"A Single to Sydney, Please"

To Sydney ... and home again for Xmas

It took me more than 12 weeks to travel from Clogherhead to Sydney. Then, after 28 hours spent on three different flights, I was abruptly returned to the starting point, somewhat dazed and a little bit shocked at the darkness and cold of the Irish winter.

After an enjoyable few days relaxing in Melbourne, I took the train to Albury on the Victoria/NSW border, where I met Dave, one of the original cOzBus members. We drove to Canberra and did some sight-seeing in that rather strange city, before meeting Nat at Canberra airport on Friday night. Canberra is more like a university campus and a shopping mall stuck together, than a real city. It was originally designed by Walter Burley Griffin, a major 20th century American architect and it has a very American feel to it. It is composed of several suburbs that are interconnected by dual carriageways, so it's hard to get around without a car. The suburbs are small and self-contained, each with its own 'town centre' with shopping and commercial districts. It's not the sort of place I could see myself living but it was interesting to wander around a bit and observe its strangeness.

Dave, Nat and I spent a great night in a campsite on the edge of Canberra. We were no more than ten minutes' drive from the city centre, but we were already deep in the bush. It was a perfect night for camping - for once cold enough to use a sleeping bag - and we spent hours lying gazing at the stars and watching for 'sputniks'.

On Saturday we drove to Jindabyne to rendezvous with OzBus and to spend the last night with the gang. It wasn't very far to Jindabyne and OzBus wasn't due in until the evening, so in the afternoon we went to Mount Kosciuszko in the Snowy Mountains, which at a lofty 2,228 metres is Australia's highest peak. We had planned to make an assault on one of the 'Seven Summits', but the chair-lift stopped running at 4pm. We realised that we didn't have enough time to summit and make it back to the chair-lift before it ceased operation for the day, so we went only as far as the Kosciuszko lookout. We did however get to take some photographs of us playing in the snow in Australia in December. This really is unimpressive as continental peaks go: it's not particularly high and there's a chair-lift to within a couple of hundred metres of the summit, although I suppose real 'Seven Summiters' probably walk up instead of taking the chair-lift.

On Saturday evening we had our last OzBus dinner in Jindabyne followed by the OzBus awards ceremony, brilliantly compèred by Andy and Gordon. We had nominations in dozens of categories and none of the passengers or crew left without an award. In the steady rain, I retired around midnight to my tent, for my last night under canvas of 2007. As it was the last night, almost everyone upgraded, but, contrary to the end, I decided to sleep with the rain lashing against the flysheet.

On Sunday morning we bid farewell to Nat and Dave and had our last OzBus breakfast before wandering bleary-eyed on to the bus for the day's drive to Sydney. We stopped off in Canberra where we visited Parliament House. Most of us were only interested in the building's pies, coffee and toilets. Our general lack of enthusiasm and burnt-out state meant that plans to visit other sights in Canberra were abandoned. We climbed back on board and drove to Goulburn, where we had lunch and also said goodbye to Maz, who jumped off early to be picked up by her brother and his family.

The last couple of hours' drive to Sydney were quite sombre. We listened to Christmas songs and tried to come to terms with the fact that after twelve indescribably long weeks together we had finally reached the end of the road. OzBus 2 was no more. We got caught in some traffic on the edge of Sydney so it took us quite a while to reach the viewpoint - Macquerie's Point - where we posed for some group photos with the opera house and harbour bridge backdrop. It was hard to believe that we had arrived in Sydney in the middle of summer. It was like an Irish summer's day: grey with a steady drizzle.

After the group photos we all got back on board and were taken into Circular Quay, where we got off for some tearful goodbyes, although most of us would see each other again in the next few days. Andrew Kelleher from OzBus was there, wearing something of a hangdog expression. Certainly the bright and cheery Andrew who had seen us off in London twelve weeks earlier was missing. A couple of the passengers tried to express some of their displeasure and disappointment, but these attempts were rebuffed with a 'send me an email'. There was to be no post-mortem on the wet streets of Sydney this Sunday evening.

