Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Looking into the crater of Gunung Rinjani, Lombok

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a two-month trip I made to Indonesia in 1997. This was part of a much larger, three-year journey that took me through Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Nepal, from 1995 to 1998.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled the world for three years, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

Bali

Kuta

Written: 14 September 1997

And so it’s time for the Big Challenge... or that’s how I’ve been feeling about leaving the safe haven of Australia and heading into the anarchy of Asia. Landing in Indonesia in the middle of the night, without any accommodation booked, precious little local currency, hardly a word of the local language, and nothing but an open mind... well, two years ago I wouldn’t even have boarded the plane. Back then, landing in Sydney with everything pre-booked was scary enough.

Because I landed late at night, Bali’s Denpasar airport was almost totally shut when I landed, and the hotel booking desk, on which I had been pinning my hopes, was closed. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, and wandered out into the airport car park, where I started asking the hotel reps hanging round whether they had any rooms. My first request ended up with a US$30-per-night response, which was expensive, but better than sleeping on the streets. Another passenger had booked into a US$15-per-night hotel, but they’d made their reservation some six weeks in advance. Things were looking grim, but funnily enough, I didn’t really mind. Tired and stiff from the flight, I was too dumbstruck to worry.

That’s when I saw a little man carrying a sign saying ‘Hostelling International’, the universal name for Youth Hostels worldwide. I’d renewed my hostel card back in Cairns, mainly to get a discount on the coach ticket to Brisbane, so I grabbed the man and asked him if he had any rooms and how much they were; ‘Yes, we have rooms, at 12,000rp a night,’ he said. After some quick mental arithmetic – 3000rp is about one US dollar, so that was about US$4 per night – and I was home and dry. I got into the van, seemingly the only person stupid enough to turn up in Denpasar without a prior booking, and off we went through the night streets of Bali.

Driving in Bali is everything you thought the Greeks were, but worse. Nominally the Indonesians drive on the left, which I hadn’t been expecting as this used to be a Dutch colony, but given the astonishing number of motorbikes and crazy drivers, it’s more a case of, ‘Give way to me, ’cos I ain’t giving way to you.’ Jet-lagged and wide-eyed, I small-talked with Putu, the hostel manager, and wondered how fortunate I was to be heading towards a bed; the feeling of landing on your feet by the skin of your teeth is quite an adrenalin rush.

Even arriving at a hostel – a clean, secure and pleasant one, I should add – is a culture shock when you first visit a country like Indonesia. I decided to get into some good habits early on, so I set up my mosquito net (even though Bali isn’t a malaria area) and went off to brush my teeth. Not so fast, though... the drinking water is guaranteed to give you Bali belly, even if you only do your teeth with it, but luckily I’d brought a bottle of Aussie water[1] from Darwin, so fresh-breathed and sweating profusely in the tropical temperatures, I bivvied down for the night.

A First Taste of Asia

The next day was my first proper experience of culture shock, and it filled my mind with all manner of thrills and spills, particularly as I’ve spent most of my travelling life so far in highly anglicised cultures. I’m sure that southern Bali is pretty mild stuff compared to legendary places like India, but it’s still a world apart from the West, and I wasn’t disappointed. I also wasn’t that spooked – I found places like Amanu far more remote, not surprisingly – but that first day in Kuta will stay with me for a very long time.

That morning I joined the hostel’s free shuttle bus to Kuta, the main tourist centre on Bali and some 6km west of the hostel’s pleasantly suburban setting. Kuta is home to a long stretch of surfing paradise, a beach populated by lobster-coloured tourists and the most bewildering supply of hawkers you’ve ever seen. My first mission was to change some money, and if I was worried about the banks being closed on a Sunday, I needn’t have been; every Tom, Dick and Harry in Kuta is a money changer, and the process was no different from any other country; I just wandered around trying to find the best deal in town. I bumped into a couple from the hostel in my wanderings – Emma and Doug from Muswell Hill – and we teamed up to explore the bustling tourist Mecca that is Kuta.

The first rule of buying anything that doesn’t have a fixed price is to barter. Some advice I’d picked up was to ask how much something was, and to offer one third of that, smiling as if it’s a game (which it is, really). The vendor looks suitably shell-shocked and makes another offer, which you counter, and eventually you meet somewhere halfway and it’s a deal. If the deal isn’t to your liking, say you’ll go down the road where you got a better offer, and just watch the price tumble. My first experience of tumbling prices came in a clothes shop off the main market road in Kuta.

So what did I buy? Some baggy cotton trousers and a cotton shirt (which I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing in London, but which proved practical and mozzie-proof garb for Indonesia) and a lovely sarong, an essential multi-purpose purchase that can be used as a body wrap, towel, bed sheet, sunshade, pillow and just about anything else you can think of. I don’t think I managed to strike a terribly competitive bargain; all three cost me 42,000rp, or about £8.50, which might sound like a bargain in western terms, but isn’t so great when you consider that’s the cost of four or five nights in an average hotel in Bali. Still, I needed the clothes, and I needed the practice at haggling, so it was a good start.

Lunch was a pleasant surprise, too. For little over one pound each we ate like kings, with a huge plate of crispy noodles and vegetables and a Coke from one of the most beautiful settings you’re likely to find, a restaurant right on the beach. Food is ridiculously cheap here, and you can eat for a few pence per meal if you’re willing to risk the street vendors’ appetising but sometimes slightly dubious offerings. For the first few meals, I sensibly stuck to the restaurants, trying such wonders as gado-gado (boiled vegetable salad with a spicy peanut sauce), nasi goreng (fried rice topped with a fried egg) and mie goreng (fried noodles). Indonesian food might not be that spectacular when compared to its more famous neighbours in Southeast Asia, but it’s certainly value for money.

Hawkers of Kuta

Sitting on the beach, supping a cold and very inexpensive beer, the ubiquitous hawkers landed on us like flies on shit. Every two seconds a new face would buzz into view, trying to off-load fake watches, sarongs, jewellery, massages... you name it, it’s here. The secret, I quickly discovered, is to say, ‘No thanks,’ firmly and repetitively, or even better a quick tidak (Indonesian for ‘no’). Wearing shades helps, as once they’ve got eye contact, they latch on like hyenas moving in for the kill, but the golden rule is not to start a conversation (unless, of course, you actually want to buy something) and not to tell them your name. Doug, in one of his most endearing features, couldn’t resist having a chat; he just loved to talk to people, and if there’s one thing that’s free in Bali, it’s a conversation involving one side trying to sell something, and the other side trying to dump them politely. I sat back and watched him and Emma dig themselves deeper and deeper; he ended up buying a massage that he didn’t really want, and she bought an ankle necklace simply to get rid of the woman selling it. For some reason I wasn’t a target; perhaps my tidaks were more forceful than Doug and Emma’s.

The whole day was constantly amazing. Waiting for our bus, we just watched the world go by; if money makes the world go round, then crazy places like Kuta make it turn a little faster, and the combination of canny natives, confused tourists and a distinctly tropical attitude towards life produces a cultural soap opera that never ceases to amaze. The littlest things become fascinating – the man in charge of parking motorbikes, the ticket touts who shout lewd comments at any girl in a miniskirt, the dogs eating discarded scraps in the streets, the taxis doing u-turns in the middle of the busiest road in Kuta, the Australian accents that the locals have adopted as a survival trait in the competitive street-selling environment – and I get the feeling this will continue throughout Indonesia.

I find myself thinking that if I get this much of a buzz from Kuta, the most touristy place in Bali, then getting out into the sticks is really going to be something...

The Warung

And so, to the next challenge. The hostel, good though it was, was essentially not that different from hostels the world over, except that it had an excellent and very cheap restaurant (at least, cheap by western standards). A good, filling meal of gado-gado or nasi goreng cost 4000rp (about 85p), but I couldn’t rely on hostel food forever, so I decided to go native and check out one of the warungs, the small restaurants dotted all over the place.

‘Restaurant’ is a euphemism when applied to some warungs. The fanciest are like restaurants, but the majority aren’t, and if you had to compare the average warung to a garage, it would be the one with a greasy attendant who fills up your car with a cigarette hanging from his unshaven lips while a mangy dingo pisses on your front tyre, and the rag used to clean your windscreen smears more dirt on it than you’d ever pick up on the road. Indonesia is, according to the guidebooks, the place in Southeast Asia where most people get a bad stomach, and judging by your average warung, it’s not hard to see why.

The warung I chose for my first roadside easting experience was just down the road from the hostel – a long way from the tourist strip in Kuta – and it was pretty damn grubby. I figured that if I was going to get Bali belly, I might as well get it over and done with, so I sat down on a plastic stool and ordered a nasi goreng. To my immense relief it was created and cooked in front of my very eyes – reheated food is a guaranteed way to get ill, so you should only go for freshly cooked meals – but the knife the woman used was so rusty that I wondered whether even a very hot wok would kill off all the nasties. Still, it tasted excellent, and didn’t cost too much (although, not sure whether one should haggle in a warung, I paid the asking price, which could have been a rip off), and 24 hours later I was still firing on all cylinders. In retrospect, this was lucky; with dirty cats prowling about and a distinctive smell of sewers drifting into the open-air warung whenever the wind changed, I felt like I was dicing with death[2].

I probably saved the situation by drinking a few cheap beers that night with Emma and Doug, and another Pommy couple, Caroline and Stuart, whom Emma and Doug had met in Australia. There’s camaraderie between fellow travellers in places like this that provides a safety blanket from the slightly scary world of reality, and talking to them about their plans for the morrow – driving north in their newly rented 4WD – helped make up my own mind. I was going to head north, too, but without the luxury of self-drive; instead, I was going to check out Balinese public transport.

[1] On the subject of water, I made a last-minute and truly liberating purchase in Brisbane. Aware that travellers buy bottled water all the time throughout Asia, I did a mental calculation of how much ten months’ worth of water might cost me, and came up with a pretty large figure... enough to consider buying a water filter. The iodine tablets I’d bought for water purification in New Zealand would have done the job, but they taste pretty rough and you shouldn’t drink iodine water more than you have to, so I scoured the Yellow Pages and found a shop in the city that specialised in water filters.

Some A$265 later (a fraction of the price of buying bottled water for a year) I was the proud owner of a pocket-sized 250g Katadyn Mini water filter that says it will remove all the nasties I might come across, even cholera, giardia, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, viral gastroenteritis, typhoid and, of course, things like worms and cysts. Between my myriad inoculations and the water filter, I should now be able to drink the water pretty much anywhere, and I can always fall back on the iodine tablets if things look particularly grim and there’s no bottled water available. I’ve got two plastic bottles, one labelled ‘Cool’ and the other ‘Crap’, and I simply filter from one to the other, meaning I never run out of water if there’s a water source nearby.

[2] I would return to Kuta to fly out to Singapore, nearly two months later on November 7th, after a long bus ride from Yogyakarta during which the drivers insisted on playing extremely loud gamelan music at 11.30pm, 1am and 2.30am (not that I was counting or anything). Soon after arriving, I would get a nasty batch of Bali belly, the final insult from a country whose standard of health isn’t as bad as some other countries, but is just as effective; E.coli doesn’t mind where it lives, but it really enjoys the human gut. It’s funny how I was joking about it at the beginning of my trip through Indonesia; it was no laughing matter by the time I left.

Some things, though, put your health in perspective. That Saturday night, I was woken up by a drunken brawl downstairs – at least, it sounded like a drunken brawl – and a car backfiring. Chatting to the janitor the next day, I got a different story.

‘So we got woken up early morning, by poliss,’ he said. ‘And polissmen go to room below you, and knock on door saying, “We know you got heroin, hashish, and stuff, let us in.” But they didn’t open up, saying, “We ain’t got nothin’ in here, man”, so they got me to get spare key, I open the door, and bash the door down. One of them runs off down the corridor, so polissman gets out his gun and shoots him. Got his leg just here. They from Java, you know.’

Excitement in Kuta? No surprises there, then.

Balinese Public Transport

Written: 16 September 1997

Tuesday morning saw me standing outside the hostel in Kuta, waiting for a bemo (the local bus) while chaos erupted around me. Lining the street were loads of motorbikes, each with an owner hanging round nattering and waiting for something to happen. There was a policeman on hand, and all I could assume was that there had been an accident of some sort, and everyone was basically hanging around to see if anything juicy was going to happen. The fact that I understood not one word added to the confusion on my part; about three bemos went past before I realised I’d have to stand in the middle of the road to catch one’s attention.

Bemos are the staple ingredient of Balinese transport. A bemo can be anything from a minibus to a truck with seats tacked on the back, and luckily in southern Bali they’re fairly pleasant, and mainly of the minibus variety (on some of the other islands they do tend to be a bit more cobbled together). I thought that would be a good thing; the only problem is that when a minibus is packed to the brim, it’s stifling, whereas an open truck has built-in air conditioning.

My first bemo, from the hostel to southern Denpasar, wasn’t too bad; wedged between two warbling Indonesians with my backpack crunched under my knees, I got to Denpasar without any major problems. Then I realised I didn’t really know how to proceed; I had directions to go to Sanglah, then Kreneng, then Batubulan, and then Ubud, my destination for the day. But changing bemos isn’t exactly like changing tube stations; you get out in the middle of a street, and you take it from there.

As it happened, it took me all of five seconds to find the next bemo. A guy came up to me and asked where I was going, I told him Kreneng, and I was bustled into a waiting bemo. This was when the fun started: at official bemo stops the driver waits until he’s filled the bemo, and then he sets off; outside of the official stops, you simply hail a bemo, and if there’s room, he’ll stop and pick you up. The problem comes in the Indonesian definition of ‘full’: in the western world it means as many passengers as the regulations allow, but as with everything to do with Indonesia, regulations seem to be things that happen to someone else, so by the time the driver had filled his bemo and started for Kreneng, the bus was bursting at the seams, a situation that wasn’t helped by my backpack.

The next station, Kreneng, was when I first came up against the payload surcharge. My first rides had cost 500rp and 700rp respectively (11p and 15p), and the next leg was supposed to be 700rp, but for the grossly inflated sum of 1000rp I got to sit in the front seat, with enough room for me and my bag to breathe. This turned out to be well worth the extra charge, and after we arrived at Batubulan, I hopped out and searched for the bemo to Ubud. Unfortunately the front seat was already taken, and it took 20 minutes to fill up the bus to capacity, but eventually we trundled off, bearing 22 passengers in a shuttle not much bigger than a Renault Espace. I lost feeling in my left foot and circulation in my buttocks, but we soon pulled into Ubud, some 20km north of my original starting point, and as I got off the bus, I felt immensely proud of myself for managing another milestone in my Asian education. The total cost of the trip was 3700rp, or just under 80p, which was great value, particularly for a cultural experience akin to being holed up in the Black Hole of Calcutta with half the population of Outer Mongolia while the whole world shakes and lurches around you.

