TRANSCRIPT
So some months back, I was in a fairly nasty car accident in Sumatra, in Northern Indonesia. And well, it’s an interesting story, so I’d like to share it. And I’d like to say just for starters though that I love Indonesia. I love Sumatra. I had a wonderful time there, even in spite of having had a car accident.
So anyways, what was happening was I was in the northern part of Sumatra, and I was hitchhiking quite a ways around the north of the country, through jungles, through all sorts of different villages and towns, cities even. Met wonderful people, lots and lots of kind people.
And one problem I had when I was hitchhiking was that a lot of the cars, even motorcycles, were full. There was no way for people to even take me. So one thing that would happen a lot is I’d be hitchhiking, and to my surprise, a car would pull over. But I’d look and be like, there’s absolutely nowhere for me to fit in this car, even with my backpack. And everybody would pile out, and I’d be like, what are they going to do? Where are they going to put me? On the roof? No, no, they weren’t going to take me anywhere. They just wanted to stop and say, “selfie, selfie.” They didn’t speak English, but they knew “selfie, selfie, selfie.” Everybody wanted a selfie with me. And I’m like, you know, half a foot or a foot taller than most of the people, so I did lots of selfies.
I found that it was goodwill, goodwill from their side toward me. Often they’d give me water or give me some candy or some treats or a little bit of fruit or something. But what I did find is that if they had space for me, they would take me again and again and again. Great experience, but exhausting, especially since there were a lot of big stretched-out towns that didn’t have roads with shoulders and lots of little turn-offs. And so I would have to walk through these towns because it was basically impossible to get a ride. There was nowhere for people to pull over and a lot of traffic sometimes. So I did a lot of walking. I was exhausted, and I decided to give myself a hitchhiking holiday. That is, a holiday from hitchhiking.
I was in Banda Aceh, in the northern part of Sumatra, very northern tip of Indonesia, and I was going to go down into the jungle. I wanted to go to this place where supposedly you could see wild orangutans, orangutans that have really had no contact with people or very little. I mean, they’ve seen them from the trees; the orangutans could see us, but they had never been fed or anything like that. And so I was going to see if I could get down there. I decided hitchhiking was going to be a little too exhausting, so I rented a spot. I paid for a ticket in a minivan, a local transport minivan. It was going to be overnight, all local people, not expensive at all.
And while riding overnight, actually, it happened early in the morning. Left at like nine o’clock at night, seven o’clock in the morning, way out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the jungle, the driver fell asleep at the wheel. And well, I was lucky because I was in a side seat that would allow me to put my legs out because I was so much taller than everyone. They couldn’t easily fit me into the little seat, so they put me on a side seat. And the problem with the side seat was that every time the guy would make turns, because there was a lot of curves in the road, I would fall off my seat while I was trying to sleep. So I strapped myself into a seat belt. I was the only one that had a seat belt on. And the result of that, oh gosh, something I realized—I’m not even recording! I am, this is funny, typical of me.
And so I had my seat belt on, strapped myself in, and the result of that is that when he fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road and smashed us into a sort of a hill of vegetation, covered hill, I, unlike everyone else in the van, did not go flying forward because that was the only one with my seat belt on. I slammed against the seat belt, and it broke two of my ribs. It was awful. The other thing was, it was just as I was waking up, and we were going down a hill. I was like waking up, and I actually had my glasses in a shirt pocket. I put them on, and I thought, oh, the sun’s coming up, been asleep for a few hours. And I saw there was a curve in the road, and I thought, this is a tight curve. That driver is going kind of fast. But I was just waking up, and I looked, and I’m like, he’s definitely going fast, he’s definitely going. And then suddenly we just kept going. He didn’t stop, and it happened so fast. And suddenly, just instantly, massive G-force. People were thrown forward, luggage and bags were thrown forward. I had my little mini guitar between my legs. I was sleeping with it that way, and it actually got kind of broken. I was able to glue it back together later with some crazy glue that I had. But my pants ripped. I’m like, how did that happen? It’s like ripped in a couple of places. My t-shirt ripped. I’m like, how does my t-shirt rip? I had some cuts on my arm. I don’t know how those even happened because the only thing that I hit against was the seat belt, as far as I knew. Oh, it was painful.
And then instantly, it was like, it was actually a strange thing because the van just like almost immediately started filling with smoke. It was terrifying. But because I was caught by my seatbelt, I think I was more rational than other people because they’d really been thrown around. People were screaming. There was “Allahu Akbar.” I heard that. And then I was next to the door, so just very, very quickly, I opened the door, took off my seat belt, grabbed my guitar, and just jumped out. Oh, I was in pain, but I was like, I wasn’t even aware of the pain. I was in shock. And I ran over because I thought this thing might blow up, and then I got away from the vehicle, and I could see the smoke coming out of it, and I could hear people moaning and screaming inside. Something like, what are you doing, Daniel?
