Big Trip Day 88: From Homeless to CEO!
Hey friends!
It’s Dory, back for an update on our week in Kuala Lumpur and the launch of our extremely-long-awaited adventures in Indonesia. I think we’re finally on track to catch up with ourselves, newsletter-wise (we’ve been weeks behind for... well, weeks) which is exciting stuff!
After our stint in Southern Thailand, it was time to return to the land of good internet and A/C: Kuala Lumpur, or “KL” as most travelers call it. Tickets to KL are bafflingly cheap from almost everywhere in the region, and it’s a popular stop for visa runs for folks trying to renew their stays in Indonesia. We started off there for our first week back at work; as Justin mentioned in the last newsletter, we’re now working and traveling at the same time, and wanted to kick things off someplace we knew we’d have US-quality internet.
Honestly, it’d be a lie if I said we had any true understanding of what KL is like. We stayed in a high rise condo, ordered a lot of takeout, and spent a baffling amount of time wandering around in malls. We did sneak in some sightseeing, though; a 15 minute drive from our Airbnb were the Batu Caves, a Hindu religious site and oft-Instagrammed location that my dad also went to in the 80s. Here are our side-by-side photos!
Our Airbnb was $20 a night, and located in a 3-tower high rise complex with the design sensibilities of a Las Vegas casino. It was called Arte Mont Kiara, and included such remarkable design elements as: cartoonishly large yellow chandeliers, neon-lit chiseled glass panels with “Arte” emblazoned across them in cursive font, lipstick-red 15-foot-high columns shaped like candlesticks, and an alarming amount of fake marble. In photos, it looked hilarious and glam. In person, it was all slightly shabby, covered in scuff marks, and host to some of the worst smells we have experienced outside of Bangkok alleyways. The designer of the Arte clearly skipped the HVAC portion of their architecture degree; our 12th floor hallway was a smell gradient of garbage, cooking food, cleaning products, and what I can only describe as rotten shower drain.
It was Ramadan while we were in KL, which altered our eating to some extent. Since many places were closed, we ended up seeking out non-Halal restaurants, understandably unimpacted by the holiday. We also ordered a ton from Grab, the local version of Doordash, which somehow consistently provided us with delicious full meals, direct to our building, for under $10. One of our most interesting deliveries was a Michelin-noted savory green tea soup called lui cha, served with rice, peanut, chopped greens, sprouts, and black-eyed peas. Out on the town (mostly, let’s be honest, during our many wanderings around shopping malls) we ate nasi lemak, Malayasian coconut rice with fried chicken and chili sambal, and drank glasses of kopi c, super-frothy iced coffee with sugar and condensed milk.
During one of our more successful mall excursions, we wandered into a salon where we both received excellent haircuts from an efficient and friendly Malaysian woman. When I complimented her work on Justin’s extremely voluminous locks, she proudly announced, “He’s gone from homeless to CEO!” Justin, who at the time was in the midst of getting his hair blow-dried into impressive verticality by an assistant, took the compliment/insult in stride.
Soon enough, it was time to repack for our next destination: Indonesia! Of all the stops on this early portion of Big Trip, Indo’s been our most hyped up and our most long-awaited. Alas, this enthusiasm did not translate into a particularly high level of planning, and we found ourselves at the visa-on-arrival desk in Medan, Sumatra... without any cash to pay for our visas.
Luckily, a long-ago internalized travel lesson from my parents (maybe via my cousin Amy? Someone correct me here!) is to always hide a $20 in the insole of your shoes. The idea is that if you’re robbed or lose all your bags, you’ll likely still have your shoes on you, and $20 can solve a lot of problems! When Justin remembered our past genius, we popped off our shoes, peeled up the insoles, and produced three damp, lint-caked 20s. Alongside the two $5 bills languishing inexplicably in my passport wallet, we were in business! We handed the visa agent our sweaty cash, and he uncomplainingly accepted it. Great success.
From Medan, we flew to the island of Nias off the southern coast of Sumatra. Nias is around the same size as Bali, but that’s where the similarities end. This is not a place you can buy a acai bowl. Nias has one small area of tourist development around Sorake, the surf break that was our main draw to the island. Other than that, it’s tiny towns along a pot-holed and only recently paved loop road, with a population scraping by on cocoa, rice, and rubber cultivation.
