There is this strange feeling I get sometimes, that I'm not doing this travelling lark quite right. Aside from the occasional stays in posh hotels, of course; if it's any consolation I'm in a little place tonight that only costs 65,000 rupiah, and has a "real travelling" squat mandi (`left-handed` toilet ;) ).

I think Pnk is rather expensive for Indonesia anyway, looking at comparative prices in other cities, like the one I'm flying to tomorrow at 6:30am. Actually I’m here now, wasn’t that fast?

I went to the equator yesterday, as you do, encountered more of what I've mostly had to put up with everywhere here - shameless ripoffs of the white guy - and made my way back as best I could and after a lovely little thali-style meal, settled into my meagre yet scrupulously clean room to read a load more comics.

I'm allowed to read comics without fear of anti-nerd reprisals, by the way. Greg met someone in Thailand also toting a laptop around, and ripped a load of stuff from the fellow's hard drive, which I then grabbed from Greg.
Now I have things to distract me like a secondhand music collection (which is pretty darned good, hence the Richard Cheese lounge versions of Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails I can't stop humming) a full season of 3 rather excellent TV series', a term I thought was self-nullifying up ‘till now, and a staggering collection of comics, which I've only ever seen in passing before but now have to come to seriously appreciate. I know the full history of Batman’s greatest enemies. I am aware of the Trust and the Minutemen. Knowledge IS power, after all.

Yes you might think it slightly geeky, but they are wonderful stories throughout and show off the most incredible artwork, and I'm happy enough with that - give me Jim Lee graphic novels over Michaelangelo any day. I'd argue they're each as good as each other, in fact. Stuff yerr’ poncy watercoloured ceiling Mickey-boy, I’d rather see grossly overmuscled superweirdos destroy each other in horrific detail, but then that might just be me…

But while plowing through a particularly dark tale of the Dark Knight a-knocking came upon my door, and it opened to reveal......a Westerner! Yes there are more of them out there, I am not alone, I can put the pretend friends away and stop having imaginary tea parties.
A german guy, predictably enough, and predictably enough he was very friendly, and had his girlfriend in tow who happens to actually be Indonesian.
Unfortunately one of the things he mentions, unassumingly, is that they came and found me because the staff here at the little guesthouse said that there was someone else who didn't speak any Indonesian much when they checked in, which is fair enough but you can imagine I was a little put out. Not by him of course, just that I thought I was getting reasonably good at it today.

Well it's natural, of course. My skills in this language aren't enough for me to always get myself understood, as proven yesterday when I boarded a ship bound for Java which would have taken 3 days to take me in completely the wrong direction, leaving me alone on the seas with hardly any money, my luggage left precariously in a room that hadn’t been paid for, and no possibility of my catching my flight, which certainly HAD been paid for.
Hey-ho. I scraped together just enough common sense and Indonesian to get me off the thing in time. Still, would have made an interesting story eh?

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Back in the guesthouse this couple and I got talking about where we were going, and went to the map pasted up on a wall in the lobby and I was shown a depressingly earnest and adventurous route that these guys had already travelled, and on to an even more demoralising game-plan of where they were going next. They had managed to penetrate Indonesia's interior, and done all of it by road and sea - the German guy had come to this part of the world from his homeland without taking a single plane, in fact. Overland from Germany to Malaysia, and boats all around Indonesia; I was starting to feel a little inadequate.

That's the thing though, and apart from the fact that, of course, with one half being Indonesian this couple didn't have to worry about ripoffs or missing out on stuff or not being able to go anywhere they wanted with ease here, they had also managed to get themselves through all of Europe and Asia to bloody Malaysia quite probably doing the same thing.

And I think of all the people who have done this sort of thing, and those who are doing it right now, and all the things I hear about about wonderful awakenings and fantastic experiences and all these wonderful people, and I think of my own impressions of people and places and think I must either be some sort of total bastard, or everyone else is monumentally dappy and naive.
Or I’m just monumentally cynical, a far more likely bet.

