WARNING: absolutely every single detail of this post is true. I swear I am not making any of this up.
So if you remember correctly from our previous adventures, we packed my house, my scooter and a bunch of dive gear in a big truck that was supposed to bring everything over. We booked said truck a month in advance, to make sure we had a spot and a vehicle booked. Now to get the trucks over to Penida from Bali, the harbour in Padang Bai has a ferry service that goes usually once a day, and it takes about 15 trucks on board. Needless to say there is sometime a bit of a wait, but if you remember from our truck journey over to the island with Sharon (http://www.maviesousleau.net/single-post/2019/06/18/PP11---Taking-Sharon-for-a-ride), you can always find a way to skip some of the queue.
So we book this truck, the guys assures us it usually takes about 3 days to get everything over. Since we booked ahead, we candidly believe he will do his job and get organised so that this happens. Oh boy, were we wrong. So first the truck shows up and it is not as big as the photo he sent us of a different truck, but after a fair amount of Tetris skills, they fit everything into it. Turns out they showed up without any rope or tarpaulin to cover the truck, this should have told us a little bit about their professionalism right there...But finally, off they go, and they tell us they will keep us posted.
Three days pass and we hear nothing. So we ask and we get told “probably tomorrow” for the first time (and not the last). We get a few more days of “maybe tomorrow” (first word I learnt in Indonesian those two, “mungkin besok”, where “besok” is a widely loose term for anytime tomorrow or sometime after that, whether it is 2 days or 2 months). Then we are starting to get annoyed, and also very inconvenienced by the fact that all the dive gear is in said truck and that we are taking bookings for diving. Then the truck guy finally explains to us there are about 100 trucks ahead of him and we are looking at another 2 weeks. Good for him he is on Bali because if he had been in front of us I think he might have gotten in trouble. We are over a week in now, and we have no idea when the stuff will get here. Not to mention that we are both sharing a mattress on the floor in an empty house because all my house stuff is also on the truck.
So I get my good friend Made, overall problem fixer and awesome human being, to give the guy a call. Made gets back to me and says: “they are gonna break down the load and shove it on other trucks leaving for Penida in the next few days”. At this point, I’ll take anything, so the next day another man (let’s call him Gede) calls us and says he is on his way with some of our stuff. And that of course he won’t deliver to our house as originally agreed, so we have to meet him in the harbour and take our stuff.
So we show up and we watch gobsmacked as a giant truck loaded full of cement electrical poles drives out of the ferry…with a bunch of my boxes shoved under said poles and my bed and fridge strapped on top of it.
The truck parks in the harbour, we get Sharon next to it and we do a couple of runs back and forth with our pick up full of stuff. Good news are: I have a bed, and Julia and I can carry a fridge or said bed on our own like a couple of badass that we are.
A few days later and more harassing later on our part and Made’s (until the truck guy gets fed up to get a call every day), he randomly calls us early afternoon to tell us my scooter is on the way. Except that we are on our way to Bali to catch a flight to Singapore, so we ask him to call a friend when the scooter arrives so our friend can pick it up. Said friend calls me a few hours later and said he heard nothing. We call back Gede, who says my bike was handed over to someone in the harbour who was there to pick it up. We said we sent no one. Ensues a couple of hours of sheer panic as he tries to find out what happened (we later will discover he is in Bali and has no clue about what is going on in the harbour in Penida), threaten to call the police, and I keep thinking on how the bike is not insured anymore and if it disappears I have a dry loss of a scooter that is one year old.
Finally, he calls back and explains that the scooter is still sitting on the ferry as no one came to pick it up. Our friend goes and check, that is indeed the case, next day he picks up the scooter and all is well.
So at this stage, it has been over 2 weeks and we are still missing the furniture. Also that Gede guy still has the papers for my scooter that he needed to send him over…Oh well. After another week of messaging and harassing, we get a call at 3pm and he goes: your furniture has arrived, you need to come and pick it up. Another great moment of WTF as we go: how hard is it to tell us a few hours in advance, and how about you deliver it like we agreed upon? To no avail of course, so here we are again driving around trying to locate our stuff that has been dropped off somewhere on the side of the road, until we find it standing in front of a furniture shop. Where a random guy also hands us my scooter papers.
When asked about the remaining payment we owe the guy, Julia goes with a big smile: “well it took you 3 weeks to get our stuff here, so we are going to need a few days for the payment”.
And then we swore that next time, before picking a truck person, we will ask around...or get someone else to organise it.