Thanks Will
I'm in Lembang
Here there's loads of kids playing in groups, quiet a few people still working, walking around without masks.... Bad-azz, you know Herman, the Dutch guy living up where you are?
Back in '98 I had a holiday back home to Rotterdam and on the day that I had my flight, from Jakarta, the riots broke out. The students thought that Suharto would be landing there that day, back from his pilgrimage to Mekkah, he didn't land there after he went to a small military airport... I took the train, the toll road wasn't build yet and got out at Gambir Station. Took a taxi and things went wrong when I got on the jalan toll to the airport, tens of thousands of protesters and we got stuck in the crowd... People started to smash in the windows of my taxi and it is only because of the taxi driver's quick thinking that I got out in one piece... he managed to drive out, crying because his broken windows and he gave me a blanket to hide under.....
He drove me all the way back to Bandung....
On the tv all you saw was Chinese at the airport trying to get out of the country, offering big piles of cash for a ticket out, to anywhere.... Pandemonium....
Next morning I tried to call the Dutch embassy but they had all fled the country, talked to a panicked Indonesian working there who said he had no advice and didn't know what to do himself....
So I took another train to Jakarta and that train didn't go further than Purwakarta becaus the whole train station was on fire... I was sitting in the buses that came to pick up all passengers behind an English couple with a small child, saw them later on tv, being dragged out of a taxi, beaten up and robbed... We were dropped at Gambir station, no taxi's, the whole city was on fire, huge groups of people running everywhere, army guys with tanks shouting at me, a bule all by himself, you must be crazy!!! So I just went walking around, watching all the malls burn. Made my way to Jalan Jaksa which in those times was where all the backpacker hotels were and everything was closed and boarded up. Walking again and I finally saw a taxi. The driver was a giant with a huge afro, looked a bit like Andre The Giant and he started driving. After a while I realized he was driving in a totally wrong direction and now, for the first time I was getting worried, scared I was going to get robbed and maybe worse.... But we started talking in my still bad bahasa Indonesia and at one point I said "Alhamdulillah" and he stopped the car... Are you a Muslim??? Yes, I am a Muslim (I would have been a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Mormon, anything at all at that point), and he grabbed me, hugged me and shouted "then you are my brother!!!!!!!!" and he turned around and drove me straight to the airport....
At the airport it was quiet. Dead quiet, not a soul, nothing, nobody which was crazy, the night before it was pandemonium... Got a flight to Amsterdam very quick and was out....
I had planned to go back to Holland for 6 weeks or so but I was back in Bandung in less then two weeks and things were still pretty crazy then...
Ahhh the good old days