1. The Journey Out
MALAYSIA
Kuala Lumpur
Melaka
Cameron Highlands
Ipoh
Kuala Kangsar
Penang
INDONESIA: SUMATRA
On the Boat
Brastagi
Mount Sibayak
Back in Brastagi
Lake loba
More Days on Lake Toba
Good-bye to Samosir
Bukittinggi
Lake Maninjau
From Maninjau to Padang
On the SS Kerinci from Padang to Jakarta
JAVA
Jakarta
Cisarua and Bogor
Bandoeng
Yogyakarta
Borobudur
Prambanan
Solo
Malang
Probolinggo
Mount Bromo
BALI
Lovina Beach
Ubud
The Journey Out
I left England on 27 November 1989 after the usual last minute panics. These included trouble with British Telecom in getting my telephone meter reading before my New Zealand tenant took over, and the discovery of a vigorous leak from the radiator in the kitchen on the morning of my departure.
Michael had kindly offered to drive me to Heathrow and phoned at 5.45 a.m.,arriving at Camberwell at 6.30 as planned. It was a cold morning though there was no ice on the roads as there had been the two previous days. There was some fog on the road out to the airport but we arrived at 7.20, well ahead of my check-in time. At terminal 4 all was peace and good order in welcome contrast to the chaos when I clocked in for the Chicago flight in September. The lady at the desk transferred me to an earlier flight as mine was delayed by the weather; this too took off late but still gave me a comfortable two hours at Schiphol which was sparkling clean and gleaming in the winter sunshine. There was a splendid row of shops for rich people, including one bearing the notice "Buy a diamond - give her a surprise" which I thought was an understatement. Among the passengers milling around in the airport was a young man wheeling a double bass on a trolley. Did he, I wondered, have to book a second seat for it when he flew?
The flight to Kuala Lumpur was fully booked - not an empty seat. Next to me was a young lady who was a Chinese Malay on her way home to Lummut in Perak for her vacation from a two year law course at the private sector University of Buckingham, following on a degree in business studies at the University of Indiana - where there had been 700 Malay students. Buckingham was a boring town, she told me: there were only 800 students at the University, most of them were mature or well-off or both and went home at week-ends. Holidays were short and work was hard in order to compress a degree course into two years.
The other passengers were a mixed lot including numbers of business people and a bevy of middle-aged Dutchwomen, all very stout. I supposed this is what happened to all those Rubens models, wobbling through later life as ungainly caricatures of their luscious youth. The monotony of the long flight was relieved by KLM's classical music channel on high quality compact discs, A half-hour stop at Dubai, a smaller and less ostentatious terminal than Riyadh, allowed just enough time to walk through the airport from arrival to departure. On the next stage of the journey my Malaysian neighbour turned the conversation to the local foodstuffs. She asked me whether I had wet taste-buds - at least I think that is what she said: it seemed an intimate question to ask. I thought I had, and this seemed to be the right answer, leading her to underline various dishes in my Lonely Planet guidebook which should appeal to me, including notably ais kachan to which I was later to become addicted.
After a 45 minute halt in Bangkok we completed the final short leg of the journey and arrived in Kuala Lumpur at two in the afternoon. It was hot, overcast, and spitting with rain.
KUALA LUMPUR
At the airport there was a desk selling official vouchers for taxis, so I decided to patronise this system rather than the hourly public bus. I asked the driver to take me to the Lee Mun Hotel recommended by Lonely Planet at their "bottom end" for accommodation, only to be told that it had been pulled down. This was a familiar story to which I paid no attention, demanding to be driven to the site of the defunct Lee Mun rather than the hotel of the taxi driver's choice which I assumed he had in mind. On arriving at the site it was apparent that the Lee Mun had indeed been pulled down and the area where it had stood was now derelict, presumably awaiting redevelopment. However we were in the middle of the Chinatown quarter in Jalan Sultan, a street largely composed of hotels in varying stages of decay together with modest restaurants. I paid off my taxi with the airport voucher, declined a request for additional payment shouldered my pack and set out to reconnoitre other hotels at the bottom end.
The Continental did not live up to the guide-book's description, the rooms being excessively shabby and a long walk along an unsavoury corridor to the communal mandis. A mandi, in either Malaysia or Indonesia, is basically a room containing a tank of cold water and a saucepan which you dip into the tank and empty over your person when you want a wash. It normally includes a loo of the squatting variety, or a sit-upon in the more up-market establishments, where you might also be provided with a wash-basin, and even perhaps a mirror and a shower. I decided to move up-market and settled into the Lok Ann just down the road, where my room had its own mandi with a full set of facilities, all for the equivalent of 8 pounds.
The Chinatown quarter was a lively jumble of shops, small businesses, markets and foodstalls. There were not many tourists in evidence. After dark open-air restaurants sprouted on the pavement outside banks and offices, and the streets were thronged with cheerful Malaysians. At one of the pavement restaurants I ordered bah kut teh, as advised by my airplane friend, and was served generous lumps of pork, white rice and soup I added some red chillis from a dish on the table: they were very strong, bringing tears to my eyes. Strolling around afterwards I caught glimpses of modern skyscrapers beyond Chinatown's skyline but was brought back to earth when I was hailed by an elderly tourist in an open-air bar inviting me to join him for a beer. He was a stout 70-year old Dutchman from Amsterdam with bristly hair and beard, a retired musician who had been trumpeter and conductor for Radio Hilversum orchestra. Since the death of his wife two years previously he had been travelling widely in Asia, where he found the girls more beautiful and accommodating than in Holland, though he worried about Aids.
Periodically, in between accounts of his indiscretions, he would pat my arm and apologise: there was a curious innocence about the man. Evidently, apart from the girls, he simply loved the crowds, the lights, and the noise, and would now and again wave his arms at the animated scene, comparing it favourably with other more sedate places he had visited - "Brighton, Eastbourne, pah!". After a couple of beers I continued my walk, passing a MacDonalds and a vast Kentucky Fried Chicken establishment crowded with young Malaysians and sporting a Halal sign that assured the local population that Colonel Saunders had slaughtered his chickens in accordance with Islamic custom.
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Next morning I found my way to the Post Office, not far away, next to the 50 storey DayaHumi complex, bought my aerograms, and continued westwards to the Railway Station, a magnificent lofty building with graceful arches and domes built around 1910 and a perfect blend of Mogul style, British imperial splendour and turn of the century railway exuberance. The Railway administration building next door was of almost equal scale and dignity. Further up the road stood the new National Mosque, a fabulous geometrical creation with a brilliant blue roof, but it was closed for repairs and surrounded by builders' yards and debris. I climbed a long steep hill towards the Lake Gardens: the midday sun shone vertically down and there were very few people about. I wondered whether Kuala Lumpur figured in "Mad Dogs and Englishmen". I checked this on return, and it didn't although the poem explains that in the Malay States they wear hats like plates: Bangkok and Rangoon are mentioned, but Kuala Lumpur - like Stoke Poges must defy any attempts to find a rhyme.
Within the park, overlooking the lake, stands the memorial to Abdul Razakh, formerly his official residence. He was the second Prime Minister of independent Malaysia, succeeding Tunku Abdul Rahman who is still alive in his nineties. The house had a pleasantly informal domestic air, not at all grandiose, with a speedboat and a golf buggy displayed outside representing Abdul Razakh's main hobbies. Inside the house were photographs spanning his life, starting with his appearance in the school hockey team and ending with groups of distinguished Asian leaders attending international conferences.
In the evening I met Kristian Litton whom I had telephoned on the advice of Bob Weaver (a friend from my Thailand trip - he had been a British Council lecturer in KL) and who lectured in law at the city's Technical College. She brought two friends with her, Ruby an indigenous Malaysian, and Shanta of Indian origin. We enjoyed a Chinese meal in a rather up-market restaurant where I had trouble with chopsticks, holding them the wrong way up until corrected. Kristian had been given her Scandinavian name because her father had grateful memories of Norway from his time in the Navy. She was a bright young woman with particularly attractive delicately shaped ears, and was the following week returning to her home in Cardiff to get married. We made plans for an expedition over the week-end and I went back to the Lok Ann through heavy rain, climbing the sixty-five steep steps to my room where a thermos of tea, full of big floppy tea-leaves, awaited me.
On Friday I went for a long walk around the city. At the centre is a confluence of two swift flowing muddy rivers: this is where Kuala Lumpur (the name means muddy estuary) was founded just over 100 years ago when tin was found and the mining industry was established. The rivers are now confined between concrete banks thirty yards apart: a tracked dredger was excavating mud from the river bed and depositing it not far away; the general effect was depressing. There are of course no buildings of any antiquity but I visited a very ornate Hindu temple of the 1890's and the modest City Mosque built a decade later at the point of the river confluence standing in well-kept gardens. I did not expect to be allowed inside on a Friday but a courteous attendant told me it was open until 10.30 and offered to answer any queries (I couldn't think of any). Not far away stood the old Secretariat, now the Tunku Abdul.Rahman buildings, a fine example of Imperial Moorish architecture, facing a splendid arena of green grass where cricket was - and still is, occasionally - played. The straight boundaries were excessively long; presumably part of the ground was cordoned off for spectators. Opposite was the select Selangor Club in Betjeman Tudor style. Around the ground piped Malayan music floated out from loudspeakers concealed in tree-trunks and flower beds, producing an eerie effect as it died away and came back again as you approached the next tree.
Calling next at the Bank I encountered a young Swiss woman, Maja from Berne, trying unsuccessfully to get dollar traveller cheques on her Mastercard and finding that she could only obtain Malaysian rupiahs and then complete the transaction at another Bank. We had coffee together; she had spent two months in Indonesia, travelling alone, wanted to go back to Thailand, then on to Laos, China, and home via the Trans-Siberian railway. Maja seemed to be a fully paid-up member of the alternative society, with a pearl brooch through her nose, and a life plan that was based on short periods of intensive work as a dental technician followed by long periods of travel.
A bus ride took me to the Asean Gardens, attractively laid out on a hillside at the edge of the city where the National Monument stood in a commanding position on top of the hill. Sculpted by the creator of the Iwo Jima monument in Washington, and copying it closely, this lively group commemorates, not Malaysia's liberation from British rule, but the independent government's victory over Communist terrorism. Some distance below, and on a smaller scale, stood a Cenotaph on the Whitehall model commemorating British war dead. Around the gardens were scattered a dozen or so modern sculptures by Malaysian and other Asian artists, their stark abstract and geometric designs softened by the surrounding trees and shrubs. Helpful plaques explained what these curious shapes symbolised, peace, growth, harmony and so on, progress being represented by a rebarbative assembly of steel tubes. After this cultural experience I set off on the long walk back to my hotel, getting soaked through by steady and persistent rain on Lake District lines, not at all a tropical storm.
I dried out in time to go to an evening's entertainment at the City Hall for which I had picked up a ticket at the Tourist Office. It was part of the celebrations for Visit Malaysia year which was about to start, but the quality was very moderate and the hall only half full, the majority of the audience being local people, There was a lot of pop singing, Malaysian style, and some graceful dancing, but all rather half-baked. During the interval the compere came round with a microphone and encouraged tourists to utter embarrassing inanities by asking them whether they liked Kuala Lumpur and other questions in similar style. Sitting in mid-row far from the gangways I fortunately escaped his attentions.
On Saturday morning the weather was heavily overcast so I decided against an expedition to the Batu caves and went along ot the tourist office to plan my trip to Melaka. In the belief that I would be returning via Kuala Lumpur I thought I would book a room at the Station Hotel I climbed a majestic staircase, treading on a green carpet that must have been, in the early years of the century, of a luxurious thickness, but was now threadbare in patches and exuded a strong smell of decay resulting from age and decomposition if nothing worse. Anita at the reception desk, a pretty girl from Melaka with a strong suggestion of Portuguese ancestry, booked me in for a couple of nights the following week after I had inspected two of the rooms, or rather suites, and chosen the smaller - either was big enough to accommodate a modest conference.
In the hotel dining room, adorned with the same green carpet, I enjoyed a continental breakfast: good strong coffee, two slices of light crisp toast (served in a basket around which two beetles scuttled), a small pat of butter, some genuine marmalade, and a glass of delicious freshly-squeezed orange juice. The dining room was a fine relic of high imperialism, fifty feet by thirty, a twenty foot high ceiling supported by Corinthian columns, and rows of big ceiling fans rotating slowly above sixteen widely separated tables with canebacked chairs seating two couples and myself. Little of the dangerous tropical sunlight was allowed to filter through the high windows, so that on emerging into the street one was almost blinded.
My next call was to the National Museum, a fine building in traditional Malay style flanked by a British built steam locomotive of the 1920's and a 1967 black Rolls Royce once the property of the Malaysian High Commissioner in Singapore. The museum displayed different aspects of Malay culture with fullscale models of wedding and other ceremonies. An appealing scene showed the young people of a family paying their respects to their elders on the occasion of a festival, asking forgiveness for their faults, and praying for happiness. The elders were seated in dignified postures on chairs and sofas while the youngsters trooped in and knelt down before their seniors. This procedure, I felt, should be introduced more widely. In the sporting section there were photographs of the Australian cricket XI that toured Malaya in 1927, led by C.G.Macartney.
I went on to book my ticket for Melaka at the Puda Raya Bus Station, a huge multi-storey complex housing shops of all kinds, restaurants, booking offices, and thronged with thousands of people flowing past like a river. It resembled a London railway terminus in the rush-hour, except that it extended over several storeys. Outside the busy evening streets exhibited their diversity; in neighbouring buildings were a pharmacy, a bank, a fishing tackle shop, the headquarters of the Kuala Lumpur Tailors' Guild, the Wildlife Zoological Supplies (mostly caged birds), the Hya Wick Hotel, and the Kun Yong Dramatic Benevolent Society. Cheerful red pillar boxes, identical in colour and design to ours, clearly indicated where letters should be posted, a fine example to all those less helpful foreign countries who provide for this purpose anonymous blue receptacles that might as well be rubbish bins. To the north was the busy street market of Jalan Sultan Abdul Rahman with shops either side of the street, mostly selling Indian cloths and silks and incongruously filling the air with the strains of "White Christmas", and in the middle the market stalls selling every imaginable fruit and vegetable, fish, and sweetmeats of all shapes and colours.
Consulting my street map on the way back to the Lok Ann, I was asked for assistance by a newly arrived traveller, Nicola Cheretta, an eighteen year old.Californian who had left high school not long ago, had been working in an office in Santa Cruz when it was badly damaged in the earthquake, and was now embarking on six months travel (or as long as her money lasted) before starting at Smith's College Massachusetts where the course could include a year studying humanities at Oxford or Florence. She had just arrived from Thailand and was awaiting an Indian visa before going on to Madras, other parts of South India, Rajahsthan, Manali, and on to Nepal. We had a meal together and explored the city further: she was charming and intelligent and exceptionally mature. She had phoned her parents on arrival - they weren't too worried about her but her grandparents (who were about my age) had been more concerned at her plans.
On Sunday morning Kristian called for me as arranged, accompanied by Ruby, and we were joined by Nicola who had asked to join the party. At Peta Jaya, a prosperous suburb of the capital, we collected Bud and Anne Dixon from their luxurious house. They had been seconded from the University of Indiana, where Bud boasted the title of Associate Professor of Communications (Drama), to the higher education Institute (TMI) at Shah Alam, the new capital of Selangor State, Kuala Lumpur being Federal territory. We were joined by another American couple and split the party into two cars, driving out about thirty miles to Carey Island, reached over a small bridge. On the island we drove along red tracks through miles of rubber plantations. Our objective was the home of a famous local woodcarver where we hoped to buy some of his wares. My companions had visited him before but we had some difficulty in finding the way as identical tracks passed identical groups of concrete huts and schools for the plantation workers and their children. Eventually we found our carver, living in a simple wooden hut with an adjoining shed as his workshop. In the shed were blocks of the dark mahogany which was the only material used for the carvings and which was reputed to be very scarce now - although that might have been a useful argument for pushing the price up.
There were also a couple of dozen examples of the finished products: animals or animal spirits, a few of a sinuous grace but most hinting of brooding power and evil, Anne already had some at home and said they made her feel uneasy. The negotiations were conducted by Ruby in her native tongue and led to the purchase of only one article, my companions demonstrating consumer resistance to prices which had increased sharply since their last visit. Ruby then led us to a Chinese restaurant where we laid in to an enormous meal of prawns, crabs, rice, vegetables, and various unidentifiable dishes. When Nicola and I met again in the evening we drank a lime-juice or two but had no appetite for food.
MELAKA
At half past seven next morning I shouldered my rucksack and walked through the still cool streets to the Puda Raya bus station, pausing at the Angel Cake House to breakfast on a banana doughnut. Down in a vast dungeon below street level fifty or sixty long coaches manoeuvred and drew up in succession to one or other of twenty-four platforms where they left their engines running. The air was now hot and damp and heavy with diesel fumes, so I was glad when my bus appeared and I could climb into its cool and air-conditioned comfort. Soon we
.drove out through middle-class suburbs and reached the dual carriage-way for the two and a half hour journey southwards to Melaka.
My neighbour, a Chinese Malaysian lady in her mid-thirties, introduced herself with her business card as Valerine M.C. Sieng, Product/Marketing Executive for Atari computers, on her way to teach a one-day course at Melaka. She told me that Atari were planning a big expansion in Malaysia. She spoke also of her uncle and family in Hong Kong, but did not really approve of "Hongkies' who were materialist and interested only in making money, leaving no time for politeness or courtesy. I dozed off intermittently on the way, being vaguely conscious of the soothing effect of endless palm oil plantations, towns and villages with well-built houses and neat gardens, and a general air of prosperity.
On descending at the Melaka bus station I was greeted by the usual reception committee of taxi drivers and helpers anxious to direct me to their favourite hotel, but I brushed them aside without too much trouble and headed for the Malacca Hotel where I booked a comfortable room with its own mandi, a shower with hot water, and a sit-down loo. Walking out into bright sunshine I expected to be hit by the midday heat and was pleasantly surprised to find there was a cool breeze from the direction of the sea. The main street was busy and a main thoroughfare with railings along the central reservations, but it could be crossed by a charming pedestrian walkway with a canopy bright with bougainvillea. The older part of the town had much more character, solid stone houses with outside staircases leading to the top storey, and curved roof tiles of colours softened by age. The most famous building in the old quarter, the Stadthuis from where the Dutch administered the area in the sixteenth and following centuries, was under major repair and inaccessible, though its harmonious lines were visible through the scaffolding. In front was an elegant fountain erected to mark the Diamond Jubilee of 1897; it was raised by subscription from all races, according to a tablet on the wall 'to testify the love and affection for Queen Victoria by her loyal subjects in this distant corner of her far-flung dominions". Other tablets commemorated past Governors and the achievements of long departed Engineers and Directors of Public Works.
On top of a hill commanding the coastline stood the ruins of St.Paul's Church, little standing apart from the walls and a new white tower in which a lighthouse had been installed. The walls were lined with huge upright tombstones about six feet by ten, bearing in fine bold deep lettering, perfectly preserved, the names of distinguished Dutch administrators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: 'Hieronder legt begraven...'. Lower on the hillside stood memorials to more recent British deaths: one mother and four children under five years old died within five months of one another in the early nineteenth century. Walking around the hillside paths I met Gea who had spent twenty-two years in Holland, the country of her birth, and the other half of her life in Tasmania, where she had a nineteen-year old son by an Irishman to whom she had been briefly married. Tall, fair, and brown-eyed, she spoke with a Dutch Australian accent (predominantly Dutch) and a charming slight stammer. She had been staying with friends in Singapore on her way back to stay with her parents in Holland, then to study on a two-month course on Hebrew language and culture, then to undertake social work - this was her profession - in Israel with under-privileged Jews. She belonged to some fundamentalist church in.Tasmania, and her task was to remedy injustices to the Jews meted out by Christians. Concerned also about the greenhouse effect, she was proud of the Tasmanian people's successful resistance to the hydro-electric project that would have decimated the world's last virgin temperate rain-forest, after which the Green Party had formed part of the State's coalition government. We walked around the streets of the old city, located the quarter known as Gluttons' Corner, and enjoyed a substantial meal of small fish, rice, and beans at a Chinese restaurant. The fish was very salty, leading us to drink several glasses of lime-juice at successive cafes.
Next morning we met at ten for a boat trip on the river. Our boat first went briefly out to sea to circumnavigate a wreck that had settled on the sea-bed, having apparently been overloaded with a cargo of cement before trying to take it to Sumatra. Then we turned up-river, past old decaying houses and giant lizards basking on the banks, old warehouses, some still in use, some occupied by families with chickens and children, little brown hands waving at us out of warehouse windows. Fishing boats manned by ancient Chinese, one said to be ninety years old and still fishing. On dry land again we walked past the ornamental bullock carts waiting for tourists and went round the cultural museum before resting in the park where Gea chattered away until she observed some inattention on my part and suggested thoughtfully that I might take a nap while she had a look at the market.
Twenty minutes later I woke up and found Gea offering me a fried banana and we moved into a more energetic mode and climbed a big hill, Bukit China, covered with tombs adorned with elaborate models of houses and ships, the largest Chinese burial ground outside mainland China, and one which had been in constant use for several centuries, Later in the evening we took a bus out of the city to Portuguese Medan, a quarter occupied by descendants of early Portuguese settlers, and settled down to some sweet and sour squid at a restaurant facing the sea - something you could not do in Melaka itself where the beach was fenced off for a land reclamation project being undertaken by Dutch contractors. We completed our evening's refreshment with an ais kachan, as recommended by my airplane neighbour, a mountain of crushed ice, covered with syrup and containing jellies and beans, quite delicious - surprisingly. It is advisable to eat it quickly before the ice melts and the whole thing collapses into an unattractive heap.
We decided to spend the next day separately, meeting in the evening. I visited one of the city mosques, and then the privately run museum of the Baba/Nonya culture developed by well-off Chinese communities who had been in Melaka for several centuries and maintained a distinctive life-style. Visitors not being allowed to wander round on their own, I was conducted by a delicately beautiful eighteen-year old Chinese girl. On the guided tour she spoke her lines like an automaton, but in conversation afterwards was quite lively and said she was sorry for me when she heard I was travelling alone. Apart from fluent English she spoke Bahasi Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese, though she was unable to help two Italians with very little English who followed me in. The museum was in fact a house of spacious dimensions and gracious proportions in which a Baba/Nonya family had lived, and their costumes, ceramic ware, and furniture were displayed in the various rooms, one of which was set aside for ancestor worship. There were three different sets of tea and dinner services, one for everyday use, one for festive occasions, and one for periods of mourning which might last from forty-nine to eighty days. The walls were hung with lovely embroidered screens. Other treasures included inlaid boxes and a Mah Jong table and set, the chairs being fitted with holders for drinks as the game often lasted throughout the night. With their high ceilings and graceful furnishings the rooms gave an impression of space, formality, and cultivated taste.
