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Green Hill
Zone - 28/04/2006
So, after four
or five hours speeding across the Melaka straits, subjected to
constant Karaoke, we arrived in Indonesia, in Medan, the fourth
biggest city and capital of Sumatra, which is the 6th biggest
island in the world
and stretches almost 2000km from Banda Aceh to Bandarlampung.
We traversed virtually the entire length in just 6 days, over 3
bus rides.
From sweltering, polluted Medan we quickly dealt with the
scheming touts trying to lure us onto minibuses with inflated
prices and eventually made our way to the terminal and headed
straight for Lake Toba. The trip took 5 hours to make the 190km
journey and was an interesting introduction to Indonesia. Under
cover of darkness we crossed the Lake from Parapat to Samosir
island. The lake is beautiful and emerged from the crater of a
volcano, the island rising out is the extinct cone. The area
around Lake Toba is the centre of the Batak culture, a group of
five tribes that migrated to Sumatra from Mongolia, Thailand and
other northern neighbours. They are now 99% Christian, and live
in harmony with the surrounding Muslim areas. Nowadays however
the main religion on Samosir is tourism and in Indonesia today,
with tourism figures low, the prices are ultra-cheap. Our hotel
felt like an exclusive resort. The island is covered in jungle
and at the end of the rainy season is awash in a sea of
different shades of green.
Pulau Samosir, Lake Toba
We took a walk around the Tuk-Tuk peninsular and to the
neighbouring village of Ambarita, past rice paddies and small
groups of graves and tombs decorated in black and red patterns.
At every tea shop we passed there were groups of old men all
playing chess, which seems to be a pan-Indonesian hobby. We
were hoping for a game but there were no more boards available
so we had to wait until we returned to our room and use our own.
Our good deed in Samosir was spending a morning with a group of
about 30 schoolchildren
from the region helping them to learn English.
Our next trip in Sumatra was across to Bukittinggi in the Bukit
Barisan mountains. However before we could find the bus
terminal we again had to run the gauntlet of would-be agents
telling us that their restaurant/cafe/stall is the bus station
before we could actually find it ourselves. The bus ride took
16 hours winding through the green hills of North Sumatra, again
the scenery was almost entirely green, really evoking images of
the jungles described by Conrad.
Dawn in Bukittinggi
Bukittinggi is a nice hill town, famous across Sumatra for its
bi-weekly market. Around the town is also a nice canyon and
some limestone formations behind farmers in conical hats in
their rice paddies, which seemed more
Vietnamese than Indonesian. The canyon was a nice walk and the
market provided snacks for the next journey.
The next journey was indeed protracted. We left Bukittinggi
Jakarta-bound having been told the journey should be about 29
hours. Over 41 hours later we arrived in Jakarta having stopped
incessantly to make repairs the bus, or to eat or to pray at the
Mosque for an hour. Every three or four hours of driving
produced a shift of roughly 1/8" on the map. We came down from
the mountains of the west and into the lowlands approaching the
port of Bakauheni and the 2.5 hour ferry crossing to Java.
Unfortunately due to the
tardiness of the bus we crossed during the night, unable to
catch a glimpse of Krakatoa just a few kilometres off to
starboard. It does prompt a slight feeling of nervousness to be
that close to the volcano that erupted with the worlds biggest
bang ever recorded and caused tidal problems as far away as the
English channel. We left Bukittinggi at 11:30am on the 26th of
April and arrived in Jakarta at around 5:30am on the 28th.
Along the Trans-Sumatra
Highway
So, what can I say about Indonesia after this brief
introduction? Firstly, Indonesians might well be the laziest
people I have ever met. All across Asia one gets used to the
buses stopping every 20metres for someone to get on or off,
seemingly unable to all wait at a designated stop. However here
in Indonesia it is even more extreme. On our long journey from
Bukittinggi we stopped at one place in order to eat and to
service the bus and we were waiting for maybe one hour for
somebody to find some oil. There were two passengers looking
extremely bored and anxious, they had about 20 cigarettes while
they were waiting. Then, not even 400m after we set off they
jumped up and got off!
I have already mentioned chess. The other major pastime here
seems to be music. Every time we get on a bus, ferry or
train we are soon subjected to buskers of varying qualities, all
armed with some instrument or another trying to extract money
from the passengers. We even saw a jogger in Bukittinggi
carrying a giant recorder with him, though he did not look as if
he was able to play it and jog at the same time. If there are
no buskers then the other feature of Indonesian transport is
karaoke. On the buses and ferries the TV screens are not used
for showing movies but for showing karaoke, constantly, 24/7.
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