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Published: February 16th 2005
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After blowing my budget to pieces in Thailand with the dive trip, I decided to hot - foot it through Malaysia (thought it was a bit crap last time and couldn't be arsed to give it a second go) and make my way to Jakarta in record time.
It was a fairly pain-free journey to the port of Melaka, Malaysia - if you consider 36 hours on a sleeper train and 3 buses pain-free (does this make me a 'guru-traveller'? I hope not - I haven't been to India and I don't have those stupid huge hole things in my ears yet). I stayed the night in Melaka. I told the guesthouse owner that I was getting the next ferry to Dumai, Indonesia the next morning. I was filled with stories of travellers being poisoned in restaurants and robbed. Primed with fear, I got the ferry the next day. I was the only foreigner.
When I got to Dumai, I made an 'instant friend' of this bloke with an id badge on (Photo and everything - wow! Dead obvious travel tip: IDs are easy to fake, I should know.). And so this bloke was going to help me out
Silly place name of the week
Who said that which we call a rose is still as sweet by any other name, anyway? Don't think it will become as big as Toni & Guy did. and he hung around the customs lounge while I got my visa. Mindful, Jedi, of the Melaka warning, I asked the visa-official about this bloke. It turned out that this feller was the kosher article (employed, I suppose, because Dumai is such a wild-west joint) and he drove me to the ATM and then to the bus station. Brilliant. There's always a balance between paranoia and trust.
So, 2 hours after getting off the ferry I was on *the* 38-hour bus journey from hell. At least the bus had air-con. In this part of the world, air-con translates to bloody freezin', so I crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere shivering and with hard nipples. At least I ate well - the bus stopped every 3 hours so that we could get some nosh. As we left each food joint, a couple of 'El Mariachi' would step onto the bus and give us a blast of their acoustic guitar and harmony singing. I thought this was quite funny and almost musical
Sink
It rains a lot at the mo'. It was explained to me that they have only 2 seasons here: wet an dry. I explained back that Britain has 8 wet seasons. until 3am on the second night when I was fast asleep with a blanket over my face and a couple of them strummed and clapped me awake. Everyone else was woken up too, but didn't say anything. I think I said "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING JOKING" rather loudly. But they carried on, loud and proud as The Proclaimers, regardless. In the morning, I was dropped into the seething mass of rain that is Jakarta.
Jakarta is the political and financial capital of the 17000 island archipelago that is Indonesia. It may be, if you believe some crap I read today, the new centre of Al-Qiada. I just thought it was a totally excellent place to go out on the piss for a few nights. (Even though I had some fever thing I thought was dengue from the mozzies - I have been bit to shit here - feel better now).
I am 'approaching the travelator' with no plan as yet, so I decided to give the cargo ship option for getting to Oz a go here in JK. I took a taxi to the huge super-industrial complex that is Tajung Priok Port. Bearing in mind that
They have it here too
Praise the Lord for Globalisation. I have been told that I cannot do this, how does a pig-headed person go about getting a lift to Australia? I started with the domestic ferry company, Pelni. They were not exactly busy which was good news because the language barrier was massive. One advantage to being English is the "David Beckham effect". As soon as you identify yourself as a Limey, you get a imaginatively pronounced "Dayveed Beckhom" in return plus some goodwill in the bargain. The Pelni guys gave me a piece of paper describing the name and place of a bloke to speak to and I jumped on the back of a moto-taxi to take me there. The bloke passed the buck and back onto the moto taxi I went. It was a bit like the wild-goose day in Irkutsk with my passport, but tons more fun and more smiles. After 4 taxi rides and 8 'Beckhoms' I found out who *the* man was. He left 10 minutes ago. The quest continues.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious. Not really. Now in Yogyakarta, still on Java. It has more of a laid back arty vibe
than Jakarta but reportedly full of crooks who are so talented that they will steal your pants without your knowledge. It is a great place to buy art and drink coffee. The level of touts is a bit annoying though. You start your day with tolerance: a benign smile and a pleasant 'no, thank you'. After a few hours of this, your nice-self is flagging. Time to bring on the more sharp, sarcastic and less personable aspects of you which have been warming up at the touchline all morning. So the replies now range somewhere from 'didn't you just see me say no to that guy just there?' to 'how does "fuck-off!" sound?'. Time-out for coffee fix and back to nice-self again. I bought a great pair of batik paintings from an area called the 'water castle'. After I paid, the shop owner said if I had come with a 'guide' the price would have been 2-3 times as much! Good job I had just shaken one off.
Next stop: a volcano and then Bali.
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