Sulawesi Trip--Intro and Day One
In the Beginning
Where on earth is Sulawesi? Formerly known as “Celebes,” one of the Spice Islands, Sulawesi lies east of Java and north of Bali, and is shaped like a lowercase “k” with the upper part of the long leg drooping forward. It’s one of Indonesia’s larger islands mostly known for its southern region, particularly an area called Toraja, where they grow the world’s best coffee (really) and kill scores of buffalo whenever someone dies, alongside other funereal weirdnesses (look ‘em up!).
I was looking to do a bike tour in Southeast Asia-Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia-before my planned (temporary?) departure from Japan in June 2011, but as the new year came my research hadn’t panned out. Everything was too expensive, or too dreadlocked-hippie-smelling, or timed wrong. A friend of my mother’s (hi, Matt!) had been sending me various links to look at, and one day he forwarded a mail from the organizer of a tour of Central Sulawesi. Someone had dropped out of the tour and he was looking to fill a spot, and was willing to give a discount. That would put the trip just within my budget, and the timing was good. I shoved money worries aside and booked the damn thing.
I had no bike equipment, no bike clothing, and only a few tools. I started out by ordering two pairs of the cheapest bike shorts on Amazon.jp, some Chinese-made items with immensely thick foam padding in the butt, like a giant sponge. They made me look like I’d just crapped my pants but they were really comfy. I also got a helmet, and later, some clipless shoes and pedals, and also some lights. And a multi-tool and a new patch kit. It was weird to return to “cyclist” mode after so many years as a dipshit sidewalk-rider. Spent the next month trying to find hills to ride my bike up in flat-as-a-pancake Tokyo. As the day approached, I ticked things off my list or wrote them off as impossible in approximately equal amounts. Somehow I managed to get my bike boxed and shipped to the airport a few days before my departure.
Saturday, March 5
Woke up at oh-god-o’clock and caught a taxi to Ueno, where I got on the veryvery first train of the day to Narita Airport. My flight was at 8:40 ayem, and the trip to Narita takes about an hour from Ueno. I found my bike at the place where you pick up delivered luggage, and managed to check in without incident or even extra charges from ANA for the bike. (Try doing that in the US!) The flight to Jakarta was surprisingly full. It took seven hours, so I managed to edit about 40 pages of the sword book I had taken with me and got through the first two of Virgil's Eclogues. (Note: On a whim a few days earlier, I had purchased a Loeb volume of Virgil with the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the first four books of the Aeneid. For some reason trying to read Latin again after a twenty-year break appealed to me. And the Georgics always remind me of my maternal grandmother, who died in 1994 but whom I miss even now. I wouldn't bother to mention the Virgil thing except that it features in an incident later on my trip. Stay tuned!)
Jakarta was crowded and confusing. I managed to find a left luggage office and paid an exorbitant amount to drop my bike overnight. After an unnerving incident with a seemingly friendly fellow who ended up wanting to get me in his private car (he's lucky I didn't punch him) I decided to take a bus into the city-safety in numbers, etc. Later learned that there is one trustworthy brand of taxi (Bluebird) and all the others will try to rip you off or who knows what. Anyway, the bus was very slow, and I had to take a cab from a train station to the hotel anyway, so it was nearly dark when I arrived. I was bummed, because I had hoped to walk around a little bit, but I was also pretty exhausted from the travel, so I just sent the Boyfriend and the Rents an email letting them know I had made it Thus Far and passed out for the night.
Sunday, March 6
[From the tour description]
Palu (capital of Central Sulawesi province)
Riders arrive
Airport transfers
Bike assembly
Swimming (hotel) and Yoga
Accommodation in international hotel on Palu Bay
Took a taxi back to Jakarta airport in the morning and embarked on the mission of finding the goddam office where I'd left my bike. Not easy, as the place was mobbed with people either leaving on a hajj or seeing off a family member who was going. Pretty crazy-a sea of women in burkas and guys in those little hats and kids riding around on luggage carts shrieking. I traveled the length of the airport twice before finally learning that the office was downstairs, in arrivals, rather than upstairs, in departures. Brilliant! Anyway, I finally Obtained my bike and checked in, and then I met Robyn and Paul, an Australian couple who were also on the trip (the bicycle tipped them off as to who I was). In the waiting lounge for the flight to Makassar we met another Australian couple, Alan and Lisa, who were on the trip, as well as Sylvia, the other American; Steve, an Australian guy from Sydney; and Lesley, an Australian woman from Melbourne. Everyone was a fair bit older than me but they all seemed nice. It was an uneventful flight to Makassar (with a not-bad curry for lunch!), where we all trooped off for about 20 minutes and then got back on the same plane to continue to Palu, our destination.
