Rough Travel (standard:travel stories, 2301 words)
Author: John Ahern	Added: Jun 24 2009	Views/Reads: 2933/1779	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Some notes on bad hotels and buses when traveling light.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

Another bad hotel from a previous trip was the Grand Hotel Braila in
Romania shortly after Ceausescu and his terrible wife Elena got dragged 
out and shot during the year after the Berlin wall (di maur) came down. 
I wanted to be first in to see the time-warp that was typical of those 
countries then and the previous year had travelled through East 
Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia  and Hungary – more stories to come. 

I had been down to the Black Sea Delta by boat to Sulina via the Danube
with the Russian border on the north bank and arrived in Braila in the 
evening. I went up the filthy marble steps and the dirty woman at 
reception gave me a key to a room on the first floor next to a stinking 
toilet. I opened the door and heard a faint scurrying – not one small 
animal but thousands of cockroaches around the hand basin and in the 
wardrobe and there were some in the bed too when I pulled back the 
dirty sheet. I nearly broke my neck going down the grand marble 
staircase half covered in the ragged remains of a carpet that may have 
been beautiful in days of long ago and the filthy woman gave me a key 
to a room on the third floor with THREE beds and THREE times as many 
cockroaches and toilet smells THREE times as bad! 

Though I figured I was the only guest in this terrible hovel and there
were probably scores of vacant rooms, I just gave up and didn't feel 
like making the acquaintance of the rest of the tiny inhabitants and 
settled for the first room with the lesser wildlife. I had a ‘trick' 
that worked before in India, Afghanistan, South America and other 
places when the nights were cool and the beds had things crawling 
about: I put on my raincoat, tucked my trousers into my socks, wore my 
other socks as gloves, pulled my own (emergency) pillowcase over my 
head tied with an elastic band around my neck and flopped onto the bed 
among the local creatures. And I slept well! 

BUSES:  The longest bus trip through Sulawesi was 14 hours over the
worst roads. The biggest problem for me was the Karoake style music 
that was blasting out of a speaker above my head – a speaker U2 would 
have been envious of. My ear-plugs made no difference and the most 
played tape (of the two) was a techno version of ‘Happy Birthday to 
You'. The other was that typical female singer with the shaky voice who 
seems to be following me about the world (and she's there in every 
Supermarket too) singing my ‘My Legs Will Go On' (Titanic?) or some 
such mind-numbing crap. The Eurovision Song Contest has a lot to answer 
for! 

After trying unsuccessfully to get the driver to turn the volume down
(even pleaded in Indonesian using such words as ‘menyakerti' (torture) 
I took drastic action after it got dark, reaching up to snip the wire 
with my trusty Swiss Army Knife. I soon realized it may have been a big 
mistake as for the next 10 minutes the driver (thinking a loose 
connection) forgot about the dangerous mountain road as he slapped, 
banged,  thumped and kicked the dashboard until he sent shards of 
plastic flying and we ran off the road and BOGGED THE BUS! 

Just a brief diversion here but it's important to the end of this story:
One of the most common causes of death in Indonesia is Tuberculosis – 
probably caused by spitting, the only sound to mask the hawking up, men 
and women, though the women are more inclined to the ‘nose blow' al 
fresco, is the Karaoke so when you're on a long trip you can be sure 
you're in for one or the other. I met a doctor doing his first year out 
with a small island community in Northeast Borneo and we talked about 
the various bad habits of the locals, particularly the spitting and 
when I suggested he write to the health minister and suggest the 
possibility of the occasional announcement on TV or radio discouraging 
spitting he agreed it was a good idea but he looked a little puzzled. I 
remarked that spitting was common in the west a hundred years ago but 
the masses had been ‘educated'. Then he nearly knocked me down with 
this question “So, where do you spit?” and when I answered “I don't 
spit” he asked “Then where do other people spit?” I answered “Nobody 
spits!” and it suddenly occurred to me that this qualified doctor did 
not know any better and it was only then it dawned on him and he said 
it “So spitting is just a habit?”. We were also talking about the 
amount of rubbish all over the place, not just the usual millions of 
plastic bags but the rags, bedding and clothing snagged on the rocks 
and trees as well as the coral reefs. People just laughed at me when 
they saw me picking up the rubbish and depositing it up beyond the 
waterline. As I did it I would just shake my head and mutter ‘kotor' 
(dirty). He said it was a local custom that whenever you got something 
new it was important to throw your old shirt, bedding, whatever into 
the sea to get rid of the bad spirits. Guess that explained the 
mattresses sitting on the once beautiful coral close to the (now empty) 
diving resort. 

We thought about the possibility of having a competition and give a
prize to the kid who collected the biggest pile of rubbish. There is 
such ignorance everywhere. He told me of a boy who fell out of a tree 
and broke his femur and his father a wealthy but uneducated fisherman 
(makes his living selling lobster to the Chinese) would not allow him 
to treat the boy. He called in the island's shaman or witch-doctor and 
when there was no improvement he arranged to take the child to the far 
off city of Tarakan on the mainland, not to the big, modern hospital 
there but to another shaman. This was in North East Kalimantan and the 
boy, after many weeks, is still lying in a relative's house, still in 
agony and with no improvement. 

I took a bus north from Balikpapan via Samarinda to Bontang in Borneo
hoping to break the estimated 17/18 hour trip by stopping overnight. 
However,  the ongoing bus didn't arrive till 12.30 next day and then 
began a 21 hour journey  that was meant to take 11 hours over high 
mountains and through torrential rain, thunder and lightening and 
easily the worst track (not really a road) I've ever traveled on. No 
Karaoke this time but sitting behind the driver (and too rough and 
bumpy to read) I just couldn't stop myself counting his spitting – he 
spat about 2.5 times per minute – disregarding any poor bugger walking 
along the side of the road. That's 150 spits per hour and a grand total 
of 3,150 for the 21 hours and he could still hawk up big gobs at the 
end of the journey – he must have had some sort of reservoir down there 
in his heels somewhere. A bit like when you take the dog for a walk; 
he'll leave his little messages (P-mails) all along the way and he'll 
always have a bit left for the last tree/post before reaching home, no 
matter how far you walk him. 

That guy must have been going for the world record or something and his
offsider may have been going for the world farting record though 
mercifully the effects of this were covered to a degree by the 
chain-smokers around him, though I worried about the volatility of the 
air whenever anyone struck a match! 

I often wonder if it's the religious up-bringing that makes us yearn for
some sort of self deprivation, a kind of self-flagellation. It's easy 
to be thinking about rough travel when you're sitting in the comfort of 
your own home with the cat purring on your knee and something good 
cooking in the oven. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR! 

Meanwhile the bus rattled on with a screeching of gears and we slid into
holes on several occasions and had to get behind and push while a truck 
pulled us out. We took our turn pulling a bus and truck out too and we 
were all covered in mud. But what is mud to the stench inside the bus 
where the people were vomiting into plastic bags and leaving them in 
the aisles among the baggage, produce and chickens where people trod on 
(and busted) them as they came and went! 

The road was so bad in some places that if there was a bit of bitumen at
the bottom of a washout we would get out and look under each side of it 
to see if there was enough dirt in there to support the wheels of the 
bus. Above the tortuous sounds of the engine you could hear the Muslims 
and Christians beseeching their respective gods, and this little 
atheist often wondered if he was about to find out about the Baby Jesus 
as the bus slid off into a hole one side or a ravine on the other 
sending us all, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, world-record spitting 
and farting contenders and all straight to ETERNITY! 


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