by Frank Kusy
The buses were getting worse. The further we moved away from the big cities, the more often they were late and overcrowded. It was on one such bus – a packed-to-the-hilt air-conditioned one with all the windows shut and everybody aboard smoking kretak (cinnamon) cigarettes – that I thought of Kevin. Yes, the jovial, ruddy-faced young Englishman I had shared similar bus journeys in India with four years before.
‘What ho, Frank!’ his familiar voice had boomed down the phone the previous Christmas. ‘I’m coming down to see you!’
‘Are you?’ I’d said, surprised. ‘What’s the occasion?’
‘The occasion is: I want to learn some of that chanting.’
I stared at the receiver. ‘You want to become a Buddhist? Really? I mean, you travelled round India with me for three whole months and didn’t show the slightest bit of interest.’
Kevin chuckled. ‘Well, I’m interested now. You said I could have anything I wanted if I chanted for it, didn’t you?’
I hesitated. This could go badly wrong.
‘Yessss,’ I said slowly. ‘So what is it you want so badly?’
‘A wife,’ stated Kevin. ‘I’ve decided that I want to get married.’
And Kevin had come down to see me and he’d slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and learnt all about chanting, and then he had gone home again to Lowestoft and become the most zealous kind of super-Buddhist going. He had gone to every meeting, attended every course and chanted for up to five hours a day. It was typical Kevin. And three months later, whether by Fate or karma or sheer bloody-minded determination, his prayer had been answered – he had found somebody prepared to marry him.
‘That’s fantastic,’ I congratulated him when he phoned me with the news. ‘So, how’s the chanting going?’
‘It isn’t,’ he said impishly. ‘I stopped the day I met Cheryl.’
‘Really?’ I said, rather nonplussed. ‘Didn’t you want to continue?’
‘What for? I got what I wanted. But I tell you what, Frank, if I ever need another wife I’ll start back up again!’
I grinned to myself, thinking of Kevin. He was such a character. But then, as the smoke from all those kretak cigarettes got too much and our driver wiped his eyes to stop them smarting, the bus hit a pothole in the road, the back wheels jack-knifed up in the air, and we all nearly died.
There was a moment’s silence as the bus swerved and then righted itself, and then the huddle of kids occupying the front seats burst out laughing. They had never had so much fun.
The next bus I took, the 2pm to Bogor which only turned up at 6pm, provided me with a wry smile. Soon after departure, we pulled into a tiny village and some 30 drink and snack vendors boarded the bus. They all had their little trays of refreshments (very reminiscent of the old-fashioned usherette in the cinema) and every tray sold exactly the same stuff: a couple of cigarettes, a few tubes of sweets, some little bags of peanuts and an assortment of fruit and drinks. And they went up and down the bus, one after another, asking each passenger in turn if they wanted anything. The funny thing was that by the time they had all got off, I was the only person on the bus who wasn’t eating. They talked everybody into buying something!
But my smile didn’t last long. Instead of making up lost time, this bus made incredibly long stops for (more) tea and snacks and crawled into Bogor five hours late. I didn’t even unpack – just fell into a cheap guest house and slept like the dead.
I was developing a peculiar love-hate relationship with independent travel. I loved the buzz of hopping on a bus or a train and going somewhere different every day – 52 hours travel in just eight days! – but without the Trailfinders crew or Nicky to slow me down, my nerves were getting frayed. I just didn’t seem to have an ‘off’ button – my restless nature wouldn’t allow me to relax in any place for more time than it took to have a plate of sate and a rushed cup of coffee.
None of this really bothered me, though. ‘If the next 40 days go as well as the last 60,’ I told myself, ‘this is going to be a pretty special guidebook!’
The lengths I was going to, to make this guidebook special were herculean. I was interviewing up to 20 or 30 people a day, and whilst the bread and butter information was coming from travel agencies and tourist offices the real meat in the sandwich was coming from other travellers – people who’d actually ‘been there’ and got the T-shirt, people I was sharing cheap digs and long boring bus journeys with. They were all keen to contribute what they knew and many of them became friends.
