Ashore in Sumatra
Lest I convey the message that life is unending hard work ( “ You’d damn well better not say that in your blog!”), we did have dinner last night in one of the luxury restaurants. The food and wine were excellent and an added bonus was that by the time we’d finished, it was too late to go to the cabaret!
When we awoke, the ship was gliding into the harbour at Sabang, a small town on an island about the size of the Isle of Wight at the north west tip of Sumatra. The hills were still pleasingly well-covered with tropical forest and we had great hopes for our day ashore.
The first hint that we might have got things a bit wrong had come the previous day when at the excursions briefing the previous day, the speaker admitted that tennis was the first time the ship had called here and that we were guinea pigs for what they had to offer! We remembered this over breakfast in conversation with a Canadian couple who said that there were just doing their own thing and had booked a taxi in advance to do their own tour. We’d never even considered this as an option.
There was something of fairground on the quayside, with a pop group, traditional dancers and all sorts of pop-up trading stalls selling the usual tat. Then total chaos as tour guides tried to link passengers with drivers and transports. After about 20 minutes, the vehicles left anyway, with or without the right people on each one. We were on a mini-bus of 8, with first stop being a locally primary school who had laid on a welcome for us. This would normally have been quite enough to see me disappear over the horizon pronto – but there was no escape! And, I have to admit, the kids were quite cute – all wanting our autograph for some inexplicable reason.
Then it went downhill. A brief stroll through some old houses that may or may not have been Dutch, a frenetic 20 minute drive to a ‘volcano’ that turned out to be some bare rocks with a bit of steam, a few bubbles of water and a foul smell, then another 30 minutes to an ‘idyllic’ beach for lunch, where lunch was a coconut and any attempt to swim severely compromised by sharp coral and only about 30 mins stopover anyway. My mood, already severely compromised by miles of being chucked about in the back of a hot mini-bus with little visibility, wasn’t improved by having to play ‘hunt the thimble’ for ‘someone’s’ best glasses on the beach!
And then we were rushed back to the boat – by which time I was feeling decidedly off colour.
By dinner time, we both had headaches and mine was worse. And no, as S acidly observed, it possibly wasn’t improved by having three glasses of red wine with dinner, having not drunk much water all day. I was in desperate need of a lie-down, and S, suspecting that it was all a ruse to avoid the cabaret again, went off to see it by herself in something of a huff. Things deteriorated even further because when she came back, I was sound asleep and unfortunately her key card wouldn’t work, resulting in a considerable amount of yelling, bashing and kicking the door before she could wake me. Then, there was an argument about the time (we keep changing the zones as we head west) and how to set the alarm clock for morning Pilates (!).
Somehow, this was all my fault and I felt this to be very unsympathetic of my suffering…
But soon, the boot would be on the other foot!
As the sun set and as our ship slid out of the harbour at Sabang, it was also leaving the Malacca Strait, where the shallow waters are choppy on the surface but have no affect on anything larger than a rowing boat. Now, in the dark, we were leaving South East Asia behind and heading out in to the vast blue waters of the Indian Ocean – what sailors of old called ‘The Rolling Deep’!