SOME OF THEM ARE CHRISTIANS, SOME OF THEM ARE CLOTHESLINES

It's dark by the time I reach Samosir. Not so dark that I can't be spotted as easy prey by the touts languishing on the pier. But dark all the same.

I'm ill. Feverish. Coming down with some swine of a flu. After a seven-hour bus ride from the hell-hole that is Medan, all I need is a bed. To die peacefully in my sleep. It's not much to ask. I nod to one of the ojeks.

Sir where you go?
Libertas. Or Lindas. Anywhere with cheap clean rooms.
Ah, sorry sir, all cheap clean rooms booked now. Is Christmas.
Take me to Libertas anyway.
Yes sir.

I get on the bike and we wind our way through narrow alleys to a long, low bungalow. It sports a dimly lit bar, from which a smiling Sumatran emerges, sipping from a cup ogf green tea. He is genuinely pleased to tell me all the rooms are full. Everywhere on the bay booked up, he says, gleefully. Is Christmas.
I thank him for reminding me.
A lone backpacker sits in a rattan chair on the verandah, flicking through a trammelled Lonely Planet, his unwashed hair piled high on his head in the style of a Cambodian laundrywoman. At his opposite end is some bright yellow rubber footwear, the kind of thing that flip-flops between being a shoe and a practical joke. His loose cotton pants are tied with a string, topped by a t-shirt with a design which may trigger seizures in those susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy. He looks up at me with the smug, self-satisfied smile of one who ate the cream on the last banana pancake.

Hello my brother, he says in an accent I can't quite place, but definitely from somewhere east of the Glastonbury Festival. I can help you with some information, he says. There is Mamas up the hill. It is not as cool a place as here, of course. He gestures around at bare floorboards, low rattan tables, empty beer glasses, and some dog-eared board games. And it costs more. But I am thinking you have no choice. He smiles, gets up, and disappears into the gloom. I do the same, on the back of the ojek's scooter.

Over his shoulder, above the squall of the single cylinder, I hear him say he knows a place. Have rooms, he says. Maybe 80,000 rupiah, he says. 
OK, fine. Whatever. I'm dog tired and sick and really need somewhere to crash.

This is my first mistake. Never show any sign of weakness to a Sumatrans or he will eat you alive. Quite literally, a few decades ago.
You want nice room? he begins. I can find. Now Christmas. No rooms, everywhere booked, only expensive rooms, you know?  How much you pay?



He turns right along a narrow causeway between the rice paddies. A Catholic church looms on our left. Everywhere there seem to be little shrines and crosses. Graves, perhaps. Graves of the people from whom I caught this flu. I see another tall building with a cross high on the hill.

I find good room for you, 200,000, he says. Very big. Very hot water.
Just the 80,000 room is fine.
I take you to Parnas, he says.
OK.

We ride past more crosses. Too many, it seems, for a Muslim country. Back in Jakarta, where the mosques swarm like mosquitoes, the blaring call to the prayer mat is everywhere. But here in the volcanic highlands of Sumatra, it seems we are deep into missionary country.

Those crosses, what are they, I ask the back of the ojek's helmet. Christian graves?
He shrugs. Some of them are Christians, some of them are clotheslines.
What?
Clotheslines.
He points out two wooden crosses standing ten metres or so apart, a faint trace of wire stretched between the two.
You can pay 500,000? he asks.
Oh Jesus. 

No, I cannot.
Because now is Christmas, he says.
And there's no room at the inn?
Sir?
Just take me to Parnas. 80,000 sounds fine.
Now I think they have only 400,000 rooms, he says.
Fuck my patron saint.
He slows the bike. To our left, a crater mountain rises high into cloud. To the right, a low building bears a sign, Parnas. The yard rambles down to a gazebo by a lake. Some women are working the soil by the yellow light of a ramshackle hut.

Mr Ojek calls out to them: You have room for 400,000?

Not "do you have a room available" but "do you have room for 400,000". To let them know in advance that, on the back of his moto, he has the goose that lays the golden egg. Oh God. It's dark, I'm sick, he knows I'm sick, and he knows I'll pay anything so I can die in peace.

Dear God, save me from this hell and I swear next time I'll hail Mary, not some devil dressed as an ojek.