It had been a particularly uninspiring tutorial. From my window high on Kent Ridge I gazed at the refinery islands towards Jurong. As usual, the red and white striped towers of Pulau Saraya stood as prominent sentinels of the oil industry. But today, the clear air and cloudless sky framed them with a distant background. Just visible was the faint silhouette of Pulau Karimun, in nearby Indonesia. I had been to Pulau Karimun before on the ninety-minute boat speedboat trip from the World Trade Center to Tanjung Balai. And starting with day trips to Nongsapura in Batam, with a beat-up second-hand mountain bike for company, I had tentatively extended my explorations of the Riau islands to include Bintan, Lingga and lastly Singkep, just south of the equator a hundred kilometers and five hours boat ride from Pasir Panjang. But today, the distinct gray sketch of Bukit Anak Karimun beckoned beyond Sultan Shoal and towards mainland Sumatra. Would a trip by mountain bike from its west to its east coast, bisecting its formidable spine of mountains, be a feasible adventure?

Two weeks later, having studied as many maps as I could find (some carefully plotted by the British during the war and now dustily preserved in the NUS map library), I still didn’t know the answer, but by now I was determined to find out. So having failed to disabuse friends of the notion that mountain bikes are fashion accessories and holding instead to the dangerous assumption that mountain bikes are meant for mountains, I set out alone from Clementi at 8 am, equipped with my steel-frame machine, five-hundred dollars, a credit card, a saddle-bag of spare clothes and a smattering of market Malay. Fifteen minutes later I had the bike checked in and the saddle bag slung over my shoulder as I fretted for a sea-change from the air-conditioned formalities of the World Trade Center.

Informality wasn’t long in coming. After the forty-minute hop to Batam, I found myself sitting on the roof on the boat to Pekenbaru, with the bike bungeed to the rail at the prow, happily chatting in broken English to the deck boys as we headed for the ten-minute stop at Tanjong Balai and a lunch of rice and dried fish served up in greaseproof brown paper . During the five-hour trip I had plenty of time to wonder why, at 31,000 rupiah, it was nearly as cheap as the $24 I’d paid just to get across to Batam. After a brief stop at Selat Panjang, a small town almost entirely perched on wooden stilts, the boat heads up the Siak River, passing scores of uninhabited islands until the banks creep closer on either side and then surrender to mangrove swamp, until estuarine passage is constricted to a halt at Buton, a dusty hot and humid staging post. I had to wait for a while at the jetty for the deckhands to clear the rest of the cargo lashed atop the boat. After numerous boxes of fruit and cages of live chickens had been laboriously manhandled down a rough wooden slide, I was finally handed my bike, which I then had to get on top of the bus to Pekenbaru.

I stood eyeing the ladder on the side of the bus. Could I climb up it with the bike on my back? The conductor squatting on the roof grinned and held out his hands. Lifting it by both hubs I could just get it up far enough for him to grab the crossbar. But if he dropped it, the 18 kilogram frame would be on top of me. With a jerk it was up and in no time lashed down next to a huge crate of lemons. My own frame was the next to suffer as I grimly endured a sweltering bone-jarring journey on laterite roads to the town, where I quickly located a small guest house tucked away in a maze of small canals and snickets behind the bus terminal.

From Bukit Tinggi I cycled southwest for about 400 kilometers to Padang, staying at small towns and villages, often taking the opportunity to get a game of chess in the coffee shops. There are some wonderful traditional wooden houses in the area, each containing many interconnected rooms for all sorts of relatives. The roofs are saddle-shaped, each end rising to a sharp vertical point. I kept well during the trip, save for a slight dose of heat exhaustion in the Plain of Solok which was fixed by a rest day.

One high point was the section down to Lake Singgarak, a swooping descent on a switchback of laterite tracks through vivid green rice paddies illuminated by shimmering water. Various summits afford excellent views of the lake clouded in mist. I found a small guest house and took a room on the beach at the lakeside, a situation of immersion in perfect tranquility. There is a mosque every half-kilometer along the lake and at twilight each offers a call to prayer. To someone like myself, who knows no Arabic, the result sounds like a changing harmony of different voices. As the wind changes, the theme of the chanting appears to vary, with one or other of the competing mosques becoming the dominant voice.

Another memorable part of the trip was the ascent of the Barisan Ridge from the market town of Solok. The road winds ever upwards, twisting and turning like a snake. Just when you think your legs can’t take any more, it flattens out into a plateau and the asphalt road splits into a maze of dirt tracks through miles of verdant peaty tea-plantation. At a cursory glance it looks strikingly like Dartmoor. I was making for a place called Danau Di Atas (literally, ‘Lake on Top’) There is also a lower lake, about 500 feet down. Unfortunately, I miscalculated time and distance and was overtaken by night, just as it started to rain. Luckily, the rain, although steady, did not develop into a torrent and about an hour after nightfall I arrived at a small village high on the ridge overlooking both lakes. Here I cheered up a bit, since there was a very basic restaurant with trucks parked outside, a reliable sign that local drivers can sleep on the premises. Sure enough I was offered a place to sleep, but since the accommodation was a wooden platform and I had no mat, I wasn’t looking forward to it. As I was attempting to grapple with the fiery chicken curry, a boy approached and offered me a bed in the grocery shop (for a small consideration). The shop was right up on the top of the hill, where the wind howled and funneled. It was teeth-clatteringly cold and I was glad of my warm waterproof jacket. The rest of the family were sitting around wearing red and blue blankets and felt hats. Not a few were drinking rice-wine to keep out the cold. I was given a brick room with a cedar wood bed, a goose-down mattress and lots of blankets. I also had a kind of sitting room reserved for paying guests, faced in by glass to keep out the wind. In the morning it was like having breakfast (noodles and eggs with about six tons of chili) in a greenhouse, with excellent views of the lakes left and right and the Plain of Padang in the far distance.

After exploring the ridge for several days I made the six-hour, 100-kilometre descent to the sea at Padang, a delightfully easy free-wheel down, although the final section is an alarmingly steep series of hairpin bends. My hands were aching from maintaining pressure on the brake levers. Padang was as charming as I remembered it. For two days I explored beautiful black-sand coves in the wrinkles of steep rocky promontories, with numerous small circular islands just off-shore. Then I put the bike on the plane for the 40-minute flight back to Batam, and the next day, Singapore.

*Note that since this was written before Suharto's resignation, prices quoted are wildly inaccurate

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