So I ran back. There was a woman in there with a burqa covered, and I was like, you know, not supposed to touch women in burqas. But then there was some part of me that’s like, what? This is nuts. I gotta help her. And she was like holding her leg. As it turned out, I think it was broken. And so I put my arms under her arms like this, and she like let me, and I pulled her out and helped her. I stepped—there was like a kind of a drainage ditch near that I put my foot right into it, got one foot totally wet. Thankfully, didn’t hurt myself, but got her away from it. Everybody then started piling out. But then I guess they were able to—the driver got out, and people were injured. I mean, like one guy, I think he had broken his shoulder, and it was like smashed faces. It was not nice. We just had a horrible car accident, and I think I have a broken rib. [ __ ] terrible. The people that broke their bones, it’s crazy. I’m having a cigarette because I need one. [ __ ] life.
Then I got scared because I was like, I’m in a very remote place. What if something inside of me is like pierced? Because I’ve never broken a bone before. I have no personal experience with having broken a bone. But I was like, somehow I knew that something was broken, a bone was broken. But my fear, because I’d read about broken ribs and heard about them from friends of mine who had had broken ribs, is the danger is that it can like pierce your lung or maybe even your liver or something like that. So I was like, well, I can seem to breathe okay. It hurt.
To breathe, but then I was like, well, what if I had like internal organ damage in some way? So I realized it was early in the morning. I had to pee, so I went off into the sort of jungle shrubbery and peed. And then I was like, well, this is going to be my litmus test. If the pee is yellow, I think I’m probably going to be okay. And if the pee is red, well, Houston, we’ve got a problem. I peed, and it was yellow, so I was like, okay, at least like some in, you know, I’m not like dying from internal bleeding because it’s really hard to know what’s going on.
Then I went back, and there was one person who spoke a little bit of English, but mostly I was just using Google Translate offline, um, Google Translate into Indonesian. And I was asking people questions, and like, no, they were telling me there’s no police here, there’s no ambulance coming, we’re just gonna have to wait. And then they’re talking to the driver. The van was pretty crushed.
Well, another thing that happened is this was kind of interesting, that people were curious, you know, how I was responding to this. And I have two little stories that kind of highlight something about this world I was in. The first is the driver came over to me, and he was pretty damaged. I can’t remember, like, it kind of, it’s funny how it’s all kind of mixed up in my mind, but I think he’d broken something. He came over to me, and he was wanting to talk to me, but he had a funny look on his face. And I was wondering if he was like maybe nervous that he would get in extra trouble that a foreigner had been in the vehicle when he’d had an accident. And he was kind of interacting with me. We were using some Google Translate, and I was wondering, well, what was he getting at? Was he trying to be nice to me for some reason so maybe he wouldn’t get in trouble?
Well, finally he popped out with it in the middle of me having a broken rib and all these other people with broken horrible things. He looked at me, leaned in, and he said, pulled out his phone, he said, “selfie.” He wanted a selfie with me. So in the midst of all this, we took a selfie. I’m like, okay, interesting world.
The second thing was I was sitting for a little while with this woman who had a, I think, a broken lower leg. She was one of the ones, or she was the one who spoke a bit of English, and we were talking. I was just, you know, trying to help her. I gave her something to lie on under her head so her head wouldn’t be on the pavement. And while I was sitting with her, suddenly she started to tear up, like she started to cry. And that’s when it just hit me, like my shock broke, and I felt all my emotions come up. And there were a few people watching, this other man watching us, and I noticed my tears were coming up, and my face welled up like I was about to cry.
And some guy punched something into his phone, and he held it up to me. And I looked at what he’d read, and it was Google Translate, and it said, “don’t cry.” And suddenly I realized, no, I don’t know, just in this world, it’s like crying wasn’t going to help from their perspective. And I swallowed it back down, and I didn’t cry. But it was interesting what I found is nobody, I mean, this woman did cry for a little bit, but nobody else cried at all in spite of all their injuries, the horror of it, the physical trauma, the terror, the ugliness of it. They didn’t cry, and they were just actually, it’s weird to say, basically pretty happy.
I mean, the driver seemed concerned with the damage to the vehicle, obviously, but local people, there was a village, I don’t know, several miles away, and people were going to work and stuff. So people were helping, and a dump truck came to pull out the damaged vehicle. But it was just like business. Let’s figure this out. Let’s get it sorted out. And I asked, like, what’s going to happen with police, ambulance? No, no, no, no, no, not coming at all. And we’re just gonna have to wait until the company’s next minivan, already scheduled and probably full of people, comes along, and then they’ll take us, they’ll squeeze us in.
And that’s what happened. We waited for three hours, and then they literally squeezed us in. I sat next to the fellow with the broken shoulder, and I was with my ribs. Oh, every bump on the road, so, so painful. The other thing is my backpack, everything was all stuffed in my backpack, was right behind my head. So anytime we’d hit a bump, my backpack would come forward. It was painful. But the interesting thing was really nobody was complaining.
