Sulawesi Trip--Day 4--to Poso
Wednesday, March 9
3rd cycle day 150 km
Parigi - Poso
We’ll leave Parigi before dawn so that we can arrive into Poso before dark
This coastal route through Balinese transmigrants’ villages is mostly undulating
A vehicle will be available at Tambarana 100 km from Parigi for those who feel they’ve done enough for the day
Accommodation in coastal guest house
We were supposed to leave before dawn, but the restaurant was not willing to serve breakfast at that hour, so we had to wait to eat until 6:30. Breakfast was nasi goreng (fried rice topped with a fried egg).
Also, I think it was at this meal that I discovered kopi susu, or "milk coffee." This is how you make coffee in Sulawesi:
Have ready a clean, clear glass cup or mug
Spoon a heaping tsp (or more!) of very finely ground coffee-like espresso grind-into the mug
Pour boiling water over
Stir and let stand for about 30 sec
Add a tablespoon or more of "susu"-sweetened condensed milk from a tube
Stir and watch the beautiful grounds settle to the bottom of the glass
Drink down to the grounds
Enjoy your caffeinated state!
The "undulating" ride turned out to be positively hilly.
And it was quite sunny in the morning, though thankfully there was some cloud cover in the afternoon. So it was kind of a tough ride. Sylvia overheated and had to ride in the van for about 30k. Robyn did too. The rest of us creaked along, some faster than others. It was really beautiful, though, with different architecture than we had seen thus far. The Indonesian government has a policy of "repopulation" in which people from Java or Bali, islands which are overpopulated, are transferred to less-populated areas like Sulawesi. So the people in one village will be Balinese in tradition, while those in another might be Javanese Muslims. Poso, the city where we were headed, had experienced violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in the 1990s, and essentially the clash was between "old" residents and new ones.
We stopped in a town to look at a Hindu temple, and found that the men of the town were having a town meeting. So we went and introduced ourselves and found out what they were talking about (it was mostly boring stuff about soliciting money for projects). The Sunday before had been the celebration following the Hindi/Balinese festival of Nyepi, a day of silence, so there were still remnants of the parade in the streets. Further down the road we came across a Balinese funeral. They had huge plastic or papier-mâché floats that I think were going to be burned.
It seemed to be the funeral of a fairly average person-not someone super-rich or important. The guys carrying the big temple float reminded me of the way Japanese people carry the shrine for a neighborhood matsuri-but of course this was a whole different thing.
Lunch was supposed to be around 60k, but when we stopped at a warung we learned that there were either 12 or 20k to go (distances, like time and hilliness in Indonesia, seem to have a rubber quality). I can't remember how it all went down, but I think after 12 k we stopped again and they said it would be another 8k, but the place turned out to be just 100 meters down the road. Anyway, it was a welcome stop. And I had my first encounter with a roadside toilet.
I don't want to go into detail about toilets in Indonesia. At best you have a sit-down thing with a sprayer for your butt. (You never flush paper.) Average looks like this:
At worst...well, the worst was in a restaurant in Tentena, a boarded-off corner where there was a widened gap in the floorboards and a rubber bucket of water with a scoop, and you just did your thing directly into the lake below. UGH. This whole trip really drove home for me the need for humankind to STOP EXCRETING INTO WATER. Really, rising populations and the lack of infrastructure in so many parts of the world means that beautiful lakes and rivers, as well as coastal areas, are rapidly becoming open sewers. And water shortages are a definite feature in our future. Why can't we learn to build and use composting toilets? Sawdust toilets work, they don't smell, don't spread disease, and can supply valuable fertilizer if composting is carried out properly. What is this obsession with shitting into water? I really don't get it.
OK, so back to the bike tour…the lunch restaurant had several interesting features, like a sponge over the spout of the ketcap manis (soy sauce) container to keep flies out.
Lunches and dinners usually started with a vegetable soup, I think this was at Colin's urging, since cyclists need to consume lots of fluid and previous tour participants had complained about the lack of vegetables. Then rice would be brought out, usually in plastic or metal colanders like you use for washing vegetables. Then meat and any side dishes would come out. For us, the meat was often chicken ("ayam" in Bahasa Indonesia). There are chickens everywhere in Sulawesi, some quite beautiful, and every morning is punctuated with roosters crowing.
