A Hotel Fire and a Train Ride in a Luxury Carriage

On Tuesday, I wake up at 4 a.m. in our Jakarta hotel room to the sound of banging on doors and shouting. At first, I think someone is just messing around and even consider going back to sleep. Then one of my travel companions calls me, but I don’t manage to answer. Instead, I write in our group chat:“You called? There were locals banging at all the room doors for some reason?”

The reply comes quickly:“Fire. In the hotel. Serious. I came down with elevator. Stairs full of smoke. Pls go down. 4th floor full of smoke.”

I’m already dressed. After reading that, I quickly grab my wallet and key card and open the door. The corridor is slightly smoky. Someone is hurrying past. I start heading down from the 5th floor via the stairs, since taking the elevator during a fire doesn’t seem wise. However, the stairwells are designed in such a way that I have to pass through each floor’s corridor to reach the next set of stairs.

The 4th floor is extremely smoky. I move through it holding my breath. I see a local man walking through with his shirt pulled up over his face. A thought flashes through my mind that I could lose consciousness from carbon monoxide and never make it out. Still, I keep moving toward the next staircase and continue down. The floor below is also quite smoky, but by the 2nd floor the air is more bearable. Finally, I reach the outside and see my travel companions already waiting for me. Fire trucks are everywhere, and more keep arriving. Most of the firefighters are just standing around smoking.

It turns out that one of my travel companions had been awake during the night because he couldn’t sleep, and he was the one who smelled something burning and alerted the staff. The smoke was coming from the room opposite theirs on the 4th floor. The staff had asked them to call both me and my roommate, but either no one called me or I simply didn’t wake up. It seems I was one of the last guests to leave the hotel.

Apparently, someone in a room next to the burning one had even been banging on the window from inside, but the hotel windows couldn’t be opened, so he was escorted out through the stairwell. A local firefighter standing near us and smoking says the fire likely started from smoking in the room or from an electrical fault. He mentions that he is originally from Yogyakarta. Since that’s our next destination, he gives us some recommendations on what to see there. I don’t notice him doing anything particularly useful at the scene.

For a long time, there is what seems like aimless running around. Eventually, a window is smashed, and a large fan is used to ventilate the smoke-filled floors.

Seeing that this will take a while, the four of us go to a Japanese fast-food place to eat. When we return, the fire trucks are already gone. In the hotel lobby, free breakfast is being served, music is playing, and everything seems as if nothing had happened. We pack our belongings in rooms that still smell of smoke, and the hotel provides us with a free ride to the train station.

From there, we board a train and travel for over five hours to Yogyakarta in a luxury carriage. The seats recline, allowing you to rest and even sleep a bit. Lunch is brought directly to your seat—just like on a plane. There is also a restaurant car on the train.

In the evening, we arrive in Yogyakarta and have dinner at a Japanese restaurant near our accommodation—there are quite a lot of Japanese eateries here.