Dili to Medan

In one of our (many) family meetings in the last few days before we left Ellie’s we had tried to do some broad brush stroke planning of the journey home. Was it possible to shave a month off the time it took us to get here, without the journey killing us…?

After Uluru, Sumatra was our next new destination. Timings for travel and complicated visa applications meant that we needed to arrive in Sumatra towards the end of March at the latest if we wanted to go trekking in the rainforest for three days…and we really did want to go trekking in the rainforest.

So, three thousand miles in two weeks.

Díli to Medan (the Sumatran city high up on on the west coast) was further than from Glastonbury to Vladikavkaz in Russia.

Right, so what did we know?

We knew there was a flight from Darwin to Bali that would cut out ten days of travel and save us loads of money…but heart and climate won that battle.

…how were we going to get to Sumatra from Dili, to see the actual proper jungle; home to tigers and orangutans, elephants, rhino, sun bears, gibbons, pythons, tapirs… (I could go on making another bingo list but I won’t …and I had thought tapirs only lived in South America?)

We knew there was a bus from Dili to Kupang…and that was pretty much it.

The Pelni website, a difficult to use specimen of the genre, was not giving away any of its secrets… I even got the Pelni Ferry app but that didn’t open any more doors.

It looked like there were no boats at all from Kupang until the 21st of March, a three day journey that only got us half way to Bali – not much use.

I emailed the Pelni Head Office and got a quick reply from them telling me two of their boats were being serviced, ‘keep an eye on the website, things could change at any moment’ …clear info even if it wasn’t much help.

Time to ask a favour or two…

I texted Edwin in Kupang and asked him to ring the Pelni Ferry Ticket Office for me…and I also texted the very resourceful Tracey.

Our previous experience had shown us that what was on the website was no guide to what ferries were actually in operational service and both Edwin and Tracey were great at finding things out.

They both got back to us saying that there was a new ferry service, run by a different company, going once a week to Surabaya. The trip was 60 hours long (in cyclone season!) but at the end we’d be in Java.

That would work – if the new company had a boat bigger than a fishing vessel and the storms we’d had every day for the last week stopped for sixty hours straight, no problem!

I decided not to focus on the ‘storms in cyclone season’ – we had enough sea sickness pills to sink a ship so we might be okay (although if anyone’s listening please don’t take that phrase literally).

Our next problem was how to book the tickets.

Once again Tracey stepped up …she had a friend who owed her a favour, whose cousin lived in Kupang – he could book them for us!

All of that happened with the minimum of fuss – funds transferred to the right places and tickets efficiently purchased.

We already knew that there was a Pelni ferry from Jakarta to Medan that left once a week…and maybe when we got to Kupang we could go to the Pelni Ferry Ticket Office (oh how I am going to miss writing that) and try to buy the tickets.

It was possible, we could arrive in Sumatra before the end of March.

Plan made. All that remained was gearing ourselves up for those two,  three day ferry journeys…

Our time in Dili was brief but long enough to reconnect with both place and people. Sheena was there, a long term house guest, beginning the research for her PhD. That afternoon a professor of economics would be turning up for a quick two day visit, and an English/Australian family who had driven from the UK in a Campervan with their two children were due to pop in with a mattress for Rosa. They were in Dili preparing their van to be shipped to Australia (cleaning seeds and dirt off every single tiny bit of the vehicle…they had already done 70 loads of washing, a LOT of work)

Billy George and Tillie (cats!) slept with Rosa over the three nights we were in Dili, sensing a kindred spirit and someone who needed cat love. The clearly wrongly named, ‘not my cat’ was now present at every meal time, bringing the total number of cats at Tracey’s to seven.

