Wednesday 22nd August 2012
Today is our big train journey!
We are up at 4.30a.m. and in the taxi by 5 with a fried egg sandwich boxed up ready to go, courtesy of Ritasona Roebuck Hotel.
We arrive at the dreaded train station before 5.30 ready for our 6a.m. train. If you read the last blog page, you will know we are unsure of whether we actually have a train ticket.
We approach the ticket office and hand over our receipt, the man takes it and exchanges it for our tickets, hooray! We can believe it, Hari was true to his word, we feel quiet guilty for not trusting him now.
The train is an economy train, but it does have air-con and 'squatter' toilets, which incidentally, goes straight out into the track below. We won't be drinking or eating much, for the next 15 hours then!
It leaves on time and is not too crowded. Matt has the window seat, as I have picked up another book at the hotel (Fifty Shades of Grey, of which I new nothing about, when I chose it!! Wow!!).
The seats are not very comfortable, so when a porter hands out cushions, we gladly accept one. Two hours later another porter appears asking for money for the cushion, (okay it's only 28p or so), but it's a very crafty way of getting money for them, because by that time you are as comfortable as you are ever going to be, on such crappy seats, so you agree to pay because you can't bare to be any more uncomfortable, than you already are!
The views are amazing. Matt is watching Java wake up, as we thunder through the towns and small villages. He watches as they wash themselves, their clothes and their children in streams and irrigations ditches, unfortunately, this is also where they go to the toilet! and most their rubbish seems to end up in the gullies too! We thought Bali was bad for rubbish, but with Java's 134 million people you can imagine how bad the litter is (or maybe you can't!).
We seem to stop at every station we pass! No wonder it is going to take so long. So it gradually fills up, ramadan is not the best time to travel in Indonesia. We now have people sitting opposite us, our knees touching.
Everyone is very smiley. They all talk to each other, (we noticed in Oz in particular, when catching trains and buses, no one talks these days, they just sit with their ear pieces in listening to music or are on their phones texting.) We get lots of looks and pointing. I don't think a lot of westeners catch the economy train! One young girl of about 7 walked past us, had a good look, turned around and returned a minute later with her friend, so she too, could have a look at us!
One couple got on with their young daughter and said 'hello, how are you?' in perfect english, she sat next to us for while, they were lovely. She went to university to study to be an english teacher. When she graduated, she couldn't afford 'the bribe' to gain a goverment position, she now works for a private company. I ask her if she has travelled at all, 'Not really', she says, but she has a dream of going to Europe one day. She went to Uni with 2 people for the Netherlands, whom she has kept in contact with. When they get off the train, the husband shakes our hands and the lady kisses me on both cheeks and shakes Matt's hand. I wish her luck and hope that her dreams come true one day.
We pull up into one station a someone flicks a cigarette butt out of the door onto the track, Matt nudges me and say's, 'look at this', on the next track is a goods train, with lots of petrol tankers in a row, which is fine until it starts to pull away and you can see that some of the tankers that have been emptied along the way, start to spill their dregs as the valves have not been closed! You can see the fumes and smell the petrol as it starts to move forward. It is a disaster waiting to happen, but fortunately, not today! Health and safety.... never heard of it!
The scenary at times has been beautiful - rice terraces, tabacco fields and volcano's. It has also been and eye-opener, when you see the houses that back onto the tracks and the litter.
We eventually arrive at our destination at 8.30p.m. What a day!!
