The Hotel Bromo Permai gave us our first Nasi Soto for breakfast. This is rice with a sort of beef sauce and a few vegetables. It was very spicy. This is a fairly common morning meal on Java. I liked it but it would not be my first choice for breakfast.

Most of the rest of the day was more hell on the highways. We ate at a great little warung in Pasuruan. We parked the bikes with some difficulty in front so we could see them from inside. I figured the place would be good because it had 11 calendars on the wall. In the book "Blue Highways," William Least Heat Moon says you can tell a good diner in America by the number of calendars on the walls. Unlike American diners however, these calendars were all for the current year and all on the right month.

This warung, like many, had three long tables with lots of small plastic stools around them. We sat at the middle table. At the first table sat a well dressed couple probably each about 40 years old. They looked very dignified but I thought they seemed to be eyeing us a little suspiciously. Everyone thinks we're a novelty. Children go crazy just screaming and yelling when we go by; teenage boys stare and yell smart remarks; teenage girls stare and giggle. But the upper-class, well dressed set looks but doesn't react much to us.

I felt uncomfortable with their suspicious glances so I smiled at the women and said, "Selemat Siang" (good day). This worked quite well. Suddenly we were attempting a conversation and the next thing we knew she was suggesting sprouts to help Joan's fertility. (We learned that when an Indonesian asks you if you have any children, it's best to answer, whether or not you plan to have any, "Not yet." I guess we were a little too convincing in our answer.) Before they left we exchanged addresses.

Pasuruan seemed like a healthy, busy city with lots and lots of becaks. We did not see an unusual police present. Later we heard there had been riots here.

The afternoon was very hot and the buses and trucks sprayed us with black diesel exhaust just after they nearly killed us. We continued to see amazing things being carried on bicycles and lots of school children in nice clean uniforms. People still yelled everything from "I love you" to "Fuck you."

One notable: I saw a large ox cart pulled by a single animal stuffed to 10 feet high just like the Grinch's sled with cardboard for recycling. It always seemed sort of a paradox driving a car to recycle paper. The exhaust from the car is more polluting than the paper. This seemed an excellent solution.

Oddly, as we got closer to Surabaya, the riding got a little easier. The road became four lanes and much of it was divided. We now had more room and we didn't have to worry about traffic coming the other way.

We stopped about 15km out of town because it was getting dark and we didn't want to navigate the city at night. We stayed in a lousy hotel on a traffic island near the airport for way too much money. There was one restaurant besides the hotel restaurant on the island but the other one had lots of cars parked out front and was very expensive even by western standards. The hotel restaurant was sort of a pavilion under a very high roof and only a back wall. It had room to have dinner for 100 but we were the only ones there. We wouldn't have minded except the mosquitos.

In the morning after the rain stopped we rode the final 15km into the city. We got into a traffic jam that we couldn't get around even on bikes. We played with the cars and buses, slipping between vehicles, using what shoulder we could, generally trying to weasel our way through but it didn't do much good. We went about walking speed for 15 minutes before we reached the cause of the hold up. A sewer had clogged and water from the heavy morning rain flooded across the road. Only one car at a time could go through on the far right. We pedaled through about six inches of water.

At one place it took us about 10 minutes to cross an entrance ramp onto the toll freeway.

We passed much the same kinds of things as we passed getting out of Denpasar - nice symmetrical government office buildings with red tiled roofs; Motorcycle dealerships with big tall facades; dirty little stalls that do tire repair or motorbike repair; rolling carts selling food; lots of stalls selling general things you find in a minimart (except cold drinks); warungs (food stalls); pharmacies.

Surabaya is a maze. Almost every street is one way. Some streets are nice tree lined divided roads but with both sides of the divide going the same way. On other streets, the traffic drives on the opposite side of the road (here that's the right-hand side).

We learned how to ride on these streets that have six or eight lanes going the same way. We reached out our hands pointing down and with the palm facing back not just to indicate we were going to move into the next lane, but telling the cars to slow down. (This is an Indonesian gesture). It worked most of the time.

Our map didn't show the way, but we found Hotel Paviljoen anyway. We had to wait for our room until a couple of young blonde haired Dutch women checked out. We realized they were the first white people we had seen since we left Bali, 300km ago.

It was only 11 a.m. when we checked in. We washed lots of Surabaya street grit off our feet. We always wear sandals, even when we ride. Our heavy large leather boots actually got moldy in our panniers and we had been feeling at little silly carrying them around and never wearing them. (We felt even sillier nine months later in Nepal, when we dusted off the boots for our big hike around the Annapurna, and the soles almost entirely separated from the boots. DON'T BUY TIMBERLAND boots! Ever!)

But after all that nasty road grit that morning, we wore them everyday in the city. (Actually, Joan wore her Tevas the first day but wore her boots the rest of the time.)

Next: Bladerunner reality

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