The runway at the airport in Palu was tarmac crazed with green where grass grew through the cracks. We deplaned on a big ladder the way you used to in the Old Days, and at the door of the airplane a guy was blowing on a big horn (a real horn, a twisty one from some kind of animal) for no clear reason. The baggage was loaded from the plane onto a pickup truck in a process that would give the FAA an apoplexy, driven to the door of the airport building, and then given a ceremonial trip on a five-meter-long rolling belt. I saw that only Steve and I had full-sized bikes; everyone else had these folding Bike Friday numbers. We were joined by Charlie (female) and the Other Paul, another Australian couple; they also had folding bikes, but a different brand. And we met our fearless leader, Colin, and his drivers and mechanic: Acok (sounds like "Atchock"), Ucok (you figure it out), and Atok. We left them to load the luggage into two vans while we went off to lunch.
At lunch Colin gave a brief self-introduction and I think it was at this point that he revealed that he was visually impaired (yes, this 750-kilometer tour of a remote area of Indonesia was led by a 67-year-old guy who is legally blind). We all introduced ourselves and our "challenges" (mine being a nagging hip injury from karate as well as a general lack of recent cycling). Here's the cast of characters:
* Colin (our Fearless Leader). Australian by birth, first went to Indonesia with the Peace Corps in the fifties and then worked there and in Malaysia as a civil servant. He's married to an Indonesian woman, and spends half his time in Sydney and half in Jakarta when he's not biking around Sulawesi and other places. He's also a dedicated Iyengar yoga practitioner.
* Robyn and Paul (Australian couple from Adelaide). Very quiet and a bit reserved, a bit older and maybe not as serious about cycling as the others on the tour, which I found comforting. Paul does something with tides for the government's meteorology department. Robyn seems to work as an administrator, though I never really found out exactly what she did. She is a fanatical Scrabble player. They have two kids, one of whom lived in Indonesia for a while.
* Alan and Lisa (Australian couple from Brisbane). She's actually an American from Colorado who went to Australia in her 30s and stayed there to marry Alan. He's an ex-rugby-player stem-cell researcher who sings in a chorus (he was going to be singing someone-or-other's Requiem a few days after the trip, so he was always studying the score when we weren't riding). They have two kids. He has this giant white mustache that makes him look like Mark Twain, and he talks a lot like Darrell Bluhm (if you know Darrell Bluhm, which if you don't do Aikido you probably won't). She is tall and long-legged and still gorgeous and must have been absolutely stunning when she was younger. She likes to talk and laugh a lot and gets really close to you when she talks.
* Charlie and Other Paul (Australian couple from Melbourne). Well, he's actually Welsh and she's British, but they ended up in Australia after an extended intercontinental ramble sometime in the seventies (? I guess) and never went back. He's a retired orthodontist and I don't know what she does or did. They don't have any kids, but they collect antique bicycles, and are leaders of a group that rides pennyfarthing cycles (those old ones with a big front wheel and tiny rear wheel) around Australia, sometimes in period costume. She's a really active leader in the cycling community. Charlie and Other Paul are fascinating to talk to because they have been everywhere-and often on bicycles. He's like an encyclopedia and knows a lot about lots of different stuff. I wasn't sure about them at first because they seemed so independent that they were almost standoffish, but they ended up being my favorite people out of the group, honestly. They're just really cool.
* Steve (Australian from Sydney). Steve was some sort of high-powered CEO in the telecom industry for a long time, but then he retired early and became a consultant. He seems quite sporting and played rugby when he was younger. He traveled a lot when he was young, too, and did some absolutely crazy stuff like hitchhiking alone through Turkey when he was 17. He had a lot of great stories. He was also really good at befriending absolutely everyone we met, especially little kids. I think he's kind of a "model traveler," who will just have fun and try to make friends no matter what the circumstances. He had this superfancy little camera that worked underwater and took a lot of pictures (which I have ganked from him since I take mostly lousy pictures, except of cows). And being a techie/telecom guy, he had a phone that worked when no one else's would. After the earthquake he let me use it to call the BF, which was really kind and a big help. And he is sooo in love with his wife and talks about how awesome she is, which is lovely.
