Java and Sumatra

I had been in Bali for two weeks amid a strange mix of close and loose friends. It had been a pleasant fortnight; mostly spent relaxing, drinking and exploring Bali’s coastline on dangerously temperamental motorbikes. The time had come however where each of our disjointed group was heading for a different road and each in their way had become listless and congested in the last few days. In an unnecessarily impulsive way, we drank ourselves bored in Paddy’s Bar, our group thinning as the night progressed. Sunrise found three of us standing on Kuta beach whispering still-drunk promises that in a few weeks we would meet on Gilli Trawangan - a small island between Bali and Lombok.

And to an extent this was where the problem lay. My younger sister Fiona was arriving at Singapore airport in only a matter of days and some weeks earlier I had agreed to meet her from the plane. This problem was somewhat exarcebated however, by the fact that I had insufficient money to fly and therefore had to cover most of Bali, the length of Java and much of Sumatra - a distance approaching four thousand kilometres - overland and cheaply, but more importantly quickly.

Realising my departure coincided with the Balinese Galungan Festival, I left Denpasar in a furious blaze, first spending a hot afternoon haggling for, or rather pleading for one of the few remaining free seats on the already overcrowded buses heading north to the port of Gilimanuk. The bus station lay beneath an afternoon sky of deep blue and rippled with colour as throngs of people came and went, laden with their lives and their belongings, each struggling to get somewhere else. Patience saw me on the last bus as it clattered out of the station and leant north-west to where I would catch the ferry to Ketapang in south-east Java. From there two lengthy bus and train journeys would take me approximately two thousand kilometres through Java to Jakarta.

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