴🏼‍♀️💨

‘Ok! Go! Now! Go! Go!’

Orange. We’ve been crossing the Sumatran jungle for 6 hours now, pursuing a glimpse of orange. The red mud, the green foliage, the blue sky. We’ve been hiking off-trail for an hour, a local tracker, wise in years, is breaking trail ahead of us.

We’ve been traveling in silence now, moral low, knowing our window of opportunity is closing. Only stopping now and again to tear leeches off our shoes and socks. The rusty-orange tobacco juice we’ve rubbed into them at the start of the day to ward off the leeches is wearing off. And so too its vague symbolic foreshadowing of orange.

A rustle in the leaves.

Before we know what’s happening, we’re running through the jungle, our local guide yelling, ‘Ok! Go! Now! Go! Go!’ All we know is that we’re in business.

Orange. A young male, off in the high canopy.

And there it was, Ceci’s life dream. An orangutan in the wild. Cascading vast, abundant, grotesque amounts of diarrhea down onto us. And it must have been fate, some kind of simian blessing, because Ceci is the only one to be baptized by it. Prodigious amounts of the holy fruit of its bowels cascading down, and I look around to find Ceci in tears.

Ceci crying, the orangutan voiding its bowels, Ceci crying, the orangutan voiding its bowels… everything conjoining into this most magical of moments.

As Ceci as it gets.

The culmination of a lifetime of dreaming in shades of orange.

A dream fulfilled.

I guess that means the rest of our lives together will be about me now?

🚴🏼‍♀️🚴🏼💨

Some places, it takes no time at all. You step out of the plane and there’s no way back. You are here.

You are here: that spot on the map, blurred, worn by so many fingers pointing, by so many travelers trying desperately to anchor themselves in a strange new universe. You are here. A place that could be any place, more defined by how unlike home it is, than by any characteristic of its own.

This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood benefits of traveling. Like learning a language, everything at first is melded into one fast indistinguishable blur.  Then, little by little, a word sticks out, then another. And from these humble tools and with a little curiosity and imagination, we begin to infer meaning.

And so, that blurred spot on the map slowly begins to define itself. The space between You and Here suddenly seems less daunting. And just as you adapt, just as you clear a nook for Here inside You; Here too starts to yield, to adapt, to make space for You. The truth of Here changes, drawing ever closer to being Indonesia. Bewildering still, but idiosyncratically so. Authentically so. And in the process, you acquire a new dimension, too. The truth of what it means to be You changes.

A new world to see, a new way to see the world.

Entering Indonesia by way of Medan, by way of Sumatra, North Sumatra was a jump in the deep end. Building our bikes at nightfall to the sound of 4 call-to-prayer at once, swarmed by excited children; we couldn’t have been farther away from home. A feeling that, over time, is beginning to feel like home, vagabonds as we are.

The chaos of cycling out of Medan, Sumatra’s biggest city, at 6am on the first bike day of the trip, is hard to put into words. Just imagine a bag of cables, USB, micro-USB, Lightning cable, GoPro cable, Fuji charger… Ceci & I are those little white earbuds with the audio jack. Throw us in there. Now shake the bag. And open it again.

All it takes is no time at all.

We turned the corner from our guesthouse, thinking: left side of the road, left side of the road… Shake shake and open the bag. You can still recognize the various elements of road traffic, just like you can still recognize the little white earbuds, but does that help you in any way?

Adrenaline at 6am is a whole different drug. No time to yawn, to rub your eyes, as a mad exhilarating rush, a tidal wave of motorcycles engulfs you. And suddenly, you are powerless but to follow, to move when it moves, and not occupy a millimetre more than the average space an average human on an average bike occupies; otherwise two humans/vehicles might occupy the same space at once.

A complex ecosystem of traffic zooming at all speeds, in all directions, honking and revving and good morning sir and good morning miss and selfies on the go and schoolchildren and grandmothers and black and white gasoline clouds and gps between the legs, navigating..!

We’re now so hopelessly tangled that even though we’re technically two earbuds of the same set of headphones, there’s no way we can hear each other over the cataclysmic explosions of motors and klaxons.

