Pekan Baru

My company has a client who has a couple of oil palm plantations in Sumatra, probably totalling 3 Singapores in size... They've an oil mill near Pekan Baru using our satellite broadband services. The system went down, and our contractor wasn't willing to commit personnel to service it. So it suddenly fell to me to fly there and get the thing working again.

Not too enthused about it. Cos when I go somewhere by car, I get to make mileage claims. And with the way my car sips petrol, I make a tidy little profit. But out in a boring little town in Sumatra, I don't get anything. And there's only 3 flights a week, I go on Tuesday, and I have to hang around there till Friday...

But it's work, so what choice have I got?

Gawd-awful early morning flight. No choice but to take a cab. Talked about Malaysia's economic disasters, past & future, the whole trip. The plane ride took off at 7.40 and I arrived at 7.20.

Luckily, the contact here met me at the airport. He slipped the customs people money to get me through without hassle. Who knows what's the going rate to smuggle in satellite transmitter parts etc... And if I let them know I'm just here to service an installation, they'ld insist on seeing my work permit/visa or something... But a couple of greens/blues/oranges/whatever greased the process far easier.

Hopped onto a car and driven almost 2hrs out of the town... Suffered a couple of minor head trauma on the way in, cos I kept dozing off in the car. But the driver was quite insistent that I see as much of his home as possible, and kept swerving the car sharply to smack my head against the seatbelt pulley. With each successive concussion, I lost more and more mental function, that it didn't even occur to me to just put the seat down and lie back until more than an hour into the journey.

They drive like maniacs here. The use of the car horn is a language all on its own. It can say a variety of things like, "Coming through!" "I'll bloody run you over if you don't get your crappy bike off the road!" "Don't you even dare think of cutting out into my lane cos I'm not slowing down for you, we'll die together if we have to."

It's better to just sleep through the nightmare and put my fate in the hands of God.

It took me all of two hours to get the thing working. After that, it's just a sad long wait till Friday.

I'm housed in some decent quarters at the mill. Room furnished with airconditioning, water heater, good spring bed, 24/7 maid service, food, gym. There's even pornographic art in my room. A kind of a spooky drawing of a topless kampung girl that reminds me a bit of Nang Nak. Small wonder that the previous occupant of the room took down the painting and put it face towards the wall.

I came prepared with appropriate 'desert island literature'. Some quasi-science/philosophy/art reading material that I prepared years ago. The kind of book that'll give you 6-12mths of reading in case you're stranded alone in a desert island... Gawd, it was boring!! I read a review of Godel, Escher, Bach in an issue of The New Scientist. I guess I'll eventually power through it somehow. For the same reason why people read A Brief History of Time.

The sex book I bought was much better reading. A lot of fascinating anecdotes on sexual cannibalism, stag horns, peacock sex, huge penises, etc. Oh, Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. It only *seems* that biologists think about sex all the time. But really, Gould writes very good stuff. He even wrote an essay on Lee Kuan Yew's eugenic government policies.

But the book I really wanted to read was Dan Simmons' Olympos. But I only have about 5-6 hrs of charge on my PDA, and there was no way to recharge it. Be assured that I'll be ranting about this book in a later blog...


Back to my living arrangements... The main door gave me a small reason for concern... There's a huge lead pipe for barricading the door with. What's up with that?

Is there some danger of the peasants revolting against the bourgeois? (Isn't it ever so cool to be able to put in a word of French to class up your vocabulary?)

Well, it appears that there had been some small trouble before.

The roads radiating from the main town are speckled with random small villages. Some village thugs have a habit of stopping the oil palm trucks and collect a 'toll' of a couple of fruits. They do this enough, and get a small truck load, and then come to the oil mill to try to sell the ill-gotten goods back to the people they stole it from.

The barricade, and the two guard-posts on the way to the quarters are necessary measures after an incident.

It's a sad, but not altogether surprising, state of affairs. What do the locals here have going for them? They've got a bit of land, and the short-sighted sale of which is only a one time source of income. The only industry around is logging, saw-mills, palm plantations and the palm oil mill.


And another unusual industry I noticed on the way in... I saw a roadside shop selling gallon bottles of 'bensin'. That's benzene, isn't it? And I thought, cool, why not? Even I have times when I felt that I could do with some mutagenic industrial solvent. Maybe there's some local industry that uses the stuff, and there's a market for gallon bottles of the stuff...

Then I saw more and more roadside stalls selling this. WTF? What's the mystery market for benzene here? Do they huff the stuff to get high?!

Then I found out that 'bensin' is indon for gasoline. And 'solar' is diesel. Ooookay... That makes more sense... They've got no petrol stations outside of the town centre. So, entrepreneurs will motor into town, buy up a couple of containers of the gasoline, and bring it back to his village and re-sell them at a mark-up.

The coolest thing though, is that nobody makes a fuss when you light up a fag at these petrol stations. Not many places around lets you satisfy your nicotine cravings while you're filling up your vehicle.


Anyway, finally Thursday comes around, and I left the oil mill. Early morning flight on the Friday, so took a room in town. Got to see a bit of the town centre. Had 250,000 rupiah in my pocket, and nothing to spend it on.

But did manage to buy 48packets of IndoMie. They're less than RM2.00 for 6pkts, where I have to pay RM3.30 for 5pkts in KL. And the Indonesian version tastes better than the Malaysian one. Well, at least I won't go home empty handed.


While I'm talking about travelling... I'll also mention a bit about how to get to and from KLIA.

Right after you exit the baggage claim, you can start making random eye contact with the crowd. I'm sure you'll then be approached by no less than a dozen illegal cabbies who'll charge you about RM70-80 for a ride into the city.

Or make a left, and follow the signs to the KLIA Express, where RM35 will take you into KL Sentral in 28minutes.

Or make right, and look for the KLIA Transit. It runs on the same tracks as the Express. But buy a tix to Putrajaya for RM6.20. Exit the platform at the correct stop. Buy another tix to KL Sentral for RM9.50, and go back down to the platform to catch the next train in 30min.

Thus, RM15.70 can get you into the city if you're not in a hurry.