Sumatra and New Zealand have some similarities. Or at least the NZ South Island and Sumatra have things in common. Both islands have a mountain range running through them lengthwise, creating a west and an east coast. As in New Zealand, so is here the west coast wetter but probably prettier. This formed part of our reasoning while deciding on our route. Also, the Trans-Sumatra-Highway goes up on the east of the mountain range which might mean more kilometres per day but it is also the route that all the trucks will take. To spare us the traffic and to avoid the possibility of highway robbers (there were warnings of that), we plan to go up the west coast before heading right into the mountains. With this plan, we have the possibility of a whole lot of rain during our time on Sumatra. In the last couple of days, we recognized a pattern: It is never raining in the mornings, starts to cloud up around lunch and either starts raining then or in the afternoon. The path was clear…we had to be on the road as early as possible.
Luckily, we were awake at spot on 6am as only a minute after I opened my eyes music started playing in a horrendous volume. It was all popular American music (I guess…there was some Taylor Swift there) and it sounded very energetic. Flo said it sounded like a Zumba class. He wasn’t too far off.
When we stepped outside to have a look a crowd of people were gathered for some early morning sport class. Four instructors were up on a stage and the crowd was following the moves as best as they could. But they were not the only ones doing something for their fitness level. The whole street was full of people going for a run. And all of it on a Sunday morning. Time for breakfast for us.
Because we were dreading the tropical rain we declined a heart-warming offer by Yudis to visit his wife and family. It was not easy, but too much road still lies ahead of us and very few days of our visa remain. 🙁
On the road, we were being chased by the rain. Every time we stopped for a bit, it started drizzling and the sky in our backs was full of low-hanging, dark grey clouds. So we pushed on. At a roadside stall, we bought bananas and some sort of chips in case of emergency hunger and travelled on.
Lunch was not worth mentioning but for our afternoon break, we stopped at a beach with a view of the coastline. This spot was pretty awesome.
Found a roadside hotel for the night with our cheapest room yet (90000 rupiah) and did some shopping to refill our drained toiletry. I even found Tim Tam wafer stick in the rather large town shop which are delicious, let me tell you.
The only thing that annoyed the hell out of Flo where a bunch of birds who lived in the building across the street. Their tweeting was electrically amplified (we know because it was suddenly a whole lot more quiet when there was a power cut) for an unknown reason. It even followed us back into our room.