Coming into Jakarta, I had no idea what to expect – a lot of friends had told me to try and avoid it because megacities never tend to have anything to do. So with a forty dollar flight ticket in hand and a close friend who was up for anything, we were practically looking for trouble in whatever corridor it may appear. With little plans and nothing to see in Jakarta, we made our way to Bogor, a city just a short ways away. It was there, at Hostel Bogor that the owner (who we affectionately called Mom) gave us an ultimatum; we could choose to see the regular museums around the area, or she could send us on a three day quest that she described as, “Impossibly confusing but really fun.” To us, this was taken directly as a challenge to our frail masculinity and was no longer a choice. Three days it is.
She drew out the instructions on the back of a crumpled piece of recycled paper – take three busses, hire a motorcycle to take you to the base, stay at the base camp, ascent the mountain and then do it in reverse. “An easy 6 hours” she laughed. That was a lie. Bags in hand and with little expectations, my friend and I walked out of the hostel feeling like Frodo and Sam in the Fellowship of the Ring.
Our first challenge was the busses. Out in rural Indonesia the concept of a bus is far different than in the West, anything can be a bus. If you slap a number on the back of your broken horse cart, you can officially operate as a bus driver and make some cash on the side. The only way we could identify which busses we needed to get to was via the three route numbers she had written – 3, 9, 6. Catching the first two busses was simple. We were able to deduce through Google Translate assisted conversations with locals where we should be getting on and off. But by the time we had reached our third bus, the language barrier and time was against us. We had overshot our bus stop riding the 9, the sun was setting and we had no way of getting back. Frantically, we came up with options – sleep in the local KFC, walk three or four hours back the opposite direction or ask the locals. Choosing the last option, we started asking around. After an hour of what felt like panhandling, someone finally responded to us – “stay at my house” he said. We knew for sure we were going to get kidnapped.
So there we were, riding on the back of a motorcycle of a man we had never met with complete trust that he wasn’t in the market for selling small immigrant boys. We arrived at his home and met his (incredibly lovely) family. We spoke few words past the initial “hellos” and soon he showed us to a room, a concrete floor with two single beds on it. Still better than a KFC washroom. Gratefully but cautiously, we fell asleep. To our surprise, we hadn’t gotten kidnapped at all, this man was just being incredibly nice to two foreigners he had never met before. In the morning, his wife was waiting with breakfast already cooked and we proceeded to ascend the mountain, hiring a guide to take us there. After seeing the incredible views, we made our way back through the rain to our salvation at Hostel Bogor. There, with bated breath we laid our bags down and went for some shut eye.
Reflecting back, what shocked me most about this trip wasn’t how crazy the circumstances were (and heaven knows how crazy they were). What shocked me the most is that we fully put our lives into the hands of five or six strangers and at the drop of a dime, any one of those people could have completely ruined us. For the most part, we were lost and had nobody understood what we were saying; we would have been in major trouble for sure. So apart from the memories, what I got from this was a lesson in humility and human kindness. The people with so little and so much more motivation to do us harm did quite the opposite and left an impression on me that I’ll never forget.
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