I don't know quite why, but I don't seem to be getting to all the wonderful sights I want to see in this country - effectively, I have seen in Indonesia just 3 generic Asian cities and nothing of any real merit, and I've been here for two weeks!
Something isn't quite adding up.

Now I am on to a place called Ketaping and transfering via a flight (yes, I do seem to be taking the easy/non-eco-friendly/bloody expensive route for some reason at the moment) to Palangkan Bun which is where I need to be to get to the Tanjung Puting national park, which is where I wanted to go all along.I’m also here now as I am of course just re-checking this before posting. Funny and interesting material will be grafted in later when no-one is looking (“with special thanks to Mr. B. Hicks…” ;) )

If I had known I would have flown straight here from Singapore - my lesson from this is to not bother with idle curiosity and go straight to where I know I want to be, no need to get waylaid any more than made necessary by transport availability.
Maybe I'll add this to the `official` list of golden rules. Needless to say I want to get to Palangkan Bun (got there, no chance of booking flights though) and book my flights (yes, these have to be flights really now thanks to time restrictions) from Borneo to Java, from Bali to Australia, from Aus to New Zealand, and work out how - and how much - to get from Java to Bali taking in the volcano at Borobudur on the way.

I get the distinct impression I'll be coming back to Indonesia to see the real highlights and finish off my plans at some point in the next year. Case in point; I ain't gonna get to any small white-sanded islands and I wont be able to see the Komodo dragons on this outing. Indonesia: I'll Be Back.

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I did get to the equator eventually though, and it was great just to be there, to know I was crossing hemispheres with a single step, and to fight my way through vast crowds of schoolchildren. Schoolchildren, any age from about 12 upwards I suppose, always lend an amusing air to things in the world of the lone white male traveller in Asia.

Yes, a predictable onslaught of catcalling and jeering, probably really directed at some poor girl labelled by cruel classmates as the one who fancies the tourist, or whatever. This particular tribe of the creatures was more like a small army, and was kind of worrying, but only as much as everyone else, on reflection. Important thing to remember: this is like India again and nothing like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam etc. - it is back to the land of staring once more.
Men stare at me in the street all the time here, though of course women are less inclined (although many do). It is only natural to expect kids, especially kids in gigantic swarming groups, to take it one step further.

A flash of the ivories usually cranks them up another level too, and I must say that despite the numbers and the proven scientific equation [children = evil] x c, where c is the speed of light, it is a lot more reassuring and non-threatening than being stared at relentlessly by a group of twenty-something men lurking in a shadowy doorway on an otherwise deserted sidestreet at 11pm.
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But continuing my theme of bitching about the place (I’m only bitter because I really wanted to come here) even getting to the equator was annoying/silly - I went for a ferry or boat, found the `Pelni Penumpang` terminal (Pelni is a boat operator across the whole country, Penumpang means `passenger`) and sidled timidly up to the gates for I did have not the slightest fucking clue what to say here - without the reassuring bulk of my phrasebook in my pocket most of what I do know cruelly deserts me under any kind of stress whatever - and I thought I got my vague point across (in direct translation I believe I said "sorry, errr, where, errr - to equator? I go..to equator??" *points at big ship* yes?" which isn't the best I must admit) and was ushered hastily towards the boat.
Ship.
It was suspiciously large to just go across one river (it is a big river, but still, it was a bigger ship if you follow me) and clambered up the boarding ladder and mooched about on board for 5 minutes before realising just how much this could fuck up my day if I was wrong, and begged for help at a counter that sported the English designation for stupid tourists (Information/Help/Cyanide tablets available) but which supported no English-speaking staff.

Just in time someone passed who probably guessed what was happening, I remembered not to ask leading questions and stammered out something that might possibly have meant "Where is this damn thing going?" and after hearing the name of a big city on Java, I ran away to the inevitable laughter and catcalling from everyone on that side of the vessel, mocking me all the way across the dockside.

I mean yes, it is funny when some muppet who doesn’t even speak the right language almost accidentally boards a ship they really do not want, but it would be kind-of nice if they waited for said muppet to leave before laughing about it.
But that just isn't Asia - and I was laughing just as much myself at that point, truth be told.

