The long, winding road

Yesterday, I mentioned that I am in Bali. Today, I'll write a bit about the intricacies of the travel from Sumbawa to here.

Traveling. It’s a large part of Indonesian life. It seems like people are always traveling. The gardener has to go back to Flores to see his sick father. The maid needs a month off because her sister is having a baby. Your child needs to see a dentist that is only available in Bali. Your visa is about to expire and you need to run off to Singapore. These realities (well except for the visa example) are pretty common everywhere in the world (ok, I never had a gardener or a maid when I lived in the US), but everyone has family emergencies that they need to go home for. When I lived in the States, I needed to attend a wedding or a funeral, but I could get a plane and be there and back in a few days.

I read on a popular blog about Bali today that getting to Sumbawa was an easy thing, just get on your motorbike, hop on a ferry, cross an island, hop on another ferry, and you’re there. Well, there’s slightly more to it than that. I have to make this trip every ten weeks or so when the kids and I have coinciding vacations. They like going back to Bali which they consider home. So we make the long, winding trip back home. I’m going to work backwards from the direction of the bali blog. You can just reverse the process if you happen to be coming to Sumbawa from Bali.

3:00 A.M. We wake all the kids up so they can eat something before we leave. Being the organized expat, I’ve packed everything in the car four days prior to leaving which only slightly irritates my wife who has to work around our personal items for four days while she shops and takes care of her normal business. Our teenagers are cranky and want to shower in case they meet a good looking boy on the ferries. My ten year old son is willing to go without changing his bed clothes because it’s still night and he’s planning on sleeping in the car anyway. The seven year old cries because she stayed up late watching her favorite sinetron about lost love and the sexual perversity of the rich and famous in Jakarta. My wife has to run to the gate to let our gardener in who will be repacking the car with the real essentials for the trip while I’m showering and having a quick breakfast.

4:00 A.M. Everyone is packed in the car. Freddy, our gardener, has all the keys to the house and tool shed and he packs May, the dog, in the tool shed so that she doesn’t follow the car out into the road and become another casualty of the Indonesian road races. We wave goodbye to Freddy while I tell the kids to quit fighting about their seating positions and who smells. Despite my vows of not smoking in the new car, I light up a cigarette as we leave in the hope that it will help me stay awake until we reach the harbor at Poto Tano in the north of the island.

4:30 A.M. I swerve wildly to miss a musang in the road and everyone wakes up and asks what music is on (Jimi Hendrix to keep me awake and remind me that once upon a time I had a life without significant others) and have I fallen asleep at the wheel.

5:45 A.M. We arrive at Poto Tano and are first in line to board the ferry. There are two overloaded antique trucks waiting in a different line. The drivers look wide awake and watch the show as all of the kids decamp from the car and debate about whether we’ll get in the ferry at the dock.

6:00 A.M. The ferry unloads and we drive in first. The kids are excited. I’m relieved that the ferry is going to be fairly empty. The kids run up the stairs and find that we are on the ferry with the slides and children’s playground set. I light up a cigarette and take a photo of the sun rising over Sumbawa. My wife immediately starts pulling out food for her and the children. She’s brought me two packs of Oreos.

Tomorrow. The ride across Lombok, the ferry to Bali, and the ride up the east coast to home.