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To get to Jakarta, we would have had to take a train to Surabaya and change. There was only "ekonomi" and "bisnis" classes. We didn't have enough money for bisnis, which was just a fancy name for first, judging by one of the trains i looked in. And the thought of going the whole way to Jakarta in "ekonomi" class really didn't grab me much. But it was Saturday norning and there was no way to get any more money till Monday.
I'd never been on an indonesian train, but i guessed they'd be similar to indian ones. I was probably wrong about this, judging by some of the buses we ended up catching, but i had no real idea. Anyway, at six in the morning, after three nights of not much sleep aboard the Kelimutu, i was feeling very weak and sensitive. The thought of spending twenty hours in "ekonomi" on trains was too much for me. Apart from anything else, i just couldn't face being the free and open object of entertainment for the other passengers. I'd had enough of that on the boat. I've never been a great fan of buses, but that morning they had a certain appeal - you get a small ammount of personal space, which doesn't get invaded like it can on a train.
We ended up catching a bus just down the road from the station, which one of the bus crew said was going to Surabaya. But it actually wasn't. It was really going to Probolinggo which was on the way to Surabaya. Surabaya was a hundred kilometres further on. Anyway, we could change there for Surabaya.
No problem! It was nice to be on the bus. Although we didn't know it at the time, that one was the best one of the lot - and there were a lot - on that leg of the journey. There was a reasonable ammount of leg room - well, just about! It never got even nearly full and the driver must have been the only bus driver in Asia who wasn't a homicidal maniac that had had too many tabs of acid for breakfast!
It was nice to be sitting on a relatively comfortable seat, after living on the deck for two and a half days. And we were moving at a reasonable rate - not fast, but fast enough.
At Situbondo, a town about half way to Probolinggo, we stopped at the bus station for almost an hour. But what a great bus station! Fried tofu and tempeh for sale really cheap. This was what we'd been hanging out for since we got to Indonesia. Protein!!! The tofu came in plastic bags along with two or three fresh chilis. Beautiful, a chili hit too!
When the bus left Situbondo bus station, a couple of young men got on. One had a guitar and stood in the middle of the bus and sang about three songs and the other one did a collection around the bus. It was a novel way of busking, i thought, but it was one that we saw a lot more during our hell trip through Java.
At Probolinggo, we got onto another bus to Surabaya. This was driven by the standard lunatic bus driver, who really seemed to have a death wish. The bus was a wreck too, which didn't help.
Surabaya bus station was a bit of a shock. It's not the biggest one we ended up in on that part of the journey, but it was still brain damage. The problem was you couldn't stand still for more than a few seconds without someone coming and hassling you. There are plenty of them hassling you while you're walking too, but it's not as bad.
One man in a uniform came up, speaking good english and being helpful. But he was being a bit over enthusiastic and he wanted us to get one particular night bus, so i began to wonder who was paying him. He claimed he was there to help tourists, but i've heard that one before. A tout in a uniform is still a tout.
The night buses are the fast long distance buses. There was a row of booths selling tickets for various night bus services. We eventually got on we could afford that was leaving in about an hour and going to Jakarta. This was an "ekonomi", non-air conditioned bus.
We went off for a walk to get out of the bus station for a while. It was really smoggy around there and there was heaps of traffic. This place was Purabaya bus station, it was about fifteen kilometres out of Surabaya itself. We got a couple of bottles of water down the road and a bit of cut fruit. It had been a few days since we'd had anything much to eat and we weren't really noticing it much any more. It was partly too much hassle trying to find food and partly because we hadn't got much money.
There was a lot of fucking about, trying to find where the bus went from and which one was our bus. And even though the person who sold us the ticket had written 3pm on it, and then later told us it was 3.30, the bus didn't leave till well after four. And then it seemed to be just driving around Surabaya, stopping here and there, for ages.
It was a pretty good bus though. The seats weren't too high and there was plenty of leg room. But it was very old and a bit shagged and extremely noisy. However, it got us to Jakarta without any problems.
On the way out of Surabaya, we passed an amazing statue. It was an anchor, about thirty foot high, with a crocodile and a shark twisted around it and an eagle perched on top. It would make a great tattoo!
Just after the bus started, we were each given a box which contained a cake and a small container of water. Then a couple of hours later, we stopped at a roadside restaurant where we got a free meal that was included in the ticket price. This was a bit of a contrast with australian buses, which always stop at the most expensive places, where i assume they must get commission for bringing in a busload of customers.
It was a long trip, but i managed to get enough sleep to make it fairly comfortable. The next morning, we arrived at Jakarta at about ten o'clock. Not at the bus station we had to leave from, of course, but one on the opposite side of the city.
*-*-*
The bus station we arrived at really was brain damage. There were hundreds of buses and thousands of people. But quite quickly we managed to jump on a number 7A to Kalideres, which is where the buses going west leave from.
It seemed strange afterwards, that we'd been in Jakarta, a famous city and one of the biggest in the world. And we were there for such a short time. The bus went probably straight through the middle and we got to see a fair chunk of it. But seeing a narrow strip of a city you don't know, through a bus window, is pretty weird.
