Pajang → Pagar Alam

Day 10 — The driver runs amok

Tiring days continued, but sleep did restore our strength. Spending our days with the driver, though, was mentally hard. Ooi in particular had been in the passenger seat the whole time, so his stress was far beyond mine. What surprise would await us today? In the morning we ate curry at a buffet-style diner right near the hotel.

Maybe today was some special day. Events like this were being held in various places. At first I thought it was a wedding, but apparently not. Music was blaring from huge speakers.

To Bengkulu the road follows the coast the whole way. Compared with yesterday, relatively good straight road continued, but here and there were unpaved places that looked badly gouged out.

A short break where we could see a beautiful beach. Again the sea was cloudy and yellow. Pleasant sunshine.

Coconuts, now a very familiar sight in Indonesia. These had fallen on the shore.

We reached Bengkulu around midday, but here too there was a problem. The driver threw a tantrum, saying he was tired. At one point he was making childish demands that he didn't want to leave Bengkulu, but that was no good. If we didn't leave Bengkulu, we would fall a whole day behind schedule. After more exhausting negotiations, we agreed he would take us to a town called Kepahiang, a little under 100 km north-east of Bengkulu. But after this the driver ran amok, driving off in completely the wrong direction. We showed him the map, saying we are here, you've taken the wrong road, go back, but he wouldn't listen at all. When he felt unsure of the road, he would stop the car and ask people nearby. Many Indonesians, out of kindness, can't bring themselves to say "I don't know". It may be prejudiced, of course, but most people on Sumatra didn't seem to know how to read a map. He valued what such people said over the map, so we couldn't go the way we wanted. The car moved further away from our final destination, Bukittinggi on the equator, and if anything closer to Java. The sun set, and the car kept driving along remote country roads. We passed many similar settlements, and when we told him to go left at an important junction, he said no. Was he planning to go straight back to Jakarta? Fed up, we demanded quite forcefully that he go left, but he threatened us with gestures like slitting a throat, saying bandits would come out. To the end he didn't follow our instructions and went right. We were completely appalled. Again today we reached our lodging in Pagar Alam very late. We had no time to find a cheap place and ended up at a hotel, but the whole responsibility for today's mistake was his, so we didn't give him any extra money.

A heavy atmosphere hung over the hotel room. We never thought we would be so unable to travel the way we wanted. This made renting a car pointless. It felt like riding in a runaway car with no idea where it was going. In Indonesia transport is cheap; even flying costs less than travelling by train in Japan. The reason we deliberately rented a car was that we wanted to see places you can't experience travelling by plane.

We decided to part ways with the driver. The idea had come up while we were still in the car, but it was to get him to take us at least as far as Bukittinggi on the equator and then give him the slip. But at this pace it seemed certain we could never reach Bukittinggi in the time we had. On top of that, we had reached our limit of being in the same space as a driver who would never try to understand us. We decided to get up a little early tomorrow morning and leave this town, leaving the driver and the car behind. From tomorrow we would lose our wheels, but the thought of travelling freely on our own made us excited.

To the next day