I met my friend Charlie, an American I met in Vietman, in Kuala Lumpur on a layover on 6 June and then we flew to Jakarta together to join a tour starting on 7 June. We met up with a family friend of Charlie's on the morning of the 7th, who took us around the city with his fiance in a private car with a driver. As I mentioned in my previous post, my initial impressions of Jakarta were quite negative. The traffic is incredibly dense and small distances can take absurdly long to navigate due to gridlock. It's crowded and polluted and chaotic. We took a quick look at the National Monument but then spent the rest of our time cruising the malls. The first time I went to Jakarta I spent two days at Plaza Indonesia and felt slightly embarrassed of this fact, but now I found out that's actually exactly what Jakartans do on weekends, so it was a proper cultural experience after all.
The Intrepid tour wasted no time in Jakarta, and we set off early in the morning on 8 June to a quiet little oceanside town on the southern coast of Java called Pandangaran. It's one of those sleepy beach towns that work best if you smoke pot and like to surf. Unfortunately, I indulge in neither, but it was a pleasant way to spend a few days and we went on a quick day tour where we saw monkeys, scorpions, porcupines and even an iguana in the distance. Our Indonesian guide Suddha pointed out magic mushrooms growing in cow shit, and later offered to cook me an "omelette." He said, "After omelette, you can fly." He tried explaining what he meant to the half-deaf Dutch guy on our tour (a metalhead who proudly wore a Celtic Frost t-shirt a couple of times), with little success.
The first night in Pandangaran turned out to be an ice-breaker, as Charlie and I started in with our patended acerbic banter, our principal target the Australian and especially British accents of our touring colleagues. I've been working on my Australian accent since Sydney. I was pleased to note that our inveterate goofiness offended no one, and in fact most people found our constant sarcasm entertaining, even as the jokes got more and more over-the-top. An older woman on the trip, Ann, a Brit who has lived in Broome, Australia since the early 1970s, told us that she found our behavior refreshing as in her experience Americans are overly serious. I initially found this comment perplexing, but as the tour progessed and our joking continued apace, I realized that in a crew of Americans our behavior would most likely be greeted with eye-rolling and eventually full on irritation and I now I can see where Ann is coming from. All of which makes me think I was a Brit in a past life (especially since I've heard Australians described as Brits w/out the seasonal affective disorder, as I've definitely got the seasonal affective disorder). An ill-tempered, moody, sarcastic Brit, but isn't that a bit of a tautology? Surly pricks.
On our last night in town, we ran into Suddha and some of his friends getting drunk on the beach and so began a night of awe-inspiring debauchery during which Suddha hit on a 19 year-old Swedish girl from the tour who with her pale skin and Renaissance figure enjoyed bottomless attention from Indonesian men and enjoyed absolutely every second of it. She later told us that she dated a 32 year old guy when she was 16 and seemed quite confused as to why we found this a bit shocking. (Indonesian men proved themselves to be quite brazen flirts with the Western ladies, it was almost a bit too much at times.) Turns out there was another 19 year old on the trip, a Brit who made the mistake of describing her accent as posh and that was all it took, she wore the nickname Posh for the remainder of the trip. (Eventually she started calling me Grandpa, due to my shocking realization that I was literally old enough to be her father. "You see that old guy over there, the bald guy wearing the black t-shirt? That'll be you in ten years." It's a humbling experience to be roasted by a teenager.) I referred to the Welsh chick as Wales and ridiculed her chronic elision of the letter "T", which would turn Harry Potter into 'arry Po'er and other egregious abuses of the English language.
