Thursday, December 11, 2008

(Un)Welcome to the Jungle

Day 275
The next morning I woke up already regretting my decision. What could I have been thinking? I knew that I was in for two days of misery, but for some reason I didn't want to walk away from my spontaneous decision and my deposit. It wasn't peer pressure, but sheer stupidity.



The ride out of Medan took forever. We had to stop at several atm's because outside of cities they are very limited, if there are any at all. When we finally did get out of the rather dirty and depressing city the road turned frightening. I've heard of scary road, but I guess that this was my first real experience with one. There were huge pot holes and in some places there were more holes than actual road. Bits of it were not paved at all. I think that there may have been landslides recently in some areas.

The town I was headed to, Bukkit Lawang, had suffered a huge flood a few years ago. Tourism almost completly stopped and is still rather slow. About 300 people died, including a few tourists. The town was almost totally swept away. Indonesia has suffered from more than its fair share of disasters in the past few years. This has kept tourism way down.

Besides the jungle there is a large orangutan rehabilitation center. Several animals that had been rescued here have been released back into the wild. The town had been on an early itinerary of mine, but I cut it due to time constraints.

When I arrived the regret of my decision and the frightening road had me in a really sour mood. This was further aggravated because the promised internet cafe was not open. I really didn't think that I was great company, so I simply went to my room to shower and veg.

I could have turned back, but for unknown reasons I paid the rest of the bill. I think it had something to do with my need to follow thru with what I said I would do. I also sorta thought that this might work out like my other spontaneous decisions have. So far they have worked out for the best, so I don't know why this one had me so upset.

After dinner we all called it an early night. I stayed up late tossing and turning trying to decided what to do. On the one hand I didn't want to waste the money, on the other hand I didn't know if it was really worth being completely miserable over.

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