The main thing that stuck in my mind was the river we drove along the side of for most of the way out of the centre. It was fairly narrow and shallow, and more or less just a ditch or an open sewer. All along it, at intervals between the bridges, there were small jetties with little ferries crossing the river. The ferries were really rectangular dinghies which could maybe hold two or three people and some shopping, and the distance they would travel in crossing the river was maybe twenty or thirty feet at the most, but there was obviously enough traffic for someone to survive off at each crossing.
Apart from that, my impression of Jakarta was of a dirty, polluted, traffic-clogged asian city. And it was a Sunday, so the traffic must be impossible on weekdays! It would be interesting to check it out a bit just for the sake of it. But i didn't feel it was much of a loss going straight through!
*-*-*
Merak's a small, busy port town, with the ferry terminal and bus station combined, right in the centre of it. We checked out places to stay, but there didn't seem to be much choice and they were fairly expensive. So we decided to jump on a ferry and find somewhere to stay on the other side.
We were getting very low on money and it was important not to fuck ourselves up. We just had to wait for the banks to open the next day. We didn't need money for somewhere to stay, as we wouldn't have to pay till we left, but we didn't want to strand ourselves somewhere where there wasn't a bank. So we debated for a long time whether or not it was a good idea to go across, when we knew we could change money where we were and we had no idea what was on the other side. In the end, we decided to chance it.
The ferry was really shitty, but it only took a couple of hours to cross the small stretch of water between the two islands. I was amazed by the large ammount of people who were walking around the decks and seating areas selling the most bizarre selection of plastic junk. The two eating places on board were exactly the same as an ordinary rumah makan (eating house) on shore. And there was a shop selling music tapes on the back deck.
When Bakauheni, the port on the other side, came into view, it was quite obvious there was nothing there! It was nothing like Merak. There was just a ferry terminal and nothing else.
Shit!
We got off the ferry and walked out towards the buses. When we got outside the terminal building, we were called over by a non-uniformed man at the police office. He was really helpful and told us we should get a bus to Bandar Lampung, which was a couple of hours away. There were losmens and banks there.
Bugger it! Another bus ride. It was about half past four by this time and we'd been on buses with hardly any breaks for the past thirty two hours and travelling non-stop for four solid days. The last thing we wanted was a two hour bus trip - especially as it would mean arriving in a strange town after dark. But there was no choice. We got on the bus.
*-*-*
On the way into Bandar Lampung bus station, we didn't see anything that looked like a town. We had a look round the night bus ticket offices in the centre of the bus station and got so severely hassled by people wanting us to buy tickets from them that we just fucked off fast out of the bus station.
We started walking, without having even the faintest clue as to where the town was. Not far from the bus station, we saw a sign saying "hotel", so we checked it out.
There was a woman standing out the front and a man walked up when we started talking to her. They pointed inside. There were three men hanging around and they were acting really weird. One of them showed us a room, but we both had a weird feeling about the place and we left quickly. It was almost certainly just a brothel and they were surprised by us wanting a room there. But they were laughing and acting strangely, which made us wonder what was going on. And we didn't really feel like hanging round to find out!
We carried on walking down the road, wondering where the fuck we were going. There weren't any bemos going past, which made me think we weren't going towards the town centre. Then, suddenly, i remembered i hadn't done my usual little ritual of introducing myself to the land, which i always do when i touch ground in a new place, and i did it quickly. A minute or two later, we passed a shop across the road and a man sitting in it waved. I waved back and then thought let's go and ask him. Sure enough, town was the opposite direction. He flagged down a bemo for us and we got in.
It was a longish drive into town and things were made more confusing by the fact that it was dark and we couldn't really see what sort of areas we were passing through, but the bemo crew and the other passengers were really friendly and helpful and eventually we ended up at the Hotel Rennie, a losmen down a laneway near a big mosque around the centre of town.
We spent the last of our money on some fried tofu and two bottles of beer. Fuck, it was good to lie down on a bed! We'd travelled the entire length of Java in thirty six hours, including going through Jakarta, and we'd caught six buses and a ferry. It had really been a hell trip. But it wasn't over yet! We got a night off, that was all!
*-*-*
We went to the bus station at around midday, hoping it wouldn't be as full-on as it was the previous night. But it was. If anything, it was worse, as we actually wanted to get one of the tickets that these bastards were hassling us to buy. But they were so pushy and there were so many of them onto us at once that we just couldn't be deal with it at all. In the end, we just gave up and fucked off back into town to buy a map and check out the trains. One of the worst things was wanting to get the fuck out of Bandar Lampung but not even knowing the name of the next town on our route.
The railway station was weird. It was more or less closed up, with no ticket office open or anything. But we talked to some of the staff and they told us there was a train out at nine o'clock that night. We didn't fancy spending nine hours more in that town, waiting for a train that would drop us off at three in the morning at a town we didn't want to go to. So, armed with a map of Sumatra, we went back to the bus station. This time it was fairly simple and we were soon on a bus on the way to Kotabumi, the next town of any kind of size on the map, about a hundred kilometres north.
*-*-*
When we first got off the bus at Kotabumi, we thought "Shit! We fucked up badly again!" But it turned out to be the best move we'd made for a long time.
Soon after arriving, we ended up buying tickets for Pakanbaru from a ticket agent with an office on the highway. These cost us about the same as they would have from Bandar Lampung, but we didn't have to fight our way through a crowd of shouting hassling idiots to get them. There was supposed to be a bus at about seven o'clock, which was two hours away. That wasn't too bad.