And I’ve seen this in other countries in the world that are not like modern rich countries like mine, that people, there’s a strength in people, a survival instinct, a feeling of togetherness, a feeling of we’re all helping each other, we’re going to do the best we can given our situation. I actually, it wasn’t, this is like, I would not wish this experience on anyone, nor on myself. It’s months later, my rib is better. As it happened, two weeks later, I was in Taiwan, went to an emergency room for 63 dollars, got to meet with a doctor, got an x-ray, two broken ribs, fractured ribs that were snapped, and they said really nothing we can do about it, just take it easy, you know, don’t carry too much, don’t do too much exercise. That is, don’t do all the things that I did for the next two weeks after I had my car accident.
I actually did end up going into the jungle, did a lot of hiking, just had to really go very slow and had to have someone help me put my backpack on because I just couldn’t put my backpack on. All the torquing of my body did get to see wild orangutans, pretty amazing, did a lot of camping and had a lot of fun. And it was just kind of painful.
But I don’t know, I would say the real, this is, this is the crazy part, and I’m not being a Pollyanna here. Oh, what a lovely experience, I’m so grateful for my horrible experience. It wasn’t that. But what I was grateful for was to see how people reacted, to see from the inside how people reacted in this awful experience, how people really were loving and helpful and caring with each other. Nobody criticized the driver, nobody chewed him out, there was no screaming, no road rage. It was actually like very friendly, and it’s like everybody was sharing everything.
It was like in this kind of traumatic experience, it somehow, it’s like we became a little community, and there was a loveliness to it. And I really feel like people really did care about me. Yes, don’t cry, that’s not gonna, and I think if I had cried, for all I know, everyone else would have started crying too, and maybe that like wouldn’t have helped, which is an interesting thought because it was like in my world of psychology, the grieving, the deep grieving would have helped me. But maybe it’s like there just isn’t room for it in this world as things were. There a whole bunch of people breaking down and crying on the side of the road? No, they needed to function, they needed to move on. And in that case, it was like, well, it worked.
This was fascinating to me, is yes, what I went through was a horror, and it was a kind of trauma in a way. But I got to compare it to being mugged two years earlier, same month, exactly. Incidentally, it was March when this happened, some months ago, March of 2023. But my mugging, I got mugged in New York City in March of 2021, and I got to compare these two experiences. And I realized that mugging I experienced in New York really, really messed up my head. These two guys jumped me in the scare, I thought I was gonna die, get killed. I had to like shut myself down, give them all my stuff, try to you.
Know not put my, you know, not not have them kill me. That really screwed with my head in an ugly way. The funny thing was, this car accident, as scary and terrifying as it was, much physically worse. I mean, really, I experienced physical damage, but I don’t feel like—and I even then I didn’t feel like I was psychologically traumatized.
And I talked about this with a few friends. I called friends on my phone over the next few days, and one of my friends pointed it out to me that there was no real interpersonal violation on me in that car accident. It was just something that happened. It was not directed at me. It wasn’t directed at anyone. It was just the guy screwed up, and he fell asleep at the wheel.
I mean, at the end, incidentally, you know, decades before, in my early 20s, I fell asleep at the wheel once when I was driving. And I’m very lucky that I didn’t get hurt or kill myself or hurt or kill anybody else. It was just a screw-up, and I think everybody recognized it as that. He made a mistake, and it was just like it wasn’t personal.
And because of that, and also because it happened as part of a community, it was like we were all in it together. And there was something very untraumatizing about it, nurturing about being a part of that community. Actually, of my whole experience in Indonesia and my whole experience in Southeast Asia on that trip and Eastern Asia, I never felt so part of a group ever as I did on that day of the car accident.
And I think that really mitigated my feelings of psychological trauma. Whereas when I was mugged by these two guys, it was an interpersonal violation that was purposefully, even evilly, directed at me. And I had to go through it alone, and I felt powerless and helpless, all alone with this group of people. This accident, I wasn’t alone, and it really made a big difference to me, actually.
People were laughing. People were friendly about it. It was kind of amazing how human kindness really came out and really gave me some insight into the lives of people who go through a lot of really rough stuff.
And then I think of the stories I heard, especially after that, when I was really attuned to it. People telling me stories of their children dying because they ate this wrong food, or people dying—children dying for no known reason. Just get a fever, and there’s no doctor, no hospital, they just die. People having terrible accidents, breaking legs, accidents with animals, farm animals, people getting cut, wounds getting septic, people falling down—like lots.
And I noticed just how many people, like walking with limps after that, unhealed wounds that are wounds that healed in strange ways. And just realizing in that world, this is life, and people just deal with it as best they can. And this was another facet of life. And in that strange way, I got to experience it from the inside.
And although I would never wish for an accident like that on my travels, the lessons I learned and then the insight, that feeling of togetherness I felt, is part of why I travel foreign.