After dozens of goodbye hugs, I picked up my rucksack and my daypack and hopped into a taxi to my hotel. OzBus was over. Freedom.

29 12 2007 - 22:13 - macmac - OzBus| 260 comments - § ¶

Incredible Indonesia!

I'm in the wonderful town of Yogyakarta, aka Jogja, the heart of the island of Java and I've fallen for Indonesia, big time. I didn't really know what to expect before entering the country last week and to be honest Indonesia had never really been in my top ten must-visit list. All along we OzBusers, probably in common with millions of travellers the world over, have been searching for the backpackers' holy grail. We all like to think that we've stumbled across somewhere that the hordes have yet to discover and, yet, we all like our home comforts away from home. That's quite a paradox: we want somewhere untouched, with up-to-date facilities. Well, maybe Indonesia provides that to a certain extent. Its facilities are second to none, at knockdown prices, but it is still waiting to be rediscovered. Unfortunately this time I'm only getting a taster, but I'll be back for more.

Well, my 29-hour bus ride from Bukittinggi on Sumatra to Java turned out to be 52 hours in the end! The bus to Jakarta was heading for 36 hours instead of 29 hours (the Indonesians call this 'rubber time'), but while I was on the Sumatra-Java ferry I spotted a bus parked beside us that was heading for Jogja. I had a quick word with the driver and after transferring 200,000 rupiahs from my wallet to the driver's back-pocket, I found myself signed up for a 17 hour extension to my trip. This did however save me the hassles of an overnight in Jakarta and searching for a bus to Jogja the next day.

It's quite common for bus drivers here to supplement their meagre incomes by adding 'unofficial' passengers to their busloads. My bus from Bukittinggi had crates the whole way down the aisle, occupied by punters picked up en route. This can make departure times a joke, as the driver circles the town for an hour or more looking for extra passengers.

By the way, Andrew Kelleher, the OzBus operations director, kindly took the time to mail me to clarify the situation regarding the flight between Sumatra and Java:

"The reason the groups flew from Sumatra is because we were told that the main highway had been washed away in two places by floods, and there would have to be two 15 hours drives to get around it. Since you have had lots of long drives we made the decision to fly the group to Java, so they wouldn't miss time in Yogyakarta, Solo and Mt Bromo which are the main highlights." Andrew also says that he has no idea where the Guardian's earthquake story originated!

First priority on arrival in Jogja was, understandably enough, sleep. With almost no foreigners in town I had the pick of the best places on the backpackers' street known as Jalan Prawirotaman. I chose the wonderful, strangely named Ministry of Coffee. I don't know if there is such an accommodation category as boutique backpackers', but if there is this place would deserve that label. A large comfortable room, with air con, safe, satellite TV, hot-water shower and a great breakfast all for just over twenty euro a night. Where would you get it, indeed.

I decided to spend three nights in Jogja and catch up with OzBus in Bali via one more overnight bus trip. The big tourist draw cards here, in times past at least, were the Buddhist temple called Borobudur and the Hindu collection of temples known as Prambanan. I booked my visits to both these places through the ViaVia Cafe, a place worth checking out on your travels. These not-for-profit travellers' cafes, in eleven locations around the globe, try to support the communities in which they are based and are big into sustainable development.

On Wednesday at 6.30am - earlier than I would have liked - I was on the back of a motorbike on the way to Borobudur. It pays to make an early start to the sightseeing here, as the middle of the day is serious stay indoors time, with temperatures in the mid-thirties, high humidity and a blazing sun. With a bit of luck you can beat the crowds and maybe get there before the touts and hawkers are out of bed too. I had been warned about the touts here; they were rather persistent, but nothing like India and I did have a fair bit of sympathy for their plight, even if I didn't want to buy any tacky over-priced souvenirs. I hired a great guide called Dani, who really knew his stuff.

