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Three hours and four breakdowns later, we slowly puttered into the port at Pulau Lingga, sunburnt, hungry, and very glad to be back on land and off that damn boat. I thanked Bakar for getting me there alive, and paid him 50,000 Rupiah anyhow for all his trouble.

It was starting to get on into the afternoon and I wanted to explore Lingga so I hopped on the bike and headed out immediately. I had read in the Lonely Planet about Gunung Lingga the highest mountain in Riau. At 1100m it is only 90m higher than Belumut which we climbed in Malaysia in June, but the locals here claim that nobody has ever made it to the peak because of the sheer cliffs for the top 200m. I was very anxious to see the 'untamed mountain' until I was about 20 minutes out from the island bobbing up and down in a broken down pompon. It was just then that I suddenly remembered that mountains don't normally travel alone, and where there's one, there's bound to be a few more. This is really only a problem if you are trying to cycle from one end of an island to another and the only way through is the one way you don't
want to go! UP.

Well it turns out that nobody really likes going up, so the way from Daik (in the south of Lingga) to Pancur (pronounced Pahn-choor, on the north-east coast) is to cycle to a kampung called Rasun, and then take another pompon up the river and out to Pancur in the east. The cycling between Daik and Rasun was incredible. Picture a greenbelt park through going through the city, with a nicely paved path curving gently through it. Add the occasion small kampung along the way and a few motor-scooters and you've got a great afternoon. It was such beautiful jungle and scenery that I was suddenly energized again. Here it was at 5pm on the third day of cycling and I'm racing alongside a kid on an old broken down Kawasaki. Admittedly his bike
was wheezing almost as much as I was! But, the two of us raced up and down those valleys at a pretty good clip. The afternoon was getting late and I still had a long way to go to get to Pancur. Following in the tradition of this trip, when I finally make it to Rasun and cycle down the dirt path to the riverside, there is the kid on the Kawasaki. It turns out his name is Ricky, and he and his brother have a pompon that they ferry up and down the river. The only problem of course being that his brother ''Reno'' (pronounce like renault) had taken the boat out and was
somewhere up the river. So we sat on a bench by the river and waited, and waited. Around 7pm we hear a belching echoing up the river and Ricky jumps up cheering: Reno!

Reno was the shy one of the two (both about 17yrs old) and was not too excited about heading back up the river to Pancur, but we loaded the bike down another ladder and into the boat and began our adventure up the river. Ricky made sure that it was ok with me that it was going to cost 15,000 Rupiah (about $2.25) instead of the regular 10,000 because it was dark out. This was going to fun.

The engine roared to life throwing a bright orange flame up into the dark night and we started our meandering trip up the river. There was absolutely zero light except for the glow of the exhaust flame, and the single beam of my cat-eye bike light trying to track how far we were ITomthe shore. (about 6 ft to where the mangroves started hanging down) It was an like some incredible scene out of a combination of Afiican Queen and Apocalypse Now. Ricky started telling me about how it was such a great river because there were big fish (Ikan Besar) and only a few crocodiles. Great!

The engine echoing off the valley was almost deafening, which mixed with the complete
darkness added a real element of challenge to Reno's supersonic piloting of the rocket shaped boat.

About half way up the river Ricky -who was squatting up on the bow of the boat watching to fend oflogs and rocks with a paddle- turns around and yells to me: "It's ok, he doesn't really need the light" Never giving up the chance at turning a dumb situation into a stupid one, I clicked off the single beam, and myjaw dropped open The whole world opened up. We had been roaring our way through some sort of dark, tight cave, and then with the light shut it was as if somebody pulled back the curtains and we burst out into openness. The river widened and we were surrounded by a hundred million, billion stars. EVERYWHERE! I mean stars to rival even those like what I saw in Dingboche in Nepal. The brightest, clearest, most beautiful stars I've
ever seen. They were everywhere. For 180 degrees above us in the moonless clear night, and reflected perfectly in the pitch black glass-like surface of the silent river. It was the closest thing to what actually floating out in space must be like! The entire trip, every single Rupiah, was completely justified in that single half hour boat ride.