IT WAS not possible. The bus stopped for even more people to get on. Where would they fit? There were now 96 people on the bus, according to my best count. There were boxes with chooks in them, chooks without boxes, mothers with babies, babies without mothers, people smoking and not smoking, bags, rags, people asleep and people who could not sleep.
This was an ekonomi bus on the most densely populated island on earth … Java. And they were nearly all smiling.
Lonely Planet, the guidebook every white pair of hands carries in Indonesia (and every other country come to that), warned not to travel ekonomi train or bus because they are too crowded. Moreover, for a tiny amount extra you can travel ekspres with a guaranteed seat, with no-one standing or crowding and no stops.
But, by accident and force of circumstance, my wife, Lynne, and I travelled ekonomi in both bus and train, in a journey from Jakarta to the great Buddhist ancient temple of Borobudur near Yogyakarta … via Bogor, Puncak Pass, Garut, Papadayan volcano and Tasikmalaya (see map).
There is no personal space in the bus (or the rest of Java comes to that). The bus lunges around winding corners and sways through impossible traffic.
Are we to end in of those two-paragraph items on the world news pages which cites a death toll twice that of Cyclone Tracy in a bus or ferry accident in some third world hell hole … “”35 people were killed when a bus plunged into a ravine in central Java yesterday . . . ”? In these reports the bus always “”plunges into a ravine”. It never rolls into a ditch at 20km/h, which in our case would have been enough to create at least a Tracy-size toll.
There was an odd contradiction here. On one hand, the driver and the nonchalant passengers seemed to be leaving a lot in the hands of Allah. Most believe that Allah has already willed what will happen, so there is no point in worrying. On the other hand, the sheer density of traffic and people presents such obvious enormous risk that great concentration and care are needed and used.
So, too, is consideration for other drivers.
In the sort of traffic generated by 140 million people on an island the size of Tasmania, there has to be some give and take. Sticking to formal rules would lead to some people not moving. People overtake into oncoming traffic that slows down. They turn in front of each other and ignore traffic lights, but the other drivers give way. In the cities, five streams of traffic scatter over the three formal lanes. To insist on one’s right of way or to aggressively refuse to slow down in the face of someone breaking the formal traffic rules is to court disaster.
There are so many people moving.
There is always transport available in Java. The only question is its quality and price.
At our outset in Jakarta, we were misdirected to a local train station 1km from main station. Yes, we could get a train from there to Bogor … but only ekonomi. It was 70 cents for the 60km trip which took half the day.
We hopped on and, surprisingly, everyone had a seat. So much for Lonely Planet. The train stopped at a couple of stations and only a few more people got on. We headed out of Jakarta. All was well. Two young women in short chadors start talking to us, laughing and giggling.
Then the train stopped. One of the young women, Sophia, tells us we have to get out for the next train because this one is returning to Jakar ft,sh5 four lines of breakout in an x-shape please ta. The next train arrives in less than 10 minutes. There is always transport in Java; it is only a question of quality and price. It is utterly hopeless. People are spilling out the doors and windows. The station is sweltering.
“”Don’t worry,” says Sophia. “”Another train in 10 minutes.” Sophia tells us she is going to Canada to study. Yes; she knows it will be cold, but she has been to Bandung … in the hills … where it is cold.
The only thing cold about Bandung is that it became famous because of the Cold War as the venue for the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. On a cold night it gets down to a chilly 22 degrees.
But she is right about the train. It comes in 10 minutes. This one is merely packed, not spilling through the doors and windows. So we force our way on with baggage. Arms are everywhere reaching up to hang on so armpits emit the sweaty sweet smell of tropical humidity.
Lonely Planet’s title is wrong for this experience, but the contents prove right.
On the ceiling an electric fan is diligently swivelling from side to side. The only trouble is the blades are not turning. When the train stops the heat turns sullen. Sophia gets off and says Bogor is two stations on.
Bogor is the summer residence in the cooler hills of the Dutch Governor-General. Now President Suharto has the house, but never uses it.
Every scrap of land is either cultivated or used for houses, shops or roads. In Indonesia rainforest is disappearing at 800,000 hectares a year and increasing. There is about 100 million hectares left.
We have nothing booked and nothing planned … the best way to travel.
Forget the nagging questions of the cautious in Australia: But what if this; what if that? You must arrange things first. How can you trust anyone? As it turned out, it was if it had all been arranged. Better; we paid no commission to some undeserving travel agent. Wandi was there to meet us. He was touting for business for his guest house with every white face that came off a train. It was unusual that we got off ekonomi, but he tried his luck.
“”Come see. No obligation.” He carried our bags to his clean and reasonably priced guest house.
