Banyuwangi to Jakarta
March 18th
We got up at about five, in a bit of confusion about the time. We thought the clocks had only gone back one hour between Bali and here, but we eventually discovered it was actually two hours. We made our way to the railway station.
To get to Jakarta, we would have had to take a train to Surabaya and change. There was only ekonomi and bisnis classes. We didn't have enough money for bisnis, which was just a fancy name for first, judging by one of the trains i looked in. And the thought of going the whole way to Jakarta in ekonomi class really didn't grab me much. But it was Saturday morning and there was no way to get any more money till Monday.
I'd never been on an indonesian train, but i guessed they'd be similar to indian ones. I was probably wrong about this, judging by some of the buses we ended up catching, but i had no real idea. Anyway, at six in the morning, after three nights of not much sleep aboard the Kelimutu, i was feeling very weak and sensitive. The thought of spending twenty hours in ekonomi on trains was too much for me. Apart from anything else, i just couldn't face being the free and open object of entertainment for the other passengers. I'd had enough of that on the boat. I'd never been a great fan of buses, but that morning they had a certain appeal - you get a small ammount of personal space, which doesn't get invaded like it can on a train.
We ended up catching a bus just down the road from the station, which one of the bus crew said was going to Surabaya. But it actually wasn't. It was really going to Probolinggo which was on the way to Surabaya. Surabaya was a hundred kilometres further on. Anyway, we could change there for Surabaya.
No problem! It was nice to be on the bus. Although we didn't know it at the time, that one was the best one of the lot - and there were a lot - on that leg of the journey. There was a reasonable amount of leg room - well, just about! It never got even nearly full and the driver must have been the only bus driver in Asia who wasn't a homicidal maniac who'd had too many tabs of acid for breakfast!
It was nice to be sitting on a relatively comfortable seat, after living on the deck for two and a half days. And we were moving at a reasonable rate - not fast, but fast enough.
At Situbondo, a town about half way to Probolinggo, we stopped at the bus station for almost an hour. But what a great bus station! Fried tofu and tempeh for sale really cheap. This was what we'd been hanging out for since we got to Indonesia. Protein!!! The tofu came in plastic bags along with two or three fresh chilis. Beautiful, a chili hit too!
When the bus left Situbondo bus station, a couple of young men got on. One had a guitar and stood in the middle of the bus and sang about three songs and the other one did a collection around the bus. It was a novel way of busking, i thought, but it was one that we saw a lot more during our hell trip through Java.
At Probolinggo, we got onto another bus to Surabaya. This was driven by the standard lunatic bus driver, who really seemed to have a death wish. The bus was a wreck too, which didn't help.
Surabaya bus station was a bit of a shock. It's not the biggest one we ended up in on that part of the journey, but it was still brain damage. The problem was you couldn't stand still for more than a few seconds without someone coming and hassling you. There are plenty of them hassling you while you're walking too, but it's not as bad.
One man in a uniform came up, speaking good english and being helpful. But he was being a bit over enthusiastic and he wanted us to get one particular night bus, so i began to wonder who was paying him. He claimed he was there to help tourists, but i've heard that one before. A tout in a uniform is still a tout.
The night buses are the fast long distance buses. There was a row of booths selling tickets for various night bus services. We eventually got one we could afford that was leaving in about an hour and going to Jakarta. This was an ekonomi, non-air conditioned bus.
We went off for a walk to get out of the bus station for a while. It was really smoggy around there and there was heaps of traffic. This place was Purabaya bus station, it was about fifteen kilometres out of Surabaya itself. We got a couple of bottles of water down the road and a bit of cut fruit. It had been a few days since we'd had anything much to eat and we weren't really noticing it much any more. It was partly too much hassle trying to find food and partly because we hadn't got much money.
There was a lot of messing about, trying to find where the bus went from and which one was our bus. And even though the person who sold us the ticket had written 3pm on it, and then later told us it was 3.30, the bus didn't leave till well after four. And then it seemed to be just driving around Surabaya, stopping here and there, for ages.
It was a pretty good bus though. The seats weren't too high and there was plenty of leg room. But it was very old and a bit shagged and extremely noisy. However, it got us to Jakarta without any problems.
On the way out of Surabaya, we passed an amazing statue. It was an anchor, about thirty foot high, with a crocodile and a shark twisted around it and an eagle perched on top. It would make a great tattoo!
Just after the bus started, we were each given a box which contained a cake and a small container of water. Then a couple of hours later, we stopped at a roadside restaurant where we got a free meal that was included in the ticket price. This was a bit of a contrast with australian buses, which always stop at the most expensive places, where i assume they must get commission for bringing in a busload of customers.
It was a long trip, but i managed to get enough sleep to make it fairly comfortable. The next morning, we arrived at Jakarta at about ten o'clock. Not at the bus station we had to leave from, of course, but one on the opposite side of the city.
- - -
The bus station we arrived at really was brain damage. There were hundreds of buses and thousands of people. But quite quickly we managed to jump on a number 7A to Kalideres, which is where the buses going west leave from.
It seemed strange afterwards, that we'd been in Jakarta, a famous city and one of the biggest in the world. And we were there for such a short time. The bus went probably straight through the middle and we got to see a fair chunk of it. But seeing a narrow strip of a city you don't know, through a bus window, is pretty weird.
The main thing that stuck in my mind was the river we drove along the side of for most of the way out of the centre. It was fairly narrow and shallow, and more or less just a ditch or an open sewer. All along it, at intervals between the bridges, there were small jetties with little ferries crossing the river. The ferries were really rectangular dinghies which could maybe hold two or three people and some shopping, and the distance they would travel in crossing the river was maybe twenty or thirty feet at the most, but there was obviously enough traffic for someone to survive off at each crossing.
Apart from that, my impression of Jakarta was of a dirty, polluted, traffic-clogged asian city. And it was a Sunday, so the traffic must be impossible on weekdays! It would be interesting to check it out a bit just for the sake of it. But i didn't feel it was much of a loss going straight through!