The real bus from hell

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Although not down at the eighth or ninth level, this one's a couple of levels lower in hell than the bus trip on Flores.

We leave Kandangan in the dark, heading for Balikpapan on the eastern coast of Borneo. No banana bags stacked in the aisle or conspiracy theorist babblers, but worse...a driver who seems to think he's an F1 racer. He aims the bus full speed down the middle of the road, smoking clove-scented cigarettes constantly, eating junk food and sometimes talking on his cell phone as we hurtle past every other vehicle.

For the next 10 hours only two cars will overtake us. Just as in India, the biggest rule the road. He doesn't slow for motorcycles or cars coming at us. For other buses and trucks he slams on the brakes at the last second coming to a near standstill, exchanges a few words with the oncoming driver as they creep past each other, then stamps on the accelerator again.

He's got a helper sitting in the navigator's seat beside him. Whenever he sees vehicles or pedestrians ahead on our side of the road he says “Az az az” - whatever that means - and whenever he sees a bump or pothole that he thinks we should slow for, or an oncoming bus or truck, he says “Tsch tsch tsch tsch” in imitation of the sound of the bus's air brakes.

I'm sitting in seat number one, directly behind the navigator. Great view of the road, but if something goes wrong out here I'll be the first one launched through the windshield.

At 21h30 we stop for a meal and the driver shows me pictures on his cell phone of his year-old son. I don't wish anything bad for the family but I wonder how soon the boy will lose his father in a road accident. We hear often enough in the media of bus crashes in Indonesia in which locals and tourists perish by the dozens. Now I know why.

At 22h00 we leave the bus stop and the driver puts on a CD of the horrible Indonesian pop music...at FULL VOLUME. I think it can't get worse until he starts to sing along. After an hour of this I fear we'll have to endure it all night but eventually he turns it off. After a while I can't watch anymore and just close my eyes. I want to sleep but it's impossible. I have to grip my armrest constantly as I'm thrown from side to side on each curve of the road.

The road is paved, but narrow, and has many potholes and dirt patches growing through like some kind of brown road cancer. He swerves left and right to miss these. At one point he swerves far over to the right, hitting the saplings and tree branches that line the road, then overcorrects coming back, nearly fishtailing to hit saplings and branches lining the left side of the road. The passenger in the seat beside me mutters “Rambo”. You can feel in the air that everyone on the bus is unhappy, but no one really complains: the bus driver has authority and in Asia people defer to authority without protest... until things become truly desperate.

We stop for another half-hour break at 02h30 and the driver turns the motor off. When it's time to go he can't restart the motor, so a bunch of people have to PUSH-START THE BUS. Just before we reach Balikpapan we cross a river on a ferry and when it's time to disembark they have to push-start the bus again, this time uphill against the ferry's incline, which is down at the stern. When several passengers get back on the bus brushing off their hands I realize who's been pushing the bus each time and feel guilty that I've been truant from some kind of expected participation. There's another bus from the same company beside ours with the same problem, so we hook a thick marine rope up and pull-start this bus while it's on the ferry.

As daylight comes on we cover the final kilometres into Balikpapan which are mercifully few in number. But the road is good and so is visibility so he drives even faster, careening around sharp corners at unbelievable speed for a bus. I'm sure we were never actually up on two wheels at any time, but there were moments when just a little more lean would have put daylight between road and rubber.

We screech into the station and I step down from the bus thoroughly shaken to face a small crowd of clamouring taxi and ojek (motorcycle-taxi) drivers. I snap at them to leave me alone. Unfair, certainly, but I'm rattled. One driver who is patiently persistent convinces me to go with him. We drive through the waking city with the sliding passenger door left open, cool morning air flowing in around me and slowly I calm down. I spend the morning at the airport, waiting for my flight to Tarakan.

The next day I take a high-speed ferry to Tawau in the Malaysian province of Sabah, then a minibus to nearby Semporna and a small boat to the island of Mabul off the northeast corner of Borneo for some of the world's best scuba diving.

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