As the sky brightened, the blue sea spread endlessly below , the cotton ball clouds dotted the skies like anti-aircraft bursts I’ve seen a thousand times in WWII movies, and on the horizon the dramatic tropical thunderheads stretched from sea to the heavens. As we approached Jakarta, I was given pause to think of the many and varied forces that bring/take me to a given locale in the world, and Indonesia was no different.
“You are the Orangutan.” Or so I was told by a girlfriend when I was in college. She gave me a framed picture of one which she hung over my bed and called me “the Orangutan.” My moniker came from the Simon and Garfunkel song: “At the Zoo,” in which the animals are described by their behavior…it seems that “Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages.” And that, apparently described me as well….
So I have had a long fascination with my behavioral as well as genetic cousins and when this year’s trip possibilities began to percolate in our heads, Indonesia just kept working its way to the top.
My 75th birthday was coming up and I always love to celebrate my birthdays traveling to special places. I have a “granddaughter” who was going to be married in Sumatra and that would be special to see a traditional Indonesian wedding. (The wedding plans were changed so we didn’t get to include that experience.) But Indonesia had taken form in our brains. Garden planting and family considerations just seemed to indicate the timing But Indonesia was the place and the timing was now. So there it is.
We left on the 4th , and will return one month later. We will be in Sumatra, Malaysian Borneo, Bali, Lombok, Java and Indonesian Borneo, which is called Kalimantan, which I didn’t know before this trip.
Indonesia has much to recommend it to all travelers…warm (hot) climate, warm,(amiable) people, colorful, inexpensive, and with 15,000+ islands there is a huge variety of things to see and do from the teeming jungle of Jakarta to the tranquil jungles of Borneo. Throw in a beach-lovers paradise, world class diving and indigenous cultures that stay traditional and Indonesia is perfect….that is if they would just move the place a little closer so that the 25+ hour transit didn’t wrack the old body.
Our stay in Jakarta was short-lived…a city of 14 million doesn’t pique my travel mentality, so we immediately got out of Dodge at 6:45 the following morning and flew to Sumatra to celebrate my birthday with ,” Eka….Choo-Choo, meaning favored granddaughter in Indonesian. She had her father meet us at the airport with the driver who would transport us 4 hours north to Langsa.
The ride through the Sumatran “countryside” was nothing of the sort…from the air you can see the ribbons of villages and homes stretching in long lines. It was seemingly one continual stream of houses, shops, and other assorted edifices with nary a mile of simply empty undeveloped space. The roads range from good to fair but the traffic is horrendous…..It seems that everybody is on the move and it’s all done by wheels, two, three or four…I never saw anybody walking…I mean never….120 miles of petrol/diesel powered mechanisms and nobody walked. The two-wheelers were most commonly motor bikes, certainly speedy enough with a few bicycles sprinkled in for those not able to afford the zippy motor bikes. These were nothing like the old putt-putts that we called motor bikes…these are just one short step below a motorcycle and they are ubiquitous. Eka’s is a new Honda, quite sporty and cost in the range of $1,500.
The three-wheelers, pedi-cabs, were the Indonesian version of the Asian tuk-tuks, but with a twist. Instead of being a single confined vehicle where driver and passengers are under cover and the driver steering a handle bar, the Indonesian variety is a is a covered or uncovered cart attached to a motor bike with the driver on the outside, more similar to a sidecar.
On the open road the four-wheeled vehicle cars and trucks formed a wall of traffic that is daunting when attempting to pass the slower “pedicabs,” and motor bikes who dart like bees in and out of the line of traffic. Although it seemed that we were screaming down the road, we never hit 50 on the speedometer. We wove in and out behind the trucks and motorbikes and it was nerve-wracking to see kids younger than my 9 year old grandson, no license required, riding with two or three friends as passengers coming at us in the opposite direction, or peddling unsteadily on bicycles, with cars whizzing only inches, literally inches, by them without a flinch on the part of anybody….
The mainly two lane road is in actually, anything but. It is at least four with the two and three wheelers occupying the outer part of the road and the four wheeled varieties the inner part, closer to the oncoming traffic. The general rule seems to be if the mirrors don’t touch, there is no problem….and there isn’t any road rage at all…everybody seems to understand the rules and accepts that Allah will take care of them. We arrived in Langsa and since Eka was still at work we checked into the “best” hotel in town, a probable 3 star under some skewed rating system but with severe limitations on the rating system.
After settling in, we wandered around for a few hours looking for a place to get out of the 92 degree, humid heat, but with little success…everything is al fresco. Since we were going to have dinner with Eka and ONE other friend at eight, we wanted a bite to eat since we had had breakfast at 4:00 in the morning. Our walk was greeted by continual smiling faces and warm curiosity, based on the fact that we were walking and that we were pasty-faced Washingtonians. This is obviously not a tourist town and we felt that we had entered a town fairly unfamiliar with western tourists.
Checking out menus in several street-side eateries, I hesitate to call them restaurants, was no help because of the language barrier. “Sandwich,” met with puzzlement or a smiling“no.” Eventually we were pointed to a little place where they had photos of the dishes…woohoo. A pizza looked good since we knew we just wanted a bite, not a meal…trying to decipher the size, however, proved more problematic than finding the restaurant…making a circle with our fingers to describe possible sizes brought curious looks, followed by a motioning to another worker to come over and see what we were trying to say. Repeat the process a couple more times and still no result…we tried to make the circle small then expand our fingers into bigger circles to determine the size of the pizza…at one point, one of the girls literally collapsed on the floor in hysterics. Obviously, we weren’t getting through…”Big?” “Small,” met with the same results…so at a price of $1 a piece, we decided they couldn’t be too large, so we ordered two…indeed, they were about the size of a saucer so that was a good decision…imagine a pizza with a very hot spiced tomato base and little dots of corn and pepperoni that was so thin it would float and you have our individual pizzas…
Eka showed up with not one, but three, friends, and so the six of us piled onto three motor bikes and roared down to a restaurant. This one actually an indoors one, but again, alas, nothing to take away the heat which had all day to build to a melting point of several metals. Shortly after settling in, four other friends arrived carrying a box of cupcakes with “Happy Birthday, Grandpa Jim” on one side and “Welcome to Indonesia Jim and Carol” on the other.
It was a very sweet gesture and the 10 of us engaged in banter which was mostly translated by Eka, the only true English speaker of the group.
We’d had a very early departure from Jakarta, a two hour flight, a 5 hr 30 min ride to Langsa all to get to this point where I was celebrating my birthday with my dear granddaughter and seven of her friends…It was all worth it, and made a wonderful introduction to Indonesia….
