First Challenge is Breakfast

Breakfast attempt #1: No food left, just kopi (Malaysian coffee).

Breakfast attempt #2: A roti joint, fresh out of roti!

Breakfast attempt #3: We are welcomed to the cafe and sit down to order. No nasi lemak left (rice & egg, one of our usual breakfasts), they don’t make roti here, but they do have rice and chicken curry or meat curry. That’s it. We say we don’t eat chicken or meat, vegetarians. We get some kopi and chat a bit with the friendly locals, including a teacher. (Kopi is a mix of coffee and herbs and doesn’t taste great if you’re expecting real coffee, but it’s good once you get used to it. I order kopi, which means it comes with condensed milk and sugar. Dave gets kopi-o, which is just with sugar.) After a few minutes, the teacher, who speaks English pretty well, asks if we want rice and an egg, a hard-boiled egg. We say yes! We sit and drink our coffee a few more minutes, and out comes a dish with three hard-boiled eggs. Only when I go to crack the shell it gives easily and egg spills out. It is BARELY COOKED. In fact, only the edges are barely cooked, the middle is raw. Ugh.

We look at each other and start scraping out the cooked part of the egg with the wee spoons they’ve given us. Oh my. But soon they deliver plates with some rice. We mix the egg with the rice and force it down, trying to smile a little because we’re being watched. As soon as we manage to finish we get out of there. We want to quickly put that behind us and move on quickly.

Breakfast attempt #4: Success! We find a roadside cafe with a cheerful woman who lets us point to food and order exactly what we want. We order plain rice (nasi), FRIED eggs (telur GORENG), chili sauces (sambal and also plain chili), and cucumber. We finally felt full.

Rice, fried egg, chili sauce = nasi lemak. This one served up on a banana leaf.

The Hard Hilly Ride

Today we start climbing. And we climb, and climb. At first it’s rolling hills that we tackle, but then we just keep going up.

It was a hot day, and with breakfast #3 to get it started, well, I had problems. My stomach at first was just a little queasy, then in the afternoon it was downright nauseous. The grade was so steep that I was pushing at a pretty high intensity just to keep moving, and with the heat and everything, I just felt like puking. (Hey Kat, do you remember how we’d almost puke in the weight room sometimes while doing squats? Now THAT was fun, right?)

We had not tackled real climbing yet on this trip, so that was also a factor. And it was so hot and humid that I sometimes had to take off my sunglasses because they were too fogged up and the sweat was just dripping off of me. Seriously, I was not having fun. But you have to be prepared for the not-fun times if you want to experience the great fun of bike touring. So we pedal on. But, yes, I was grumpy.

All we needed to be able to stop for the day was water, enough to filter for drinking. We finally found it – a stream rushing down the side of the mountain. There was a sort of rest stop there, with bathrooms and a couple of picnic tables. I sat in the shade with my feet in the cool water while Dave scouted out a place to camp. He found a great spot just back a half kilometer or so, up a logging road to a cleared area, up that stream a ways. We had the privacy to bathe in the stream, then we washed out our clothes and filtered water.

Wild Animal!

We then went for a sunset walk up another branch of the logging road and enjoyed the evening sounds of birds and insects. While we were walking back we came around a corner and saw an animal walking up the road that came from the highway. It looked up for a half second before turning and galloping back down the road. I first thought “German shepherd” when I saw it, because it was dark, with what looked like a long snout and big ears, but it was too tall and big, and it didn’t run like a dog. We went down to look at the tracks (and Dave got a picture the next morning) and they were of a hoofed animal. Dave’s best guess is a tapir, but we’re just not sure after looking it up in the net. It was pretty exciting to see a large animal in the jungle, even if we don’t know what it was.