Doom ship on Resurrection Day: W. Timor to Flores

Doom ship on Resurrection Day: Timor to Flores

Some journeys in Indonesia are made priceless by indescribably beautiful scenery. Some are long and tiring. Others are forgettable, what with tethered chickens beneath seats and people rammed in like sardines and spilling out of windows or onto the roof for breathing space. My journey from Kupang, Timor to Flores island was none of these. Nerve-wracking is the best word I can think of for the first fourteen hours, and heavenly the last two.

The reason for my negative emotion for this trip was the modes of public transport available to get to the Kupang's harbour and then across the Sabu Sea. For the first part, did I take a Timor 'bemo' (minivan bus) or an 'ojek' (motorbike taxi) to the harbour?
Bemos are small Toyota people carriers that, in Timor, are souped up to the max with whale tail spoilers, brightly painted wheels and windows emblazoned with stickers of motifs and names such as: BECKHAM; RONALDO; SHOOT TO KILL; a batman sign next to a Jesus face. The bass boosters make the air and ground for 20 metres around thud with Timor-style jungle or heavy bass music. The typical fare collector is a gangsta rap cop killer wannabe who hangs out the side door, baseball cap sideways and gold chains swinging from the neck, yelling the destination at pedestrians. The bemos race around town searching for passengers until crammed full of mostly the bemo boy's crew, who all this boy racer decor is to impress (a hunched old woman passenger taking her bag of manky tomatoes to market is not good for a bemo gang's street cred). I'm sure these bemos are perfectly safe for any foreign passenger (who doesn't care about his eardrums) and all just a show of teen angst, but I didn't fancy riding in one today. I was taking an Indonesian ferry next and needed no more unsettling karma.

Typical bemo

Declining a lift from a bemo full of staring, frowning and testosterone-filled teen-apes, my other option to the harbour was on the back of an ojek/motorbike taxi. The ojek driver that turned up at the guesthouse was drunk, so I reluctantly went on the back of a motorbike of a chap who'd been squatting, bored, on the roadside all morning. With no helmet for me and my 85 litre capacity rucksack balanced precariously between his knees, the driver didn't help his cause by winking at me and saying, "Valentino Rossi" whilst tapping his chest. When the Heavens opened we had to got off the rapidly flooding road and under a street stall's plastic sheet shelter. The driver took the opportunity to fill the gas tank with 'bensin' held by the litre in John Roberts whisky and brandy bottles by the stall. As the rain abated, the actually thrilling ride to the harbour took me past villages of rickety shacks, beautiful palm-fronted beaches, over lines of fist-sized pebbles that were washing down roadside gullies and being deposited across the pot-holed road, and by life-sized models of Jesus and 2 others on their crosses now surrounded by women sweeping up the debris of whatever ceremony had recently taken place.

Bolok Harbour is the official start point of my homeward journey. What a pity the harbour wasn't as scenic as the event momentous. By the shoreline shed of a waiting room and collection of tables from which snacks were being sold, was just concrete and waste land. My fellow passengers, and local barefoot lads just hanging around, would come and stand directly over me to watch close-up as I sat, wrote and frowned up at them. Females of any age casting their short (as the sun's directly above) shadow over me I don't mind as they're nearly always friendly, if not with broken conversation at least with a smile. But emotionless, characterless, soulless Indonesian males (the majority it would appear - I'll write more about this in some other blog), gawping at me for some highlight to their day, grates on me after a while. After getting my ticket I walked slowly and with deep breaths to the rustbucket I had just joked about the seaworthiness of, not realising it was my transport across the Sabu Sea. Goodbye Timor.

The rust bucket to Flores with Pulau Rote, 'island of tragedy', behind

I'd purchased a 61,000 rupiah (4 quid) ticket in Ekomoni A/Bisnis Class and was looking forward to a little luxury on the 15-hour overnight sail. Oh chicken counting fool! When will I learn to set no hopes for creature comforts in the poor outreaches of SE Asia? Compared to the Ekonomi B class, my sitting room had comfy seats and walls. Nice one. However, there was only one opening window and a karaoke screen to accompany the dire and nightclub volume music I was going to get little respite from this night.

Waiting for the boat to get up steam, the most unnerving and poorly timed music video possible was shown. Track 1 was a tribute song to those killed in an Indonesian ferry sinking. The accompanying video footage was of people being hauled out of liferafts onto a coastguard boat, intermingled with that of the singer holding the coastguard vessel's gun and surrounded, like a Messiah, by survivors. Back-in singing was by the survivors' choir and a chilling echo of a young baby's wails. Around me the passengers and biscuit sellers were transfixed. Was anyone else feeling uneasy? Not a bit! The Ekonomi B'ers were piling in to stand with rigid fascination before this video. After seeing one of the snack-selling girls recognising one of the teenage survivors, it dawned on me this may be a local disaster. Well, it only turned out that the sunken ferry had left this harbour bound for Pulau Rote, the island lying a couple of kilometres out of the port window. Alarm bells starting ringing in my head. My brow was suddenly damp.