Sitting on a street corner and watching the Balinese drive is a bit like going to watch motor racing; you’re there to see someone crash (at least, that’s the only reason I’ve ever watched motor racing). Being actively involved in the whole traffic scene is the difference between watching a bull fight and waving the red cloth yourself, and using public transport in Indonesia manages to be both thrilling and deeply scary. Driving down the right-hand side of the road to overtake isn’t unusual, but in the West we normally wait until there’s nobody coming the other way before pulling out; red traffic lights mean ‘stop’ in the West, but here they mean ‘grit your teeth, we’re going through’; and pedestrian crossings here mean ‘sound the horn’ rather than ‘look out for pedestrians’. As an outside observer the horn sounds are almost lyrical, providing a sonic backdrop to the traffic scene in much the same way that kookaburras and curlews provide a backdrop to the Australian bush, but when you’re actually inside the maelstrom, horns are a matter of survival.

But there is one thing that strikes me about the Balinese driving system: it works. Given the amount of traffic and the random development of the road system – a relief after the orthogonal sterility of Australasia – the traffic’s always moving, even if it’s only millimetres from the oncoming trucks in the middle of the road. London drivers come in for a knocking, but their automotive audacity is nothing compared to the crazy stunts in Indonesia, and you can’t help wondering if cabbies couldn’t learn a thing or two from their Balinese cousins.

Learning Bahasa Indonesia

Written: 16 September 1997

I’m learning a new language while in Indonesia, and it’s making travelling here so much more rewarding. Bahasa Indonesia (bahasa means ‘language’ in Indonesian) is a whole lot easier to pick up than English, and it doesn’t take long to become proficiently fluent (by which I mean able to travel without having to resort to screaming loudly and slowly in your native tongue).

Bahasa Indonesia has no tenses, no conjugation, no sexes, no irregular verbs and no plurals, it uses the Latin alphabet, and it’s easy to pronounce. Literally all you need is a good vocabulary, because once you’ve got the words and a basic understanding of the grammar, you can speak the language as fluently as is possible for a foreigner. To say something like, ‘I want to go and climb that mountain tomorrow,’ you say, ‘I like climb that mountain tomorrow,’ or to say, ‘Can I please have a cup of sweet tea,’ you say ‘Please sweet tea’. It’s very easy.

There is only one important point: in Indonesian, the letter ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ch’, so cap cai is pronounced ‘chap-chai’; the letter ‘k’ is used for hard k-sounds. There one notable exception, though: Coke is pronounced as in western English, probably because it wouldn’t sell too well if pronounced correctly in Indonesian...

I spent the first few days learning the greetings, the numbers and the basic grammar, and within a week was speaking reasonable sentences. With the constant learning of new words that happens as a result of travelling alone, the language barrier I’d feared simply evaporated; besides, so many people speak a smattering of English in Indonesia that you can’t really lose.

Finally, as an added bonus, Bahasa Indonesia is almost identical to Bahasa Malaysia, so what I learn in Indonesia will also be very useful for Malaysia.

All this rather goes against the grain of this particularly telling joke that I heard on the road:

What do you call someone who can speak three languages?

A polyglot.

What do you call someone who can speak two languages?

Bilingual.

And what do you call someone who can only speak one language?

English.

Ha bloody ha.

Ubud

Written: 18 September 1997

Stepping out of a bemo from Kuta into a chaotic street in Ubud, how the hell do you know where you are? The guidebook has a map, and a blob saying where it thinks you should be, but how do you find somewhere to stay that won’t break the bank? So I wandered aimlessly for half a minute, and then a man on a motorbike came up to me and asked if I was looking for a room. ‘How much?’ I asked. ‘10,000rp a night,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a look, then,’ I said. ‘OK,’ he smiled, taking my pack and stuffing it between him and the steering wheel, and indicating that I should sit on the back.

The hotel – or losmen in Indonesian – was very pleasant, and for my 10,000rp I got a room to myself (as is standard) with two beds (a single room almost always has two beds, while a double has a double bed and a single bed) and an en suite bathroom, complete with westernised ablutions. The traditional Asian ablution involves the squat toilet and mandi, the latter being a tub of water and a scoop; you don’t get in the tub, but scoop water onto yourself like a do-it-yourself shower, but in Bali, western ablutions are becoming the norm. Not only that, every room had a lovely shaded veranda to itself, and the price included breakfast, as well as coffee and tea all day. Not bad for £2.15 per day, and I was staying in fairly expensive lodgings, too. When you get all this for less than the cost of a pint of beer in London, it makes you wonder how you’ll ever cope with western prices again.

For lunch I tried my second warung – a cleaner and cheaper one than the one I’d tried in Kuta – where I had a wonderful nasi campur and Coke. Nasi campur (nasi means ‘rice’ and campur means ‘mixed’) is basically rice with odds and ends, meaning you get about five or six portions of whatever’s going; all of the odds and ends I had were exquisite, even if I had no idea what most of them were, and suitably stuffed, I decided to explore a bit of Ubud.

The Sights of Ubud

After soaking up the central Ubud scene, I wandered south to the Monkey Forest, a small and almost dead forest populated by a large Balinese temple and an even larger population of monkeys. If you imagine that scene from Disney’s Jungle Book then you’re not far off what the Monkey Forest could be; huge trees slowly being crushed by strangling figs, pesky monkeys attacking tourists for peanuts, vines hanging off temple buildings – it could be so wonderful, but it’s actually rather sad. The forest is dead, the monkeys are only after one thing – food – and the tourists are only there to take their pictures so they can say they’ve ‘done’ the monkeys in Bali. Never mind, I suppose it’s one way to fill up the afternoon.

It was also my first experience of the entry fee system in Bali. Most things have an entry fee, which is fine because it’s normally something like 10p, but you not only pay entry for yourself, you pay a fee for your camera too, and if you’ve got a video camera, the charge is even more. It seems a bit strange at first, but you soon get used to it, though I never really understood why some tourists hid their compact cameras in their bags to avoid paying a few rupiah; if you don’t pay, you can’t expect the sights to be protected from the sort of decay that the Monkey Forest demonstrates all too sadly.

That night I shelled out to visit the ballet. Balinese dance is something else; it’s totally different to western dancing, and is a step beyond Polynesian tribal displays. It’s quite beautiful, with its combination of colourful and ornate dress, strange pentatonic and diatonic orchestral music played on the local equivalent of the xylophone, and eye and hand movements that are surprisingly expressive. The ballet I went to see, the Ramayana, was the story of the kidnapping of a beautiful girl by a demon, and helped along by some notes in English describing the plot, I found it a wonderful experience. The ‘stage’ was open air and in the round, set up very much like a temple with burning butter lamps and beautiful stone carvings everywhere, and as the moon rose over the whole proceedings, I really felt for the first time that here I was, in a radically different culture, rather than just a radically different lifestyle.

The only drawback was that every time a new character hit the stage, the camera flashes went off like the Oscars when the stars arrive. Ah well, Bali is a tourist trap, and Ubud is its cultural heart, so I guess I should have seen that coming...

Around Ubud

My second day in Ubud turned out well, too, despite a rather unpromising start. Waking up leisurely and enjoying a breakfast on the veranda felt pretty damn luxurious after all the lame breakfasts I’ve had to make for myself over the last two years, but on visiting the centre of the sprawling metropolis of Ubud, I found it comparatively dead. The public holiday that was in force, set to coincide with September’s full moon, turned out to be more of a holy day than a holiday; everyone disappeared into the temples, leaving the shops closed and the streets rather quiet, except for the beautiful bamboo poles set up by the sides of the road, which bent over the streets like decorated street lamps, with wind chimes dangling off the ends and gently tinkling in the breeze. I suppose it would be similar to a non-Christian turning up on December 25th expecting a riot, only to find empty streets stuffed with Santa decorations, Christmas trees, and closed shops. Never mind; if the town centre was sleeping, I’d simply go exploring the surrounding countryside.

Walking west out of Ubud, I soon left the hotels and restaurants behind, and headed off into my first experience of rural Bali. Coming round a corner, I was confronted by lush green meadows, which on closer inspection turned out to be paddy fields. Dotted throughout the fields were flags on large poles, stone pillars where floral offerings were being made to the gods, little thatched shelters, and people working the fields (though not many, as most were praying somewhere else). I stopped to take a quick break on the side of the road, fishing out my inadequate map in the process to try to work out where I was, and before you know it I was accosted by this elderly man, all dressed up in the basic farmer’s garb of sarong, flip-flops and baggy shirt. Smiling, he asked me in English where I was from.

So, we got talking. He introduced himself as Made Tunas (pronounced ‘Maday Toonas’) and said he lived in Sayan, a village some 2km west of central Ubud, and home to huge spreads of paddy fields. He offered to guide me to his village, which seemed a sensible prospect seeing as I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, and we strode off towards the nearest paddy field.

Given that I was wearing my new cotton trousers – I was trying to look respectable, so as not to offend the locals – I wasn’t too keen on marching through the quagmire that makes a paddy field a paddy field, but, of course, I hadn’t been thinking. Criss-crossing all paddy fields are perfectly dry paths; paddy fields are effectively fields fed by man-made streams, and to keep the water in they need sides. These are what you walk down, sometimes hopping across flowing streams on bamboo sticks, sometimes scaling steep terraces, but mainly just wandering through a confusing but fairly logical network of little raised tracks. Every few metres is a little statue or stone monument – it seems each field needs its own little offering spot to ensure the gods make the rice grow – and there are also plenty of wind-powered rattles that play out a strange tune, not a million miles from the sound a wooden wind chime makes. Combine this with the Hindu singing you often come across, and it’s a step into another world. I felt deeply spooked to be wandering through a segment of photographic pastiche as the sun beat down mercilessly; after all, how many pictures of paddy fields being worked have I seen? Countless. And how many paddy fields have I actually explored? Well, none... until now.

Arriving in the little village of Sayan, we took a few sharp turns down tiny alleyways, and before long Made Tunas pointed to a collection of ramshackle and crumbling buildings and proclaimed, ‘This my house.’ We sweltered across a small courtyard and sat down in the shade, and while the ducks clacked around, the dogs sniffed at the daily offerings[1] and the cows in the field snored and chewed the cud, Made Tunas offered me a drink.

Thinking quickly, I asked him if he had any tea; after all, tea has to be heated somewhere along the way, and I figured that I was probably going to get as sick as a dog if I ate or drank anything at all, but tea might just be all right. Off he pottered to put the proverbial kettle on, and I sat down to examine the area. There were four small houses around the courtyard, with some beds kicking around (though to call a flat wooden palette a bed is a bit of an exaggeration) and odds and ends everywhere. Off to one side was a small, private temple area, decorated with beautiful cloths and flower arrangements, and the smell of incense wafted over in the gentle breeze. When Made Tunas came back with a grotty glass full of sweet but worryingly tepid tea, I gingerly sipped it, finding a delicious and refreshing sweet drink, containing goodness only knows what. We made small talk – his English was quite passable, something that surprised me for a farmer – and he showed me the woodcarvings that his son made and sold in the market, even giving me a little wooden tortoise as a present. Of course, I knew all this was going to cost me something in the end, but I was having such a sensory overload that I figured it would be worth it.

After a while, during which I picked up some more Bahasa Indonesia, I declined his kind offer of some food, figuring that eating would really screw up my intestines, and we set off back through the paddy fields, heading towards the road to Ubud. When we finally reached the road, I offered to give him some something (‘I have nothing to give you, but perhaps some money...?’), and after some gentle negotiation I coughed up a pretty paltry sum; he seemed happy enough, and I reckoned I’d got a fair old experience for my cash. Satisfied but hungry, I set off back into Ubud, picked up a wonderful spicy chicken dish at a restaurant on the way, and ducked back into the hotel for a well-earned siesta. I slept like a baby...

[1] Throughout Bali you’ll see these little offerings on the street, in the houses... pretty much everywhere, in fact. Consisting of a small tray made of woven leaves, filled with dried flowers, a couple of rice balls and an incense stick or two, they’re put out every morning outside the front door, where the dogs come and eat the rice, the motorbikes drive over them and the ravages of the world turn them into a squashed mass on the highway of life. Still, the next day there’s another one, and they’re a pretty pleasant way of littering the streets with biodegradable art.

Curse of the 60-day Visa

Written: 18 September 1997

Ubud was where the enormity of my Asian trip kicked in. In Australia and New Zealand I had plenty of time, my own transport, and mounds of information on walks, sights to see and places to stay. In French Polynesia I had a much more fixed schedule: where Zeke went, I went. But in Asia there are no guidelines except for time: I have 60 days in Indonesia, and then I have to leave, end of story. I can leave via plenty of recognised entry/exit points, but it’s still only 60 days, and that adds a certain impetus to proceedings.

A quick geography update might help explain the quandary of the 60-day visa. Heading south and east from Singapore in a rough circle (from about nine o’clock to four o’clock, with the clock centre in the middle of Indonesia) stretches the main archipelago of Indonesia. The larger islands are, west to east, Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo, Flores, Lembata and Timor, with Sumba tucked in south of Flores; the islands east of Bali, ending in Timor, are collectively called Nusa Tenggara. Then, north of the archipelago (at the centre of the clock) are, west to east, Kalimantan (previously Borneo), Sulawesi, the Malukus (the fabled Spice Islands) and finally Irian Jaya, which borders on Papua New Guinea.

Anyway, finding myself with a free afternoon in Ubud after my walk round Sayan, I sat down to make my plans. Plan one, the easy plan and a guaranteed good trip, although extremely touristy, was to head west to Java, then through Sumatra, and finally into Singapore. Plan two, a more challenging route, was to head east from Bali through the islands of Nusa Tenggara, then to fly or sail north to Sulawesi, then west to Kalimantan (southern Borneo), and further west to Singapore. Plan three started like plan two, but instead of crossing Kalimantan from east to west (a bit of a misnomer, as you have to sail around the south coast, there being no roads), I would take the boat south from eastern Kalimantan to Java, from where I would go back to Bali, and would fly to Singapore using the relevant part of my Tahiti-London ticket.

The problem? Well, apart from not knowing how much time to give to each place, and not knowing how reliable the inter-island transport will be, it isn’t exactly the same as planning a self-drive trip round Australia, and besides, most of the Indonesian section of my guidebook seems to talk about Java, Sumatra and Bali, with only sketchy details of the other islands. Perhaps this is why I’ve decided to go for plan three: most tourists don’t get to Kalimantan or Sulawesi, they go to the sights in Java, which I should still manage to catch. So, I’ve decided to change some more money in Ubud, where the rates were good, and catch a bemo east to the port of Padangbai, leaving Bali behind for my return in eight weeks’ time. I hope I’m doing the right thing; only time will tell.

Types of Traveller

Written: 18 September 1997

Ubud is billed as the ‘centre of cultural tourism in Bali’, which basically means it’s full of art galleries, wood carving shops, hotels and restaurants. It’s also full of tourists, and where Kuta is full of Australians on shag-and-tan holidays, Ubud is full of Germans on a more cultural experience. While I perused the streets, I noticed a complete social stratum in the tourist scene, one I’d never quite spotted before because in a white culture, it’s not always so easy to spot who the tourists are.

First up there are the package tourists, who come in two flavours: beach bums and smarter couples. They’re obviously only here for a short time, because they spend money like there’s no tomorrow, buying big and bulky souvenirs for inflated prices and making the local tourist industry rub its hands in glee.