Afterwards it turned out to be a good tactic as I just needed a speedboat (not an 80-thousand-tonne cruise ship, then) to get across, or failing that, anything with an engine, perhaps even just a rowing boat and a big umbrella (it was a cloudless midday) and one of the staff in the terminal actually walked me a few hundred metres, out of the compound, down the docks to some random fishing boat kind of affair and arranged passage across the waters.

I was to sit in the captain's cabin, which was unfortunate for the captain because he practically had to remove a limb to accomodate me. The cabin was small, cramped, and lined with botched-together "instruments" and a hundred thousand million bits of wiring. The two controls were, I joke not, a go-cart or bumper car steering wheel, and a piece of scaffold pole with two - non-matching - bicycle handlebars hammered into the top used for fine steering. These were connected to the murderous whirring machinery standing between me and the briny depths by bare wiring, gaffer tape and a series of inadequately-updated offerings to Jesus, Allah and Moses, which somehow still managed to keep it together to get across the water with only ONE complete collapse and failing of the engine, which saw a muttering captain throwing the floorboards of the damned bucket all over the place to disappear into the unpleasant reaches underneath the cabin.

There were three other guys sitting out on the bench at the front, they loaded up crates of drinks and food and various comestibles before setting off, and 6 minutes later bizarrely stopped at a phantom rusting ship anchored a hundred metres out in the water from the other side of the river and unloaded all the crates onto it along with themselves. I'd been noting this small-ish ship for a few days and wondered, as always, how seemingly abandoned vessels often stay anchored on busy shipping routes for indefinite periods of time, often years, by the look of them.

I surmised there was some kind of low-level smuggling deal going on as we stopped there for these three and all the many crates of stuff to be onloaded, and they were to be left there. Maybe it's a gambling den, as it has been outlawed now in this country. Meh.

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I don't mind what I paid for it, the guy obviously needed the money given the state of his boat, but a private chartered speedboat costs 15,000, a ferry ticket (from the right terminal…) costs 3000, and to drive the road route takes an hour in a proper car-taxi and is 50,000.
He made me cough up 50,000 and he was going there anyway; He may have refused to talk about price before we left which is a sure sign you're not getting the real deal, but sod it; in reality that is only £2.90 or so. There is still that steady drain on resources from every angle however. Constant and relentless overcharging is what the lone traveller is up against and it doesn't make you feel good when you're not working, that's all I'm saying.

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I walked back from the equator monument in the beating sun for half an hour, then stopped in some little roadside shack for a drink. Asked about a taxi place and lo and behold, the owner's mate had a bike, and was an impromptu ojek (motorcycle taxi). He even had a helmet that fitted, although I had to tie the straps together myself, and the ride back was a pleasant an hour as you can spend riding pillion in busy Asian traffic. It cost me 50,000 too and I was more than happy to pay after the heat and the schoolchildren and the ease with which the other guy ripped me off.
And anyway, he had to ride a full hour back, too and that is fair enough in my book.

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... I can't help feeling like I'm severely missing out though. I haven't seen any kind of natural wonder at all and I'm halfway through my visa allowance. You can't tell me that's right.
So on to Tanjung Puting national park and a few days there hopefully right in the heart of the forest, whether on a boat or hiking from station to station, I have no idea.

They say the next town is amazingly clean (they rather lied on that count, now I’m here…) and is the launching pad for the park, so with a bit of luck I'll find fellow travellers and the cost of those big sleeper boats can be shared out, because as it is I'm going to have to pay 300,000 Rp. every day just to be there with a guide - which is mandatory - and the boats cost almost double that, and then there's food, too.
At a million rupiah a day, that's too rich for my blood, and I'll only be able to go in for two or three days at the most, not seeing much of what I wanted.

Let's hope for a little company, eh?

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Got here and, well bless my sould, it’s only costing me 4 million rupiah for a three day tour.
Prepare sarcasm injectors!
“cynicism canisters fully primed, captain!!”
Fire when ready….