Pekanbaru to Singapore
March 23rd 1995
From Pakanbaru, we were crammed into a shagged-out old bus for four hours of incredibly rough dirt road. A lot of this road was obviously oil company road as it had a surface of crude oil poured over the dirt and there was a gigantic pipeline running along by the side of it. Most of the land it went through was plantations of oil palms. I don't know if the oil companies grow these too, or if it was a coincidence and they were something separate.
Eventually we arrived at the river and the bus stopped at a jetty. There were the normal crew of people selling rice, drinks, peanuts and other things travellers might need for their journey, but we didn't have long to wait. After about quarter of an hour a speed boat came down the river and stopped at the wharf and there was usual mental scramble and all-in wrestling match to get on board.
The boat was more or less like a bus, with a hundred or so seats inside. It was air-conditioned, but there was an open area at the back and on the top, where you could sit and watch the water shoot by at about twenty knots. Considering the speed it travelled at, it created a surprisingly small wake. There were television screens in the two seating sections which showed kung fu movies the whole journey.
We went down the river, which was lined on both sides with mangroves, for about half an hour, passing lots of boats of all shapes and sizes. There were little boats with triangular sails; long, narrow dinghies being rowed standing up and facing forwards, with the oars tied onto a single long, vertical peg on each side; small narrow boats with motors; wooden barges; a massive lighter, stacked up with cargo and towed by a tug; passenger speedboats with three outboard motors.
We passed several small villages on the edge of the river, their huts built on stilts over the water, and a shipyard, where timber boats were being built. Eventually we docked somewhere, i think it was actually an island, surrounded by river delta. A lot of people got off and a lot more got on, but we got away from there quite quickly.
There was this crazy bi-lingual kung-fu film on the television, with chinese and english subtitles, about a very small, bald child superhero and a little boy who shaves his head and tries to copy him. Or something...
Then, after a while, we came to the open sea which was dotted with lots of little, tree-covered islands. The next stop after that was Tanjungbalai, on Karimun Island. This town was spread out along the coast of the island and you could see it from quite a distance away.
Then, after four hours on the ferry, we arrived at Batam. This island is part of Indonesia, but it's the closest one to Singapore. It's where Singapore businessmen go for a day on the golf course and it has the same high prices as its gigantic city neighbour. We got in and out of there as quickly as possible and luckily we were just in time for the last ferry, which left really early, at around seven in the evening. This was just as well as we really didn't want to get stuck on Batam for the night.
- - -
On the ferry to Singapore, they gave us small cartons of soya milk once we were underway. That was great, it had been a very long time since we'd had any of that.
I looked back at Indonesia as we sped across the water towards the skyscrapers of the ultra-modern city ahead of us. It was a strange contrast. I was glad to be leaving Indonesia. I hadn't liked the place much this time. The last time i'd been there, i'd spent all my time around fairly touristy parts of Lombok and it had been very different. This time, i'd seen a lot of the country and got more of a feel of how it really was. And how it really was a fascist military dictatorship, keeping the population in a terminal state of fear and poverty. It was an empire where genocide was practiced without a care by the rich and powerful bastards who were in control. Where the people had to be extremely careful about giving any kind of opinion on anything vaguely political because it was too dangerous to be seen to be thinking for yourself. The massive slaughter of the late sixties was still there in the air, when millions of people were massacred not for what they did, but for what they thought. The people seemed to have learnt from this and they didn't voice any thoughts that could be taken as political opinions unless they were in praise of the arseholes in power.
The massacres were still going on. East Timor was one of the main places where the military might of Java was concentrating its evil colonial forces. The continuing genocide, torture and oppression there was being totally ignored by most of the world's press, but it was still going on. In February, not long before we were in Timor, the army had tortured six students to death. I read a story about it in an english language Jakarta paper while we were on the Kelimutu, it said that the military leaders have admitted they were wrong to do it - there are rules which govern conduct in war, they said, and they were broken, but the six people were rebels anyway. Implying that because of that it didn't matter.
There were similar things going on in West Papua, which the javanese imperialists called "Irian Jaya". There were resistance movements in several regions of the javanese empire, as Indonesia should really be known. It wasn't a country, it was a massive group of nations, each with their own language and culture, that were being subjected to domination, exploitation and extermination by the military oligarchy.
The poverty of third world countries bothered me. I didn't feel comfortable with the knowledge that our wealth - and even poor people in european countries were generally better off - has been stolen from these countries. The wealth of Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia had come entirely from colonization, nowhere else. It was maintained by the artificial manipulation of international exchange rates so that the rich countries could continue to heavily exploit the poor countries by paying virtually nothing for their products.
Our ability to travel in these countries very cheaply was really
only a side effect of that, but it didn't make me feel very
comfortable. Although i could live with it as long as i attempted to
redress the balance in some way. But i could never quite
believe that just spending my money there, as the
Lonely Planet
guide books suggested, really was enough to make up for the damage
done by the tourism industry. Still, there was no doubt it provided
people with jobs they otherwise might not have had.
However, i found it much harder to handle the fact that the poverty of the people in whose country i was living cheaply was being deliberately maintained by a fascist military dicatorship, whose grip of fear was being reinforced by the so-called "western" powers. Australia for instance, was keeping very quiet about the genocide going on in East Timor because, with Java, it was jointly exploiting the oil fields in the Timor Gap, which would have belonged to the East Timorese if they'd had sovereignty over their country. Of course, the australian government was also scared it would be next on Java's list of places to colonize!
Anyway, i was also glad to be leaving Indonesia because it was one of the most difficult places to travel through that i'd ever been and i desperately needed a rest from the endless hassle it involved.