A tour to bada valley with….?.
The only other people early to breakfast are… well, are they our tour mates? Clara and Tim a young German couple in there twenties and we are off to see megaliths.
Jefri is our driver. He has just a few words of English. Yay, a captive subject.
I start the questions with one we get asked
Children, yes, but gone to god.
Bugger, oh sorry. It’s okay, it was long ago.
We stopped and saw fabulous pitcher plants a height of twenty plus centimetres. There is weird curly moss along the roadside. And what looks like bracken fern..it’s Pakis fern and you can cook the tips.
At one point Jefri says the road goes down for 4km. . The brakes are hot and we stop at a very modest warkop / coffee shop.
But the toilet sign was ;
Be clean. Don’t leave rubbish. If you have a sanitary napkin throw it in the river.
A scooter with an eski box on back zooms past. Jeffri tells us he comes from a town near Tentena. Its an 8 hour trip everyday with one box of icecream. Along a potholed mountain road. I urged Jeffrey our driver to go faster to catch him.
We pass roadworks vehicles idle . Lots of roadworks but all with idle machinery. Nganggur
Today’s word; Nganggur / Idle sleepy.
It’s taken more than 3 1/2 hours to cover 70km. Lots of road washed away and holes. It’s not a priority road. There are not many villages.
There is a truck loading bags of rice beras, harvested rice, in the path. We park and walk.
First megalith. The sign doesn’t say much other than its protected ..don’t move it deface it ect. Hmmmm
We walk through the coffee plantation. Kokao / cocoa green brown red yellow.. ripe when they are yellow.
I ask questions
Jefri picks one, says suck the fresh white flesh around the seed . Don’t eat the seeds. You can eat one but not lots says Jefri. If you are local it’s stealing but we are guests. And indeed we get the thumbs up enak from the workers. It tasted like a sweet soursop.
For the second we walked past a house they had vanilla pods laid out for sale
Just Jefri and I walk to the shelter/Pondok.
What’s for lunch I ask daging/meat. Cow? I ask, babi hutan/ forrest pig and rice.
It’s photo time, Jefri has his phone out. Should I sit on the pondok with the farmers? They grinned and shuffled to make room. I say oh I have a big bottom. Pleased with myself that I could remember the word and as I wiggled on there was a giant creak. And an even more giant roar of laughter. Steve’s favourite bit of the day. Standing 50 metres away and hearing that creak followed by the laughter.
We are always being asked by random people for photos, just the same as we are doing. Our driver tells Steve “I’m happy . ” He likes my Indonesian, likes showing us stuff.
A farmer walking past with a Sogili/eels in a bucket he caught while working in the Padi.
There is the Flattest rainbow ever. Rain coming. We head for shelter and two rice farmers converge on the shelter at same time. I notice a dead rat on a ledge looking like it had been chewed on. Or it had freshly had it’s head cut off. Jefri asks will they eat it . Yes.
Rice dehusker. This was our last stop.
The road seems even worse going into the dark. I told Jefri in Australia at dusk we would be looking out for kangaroos. ” Lucky we don’t have kangaroos in Indonesia” he says ” the Bada would eat them”.
We arrived back at our hotel after almost exactly twelve hours and need to hit the street to find dinner. Catfish Lakapan and Soto Banjar in a neat friendly family place and then it’s time to sort tomorrow’s transport and accommodation.