The scenery continued like yesterday; riding through rural areas with thatched huts and nice village flair. People friendly and inviting. I received a lot of red lipped smiles from all the men and women, chewing on their bethel nuts. Their teeth and gum turned reddish. You could see them everywhere, if not just follow the red stains on the tar, where they spit out the fluids, wherever they walk or drive.  I first stopped at a school, when I heard a singing. Unfortunately it stopped immediately when I approached, but I could get a special performance after a lot of handshakes and photos with the kids and headmaster. Like everywhere in Indonesia, the scholars are like parrots. If you want them to do something, e.g. repeat a song and you sing for them they simply echo back what you do. This was my chance to teach them some German, so I transformed their Bahasa counting song into ‘counting in German’. At the school gate a guy was performing tricks with a ‘spinning top’, so I went there to see him. It was running on his finger, down the arm and on his forehead; later on my thumb. He became my bracelet brother, as he had more on his one arm then I could ever collect during all possible TdA tours. It was already an hour into the day and only 12km done, when Henry and Nellie passed me at the school. Although they were sweeping, they left me behind, without stopping knowing that I am never lost and don’t need to be babysit on cycling days. When I closed up with Henry, we both recognized that we ‘will not make it to camp *)’ at this special day, thus we decided to take it very slowly and enjoy as much as we could until the sun sets and we get picked up by the van. It wasn’t long after I left school, that I saw a woman in her hut weaving a tablecloth or alike. I ask if I could come closer and was waved in. Amazingly she did the pattern without a template, like the weavers I met in Ecuador. Her pretty daughter was always behind her watching what she and I did. Shortly thereafter a family was sitting in a circle in their backyard and with bowls filled with corn that they were pounding into flour. I was also invited to come closer and the girls were working for the camera. At another house a little girl was sitting in the dust below an ‘Angry Bird blanket’. I had to stop and take this photo. This part of the island is so clean, totally different to the rest of Indonesia we traveled. Here in the rural area to the east the people keep their houses and garden tidy and clean. No plastic or trash thrown away, the front yards swept, as if my sister-in-law was around with her broom. Must have been German missionaries from Swabia who not only brought Christianity to the country, but also introduced the ‘Kehrwoche-System’. It was a hot day again. Some of us used the opportunity of having a pool near the lunch stop, to cool down. Now we are just 1 day away from the border to Timor-Leste getting excited about the 2nd part of the tour.

Tomorrow’s stage is modified to a shorter distance, because the day after into Timor-Leste and Dili is said to be a tough one again, as we will probably face 60+ kilometers of very bad or none existing roads in the one of the poorest Eastern-Asian countries.

*) just kidding, it was only 1pm when I arrived at today’s destination, with loads of new impressions, which the ‘racers to camp’ do not have.

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