Next up are the obvious backpackers, who tend to hang around in couples or groups, with young girls gossiping just like they were back in the hairdressers at home, and the lads being lads but without quite stooping to the depths of the beach bums. They wear lightweight hiking boots, daypacks, big money belts and keep talking about travelling and how it opens your mind and how they’ll be so different from their friends when they get back home and how they don’t know what they’ll do for a job when they get back and how everyone should go travelling and how much they miss real beer and how amazing it is to think that people can survive in suburbia... and so on, ad nauseam. Quite a few of them have visited Cairns and Uluru and think they’ve done Australia, if you know what I mean.

Then there’s the dropout crowd, made up of hippies who hit the Asian trail, discovered cheap Thai grass and never looked back. Not as prevalent as they used to be due to stricter entry requirements, they’re still here, wearing scraggy clothes and inane grins. The dress code for Southeast Asia is clear; in most countries, modesty is highly respected, and both men and women should cover up in public (so that’s trousers and shirts rather than tiny shorts and bikini tops). Flip-flops, swimwear and long hair are generally frowned upon by the locals, but they tolerate it because these strangers have money to spend, particularly in tourist spots like Kuta. Long shorts seem to be reasonably acceptable, but skimpy swimming trunks or teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikinis... well, they’re really not the done thing.

And me? Where do I fit in? Well, I’m obviously a tourist, but I’m trying to look like someone who’s attempting to fit in. I wear passably smart clothes. I have a respectable, short haircut. I keep myself to myself, don’t get rip-roaringly drunk in the watering holes, avoid the expensive restaurants, and try to take public buses rather than the pricier tourist shuttles. I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn, but I’ve already done more adventurous things than most people do in their whole year in Asia. Give me a couple of months, and I hope to be able to go anywhere, and survive.

Lombok

Ampenan

Written: 19 September 1997

Once I’d decided to head east from Bali to the neighbouring island of Lombok, it all fell into place; in the end, I managed to get from Ubud into the thick of Lombok in just two days, which struck me as pretty reasonable. I left Ubud on a Wednesday morning, jumping on a couple of bemos that took me across Bali to the port of Padangbai on the east coast. On the way I shared the inside of a tiny van with 22 other people, and even had a little kid throw up on my backpack, which was a nice touch. Still, I count myself lucky; the breakneck driver didn’t hit anything, I didn’t have anything stolen, and I got the feeling back in my legs and bottom within about half an hour of arriving in Padangbai.

Shrugging off the hawker trying to sell me hugely inflated prices for the tourist buses in Lombok, I managed to track down the ferry ticket office, paid my 5500rp fee and ran all the way up the gangway, jumping on the 12 noon ferry just as the ropes were falling off. The four-hour journey went pretty smoothly, as I managed to sit next to a couple of interesting English couples who killed time by providing me with tips on Malaysia, Thailand et al (and I reciprocated with bits and bobs about Australia and New Zealand, a ritual that soon becomes familiar on the road, but never tiring).

Docking in Lombok after the crossing didn’t quite go according to plan. We got there spot on four o’clock, but then spent 40 minutes circling round the harbour in the marine equivalent of the plane stack above Heathrow. There was another ferry in our spot, and when it eventually filled up and headed off, a ship’s horn slagging match ensued that left the passengers on both boats deaf, but the captains sufficiently de-stressed. I’ve never witnessed the maritime equivalent of road rage before and it’s quite something, though it’s mainly bluster, seeing as the captains can’t leap out of their vessels for the traditional punch-up.

Despite my, er, relatively extensive experience of bemos, I got stung on the ride from the port of Lembar to the main city of Mataram. Yes, I was grabbed and bundled into what I thought was a bemo, and yes, they thought I’d pay them the extortionate fee of 3000rp they had mentioned; but I told them when I got in that I wouldn’t go above 2000rp, not realising that this wasn’t a public bemo, the rate for which was about 700rp. Oh well; private citizens on the make I can handle, but when they refused to budge on the price and so did I, they kicked me out of the van in the middle of nowhere, and one of their accomplices stuck me on a public bemo to Ampenan (the suburb I wanted to go to). It was another learning experience; don’t trust anyone who’s simply after your money.

Peaceful Ampenan

Soon I was wandering around Ampenan, trying to fit my map to the roads themselves. The concept of road signs is apparently alien to the Indonesians, and after walking around for half an hour with no success, I collared a passing horse cart and asked him to take me to the Hotel Zahir. These wonderful little constructions, called dokars if they have two wheels and andongs if they have four, are a pleasant way to get around; the cart is tiny, seating four at a push, and the donkey trots along the road, crapping when it feels like it and adding to an atmosphere that is already explosive enough. The cost is the same as your average bemo, except you tend to bargain more with a dokar, knocking him down from his initially ridiculous offer to something that’s only about four times the price the locals will pay... and it all adds up to a heap of fun.

The Hotel Zahir, at a whopping 8000rp per night including breakfast, was a rather more earthy hotel than the one in Ubud. As I arrived, a disgruntled Australian woman was complaining that she’d given 10,000rp to a masseur, who’d then gone off to change the money in the market and hadn’t come back. The Aussie was miffed and the proprietor was offering to refund the 10,000rp himself (because the masseur, Maria, was a regular at the hotel), but in a fit of obstinate pique, the girl was having none of it. She looked over to me sipping Indonesian tea outside my room door, warned me not to buy anything because I would probably get ripped off, and stormed off in a huff and a sarong. The masseur turned up five minutes later, of course, having had trouble changing the large denomination note, but it made an impression on me; how stupid complaining westerners can look when banging their heads against problems that only they perceive as being problems. It beats television any day.

After booking in and using the mandi, I ducked out to a warung – a stall on the main street, selling fabulous nasi campur that I ate under a makeshift tent next to the stall – and there got talking to a friendly couple from Holland who were over here on a three-week holiday in Bali and Lombok. We were on the same wavelength, so we went off for some pisang goreng (fried bananas, 50rp each, or about one penny) and then a bir bintang (a surprisingly pleasant make of beer) in a local watering hole. It never ceases to amaze me how I keep meeting people in the middle of this social quagmire; I suppose when you’re bouncing around in a boiling pot, you’re going to bump into a lot of other bubbles.

Gunung Rinjani

Written: 25 September 1997

Friday morning saw me catch two bemos to the little village of Senaru, which teeters on the northern slopes of Lombok’s towering volcano Gunung Rinjani (gunung means ‘mountain’ in Indonesian). On the way I got talking to a young bloke called Saina who said he ran a new losmen in Senaru, and he could help me get all the equipment needed for the hike up the still-active volcano that dominates the centre of Lombok. I gently refused his offers of a guide or a porter – a guy I met in Ubud convinced me they were totally unnecessary – but I rented a tent and roll mat off him for 24,000rp, and bought four days’ food and some water for 28,000rp, somewhat cheaper than the equivalent costs in Australia and New Zealand. Packed and ready to roll, I spent a night in his new and delightfully positioned losmen, relaxing as the sun went down and the local mosque broadcast its chants over the valleys (Lombok is mainly Muslim, while Bali is mainly Hindu). The next day I got up ridiculously early to conquer another volcano.

Gunung Rinjani is huge; in fact, it’s the biggest peak in Indonesia outside Irian Jaya, which has mountains that make even professionals think twice. The only times you can see the peak from the towns around the volcano’s base are first thing in the morning and last thing at night; it’s so big that clouds form around it after a couple of hours of sunlight, shrouding the crater in mysterious grey swathes. At a height of 3726m (12,224 ft) it’s a lot bigger than anything else I’ve attempted to climb so far, and the walk up to the top from the village of Senaru takes a little over two days of solid mountain hiking.

Most people, by which I mean about 99 per cent of visitors to Rinjani, hire a porter to carry all the food, camping equipment and so on. These porters, who double as guides, are astounding; walking up sheer mountain paths with everything strapped to two ends of a bamboo pole that they balance on their shoulders, they manage to traverse sharp pumice trails with nothing but flimsy sandals on their feet. The weights they carry are nothing short of backbreaking, and you never hear a word of complaint as they trudge their way round the park. So most people load up their porters and do the walk with just a daypack, carrying maybe some water and a bit of warm clothing.

But I decided I wasn’t most people, so I packed up my tent and sleeping mat, along with eight ready-cooked meals of nasi goreng wrapped in banana leaves, and set off into Rinjani National Park with a heavy pack and a hastily copied map of the area that looked more like something from The Hobbit than a serious proposition. The pack weighed quite a bit, the other tourists thought I was crazy, and I started up the track at 7am on Saturday 20th September.

Senaru to the Summit

From Senaru, which is to the north of the mountain, I headed south through rainforest, climbing from Senaru at 600m to the crater rim at 2600m; the ascent was tiring, but it was a simple case of putting one foot in front of the other. I passed three very basic mountain shelters, known as Pos I, II and III on my map, but soon enough I reached the rim, where the most incredible views opened up in front of me. For the first night I camped right there on the rim, overlooking the inside of the crater, with its beautiful lake and second, still-smoking cone (the latter being the result of a recent eruption in 1994). The whole place was stunning; suffice to say that I have never seen a sight quite like the crater of Rinjani, even in Tongariro, and it was worth the six-hour uphill struggle just to see that view.

Delightful though the walk up to the rim was, it didn’t take me long to spot Rinjani’s biggest problem. Indonesians have absolutely no concept of litter; to them the world is a dustbin, and as a result Rinjani often looks more like Binjani.

There is shit everywhere, both figuratively and literally; because there aren’t any toilets in the park (not that you would expect any) there are piles of toilet paper and the associated dried masses behind every outcrop and tree, and the tracks are piled with litter, dropped by guides and locals alike. This applies throughout Indonesia; on the ferry to Lombok, people just threw their rubbish overboard and nobody seemed to care, but the effect is a bit more obvious in the natural environment of a volcano.

It’s probably a result of there being little ecological awareness here – being green is, after all, a luxury only afforded by the rich West – but I still packed out what I packed in, being careful not to add to the pile of sweet wrappers and plastic bottles that threatens to choke the park; one day the attitude might change, but in the meantime I would even discover that there are discarded cigarette packets and biscuit boxes on the summit, at 3726m.

By all accounts the problem is worse in people-heavy areas like Java. It really makes you appreciate how clean the western world is, even places like London where people complain about the mess. This, rather than the incredible views, is one of the most striking impressions of Gunung Rinjani, and it’s a terrible shame.

The next day I was up for the sunrise, a pleasant affair that would have been better if the whole of Lombok hadn’t been covered in cloud (though, being above the cloud layer by now, it was still beautiful). An early start saw me loping down the crater rim towards the east, stopping at the crater lake for a breather. Then it was on to the hot springs, a delightful river that cascades in waterfalls into rock pools with temperatures between boiling and warm; I found a lovely spot under a 40° waterfall and washed away all those aches and pains. However, it wasn’t long before I had to strike back up to the crater rim, this time on the eastern side, ready to tackle the summit.

The summit itself is part of the crater rim, a sharp tooth that juts out of the eastern side of the volcano, dominating the whole area. The second rim campsite is at about 3000m, just below the slopes that lead to the summit, and there I tasted real Indonesian hospitality, as the sun went down and lit up Bali in the distance. I had made some friends on the way: one girl, a Slovenian, had broken her sandals, and I’d whipped out my penknife and twine and fixed it up for her; another couple of girls had blisters, which I patched up with plasters and anti-bacterial cream; another bloke had a painful knee, so I gave him some pain killers... yes, some people try to climb mountains without the most basic equipment, and by the time I got to the rim, I’d earned a bit of a reputation as a survivor[1]. My kindness was repaid that night, as the porters from the group containing all these people fed me noodle soup and tea, a pleasant change from my cold nasi goreng.

We were up at 2am on the morning of the next day, and after some tea and biscuits, a group of us set off for the top, to catch the sunrise at 6am. This climb of over 700m was as close to hell as you can get; the first stage up to the main ridge was hard, the second stage along the top of the ridge was reasonable, but the last 100m or so was terrible. Imagine trying to walk up a big mound of coal, or a pile of sand, and you might get close to imagining the summit of Rinjani; it’s one step up and three steps backwards, clawing with your hands to maintain a grip in the freezing winds as dust fills your eyes and stones fill your shoes. This kind of volcanic rubble is called scoria, and it’s an absolute killer.

It took a good three hours of torturous ascent before I reached the top, arriving at the top alone and just in time to see the sunrise. Eventually everyone else arrived, bar the casualties who had turned back, and the world spread out below us. 12,000 feet is a hell of a long way above sea level, I can tell you, and the kretek cigarette that the porter gave me as the lake lit up in the sunlight was the icing on the cake...

Bouncing down the scoria was like walking in ten-league boots; it felt just like coming down Taranaki as I covered in one hour what it had taken three hours to climb. There were more hot noodles and tea for breakfast, and then it was time to retrace my steps back to the lake and hot springs for some thermal therapy, just a four-hour walk down from the crater rim. That night I camped by the lake, with the clouds pouring into the crater in their nightly ritual, settling on the water and making it look like a seething and bubbling cauldron. I got talking to Morton and Linda, a Danish couple whom I’d met on the second rim, and who were finding the walk a real struggle (despite their having a porter), but soon enough the early morning start up the summit caught up with us, and it was early to bed, and early to rise.

Monkey Business

Every park has its pests, whether they’re rats, mosquitoes, dingoes or sandflies, but in Rinjani there are two especially annoying pests, namely monkeys and humans. The humans are only irritating for the rubbish they leave behind, but the monkeys are as annoying as Fraser Island’s dingoes; they will open your tent (yes, they know how to operate zips), steal your food and throw the rest of your stuff around, if you don’t keep guard. I never left my tent alone, and when I hit the summit one of the guides stayed behind to guard the camp, but occasionally you come across a territorial monkey who’s got an attitude.

On my second visit to the hot springs, when I happened to be alone, a monkey appeared, slowly loping its way over towards my pack, which I’d left in the shade of a rocky outcrop. I got up and shouted at it, but unlike the soppy specimens I’d come across on the way up, this guy wasn’t going to take any shit from a pesky human, and he bared his teeth, let fly a vicious screeching, and started running straight at me, looking for a fight.

There’s not much that’s scarier than a monkey running at you, full pelt, fangs glinting in the midday sun. Because their faces are so expressive, you can see the evil in their eyes well before they get to you, and those teeth are simply savage. Luckily I stepped back into the hot pool, discovering in the process that monkeys don’t like hot water, and satisfied myself with a few feeble expletives from the safety of the pool, more like a coward who knows he’s unreachable than an all-conquering explorer. Eventually the monkey gave up trying to scare me into submission – well, he’d already succeeded, to be fair – took a few contemptuous sniffs at my backpack, and wandered back up the hill, casting the odd look back at the springs and hissing at me, making sure I knew who had won...

