I could go on and on about another day with yet another very early start to avoid nightmarish traffic and another entertaining selection of pot-holed roads to jar our bones along Sumatra…but all of that makes it sound like we are having a terrible time, and we are not! Sumatra is beautiful. It’s just so stunning, so green! Not your normal green, but an eye-searing brilliant green! The rice fields, the trees, the bamboo, the huge leaves hanging over the roads–all green, green, green!

It’s a shame that the roads are generally so polluted with these road-hogging, diesel-belching trucks! Have I expressed my opinion of them before?

We are almost at the end of our time in Sumatra. Would we come back? Oh yes, most definitely! It’s a huge island and you could spend your entire two-month visa just here. We have only just skimmed the surface so maybe one day…..who knows.

We arrived in Kalianda, the final town at the southern tip of the island of Sumatra, in the dark and crashed out from tiredness in yet another grubby and dingy hotel room. Tomorrow we will be on our second Indonesian island; Java. We’ve only got another five to go!

We hoped that we’d have dry roads to the ferry in the morning, but it was raining again so we had some really muddy sections to keep us occupied. Our nice clean bikes were now not! Oh well, we were only trying to keep on top of the dirt so the job of cleaning them when we have to get them across to Australia will not be so dreadful. The Australian Quarantine Service (AQIS) has a reputation for checking for even the tiniest speck of dirt on bikes and equipment.

We hung over rails and watched as the ferry left Sumatra and as we slowly sailed away from the dock, we passed a small smoking volcano…a fitting summary of a stunning island.