North Sumatra

[Note there are no photos in this post, hopefully just until some tech issues are sorted]

 

I felt a bit hurried through Sumatra.

In a way that’s strange, because in reality I’ve had a bit of hurry and impatience about me for the whole trip.  Maybe I’m relaxing a little (with concerned effort!) into the natural cadence of a road trip – just when the schedule for ferries to Malaysia required I needed my skates on to avoid a 10-day Muslim New Year delay.

Consequently I saw much less (and took fewer photos) of the northern most Indonesian island on my route.  But speed of progress was always going to compete with depth of engagement along the route, with only finite time for the trip.

For various reasons there have been several big days over week in Sumatra, with a few hiccups along the way.  I didn’t even circle back to find the equator when I realised I had failed to spot the “you can’t miss it” milestone I was promised.  I’m actually genuinely disappointed.  I’ve crossed that line plenty of times, but only by plane.  Riding from Melbourne – latitude -38 degrees – all the way to the equator feels significant.  I wanted to mark the moment.  I am confident that I started in the southern hemisphere, and I am pretty sure I’m now in the northern – so unless Dr Who got involved I reckon I did cross the equator last week!  I just have nothing to frame for the lounge room wall to celebrate it.

Fine-tuning the Malaysia entry planning was a major exercise in information gathering.  And a major fail.  I finally settled on an understanding that I’d need one ferry for the bike and a seperate boat for me.  I was told that while they both leave from Tanjung Balai, they leave on different days and arrive in different ports, and that the earlier motorbike ferry is the faster one.  That left me hoping (without confidence) that it didn’t create challenges with customs handling the bike days before I turn up for Malaysia’s visa-on-arrival.  It felt at the time like it was all getting a little complicated.  But we’ll come back to that shortly.

Meanwhile I was met at Lake Toba by another biker from John’s circle, Sumantriono.  Suman and his wife and I spent every waking moment together for the day and a half in the area.

It is a strange thing; but on this solo motorbike ride to the other side of the world, I am struggling to find time to myself.  I relish a stolen moment waiting for a ferry, or going to the loo, or “heading to bed early” to have a moment of silence alone in my room.  For this introvert, that (unexpected) people intensity is something I need to manage.  Extroverts (which I think is probably statistically most of us 🤓), fill your metaphorical batteries with people time – I fill my extremely-introverted batteries with time alone.  Low batteries on a long bike ride would actually become an issue.  I’ve found myself getting grumpy at the overlapping and unrelenting people time, and need a frequent attitude re-check to stay gracious, and thankful, and friendly.  The reality is I am being absolutely showered with constant kindness, with help and with generosity, and there is simply no place for a grumpy-old-man response to that.  Work in progress.

My one full day at Lake Toba actually wasn’t at the lake at all, but Suman and I went with his wife to visit the family home, “Bet El” church, school and enterprise.  All four of these (home, church, school, enterprise) share the same small lot of land, with Suman’s vision to provide spiritual nurture and education for free.  He has a burden for those who might be tempted from their Christian faith into other religions by financial enticements; apparently a real issue in Sumatra.  By the time we completed our 90-minute motorbike ride to Bet El I had released most (but not quite all) of my grumpy, with a fair bit of verbalising (thankfully) kept private under my helmet!  The level of my frustration and feeling of peopled-out suffocation was a surprise even to me!

But it was such an incredible blessing to me to meet the school children, pray for each one, sing with them, see their future building progress and plans, and get a sense of the hope inherent in the vision Suman has taken on.  I didn’t need anyone to explicitly chide me for my earlier selfish attitude, as the blessing of the day contrasted with my earlier grumpy without any help.

From Lake Toba I rode to Tanjung Balai, from where the bike would take a 50-foot wooden cargo vessel to Port Klang in Malaysia’s KL.  Suman was keen to convoy with me on the first hour or so of the ride.  And another new biker colleague took the 4-hour ride from Medan to Lake Toba just to ride with me from there to to Tanjung Balai.

The CEO and founder of the 5-vessel shipping company joined me at Customs when we rolled into town.  And a couple of other bikers materialised as well.  All this is thanks to John from Jakarta introducing me to the “Global Bikers” WhatsApp group.

It turned out to be a very helpful thing to have a few friendly faces there, because that introduced strong relationship with the Customs team.  Why was that so important?  Well…  After four other customs teams had stamped my “Carnet” (like a passport, but for the bike), the Customs team on my exit from Indonesia discovered a discrepancy that boiled down to a wrong engine number.  That’d be like having my surname wrong on my own Passport.  Big no no.  I think it was all heading towards a nasty bit of red tape explosion which would have seen me miss the ferry.  And then I’m told that the Muslin NY celebration would mean I’d be stuck waiting 10 days for the next ferry.  So when cool heads prevailed and Customs wagged their proverbial finger but stamped my Carnet anyway, I was Uber-thankful for the friendly local biker faces that got that across the line.  I then emailed the Australian authorities who issued my Carnet, and they’ve been gracious enough to acknowledge their error and provide me a letter stating the correct details and owning the issue themselves.  Hopefully that’ll help if any future Customs team digs beneath the VIN in search of the engine number.

So that was a big win for the day, and we then wrestled my bike onto the boat and lashed it on to what seemed to me to be a flimsy fishing vessel rather than a modern cargo arrangement.  It all got there beautifully in one piece, for which I’m very grateful.

One win.  And… a big fail.  It turns out that the passenger vessel had left 8:00 that morning.  Perhaps I should have tried to verify the information I’d been given.  The next passenger vessel was three days from then.  And I had a bike service booked in KL, so was very keen to close the Indonesian chapter and open a Malaysian page.

After much discussion of options with my extremely hospitable and helpful new Tanjung Balai friends, it became increasingly clear that the only solution was to take a taxi to “neighbouring” Medan and fly from there to KL.  There wasn’t time in the day left to fly that day, so I booked an 11:30am flight, wth a taxi scheduled to pick me up in Tanjung Balai at 6am.  For a four-hour taxi fare.  I didn’t know when I booked, but it turned out to be a shared taxi, which was an adventure in itself.  I got a bit stressed about whether we’d make it with the messing around the sharing represented, but in the end I was there in plenty of time and for a relatively tiny AU$20 ride.  I still can’t quite get my head around the commercials of that.  Oh well.

With a night at a hotel, a 4-hour taxi, a 55-minute flight, and one more 1-hour taxi through KL, I arrived at the docks an hour before my GSA was unloaded.

WIth that my Indonesian sojourn drew to a close.

I’d ridden a bit over 10,000km from Melbourne, taken about 5 months (much of that stuck between Darwin and Dili), ridden across the equator, notched up a measly 3 countries (with Malaysia to be the 4th) and covered about 1/3 of my overall Melbourne-to-London distance.

It is beginning to feel like a road trip at last!

1 Comment

  • Alex van der End

    Way to go buddy!

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