Monday, 10 June 2019, Yogyakarta, Java
It was a jolting, jarring four hour drive this
morning from Lake Toba to Medan airport.
I was thinking of trying to sleep on the way, because we'd had to get up
at 4am for the 5am ferry ride across the lake to Parapat,
where our driver was waiting.
Any dreams I had of sleep were just that - dreams. The road was so rough it kept me wide
awake, until we reached a motorway 50km from the airport. From then it was all smooth sailing and
flying to Yogyakarta, on the island of Java.
A few impressions from the drive:
A very big rubber tree plantation, with a sign announcing it was one of Bridgestone Tyres properties. It struck me a rubber tree plantation is very labour intensive. Each tree has to be cut individually, with the sap running into a small cup tied to its thin trunk I don't know how many trees one worker could do in a day, but this plantation went for many, many kilometres, so it probably had hundreds of thousands of trees. And from the depths of my memory, I seem to recollect that each tree has to be cut each day, before or around sunrise. (After sunrise, the sap gets too thick and sticky). So, many hands are required.
And if it wasn't rubber trees we saw
this morning, it was palm oil trees, that despised cooking oil which has caused
much ecological damage, as native forests have been burnt off to clear the way for palm oil fortunes.
And next came rice paddies. Brilliantly green in the early morning sun. Here in this part of Asia, rice also seems to be labour intensive - I saw no sign of any machinery which could make rice farming any easier.
The drive to the airport was more interesting than the flight which
followed, two and a half hours
squished up on an A320, with only AirAsia's less than desirable menu for
entertainment. I gave that the
thumbs down.
However, it was thumbs up to the pilot
- Dave and I over the years have indulged into a little judging of pilots by
their landing techniques, on a 5 out of 10 basis. Obviously, no one can get less than a 5. That's a fail mark , and today's effort
from the AirAsia pilot earned him a 9.5 ranking, the
best we've ever awarded.
I know very little about Yogyakarta,
except that it's spelled variously with a J. Or a Y. And that it's colloquially called Yogya. Well, its full name is a bit of a mouthful. We're here for three nights,
so maybe I'll know more about Yogya by the end of the
week - but this I can say, after only the drive from the airport, it appears
much cleaner than cities and towns in northern Sumatra, and the traffic/driving
seems much calmer - both good omens, I think.
One discordant note – here at our hotel, we must be surrounded by at least half a dozen mosques, and at the Call to Prayer time, they set out in competition with each other. The volume is intense and the sound unmusical to our ears. We'd better get used to it.