The last day was a simple job, back up to the first crater rim, and down the long slope to Senaru. I met Morton and Linda again, along with an Aussie couple called Mick and Ruth, and by the time we all reached the village, we’d arranged to meet up with each other for a feed and a couple of beers, as ever one of the sweetest moments of a long walk. It was also exactly what I needed; company helped banish the feeling of emptiness I’d had before arriving in Senaru, and my plans started to fall into place as we talked about good places to visit and how to get there. And as if I needed reminding about fate, it turned out that Mick had a Pelni timetable – Pelni being the inter-island ferry company in Indonesia, an outfit notorious for not being able to provide punters with timetables – so I copied the relevant details from him, and used it to sit down and plan my itinerary through Sulawesi. It was simply perfect timing.

So, those are the bare bones of the long grind up Gunung Rinjani, but aside from the schedule, what did it mean? Well, I’ve walked through deserts, climbed snow-bound volcanoes, slogged through rainforests, stomped up steep-sided river valleys and trekked along huge beaches, but Rinjani has to rate as one of the most amazing walks I’ve ever done, for a number of reasons. For a start, the scenery is quite unique, as hard to describe as Mt Cook and Uluru. But beyond that is the fact that Rinjani was my first solo walk outside of an English-speaking, westernised culture, and it was tough, challenging and all the more satisfying for its cultural isolation. My map was rudimentary, to say the least, and there were precious few signs on the way (and they were in Indonesian). Add in the altitude, the extremes of temperature and the seriously steep gradients, and you’ve got a challenge that’s easily on a par with the Pyke Route.

Aside from the physical and mental demands, there were the unusual points about Rinjani that made the walk such a different experience from other volcano treks I’d done. For example, down by the lake were women in Islamic dress, with burqas hiding their heads and prayer mats laid out to face Mecca. The locals just slept on the ground, or in the makeshift shelters dotted along the way, and they did the walk with gear that no self-respecting westerner would even consider using. And I didn’t see one cooker on the whole trip; everyone made a fire on which to cook their meal, something that’s quite rightly banned in a lot of western National Parks, but which added a wonderful atmosphere to the world inside the crater. What a place...

[1] A few weeks before I visited, a Dutchman died on Rinjani from exposure while camping on one of the rims. Rinjani is not a climb to take lightly, though with sensible precautions it’s not unsafe.

Indonesian Peace and Quiet

Written: 25 September 1997

In compiling this travelogue, I came across a note in my ‘diary summary’ document – a list of one-liners that remind me what I want to write about – that read as follows:

JUST FUCK OFF! (JFO)

This demonstrates how the friendliness of the locals really got to me on the day after my walk up Gunung Rinjani, though it wasn’t their fault at all. To the Indonesians a foreigner is someone to be friendly to, to talk to, to be interested in, but for the foreigner it can be more wearing than brakes without pads. There is no such thing as sitting quietly in Indonesia; one of the things I used to love doing in Australia and New Zealand was sitting in a park or botanic garden, watching the world go by as I read another chapter of my book, wrote some more travelogue, planned the next stage of the trip, or whatever. This simple pleasure is just not possible here.

In Indonesia, people are constantly coming up to you and talking at you, whether you like it or not. There is no concept of personal space here; everyone is a potential conversation, and although it’s meant well, it can really start to grind you down after the tenth local in a row has had the following conversation:

Local: ‘Hello meester, what your name?’

Me: ‘Mark.’

Local: ‘Where you from, Meester Marrr?’

Me: ‘England.’

Local: ‘Ah, Ingran. You know Laydee Deeana?’

Me: ‘Ah, Lady Diana.’

Local: ‘Lady Deeana dead, meester.’

Me: ‘That’s right.’

Local: ‘What job you do, Meester Marrr?’

Me: ‘I’m a journalist.’

Local: ‘Ah. You be Indonesia long?’

Me: ‘Oh, about two months.’

Local: ‘Your hat. Marlboro Man, ha, ha.’

Me: ‘Yes. Ha, ha.’

Local: ‘Yes. Ha, ha... you very funny man, Meester Marrr...’

[Conversation draws to a close. Local eventually makes a polite withdrawal when he’s realised that getting further conversation from me is like getting money out of an insurance company, to be replaced by an identical conversationalist just two minutes later. As we leave this happy scene, we can hear Meester Marrr quietly screaming for peace. Poor bastard.]

Yes, it can sometimes be a right royal pain in the arse to be a tourist in Indonesia, though it’s important to realise that the locals are just being friendly and that it’s rude not to chat back. It’s just that sometimes you wish they’d give it a rest... and JFO.

Sumbawa and Flores

Sumbawa

Written: 26 September 1997

After climbing Gunung Rinjani, I decided to strike east from Senaru, in the general direction of the island of Flores, from where a passenger ship would be departing for Sulawesi in just over a week’s time. I got offered a ridiculously high-priced ticket from Senaru to Flores by a local tout, but I turned it down; he wanted 85,000rp for a trip that ended up costing me about 35,000rp, and he would have been using a ferry that turned out to be non-existent, an unsurprising discovery for this tout-weary cynic. Public bemos took me, bruised and cramped, to Labuhan Lombok on the eastern side of Lombok, crammed between locals with live chickens, dead expressions and suspicious eyes; one bemo even had to stop and fill a flat tyre with air, before it could crunch and grind its way through the dusty northeast of Lombok. In Labuhan Lombok I alighted, was grabbed by a tout trying to persuade me to come to his hotel for information on a ticket to eastern Sumbawa, and figuring there could be worse options I hopped on his bike. This time it turned out to be a good move.

Chris, the Indonesian proprietor of the losmen, turned out to be extremely helpful, and he was very well tuned in to the needs of travellers; it helped that he spoke English, French, German, Indonesian and a smattering of other languages, having spent a fair amount of time travelling in Europe. It didn’t take much to part me from a bargain 27,000rp to buy passage from Lombok, across to Sumbawa, and almost right across that long island to Bima, from where a bemo would take us to Sumbawa’s eastern port of Sape; the ferry to Flores, bypassing Komodo, would leave at 8am on Friday morning. Perfect.

Or, perhaps not. Ever been on a long bus journey? Well, take it and double the pain. Add in steaming temperatures; shocking roads; a driver who only knows how to accelerate at full whack and brake suddenly, often at the same time; a TV blaring out a terrible kung fu movie from America[1], subtitled in Indonesian and guaranteed to hard boil even the most vacuous of brains; incessant Indonesian music, turned up loud, all through the night, bringing to mind an Indonesian Demis Roussos mixed with awful Bontempi organ; sweaty locals, sitting next to you and falling asleep on you, kretek[2] ash dropping onto your trousers as the smoke licks round the holes in the seats; cockroaches crawling up your legs; a time schedule to disturb even the deepest of sleepers (leaving at 2pm, arriving at 2am... which actually turned into 4.30am); even the Australian long distance bus wasn’t this bad, but I suppose it’s unfair to complain too much when you look at the price.

Luckily I met a very pleasant French couple on the way, Luc and Marilyn, providing each of us with someone at whom to glance sideways every time something straight out of a disaster movie occurred (which was pretty much all the time). Sleeping sporadically and in positions normally reserved for tantric yoga, we eventually reached Flores, arriving at the western port of Labuanbajo on Friday afternoon, after yet another kung fu movie on the ferry’s TV. Hi-ya!

[1] Every bloody American kung fu movie has the same plot. Boy trains himself in ju-jitsu/kung fu/karate, is driving through the city, finds girl being attacked by no-good gang, beats the crap out of gang and saves girl, gets seen in the process by an old eastern mystic who used to be a wicked fighter in his youth, old man trains boy even more, boy goes on to enter and win big contest, in the process destroying a huge drugs/firearms cartel. Oh, and the acting’s really lame. Now can I have my US$10,000 for the screenplay, please? Thank you.

[2] Indonesian cigarettes, or kreteks, are something else. As well as tobacco they contain cloves, which means the smoke smells rather exotic and the filters leave a sweet, herbal taste on your lips. They’re not that bad, but smoking a whole packet would be in the same league as eating a whole jar of Marmite, or sucking a whole packet of Polos in one go. They are certainly intense... but then again, so is the nicotine rush, because if there’s one thing that kreteks are, it’s strong. Which could explain the amount of deep-chested coughing you get round these parts...

Labuanbajo

Written: 28 September 1997

The island of Flores, named ‘Flower’ by the Portuguese before they sold the island to the Dutch, is quite beautiful, which came as a bit of a relief after the long bus journey through the comparatively desolate and barren Sumbawa; the island of Komodo, which is sandwiched between Sumbawa and Flores, is well worth a visit to see the huge Komodo dragons that live there, but unfortunately I had to sacrifice it to my schedule.

Labuanbajo, the western port of Flores, is a small town with the ubiquitous mosque, a number of dodgy shops, and plenty of places to stay, the most popular of which is at Waecicu Beach. A free ferry takes you to this wonderful collection of beachfront bamboo bungalows, and before embarking on the trip across the pond to the hotel, I decided to search out the Pelni office to book a ticket for the ferry to Ujung Pandang.

This turned out to be a bad move. I eventually found the Pelni ‘office’, which turned out to be a tiny shack, locked and unattended, and tucked up a dirty and forgotten dust-laden street; I then realised that Pelni, despite being an Indonesian-wide company, isn’t exactly P&O. When someone did arrive and I managed to communicate in broken Indonesian that I wanted to buy a ticket from Maumere to Sulawesi, the women told me that I would have to go to Maumere to buy that ticket, as all they sold in Labuanbajo was tickets from, well, Labuanbajo. I later discovered that this wonderful concept applies not only to all Pelni offices, but also to all Merpati offices, Merpati being the domestic airline. The thought of being able to book ahead by telephone from one office to the other hasn’t quite reached the scrubs, rather making one wonder how the hell anyone gets organised enough to get anywhere in Indonesia.

Never mind, I thought, and headed back to the free ferry, only to have to wait for an hour for a lift to Waecicu, where it turned out they had no bungalows left anyway. However, if there’s one thing that your average Indonesian is, it’s enterprising, especially when money’s involved, and they offered me and another guy the ultimate crash pad: a bed on the boat moored off the beach. How could I refuse, when my idea of perfect hell is sleeping on a small yacht...?

Actually, the Hotel of a Thousand Stars, as the staff euphemistically called the boat, was a delightful place to sleep, particularly as there were no mosquitoes out on the sea; I slept under the stars, snug and warm in my sleeping bag, waking up every now and then to admire the firmament, watch the sun rise or listen to the geckos with their distinctive cry of ‘gecko... gecko...’ Peace reigned, and the following day I lazed on the beach, chatting for most of the day with other travellers staying there. That night I managed to get a bungalow, but it was a little academic, as the next day I had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus to Bajawa.

How to Survive Indonesia

Written: 28 September 1997

It’s downright impossible for a visitor like me to be fair in any commentary on Indonesia (or, indeed, Asia in general); the basic fabric of society is so different here that imposing western values is not only pretty hopeless, it’s foolhardy. But as a part of the ongoing education that happens to all travellers – an education better known as culture shock – I’ve formulated a number of suggestions that might help when trying to cope with travelling in Indonesia.

1. Always stay cool. If you lose your cool, you’ve lost the game. Sure, the bus might be massively delayed, and the man behind you in the bemo might be blowing cigarette smoke right into your face (when he’s not coughing up half a lung, that is), but complaining or getting stressed is totally counter-productive. Not only will it increase your personal frustration level, it won’t achieve anything, and will simply bemuse those who are used to life being this way.

2. Accept that you will be ripped off. Some Indonesians (but by no means all) are out to make a buck at all costs. As a tourist – a fact that is rather hard to conceal unless you have local blood in you – you will be charged more, you will be harangued constantly while locals slip through the melee, and you will be told outright lies: ‘No, that hotel has burned down, you must stay at mine’; ‘This is the cheapest and best deal you will find’; ‘Yes, this bus is going to Senaru’; ‘No, we have no bread, so you can’t have toast,’ and five minutes later someone else gets served hot, buttered toast... that kind of thing. You will also be subjected to constant sniggering and hassle from a people who are so fascinated by foreigners that being one can feel like being an animal in the zoo. But if you know you’ll always be stung, it helps. Which leads nicely to number three.

3. If you have already paid for something, never, ever ask anyone else how much they paid. You will invariably be horrified to find that they paid half what you did for the same thing, which will, in turn, make you feel inadequate and a little miffed. If you have yet to buy something, then asking another tourist at least gives you a ceiling price, but I’ve found nothing but distress when talking prices with anyone other than obvious package tourists (who really pay through the nose when they buy tours from home or from tourist centres like Kuta). In this case, ignorance is bliss.

4. Just eat it. All the advice is to be very careful about what you eat – always peel fruit, never eat reheated food, don’t drink the water – and most of it, such as be careful with the water, is good advice indeed. However, you can take it too far, and paranoia is often more depressing than a bout of dodgy guts, so I say mellow out and try that fruit, eat at that squalid looking warung, and immerse yourself in the whole experience. Hell, if it’s good enough for the cockroaches, it’s good enough for you.

5. Remember: if things get really bad, you can always fly home. As Stewart Copeland once wrote, ‘Life was easy/When it was boring,’ and the converse is true; good travel is often hard work, and the lows come thick and fast. Then again, so do the highs, and before you know it things are going well again, the world is rolling by as you march on to the next destination, and life is looking good. Still, knowing you have a safety net is a great asset.

6. Never, ever drive in Indonesia. Not unless you habitually carry five pints of A+ blood around in your backpack, or you’re one of those nutters who drive from London to Sydney every year (in which case hats off to you!).

7. Get off the beaten track. OK, you’ll probably still bump into Gunta and Friedrich from München on the way, but it’s good to get away from the crowd. Ignorant tourists suck the life blood out of any society – watching people complain in public is a pet hobby of mine, but all it does is enforce the attitude of the locals that, as Asterix put it, ‘These foreigners are crazy,’ (tap side of head with finger) – and getting away from them is all part of the experience. However, the further you get from the infiltration of the paleface, the more of a centre of attention you will be, and the Hello Mister cult will become a way of life. How much this is worth the effort is up to you; sometimes I’d trade all the amazing views and cultural isolation in the world for a peaceful spot under a tree somewhere in civilisation, and sometimes I can’t get enough of the insanity and amphetamine pace of life in Indonesia. That’s the contradiction of travel here; at times it’s invigorating, but at other times it’s just incredibly wearing.

8. But do come back to the beaten track every now and then. Without a fairly regular taste of life as we know it – beer, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, beaches, good music, English conversation – you will go quite, quite mad. And that rather spoils the travelling, if you ask me; immersing yourself in Australian culture is somewhat different to losing your bearings in the Indonesian quagmire.

9. Don’t believe your guidebook. Most people travel with guidebooks that are a couple of years old, and in Indonesia this means everything will be totally inaccurate. For example, paying for a bemo is easy if you know the price – just hand the readies over – but if you don’t know the fare and ask how much it is, you will be told a fictitious figure that’s at least double what it should be. I have a formula: take the price in the guidebook, if there is one, add about 20 per cent, and hand that over. If it’s too much, look expectant for change; if it’s not enough, he’ll demand more. You’ll probably still get ripped off – see rule two – but at least you’ll be in the right ballpark.

