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Published: January 11th 2010
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Day 47: Batu Pahat to Kulai
Today was Merdeka, Malaysian Independence Day. We awoke and Grandma Doris was in the kitchen, strong coffee brewing, reading the paper, wearing thick reading glasses. It was such a warm and comforting feeling, like being with my own Grandma in New York. We went for Indian food, as we had earlier mentioned we loved it, and they were eager to take us to a great place they knew. Doris kept stuffing us and forcing us to eat more roti and mutton gravy, like a good Grandma would. She warned us to watch out for the foreign workers sitting nearby, as they would steal our stuff. As we ate breakfast, the sun was just rising and it was still cool. It was a lovely, lovely scene, being so hospitably made to feel wanted and welcome by these people who were yesterday strangers and today good friends. One of the most wonderful effects of travel: new friends and fast friends, from all different walks of life.
Doris and Daniel insisted on driving with our bags to Air Hitam, a town 18 miles away, where we could rendezvous for morning drinks. They said they didn’t have
Doris, Daniel and J at breakfast
I was there too but someone had to take the photo. anything to do that day and wanted to stop at a shop on the way out there anyway. J, felt like a whimp without his bags so he still ported them, but I was curious to see if I could keep up with J if I didn’t have bags and he did. I discovered I was able to bike about 2 mph faster without bags, but would you believe it, J was still way ahead of me. D and D drove by, waved, stopped, waved from a plaza, drove on, stopped, and waved from another plaza. They were the nicest people! We rode as fast as we could, just for fun, and did about 20 miles in 1 hour and 20 minutes, a great speed for us.
We stopped at the chosen meeting spot, a small restaurant by the roadside and drank ice tea while waiting for D and D. They arrived ten minutes later, having stopped, again, enroute to have coffee and wait for us to pass. But they must have somehow missed us so they had been waiting for us to pass for awhile. We drank tea together and then they insisted on paying plus buying us
water for our journey.
We were sad to say good bye to them, the kindest people we had ever encountered. It was like being with my grandma, being taken care of and loved, plus they were informative and fun too. We hugged goodbye.
We set off riding and after about two hours, J’s front tire went flat. He fixed the flat, inserting a fresh tube in to the tire and pumping it up. It started to rain, but we had been hot, so we didn’t have our raincoats on, as we were enjoying the refreshment. Five minutes later, J’s tire went flat again. The same one. We thought the pump must be broken and unable to pump enough air in to the new tube. So we decided one of us would have to bike back with the tube and the tire, on my functioning bike, to find a car shop where they could pump up the tube.
I couldn’t hold the tire and bike at the same time, and J looked cold, as it’d been pouring rain the last twenty minutes we’d been trying to inflate the tire. Many cars were passing, as we were on the
side of a busy road, but nobody stopped to help, probably because it was pouring rain. So J biked back, while I stayed with our bags and J’s bike by the roadside.
The pouring rain continued, and a thrashing thunder and lightening storm commenced. The thunder was heart-stoppingly loud. I’d put my raincoat on only when I got cold so it was protecting me now, but underneath I was already soaking wet. Quickly I became very, very cold, standing there. I tried to take cover under the one small tree nearby, but each time I did, I was attacked by hundreds of tiny red ants. So I ate what food we had, a banana, some crackers and a nougat, as we’d been just about to stop for lunch but hadn’t agreed on a place to stop. I peed behind a sewer. Then I did pushups to try to keep warm. Then I paced.
Then I was so cold that I squatted in to a tiny ball, pulling my arms and legs in to my raincoat and hugging my knees tightly, ducking my chin and face in to my lap. The rain continued pouring down on me, and I
realized it was probably the first time I’d sat outside, without cover, while a thunderstorm raged atop of me. It was intense. I was miserable.
J returned for another tube as he said the one he’d brought the first time had a leak and he didn’t have the patches. He said he’d found a shop a half mile back. I cuddled back in to that tiny ball for what felt like forever, watching the insect life in the grass. It seemed like J had been gone a long, long time and I began to get worried. It finally stopped raining and I took off my soaked shirt and jacket and put on a dry sweatshirt. I was so happy to be dry. But then J still wasn’t back and I got more worried. And then it began to rain again. I tried to go under the tree, again, and again the ants attacked me. So I began pacing again. Finally, J returned.
It had felt like forever because it had been 2 hours and 15 minutes. That’s a long time to be out in the rain.
I had used all my strength to keep warm and to keep
my spirits up, and now I was beyond exhausted, yet so happy to be able to depart. I think I was in shock from the experience. I wanted to be mad at J but I was just so relieved to be OK and to be biking again and getting warm and not isolated and stuck anymore. What had happened was, the outer tire had gotten stuck with a copper wire, and each time J inserted a new tube in to that tire, the tube was pierced by the copper. But the wire was nearly invisible to the naked eye, so he had not spotted it until three failed attempts had passed, each time having biked almost back to me.
It was a tough experience and J was exhausted from it too. We were also very hungry and had to bike over an hour before we found a restaurant, at which point we were ravenous wolves. We ate three roti breads, noodles and tea. The bathroom was similar to one I’d seen once in Cambodia. It was just a small room off the kitchen, containing nothing but a hole in the corner of the floor. So strange. After eating, we had to bike 15 more miles to the first hotel. We were tricked twice in to thinking we had made it to a dry place to pass out.
Once, a giant HOTEL sign for some reason made us believe there would be a hotel. There was not. The second time, J went up in to a hotel, but the proprieter was mentally disturbed and couldn’t answer J’s request for a room, he just rocked and mumbled. Finally, just after that experience which really frightened J, we came upon a series of strip malls with a dozen hotels. Heaven!! It was 7:30 by this point and it was dark.
Thrilled, we showered, got right in to bed, watched a Malay I Love Lucy-replica sitcom and fell fast asleep by 8:30. What a day!
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Alissa
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I love those heart shaped leaves!