Dave: The day that smiling and waving stopped working

It’s fair to say that our time in Indonesia didn’t started out well.  After arriving in Medan on Sunday evening, we had hopes of collecting our on Monday or Tuesday and setting off to try and make it to Dili in East Timor in time for the ship to Darwin. Unfortunately, Monday and Tuesday came and went, along with Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  Unbelievably, the place we’ve spent the most time in the entire trip was also probably the most dull and unpleasant of anywhere.  The endless games at Timezone were starting to lose their appeal by Friday.  Each day however we were getting new news about the car and each day it seemed like it would be arriving ‘any time now’, meaning we couldn’t leave Medan to find something else to do.  Finally however, on Saturday morning our container was unloaded around lunch time and we were on the road again at last.  With almost two weeks taken up by transporting the car from Malaysia to Indonesia, we had some catching up to do in our schedule.

We have developed a strategy along the trip for dealing with officialdom and beaurocratic procedures which can be best described as ’smile and wave’.  It’s incredible the number of circumstances which this will carry you through.  When the police look like pulling you over, a smile and wave will send you on your way.  In Pakistan, a smile and wave allowed us to cruise through half the highway tollbooths without needing to stop.  The height of smiling and waving came when we arrived to Laos and passed through the entire entry process for customs with a smile and a wave. (This actually almost brought us unstuck on the way out, since we didn’t have any of the correct import paperwork, but a smile solved that problem too).  Driving down to the ferry from Java to Bali however it finally stopped working.  While smiling and waving, our third police car for the day pulled us over regardless to check all our paperwork. First they needed to see drivers licenses (the first time we’ve been asked in the entire trip!), then car paperwork, then customs paperwork.  After we’d produced all that, they decided that they were going to take us to the station to register our details.  Given our very tight schedule, we didn’t have time for a delay like that and tried to explain the problem.  They decided instead to escort us to the ferry, which sounded OK, but then things got worse.  At the ferry terminal we had no less than fourteen police all standing around thinking up thinks we needed to do.  These included having to register at the police station, get insurance for the car (which we already have) and register at the Australian embassy, which was six hours drive in the wrong direction!  After standing and arguing for close to an hour it became obvious nothing was going to happen soon.  I managed however to wrangle our paperwork back and we simply got in the car and drove to the ferry gate, still with the police shouting at us to stop.  After getting up at 6am to make an early ferry, we were pretty annoyed at the whole episode and generally not in a great frame of mind to finally be on a ferry 2 hours after we could have been.  In hindsight it was obvious that the police were making life hard for us simply to try and get a bribe from us.
Our bad mood however was almost instantly turned around when a young girl in the car next to us said ‘Hello, do you speak English, I’d like to practice’.  We spent the whole hour on the ferry over to Bali chatting to Ivana and Regina in the back seat who were translating for Mum and Dad in the front.  The whole family were lovely, and it was great just talking to them and telling them about our trip, as well as hearing about them.  We drove off the ferry to Bali feeling very different about Indonesia.

After one week and five ferries, tonight we are in Ruteng on Flores and will drive down tomorrow to Ende to find out if we can get one last ferry to get us to Timore in time for the boat to Darwin.