Thankfully, the next track was about a teenage couple running away from home, and the mother wailing and sobbing and rolling around on a bed, in despair at the news brought by a telephone call. Hardly uplifting TV, though I was relieved it was only as depressing as Eastenders. Oh hang on! it's another aspect of the JM ferry disaster. The teenage ranaway male is in a bodybag on the coastguard boat's deck, as it's being oh so dramatically slowly zipped up. Tell me this whole 16-track DVD isn't a tribute to this harbour's recent accident.
Alas! not the music video I was hoping for for track 3. It was a collage of camcorder clips of: people in liferafts; Jesus talking to a crowd; and two 8-year-old orphans wailing, "Mama, Papa" as a bloated, dead, male body was being hooked out of the water. The woman next to me was dabbing her eyes. Everyone remained transfixed. I scanned about for my nearest liferaft.

I tried to make light of my nervousness by pointing between the island of doom and my bread whilst showing off my Indonesian vocabulary skills, "Rote, roti. Ha ha". She didn't smile; she was too focused on following the singer's words as they slowly changed from white to yellow across the screen. Yes, this was a karaoke video! And what a morbid choice for Christ's resurrection day. And what a way to remind a community of their tragic loss. Maybe the first mate hoped the ferry and victims would rise up from the sea floor? I'm going to need a couple of large Bintang lagers, on my chosen teetotal night, to get me through this journey.

We set off and the karaoke videos were changed from the heart-wrenching, to the gut-wrenching Vengaboys, Cheeky Girls, Indonesian power ballads, Korea's 'Rain' and even some teeny Japanese bubblegum music with each syllable romanised along the screen but no less comprehensible to any of us. The bonus was a free hot dinner of plain rice, flavourless KP Skips and a hot, boiled egg. Happy Easter!

My luxury Easter Sunday dinner (genuine luxury by Timor standards)

Without any access for a sea or motion breeze, Ekonomi A/Bisnis Class was stiflingly hot as I dripped and chatted 1/2 English and 1/2 Indonesian with a shy teenage Muslim lass. Talking about previous occupations, she informed me that 'teacher' in Indonesian is guru. She tried to hide her giggle when I indicated where I was on a teaching scale compared to Jesus.

I slept a little, absolutely sodden in my own sweat that brought the smell of the previous hundred sweaty sleepers out of the seat's cushioning. Then I was woken at 2:45am by the Vengaboys to Japanese bubblegum video being played again at full blast. I cursed the mentality behind, 'We'll play atrocious music at ear-splitting volume for the 2% of passengers unable to sleep, and if the other 98% are tired enough they'll sleep through it', that I've encountered on buses and ferries from Bangkok to Timor. Yet only a couple of other passengers showed signs of stirring, and only I of irritation. I am constantly astounded by the extraordinary talent of Asians from Seoul to here, the middle of the Sabu Sea, of falling into instant, temporary comas on public transport.

I went outside to the wall-less Ekomoni B deck, where sleeping people sprawled across the iron floor, using sarongs as groundsheets and flip-flops as pillows. The 'music' here was even louder, the metalwork emitting shockwaves to the beat. Maybe it's a sneaky ploy to wake people up and piss them off, so they buy coffee and snackfood to use up 3 minutes of their pre-dawn boredom? Well it wasn't working; only the snack-seller and I were awake. Thankfully though, there was a slight breeze and places to stand where the din of the ship's engine was louder, and certainly preferable, to the Cheeky Girls' vocal horse manure. If there's a next time, I'm sleeping by the ship's funnel, with the subsistence farmers!

For hours, there wasn't a single light on any horizon, only those twinkling above. Then from ahead left to right came the volcanic saw-tooth topography of SE Flores and more easterly (and perhaps more Easterly) the remote islands of Solor and Lembata. On lembata, whales are still caught when a boat crewman pole-vaults onto a surfaced whale's back with a +4m long harpoon, thrusts it in, and a chase is on until the whale dies of exhaustion. If only I had time to visit. It's great to see that some lands are still barely inhabited/spoilt by humans. The sunrise revealed a landscape reminiscent of a broad Scottish glen and loch that we were sailing up. The clue we weren't in the Highlands was the volcano Lewotobi at the starboard, emitting a dirty-grey cotton wool cloud out of the crater.

Sunrise over volcanic Pulau Solor, next to the east end of Flores

Ahead, smooth white clouds were draped over the intimidating Guning Iri Mandiri, as it seemingly leaned forward over the line of coastal lights marking the snugly located Larantuka town. There was no sound or movement but the boat. A fellow passenger marvelling at the peace and tranquility, broke it telling me he liked Rooney, Lampard and Terry and that England would win the World Cup. I should learn to have as much faith in Indonesian transport as the Indonesians do in my national footie team.

Approaching Iri Mandiri volcano, Flores. What buckled the 3 inch thick ship iron bars?

Across Flores next, to see multi-coloured volcanic lakes, traditional villages following animistic beliefs, and hobbits.....