Anyway, I’m traveling with just that bag of cables, so take my word for it. It’s messy. Those little white earbuds, even if you manage to extract them, they’ll never be the same. But that’s us too, in a way. We’re messy. Which only makes it easier for us to blend in.

At last, 2½ hours after leaving the guesthouse, we take a slight right off the main road into exactly what we dreamed Indonesia would be. Rural, jungle-y, kids walking to school, broken roads, adventure. Soaked in perspiration, wild-eyed and hungry, feeling like we just rafted through some class 6 rapids (made it up), we are suddenly free from our worries that said ‘Don’t go!’; free from our ego that said, ‘We can wing it!’

The whole affair felt oddly like a rite of passage. A necessary one, allowing us to see Indonesia with unbiased eyes.

We had a lot of doubts going into this trip. The general online consensus of the cycling community seemed to be either: “Don’t go, you’ll die!” or “If you haven’t gone, you haven’t lived!” And now that we are here, it becomes clear why.

Indonesia is Indonesia, it is who you are, what you can bring to the experience, how open you are, how adaptable, that defines the trip.

And now that we’ve voyaged through some of the worst of it, and found it exhilarating, and found that it only adds to the wild contrast of the place; we are here, at last. In tune with Indonesia and humbled enough to enjoy it in all its extremes.

Home at last.

This is who we are.

This is what we do.

And where better to be us than here.

🚴🏼🚴🏼‍♀️💨

‘Saturno tiene dos tigres empaticos que comen lima que les desgasta el enamel de los dientes…’

Sipping her avocado juice, waiting for the rain to stop, Ceci is gradually losing her mind.

Meanwhile, women in colourful hijabs are zooming back and forth in makeshift seadoos and on hotdog-looking banana boats. This is lake Toba on a Sunday morning. And it’s absolutely impossible to get annoyed at such incessant noise in such a peaceful place because they are screaming at the top of their lungs like children in a candy shop. A candy shop which is also a bouncy castle. Made of marshmallows. They are have the time of their lives at 7 in the morning, and it’s absolutely contagious.

Seven AM for me is not the time of my life, and still, I’m smiling with all my teeth.

‘Por eso comen del pan toujours con Sambal pero se enchilan se echan punes y dicen ça pu.’ Ceci whispers, counting on her fingers. Like it’s a competition and she’s refusing to be out-crazied by the women on seadoos who are yelling like their house is on fire and their accidentally on LSD so it’s mind-blastingly fun.

There’s a shift in perspective that inevitably occurs when you travel through Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. I’m not certain I can articulate it without sounding ignorant, so offer me a grain of salt in advance.

I believe it has to do with our conception of culture and religion. It is something we spend a lot of time mulling over, Ceci and I. For one, we found ourselves naturally shifting our vocabulary from extremist to orthodox or strict observance. Secondly, our conception of the hijab which constitutes 99% of the veils worn by women (in our experience) began shifting from religious symbol of oppression, to that of traditional clothing. There seems to exist as many forms of Muslim religious observance as in the Christian world. Not every girl/woman wears a hijabs, and not everyone observes the 5 daily prayers.

The reason for this shift in perspective seems to be primarily because there is a distinctive top-down feeling to religion, imposing rituals and customs on people, whereas what we experience on a daily basis, as we slowly cycle through cities and villages, has the distinctive ground-up feeling of culture.

Humans are humans. It is one of the foundational truths you discover as you travel the world. And it seems to me that it is in all our interests to experience the world firsthand and remember this truth. There is too much good in the world to focus on exceptions.

I believe there are other ways to face the problems of our world, than through depreciation of humanity, and one of them is through a deeper understanding of what unites us. Humans are humans.

And Indonesians, are certainly more human than most. Their love of life, their overflowing enthusiasm, their beautiful smiles! We live in a state of constant wonder here. And have smiled more since we started this trip than in a whole year of life.

‘Hello Misteeeeer!’ Two women on a seadoo scream at us, veils flapping in the wind, as they zip by at terrifying speeds.

