The rising sun was painting the sky in hues seldom heard of: shy purple, hesitating blue, grays melting into whites as the stream of dreamy clouds passed by. I closed my eyes, at peace.

I opened them again what seemed but an instant later. New colors had appeared behind the windscreen: different tints of orange were struggling to see which one would become yellow first. The time read 6.14. The lady had said we would arrive at 6, but then, we had left an hour and a half late, so…

The bus stopped, once more. I lazily let my eyes wander to the side to watch the passengers recover their luggage from the hold. There was actually only one passenger. It was hard to focus, but I did nonetheless.

It was Aldi.

And he was frantically making me sign to get off the bus.

I shook Ladina’s arm, gasping a hurried “We have to get off!” She instantly woke and understood. The bus made a tiny threatening movement, as if to leave, but Aldi must have said something to the crew, for it stopped. I gathered the camera, the laptop, sticked my feet in my shoes, stood up, grabbed the guitar overhead, and made for the door — all this in the lapse of a few seconds. I did not have to turn to Ladina. I knew she was following.

Our backpacks were already on the pavement, and the bus started off as soon as we hit the ground. “I hope we’ve got everything.” Ladina checked her things and nodded with a confident smile. We had never forgotten anything anywhere — probably thanks to our now very limited amount of possessions — and we had no intention of starting soon.

Aldi was waiting on the roadside, sending an SMS  with his phone. “Someone picking you up?” “Yes, my uncle!” Aldi, a young man from Bogor, was in holidays for Lebaran (the end of Ramadan) and was visiting his family in Yogyakarta, or Jogja, as Indonesians affectionately call it.

As we reorganized our backpacks, a taxi driver approached and tried to wiggle our destination out of us. Only thing was we ourselves had no idea where we were going. After a look in the guidebook and to the map, we settled for a backpacker street near the Tugu train station.

“Stasiun Tugu?”
“Oh, Tugu? 300,000 rupees!”
“What? No way.”

While Ladina crossed the street to ask a policeman the way to Tugu station, Aldi’s uncle finally arrived on his motorbike. He shook my hand, adding a last “Be careful!” I smiled and thanked him. “Terima kasih!” He smiled back and walked off to greet his uncle, grabbing with both hands his uncle’s right one and lowering his forehead to touch it. Both seemed very happy. They probably had not seen each other for a very long time.

Like it always is for me, I reflected. Except I had chosen this lifestyle.

Ladina came back with good news. “Apparently we just go in this street and turn left, and there’s a bus stop where we take a TransJogja bus. It’s only 3,000 each!”

We finally found the backpacker street, namely Jalan Sosrowijayan, a colorful, narrow street lined with noodle stalls and sleepy becaks (bicycle trishaws). As we slowly made our way to a guesthouse we had picked in the guidebook, dodging motorbikes and horsecarts alike, we overheard an Indonesian man speaking to another traveler. “Every night there are tourist sleep in the street! Everything full!” We had arrived in the highest of high season here, when the sun was brighter, the rains rarer, and half of the country in holidays for Lebaran.

“That’s not very reassuring,” I admitted.
“Well… We’ll try.”

We tried. Freshly arrived and unimpressed by the “Full” signs hanging at almost every door, we asked for vacancies, at charming and artistically decorated guesthouses as well as bare and spartan ones. And found nothing — except a cell-like room coming with a disgusting shared mandi (Indonesian bathroom with squat toilet and bucket shower) in a dodgy building. A bit of breakfast seemed suddenly appropriate to raise our morale and give us a rest, allowing us as well to wait for check-outs before asking again.

I went first, leaving Ladina with the luggage in the restaurant. It was far easier like this, without the twenty kilograms on my back: though by now accustomed to it, it remained, and remains, eventually taxing. I made a tour of the district, diving in the labyrinthine but green and welcoming alleyways, asking at so many guesthouses I lost count of them. The speed at which such a place so cramped up with accommodation could fill up only showed how desperate our situation was. And all the available rooms were, unsurprisingly, too expensive.

“Let me try,” proposed Ladina when I came back defeated.
“Up to you,” I answered before sinking in a chair.

Not even ten minutes had passed before she was back.

“I found a room! It’s not much, nothing special, but it’s clean, with private bathroom, and it’s cheap.”

Sometimes, I wonder how I ever did before meeting her.

One thing is sure though: I did it without ice creams.