The meat is cut into chunks, bone and all, is generally fried, or stewed in sauce-most cooking is done over a wood fire, so baking would be difficult. It's usually cooked so much that you can eat the cartilage and small bones (I did, though most other people were grossed out by this for some reason). Fresh sambal (hot chilies ground together with garlic, onions, salt, sometimes tomatoes and other stuff)
is a regular feature, along with bottled sambal that resembles spicy ketchup. But remember that ketcap is brown and soy-flavored and very different to our ketchup (I think the people who brought the word to the New World mixed the sauces up and we should really be calling ketchup "sambal"!). Fish (ikan) was also frequently featured, usually grilled. Beef or goat meat is eaten rarely on Sulawesi, even though there are cows and goats all over the place. It's usually reserved for special occasions.
After lunch it was a pretty easy 60k to Poso. There were a few more "undulations" but there were also plenty of rest stops for water, cookies, and bananas. 'Pa (short for “bapak,” or mister) Acok would lumber out of the van and bring cups of hot tea or coffee, and then pass around a metal tin of these great chocolate wafer cookies. In fact, I think the key to bike touring is to take frequent breaks like this, and also to stop and wait for the people behind you to catch up so you can look at the plants and stuff around you. In my previous touring experiences, I know that I didn't take enough breaks, and it made the riding much less pleasant; I also missed out on a lot of stuff.
Finally we pulled up in front of our beachfront hotel in Poso. Here we were going to leave the bike boxes and other heavy luggage for a while; the plan was to ride up (and up and up) to Tentena the next day, then take a few days to cycle around the lake. We would ride back to Poso on Day 10. The hotel was pretty nice, but I don't think they'd ever had 12+ people stay there at once, and so the air conditioners kept conking out and there wasn't hot water (didn't really miss it much, actually). The big excitement was that there was an enormous spider in our bathroom! Sylvia showered first and actually never noticed it because it was behind the door. It was truly, no lie, the size of my hand, and kind of fuzzy and grayish brown. It only had six legs, too, but it really was a spider and you could tell it wasn't a six-legged thing because the legs were asymmetrical. Anyway I was taking a pee and it was on the wall opposite to me, so I couldn't help but notice. I fucked up the macro setting on the camera so this came out all fuzzy, but I swear the thing was the size of my hand! Seriously!
Now, I like spiders and other insects except for bloodsuckers and roaches. And I knew that if we told the hotel they would bring in either a large shoe or the bug spray and there would be a messy and undignified death for this lovely arachnid (did I mention it also had several eyes? It was really cool!). But I wasn't sure what Sylvia's stance on spiders was. On the one hand, she was a marathon runner, mother of four, and all around a pretty tough cookie. On the other hand, she did have some...issues...that made me think she might be a shrieker. As it turned out, though, she was somewhere in between. She said she didn't mind spiders, but when I showed our spider to her she said, quite firmly, "Uh-uh. I'm not going in the bathroom if that's in there!" So I had to undertake Removal Proceedings.
I ended up emptying my travel documents out of the clear plastic folder they were in. I then took the water scoop from the mandi (the big tub that holds water for washing/toilet flushing in such places) and placed it over the spider. It was just big enough to cover the him/her. Then I slid the folder between the mouth of the scoop and the wall, trapping the spider in the scoop. Then I took the whole thing outside. The hotel people saw me and didn't bat an eye, assuming (rightly, I spose) that I was just up to some nutty Westerner hijinks that people like me do all the time. I found a quiet-looking garden and dumped the spider on a rock, and that was that. When I brought Lisa out to see it, it had disappeared.
Dinner that night was at a fish restaurant that had an outdoor grill. We had a fish that I think the Japanese call hamachi (yellowtail?).
One thing I noticed about the fish in general in Indonesia is that it just doesn't taste as good as fish in Japan. Maybe it's because of the warm water? Or they let it sit too long before cooking it? Whatever it is, I really was homesick for a nice grilled mackerel; still, this place was all right, and the sambal was very tasty.
We returned to the hotel to find the air conditioner not working. Sylvia (in her shortie pajamas! In a Muslim hotel!) went out into the lobby to argue with the hotel manager, and it transpired that unless everyone in the place turned their A/C to 26 degrees, the generator would overload and all the power would go out. Needless to say, it was a warm night. But there were no spiders.