Another day of travel took us to Yogyakarta in central Java. Yogya (the first and second "Y's" are pronounced more like a soft "J" so it sounds like 'Jogjakarta') is the cultural capital of Java, which unfortunately meant to a large extent that it's known for its shopping. And by shopping, I mean lots of trinkets designed to be snapped up by tourists. Not my thing. However, just outside of the city lies Prambanam, an ancient Hindu temple built in the middle of the 9th century. An earthquake a few years ago damaged the temple and visitors are not allowed to climb over certain portions of the structure, but it was still absolutely stunning, nearly on the level of the awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping amazingness of Angkor Wat. The fact that temples like the Angkor Wat complex and Prambanan have not been meticulously preserved adds immeasureably to their ancient feel, it's like you're back in the 9th century when staring down those ancient, crumbling structures. The ancient Buddhist temple Borobudur can also be found in the area, although paradoxically the fact that it has been very well-maintained makes it less interesting, and its design is more repetitive and ultimately it didn't inspire the same sense of wonder I got from Angkor and Prambanan.
After a forgettable day at a nature preserve, during which I mostly caught up on my sleep-- the roosters were blaring in my ear from about 3:30 to 5:30 a.m. every morning in Yogya and I barely slept for three days-- we made our way to the mountains of East Java and woke up at three in the morning to witness the sunrise over Gunung Bromo, an active volcano. Bromo is one of three volcanoes emerging from a vast crater that stretches 10 km across, flanked by the peaks of Kursi and Batok (that last bit taken from Lonely Planet). Shrouded in mist as the sun rises, it truly feels like an alien landscape, or maybe the last bit of swallowing panorama at the end of the world. If Herzog had decided to film Aguirre, The Wrth of God in Indonesia, Kinski's death scene would've involved a camera spinning around Bromo's crater. As you get closer to the actual crater, which constantly belches smoke, your nostrils are invaded by the sulphur smell, which becomes so thick that it ravages your throat. The angle is steep and my lazy ass barely made it up the steps, but I'm glad I worked up a sweat, the sight from up top was possibly even more stunning than the sunrise.
Next, a car, non-AC train and finally a ferry to Bali. Charlies and I befriended a 4 year-old Indonesian boy named Riski on the train, who seemed fascinated by my prolific air-guitaring while listening to Graves At Sea on my iPod and couldn't stop staring at me. He was shy at first but warmed up when I started making silly faces and pretending to hide from him behind a curtain. We were complaining about the sweltering heat in the cabin until we found out that Riski and his parents had been on the train for 3 days, after 4 days on a boat. We had the option of moving into the a/c car after a couple of hours but decided to sit it out with our new buddy. It was so hot that after a while I felt like I was knee-deep in some kind of hypnotic trance. Charlie would ask me a question and I would reply a minute later like no time had passed and we were both so out of it neither of us thought this was weird.
In Bali, we started off in Lovina, a quiet beach town in the southern part of the island which was little more than a strip of restaurants and bars bordering the beach. We went to a local hot springs where we were the only Westerners and it was quite a spectacle. As we walked through the crowds, it was-- to borrow Charlie's words-- like Moses parting the Red Sea as Indonesians gawked at us. I sat out the first night of partying but made it out for the second night of partying, and ended-up with one of the worst hangovers of my life. I have some vague memories of insulting a British dude in a pool hall, entirely without provocation, and came dangerously close to getting my ass kicked. A little food settled my stomach and we got on a mini-van to Ubud. Ubud is the cultural capital of Ubud, which like Yogya, means an endless stream of stores selling batik, wooden sculptures of the Buddha and massive phalluses, junky "Bintang Pilsenser" t-shirts, jewelry... etc. etc. etc. Some great restaurants, though, and for our farewell dinner, we ordered an entire Balinese roast suckling pig. I ate stacks and stacks of pork, including massive rolls of fat and gristle, and it all tasted delicious.
I'm in Kuta now, one of the southern beaches in Bali. It's kind of a hellhole, really. Endless winding streets filled with the usual assortment of hawkers and stores selling batik, boogleg DVDs, t-shirts with witty slogans like "No money no honey" and "Lest's [sic] fuck lesbians". And the usual parade of women ogling men for massages and taxi drivers harassing pedestrians for fares. I'm burnt out on that vibe and looking forward to flying to Jakarta in a couple of days.
Comments