T

he Trans-Sumatra Highway winds as a two-way, two-lane, fraying ribbon through the length of the island of Sumatra, connecting Banda Aceh in the north and Bandar Lampung in the south and many cities and towns in
between.  

It is over 2,500 kilometers long, and is pretty much the only road available for city-to-city travel.

The long and very challenging road is often mountainous and plagued by landslides, floods, huge potholes and thousands of sharp bends. It is always in repair somewhere, narrowing the road even more.

The available road surface, which is officially for two lanes of traffic, is way too narrow for the huge, overloaded, blue-tarped trucks that frequent the highway. Even personal cars must cling to the edge of the road when passing.   

It is common to see a group of people scratching their heads and hunched around a truck that has slid off the road in an effort to avoid an oncoming vehicle, sitting with its left wheels dug into the soft sandy side of the road, dangerously tilted to the left.

When, in 1984, we traveled the Trans-Sumatra Highway from the southern tip of Sumatra to Medan, it was an adventurous, if not dangerous, trip as it was during a very wet rainy season that caused the road to be at many places impassable.

Cars, trucks and buses were cornered in sharp bends, others had slid halfway down muddy hillsides and others again had dug themselves so deep into the mud it looked as if they would never get out again.

But, the memories of this road are far more of beauty and amazement of the never-ending change of landscape and the fascinating stream of human life that passed by the window; of mountainsides going straight up or falling steeply down; of simple houses glued to the mountain’s edge built on meager sticks for support; of clothes being laundered by a little stream or pipe of water right by the road; of laughing
and running schoolchildren flooding the roads with no apparent fear of the traffic; and of the late afternoon trek by mothers and children to bathe with buckets of soap and toothbrushes in hand, large washbowls with dishes balanced on their heads.  

During recent travels, we realized again that we should not judge the road from the perspective of western comforts; it is an arduous ride in whatever vehicle.

But, it shows us the beauty of this part of Indonesia in a nutshell.