The Pleasures of Independent Travel

Spending seven hours of watching buses, taxis and pedestrians weave among the diesel fumes of Johor Baru’s Larkin Sentral gave us more than one moment to reflect on the pleasures of independent travel.  

Blowpipe hunter explaining palang piercings

Added to the smell of fuel was the sound. Rising and falling through the grinding sonorities of clashing gears and racing engines, the ululation of bus agent voices added a peculiar background sound like that of auctioneers gone feral in the heat.  At first it is an undecipherable  babble of overlapping cries, but after time it resolves into the sound of men and women calling out the names of the towns to which their company’s bus is heading, each hoping that the volume of their cries will create business and taking obvious pleasure in the percussive rhythm of their own voices.

Our reflection on independent travel focussed on the time we could waste when even slightly indecisive about the destination, and led to some philosophical pondering of how life itself follows the same principle.  As if to reinforce the moral prescription to walk the direct path, Allah placed us on a bus ride that could have been scripted by Disney.

After the 7-hour wait, our bus wheezed into the station and let itself down from the air brakes with a sigh of exhaustion.  The door flopped open and we were invited to board by a negligent flip of the wrist by the driver, who descended looking all around as if for help.

Assistance arrived. The station crew joined the driver, and to Ingrid’s dismay they led him back to the bus and began pointing out the purpose of various switches and controls.  Next they helped him to adjust his seat and ensured he was comfortable.

By this time all the passengers were craning their necks, slightly incredulous about the requirement for instruction in these things.  When all seemed in order, the driver stepped out for a final cigarette, then, grinding the butt into the concrete with the exaggerated toe of his leather shoe and commending with a heavenward glance his soul to the same Allah who had placed us all aboard, he mounted to his seat.

Borneo bus driver completing training.

In the first block out of the station he blew his very first shift and then sat unable to find a way to merge with traffic.  His braking technique was equally uneven, but it required constant use as he experienced great difficulty working his way through the maze of roundabouts and one-way streets.    

Once on the highway and safely through all the gears, our driver attempted to make up in velocity what he lacked in skill. The suspension on the ancient bus could not manage the energies of acceleration, cornering or deceleration, and emphasized his every move, so when he carved around corners at speed, it dipped and bounced and rocked over sideways in an alarming way. From time to time he bottomed out entirely, scraping off fragments of bus undercarriage with a big rough sound. 

Not only did he ignore double white lines to overtake on curves, he tended to drive out there on the wrong side of the road for long stretches of S-bends at whim.  The only bright side to this habit was that it was doubtlessly much less frightening for us than it must have been for the poor oncoming cars.

I found myself peering out into the dark and watching for the kilometer boards to Mersing, not allowing myself the certain hope that we would make it there, but at least consoling myself that the opportunities for disaster were diminishing as the distance shortened.

Eventually we did make it to Mersing, thoroughly chastened and ready to embrace the true path of clarity of purpose.  Since it was so late and we knew hotels would be full, we took the first room we found (and the last room open in the hotel), blowing our budget on a $50 room in the combination of fatigue and gratitude.

After the hair-raising adventure of making it from Kuching to Mersing in one long day, the five hours it took us to book and take the ferry across to Tioman Island was an anti-climax.

Fires under captured heads keep them warm to appease spirits.

And now we sit on a tiny island in the South China Sea, about an hour’s walk along the shore from a duty-free shop where we bought a couple of liters of rum and gin to assist the holiday spirits.  Unless you take scuba lessons, there appears to be nothing to do here, so our tenure might be limited.