At Gapang Beach we walked along the beach/jungle edge for an hour and two lovely dogs adopted us and came with us for the walk. The water was a bit murky in the shallows so we walked up the pier beside an enormous abandoned resort that didn’t look very old, & jumped in the water from there.
After our snorkel we found that for the second time in Indonesia we were in a place so quiet, that there was no transport available. We approached a young man fixing a table and offered him money to drive us to Iboih village. Beside him was a motorbike with a sidecar ute tray attached. It looked like the type of vehicle that would be used to carry trays of eggs, or giant ice blocks, or palm fronds or a gaggle of primary school children. We hopped in, wearing our dripping wet snorkeling gear. I sat on top of my rubber thongs on the wooden boards to make the journey slightly more comfortable. We made it about 120 metres & ran out of fuel.
We gave our driver some fuel money & he ran off, borrowed someone else’s motorbike & zoomed off to buy petrol. He returned with a plastic bag of petrol. He bit a hole in the plastic bag & poured in the fuel and off we went.
Back in our room, we showered in our bathroom with a view of the sea, phoned our driver Ivan with the more comfortable motorbike transport & walked into town to meet him. He drove us to Japanese bunkers all around the north east coast of Pulau Weh, leftover from the Japanese occupation of 1942-3. The bunkers have the best real estate on the island. The views from them are spectacular. The horizon appears to be a million miles away.
We drove along some roads less travelled on the island. One road was so steep downhill, I thought we might tip forward in our becak & roll over, head over heels style. We passed goats clambering up a rubble covered hill & little children in their front yards yelling out to us “Hello! Photo!”
We did a little bit of four wheel driving on a dirt track and at the end of a steep downhill, we came across a gate blocking access to a bitumen road that our driver wanted to be on. Two men who were passing by helped Dave & Ivan to lift the vehicle semi-sideways, up and over the gate. We hopped back in & drove off. No problem. We headed back to our beach village, driving through beautiful forested twists & turns on the best roads we’ve encountered in Indonesia, with monkeys scampering about on the road’s edge.