Walking round the old city I passed the headquarters of the Red Swastika Society, which was probably nothing more sinister than a Chinese friendly society - and anyway the swastika was the other way round. I looked for the UE Teahouse, listed as the best dim sum place in town, but regrettably it had been replaced by a new and larger restaurant shortly to open as the Woontucky Fried Chicken. So I moved on elsewhere, noticing in the sunlit streets that many of the Melaka women had put up parasols for protection, and that the schoolgirls were smart in their bright blue uniforms. After a quick snack I stood at the doorway of an ancient Chinese temple: the Temple of Evergreen Clouds founded in 1645. A monk in black robes and two in yellow were burning incense and chanting continuously to the accompaniment of bells, gongs, and drums, and apparently going on for ever. Statues of gods and goddesses were arrayed in profusion before them. An attendant beckoned me to come in and signalled that I could take a photograph, which I did without in any way disturbing the concentration of the worshippers.
I met Gea in the evening at a South Indian restaurant where we ate a rice dish served on a banana leaf, using our fingers instead of utensils. Gea showed me how to eat tidily, using cupped fingers as a bowl and pushing food into the mouth with the thumb. Quite easy and not at all messy when you know how to do it. An Indian at the next table offered to take a picture of us, and told us about his son who was studying law in London and living in Earl's Court. After a last ais kachan and lime-juice we parted with the hope that we might meet again in London, Holland, Israel, or Tasmania.
CAMERON HIGHLANDS
I had discovered a direct bus to the Cameron Highlands from Melaka with no need to change or spend the night at Kuala Lumpur, and so had cancelled my reservation at the Railway Hotel. A prompt nine o'clock start in a splendid air-conditioned bus only one quarter full led to a comfortable ride, all going smoothly until we stopped suddenly a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur. The driver leaped out, as did the conductor who up to that point had been lying flat on a sort of sun-bed he had rigged up with his head slightly raised so he could see the road ahead. They came back after a few minutes, arguing vigorously between themselves and with two passengers at the front of the bus. Clearly we had broken down and they were deciding how to get the bus repaired and how the passengers could continue their journeys - or so I thought. However, after a quarter of an hour we drove on, with nothing apparently wrong with the bus, and dropped off the two loquacious passengers at a bus stop - and continued northwards through the outskirts of the capital. The cause of the hitch remained a mystery; maybe the argument was about the best way round Kuala Lumpur.
After two short halts during the day for food we arrived at the sizeable town of Tapeh at three o'clock on a hot and sticky afternoon. The streets were steaming after a tropical downpour. I decided on the comfort of a taxi rather than the trial of a crowded bus for the long climb up to the Highlands: the cab-driver.assured me he had two other passengers waiting and would set off as soon as he had secured a fourth. After twenty minutes, with no clients in sight except for me, we drove off but instead of heading uphill made a circuit of the town and returned to our starting-point. He said he would now wait no more than a quarter of an hour for other passengers but by this time I had lost faith in him, headed for the bus stop just down the road, and climbed into a very hot and crowded vehicle, squeezing in with my pack as the third man in a seat for two and not enjoying another long wait which seemed tedious after already travelling for seven hours that day.
At last we set off, driving up round one hairpin bend after another through the jungle. I couldn't see much through the crowded bodies and steamed-up windows, which was just as well since we were often overtaking slower vehicles on a road barely wide enough for two-way traffic in places where you could only see a few yards ahead. The adventurous style of the driver was unaffected by the sight of a badly smashed-up car and an overturned lorry by the side of the road. In an hour and a half we reached Ringlet, a small settlement about 4000 feet up, and a climb of another thousand feet brought us to the hill resort of Tana Rata where I had decided to spend a few days. I booked into reasonably decent room at the Town House Hotel, with the mandi and loo down the corridor. As the hotel was on the main street - the only street - I chose to be three flights up. The establishment had a rather unattractive restaurant on the ground floor: the friendly owners were Indians, as were most of the proprietors of hotels, shops, and restaurants in the Cameron Highlands which had been largely populated by Indian immigrants when the tea plantations were established by the British. After a short stroll exploring the town - which didn't take long - I practised my newly acquired skill of eating with the fingers at an Indian restaurant, chatting with a Swiss couple who had been on a twelve day cycling tour in China with a party of Australians. Unlike most travellers in the country they had found the Chinese friendly and welcoming, perhaps because as cyclists they were recognized as like-minded people.
Around Tana Rata, and between there and Brinchang, the next and last place on the road up the Highlands, there are about a dozen 'jungle walks" of varying degrees of difficulty which followed marked tracks through the jungle. It was not always easy to find where they began, but after a couple of false starts I found an easy walk to Robinson Falls, where there was a lot of very muddy water, and beyond. The track went steadily downhill along the river course: the going was not arduous but it was slippery and in places eroded by recent rain. There was not much to see except thick green vegetation, and after a couple of miles there were some big trees fallen diagonally across the path where it crossed a deep ravine, and it started to rain - a combination of events that encouraged me to retrace my steps. I went back as quickly as I could through steady rain, washed out my muddy clothes at the hotel and hung them up with no great optimism that they would ever dry in the humid atmosphere. I refreshed myself with banana pancakes and coffee and met Chris and Jane, a young couple from New Zealand who had left their jobs as nurses for a two-year journey round the world, including six months working as nurses in London and several weeks in India going beyond Manali to the Rotang Pass - inaccessible through snowfalls when I had been there three years ago - and to Dharamsala, Jane was now pregnant and they were on their way home.
Later in the evening it rained hard, with thunder and lightning, and I got soaked through just crossing the road to an Indian restaurant. Afterwards I read in my room by a poor light and wondered why I had ever left home. In next morning's sunshine the world seemed a better place. Over my usual breakfast of banana pancakes and coffee I talked to Paul Akerman, a twenty-eight year old nurse from Tasmania, on his way now to revisit England which he left at the age of ten when his family emigrated. He would be going through Thailand, India, Nepal, and possibly part of the African continent. A friendly young man, a little naive, he joined me on a jungle walk slightly more ambitious than my first. Again it was a well-marked trail that wound upwards through the jungle, over wet and soggy ground that was luckily not too slippery because a tangle of roots and a carpet of leaves offered some foothold. Strange harsh bird noises assailed the silence and odd whirring Black and Decker sounds. We reached a summit with some good views and began a descent after a circuit of two miles or so on the high ground, meeting Anders, a much travelled Danish forestry student taking a year off from his studies. To my surprise he told me that Denmark was well-forested, over 11% of the country being covered, partly owing to the wisdom of a Danish king two centuries ago who was a conservationist ahead of his time.
On the way down we skirted the greenest golf course I have ever seen. Nearby was The Old Smokehouse in the form of a traditional English inn transported to the tropics and smothered with Morning Glory and a hibiscus of exceptionally vivid colour. Their 'Devon Tea' seemed well above our standards at the equivalent of one pound fifty, but as an ordinary cup of tea was almost as much we indulged in the riotous extravagance of the full treatment and enjoyed the scones, cream, and strawberry jam, even it was served up in rather ladylike quantities. On the way back Anders spent several minutes adjusting his expensive camera in order to take a close-up of a tropical flower of a brilliant orange, and was disappointed when I told him it was a monbretia and that they grew so vigorously in my garden that I was constantly digging them up and throwing them away.
We met for an evening meal in Kumar's restaurant, which was very busy, and put away some enormous platefuls, or rather banana-leaf fulls, of rice dishes, with lots of roti, glasses of lime juice, and other accessories, all for much less than our cream tea had cost. We exchanged useful information, about Thailand and India for Paul, and Indonesia for Anders and myself. I booked a room in the more luxurious Garden Inn for the following night as I was beginning to find the Town House depressing and my washing was not getting any drier. I took my luggage round in the morning, admired their spacious gardens bright with busy lizzies and giant salvias, and went out for a walk while they prepared the room. As it had started to rain and my jacket was at the bottom of my rucksack I borrowed an umbrella from the receptionist; it was bright blue and decorated with little penguins, very fetching.
Unexpectedly I met Paul again and we spent the morning together; he had planned an early start hitch-hiking northwards but had delayed it because of the rain. It was dry by afternoon so I tried another jungle walk up in the direction of the Smokehouse and going on to Brinchang but the weather looked increasingly uncertain so I turned back near a hill named Bukit Lowick and returned by the route we had taken the day before, enjoying the company of a young Danish medical student who had been travelling in India, Nepal, and Thailand, and was on her way home for Christmas.
There was no shortage of eating places in Tana Rata and I went Malaysian that evening with a big plateful of nasi goreng, fried rice, egg, shrimps, and vegetables. I was joined by three more Scandinavian girl medical students, the most communicative being Muski from Stockholm whose English was near perfect. Their travels had included India and Nepal, where one of them had had dysentery for two weeks. They had reached Katmandu from Darjeeling after 36 gruelling hours in a bus: a closed frontier had stopped me in 1987 from the reverse trip.
IPOH
Awakened by intonation of verse from the Koran at 5.55 a.m. I got up to find blue sky and fleecy clouds with Tana Rata looking its best. A dozen travellers gathered at the bus agency where we were ushered into different minibuses according to our respective destinations. It was still cool when we started but grew steadily hotter as we descended to sea level down the six hundred and fifty three famous hairpin bends. It was a small bus with only eight passengers but the descent should not be attempted by anyone the least bit subject to travel sickness. I was quite relieved when we rounded the last bend and hit the straight road at Tapeh, where three people alighted to change buses for Lummut and the boat to Pangkor Island, Apart from myself everyone else was heading for Butterworth opposite Penang Island. The landscape to the north of Tapeh bore the scars of tin-mining while giant diggers and cranes marked the skyline. To the east dramatic limestone cliffs rose up sheer as in the south of Thailand, but the whiteness here was stained with brown of metallic ore. Ipoh at midday was hot enough to discourage walking around with a pack, the bus terminus was not far from the railway, and I settled for the impressive Station Hotel, built on the same lines as its sister establishment in Kuala Lumpur but not quite so grandiose and in rather better condition. In front of the hotel was a fine garden area about the size of Trafalgar Square, with market stalls and restaurants around the perimeter.
In the Station Hotel I was shown to a suite of vast proportions, and on enquiring for something more modest was conducted to a marginally smaller suite consisting of an air-conditioned bedroom about twenty feet by fifteen, an anteroom fifteen feet square and a large bathroom. What it lacked was anywhere to hang up my still damp washing; perhaps the guests here normally used the laundry service. In the end I rigged up a line from the bedroom mirror to the bathroom cupboard and loaded it up with a variety of garments that had acquired the characteristic revolting smell of damp clothes carried around in a pack on a hot day.
Ipoh looked to be a prosperous town, in line with its nickname of "millionaires' city" with broad avenues bordered by shrubs in the modern city centre. There were three bus stations, and at the third attempt I found the right one for Sam Poh Tong and the ancient Buddhist temples for which Ipoh is famous. The temples are hollowed out from natural limestone caves in the side of the cliffs. Outside the first stood an assortment of gaudy Chinese statues of gods and animals, Inside a service was taking place but it was possible to by-pass this and climb the stairways that lead out of the top of the cave near the summit of the cliff. I went up 269 steps, some of them very steep, and in light that was generally very poor. There were occasional glimpses of the surrounding landscape through holes in the cliffside but the stairs petered out before they emerged into the open: I think the main route had been closed off for repairs and I was following a subsidiary stairway. In the face of the cliff, on the first floor so to speak, was a Chinese vegetarian restaurant that the Scandinavian girls had recommended and where I ate an excellent chow mien. There were no other tourists around the place. At the far end of the temple area was a garden with rocks and water, not at its best as various improvement works were being carried out as part of Visit Malaysia year for which extra budgets had been allocated to most tourist areas by the Federal Government. By the garden was a fiercely worded injunction as follows "Strictly prohibited putting rubbish tortoise and fishes into pond. Please take care of plants and thank you for not plucking". I abandoned any thoughts I may have had about putting tortoises in the pond and went back.
.In the evening I walked round the narrow streets of the old city until I found a pleasant square with open-air restaurants. By this time I had concluded I was the only foreigner in Ipoh and was amazed to see three heads of fair hair across the square. There were Muski, Lone, and Maria, who should have been on their way to Thailand. In fact they were, having arrived in Ipoh from Tana Rata earlier in the day to find that the next bus to Hat Yai left at 11.30 p.m. From Tapeh Maria had travelled by bus with the luggage of all three while the other two hitchhiked. After a drink in the open-air I conducted them to the Kedai Kepi Kang Heng which I had located earlier and was renowned for its kway teow soup. Unhappily they were right out of kway teow that evening but the chicken mien and the prawn mien were excellent and good value. We compared notes on travel and remarked how one booked tickets for long bus journeys at obscure little agencies with little confidence that the system would work, but it always did. We must have talked about travel in Europe - they suggested I should visit Stockholm - and I must have said I would leave my European journeys later in life after I had made more trips to Asia, because months later Muski wrote to remind me that I was to visit Stockholm when I was old enough. As they would be on the bus all night, arriving at Hat Yai at eight in the morning we were in no hurry and I asked whether they would like a shower at the Station Hotel. We agreed that to use my suite might give a wrong impression to the hotel staff, or even worse that I might be charged for four persons overnight, but they found the facilities in the ladies's loo quite adequate.
They had been entertaining company, especially the vivacious Muski, and recounted some of the adventures they had survived. To go to Langkawi Island (which they did not recommend - the beaches were dirty) they had been due to leave their hotel on the mainland at nine in the morning but had been awakened at seven by men who burst into their bedroom and insisted, despite their protests, that they should leave at once on the pillions of three motor-bikes, which then all dashed off in different directions. To their relief they met again later at a song thaew depot and were hustled across the Thai frontier with Malaysia and delivered to the part where a boat was waiting for them. They discovered that the operation had been organized by the boat owner, who charged them nothing for their land journey - although he probably overcharged for the boat.
KUALA KANGSAR
After breakfast in the grand pillared dining room of the hotel I walked through into the railway station and bought a second-class ticket for the 10:29 to Kuala Kangsar, which was the first stop on the line northwards. My ticket was a computer print-out but the advance of technology did not prevent the train from being twenty minutes late on arrival. The train was pretty full, most of the passengers probably being on their way from Kuala Lumpur to Butterworth. It was easy to locate my coach and numbered seat: the compartment was roomy, comfortable and air-conditioned, confirming my high opinion of railways in South Asia.
In Kuala Kangsar I headed for the government rest house, about a mile uphill from the station, only to find that they had no single rooms free, no doubles, all that was on offer being VIP suites at the exorbitant price of 8 pounds. Having enjoyed the extravagant luxury of the Station Hotel at Ipoh the previous night I thought I could hardly continue this rake's progress, and turned back to town to explore the only other accommodation listed in the Lonely Planet, the Double Lion. On further study I noticed that this was described as 'extremely basic", and while I usually found basic perfectly acceptable I was not sure about the 'extremely'.
So I turned on my heel again, and settled resentfully for the VIP suite. This was indeed the very height of luxury, one half of a long bungalow with a living room twenty-seven feet square containing four armchairs and a bamboo table with a glass top, and a large bedroom with double and single bed, both rooms airconditioned; plus dressing room and spacious bathroom with bath and shower - and hot water! The rest house was pleasantly situated above a bend of the Perak River.
Kuala Kangsar was the birthplace of the Malaysian rubber industry, where the seed smuggled out of Brazil to Kew were first planted. It is also the home of the royal family of the State of Perak. But despite these distinctions it is a rather ordinary small town and the only reason for visiting it is the Ubadiah Mosque, said to be the finest in Malaysia. As you walk up the hilly road that leads out of the town you catch sight of its magnificent golden onion dome and the four minarets clustering closely around it. The supporting structure is gleaming white and set in gardens planted with bougainvillea. A service was in progress and visitors were not allowed inside the building but it looked marvellous from every angle.
At the rest house one of the other guests was a Malaysian business man who engaged me in conversation and claimed to have been a student at Trinity, Cambridge, twenty years ago. There were some curious gaps in his memory and I was left uncertain whether his claim was genuine: maybe he visited Cambridge once and invented the rest. Also, by his account, he owned a house in Ealing. He was going to ring me at the rest house at three o'clock and arrange to take me on a tour round the mining areas and rubber plantations. I never heard from him.
Other occupants of a VIP suite were a psychiatrist and his wife, John and Jean, from Morpeth near Newcastle, with a daughter who had been working in Australia. They were now touring Malaysia in a hired car. They were all keen Lake District walkers, more familiar with the northern part of the National Park than the southern. They were to visit me at Low Longmire six months later. There was a heavy shower early in the evening but after the streets had dried out I strolled around the town to find the local nightmarket. It was a lively scene in which I was the only non-resident. For the equivalent of twenty-five pence I was served with a bowl of very tasty soup, dumplings, meat-balls, noodles, and various embellishments that I could not identify in the dim light. Back at the rest house I chatted with John and Jean who were driving on to Penang the next day, and offered me a lift. I had been planning to stay at Taipeh on the way to Penang but succumbed to the temptation and accepted the offer. Clearly the luxurious hotels and rest houses were sapping my moral fibre.
The car drive from Kuala Kangsar to Penang with John, Jean, and their daughter Kirsty was the most comfortable journey of any I took in Malaysia, Soon after midday we drove across the two kilometre long bridge, built five years ago by Korean contractors to join Penang Island to the mainland and arrived at the southern perimeter of the capital, Georgetown. The car had to be delivered to an agent next to the famous E and O Hotel; we navigated successfully through the city to the northern seafront and I ordered coffee for myself and the ladies on the verandah while John dealt with the return of the car. From the expensive and once fashionable end of the market we moved abruptly to the bottom end, walking down Chulia Street to locate the recommended Eng Aun Hotel where we all booked in. The single rooms were very cheap but unattractive so I took a double room which had its own wash basin, mandi, and shower, though the loos (squatters) were down the corridor. The hotel lay back from the road with an open eating area in front of it where they served excellent food at very good value. We met there an Englishman who had been teaching English in Bangkok for ten years, as well as conducting some business activities about which he was not explicit. His visas for Thailand extended for three months, and at the end of each period he would come down for a week-end in Penang and apply for another Thai visa. This was his fortieth week-end in Penang. The authorities knew perfectly well what he was doing and seemed quite happy about it.
After collecting my first mail in Malaysia at Poste Restante near the quayside, I called at the tourist office to enquire about the next leg of my journey, which I hoped would be a boat trip to Medan in Sumatra. The tourist office confirmed the rumours I had heard to the effect that the ferry boat had been out of action for months and the service was unlikely to be resumed for some time. However, they were more positive about the prospects of my getting to the Science University of Malaysia (USM) where I hoped to look up a husband and wife team of lecturers who had spent a year at the University of Wisconsin where they had been friends of Diana and Robert. As advised I caught a number 66 bus from the quayside and sat in it while it followed a devious course through the suburbs of Georgetown for an hour before reaching the open road. A few miles to the south I was set down at the entrance to the University campus, not designed for pedestrians as I had to walk a mile and a half up a long hill before reaching any of the university buildings. Here there were plenty of students milling around, most of them with a passable command of English, and I soon found the Department of Biological Sciences. It was nearly five o'clock and I reflected wryly that in England my chances of tracking down a university lecturer in his departmental office would not be too bright. However the office telephoned Suan Pheng for me, only to find that her number was engaged. I walked round to her room, where I found a small and slightly built lady involved in a long phone conversation about the unsatisfactory behaviour of a computer programme. She signalled me to sit down, and about quarter of an hour later - for the computer had evidently misbehaved badly - she put down the phone and I introduced myself as Diana's father. I was at once taken round to her husband Yueh Kwong who was at work next door. They were lovely friendly people and insisted I should move in as their.house guest the following day. Meanwhile they gave me a lift back to the Eng Aun where I linked up with John, Jean, and Kirsty, and the four of us went out together for a first-class Indian curry at the well-known Dawoods.
After breakfast, in the knowledge that there would be no boat service to Sumatra, I tried to book a flight to Medan with Malaysian Airways. As I would be travelling the week before Christmas this proved difficult, and the only firm booking I could make was a first-class class flight for the Monday, while I was put on a waiting list for economy flights on the two following days: arrangements could be confirmed two days later. Having ensured I would reach Sumatra one way or another I went into the Komtar building which rose sixty stories above the street level where the airlines had their offices. There was a special lift taking visitors up up the fifty-eighth floor where there was an observation platform. There was a five dollar (Malaysian) charge in return for which an attractively dressed hostess provided a voucher entitling you to make five dollars worth of purchases in the shops around the observation platform. The splendid views out to sea, over the fishing harbour, and over the city, were somewhat marred by a thin haze, partly no doubt caused by pollution. With my five dollars I bought an ice-cream, some postcards, and a drink, and as I still had some to spend, a second ice-cream.
Georgetown is a good city to walk round on foot if you don't mind covering six or seven miles in the day, and the street plan is straightforward. The only complication is that the government has changed many of the old British street names: however the locals prefer to keep the old familiar names in use whatever the street signs say, I found my way back to Chulia Street, a long road filled mostly with cheap hotels, and checked out of the Eng Aun, shortly afterwards being picked up by my new Malaysian friends and driven to their home in the well-to-do suburb of Hillside on the road out from Georgetown to the international resort of Bati Feringhi. They had a sizeable bungalow near the end of a cul-de-sac surrounded by a garden with mango and other fruit trees. They installed me in their guest-room, a bedroom of generous dimensions with two double beds and its own bathroom, all air-conditioned. They had to go back to work at the University, so I was given a set of keys, a precisely drawn plan of the district in the best tradition of geography lecturers, and the necessary information about buses to and from Georgetown.
On the way to work my hosts dropped me at the Botanical Gardens where I spent a couple of hours. The specimen trees included a fine collection of different palms from all over the world. There were extensive areas of well-kept grass and beds of flowering shrubs though it was not the season when many of them were in bloom. Troops of monkeys sat around waiting to be fed by visitors who could buy peanuts from vendors at the gates to the Gardens. I had been warned against encouraging the monkeys and I ignored them. Following Suan Pheng's detailed instructions I caught the right bus to take me back to within ten minutes walk of the house, and spent the evening with my hosts after they returned from work. We dined out at the nearby Penang Swimming Club (which had a fifty meter pool) on a great Chinese meal based on the popular delicacy of fish-head curry. I learned much about the Chinese community in Malaysia and how they suffered from the positive discrimination policy of the Government in favour of indigenous Malays, which had become active discrimination against the 40% of the.population who were of Chinese origin. Yueh Kwong was a third generation 'immigrant", Suan Pheng a fifth. I learned incidentally that they were conversing with each other in English not out of consideration for their guest but because it was their only common language, though they each spoke three Chinese dialects. They gave some of their lectures in English and some in Bahasi Malaysian in which they were obliged to pass a test. This was not unreasonable, but promotion or jobs in senior university administration were virtually reserved for indigenous Malays, sometimes at the expense of competence.