10. Detach yourself. I find that viewing life as if it was a movie is very handy in places like Indonesia. There’s no way you’re ever going to get really involved in the culture – even westerners who spend whole lifetimes in Asia can still find the ideas and attitudes alien – so just accept you’re a tourist and go with the flow. In Australia and New Zealand I felt I fitted in, even to the point of being mistaken for a local on a few memorable occasions, but that can never happen in Asia. It’s an experience, but nothing like the travelling I’ve already done; there’ll be no whingeing about the bus and hostel option here, because it’s pretty much the only way to travel.

11. Never believe the times that you’re given. This applies both to times of day and durations. On the ferry from Sumbawa to Flores I heard four different possibilities for the length of the voyage: six hours, seven hours, eight hours and ten hours (it turned out to be six and a half). And our bus to Bima in Sumbawa should have arrived at 2am, but turned up at 4.30am. This, apparently, is perfectly normal, and comes as no surprise when you look at the crappy watches the hawkers try to off-load onto unsuspecting tourists in Kuta.

12. Plan your plan to fall apart. Nobody who lives their lives by timetables and strict pricing will survive beyond the first night in Indonesia. If your plan is ‘Go from point A to point B’, rephrase it as ‘Go from point A to point C, which may or may not be somewhere near point B, and then make up a new plan’. If you don’t, you’ll lose your hair quicker than Sampson as you tear it out by the roots in frustrated clumps...

Follow these simple guidelines and your Indonesian trip will still prove to be as unpredictable and strenuous as a triple bypass operation. But at least you won’t be surprised when, yet again, you find yourself wondering how Indonesia manages to survive as a nation, and you might even get into it. I do hope so... it’s always worth the hassle.

Bajawa

Written: 29 September 1997

Rosy-fingered dawn[1] saw me getting up at 6am to catch the bus east from Labuanbajo to Bajawa. This I missed, thanks to some creative timekeeping from the hotel manager (‘Oh, the bus leaves at 7.15’, he said confidently, when it actually left at 7am). Still, I caught another bus, and instead of a direct journey, I had to change in some backwater where the bus terminal was home to as many squealing pigs as humans.

After a long ten-hour bus journey through the beautiful volcanic scenery of western Flores, I finally arrived in Bajawa with little more than a hotel name and an extremely bruised coccyx. The hotel proved to be full with a package tour, but after a lengthy search through sleepy Bajawa, I managed to find a place with some help from an Israeli girl called Idit (pronounced ‘Ee-deet’, not unlike an exotic form of Edith), whom I’d met on the bus.

Surreal things began to happen as Idit and I set off on our evening mission: I wanted to find a bus ticket for the morrow to take me to Moni, and Idit wanted to find out about tours in the area. The whole town seemed to be having private parties, and the streets bustled with smartly dressed Indonesian families. Idit decided to poke her nose into one of these noisome gatherings, and before you could say, ‘Where’s the party?’ we were introduced to a middle-aged man and a young boy, were plonked down on a couple of plastic chairs, and were offered some tea. All around us milled smiling locals, with new arrivals appearing all the time, all shaking the hands of the man and child, all thrilled to be there. Had we stumbled on a crazy birthday party, or was it something more bizarre?

No, it wasn’t a birthday, explained a woman who knew rudimentary English and who was sitting between Idit and myself. Exactly what it was, though, remained a mystery; there was a cake, with the boy’s name emblazoned on it, and people kept giving him envelopes containing money (or so I supposed from the way he eyed their contents). Confused, Idit and I accepted the invitation to have a little food, so we did, being careful to take only a very little from the various scrumptious dishes laid out on the table.

After some very basic small talk, not helped by me leaving my phrase book back at the hotel, the woman suggested we go to another party. Another? Well, why not; either these Bajawans were crazy, or we were a party to a party the likes of which we’d never seen. If Bajawa was going to go ballistic, I sure wanted in on the action.

The second party prompted déjà vu. We shook hands with the father and son, admired the cake, accepted some more delicious food, marvelled at the decorations and loud, crackling music, and smiled our best cocktail party smiles. Before long we were whisked off to a third party... and it would have gone on all night if we hadn’t made our excuses and left, much to the distress of our hostess, who was obviously getting quite a thrill by being able to bring a couple of westerners into this strangest of communal parties (and, judging by the photos being taken of us with various other party-goers, so were the other locals).

It turned out that my only night in Bajawa was timed perfectly to coincide with Confirmation Day, the Sunday when young boys throughout the country get confirmed. Flores is mostly Catholic (yet another religion in highly multi-cultural Indonesia), and the custom is for the families to throw open parties to celebrate the confirmations, to which anyone can go. However, to ensure that this practice doesn’t cost the party-throwers too much, party-goers give a donation to the proud father upon entry (hence the envelopes). We were spared this financial sacrifice because we paid with our novelty value, but suddenly it all became clear, and I realised that I’d been wishing young boys and girls throughout Bajawa a happy religious life... and this from a man who only got confirmed because he thought it was a good idea to take up all options, especially those that were free.

Bus Hawkers

My next mission was to try to find a ticket to Moni for the morning, an impossible task on a Sunday evening, especially when everyone was out revelling in each other’s houses. I tracked down the bus office with the help of a local, and found out that tickets weren’t available any more, and that I would have to get up early and get to the bus terminal to ensure a lift. This was a bit of a pain: normally the buses in Flores will pick you up from your hotel, but only if you have a ticket, and the bus terminal was a good few kilometres out of town.

But I should have remembered the first law of Indonesian transport: if you stand around for long enough looking like a lost tourist, then someone will come along and coerce you onto their bus, a good prospect if it’s going your way, an expensive inconvenience if it’s not. I got up early on Monday – 5.30am, to be precise – and wandered into town, slowly making my way to the bemo station, where I hoped to catch a bemo to the bus terminal. That’s when I heard a voice.

‘Hey Meester! You go to Moni? Moni???’ Of course I was, so I chucked him my pack and squashed myself into the bus between the chickens and spare tyres. From Bajawa, tourists either go west to Labuanbajo, or east to Moni, so I was an easy target for the bus hawkers.

Bus hawkers are an astounding breed. They sniff out potential bus travellers with an enthusiasm that borders on the rabid, and spotting tourists seems to make them even more enthusiastic. Hanging out of the back door of the bus, holding on by fingertips and cigarette butts as it careens round another hairpin, they shout at any vaguely sentient being, ‘Maumere! Moni! MauMERE! MoNI! MAUMERE! MONI! MAUMEREMONIIIII!’ Presumably they employ the same logic that the British abroad use when trying to make themselves understood in a foreign language: shout; shout louder; and if they still don’t want to get onto your bus, try to persuade them by screaming the destination at a lung-ripping intensity, and this time with feeling. It works; sometimes you wonder if the people on the bus actually meant to go to Maumere, or whether they simply popped down the shop for some eggs, and ended up being cajoled into a journey to some mythical far-off land. At least, that would help explain the wonderfully surreal nature of the Indonesian bus system...

[1] A quotation from Homer, not a lesbian porno movie. Not to be confused with being up at the crack of dawn, either, which is quite a different experience.

Indonesian Habits

Written: 30 September 1997

The Indonesians are amazing. The differences between western and eastern culture are sometimes huge, sometimes tiny; I challenge anyone to define the Indonesian mentality, as much as I challenge anyone to define the western mentality. One thing’s for sure, though: apart from a few bad eggs, the Indonesians are a good people, always kind, considerate, interested and willing to chat. Yes, when the lonesome traveller is tired and wants some peace the overly keen Asian instantly becomes a pain, but compared to westerners, Indonesians are friendly beyond the call of duty.

Here, then, is a quick summary of face-value Indonesians, based purely on the observations of a fleeting visitor. Take it with a pinch of salt; I’m no anthropologist, but welcome to the eleven S’s...

1. Smoking

The Indonesians smoke an incredible amount, and there are, of course, absolutely no rules or regulations when it comes to the national habit. You can smoke anywhere, and the butts go on the floor, out of the car window, wherever; it came as no surprise to me to learn that, when I arrived in Indonesia, there were bushfires raging all over Kalimantan and Sumatra, because when the weather is dry (as it has been in this El Niño year) it only takes one carelessly discarded cigarette butt to spark a disaster. And there’s no shortage of butts flying out of car windows in Indonesia.

Smoking is incredibly cheap, at least by European standards. A packet of 20 American cigarettes costs about 850rp, or around 18p, so it doesn’t break the bank to smoke as much as everyone else does (they’re called American cigarettes to distinguish them from kretek, the clove cigarettes that the locals love so much, which are even cheaper). Besides, without smoking there couldn’t be as much of the following...

2. Spitting

Ah yes, smoking and spitting, two Indonesian hobbies that go hand in hand. Along with the sweet-smelling smoke is the universal soundtrack; it starts as a cough, a black-lung rattler that makes you really appreciate the effect of tar on the bronchial tubes. This is followed by that deep throat-clearing sound that even the boffins at the Oxford English Dictionary can’t transcribe using the letters of the Latin alphabet, and then comes the inevitable spit. It’s pretty foul, and as with the smoking, there are no social rules governing the sport of spitting: it’s valid anywhere, any time.

It’s not just a male occupation, either; women spit plenty, too. An added bonus is the effect of the betel nut, which a lot of Indonesians chew continuously, staining their lips red and giving their spittle a hue that Jackson Pollock would be proud of. It’s mainly a rural habit, chewing the betel, but that’s a good thing; if everyone in the city chewed betel nuts, the sewers would run red.

3. Staring

Yes, as your bus burns rubber through the tiny villages of rural Indonesia, people just sit there and let their jaws drop. Children flock out of the houses to watch the strange shiny box rumble its way along the road... it’s bizarre. And if you’re a traveller wandering into a small village in the middle of nowhere, everyone stares at you, as if they’re waiting for you to do something weird.

But this isn’t rudeness; it’s simply the locals being interested in seeing something unusual and different. Before long they’ll be talking to you and trying to find out all about you, and this is where learning the language comes in handy – even a few words of Indonesian can make things that much more interesting, as the staring changes into conversation.

But it’s weird and unnerving to be stared at all the time, believe me...

4. Sleeping

This observation doesn’t mean that the Indonesians are lazy; far from it. In fact I’ve never seen such a hard-working bunch in my life. Up at the crack of dawn with the 4am Muslim call to prayer, working hard at jobs that would drive westerners to distraction... they’re an astoundingly conscientious race. But with this physical burden comes an increased need to sleep.

The amazing thing about the Indonesians and their sleep is that they can sleep absolutely anywhere. On the buses, on the street, standing up, sitting down... shut-eye isn’t the problem it seems to be in the world of nine-to-five and insomnia. I’ve seen people literally sleeping on concrete, curled up on thin reed mats and snoring in a way that no soft-boned white man could manage; I’ve seen men crashed out in their tiny becaks (bicycle rickshaws), grabbing a few minutes’ rest after hurtling round the backstreets, legs and arms sticking out of their tiny compartments like octopuses in a bucket; I’ve seen men drifting off in buses whose spine-shattering jolts would keep normal humans awake for the following three days; yes, the Indonesians have a talent for being able to grab forty winks whenever and wherever, which is a skill that all of us could use (especially when visiting Indonesia itself).

5. Speeding

I’m not talking drug abuse, but road abuse: the speed at which Indonesians drive is simply scary. Probably the craziest thing is that even the drivers have no idea how fast they are going; a sizeable proportion of bemos I had the pleasure of riding in either had no speedometer, or had one that obstinately stuck at zero km/h when it was pretty obvious that there should be a lot more needle movement. I suppose ignorance is bliss, but with the tyre screeches echoing round the streets, there’s no way the bemo drivers can convince me that they don’t know they’re speeding.

Of course, the definition of ‘speeding’ is important here. Speeding, in the traditional sense, implies that there’s a speed limit and that you’re breaking it, but in Indonesia I only saw a handful of ‘40’ signs (all of which were heartily ignored), so it’s debatable whether the drivers are speeding, or whether there is no speed limit anyway. The answer to this is that any speed where the tyres leave the road when cornering is too fast, but when you only drive a car with the accelerator or the brake fully depressed, how can you drive any other way? Exactly.

6. Smiling

Infectious and irrepressible, the Indonesian smile is universal and a real joy to behold. The kids do it best, of course, but even adults spend a lot of time smiling, especially if you greet them with an ear-to-ear teeth rattler yourself. The Indonesian laugh is also pretty common, but without understanding the language, a group of Indonesians standing and laughing at you can make even the most confident person paranoid, but they’re not being rude, they’re just expressing their amusement and bemusement in the most natural way, something that the miserable sods on the London Underground could do with remembering.

After all, a smile a day keeps the doctor away, something that’s pretty damn useful when the doctor’s probably on the other side of the island, and doesn’t even know his plasters from his penicillin...

7. Selling

The Indonesians have an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide, and they’ve worked out that all tourists are rich and just love parting with their money. As a consequence, a large number of conversations end up with them trying to sell you something, but after a few of these you get the hang of sweeping the offer aside with an off the cuff, ‘I’m not interested.’ To be honest, most people who end up talking to you are interested in talking for the sake of talking, but some locals, especially in places like Bali’s Kuta, are little more than walking, talking salesmen.

8. Screaming

If you can’t make yourself heard above the millions of other people in your crowded country, then shout louder than they do. Shout if you’re at the market. Shout if you’re on the bus. Shout if you’re trying to talk English with a tourist. Shout if you’re a becak driver who wants a customer. Shout if you’re working in the kitchen. Or just shout for the hell of it.

Indonesia can be a very noisy place; the locals are either so laid-back they’re mummified, or they’re cackling around as if they were extras in a Shakespearian crowd scene. The women seem to be the worst culprits, shrieking across the road at other people at all hours; it seems that it’s all in the delivery here. If you want quiet, go to the Australian outback.

9. Speaking

As already mentioned, the Indonesians just love to talk, especially if the object of their conversation is a tourist. I’ve come across a number of survival instincts amongst the westerners who have been subjected to endless hello-mister what-is-your-name where-do-you-come-from how-long-have-you-been-in-Indonesia conversations, such as telling them your name is ‘Load of shit’ or the name of some celebrity, and then carrying on the conversation regardless. It’s a bit cruel – after all, ‘Hello Mister’ is what the Indonesians are taught in school to say to tourists to be polite, and most of them don’t actually know what it means – but it’s totally understandable if you’ve ever been subjected to hours of locals constantly being interested in you.

Another interesting runaround is to go up to complete strangers and go, ‘Hello Mister,’ in their faces; not too many locals bother with you after that. Or you can just ignore the small talk, but that’s rude; after all, the reason that the locals want to talk is that they’re genuinely interested in you, and the reason that it’s an awful conversation is because you can’t speak the language. Wearing or not, it’s a part of Indonesia that you can’t avoid, so you might as well revel in it. If you don’t lose the plot first...

10. Singing

It’s not just the colourful and delightful way that Indonesians spontaneously burst into song – whether they’re walking down the street, sitting in a hotel or killing time on a ferry – but also the bad side to Indonesian music, namely that it’s terrible.

