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Published: January 5th 2010
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Day 34: Lumut to Sabak Bernam
We woke up early, but it was dark and rainy, and I was tired from staying up to watch the storm, so we went back to sleep. At 10:30, we really got up, packed our stuff and rode our bikes around the corner to a busy breakfast place, named after Nasi Goreng, the national dish.
J weighs forty pounds more than me, but wears the same size bike shorts as me (medium). So he carries three of our bags down flights of stairs and I carry one. That sounds right, right?
We ate fried chicken, rice, vegetables and roti and drank strong, sweet coffee with condensed milk. The place was bustling with people, locals and tourists, and J’s favorite sport, table tennis, was playing on the Olympics on TV. Teenagers came in with big shopping bags from the many covered clothing stands set up on the wet street. The place was cozy and we were reluctant to head off in to the rain, but we figured we’d bike really, really fast and get to our destination in four hours. Boy, were we wrong.
All day we biked along one back road,
sometimes busy with cars and trucks and sometimes with only a very small shoulder. It was a tough ride, because it poured for four hours. The rain was fun for awhile, because it kept us cool, but after about twenty miles, soaked through, we started to wear out. But oh well, we made ourselves keep biking, down that long, straight boring road, with nothing much to see. Mostly palm tree farms, which were beginning to lose their intrigue. A few friendly children. Most people were inside on this wet day. Our under-parts were surprisingly, extremely sore from our long ride the previous day.
We rode over two terrifying bridges with no shoulder and lots of big trucks whoosing by, too close to our bikes for comfort. My odometer hit 999.99 miles and I pulled off the road to take a picture. Unfortunately, the shoulder was steep gravel, and I wiped out, my first wipe-out of the whole trip! In almost 1000 miles! Luckily, I only scraped my hand. We pulled back on to the road for a moment, then stopped again to take photos of the odometer hitting 1000 miles. We marveled at the fact that we’d just ridden
1000 miles. On a lark! Just for a fun, to see what it’d be like! How cool! And we hadn’t seen anyone else doing what we were doing! The locals hadn’t either, and they must either have thought we were nuts or really amazing. From the smiles and waves we generally received, they were pleased to see us either way. When we biked through the rain, however, they definitely thought we were nuts. More impressive to us was that we’d done the ride without any training, without a sponsor, by just keeping our costs low. We only bought food and shelter. Sometimes beer. We felt like we'd proved that young people, without debt, can really do anything they want, anything they can dream of.
We stopped at an amazing outdoor food market, just setting up, and ate some souvlaki from a spit piled thickly with the most juicy chicken I’ve ever seen shoved on one spit at a time. The souvlaki was served on a hot dog bun with coleslaw, mayo and chili ketchup. Next in our mouths was a deep fried bun with sweet red bean filling, then a moon cake, a flat white cake with a soft
brown interior. Following that, we bought a kilo of rhambutan, that sweet lychee-like fruit, for 2 ringit, a banana bread and some sticky rice Thai desserts. The market was bustling with people and tents and boasted a stunning variety of foods. People seemed really surprised to see us, our bikes especially. Vendors were driving big trucks through the market, and the trucks would get stuck and the tents would have to be lifted up to let them by. Vendors were selling fruit, corn, meat on a stick, scrunchies, toys, bed spreads, and burgers. All kinds of things!
This stop revitalized us, and we continued on, down another long straight road, to reach Sabak Bernam, J’s chosen destination for the day, just as I was beginning to think it might not exist. Sabak was a small town where we were surprised to encounter prejudice against non-Muslims. The first hotel we looked at was all booked, but then they remembered one suite, for 175. We translated that as, Muslims only, unless you want to pay us a lot of money. We declined, and biked on, spotting a hotel nearby that actually said, on the sign, “Muslims Only.” That sign really surprised
us, although it shouldn’t have, as we had previously seen three-story, hundred-room hotels and been told we couldn’t stay there because they only accepted “family”.
Dog-tired, we finally found a basic but clean hotel above a Chinese restaurant for 30 ringit. It had only a cold bucket shower but the clerk, the same woman who ran the restaurant, brought us a tea kettle to heat water, plus, top sheets, and ice tea. The clerk was about twenty-five and had gone to school in England. She boasted the most bizarre intonation on her English and was kind though definitely not friendly. We managed to take somewhat warm bucket showers by adding three hot kettles of water to the cold tap water in the big bucket. All of the rooms at this hotel were off a big central lobby, really just a big room, used basically as a storage facility for all the family’s stuff. The blue walls were filthy and the plastic covers on the headboards of our two twin beds were ripped. But there was not a speck of dirt anywhere. Which brought up the question for us: who decides which places are OK to rent out? And what
needs to be repaired? And what is presentable? But still, the room was better than Taiping, maybe tied with Lumut. It had a flush toilet, a fan and A/C as a bonus.
We ate dinner at an Indian restaurant downstairs, attached to the building we were in by a small strip mall. There was a pre-prepared buffet, and we chose three mains each to put atop our rice for 4 ringit. After choosing my mains, different than the ones J chose, I was informed by the proprieter that I had chosen brown horse curry and red mini-hardboiled egg curry. Oh god! Horse!! I wanted to put it back but it was too late! So I ate it.
It was a very dark meat, but soft, not tough at all, pretty tasty, actually. The egg curry was worse really, I could only handle it for one bite and then it became disgusting. It was the same story with J’s red squid curry. This place sure was creative!! The food was also all extremely, extremely hot; the first time Indian food had been so spicy in Malaysia. We returned to our room and read the large selection of Time magazines
from 2007 that had been graciously left by our hosts, but in the back of my mind I couldn't stop thinking about the horsey I had just consumed. Was this bad?!
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