Bukittingi to Sungaipenuh

Early start- but it was no problem.. the call to prayer went off well before our alarm. Our car was waiting for us at 6:30 and we were off- by ourselves in an air-conditioned van with lots of legroom. What a wonderful way to travel. The scenery was spectacular. Most of the drive was in the Kerachi National Park- filled with tea plantations and cinnamon trees. The cinnamon trees new leaves were red- so it looked like a New England fall as we drove through the mountain roads.
As you got further into Sumatra, English was harder and harder to find, so we had to learn a bit more Indonesian and a lot more sign language and pointing. Our main challenge today was trying to get the driver to understand a “pee stop”. Amazingly, there was nothing in either the phrasebook or the dictionary to get across the concept of a “bush stop/pee stop”. John tried to explain with “urinate”- but it was met with blank stares. One would think that this phrase would be high priority for the guidebooks. We finally decided that “photo stop “would work…success. The landscape was very much like Costa Rica and the people had an “Indian” look- not the exotic Asian look of Medan. We made it to our hotel in Sungaipenuh at about 4:00. The hotel was pretty bare and fairly depressing so we caught a ride with one of the hotel staff into town and found a restaurant to park for awhile. They put a few beers in the freezer for us and we had more mie goreym and nasi goreym (fried noodles, fried rice). We were looking forward to the McDonalds in Jakarta already.
Indonesia, like Burma, was filled with young men playing guitars and singing….badly. It seemed to be the only entertainment at night- unless you had a satellite dish and could get MTV. It was a very strange place- a fairly high literacy rate - but there were virtually no bookstores or newspapers. It doesn’t bode well for the future of the country- lots of MTV junkies with no skills…..