Muara Enim → (night on the bus)

Day 12 — By long-distance bus to Bukittinggi!

We woke at about 6:30 a.m. to the sound of the lodging staff knocking on the door. This place even included breakfast (a set of instant mie goreng and coffee). Last night they had brought an extra bed too; full marks for service at that price. We ate breakfast looking at the courtyard, and after checking out we had to quickly find a bus to Bukittinggi. For three days we had been moving, yet we hadn't got any closer to Bukittinggi at all. Bukittinggi is a scenic tourist spot about 50 km south of the equator, and joining a jungle trekking tour run nearby was our main goal in travelling on Sumatra.

We went to something like a bus terminal and asked whether there was a bus to Bukittinggi, and there was. It was a little expensive, so we haggled down to what seemed a fair price. But the ticket counter felt shady, so we didn't pay straight away; we said we'd pay once they showed us the bus, and they agreed. After waiting at the terminal for a while, a small van came and told us to get in. It seemed we wouldn't board the bus here but at a bus depot a little way off. During the hour and a half we waited, we enjoyed chatting with the man from the ticket counter who came with us. He loved singing, and played a Hideaki Tokunaga song on his phone and sang for us. The bus had working air conditioning but was clearly not VIP class: an ultra-long-distance bus from Palembang to Medan. Now and then it stopped and vendors got on to sell food. Music was also blaring inside the bus.

We passed through town after town. Reading made me carsick, so we passed the time eating snacks and so on.

Hard to see, but those are chickens crammed into wooden crates. No doubt at all they're destined to be eaten.

Late at night, while I was sleeping, KEN suddenly woke me just before midnight and said we were getting off. We were supposed to reach Bukittinggi the next morning, and looking around, it didn't look like Bukittinggi. Half asleep, I was very confused. It was a cheap bus, so were we being abandoned here? But when we asked a nearby person who got off with us, it turned out we were changing buses here. After waiting by the road for a while, a bus did come. We got on and headed for Bukittinggi again.

To the next day