* Lesley (Australian from Melbourne (I think)). Lesley was some kind of high-powered government bureaucrat who has retired and now spends a lot of time traveling. She does these hardcore bushwalks in Australia that last for weeks, but she's also done that super-swank train trip in China where they cart you around in a five-star railway car between fancy hotels. She's been everywhere and is a great traveler, even though she has to wear a hearing aid. She's super kind and thinks of everyone before herself. She let me use her mosquito net because she knew I was terrified of getting malaria. Even though she got bitten herself! Which is actually nicer than anyone really *should* be.
* Sylvia (American from Texas). Well, she's not a Texan though-she's definitely East Coast. Sylvia reminds me a lot of my mother, or maybe it's just her being a super-fit, hyper-driven American woman. Some things about us Americans drive me crazy, like their conviction that Things They Use are better than anything else (and I am totally guilty of this too, which is why it drives me nuts). Anyway, Sylvia has a very kind heart. She runs marathons and rides her Bike Friday all the time, and has incredibly high-achieving children and a very successful husband. She's a dentist but only practices on volunteer trips to give free dental care to people in Puerto Rico and other places that need it. And also she has this thing where she won't eat anything that contains cholesterol, including red meat, eggs, and shrimp. But props to her, she owns it, and doesn't complain when she won't eat what's served. Sylvia and I were roommates for much of the trip and I probably drove her nuts with this and that. Anyway, she's all right.
So that's us. After lunch we went to the hotel, which was a really swank place and must have been built for a diplomat who was visiting or something-the vans were swept with a bomb detector before we could get into the parking lot. We were shown to our rooms (I was bunking down with Sylvia) so we could get cleaned up and settled in before putting our bikes together.
My bike, an aging Schwinn mountain bike that a friend had given me when she left Japan (and another friend had left it to her when he left), seemed in fine condition-I'd had a shop in Tokyo pack it up and send it to the airport a few days before the trip. It was interesting to see the Bikes Friday put together. Each one can fit in a large-size Samsonite suitcase. Sylvia put hers together herself in the room ("Nobody touches my baby!" she says) so I took a photo.
When all the bikes were together, we stored them in an empty room in the hotel and then trooped off to dinner.
So I had a few overriding concerns at this point. One was diseases. The Lonely Planet is quite severe about all the inoculations you're supposed to get before traveling to Southeast Asia--typhus, malaria, hepatitis, etc.--but somehow I had been unable to find a clinic in Japan to give me the shots I needed before I left. So throughout the trip I was super-paranoid about getting mosquito bites, and also about eating raw vegetables. I'd been to Malaysia and Singapore twice before and never gave inoculations a second thought, but all the other people on the trip were talking about all the different shots they'd gotten. Paul and Robyn had been to a doctor who'd given them a full course of inoculations, including even rabies shots! At the other end of the spectrum, Colin admitted that he never got any shots. Sylvia said she'd declined malaria meds because they made you vulnerable to the sun, and on a bike trip to the equator you were much more likely to get sun than to run into malarial mozzies. Other Paul and Charlie, who have been practically everywhere in the world by bike, said that they didn't want to take any chances, as Other Paul had once gotten dengue fever and it was horrible. (Other Paul later said, "I've been deathly ill in some of the most beautiful countries on Earth!" -maybe when he was talking about getting amoebic dysentery in Tibet. Those two had some amazing stories.)
The other thing was the sun. I am very fair and I burn like crazy. And since it was winter in Japan when I left, it was really hard to find sun block cream! I realized later I should have just gotten it on Amazon when I bought my cycling gear-but as it was, I only had a medium-sized tube of some kind of hippie organic paste plus some sensitive-skin stuff for my face and neck. I had brought a pair of gi pants along, thinking that they would be light and good to wear after cycling, but I ended up wearing them over my shorts while I was riding so my legs wouldn't be exposed-and also wearing long sleeves all the time, and a bandanna to cover the back of my neck--the whole time I was riding. Seeing the photos now, I looked like a total DORK, but at least I didn't get a bad sunburn. So that explains why I'm wearing white pants in all the photos.