Next morning at eight my hosts set off for work, dropping me at the foot of Penang Hill where the funicular railway built by Swiss engineers in the twenties takes passengers to the summit of the hill 8500 feet above sea level. It is a dramatic ride up, with a change of cars at the halfway point, and the temperature falling perceptibly throughout the ascent. Most of my fellow passengers were local people, this being a popular family trip which I had been advised not to defer until the week-end or there would be long queues. At the top was an extensive plateau, perhaps four or five miles in circumference, occupied by gardens, aviaries, a small zoo, a temple, a mosque, hotels, restaurants, and a convalescent bungalow. It was agreeably cool up there, and the views down to Georgetown and across to the mainland, which were restricted by the haze, must be marvellous on a clear day. The flowers included a sort of agapanthus with white petals longer than the usual type.
As instructed I caught a bus to Ayeh Itam - the bus service in and around Georgetown was excellent, the buses being comfortable and clean though sometimes there could be a long wait - where I ate a curry bun (an improvement on the Cornish pasty) while waiting for the bus into town. As I was walking past the ferry office I casually enquired, without any real hope, whether there was any more news of the boat under repair. The electrifying news was that they now had a new boat which would make a fast crossing to Sumatra in six hours, and I should report there at 8 a.m. on Monday to join the first crossing. On the strength of this I bought a ferry ticket and cancelled my flight with Malaysian Airlines. The museum was just down the road past the walls which are all that remain of Fort Cornwallis. Outside was a statue of Captain Francis Light who acquired Penang Island on behalf of the East India Company in 1786, buying the almost uninhabited island from the local sultan and then founding Georgetown. The statue was somewhat conjectural since there was no surviving portrait of Francis senior when the memorial was erected, so the features are those of his eldest son, who achieved his own fame in the next century by founding the city of Adelaide in South Australia. The museum itself displayed some interesting photographs of nineteenth century Penang but was not otherwise very exciting.
That evening I at last persuaded my hosts to let me take them out for a meal - the only small return I could make for their generous hospitality - at the popular Dragon King where there were quite a lot of tourists. Our main dishes included jellyfish with rice, soup with pork and okra, while the chendoh was a sweet made of fruit and iced coconut milk. Continuing a gastronomic evening we patrolled the night foodstalls and settled down to bowls of sweet soup with lotus seeds and quails' eggs. We drove out of town to a night market that extended for miles by the sea and sold.everything. Here too there were food stalls, where I tried sugar cane juice with lime, very refreshing. The Malaysian phonetic spelling over shops and elsewhere had its own logic and charm: 'filem' , ' ais krim' , 'TAKSI', ' BAS MINI" for example, not to mention 'Sains University" where my friends worked.
After an idle morning I met Suan Pheng and Yueh Kwong for lunch at the Komtar. Two stories with a big area of floor space were given over to restaurants, including a MacDonalds and a Kentucky Fried Chicken (both popular with locals rather than with tourists), a Pizza Hut, Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian. We chose Chinese. The Komtar is a general meeting place where people can sit, walk around, shop, or eat, and is kept very clean and tidy, Good public loos were available for a nominal charge too small to convert into pence. In the afternoon Yueh Kwong drove me to a land reclamation project on the south coast of the island in which he was involved as ecological consultant: he was taking some 'before and after" photographs. The reclamation was designed to double the area of a large industrial estate which included a number of microchip factories owned by Hewlett Packard and the like, Penang apparently now being the world favourite site for this activity. The site was opposite a small island and the water was very sheltered with a tide of no more than two feet. The reclamation consisted simply of pumping sand from the sea-bed through large diameter pipes to the coastal margin and allowing it to settle. No special consolidation was needed and factories were up and working on the reclaimed land within six months. On the way back we called at the 'snake temple' where hundreds of snakes twined around branches and twigs were so still that it was almost impossible to distinguish between snake and twig.
The evening's entertainment was a party of the Malaysian Nature Society of which Yueh Kwong was chairman and Suan Pheng the secretary. It was held in a neighbour's garden where the main meal was organized by professional caterers with extras provided by the Society's members, Suan Pheng having prepared the fruit dishes. The majority of the members were Chinese Malaysians and everyone at the party was speaking English. Among the people I met were a young woman journalist of nineteen, a philosophy don who had now turned to the teaching of history, and a law student at LSE who was living in Golders Green but had returned briefly for her sister's wedding. After the meal there was a slide show starting with Yueh Kwong and a colleague showing pictures of Krabi and Phi Phi in Thailand where the Society were planning a visit in the near future (I heard later that it turned out to be a disaster because they were let down by their transport). The pictures by deliberate accident included one of a topless lady tourist which provoked some ribaldry, Indeed the evening was full of laughter and gentle banter. There followed some very expert pictures of hornbills, kingfishers and other birds, taken by an Indian who must have had great photographic skill and infinite patience, and some slides by a botanist of the Western Australia national park and of Rafflesia (the largest flower in the world) taken at various stages of development in the Malaysian forest.
My last day in Penang was a Sunday when Suan Pheng and Yueh Kwong were off duty. We started the day in traditional Chinese fashion by going out for a dim sum. There was a local restaurant that specialised in this dish: several hundred Chinese were sitting at tables in a very large room, tucking in energetically, and greeting their friends. We enjoyed a.substantial meal of dumplings, fish, meat, and vegetables, fortifying ourselves for a day's trip round the island. We stopped first at Bati Feringhi, a long beach bordered by big hotels and small chalets. Many of the holiday makers never saw anything else of Penang, let alone the rest of Malaysia. Although the hotels naturally had their own beaches there was always a path along the foreshore for the general public; local pressure groups had insisted that the government should impose this condition on any developers, and it seemed to be strictly observed. A little further along the coast we stopped at a small fishing village where the University had carried out some research. Rickety wooden piers provided mooring places and shelter for the fishing boats. A few miles beyond was the world-famous butterfly farm where magnificent tropical butterflies were reared, as well as a selection of snakes and scorpions. We spoke to the scientific head of the farm who told us that nearly every variety of tropical butterfly had been bred here, but there were still three or four that defied all attempts to breed from them although their natural environment had been meticulously replicated. Some of the specimens we saw flying around were eight or nine inches across.
Continuing our tour we lunched on local specialities at a restaurant called 'The other side of the island' where Yueh Kwong pleased the proprietor by conversing with him in his own Chinese dialect which was not widely spoken in Penang. In the evening we were due to meet some friends and share a 'steamboat meal', a banquet that requires several participants. However, they phoned to say they were held up and unable to join us so we went to the Komtar again, this time to an Indonesian restaurant. Back home later in the evening the missing couple arrived, bearing six durians they had acquired on an outing earlier in the day. Yueh Kwong split the hard husk with a heavy piece of wood known as a durian stick which is reserved for this purpose so that the soft interior was exposed. I had no objection to the smell, which many people find unendurable, but found the taste strange and rather unpleasant.
In the morning Yueh Kwong gave me a lift to the ferry offices where I arrived at 7:30 in good time to report at eight o'clock as instructed. About a dozen prospective passengers had already arrived, some of them asleep on the grass opposite where perhaps they had spent the night. The office opened at nine and told us the boat would sail at ten; so much for reporting at eight. At ten we were told the boat would leave at eleven, at eleven we were assured it would leave at twelve. At twelve we were let in from the pavement outside the Office, where it was getting very hot and there was no protection from the sun, to a covered space without any seats. In the absence of any firm information rumours circulated. The ship's documents were incomplete. The Indonesians had not been given notice about the new ferry and were making difficulties. Or perhaps the ferry operators were simply waiting for more passengers to turn up: very little notice had been given of this voyage and most of the travel agencies in Penang were still unaware that the ferry service had been resumed. By three in the afternoon the passengers were growing restive. We advanced along the quayside to where the boat was moored, apparently all ready to depart, and demanded to be allowed aboard. The crew resisted but gave way eventually, and I left Malaysian soil by walking along the gangplank into a smart airconditioned boat with one hundred and fifty reclining seats.
SUMATRA
ON THE BOAT
We chugged out of Penang Harbour a couple of hours before sunset, hugging the coastline for a while before heading towards Sumatra. The boat being no more than one third full, there was plenty of room to walk around both inside the passenger compartment and on the narrow deck. I made friends with Susie and Annie, two twenty-eight year old teachers from Camden who were fed up with their jobs and wanted a long break. Susie had already travelled widely, her previous trips including China and several South American countries, and had on this journey spent four months in Spain, Thailand, India, and Nepal; after Indonesia she was going on to Australia and New Zealand, planning to be away two years in all. We had a long talk on deck as the sun was setting and continued in neighbouring seats inside as night drew on. Susie was fair-skinned and fair-haired with the 'English Rose' type of beauty and a lively personality. She was writing a novel about the adventures of a lone woman traveller, and I dare say had a good deal of experience to provide the background.
The crew provided us with egg sandwiches and cake. The seats were comfortable enough for a doze. No-one gave us any information but we reckoned that if the journey across was seven hours we would arrive about 2 a.m. As there would probably be no transport at that time, we hoped that we would be allowed to stay on board until daybreak, and so indeed it proved. We dropped anchor some time in the small hours but then waited for a pilot to take us in, docking at 6.30 a. m. Indonesian time. The local immigration officers came on board to inspect our passports, called us up by nationalities, and told us we could stay in Indonesia for sixty days. They asked for evidence of our intention to depart, which I could provide by means of my return air ticket, but were content with verbal assurances from those passengers who lacked an onward ticket. The officers were polite and efficient.
We had docked in Belawan, the port for Medan which was twenty-eight kilometers away. On the quayside we were greeted by a money changer and his assistant, rapidly converting Malaysian currency into very much bigger numbers of the less valuable Indonesian rupees. It was quickly done and the exchange rate was reasonable, perhaps surprisingly so since the arriving passengers were not in a strong negotiating position. Two buses were waiting to drive us into Medan, along fairly good roads across flat country criss-crossed by rivers, streams, and canals. Medan, although the third largest city in Indonesia, looked every bit as undistinguished and uninviting as the guide books suggested. The day was still young and there seemed little point in hanging around. I decided to head straight for Brastagi in the mountains of North Sumatra.
BRASTAGI
Motorcycle trishaws seemed to be the standard transport in Medan, so I caught one and after three miles alighted at the alleged bus station for Brastagi. It did not look anything like an urban bus station but at the roadside were a couple of dilapidated minibuses, one of which was about to leave for Brastagi, so I jumped aboard. For half an hour we cruised slowly.through the streets, the eonductor leaning out of the bus and shouting out our destination. We collected a few more passengers while I was wondering whether the bus could go any faster than 10 mph, but it then speeded up as we left Medan and the road started winding uphill round hairpin bends with glimpses through tail trees of distant mountains with cloud clinging to their summits. Higher up, the road developed huge potholes, some covering half the width or more of the road surface, and the bus lurched slowly from one side of the road to the other as we negotiated them.
It was still only nine in the morning when the bus reached Brastagi. The Ginsana Hotel was right opposite the bus stop: it looked a reasonable place
so I booked in. It was a three storey modern concrete building with a restaurant on the ground floor. My room, with its own mandi, was on the top floor,
Across the road was the town monument in the centre of a traffic roundabout: at the base were replicas of the horned roofs typical of the Karo lands of which Brastagi was the capital: a tall stone column was topped by the figure of an army officer cheering on his troops who consisted of two soldiers apparently aiming their rifles at the traffic below. Nearby were two rival churches (North Sumatra being predominantly Christian) and a fruit market.
I walked down the main street to call at the Wisma Sibayak at the far end. This was a street I got to know fairly well during my stay, most other roads in Brastagi being at right angles to it and petering out after a couple of hundred yards. It was a wide dual carriage-way with a strip of trees and grass in the middle, but the surface itself was in poor condition with about ten feet of mud and filth at either edge. Half way down there was a cinema, a couple of restaurants, and a big open market selling flowers, fruit, and vegetables. A variety of stores met local needs: it was a working town, not designed for tourists. This was on the road to Lake Toba, carrying a lot of heavy through traffic, while the local traffic included some smartly plumed horses and buggies which were patronised occasionally by the inhabitants and - surprisingly - made no effort to attract tourists. Another feature of the street was a cheerful old boy who invariably greeted me with a loud hallo and rushed up to shake my hand. On a clear day half a dozen volcanoes could be seen towering above the Brastagi plateau where we were 4000 feet up and comfortably cool in the mornings and evenings.
I met Susie and Annie at the Wisma Sibayak which was situated in a spacious triangle of grass and flower gardens with some splendid agapanthus and was a pleasantly informal place catering for budget travellers. I was tempted to move but instead decided to have most of my meals there, choosing from a remarkably varied menu (including guaccamoli toast) at very cheap prices. I learned that the menu, despite its wide range, suffered from a certain inflexibility, one of my friends who ordered a salad finding it quite impossible to be served bread with it although she offered to pay extra. After an afternoon rest, and tea at the Sibayak, I enjoyed dinner at the Ginsana with an English couple from Cirencester,
MOUNT SIBAYAK
I started the next morning with porridge at the Wisma Sibayak where Gabrielle from Toronto and John of uncertain origin - he had a slight
.accent which I couldn't identify - were setting off to climb the local volcano, the 6500 feet high Gunung Sibayak. After studying a diagrammatic map at the Wisma I decided to follow suit and set off uphill through what seemed to be the fashionable quarter of Brastagi. First came the local school, the boys and girls very neat in their red and white uniforms, the boys wearing large peaked caps with red and white quartering that would have been quite in place at an expensive prep school in Sunningdale. Then the road passed some smart bungalows, some of them for rent, with well kept gardens and lawns of brilliant green and hedges of hibiscus laced with morning glory. In half a mile the metalled road degenerated into a twenty foot wide dirt track, compacted by a road roller that I passed later on. Half an hour's steady climb led to the crest of a wooded ridge giving a good view of the mountain with the early morning clouds beginning to lift.
A gradual descent now led through thick jungle accompanied by suitable bird noises, one like the song of a warbler but with fuller and more liquid notes, another more like the sound of agricultural machinery with long sustained repetitions. After a mile of gentle downhill walking I came to a fork in the track where a land rover was parked by a load of stones and cement, the Indonesian driver dozing off to the unrestful lullaby of taped pop music. He woke up sufficiently to confirm that the route followed the narrower track uphill through ever thickening jungle. The path here was only two or three feet wide and so muddy that my walking shoes were soon caked in wet earth and rotting leaves and lost all grip. As the climb grew steeper it became more and more difficult to avoid slipping over or losing a shoe, The best tactic was to try to find a relatively horizontal foothold every few paces. Added hazards were fallen trees with trunks three or four feet in diameter that had to be clambered over. Progress was painfully slow, and I was glad that - if the map could be relied upon -- I could return by a different route. At times I wondered if I would make it to the top, but the thought of going back down the way I was ascending provided a strong incentive to keep going.
At last I reached a clearing and saw the steep wooded slopes of the peak about a thousand feet above. Here I met John on his way down: he had lost the key to the padlock on his room and was going back to the Wisma Sibayak leaving Gabrielle to continue on her own. From here onwards it was firmer underfoot but harder work as the gradient got steeper and steeper while the path was covered in volcanic ash and rocks. Before long I was over the irregular rim of the crater and skirting the series of fissures emitting sulphurous fumes. The route was not difficult to follow though at one point it narrowed with a rock face on one side and an alarming steep drop on the other. The smoke grew thicker and some figures walking along a ridge in front looked like soldiers in a battle zone. Successive eruptions had created a crazy landscape: as far as I could judge I was now at the summit. The track now skirted the area of greatest volcanic activity and apparently continued indefinitely without losing much height. Suddenly I was arrested by a barking dog belonging to a group of four Sumatrans sitting by the side of a small track which forked sharply off to the right. They told me that the way down followed this track. My doubts were put at rest when I noticed some arrows on a rock pointing that way, and a reassuring - if regrettable - trail of empty cigarette packets and abandoned water bottles. Later I found that several other walkers had missed this fork and spent several hours wandering about, one spending a cold night out on the mountain. I resolved to take a companion on any more volcanic ascents that I might plan.
After some scrambling I reached a cliff top from which a village was visible three or four thousand feet below, presumably my objective. At this point, as indicated on my map, there was a descent down 2700 steps which was hard work but a lot better than returning down a steep muddy slope. The steps were mostly concrete blocks set edgewise with the earth between them often washed away by the rains, making for uncomfortable walking as I recalled from the climb at Phu Kradoeng in Thailand. Round about the two thousandth step the descent became steeper and I thought how glad I would be when the steps ended. However the next stage was over pure mud where the previous walker had left footprints eighteen inches deep and I was getting very tired of floundering through ankle-deep slush when I suddenly glimpsed fields of vegetables ahead and was so relieved that I almost slipped over on my face.
The approach to the village was criss-crossed with streams straddled by small footbridges, some in a state of total collapse. I had to walk through a few of the streams, which were hot and smelt strongly of sulphur. Probably good for the feet. At the village there was a small swimming bath fed by the hot springs, which was not particularly tempting, and a fourwheel drive minibus with five waiting passengers on board. The staircase descent had landed me several miles from Brastagi, and more than a thousand feet lower, so I gladly boarded the minibus where one of the other passengers guarded an extremely large bucket of water containing two giant goldfish. In the twenty minutes before we drove off I attempted some conversation with the help of my phrase book, asked my companions how they were, told them. I came from England, asked them where the bus was going, what their names were, and what day of the week it was. Conversation then languished, since there was little point in asking them where I could change travellers' cheques or whether I could have a room with its own mandi.
We bumped along to the next village, where the man got out with his goldfish, paused to unload vegetables at a wholesale market, and then made several halts to disgorge or pick up passengers. The driver had a young assistant to let down the tailboard at each halt, and delighted in starting off with violent acceleration obliging the assistant to sprint along behind and leap aboard. Back at the Wisma Sibayak I attacked a large plate of noodles - nothing like climbing volcanoes to give you an appetite - and on the advice of two Swedish friends drank a glass of the juice of the marquisha, described by my guide-book as a sickly sweet passionfruit grown only in Brastagi and Sulawesi, but actually rather pleasant with a flavour resembling guava.
BACK IN BRASTAGI
My Swedish friends were Gunnar and Maria, in their mid-twenties, who had been travelling together in Nepal, where both had contracted dysentery (Maria had the amoebic variety). Maria now had an infection that brought up lumps under the arms and had visited a clinic in Brastagi in the hope of getting medical treatment. The head of the clinic appeared baffled by her symptoms, understandably so since it turned out to be a dental clinic not
accustomed to dealing with underarm infections. Gunnar and Maria gave the impression that they enjoyed a long-term partnership, but Maria took pains to explain to me that "we are not a couple", although they naturally shared a room on their travels to save expense. They had been friends since childhood. I chatted also to John, who was relaxing after his attempt on the volcano the previous day, and was delighted that by a stroke of luck another walker had spotted his keys on the track and returned them. In fact John did a great deal of relaxing, appearing quite content to sit around the Wisma most of the day and read old magazines. He had been born in England, emigrated with his parents to the USA when he was a schoolboy, and had spent the last few years in Digne in the south of France where for five months every year he worked an eighteen-hour day in a bar, He travelled for six months of the year and knew South America well, having spent time in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Costa Rica as well as Mexico.
Apart from climbing volcanoes the thing to do from Brastagi was to visit the local Karo villages with their distinctive tall long-houses with horned roofs. I planned a ten mile walk that would take me through two of the villages, and set off along one of the main roads out of the town past suburban bungalows with colourful gardens. The road then went through a vast open area of intensive vegetable cultivation. There were fields of superb cabbages with hearts like footballs, onions, potatoes, parsnips, marrows, tomatoes, cucumbers, and large pear-shaped gourds. Most of the vegetables were grown along ridges, probably to make weeding easier as well as to contain the run-off. One keen gardener had grown a bright triangle of asters in the corner of a cabbage field. The plateau was ringed with volcanic mountains which accounted for the fertility of the soil, though I also saw bullock carts emerging from nearby forests with what looked like loads of top-soil. There was no sign of any pests: a man was spraying the potatoes from a knapsack-sprayer. There were fields of maize plants about ten feet high, and what I thought was barley protected by wires strung across from poles and supporting lifelike scarecrows.
My route left the main road along a mud track partially paved with local stones and past a college where a group of young women insisted on being photographed. In several of the fields there were elaborate tombs, some surmounted with a cross, either singly or in groups of two or three. There were no cemeteries by the churches or mosques, or elsewhere in the villages as far as I could see. The first village I approached boasted a church and a mosque, and a dozen traditional longhouses on stilts with high thatched roofs As I passed through I received friendly greetings from the villagers, and as I went on along what was now a very muddy road I was pursued by the sound of Christmas hymns. At mid-day I was glad to have the shade of a bamboo forest for ten minutes before emerging for half an hour of rather trying walking under the vertical sun. Then the track met another main road where trees provided intermittent shade until the turn Off to Lingga, a Karo village on the tourist coach route. The last stretch along the road was monotonous, and I relieved the boredom by trying to memorise phrases in Bahasi Indonesian from my phrase-book.
By the start of the track to Lingga was a small museum of traditional crafts, displaying brass cooking pots, ladles made from coconut husks with a design carved on the back as an antidote to any poison which an unfriendly person might add to your vegetables, although the young man who.showed me round told me that "we don't believe that any more". There was also a long bamboo stave delicately inscribed with the old Karo alphabet: the young man said he could not read the characters although his grandfather could. By the museum there was a 'coffee house' selling bottled drinks. I sat down gratefully in the shade of the hut to enjoy a rather warm drink, but moved out hastily five minutes later when I realised I had collected twenty mosquito bites. Lingga itself was a text-book example of a village spoilt by tourism. Some of the women wore lipstick and nail varnish, the children asked hopefully for money, and a man with a roll of tickets tried to charge two hundred rupees to enter the village. There were a number of longhouses scattered higgledy-piggledy through the village, and guides offering their services to take visitors inside. I protested that I did not want to disturb people living there, but I was assured that a busload of German tourists had been shown round that morning and that there was no need to worry.
Wishing to leave Lingga behind me I found a minibus containing an old lady with a large bag of chillis, the driver hooting occasionally in an encouraging manner. It would take me to Kabanjahe, halfway to Brastagi, so I sat in it while the driver hooted his way round the village picking up as many passengers as he could, and then set off at high speed. At Kabanjahe a local motorcyclist invited me to sit on his pillion while he toured around for transport to Brastagi, eventually locating an ancient limousine which took me back there, rather footsore and hungry and ready to address an enormous plateful of noodles, egg, peanuts, cucumber, and tomato, washed down with marquisa juice, all for the equivalent of 70 pence. That evening and on the next day, a lazy one, I noticed that the warm and well-meant friendship of the Sumatrans could be somewhat intrusive. They would sit down and start a conversation with you, asking question after question, regardless of whether you were reading or writing or already talking with others. Once when I was reading a young man sat next to me, picked up my book and turned the pages with a mystified air, and returned it to me reluctantly only when I told him I would like to read it again.
