Story of Bali, Indonesia

The car has slid through the quiet dark of a sleeping Djakarta to an airport lounge packed with people and crackling with voices. You should have been here half an hour earlier, but could not believe that you were required to check in an hour before take-off for a domestic flight. Yes, you are told, one hour before: the planes are full. See that queue . . . those arc people who've come out on the chance of getting a cancellation or a latecomer's scat.

You wonder why so many people want to fly to Sumatra at five o'clock in the morning. As you go aboard the Garuda DC-9, and as the roaring cocoon full of people soars up into the dawn light. you are still a bit surprised that you arc flying there yourself. Sumatra may have the tourist potential you've been told it has. but -it is hardly on the tourist track yet.

Sumatra is Ultima Thule in these Indies. North Sumatra, where you're going, is the western extremity of the Indonesian archipelago. It is big, though. Sumatra: not an-isl2nd like Ball that you might have difficulty finding on the map. From the eastern end you are over very soon after leaving Djakarta to Medan where you arc going, is about a thousand miles. Sumatra is almost the size of Spain. It would make three and a, half javas-and has only a quarter of Java's population. Much of Sumatra is jungled mountains, which run the length on the Indian Ocean (pardon, Indonesian Ocean since Sukarno) side of this long I island that might be said to look on the map like a stumpy-tailed, pregnant crocodile.

Sumatra is beginning to move ~ out' of the Maugham-type novel the oil-industry handbook the rubber- and timber getters' gazetteer and into the tourist guide-book. As yet in the Golden Guide to South & East Asia Sumatra gets only one page out of 500 pages. Its main tourist attractions are Lake Toba and the Batak people's remarkable houses in North Sumatra.

This plane appears to have only two other European passengers. They don't look like, tourists. They arc white-shirt types who could be Goodyear Rubber accountants going out to do an audit at the Deli plantation. Next to me is the most aromatic Indian lady. The flowers she carries are tropically fragrant. and she laves her arms with a heavily sweet-scented pomade. Tobacco fumes and the faint smell of the proffered airline coffee fight back unavailingly. Night reddens into day and overcast obscures the geography of Sumatra until we come down through grey nothingness of cloud to the sight of a tape-. worm river eating its way through sodden, palm-studded green that now has the geometry of the airport of Medan (pronounced Maydan).

I AM by a representative of Nitour. which is Indonesia's ..official tourist organization, the big one, and the one that could be (but isn't) the Indonesian equivalent of Cooks.

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