Bulek Eye

Sometimes getting to the story is a bit of an adventure. Two Mondays ago, I flew one hour to Medan, the traveling hub in North Sumatra, hoping to catch a flight the next morning to Padang and a boat out to the Mentawai Islands on Tuesday afternoon. But trundling into the Medan airport on Tuesday morning, I found my flight had been cancelled. And there wasn’t another one until the next morning. I canvassed the freelance agents milling around the ticket counters at the airport: could I take an alternative route to Padang, which is half way down the west Sumatran coast? One tall guy who spoke a little English dialed a few of his friends in the bus business while I checked on flights to places near Padang. We figured I could jump a bus from Medan all the way to Padang or fly to Pekanbaru in the middle of Sumatra and go by road the rest of the way.

The Pekanbaru flight didn’t leave until 12:30, so at a little after 10 I hopped in a taxi to go out to the bus stations. As we worked our way down the row of private terminals, the news was grim. It would take 24 hours to get to Padang by bus. (But it’s just not that far on the map, I’m thinking). Tidak ada espress? I kept asking. Tidak . Back to the airport. Pekanbaru or bust. The agents still hovering at the air ticket counters estimated eight hours from Pekanbaru to Padang by road, after the short flight. If I could pick up a minibus quickly and the boat was a little behind schedule, my carefully hatched plan just might work.

The flight landed on time; at the airport information desk, a courteous youngster told me: “Don’t go to the bus station, there’s bad men there,” and sent me to a minivan company in a residential part of town. There were about eight drivers sitting around watching TV in the office, attached to an empty restaurant. We did have a van for Padang, they said; it left ten minutes ago, at two o’clock. One guy, with longish hair and pulling on a cigarette, said, I’ll take you to Padang for 500,000 (about $50 US). That’s big piece of change in Sumatra. I downshifted into my haggling voice, but at this point I was a bit hot and still hadn’t had eaten lunch so I think I was cracking like a 13-year-old. I managed to get the driver down five dollars. They passed the cigarettes around and kept trying to give me one. Seeing the pained look on my face, another guy began discreetly flashing two fingers and pointing at a different car outside, as if he would do it for 200,000.

Then two guys walked in and one asked to go to Padang. When they found out I was headed there, the traveler, who turned out to be an executive in a security company, said, “We’ll split it, you pay 300,000 and I’ll pay 200,000.” I think he was just winding me up, and it worked. 250, 250, I repeated. No, he said, you’re American, you’re rich. The drivers were eating it up, sort of a stand up act for them. “Three hundred for you, I don’t need to go so soon!” the guy said; laughs all around. But he did want to go soonish and finally relented. An even split.

After my lunch of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, we took off on one of the hairiest trips I’ve ever joined. The driver, heretofore in little hurry to get in a car to Padang, now drove like Jeff Gordon. On speed. Since there were only two of us passengers in a three-row SUV, I lay down in the very back row, hoping the back of the second row would cushion me should the NASCAR exercise suddenly go pear shaped. At one point, I sat up, and seeing exactly how we were slicing off the corners as we crossed the mountains from Riau into West Sumatra, I quickly found the lines “I don’t want to die! Slow down!” in my Lonely Planet phrasebook and screamed them from the back. The driver shook with laughter. “Are you my wife!?” he asked. “I thought you were in a hurry and wanted to get there fast?” My Bahasa got suddenly clear, and straight from the top of my head I said “There’s fast and there’s crazy. You’re crazy!”

He slowed down. For a little bit. We stopped to break the Ramadan fast and for prayers at just before 7. Then again for dinner and prayers at 8, at a restaurant that had tablecloths and a cascading fountain at one end. Outside after dinner, a pack of boys wanted to know where I was from, where I was going. The smallest, skinniest boy did the asking, in English. I embarrassed him by telling him how well he spoke.

We descended into damp Padang just after 11 pm.

I’d missed my boat, but my contacts with SurfAid, the humanitarian group in Padang, said there’d be others in the next day or two. By midday Wednesday, a flight to the Mentawais on Thursday morning turned out to be my ticket. On the tarmac the next morning, a young Indonesian guy with a traveling Christian group looked at the twin-prop, 18-seater plane and said, “It’s a toy!” But after a slight delay, we had a smooth 30-minute trip over atolls and turquoise water before landing at a concrete strip near the beach, on the east side of Sipora Island. The flight saved me at least a 10-hour boat ride.

What a relief to step onto Mentawai ground. But I wasn’t there, yet. Between trying to arrange a return ticket with a wandering airline rep and hooking up with a boat that would take us around to the Mentawai capital of Tuapejat, I dropped my lightweight sleeping sack. I searched in vain for a couple of minutes, only to find that the airline’s boat had left, leaving me to Ferdinand, an entrepreneur in a life jacket. He had my sleeping sack, and, Sure, he’d take me to Tuapejat. We headed out from the beach in his narrow, wooden longboat, built to slice the waves. He fished along way, while one of his buddies motored. When we hit Tuapejat, I waded into land with my bag and Ferdinand calmly hit me up for the ride, though I’d been told at the airport is was free. We worked out a half price detente.

After finally dropping the backpack in Tuapejat, I headed out with Surf Aid, in a small outboard boat, to visit villages affected by the earthquakes and surfers at Telescopes break.

The next day, we did more of the same.

By Friday evening, I’d written the story but needed to send it. A foundation had set up a satellite internet connection in a wooden house in Tuapejat after the earthquake. By evening, after a bunch of tries, I got into one of my webmail accounts and began sending off the story and some pictures. It was slow, grinding web work. The foundation organizer, a guy from Medan who’d been working in Banda Aceh, pumped out some classic U2 tunes while I stared at the screen.

On Saturday morning, the story successfully through to New York, I got a call on my cell phone from my mother in the States. She wanted to talk about a rendezvous in Southeast Asia this winter. “Where are you?” she asked. “The Mentawai Islands,” I said. She barely missed a beat: “So, let’s talk a little about Vietnam…”

Take care until next time,

Oakley