Another early morning. Although our hotel is almost next to the station, it’s the wrong station. Apparently the “cattle class” trains go from a different station and a 15 minute taxi ride takes us to there. No drama as we exchange our voucher code for real tickets, and after a 1 hour lounge the train arrives.
It’s not terrible full, but full enough that we can’t sit together. The train conductor has a uniform the average dictator could be jealous of, and to top it he also has one or two armed military police to protect him (from political assassination, presumably).
After 10 hours or so we arrive in Probolinggo.
Probolinggo should have it’s own blog. It’s hard to determine whether Probolinggo residents are just very resourceful or just plain corrupt. But in their corruption they’re also ignorant to the point of stupidity.
The bus station if 10 minutes away from the train station, and any Indonesian would take a bemo there for 5-7K. Of course the bemo would wait till it is full, but not for us – it goes straight away. This is suspicious. Suspicion is confirmed as the bemo tries to stop at various bus companies along the way, instead of taking us straight to the bus terminal. And when I pay the guy, he wants 50K. In the end he scoots off with 30K and a dent where my boot kicks his car (note: always make sure you have change).
Walking back the the bus station we do find the public busses have stopped. So a guy offers us 35K each to go to Cemoro Lawang. But this involves a fully crammed bus and some Spanish people complain this is not reasonable. A big argument ensues and the driver wants 50K each.
Fortunately we form a group of 12 with some other travellers and offer a guy 500K to dive us up – he doesn’t blink an eyelid and says yes. That’s 42K each or so, which is not bad. When we leave the other bus driver is still bickering. It’s more than an hour drive and quite dark when we get there. We get a quite nice family apartment although we have to walk past an extremely smelly garbage patch to get to the restaurant.
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