Breaking the silence! Adventures in Takengon, Part 1

My friends, I apologize. I have broken my promise of regular updates pretty spectacularly. The last update was one of necessity. This one will return to the original purpose of the blog. So, my adventure in Takengon!

It started on Friday, around lunch time. I got on the motorbike and met my friends Helen, Yvonne and Piva across from Hotel 61 in town (a strange, modern establishment that is built on top of, and around, an A&W Root Beer restaurant ("Real American Food!" It's like a burger and fried food joint, specializing in enormous pints of A&W root beer, sold in frozen glasses with a dollop of vanilla soft-serve ice cream in the middle. Pretty great). However, this was not our actual objective. We rode out down the road and turned down a small lane, headed for one of the city's most forbidden and succulent sins: THE PORK RESTAURANT! It's this small joint, a little secluded restaurant room behind a house-compound wall, sheltering a typical food-stall-cart in the back...loaded with Pork. I think it's one of maybe two such joints in this whole part of Aceh, though I could be wrong. I have no idea how they even get the pork to the restaurant, but I'm sure they have their ways.

Anyway, we were sitting over our lunch of sin, when Ricardo (Helen and Piva's boss, he met us there) brought up the fact that a bunch of them were leaving, that night, for a city in the mountains called Takengon. They were headed out for the three day weekend (holiday on monday) to spend a few days mountain biking around the area. That's all they really told me at the time, aside from "hey! Why don't you come with us?" I was thinking that this would be a relaxing weekend hanging out around Banda Aceh, or maybe somehow grabbing the night bus down to Medan with some friends from here on a quest to find a movie theater playing Harry Potter (there is not a single movie theater in the province of Aceh. Aceh is about the size of Alabama). I was having my fill of adventure just making my way here and, kind of uncharacteristically, wasn't really up for a crazy romp. So, this new idea, of hauling my out-of-shape tukus up some mountains nine hours away by car, was only partly appealing, especially last-minute. However, as we sat over some of those root beer floats a little while later, and Ricardo kept saying "spontaneous is wonderful, man! Come on! Spontaneous! You can borrow bike. I lend you water bottle, gloves, helmet, come on! We have space in car!" I was a little more tempted. I've been trying to find a way to get myself to start getting back in shape (my post-thesis, post-college physique is a bit lacking), and this, coupled with a love of biking, DID sound good...My girlfriend actually gave me the final push, helping me get psyched to go and do this thing. I dropped by a bike store, picked up the requisite bike shorts, bottle and helmet, threw stuff into my backpack, dropped a fast line to the family and hit the road.

We met at a coffee shop on the outskirts of town. Three SUVs and an enormous dumptruck-type-thing. The truck was full of bikes. We grabbed a little food, piled into the cars and set out into the night.

The open road in this country is somewhat of a terrifying proposition. Imagine your typical two-lane country road. Chop off about a meter of roadway on either side, so that cars most of the time have most of a full lane. Throw in some twisting turns and landslides. Take out random chunks of pavement. Add an assortment of wheeled vehicles, and let people graze their herd of cattle on the road itself. Now make it night time, and fill this road with a mix of country folk on motorbikes who live with no driving rules or customs, and a passle of hyped-up, suicidal van drivers and turbo buses who are trying to do the 12 hour drive to Medan in eight. This is the main highway through eastern Aceh, and we were basically racing on it. We hit the road at 9 PM and drove through the night, dodging goats, people and fate, and right around 4:30 AM we rolled into Takengon under the stars, stepping out of a car-climate from the tropical floodplains below into the cool, crisp mountain air of this lakeside city. We stumbled into our hotel up on a hill, a building that reminded me of the meeting hall at my old summer camp, and when the girls went off to their bedrooms, us guys piled onto a handful of mattresses that were made up on the floor of a conference room. We were so tired it didn't matter, and as soon as we figured out how we'd all fit, I happily passed out.

To be continued...