Heading for the ferry to West Timor March 11

I was awakened about 2:00 am by the wild shaking of the door to my hotel room. The power was knocked out but they managed to get a generator going. I knew it was an earthquake but didn't find out the strength until I was in the taxi.

I needed to be up at the crack of dawn anyway so was in time to see the sun peaking behind the trees from my hotel window and excited about my ferry journey today. I traveled by taxi from Mataram to the ferry terminal at Lembar, a trip of about a half hour.

I had expectations, like tanning on the deck and reading in my air conditioned room (that's what they told me). Will I never learn?.....what they say and what you get is never the same. There was an air conditioning outlet on the ceiling blowing room temperature air, slowly.

I am on board and looking down on the food merchants along the dock.

In some ways I have come to rely on them being around. Like bananas for instance, they have always come to me before I even thought I needed any. A while back, in Phnom Penn I was wishing for bananas and I would have had to make a trip to the store to get them.

The unloading area of the wharf.



The first and second class dining room.

For the first two days there were only 2 of us eating there. The meals weren't great but better than third class meals which were passed out in Styrofoam boxes to be eaten on their mats or on the floor.



This is the deck outside on the level my room was on. It always had people sitting and sleeping all over the floor. I'm thinking the sun tanning may be a no-go.

They commonly sell way more tickets than there are spaces, because they don't turn anyone away.



Lots of cargo comes on with the people. Here some are sorting fruit, discarding the rotten ones and bagging the rest for sale. There are no deck chairs on this boat.

I spied an empty deck, but after two more stops you couldn't walk down there. After the last stop I could hardly walk from my room to the dinning room.

While I was waiting for the ferry I met a police officer going to Kerpang. He helped my with boarding. This is his three year old son called Amy ("Am-ee") held by the woman from the next sleeping platform.

I was down to see their quarters in the bottom of the boat. It was a bed space on a hard platform and a shelf above. You could rent a foamy mat for 5,000 Rb (50 cents). In this side there were 12 beds to a section and fourteen sections, so with similar on the other side plus the people on the floor just on this level there were about 350 people .

The whole boat was made up of these beds with only 24 small rooms for first and second class on the second deck and most of those were empty.

I was blissfully unaware that the scope of the earthquakes had been beyond our local area. It hit Japan at least 12 hours after the quake I felt in the morning and after that we were pinned to the TV for updates and predictions. It seemed there were advisories for Indonesia and they predicted what was left of the wave would reach here at around 11:00 AM tomorrow.

The ferry staff were not concerned so I went to bed. No other options anyway.