Entry #2: Midnight Coffee & Conversations over Google Translate
The Bukit Lawang Diaries
6 January 2025 - the drive from Medan to Bukit Lawang - 21:30
Through immigration, cleared customs, IMEI slots registered. I’m in. Welcome to Indonesia.
The airport in Medan is, as also the city, small. There were isolated cultural installations - I was too tired to snap any pictures of them - and assorted tea houses and eateries that I now remember as no more than one gelatinous mass.
I noticed a gaunt man with active eyes and a tried face holding up a sign with my name — I’d never been collected from the airport by a driver holding a named sign, the novelty! He introduced himself as Arief: the Trust’s driver.
We pattered through basic greetings: how are you, where are you from, how were your travels, but we simply did not have the means to communicate. He spoke more English that I did Bahasa Indonesia - none, that is to say. Each time one of us tried to spark a conversation, the other shrugged, waved their hands awkwardly in air-circles, and laughed.
The car smelled of stale cigarettes and played what I assumed to be Indonesian folk rock; there wasn’t a common word between us, but we nodded our heads in tandem to the music regardless. Experiencing Indonesia after India was like experiencing the UK after living in America — different in significant ways, but the strangest little details offered familiar comfort: the black and white stripes painted on the curbs, the way drivers communicate using the horns and headlights — though markedly more polite here — the neon-lined sleeper buses that careered down the motorways.
It took all I could to say awake during the four-hour drive from Medan to Bukit Lawang. I failed in that mission when we stopped to get petrol — damn! I flashed in and out of sleep. Time seemed at once to pass in great chunks and stand perfectly still. We sang to a cover of Yusuf / Cat Steven’s Wild World in a strange bonding moment that transcended our language barrier.
During one of my spells among the lucid, he signaled that we had about ninety minutes of travel left. My journey that would ultimately cumulate in 40:33:52 of travel was coming to an end, and I could taste whatever was to come next. He pulled into a gravel parking lot — it was approaching midnight — and signalled that he needed a coffee. Caffeine was probably the last thing I needed standing nose-to-nose with a much needed sleep, but I followed him in against my better judgement.
The air was warm and muggy, even in the dead of night. A layer of sweat quickly encapsulated my person, something I’ve now come to know simply as a facet of life here. A covered corridor lined with polished teak tables opened into a courtyard; people were chatting and chain smoking over many emptied glasses of coffee. Arief greeted warmly the families and groups of young men alike — a regular, it seems.
He ordered two coffees and a plate of tempe goreng, fried slivers of fermented soybeans, with a chili sauce. The coffee was thick and sweet and spiked with condensed milk: a meal of its own. Spicy! he shouted at me as I chowed down on a piece of sauce-covered tempe; I’ve many times overcame the stereotype that muzungus/gordas/blondes/bules cannot handle their spice, and it fills me with such glee every time I look someone in the eyes and down mouthfuls of capsaicin-rich treats. He laughed, and I laughed back.
Arief lit a cigarette and whipped out his phone; he spoke furiously into it. He turned it in my direction — the light hurt my eyes — how long was I going to be in Bukit Lawang? I whipped out my phone in suit and began typing: a year if all goes well, perhaps more. His eyes widened and a restrained smile broke across his face: out of sadistic pity or excitement, I still wonder? How long have you been a driver — twenty-three years — wow, so you must have some pretty exciting stories from your journies. He nodded but did not share and lit another cigarette. How much are a pack of smokes here — for the cheap ones, one pound; for expensive cigarettes, three pounds — Damn!
We carried on for a time; the caffeine and second hand smoke breathed life back into me. I wouldn’t sleep much that night on account of it: a worthy sacrifice. Buildings faded to jungle, to palm trees and humongous leaves. The level terrain dipped up and down and up again. We entered a thick fog, which I took to be the jungle’s maw. Isolated buildings and lamp posts passed us by, until suddenly the trees opened to the town of Bukit Lawang.
Arief and I parted ways, and life at the Trust had begun.