My last meal at Brastagi was at a Chinese restaurant favoured by John from Digne where I enjoyed an excellent dinner in congenial company. Gunnar and Maria were there, and a Dutch couple called Rein and Karen who advised that the best cheap place to stay in Singapore was an illegal crash pad on the thirteenth floor of the big Radio building, John had been to the cinema in Brastagi but appeared to have done little else in the past two days. Gunnar went off after dinner to play billiards - a popular game in Sumatra, even in small villages which advertised a Bill Yard Hall - with two policeman he had got to know. He and Maria had joined a trip to see Karo dancing in one of the villages: this was advertised in the local hotels and sounded like a tourist rip-off. Another notice in the town announced a Karo wedding the following week: "bride and groom in traditional dress, lunch of family, nice and funny peoples".
LAKE TOBA
To get from Brastagi to Prapat on the shore of Lake Toba I would need to take three buses, changing at Kabanjahe and Silantar. The journey started well when the lady in charge at my hotel stopped a minibus in the road outside, a superior model with a push-button bell in the roof to remove the need to shout at the driver when you wanted to stop - though passengers shouted just the same. We soon arrived at the bus station at Kabanjahe (which means a thousand mountains - well there are a lot of volcanoes around but that is an exaggeration), where there was no shortage of advisers to help me on to a full-sized bus to Slantar. Here I was soon surrounded by friends, including a 65-year old Sumatran speaking excellent English who engaged me in the standard catechism about my personal history and travel plans.
After twenty minutes and a lot of hooting the bus made a slight movement forwards, only to draw up again while a very old man was ushered in, followed by a woman with a large kettle. We then set off on a tour of Kabanjahe, hooting continuously to attract new passengers, passing a school where boys were playing badminton and calling back at the bus station from time to time. I bought a bag of peanuts for which 200 rupees were demanded, offering 100 after consulting my friend who commented "many sellers deceive the buyers". After protracted negotiations during which I handed back the peanuts my offer was eventually accepted.
My friend told me that the journey to Siantar would take three and a half hours over very bad roads. We drove off past ricefields and neat villages, mostly built in traditional style but one consisting entirely of new concrete bungalows, perhaps designed as part of the transmigration programme for villagers from Java or other overpopulated parts of Indonesia, The road was indeed pretty rough in places, particularly near the edges where the bus often had to go in the face of oncoming traffic, so the journey was bumpy but not intolerably so. After a couple of hours of violent jolting the senses became numbed and one ceased to observe the outside world. I found myself dwelling on my own misspent life and my lengthening past and diminishing future.
After four hours we arrived at the large and busy bus station of Siantar. As soon as I recovered my pack from the roof of the bus I was hustled by three men trying to carry it off to their minibus heading for Prapat. As most tourists come to Siantar only to change buses, this kidnapping of travellers in transit was obviously one of the town's main activities, As always I insisted on retaining my pack but walked with them to a waiting minibus, encouraged by the sight of a few passengers already on board. I was asked 1000 rupees for the trip to Prapat, and offered 600 after consulting the Lonely Planet Guide and the other passengers. Soon we were off - for a short tour round Siantar and back to the bus station where we drew up a couple of inches from a large bus that had just arrived and from which various packages, bundles, and sacks were unloaded on to our roof. Our driver was a great entrepreneur and was running all over the extensive area of the bus station in the hope of attracting more custom, From time to time we would drive around.and park in different parts of the bus station area and then back to our starting point where the driver would discouragingly switch off his engine.
After an hour or more of this manoeuvring, we at last drove off - this time to make a complete circuit of the town and return to the bus station, Four more passengers boarded the minibus, bringing the total to a rather overcrowded fifteen. Another long wait, during which I wondered whether I would have done better to take the longer but quicker route back to Medan and from there direct to Prapat, I thought also there must be better ways of spending an afternoon than jammed tight in a stuffy minibus at a dusty bus station on the equator. These melancholy reflections came to an abrupt end when we left the bus station once more and stopped at a fruit stall, where after a decent interval two stands of bananas were loaded on to our roof. A man trying to sell books wandered up, and women selling all sorts of food and drink. No-one bought anything.
Now we drove right out of the town and to a small village where the road forked and still more passengers and bundles were added to our total, We stayed there by the roadside a very long time, this further delay causing even my Sumatran fellow-passengers to show signs of impatience. One man forgot his oriental impassivity so far as to indulge in some tut-tutting. A young woman held forth angrily, demonstrating that Bahasi Indonesian was a language well-suited to express frustration and anger, Bystanders pointed in all directions, bells rang, people shouted. A new driver appeared, our entrepreneur disappeared, having collected all the fares, and after that we never looked back. The road wound uphill, the vegetation grew lusher and the trees taller, road signs advertised hotels on Lake Toba. Suddenly, far below, gleamed the waters of the lake, and we approached Prapat along a spectacular corniche road.
The first view of Lake Toba is stunning. It is about forty miles long and twenty miles wide, but looking across the lake you do not see the far shore but the beaches and the mountain ridge of the island of Samosir which occupies half the area of the lake. Toba itself is completely surrounded by steep mountains, in places falling sheer into the lake, elsewhere - as at Prapat - giving on to small flat areas where towns and villages have been built on land created by the silting up of the lake near the shoreline. The lake and the island must have been created by stupendous volcanic eruptions over geological time, and stand 2500 feet above sea level so the air is relatively fresh while the water is pleasantly warm, Prapat is a fashionable resort catering for wealthy holiday makers from Medan and for tourist parties (including, I have recently noticed from the Saga catalogue, the old and infirm). However there are also some more modest establishments for the budget traveller, and into one of these, the Pago-Pago with a view over the lake, I settled as the only guest for the night.
My room did not directly overlook the lake as there was a balcony in between, with chairs and a television set. The loos and showers were reached by descending a steep stairway where I noted carefully that the last stair was markedly higher than the others, constituting a major.hazard for nocturnal visits with possibly devastating consequences for the spine. With this in mind, plus the possibility of other guests arriving and using the TV lounge to a late hour, I called in at some of the more luxurious hotels round the bay to check their terms and availability. All were completely booked up, this being three days before Christmas, except for the more modest Indian-owned Olibert Hotel some way back from the lake, where I booked in for the following day with a man who purported to be the manager, spoke English well, and said his firm also owned the Pago-Pago.
There wasn't much activity around the Pago-Pago that evening, so I walked around the harbour and ate at a friendly restaurant by the waterside. Continuing round the harbour I arrived at where the action was - a busy street lined with markets and restaurants. Most of the visitors appeared to come from other parts of Indonesia or nearby Asian countries including Singapore, but I found one bar full of white tourists, sitting around despondently having presumably been dumped there by a tour bus - there were half a dozen standing down by the harbour - for later collection, Back in the Pago-Pago lounge I wrote my letters, watched by four lizards on the ceiling.
MORE DAYS ON LAKE TOBA
Early next morning before the sun climbed too high I set off with my pack up and down the hilly streets of Prapat to move into the Hotel Olibert. There followed one of those scenes only too familiar to travellers in Asia which are madly frustrating at the time but comical in retrospect. No-one at the Olibert spoke more than a few words of English: no-one knew of my booking: the hotel was full up anyway; no-one could identify the man who had taken my booking the previous day. I was escorted under a barbed wire fence to an adjacent hotel which was also full, though I was offered a share of the room occupied by several of the hotel staff. 1 protested, I cajoled, I insisted - all to no avail. If the man who made my reservation had no connection with the hotel, as seemed likely, what was his motive in deceiving me? He had not attempted to demand any money. Eventually, to the evident relief of the hotel staff, I abandoned my efforts, decided I didn't like the hotel anyway, and checked back into the Pago-Pago. The day still being young, I decided to spend the rest of it on Samosir Island and explore the accommodation there.
I walked half a mile away from town to the ferry port, past a market square full to overflowing with fruit, fish, vegetables, and people. Several ferry boats were waiting, each with a capacity of one or two hundred passengers, and I boarded one already half full which I judged would be the first to go despite solicitations from the owners and crew of the other vessels. On board I happened to sit next to a young woman of exceptional charm and beauty: Agnethe was a Norwegian of twenty-eight who spoke perfect idiomatic English and fed me with marquise and other fruits during the forty-five minute crossing. The marquise has a hard skin but is soft and squishy inside: the only way to eat it is to bite through the skin and suck out the contents with a single slurp,
Before I learned that Agnethe had reached the mature age of twenty-eight I asked her if she was a student, forgetting that the last young woman to whom I had put that supposition had turned put to be a management consultant. 'No' said Agnethe 'I am a civil engineer and design North Sea oil platforms'. She had been travelling in Nepal, India, Thailand, and Malaysia, and stayed in Singapore to meet her mother who had flown out for a shorter holiday, only to contract pneumonia and pleurisy when they were walking together in the jungle on Nias Island to the south of Sumatra. The journey passed quickly in the company of my new friend, and we disembarked together at the landing place belonging to Carolina's, Samosir's only hotel apart from one at Tomok at the tip of the island, the remaining accommodation being a series of 'losmens' scattered around the coast and usually approached from the lake when the ferry boats made request stops.
The staff at Carolina's were most helpful, the young ladies being fluent in several languages, and I was promised a room from the 26th onwards, with the possibility of the 25th if anyone should leave on that day, 'Just ring us up and ask for Julie' I was advised, Agnethe and I walked half a mile along the coast road (the only road on the island) to meet her mother at their losmen. At first they had stayed at another one further along the shore, but her mother had woken in the night when something brushed her face, and in the morning found a large rat asleep in the bedclothes. The losmen owner was highly indignant when they decided to leave and refused to give them a hand with their luggage. Their present losmen, Romlan's, was one of the best on Sampsir, with a reputation for good food and its own swimming place. The approach from land was less inviting, a narrow track leaving the road by a rubbish dump and traversing precipitous rocks before arriving at the kitchen.
Elizev, Agnethe's mother, was a vigorous woman in her fifties, on holiday from her job as an accountant with a firm manufacturing earplugs, and in fine spirits despite her pleurisy, which did not discourage her from her daily swims. She displayed several bottles of pills prescribed by the local doctor and said she now rattled when she jumped up and down. I spent most of the day with this delightful couple before Elizev retired to rest, By this time in late afternoon one had to take care not to miss the last ferry back to Prapat. Agnethe and I went down to the shore and waved frantically but unavailingly at three successive ferry boats passing by, after which the young man of the losmen advised (wrongly, as Agnethe told me later) that there would be no more boats to the Tuk-Tuk area where we and Carolina's were situated, and I would have to go to the main car ferry at Tomok. He took me there on the pillion of his motor-bike along three miles of rough bumpy road with hairpin bends: I was glad to arrive safely. There I bought a ticket and waited while twenty or thirty lorries drove on to the ferry, I tried to board then, apprehensive of being left on the quayside while the boat set off, but was restrained by an official who held me back while some cars were loaded. Accustomed to handling restive westerners he advised me to be patient and take it easy. At last I was allowed to climb up to the passenger deck above the vehicles and relaxed while we chugged across to Prapat to the accompaniment of Jingle Bells in Indonesian blaring through the loudspeakers, followed by See the Conquering Hero in fifty-five verses, and - more restfully - Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.
I had acquired some useful information from my new friends. Elizev said you had to be firm with the ferry boat crew on the way to Sampsir to ensure that you were landed at the right place; otherwise you might have a long walk to reach your destination on the island. Once when they were carrying heavy packs the captain refused to put them ashore at their losmen, making her so angry that, though normally of a placid temperament (or so she assured me), she shouted at him and hit him until he relented. Agnethe told me that the road to Bukkitinggi, which would be my next stop after Lake Toba, was excessively winding, causing nearly all the Indonesian passengers to be sick. Undeterred, they all weighed in to a substantial plateful at the first stop and recharged - as she put it - with fresh ammunition.
At the Pago-Pago that evening I met two young women from Amsterdam whom I had encountered in Brastagi, and went out with them for a hot spicy meal at the other end of town. They had degrees in psychology and had been victims of the current Dutch disease of graduate unemployment before taking their present jobs in adult education, one lecturing dustmen on public health problems (the main occupational risk to Amsterdam dustmen deriving from used syringes) and the other on fire precautions. I had coffee with an English couple in their mid-twenties, Gary from Leicester where he was a buyer for Next, and Rosemary from Welwyn where she was a health education officer in the NHS. Actually Rosemary had Ovaltine, not coffee, which seemed appropriate for a young lady from Welwyn; more surprising perhaps that it was readily available in much of South East Asia, a tribute to the Ovaltine marketing organisation. Gary and Rosemary had been travelling for four months and were wary and embattled by constant efforts by the locals to rip them off in Bali, Java, and elsewhere. They were now resolved, belatedly, to treat it as a game in which you lose some, you draw some - you don't win any.
Next morning, Christmas Eve, I surveyed the scene from the Pago-Pago balcony. Immediately below was a jumble of rusting corrugated iron roofs - extending to the shoreline two hundred yards away. Banana plants and palm trees were scattered around irregularly, Beyond lay the blue-grey waters of the lake and then the shore of Samosir Island where you could just make out the losmens lining the edge of the Tuk-Tuk peninsula, and behind them steep cliffs lined with deep rain gullies.
I breakfasted with Gary and Rosemary who were off to Samosir that day, I had intended to spend a third night at the Pagn-Pago, where it had still been relatively quiet the previous night with about half a dozen guests including the Dutch girls. However, two Indonesian families, each with about a dozen children, suddenly materialised and settled in to the remaining two rooms. They were neat and well-behaved, but it could hardly be expected that peace and quiet would continue to reign at the Pago-Pago, while the prospects of access at short notice to either of the two hotel mandis were remote. So I packed up and decided to try my luck on Samosir. In any case I had exhausted the delights of Prapat and preferred what I had seen of the island.
The market place opposite the ferry terminal, which had presented such a lively scene the previous day, was now a desolate sight, a big dusty square strewn with discarded packaging and husks and vegetable refuse. The ferry boat I boarded was pretty scruffy too, and in no hurry to move off. The two Dutch girls were on board, and we were joined by a small boy carrying a live chicken which clucked dejectedly throughout the voyage. I disembarked at Carolina's, who confirmed they were full up that night but would reserve a room for me from Christmas day onwards. They agreed to look after my pack while I scoured the island for somewhere to spend the night. This took the whole of the afternoon and most of the evening until just before dark. It was No Room at the Inn with a vengeance. Other weary travellers passed and repassed me along the coast road, engaged in the same search, many of them carrying enormous packs. Young islanders on motorcycles periodically offered to take me and my luggage to a losmen where they knew there was room, but I preferred to retain freedom of choice. I was offered several rather unappealing places, often in shared rooms which I prefer to avoid. At one up-market losmen I could find no-one in charge, but chatted to Annie from Peckham who was sharing a smart Batak-style house with her Dutch boy-friend. She offered to help in finding a place, and said that if all else failed I was welcome to sleep on the upper shelf in her house. It was cheering to have a fall-back position.
.Annie took me along to Rosita's, one of the better known losmens, which was full as I knew from previous enquiries. However, Rosita's mother kept a losmen called Wros about a mile away where there was a vacancy. The Wros losmen was nothing to write home about, and the price demanded, 5000 rupees, bore no relation to the standard of accommodation. Having negotiated the price down to 3000, still grossly excessive but my options were diminishing, I was shown a tumbledown Batak house, approached by a sequence of dangerous and slippery stone steps, ladders, and platforms; and a most insanitary mandi further down the hillside approached by even more dangerous steps. A nocturnal visit was to be avoided if at all possible. But I wasn't going to find anything better that evening so I collected my pack from Carolina's, who cheered me up with the news that my room there should be free by 10 a.m., returned to Wrus and went cautiously down the stairs, swung from a ladder on to a platform, and from there climbed through a small trap-door into my new home. Inside a local resident was sitting on a decrepit mattress which was the only article of furniture, but he departed after some conversation.
I was not to have the house to myself for long, however, because I was joined by a wizened old woman carrying a broom, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. She sat herself down next to me on the mattress, said she was sick, and invited me to feel her chest. I told her that if her chest was sick she ought not to smoke, so she stubbed out her cigarette on the mattress, After the exchange of further pleasantries she made some desultory flourishes with the broom and shuffled off. I was bothered by a bad smell in the house and searched everywhere for its source before tracing it to my trainers.
Towards evening I walked over to Romlan's to call on Agnethe and her mother. The island was very full now, with young Indonesian tourists camping out on every available flat patch of ground near the lake and lighting fires, sometimes right by the side of losmens where people were sleeping or eating. There seemed to be no-one about at Romlen's so I knocked at the door of the room which Agnethe shared with her mother - and found that I had interrupted their hour of meditation! They took my intrusion in good part, and did not return to their afternoon meditation which was no doubt damaged beyond repair, We chatted over hot lemon drinks. Agnethe had been assaulted the day before when she was walking in the mountains. She had asked the way from a local man who led her up a steep path and he grabbed hold of her. She fought him off successfully, shouted for help, and threatened to report the incident to the police, on which her assailant ran off. She suffered no physical harm beyond a couple of bruises but it must have been a nasty experience.
Later that evening I joined a Christmas Eve party at Romlan's at the invitation of my Norwegian friends. There about thirty of us from a dozen nationalities. The losmen owner welcomed us with a delightful speech and lit all the candles on a Christmas tree. We helped ourselves to a good spread for which we had paid a modest sum -- unlimited quantities of rice, fried chicken, fish, cooked vegetables, salad, and fruit, Cold tea was on tap, and we could order beer if we felt extravagant. Carols were sung, followed by a display of dancing by the young people of the house with many and varied fluttering hand gestures. Some of the younger travellers joined.in, causing great amusement to the locals, I think because the flutterings were not imitated accurately and probably conveyed unintended sexual messages.
I walked back to Wros soon after ten while there still some lights showing in the losmens. A couple of dim bulbs hanging from wires helped me to negotiate the hazardous approach to my room. By torchlight my dwelling appeared comfortable and spacious, the mattress was just thick enough to soften the hardness of the wooden floor, and I was soon asleep. Waking after an hour, as usual, with an urgent need and hearing a patter of rain, I balked at making a trip down to the mandi, and made use of a large hole in the floorboards with a steady hand and accurate aim, Any misgivings about the sanitary correctness of my action were immediately washed away by a tropical downpour and rushing waters under the house and down the hillside. The noise of the rain on the corrugated iron roof was almost unbelievable. After a while it seemed impossible that it could get any louder, but the violence of the storm increased and the noise doubled and then redoubled. The rain stopped after an hour.
On Christmas morning I was at Carolina's promptly at ten ready to enter the promised land. My room was empty but not yet cleaned so Julie at the reception desk suggested that I went for a swim while the room was prepared. Steps led down to a flat beach area with a few chairs and parasols and a dozen people lounging around. A gentle blissful swim washed away all traces of the previous day's frustrations and the unsavoury Wros losmen. The room was all that I could wish, situated at lake level nearly opposite the embarkation point for the ferry, clean and spacious, a mandi with a sit-upon loo and with a large bowl for washing clothes and a contraption for hanging them out to dry. There was electric light, but the bulbs were low wattage and the power came on only at night. Carolina's other rooms and 'cottages' were round by the bathing beach or perched on the hillside above. A staircase up from my room led to the main lounge and restaurant area with a view over the lake framed by bougainvillea. There were plenty of good eating places within an easy walk, but Carolina's also served excellent meals and tea, coffee, and fruit-juices almost as cheaply as the smaller losmens.
The clientele was varied but on the whole less attractive than at the more scruffy establishments. There seems to be a general law that the cheaper the accommodation the better the company. You didn't have to be rich to stay at Carolina's at seven pounds a night, but there were a lot of other places where you could stay comfortably (except on Christmas Eve) at half the price. Here there was a preponderance of Germans and Scandinavians and a smaller proportion than usual of British and Australians. I made some friends during my stay of five days and met some interesting characters. There was a retired Dutch sea-captain, Koppman, who survived as a boy in Auschwitz until the war ended, and who had visited Samosir not long after with a Dutch ship at a time when the island's only communication with the mainland was by canoe. He knew everything and everyone. Conversation tended to be uphill, as whenever you imparted any information to him he said "You don't haff to tell ME that". But he was very kind-hearted and went to endless trouble to get treatment for Elizev, escorting her to the mainland and on to the hospital at Siantar for X-rays.
.Another older traveller was Bill, sixty, born in Ireland, who had spent most of his life in North America, the last twenty-seven years at his homestead in Alaska a hundred miles north of Anchorage. He lived alone, was a keen gardener with a greenhouse, and claimed to have grown cabbages weighing twenty pounds apiece, the short growing season being more than compensated for by the day-length in the Arctic summer. There were David and Marilyn with their two children, a New Zealand missionary family taking a holiday from the Madras Assembly of God. Their daughter attended a missionary boarding school in Penang, while the son who was younger stayed with them in India. The two missionaries spent much of the day writing in big notebooks while the children swam in the lake. Other regular swimmers were two young Canadian women on holiday from the International School at Jakarta where they had two-year teaching contracts: one contacted me a few months later when she was coming to London but we failed to meet again.
Walking one day I met a tall Dutch girl, handsome and bronzed, escorted by a dozen local people. She had been on Samosir for three months, preparing a thesis on the effects of tourism on the islanders. Her present task was interrogating the farmers about any changes that tourism had caused to the type of crops they grew or to their methods of marketing. Nelli, an advertising assistant from Zurich, regularly spent five months a year travelling in S. E. Asia, accepting that this choice of life-style meant she would never climb the career ladder. She found her way to Carolina's after landing mistakenly five miles away, the other side of Ambarita, and putting up at an isolated and not very good losmen. Dorothy from Toronto, on holiday from a teaching job in Bhutan, had been travelling in Thailand and Malaysia, and had caught the next boat after mine from Penang to Medan. She had to endure a forty-eight hour delay before leaving port while a spare part was fetched from Singapore, but passengers were allowed to stay on board and served with meals. Later I learned from other travellers that the boat's third voyage had been even more disastrous, one engine catching fire in mid-ocean and the crew and passengers standing by to abandon ship until the crippled boat limped into Belawan on one engine.
Many old friends were met again, either at Carolina's, where people tended to call in for a drink or an unauthorised swim even if they were staying elsewhere, or encountered on walks, Gunnar and Maria from Brastagi, Susie and Annie who had become friends with me on the ill-fated boat from Penang, the two Dutch girls who kept cropping up, Gary and Rosemary from the PagoPago. I spent more time too with Agnethe, and with the two Canadian teachers, and rarely had a meal or a drink by myself during my stay. One evening at Carolina's I saw the television news from Kuala Lumpur and learned of the fighting in Rumania: Koppman kept us all up-to-date with the sequel.
