November 25th, 2010
After more than 10 years, recently I have another opportunity to travel from Bekasi to Medan by driving a car (actually not only me but we). The car driving is only from Bekasi to Pekan Baru and the last leg of the trip was taken by Bus.
After more than 10 years surely the condition must have changed very much but some remain the same, the following pictures will tell more about the story.
Since our eye sights are not as well as 10 years ago, we planned to avoid driving in the dark and decide to stay for the night at the nearest town. We start early from Bekasi at dawn in order to be able to reach Palembang (our planned first stop for the night) before dark.
Our first fuel stop before we start the journey
The picture on the left is when we start the journey filling our car tank full of gasoline at the gas station, just to make sure that we will not stop until half way of our first day journey plan.
The drive went smooth but on the way we saw remain of an accident on the highway.
an accident on the highway
We reached the west end of Java Island (Merak crossing harbor) at 8 am right on schedule and get ready to board the ferry.
- Queuing up to board the Sunda strait crossing ferry
However the boarding process took nearly 1 hour….
Sumatra after 4 hours, see the Lampung province sign
The cruising time actually is about 2 hours but again docking and disembarking from the ferry took nearly 2 hours, so we lost more than 2 hours driving time (Sumatra is just very near but we cannot do anything).
This is not Bali but Lampung
The weather is fine and we passed through a newly developed route (a shortcut) directly towards Palembang the south Sumatra province capital. Formerly we have to pass Bandar Lampung and Metro which is about 150 kilometers additional distance. The area passed were populated by Bali trans-migrants so no wonder we saw many Hindu temples along the roadside.
Our first refueling stop
It was already late in the afternoon when we stopped to refuel and straighten our weary legs but Palembang is still quite far and unfortunately our comfortable driving speed is just around 80 kilometers per hour, so we lost much time.
Our stop for the first night
Since we agree not to drive during night-time we have to stop at last at Tulang Bawang and stay for the night here. We have to stop anyway since it was raining heavily and our line of sight distance is very near, should we forced ourselves to continue the risk of having an accident will increase dramatically.
It is day 1 and we were not able to keep with our schedule mostly because of the time lost during the strait crossing.
(Sorry if the pictures are not properly aligned I have still a lot to learn on publishing)