Where on earth is Sulawesi? Formerly known as “Celebes,” one of the Spice Islands, Sulawesi lies east of Java and north of Bali, and is shaped like a lowercase “k” with the upper part of the long leg drooping forward. It’s one of Indonesia’s larger islands mostly known for its southern region, particularly an area called Toraja, where they grow the world’s best coffee (really) and kill scores of buffalo whenever someone dies, alongside other funereal weirdnesses (look ‘em up!).
I was looking to do a bike tour in Southeast Asia-Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia-before my planned (temporary?) departure from Japan in June 2011, but as the new year came my research hadn’t panned out. Everything was too expensive, or too dreadlocked-hippie-smelling, or timed wrong. A friend of my mother’s (hi, Matt!) had been sending me various links to look at, and one day he forwarded a mail from the organizer of a tour of Central Sulawesi. Someone had dropped out of the tour and he was looking to fill a spot, and was willing to give a discount. That would put the trip just within my budget, and the timing was good. I shoved money worries aside and booked the damn thing.
I had no bike equipment, no bike clothing, and only a few tools. I started out by ordering two pairs of the cheapest bike shorts on Amazon.jp, some Chinese-made items with immensely thick foam padding in the butt, like a giant sponge. They made me look like I’d just crapped my pants but they were really comfy. I also got a helmet, and later, some clipless shoes and pedals, and also some lights. And a multi-tool and a new patch kit. It was weird to return to “cyclist” mode after so many years as a dipshit sidewalk-rider. Spent the next month trying to find hills to ride my bike up in flat-as-a-pancake Tokyo. As the day approached, I ticked things off my list or wrote them off as impossible in approximately equal amounts. Somehow I managed to get my bike boxed and shipped to the airport a few days before my departure.
Saturday, March 5
Woke up at oh-god-o’clock and caught a taxi to Ueno, where I got on the veryvery first train of the day to Narita Airport. My flight was at 8:40 ayem, and the trip to Narita takes about an hour from Ueno. I found my bike at the place where you pick up delivered luggage, and managed to check in without incident or even extra charges from ANA for the bike. (Try doing that in the US!) The flight to Jakarta was surprisingly full. It took seven hours, so I managed to edit about 40 pages of the sword book I had taken with me and got through the first two of Virgil's Eclogues. (Note: On a whim a few days earlier, I had purchased a Loeb volume of Virgil with the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the first four books of the Aeneid. For some reason trying to read Latin again after a twenty-year break appealed to me. And the Georgics always remind me of my maternal grandmother, who died in 1994 but whom I miss even now. I wouldn't bother to mention the Virgil thing except that it features in an incident later on my trip. Stay tuned!)
Jakarta was crowded and confusing. I managed to find a left luggage office and paid an exorbitant amount to drop my bike overnight. After an unnerving incident with a seemingly friendly fellow who ended up wanting to get me in his private car (he's lucky I didn't punch him) I decided to take a bus into the city-safety in numbers, etc. Later learned that there is one trustworthy brand of taxi (Bluebird) and all the others will try to rip you off or who knows what. Anyway, the bus was very slow, and I had to take a cab from a train station to the hotel anyway, so it was nearly dark when I arrived. I was bummed, because I had hoped to walk around a little bit, but I was also pretty exhausted from the travel, so I just sent the Boyfriend and the Rents an email letting them know I had made it Thus Far and passed out for the night.
Sunday, March 6
[From the tour description]
Palu (capital of Central Sulawesi province)
Riders arrive
Airport transfers
Bike assembly
Swimming (hotel) and Yoga
Accommodation in international hotel on Palu Bay
Took a taxi back to Jakarta airport in the morning and embarked on the mission of finding the goddam office where I'd left my bike. Not easy, as the place was mobbed with people either leaving on a hajj or seeing off a family member who was going. Pretty crazy-a sea of women in burkas and guys in those little hats and kids riding around on luggage carts shrieking. I traveled the length of the airport twice before finally learning that the office was downstairs, in arrivals, rather than upstairs, in departures. Brilliant! Anyway, I finally Obtained my bike and checked in, and then I met Robyn and Paul, an Australian couple who were also on the trip (the bicycle tipped them off as to who I was). In the waiting lounge for the flight to Makassar we met another Australian couple, Alan and Lisa, who were on the trip, as well as Sylvia, the other American; Steve, an Australian guy from Sydney; and Lesley, an Australian woman from Melbourne. Everyone was a fair bit older than me but they all seemed nice. It was an uneventful flight to Makassar (with a not-bad curry for lunch!), where we all trooped off for about 20 minutes and then got back on the same plane to continue to Palu, our destination.