There is a great fear of touts and thieves in strange railway stations in the Third World. Of course there are dangers. I was thoroughly ripped off and robbed in Indonesia … of at least several hundred dollars. It was at a five-star hotel when I got the phone bill for several calls to Australia and filing copy to The Canberra Times by modem. I got a bill for $420 for international calls that should have cost about $80. The white-teeth smiling hustlers at every bus and train station and every street corner selling transport, food and accommodation were never that sharp.
In Bogor, it was if Wandi had been pre-arranged by the best organised travel agent in the world. He was working in a near perfect market of many players and many customers (the one dreamt of by the five-star mobile-phone using businessmen, but never reached because they are always sharking for some unnatural advantage beyond good value and service for money).
The botanical gardens in Bogor are exemplary. A hundred species of pandanus, palm, climber, fig or rainforest tree each reach for sunlight in a great Darwinian contest for sunlight share … like the train station touts.
That evening we travelled the green angkots of Bogor. These are Suzuki Vitaras converted with two benches at the back. Often 14 or 15 people cram into space suitable for six or seven. Angkots are different from buses that go on a fixed route, cost virtually nothing but are crowded to the extent of being unusable. Angkots are different from taxis.
They go from pick-up point to exactly where you want to go, but you share with whomever else the hustler can pick up and you go in hopeless circuitous routes.
Rabin has a dangerous job. He is the hustler on a green angkot. He hangs out the door yelling destinations and piling customers into the back. He communicates with his drivers in a series of knocks and yells and maps a route through the city with great agility. Rabin is about 15. Youth is everywhere in this lush, green, wet, overpopulated island.
The angkots are a mix of capitalism and socialism, ruled by a mix of price mechanism and sharing to get the best return for limited resources.
You can hire one on your own, but it costs.
The angkots require co-operation rather than individualism. Individuals have to subsume their desire to go directly to their destination and agree to go indirectly so that all can eventually get to their destination more cheaply. But there is no common ownership of the angkot. And the driver and his hustler get paid according to how much effort they put in.
The hustlers work in teams, moving people from one bus to another and giving change to each other. But there are great pressures as well as great co-operation. An enormous effort is required to make the thing work. A lot of give and take is necessary. They are a micocosmic sample of the way Indonesia runs.
Wandi arranges for us to see some cottage industry, supposedly a tourist attraction. Fifteen men are working next to an open coal fire in a dark room, hammering red-hot bronze plate into gongs for traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments.
If only the work did not look so hard, I’d like to believe that tourism helps traditional arts like gamelan, puppets, batik and carving and it is less insidious than the invasion of Marlboro, Panasonic and CNN.
In another place, school-aged children worked flour to make puff biscuits. We learn they do go to school, but work afterwards. There is no social security so everyone works or if not able, begs.
Wandi is mortified he could not arrange a mini-bus trip for the next leg of our journey. He said he prayed before coming to tell us.
I told him it did not matter. You can only travel your journey in one way, and afterwards cannot imagine it having happened any other way.
What if you arrived a day later, or Wandi had arranged the mini-bus? Would you have met X or seen Y, or sprained an ankle, got run over by an angkot? Been bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito? Seen or not seen some enlightening spectacle? And so on.
This makes me think I am sub-consciously siding with the Islamic fatalists and determinists and note that I must do something about it.
We board an angkot. A man lights a clove-infused cigarette. A son of the President has a large interest in the cloves trade and is making a great commercial success of it. The cloves smell monopolises the angkot. The smell of the cloves is like the petrol fumes.
On large buses, both ekonomi and ekspres, a veritable take-away shop of vendors walks down the aisle at major stops where the transfer of passengers allows passage … spring rolls, rice in banana leaf, peanut crunchies, drinks, newspapers, toys, shoes, cloth, you name it.
We got the ekspres to Bandung over Puncak Pass where bizarrely we saw a yellow paraglider. It costs an astronomical $4 for the three-hour journey (more than treble the ekonomi).
We arrive at the bus depot to find there are no buses to Garut. A sympathetic man takes us in hand. We lug our baggage into the noisy street.
He hails down angkots one after the other till he a secures a seat for us.
Indonesians want you to like their country; want your stay to be good.
The notion of Australia’s notional invading enemy is absurd.
Most of the buses play loud, hideous disco music. Unfortunately for visiting western passengers, Indonesia has now signed international copyright agreements. This means there are very few pirate tapes of western albums on sale or played. Instead, it has resulted in an indigenous industry of Indonesians singing the western songs themselves, to reduce copyright fees. The results vary from bad to appalling. Can you imagine Simply Red or the Beatles being sung in English by an Indonesian band.
