There is honestly very little reason to visit Lundu. It’s a small town in one of Malaysia’s most remote provinces and, apart from a nearby national park, home to an enormous and infrequently blooming parasitic flower that smells like rotting flesh, there are no tourist attractions to speak of. It’s just an ordinary Malaysian town. And yet, one of the things we love about bike touring is visiting places like this. There are few sidewalks and the houses and shops crowd the street, many with plastic or rusty metal containers of bougainvillea and other flowering plants. We walk by the Law Soon Sang hardware store, which sells Stihl power tools behind a facade of flowers.

We stop at a small general store to browse and find aisles overflowing with items arranged in hilariously random fashion: dried spices next to door knobs and stir fry mixes next to paint brushes. The one thing we’re hoping to find, granola (!), is nowhere to be found. But we do leave with some salted peanuts.

Lundu is the sort of place tour buses don’t stop but that makes traveling slowly by bike so interesting.

By the time we depart, it’s already 90 degrees and the air quality has not improved, so we resolve to only ride for a few hours, to the coastal town of Sematan. We see faint outlines of mountainous jungles on either side of the road, but visibility is poor and we focus on the beautiful tropical hardwood trees that line the road. At a small fruit and vegetable stand down the road, we stop for lady finger bananas, dragon fruit, sour mangos, calamansi limes, a papaya and a bag of fresh lychees. It’s a bounty.

We stop for the day at a beachside resort where we relax in an air conditioned room overlooking the South China Sea. It feels indulgent and incongruous but we enjoy it, sipping a cold Malaysian beverage of fresh lime juice with preserved plum called limau asam boi and swimming in the warm and salty sea and fancy pool overlooking the beach.