... notable events : Being left behind in Hazy Pekan Baru Airport

1997 was a bad year in more ways than one. It was the height of the Asian Financial Crisis. It was also the year I broke-up with my girlfriend of 4 1/2 years, it was also the first time the word Haze became a worldwide phenomena no associated with university/highschool initiation rituals.

My 15 storey "skyscraper" building construction in Yangon had just been cancelled, the new 100 million USD$ Baliness resort every engineer in my company had been jostling to manage was shelved indefinitely and my own personal pet project, a 500 million USD$ pulp and paper mill project in Pekan Kerinchi on Sumatera Island was being downscaled.

For 2 years I had been involved in the Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper Mill project or RAPP for short, designing pad foundations for the huge storage tanks, kilometres after kilometres of pipe bridges which went up, over, under and through both the buildings and through the Sumateran jungle and all the other bits and pieces that engineers spend countless hours worrying over just so that the plant can go online within acceptable datelines.

It was a "fun" project, perhaps not as "fun" as a balinese resort would have been, but "fun" al the same because of the travel component, as well as being able to work in a "foreign" environment. Flying in for meetings and to rush designs became a routine affair, two days here, 1 day there, sometimes with other colleagues, most times alone. The cast on site was international, Canadian engineers, US specialists, Indonesian design teams and of course, other Singapore consultants. It was also fun because the engineering was "real". Designs were calculated and thrown to the drafters who would produce drawings in time for construction on the very next day. Often I would sit late into the night at the site office pouring over drawings, checking and cross-checking so as to endorse them for construction in the morning. Within days, you could literally walk the site and see your design "in the flesh". No messy design submissions for authority approvals, no overviewing by other engineers, no boss looking over your shoulder. It was your design, your approval and your endorsement that got things moving. Things couldn't have been any more "exciting".

Apparently I was wrong. The haze which blanketed most of Southeast Asia in the second half of 1997 put a stop to my short trips across the Melaka Straits. The Financial Crisis had also hit RAPP hard and we were told to wrap whatever was in hand up. I needed to make one final trip to Pekan Kerinchi to finish off the remainder of the most critical pipe-bridges.

For weeks, the secretary tried to book a flight from Singapore to Pekan Baru, the nearest airport. For weeks works were stalled because of the haze. Silkair flights were cancelled, Garuda Air flights were cancelled, nothing would fly into Sumatera which was one of the main haze "epi-centres". Then suddenly, one flight opened. A Garuda flight was confirmed! "Will you go?" the secretary asked me. "It's an Indonesian airline." she warned.

I nodded my head, desperate to clear the backlog of work on site.

The flight over was uneventful except for the nagging worry cause by seeing duct-tape used to keep some of the overhead baggage compartments shut and the fact that I couldn't see anything outside of my window from the haze. The one thought that went through my mind at the time was that, "They must know what they are doing, and perhaps the ground is clear of haze enough to land." This little thought was still going through my head as I stared outside at the blanket grey outside my windows when the pilot announced that we were landing. Moments later, when we felt the wheels touch down, I still couldn't see anything outside my windows, not the airport, not the ground, not even the tip of the aircraft's wings. I was amazed the pilot could land. I'm just glad he knew where the ground was because I sure couldn't see it until I was actually on the ground. It was nerve-racking to say the least, and I still had to return to Singapore on another flight!

As usual, I was met at the airport by one of the site's drivers in a 4-wheel drive for the long ride through the small single-lane road through the jungle. Pekan Kerinchi was a town that only existed because the site existed. It was literally created from virgin jungle to serve the needs of the construction crews and subsequently to house the workers for the RAPP mills.

The driver must have been possessed I think. The drivers usually zip along at 80-100km/h on these narrow roads, using the horn as often as they use their brakes to skirt around slower moving traffic and all manner of people ranging from school children to entire families on motocycles as they go up and round bends that I'm quite certain don't meet regulatory "stopping-sight-distances" in most countries, ie. the roads are not built sufficiently gentle for you to be able to see obstructions and still stop in time. But with the haze, this was suicide, and to make things worse, that was the day I decided to sit in the front seat. Maybe the driver had the same type of super eyes the pilot had, because for the life of me, I couldn't see 10 feet in front of me. Thankfully the ride was uneventful, except for my musings on how far apart the walking school children on the roads were and the length of time it took for me in my 4-wheeled transport to actually pass the school they were quite obviously walking to, and the various blacken patches of secondary jungles which were still streaming grey trendrils of smoke into the already hazy air. Sumatera was one of the primary sources of smoke for the 1997 haze and I lay claim to the dubious honour of having been in the smack centre of it at its height.