At the new Augusta Hotel at a village outside Garut we are greeted by nine hotel staff and find we are the only guests in this extraordinary three-storey 70-room hotel. Three staff take our luggage. Three are behind the desk and a further three hover.
There is a huge empty swimming pool. We are there for the “soft” opening, attracting a 20 per cent “”discon”. We are moved to the hotel’s VIP room where the water from the volcanic hot springs runs into the bath. This is only $24 a night. Is there something we don’t know? At dinner I counted 17 staff people.
And we were the only guests.
We had ikan. I now know the secret to making carp edible. Frazzle it, so the bones and scales are brittle enough to crunch into little bits in the mouth. Trouble is the flesh is equally brittle. But it’s a good source of protein. It, plus rice and two beers was the equivalent of $7. I had no change and left them the equivalent of $8. Ten minutes later two hotel staff arrived at the room door with the change. Smiling.
Surely this is better than a few people stressed to the eyeballs, over-worked while the rest idle on the dole. Is capitalism about to go through a self-destructive phase after so successfully beating off communism to come to some new sort of Hegelian synthesis.
If not, and capitalism continues rampant, I thought, glancing out at seven men mixing concrete by hand, what will happen to millions of Indonesians when it becomes more economic for machines to replace labour? As economic conditions improve, workers are demanding higher wages; students and dissents are demanding a greater say.
We visit the nearby Gunug Papadayan volcano. At the surface of the crater the occasional small pool of water boils and bubbles. It simmers and some steam comes out. But underneath pressure is building up.
Back at the hotel, the guard stayed all night. He had nothing to do. A man scrubbed the pool by hand.
Whole trucks are filled and emptied by men with single shovels.
There is a mysterious arrow painted on the ceiling of the hotel room. Of course, it points to Mecca.
Yes, there was something we did not know. At 3.30am we are awakened by the most hideous wail. It is an amplified tape in Arabic of the call to prayers from the Quoran. It pierces the silent tropic morning.
The hotel is right next to a very small mosque. It seems the sound in inverse proportion to the size of the mosque. The whole village must have been awakened. I thought there must have been a special religious day.
But no; it happened again next day.
What an extremely religiously tolerant society, I thought. Here was extraordinary example of the whole village, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and animists tolerating the religious practices of the Moslems, even though it meant a hideous amplified wail shattered sleep in the wee hours. In a less tolerant society someone would have cut the speaker wires or filed a suit under the Noise Act. I was impressed. Equally, some days later I saw another display of religious tolerance on discovering that antiquities authorities had allowed the construction of a small modern mosque at the site of the ancient Hindu temple at Prambanan. As it is, I suspect that the Augusta’s business will be destroyed by religious tolerance when someone writes to Lonely Planet about the compulsory 3.30 wake-up call.
Most Indonesians are keen to say they are Moslem, but are insistently keen to say they are not orthodox or fundamentalist. “”I like my beer”, or “I like my sleep” are proffered.
Next day, we go to Tasikmalaya on the main railway line, but learn that the ekspres train and all ekspres buses to Yogyakarta have left. We must go ekonomi. At least we get a good seat, at the back. Very few will actually take the whole nine-hour trip to Yogya. People will get on and others get off at hundreds of stops on the way. The hustler will yell destinations out the window. Soon the bus has 94 people on it, as best I can count. But I dare not stand up, lest I lose my seat. The bus stops and it is then that credibility is stretched as passenger 95 and 96 are, with great humour hauled aboard.
No-one is starving. People are clothed, albeit often dirtily. Sure there are beggars, but people give them money, knowing that if they don’t they will starve. At one stop a beggar whose legs beneath the knees were stumps, walked down the aisle begging with great dignity and without crutches and then “”walked” down the steps at the back to board the next bus.
It is not a police state. The vast bulk of the 500,000-strong army is in fact civilian police. This is not Iraq where no-one dare speak. Nor Africa where people starve. There is balance here. We may not like some aspects of it, but it is certainly not a totalitarian or theocratic tyranny.
But the army has its privileges. On one trip a soldier who got on paid R1000 (60 cents) for a R4000 trip. He refused point blank to pay the full fare and the hustler had to cop it.
In Yogyajakarta we are bundled out with courtesy but great hustle.
We will go to Borobudur the next day. For us the trip has been all new. But for the hustler it is to make a living. This trip will be done tomorrow and next day and next. He will be on that bus today if it has not plunged into a ravine.
But I have now annoyed the Features Editor. I was supposed to write a real travel story with arty pictures about what the travel industry calls a “”destination”, in this case, Borobudur.
Well, Borobudur has been there a thousand years. It can wait.