Short of trekking up and over the mountain - and I was in too lazy a mood for that - there were just two walks one could take, as in Proust's childhood. One wound round the coast to the west, past ricefields and scattered tombs, to Tomok where there were souvenir stalls and a lively market. The eastwards walk, over more hilly country and round a deeply indented coastline, led in a few miles to the village of Ambarita with its stone chairs encircling a block reputed to be the site of executions. The place was guarded by sinister carved statues and there was the strongest impression of brooding evil.
GOOD-BYE TO SAMOSIR
It required an effort of will to drag myself away from the relaxed island of Samosir and the luxury of Carolina's. I had been lucky with the weather; other visitors told me that it had been consistently wet until the week of my arrival, Over Christmas cloud tended to build up in the afternoons, shrouding the mountains around the lake, and there were sometimes heavy showers in the evening, but for the most part it was fine and sunny with the temperature in the eighties, ideal for swimming or gentle walking. The local people were friendly: many of them made their living from the tourist trade and while prices had doubled since the Lonely Planet Guide was published three years ago they were still reasonable. No doubt competition played a part, since it did not need much capital to open a new losmen - several were being built at intervals along the road between Tuk-Tuk and Ambarita. How long would it be, I wondered, before the international hotels established themselves and turned Samosir into just another fashionable resort?
Friday 29th December was a day of low cloud and intermittent heavy rain which made it easier to leave the island. At mid-day I paid my bill and boarded a ferry boat which cruised along the shore picking up passengers from other losmens and finally transferred us to another, more decrepit, boat where we were stifled with diesel fumes. There seemed to be something wrong with the engine, as a chap lifted up the floorboards and disconnected some electric cables, after which we seemed to get on better. We could not get alongside the dock after we reached the mainland as it was full up with other waiting ferry boats, and we had to clamber over several decks where it would have been quite easy for anyone with a heavy pack to overbalance into the water, but I managed to keep my feet. A minibus took me up the hill to the main bus station about a mile out of town.
The Prapat bus station had a desolate aspect on an afternoon of steady rain. It was a large area of sand, now turning into mud and puddles, about two hundred yards square. It was surrounded by market stalls, dingy restaurants, the local Youth Hostel, and a booking office. In the middle of the square there was an island with a waiting room, some chairs, and a table. As I sat in the waiting-room various characters asked me where I was going and did I have a ticket, and seemed disappointed to find that I had one. I discovered a couple of hours later that what I had was in fact a receipt, and I duly exchanged it for a ticket for the luxury airconditioned bus to Bukittingghi due to leave at 3 p. m. I was expecting a long wait anyway as I'd arrived at half-past one, not wishing to put too much reliance on the irregular ferry boat service to Prapat. As the hours passed any number of ramshackle buses swept into and out of the station, all packed to the gunwales and none bearing any resemblance to a luxury air-conditioned vehicle, There were no other tourists in sight. I wondered whether the bus existed, and if it did arrive from Medan would there be any seats left or would I have to stand for the twelve or thirteen hour journey on which, according to Agnethe, all the other passengers would be vomiting at regular intervals as we swept at high speed around sharp bends. The Prapat bus station is not the most attractive place to spend a wet afternoon of uncertain duration, and as I sat there I thought 'What am I doing here?' as travellers from time immemorial have thought in adversity.
At three o'clock there was no sign of the luxury bus, but things began to look up, Two very large and very tough-looking Dutchmen arrived, a sort of Netherlands version of the Kray brothers, and declared their intention of not only catching the bus to Bukittingghi, but continuing for another two and a half days by bus along the deteriorating roads to the south-eastern tip of Sumatra and then on to Jakarta. Then an English couple, Christopher and Sarah, discovered that their bus to Sibolga on the south coast of Sumatra had been cancelled, and decided to go to Bukittingghi instead. Then, only twenty-five minutes late, our bus swept into the station. It looked very full but there were five seats vacant and I squeezed into one next to an exceptionally large and well-built Indonesian.
There was air-conditioning of a sort, but quite inadequate to dispel the clouds of smoke: almost everyone on the bus was smoking continuously. The seats had just about enough leg-room for me, but not nearly enough for my burly neighbour who perforce sat with his knees wide apart forcing me into the corner, and whose great bulk swung over to crush me every time the bus went round a right-hand bend. Since the road consisted of an interminable succession of S-bends as we swept through thick jungle at alarmingly high speed, it was not the most comfortable of journeys, but there were exciting moments as we drove along the brim of deep gorges or crossed narrow bridges, sometimes makeshift wooden structures to replace bridges swept away by floods, with no more than a couple of inches to spare on either side. The crossing of such bridges, and other hazardous passages on the route, were enlivened by much shouting between the driver at the wheel and the conductor leaning out of the back.
After a couple of hours the bus stopped at nowhere in particular while the driver and conductor got off and looked closely at one of the front wheels. We drove on to the next village where we stopped again, this time for an hour and a half while a puncture was mended; we did not have any spare wheel, and the puncture drill was repeated twice more during the night. The three long halts were not at all unwelcome although they lengthened the total journey to nearly eighteen hours. They relieved the monotony of the journey, the nausea induced by fast driving round sharp bends, and a certain numbness of the bottom. I passed the time talking to Christopher, an officer of the British Council, and his wife Sarah who was a few years younger, probably not much more than twenty, They had met in Dacca in Bangladesh where they were both stationed and had been for nearly two years; this was a holiday before their final spell in Bangladesh after which, to their infinite relief, they would be posted to Tel Aviv.
The night seemed to last for ever, though I snatched the odd half hour of sleep between punctures, and it was a relief to arrive at Bukittingghi at nine in the morning, even if it was still raining and the bus station was no more inspiring than that at Prapat - though we were met by a reception committee of small minibus (or opelet) drivers, all wishing to drive us off to a hotel at an exorbitant price. Travellers, after all, are less inclined to bargain when arriving at a strange town in a steady downpour after eighteen hours on a bus. We took an opelet to the Mountain View Hotel but found it full up. I booked into the cheaper Suwarni Hotel just opposite: Christopher and Sarah looked around and inspected several others but came back to join me at the Suwarni.
BUKITTINGGI
Bukittinggi is described in the guide books as the cultural and educational centre of the Minangkebau people, and has a university to prove it. The town is 3000 feet high and is built on a slight rise in the middle of a plain ringed by high volcanic mountains, the three highest - usually in cloud - being Merapi, Sago, and Singgalang. The town centre is dominated by a clock with four faces, rather like Big Ben, surrounded by gardens. On one side stands a long concrete building three stories high encircled by market stalls, with shops and restaurants on the ground floor, tailors selling cloth on the first floor, and banks and offices in the upper stories. From the central square, streets radiate confusingly in all directions - it took me a couple of days to get my bearings despite a tolerably good street plan - the highest road going along a ridge past my hotel and ending at the old Dutch Fort de Kock. Streets at higher and lower levels were connected by flights of stone steps, and housed the usual collection of food shops, chemists, tape and video rental places, while tourism left its mark on the main street, a wide straight thoroughfare leading gently downhill from the clock, in the form of frequent wismas, restaurants, coffee houses, and travel agents. It was mainly a modern town, built on more spacious lines than most.
My hotel, the Wisma Suwarni, had half a dozen rooms including one dormitory. My room was just big enough to accommodate two beds and a couple of shelves for clothes and other luggage. There were windows and wooden shutters which could admit plenty of fresh air (and a few mosquitoes in the evenings) as they looked out over the side of a hill, My room was next to the loo and the mandis, a mixed blessing but on the whole rated a plus as the proximity was handy for nocturnal visits and the place was kept exceptionally clean. The loo was a sit-down model with - unusually - a good flush. I was divided from the neighbouring bedroom by the thinnest of partitions which stopped short a yard from the ceiling, so I could hear the slightest murmur from next door and inhale a lungfu1 ot my neighbours cigarette smoke, The eating room was a rather gloomy place, adequate for breakfast but not an attractive spot in which to linger during the day, and was usually left empty while residents toured the town and surrounding areas, spending their idle hours in the local restaurants and coffee houses. The Suwarni was run by a pleasant middle-aged woman, helped or hindered by family or hangers-on who spent most of their time watching the TV which remained on in the dining room at all times. I would rate it a good average hotel by my standards, with a friendly atmosphere and the welcome offer of a cup of tea on arrival after that eighteen hour bus journey.
Having settled in I walked across the town, in slight rain, to the Post Office where no fewer than four letters delivered a considerable boost to morale. I lost my way briefly on the way back, found Bukittinggi looking better as the clouds lifted to reveal the mountains, enjoyed a late breakfast (excellent banana porridge) with Christopher and Sarah, took a shower and read my letters.
Later in the morning I explored the town and discovered The Coffee House, a well known haunt of travellers, meeting Gabrielle from Toronto, previously encountered on the ferry from Penang and again at Brastagi. The staff at the Coffee House offered various local tours and attractions, including a visit to a buffalo fight which I did not take up at the time. After further explorations I called at Roda's restaurant in the town centre for my evening meal, meeting a party of four Californians from Santa Cruz, and enjoying a tasty - and filling - vegetable murtabak. To follow I tried a local delicacy, Dadih Campur, buffalo yoghurt with oats and fruit salad. The yoghurt was very sour, and the whole dish was pretty revolting.
Next morning, New Year's Eve, the clouds were higher but there still no distant views. I breakfasted alone, none of the other guests showing any sign of life by 7.30, visited the zoo which was as depressing as most zoos in Asia, and toured the local museum. This was housed in a splendid building, designed by a Dutchman in the local Menangkebau style, containing an odd miscellany or objects, many of them illustrating traditional arts and crafts, described in quaint English. The Lesung Endek, for example, was "part of productivee mean (mean that can produce things). It is used to pound rice plant. It consists of two parts, rice mortar (as place to put rice plant that will be pounded). And the other one is scheme made of wood which is more bigger for putting on its pounder. By technological processing this scheme is trampled down and to be released so that the process of pounding will be done repeatedly. The products of this will be got rice mixing with shell. This work is always done by women." Other more morbid exhibits were sheep with eight legs or two heads.
It was time to turn my attention to booking the next stage of my journey that would take me from Sumatra to Java. I hoped to secure a passage on the S.S. Kerinci, reputedly the finest ship in Indonesia, which made a fortnightly trip from Padang, on the south coast of Sumatra, to Jakarta. The alternative, to go on by bus to the extreme east of Sumatra and then to take a small ferry-boat, seemed unreasonably arduous, Reluctant to hand over a large sum, about thirty pounds, to a travel agent, I had it in mind to catch a bus down to Padang myself, buy a ticket from the shipping line, and return to Bukittinggi, but in the end I entrusted my money to the most reassuring of the travel agents where a young man promised to travel to Padang the next day, and return with a first-class ticket for me.
I lunched at the Three Tables Coffee House - this seemed to be a popular name in Sumatra irrespective of the number of tables provided, Here I met two new arrivals to Bukittinggi, Anna and Stefan, who were to become firm friends in the next few days. Anna was thirty-two, Swedish (she complained there were too many Swedes travelling in Indonesia), blue-eyed, fairhaired, on the plump side, and wonderfully warm-hearted. Stefan was twenty-three, Finnish - but from the 8% of the Finnish population whose native language was Swedish - lean and dark, a little abrupt at first but good company when you got to know him, Anna spoke near perfect English, Stefan quite good but with a heavy accent. Occasionally one of them had to search for a word; usually the other came up with it. They were married, Anna explained, not in law but ' in our hearts".
.Anna and Stefan were tough travellers. They had been staying on a small island to the north of Sumatra, and had come overland to Bukittinggi in overcrowded public buses with a total journey time of forty-eight hours. They were jammed tight throughout, with other passengers sitting half in their laps, a baby lodged on Anna's shoulder for several hours, children vomiting and urinating in the bus at frequent intervals, They were a cultured and well-informed pair, although their jobs lacked a high intellectual content, Anna had been a waitress on a passenger liner until the company sacked all their Swedish staff and employed lower-paid Filipinos. Now she was a mess-maid with a company which ran cargo ships and oil tankers, wherever possible working on the same ship as Stefan who bought and cooked the food for the crew. Their work had taken them all over the world, British ports of call being Chatham, Hartlepool, and Sullom Voe in Shetland.
I went for a walk in the afternoon, going several hundred feet down a steep hill to a canyon where a wide river flowed. Local campers had their tents on the banks, Coming back I passed the entrances to a vast network of caves hollowed out of the hillside by the Japanese army when they occupied Indonesia. They might have been for the storage of ammunition, or a bastion for a last ditch defence against allied forces: they were now open to the public but I had no inclination to go in, I was caught by a sharp shower but reached my hotel before it got really heavy.
It was still raining at 7 p.m., when I went to meet Anna and Stefan at the Three Tables. They had been searching for some French travelling companions who had arranged to meet them in Bukittinggi, and were leaving messages - without success - at all the probable hotels. I had suggested that Chris and Sarah might join us, and we had an entertaining evening together listening to Anna's tales of travelling under difficulties. Among other misadventures she had contracted a swollen foot which had gone septic after a mosquito bite, and had to undergo an operation without any anaesthetic. The restaurant filled up as New Year's Eve advanced: raffle tickets were awarded with each three bottles of beer purchased, the prize, appropriately enough, being an umbrella: midnight saw a multi-racial rendering of Auld Lang Syne.
On the morning of New Year's Day, I went with Chris and Sarah for a walk to the nearby village of Kota Gadang, famous for its silversmiths. We started down the steep road to the canyon, where helpful locals directed us down some steps to the river bank. We followed a good track along the riverside until we met a local inhabitant who adopted us and waved us along when he diverged to visit his 77-year old grandfather. From this point the track became narrower, steeper, and a lot more slippery, with some sharp drops and climbs that were difficult to negotiate. Chris was for pressing on, Sarah was more cautious, and I became convinced that we should have crossed the river further back. In the end we decided to retrace our steps, and soon met Grandpa who spoke fluent Dutch and tolerable English and wished us a happy new year. We found that the path had forked just at the point when we were cheerfully waved on by our adopted guide, and following the correct fork we crossed the river by a wooden bridge which led to steep steps up the hillside, Twenty minutes of stiff climbing brought us to the village of Kota Gadang.
.It was a scattered village with one coffee house, fifty or sixty dwellings, and half a dozen metal and jewellery workshops. We watched one man melting a blob of silver with a flame fanned by foot bellows. After a rest taking black coffee in the coffee house we wondered whether to make a circuit back to the main road avoiding the canyon. However at a cross-roads in the village there were two signposts marked Bukittinggi, pointing in opposite directions. We asked a villager the best way to return to the town and he pointed in a direction at right angles to the routes indicated by the igpost, Sarah, always cautious, suggested that it would be safer to retrace our steps and that it is what we did.
Later that day I saw a tall slender girl with long hair leaving the Suwarni. I followed her into the town where we had a drink together. She was Lilian, from the Dublin area, thirty-one, and travelling continuously since she was nineteen apart from brief spells at home every three or four years. She had journeyed throughout Asia, East and South Africa, and South America, earning money when necessary by any job that came along. In recent years she had worked on ships, in a fish factory, and had looked after old ladies. She had just come from Nias Island, travelling to the mainland on the deck of a cargo ship where she had fixed one side of her tent to keep out the wind and rain and shared a blanket with a large dog which had passed on one of its ticks.
An interesting discussion on ticks, lice, and bedbugs, on which Lilian's adventures had made her something of an expert, continued when we were joined by two Dutch girls who had also been staying on Nias. As the Dutch were having trouble with their vocabulary, Lilian illustrated the different varieties by drawing on the back of the menu. The Dutch girls, undeterred by the conversation, were tucking into some large pancakes, reminding Lilian that she hadn't eaten for some time, so - we adjourned to the Familie restaurant on the hill near the Suwarni. Here we enjoyed a splendid view of the mountains and a red sunset, followed by the rising of a new moom. The food, unfortunately, did not live up to the surroundings, and our portions of gado-gado were disappointingly small. We walked into town again, and continued eating at Roda's, with Chris and Sarah who had already met Lilian in the dormitory at Suwarni's. When Roda 's closed at eight, Lilian was still hungry - perhaps she hadn't eaten a square meal for several days - so we adjourned to the Coffee House and were attacking some generous banana pancakes when we were joined by Anna and Stefan. Late into the night they were swapping tales about life at sea with Lilian who had worked on ships in Scandinavia.
Next morning at 8, 30 I paraded for one of the minibus tours of the surrounding countryside. There were eight of us, including Dave from Australia and Kathy from Purley whom I had met on my canyon walk, and a German couple in their thirties, Wolfgang and Sibele. Our guide, Martin, was a local lad from Bukittinggi, spoke excellent English, and provided helpful explanations of the culture and traditions of the area. He insisted on proper introductions to each member of the party, and seemed particularly solicitous about my welfare (perhaps because of my advanced age) turning round often from the front seat to enquire "Are you all right Mr. John?' The bus was comfortable apart from the exhaust fumes which came up through the floorboards, and it was a well-organised tour.
Our tour first took us to cultivated fields on the mountain slopes where Martin pointed out cinnamon trees with their reddish leaves, clove and coffee bushes, and several types of banana including one with a tall tree stem. On the upper slopes there was mountain rice, growing without benefit uf irrigation. Lower down, water trickled from one terrace to the next until it reached the plain, where water-wheels extended the irrigation system through raised pipes. We visited a coffee mill powered by water flowing through concrete channels, and stepped precariously across the channels into a large shed dominated by a thick horizontal shaft rotated by a water-wheel twelve feet in diameter. On the shaft was a series of toothed wheels, engaging in heavy vertical timbers which were lifted high and then dropped to the floor of the shed where metal caps at the foot of each timber pulverised the roasted coffee beans, Nearby was a coconut plantation with a large monkey chained to a tree. These monkeys are trained to climb the hudred foot palms and throw down coconuts. A well trained monkey that will select only the ripe nuts is worth twenty pounds.
Our next call was at the vast ornamental palace of the local Menangkebau king, now maintained as a museum while the king lives in retirement and his sons are educated abroad. Decorated in red, black, and gold, the main hall was two hundred yards across and fifty yards deep, with a high horned roof supported by columns six feet across. Everything was of wood except for the thatched roof which curved to rise at each end but without the overhang of the Karo rants in the Batak region. In the centre of the main hall was a throne surrounded by rich hangings; smaller rooms for the women of the household were at the back. A mile along the road was a modern structure of similar design and workmanship, the outside decorated with elaborate painted patterns: this was the town meeting-house.
In the next village Martin took us into a traditional family house, entered by a high staircase leading to a long room sixty feet from end to end with smaller rooms adjacent. We spoke to Grandma who owned the house and lived in it with only three others - it must have been built to house a dozen families, Walking through the village we were welcomed on equal terms by people who seemed uncorrupted by tourism. The children were delightful and wanted to hold hands as we walked along so we each finished up with large adopted families.
At a local craft centre we saw the hand weaving of cotton lined with gold thread. The operation of the hand looms looked incredibly laborious. We called briefly at a hotel by a big lake where another party had been swimming but we were now behind schedule and had to push on to see the buffalo fight which was unavoidably part of the tour. It took place in a muddy field about four times the size of a football pitch, with a fence of wooden poles around it, Within it the local people had formed a smaller square, and inside that were two reluctant water-buffaloes, who were eventually induced by prodding and shouting to butt each other on the head in a desultory fashion for quarter of an hour. At that point, as a result of exhaustion or sheer boredom, one of them turned tail, ran off at high speed pursued by its opponent, and crashed into the fence, splintering the wood and scattering the spectators. One American girl was slightly hurt by the collapsing fence; luckily no-one was trampled by the buffalo. The.contest was repeated with two new buffaloes, one of which fled within a few minutes. The whole spectacle was excessively boring and depressing.
In the evening I ran across Anna and Stefan once more, this time with John from Chicago who had been with them on the island. John had just finished his first degree (anthropology) in Montana. We ordered a meal at the Three Tables, writing down our choice with the aid of the usual pencil tied on to the lampshade above the table. Anna held forth passionately in favour of green policies and said she was going to demonstrate in Sweden against the export of arms. She reprimanded me for squashing an ant on the table, pointing out that he too had a wife and family - betraying a warm heart but ignorance of social life in the ant world. She gave me the address of their small flat in Stockholm which was their only land base but where they did not live for long enough periods to pay Swedish income tax. They seemed very content with their life-style, which provided them with plenty of leisure and enough money to enjoy it.
LAKE MANINJAU
As there were three days to go before the S. S. Kerinci left Padang I decided to visit Lake Maninjau in central Sumatra. On a clear morning, the sun already hot but the streets cooled by a pleasant breeze, I caught one of the little red opelets to the main Bukittinggi bus station where I was assailed on all sides by 'helpers' trying to sell me tickets or to escort me to a bus of their choice. I ploughed on ahead until I located the 'Harmonis' minibus which went to Maninjau. Taking my seat promptly in the bus provided no protection against further attempts to gain my custom, one persistent seller being determined that I should buy an English-Bahasi dictionary. In vain I showed him my phrase-book and demonstrated my mastery of the language by asking him when the bus was due to go and wishing him good-bye with a fluent ' salam tinggal' . In the bus sat several old men wearing black fore-and-aft hats and puffing steadily at their cigarettes, while the driver kept the engine running to add his share to the atmospheric pollution. A dozen sellers of miscellaneous foodstuffs tried to market their wares with absolutely no success, while a beggar with a large metal money-box with a slot pushed it hopefully through the window while continuing to smoke his cigarette. As more passengers boarded the bus the driver insisted on putting my pack on the roof which was already heavily loaded with produce, The minibus had five rows of seats with a nominal capacity or about twenty but this was soon exceeded and I found myself tightly sqeezed in with my knees pressing hard against the back of the seat in front of me. I was glad my legs were not any longer.
We circled around the bus station and the market touting for still more passengers before finally getting under way, at least to the point where we could call to fill up with fuel, it being a matter of honour that the driver never does this until the bus is full up and the passengers are looking forward to a long-delayed departure. For two hours we drove up a steep winding road through bamboo forests and thick jungle, then down to a rice plain, then down further until we caught a glimpse of the lake far below. The final approach was down the forty-four hairpin bends that descended to the lakeside, each so sharp that even an Indonesian driver was reduced to five miles an hour,
It was hot and sticky, Lake Maninjau being well below the level of Lake Toba or of Bukittinggi, and completely ringed by high mountains: its perimeter measured over forty miles and its depth 1500 feet. There was a luxury hotel, the Indra, just opposite the bus stop, with a swimming pool and a floating restaurant, and after a tiring journey I thought 1 would hang the expense and squander twelve pounds for one night, and look for more modest accommodation in the cool of the morning. Beyond the floating restaurant, jutting out into the lake like a pier, was a floating block of rooms, and I booked into one of these despite warnings from the staff - who spoke little English - who seemed to be saying that the rooms sometimes went out to the middle of the lake. Whether this was some sort of joyride for tourists or the result of the rooms becoming unhitched in a storm I could not establish, but I decided to take the risk, When I booked in I seemed to be the only guest, although there were twenty or thirty staff lounging around.
