Sleeping on the eve of the goat-cutting holiday was difficult at best. I felt marginally better than the day before, but somehow could not settle comfortably in my bed. It didn't help that there was a constant moaning and crying noise being broadcast from every mosque all night. The noise was vaguely the sound you'd make falling out of a hundred story building over and over again. When the call to prayer sounded at 4:30 a.m. I had the sense that I hadn't slept at all. I spent the next hour and a half milling about the room generally annoying Andy while waiting for our breakfast.
I was a little worried, my lack of appetite from a few days ago had re-emerged and I had trouble getting my *nasi goreng* down my pipes. As we stepped out of the hotel Santoso was dutifully waiting for us. We began to pedal out of town with Santoso in the lead. Still Santoso was pedaling as 100+ revolutions per minute in a very low gear. Finally I had to pass him at Andy's insistence in order to step up our pace. Santoso, unwilling to let a \"guest\" lead, re-passed me, finally shifting into a more reasonable gear. Thereafter much of the morning was a straight road along a massive dike.
Houses with steeply pitched roofs and intricately carved peaks with mother of pearl inlay lined the road. When we stopped to photograph an especially elaborate house with intricately carved teak shutters and doors Santoso told us it was similar to his house. Somehow Santoso didn't understand our itinerary and we missed our turn-off towards Bandungan. We had to backtrack over a very bad stretch of road. Santoso's bike was ill-suited for such a ride. We stopped for a drink in a medium-sized village where we became, as usual, the main attraction of the day. Fortunately we had Santoso with us, so he managed to answer the six or seven standard questions for us as newcomers came to ask about us.
Santoso had to turn back to Kudus after our refreshment stop. I almost wished I was going back as well, the afternoon was where we'd do all of our climbing. In the short-term the road remained flat to gradually uphill. We passed a little mosque where a frenzy of meat cutting was going on. Andy grabbed the camera and began to shoot photos of kids and adults abusing a cow carcass. At last we see the festival in action. Rather, Andy did, my stomach still to dodgy to look on. Huge road signs indicated that there was another \"Tourist Object\" that had to be seen.
The \"Eternal Flame\" was basically a hole in the earth that natural gas leaked from that had been covered by rocks and lit on fire. A crowd of Indonesians stood by and watched it burn. Occasionally someone tossed their entrance ticket on the pile of rocks and watched it burn. This was substantially less exciting than the boiling mud in New Zealand. The hills became more challenging and I was overheating again as the thermometer pushed towards 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 11 in the morning. I was ready to stop and rest; Andy wanted to push onward. We stopped and ate some noodles at a *warung* and attempted to negotiate transport for me up the hill.
In the end Andy decided to join me, not wanting to ride in the midday sun. It turned out to be a good decision because the next town was twice as far as we thought and the road far steeper in stretches. Our negotiation took far longer than we'd have liked, complicated by the driver's demand for far too much money. The next 20 kilometers were some of the most rewarding in Java. From Salatiga we rode (mostly coasted for the first 7km) until we reached Lake Rawapening. The temperature was cooler from the altitude (500 meters) and the sun was completely obstructed by the black clouds that gathered over the mountain looming above us.
We arrived in Ambarawa just as the clouds looked most pregnant. I was hoping for rain if not just to clear the smoke-filled air. We visited the railway museum where they had an impressive collection of derelict steam engines arranged around an old station. An ancient Javanese man who was the custodian of the museum seemed deeply disappointed that we couldn't speak Dutch. Still he showed us some of the prize objects of the museum including an actual phone from America. Our favorite exhibit was, of course, the pedal-powered rail car. The next (not-so) difficult decision was: should we ride or transport up the next 500 vertical meters to the hill station at Bandungan?
We found a pickup truck and negotiated a good deal by pitting one driver against another. When we arrived in Bandungan it felt like another planet. For the first time in weeks I wasn't sweating. Above us hovered an enormous volcano and below us hung the haze-choked lowlands. At first glance, Bandungan doesn't look like much --just a ramshackle collection of wooden shacks and tacky concrete hotels clinging to the steep-sloped side of a mountain. Our own lodgings were of very dubious taste --a concrete fantasyland set in an Indonesian-style garden, complete with an aviary, color-coded tennis courts and a bewildering open-air amphitheater.
We splurged (nearly ten dollars) and rented a condo-like substance, with numerous rooms on three levels and several outdoor areas looking out onto the view we never saw (due to the continuing haze from rice-burning). One day of relaxing and HTML-ing in the cool mountain air turned to two and could easily have been extended beyond that. At breakfast the first day we met a pair of standoffish Americans, Stan and Janet. They had just completed a stint of organizing an educational program for American students in Yogyakarta and were chilling (literally) for a few days before heading back to Michigan.
Not your typical American couple, they told us how they'd lived in Vietnam for a few years yet were curiously vague when queried about the details. CIA? Neither Fred nor I thought so, since the older couple had a distinctly Christian bearing. Our suspicions were confirmed the following day when we ran into them at Gedung Songo, an 8^th^ century Hindu temple complex nearby. Walking back to \"town\" with them, we learned that the program they had organized in Yogya was through a Mennonite college, and that their work in Vietnam was through the Mennonite Mission. I chatted with Janet about Indonesian politics while Fred discussed Clinton with Stan, who apparently voiced some ultra-right views.
Both of us were very careful not to offend, but as soon as we arrived back at our lodgings, our new friends beat a hasty retreat back to their room and were very careful to avoid us for the remainder of the day. Could they have been freaked out by any homovibes they picked up, or was it our general godless heathen tendencies? We'll probably never know.