Borobudur is considered by some to be a Buddhist monument, rather than a temple, as all Buddhist temples can be entered and contain statues of the Buddha. This place is huge and very impressive. It has nine levels representing the nine levels to nirvana. Each level contains stone panels that are carved with images telling a story. Fortunately, Borobudur was hidden away for hundreds of years, so what we now have is the barely restored original. Built in the eighth century using two million stone blocks, an eruption from nearby Mt Merapi covered the site and it wasn't rediscovered until 1815. The monument has survived earthquakes and even a terrorist attack in 1985.

I visited Prambanan on Thursday morning, again by motorbike. The temples here reminded me a lot of Angkor Wat, although the site is a lot smaller than that in Cambodia. The large earthquake in 2006 did a lot of damage. It is no longer permitted to enter the temples and they can only be viewed by walking around the perimeter of the site. My local guide was something of a boffin, having written several books about the site, but he wasn't as interesting as the Boropudur guide had been. Overall I preferred Boropudur, but I was amused at my celebrity status at Prambanan. There was a coach load of tourists from Kalimantan who all wanted to have their photos taken with me, the token foreigner.

My final organised tour in Jogja was a tour of the part of town known as the Kraton. I found this hard to believe, but in the modern Republic of Indonesia, the province of Yogyakarta is still ruled by a sultan: a monarchy within a republic! The sultan lives in a palace at the heart of the Kraton. Surrounding the palace is a walled city in which something like 25,000 people live. This mini-town is known as the kampung. My guide was a witty and charming lady called Vanie. We strolled in through the Kraton's southern gate and made our way to the alun-alun square, which is where the locals gather of an afternoon before the sun goes down. Again I don't think I saw a single other foreigner. In the middle of the square a football game was underway. Mothers gather here, for some reason, to feed their children, and there is a range of entertainment laid on as a result. Some of the kids were enjoying rides on a couple of Indian elephants, while others took their turns on strange pedal-powered mini-carousels. These strange contraptions are like cycle-rickshaws, with the operator's cycling power used to turn the carousel load of children. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Vanie and I sat and watched the goings-on, while sipping a strange local beverage/soup called ronde, which contained among other things sugar, ginger, glutenous rice and corn. Later on, after dark, we joined in the local 'mystical game'. There are two banyan trees in the square and legend has it that if you can successfully walk blindfolded and unaided between the two trees, your wish will come true. I succeeded on my second attempt, with just a little vocal guidance.

I could easily spend a week in this very interesting city, but it's time to move on. Eighteen hours or so on today's bus will hopefully bring me to Denpasar in Bali, in time for lunch on Saturday. I will meet up with the OzBusers again there and spend two nights relaxing before we all fly to Darwin. Actually, we should have almost the full complement of passengers in Bali for the first time since Delhi, as many are flying in directly from Thailand. It should be fun.

30 11 2007 - 03:04 - macmac - OzBus| 620 comments - § ¶

What's Sumatra you, hey, gotta no respect

I still find it hard to believe that Joe Dolce knocked John Lennon's "Woman" off the number one position in the UK charts all those years ago. Well, I've arrived in Indonesia and I'm in the heart of Sumatra, in a great little place called Bukittinggi, which sounds a little like the Bahasa Indonesian for TicketMaster ... sorry that's the end of the bad puns.

But it is indeed a great town. I couldn't quite put my finger on it and then it hit me this afternoon: what makes this place great is the fact that it's all set up for tourists and backpackers but there are almost no foreigners here. Indonesia's once healthy tourist industry has never quite recovered from the Bali bombings, so we have the place almost to ourselves.

This is my first blog entry from the southern hemisphere: Bukittinggi is at 0°18′ south and 100°23′ east. We crossed the equator yesterday afternoon about an hour or two before entering the town. The equator is so irrelevant to the Sumatrans that our guide Anto didn't bother mentioning it and there is no mark on the road at all - there's a business opportunity not being exploited. I'm not sure he even understood what the line on the globe we were talking about was.