Maninjau was a rather scruffy village straggling along the shore of the lake. Despite the village's run-down appearance it boasted a post office, a police station, a mosque, eight or nine guest-houses, and a couple of coffee-house/restaurants offering the usual menus and fresh fruit-juice. I looked into the Pilli Guest house which had been recommended by the Suwarni in Bukittinggi: it was new and clean and I booked in for the following day. Relaxing over a drink I saw Dave and Cathy arriving at the bus stop and advised them to try the Pilli which was under three pounds a night. They did so, but then I observed them, wearing their heavy packs and visibly suffering in the midday heat, trying out all the other places in the village before settling on the one that offered the best value. Not for the first time I was grateful that I could afford the more extravagant style of travel to which I was becoming accustomed.
Back at the Indra it seemed time for a swim. The hotel swimming bath might be thought to offer advantages over the lake, into which all the local sewage naturally found its way, but in fact was filled up by pumping direct from the lake without any apparent purification. So I swam in the lake, enjoying the magnificent view of the mountains while the village itself looked quite attractive if you swam far enough out. The lake itself was like a warm bath, not at all refreshing as Lake Toba had been. When I came out, more guests had arrived, and three youngsters I took to be college students were diving athletically into the lake from a high board, watched by a middle-aged man of distinguished appearance with whom I spoke. He said that he worked in Jakarta, and when I asked him what job he did replied that he was the Australian Ambassador. He was taking a few days off with his children and was driving on next to Bukittinggi, with the accompaniment of a full-scale police escort. His post was a major one in the Australian diplomatic service, the main concerns being political and commercial, but his staff spent a lot of their time on problems with visiting Australians, of whom there tens of thousands in the country at any one time - most of them, he added ruefully, in Bali which they did not even know was part of Indonesia.
Towards evening storm clouds began to gather on the far side of the lake, with rain visible in three different directions, An island was revealed, standing out against a cloud bank between itself and the mainland on the far side. A brisk wind blew up, the lake grew chappy, and it was an.awesome sight to see heavy black clouds massing over the lake against a lurid sky. My floating platform developed an alarming side to side motion. I set out on a brief walk before the rain reached our side of the lake, but was driven back after a few minutes by heavy rain. When it cleared for a while I walked along to the Beach Guest House where I knew Dave and Cathy had been heading; it was some way off the road, on marshy ground by the beach. My friends had found the place was full, but had been put up by a kindly proprietor in his own house. The Guest House was in fact a collection of old traditional houses with fairly basic facilities, but I was assured that the food was good. However, we were unable to eat there that evening as we had not given the requisite notice, so we adjourned to a coffee house in the village where we had a leisurely meal and stayed for three hours until a tropical storm had abated.
When I had last seen my bedroom it was rocking violently, each side in turn lifting at least six feet on the waves, but when I returned the wind had dropped and the lake was calm. Fortunately it remained so during the night and I slept well. Next morning was calm, with some blue sky overhead but a ring of clouds concealing the mountain tops. I moved into the Pilli hotel, occupying a pleasant room facing the lake, although immediately underneath my window a couple of men were breaking up large stones to make a hard landing at the lakeside. It was not a restful noise. My first task was to dry out the contents of my waterproof wallet, which I had failed to secure properly for my swim. As I had been to the bank not long before, and all Indonesian notes are of relatively low denominations, I needed to lay out over fifty banknotes on the bed to dry, together with stamps, my ticket for the boat, and other vital documents. In the event none seemed to have suffered.
The day was humid and I felt extremely lazy. I sat on the hotel balcony which had comfortable chairs and pots of coleus and chatted to other guests until the noise of the stone-breaking became too much, and I made the effort to go for a walk for a few miles along the lake shore. The road led past the mosque, where about two hundred worshippers trooped out, this being a Friday. The muezzin calls struck me as unusual, a high-pitched tortured song apparently from a young boy. I passed through more straggling villages with not much open country between them. In places the narrow lakeside plain widened out into ricefields. There were plenty of friendly hallo's from the children. Frequent paths led off the road to houses by the lake or up into the mountains.
The afternoon bus brought a few day trippers from Bukittinggi, including Wolfgang and Sibele who had dismounted higher up the mountain and taken the energetic walk down to the lake, and the two rather unkempt Dutch girls whom I was to meet almost wherever I went. At the Pilli stone-breaking had finished for the day, making it more agreeable to sit on the balcony and watch bats fluttering over the lake as evening approached. I chatted to a young Swiss couple, Angelika and Jurgk, who were German speaking but she had passable English. (Months later they sent me a postcard from Egypt. ) Angelika, who worked on computers for Swiss railways, had been to Indonesia before. Jurgk was a communications engineer. We ate together at the Three Tables restaurant which by now I had established as the best eating-place (certainly it served the largest portions) in Maninjau. The Indonesian clientele were quieter and more friendly than in the other restaurants, consisting mostly of students in their twenties, An older man of about forty, who helped in the restaurant, told me that he was connected matrilinearly to the owners of the Pilli Guest House and that he liked western music, particularly Beethoven and Mozart. In further conversation he used a striking phrase, saying that the orang utan were 'Darwin brothers' of the orang asli, the native people of Indonesia (or Malaysia).
The following day I took a walk along the lake in the opposite direction. After an 8.30 start in the cool of the morning it soon heated up, and by ten the tar on the road was melting, In this direction there were more substantial square houses built of concrete or wood and with corrugated iron roofs. Their solid appearance suggested a Dutch origin as did the formal front gardens. Atter Maninjau petered out, I passed other settlements as the road wound through ricefields. At one point there was a procession of women carrying sand in buckets the size of a child's seaside pail; they started from the beach and turned off the road a few hundred yards further along. Each village produced a chorus of hallo's from the children, varied with ' Hallo mister', 'Hallo sir', and even 'Hallo mister John'. Rice was spread out to dry by the roadside, and rollowing the sound of an engine I discovered a diesel-driven machine taking in rice through a hopper at the top and spewing out separate streams of husks and kernels. The scenery changed little and after four miles I turned back, meeting on my return Angie and Jurgk setting out to ride for forty miles round the lake on shiny new bikes they had hired.
I enjoyed a long swim in the afternoon, and in the evening met Angie and Jurgk sore but triumphant after their circuit of the lake. Apart from a few miles either side of Maninjau village most of the road had been rough and pitted with potholes. We ate together with a Canadian couple, a man who was an artist on a visit to the young woman from Saskatchewan who was working on an aid project in Bukittinggi and spoke fluent Bahasi. She told us that Maninjau had formerly been a popular resort but for some reason in recent years its popularity had declined. They were staying in a sister Guest House of the Pilli, curiously named the Amai Cheap, which was an older building but also very comfortable with pleasant rooms and high ceilings.
Next day was to be a long one, starting with the return bus trip to Bukittinggi, where I was to pick up a minibus which would take me to Padang where I would board the S. S. Kerinci that night: I had collected the minibus ticket and a first-class ticket for the ship before leaving Bukittinggi. It was a fine morning in Maninjau after a stormy night, and for the first time the air was fresh. The lake was strewn with banana leaves torn off by the gales in the night. As usual the morning was noisy from soon after six, a baker shouting his wares down the street and blowing a hand horn, the first bus honking its way round the village. I heard a child crying and realised how unusual that was in Indonesia. At breakfast I met Dave and Cathy also ready to travel, and we lingered until the arrival of the eleven o'clock bus to Bukittinggi.
FROM MANINJAU TO PADANG
We made a punctual start up the road with the fourty-four hairpin bends and made good progress until a bus in front of us ground to a halt right on.bend number three completely blocking the way. There was great activity as men rushed around putting stones under the wheels, flinging themselves under the bus with spanners, and shouting instructions to one another. After twenty minutes the problem, whatever it was, was solved, and we were on our way again. At villages en route the bus filled to overflowing as usual, but within a couple of hours I was back at the familiar scene of the Bukittinggi bus station, where for once it was not raining, With the benefit of experience I brushed away the extortionate drivers of unauthorised taxis, minibuses, etc., and caught the red opelet to the main street where I called on my travel agent. Here I was greeted with the news that there would be no minibus to take me to the quayside at Padang as there were not enough passengers to fill it. I should catch the tour o'clock public bus to Padang, and then a smaller bus from a different point - a helpful sketch map was provided - for the considerable journey out of Padang to the quay. The young man gave me back the money for the minibus fare, and accepted custody of my pack until I called back later in the afternoon for the bus.
At The Coffee House, where I called for a drink and a fruit salad, I met the inevitable pair of Dutch girls, playing Scrabble - in Dutch of course. With time in hand I adjourned to the Three Tables and passed the time with a girl from Streatham who had given up her job as an accountant to go on a year's travel followed by a course in third world studies at Middlesex Poly, and her companion who had left his job at the Government Veterinary Research Station in Weybridge for the more adventurous life of a tour guide in Turkey and other countries. Having failed to book tickets for a cabin in the Kerinci, they were going to travel economy class on the deck, and went off to buy food for the journey to supplement the notorious diet of rice and fish-heads supplied to deck passengers. At the next table was a cheerful couple from Oxford, where Denis had set up a successful furniture business and Julie was a teacher; they had been able to book first-class tickets for the ship.
I collected my pack from the travel agent, where there was now a different young man who first asked me if I had a receipt to prove the pack was mine, and then demanded a thousand rupees for looking after it. Despite a firm negative to both requests he handed over the pack without demur. The bus to Padang, when it arrived, proved to be 'fully air-conditioned', that is to say it had a panel in the roof which could be opened, while the seats were comfortable. The road to Padang took us through dramatic country of wooded mountains and deep gorges, past a waterfall with a vertical drop of several hundred feet, alongside a single-track railway now used only for freight with girder bridges crossing steep ravines, and eventually into rice plains extending to the coast at. Padang. There was a dignified approach to the city along a dual carriage-way divided by a broad strip of grass, trees and shrubs, before we arrived - in darkness - at the confusion of the bus terminus.
The layout of the bus terminal and the streets around did not seem to correspond exactly with my sketch-map, but there was no shortage of willing drivers volunteering to take passengers to the quayside, no doubt for many times the fare on the public bus. With some difficulty I found my way to a smaller bus station half a mile away and identified from among twenty or thirty others a small minibus bound for the quayside and chockful of.people, luggage, and produce. I squeezed in with my pack uncomfortably jammed between my knees. After half an hour's drive through dark streets we stopped by some dockside buildings where the outline of big ships could be seen against the night sky.
THE S.S. KERINCI : PADANG TO JAKARTA
The bus stopped outside the offices of Pelni, the shipping line, where there was a large waiting hall with rows of seats for the first-class passengers. Here I met lots of old friends, not all of whom were travelling first-class, including Denis and Julie from Oxford, who told me more of their experiences during the three hours we were waiting to go on board. After a three-year design course (I think at Keele, but my notes are badly smudged) he set up business with a partner to manufacture and fit turniture and units of his own design. The business seemed to have prospered as he had recently bought a second home in Northern France and couldn't have been more than thirty, if that. He and Julie had been sailing to Sumatra from Malaysia with half a dozen other travellers in a small fishing boat when a violent storm blew up. The fishermen put them ashore on a small island, owned by a Malaysian Royal Family, and made off for a safe haven with no indication of when, or indeed if, they would return. A guest house on the island which had been closed for the season opened up to accommodate them, and after being stranded there for a few days the travellers managed to telephone the British Embassy at Kuala Lumpur, There would not have been enough small change on the island to extend the conversation long enough to explain their predicament, but they begged the Embassy to ring back. The Embassy did so, then got on to the local police and the harbourmaster, and soon afterwards a rescue vessel arrived.
We boarded at ten and I went along to my cabin. First-class passengers shared a two-bunk cabin, but I had the good fortune to have the cabin to myself, in total air-conditioned luxury beyond imagination. Carpets, light fittings, shower, wash-basin, sit-down loo, all clean and gleaming white, Clean sheets on the bunk and a comfortable mattress. I relaxed in a long, hot, shower, and walked around the ship talking to other travellers stunned by the experience. Denis said he wanted never to get off the ship, but in the end settled for the thirty-six hours that would take us to Jakarta. Later I slept through to the morning amazed by the silence - no dogs barking, cats squealing, or cocks crowing, and though there was a room on board serving as a mosque, the worshippers were considerately quiet at their devotions.
The cabins were splendid, the whole ship smart and clean, but there was hardly anywhere to go except the dining-room when it was open for meals, There was a small bar, heavy with smoke and pop music, and there were decks to walk around but only a handful of wooden seats - no deck-chairs. The economy passengers were cleared from their deck during the day, and though the first-class quarters were supposed to be out of bounds to them they had little option but to sit or lie around in corridors or by stairways, clasping their luggage and looking like denizens of London's cardboard city. The result was that we tended to stay in our cabins when we were not walking round the decks or eating our meals, and met other travellers only during our perambulations or in the dining-room.
.New friends were a Dutch couple in their sixties who had spent their first eighteen years in Bandoeng, and Gavin Young, travel writer and former Observer correspondent, who was now of no fixed abode - having sold his house in Cadogan Square - and was going around Indonesia researching a book on Joseph Conrad. He was a ruggedly handsome man in his fifties, tall and powerfully built, and of a friendly disposition. He had been in Indonesia when the Soekarno regime was overthrown and had witnessed more than his fair share of horrors. There had been massacres of communists, suspected communists, and of Chinese who might have been communists. During a discussion of travel writers I confessed that I had not read his books and agreed to buy and read Slow Boats to China (which I have since enjoyed enormously) and all others available in paperback.
The voyage passed all too quickly, punctuated by meals that were adequate but not exciting, but at any rate provided opportunities for conversation, and by a boat drill that revealed that none of the economy passengers had been issued with life belts, although it was rumoured that there was a supply of belts for them located somewhere on the ship. Generally they had a bad time, huddled shoulder to shoulder on a lower deck at night, some being lucky enough to have been issued with mattresses, others not, The dreaded diet of fish-heads and rice lived down to its reputation. And of course there was no security at all for their possessions.
On our second night we were due to pass near to Krakatoa, Gavin Young said about eleven o'clock. It was sometimes possible to arrange a visit by fishing boat to the islands that had sprung up after the 1882 eruption: Patrick Joyce, whom I had met in Nepal and was to look up in Chicago, had done it: Claire Lightfoot who was with me for a couple of days later on in Java tried to do so but was told it was too dangerous to make the attempt at this time of year. It was a pitch black night and raining hard when we were due to pass the islands so I stayed in my cabin. Gavin went out on deck and said he could make out the jagged outlines of the islands.
When I woke at five-thirty next morning there was no sign of the heavy swell that had prevailed throughout the voyage. Evidently we were near to port, and I hastened to get in a breakfast before facing the uncertain hazards of Jakarta. Denis and Julie, with the same idea, had already started on the porridge, and informed me that it tasted like bubble and squeak. Indeed it contained a number of cabbage leaves which I carefully removed before neutralising the vegetable flavour with sugar. There followed hard-boiled eggs, good strong coffee, some dubious bread which we asked to be toasted, and miserable portions of marmalade which we supplemented by raiding the neighbouring tables, there being very few other breakfasters. Landing announcements came over the loud-speakers, but only in Bahasi, we handed in our cabin keys in return for our ten thousand rupee deposit, and at half past seven on a wet morning we set foot on Javan soil at the port of Jakarta.
.JAKARTA
Jakarta has the reputation of being one of the nastiest as well as one of the biggest cities in the world, surrounded by vast slums of shanty towns, drenched with pollution, and riddled with crime and violence. My intention therefore was to make my stay as brief as possible, and to move on quickly southwards to Bogor to stay near the horticultural gardens. At the quayside as we disembarked from S. S. Kerinci there were a few taxi touts but not the frenetic activity to be expected, Denis negotiated a reasonable taxi fare for the three of us to the Gambir Railway Station, a good area for cheap hotels, and the hour's drive through continual traffic jams did nothing to improve Jakarta's reputation. Ten minutes' walk trom the station took me to the Jalan Jaksa, Jakarta's equivalent of Bangkok's Khan San, Kuala Lumpur's Jalan Sultan, and Penang's Jalan Chulia, where every second house was a cheap hotel and budget travellers with their backpacks thronged the street. My first choice, drawn from the Lonely Planet, had been absorbed into a new development, the second - Hotel Karya - was on the gloomy and stuffy side, and at eleven pounds expensive by any than capital, city standards, but adequate and reasonably clean.
I stopped for a drink at the agreeable Restaurant Bagus, cool and screened from the sunlight by its high reed roof and was on my way to the National Museum when I ran across Lilian. She had taken two days and a half to reach Jakarta from Bukittinggi, partly because of bad information. She had taken the train from Padang to Lubuklinggau, but was then faced with a fifteen hour wait for the next train to Panjang opposite the coast of Java. So she continued with an exhausting journey by bus along very bad roads. We arranged to meet again in the evening. No sooner had I left Lilian than I heard someone else calling my name from a Chinese restaurant, and there were Rein and Karen from Brastagi. They had followed me to Bukittinggi and Maninjau but had also fitted in a quick trip to Singapore by air, in general travelling in greater comfort than the austere Lilian.
On my way to the National Museum, skirting the vast Merdeka Square - it must be one of the biggest open spaces in any of the world's cities - with Sukarno's Monas monument in the centre, I was overtaken by a violent rainstorm. The six-lane highways around the square became wide rivers within minutes as I made for the only shelter within reach, a traffic control post which I shared for half an hour with three policemen. Nearby was a generously flowing ornamental fountain which threw a well directed spray of extra water at us whenever there was a gust of wind, I was no more than five minutes' walk from the museum, and made a dash for it as soon as the rain reduced to what in England we might regard as a heavy downpour. As I gratefully reached the shelter of the museum's main entrance the heavens opened up again. The attendant at the door told me I would need to buy an entrance ticket at the Office situated fifty yards away across an open courtyard now about six inches deep in rainwater. I conformed dutifully, and entered the museum soaked to the skin and leaving a puddle in front of every exhibit I admired. After an hour and a half I was more or less dried out except for my money belt and its contents which, as in Maninjau, had to be spread out on my bed to dry.
The museum housed a marvellous collection, though not nearly as well displayed and described as in the Bangkok museum. There was some fine .ancient Hindu sculpture, magnificent gold crowns and necklaces from early Indonesian kingdoms, and grotesque masks and puppets. There were also models of traditional houses in the Batak and Mening kebau style that I recognised from my travels in Sumatra.
In steady rain I walked around the great pillar that formed the National Monument, undistinguished except for its huge scale. The surroundings of Merdeka Square looked like any anonymous modern city - blocks of banks, government offices and the like. Before long torrential rain came down again and I took refuge in the Bagus before running back to my hotel where the rain was leaking through the bathroom ceiling but the bedroom was still dry. There was a three inch cockroach in the bath. In the evening I met Lilian, Karen and Rein for a meal. It was still raining.
The Lonely Planet suggested that Bogor itself was not the best place to look for accommodation, while there was a good rest house a few miles further south at Cisarua. Next morning it had actually stopped raining; indeed the sun was so hot by eight o'clock that half way on my walk to the Gambir station I decided to take an opelet. There was no queue at the station, where I bought a third-class ticket to Bogor and was helpfully directed to the right platform. It was clean and well-kept, with seats for the full length of the platform, an improvement on British Rail. There was no bridge to the other platforms, which were approached simply by walking across the tracks. A train passed through slowly, while a man on the footplate waved a red flag and blew a mellifluous horn. I bought a copy of the daily English language paper, the Jakarta Post, having negotiated the price down from 1000 to 500 rupees. I expect the proper price was two or three hundred, but it was not printed on the paper. I had never before had to negotiate a price for a newspaper.
Several helpful people assured me that the next train was for Bogor. It had comfortable seats along the sides of long compartments with a wide gangway in the middle. Once the train started, the gangway provided the setting for the most varied parade I had seen on an Asian train, though Thai buses would not be far behind. Dozens of vendors of food and drink, a lame beggar dragging himself along the floor, a blind beggar led by a small boy, a blind woman on her own, people selling writing materials, books, toys - one man pulling a large toy aeroplane and playing a tune on the mouth organ, shoe polish, and a school percussion band providing a musical accompaniment. The vendors and beggars did very little trade, and got out a couple of stations down the line, presumably catching the next train back to Jakarta for a repeat performance. It was a slow train with plenty of stops and we passed through torrential rain. It cleared for a time, but had resumed by the time we arrived at Bogor.
As usual the bus station was some distance from the railway. Despite my weak negotiating position with the rain thundering down I declined the offer of a minibus driver to take me to the bus station for 1000 rupees, and with the aid of local advice found a bemo to take me there for 150. During my wait at the station and my drive to the bus terminus I was under heavy local pressure to stay at Bogor, one young man telling me that he had friends from Oxford (Denis and Julief) living at his losmen. It was still pouring down at the bus station, but I soon located a minibus that would pass Cisarua and climbed in out at the wet.
.CISARUA AND BOGOR
The bus left Bogor along a fine motorway to the south, fringed with brilliantly coloured flowering shrubs on the verges. A few miles on we forked off along another good road that swept uphill through fairly open country towards the Puncak pass. The landscape suggested a lower rainfall than around Bogor, but it began to rain hard as we reached Cisarua, four or five miles short of the pass, after three quarters of an hour. The Kopp Hostel, strongly recommended by the Lonely Planet, stood back from the main road in its own gardens, and fully lived up to its description. It was in fact a Youth Hostel, and I could have claimed a discount for a dormitory bed if I had had my YHA card with me. However, it hadn't been any use on previous trips so I had left it behind; nor did I usually go for the dormitory though on this occasion I might have been the only occupant. The other accommodation was in semi-detached bungalows, each with its own mandi, all clean and with instant hot water. From the bungalow terrace there were splendid views of wide sweeping landscapes and distant hills. I ordered a second breakfast, chatted with an Indonesian visitor and his Australian wife, and welcomed Rein and Karen when they arrived unexpectedly an hour after me.
I explored the small town of Cisarua which was strung put along both sides of the road and well provided with hotels and modest restaurants, clearly something of a tourist resort for Indonesians as well as foreigners. There were long views up towards the Puncak pass and down towards Bogor when the clouds lifted, but soon they thickened and there was a two-hour downpour. Back at the Hostel I made friends with Rhian, a Welsh woman in her early thirties, who had taken a degree in personnel management at Brighton Poly and had just left her job as Hospital Personnel Officer to travel in India, Nepal, and Thailand. When the rain stopped we went out as a party including two Danish girls to the rather up-market Safari Hotel where I shared some generous portions of rice, gado-gado, and satay, with Rhian.