The man we bought the tickets off took us next door to a little rumah makan and bought us coffee. Then we decided we wanted a beer and they pointed us to a small tobacco, sweets, drinks etc shop over the road. It was run by an old man who was really nice and friendly. He asked us if we wanted to drink the beer there. When we said yes, he sat us in a couple of folding chairs, gave us glasses and opened the bottle for us.
Sitting in that little shop drinking beer was probably one of the most pleasant moments of the whole journey. I had a bit of a chat with the old man and wished my Indonesian was better so i could have talked to him properly and asked him a bit about himself instead of just telling him about me. He seemed to have a better than average knowledge of geography - well, he knew where Timor was, anyway, which most Indonesians don't! - and i wondered if he'd done a bit of travelling himself. He seemed like he'd have some interesting stories to tell anyway.
A couple of boys came up to the counter to buy a cigarette each and asked him who we were. They were a bit off, and even more so when he said we were having a beer. One of them looked even more disgusted by the foreigners in the shop - probably a little self-righteous muslim shit! They're almost as bad as catholics, those bastards! Anyway, before he could say anything else, the old man told him that we spoke indonesian, which shut him up.
A few more adults and kids came to have a look at us, but the old man sent them away. We had another bottle of beer and then went back over to the bus agent's place - just in case he decided to go home early or something. We had the tickets, but we needed him to get us on the actual bus when it came. We needn't have worried, but sometimes it pays to stay in sight, so they don't forget you.
*-*-*
One bus came along, but we didn't take it as we wouldn't have had seats. Then after a while another one came and we thought fuck it, we'll just get on, seats or not. But no chance! It was so crowded that the other passengers wouldn't let us get on board. Back through the pissing rain to the bench in the office.
Then, not long after seven, we finally got lucky on the third bus and ended up with two seats together. It was fairly comfortable too.
That bus was pretty well fucked. The back shockies were virtually non-existent, which made it lurch quite badly round corners. And the road for probably the next six hundred or so kilometres was appalling - just one long series of sharp bends, one straight after the other, with only room for one bus or truck on each corner at once. It was slow and extremely uncomfortable. I hardly slept at all that night.
*-*-*
"Well, with luck, we should be crossing the equator today. A good time - the same time as the sun. Today could be the equinox, or it could be yesterday or tomorrow, i don't know. But crossing the equator on the equinox, at the same time as the sun crosses it, must be good.
"However, we might not be in luck today. At the moment we're stranded in a shitty little nowhere town called Kiliran Jao, about two hundred and fifty kilometres from Pekanbaru."
The bus we got on in Kotabumi wasn't actually going to Pekanbaru, it was going to Padang, which isn't quite on the way. So they dropped us in Kiliran Jao, which is at the turnoff to Pekanbaru, to wait for another bus. There was also an indonesian family who were in the same situation, which was probably lucky for us.
The people on the bus we got off said we'd be right for travelling the rest of the way on the same ticket, but one of the bus station people tried hard to get us to pay another twenty thousand rupiah, which was two thirds of the cost of the original ticket, and go on an air-con bus. But we all said no, we want an ekonomi and we're not paying any more. So we just had to wait.
And we waited five hours...
To get out, we had to cram onto an already crowded bus. There was a plank running the whole length of the aisle, suspended between the seats, with just enough room to put one leg on each side and sit astride it. We had to squeeze onto this along with quite a few other people. Needless to say it wasn't very comfortable - even at the start of the five hour journey.
This was the most horrific part of the trip so far! The bus took the shortest route to Pekanbaru. This road, at its best, was only slightly better than a country lane. At its widest, the road was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass.
There was an advantage to being perched half on a narrow plank in the middle of the bus and that was that i got a good view out of the front window. It was one of the most crazy trips i'd ever done.
I reckon on average over the whole two hundred and fifty kilometres there was probably a fairly major obstacle every hundred metres, which required careful navigation, specially with an overloaded bus. There were holes in the road, lumps of timber, hump-like bridges, piles of gravel, sections of rough dirt road, broken down trucks, very sharp corners, cows, goats and almost everything else imaginable. There was also a constant stream of trucks and buses going the other way, which had to be passed carefully. Bicycles wobbling along with two people on them, hand carts, children. Pedestrians were wandering all over the place, apparently oblivious to the steady flow of heavy vehicles speeding past to and from Pekanbaru, which is a major industrial and oil centre. Log trucks with trailers and bits of wood hanging out dangerously, crowded buses, with the roofs piled up with luggage, big trucks with tarpaulins over their backs, indonesian style mini petrol tankers, trucks with mechanical diggers on the back, small trucks, large trucks, flying along where they can and going slowly through danger spots. And all the way, the road went through village after village, with people sitting standing, walking around, living normal lives on the edges of this crazy road.
Somewhere along here we crossed the equator.
Meanwhile, my arse and legs were getting more and more uncomfortable from the cramped position i was forced to sit in on that narrow plank. But anyway, we eventually arrived at Pakanbaru (or Pekanbaru as it's also known) at around half past ten that night.
