A few weeks ago, we had a long holiday weekend and a few of us decided to take a spontaneous motorcycle trip, overnight. to one of the villages that we serve with the airplane. I was able to borrow a motorcycle (my scooter wouldn't do) and at 6am we were off. Above, we are stopped in the town of Kuala Kurun to eat lunch and take a break. We also fly the airplane here, it is a 38 minute flight or a 4 hour motorcycle ride. We had a wonderful lunch at a friends "cafe" and continued upriver. Up to this point, the road was decent, and completely paved.
As we broke in the motorcycles for the first 4 hours, a few gremlins appeared. My friends chain had become loose so we stopped at a repair shop to have a link taken out of the chain. $2 later it was fixed and we were away.
The mechanics toolbox. Not as much as I'm used to having available to me, but they can do everything they need to with what's in the box.
After our lunch stop and quick roadside repair, the roads quickly became worse. Gone was the asphalt and abundant were the slippery packed mud, deep mud puddles, and questionable bridges. They slowed our progress...but we were having fun!!!
Just before sunset, we arrived at our destination of Tumbang Marikoi. We were going to stay they night with some friends that live there, a pair of German nurses that have lived and worked in Central Borneo for over 30 years!!!
We had a great time hanging out with Anne and Lydia, and we enjoyed a downpour of rain on the sheetmetal roof all night. Good food. good friends,...good sleep.
The heavy rains the night before made bad roads worse. We went through countless mud puddles. Eventually, we just gave up trying to stay dry and clean. It was more fun anyway to go fast through the puddles.
On our way home, we took a different, unknown way. We stopped in a village along the way for a rest and to get some drinks. They had a traditional long house available for use as a hotel and tours. It was neat to see the traditional construction of the huge stilt house.
Why use the purposely built wood-plank path when a perfectly good path full of mud and water lay right next to it?! By this time in the journey, Aaron made it his priority to take the path less traveled and see what he and his motorcycle (with street tires I might add) could do!
As I expected, this trip was a lot of fun, and completely exhausting. On our return trip home the second day, it took us 13 hours of hard motorcycle riding over almost impassable sections of road to arrive at my doorstep. That same trip in the airplane takes 45 minutes. Granted, infrastructure is slowly getting better and better, and farther and farther into the depths of Borneo, but the airplane is still a wonderful tool to quickly and efficiently go places that are hard or still impossible to reach otherwise.
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