We spent our first two weeks on Nias at Ndulu English School, a crumbling cinderblock and wooden shack on the beach that is brilliant in concept and totally chaotic in reality. It’s been here for over a decade, hosting foreign travelers (almost all surfers) who provide free English lessons to local kids for an hour a day. In exchange, volunteers get cheap housing at the beach: all meals and a bed for $10 a day, walking distance from one surf break and a 6 minute scooter ride to the other.
The other volunteers are great. Justin surfs far-off Rockstar Beach with the other Americans, Abe (California) and Spencer (New Jersey); Dory joins Greta (Germany), Danielle (Vietnam), and Alex and Evie (Scotland) at the closer sandy-bottomed beach break on longboards. In the afternoons, we teach one-hour English lessons in rotating teams. There’s no guidance on curriculum, so we do our best to lead our group of two dozen 10-year-olds through lessons on colors, clothing, and plural vs. singular. They pick up some of it. Justin showed up with a plate of lunch one lesson, and Valdes shouted “Justin hungry!” which felt like a real accomplishment.
Unfortunately, the project’s founder and director is the place’s undoing. Aprianto is a volatile and somewhat despotic chainsmoker whose chief passion seems to be lecturing 20-year-old volunteers on their character flaws and in general making everyone miserable. In our two weeks there, he provided one-hour diatribes and, in the case of two younger volunteers, unceremonious evictions, for offenses that included a.) asking for a refund on a surfboard rental that was unused due to injury, b.) being a “bad influence” on the other volunteers for reasons unknown, c.) renting a surfboard elsewhere, even though Aprianto had none remaining for rent, d.) riding a rented scooter to an unapproved destination; in this case, a well-known tourist site only 20 minutes away, and d.) not smiling enough.
As much as we enjoyed teaching, we decided that giving Aprianto another dollar was too unpleasant a prospect to warrant staying on. So, we left. Now we're residing in a lovely, air-conditioned bungalow tucked into a palm-tree lined garden just in front of the surf break, eating well and spending time with people who aren't trying to grift us to within an inch of our lives. The vibes are, once again, good. And when we leave the island, we’ll be writing an extremely honest review on Aprianto’s operation.
Our best takeaway from our time at Ndulu has been a sense of community. Trauma bonding though it may be, we still see the volunteer crew every day, in the water for a surf or in the evenings at a nearby bar for beers and card games. It's really wonderful to have friends here.
In general, life on Nias is lovely. This morning, we woke up at 6am to the sound of rain on our bungalow’s tin roof. We walked barefoot out to the beach, where under cloudy skies the wave was nearly empty. At the water’s edge, we stepped down into ankle-deep water, hopping along the black-and-white checkerboard tiled stepping stones that locals have installed to protect your feet from the reef. At the end of the walkway, we dropped our boards in the water and made the delightfully short paddle out to the point. We spent the morning surfing under light, glittering rain: endless waves, the sky a moody slate gray, and the call to prayer from one of the island’s mosques echoing across the water.
We ate breakfast with Leo from Ghent and his friend visiting from Thailand, inhaling banana pancakes and milky tea while getting regaled with old ocean tales from our host Mark, an Australian who’s been in and out of Nias since the 80s. Now we’re catching up on computer work on the surf deck, getting intermittently distracted by the action on the waves. If Sorake is working at all (and the wave almost always is) you can be assured that some 10-year-old local is out there landing 180 aerials with confidence. It’s pretty amazing to watch.
Our visas expire on the 20th, so our time here will come to mandatory close in just 10 more days. We’re going to Vietnam for a week or so, to eat some good food and (hopefully) get some clothes tailored for our 2025 wedding festivities, and then we’ll be back in Indonesia to meet up with my parents (hi mom and dad!) for a three week visit. They’ll be our first visitors from home, which feels like an exciting landmark!
We’ll report back soon. In the meantime, thanks for keeping in touch with us while we wander the planet. We miss you loads!
Love,
Dory & Justin