The one and only place I’d had to pay for information was Solo. With the tourist office shut and nowhere else to get what I needed, I was forced to give a shifty travel agent £45 in exchange for four batik paintings and two hours of juicy gossip that no other guidebook in the world would be privy to. I didn’t mind, actually. The paintings were very beautiful, and I sold them back home for far more than I had paid for them!
*
Jakarta, my next port of call, had to be one of the least likeable cities in the world. It was hot, sticky, dirty, polluted, annoying and generally mind-numbing. There was also nothing (apart from a couple of poky museums) to see. As in Kuala Lumpur, which Trailfinders had briefly called in on, they had ripped out what was mainly the old town and put an ugly heap of new buildings in its place. The only thing they had left unchanged was all the surrounding poverty. On the recommendation of Steve, who’d said ‘If you want one photo that sums up Jakarta, this is the one!’ I travelled down to the railway line below Slipi flyover. There was a kampong (village) here along both sides of the track and very dramatic it was too – a heaving slum of penniless destitutes framed against a glittering backdrop of high-rise hotels and business blocks. I just stood there – mouth agape, and my camera hanging uselessly at my side – and watched the poverty moving up the line and into the wealth of the city.
But Jakarta wasn’t all doom and gloom. I did get a little chuckle from the New Straits Times:
CONDOM FESTIVAL TO BE HELD IN JAKARTA
JAKARTA, Fri. – A condom festival will be held here over the weekend to encourage wider condom usage among Jakarta men to curb population growth. The Chairman of the FPA (Family Planning Association) said the public had so far given ‘encouraging response’ to the festival which would consist of talks and distribution of condoms.
He said prizes would be given to winners at the festival but declined to give details on how they would be selected.
I didn’t want to travel through Jakarta by bus – I still remembered John’s experience of losing his passport – but then, going through another kampong area to the north of the city, I had to. And nearly lost something far more embarrassing than a passport.
‘What are you doing?’ I said as someone on the bus tried to remove my trousers.
‘I like them. I want them,’ murmured the misty-eyed youth hunched at my heels. He was obviously on drugs.
‘Well, you can’t have them!’ I said, giving him a very non-Buddhist kick. ‘Go steal somebody else’s trousers!’
Chapter 7
Marco Polo and the Voodoo Bus Driver
Sumatra was tough. To stay on schedule, I had to cover a country twice the size of the U.K. in just ten days…and on less than one hundred dollars.
Yes, that big, fat cheque Paula had handed me back in England was now half gone. I’d left the other half with my mum for safekeeping, but the thousand or so pounds I’d taken with me travelling was down to a few tattered notes. Forget a marriage in style with Nicky – I was now looking at a pauper’s registry office ceremony and a cake from Sainsbury’s.
Money aside, I was quite grateful to be out of Indonesia. Especially out of Jakarta. My only good experience there had been to be present when the Joju Gohonzon (special devotional scroll) was enshrined in the main temple. It had been an amazing ceremony.
I flew into Padang on the 4th of March. It was hot, hot, hot, and about to get much hotter. Someone had tipped me off about a great digs c
alled Papa Chilli’s Traveller’s Lodge in Air Manis, but they had neglected to tell me of the total absence of transport to get there. I got a dhokur (horse-drawn cart) into Padang centre alright, but nothing prepared me for the long five kilometre walk – with 30 kilos of luggage, in the blistering heat – out to the lodge. It was gruelling! And I’d come on a Sunday, so had to run the gauntlet of irritating young students gawping and throwing nuts at the zoo-specimen foreigner.
I arrived at Papa Chilli’s a steaming, melting mess, sweat dripping from every pore of my body. But the slog was worth it. The lodge was perched right above a beautiful, unspoilt beach, and while the great man was not there, his smiley son Ali, and even smilier daughter Yusna were. Sitting me down gently on the veranda, they fed me endless cups of tea and tasty nasi goreng until I got my will to live back again. That night, gazing out onto a magical sunset, I began to feel more optimistic about the upcoming Sumatran adventure. It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?
