Oops, a long hiatus from blogging. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Except not!
I will take a break from my usual life musings, which usually focus on my life in Taiwan to talk a little bit about the traveling that I did during the Chinese New Year’s holiday. Of course, the Lunar New Year is The Big Holiday in Taiwan, and this year Taiwan had a lovely 5 days of vacation, plus a weekend for a consecutive 7 days of vacation time. I took the opportunity to do my first bit of traveling since moving to Tainan in September: I joined my parents for a trip to Indonesia.
No, we did not go to Bali.
My mother did a lovely job of some quick research into tour organizers and settled on an action-packed private tour for just the three of us to check out the highlights of North Sumatra. Sumatra is the large western island of Indonesia, which stretches alongside the peninsula of Malaysia, but also dips past the equator into the southern hemisphere. (Look, I’ve included a map in case you’re as geographically challenged as I am – I pretty much need to go to a place before I can find it on a map.) Simply put, it’s a pretty big island (6th largest in the world, or roughly the size of California plus Maine), that nicely runs along the (in)famous Pacific Ring of Fire – specifically running alongside the active subduction zone where the Indian Ocean Plate is going under the Eurasian Continental Plate. As a result, the island is peppered with active volcanoes and subject to some rather devastating earthquakes every so often. The volcanoes are located in the chain of mountains along the western half of the island, which includes peaks greater than 3000m, as well as many tropical forest ecosystems in the lower rolling hills and plains to the east.
Or at least it used to have many tropical forests. Sumatra is now also home to some 50 million people.
But before the human population explosion, the island of Sumatra was home to quite a variety of flora and fauna, including (but definitely not limited to only such charismatic megafauna) tigers, elephants, rhinos, and orangutans.
We set out on a whirlwind tour that attempted to include as many of the previously described aspects of this entire island in only 8 days. To begin with, we stopped by the capital city of Medan. Which was also basically the only place that we could start if arriving via airplane, being that it is home to the only international airport. The Medan airport has actually just been upgraded to a large, modern facility. It seemed like a quite respectable segue coming from Taipei and stopping through the international hub of an airport in Kuala Lumpur. It’s even connected to Medan by a series of well-maintained toll roads, on which we sped away from all remnants of first world transportation so fast that we didn’t have a chance to realize it was even happening.
Within an hour, we were in the metropolitan area of Medan (population around 4 million). And it was rush hour – one the likes of which I have never witnessed. Given the volume of traffic, the roads were the skinniest, least maintained, and least orderly roads that I have ever seen. Which is generally on par with things that I have heard about Indonesian cities. Traffic lights only exist in the busiest areas of the city center. Complicated traffic maneuvers such as right turns (they drive on the left side of the road) or merging into the stream of traffic are only managed by excessive horn honking and ballsiness, or by entrepreneurial teenagers who direct (ie. leap in front of) traffic for tips handed through windows.
Given the nature of our see-all and do-all itinerary, we had a variety of different locations that we wanted to hit up, and in the process we became intimately familiar with transportation in North Sumatra. We ended up with several days which were largely spent in the car, bouncing along and weaving around potholes, passing sputtering motorcycles, and drifting listening to the arrhythmic car honks communicating everything from “pass me” to “watch out I’m here” to “I guess it’s about time that I honked my horn.” Later, when I was retracing our route via googlemaps, I was amazed to find that these seeming very long car rides circumscribed only a very modest radius within North Sumatra, and that our average travel speed was probably around 25 mph.
Still, when I wasn’t feeling horribly carsick, there were still a lot of interesting things to be seen from the window.
To start with, the vehicles sharing the road with us were of impressive diversity. While there was no shortage of modern Japanese, German and American cars, especially in Medan, there were even greater numbers of vehicles that were somewhere between cars and bicycles. There were plenty of motorcycles, and also motorcycles plus add-ons. Always a good place to appreciate human creativity and resourcefulness – DIY vehicle modifications, right? Common modifications are for increased ability to transport goods or for added passenger capacity, which turns the average motorcycle into vehicle called a “becak” that seats from 3 people to as many children as can cling on to the outside! Helmet wearing appeared to be optional, and inversely proportional to urbanization level of the area (as is probably almost globally true).
TBC…