View of one of Indonesia's active volcanos, Mt Sinabung, from our hotel terrace in Berestagi.
Friday, 7 June, 2019, Berestagi, Indonesia
Indonesia has a
population of more than 250-million. I think most of them were
on the roads
today. While their motorcyclists are highly skilled (good enough
to be stunt
riders), they are also suicidal, if not homicidal. Many times on
a single lane
bit of road, we were overtaken by bikes on both sides. And
forget the legal
limit of each bike carrying only two people - three and
sometimes four is more
common. And we saw one instance of five up. Mum, dad and three
kids, one
motorbike. (But I haven't seen any instances of breast-feeding
mothers riding pillion as I
once did in Burma).
The head of the child wedged in the middle is a little hard to see, so I've numbered them all. There's one child in front of Dad (the driver), two in front of Mum, (including one in a sling)
If
the travellers weren't on bikes or scooters, they were in mostly
late
models cars, mainly vans, SUVs or 4WDs. Not many old vehicles
around, except
for some buses and trucks.
When I heard our 64km
drive to Berastagi today was going to take three hours, I was
disbelieving.
Holiday trafffic, I was told. How did it go? Five hours!!
At one point, Dave said he was glad he wasn't driving a rental
car here today.
It would have scored a few dings by now. The driving was just
crazy. Drivers and riders would go up the inside, the outside,
and expect to dive back into the single
lane of traffic only if forced to by oncoming traffic.
Absolutely nuts.
And
then it
rained.
The delays gave me time to check out the villages we drove through. It reminded me of Malaysian rural areas of 15 years ago, and it was even more so for Dave, who remembered his first visits to Asia for rallies in the early 1990s.
left: A villager weaves attap with bamboo strips. It's generally used for walls in basic shelters.
Many of the villages, in addition to the usual mosque, had Christian churches, mostly of the Protestant evangelical variety (left). This surprised me, since most references say that 90% ofthe population follow Islam.
On
our list of places
to go included a fruit market and a Buddhist temple (above
left). We gave the fruit market
the flick, but the temple was supposed to be an exact copy of the
big temple in
Yangon, Myanmar. If that
was the
aim, they failed. However, it's become a tourist attraction in its
own right.
Thousands turned out today, so many we had to park 200 metres away
and make our
way through a traffic jam of cars, vans and bikes, only to find
out then that
the temple interior was closed for spraying. Spraying for what, I
don't know. At least I
was saved the trouble of yet again taking my shoes off.
We've noticed that Westerners like us (i.e., white ones) are few and far between. We've seen only one other since we arrived in Sumatra. And at the temple, we – or at least Dave – was an object of curiosity for a group of local ladies, who insisted on a selfie with him (left).