Air Manis was geared to total relaxation. As Bob, Papa C’s only other Western guest, related: ‘Every day at 3pm, four brown cows walk down the beach in search of garbage and food. Around 4.30pm, the children vendors come by with banana, coconut and rice treats to carry you over to dinner. As the technicolor sunset light show begins, one dragonfly will buzz you continually if you sit on the beach. Soon after 6pm, a bat will fly random patterns between the boat and the palm stumps on the left. This will happen every day, but soon the days will cease to exist – just on and on and on, like the waves and the clouds, a continuum of change and “same same”.’
It was tempting to stay longer and to test Bob’s theory out, but I had no time for ‘total relaxation’ – the clock was ticking, and I had to move on…
*
The bus from Bukittingi up to Lake Toba, the popular travellers’ hang-out at the centre of Sumatra should have taken twelve hours. It took twenty-two. The reason it took twenty-two was our voodoo driver, coupled with the most clapped out bus in existence. Half an hour out of Bukittingi, it ground to a stop, and instead of opening the bonnet to see what the problem might be, our voodoo driver – a short little man with a huge brush moustache and a ratty scarf wrapped round his head – just leant forward and began praying at it. At the dashboard, to be precise. And it worked! One click of the ignition key, and we were off again! But then, another hour down the line, the engine packed up once more. This time, no amount of urgent praying worked, so our voodoo driver resorted to stratagem two. He ripped the entire dashboard from its moorings, broke it in two over his knee, and tossed it out the window. And wow, that worked too, the engine purred back into life.
I was beginning to be impressed by our voodoo driver. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he conjured loaves into fishes and water into wine. Okay, he was an unlikely Messiah, with his stubby cheroot hanging out of his mouth and his sweat-stained Bob Marley T-shirt, but I was prepared to believe.
I stopped believing thirty-two minutes later. That was when the bus coughed and died again. I watched as the voodoo driver ripped everything else out in his cab – pausing only to leave the gearstick, yes, he might need that – and then jumped out of the bus, a defeated man. But no, not quite defeated, he rounded up a group of old local ladies sitting by the side of the road, and got them to start praying at the bus while he went off for a snooze.
Two hours later, he returned, paid the old ladies some small gratuity – and a few packs of kretak cigarettes – and settled back into his cab. ‘There is no way this bus is going to start again,’ I thought to myself. ‘He’s dreaming.’ But he wasn’t. Miracle of miracles, holy of holies, the engine ignited with the very first click of the key and we were off again.
There was one other Western passenger on the bus, a mealy-mouthed American girl who refused any attempt at conversation – she wouldn’t even give me her name. When the bus finally rolled into Toba, ten hours late, I watched for her reaction as she got off.
It was priceless.
‘Well, goddamn,’ she muttered darkly, giving one of the back wheels a vicious kick. ‘I say SHIT!’
*
It was while sampling a delicious martabak sayur (vegetable spring roll) from a street cart warung in Bukittingi that I bumped into Steve from the Trailfinders tour.
‘You look shattered, Frank,’ he said with his familiar grin. ‘Are you still burning the candle at both ends, “going off the beaten track”?’
‘No, mate,’ I said. ‘I just got no sleep last night owing to an insomniac next door and a guy building a house right outside my window at 2am. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘Oh, I always come to Bukittingi between tours,’ said the twinkle-eyed tour leader. ‘It’s got the cool hill-station air, it’s got fantastic food like you’re having right now, and it’s got this ace clock tower in the square that looks just like Big Ben. It reminds me of home.’
I gave a wry smile. Yes, I had seen that clock tower earlier. It had reminded me of Nicky…and of how much I was missing her.
‘Bukittingi also has lots of interesting little cafes which only close at midnight,’ continued Steve. ‘Look, there’s one in particular that you got to put in your book – it’s called The Coffee House, and it’s a real one-upmanship place, full of “real travellers” going on about who’s done the most daring trip recently. Unless you’ve just crawled off a 60-hour horror bus from Yogya, you’re ashamed to even sit down!’
