In the morning we found a great restaurant by asking around. The place was called Sari Rasa. We had eggs and toast and fruit juice. We still haven't learned to like fried rice for breakfast, although it really does just fine.

A little way out of Lubuksikaping we entered a fairly wide valley. Property values seemed to plummet. The valley supported a lot more rice growing and the number of people and villages we passed increased a lot. At the same time the poverty increased as well. The houses were not neat. Some villages looked worse than most of what we saw on Java. The area between the houses and the road was filled with just rubble and garbage. Many of the buildings were made of an almost black wood that looks like it has been burned. The roofs, like on most of Sumatra, were made of rusting corrugated metal. They look awful. When we got up a hill and could see down on a village, it looks far more ugly and poor than it appears when you look at it from road level.

West Sumatra and North Sumatra, the two provinces we bicycled in, have very distinctive classic architectures for there homes. Both styles have pointy ends on the roofs to make them look like the horns on a bull. However, almost no one use this style anymore. We saw them occasionally, but not often. Government buildings and tourist bungalows are about the only new buildings using the traditional architecture. You have to give the Indonesian government credit for constructing interesting buildings and using something akin to the local architecture.

In Rao we ate a spicy fried rice for lunch and drank at least 3 sodas each. Sometime after Rao the road started to climb and it started raining. We put on our rain coats but took them off after a while because the light rain felt good. By the time we reached the top of the climb the rain also reached its peak and we were soaked. By that point we didn't even bother with the raincoats.

We descended down a narrow valley and rolled fast though towns that could pass for poor West Virginia mountain towns except all the kids screaming, "Halo Meestir!"

The heavy rain caused the road to be flooded. In several places we forded streams. At one ford as I rode behind Joan and a little to her right, I heard her scream then saw her start falling towards me. I braked and swerved but still hit her handlebar bag as her bike fell into mine. Her front wheel had fallen into a 6 inch deep pot hole hidden underneath a puddle. It knocked her over. Amazingly, she was complete unhurt. Not a scratch.

Unfortunately her front tire went flat. I hate flat tires especially in the rain on a narrow road. There was no good place to get off the road so we had to fix it on a narrow strip of grass right next to the highway and live with honking buses and cars dodging us.

For some reason fixing a flat can never be straight forward for us. This story is a long one about rim sleeves and bad vulcanizing fluid. It took forever to fix. Shortly after we stopped, a man with an air gun showed up and watched us. I think he tried to tell us that nearby was a place that could fix it for us. A while later 4 more guys showed up to watch. I heard a rustle in the trees across the road and we all looked up to see if we could see what caused it -- probably a monkey. The man with the gun took a shot but didn't get anything.

At last we fixed the flat and rode the final 15km into Kotanopan. Unfortunately Kotanopan is small and ranks in the "grimy" class of Sumatran villages. It's only a couple hundred meters from end to end. We passed through without seeing a single place to stay. A woman working at a warung and who spoke a little English directed us to the guest house a little way off. Then she said, "You come here for dinner later?"

We had ridden right past the guest house and not known what it was. It had an official type sign with a long Indonesian word on it so we had ignored it. These are usually government buildings. This was kind of a nice looking Dutch colonial building. It had a porch all the way around and doors and windows at regular intervals. A few tables and chairs sat on the porch at the top of the stairs. An older man slept quietly on one of the chairs.

I walked past him, through the open entrance and found someone to show us a room. The room was simple but clean. The shared bathroom, however, looked awful so we left and tried to find another place.

Joan found a Losmen down the street but it's bathroom was way worse. While she checked it out, I was mobbed by children on their way home from some sort of Muslim school. The little boys asked me lots of questions and laughed a lot. The little girls just shyly glanced. One little girl blew me a kiss satirically, exaggerating her hand movements.

We went back to the guest house and stayed there.

We ended up having dinner at the warung with the English speaking women. She turned out to be one of the many warung owners that we really like. She talked enthusiatically to us. She smiled. She had the patience to try to understand our Indonesia. Also she was one of the only Indonesians that tried to help us learn to speak Indonesia. She corrected our pronounciation if we kept saying a word wrong.

We liked her food. She had suprisingly good "ground tapioca leaf in coconut sauce" that we mixed with rice. She put a bunch of dishes out for us and we tried everything and liked it all. That's unusual.

She's also good at business. She wanted to know how much a coke cost in Padang and Bukkittinggi. She learned English on her own from a book and practicing with people like us. She said bicyclers come through town once every two or three weeks. Small tourists shuttle buses, however, stop everyday. One stopped in while we were there.

The tourists from the bus didn't eat anything. They just had cokes. Also they didn't talk to anyone except amongst themselves. Then they left. If we had been on the bus, we would have done the same thing. It was good to feel on the inside of the warung for once. Scores of warung owners have served us drinks and maybe some food. After a while they can become nameless and faceless if you don't try to communicate. At home I might say, "how are you doing?" to a gas station attendant and maybe he just says "fine", but I might also gather from his appearance or the way he responds or what he says to another person other things about him. But here, since I can't pick up any subtleties in language or dress and don't have any cultural perspective, people easily turn into nameless automatons.

Next: Padangsidempuan 

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