For all of us Dili had been a great experience back in December. We had been busy right from when we’d first arrived – choir practice on the second day, preparing to sing carols at a Christmas concert, followed by several rapid fire performances out on the street in cafes. Our daily travels to try and find the harbour master, our connection with the struggle for independence and the people who had been involved in that struggle. Tracey’s extensive social networking calendar in the lead up to Christmas …and even the building of a raft out of recycled plastic bottles, gave us the chance to connect with this place and people and here we were back again, easily fitting back in to life in Dili…

The next morning Rosa, Tracey and I set off early to go and pay our respects to Jesus…it seemed churlish to come all this way and not make the effort to climb up the iconic statue again…we had a delicious breakfast back at the bottom and then Rosa and I headed to the second hand clothes market.

Tracey encouraged all her house mates to go there because every penny we spent was going to where it was needed, directly to the people, most items were $3 and if we got it home and hated whatever we’d bought she’d take it back next week.

I had a scarf and a cardigan to replace and I was looking for trousers as well and Rosa was keeping me company…

We spent $18 (about £14) and got Rosa and Theo some trousers, I got two tops and a cardigan and Rosa got a light shirt and a t-shirt she loved and ended up either lost or taken by someone in the laundrette in Jakarta…it was a perfect Rosa t-shirt but if the fairies need it to keep these ferry crossings smooth (or some young girl loved it as much as Rosa and temptation got too much) then it’s another chance to wave goodbye to something we loved, however briefly.

(Turned out it was in her rucksack all the time so we got to let it go and get it back : )

It was fun shopping for clothes, buying things that looked okay knowing we didn’t mind too much whether they fitted or not.

We bought a squash, some pumpkin leaves and carrots for dinner and headed home in one of the little minibuses that criss-crossed Dili for 25 cents a journey.

Tracey had a dinner party that night; Sheryl, the friend with the cousin in Kupang came, the family travelling from the UK, Jerry our Greek/Australian Economics professor (who I really liked) Dan who had managed to get across the Timor Sea on a yacht (…he’d made his peace with an early watery grave a good few times before he’d made it).

I hung out with the twin eight year olds before our slightly shy 20 year old was encouraged into the picture, and then the two eight your old limpets found their soulmate, for the rest of the evening…

The evening was fun snd the food delicious but Rosa woke up with diarrhoea the next day and pretty soon she had a fever as well …the cats did most of the caring for her as she rested.

That last day we washed clothes, packed and had a chance to see friends we’d made last time. Marion and Savio came over for lunch, Marion gave Theo’s knee an unexpectedly thorough check over in her capacity as a nurse …and Savio filled us in on life in the Foreign Ministry. I went up to the bus ticket office to make sure we were booked on and get some food things for our journey the next day, hoping that Rosa’s illness would only last a day.

She seems tired but a little better in the morning, willing to face the journey to Kupang, which was long, but not scary. Taken to the border by one bus and then picked up the other side by another.

That journey through no man’s land was when we felt the reality of the damage to Theo’s knee…

It was over a mile through the two border control areas so I went in search of a something I could wheel our luggage in …our inability to speak either language led to us commandeering a very dangerous looking wheelchair. My plan had been to put the luggage in it but the porter had other ideas…there was no way of explaining the subtleties of Theo’s knee.

‘It’s only sore, he can still walk – he just can’t carry anything heavy’…just wasn’t coming across so Theo, all be it a little reluctantly, went in the wheelchair and we piled some stuff on top of him…that cumbersome and slightly embarrassing arrangement got us as far as the end of the East Timor part of no man’s land…now it was down to Rosa and I to do the heavy lifting…not so easy!

I’ll take embarrassment any day.

We arrived in Kupang as it was getting dark and our bus began dropping everyone at their homes and hotels – at one stop there was a necklace and bracelet salesman, stood quietly to one side, knowing the people who had just got off this bus were not going to want his trinkets and the resignation I saw on his face got me.

I love how all my bracelets tell a story…

Arriving at Edwin’s felt like coming home every bit as much as arriving at Tracey’s had. Aurelle was there waiting and she flew into my arms…barefoot and skinny, huge brown eyes on a questioning face. Her short hair dark and spikey, We played the game I’d taught her last time I was there and we played with the new kitten. I had asked Edwin to cook us one of his wonderful omelettes and we went to bed tired but happy.