‘Oh, you mean the Marco Polo brigade,’ I laughed. ‘Yeah, I came across a lot of them in India. Their gig is to cover as much distance as possible in the shortest possible amount of time. A 40-hour journey across China, sleeping in a luggage rack, is bread and butter to them.’
‘You should write a book about real travellers,’ said Steve, flicking a stray mosquito from his close-cropped brown hair. ‘I could give you lots of stories.’
But I didn’t need Steve’s stories. I found enough of my own in The Coffee House.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked the waif-like young German girl sitting by the window. She was nursing a banana lassi. It looked like she’d been nursing it for hours.
‘I am living on five dollars a day in Indonesia,’ she intoned slowly.
Wow, that was impressive. I was having trouble getting by on ten. How was she doing it?
‘Oh, I am eating at warungs all the time. I stay in the cheapest room in town, and I am not seeing very much.’
‘Erm…why did you come here in the first place?’ I asked, puzzled at her obvious lack of enjoyment.
‘Oh, that is easy,’ she said. ‘I vont to say that I’ve come to Indonesia!’
Over in a corner, I saw two travellers in kaftans and funny ethnic hats having a heated debate as to who had had the most extreme travel experience.
‘I’ve got malaria,’ said the first guy. ‘Look at the scabs on my arms and legs.’
‘I’ve got guardia,’ countered the second. ‘I’ve been farting and shitting so long, I can’t feel my arsehole no more.’
That annoyed the first guy, who now had to go one better.
‘I got amoebic dysentery on a 36-hour bus journey to Kathmandu,’ he said with a controlled hiss.
‘That’s nothing,’ grinned the second guy. ‘I had a six-month bout of hepatitis in the Himalayas.’
There followed a hilarious exchange which reminded me of the Four Yorkshire Men sketch from Monty Python.
‘I spent a year in a Buddhist retreat in Manali, living on a bowl of rice a day.’
‘I spent two years meditating in the Kashmiri mountains. Three grains of rice a day, that’s all they gave me.’
‘A rat ate my underpants in Pokhara.’
‘An iguana bit me on the bum in Penang.’
‘Right,’ said the first guy, drawing himself up in his chair to put paid to the matter. ‘I was swimming off the coast of Goa one day and a shark came along and bit off my leg. I had it sewn back on by a witch doctor, but he put these tiny little crabs
in my ear that ate half my brain. Then, to top it all off, a bear bit off the back of my head in Dharamsala.’
There was a moment’s pause as the other guy digested this information.
‘Yeah, I know that bear, man,’ he said at last. ‘It ate my girlfriend back in ’83.’
I grinned at Steve, and considered his idea about a book about real travellers. Then dismissed it. Not only would it offend about 90 per cent of people travelling to Asia (only the well-heeled travellers might get a kick out of it), but I couldn’t imagine any of the subject audience forking out money to buy a copy.
‘That’s a pity,’ said my chunky, weather-faced companion. ‘But you’re right. They’re awfully keen on saving money…even when the cheapest option is not the best. Have you ever been to Pai in northern Thailand?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was gutted when Ian didn’t take us there. It’s really off the beaten track, isn’t it?’
‘Not anymore,’ said Steve. ‘It’s a typical freak centre now, with four guest houses. Three of them are awful bamboo-hut dives, riddled with spiders and vermin, and the fourth – which nobody goes to – is clean, quiet and friendly. In the morning, you’ll find all the backpackers enthusing “Hey, this tarantula crawled all over me last night,” or “I woke up with a rat in my mouth.” And they just wouldn’t listen to me when I told them of Duang Guest House (the clean one), even when I told them it was cheaper! It wasn’t mentioned in their survival guidebook, so it had to be a rip-off. They much preferred the poky bamboo room with the paper-thin mattress, the rodents and crawlies, and the exhibitionist Dutch couple bonking away all night, clearly audible through the thin partitioned bamboo walls. “I couldn’t sleep all night, man,” was the classic complaint. “I was too busy listening…sorry, meditating.”’
