Nov 10 - The Legendary Semen Truck

Heh heh heh, well I'm taking a quick detour into girly immaturity. This is all DIRECTLY the fault of yesterday's Sign of the Day.

In my response to the comments at the bottom of yesterday's Sign of the Day entry, I mentioned the most eye-popping of unusual signs -- the illustrious Semen Truck of Indonesia.

This thing is like the yeti or the Lochness Monster. Why? Even in Indonesia I knew this would be a memorable sight to capture on film and bring back as an exotic sight from a far land for everyone to chuckle at with the guilty pleasure of hidden immaturity. But every time we passed one of these trucks on the road I NEVER had my camera. NEVER!!

So in frustration I came home empty handed. Not one picture.

Forward five years later. Except for brief moments of chuckling to myself from sudden recollection, I'd largely forgetten about the Semen Truck. Until Shelley's comment yesterday made me think of it again. SO, I set out to finally find a picture of this dang truck on the internet. Everything's on Google right?

Well, no. NOBODY seems to have captured this on film. ...... Well almost.

All I got was this one, blurry, tiny black-&-white photo. This is the tanker truck fleet of the one-and-only Semen Gresik, Indonesia's leading producer of semen (or as we call it in English....cement.)

Even funnier, while searching for this I came across loads of American and European business articles discussing the financial goings-on of Indonesia's "Semen Industry". An excerpt from Yahoo news reports:

Indonesia's Semen Gresik To Build New Cement Factory

JAKARTA, Nov 1 Asia Pulse - State-owned cement maker PT Semen Gresik (JSX:SMGR) in East Java will soon build a new cement factory with an annual capacity of 2.5 million tons.

Sugiharto said in principle the government has encouraged PT Semen Gresik to carry out its plan.

PT Semen Gresik with three factories in operation in Tuban has an annual production capacity of 6.9 million tons, including its subsidiaries PT Semen Padang with an annual capacity of 5.57 million tons in West Sumatra and PT Semen Tonasa in South Sulawesi with an annual capacity 3.48 million tons. The Gresik Group is the largest cement producer in the country.