True Love Waits (An Average of 20 Minutes for a Bus)
vAs this title suggests, the cross-province buses run on a major road outside my village at a schedule unknown to any except the driver, which means I typically build in a max thirty minute wait time for any traveling I undertake. The buses are often crowded (sometimes three to a bench seat with a line of people packed standing the length of the aisle), hot, and a complete olfactory assault- the perfect storm of many people sandwiched into a hot bus while men smoke and ash into the aisles, food vendors weave their way down the aisle hawking fried tofu and milk in plastic bags, and outside pungent scents of either burning trash or malodorous, stagnant canals blow through the windows.
The buses are no great testament to safety and security, either. They hurtle—and when I say hurtle, I want you to imagine the fastest you have ever moved inside a vehicle, roller coaster, space ship blasting into the atmosphere; now remove your seat belt—down the roads, dodging and passing motorcycles, bicycles, becaks (pedicabs), other buses, cars, trucks laden down with every imaginable haul-able object, often going head to head with oncoming traffic. I have been on buses that decided that the car in front of them was passing too slowly, and therefore the driver goes for a simultaneous double pass. I tend to either fixedly ignore these moments, staring out a side window and thinking happy thoughts about 7-11 fountain cokes and puppies, or consumed in rigid certainty that this is probably it, and I never got around to going to Burning Man because I thought I’d have more time.
Safety concerns sometimes extend inside of the bus. I have yet to experience any theft or threats, but other volunteers have been pickpocketed in various degrees of subtlety. And during PST, we heard a litany of bus danger stories, including vendors selling drugged food and drinks and then robbing their passed out victims, so that now I think every bus vendor is a murderous sociopath behind a basket of peanuts. While less of a security problem and more of a puzzling slice of Indonesian life, it is typical for buses to pick up buskers at stops who plant themselves in the middle of the bus to sing, play ukuleles or guitars, or in some other way “entertain,” and then proceed to go up and down the aisle with an extended hat or bag for passengers to drop a few coins in. I still can’t figure this out—are the bus drivers getting a kick back from said roving minstrels? How much money can they be making doing this all day—jumping up on buses for a song, collecting maybe a thousand rupiah, jumping down and doing it all over again. And don’t forget the travelling salesmen hawking vegetable peelers, belts, and face masks… its like having QVC live on the bus, only Joan Rivers is a sweaty fifty year old man with a cigarette hanging from his lip. These vendors have a habit of trailing down the aisle and dumping their wares in your lap, and then picking it back up on the second go, so you can get a good look at the holographic poster of two tigers at a moonlit lake.
I wrote the above paragraphs mid-Idul Fitri vacation. Days afterwards, I had probably the most horrendous bus experiences to date, where a two-three hour trip wound up taking a ponderous, sweaty, nauseating five and a half hours. The trip sent me into a state of frantic anxiety that I mostly recovered from in the form of wandering loops around an air conditioned, Western style grocery store while talking the ear off one of my friends, who possibly deserves sainthood for listening to a personal record of fastest, longest babbling by an admitted motor mouth. For perspective, the next day I was on a bus where my seatmate threw up on herself, and I still consider that to be a better bus ride than the five hour trip of misery.
All this being said, I stand by my man. My man being the bus system. Really? you’re probably asking right now, squinting at the computer screen in skepticism. What can really redeem this lost soul of transportation? I’m going to sound like a slightly codependent girlfriend if I insist that it has really great qualities, they’re just hard to see behind all the problems and its not that bad, you learn to love it. In this case, you pretty much have to learn to love it or never go anywhere ever again, and hope you have kindly friends that will hoof it to see you. I’m going to argue this is less codependent and more optimistic.
So, the best part of the bus is that it gets me to where I need to go (a place of Nutella business, or a friend’s house) in a usually quick manner, if you can sharpen up and figure out the most direct routes (depending which bus terminal I head towards, it can add or save an hour), where to stop so that you don’t wind up taking a thirty minute loop around the city just to get back to where you started (has happened, twice), and you don’t travel during a major holiday that makes BWI Thanksgiving check in counters look like a line dance (I’ve made a huge mistake).
And I have (yet) to experience any problems with getting lost, being overcharged, or other bad things happen to me, and this is a credit to the bus guys. On every Indonesian bus, there are three employees—the driver, the front door guy, and the end door guy. These door guys (official job title) are in charge of leaning out the open doorways of the speeding buses, hollering at people on the sidewalks, taking bus fare, herding people to seats or aisle space, finding space for oversized bags, and making sure that lone bule (foreigner) gets off at the right stop. The door guys are always friendly, and at this point the Trenggalek-Kertosono-Surabaya Pelita Indah team know and remember me. The same goes for the food vendors I occasionally wait for the bus with. They will always give me travel advice and tips, and make sure that the bus guys know where I want to go.
I also have to give it up for my frequent seatmates, the ibus. You sit with these ladies and they will make sure your trip is golden. The older they get, the bossier and more demanding of the bus guys they will be, and the more protective they will get of said lone bule. If I have one tip for solo travelling in Indonesia, its go where the old ladies are, smile at them, tolerate their pokes and slaps, and know you’re being looked after. On my recent bus trip with a side of vomit, I originally sat with an older ibu who spoke very clear Bahasa Indonesia and had a vested interest in everything about me. I in turn had a giant oversized backpack full of boxes of oleh-oleh, in this case apple juice cups , that I couldn’t hold in my lap. She planted the bag in the aisle and held onto it for me the entire trip, eyeing anyone who walked past it like a hawk. When she finally got off the bus, I wanted to hug her. She instructed a teen girl who took her seat to hold onto my backpack in the aisle and make sure nothing happened to it. Later, this girl would wind up vomiting on herself, but she didn’t throw up into the aisle onto my bag. That was seriously the most Javanese thing I have ever witnessed. So polite.
Maybe the best part of the bus is getting off it. Stumbling from its rusty iron steps back into my desa is not unlike emerging from a club at two in the morning—the air feels a thousand times fresher (no small task in Indonesia), I’m a little disoriented, and I feel like I’m covered in the sweat of a thousand other people. And I’d kill for a trip to Sheetz.
All in all, the bus system calls for a lot of cultural flexibility and a complete release on any sense of control you might want. In a strange way, riding the bus is similar to mental activities during yoga or meditation—staying in the now, acknowledging limits, relaxing your need for control. If you can do that, its probably the most zen you can get when you’re hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with a hundred-odd Indonesians and maybe a live animal or two.