*-*-*
Unfortunately, the bus didn't go to the bus station, but to the terminal of the bus company which was a few kilometres out of town. There was a bemo standing there, but it showed no sign that it was going anywhere very soon. Another one came in and the driver said the fare to town was five thousand rupiah each. I just laughed and walked off. It was a ridiculous price for a bemo ride, normally a thousand would have got the two of us there and back, with change.
We ended up walking out to the road to try and flag one down. There were two young men out on the roadside and they said they were waiting for a bemo and we should take one together as it was dangerous to walk down the road. If i hadn't been in a state of complete demented fuckedupness from four days on buses, and specially from that last section, i would have spotted this as a dodgy situation and just kept on walking. But i didn't.
Soon after, a bemo drove up, well, not really a bemo, but the same sort of van, only with just one seat in the back running crossways with back doors like a car. The two Indonesians spoke to the driver and then one of them said it was a thousand rupiah between the four of us, so we all jumped in.
When we got into the town centre, near the bus station, they asked us for five thousand rupiah between us. I began to get really pissed off at this point and started arguing with them. We stopped at the bus station, where we jumped out straight away and continued the hassling on the street. First i gave them a thousand, and then two thousand and the driver was arguing, so i said alright, get the police and started looking around. I had no intention of having anything to do with the police, but i thought it would freak them out.
Eventually i just walked away. The other two were going through some show of finding the money between them to pay the rest of the supposed ten thousand. Then i thought again and gave them the five thousand rupiah. I was pretty certain they were all in on trying to rip us off, because five thousand rupiah was massively over the odds for a journey like that, about ten times what it should have been. But then i thought seeing, as my judgement was so impaired anyway, i might be wrong and i wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all it was only three dollars fifty to me, but a fuck of a lot of money to an average indonesian. Anyway, i still walked away very pissed off.
*-*-*
I'd checked out someone's Lonely Plonker guide book in Ende, for places to stay in Pekanbaru and it only had one in it, which was Tommy's, near the bus station.
We walked down the lane where it was supposed to be and after a little way, a few kids came up and asked us if we were looking for Tommy's we said "maybe" and they said "come with us" and started walking back the way we'd come. It was probably a combination of the bullshit with the bemo and the effects of all the dozens of people at bus stations etc, that seem to have tried to make us go with them over the last few days, but we turned round and just kept on walking.
Anyway, we didn't find anything that looked like a losmen and we ended up walking back up the next street. We stopped at a tailors shop that also sold drinks and sweets and stuff and got a bottle of beer, which we sat down on a bench outside to drink.
The people in the shop were asking us where we were staying the night and suggested Tommy's. They gave us vague directions how to get there. But just then a man and a boy rode up on a moped and the shop people called them over. It was Yan, who runs Tommy's, with one of the kids who spoke to us in the lane before. They'd told him we were looking for the place and he'd come out to look for us!
He waited while we finished our beer and then walked with us back to his place. Nicki asked him if he was Tommy and he said no, he was Tommy's brother, Tommy was in trouble with the council and couldn't run a homestay any more, so he was running it now!
"Tommy's Place" was a small, three-room semi detached bungalow, out the back of a house on the original lane we'd walked down. Two rooms had two beds in and the other one had four bunks. Out the back, through the room with the bunks in it, was the kamar mandi. This had half a well in the middle. The other side of the well was divided off by a common wall with the house next door, which shared the well. It was a bit of a strange place, but it was comfortable and cheap.
It was great to lie on a bed again! By the time we'd got in and sorted, it was half past eleven and we hadn't eaten for ages, so we went straight out again, to look for some food.
There were warungs, or food stalls, all along Jalan Nangka, which was the nearby main road that runs along the front of the bus station. We walked along and checked them out. Eventually, we got some tofu, tempeh and a couple of different root vegetables fried in rice flour batter. We bought a bottle of beer and went back to our room to eat, drink and recover from the nightmare journey that had brought us here.
It had been a pretty drastic change in our travelling style. After taking two weeks to cover two hundred and fifty kilometres, we'd suddenly just done ten times that distance in a little over six days! The pace had been frantic for the last three and a half, during which time we'd travelled on nine buses and a ferry, and we were completely shattered.
*-*-*
The next day, i went to the bank to cash a travellers cheque to pay for the trip from here to Singapore, which we were going to do the next day. I made the mistake of giving the bank clerk my british passport as the fact that my money was british and my passport was austrlian had only added to the confusion in the bank in Bandar Lampung. The clerk asked me about not having an entry stamp and i told him i had an australian passport too. This caused him a bit of concern and he went of to get someone higher up.
This next jerk then questioned me about why i had two passports "in the same name"! I told him millions of people in the world have two passports, but he didn't believe me - i suppose it was because very few indonesians are able to get even one passport. He told me that if they hadn't already changed my money he would have refused me if he'd known i had two passports!!! They photocopied them both and no doubt they were quickly on the phone to the police to inform them about someone who was obviously a criminal, carrying two passports "in the same name"...
I'm sure what really got the smug little turd going was that i've got tattoos all up my arm. There was a national tattoo witch hunt going on in Indonesia at that time. A couple of weeks before, someone with a tattoo had supposedly killed a cop in Jakarta and the police were using that as an excuse to round up everyone with tattoos and... Well, who knows what they were doing to them, but as it was Indonesia, they were probably bashing, torturing and killing them. The Indonesian government's got a history of indiscriminately murdering tattooed people.
