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Afterstan

20260502-IMG_0704 Hi, I'm Megan Jamer. This is my blog! Right now I'm travelling in Asia on my bicycle. I'm also part of the team at Hive, a digital h...

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Zine: seven sounds of Sumatra

I made this zine a few weeks ago but it feels like longer, because I haven't heard many of the sounds since I left Sumatra. So when I unfolded it and put it beside me on a chair where I am writing this in Kuala Lumpur (in Malaysia), I smiled big without trying. Because I was delighted at the effect of seeing it, how I was transported so thoroughly back there. To the continuous road that Bell and I…

July 2026 in Sumatra, Indonesia

Hi internet friends, Time for my July update, and a note about the future of these updates. Meta-commentary about this update First, to make this update make a bit more sense, a bit more context: In July we continued what we had been doing, which was cycling up the west coast of Sumatra. If you're the type of person that googles the place names I mention (love that), you'll maybe notice that Dumai…

June 2026 in Taiwan and Indonesia

Hi internet friends, Time for my June update. After Taiwan, Bell and I flew to Indonesia. We decided to go here, well I decided to take us here, mainly because I didn't know anything about Indonesia. And that seemed a bit odd, given that it's a big country of 280 million people. More pragmatically, it was conveniently located in the general region, so we could visit before a better cycling climate…

May 2026 in Taiwan

Caption: Art postcard in a very cool shop on Jieyue Street, Hualien. Greetings from Indonesia. I’m popping in on this late July Monday to share a page I wrote about May, cycling up the east coast of Taiwan. Looking back, May was different trips in one month: Bell and I continued our ride around Taiwan, but also took a week off work to complete a side-trip loop into the mountains. The last week of…

Reading Taihe school's account of when we stayed the night there

The list of people I want to send postcards to doesn't get shorter. It's a list of old connections and new ones. But today I wrote one, to Taihe School, in a village up in the hills of central Taiwan where oolong tea grows, where the steep roads are in poor condition by the country's high standards, and where it is so hot and humid that I was close to tears by the time we reached Taihe School.…

April 2026 in Taiwan

April: poodling down the west side of Taiwan, somewhere between the ocean + the mountains. Every week, people taking us in under their wing in their little corner of little Taiwan, which doesn't feel little at all. Previous monthly updates in this series: March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 April 2026 Start: Taichung, Taiwan…

Blog migration reflections

I am finally, incredibly, nearly done with moving 10 years of blog posts from WordPress to here in Bear. It is something I don’t want to do again. It was a lot of work. I’d love Bear to be my forever home. At the same time, migrating has been a powerful process. My WordPress blog had sat pretty much dormant for a few years. It’s not that I didn’t think about it. I thought about it all the time.…

March 2026: Deciding where to go next; Kalady, Kerala; Camping in Taiwan

Bell and I spent March first in Kerala (a state in southwest India), then flew to Taiwan. From Taipei in the northwest, we got started cycling on a counterclockwise circumambulation known as 環島 / Huándǎo ("journey around the island"). A page in a journal barely scratches the surface, especially when you have a tendency like me to fixate on particular details. So in this month’s update you’ll find…

February 2026: A meeting, a cancelled ferry, a climb (Tamil Nadu)

The first image is of the dog who was our companion when we camped at the beach in the village of Chithiraipettai, Tamil Nadu. I remembered that we had peanut butter, and I remembered that you can feed a dog peanut butter, so we did. The second image is our route through Tamil Nadu. I was just on Google Maps looking up the village I spelled out in the previous paragraph, and I realized that…

January 2026: Mostly in Tamil Nadu, with a train ride, fellow women cyclists, "cycling to the mountain"

[Content warning: brief discussion of dead animals; 1 graphic photo of dead people] Most of this little monthly update is about Tamil Nadu. Here, enormous vinyl billboards like the one shown above were a daily sight along the road. They're the kind of thing that makes for a photo that is easy to share - - it kind of speaks for itself! - - but that doesn't mean they're simple: they're a world in…