29. 6. 2014
I got my laundry done by professionals for the second time in 3 months. This time not only that they didn’t tear it but it also smells nice! My clothes smells nice! I can use my towel again, it is dry and clean and sandless ans soft… Not for long, of course, but anyway.
Finally came beautiful weather again. It got not-so-nice already on Koh Tao and on Penang, Batam and in Jakarta it was literally gloomy. I checked the weather forecast and it is supposed to be cloudless here for the next month so I shall like to see that please! The dry and main touristic season has already started – which means higher prices for accommodation, damn it. Good I have my hammock.
But back to Thailand. I somehow always leave the Thai parts unfinished. We came there from Cambodia. Ah, Cambodia, ah Kep, ah Rabbit Island, ah Sihanoukville, ah Utopia. Why is there not one Utopia in every town or city? Such a nice Asian chain with a bed for 1$ it would be. Who cares that there are just dorms and some of them have bed bugs! 1 American dollar! For example today in Borobudur, I stay for 105 000 rupias. (My haggling skills are wearing down or what, the lady started only at 125 000. But she is really tough. And she doesn’t speak a word in English which doesn’t help the conversation.) 105 000 rupias, that is equal to 10$. We might have paid this amount with Mr. Black several times but then we were two for it so it was just 5$ per person. Aaarghrhgrhh#@##!!! Well, it was obvious that the trip to Borobudur will mean a lot of money spent. Thanks God I am white = rich.
Moreover, the quality of accommodation has been going steeply downwards on the way to the south. I haven’t encountered bed bugs yet (despite all rooms I slept in looked like them) but the bathrooms are tragic. Strictly squat toilets, I wash myself from a bucket and can only dream about luxury of a shower or a wash basin. I need to wash my hair, damn it. It looks for example like this :
So back to Thailand.
Hanzi had left Sihanoukville 2 days earlier than us, I think. Me, Mr. Black and Frank, Black’s friend from the time before the passport story, were hanging out there little bit longer, continuing doing nothing. Frank is fun and despite he behaves a lot like Bernard Black, or maybe because of it, I liked him straight away. You can check his mean page here. But it was already time to leave. Mr. Black had spent already 2 weeks inSihanoukville, me 9 days, so we set off in the direction to Bangkok right in time for a farewell evening with Hanzi before he left for Australia.
Next sunny afternoon found us already on a train southbound to the white beaches. We started our stay on Koh Tao with quite a party, that commenced already on the mainland, in Chumpon, where we were waiting the whole day for a night boat, continued on that boat and peaked the next day, after we arrived at the island. In the evening, we still made it to a beach bar with an awesome fireshow. The Thai boys were really really skillful and I enjoyed dancing so much…. We had some terrible hangover the whole next day and one my tooth started aching.
I decided to spend the rest of my time on the island… differently…, booked a 4-day diving course and we went to snorkel in the afternoon. Just 2 metres from the shore there was so much stuff so I got really curious what everything I will see while diving.
Diving is… at first a challenge, then tiny bit of panic, then the discovery that it is no problem at all to remove your oxygen tube or your mask 18 metres below the surface, then the cool feeling that I am making this – the pressure, the buoyancy, inflating and deflating my vest (OCB) as required, descending and ascending without permanent damage to any of my organs, swimming in a stable depth and yipeee – fish and corals, first a few, then more and more, with every dive, gaining confidence and enjoying more…
I had to take a two-day break after the third day of the course as my toothache was not ignorable any more, finally I was also able to find out which tooth exactly it was. It was the one I got “fixed” by me new, young, just-after-school dentist in Czechia, so I wouldn’t have trouble with it on the road. Thanks. David, my chain-smoking diving instructor with permanent teeth problems, recommended me a good dentist whom I visited the next day (she is on the island omly 3 days a week) right after she opened. I had been taking painkillers for several days at that point, and they didn’t work, my jaw still pulsing. An iflamed root canal, drilling, cleaning, some magical liquid spread there, 3 000 baths (150$), antibiotics for the next 5 days, brutal painkillers (they would help a horse, maybe even an elephant. I didn’ follow the recommended dosing.), continue treatment when you are back home, bye bye. Terrific. I haven’t felt anything for a half a day thanks to the injections and the pain that came after was like the scent of jasmine and a view of snow-tipped volcanoes watched from a sunny summer meadow compared to the one before. Jeanie, the second instructor and a very cute Thai girl in one, offered that she would go for my 3rd and 4th dive with me another day so I wouldn’t have to join another group. It was very kind of her, I wondered why she did it but then she likes diving so perhaps why not.