Later that day, on the television in the house next door to Tommy's, i saw a story on the news about the tattoo witch hunt. They showed a number of tattooed men lined up for the camera against a wall in a police station in Jakarta. I couldn't really follow the commentary, but i got a fair idea what was going on. However, they didn't show what became of these latest victims of this fascist military dictatorship.
It's fucked anywhere, but in a way it's even more of a shame here, in a country with a strong history of tattoo culture in parts of it. Tattoo styles from Borneo, in particular, have had a major influence on modern european, american and australian tattoo art. And other islands in the javanese empire, whose people have a lot of polynesian ancestry, have strong tattoo culture as part of their history.
It was good to be a tourist walking around Indonesia covered in tattoos at that time. Because i was white and european, i was part of what the indonesian government is promoting as something to aspire to, but at the same time, i was tattooed, which they're condemning as evil and a threat to society. I was also virtually untouchable as far as the police were concerned, as the government is desperate to attract more tourists to the place. A lot of people on the streets expressed appreciation for my tattoos and there seemed to be a certain ammount of adimiration for the fact that i could walk around openly displaying them.
A lot of people, were trying to remove tattoos at that time. I meet one young man with massive ugly scars on his upper arm, where he used to have one. And another whose tattoo was swollen and inflamed, from his attempts at removing it. Displaying tattoos was almost certain to attract the unwanted attention of the police. You don't see older people with tattoos in those parts of Indonesia - they were all slaughtered in 1971.
*-*-*
Eventually we arrived at the river and the bus stopped at a jetty. There were the normal crew of people selling rice, drinks, peanuts and other things travellers might need for their journey, but we didn't have long to wait. After about quarter of an hour a speed boat came down the river and stopped at the wharf and there was usual mental scramble and all-in wrestling match to get on board.
The boat was more or less like a bus, with a hundred or so seats inside. It was air-conditioned, but there was an open area at the back and on the top, where you could sit and watch the water shoot by at about twenty knots. Considering the speed it travelled at, it created a surprisingly small wake. There were television screens in the two seating sections which showed kung fu movies the whole journey.
We went down the river, which was lined on both sides with mangroves, for about half an hour, passing lots of boats of all shapes and sizes. There were little boats with triangular sails; long, narrow dinghies being rowed standing up and facing forwards, with the oars tied onto a single long, vertical peg on each side; small narrow boats with motors; wooden barges; a massive lighter, stacked up with cargo and towed by a tug; passenger speedboats with three outboard motors.
We passed several small villages on the edge of the river, their huts built on stilts over the water and a shipyard, where timber boats were being built. Eventually we docked somewhere, i think it was actually an island, surrounded by river delta. A lot of people got off and a lot more got on, but we got away from there quite quickly.
There was this crazy bi-lingual kung-fu film on the television, with chinese and english subtitles, about a very small, bald child superhero and a little boy who shaves his head and tries to copy him. Or something...
Then, after a while, we came to the open sea which was dotted with lots of little, tree covered islands. The next stop after that was Tanjungbalai, on Karimun Island. This town was spread out along the coast of the island and you could see it from quite a distance away.
Then, after four hours on this ferry, we arrived at Batam. This island is part of Indonesia, but it's the closest one to Singapore and it's where Singapore businessmen go for a day on the golf course and it has the same high prices as its gigantic city neighbour. We got in and out of there as quickly as possible and luckily we were in time for the last ferry, which leaves really early, at around seven in the evening. This was just as well as we really didn't want to get stuck on Batam for the night.
*-*-*
On the ferry to Singapore, they gave us small cartons of soya milk once we were underway. That was great, it had been a very long time since we'd had any.
I looked back at Indonesia as we sped across the water towards the skyscrapers of the ultra-modern city ahead of us. It was a strange contrast. I was glad to be leaving Indonesia. I hadn't liked the place much this time. The last time i'd been there, i'd spent all my time around fairly touristy parts of Lombok and it had been very different. This time, i'd seen a lot of the country and got more of a feel of how it really was. And how it really was was a fascist military dictatorship, keeping the population in a terminal state of fear and poverty. It was an empire where genocide was practiced without a care by the rich and powerful bastards who were in control. Where the people had to be extremely careful about giving any kind of opinion on anything vaguely political because it's too dangerous to be seen to be thinking for yourself. The massive slaughter of the early seventies is still there in the air, when millions of people were massacred not for what they did, but for what they thought. The people have learnt from this and they don't voice any thoughts that could be taken as political opinions unless they're in praise of the arseholes in power.
The massacres are still going on. East Timor is one of the main places where the military might of Java is concentrating its evil colonial forces. The continuing genocide and torture and oppression there is being totally ignored by most of the world's press, but it's still going on. In February, not long before we were in Timor, the army tortured six students to death. I read a story about in an english language Jakarta paper while we were on the Kelimutu, it said that the military leaders have admitted they were wrong to do it: there are rules which govern conduct in war, they said, and they were broken - but the six people were rebels anyway. Implying that because of that it didn't matter.