From Melaka we caught a two-hour fast ferry across the straits, which was a little bit choppy. Then we drove for quite a number of hours to Pekanbaru, which is Indonesia's oil town. Actually the town and its hinterland reminded me quite a bit of Venezuela: oil wells, palm trees, rural shacks and a city that clearly has a lot of oil money. Indonesia is obviously much poorer than Malaysia. Actually the brief sojourn in Thailand and Malaysia was almost like being back in Europe. We're very definitely back in Asia now. The people are fantastic here: lots of 'hello mister, how are you' and smiling faces.

There was little to detain us in Pekanbaru, which was just as well, because we arrived late and left early in inimitable OzBus style. We have had a rare two-night stop here, which has been great. With a small splinter group I upgraded to the town's best hotel (Novotel) - well, you have to splurge when it's cheap. The OzBus hotels since we arrived in Indonesia have been below par; on the first night there was no running water in the room and the sheets had been used by a previous guest or two (I upgraded in Pekanbaru too).

Speaking of splinter groups, I'm less than three days back on OzBus and I'm getting off again! It was announced in Melaka that severe storms had largely washed out the roads south and east of Bukittinggi and therefore OzBus has been left with no option than to fly to Jakarta. Today's Guardian has the 'official' blog of one of the OzBus 1 passengers and the story there is that the roads were made impassable by an earthquake. All this is rather strange. This morning I walked into a travel agent and bought a bus ticket to Jakarta: 29 hours, bring it on! So it seems that the roads are impassable and/or fell into the Java Sea and yet they're good enough for a daily bus service to operate on them. Somebody's nose must be a couple of inches longer at this stage.

I could well be nuts (no news there then). The bus is possibly more expensive than flying. Twenty-nine hours! That deserves to be spelt out. But it's the old Continuity OzBus motto: 'can't fly, won't fly'. I will eventually have to fly from Bali to Darwin, but I want to try and continue overlanding as far as I can. Even Peter Moore had to fly from East Timor to Darwin, if memory serves. I'm not sure yet when I'll rejoin the bus but it could be somewhere in Java or on Bali. There are some interesting rail options from Jakarta across Java and the train seems to be quite quick.

Today I went on a tour of the area surrounding the town. With a small group I trekked through some jungle. We were in search of Rafflesia arnoldii, which is the world's biggest flower. It only flowers for a few days before it turns into a black, gooey mess. We were extremely lucky that our expert local guide managed to find one in flower. Then we drove into the mountains and got astonishing views of the shimmering blue Danau Maninjau lake. The countryside around here really is beautiful.

So it's back on cOzBus for me tomorrow morning. Maz, very wisely, has chosen to fly to Jakarta with OzBus, or OzAir as some of the passengers have started calling it. I shall talk to you from Java.

24 11 2007 - 11:41 - macmac - OzBus| 96 comments - § ¶

Malaysia, truly Asia ...

Or so the jingle goes. Having rejoined OzBus I now have other people than just Maz to annoy with this jingle (familiar to anyone who's ever watched CNN) and other ditties - "the world is a vampire" being another favourite. Ever since my MP3 player broke I've had to hum or sing to myself for entertainment, especially on those long bus journeys where I can't read.

As of midnight yesterday local time, Continuity OzBus [cOzBus] has ceased operations and has merged with OzBus. We finally caught up with the OzBusers in Penang, a small island off the west coast of Malaysia. The timing was hard to believe. Maz and I had just arrived off the ferry from Butterworth, hopped on a local bus (the driver of which really wanted to show us around the island when he finished work) and walked up to the hotel lobby, where we spotted Leighton, still valiantly leading his merry band of OzBusers after all these weeks. Plenty of happy reunions with him and the surviving OzBusers ensued. Before we rejoined yesterday there were 18 on board; we're now up to 21, as we picked up another stray in Kuala Lumpur today. The rest are scattered in various places around Thailand.

We left Luang Prabang, Laos on Saturday morning, somewhat sad to be leaving such a lovely, relaxing place. We were on board the 6.30am bus to Vientiane by 6am. It finally got on the road by about 7.30am (not bad for Laos). The drive was through some spectacular scenery and would have been really enjoyable but for one unfortunate aspect. The Lao people in general aren't great travellers, it would seem. As soon as the bus started slaloming along the switchback roads that snake through the mountains, more than a couple of our fellow passengers started throwing up. The 'conductor' instructed them to stop opening the windows and puking down the outside of the bus, so they resorted to vomiting into plastic bags. Very pleasant. The rising stench of vomit made me feel a little nauseous, but I managed to hang on to the tuna baguette I consumed for breakfast.

