Despite wishing I could stay in GS a little longer, I had to leave for the airport bright and early. Much earlier than my flight, in fact because that’s when the van was running. Arriving at the, uh, airport, I waited in line for about 30 minutes before being told I was on the NEXT flight and to come back in 20 minutes. So apparently there IS more than one flight a day! I met an Aussie bloke in the line who was on a four week surfing vacation with a couple mates. They’ve been pretty much everywhere in Indonesia. I need to learn how to surf and come back here. We chatted for a while – I think being the only white people in the place drew us together. That and the English.
Checking in is a process of exchanging your handwritten ticket for a handwritten boarding pass. On the way down, I had to pay a weight surcharge for my bag. I guess domestic flights have a lower weight limit, or maybe it had something to do with our tiny plane. I was wondering if I would slip by since there’s really no electricity in the airport and they might have a scale. But there it was. No power, lights, fan, computer or anything else you would expect to see at a check-in desk, but they had their scale! Anything to make a buck I guess. Funny thing was, I looked at the only screen on the thing, and it was shot. No numbers. But the guy working it was still dutifully writing weights on the luggage tags and sure enough I had to pay extra. Maybe it’s based on size or maybe he’s really good at guessing weights. Either way, when I didn’t have exact change, the guy called what I had “close enough.” That’s not shady.
After paying the airport tax, I moved over to the waiting room. I walked through a metal detector and past a x-ray machine, but neither was operational due to the lack of power. This is part of the joke of airport security. I could walk through a place like that with explosives, get on a plane to Medan. From Medan, I could cross over to the international terminal. If the guys happened to be watching the screen as my stuff went by and saw anything, so long as it looked high-tech enough and you talked fast, they wouldn’t stop you. From there, I could get on a plane to anywhere. Not to make any of you nervous fliers more nervous…just something to think about the next time you’re practically strip searched in the US.
The flight back to Medan was an uneventful as such flights are. The skies were clearer than they were on the way out, and I got a much better look at the country. It’s beautiful, mostly uninhabited. At one point we could see a large mountain jutting out of the surface of the island (Sumatra, not Nias). I’m not used to seeing mountains that aren’t in mountain ranges. This was literally a sheer face of rock, nothing else to it. As such, there was nothing growing on it. Just the rock.
Arriving at the domestic “terminal” of the Medan airport, I got to see another side of it. It appears that there may have been a much larger airport behind the current airport at some point, but most of this building was destroyed. A couple guys were working on it, so I don’t think it’s a high priority. Near the end of the runway there were a couple planes up on blocks. Yeah, just like old cars. They had to have been there for some time, as the grass was starting to overtake them. I wish I could have taken a picture, but we were being herded along. Maybe on my next flight.
Back in the hotel in Medan, I got to take a real shower! This bathroom is a lot like the one in GS, except instead of a bucket, there’s running water. But the shower area is still just in the room (different from my last room in Medan) and you use a handheld showerhead. I did a little laundry in the sink, but just enough to get me to my next stop. The rest will take too long to dry, and I’m just here overnight.
The afternoon was spent with Theo’s family. We had lunch and talked about a great deal of things, many of which I would classify as “internal” and probably not appropriate to print here. He’s a man with an incredible breadth of experience in many places and it’s been good to talk with him. This ended up going through dinner, which we had in “downtown” Medan, at their equivalent of a boardwalk (sans water). The kid waiting on us was wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Germany” and the Nazi logo. He had no idea what it said/meant, but it was a little awkward. We were walking past the shops on the way back to the car when we came across one of those infamous Asian DVD stores. We stopped in to see if they had the latest Indiana Jones which came out the day I started this trip, much to my extreme displeasure. Sure enough, they did, and only a dollar! I grabbed a couple movies for the trip home, since I’m almost done with the reading material I brought.
But now it’s time for bed. In the (late) morning, I leave for Banda Aceh – a fascinating city I’ll post more on later – and a drive to our project in Pidie. I hear it’s quite a bit more civilized than Nias, but am still not quite sure what to expect.
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