Anyway, after hanging on for dear life for the better part of 2 hours, we arrived on site safe and sound. Evidence of haze was everywhere. Cars and just about everything else left outdoors developed an orangy coloured covering overnight. The smell of the haze was so strong that I still have memories of that stench. It was literally like living in the twilight zone. Visibility was literally down to just 10 or so feet and everything else beyond that would take on surreal shapes. The days were dark as sun would shine but it'll be more like a full moon. The nights which were usually already rather pitched dark at night so far from the nearest town, now took on a heavy presence since even the moon, let alone the stars were missing and all you had was this ominious presence of an enveloping haze.

Two fruitful days later, having given instruction for the driver to pick me up at 5am in the morning for my flight back to Singapore, I was up bright and early at the front of my quarters waiting to be picked up. The flight was for 7am in the morning and 2 hours was usually more than enough time to travel the long road back to civilisation. 5am and no driver in sight. It was 6am before the car arrived and flinging my bag into the boot I was torn between asking the driver to step on it, and my desire not to experience another mad high-speed drive through the haze-filled jungle.

The driver tried his best. I got there in record time and still very much alive. My watch showed exactly 7am when I bundled myself out of the rear seat of the car, but a glance around the airport told me that my worse fears were confirmed. Slamming into the check-in counter I half yelled in Bahasa, "Penerbangan ke Singapura! Sempat tak?". The check-in lady practically flew to the door just 10 feet behind her which opened up into the airport tarmac. I could see the plane I was supposed to board, it's doors closing and the ladder being driven alway. The lady spoke furiously into a walkie-talkie but her face told it all. Shaking her head she gave me a sorrowful stare. "Sudah tutup." The doors were closed and unless I was an Indonesian bigwig with lots of money, I wasn't going to make that flight.

I stood there, the only passenger in an airport full of airport staff and stared through that still open door, as the plane taxied out of sight and I heard the engines vibrate to a roar and then die off into the distance. It was a Saturday, my transport had left, and I was in the tiny international airport of a small sleepy provincial town.

"When is the next available flight?", I asked in Bahasa.

"Isnin." came the reply. Monday. What in the world would I do here until Monday. I have a life you know! No way was I going to let myself be stranded a whole weekend here, but what were my options? I could call the site and have them send someone to pick me up again, but that was one hazy horror I didn't want to relive. I'd risked my life twice this trip already. Better to stay at Pekan Baru. At least I only risk bed-bugs.

Then I had a brainchild. "Any flights to Malaysia? Or better still, any to Battam or Bintan?" I asked in Bahasa, knowing I could then hop onto a 45 minute ferryride and be back in Singapore in time for dinner. Yes was the reply but the flight was in 2 hours.

Eureka! I could do that, I said to myself. "How much is the ticket?" I asked, only to realise my mistake too late. The gleams on the face of the lady and her two male colleagues who had magically appeared beside her, drawn by the scent of blood probably, told me I was about to be fleeced.

The cost came up to about SGD$450 which was way more than the return flight I had booked from Singapore but they showed me their pricing charts and yes, it was SGD$450.

I panned my options again. Credit card? No, that'll just be suicide. Cash. How much rupiah did I have? I counted out all my rupiah and came up SGD$300 short. I knew it had to be done so I asked the question they were all waiting for. "Do you take Singapore Dollar?"

I almost winched at the sudden gleam of teeth as they smiled. "Of course we do!" they chorused and quoted me an exchange rate loan sharks would have been proud to call their own. Naturally, they also had the exchange rate charts to prove their point. Sighing and vowing to claim all this back from the client for making me miss my flight, I forked over the cash, leaving me with next to nothing but a final SGD$50 note in my pocket. Clutching my precious ticket out of Pekan Baru, and with that last miserable SGD$50 note I settled for a 2 hour wait. I didn't even dare order anything more than a cup of coffee and a piece of local pastry in case I run short of the ferry ticket at the other side and find myself really stranded just 45 minutes from Singapore.

The flight arrived. It was Mandala Air, an airline I had never heard of before in my life, and probably would have remained ignorant of it's existence if not for this. I boarded the flight feeling a little better, at least home would be just 50km away and not across the Melaka Straits.

Arriving in Battam airport, I met a fellow traveller who was also going to Singapore via Battam. Happily we shared a cab from the airport to the ferry terminal and my fellow traveller who had obviously done this route before, led the way. I was too exhausted and too happy to care. The rest of the trip was uneventful, a trip that started at 5am in the morning took me 12 hours to travel just the width of the Melaka straits, but I was back home in time for dinner and looking forward to a nice relaxing Sunday at home.