Getting off the beaten track

According to The Man in Seat 61 it is possible to get from Bali to Jakarta by bus, ferry and train in not much more than 24 hours. I had 2 weeks for the journey so clearly needed some slower transport and more interesting route. Day one started with a car to the bus terminal and a minibus across the island to the ferry port. Arriving in Java I took a bemo (something resembling a car but gutted and filled with wooden benches) followed by a bus heading north. The only available transport from where the bus dropped me was the trishaw pictured above. When this broke down I started to walk but was given a lift by a girl on a motorcycle in exchange for a dollar's worth of petrol money. She took me to the ferry terminal for Madura Island but that day's ferry was long gone and so my first full day of travel had got me a satisfactorily short distance.

 

I always say that I love travelling on boats and I enjoyed the first couple of hours on the Madura ferry (picture above), but for the next 5 hours I was looking forward to getting off. If I'd stayed on the mainland of Java the train to Surabaya would have taken less than 7 hours but via Pulau Madura, where it seemed that they had never before seen a foreigner, it took 3 days. The second night I stayed in a fishing village where everyone wanted to talk to me. Unfortunately they had virtually no English and, although it is very similar to the Malay language, I only knew a few words of Indonesian. This didn't dampen their desire to communicate and I found their unabashed openness to be refreshing after being more used to the Chinese reactions to foreigners as noted in Chapter 3 of The Travel Addicts Puzzle.

  .....the Han Chinese childlike fascination with anybody who is not exactly the same as them. In the smaller towns people stare openly and are unfazed when I stare back at them. In the larger cities many people try to be more subtle, by keeping their heads straight when passing in the street but following with their eyes, which actually gives them a rather furtive appearance. Another group want to express their delight at finding something as extraordinary as a foreigner, with exclamations and enthusiastic greetings, as if you had suddenly appeared wearing a particularly clever form of fancy dress. This can be irritating when you are just trying to quietly go about your business, but the reaction that I really don’t like is the parent pointing me out to their young child as if I was an exhibit in a zoo. If they are small enough they can hold them up to get a good view of you and they then expect you to smile sweetly at their offspring as if to say ‘look at me aren’t I a funny sort of creature’

.

Walking along the beach I came across a cottage industry of rope-makers (above) who smiled and greeted me but it was the fisherman themselves who were determined to get a closer look at me. I acquiesced and climbed aboard a boat on the sand at low tide where they were repairing their nets.

 

Getting off the beaten path means giving a bit of yourself rather than just absorbing what is around you, but maybe that is what true travel should be.