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| Wild Orangutan!! |
It seems like at the start of this trip, every country that I entered posed some kind of annoying problem. Scamming hostel owners, dodgy visa payment options, fighting taxi drivers or some other kind of situation that made my piss boil. That all seemed to stop for a while which was kind of nice but it gave me nothing to complain about. Well, when we came to Indonesia a certain customs officer managed annoy me in a way that took me back to the good (bad) old days. When I was going through immigration I was politely informed that I wasn't in fact Kristopher Coulthard.
Thats pretty fucking weird?! I was Kristopher Coulthard the last time I checked, and I'm fairly sure that I was Kristopher Coulthard for the last 24 years. I've got a passport in my pocket that belongs to Kristopher Coulthard and the picture on it looks somewhat like me. Never mind I must be mistaken. The fella at the desk was having none of it. I'm not sure if he was bored or just a cunt (thats the first time I've dropped the C-Bomb in all my posts.....sorry Mam) but he wanted to make things difficult for me. Apparently using an internationally accepted passport isn't enough to get through immigration these days.
Oh, OK then, they must have some new super duper advanced technology that has superseded the good old passport. Not quite. I was told that I had to provide a signature.
A fucking signature?! Anyone who practices enough can learn to forge a signature! Surely actually owning the passport with my face in it is worth more than a signature? Not to worry though, I write my signature all the time, it's easy.
When I provided my signature the guy laughed at me and asked me if I was joking. I tried again. He said that it looked nothing like the signature on my passport. I explained that I was about 15 when I signed that and that my signature had developed slightly through time. Not good enough. He then started looking through my passport at all of the stamps I've collected over the years. He didn't like that. "Are you rich?" he asked me.
Of course I'm not fucking rich otherwise I wouldn't have flown in to this shitty airport on a tinpot airplane. I'm clearly on a tight budget. I think he was just trying to wind me up due to the sheer boredom of sitting in a booth all day stamping the passports of happy holiday makers. In the end I didn't really have to do anything to get through, I guess he had just finished winding me up and decided to move on to the next unsuspecting traveler. He's an idiot though, he didn't even find the kilo of weed that I was hiding in my bag (joke mam).
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| The airport express. |
A bad start for Indonesia then due to one idiot on the immigration desk. It left me with pretty small hope for the country and what it had to offer. In truth, I had no idea what we'd be doing. Laura had done her usual thorough planning using the guide book and what not but as time has passed I've grown less and less interested in reading that sort of stuff. It's so lazy but I know Laura is keen so she just tells me the crack. I was pretty excited when I found out we'd be going on a jungle trek to try and spot orangutans, climbing to the top of active volcanos, staying on the edge of one of the worlds deepest crater lakes and learning to surf. However, in order to achieve all of this it meant that we had to fly with a real ropey airline. You all know by now that I'm not the bravest of flyers so imagine how I felt when I was told we have to take two flights with "Meth-Death Airlines". It's not their actual name, but in the last 10 years they've crashed about 95% of their fleet and had to sack their pilots for being on crystal meth.
Fucking crystal meth man. But, just because Laura couldn't be bothered to take a five day bus journey on pot hole covered roads in the sweltering Indonesia heat that would of cost about three times as much, I had to get on "Meth-Death Airlines" and fly to an almost certain crash landing or mountain side. At least I would have died happy and well traveled. As I'm not writing this post from the grave you may all assume that I didn't die.
Kris 1-0 Death.
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| 5 star hotel in the jungle. |
Our time on the jungle trek could not have been better. We've done a few of these nature spotting type walks and safaris and it's usually left us feeling pretty gutted after not seeing anything. Remember our ordeal in the alleged 'Tiger Safari' in India? I was prepared to be let down again and thought that I would be over the moon to just see a glimpse of one orangutan. Well, we actually saw about 12 orangutan, 2 black gibbons, 1 grey gibbon, numerous macaques and thomas leaf monkeys and loads more of those Dino-lizard's. It was amazing. As well as the enjoyment of trekking through the jungle we were able to get pretty close to all of these amazing animals. We opted for the two day trek which included one night in the jungle. I knew it would probably be a rough night under the stars but I guess it was worth it to be sleeping in the jungle. We had spiders, snakes, dino-lizards, mosquitoes and who knows what else all over us.
Wait a fucking minute, it wasn't worth it at all. I got no sleep, had to sleep on what was essentially a rock covered in tarpaulin and woke up at 4am to the sound of a rooster making that annoying rooster noise that they make in the morning. What the fuck is a rooster doing in the jungle anyway? Forget it. I woke up groggy and aching. Luckily we didn't have another two hours of trekking, oh wait, we did. That said it was a pretty easy two hours which ended with a 45 minute raft back to the village that we were staying in so it wasn't all bad.
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| Cat shit coffee beans anyone? |
Trying the local delicacies is something that I always like to do. It's had me eating some pretty odd things though. Scorpions, fried frogs, sheep bollocks and a range of insects...and that's just the stuff I know of. Well, on Sumatra I was lucky enough to try the worlds most expensive coffee. Yeah, a nice step up from sheep balls eh? Not quite. The most expensive coffee in the world comes from the arsehole of the Civet cat. Yep, you read that right.
The arsehole of a civet cat. In a nutshell, the cat eats the beans, passes them through it's digestive system and shites them out. Then, a little Indonesian fella collects the shit, picks the beans out and pops them into your brew. As if cat shit coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world?! It tasted nice to be fair so I can't really complain but I just can't see it making the menu in Starbucks anytime soon.
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I thought the volcano was erupting but it was just
Laura landing. |
I almost died a few days ago. True story. We were climbing a volcano in Sumatra (which is dangerous enough) when I came face to face with a big old snake (species unknown). I was climbing over some rocks and noticed it when I was bout 1m away from it. It saw me and uncoiled itself, I was certain it was going to go for me. Now, as you all know, I'm a hard lad (no not in the mens showers) so I didn't yelp, didn't jump out of my skin and definitely didn't loose the ability to breathe, that would have been embarrassing. Luckily for me, instead of going for a life ending bite, it just slithered away. Later in the day when we bumped into a guide I told him of my near death experience and he said that I was genuinely lucky. I don't know what kind of snake it was but the guide told me that if it had of bit me, I wouldn't of had time to get down the volcano and to a hospital before keeling over.
Kris 2 - 0 Death.
So, we're now in Bali. It's pretty much our final stop before the Boulage ends. I can't really believe it. It feels like we've only been away two minutes and here we are at the end of our journey, or, at least at the end of this chapter. I guess going to Australia doesn't really mean the end of the trip, but we do have to find jobs when we get there so it does mean the end of a relatively stress-less life. Actually that reminds me, stress. It's weird, over the last couple of months my stress tolerance has dramatically decreased. I find myself getting stressed out about nothing. Seriously. Nothing. Last week I was trying to book a flight and couldn't get the website to accept my card details. I almost had a mental breakdown. If it hadn't of worked when it did that would of been it for me, I would have snapped and ended up going missing only to be found years later in the dense Indonesian jungle living with apes and wearing a wheely bin. I really don't know what I'm going to do when I have to get up for work everyday and deal with all of life's little stresses. Anyway, I'll report on Bali shenanigans in a couple of weeks.
*Update. My SD card still isn't working so again, no photos. I'm sorry. You'll find me in the Jungle. I'm the one wearing a wheely bin.
**Update 2. I've managed to get out of my wheely bin and sort out the photos.
Lessons Learnt This Week;
- I am not Kristopher Coulthard.
- I can chin snakes.
- Meth-Death Airways do fly one plane a year that does not crash. I was on it.
- Cat shit coffee tastes good.
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