There are similar things going on in West Papua, which the javanese imperialists call "Irian Jaya". There are resistance movements in several regions of the javanese empire, as Indonesia should really be known. It's not a country, it's a massive group of nations, each with their own language and culture, that are being subjected to domination, exploitation and extermination by the military oligarchy.
The poverty of third world countries bothers me. I don't feel comfortable with the knowledge that our wealth - and even poor people in european countries are generally better off - has been stolen from these countries. The wealth of Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia has come entirely from colonization, nowhere else. It's maintained by the artificial manipulation of international exchange rates so that the rich countries can continue to heavily exploit the poor countries by paying virtually nothing for their products.
Our ability to travel in these countries very cheaply is really only a side effect of that, but it doesn't make me feel very comfortable. Although i can live with it so long as i attempt to redress the balance in some way. Not, however, in the way that The hip capitalist entrepreneur who runs the Lonely Plonker guides to the coolest places on earth, suggests: "Don't worry about the fact that you're fucking up their cultures and their country and ripping them off blind. Just spending your money there makes up for all that... You belong to the master race - just go!" Or something along those lines...
However, for some reason, i found it much harder to handle the fact that the poverty of the people whose country i was living cheaply in was being deliberately maintained by a fascist military dicatorship, whose grip of fear was being reinforced by the so-called "western" powers. Australia for instance, is keeping very quiet about the genocide going on in East Timor because, with Java, it's jointly exploiting the oil fields in the Timor Gap, which would belong to the East Timorese if they had sovereignty over their country. Of course, the australian government's also scared it will be next on Java's list of places to colonize!
Anyway, i was also glad to be leaving Indonesia because it was one of the most difficult places to travel through that i've ever been and i desperately needed a rest from the endless hassle it involved.
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We'd arrived at the jetty at the world trade centre in Singapore at about eight o'clock, expecting to have to spend a night in this big, expensive city. We'd changed our minds about staying here long enough to get our visas for India, partly due to the expense that would be involved and partly due to neither of us really fancying spending that long somewhere like Singapore. Instead, we thought we might as well get them in Kuala Lumpur. That way, if we wanted to, we could go off somewhere else in Malaysia while we waited.
It was wonderful to arrive in Singapore and, for the first time in what seemed like a hundred places, not get hassled as we tried to get off the ferry. I'm not a great fan of the relatively dull culture of the so-called "developed" countries, but at that time it was a pleasant change to be back in one again! Singapore reminded me in a lot of ways of Australia. I guess it had that same british colonial touch to it, that same british influence on the architecture and the general structure of the place, i don't really know. Anyway, whatever it was, neither of us had any great desire to hang around there any longer than we had to. I wouldn't have minded if we'd had to stay one night, just to get a bit of a feel of it, but i certainly wasn't disappointed when, half an hour after arriving, we got to the railway station and found there was a train that night.
Inside Singapura station there was a smallish ticket hall with a very high arched roof. High up on the walls, there were panels painted on tiles - three pictures, made up of three panels each, were on each of two opposite walls. These depicted a variety of mainly rural scenes from an obviously colonial past. Rubber tappers at work; people working in rice fields, a railway being built; people climbing trees to gather coconuts; an interesting assortment of ships and boats - including an old three-masted square rigger; a rural scene with an ox-cart, coconut palms and a thatched hut. A portrayal of a tranquil and industrious colonial Malaya, where the natives were obviously happy to be slaving away to support the Brutish Empire. Anyway, despite its obvious imperial origin, it was an interesting and, in a way beautiful decoration for a railway station.
What wonderful luxury it was, speeding through the warm peninsular night in second class sleepers. The sleeping carriages had two rows of double bunks, one on each side, running the whole length of an open corridor. Each bunk had a curtain, sheets and a pillow. This was unbelievably comfortable compared to the way we'd been travelling up till now. In fact it was more comfortable than most of the travelling i've done in my life. And we appreciated it doubly after the last week of hell!
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There was something i liked about Kuala Lumpur, or K.L. as all the locals seem to call it. Something indefinable. It was probably a combination of things really, because although it's a big, modern city, it had a very definite character of its own. A character that was distinctly asian.
One thing that struck me in KL was the apparent harmony that it's three main ethnic groups live side by side in. As well as ethnic Malays, Malaysia has large populations of Chinese and Indians. The Indians are mainly Tamils, from the south of India. These three communities have been living together for over a century and, from the point of view of an outsider and a stranger to this country, they seem to have arrived at some kind of peaceful co-existence. Of course, i could be quite mistaken here, as appearances can often be deceptive when it comes to such matters.
In Malaysia, the Malays hold the political power, being mainly muslims, in a predominantly muslim country, while the Chinese hold the economic power, being naturally good at business. The Indians seem to just live in their own little world, not too concerned about what the Chinese and the Malays are up to, so long as they're not bothering them.
This is, of course, a gross simplification and probably a considerably distorted view, but i offer it purely as the shallow impression of someone who wasn't there for very long. No doubt the reality is much more complicated than that.
Anyway, what i felt in those first days in KL was that here was a genuine example of multiculturalism. It's a phrase that's often heavily overused and often, particuarly in Australia, used in the weirdest of ways, but it's something that you rarely get to see. Somehow it seemed to exist in KL. Multiculturalism in this case appears to mean the different cultures not really having much to do with each other. But then maybe that's the only way we can live that closely with other cultures without a lot of friction. It certainly appeared to mean the individual groups being able to maintain their cultures reasonably intact.
