In order to take it slow we’ve given ourselves some time to fully get here and adjust. So we sleep long on the first day and only venture out to have the complimentary breakfast. It is delicious but oh so tiny! I am tempted to ask for more but they are already cleaning up. Oh well, at least we’re not cycling today.

We eat some cookies and nuts in our room and hang out, read and chill. Finally at 2pm hunger gets us out of the room again and we’re on a mission to find food. At the moment I miss having fully stocked food panniers and things like bread and spreads ready to eat. But of course we find delicious food and all is good again.

After that we wander around and take it all in. There is a lot to see.

Statues of elephants and quirky persons.

A lot of green surrounds us, there are coconut palms, water is flowing through canals and sometimes there are rice fields in the middle of the city. We see a lot of food stalls and I wish I would understand what they are selling. Learning the language and most importantly all the food words seems to be a priority for the next days.

The next days are quiet ones. We didn’t really have any fixed plans on when to move on but for now we’re really enjoying just being in one place for a bit. For the first time in months we have a room to ourselves and just that. No one around that we know which gives us plenty of opportunity to process all that has happened in the last months. For me that means that I’m catching up on some blogging which feels really good.

Torsten manages to get some work done and in between we go out to explore a little bit and mostly to find food. Each time we learn a few more words and understand a little more of what vendors are selling. We find the perfect Nasi Goreng (Fried Rice) and Mie Goreng (Fried Noodles).

On the third day we move to a cheaper room which is on the edge of the city and just in front of a rice field. It is amazingly quiet and so relaxing. The owners are very friendly on top of that and provide a free flow of coffee and tea – nice!

To stay connected we buy sim cards which is an easy affair and works instantly. Getting a rabies vaccination is a bit more complicated on the other hand. Our budget in mind we didn’t feel compelled to do that in Australia and thought it might be easy enough to take care of that here. Well, not really. We call several clinics and none of them have the vaccine or do expect it any time soon. In the end there is one expensive clinic which is still reluctant to provide us with the vaccine as they usually only give it to people who have been bitten by dogs.

So we decide to skip it for now. Rabies is still an occurrence in many of the countries we are travelling to in the next months if not years. But as it is unlikely that we are cycling through very remote places from where we can’t hitch a ride to a hospital or even catch a flight to somewhere in a timely manner we’ll deal with it when we have to. We might still get the vaccination for peace of mind at a later point though.

In the meantime we rest, blog, work, read some more. Actually it feels really nice to slow down and just take it all in. For both of us.