Indonesia : Sulawesi + Raja Ampat – July 2017
Dear English-speaking readers, this page is an automatic translation of an article originally written in French. I apologise for any strange sentences and funny mistakes that may have resulted. If you read French, click on the French flag below to access the original, correct text:
Français Ah, Indonesia!!! My favorite destination for scuba diving! But before being able to make bubbles with the fishes, you sometimes have to face the dreaded jam karet, the "elastic time"...
A long trip to Indonesia
That's right! This July 2017, I flew to Indonesia (again)! 😎 Getting to Jakarta, the capital on the island of Java, is easy. It's after that that the going gets tough...
Nothing is ever certain when traveling in the immense Indonesian archipelago. A volcano can wake up (like the Sinabung, at the moment when I publish this post, at the beginning of August 2017). Or the weather to make his. In Indonesia, late flights are the norm and, on many roads in poor condition, you never exceed 50 km/h. Over there, you never count in kilometers, but in hours. You're never sure what time you'll leave, or what time you'll arrive. When you travel in Indonesia, the only sensible thing to do is to put yourself in "patience and zenitude" mode.. And to tame the jam karet, the "elastic time"...
Any journey, any transport is potentially synonymous with hazards, delays, unforeseen events. You have to deal with it. And tell yourself that it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, you always arrive at your destination. Wonderful Indonesia, as the tourist office says.
For the first step of this new diving trip in Indonesia, I chose a remote area, quite far from the usual tourist routes. I've already done more twisted as a route, so I'm reasonably optimistic.
I booked in a tiny diving structure (only three bungalows for the moment, soon five), the nice Tompotika Dive Lodgelocated in Kampanar, a small Muslim fishing village on the eastern peninsula of Central Sulawesi. It is here:
It's away from it all and very nice. With, as is often the case in small Indonesian villages, the typical sound environment that goes with it... 😂 Shrill cries of children playing, unexpected choirs of barking dogs, motorcycle and boat engine backfires, hoarse cock-a-doodle-doo competitions and very, very early morning calls from mosques...
Personally, I love this kind of atmosphere and nothing much wakes me up at night. At the risk of sounding preachy, I'll leave you with a word of warning for travellers who love the "authentic": in Indonesia, the peaceful atmosphere of a village is not necessarily synonymous with silence and tranquillity... 😉 I'm delighted with my stay in Kampanar. I'll tell you more about it in a future post.
Jakarta-Makassar-Luwuk
So here it is. I arrived in Jakarta on July 1st at 7am, after a 15 hours flight from France. At the end of the morning, I took a domestic flight to the city of Luwuk, in Sulawesi, with the Indonesian low-cost airline Lion Air and its subsidiary Wings Air.
I'm supposed to land in Luwuk at 4.50pm. It will then be a two-three hour drive to Kampanar. A driver sent by the Tompotika is due to pick me up at Luwuk airport in the late afternoon. (Yes, long journeys don't scare me, when it's to go diving... 😆)
But this Jakarta-Luwuk flight is not direct. There is a stopover and change of aircraft in Makassar, the big city of South Sulawesi. And it is there that the jam karetthe famous "elastic time", takes back its rights...
At the Makassar airport, at the boarding counter for the connection, the young woman in charge of receiving the passengers tells me to sit down and wait. The flight will be delayed.
Good. Nothing more normal, in Indonesia. In fact, I was rather surprised by the punctuality of the first plane between Jakarta and Makassar...
😂
30 minutes, then an hour, then an hour and a half pass. I come to ask again at regular intervals if we always leave from the same gate, the 5th one (because I've already had the unexpected change of gate, at the airport of Makassar). Yes, yes, they reassure me. And they reconfirm the delay.
I am coolitude and zenitude embodied. Jam karet ...
Flight reported
Late afternoon. Of course, by being late, the flight ends up being cancelled!
"Bad weather in Luwuk", explains an airport employee. An Indonesian I'm chatting to tells me that he's called a friend in Luwuk, and that it's pouring down there! A huge storm, with waterspouts. 😱
The small crowd of passengers who had been waiting patiently in front of gate 5 then followed an airport attendant in an orange vest, who led us through the corridors to the entrance of the terminal, where we were all ushered into the lobby of the Ibis Budget hotel. I remembered that I had already slept here, between two planes, during previous trips to Raja Ampat. We can hear the airport announcements in the rooms!
Everyone has to hand in their ID and boarding pass at reception. We're put up for the night. It's a bit of a mess, and I almost end up in an Indian businessman's room (we were the only two passengers with foreign passports, so we thought we were traveling together 😂).
But in the end, everything is not so bad. We just have to wait. The time stretches again, endlessly. Jam karet ...
Three guys from the airport come and go, collecting the checked luggage of those who ask for it. I am soon reassured to see that my bag followed me to Makassar.
The flight is postponed to the next morning, at 6 am. All you have to do is present the same boarding pass and leave the tags on your luggage. I get the information repeated three times to be sure of the time. By the guy at the airport. By the Lion Air office employee. By an Indonesian passenger speaking good English.
I did well to buy a local SIM card at an airport store when I arrived in Jakarta. I was able to keep my contact for Tompotika up to date as I went along.
In the evening, two Lion Air employees knock on my door. They reconfirm my 6 a.m. flight and ceremoniously hand me 300,000 Rupiahs (about €20, which is a lot for that place, I ate for 30,000 Rp) in compensation in denominations of 50,000, in exchange for signing a receipt and photocopying my passport and boarding pass. I'm pleasantly surprised, in fact the company is handling the situation rather well, I think.
Finally Luwuk!
At dawn, I meet again in the lobby of the Ibis Budget the guy speaking good English with whom I had talked the day before. I'm a bit undecided: should we wait here for the airport employees? He tells me that we can go there directly. Other passengers whose faces I recognize are there. A woman with her daughter, and another guy. We decide to go all together.
Here we are again, waiting in front of the famous gate 5. There is no sign, no screen, no announcement concerning our flight. We have to wait, that's all. Yeah, it feels like jam karet, That... My Indonesian companions don't seem more worried than that. The young woman bought buns, she offers us one to each. We chat, we joke. But I am much less relaxed than them.
Finally, shortly before 6am, we are signalled to board! Phew, no jam karet About an hour later, here I am on the tarmac still shining with rain of the airport of Luwuk.
A young man wearing the Tompotika T-shirt is there to welcome me. He takes care to get my bag and to carry it to the car where the driver is waiting for us. And here we go all three for Kampanar!
Flooding on the road
Very happy to be finally in Sulawesi, I am in a good mood despite the rotten road (jalan rusak) and gray weather. I jibe everything I know about Bahasa IndonesiaI'm doing selfies with both guys, who are thrilled. It's still raining a little at times.
And then at the end of one hour and half of road, after a fork, we must turn back. I learn a new word: Banjir. Flood.
We can not go through there, the road is impassable. We will try another route. Jam karet ...
But via the alternate route, it's the same. We soon find ourselves immobilized behind a long line of vehicles. The river of the corner and the rice fields overflowed on the road. Then we wait. The driver and the guy of Tompotika leave to the news. Not serious, I have water, cookies. The time lengthens still. Jam karet ...
It will be necessary that a car, stuck in front, decides to try the crossing and succeeds, so that the other drivers, including mine, are emboldened and imitate it.
I'll let you appreciate the atmosphere, with the little video shot on the iPhone below... 😉
Finally, we will take more than five hours, instead of the estimated three hours, to reach Kampanar. Coolness and Zenitude, I am. Wonderful Indonesia. Jam karet ... 😂
