Our hotel in Batam wins the inauspicious award of being the most hideous, tacky thing on the planet. A full scale concrete model of a ship with a small gunboat beside it. The "Greek Mythological Inspired" decor, porthole windows and gilded Titanicesque windows contributed to a bemused thumbs down. Thankfully the staff were able to help us arrange tickets on a Pelni ship heading to Jakarta, even if they couldn't help us get decent food or a nice Margarita.
Thirty miles of bumpy road later and we're piling into what can only be described as a giant cattle shed with 400 other souls, all waiting for a ship that may or may not be arriving today. Oh dear.
Just as the rain is beginning to pick up, the ship arrives and we all pile on, elbows and shouting being the preferred means of heading up the rickety gangway. Bye bye Batam.
We settle into our little cabin and prepare for 30 hours of waiting to get off the boat. And waiting... And waiting... A mere 5 hours laters that schedule the ship heads off into the night, just as we're tucking in to a dinner of dry rice and cold tofu with fish heads with our new friends, the only other westerners on the ship who have been forced to make our acquaintance as the crew shepard us all towards a table laden with cloudy water and something approximating chicken bones.
Naturally, the Australia couple are doing almost exactly our trip, London to Brisbane (instead of Cork/Dublin to Melbourne) and after 5 months of Trans Siberian, Chinese and Southeast Asian delights are on the home stretch. They have similar notions of ships around Indonesia, perhaps a brief jaunt to East Timor then onwards, somehow and on something that floats, to mainland Australia. We wished them luck, but we'll try to keep a bit of that luck for ourselves.
On reflection we're had to trim and chop our itinerary for a number of reasons. We traded 4 fantastic months in Vietnam for the honour of spending less than quality time in Northern Thailand, Laos and the Thai and Malaysian Islands. We were disappointed not to have had a chance to see Fiona's uncle and his growing family in Pattaya and missed meeting a contact in Singapore by a day because we were rushing to get these boats to Indonesia. We also didn't have a chance to get to Bali, Lombok and Komodo on this trip or to catch up with Eoin and Caoimhe in Bali due to shipping schedules, and we might not have a chance to experience a full month of Ramadan in Indonesia, all that fasting and prohibition we were so looking forward to. All of this and more has gone out the window for the sake of the over-riding mission, to blaze a trail to Flores and board a catamaran that promises to take us around Flores, onwards to Timor and across the Timor sea to Darwin, maybe even around the coast as far as Byron Bay. Not the most harrowing trade-off we've ever been forced into. And anyway, we'll be back.
Still on the ship to Jakarta we've just been treated to another wholesome meal of cold rice, tofu, burnt fish and some sort of green past. Dessert was a view of the sun setting over the equator off the starboard bow. Picking our way back to the cabin over the hundreds of bodies littering the deck, we wait patiently for the evening call to prayers to boom over the intercom. Our fellow intrepid travellers had tried to avoid the 1st class option and opted for 2nd class closed cabins with 6 berths. "No" said the Pelni ticket office. Apparently women are not permitted in these cabins. Best not to ask any more.
A couple of thrilling taxi rides later and a decadent club sandwich in our Jakarta hotel, we were ready to head off again into the big blue, but the boat was leaving in an hour and we weren't sure we could survive 5 days on pot noodle alone. 20 minutes of supermarket sweeping later and the pantry looked thusly...
Off we go.
The 5 days on the Kelimud from Jakarta to Surabaya to Sulawesi to Flores isn't hard to sum up.
Day 1
Fish and Rice. Hollow man on HBO.
Day 2
Fish and Rice. Perfect Stranger on HBO. Our walk on deck was only mildly interrupted by a thump from a salivating girl chained to the deck railing. Pelni, moving people around Indonesia around Indonesia like cattle for donkey's years.
Day 3
No fish. No rice. I think we've been forgotten about. Hollow man on HBO. We made our own Sudoku puzzles from scratch to pass some time.
Day 4
Fish and Rice. Perfect Stranger on HBO. Getting sick of "Heh, mister", "Hello, mister", "Marijoowana, mister?". Where you work, where you from, where you wife, give me cigarette, no cigarettes sorry, oh no no give me cigarette, where irlandia? The ship pulled into the port of Makassar on Sulawesi and we once more stood witness to the chaos and mayhem of unloading and reloading with everything from onions to people, vases to coffins. We leave Makassar severely overloaded. No longer possible to leave the room with the amount of people on the floors.
Day 5
No fish. No rice. Hollow man on HBO. The cockroaches and screaming babies are getting to be a bit much. We met a Catholic nun at dinner, we think there might have been a call to prayers for the Jesus-folk. A screaming erupted on the deck outside our window, lots of screeching and hair pulling, lots of laughing men enjoying the show.
Midnight of day 5 we finally arrive into Larantuka and search for an open hotel with something soft to rest our weary heads. Hair-raising moto ride later and we've checking into a "VIP" aircon room at Hotel Fortuna I, feels like a small slice of heaven after the confines of the boat. Here's hoping that catamaran shows up.
2 comments:
sounds fun
Cheers Dave
Post a Comment