The runway at the airport in Palu was tarmac crazed with green where grass grew through the cracks. We deplaned on a big ladder the way you used to in the Old Days, and at the door of the airplane a guy was blowing on a big horn (a real horn, a twisty one from some kind of animal) for no clear reason. The baggage was loaded from the plane onto a pickup truck in a process that would give the FAA an apoplexy, driven to the door of the airport building, and then given a ceremonial trip on a five-meter-long rolling belt. I saw that only Steve and I had full-sized bikes; everyone else had these folding Bike Friday numbers. We were joined by Charlie (female) and the Other Paul, another Australian couple; they also had folding bikes, but a different brand. And we met our fearless leader, Colin, and his drivers and mechanic: Acok (sounds like "Atchock"), Ucok (you figure it out), and Atok. We left them to load the luggage into two vans while we went off to lunch.
At lunch Colin gave a brief self-introduction and I think it was at this point that he revealed that he was visually impaired (yes, this 750-kilometer tour of a remote area of Indonesia was led by a 67-year-old guy who is legally blind). We all introduced ourselves and our "challenges" (mine being a nagging hip injury from karate as well as a general lack of recent cycling). Here's the cast of characters:
* Colin (our Fearless Leader). Australian by birth, first went to Indonesia with the Peace Corps in the fifties and then worked there and in Malaysia as a civil servant. He's married to an Indonesian woman, and spends half his time in Sydney and half in Jakarta when he's not biking around Sulawesi and other places. He's also a dedicated Iyengar yoga practitioner.
* Robyn and Paul (Australian couple from Adelaide). Very quiet and a bit reserved, a bit older and maybe not as serious about cycling as the others on the tour, which I found comforting. Paul does something with tides for the government's meteorology department. Robyn seems to work as an administrator, though I never really found out exactly what she did. She is a fanatical Scrabble player. They have two kids, one of whom lived in Indonesia for a while.
* Alan and Lisa (Australian couple from Brisbane). She's actually an American from Colorado who went to Australia in her 30s and stayed there to marry Alan. He's an ex-rugby-player stem-cell researcher who sings in a chorus (he was going to be singing someone-or-other's Requiem a few days after the trip, so he was always studying the score when we weren't riding). They have two kids. He has this giant white mustache that makes him look like Mark Twain, and he talks a lot like Darrell Bluhm (if you know Darrell Bluhm, which if you don't do Aikido you probably won't). She is tall and long-legged and still gorgeous and must have been absolutely stunning when she was younger. She likes to talk and laugh a lot and gets really close to you when she talks.
* Charlie and Other Paul (Australian couple from Melbourne). Well, he's actually Welsh and she's British, but they ended up in Australia after an extended intercontinental ramble sometime in the seventies (? I guess) and never went back. He's a retired orthodontist and I don't know what she does or did. They don't have any kids, but they collect antique bicycles, and are leaders of a group that rides pennyfarthing cycles (those old ones with a big front wheel and tiny rear wheel) around Australia, sometimes in period costume. She's a really active leader in the cycling community. Charlie and Other Paul are fascinating to talk to because they have been everywhere-and often on bicycles. He's like an encyclopedia and knows a lot about lots of different stuff. I wasn't sure about them at first because they seemed so independent that they were almost standoffish, but they ended up being my favorite people out of the group, honestly. They're just really cool.
* Steve (Australian from Sydney). Steve was some sort of high-powered CEO in the telecom industry for a long time, but then he retired early and became a consultant. He seems quite sporting and played rugby when he was younger. He traveled a lot when he was young, too, and did some absolutely crazy stuff like hitchhiking alone through Turkey when he was 17. He had a lot of great stories. He was also really good at befriending absolutely everyone we met, especially little kids. I think he's kind of a "model traveler," who will just have fun and try to make friends no matter what the circumstances. He had this superfancy little camera that worked underwater and took a lot of pictures (which I have ganked from him since I take mostly lousy pictures, except of cows). And being a techie/telecom guy, he had a phone that worked when no one else's would. After the earthquake he let me use it to call the BF, which was really kind and a big help. And he is sooo in love with his wife and talks about how awesome she is, which is lovely.