I don't know why i felt this more in KL than anywhere else i've been. Certainly Hackney and Stoke Newington, where i used to live in London are very multicultural, with no one racial or ethnic group being really dominant. But there, there's a lot of tension. Not necessarily racial tension, just a tension that i didn't feel in KL. Maybe it was me, maybe it's the way Asians are, i don't know. But i suspect there's much more tension generally in european cities than in asian ones.
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Anyway, we stayed in a hostel called the Travellers Moon Lodge, in Jalan Silang, in Chinatown. It was run by a tamil family and was a very friendly and comfortable place to stay - as well as being cheap. It was a lively area, with lots of food and drink stalls in the streets. The ones i frequented the most were the ones which sold fresh soya milk by the glass. It was such a luxury to be able to drink it again after not seeing it anywhere at all in Indonesia. There was also a large selection of good quality cheap fruit - in fact Malaysia seemed to have better fruit than most other places i've been.
Not far away, just around the corner really, was the Indian area, near Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman and Jalan Masjid India. This was a good place to eat, as there were a lot of cheap southern indian restaurants, where it was easy to find good vegan food. There were also street sellers with a good selection of nuts and indian fried snacks.
The best and cheapest meals were to be had in the various banana leaf restaurants, where you got a banana leaf laid on the table in front of you, which was then piled up with rice and a variety of tasty curries. You eat this with your right hand and the custom is to fold the banana leaf in half when you've finished - otherwise you get another helping. In these places, you can eat a large, filling meal for only a couple of ringgits. This was heaven after the last couple of weeks of near-starvation, however, neither of us had big enough stomachs to hold a full meal without difficulty any more!
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We found the indian high commission, which was quite a trek from Chinatown, away from any bus routes, and went to apply for visas. We had to pay for them to check us out with the high commissions in our various countries (like a fool i told them i lived in Britain, which meant we had to pay for two telexes, rather than just one!) and they told us to come back in a week.
However, we changed our minds in the meantime. We'd spent a lot more money than we had expected, getting this far. And it wasn't going to be quite as cheap as we'd hoped to get from there to Madras. Nicki only had a limited ammount of money and it was beginning to look as if she'd only have enough to get there and then back to Australia, but not enough to live on while she was there. We didn't make any final decision about what we were going to do, but we decided we didn't really want to hang around in KL while we decided, and we'd go to Penang and work it out somehow along the way. There was still a glimmer of a possibility that there would be a boat from Penang to Madras, although this was looking distinctly unlikely now. And it was also possible that air fares would be cheaper there too. Anyway, we were going to go and find out.
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The journey was uninspiring, as most of the route was very built-up and industrialized. There was virtually no interesting countryside to be seen on this particular journey, although i'm sure Malaysia has it's share of natural beauty. Unfortunately, too, the train was air-conditioned, which made it cold and suffocating and we had backwards-facing seats. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the ease and lack of hassle of travelling in Malaysia.
The railway station at Butterworth is right next to the jetty where you catch the ferry across to Penang, which is an island a mile or two off the coast. The ferries are similar to the one we had the misfortune to travel from Timor to Flores in, with the lower deck for cars and the upper deck for passengers. It takes quarter of an hour or so to get to Georgetown, the main city on Penang.
That night, we stayed in the Tye Anne hotel on Lebuh Chulia, which is one of the main streets in Georgetown, and is certainly the main tourist street. It was a weird place, with a very steep wooden staircase leading up from the street door to the hotel which was on the first floor and above. Downstairs is a restaurant which does a lot of european food - like baked beans on toast - and is almost exclusively patronized by tourists.
But we didn't like the Tye Anne very much, we both agreed it had a strange and uncomfortable feeling. So the next morning we checked out and went in search of somewhere else. We ended up in the Plaza Hostel on Lebuh Ah Quee, which was a massive place run by Indians. It had a gigantic dormitory, with about thirty beds, all double bunks which were a bit too close together for comfort. However, it wasn't too bad, although we found the other guests extremely unfriendly compared to what we'd been used to. No-one said hello when they passed you, or smiled, or even looked at you - not even the person in the next bed to you! This was a real contrast with the Travellers Moon Lodge in KL, which was a very friendly place. I later realized that this was a result of the fact that almost all the people here had come here from Thailand. I don't know exactly what it is, but i think it's because Thailand's packed solid with european tourists and you just get sick of the sight of them, which makes you much less friendly. Whatever it was, we didn't like it.
There were, in fact, massively more tourists in Georgetown than anywhere else we'd been up till then. It seems to be a very popular destination, mainly due to its closeness to Thailand. A lot of people go there for a few days when their thai visa expires and apply for another one so they can go back and spend more time there. A lot of people were also travelling between Thailand and Indonesia - there's a ferry from Georgetown to Medan in the north of Sumatra, which is a very popular tourist destination. For some reason, Malaysia didn't seem to interest very many people, except as a crossroads which they got through as quick as they could. This was strange, as i preferred Malaysia to both Indonesia and Thailand, by a very long way. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest if i never went to Indonesia or Thailand again, but i'd certainly like to spend some more time in Malaysia.
