And so it begins!

How is it that the first day of traveling is always the most jam-packed and eventful?

Last night, actually this morning, I ended up finding a cozy spot on a tucked-away staircase and managed to sleep for about half an hour before they started letting people into the airport. As soon as I checked my bag, though, I was hit by my next big expense (after the Rp250,000 visa at arrival): Rp40,000 exit fee from the airport! I’m not even sure what I’m ‘exiting’ because I’m just going from the check-in desk to the terminal and my flight is domestic. Even the locals have to pay it, though, which seems like it would be quite a stiff price hike for them.

Finally!! After sleeping on a row of benches at the gate for another few hours I hear what I think is good news: “Blah blah Indonesian blah blah PADANG blah blah Indonesian blah.” (BTW: It’s pronounced Pah-dahng) I assumed this was a boarding call, which fortunately turned out to be true, and so made my way down to the tarmac to the plane. An hour or two later I’m looking out the window at mountains blanketed in lush jungle that covers everything from the tips of the mountains straight down to a thin strip of clear, sandy beach. Tiny waves crash on even tinier rocks and the newly-risen sun reflects off of the ocean in a million and one sparkles. Trust me, I would jump out of this plane if I thought I could survive the impact.

And then I’m on the ground, ready for my first up-close look at Indonesia. The first thing you notice is that it’s green EVERYWHERE (sorry, but there was no, great show-stopping gift has lear and we remembered).. The jungle is omnipresent, only giving way to rice fields, small colorful houses, and roads. Children scatter like (and among) chickens outside wooden houses raised on stilts. Fat old men sit and yell at fit young men as they spar in a decaying outdoor boxing ring. Small mosques with steel minarets poke through the trees. Tricked-out opelets, public mini-buses, go screaming by with massive plastic grills and stickers showing Mickey Mouse, Avril Lavigne and gang signs, announcing their presence by blaring Michael Jackson.

After a ridiculous fiasco with the bus that involved a lot of me yelling, “No, you take me here or give me back money”, I finally get to my place, Hotel Imanuel, and get a tiny room located in a small outdoor courtyard where the staff do laundry and eat lunch. The price is an outrageous Rp150,000, but after doing some research I found it was about average. Hungry, I walk out along the street looking for a restaurant that I would never end up finding, but as I’m checking the addresses on the buildings and waiting to cross the street a red van pulls up. Enter: Iyeli, a native Padangian girl about my age.

Over a really good lunch of blackened honey chicken and fresh apple juice, Iyeli says that she likes to help tourists as much as she can, and she certainly provides a lot of good information and speaks English very well. She says her boyfriend is an Australian surfer (not that her parents know about this because he’s not Muslim), and he just goes around SEA looking for the perfect wave. In typical fashion for this part of the world, he’s 45. We chat about boys for a while, but she’s got to get to check on her store (she sells mobile phones as well as works as a tourism consultant and civil engineer, for which she’s also finishing her thesis) and exhaustion from my early-morning adventures has set in so we make plans to meet for dinner later and she drops me at my room.

After an hour’s sleep in what had become quite a warm room, I felt ready to go see the sights. The cultural museum was only a few minutes away and had beautiful traditional architecture. I love how the ends of the roof slope upward so dramatically and gracefully. The best exhibit had mannequins dressed in the traditional clothes of the various peoples of Indonesia, but there were also models of traditional homes and the standard displays of traditional food agriculture. I’d have taken more photos, but I didn’t want to stop walking because I was being stalked by a small group of schoolboys. Just the first awkward moment of many, I’m sure.

There isn’t a ton to see in Padang, but where I went next was what I most interested in: the Indian Ocean. The beach and water weren’t overly clean, unfortunately, and there was a fair amount of detritus washed onto shore, but the water was warm and from time to time huge waves would crash against each other. It felt good to stand a while and just watch Along the beach, tired-looking men and women watch TV in squalid stalls as they wait for someone to come along and buy water, juice or boiled turtle eggs in shades of ivory and pale blue. The eggs sit inside clear plastic bags, making what look like thick columns of ping pong balls.

Next, I walk southeast to the harbor, where colorful boats are moored and across the river small houses cling to the edges of the hill. The area is a bit ramshackle; you can still see signso f the earthquake and tsunami of 2004 in the cracked roads and ruined buildings. Reconstruction seems to be going very slowly here, although there are some surprisingly nice and new places, one of which I step into for a snack while I wait for a sudden rainstorm to end. My young waiter, like most Indonesians, speaks decent English and assumes that by coming into his restaurant I have just given him permission to practice with me. He’s endlessly curious, with questions about the US, my work, my tattoos, and, of course, why I’m single. He just keeps coming back to how he “thinks it’s better for [me] that [I] have man and a family”. Thanks, kid, I will go to Singapore right now and take care of that. It goes without saying he asks to be friends on Facebook.

The rain finally ends and I meet Iyeli to go for a quick driving tour. We start across the river, and since the sun has gone down you can see into the colorful homes—everyone is watching TV, it seems—and along the docks where wooden boats seemingly too small and fragile for such a powerful ocean bob lazily in shallow water. Our next stop is further north at the official Padang Beach, which I think should be renamed Umbrella Beach for the hundreds of them stuck in the sand. They’re anchored very low to the ground in order to almost totally conceal the two chairs beneath them, where young Muslim couples sit at night and do what they aren't supposed to even think about. Apparently, the police swing by from time to time to round up these unmarried law breakers.

Finally, we’re ready for dinner. After driving for quite a while looking for a place that serves good bakso and sio mai, the dishes I’ve been told to try, we settle into a side-of-the-road dive. I try not to think about where they get their drinking and dishwashing water from. Iyeli tries to teaches me some Indonesian while I try to choke down the mystery meat in front of me, and then she makes a really interesting comment that gets me thinking. She compared Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries that are about the same age, which are in the same region of the world, and have a similar language but which have vastly different economies and general levels of development. Iyeli thinks Malaysia is in a better situation because it used to be a British colony, whereas Indonesia was under Dutch control. According to her, Britain gave much more support to the nations that broke away from the empire in the 20th century than the Dutch did: “Look at Malaysia, Hong Kong and especially Singapore. The only place they screwed up was India, but that wasn’t Britain’s fault. Indian people are just impossible to work with.” I’m sorry to have to admit that a tiny part of me wanted to agree with her after my trip there, but I just changed the subject instead.

With my stomach full of delicious, albeit unidentifiable, Indonesian food, I was verklempt. It was time for bed so Iyeli drove me home with a tentative plan to meet tomorrow morning. I dragged myself to bed and drifted off cocooned in a scarf to keep the mosquitoes off. It didn’t work.