So we were in the underworld just in a group of two amd have seen so much… Not the whaleshark but anyway. And I got attacked by a triggerfish. I was swimming calmly, looking around, and suddenly I feel something pulling on my fin. A diver from another group? I was thinking. I turned around and saw a nearly 1-meter big fish grinning at me with her big teeth and at that moment attacking my other fin. They attack when someone enters their territory. Which is often. Jeanie told me later that she was once attacked by three of them at the same time and that it was not funny at all. This one remained solo. So I started kicking my fins towards her and swimming away from her when this little Thaiee, 1 meter sixty, jumped in front of me and started kicking her fins against the fish and protecting me. It was so nice and funny and still a bit scary. The fish lost interest after some time and after that it all went calmly again. Only about a third of my oxygen was gone thanks to the rapid breathing and increased physical activity in that one hot minute.
Anyway, we still saw a bit less colours and kinds of fish down there than I saw the previous day while snorkeling along the rocky north coast of the island, I think. I don’t know. Some drivers appear to neglect on snorkeling as something not good enough compared to diving but I think that might be some kind of diving snobbishness. Yes, there is not that exceptional aspect of you doing something that you should perhaps not be able to be doing, the awareness of the mass of water above you, the buyoancy, ease of the slow movements, the laziness, like if you were another fish. On the other hand, while snorkeling, you are higher , at the surface, and you see more colours than in the deep when they fade, the coastal cliffs never end and you even get tanned. So I am planning on continuing both. Well, with diving it will need to be some other time now. The bill from the dentist just added to the pile of unexpected expenses and after I bought the flights from Jakarta to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Prague, I have about 250$. Mr. Black lent me another 150 and after 1 day in Penang, Malaysia, we parted again, he went to a Malaysian beach to spend his last week in Asia sunbathing and snorkeling, and I sat on a night bus to Singapore, from where I will continue to Indonesia.
From Batam, 27. 6.
Today was quite intense again!
The night bus from Butterworth to Singapore was surprisingly comfortable, just freezing. Crossing the double border over the river Singapore went smoothly too and the bus brought me directly to the centre of the megapole. At 5 a.m., the dawn was yet about to happen and the birds were singing as much as they could. Thanks to my tablet with a dying battery (in Malaysia, Singapore and part of Indonesia, they have the English type of electric sockets so I couldn’t charge it) I found out where exactly I was and surprisingly even started walking in the right direction. With the day developing, I could admire all those impressive skyscrapers and on the left, between the blocks, I saw water of a nearby bay. After some while, a familiar building appeared above it – that big house with a roof terrace in a shape of a boat, with infinity pools and such. It is a hotel, Marina Bay it’s called. I assumed I have some extra time and I can go to have a closer look at it, and turned towards it. It is pretty, especially with the surrounding buildings. There were also two American guys from Ohio, wandering around the bay, just about to go to explore if they maybe could get up to the roof. I joined them, of course. Charles and Rowan – just arrived that night to Singapore, soon continuing to Saigon where they wanted to buy themselves some motorbikes, go around Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, sell the motorbikes and cool off their butts in Southern Thailand. They just finished their uni degrees. What the hell was I doing whe I finished uni? Oh yes, went to work in London. Looser!