3rd cycle day 150 km
Parigi - Poso
We’ll leave Parigi before dawn so that we can arrive into Poso before dark
This coastal route through Balinese transmigrants’ villages is mostly undulating
A vehicle will be available at Tambarana 100 km from Parigi for those who feel they’ve done enough for the day
Accommodation in coastal guest house
We were supposed to leave before dawn, but the restaurant was not willing to serve breakfast at that hour, so we had to wait to eat until 6:30. Breakfast was nasi goreng (fried rice topped with a fried egg).
Also, I think it was at this meal that I discovered kopi susu, or "milk coffee." This is how you make coffee in Sulawesi:
Have ready a clean, clear glass cup or mug
Spoon a heaping tsp (or more!) of very finely ground coffee-like espresso grind-into the mug
Pour boiling water over
Stir and let stand for about 30 sec
Add a tablespoon or more of "susu"-sweetened condensed milk from a tube
Stir and watch the beautiful grounds settle to the bottom of the glass
Drink down to the grounds
Enjoy your caffeinated state!
The "undulating" ride turned out to be positively hilly.
And it was quite sunny in the morning, though thankfully there was some cloud cover in the afternoon. So it was kind of a tough ride. Sylvia overheated and had to ride in the van for about 30k. Robyn did too. The rest of us creaked along, some faster than others. It was really beautiful, though, with different architecture than we had seen thus far. The Indonesian government has a policy of "repopulation" in which people from Java or Bali, islands which are overpopulated, are transferred to less-populated areas like Sulawesi. So the people in one village will be Balinese in tradition, while those in another might be Javanese Muslims. Poso, the city where we were headed, had experienced violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in the 1990s, and essentially the clash was between "old" residents and new ones.
We stopped in a town to look at a Hindu temple, and found that the men of the town were having a town meeting. So we went and introduced ourselves and found out what they were talking about (it was mostly boring stuff about soliciting money for projects). The Sunday before had been the celebration following the Hindi/Balinese festival of Nyepi, a day of silence, so there were still remnants of the parade in the streets. Further down the road we came across a Balinese funeral. They had huge plastic or papier-mâché floats that I think were going to be burned.
It seemed to be the funeral of a fairly average person-not someone super-rich or important. The guys carrying the big temple float reminded me of the way Japanese people carry the shrine for a neighborhood matsuri-but of course this was a whole different thing.
Lunch was supposed to be around 60k, but when we stopped at a warung we learned that there were either 12 or 20k to go (distances, like time and hilliness in Indonesia, seem to have a rubber quality). I can't remember how it all went down, but I think after 12 k we stopped again and they said it would be another 8k, but the place turned out to be just 100 meters down the road. Anyway, it was a welcome stop. And I had my first encounter with a roadside toilet.
I don't want to go into detail about toilets in Indonesia. At best you have a sit-down thing with a sprayer for your butt. (You never flush paper.) Average looks like this:
At worst...well, the worst was in a restaurant in Tentena, a boarded-off corner where there was a widened gap in the floorboards and a rubber bucket of water with a scoop, and you just did your thing directly into the lake below. UGH. This whole trip really drove home for me the need for humankind to STOP EXCRETING INTO WATER. Really, rising populations and the lack of infrastructure in so many parts of the world means that beautiful lakes and rivers, as well as coastal areas, are rapidly becoming open sewers. And water shortages are a definite feature in our future. Why can't we learn to build and use composting toilets? Sawdust toilets work, they don't smell, don't spread disease, and can supply valuable fertilizer if composting is carried out properly. What is this obsession with shitting into water? I really don't get it.
OK, so back to the bike tour…the lunch restaurant had several interesting features, like a sponge over the spout of the ketcap manis (soy sauce) container to keep flies out.
Lunches and dinners usually started with a vegetable soup, I think this was at Colin's urging, since cyclists need to consume lots of fluid and previous tour participants had complained about the lack of vegetables. Then rice would be brought out, usually in plastic or metal colanders like you use for washing vegetables. Then meat and any side dishes would come out. For us, the meat was often chicken ("ayam" in Bahasa Indonesia). There are chickens everywhere in Sulawesi, some quite beautiful, and every morning is punctuated with roosters crowing.