By Indonesian music I don’t mean classical ballet or old songs; those are the equivalent of western classical music, and you don’t get too many new pieces, in the same way that you don’t get so many new symphonies or choral masterpieces back in Europe these days. I mean that the Indonesian pop scene is about as depressingly awful as you can possibly imagine; their most popular artists are terrible MOR[1] balladeers, inoffensive beyond belief, but simply depressing to anyone with a modicum of interest in modern music. Take Neil Diamond and suck out all his talent; or take the band from down your local pub and remove any vestiges of musical ability... and you’re close. The best approximation to Indonesian rock that I’ve seen is the credit roll on Alas Smith and Jones from a few years ago, when they played a cringe-worthy electronic organ and bongo extravaganza to end the show. The difference is that, sadly, the Indo rockers are serious, and their records sell. Now that’s what I call a culture gap.

11. Stamina

Indonesians have an astoundingly high boredom threshold, and are able to do things for hours that would send westerners totally round the loophole. They painstakingly tend rice fields. They carry heavy loads for hours up mountains, repeating the trip many times a week. They sit for hours, staring at westerners who are doing their damnedest to ignore them. They sit around when they’re not tending the fields, talking and smoking lots. They make small talk to every foreigner they meet, repeating the same conversations every time, simply to practice English. You and I would lose the plot if we had to live the way the Indonesians live, and that’s an important thing to remember when trying to comprehend a culture that is, effectively, so different that most westerners never really understand it.

And that’s probably the most useful thing to remember: it’s OK not to understand Indonesian culture. This is their country, it’s their culture, and you’re the alien, which will be painfully obvious more often than not. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along...

[1] MOR means Market-Orientated Rock, the record company acronym for music that shifts units because it’s inoffensive and guaranteed to sell: Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard... the usual crowd. However, MOR is also known as Middle of the Road, because it treads on nobody’s toes, unlike real music. But Indonesian rock is beyond MOR; it’s just too terrible to comprehend. The chords are straight from the fifties, before The Beatles showed the world how to write songs, and the arrangements are from the electro-pop factories of the mid-80s. Thank goodness I can’t understand the lyrics; I’m sure they’re just as awful as they sound.

Moni

Written: 1 October 1997

Five hours after leaving Bajawa I arrived in Moni unscathed[1] and checked into the Hiddayah Bungalows, a lovely collection of bamboo huts clustered next to some paddy fields on the uphill side of the village. As I wasn’t feeling too great and had a bit of a sore throat from all the kretek smoke and dusty roads (though no fever, so there was no worry that it might be malaria), I figured I’d take a day off and relax, and that’s precisely what I did the next day, sitting on my balcony, drinking Indonesian tea (no milk, lots of sugar, delicious flavour), visiting the local market and waterfall, and generally watching the world wander past.

As if to answer the change in my outlook, on my first night in Moni I met a very friendly German called Rainer (pronounced ‘Rhiner’) and we went out for a slap up beer and cap cai (vegetables, noodles and a stunning soupy sauce), improving my low physical and psychological state immensely. The next day I met more and more people, and by the evening six of us had gathered together to eat a huge buffet of local cuisine (for the less-than-scary sum of 4000rp per person, or about 85p). We were practically one big happy family as we prepared to scale the heights of Keli Mutu at 4am the next morning.

Keli Mutu is one of the big tourist attractions of Nusa Tenggara, along with Lombok’s Gili Islands and Komodo’s dragons. My guidebook says, ‘This extinct volcano is the most fantastic sight in Nusa Tenggara, if not all of Indonesia,’ and although this is a bit of an exaggeration, Keli Mutu is well worth a visit.

The big attractions of Keli Mutu are twofold: first, it’s easy to get to the top, as a truck goes up and down for 3000rp a ride; and second, the three main craters are full of coloured water, making the whole experience somewhat surreal. The black, green and blue lakes change their colours regularly over time, so although they’re named after their colours, the green lake is now very dark brown, the colour it was in the mid-70s. There’s a convenient lookout where hawkers sell tea, coffee and pancakes, and the truck leaves Moni at 4am, reaching the summit in time for the sunrise.

Hyped up sunrises are, generally, disappointing, and Keli Mutu didn’t prove the exception to the rule. I always find a good sunset to be far more enjoyable and relaxing, but it never ceases to amaze me how many places make a real thing of the sunrise – Uluru, Keli Mutu, Yellow Waters in Kakadu and Rinjani, to name but a few – and how, about an hour after sunrise, all most of the tourists have disappeared, as if the location has nothing more to offer now that the sun’s up. This happened at Keli Mutu, much to my satisfaction, and as the sun climbed up and lit up the blue lake, showing off its real colours, I was left almost alone. I’d decided to walk round to the other side of the crater, a walk that maybe three other people bothered to do, and the view as the sun rose behind me was breathtaking; it isn’t Rinjani, but it’s well worth getting up for. As Peter, a friendly German whom I’d meet on the bus to Maumere, said, ‘When God made the world, he washed his paint bushes in Keli Mutu.’ That’s a very good description.

The walk down from the top – a preferable alternative to taking the 7am bus back down – was pleasant, but it did illustrate one of the frustrating things about Indonesia. I was bounding down the path, passing through villages where locals tried to flog me warm Coke and cold pancakes, and when I got to the second village, very close to Moni, I passed a couple of kids who said hello and tried to start a conversation in the best traditions of the Indonesians. I mumbled a hello, but not wanting to be too delayed, I hurried straight on, passing them by and heading for my breakfast back in Moni.

It was only after half an hour of following the path away from Moni that I realised I’d made a wrong turn. Backtracking, I discovered that the kids had been standing right across the right turn I was supposed to make, and when I asked them why they hadn’t pointed me in the right direction, they said that I hadn’t stopped for a conversation, so they thought it served me right to go off down the wrong path. This might have annoyed me if I hadn’t already discovered that getting angry with the locals is like punching bread dough: it’s pointless and more than a little tiring. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that you’re a guest in their country, and that your western expectations are not only wrong, they’re your problem. I had to laugh at the little bastards; it served me right for commuting when I should have been strolling.

[1] Well, physically unscathed at least. With my musical sensibilities I found the hardest part of the journey to be the music, played at decibel levels that the British police would claim justified all those arrests, m’lud. Every bus has two tapes, one in Indonesian and one in English, and they’re both absolutely abysmal; these tapes are played on auto-reverse for the entire journey, so by the end you know the lyrics to everything (even though you don’t know what they mean), and for days these god-awful ditties lilt through the subconscious, gnawing at the soul until you’re left weeping on the sidewalk. That’s just my humble opinion, of course; I’m sure that some people find Indonesian bus music to be the epitome of symphonic excellence. Like the Indonesians, for example, who sing along like people possessed, not exactly adding to the listening experience...

Loneliness on the Road

Written: 1 October 1997

The following excerpts from my travelogue illustrate one of the downsides of travelling alone: it can really get to you when you don’t meet people for a while. But you do meet people on the road, especially in Southeast Asia, as the following two stories show. So if you’re on the road and feeling lonely, rest assured we all get like this sometimes. It does get better – honestly!

Ubud

Back on Magnetic Island, one of the girls who read my travelogue had asked if I believed in fate; I’d used the phrase ‘as if by fate’ somewhere along the line, not through any great belief, but because it’s a useful stock phrase when trying to sound mystical. Judging by the events of last Wednesday night, I’m beginning to wonder if fate isn’t a constant companion of the solo traveller after all.

I spent the early evening sitting on my little veranda, swatting mosquitoes and wondering where to eat. The truth was, I was feeling alone; not so much lonely, just alone, and the reason was obvious. Throughout my wanderings in Ubud (excluding my visit to Sayan) I had been surrounded by white folk, mainly in couples or groups. Nothing makes you feel more alone than being an unaccompanied traveller in a sea of white faces; when everyone else is obviously a local, it doesn’t feel so strange to be alone, and any success in talking to the locals is almost always rewarding. It’s only when there are loads of other white people around that you feel the pinch of being isolated and a long way from home.

It was with this feeling that I set off to a warung for some nasi goreng. I wandered around, found a good-looking spot, and parked myself in a seat; as with most warungs, you just pick a seat at any table, rather than getting a table to yourself. When I looked where I had sat, I saw a European guy opposite munching his way through a plate of nasi padang (a mixture of rice with whatever you fancy from the various cold dishes sitting in the warung window; the dish originated in Padang in Sumatra, hence the name). I told him that it looked rather good and asked him what it was, and the conversation flowed from there.

Simon, from Lincolnshire and Derbyshire in the same way that I’m from London and Staffordshire, was the perfect nattering partner for this stage of my travels. He was just finishing off ten months travelling round most of Southeast Asia, taking in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, including every island on my Indonesian itinerary, and a couple of the more out-of-the-way places I’d earmarked for Malaysia. He filled me with stories and tips, and when I discovered he was a keen walker (taking a tent with him round Southeast Asia and camping in National Parks, a familiar concept to yours truly) I told him of the wonders of New Zealand and Australia; we both came out wishing we’d done what the other had done, the sign of a good meeting of minds. We tried to go for a cheap beer afterwards, but found that the cheap beer hole was closed for the festival and so called it a day, but he really fired me up to visit Lombok, Flores, Sulawesi and Kalimantan.

It was just what I needed. Perhaps I do believe in fate after all; if not fate, then perhaps there’s somebody upstairs looking after me. It certainly feels like it sometimes...

Moni

I feel change; everybody does, especially when it happens relatively quickly. Whether the reaction is a scared ‘We Fear Change’ or a mellower ‘Go With The Flow’, humans have an uncanny knack of knowing when something is amiss, when things aren’t quite what they used to be, when the gods are rolling the proverbial dice. As I write this, I’m feeling a change.

In this travelogue I’m sometimes guilty of hiding my real feelings behind semantics. My earlier claim that I was alone but not lonely back in Ubud is not strictly true; in fact, it’s complete rubbish, but I have left that section as written to demonstrate the process of change. The truth of the matter is this: when travelling in western countries, it’s easy to talk to the locals, to pop into a pub or restaurant and mix and mingle, and any conscious decision not to do this is justified by financial restrictions, normal reticence or simply the sometimes less than salubrious nature of the establishment. However, the option of joining in with a local social scene, or even a travellers’ social scene, is always there.

In Indonesia, indeed in the whole of Southeast Asia, that option is no longer there to provide assurance to the lonely traveller. When you are alone in Asia, you are very alone, and conversation with the locals makes one feel even more isolated, with the inevitable succession of pleasantries and small talk, but no real substance. Talking to other travellers is rewarding, and is really the only solution, but these meetings are, by their very nature, transient.

It took a good couple of weeks of travelling in Indonesia, but I soon realised that a change had occurred in my outlook. Previously I was delighted to be travelling alone, able to make up my own itinerary, able to do exactly what I liked, satisfied beyond all measure to be achieving things by myself, without help from anyone. And always the spectre of solo travel in Southeast Asia loomed on the horizon, the ultimate challenge, the big test of my ability to survive on my own in an alien world. I’ve managed to succeed in clearing the hurdle – that of finding my feet in Indonesia – and from now on it should be reasonably plain sailing. But there’s something missing.

That something is a travelling companion. I met a girl back in New Zealand who was very interested in how I managed to travel alone. She heard about how I could decide where to go when I woke up; she listened as I told her of the thrill of solo bushwalking; she put up with my soliloquies on how coping by yourself means you experience everything, and I mean everything. My argument was that travelling with someone split the experience, halved the responsibility and watered down the intensity of the challenge by providing you with someone to help, to take the first step when you can’t be bothered, to share the burden. Her reply was that to her, one of the most beautiful aspects of travelling was being able to share the sights, the sounds, the whole experience, and without a travelling companion, she would only get half the story.

I didn’t really agree with her – at least, not as far as my travelling experience was concerned – but Asia brought her words back to me. I wondered, is sharing essential to the appreciation of an experience? Without someone to bounce ideas off, is life monocular rather than binocular? Do we need to paint our experiences on the canvas of company to bring it to life, or is a view, a culture, a journey just as amazing if you have nobody to talk to about it, nobody to relive it with over a beer and packet of crisps? Even this travelogue, by its very definition, needs a reader to make it worthwhile; it’s interesting for me to read it every now and then, but nothing beats the thrill of having other people look at it, and to see their reactions.

So, that’s the change; after a little over two weeks in Indonesia, I have revised my opinion on solo travel and, for the moment, will actively search out travelling companions. There’s only one problem; my rather out-of-the-way schedule is hardly tourist-friendly, which could prove a problem. We’ll just have to see.

(And the very night after I wrote this, I started meeting people in Moni, some of whom would make it all the way through Maumere to Ujung Pandang with me. Fate again? Perhaps...)

Sulawesi

Maumere to Ujung Pandang

Written: 3 October 1997

The bus trip from Moni to Maumere in eastern Flores went according to plan, and Rainer and I alighted that evening, along with another friendly German called Peter whom we met en route. We booked into a hotel and hit the local restaurant, where we bumped into Idit (whom I’d met in Bajawa) and a very pleasant Dutch couple who had just landed in Flores. That night managed to banish any pretensions of loneliness I was having, as we talked the night away over copious teas and banana ice drinks. The conversation concerned travel in general and India in particular; the more I hear about India, the more intriguing it sounds.

The reason for the rush to Maumere was to catch a Pelni to Sulawesi; Pelni is Indonesia’s domestic passenger ship service, connecting all the islands for fares can’t be sniffed at. The 22-hour trip from Maumere to Ujung Pandang cost me 44,000rp (just under £10), but the drawback was that the boat only goes every two weeks, so if I’d missed it, with my 60-day visa, it would have really scuppered my plans... hence the rush to get tickets and to ensure a place.

Our motley crew of three other westerners and I set out from Maumere at 4.45am to catch the Sulawesi-bound KM Awu. The number of locals hanging round the harbour was astounding; more people were there to welcome people travelling from Dili in Timor than were joining the boat, but it was still an elbows-in-and-scrum-down event as we crushed our way down to the economy class deck, right in the bowels of the ship.

Economy is the word: the beds were simply flat wooden strips, onto which millions of locals crushed themselves in a territorial thrust that even their Timor-invading government would have been proud of. For 1500rp you can rent a mattress for the voyage, so Peter and I grabbed two empty berths – despite the protestations of a nearby Indonesian who seemed to be saving every space available for his friends who had yet to arrive – and he managed to track down two mattresses, converting our sweaty corner of the crushed deck into a semblance of comfort, despite the lack of free-flowing air and the stifling heat and noise.

The Pelni experience is cheap and it shows. There’s no real way to complain when the trip costs so little (to western pockets, anyway), but some things are pretty disgusting, whatever the price. For example, the meals on board, which come included in the price, are abysmal, and after one I fully understood why foreigners who travel Pelni either go first class, or bring their own food. A tiny pile of tepid rice, an inch-square slop of, er, red stuff, and a fish head... that was supper. Luckily there was a cafeteria where we could buy suitably expensive Coke and coffee, and the biscuits we’d bought as a last-minute gesture filled the gaps. Not surprisingly we ignored breakfast the next morning.

