Pelni Experience

The Pelni experience is cheap, and it shows. There's no real way to complain when the trip costs so little (to Western pockets, anyway), but some things are pretty disgusting, whatever the price. For example, the meals on board, which come included in the price, are abysmal, and after one I fully understood why foreigners who travel Pelni either go first class, or bring their own food: a tiny pile of tepid rice, an inch-square slop of, er, red stuff, and a fish head... that was supper. Luckily there was a cafeteria where we could buy suitably expensive mineral water and tea, and the biscuits we'd bought as a last-minute gesture filled the gaps. Not surprisingly we ignored breakfast the next morning.

And as for the toilets... overflowing is one description, swamped is another, and blocked hardly starts to bring home the squalor of the Pelni ablutions. And nobody seems to mind, despite the fact that in a 22-hour boat trip, people need to go to the toilet. I dare not think where the more enterprising passengers ended up leaving their deposits.

Add to this equation the Muslims who had to pray their allotted five times a day (including the 4am slot, when the whole boat was woken up by loudspeaker to enjoy the wisdom of Allah, whether they cared or not) and who very effectively blocked the aisles at prayer time (anyone who walks through a Muslim prayer meeting is inviting more death threats than Salman Rushdie) and you've got a fairly strange experience that is hard to beat in the Western world. Not that I'm complaining...