The next morning we met  Donal, the cousin who had bought the tickets for us. He bought them round to Edwin’s and it turns out Edwin and Sheryl knew each other back in the day – I wondered if there might have been a story there…? The film star and the glamorous secretary…

Rosa was feeling well enough after her (restful!?) 12 hour bus journey with extra luggage carrying strengthening exercises, to come on the Pelni mission with me.

We needed to do five things:

1. try and buy our ferry tickets from Jakarta to Medan. We knew where the Pelni office was – I’d seen it on our endless trips to the harbour – it was a twenty minute walk and more importantly we had no idea where the Pelni Ferry Ticket Office was in Jakarta, much better to get it here? (…knew I’d find a way to write that one more time…)
2. see if there was any life in the SIM cards Tracey had been given by people travelling from Bali to Timor
3. buy a wheelie suitcase – we needed something to help us carry Theo’s stuff and a wheelchair was not the answer
4. food for three day ferry journey
5. get some cash out

Pelni was a dream, it all worked so perfectly, we were booked into cabins next to each other (although we had managed to be in the same cabin on every other Pelni ferry so we had high hopes…)

We walked through the heat of the day to the Telekom office where a kind security guard took pity on the two of us wilting in front of him and gave us a lift to the real office because the office had moved and it was a couple of miles away…

We spent a very relaxing three hours in air conditioned bliss sorting out our connectivity. Echa did everything for us…she helped me get the Telekom app on my phone in case we needed to top up, I downloaded the taxi app as well and she even helped us order our first GRAB.

That taxi system worked unbelievably well and cost a fraction of what we got charged on the street for the same journey – we were going to be lazy from now on!! …and none of us would have to be pushed around in wheelchairs or carry extra bags.

…how had we managed to travel all the way from the UK to East Timor without data at any point after Europe? The only time we accessed the internet was when there was WiFi…we are none of us that clued into tech I guess…

Watching other travellers effortlessly use apps to order taxis, book trains, and find places to stay on the move had reluctantly dragged us back towards the digital age – being connected saved money and whilst our decision had in part been to keep the internet at bay…(and because my phone company offered bolt on’s that cost £6 a day for most countries), we hadn’t really thought about buying a SIM in the country we were in… used sparingly local apps were REALLY useful.

It was Tracey who had initially given us East Timor SIM cards when we had first arrived in Dili last December. A taste of the ease data could give us. Sharing live locations for when we wanted to meet up – texting each other outside the house, looking up stuff about where we were …it was so much easier to do everything.

Looking further into it we discovered that there’s two ways of getting connected…the fast expensive way (online eSIM), or the slow cheap way (go to the provider in each country) for two more weeks the slow cheap saved us £30 and worked really well…

We were tired but happy, a local dinner of gado gado, some time with the lovely Napa, who had tried to help us last time – then an early night.

We bought cat food for the little kitten and Edwin’s other cat, gave him money for everything he does and the locals he supports and left a small amount of money for Aurelle and her family  – but I didn’t get to say goodbye to Aurelle. Seeing her again had cemented something for me though…as each of these mini visits had.

These were people in my life now, people I was connected to and wanted to stay in contact with…people I could text occasionally or, in Aurelle’s case, send cards and postcards to.

If I had only been once I don’t I would have felt the same…

We set about the final bits of packing and that’s when the suitcase broke – the handle mechanism, that handy little button you press to make it go up and down? It wasn’t working… we all spent an increasingly irritated twenty minutes trying to gently WRENCH it back out – but it stubbornly refused to budge.

Pushing that was going to be fun…

We were at the port by 5.00 the next morning – three hours early. Bobby, a friend of Edwin’s drove us and looked after us as we waited.

Our first sight of the ship was a massive relief for me, my imagination had served up a listing rust bucket with thick black smoke billowing from the funnel…but this boat was huge, and pretty swanky looking.

When we walked in all the crew were dressed in expensive looking uniforms – some money had been spent on this ship.