And as for the toilets... overflowing is one description, swamped is another, and blocked hardly starts to bring home the squalor of the Pelni ablutions. And nobody seems to mind, despite the fact that in a 22-hour boat trip, people need to go to the toilet. I daren’t think where the more enterprising passengers ended up leaving their deposits.

And don’t forget the crowds of devout Muslims who have to pray their allotted five times a day, including the 4am slot, when the whole boat gets woken up by loudspeaker to enjoy the wisdom of Allah, whether they care or not. They very effectively clogged up the aisles at prayer time, as anyone who walks through a Muslim prayer meeting is obviously in danger of causing considerable offence, even if the meeting is blocking the main thoroughfare.

In all, the Pelni experience is hard to beat, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Not that I’m complaining; it was fascinating, no doubt about it.

Ujung Pandang

Written: 4 October 1997

Sulawesi, according to the papers and travellers I’ve managed to consult en route, is looking like a pretty dangerous place to visit in early October 1997. There have been riots in the capital of Ujung Pandang between the Chinese and the Indonesians, resulting in a military infiltration to keep the peace, but not before a number of people were killed and huge amounts of property burned; there’s been an earthquake in Parepare, some 100km north of Ujung Pandang, that is supposed to have caused chaos; and northern and central Sulawesi are apparently on fire and full of smoke. However, like most news you hear along the grapevine, some of the facts have given way to fiction somewhere in the telling.

The earthquake and riots did happen, but now that we’ve arrived, peace is reigning once again in Ujung Pandang and Parepare is back to normal. The fires were relatively small, apparently, but there’s one major piece of news that Peter and I have managed to confirm in an English-language paper we tracked down: the chaotic fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan are definitely still burning.

It hasn’t been a terribly good couple of months for Indonesia. On Friday 26th September a Garuda airbus plying the Jakarta-Medan route crashed into a ravine, killing 234 people in Indonesia’s worst ever plane disaster; the blame was put on bad air traffic control, with the pilot and the ground staff apparently reaching a misunderstanding on the meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’. At the same time, the currency slump in Southeast Asia is seriously devaluing the Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit, the Philippino peso and the Indonesian rupiah, and to cap it all, serious bushfires have started raging in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Plane crashes and currency slides are fairly common round these parts, but the bushfires are among the worst ever seen; a smoky haze covers northern and western Borneo, Sumatra, most of Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and Indonesia is being squarely blamed. The smoke is posing a serious health hazard to people in affected areas, tourists are being warned off the area, airports are being closed, and the monsoon season is late, with rain not expected for months. Back in 1982 fires in Kalimantan spread to the peat beds underneath the forest and continued to burn for two years, and concerns are rife that a similar disaster will happen this time. More affluent Malaysia and Singapore have had ‘several sunless weeks’, according to The Indonesia Times, and are evacuating their residents to better areas.

The blame for the fires is being apportioned in typical Indonesian fashion; the loggers blame the farmers for their slash-and-burn farming techniques, and the farmers blame the loggers for chopping down the trees and leaving dry, tinder-like areas behind, but whatever the real story, one thing is clear: Indonesia is destroying its countryside by degrees, and fires like this are simply a symptom of a country that doesn’t even know how to spell ‘conservation’. The Borneo jungle is fast becoming a myth, and by some accounts, in ten years’ time it won’t even exist, especially if fires like this continue to occur.

However, I digress. Sulawesi, being east-southeast of Borneo, is potentially at risk of being smothered in smoke, but due to fortunate winds, it’s managing to stay clear and fresh for the time I’m planning to be there. This is lucky: the thought of putting up with an environmental smoke hazard on top of the usual Indonesian kretek habit is daunting, to say the least. But despite these worries, in reality Ujung Pandang is turning out to be a pretty cool place.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gained a travelling companion – Peter and I have decided to team up for a few days, as our plans coincide fairly well – but I actually thrived on the ‘Hello Mister’s in Ujung Pandang. And they came thick and fast when we first struck out to explore the city; every two seconds there was someone calling out as we wandered the streets, first in search of a bank to exchange money and then in search of the Pelni office to work out times for boats out of Sulawesi. We bought a bus ticket for the overnight bus heading north, we went on a short bus ride to Old Gowa in search of some sultan’s tomb that proved too elusive for us to track down, and we explored the city’s sights such as Fort Rotterdam (an excellent example of colonial architecture) and the bustling market... but nothing prepared us for the evening meal experience.

In preparation for our forthcoming overnight bus experience, Peter and I decided to stock up on essential vitamins by buying some fruit from the market, and after some hard bargaining we were the proud owners of a water melon and a handful of sumptuous mangoes. So we sat down on the sidewalk to eat them.

The first observers turned up after about ten seconds, mainly people from the shop just down the road from where we’d sat. Then some more drifted in from the sides, a group of kids stood there watching, and before we’d got halfway through our melons, there must have been about 30 people just standing round, staring at us and giggling to each other. Some brave souls attempted to talk to us, and one woman was so intent on practising her English with us that she got a chair and sat in front of us, as if we were a television. She screeched at us in pidgin, we smiled politely and ate our fruit, and marvelled at the total lack of privacy in a culture such as this. For some reason, the sight of two foreigners eating a water melon was the most exciting thing happening in Ujung Pandang that evening, and we drew a huge crowd, especially when we started eating our mangoes in the Polynesian manner, slicing off half of the mango, crisscross cutting it and turning the skin inside out to give a pleasing, cubist design, perfect for guzzling. It was amazing to the Indonesians, who perhaps had never seen it before.

It was here that I began to get an inkling, albeit a small one, of what it must be like to be a celebrity...

Bada Valley

Written: 11 October 1997

By the following afternoon, Peter and I had arrived in Tentena, a small village in Central Sulawesi that took a bus journey from hell to reach, not just because of the normal problems of awful music and cramped seats, but also because the roads in Sulawesi are shocking. We settled in for a relaxing evening in a good but pricey losmen, and made our plans for the morrow. Our mission: to discover the megaliths of the Bada Valley.

The Bada Valley follows the Lariang River along the southern border of the forested Lore Lindu National Park, and it’s world famous for its ancient and mysterious statues, or megaliths; megaliths are large stone carvings along the lines of those on Easter Island. Our options were many, but we decided we’d go it alone and try to find the megaliths ourselves; guides from Tentena came in at 50,000rp per day per person, which sounded like a right royal waste of money, so we bought a seat on a jeep heading east into the valley the next day, and tried to glean as much information as we could from local tour guides and other travellers. It wasn’t the most successful fact finding mission; all we got was a photocopy of a dodgy-looking map and some vague walking times, but at least it confirmed that we were in the right area. And besides, a walk with a proper map just wouldn’t be right in Indonesia, would it?

We took off from Tentena the next morning, crammed onto the back of a shoddy old jeep that had seven other occupants, along with boxes of smelly fish and peanuts, a blindingly loud sound system and a radiator that overheated every twenty minutes and guzzled water faster than a hot westerner in the middle of the tropical forest. The trip along the terrible dirt road to Bomba at the eastern end of the valley took some seven hours, and although it was pretty tiring, perched on the back of the jeep with legs dangling and arse bruising, it was kind of entertaining, and we experienced the pinnacle of Indonesian pop music for most of the trip; Deddy Dorres, an overweight crooner who looks like an Indonesian Fat Elvis, graced the jeep’s stereo, adding a flavour of big shades and bigger sideburns to the whole exercise. His music was terrible, his image embarrassing, but he is, by all accounts, one of the most successful artistes in Indonesia today. Ye gods.

The losmen in Bomba was expensive, but it did have a map of the area on the wall, which I hurriedly copied down, giving us a totally different version from the map we’d obtained in Tentena. Still, we were determined not to waste money on a guide, and the next morning we set out for the valley itself, home to the megaliths and a slice of human history that’s as mysterious as Stonehenge.

The Megaliths of Bada

Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they’re there. They probably date from the first millennium AD, but this figure is fairly debatable, depending on which scientist you consult. The locals don’t have a clue – ‘They’ve always been here,’ is the most common response if you ask someone where the statues came from – and all this adds to a wonderful sense of mystery. Even more interestingly, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the near vicinity, so work that one out; these megaliths are huge, heavy, and in the middle of nowhere, a long way from where they should be.

There are 14 statues in total, plus many large stone vats scattered along the 15km valley. In 1984 the government persuaded the locals to build some wooden houses next to some of the megaliths, which appear to serve no purpose, and some concrete walkways around some of the more famous statues. You would assume that this makes the megaliths easy to find – it’s almost set up as a tourist destination, after all, just without the tourists – but it’s never that easy.

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. The Bada Valley is a farming area, smothered in paddy fields and little streams, and there’s just no way you’re going to find megaliths in something like that, especially with a map that looked great when I copied it down, but which proved to be pretty useless in the field. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and we just kept asking the local farmers where the megaliths were until, eventually, we realised that they were sending us in totally the wrong direction. And that’s when we saw the house, complete with little kid and grandmother, who turned themselves into our guides for the morning.

Following this odd couple through the fields, we soon realised that finding megaliths was fine if you know where to look, but not so good if you don’t. Luckily our guides managed the job fairly successfully, guiding us to all sorts of statues and large stone pots, and only getting lost a couple of times, and before you knew it we’d seen standing megaliths, sleeping megaliths, large pots, small pots and all sorts of odd stone shapes, all of which we would never have found alone. Returning to their house we gently knocked their initial demands for huge sums down to a more reasonable 3000rp, and then persuaded the old man of the house to take us to another megalith on our way out of the valley, all for another 2000rp and half a packet of cigarettes; this one turned out to be hidden inside a paddy field, along a network of paths that nobody could navigate without help. It all felt rather satisfying to have found the megaliths, but without resorting to the tourist trap of hiring an expensive guide for the day.

The megaliths we saw were among the best of the bunch, and trekking round the whole valley to find them all is a long and difficult process, only suited to those who live, breathe and eat megalith mythology. We got to see the following:

- Palindo (‘The Entertainer’), 4.5m. The largest statue in the area and the most celebrated, it is situated south of the tiny village of Sepe. It is perhaps a representation of Sepe’s first mythological inhabitant, Tosaloge. A local legend tells of the Raja of Luwu, who once ordered 1800 of his subjects to move the statue from Sepe to Palopo (a very long way to the south) to prove his dominance over Bada, but the effort failed. The statue was said to originally face Luwu in the south, but the Bada people turned it to face the west as a snub to the Raja, and when the Raja’s followers tried to turn it back, it fell onto its side, killing 200 of them. In the past, offerings were brought to this figure before embarking on any new enterprise, such as opening up a new garden. Whatever the legends, it’s a wonderfully atmospheric sight.

- Maturu (‘Sleeping’), 3.5m. This statue lies on its back, and has good features, like a reclining Palindo. As with its bigger brother, it’s a male; the erect genitals on both are a bit of a giveaway.

- Mesinga (‘Wearing a Scarf’). Actually, this looked more like a little penis and I didn’t even waste a photograph on it. The features are very faded and if it wasn’t in the Bada Valley, you’d think it was just a rock. It’s only just up the path from the Kalamba, which are far more interesting.

- Kalamba. These are vast stone cisterns, dotted all over the place, which may have been used as baths, or burial chambers for aristocrats. Some are better than others.

- Oba (‘Monkey’). This was the one that the old man took us to on the way out of the valley, and it’s a real cutie. Only as high as a squatting man, its features are amusingly monkey-like and cheeky. It’s right in the middle of a paddy field.

We could have seen more, but the rest of the walk beckoned, and after this many megaliths, we’d seen plenty. To be honest, it was a thrill just to find them, especially under our own steam.

That night we camped in the forest, just for the jungle experience, walking in the dark until we found a suitable spot to drop everything, set up the mozzie nets and sleep. It most definitely was an experience...

Leaving the Valley

The second day of our walk was comparatively uneventful. The path cut through tropical forest, following the huge Lariang River north towards the town of Moa. At 225km long, the Lariang is Sulawesi’s longest river and it’s an impressively powerful beast, strewn with rocks and the detritus of rainforest. The walking was easy enough, which was lucky as our map didn’t stretch beyond the valley of the megaliths, and soon after lunch we arrived in the small riverside village of Moa.

Here we spent the night in a basic losmen and sat there watching the entire village using the river as a bathroom, toilet, clothes washer, water source and village meeting place. I’m sure that Peter, ever the adventurous sort, was keen on the idea of spending this night in the forest too, but to be honest I wasn’t feeling too ecstatic after the heavy walking. I had blisters on my feet and aches and pains everywhere, and I wanted a bed; for this reason alone, Moa was a pleasant surprise.

The last half a day from Moa to Gimpu was, unfortunately, rather depressing, with little to recommend it. After the archaeologically interesting Bada Valley and the beautiful tropical rainforest along the Lariang, the final stretch to Gimpu showed signs of being pretty much destroyed by man, with plenty of logging, farming and environmental destruction littering a flat, boring road that insisted on staying at a slight incline that wore me down, bit by bit.

The rain didn’t help either, and as we arrived in Gimpu after the three-day slog, the tropical sky exploded in a torrent of rain that soaked us to the skin and made the little losmen down the road look doubly inviting; thankfully the rain held off until we arrived, or we’d have been thoroughly miserable, it came down so heavily. As it was we found some beds and greedily launched into supper, drank loads of tea, and settled into a good night’s sleep, extremely happy to have discovered the elusive megaliths of the Bada Valley.

Bada Belly

I thought it was all over, but it was not to be. A couple of hours after retiring at the ridiculously early hour of 6pm, I was back up again, rushing to the toilet for my first bout of Indonesian food poisoning. I threw up every couple of hours until about 6am, and I won’t debase this travelogue by talking about my other orifices. There was no way I was going anywhere when Friday finally arrived; not only was I suffering from the intestinal equivalent of the levee breaking, but I had the associated total lack of energy and interest. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Peter, however, had to head off as his itinerary was far less flexible than mine, and Gimpu isn’t exactly an interesting place to spend your holiday, so I bade him goodbye through a haze of illness, promising to keep in touch and let him know how the rest of my trip went. All of a sudden I was on my own, frighteningly ill, and alternating between the toilet, my bed and the little shop down the road where they sold bottled water, as I didn’t even have enough energy to operate my water filter.

By lunchtime on Friday I was no better, so the concerned losmen owner took me along the main road to visit the doctor, who worked from a basic-looking room that I wouldn’t have identified as a doctor’s surgery if it hadn’t been for the discoloured white coat she was wearing. After filling in the paperwork and explaining the problem, I had myself weighed, had my blood pressure taken, and after refusing an injection – just as much to do with my needle phobia as for fear of contaminated needles – I was given a selection of pills, tipped by the nurse from a collection of bottles that looked extensive enough to cater for every illness from malaria to mumps. I had to take the little white one, the big white one and the big black one three times a day, and that was that.

