Sumatra Safari

Gosh I have been a bad blogger recently- partially because we have been busy and equally because I have been lazy! But I got a nice note from one of my wonderful Aunts that said she likes the blog and it makes her feel like we are not so very far away, and since that was the whole point of the blog, Imma gonna keep on bloggin'-so thanks to Aunt E for being my motivation to post some more pictures and stories!

I am still reeling from my Sumatra adventures. To say I was nervous about it would be a huge understatement. There were just soooo many things that sounded miserable- lots of early morning flights, extensive car travel in a developing nation, lots of time with clients, potential for snake bites...ugh, I was so dreading this trip.

It all started in Jakarta.... the first sign that things were going to be better than expected was showing up at my fancy-schmancy hotel and being upgraded to the biggest suite I have ever seen. And, for the record, this is the 3rd suite upgrade I have had in the last 2 months- pretty lucky! This balcony is probably larger than my apartment was in NYC! Too bad I had to do work and didn't get to enjoy it properly, sigh. 

Jakarta at sunrise. Sort of pretty from this view! Unfortunately I didn't get to do much exploring of Jakarta, or enjoying of my ridiculously large hotel rooms because I had a big night of work followed by a 4am wakeup call for a 7am flight to Pekanbaru, Sumatra.

Much of the next 7 hours of my life looked like this..... jungle, jungle, jungle. 

Then we would stop, and check out some more jungle. 

Fresh oil palm fruit bunches- watched them being harvested myself. 

They go from the tree, to the truck. All we saw on the drive through Sumatra was truck loads of these massive fruit bunches heading towards their destiny of becoming palm oil. 

Well here is a photo of 1 part of the trip I was really dreading. Our schedule mysteriously didn't list a hotel on night 2... which made me fear the worst. Turned out we stayed at a guest house on the property we were looking at, and while it was not the Four Seasons, it coulda been worse. In fact, that became my motto on the trip, "This could be worse"... and it could of, but it was still awkward to share a bedroom with my client. Due diligence slumber party! 

Day 3 was dedicated to all things rubber. I guess I knew that rubber came from a tree, but well- now I really know all about it. And it was pretty cool. 

Fresh bucket of latex anyone? 

[Insert awkward Indonesian condom jokes here] Luckily for me, most of the condom jokes where delivered in Indonesian so the only parts I got were "wahwahwahwhawhaahwahhwah condom whawhawha -chuckle, chuckle, giggles, chuckle" 

Raw rubber waiting to be processed. I cannot even begin to tell you how bad this smelled. It was all I could to do refrain from vomiting on the raw materials. Didn't figure that would go over well on a business trip. 

We eventually left our rural adventures to head towards the train station to catch a train to Medan. After spending so much time in the sticks, I tried to capture a few pictures of civilization in Sumatra as well, which was difficult given that our driver was travelling at about 100 miles an hour on crowded streets, so pardon the blurry snaps! 

School bus! 

Yup, under all that stuff is a little tiny motor bike. Seriously efficient packing. 

While I thought the car ride was bad (lots of speeding, swerving, honking, passing at high speeds into oncoming traffic) the train wins the award for WORST transportation ever taken. Seriously, this train was 10x worse than the trains in India. For one, they were super stinky and dirty. Additionally, it was like riding an old wooden roller coaster. My butt literally lost contact with the stinky seats on every bump, it was a wild ride. 

And it all ended up in Medan, which has apparently been called the worst city in the world. As this, the view from my hotel room, is the only real experience I had with Medan, I will not pass judgment. I was just so glad to have a normal hotel room, to myself, Medan might as well have been Paris. 

When I first got back, exhausted and dirty, I was not having too many kind things to say about the experience. But after some additional reflection, it was a pretty cool experience. Not too many people in the world will ever have the experience to go on a road trip through Sumatra. And when I am back in NYC years from now, assigning some more junior associate to go do diligence somewhere tedious, I can tell them not to complain, because it could be worse, I could be sending them to rural Sumatra! So cheers to unique experiences! And thank god I don't have to do that again!