It was easily the most modern and smartest ferry we travelled on…

We ended up being down graded to the nicest cabin we had all trip – such comfy beds and a really big window. The tickets Sheryl had booked had private toilets but no window – the window was worth every one of the few steps to go for a pee in the night!

There was a gym of sorts, a kids play area, a karaoke bar…This ferry would not have been out of place doing the Dover to Calais run.

There was food and it was delivered to us in our room …and as vegetarian food goes on a ferry it was pretty good. The only thing wrong with the boat was the lack of outside space – our beloved Pelni ferries may have cockroaches, but they also have loads of benches for passengers to sit on and commune with the sea.

The days passed and whilst it rained a couple of times and the wind was strong most of the way – the worst weather was a few hours of lying down with half a sea sick tablet for me and a whole one for Rosa.

She and I had a couple of late night walks around the top deck of the shop being lashed by wind and rain and then it was all over – the journey we’d been dreading most, ‘tell us how the ship goes in the storms’ ‘I hope you’re ready for a rough one, high winds every day this month’ etc etc.

We arrived five hours late into Surabaya but we were in one piece with Theo’s knee slightly better. I ordered a GRAB (…so got this now) and headed for our hotel…

We had paid way more than normal for this hotel – anticipating that we would be recovering from three days of heaving our guts up…it had a lobby area and lifts!

As we made our way up to the room the suitcase broke, properly this time …three whole days into our journey home…our mood did not improve when we opened the door to a sewage stink.

I wasn’t up for sleeping in a sewage room so we asked to change room, they moved us three floors down where there was less of an overall sewage smell, and sprayed the room with enough air freshener to take out the ozone layer.

We moved in and got straight to work trying to book a train to Jakarta. I had meant to walk to the station when we arrived and book the tickets during the day but we were so late we now had to download the Indonesian train app instead (couldn’t have done that without the SIM card!)

We had to decide whether we were up for spending £35 per person to get to Jakarta in eight hours, or £15 each and do the 13 hour version of the same journey – arriving at 1.20 in the morning.

Slow and cheap won again partly because it meant we had a lie in and we could look at how we were going to transport a case that no longer had a handle.

Mostly we pushed it but our new best friend GRAB meant we were dropped at the station right by the trolleys.

The station was beautiful and easy to navigate, people helping you find your way and checking if we were meant to be on the train that was about to leave, taking care of us. The fountain and green areas were well maintained and even the snacks in the shop were wildly over priced…it was familiar and yet nicer than any station in Europe that we’d been to.

I walked out along the platform to the beautifully kept path lined with flowers and bushes, where a frustrated man was squatting down by his broken strimmer…I felt for him, we shared a rueful smile and as I walked back towards the platform, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a slither.

I turned and looked squarely at it, and saw the last six inches of a snake glide into the wall of a building – it was grey and black and it looked striped but when Rosa and I looked it up the only striped snakes live in the sea.

Still though, whatever type it was I had still seen another snake …and at a nice safe distance : )

The train was comfortable enough (for a three hour trip…tedious and bum numbing for thirteen hours). The views from the window though were stunning and occasionally spectacular. At one point Rosa nudged me and pointed out of the window. A huge volcano, lit by the setting sun sat glowering at as from the horizon – Mount Merapi, the active volcano that had erupted only eight weeks ago – wouldn’t have minded seeing that…although I wondered what it must it be like living with that possibility on a daily basis…

We arrived in Jakarta pretty knackered, ordered a GRAB (so easy now) and we headed to our hotel, the same hotel as last time.

We had originally booked it purely and simply because we could see its name on my map. It had been the first hotel we’d stayed in after our epic three days and nights on trains through Thailand and Malaysia only to discover the hotel we were meant to stay in in Batam didn’t actually exist.

After that we had decided that if we couldn’t see it specifically named on our map we weren’t staying there.

The Citi M was easy and they gave us breakfast…and we ate enough at breakfast to mean we didn’t need much lunch. A rhythm most of the inhabitants of Jakarta were familiar with because we were half way through Ramadan.

