05/20/2014 – 320 days/27335 miles

We left Lake Toba on a ferry boat with the loudest horn known to man. Rather than head back to the other side of the island we stayed on, and ride across the bridge to get back to the mainland, we opted for the faster, and probably also cheaper route…3 people and two big bikes on the relatively empty ferry cost less than $3…not too bad.
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05/12/2014 – 312 days/26654 miles

After my short bikeless stint in Singapore, I had to get back to the real world and reunite with my motorcycle.
I flew into Medan, Indonesia (on the island of Sumatra) on Sunday, and met up with my buddy Ben and Andrea (who’s riding along with him for the next few weeks). For being so geographically close to Singapore, Medan is incredibly different in nearly every way. Supercars have been swapped out for ~100cc bikes, the sidewalks are cracked with weeds growing through them, the traffic is chaotic, and everyone on the street is smiling and couldn’t be more joyful.
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05/07/2014 – 307 days/26632 miles

The final piece of business in Penang was getting the bike loaded on a boat to Indonesia. My buddy Ben, who I’ve been traveling on and off with through Malaysia, and I planned to use the same boat, which goes from Penang, Malaysia to Belawan, Indonesia, which is not far from Medan, on the island of Sumatra. The boat is not your typical roll on/roll off ferry, or a large cargo vessel. It’s a wooden boat, about 30m long, that hauls vegetables from Belawan to Penang. So on the return trip to Belawan, there’s plenty of extra space for random cargo, like a couple motorcycles.
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05/06/2014 – 306 days/26625 miles

I’m really loving Penang. I’ve got a flight scheduled out of here, but if it weren’t for that, I think I’d be staying for a much longer time. That’s not to take away from any of the previous places I’ve been that I’ve really enjoyed…I can look back and still really enjoy them, but Penang just seems damn near perfect. It has a nice laid back feel to it, and there’s a certain unique charm to the town, and to top it off, the food here is absolutely amazing.
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05/05/2014 – 305 days/26619 miles

My main priority when I arrived in Penang was to get some things sorted out with my bike. Most important was getting my starter situation taken care of. Although it’s been working fine for a couple days with the paperclip, that’s not much of a long term solution.
In some brief looking around online, I came to the conclusion that replacing the switch assembly with a BMW part would be pretty expensive (like into the hundreds of dollars expensive!). I figured I’d be able to build a simple setup with some basic wires and switches that mimicked my paperclip setup for far less money.
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