Lost In Sumatra. A typical whitewater kayak expedition.

January 27, 2020  •  Leave a Comment

 

So new video on the Youtube this week where I tried to show our trip exploring first descents in Northern Sumatra.  It is a slightly different style to my usual video with my good friend David Silk taking the lead story teller position and walking people through the trip from start to finish.  As with every trip there is many more anecdotes to the story that there is time to fit into a 7 min video, so the video is really just the highlights (and a few low lights).  There will be tons of other memories that don't make the video and I will list a few below. 

 

1.  SELFIE?:  Sitting out front of our small little rented accommodation to drink morning coffee was a common occurrence.  The weather was often nice and warm (which I miss right about now) and the smell of burning garbage wasn't prevalent yet, as generally speaking people burned there garbage in the evenings. On more than one occasion cars of people would roll by the house, stop, and the occupants (also teenagers) would come over and in broken english ask to take selfies with us.  Evidently where we where did not have a steady flow of white people coming through and we were becoming something of an attraction.  As bizarre as I found these moments they eventually became more normal, somewhat normal at least.

 

2. You Alive bro?: Sickness was a theme of our time in Sumatra, I don't know specifically the cause, maybe low hygiene standard, maybe garbage burning in the street, maybe that literally everyone smoked cigarettes, maybe something else but as someone who is rarely sick for extended periods of time I was suffering hard on this trip.  Not just with the usual travellers diarrhoea but also with a hacking couch that sounded  like I had smoked two packs a day for my entire life, a weird rash on my arms, general fatigue, etc etc etc.  But the point where things took a real turn, and something I didn't feel good about trying to capture on video, was a few days in.  When David and I listened Ben loudly and by the sounds of it, quite violently, puking, groaning and rolling from bed to the bathroom repeatedly.  Walls in the house were only a layer thin so the question would get asked by one of us to the other through the walls "You alive bro?", as long as you kept hearing an affirmative groan back then the mission was still a go.  albeit at a much slower pace than ideal.  

 

3. The kids at the window: Almost as an extension of my first little anecdote, our little house was next door to a school, and every afternoon after school let out probably ten kids would play out front of the house, frequently playing hide and seek under the house and then seemingly spending all the time they weren't playing looking at us through open doors and windows, just to see what we were up to.  Many of these times Ben or I would be pretty sick and laid down which must have been boring to watch but they kept coming back so who knows, maybe not.  

 

These are just a few stories i wasn't able to show in the video.  There are probably 50 more but that is what I can think of right now and I have to move on to work on another project so thats it, thats all.  chef out the video and let me know your thoughts on it.  

 

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