Travelling in the night

Woods, vines, lots of green, red and rocky roads, turning and winding their way up the mountains through the jungle. We left Banda Aceh around 1.30 pm, even though we were supposed to leave at 12.00… But times don’t really count when it comes to road transportation in Indonesia, jam karet it is called; “rubber time”. I feel like a piece of rubber by now since we travelled for 24 hours on that minivan, and then another one. A stunning trip in many ways.

Old bridges over the river, little naked kids are playing below and their mothers are doing laundry. A chain smoking driver, talking on his cell phone while loud music is blaring through the mini-van. We are sitting three in a row, shifting and shaking up and down. The road is really good, in some parts, and really bad – or nonexistent – in other parts. I enjoy listening to some music on my Ipod, even when it is difficult to ignore the bass of the music in the van, and looking out the window at life along the roads.

As always in Indonesia there are so many motorcycles with people heaped on it, little kids being breastfed, schoolgirls in their uniforms riding side-saddle. With every move our van makes the drives honks at the motorcycles and other cars. It’s a single lane road but that does not prevent anyone from overtaking one-another all the time. We arrive in Takengon late in the evening and get out for a quick meal of nasi, of course, nasi, always nasi. As a vegetarian it is a bit challenging sometimes, but usually I manage to get some vegetables with it and avoid the fish and meat. Although I do have some fish once in a while, when my body screams for protein ;-)

After the dinner we get on the bus again, three white girls and about eight Indonesians going back home or visiting family. From Takengon the road into the Gayo mountain range gets really narrow and winding and rocky, everybody is slumping in their seats and sleeping, or pretending to sleep, but for now I prefer watching the road and hoping to see some more monkeys, or even better: tigers or orang utan! These animals still live in the Sumatran jungle, together with all kinds of rare birds and monkeys and snakes and bear and elephants and rhinos…. But so far I have only spotted some smaller monkeys (bavianen) and mosquitos.

Being on the road all night was not as bad as I had anticipated, with my ipod on, slumped between Chiarra and Carolien, I even got some sleep. We expected to get straight to Ketambe, but at 4 am we pulled into some sort of garage and were told to sleep there in the bus till 7 when another bus would leave for Ketambe…. This was of course not communicated to us in Banda, but we just went with the flow, slept and woke up to a perfect sunny morning.

The drive to Ketambe was beautiful, lovely mountains and jungle and the Alas river down in the valley. We could not wait to start our jungle trek!