‘Saturno tiene dos tigres empaticos—‘ Ceci whispers.

‘De que hablas, estás completamente loca…’ I just have to ask, because if I don’t, I’ll be the one going crazy.

‘Satu, dua, tigga, empat, lima, ename, delapan, tujuh, sembilan, sepuluh.’ she says, exactly as though she was making sense. Which is, point and fact, exactly what a crazy person does. ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro—‘

‘Okay, I get it, I get it. But what’s that other story you were whispering?’

‘Oh, that. It’s just a story I invented to remember numbers 1 to 10 in Indonesian. Saturno (satu) tiene dos (dua) tigres (tigga) empaticos (empat) que comen lima (lima) que les desgasta el enamel (ename) de los dientes por eso comen del pan (delapan) toujours (tujuh) con Sambal pero se enchilan (sembilan) se echan punes y dicen ça pue (sepuluh).’

You tell me which one is the simplest to remember, the story or the numbers.

🚴🏼‍♀️🚴🏼💨

Sitting here, chasing tapioca pearls at the bottom of milk tea at 9pm in Pedang, you wouldn’t suspect the day we’ve had.

The vast spectrum of experiences condensed into every single day here, extends our two weeks in Sumatra into a whole lifetime.

Journal entry #15 – Our last day in Sumatra.

Maninjau, 5:20am banana pancakes. 30kms in, a wrong turn through tight ripples on the map, up steep mountain sides, down steep mountain sides, up, down. We reached the sea 60kms in, hollow legged, exhausted, with 95kms to go. It’s only 11am as we watch Ceci’s sunburned arms blistering in real time, despite sunscreen. I wear long sleeves despite the suffocating humidity, the sweltering heat. Over two Kelapa Mudas (young coconuts) we decide to end the day in Padang, 30kms before our planned destination.

As we reach the guesthouse, Ceci turns to me and says, ‘And what if we end the Sumatra part of the trip here?’

The jungles and mountain villages are behind us now. Before us, another 600km of flat busy highways until our next destination of note, Bengkulu.

It’s 1pm by the time we shower. We then investigate our options, walk 2kms to a bikeshop, arrange to find cardboard bike boxes, also to fix and pack the bikes, walk 4kms around town, take photos, visit a restaurant that serves you 20 different dishes and charges you for what you eat, walk 2kms to the guesthouse in the rain, buy tickets to Yogyakarta (Java Island) for tomorrow, reserve a guesthouse there, go out for dinner, get intercepted by 3 schoolgirls who ask us questions as part of an English assignment, get ambushed by two boys who wait in line to take selfies once we’re done, we reach the restaurant by 7pm, eat two dinners each, order bubble tea, ask for it in a glass because everything always comes in plastic, receive the drink in plastic with a glass on the side, and now it’s 9pm, we’re done journaling, 15½ hours after waking up that morning in Maninjau, ready to walk 2kms to bed. Goodnight.

🚴🏼🚴🏼‍♀️💨

That’s it folks. My aim in writing these trip articles is always twofold. 1)To make Ceci laugh. 2)To make Ceci cry. If I accomplish those two goals, then I know I’m onto something. I’m incredibly lucky to have such an authentic wife. She’s not a bad cyclist either, I guess.

We love you Sumatra!

P.s. Having typed & formatted all this on my cellphone, I apologize for any and all errors.

🚴🏼‍♀️🚴🏼💨

Day 1: Medan -> Bukit Lawang 90km 515m (Elevation Gain)

Day 2: Bukit Lawang -> Berestagi 135km 2,582m

Day 3: Berestagi -> Tuk-Tuk 111km 784m

Day 4: Tuk-Tuk -> Tarabunga 80km 800m

Day 5: Tarabunga -> Sibolga 108km 955m

Day 6: Sibolga -> Aek Sijorni 123km 1045m

Day 7: Aek Sijorni -> Sunpadang 130km 1106m

Day 8: Sunpadang -> Bukittingi 129km 1,996m

Day 9: Bukittingi -> Maninjau 35km 600m

Day 10: Maninjau -> Padang 125km 577m