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I really liked Georgetown. I don't exactly know why. The fact that it was right by the ocean contributed a lot. You could take a short walk from where we were staying to Padang Kota, which was a park area on the water's edge. From there, there were views of the mountains on the mainland, across the channel between there and Penang. To your right, you could see the docklands of Butterworth and on the left, there was the open waters of the Bay of Bengal (although i think it's called the Andaman Sea there).
I also liked that feeling that it was a multicultural city, which was as strong here as it had been in KL. The main indian area was centred around a street called Lebuh Pasar. This was close to our hostel and one of my favourite places to wander through. There were a lot of food stalls doing south indian dishes as well as a few banana leaf restaurants where we could eat well and cheaply. There were also sari shops, music shops with loud indian pop music coming from them, and other shops with an assortment of indian products.
At Padang Kota, in the evening there was a mass of food stalls, with tables and chairs spread out between them. Here the food was mainly malay style and it was a great place to sit by the ocean and eat a good meal. There were always a lot of people around there at that time of day, mainly Malays.
All along Lebuh Chulia, and most of the side streets off it, there were a lot of chinese hotels and cafes. There was a lot of good chinese food available eveywhere, although i didn't eat much of it as it's hard to find anything that hasn't got some animal products in it and, anyway, they tend to use msg in everything and i don't like the way that stuff makes me feel. Not far past the Tye Anne, on Lebuh Chulia, near the end of the hardware market, there were a lot of food stalls in the street at night. Near here too, there was a morning street market where you could buy all sorts of fruit, vegetables, dead animals and a fair selection of other types of food too. All in all, Georgetown was a great place to find interesting, good quality and cheap things to eat. And as our stomachs gradually stretched back to normal size, we began to be able to stuff ourselves with less discomfort!
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One day, wandering along Lebuh Chulia, i ran into Martin, who we'd met in KL. He was on his way up to an organic farm in the hills on the other side of the island, where he said guests were welcome and you could stay there and be fed in return for working on the farm. That sounded interesting to me and i began to think about going up there for a while.
Nicki was keen on the idea too. We both felt like doing something constructive with our time, rather than just being vacant wandering tourists, continually consuming and not giving anything back. We were also both really interested in finding out what was going on in organic farming in this part of the world and we were both keen to support any efforts to change farming practices towards this form of growing.
We had actually been intending to try and do this sort of work in India, but it had begun to look more and more like we wouldn't be going there now. Up till this point, we still hadn't decided what we were going to do, but i'd realized i was trying to go the wrong way round the world and had begun to seriously think about going from here to Mexico - where i'd been hoping to go later on in the year. It was a bit of a drastic change of idea, but that's normal for me. My life is one long chain of u-turns and i never know where i'm really going until i've been there!
The organic farm seemed like a perfect answer to the big question hanging over us - what are we going to do next? We decided to go up and check it out.
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The scenery on the way was interesting. Georgetown and its suburbs went on for a long way into the hills and there seemed to be plenty more being built on the fringes. In fact, the urban or suburban zone really didn't end till we got to Balik Pulau, which was very definitely a small country town. From there to Sungei Pinang, it was farmland all the way.
We got off the bus at Sungei Pinang which was a fairly small village at the bottom of the hills, on the edge of a flat coastal plain. From here, we had to walk up the road to the north, which went towards Teluk Bahang on the north coast of Penang. We walked along that road, uphill all the way, for maybe half an hour before we came to the beginning of the track which went up to the farm. There was an enormous boulder on the hillside, just above the road, and on this we could just make out, in faded red paint, the words "Penang Organic Farm".
This track was really just a path and it wound its way up the hillside at quite a steep slope for what seemed like eternity. It was a hottish day, in a humid, wet season sort of way, and although we hadn't got much stuff with us, our packs still weighed too much. We had to stop for a break every so often and to glug down a load more water, which we'd fortunately remembered to bring. The path passed a number of small farms on the way up and at every one we thought hopefully "is this it?" But each time we spotted the faded red paint on the path: "O F" with an arrow pointing upwards.
Eventually, after about an hour climbing this path, we arrived at the farm. There was fair sized timber farm house and Martin was inside. He was the only person there at the time. Ong, the man who ran the place was off somewhere else for a few days.
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We spent the next couple of days not really doing much. We did a bit of weeding here and there, but because we didn't really know what needed to be done, we couldn't really do anything else. I've spent quite a lot of time growing things in this sort of situation, but everyone has their own ways of doing things and i knew there was no point in trying to work out what to do as i had no idea of the way Ong liked things done. Anyway, we weren't too worried, it was really nice to be out in the bush again, without fucking electricity and with real air and clean spring water to drink. And we both really needed it.
I decided i was going to go to Thailand for a couple of weeks. I needed a spell on the beach and i fancied spending a bit of time in that country before i went to Mexico - which was what i'd now decided i was going to do. I was going to fly there in a month, on the next new moon of course, and i thought it would be a good idea if me and Nicki had a bit of time apart before we went our separate ways, so that when that happened we wouldn't be glad to see the back of each other! Nicki didn't have a lot of money left, but if she stayed here for a while, she wouldn't be spending much anyway. That was what she wanted to do, so we were both happy.
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