The Lao countryside really is spectacular. The road was amazingly windy and twisty (imagine if you can the Tralee to Cahirciveen road) considering that route 13, on which we travelled all day, is the main north-south artery through northern Laos. Things were, however, much worse ten years ago before the road was sealed. We passed over and around several hills; everywhere the accompanying scenery was extremely lush and green. I was really struck by how neat and tidy everything was too. There's plenty of poverty around, but I didn't see any squalor at all during my short visit to the country. Everyone seemed pretty happy too. Definitely another country to revisit at some stage.

In Vientiane we had to transfer to a minibus that took us to the border, which was about half an hour away. After completing the Lao immigration formalities we drove across the Friendship Bridge to do it all again on the Thai side. Once again Thailand shocked me slightly with its first-worldness: it just sort of sneaks up on you unexpectedly. It was almost like arriving back into Europe. Our bus from the Thai border to Bangkok was a beauty: a double-decker coach, with a sofa and table downstairs and extremely generously spaced rows of reclining seats upstairs. We left the border area about 8pm and were due to arrive in Bangkok at 6am.

Our driver had other ideas. I found it quite hard to tell just how fast we were going, perhaps because I haven't travelled very fast for a few months, but it seemed well in excess of 120 kph, maybe as fast as 150 kph. We were certainly the fastest moving vehicle on the road. I didn't manage to get more than a few minutes' sleep on the way but I still wore my traveller's eye shades, mostly so I couldn't see how fast we were moving. As a result of this accelerated schedule we were dumped quite close to Khao San Road in Bangkok at about 3.30am. Realising that it was still Saturday night and that we could salvage some of the night's sleep we decided to get guesthouse rooms for two nights instead of one. After not too much difficulty we found a pretty good place for about 16 euro a night behind the temple at one end of Khao San Road.

As I'd been to Bangkok a few times before, I didn't do any sightseeing this time. I just relaxed and enjoyed all the first-world comforts: fast internet access, good food and drink, and sleep. You have to take advantage of these things when you can.

Less than 36 hours later we were on the move again. This time we were on the railways again, with air-conditioned sleepers booked from Bangkok to Butterworth in Malaysia, a trip of almost 24 hours. The railcar's nameplate suggested that it was only about 10 years old, but if this is the case it must have aged rapidly or they must have specially ordered rolling stock with that 1960s look. Still, we were travelling in the best available class and the service was pretty good. A steward came around and took our dinner orders shortly after we left and the food, which was quite good, showed up about 6pm. The only real problem was the extremely annoying Penang-Chinese family in our immediate vicinity. They insisted on shouting to each other non-stop for about 10 hours, as though they were seated at opposite ends of the railcar, instead of right beside each other. It was so bad that I put in my earplugs while I was trying to read, but I could still here their incessant nattering. The joys of travel. Finally they shut up about 10pm, but then grandad started snoring. I thought this was an improvement on the shouting/chatting, but Maz wasn't impressed.

We finally got into Butterworth around lunchtime on Tuesday. After a tasty little lunch by the ferryport, we took the short, picturesque ferry across to Penang.

Right now we're in Melaka, near the bottom of peninsular Malaysia, having driven down today via Kuala Lumpur. We haven't seen much of Malaysia apart from the scenery alongside the motorways. The roads are so good here you could almost be in England. We had a couple of hours in KL and got to see the Petronas Towers, but really it could have been any Asian city. I'm not too bothered with this rapid transit through Malaysia, as I've spent several months here in the past.

Tomorrow we board our ferry which will take us across the straits of Melaka to Indonesia. I'm really looking forward to this, as I know very little about this huge country.

21 11 2007 - 11:31 - macmac - OzBus| 2223 comments - § ¶