Obviously something happened a few days ago that I am excited to share so I will start there.
5:00am my alarm goes off and I reluctantly pull myself out of bed. Barely aware of my actions as I begin to get dressed to go on one of my twice a week rides with Sid. Thirty minutes later I am waiting out by the road in front of the school.
So Sid shows up and as usual he is ready to ride, so we take off. I never really know where he is going to lead me to on these rides but I do enjoy getting out and seeing Indonesia before it is fully awake, and before it gets that usual hot sticky feel. This particular morning my legs started off feeling fatigued from the three hours of ultimate frisbee and basketball I had played over the weekend, so of course we started off hitting the hills first thing (my legs were not excited about this). There was literally a hill around every corner we took. All in all we had as much elevation change in this ride as we did on the ride of death, so I was feeling pretty good about myself. It was while we were riding these hills that we passed a little boy that put the biggest cheesiest grin on my face.
Sid was riding in front as usual and I was trailing about 5 yards behind him just to give myself time to adjust to any route changes. So Sid passes the house first that this little boy was standing out front, and I see the boy about the same time he sees us. Sid goes by and the boy just stares blankly, like he can't believe what he is seeing. Then I ride by and it seems to snap him out of his trance and he just shouts out, "ADA BULE!" In English this means "There are white people!" I found this hilarious, just because of the sheer surprise and excitement on this boys face, so much so that he had to announce it to the world.
We rode a little farther past the boys house and eventually we ended up at a decently flat road that ran along the edge of the jungle. This is where we stopped and Sid offered to take the picture above. After my photo shoot Sid hopped back on his bike and said, "Right up here we will take a short slippery road, but it has a great view of Merapi." I got excited because we have been here a month and I have yet to even see Mt. Merapi since it erupted earlier this year. We took the route Sid described and then all of a sudden there it was, still sending up its' smoke signals to let the world know that it is still alive. I was standing on this slippery slope when I snapped this photo below of the two mountains. The larger mountain toward the right of the photo is Mt. Merbabu, if you look just above the treeline to the left of this mountain you will see a mountain in the distance with a trail of smoke streaming out, this is Mt. Merapi.
We turned around and headed home not long after I took this picture. The ride home was much easier than the ride out, mostly because the ride home was all downhill. It was definitely an adrenaline rush to be going fast enough to pass motorcycles. We ended up making it home safe and sound in less than half the time it took us to get out to that slippery slope where I saw Merapi. It was a great ride.
Merapi is the volcano that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of so many Indonesians here on Java. It was as a result of this catastrophe that our teammates saw a need and sprang to action. To see more about how lives are being restored after the eruption, and how you can help visit http://www.beadsofjava.com/.
No comments:
Post a Comment