On the main road there were fleets of little blue buses that plied back and forth to Bogor, and I boarded one on a hot sunny morning with a blue sky, The buses were comfortable and not crowded; for much of the way the road went through villages or suburbs with well-built houses, neat gardens, and a prosperous air. On the edge of Bogor was the huge horticultural park where there were shady walks under gigantic trees with flying buttress trunks, lotus ponds, water lilies with leaves a yard across, and a dignified palace, once the official residence of Dutch Governors-General, now a presidential palace which was much favoured by Sukarno and houses his art collection, but is rarely visited by Suharto. For the most part it was like walking through a tame jungle, and very peaceful except when people jumped out of the undergrowth at you and offered to be your official guide.
I enjoyed a leisurely coffee at an attractive cafeteria at the top of a gentle hill, overlooking flower beds and lawns, with a lotus pool at the foot. When the sky clouded over and there were ominous claps of thunder I started to make for the exit which was a couple of miles away. I was less than half way when heavy rain forced me to take cover in one of the little shelters thoughtfully provided - Bogor has the highest annual rainfall in Java and is said to average 322 thunderstorms a year - together with a group of friendly Indonesian tourists. When the rain slackened I made a.dash for the exit and the bus stop, and reached the Kopo without getting too wet.
In the evening Rhian and I explored the local small restaurants which were all much of a muchness, and chose the one which seemed well patronised by local people and also had slightly fewer insects lying round the lamps. It was a good choice, as we enjoyed generous portions of rice and barbecued satay before returning to the Hostel for a sociable evening with the other guests.
After an early breakfast, at which I met an Englishman of about thirty who had trained as an engineer but had spent the last seven years in Indonesia as a freelance photographer, I caught a bus to Bandoeng - no great effort as I was more or less scooped up by a bus conductor as I stood waiting outside the hostel. The road climbed by majestic sweeps to the summit of the Puncak pass, them descended more gradually to Bandoeng.
Everywhere along the journey could be seen solid well-built houses roofed with attractive brick red tiles of local manufacture, bright when new and weathering into darker reds and browns that blended perfectly with the landscape. As we reached the outskirts of Bandoeng after three hours the conductor indicated that I had reached my destination. We seemed a long way from the centre of the city, nor were we at a bus station at which one could expect to find other transport. Reluctantly I was persuaded by the other passengers that this was as near as I would get to the middle of Bandoeng. There were no buses or taxis in sight so in desperation I asked a passing policeman how to get into town, To my surprised relief he invited me into a police vehicle, drove me right into the city, and insisted on dropping me at the hotel of my choice, refusing to accept any money for his trouble.
At this point my luck ran out, as the hotel was full, as was my second choice nearby. I decided to move up-market to the Guntur Hotel near the railway station a couple of miles across the city, and on my journey there I was soon befriended by an eighteen year old boy who wanted to practise his English on me and insisted on walking all the way to the hotel. It was further away than he thought, and it was hot work getting there at one o'clock in the afternoon. In the final stretch we had to cross the railway line by a bridge that I was to get to know well; the steps were steep and narrow and of uneven height, a beggar was permanently stationed mid way across, and there was one step on the far side that tilted disconcertingly when you trod on it. My heart fell when I saw the skeleton of a new building under construction just where the hotel ought to be, but in fact the hotel was next door and in good working order - and had a room for me.
BANDOENG
At the Hotel Guntur I offered my young guide some iced tea, which he sipped for politeness' sake before departing, and took up quarters in a luxurious room with balcony (excellent view of the building site). The price was quite moderate and the location most convenient if I was to continue my journey by train, as indeed I did. In any case I might not stay more than one night if I should succeed in finding Daphne's friends, Simon and Oom, in Bandoeng, and if they should ask me to stay with them, I was anxious to meet them anyway, so after a badly needed shower I caught a taxi to their address in Jalan Jonggalong.
.The taxi had a proper meter and was surprisingly cheap for a three or four mile drive into the suburbs. Jalan Jonggalong was a long narrow road with small neat houses on either side. Simon Cook and his Indonesian wife Oom were in their garden saying good-bye to an elderly man carrying a musical instrument - he was one of Simon's teachers and had just completed a lesson with him. They had no telephone and thus no warning of my arrival, but had heard from Daphne that I might be in Bandoeng and they welcomed me warmly into their simple house, which in the Indonesian style had very little furniture. Simon was studying Javanese music on a post-graduate grant from SUAS in London University and hoped to stay another year if the grant could be stretched: 0om was pregnant and they were looking forward to a baby in the summer (Adam was born in June). Simon kindly saw me back to my hotel via two buses with a walk in between and we arranged to meet for an evening meal.
They called for me at eight taking me along to a restaurant for Padang food in the Jalan Asia-Africa. This grand-sounding road dates from the famous non-aligned Bandoeng conference, and I expected a great wide highway, but like most of the city it was rather a disappointment, being a normal Asian shopping street. On the way we met Denis and Julie who were staying at the Sakardana Hotel and were going out tor a splurge at one of the better Chinese restaurants. We did quite well ourselves eating Padang style, a variety of foods including chicken, crayfish, shrimps, and spinach-like vegetables being spread around the table in individual dishes, and the bill is calculated from the number of dishes consumed. Most of them are hot and spicy. Simon and 0pm asked me to spend the rest of my stay at their house, rather tentatively I thought. I hesitated, recalling that it was a small house (though there was a spare bedroom) and out in the suburbs, But I accepted, out of politeness, and in the event enjoyed my stay with the young couple.
Before setting out on my next day's programme I had breakfast at my hotel a thing I rarely do but at Guntur's it was included in the price! - and then collected letters at the Post Office. Here I was adopted by a twenty eight year old student - 'Excuse me, I wish to practise my English' - who
showed every sign of wanting to spend the day with me, but I was able to disengage without any ill feeling. At the Tourist Office I collected a town map and railway timetables for the next stage of the journey, and called at the Sakardana to meet Denis and Julie for a second breakfast. It was on the main street, noisy, and rather run down I thought - but perhaps I was raising my standards. It was a friendly place with a lot of useful information freely available. A German woman in her thirties, probably the wife of the proprietor, wandered around with a brown baby looking like a lost soul. Often I had met such women (there had been an Australian in the Bagus at Jakarta) who seemed to have been left stranded on a strange shore, never finding their way back to their old environment and seemingly never becoming accustomed to the new.
In the afternoon I moved in with Simon and Uom who had invited some relatives round for the evening. The visitors arrived much later than the appointed time, which caused no surprise, and I kept going by eating a bowlful of dukuhs, which looked like new potatoes but tasted like lychee. After some trouble with the calorgas oven Dom served up a delicious meal of.rice, chicken, vegetable, and pizza, which I tried to eat while sitting on the floor with the others, at the same time remembering my etiquette and not pointing my feet at anyone, nor of course using the left hand. In the end my discomfort must have been evident and I was provided with the only chair in the house. The proceedings were very informal: the guests wandered around playing their own radios or twanging Simon's musical instruments and talking to each other and sometimes to me but few had much English, They went off spon after ten and I joined Simon in a drink of Ovaltine, a surprising favourite in south-east Asia. Rain set in for the night.
Ovaltine again for breakfast, with toast, before Simon and Com set out in the rain to spend the day, as they were committed to, with the music teacher. I wrote letters until the rain stopped in mid-morning, when I walked two or three miles to the newly established museum of Sundanese culture which was near the place where I had dismounted from the bus from Cisarua. The exhibits ranged from antiquities, urn burials and stone inscriptions, to contemporary costumes, and agricultural and musical instruments. They were well displayed and carried full descriptions, but only in Bahasi. Two Germans with notebooks were working on German legends for the exhibits.
Walking back through the town centre I bought an umbrella and some tapes of gamelan music. As the day grew hot and humid I took refuge in a westernstyle air-conditioned bakery, enjoying doughnuts, iced coffee, and the luxury of a sit-down loo. Bandoeng seemed a bit short of places of interest, but the Dago Teahouse was recommended for its extensive views over the city and surrounding country. I caught a bus there, along roads that climbed gradually to a high ridge, only to find that I could add the Teahouse to the world-wide list of tourist attractions were closed when I tried to visit them. Major extensions were being built, trees were felled, earthworks thrown up, Walking around I caught some glimpses of the famous views, but it was largely a wasted trip, so I took the bus back, more buses to Jonggalong, let myself in and did my washing.
Simon having approved of my tapes, we enjoyed a great meal prepared by Oom, featuring soup made from bones, rice wrapped in banana leaves and bean sprouts with chillis. After Oom went early to bed Simon and I sat up talking on the patio as he told me about his unhappy school life boarding at Sedbergh after his mother had run off with a dishy Italian (now set in middle-aged corpulence and no longer dishy), his music studies in Amsterdam (where his Dutch teacher, jealous of competition in his own field of Indonesian music, had suggested that Simon transferred his attentions to Latin American music), the different varieties of ethno-musicology, and his travels around Europe with a street group before he came to study in Java.
Next day, since I was planning to catch a train to Jogjakarta at an unearthly hour the following morning, I booked into the Guntur again as it was near the station, and left my pack there. For the long train journey I tried to book a second-class ticket, having been told earlier that I could not book until the day before travelling. However the 5.25 a. m., the only train with anything but third-class seats, was sold out of second-class according to the booking office, so l booked third. On reflection I thought it worth enquiring at the station-master's office just to check,
Behind a big desk sat a smart young woman whom I took to be the stationmistress, and who confirmed that all the second class seats were booked. When I protested that I had tried to book some days earlier but had been told that I could reserve a seat only on the day before departure, she said severely that I should have come along when the booking office opened at 8 !
I asked whether even at this late stage something might be arranged, on which she suggested that I waited a minute; she then disappeared down the platform. I sat patiently at the desk until she returned a quarter of an hour later with the news that I could indeed have a second-class seat. I handed over my third-class ticket and the excess fare of 1200 rupees, obtaining in return - not a ticket, but a form which I should present at grille number nine at 5 a.m the following morning, after which I would be given a ticket for the 5. 25. There was nothing more to be done except to thank her warmly and to hope for the best.
With an early start in prospect I stayed the night at the Guntur after fond farewells to Simon and Oom. The hotel obliged with breakfast at 4.30, including a boiled egg which I thought of taking with me for the journey, but luckily decided to consume in situ as it turned out to be very softboiled. For the last time I climbed the treacherous steps over the railway, finding that our friendly neighbourhood beggar was not yet in post. Number nine grille exchanged my form for a ticket, a uniformed official escorted me to my seat on the waiting train and hung around expectantly for a while, I sat down making a fourth with an agreeable Indonesian couple and their very well behaved two year-old daughter, and the train left punctually at 5.25.
YOGYAKARTA
The seats were comfortable but the fan overhead was not working, nor did the window open. The train climbed slowly between volcanic mountains, the sun rose higher in the sky, I ate some dukuhs and became more and more drowsy. I had a vague impression of a landscape dotted with square houses with brightly painted white walls, red roofs, and meat gardens. I must have slept for a long time because suddenly the eight and a half hour journey was at an end and we were drawing into a busy town. The station at Yogyakarta lived up to its reputation, with touts and becak drivers converging from all directions on the unwary traveller. I waved them all away with practised nonchalance, and located the recommended Hotel Aziatic within five minutes' walk. It offered a rather grim prospect, with a long high-ceilinged central hall with rooms leading off on either side, and the common loos and mandis at the far end. The cell-like rooms had barred windows, to keep out intruders rather than to keep in the guests, but the general effect was that of a clean and well-run penal institution. It was cheap, secure (a consideration in a big Indonesian town), and centrally situated. I booked in and chatted to an Irish couple who had been following much the same route through Indonesia. They had come across their fellow country-woman Lilian, and also Gunnar and Maria who must have mentioned their elderly English friend - 'you must be John' they exclaimed.
There was time before dark to explore Yogyakarta, so I walked down the arcaded Jalan Malipborn, named after the Duke of Marlborough during the
.brief period of British occupation between 1811 and 1816. This is liable to confuse people, including the American author of the Indonesia Handbook who informs his readers that Marlborough was a victorious British general
in the Napoleonic wars, The Avenue is a continuous, brightly lit, succession of shops and souvenir stalls, crowded at evening with parading tourists and Yogyakartans, a cheerful and attractive scene. You don't have to buy the souvenirs, and the arcades keep you dry when it rains - as it did. Back in the gloom of the Aziatic I met a young Englishwoman who was a WSU teacher in Papua New Guinea, and her sister. It was a hot sticky evening after the rain.
At breakfast I met Clare, an English pharmacist in her thirties, who was not staying in the Aziatic but was waiting to pick up a bus there for a day's tour starting at 7.15. It sounded like a good tour, so I decided to join it and boarded the coach to join a very international party of about fifteen, of which Clare and I were the only British. We had an excellent guide who told us of Yogya's turbulent history as we drove through the city, and out into the countryside, arriving at Borobudur at 8.45 before the main influx of tourists, After a brief introduction to the twelve hundred year history of this great Buddhist shrine the guide sensibly left us to our own devices. The site is magnificent, a hill surrounded by a plain ringed with volcanoes, and the first sight of Borobudur was breathtaking, human figures being dwarfed by the vast structure rising, terrace upon terrace from the plain, The approach takes the visitor past booths where guide-books can be bought and past the 'guides' and souvenir sellers, this being Indonesia's equivalent of the Taj Mahal, though the attention paid to the tourist is not quite as persistent. The monument itself has been subject to successive restorations on the grand scale, but the work has been done skilfully, and on the terraces illustrating the life of the Buddha it is difficult to distinguish the restored from the original among the intricate carvings. The only visible evidence of restoration was a man scraping off the accretions of moss with a fine brush.
There followed a long two and a half hour drive to the Dieng plateau, which because of its remoteness I would not have planned to visit but for the opportunity of this tour. The coach climbed up a mountain road round hairpin bends up to 8000 feet, every available inch of the steep slopes being covered by terrace cultivation, potatoes at the higher altitudes, until they disappeared in cloud. We stopped on the plateau, where the squat ruined temples from the seventh century adorned the lonely plain. Nearby were volcanic springs where black water bubbled and spurted with sulphurous fumes. Pipes were being laid not far away for a geothermal project, presumably to fuel a power station as there seemed to be no users within a considerable distance. We walked to the so-called 'Lake of colours' where surface films produced blues, greens and reds on the water, but by this time it was raining and we did not see it at its best.
On our return journey we stopped for a meal at the Dieng restaurant at Worrosoba, a rather out of the way spot to find an establishment of an exceptionally high standard of cooking and cleanliness with really good cheap food. On the long journey back I learned something of Clare's life. She was a seasoned traveller, having ridden around Sri Lanka on a bicycle, seen much of India including Ladakh, and visited Nepal and many cauntries in Central and South America. In Manali in Himachal Pradesh she had gone out for an evening walk without a torch and been overtaken by darkness and one of the famous Manali power cuts - I remember them well - and was then startled by a man who shone a flashlight in her face but then escorted her back to her hotel. He was a Tibetan exile, they became good friends. Clare stayed on in Manali, they decided to marry by Tibetan rites being tied together with ribbons but taking the precaution to have an affidavit certified by an Indian magistrate. He had been a monk in Tibet: like all men from his country he showed great respect and consideration for women in contrast to the typical Englishman. He was now working as a chef in Mysore, hoping to join his wife in England, but lacking a passport and not wishing to adopt Indian nationality he was not finding it easy to enter as an immigrant and there might be a long wait.
In the evening we met again for a meal at Supreme's in Gang One. Gang is a Dutch word for a small lane or alley-way, and Gangs One and Two are famous places for eating in Yogya, They are ill-lit narrow streets which look like places to avoid at all costs, but in fact are lined with popular cheap losmens and little restaurants packed with travellers. We ran across Rein and Karen and treated ourselves to some excellent San Miguel beer.
Clare called next day and booked her bus ticket to Bogor at the agency outside the Aziatic; she was planning then to head for the coast and try to get a fishing boat to Krakatoa. We went on down Malipborn to visit the Sultan's palace, the Kraton, where a pleasant young Indonesian woman was our guide. The Kraton occupied a huge area with spacious courtyards and pavilions displaying coaches and costumes in glass cases, The Sultan's palace guard, aged retainers in traditional Javanese dress, patrolled the courtyards but looked as if they would be more at home in glass cases. There was a portrait gallery displaying pictures of the nine Sultans who had ruled Yogyakarta, including the present incumbent who had succeeded only last year - the first Sultan to have been educated in Java, his
predecessors having all gone to University in Holland. He had five daughters and no sons, and would be able to choose whether he should be succeeded by one of his daughters or by a brother. The palace gave a
general impression of modest opulence: there was a lot of marble about but the style was remarkably plain and simple for Asia.
After lunch at Supreme's I offered Clare the hospitality of the showers at the Aziatic before her long journey - fifteen hours by bus to Bogor - since she had had to check out of her hotel, and we waited in pouring rain for her minibus which wad due at three to collect her and take her to the main bus stop. By 3;15 there was no sign of the minibus, though the agency man assured Clare that the main bus would wait for it. He seemed very relaxed about it all, but we eventually prevailed upon him to make some enquiries which he did by riding off on his bike and returning ten minutes later with the news that the minibus had to make many calls to pick up passengers, it would turn up soon and yes it would definitely make the connection with the big bus. All this sounded very unconvincing but at half past three, by which time the Bogor bus should already have started, the minibus arrived and Clare and I embraced in an affectionate farewell, probably causing shock and horror to the onlookers by our demonstrative and indiscreet behaviour. When we met months later in London, Clare told me that she had indeed caught the Bogor bus. It went on raining for another two hours.while I rested in the monastic gloom of the Aziatic before venturing out with an umbrella for an evening stroll.
I went to Gang Two for an evening meal at Anna's where I found a number of old friends, Martin and his Swedish wife Susie, last seen at Cisarua, had returned from the seaside resort of Pangandaran on the south coast where they enjoyed magnificent beaches: they were heading next for Lombok and Bali and hoped to do some good snorkelling. At the next table were Denis and Julie and a young Canadian from Vancouver who had been travelling in Kashmir (which he thought was spoiled by too many tourists, especially in Srinagar) and in Nepal where he had done some casual trekking 'somewhere around Annapurna' without knowing exactly where he had been.
At half past nine the stallholders in Malipboro were packing their goods away into cardboard boxes. Further along the arcade where rugs lined the pavement outside the shops, people were cooking by the roadside and serving up three course meals to their friends and families sitting on the rugs. It was a warm sticky night, and when I got back to my cell at the Aziatic I opened the windows (there was no ceiling fan) and decided to brave the mosquitoes wearing nothing but briefs and with no sheet. I suffered a few bites in the night but slept better than I would have done without air or mosquitoes. The prison atmosphere of the hotel was enhanced by two guardians who sat through the night opposite my bedroom and who observed me closely whenever I visited the loo. One of them rebuked me for being improperly dressed so I put a towel round my waist on future visits in order to reinforce what was clearly regarded as the inadequate cover provided by my briefs. The loos and mandis were kept clean but were drained by an interconnected network of channels so that whatever you were doing you might at any moment be surrounded by fast-flowing streams.
In the morning I travelled by public bus to the ninth century Hindu temples at Prambanan ten miles to the east of Yogyakarta. The driver demanded 500 rupees but after consulting my Javanese fellow passengers I proferred the correct fare of 400 which was accepted without demur. The day was overcast with low cloud that allowed only occasional glimpses or the volcano tops. Suddenly the great Hindu temples appeared, rising out of the plain a few hundred yards from the road. The approach led through landscaped parkland of recent construction furnished with information offices, book and souvenir shops, and sellers of postcards and jewellery, and peopled with guides offering their services. As at Borobudur the temples had been heavily - and skilfully - restored, and work was still in progress, one of the three main temples being reconstructed and surrounded by scaffolding, while on the ground masons were chiselling away at stones numbered with white paint. The main shrine carried the Ramayana story carved in fine detail on a frieze around the second tier, a few stones of lighter colour giving the only indication of restoration.
Apart from the three main shrines, other temples were scattered over the plain but I took them as read and caught the bus back towards the city, stopping off at the Yogya Craft Centre where one could buy batik and leather work from the co-operative without the necessity of bargaining, and probably at a better price than that available to all but the most.determined bargainers at the market. I returned with my purchase to the Aziatic where the new arrivals included a young Canadian from Winnipeg who was hoping to win an ice-hockey scholarship to an American university with a view to a subsequent professional career, a melancholy Dutchman of twenty-eight who was a psychology graduate doing manual work in a factory because there were no jobs for psychologists, and two young English women in their final year of medical studies at University College Hospital.
After the evening rain had eased off I went out with Thed the Dutchman for a meal, the restaurant being lit with candles during a long power failure. We were joined by Torben, last seen waiting at Padang for the S. S. Kerinci, who I always thought of as the Great Dane, a young man six foot six tall and broad in proportion. He told us that the Kerinci always overbooked the economy class, and he was one of the unlucky passengers who slept on boards as there no mattresses left. There were in fact lifebelts for the economy passengers, but they were packed away in boxes and there was no prospect of their becoming available for use in an emergency. Torben suffered from other travelling problems: after his knees had been rubbed raw from pressure against the bus seat in front of him he had taken to riding on the roof wherever he travelled in Asia, there he could usually stretch put to his full length, but it was not always easy to hold on with 'crazy Nepalese drivers'. But in general riding on the roof of buses was fine - except when it rained, Torben spoke a good idiomatic English: words poured and tumbled out of him, and despite his discomfort as a traveller he was full of gusto and enthusiasm.
It was time to move on, though I was sorry to leave Yogya with its friendly people, its bustling markets, the cornucopia of the fruit stalls at the lower end of Malipboro, and many congenial travel companions, Nor had I exhausted its museums, palaces, and gardens, nor fully explored the local culture. However this last omission could be remedied further along the route, so I set off for the old royal capital of Solo, fourty miles to the north east, founded in 1745 as a result of a revelation to King Pakubuwono the Second after the sacking of his court at Kartasura.
SOLO
The bus journey to Solo was straightforward and reasunably comfortable though as always the seats were rather cramped (I thought of Torben, but then he would have been on the roof). In mist and low cloud we drove through flat country and prosperous villages to a bus station on the outskirts of the city, where I negotiated a becak ride to the Hotel Putri Aya which provided more comfort and more congenial surroundings than the prison-like Aziatic. Although on the main street the hotel was two miles from the town centre, but it was a pleasant walk after the cramped bus ride. The Kraton was closed, the tourist office was open but not very informative, and there were some lively fruit and vegetable markets. A couple of Australians, whom I remembered from Cisarua, were madly pedalling becaks in a race down the high street, while the drivers sat in the back and the crowd cheered enthusiastically. I called in at a restaurant and enjoyed a gado-gado with a Canadian who was staying at Solo in order to study the craft of the local wood-carvers.