We made it to the top floor. You can legally get there only if you have a room key but a group if actual guests didn’t seem to mind when we joined them on the way up, incospiciously. What had happened to the rich of this world? Tolerating such rabbles? Scandal. It seems that the hotel stuff is also used to curious social cases as the guard simply let us taking pictures and admiring the view until we were content and left on our own. We explored the rest of interesting floors via the fire staircase and went to see the next-door botanical gardens after that. Then we finally said our farewells, I gave guys my frisbee as I played with it like once and they really liked it, and went off to look for some singdollars and breakfast and metro to the port. There I bought a ticket to Batam, which is the first of the Indonesian islands on the way from Singapore, spent the last singdollars apart from one that I kept despite it meant a bit of hunger. They are really beautiful coins! I had to keep one. I slept through the whole journey on the boat and woke up already at the provisional destination. And that’s where the problems started.
It turned out that the boat to Jakarta is going every Wednesday. It is Friday. I remembered how I read about it somewhere and then happily forgot about it. I must have thought it was an old piece of information or that it will simply end up somehow. So it will have to end up somehow. Lately, I am somewhat floating in a happy holiday mood, maybe I should stop it. Another alternative was to take a ferry to Sumatra the next day and continue to Jakarta by bus from there. But that would be about five times more expensive, which is a factor I need to watch out for now. Well, but waiting also didn’t sound attractive. Firstly, the accommodation would cost something, too, and secondly, I didn’t know a single interesting thing about Batam and the weather sucked. A bit of a shitty situation. The tablet battery was out of power and the chance of independent information very, very tiny. As the first rule of travelling social cases is: never trust boat, plane, bus or train ticket sellers and especially not the taxi, tuk-tuk and motorcycle drivers. After a while of depression and panic, I decided to sort out the battery and just find an adapter on the premises of the port. It was surprisingly easy – a guy in a clothes shop had one already in the socket and didn’t mind me plugging my device in and staying there for a while, till it gets charged a bit. No Internet, of course, so I was sill left in the same state of ignorance. I started talking to the man, who seemed very nice. Claimed himself to be a pastor, apart from a merchant. He advised me on where the public bus is departing from and that it costs just 4 000 rupias (less than 0.5 $), where I need to go to find some cheap accommodation, and looked surprised why I just don’t fly to Jakarta when the flights are so cheap from Batam with Lion Air. That sounded promising but still, with no connection, I couldn’t check the prices for today and the days after. The gentleman also started being less and less trustworthy – it began with him praising my beauty, continued with questions if I was married and regreting that his wife was on Sumatra so he couldn’t invite me to their house and take care of me, then it was quite obvious that he was considering inviting me there anyway but what would the neighbors say! No then, but he could call his son to come to take care of the shop so he could drive me to the town himself and help me finding some cheap accommodation, he already called the son… I didn’t need to worry, he was a pastor, wasn’t he? It was time to pack my stuff and leave.
I thanked the good man for all his advice and help and tried to find a stall of the Pelni company to verify the information the ticket sellers in the port told me. It was supposed to be really close but I went on and on… and despite women, kids and policemen kept comfirming the direction, I liked it less and less as I was getting somewhere to the end of the world and EVERY single man and boy on that road – and there were many – was shouting at me, despite I wrapped myself in a sarong from the head to toes and wore long trousers and long sleeves, blond hair hidden. It is simply enough that I am a tourist, a white one in addition, so they think they can treat me like they would never treat a local girl and if they did, someone would come and punch them in their face. They were very annoying and I was getting scared. So I left Pelni to Pelni, turned on the spot and a flip-flop and went to find the bus stop instead. That was way simplier, the bus was already waiting there, I paid my 4 000 and off we went. But where…? The town was supposed to be called something like Ngoya but despite all bus stops were clearly named, I haven’t seen such a sign for about an hour of the ride. So I consulted the GPS on my tablet and found out that we had nearly crossed the whole island already and we are, by a lucky coincidence, that I don’t believe in any more, getting very close to some big town and the island’s airport. OK, I said to myself. So I will go to the airport, check the flight ticket prices for the near days and if there is nothing cheap, I will find some accommodation and take the boat to Sumatra tomorrow. I asked the steward to let me know where to get off and what connection I needed next. He claimed there was a transfer bus to the airport for about 6 000. That didn’t sound bad. Only the guys with motorbikes at the bus stop swore that there was no bus going to the airport at all but they would take me there happily for 80 000. They probably think I breath the money out or I don’t know. I didn’t like staying on the bus stop and waiting for a bus that might exist and might eventually come while these boys would be persuading me all that time to use their services so I just started walking towards the required destination, thinking that I will either find another bus stop with another information or I will simply walk there if it was to take until midnight.