The meat is cut into chunks, bone and all, is generally fried, or stewed in sauce-most cooking is done over a wood fire, so baking would be difficult. It's usually cooked so much that you can eat the cartilage and small bones (I did, though most other people were grossed out by this for some reason). Fresh sambal (hot chilies ground together with garlic, onions, salt, sometimes tomatoes and other stuff)
is a regular feature, along with bottled sambal that resembles spicy ketchup. But remember that ketcap is brown and soy-flavored and very different to our ketchup (I think the people who brought the word to the New World mixed the sauces up and we should really be calling ketchup "sambal"!). Fish (ikan) was also frequently featured, usually grilled. Beef or goat meat is eaten rarely on Sulawesi, even though there are cows and goats all over the place. It's usually reserved for special occasions.
After lunch it was a pretty easy 60k to Poso. There were a few more "undulations" but there were also plenty of rest stops for water, cookies, and bananas. 'Pa (short for “bapak,” or mister) Acok would lumber out of the van and bring cups of hot tea or coffee, and then pass around a metal tin of these great chocolate wafer cookies. In fact, I think the key to bike touring is to take frequent breaks like this, and also to stop and wait for the people behind you to catch up so you can look at the plants and stuff around you. In my previous touring experiences, I know that I didn't take enough breaks, and it made the riding much less pleasant; I also missed out on a lot of stuff.
Finally we pulled up in front of our beachfront hotel in Poso. Here we were going to leave the bike boxes and other heavy luggage for a while; the plan was to ride up (and up and up) to Tentena the next day, then take a few days to cycle around the lake. We would ride back to Poso on Day 10. The hotel was pretty nice, but I don't think they'd ever had 12+ people stay there at once, and so the air conditioners kept conking out and there wasn't hot water (didn't really miss it much, actually). The big excitement was that there was an enormous spider in our bathroom! Sylvia showered first and actually never noticed it because it was behind the door. It was truly, no lie, the size of my hand, and kind of fuzzy and grayish brown. It only had six legs, too, but it really was a spider and you could tell it wasn't a six-legged thing because the legs were asymmetrical. Anyway I was taking a pee and it was on the wall opposite to me, so I couldn't help but notice. I fucked up the macro setting on the camera so this came out all fuzzy, but I swear the thing was the size of my hand! Seriously!
Now, I like spiders and other insects except for bloodsuckers and roaches. And I knew that if we told the hotel they would bring in either a large shoe or the bug spray and there would be a messy and undignified death for this lovely arachnid (did I mention it also had several eyes? It was really cool!). But I wasn't sure what Sylvia's stance on spiders was. On the one hand, she was a marathon runner, mother of four, and all around a pretty tough cookie. On the other hand, she did have some...issues...that made me think she might be a shrieker. As it turned out, though, she was somewhere in between. She said she didn't mind spiders, but when I showed our spider to her she said, quite firmly, "Uh-uh. I'm not going in the bathroom if that's in there!" So I had to undertake Removal Proceedings.
I ended up emptying my travel documents out of the clear plastic folder they were in. I then took the water scoop from the mandi (the big tub that holds water for washing/toilet flushing in such places) and placed it over the spider. It was just big enough to cover the him/her. Then I slid the folder between the mouth of the scoop and the wall, trapping the spider in the scoop. Then I took the whole thing outside. The hotel people saw me and didn't bat an eye, assuming (rightly, I spose) that I was just up to some nutty Westerner hijinks that people like me do all the time. I found a quiet-looking garden and dumped the spider on a rock, and that was that. When I brought Lisa out to see it, it had disappeared.
Dinner that night was at a fish restaurant that had an outdoor grill. We had a fish that I think the Japanese call hamachi (yellowtail?).
One thing I noticed about the fish in general in Indonesia is that it just doesn't taste as good as fish in Japan. Maybe it's because of the warm water? Or they let it sit too long before cooking it? Whatever it is, I really was homesick for a nice grilled mackerel; still, this place was all right, and the sambal was very tasty.
We returned to the hotel to find the air conditioner not working. Sylvia (in her shortie pajamas! In a Muslim hotel!) went out into the lobby to argue with the hotel manager, and it transpired that unless everyone in the place turned their A/C to 26 degrees, the generator would overload and all the power would go out. Needless to say, it was a warm night. But there were no spiders.