.I was approached and befriended by a young Indonesian who introduced himself as John from Bali, where his father was a painter in Ubud, He was studying economics in Solo, escorted me back to my hotel which was near his home, and arranged to call for me at eight in the evening and to take me to a performance of the Wayang Orang, the dance drama enacted by live performers presenting traditional stories on similar lines to the Wayang Kulit shadow-puppet show. Before then the afternoon rainstorm had flooded through the roof of my mandi, amplifying the cold shower I was taking and making it impossible to occupy the loo without holding up an umbrella. It was still raining hard when John called and we took a becak to the theatre, being protected from the downpour by a plastic curtain while the driver kept himself dry with a waterproof hat and cape.
The hall was less than quarter full, and there were few tourists in the audience. We were to see part of the story of the Ramayana, the remainder being enacted on the following nights so that you would need to go every night for a week to see the whole story. A gamelan orchestra started playing and the stage was soon filled with graceful sinuous dancing, with subtle inclinations of the head and delicate hand movements. The women dancers trailed and twirled red and green sashes with quite an erotic effect. It was not always easy to follow what was supposed to be going on: John had offered to explain and interpret but his English was not really up to it. There were long periods of little or no movement when Rama was talking to five dancers with grotesque monkey masks - two red monkeys, one green, one yellow, and one black - who responded by shambling and tumbling around the stage. Hanuman appeared, regal in a white coat, after which the red monkey suddenly erupted and stamped off.
After more static dialogue four clowns took the stage and amused the audience with some rapid cross-talk which was obviously hilarious, John told me it was very funny but offered no further explanation. The red monkey came back and had a violent fight with Hanuman before being subdued. The threatening gestures from each participant were convincing, and when fight was joined you had to look very hard to see that they were not actually striking one another. There were some scenes with clowns and monkeys that I could not follow, after which the clowns sang funny songs to gamelan accompaniment. Finally Rama appeared again in a long scene without much visible action. At the end of the performance John suggested he called for me next morning at the hotel to escort me to the Sold Kraton, but I did not relish being led around all day and suggested we met at the Kraton. This seemed to offend him and he went off in a huff. Back at the hotel I watched the television news which consisted entirely of public ceremonies where Indonesian politicians and generals made speeches and awarded prizes. It was followed by the national anthem, as boring as most of its kind and rather more prolonged as it was sung by a succession of different choirs over a full ten minutes, The next programme was 'Superman'.
The main road outside the hotel which led to the city centre was a route for white double-decker buses, while goods trains rattled along a track at the roadside. In the morning I caught one of the white buses to the Kraton for a guided tour - you were not allowed to go round on your own - together with a middle-aged Dutch couple. The Kraton was the palace of a long line.of local kings who had been supported by the Dutch since 1750 in a form of indirect rule. The tenth and last king occupied the palace until 1945: now it was a museum. Rather like the Yogya Kraton the approach was through a big courtyard planted with trees, leading to open-sided audience halls. The architectural style was plain, and the materials mainly Italian marble and Dutch tiles. Inner courtyards boasted Corinthian columns and classical nymphs and goddesses who seemed curiously out of place. There were some big cannons on display, while the museum section exhibited crystal glass chandeliers, palanquins and coaches 250 years old, dowry boxes, Hindu statues of Shiva, Ganesh, and other sacred figures, guns, kris, and spears as well as more peaceful objects such as a gamelam set, an ancient stone with a Sanskrit inscription, board games, and another game in which the contestants struck two nuts or fruit stones together with a hammer, the winner adding the loser's score to his own as in 'conkers'.
Walking back along the main street I noticed a statue of a bearded Dutchman who was presumably a provincial governor, and several churches. I stopped for coffee at the New Holland Bakery, where an Indonesian introduced me to his second son who was at elementary school but who wished - with my assistance - to apply for a job. I do not know what influence he expected me to wield, but I felt unable to help. The afternoon rain was heavy and lasted for six hours. The television was showing a musical version of Oliver with Mark Lestor as Oliver Twist and Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes. In the evening there were lakes in the road and on the pavements big enough to sail sizeable model yachts.
MALANG
My general plan was to travel by bus through East Java towards the tip of the island and then by ferry to Bali. A good stopping place after Solo seemed to be Malang, described as 'one of Java's finest and most attractive hill towns'. There was a more or less direct bus route through the hills, but I allowed myself to be misdirected to take a bus which I found after a prolonged misunderstanding with the conductor to be on its way to Surabaya which I had hoped to avoid. I consoled myself with the thought that I was on a nice comfortable bus, speeding along a good road, and that the less direct route I was taking would cost only a pound or two more and would probably last only an hour or two longer. The bus soon filled up, however, as we bowled along the main road, and stopped at a collapsed bridge which was being rebuilt, a Pertamina tanker and trailer which had presumably caused the collapse resting upside down at the bottom of the gorge. The driver had some difficulty in restarting, and a few miles further on, by which time the bus was full to suffocation, we ground to a halt and all the efforts to start up again were unavailing.
As we all dismounted I wondered what the drill was when a bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. I soon found out, The next bus to come along, also crammed full to overflowing, pulled up alongside and we all jammed ourselves into it, several passengers in the aisle being suspended in midair by pressure of neighbouring bodies. Unbelievably the conductor allowed more passengers to wedge themselves in at the next halt, but at the one after that, tor the first time in my life - and in that of most of the passengers - we saw people refused admittance on the grounds that the bus was full up. As we neared Surabaya towards the end of a seven hour journey.the bus began to empty and I could see out of the window, We were travelling through flat fields with a geometrical pattern of bright green rice and dark green sugar cane, punctuated by rows of banana trees. The road was straight and not very wide, which lent excitement to a race we had with another bus that tried to overtake us at 75 mph. Our driver refused to give way and we drove cheek by cheek using every inch of the road until the prospective overtaker lost his nerve and dropped behind, only to repeat the manoeuvre twice more before we reached Surabaya and drew into a vast bus terminal. As always it was a scene of great confusion but I managed to establish that Malang buses left from the same terminal, so I refused the approaches of a persistent taxi driver who would probably have taken me twice round the city and dropped me back at the same place for 5000 rupees.
The next bus, from Surabaya to Malang, was almost full when I located it, but I found a gangway seat next to a character of sinister appearance who looked like a Tonton Macoute, He wore dark glasses and his face went straight down vertically under a cap with a long hard peak which kept digging into my shoulder as every half minute or so he fell asleep and slumped against me, Twice I managed to tweak off his cap, but each time he woke up and jammed it firmly on his head again before promptly falling asleep. Finally I succeeded in tweaking it off into the gangway, which puzzled him a lot when he woke up next. However when it was handed back to him and he had once more clamped it on top of his head he tried to droop forwards instead of sideways whenever he fell asleep so that he wouldn't lose his cap again.
For fifteen miles out of Surabaya we drove south along a great new motorway with a hard shoulder as well as two lanes each way, and a central crash barrier, and indeed so closely modelled on British motorways that there was usually one lane closed off with cones, though they were not yet into contraflows. Later, as the road climbed higher, volcanoes loomed up through the clouds, the air cooled down, and we ran into a belt of rain.
At Malang I had chosen a hotel opposite the bus station shown in the Lonely Planet town plan, but my bus arrived at a quite different terminal. I assumed that the little minibuses that were waiting would ply between one bus terminal and another, so I boarded one and asked to be set off at the Pattimura bus station where my hotel should be. We drove all around the town and out into the country, arriving after 45 minutes at a bus terminal which I was quite sure was nowhere near where I wanted to go. I stayed in the bus demanding to be taken to Pattimura which I had asked for in the first place, the driver demanded more money which I refused to give him, and since he spoke no English and I spoke little Bahasi we did not make much progress, Eventually we drove off, and by dint of asking every passenger who boarded the bus the whereabouts of Pattimura I was able to get off at a nearby stop and there was my chosen Hotel Helios, just as the guidebook said, clean, comfortable and with a garden. The explanation of this protracted misunderstanding - at the end of a long day's travelling - was that the Pattimura bus station had closed six months before and the terminal had been transferred to several miles out of town.
I had a chat with a friendly young man at the hotel desk, who advised me on the next stage of my journey that would take me on to Probolinggo and then to Bali, and walked to a local coffee house where I was served coffee and gado-gado by some rather good-looking young women. lheir attitude seemed.to be friendly in an unusually intimate way, and one of them sat down next to me while I was eating, so close that I shifted over in order to be, as I explained, nearer the light.
When I returned to the Hotel Helios I met the first traveller I had seen for a day and a half: Andrea, a teacher of about thirty from Tasmania who was planning a year's tour, partly with a cousin, partly alone. She had arrived in Java two days before from Bali, having stayed on the way at the hotel near the top of Mount Bromo and walked all round the crater which must be fifteen to twenty miles in circumference, She had got up in time to see the sunrise but the clouds did not lift till mid-morning. She would be going on to Malaysia, Thailand, and India - skiing in Kashmir - and might travel to Europe by land, finishing up in London to find a job there. She had had her hair frizzed into tight little curls in Kuta so that it would not require much washing.
The hotel was built around a courtyard with trees and shrubs and a pool of water ideally suited to the breeding of mosquitoes. These spent most of their time in the communal loos and mandis where the best feeding surfaces were exposed, and were particularly vicious biters. Because of their attentions I slept less well than usual, and did not see the need for the staff to sweep the courtyard at five o'clock in the morning.
Breakfast is not a strong point with Indonesian hotels, but since it was included in the price I felt obliged to eat some soft sweet bread spread with something that was optimistically described as jam, and to drink some weak coffee already sugared. Recognising the inadequacy of the diet provided, a man called round selling sweet buns and other food wrapped in leaves, while our intellectual needs were catered for by sellers of books and dictionaries.
Malang was indeed an attractive town, landscaped with parks and squares, and with a fine Dutch church, but was hardly worth a long stay so I decided to explore it in the morning and catch a bus to Probolinggo in the afternoon. The day grew oppressively hot before long and I was glad to sit down for an iced drink in a smart air-conditioned restaurant. When I called at the Post Office a woman engaged me in conversation and said something about 'tidur' (sleep), resting her head on her arm. Admittedly I'd had a bad night but it was surely not obvious that I needed a rest. Not being accustomed to being propositioned in the main Post Office at ten o'clock in the morning, it took a little time for the penny to drop, after which I made my excuses and left. Putting this incident together with the behaviour of the waitresses the previous evening I figured out that there was something about Malang which no-one had told me. Perhaps it was a resort for tired Dutch business men or traditions had lingered on.
I caught a bema to the correct bus terminus for Probotinggo without any difficulty, and boarded a comfortable half full bus for the two hour journey. I sat next to a Javanese who after the usual questions asked me if I believed in Jesus Christ. It seemed politic to say that I did, on which he disclosed that he was a member of the Mount Bromo Evangelical Church. I never discovered what particular doctrine characterised this sect - a belief in hell-fire would be apt, Bromo being an active volcano - since his English fell short of the standard required for theological argument. Instead I concentrated on the landscape, which was lush but dead.flat, with a distant range of high volcanoes visible through cloud, and behind them the outline of higher and more remote mountains barely discernible.
PROBOLINGGO
There was no reason to visit Probolinggo except that it was near Mount Bromp and on the way to Bali. However there was a good cheap hotel right opposite the bus station, where I had a pleasant room with a fan and my own mandi for 6000 rupees (#2.50) including breakfast. When I walked down the main street to find somewhere to eat, half the road and most of the pavement was being dug up and a strong wind blew fine dust into the eyes. In an agreeable restaurant I ordered an omelette and a plate of rice which I was enjoying until some very persistent flies wanted to share the meal with me. I couldn't keep them away from both plates at once, so I put all the meal on one plate, and soon after counted thirty-nine flies on the one I had discarded. The waitress brought a candle - in broad daylight - and this seemed to discourage the flies.
On my walk back to the hotel rain blew unpleasantly hard into my face but at least it was laying the dust. I met twenty-eight year old Stuart from Haringey, who had managed a staff of fifty when in charge of Stone's Ginger Wine factory in Old Street until it was moved to Leeds by new owners who decided there were more profitable uses for a site in central London than to make ginger wine there. Stuart took his redundancy, not wishing to move to Leeds, and was travelling for a year before looking for a new management job or taking an MBA. He had been in Australia and New Zealand, had come to Java from Bali, and was going on through Java to Sumatra, Malaysia and Thailand, Previously he had travelled in India, where he took a particular liking to Kerala, and in Nepal where he had been ill.
MOUNT BROMO
Stuart and I decided there was little point in getting to Mount Bromo for the sunrise, as there was heavy cloud every morning, but we made an early start to catch the 7 a.m. bemo to the volcano. The two hour ride began with half an hour on the plains, after which the road wound steeply uphill all the way to the village of Ngadisari. It was exceptionally fertile country, the soil being enriched with volcanic ash from earlier eruptions and drenched with high rainfall, and luscious cabbages, onions, and potatoes grew on the steep and sometimes almost vertical slopes, forming intricate geometrical patterns as the gradients changed. We were deposited in the village square of Ngadisari, a surprisingly smart, clean, village, from where another bemo would take us up the final steep three kilometers to the hotel on the rim of the crater. The standard fare for this final stage was 1000 rupees but that depended on the driver getting a full load of five passengers. There being no sign of any other travellers, we negotiated a fare of 1500 rupees each, and were driven up to a big modern hotel just below the rim. Declining the offer of horses for the journey across the outer crater of Tengger we climbed the rim and gazed across the vast sand sea below, Within the crater, about a mile away was a tall rugged cone towering up into the clouds, while a mile beyond and to its left was the inner rim of Bromo itself visible through light cloud.
.We walked down a steep track into the sand sea, a completely flat area of fine volcanic ash in which nothing grew as the surface was constantly blown about by the wind, Gusts blew the ash into our faces, varied sometimes with clouds of coarser grit. We followed a party of a dozen Indonesians carrying a picnic to this inhospitable spot, and after a mile and a half left the soft sand and climbed up a track leading through a lunar landscape of weirdly shaped rocks, Finally a staircase of 270 steps ascended the inner rim and stopped abruptly at the edge where the swirling crater was vertically beneath us and the air was full of an overpowering smell of sulphur. There were clouds around us and within the crater - we were 8000 feet above sea level - but every now and again the clouds would clear and we could see smoke and flames near the middle of the crater. It was a gripping spectacle but after twenty minutes we were choking with smoke and sulphur fumes, and retraced our steps across the sand sea with the wind behind us, and clouds now thickening and threatening to envelop us, now lifting again. Having worked up a good appetite we enjoyed banana pancakes and coffee at the hotel before walking back down the hill to Ngadisari.
There was a bemo waiting to take visitors back to Probolinggo but there were only four other passengers and the driver waited in the vain hope that more would turn up. Bromo was clearly a place for exploiting the unwary, and the driver demanded 2000 rupees for the trip back, twice what we had paid for the journey up. We paid 1000 and sat tight while the driver threatened to put us off his vehicle. We said that would be 0. K. - we would walk or catch the next bemo - and that seemed to settle the argument; anyway he drove on and was doing quite good business, picking up women with vast bundles of produce at various points along the route and setting them down at a market half way to Probolinggo.
Stuart gave me some mosquito coils which kept the insects at bay and I suffered no more than two or three bites that night after a rather higher score the night before. Harsh calls from a nearby mosque woke me up at 4. 30, giving me plenty of time to prepare for the eight o'clock bus to Ketapang opposite Bali. I was the only foreigner on the bus, which kept up a fine speed along a good road through flat ricefields, serrated volcano peaks looming up occasionally through clouds to the south. At times the road skirted the north coast where a strong wind was blowing white and brown breakers against the beach, then for twenty minutes we drove through a cool thick plantation of tall broad-leaved trees. After three stops at medium-sized undistinguished towns, we emerged on the coast again, the road turned south, and across the water we could see a low range of mountains with a range of high volcanoes beyond - Bali. At 12. 30 we stopped at the quayside where the ferry terminal was surrounded by tidy gardens and I boarded the ferry for the half mile sea journey across to Bali. The ferry was very crowded so I stood by the rail as we chugged across, Looking north I could see from each island a low spit of land extending into the sea, showing where at one time Bali had been joined to Java.
BALI
I planned to start my ten days in Bali on the north coast, at Lovina Beach t which I had heard good reports, and which could be reached by direct bus from the ferry terminal at the western tip of the island. No transport or organization of any sort was visible when I left the ferry, so I followed all the other passengers who were walking up the road. It seemed to be a long way to wherever they were going, and I accepted a lift for 200 rupees on the pillion of a motor-bike, the driver giving me his crash helmet and resting my pack on the petrol tank. After a few minutes we arrived at a bus terminal where there was no lack of willing advisers pointing me towards a crowded bus waiting to go to Lovina. There was one other tourist on the bus, which was heavily loaded with produce, including giant coconuts, as well as passengers, but bowled along at a fair pace to reach Lovina in a couple of hours.
The weather had turned rough and my first impressions were not favourable - nor were they to be much improved upon in the next two days. The drains were being relaid so that the pavement and half the road had been dug up, there were piles of cement in the entrances to the homestays, as the losmens were described, dirty great rollers were pounding a nondescript grey beach, and there was a general air or squalor and decay. I found an acceptable losmen where my room had its own mandi and settled in there, but then looked around for a better place to move into the following day, being prepared to move some way up market. However, apart from a group of luxury cottages with their own swimming pool - at a ridiculous price - there was nothing very different from my first choice, and I settled for one with a better situation, with agreeable gardens and a restaurant giving directly on to the beach.
When I looked around for a restaurant, one owner assured me that his food was cheap and delicious but there were no other diners so I chose a livelier place with bright lights upstairs and a buffet at 3000 rupees where you could eat as much as you liked. It was well patronised and I tucked into the biggest meal. I had eaten in Indonesia, including rice, sati, fried meat, a great selection of vegetables, beansprouts, peanut sauce, coleslaw, and fruit salad featuring banana, papaya, and pineapple. Tables and chairs were arranged round the circumference of the room, leaving the centre clear for an evening of Balinese dancing to accompaniment of gamelan music, with its sudden changes of volume tempo, played on tapes. There was a succession of solo dances each performer wearing elaborate headdress and costume: a love dance by a girl of sinuous grace, threatening performance by a warrior with violent jerks of the head, a dance by a hunter with spear, and a monkey dance with grotesque mask and movements.
Next morning I moved into the Nirwan and occupied one of the line of bamboo thatch cottages strung out along the beach. The setting was much more attractive, or would have been in fine weather, but I hadn't achieved much of an improvement as the room was full of flies and the mandi open to the skies and paved with moss and wet leaves. The beach restaurant was a mixed blessing since the wind off the sea remained strong and blustery and things.tended to blow off the tables, I explored the beach and sat there for a while when the sun shone briefly but decided that Lovina was not for me.
I decided to move on to Ubud for a few days, accepting a lift from Adrian who had hired a jeep with four wheel drive and high ground clearance. He was a forestry graduate from Bangor who was now working for the ODA in Wanuatu where he had previously done a spell with the WSO. He wanted to drive across the island's central ridge rather than follow the main road round the coast. We drove up steep winding roads through lush vegetation and neat villages, attracting friendly waves from the local people. I must have been a festival day as we passed processions of graceful women carrying offerings on their heads - beautiful arrangements of fruits and flowers. The road climbed up into the clouds and we were approaching the lakes in the centre of the island when we found the road ahead closed for repair and no way of getting through. We drove back fifteen miles to take another fork, climbed again into the clouds, and were making good progress until we were confronted with a major landslip where Adrian was unwilling to risk a traverse across the soft red earth, even with four wheel drive. So we retraced our steps again, this time for ten miles, to make a final successful attempt to cross the ridge, nearly at its western edge, and descend to the glittering blue sea below. We still had a long drive along the coast before we struck inland, skirting the capital of Denpasar, and arriving at Ubud at 4.30.
We booked into the Happy Inn at number two Monkey Forest Road, centrally situated as far as one could judge, though Ubud was a spread out sort of place without any proper middle. It was a clean, comfortable, and friendly hotel where I had a large bedroom equipped with mosquito nets and a good mandi with a sit-upon loo. It had been a long day but I felt rather more tired than I would have expected although I had often dozed off in the jeep. I took my temperature as a precaution, found it was 102, went out briefly for a meal with Adrian, and when he went on to the Legong dancing I went to bed with a couple of aspirins and slept till eleven thirty next morning. I must have caught some sort of flu-like virus, nothing especially tropical as far as I could judge, and spent much of the rest of my stay in Bali lying in bed feeling very lethargic.
I managed to keep the fever under control with some powerful anti-biotics I bought from a local pharmacy - there was not much point in going to doctors since from all accounts they would simply prescribe anti-biotics and you could get them anyway without a prescription - the temperature fluctuating between 100 and 102 degrees. I went out occasionally to explore Ubud which was a truly delightful town famous for its painters and carvers, and adorned with the elaborate temples that are found throughout Bali. One walk took me through the monkey forest with its lively simian population; it was pleasantly shady and cool. The weather was hot and sticky except when occasional storms cleared the air. When I felt too lethargic to do anything but lie in bed it was just tolerable when the ceiling fan was working, but the electricity was off for part of each day and the only way to cool off then was to stand under the cold shower, There were a few books in the hotel to ward off boredom: a P. G. Wodehouse was just what the doctor ordered, but a thick volume of Henry Miller's turgid prose was
heavier going.
Friends looked in from time to time to see if I needed anything, including Rhian with whom I had spent time in Cisarua. I lived mostly on fruit juice and fruit salads in which Bali excels, and was unable to do justice to the other delicacies of Balinese cooking. I wondered occasionally what the anti-biotics were doing: they looked like depth charges and I visualised them creating chaos among the biotics or whatever was causing the trouble. Later the biotics would regroup for the next round, each time a little weaker, but putting up a strong fight.
One evening I felt fit enough to go across the road to the Ubud Palace where there was a nightly performance of the Barong dance, accompanied by gamelan music which I could hear from my bed and with which I grew very familiar. The Barong dance illustrates the battle between good and evil, the good being represented by Barong in the form of a lion, and evil by the witch Rangda; after fierce battles the good spirits naturally emerge victorious. Barang is supported by a group of followers including young men and women and assorted monkeys and grotesques, some of whom change sides in the course of the battles. The shaggy lion is about ten feet high and twelve feet long and is operated by two men in the same way as a pantomime horse though with far greater sophistication, snapping his jaws and making sudden and alarming rushes at other performers and nearby spectators. Each character in turn makes a first appearance at the top of the temple steps and then slowly dances or prances down into the arena. The gamelan players perform throughout the long evening and without any written music and there is perfect synchronisation between music and movement. It was an exciting and moving experience.
With the climax of the Barong dance I end my brief chronicle of my stay in Bali. Restricted though I was, I saw enough of the enchanted island to make a resolution to return and to see more of a society which, despite exposure to tourism, has retained its characteristic charm and culture.