The music is by:
Jughurta, from Berlin, Carthage, Marseille and Paris. This band is a project to enshroud North African, Middle East, Arabic, Touareg & Berber music with silky smooth modern electronic music (band camp.com).
Thievery Corporation, an American electronic music duo consisting of Rob Garza (born March 28, 1970) and Eric Hilton. Their musical style mixes elements of dub, acid jazz, reggae, Indian classical, Middle Eastern music, hip hop and Brazilian music, including bossa nova (Wikipedia).
Today’s post continues the narration from:
with the series: Out and About by Boat in-between.
Step One: Disembarking Kelud
It’s almost noon. Kelud has just spat out many hundreds of Indonesians and one odd bird onto the docklands of Belawan. It reminds me of all these massive exoduses from speedway stadiums of my childhood: cordons of disappointed or overjoyed pedestrians, randomly mixed with various means of motorised transport.
All around, people are looking for transport as much as transport is looking for people. Many gentlemen are particularly intent on plucking my unconventional plumage out of the rather uniform, mostly grayish flock. I sense that the unusually dense gathering of taxi drivers and the such around my bum bag has something to do with the remaining hundreds of thousands of rupiahs around my peckish gut. ‘Why is it that the Indonesian rite of plucking of foreign belly feathers is always performed on an empty stomach?!’, I wonder as we all push and are pushed away from the dockland area and onto the main road.
According to onboard recommendations, there was supposed to be a train waiting on the other side of the busy road here. My awkward query about the next train service into town meets with a long symphony of uncontrolled laughter in the middle of an old crumbled platform…
’The last one left about ten years ago’, they say.
Step Two: Bemodriving into the City of Medan
I end up squeezed into a Bemo school bus, which has picked me up off the top of the platform. The Bemos seem to be the smallest buses and taxis in the world. They look as if they had been constructed to transport toys, maybe Minions or maybe primary school children. The done thing here is for the Bemo Knights to select their full war paint to outmatch other Bemo knights when racing, dodging and weaving in between the thick traffic of Indonesian smoky urban arteries. It is difficult to get into them for anyone who has grown out of their school uniform, but local commuters have somehow learnt to transfer their happy souls in Quasimodo-like body postures.
I sit on the floor right behind our Kapten. We talk some and he is very cool about everything. As we chat, he routinely grabs wads of thousands of rupiahs from other commuters, glances at them, always assesses that it is not enough, snarls in disgust, and then, depending on how they fit into his left hand, he makes balls or rolls out of the banknotes and snaps it all into the space between the windscreen and the steering wheel.
There, a large pile of crumbled and/or rolled legal tender is at all times closely monitored by cockpit guards: two green Egyptian pyramids, a green toad and a large green cannon. Isn’t it wonderful that this world has invented so many different ways of negotiating reality?
Step Three: Bemocycling out of the City of Medan
One rickshaw and about 90 minutes of Bemocycle slalom race later, I find myself outside the smoky city of Medan.
It has been an extremely friendly, cheap and relaxed place on and around its pavements, and at the same time extremely tiring on its roads. I suppose that its attractions will have to wait for someone with more time and motivation on their hands.
When Bemocycling across this fourth most populous city of Indonesia, me and my driver bump into Bandara Internasional Polonia! ’Holdeth thy h’rses, mine own brave knight!, from under my helmet I shout. We stop, I take out my phone and read that:
the airport's name is taken from the plantation area owned by a Pole, Baron Ludwik Michalski in which it is situated. Polonia originates from the Latin name of the country of Poland. Michalski was a veteran of 1863 January Uprising against the Imperial Russian rule, after which he fled to Switzerland. In 1872, Michalski obtained a concession from the Dutch East Indies administration for a tobacco plantation in Medan. He named the plantation after the country of his birth, which at that time was not an independent state (Wikipedia).
‘Just brilliant, my dear Baron, just brilliant!*, I conclude and set off in search of Sumatran happiness twenty-three hours away on the opposite coast of the island.
Step Four: Facing East
The curse of the pink towel has dragged itself with me to the other side of the Strait of Malacca! While the other passengers on the coach, which is about to transport me diagonally across the sixth largest island in the world, are enjoying blue-green striped blankets, my shaky body is in constant opposition to the unyielding impact of onboard cryotherapy under a furiously pink Hello-Kitty with a pretty bow!
Just my luck! It's a good thing that it’s almost 6 p.m. and that and equatorial sunsets are such early and quick affairs!
* Arthur Conan Doyle. The full dialogue that I remember goes like this:
- ‘Brilliant, just Brilliant, Holmes!’
- ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’
There will be much more from Sumatra next week. And remember my dear subscriber that whatever’s been published before, can be found in the archives. Also, if you can’t find my post on Monday next week, well… it will mean that I have gone to do the next thing that is making me tick at that moment I time….