Kiliran Jao to Pakanbaru
March 21st
My diary said:
Well, with luck, we should be crossing the equator today. A good time - the same time as the sun. Today could be the equinox, or it could be yesterday or tomorrow, i don't know. [It was actually about 9 o'clock that morning.] But crossing the equator on the equinox, at the same time as the sun crosses it, must be good.
However, we might not be in luck today. At the moment we're stranded in a shitty little nowhere town called Kiliran Jao, about two hundred and fifty kilometres from Pekanbaru.
The bus we got on in Kotabumi wasn't actually going to Pakanbaru, it was going to Padang, which isn't quite on the way. So they dropped us in Kiliran Jao, which is at the turnoff to Pekanbaru, to wait for another bus. There was also an indonesian family who were in the same situation, which was probably lucky for us.
The people on the bus we got off said we'd be right for travelling the rest of the way on the same ticket, but one of the bus station people tried hard to get us to pay another twenty thousand rupiah, which was two thirds of the cost of the original ticket, and go on an air-con bus. But we all said no, we want an ekonomi and we're not paying any more. So we just had to wait.
And we waited five hours...
To get out, we had to cram onto an already crowded bus. There was a plank running the whole length of the aisle, suspended between the seats, with just enough room to put one leg on each side and sit astride it. We had to squeeze onto this along with quite a few other people. Needless to say it wasn't very comfortable - even at the start of the five hour journey.
This was the most horrific part of the trip so far! The bus took the shortest route to Pekanbaru. This road, at its best, was only slightly better than a country lane. At its widest, the road was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass.
There was an advantage to being perched half on a narrow plank in the middle of the bus and that was that i got a good view out of the front window. It was one of the most crazy trips i'd ever done.
I reckon on average over the whole two hundred and fifty kilometres there was probably a fairly major obstacle every hundred metres, which required careful navigation, specially with an overloaded bus. There were holes in the road, lumps of timber, hump-like bridges, piles of gravel, sections of rough dirt road, broken down trucks, very sharp corners, cows, goats and almost everything else imaginable. There was also a constant stream of trucks and buses going the other way, which had to be passed carefully. Bicycles wobbling along with two people on them, hand carts, children. Pedestrians were wandering all over the place, apparently oblivious to the steady flow of heavy vehicles speeding past to and from Pekanbaru, which is a major industrial and oil centre. Log trucks with trailers and bits of wood hanging out dangerously, crowded buses, with the roofs piled up with luggage, big trucks with tarpaulins over their backs, indonesian style mini petrol tankers, trucks with mechanical diggers on the back, small trucks, large trucks, flying along where they can and going slowly through danger spots. And all the way, the road went through village after village, with people sitting standing, walking around, living normal lives on the edges of this crazy road.
Somewhere along here we crossed the equator.
Meanwhile, my arse and legs were getting more and more uncomfortable from the cramped position i was forced to sit in on that narrow plank. But anyway, we eventually arrived at Pakanbaru (or Pekanbaru as it's also known) at around half past ten that night.
- - -
Unfortunately, the bus didn't go to the bus station, but to the terminal of the bus company which was a few kilometres out of town. There was a bemo standing there, but it showed no sign that it was going anywhere very soon. Another one came in and the driver said the fare to town was five thousand rupiah each. I just laughed and walked off. It was a ridiculous price for a bemo ride, normally a thousand would have got the two of us there and back, with change.
We ended up walking out to the road to try and flag one down. There were two young men out on the roadside and they said they were waiting for a bemo and we should take one together as it was dangerous to walk down the road. If i hadn't been in a state of complete demented exhaustion from four days on buses, and specially from that last section, i would have spotted this as a dodgy situation and just kept on walking. But i didn't.
Soon after, a bemo drove up, well, not really a bemo, but the same sort of van, only with just one seat in the back running crossways with back doors like a car. The two Indonesians spoke to the driver and then one of them said it was a thousand rupiah between the four of us, so we all jumped in.
When we got into the town centre, near the bus station, they asked us for five thousand rupiah between us. I began to get really pissed off at this point and started arguing with them. We stopped at the bus station, where we jumped out straight away and continued the hassling on the street. First i gave them a thousand, and then two thousand and the driver was arguing, so i said alright, get the police and started looking around. I had no intention of having anything to do with the police, but i thought it would freak them out.
Eventually i just walked away. The other two were going through some show of finding the money between them to pay the rest of the supposed ten thousand. Then i thought again and gave them the five thousand rupiah. I was pretty certain they were all in on trying to rip us off, because five thousand rupiah was massively over the odds for a journey like that, about ten times what it should have been. But then i thought seeing, as my judgement was so impaired anyway, i might be wrong and i wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all it was only three dollars fifty to me, but a hell of a lot of money to an average indonesian. Anyway, i still walked away very pissed off.