Samarang and Beyond

Monday, 1 February 2010, Samarang Indonesia (The drive to and from the Ruins) Samarang is the capital of Central Java, a big city with a super highway and lots of old dutch colonial areas as well as modern looking bored teenagers. We pulled in the very busy and kind of dirty port area and, 1) watched the traditional dock sweeper, uh, sweep the dock, and 2) the bored teenagers dressed up as the mythical Garuda bird but without the propeller beanie of the previous encounter with this fabled creature. The fable is that it only appears when tourists are present. This may very well be true. We departed the ship at 7:30 am for the 3 hour ("with coffee and restroom stop each way") drive to "Fabled Borobudur", Excursion SGR-A. I will report here on the drive and on Samarang and add a separate entry shortly on our visit to
ruins.

Our three bus convoy was escorted by a police car with siren sounding and overhead lights ablinking. It was a joy to behold as we changed lanes to oncoming traffic sending school buses and motor bikes into the ditches and pedestrians up drainpipes and into open sewers. I asked to hired such a police escort for drives to Denver. I think they were willing to come if I bribed the right people--them. We passed through delightful (really) towns, many of which seemed to feature dozens of identical stands selling durian melons (see picture),
furniture, flip flops, etc., respectively. I saw this sort of thing in Vietnam years ago but couldn't really find out the business model since all the stands were identical and appeared to be stocked by the same wholesaler. Oh, the wonders of travel.

We returned to Samarang from the ruins in time to tour the city in depth, seeing the old Dutch colonial area by the docks, after stopping at a tourist trap jewelery store where a quite authentic "shadow puppet show" was to be ignored except by me. Most interesting and a quite delightful drive all in all.