sleeepover!

we're sleeping over at the KL airport tonight but unfortunately they are shutting down at 12:30am and "fogging" for pests. So while we wait for them to close down and relocate us, we paid the equivalent in Indonesia of three meals with drinks or a four/five hour bus ride or twelve pounds of mangoes (you get the idea) for ONE starbucks orange juice in Malaysia. All so we can enjoy the "free" wifi.

So as we're probably not going to find a nice little quiet corner with a mattress to sleep on at the airport - nothing better to do then to blog

Ari did a mini post about kawah ijen, which was beautiful, but the most exciting part was actually the getting there. We hired two motorcycles (with drivers) to take us from our hotel to the base of the volcano - a two hour ride. The first hour went by pretty quickly. Smooth and deserted streets and watching the sunrise over the rice paddy fields was pretty surreal.

By the second hour, the road was very bumpy, you would have thought they planned the road to be covered in potholes. actually, all the potholes had merged and become one giant pothole leading to kawah ijen. So as the motorcycles struggled to climb the steep hill, my motorcycle suddenly died. Turns out, the chain needs to be attached to the motorcycle for it to run. (The chain had broken off and was left lying on the road/pothole)

So the obvious indonesian solution was to get me, ari and ari's driver on one motorcycle. For those of you who know a thing or two about motorcycles the bike was less than 200cc. I think those children Barbie and Hummer vehicles (that run on batteries) have about the same amount of power.

And for Indonesians it's pretty common to have three people on a motorcycle, in fact, it's pretty common to have three people, two chickens in cages and a huge stack of hay, some random building material (most likely a steel pole) and groceries. So one american, one canadian and one indonesian should be no problem!

Aside from dangerous (Ari's feet got caught on the lip of some of the potholes and almost tipped us all over) I can't explain how incredibly funny we must have looked and sounded (my best onomatopoeia of a bike struggling up a mountain in first gear would probably be "nggggggeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh").


But I guess a photo is worth a thousand words. Kids this is only a simulation and please don't try this at home.

(If you zoom in - yes, our driver is wearing flip flops with socks.)

Eventually we discovered that if Ari put his feet on the passenger pedals and I rested my shins on his feet we were able to go more than 30 ft. at a time.

Lastly, imagine ari, me, our driver and the motorcycle flying down the mountain that we had just struggled to climb - avoiding the laughing villagers, the potholes and most importantly the oncoming trucks.

and that my friends is what you call an adrenaline rush.