The Road to Hotel Baru

How many people can you cram into a mini-bus? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? John's count had the total at 22, but, from where he was sitting, he couldn't see the front floor. Once again the rule that you can always squeeze in one more applied. With our packs on our laps and the blood circulation quickly draining from our legs, we were taken from the ferry terminal in Java to Bunyuwangi.

Lest you think we have finally mastered the art of getting where we wanted to go, let me say that finding this van took no less than 40 minutes and entailed endless babble in both English, our side, and Indonesian, everyone else's. In the end, no one understood the other but everybody in town was pulling us onto their van, bus, motorbike, bicycle cart and donkey to get to the famed Hotel Baru that, despite everyone's "Ya,Ya," no one seemed to have heard of.

Finally in a van, we sat like sardines trying to look out the window for a hotel sign. "Hotel Baru, Hotel Baru," the driver called and the bus skid to a stop. There was a lot of pushing and stepping and we were deposited onto a road, no hotel sign in sight. Little eyes were on us instantly. Every child on the street was staring at us. "Hotel Baru?" I asked one of them and a small finger pointed down a long house-lined alley. We started walking. Again every eye was on us as if they had never seen backpackers before. Apparently the Hotel Baru, listed as a favorite for travelers, doesn't get a whole lot of business.

We found the hotel around a corner and checked in. We took the air-con room with private mandi for US$12. We thought we would splurge this time. After the day we'd had, walking into an air conditioned room was like walking into heaven. I didn't even mind the dirty moth-eaten velvet cushioned chair, the jumble of bare wires hanging from the ceiling light fixture or the closed in odor. I was finally cool and that's all that mattered.

I felt filthy. I had planted my butt on every van seat from Denpasar, Bali to here and breathed in enough diesel exhaust to choke a horse. I desperately needed a bath. But hunger came first. Breakfast seemed like ages ago, which it was, and lunch had been only a few sweet bread buns (everything in Indonesia is sweet) and some cookies. We dropped our packs and headed down the street for something to eat. But before any of that happened, we met Karl Herbert, or Abdul as the Indonesian Government knows him. But that's another story.