We settled in to our three days in Jakarta, relieved not to be on a boat and preparing for our last ever Pelni ferry. Would this one be smooth like all the others, would our luck hold?

…and would we have fallen out of love with them now we’d been on the newer fancier KM Dharma Kartika V?

Rosa had a really bad sore throat when she woke up the next morning. A ragged band are we, I thought to myself as I headed out into Jakarta to find throat soothing things for Rosa. ‘Can you find some thin nuts and bolts with washers while you’re out?’ Right, was he serious?! I had no idea how to even say chemist in Indonesian ‘our suitcase has broken and I need some very thin nuts and bolts, ideally with washers both ends’ was probably a bit beyond me…

Jakarta is a busy, smoggy, smelly city and I finally gave up trying to get to to the chemist after an hour of walking in the heat alongside roads jammed full of rickshaws, scooter taxis, motorbikes, cars and lorries. The final part of the route was taking me up and over a long bridge with no pavement…as I watched every motorbike in a hurry used my six inches of portioned off road to undertake, and decided against it. I walked across the road and in the parking lot ahead were hundreds and hundreds of mannequins.

Why?

It was a large area sealed off and in every corner there were piles and piles of mannequins. Thousands of them…I shuddered as I imagined them coming alive and taking over the city (was I getting sun stroke?!)

Time to head home, I’d already found strepsils and local honey… that would have to do.

As I turned to go back, a number of blanket stalls caught my eye and there on the ground, in a plastic Tupperware dish, were a whole load of random nuts and bolts.

No need for any language skills I bought a selection and asked if there was an ‘apotek’ near by (I did look up ‘chemist’? There was one just up the road – Vitamins purchased I headed home…

Theo and I fixed the suitcase the next day – ‘that things gonna need a name by the end of this journey’ I grumbled as we slathered the plastic in super glue to reinforce our newly attached bolt…

The next day Rosa felt well enough to participate in the discussions we needed to have about what we did next.

Sumatra and beyond.

The plan had been to go to Batu Katak, a small village next to a piece of the forest not currently protected – somewhere where tourism is helping keep the loggers at bay. We would trek from there into the National Park and stay there for two nights.

…our chances of seeing an orangutan were less here but if we did see any they would be fully wild…and however tired and hard travelling can be, I felt the rush of joy I feel when I know that in a few short days I am going to be sleeping next to a forest that has tigers and oangutan’s living in it.

We booked our three day trek in the Sumatran rainforest, we booked our trains to Thailand, we applied for Cambodian visa’s – booked a hotel in Siem Reap and wrote again to the Russian Embassy in Guangzhou asking about applying for a transit visa. We even booked our ferry over to Malaysia from Dumai a city ten hours south from Medan

I went out and found a laundrette and started taking cash out of the ATM 2,000,000 rupiah at a time. Trekking in the Sumatran jungle was going to use up a nice big chunk of our last remaining savings but it was money being spent at the heart of one of the most precious pieces of forest left to us…yes we were up for it.

The days passed quickly with Rosa recovering and Theo’s knee healing slowly. On the last day I started to feel rough and by midday diarrhea had taken hold…it was pretty full on and 60 hours on a ferry in unpredictable weather with a toilet down the corridor  was not looking good to me.

I rested as best I could in the lobby (we had to be out of our room by 1.00 and the boat didn’t leave until 11.00 that night so there was a lot of sitting (and quite a lot of another word that rhymes with sitting).

Nothing to be done. We were getting on that boat whatever.

To make things as stress free as possible we ordered the taxi for 7.30,  three and a half hours before the boat was due to leave and it was only half an hour’s drive away.

We loaded all our luggage and set off – me clutching my tummy and keeping my fingers (and legs) crossed.

It nearly went really well. There was the usual amount of traffic but our driver was nifty and we got to within a mile and a half of the ferry terminal  when we stopped.

