Day 36: With Our Powers Combined...

May 8th, 2011
Days Left to Journey: 16 Days
Planned Route: Southern
Planned Departure Date: Monday, May 23rd, 2011
Planned Completion Date: Tuesday, June 8th, 2011
Team Members: Mark "Eagle Eyes" (inside joke, and not my real nickname) Sueyoshi, Heather "Neneng" Halk, Iwan "Mas Wang" Nirwana (photo to the left - our newest team member)



An Ode to Mas Wang.
"Go-od" is what connected us.
Making sure we were "Ok" (not pronounced oh-kay)
Breakfast sandwiches a must
With wasabi mayo and "tomat"
Without you we would be lost, literally
Navigator, chef, and our new family

A Word on WORDS.
Amazing.

Words on WORDS.
The entire weekend was amazing. Huge props to the organizing ETAs. The Indonesian students made countless friends, memories, and many will undoubtedly go home to redouble their efforts to learn English. If you've got about 4 hours to kill, here are the links to the amazing performances (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). As you can tell I'm either super amazed by the WORDS weekend, or my vocabulary has become amazingly limited. If only the farewells could've lasted longer for ETAs and students alike; best of luck to everyone!

A KFC Meeting.
After the WORDS competition I ended up at a Bogor KFC near the train station. My hope was to re-introduce Heather to the Bike2Work posse and our new member, Mas Wang, at the end of their fun bike trip from Jakarta. All was chaos. There was traffic on Heather's end, disagreement about how they would return on the other end, and sleepiness on my end. Fortunately, KFC was there to save the day with their Mocha Floats. If anyone from KFC headquarters is reading this - "USE LESS ICE". 3 hours later the gang got together, went over some biking business related to Polygon Cycle and Eiger equipment sponsorship and questions about our route. Plan B is to borrow everything from our friends. That was when it was decided that Mas Wang would be the captain or the all-powerful navigator of BikeJava - our bike god, in a sense. For those of you who are strictly monotheistic - our bike prophet.
I kept on saying how "Bike2Work gets it done", but Lucy insisted that it was friends only helping friends. I could've shed some serious man-tears (tears in the form of high-grade synthetic motor oil with the fragrance of Axe, of course). I seriously hope one or all of them can join in the beginning or somewhere along the way.

Mas Wang.
Mas Wang came into the picture during the Srikandi Tour. He was recommended by one of the members of Bike2Work to support the Srikandi. He acted as food and mechanical support, he was my occasional roommate and helped me feel the most comfortable during the Srikandi Tour (see previous posts). Mas Wang is an expert cyclist who spends some of his free time making mountain bike trails. He's originally from Bandung, but since the tour, he has been in Jakarta a number of times. After the meeting in Bogor, he actually rode his bike to Bandung that night (approximately 125 km)... wow. And he loves his Marlboro.