* Lesley (Australian from Melbourne (I think)). Lesley was some kind of high-powered government bureaucrat who has retired and now spends a lot of time traveling. She does these hardcore bushwalks in Australia that last for weeks, but she's also done that super-swank train trip in China where they cart you around in a five-star railway car between fancy hotels. She's been everywhere and is a great traveler, even though she has to wear a hearing aid. She's super kind and thinks of everyone before herself. She let me use her mosquito net because she knew I was terrified of getting malaria. Even though she got bitten herself! Which is actually nicer than anyone really *should* be.
* Sylvia (American from Texas). Well, she's not a Texan though-she's definitely East Coast. Sylvia reminds me a lot of my mother, or maybe it's just her being a super-fit, hyper-driven American woman. Some things about us Americans drive me crazy, like their conviction that Things They Use are better than anything else (and I am totally guilty of this too, which is why it drives me nuts). Anyway, Sylvia has a very kind heart. She runs marathons and rides her Bike Friday all the time, and has incredibly high-achieving children and a very successful husband. She's a dentist but only practices on volunteer trips to give free dental care to people in Puerto Rico and other places that need it. And also she has this thing where she won't eat anything that contains cholesterol, including red meat, eggs, and shrimp. But props to her, she owns it, and doesn't complain when she won't eat what's served. Sylvia and I were roommates for much of the trip and I probably drove her nuts with this and that. Anyway, she's all right.
So that's us. After lunch we went to the hotel, which was a really swank place and must have been built for a diplomat who was visiting or something-the vans were swept with a bomb detector before we could get into the parking lot. We were shown to our rooms (I was bunking down with Sylvia) so we could get cleaned up and settled in before putting our bikes together.
My bike, an aging Schwinn mountain bike that a friend had given me when she left Japan (and another friend had left it to her when he left), seemed in fine condition-I'd had a shop in Tokyo pack it up and send it to the airport a few days before the trip. It was interesting to see the Bikes Friday put together. Each one can fit in a large-size Samsonite suitcase. Sylvia put hers together herself in the room ("Nobody touches my baby!" she says) so I took a photo.
When all the bikes were together, we stored them in an empty room in the hotel and then trooped off to dinner.
So I had a few overriding concerns at this point. One was diseases. The Lonely Planet is quite severe about all the inoculations you're supposed to get before traveling to Southeast Asia--typhus, malaria, hepatitis, etc.--but somehow I had been unable to find a clinic in Japan to give me the shots I needed before I left. So throughout the trip I was super-paranoid about getting mosquito bites, and also about eating raw vegetables. I'd been to Malaysia and Singapore twice before and never gave inoculations a second thought, but all the other people on the trip were talking about all the different shots they'd gotten. Paul and Robyn had been to a doctor who'd given them a full course of inoculations, including even rabies shots! At the other end of the spectrum, Colin admitted that he never got any shots. Sylvia said she'd declined malaria meds because they made you vulnerable to the sun, and on a bike trip to the equator you were much more likely to get sun than to run into malarial mozzies. Other Paul and Charlie, who have been practically everywhere in the world by bike, said that they didn't want to take any chances, as Other Paul had once gotten dengue fever and it was horrible. (Other Paul later said, "I've been deathly ill in some of the most beautiful countries on Earth!" -maybe when he was talking about getting amoebic dysentery in Tibet. Those two had some amazing stories.)
The other thing was the sun. I am very fair and I burn like crazy. And since it was winter in Japan when I left, it was really hard to find sun block cream! I realized later I should have just gotten it on Amazon when I bought my cycling gear-but as it was, I only had a medium-sized tube of some kind of hippie organic paste plus some sensitive-skin stuff for my face and neck. I had brought a pair of gi pants along, thinking that they would be light and good to wear after cycling, but I ended up wearing them over my shorts while I was riding so my legs wouldn't be exposed-and also wearing long sleeves all the time, and a bandanna to cover the back of my neck--the whole time I was riding. Seeing the photos now, I looked like a total DORK, but at least I didn't get a bad sunburn. So that explains why I'm wearing white pants in all the photos.