I was hungry and thirsty and desperate and there seemed to be no sane way how to get to the place I wanted to get to, I didn’t have any idea where there was the part of the town to look for a cheap place to stay and I was having trouble with recalculating all those different currencies. I was missing Mr. Black badly, as a buddy, as someone to talk to, for a counsel, comfort and company. Not to be alone at this. And at that moment, a nice young guy on a scooter stopped next to me, with a small brother or friend, about 10 years old, behind him:
“Hi! Are you a backpacker?”
“Yes.”
“And where are you going?”
“To the airport.”
“So jump on, I will take you there. I am also a backpacker, I went once to Bali.”
I looked at him critically.
“Really? And for how much?”
“Nothing, backpackers need to help each other!”
I gave him ankther screening look and waited what my intuition will shout at me. He didn’t look like someone who would hurt me. In fact, he looked nice. Also the presence of the younger brother was calming me down. He already took of his helmet and was handing it to me. I decided I trusted them.
“OK then,” I took the helmet, put it on and jumped behind the younger brother. And off we went. Even in the right direction. It was far as a hell. I would be definitely walking that till midnight. Or longer. Now, in about 15 minutes, we were in front of the airport. I didn’t know how to thank Adiet. I gave him all the change I had, which was not much, and my email, as he said he might be going to Bali tgis month again so maybe we could meet there. Very touched, I waved them good bye and went to check the flight prices to Jakarta or Surabaya. Today was already sold out, tomorrow at 11 a.m. Jakarta for 670 000 rupias. Twice more exoensive than the ferry but without waiting and still half the price of the way through Sumatra. And just one night at the airport, not two that I was willing to bare. Deal! Unfortunately, they threw everybody out from the terminal for the night, the meaning of which I never understood, so I slept on a bench in front of it. I was eoken up every hour and half by the nasty mosquitoes, that was no itching! I know what itching by mosquitoes feels like. This hurt. Every hoir and half I woke up by pain caused by mosquito bites. Incredible. I would also feel way safer inside as there would probably not be coming crowds of young local boys with the intention of befriending me at 2 a.m. Anyway. Things are happening again. So my problem has been sorted out. I will be in Jakarta tomorrow afternoon and then will continue according to the plan.
The plan has somewhat shrinked, by the way. It looks like I will see a bit of Java and Bali and that’s about it. Sulawesi, Komodo Islands, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Molukkas etc. will have to wait for the next time. Nobody says it is too few. I had wished to go to Bali already while on high school, don’t know how I came over that then. It was my big dream. Perhaps it was some vision, perhaps I guessed then that I will get to know that island once, maybe that I experience something extraordinary there. Or maybe it is the other way round and I will only discover why I had wanted to go there so badly. My budget is riddiculous but if I continue eating as little as during the past two days and spend my nights travelling instead of sleeping in hostels, or if I manage to find some bar job on Bali, I will be fine. If I find out I can survive without looking for work, I will simply walk around the Balinese coast and sleep in my Cambodian hammock. And I will climb some volcano. Or something like that.
I liked Malaysia a lot, by the way, although I haven’t seen much of it. Not Penang or Butterworth (for God’s sake!) in particular, rather the mixture of cultures and races and religions – Malays, Indians, Chinese, Hinduists, Moslem, Christians and all possible combinations of all those. Me and Mr. Black were the only white guys at the Butterworth bus station, the same applied for me on the bus to Singapore and at the border terminals there. Girls in hijabs everywhere, the singing of the muezzins, once again a readable alphabet and graspably sounding language. I am looking forward towards the hustle and bustle of afternoon Jakarta tomorrow and in the evening I will hopefully already sit on a train to Yogyakarta, with Borobudur just around a corner. Haleluyah to the road!
P. S.: Yup, I will start writing chronologically again. It is just that as I travel alone now and don’t have anyone to talk to, I write a lot.