Sandwiched between two huge lorries with barriers on one side and vehicles on the other, we went nowhere for ten minutes, which turned into twenty, and then half an hour. We started to talk about how long we were willing to sit here waiting. The driver understood what we were discussing and flagged a driver going the other way…it was obvious from his gestures that we were going nowhere.

The taxi driver looked up the route to the port on his map and it was all red.

It was 8.50 and over a mile to the port – we were surrounded by huge trucks, in a dark and inhospitable port, containers and cranes looming over us and vehicles coming at speed in the opposite direction.

It was not a good place to be walking at all, never mind over a mile, and the dark (very dark) humour of it all was that Theo and I were operating in two totally different realities.

Theo needed to move carefully and gently to make sure he did nothing to aggravate his knee. I needed to get within 100 yards of a toilet as quickly as possible…just in case.

Meanwhile Rosa didn’t want us on the road at all and there wasn’t any pavement….

…and the F***ING suitcase broke again.

It was not our finest hour.

I can truly say we did our best and the fact that we found the ferry in one of the busiest ports in the world was a total miracle. Everyone official I asked confirmed we were going in the right direction.

It will come as no surprise that there were some raised voices followed by long stony silences during that walk, and some hard frosty stares after an hour or so of navigating the port, but arriving into the arms of Pelni (and somewhere with a trolley and a toilet) helped.

We had made it.

I think the person in charge of rooms could see a little of what we’d been through on our faces and helpfully agreed to us sharing a room.

We headed down a corridor, threw our stuff and ourselves into the familiar cabin, and one of us put their knee up in the air, one of us went to the toilet and one of us vowed never to go travelling again.

After some considerable time had passed Rosa and I were ready to leave the cabin. We noticed that the boat was already moving, and Jakarta and its horrible port were behind us. With a swift well aimed kick to the suitcase we headed out.

We wandered around aimlessly for a bit and then we started to notice that the pictures on the walls looked familiar – was this the same boat we had been on when we first arrived in Indonesia? Our first and last Pelni ferry was the KM Kelmud!

That cheered us up – this boat had some great places to sit and watch the world go by…and the first hour had passed without a whiff of cyclone.

We went to bed and only I woke early the next day, my need for the toilet came a calling, a little more gently than the day before…

I was one of only three people out on deck – the sun was yet to rise and the skies were soft. I leaned on the railing and thought about all we’d been through the night before. Maybe it would be great if later we all had a chance to say how it had been for us, clear the air and remember we’d each been trying our best …in the meantime I marvelled at the silky smooth quality of the water and gratitude filled my heart.

It was lovely feeling grateful rather than a bit grumpy and aggrieved…I started to think about the ‘what next’ – with all the travelling we’d been doing  I hadn’t really thought about ‘The Sumatran Rainforest’ what would it be like? I loved the word Sumatra, it conjured such mystery and romance for me.

Were we really going to see orangutans in the wild? Was all this crazy travel going to be worth it…?

I was about to walk away to go and wake the family for breakfast when out of the corner of my eye I saw a ripple in the silky smooth. Two dolphins passing by on their way to… more ocean? (…showing my deep ignorance of the sea here…I expect it’s all actually divided up geographically by depth, temperature and territory and every dolphin knows exactly where they are going …and then of course there’s migratory routes …plus there will be zoning, by-laws, one way systems, traffic lights – roundabouts!)

Back out of my town planning mode I loved watching the dolphins, a little blessing to my sunrise.

Our day passed gently – the sea was calm and so were we – we filled our time reading, resting (going to the toilet a little less often) and watching the sea for its treasures.

We saw lots of flying fish and one large thing that leapt out of the sea …and then it was time for our second night on board ship.

Rosa and I stood out on deck at midnight checking the map so we knew when to jump across the Equator. We had done the same thing on the way here…jumping loads of times because we had no idea where the line actually was – but this time we only jumped three times and as we landed that last time we thought we almost heard the seasons whisper goodbye to each other – Autumn giving way to Spring as we headed North.