Biking around the Bukittinggi hillside

It takes 16 long hours to bus it from Parapat to Bukittinggi, a small town in the heart of west sumatra. How or why we ended up there neither of us is quite sure. May be we craved some long distance punishment dished out all too readily by local buses in Asia. Or may be it was that we were keen to continue treading a path few westerns choose to take. Either way, Bukittinggi was a great find. Known as Fort de Kock (the Dutch have such a way with words) during colonial times, Bukittinggi started out as a market place for settlements scattered about the nearby hills. During the Second World War, when Japan occupied Indonesia, the town played host to the Japanese 25th Army which forced the locals (who's going to argue with a Japanese soldier when he's holding a gun to your head?) to hollow out a deep network of tunnels and caverns in the nearby Sianok Canyon. Nobody seems to know how deep and far these tunnels run; what we do know is that thousands of Indonesians were murdered during and after their construction without mercy or regret. Fortunately, our experience of Bukittinggi was far more positive- although the local monkeys did give us a fright with their territorial antics. We roomed at the cheapest place in town, a derelict establishment called The Raja Walli run by an overtly eccentric German who knew "everything" of Sumatra and who wasn't shy of saying so. While Uli's rhetoric could be best described as tiresome (and christ did his breath stink) there is no doubting that without his help we'd have seen nothing of note in Bukittinggi or its surrounds. Take, for example, the shithouse shack opposite our hostel. To us, it was just that, a timber shell cloaked with tarpaulin where locals noisely slurped their noodles. For Uli it provided the freshest brew of kopi (coffee) in town, and its lontong (a cold savoury coconut dish with noodles) was the best for miles around. He was right too, on both fronts! Not only that, but through the shack's owners we met Taufik, a baby faced 21-year-old who spoke excellent English and whom, when not teaching Japanese to Indonesians two years his junior, doubled up as our chain-smoking chaperone. It was Taufik who kindly steered us through the traditional market maze, where we pocketed all sorts of bargains for what amounted to less than nothing. Take for instance a pouch of local tobacco. For less than one NZ dollar we came away with half a kg of sweet smelling shag and two packs stuffed full of rolling papers (both notoriously hard to find in Indonesia). And while it can be said that 'when you've seen one Asian market you've seen them all', Bukittinggi's market trumped many that had come before.

Hiring motorbikes handed us the luxury of independence, something one finds all too rarely in Asia. Following another of Uli's tips we hired, for the princely sum of 50,000 rups (or seven NZ bucks) ourselves a fine steed of a machine and set about exploring the surrounding countryside with Liew and Juese from Toba. Regrettably, we failed to observe the state of the roads and with less than 15kms under our belt our steed pulled up lame with a flat. Thankfully, Asia is chockablock with tradesmen offering up their services for a small fee. On this occasion it was a tyre fixer, who for a couple of ciggies and 15,000 rups soon had us on our way.

Trying to avoid foot-deep potholes while dodging the oncoming traffic was hard work (there was too much of both) but after two hours of terrifying biking we reached our first port of call: the equator. Now this is no ordinary line you know. No, the equator represents the intersection of the earth's surface with the plane perpendicular to the earth's axis of rotation and containing the earth's centre of mass. What? Basically it's an imaginary line spliting the earth into two hemishpheres: north and south. In short, it's the perfect place to pose for a tacky photograph, which is, of course, what we did. Oh, and for those that care, water runs down a plug hole clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and anti-clockwise in the southern hemispshere. Try it.

We'd be told that the mighty Rafflesia flower (one of the world's biggest) was not yet in bloom so instead we headed deeper into the jungle in search of a rarely visitied village we were told (Uli again) was home to a magical instrument that produced sounds which echo around the mountains for many miles. The trek through the jungle was both awesome and frightening. Awesome because we had this wonderful place all to ourselves. Frightening because there was no tradesmen to fix a punture this time round!

Our arrival in the village with the all too complicated name to remember was met with much fuss: who were these four bole (foreigner) and what did they want? "Instrument", we ventured in our most polished English. "Can we see?" Cue those clueless smiles that all too often light up an Asian face, followed by laughter and then frowns. "Instrument, can you show us?" we offered a second time with the four of us systematically bashing the air with our imagainary sticks. Cue more laughter and smiles. Then, as the exchanges started to become tiresome, a breakthrough and moments later all was revealed. Remarkably the entire village turned out to greet us - and to watch us make fools of ourselves playing the most bizarre of instruments - a giant sized xylophone shaped from half tonne granite rocks. Its purpose: to ward away evil spirits. Noise travels down the vast shaft on which the rocks are perched and out into the nearby valley care of a trumpet opening that has been hacked into the steep walls.

Such is the intensity of ancient beliefs here that to step on one of the rocks is said to lead to a premature death. Whether you believe that or not is besides the by, but it was getting dark and we still had some 120kms of potholes and motorists to navigate if we were to make it back to Bukittinggi in time for tea.

The geography and landscape in this part of Sumatra is sublime: waterfalls frame the fertile green mountains, while thick mist cloaks appears from nowhere to create mystical looking rainbows. Evenings are spent devouring simple dishes like gado-gado (veggies drenched in stay sauce) and nasi goreng (mixed veggie fried rice topped with egg). And always there are a few ice cold Bintangs to see out the night. Down the road, a short 100km hop, stands the city of Padang, another Indonesian city recently flattened by the all to frequent earthquakes that rock the island. On our last night we were saddened to hear that the latest of these earthly spasms had hit the nearby city of Bengkulu; casualties unknown.