By the time Ari arrived at Lake Toba from Medan he had been on the road for 6 hours with a share-taxi minivan full of passengers. By the time we reached Bukittinggi he’d been driving for 24 hours.
One of the reasons Sumatra gets far less tourist traffic than islands like Java and Bali is that its roads are notoriously bad. Buses and share-taxis are the most common ways to navigate the 300 miles to Bukittinggi. When I inquired at the travel office on Samosir Island, the guy selling tickets said: “This is Sumatra. Both options are bad options.” I went with the share-taxi.
The driver, a tough-looking guy named Ari, liked to drive fast. We sped through the darkness, passing cars and motorbikes by the hundreds; few vehicles passed us. Ari chain-smoked, fiddled with his cell phone, blasted techno on the stereo. He leaned on the horn as he made surgical passing moves on seemingly blind corners. He didn’t talk much.
How often is one tasked with the prospect of burning off 18 hours in a weaving, noisy enclosed space? Even if I could sleep in cars, the twisting road and incessant horn signaling between Ari and the other drivers wouldn’t have allowed me much rest. I listened to an audiobook and some music on my iPhone, but mostly I just stared out at the darkness, then the dawn, then the increasingly humid midday. I let my mind wander.
If there’s any narrative arc to be had here, it might lie in the way a person slowly makes peace with the low-stakes anxieties and discomforts of taking an 18-hour share-taxi journey. Inevitably, you have little choice but to let it take you. So I did.
One is tempted to cast a person like Ari as a baller, a speed-addicted madman behind the wheel. But for all his horn-honking and blind-corner accelerating, his attention to the road was unrelenting, flawless, reassuring. As a driver, he was a consummate professional.
Often, when we joke about the shortcomings of roads and the idiosyncrasies of drivers in places like Asia, we’re really just trying to make sense of what we don’t understand. Sumatrans travel this way all the time: Somehow it all works out.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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