Goodness only knows what the pills were, but they worked. Within an hour I was bunged up, able to keep my rehydration mixture down, and although I still felt bloody awful, I was no longer exploding quite so badly. My temperature, which had fleetingly gone up, came back down and stayed down, and I managed a few bananas to start the digestive process working again. I had survived my first case of Asian food poisoning, though quite what had caused it remains a mystery. Suffice to say it was pretty unpleasant, but inevitable too. It hasn’t stop me trying the food, though; the best meals are often to be found in the dodgy warung stalls in the city roads, and some of the snacks are simply great – almost worth the risk. The result? This is almost certainly not going to be my last batch of food poisoning in Asia...

Togian Islands

Written: 16 October 1997

After recovering from my forest food poisoning, I took a long bus ride from Gimpu to Palu, then on to Poso and finally Ampana, where I managed to stay in the noisiest losmen I’ve ever been in; between the nocturnal cockerels, the cats on heat and the workmen who ripped the roof off my mandi at 7am, I was dog tired and ready for a rest. This proved to be fortuitous, because my ultimate destination, and the reason for the long bus journey, were the Togian Islands, an undiscovered paradise of coral-fringed islands just 25 miles south of the equator, sitting in the middle of the c-shaped bay formed by northern Sulawesi. After so long in French Polynesia I might not be that impressed by yet more beautiful islands, but in the Togians I saw a potential advantage: peace in isolation.

The Togian Islands are pretty much undiscovered territory as far as tourism goes. There are a number of beach losmen dotted around, and the clientele is almost exclusively western, but in terms of mainstream tourism, the Togians are well off the beaten track.

I suspect this won’t be the case for much longer. If you manage to ignore the fairly typical and disgusting town of Wakai – smelly, dirty, environmentally hopeless and only there as a port for the boats sailing to and from the mainland – the Togian Islands are relatively untouched, though trends such as fish bombing and hunting the almost extinct coconut crab are symptoms of a worrying lack of foresight. There are six main islands, plus the recently erupted volcano of Unauna, as well as countless tiny islands dotted all around, and with the lush vegetation and beautiful blue sea it’s a perfect place for paradise.

The big attraction of the Togian Islands is the large amount of good coral reef surrounding the islands, and it’s one of the few areas in the world where all three main types of reef are found: barrier reef, atoll and fringing reef. I met a couple of fascinating travellers in Ampana who had been hiking through Sulawesi in search of very rare pitcher plants, and we teamed up to take the ferry to the Togians, all in search of some relaxation; our destination was Kadidiri Island off the north coast of Togian Island itself. What we didn’t realise was that Kadidiri Island was also home to the only diving operator in the Togians.

Living on the Togian Islands was Paul, our Australian dive master, but that wasn’t Paul’s most distinguishing feature: that would be his long blonde dreadlocks, something of a unique sight in an island community full of Indonesians. When Paul first arrived in the Togians, he would visit Wakai, the main village on the islands, and the kids would run up to him and shout, ‘Hello mister, what’s your name?’

Before long everyone in Wakai got to know Paul: the shopkeepers, the ferrymen and the hotel owners. He’d been there for eight months when I met him, and when he walked down the street, the kids still ran out and followed him. And what did they say to Paul when he walked down the street after eight months?

‘Hello Paul, what’s your name?’

Diving in the Togians

With all that reef about, it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to throw off all the cares of the outside world, and enter the silent world of scuba. During the four days I spent in the Togians, I went on two dives. The first was easily the most amazing: a B-24 bomber had come down in the sea off the south coast of Pulau Togian back in 1945, and it’s a pleasant 20m below the surface, perfect for diving. It’s now encrusted in coral, and exploring a wrecked but pretty intact plane at the bottom of the sea is an amazing experience, especially when the water at 20m is a balmy 29°C. Everything is covered in growth, not surprisingly after over 50 years, but it’s amazing how much is almost untouched: the pilot’s throttle controls, the engine’s radiator fins, the machine guns, the landing gear and so on are all instantly recognisable, and living on this plane-shaped reef are plenty of weird and wonderful marine creatures. Diving the site was a clash of history, surrealism and imagination, where you could almost hear the conversation as the crew prepared for crash landing, an event that they would all survive, to be rescued by the inhabitants of the local fishing village of Liberty. It was my first wreck dive, and hopefully not my last.

After a day’s snorkelling the following day – a poor man’s second when you’ve learned to dive, but a worthwhile occupation when the coral is just off the hotel beach – I decided that the budget could stretch to another dive, so the next day I joined the others for a dive in the Labyrinth, a more standard coral bommie dive that was nonetheless very pleasant.

The two Togian dives were just what I needed, and they acted as a catalyst to relieving the accumulated travel stress and fatigue that Indonesia has so far piled onto my shoulders. It also helped that the place was seriously relaxed; for example, our last night on the island coincided with the full moon, so out came the beer and the arak (rice wine) and, when the arak had run dry, out came the Indonesian vodka. I passed out on the beach by the fire, and the next day awoke with a familiar feeling: I was still quite drunk. Which was just what I needed for a long bus ride through bumpy Sulawesi... though even through the haze of the morning after, I was sad to see Kadidiri disappear over the horizon, as I now felt properly recharged.

Wild Mood Swings

Written: 18 October 1997

After some 30 days of fairly hectic and intense travelling in Indonesia, I had totally lost the plot and was basically at the end of my tether. It’s a travel trap that I’ve fallen into before; if you push yourself too far too quickly, you’ll burn out, and the whole experience suffers as a result. When I got to Ampana, I was almost ready to throw in the towel and fly back to London. Let me elaborate.

For a few days, aided and abetted by my bout of intestinal hockey, a really bad feeling had been growing inside of me. I sat back and looked at my Indonesian experience to date, and to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. Despite the fact that I had found so much to write about, had had so many different experiences to describe and a constant battering of ideas and intrusions that had kept me on my toes, there was one thing that I realised when I got down to the nitty-gritty; I was in serious danger of getting bored of travelling in Indonesia. The novelty had already worn off.

I even went as far as to make a list of things that were really winding me up, as a kind of organisational therapy. I repeat the list here, to give you a peek into the mind of a long-term traveller, though bear in mind that these notes were jotted down under a black cloud of illness and travel fatigue, so take them with a large pinch of salt:

- I came to Southeast Asia for the culture; after Australia and New Zealand I’m not too bothered by trying to find amazing landscapes here, but I want to discover different ways of life and different ideas. The problem is that I’m finding Indonesian culture rather hard to experience, outside of the neatly packaged cultural experiences like Ubud. Essentially, I can’t find the culture I so badly want to see.

- The effort involved in travelling in Indonesia is astounding. The constant and weary Hello Misters and JFOs, the tiring and eternal public transport... however good the destinations, sometimes you find yourself thinking that the gain is not worth the pain.

- After about a week, the food becomes pretty damn boring. Constant rice and noodles gets pretty uninspiring when you’re used to western food. I now find myself craving Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which isn’t a good sign.

Pretty miserable, eh! On the other hand, rereading the above after the low patch had passed didn’t make me press ‘delete’ and start again, something I normally find essential if this travelogue isn’t going to be just a collection of moans and groans written at a bad time of the day. No, these whinges are pretty valid, and not the result of illness or exhaustion, so I’ve left them in.

A big result of the above discoveries was that I decided then and there not to bother with Kalimantan; apart from the fact that Borneo was pretty much smothered in choking smoke at the time, I realised that I simply didn’t fancy hacking my way up another river to discover a jungle that’s been logged, or a culture that’s being swallowed by Coke and MTV. I decided that I’d try to go straight from Sulawesi to Java, skipping the bushfires altogether and heading for some guaranteed sightseers’ delights.

After cheering up during my stay in the Togians, though, I began to see the other side to my complaints. Take the difficulty in discovering the real Indonesian culture; my initial problem was that I thought Indonesian culture was dead. Looking around, the biggest influences you see are Coke, English language slogan T-shirts, motorbikes, cars, television, and all the rest of the axioms of westernisation. This didn’t surprise me one bit; Indonesia is a developing country, so western ideals and concepts will be greedily guzzled up by the populace.

But everywhere you go there are signs of the culture that are very different to the western world, it’s just that it doesn’t take long to become immune enough for you to begin to take it all for granted. Try the following everyday sights: people walking cattle down the street; bicycle rickshaws rattling over the stony roads; warung stalls dotted about town, selling cheap snacks and meals; colourful markets everywhere; Muslim mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches, all on the same street; lush vegetation and tropical palms just about everywhere; clothes like sarongs, Islamic hats, batik designs and so on; smiling and laughing, the likes of which you’d never get in a western city; a people who are always helping you find the right bus, the right boat, the right bemo, without expecting anything in return except a little conversation and politeness; yes, Indonesian culture is far from dead, it’s just ingrained so deeply into everyday life that after a month, it’s no longer new, so you get used to it. Actually Indonesia is culturally very interesting, and I’ve learned to look at everything with new eyes every day to appreciate the subtleties of the local psyche.

My whinge about the effort required in travelling through Indonesia is totally fair, and most western travellers I have met have to take regular breaks at places like beach resorts to regain their sanity. Which is exactly what I did in the Togians, and is exactly what I shall continue to do.

Finally, the food. Yes, it is a bit disappointing, no doubt about it. But there are plenty of other more exciting countries on my itinerary, and at least the food here is incredibly cheap. So I can’t really complain, can I? Exactly.

Poso

Written: 18 October 1997

I don’t want to think too much about the journey south. From the Togian Islands to Ampana to Poso to Tentena to Pendolo to Rantepao, this mammoth three-day journey on painful buses, crowded boats and sore feet was only made bearable by a friendship struck up on the Togian ferry; Rose, a solo traveller from New York state, was on my wavelength, going my way and would prove an amiable companion until we were rudely parted after a couple of weeks... but that’s another story. For now we’re bouncing through central Sulawesi, Rose full of stories about her eight-month trip through Southeast Asia, and me full of dread at having to repeat the awful stretch of road that Peter and I had put up with when heading north to Tentena for the first time.

Salvation, though, came in the form of the Lake Poso ferry. The worst stretch of road – between Tentena and Pendolo – skirts the shores of Lake Poso, a huge freshwater soak in the middle of Sulawesi, and where there’s a lake, there’s a boat. We arrived in Tentena to find that the boat was leaving that evening, and would arrive in Pendolo to meet a night bus heading to Rantepao, our ultimate destination. This gave us a day to kill in Tentena, which we filled by lounging about in a forest-clad waterfall called Saluopa, some 20km west of Tentena in the general direction of Lore Lindu.

I should have revelled in the cool waters more, because the next twelve hours were typically awful. The waters of Lake Poso splashed over the sides of the crowded ferry onto our legs; the restaurant where the bus was due to arrive was a good half-an-hour’s hard walk from the ferry terminal; the night bus didn’t turn up until 1am (so we slept on the floor of the restaurant, without anyone seeming to mind); and the seats we managed to squeeze into for the journey proved inadequate as seats, let alone beds. Our arrival in Rantepao on Saturday morning was fairly ethereal as sleep deprivation washed away any good intentions about leaping into the culture straight away, but at least we’d made it in one piece.

The Torajan People

Written: 23 October 1997

We arrived in Rantepao totally exhausted, and as is always the way when you’re tired beyond comprehension, we discovered that we’d arrived on market day. As market day in Rantepao is only every six days, we just had to make the effort to go, so go we did, catching a bemo to Bolu where all manner of produce gathered dust on the ground under makeshift tents and the wilful gaze of the hawkers. It was hot and strenuous, but Rose saved the day by announcing that she had a mission: as she was going to go home in just a few weeks, she had to buy presents for her close family, and she had seen the perfect thing. Torajan boxes, stuffed with Arabica coffee beans, the best coffee in Indonesia, would make a wonderful gift, and we spent a few entertaining hours buying ten boxes and a big bag of coffee beans, haggling the price from ridiculous to almost acceptable, and discovering plenty about coffee merchants in the process.

For it is the Torajan people that attract tourists to Rantepao, and it’s not just their boxes that are interesting. Hidden away in the folding hills of the central highlands is an animist religion with myriad rituals and ceremonies that have miraculously survived the steamroller effect of Islam. Chief among these unique aspects of Tana Toraja, as the area is known, are the traditions associated with the dead; never has dying been such a huge event.

The Torajans are animist: they believe in the spirits of the dead, spirits of dead animals, the underworld and so on. They believe that when a person dies and goes onto the next plane, they can take their possessions with them, which means that people are buried with all sorts of expensive items. In the past this led, not surprisingly, to a serious amount of grave robbing, so the Torajans began to bury their dead in caves, hewn from the surrounding cliffs and closed off with doors, thus preventing the robbers from getting in and the dead from oozing out. There was one problem, though: the local rock is so hard that digging a burial cave is a highly expensive exercise, so the cave diggers are traditionally paid in the well-known currency of water buffalo, which are very expensive. This means that only the rich can have cave graves, and as a result the whole burying and funeral process has assumed an important status: the better the cave, the more expensive and elaborate the funeral preparations, and the higher the status that is afforded to the family.

So far this sounds fairly reasonable; after all, westerners are just as fickle in wanting to show off their wealth, except it generally happens at more celebratory events that at a funeral. But the Torajans are really into celebrating death, from throwing multiple-day funeral parties to carving spooky wooden effigies of dead people and sticking them outside the cave graves; the carving of these tau-tau, as they are called, can cost nearly a whole year’s wages, for just one effigy. In fact, families have been known to bankrupt themselves to put on a good funeral show and build a good cave, something that seems illogical to me, but which is perfectly acceptable to the Torajans; they live for death, it seems, and everywhere you go there is something to see that’s connected with the next world. It’s quite eerie, and utterly fascinating.

Tongkonan Houses

The funerals might be the most famous events in Tana Toraja, but the most obvious cultural objects are the houses. The tongkonan, as the traditional houses are called, are distinctively ornate in a way that makes the layered paddy fields of central Sulawesi look totally unique; everywhere you look there are houses whose roofs curve up at opposite ends, not unlike a water buffalo’s horns, or a huge, thatched banana. It is a beautiful sight, an architectural study in symmetry and precision that could teach modern builders a thing or two, especially when you consider that the wooden houses don’t use nails: they are built so everything just slots together and holds together through rain and shine.

But, like everything the Torajans do, this wonderful tradition is tinged with something that smacks of idiocy to the casual observer. They don’t live in these beautiful constructions, they live in normal crappy Indonesian tin-roof squats right next door, saving the tongkonan for special occasions, ceremonies and status symbols; size is everything in Tana Toraja, and if your roof doesn’t curve at the right angle, you’re a nobody. Then there are the rice barns, built in the same style as the tongkonan, and the more rice barns you’ve got, the richer you are – or, rather, the richer you appear, because if you build too many rice barns, you’ll have precious little capital left over.

The reason for this distinctive house design has baffled historians. Some think the roof is based on the design of the water buffalo’s horns, another reflection of the Torajans’ obsession with the beast, while some say that the design is based on the shape of an overturned boat, something I can’t really see myself. All the houses face north, possibly because the Torajans came from the north, carrying their boats, and the theory goes that they then inverted these boats to make shelters, hence the curved shape. Though that sounds like a load of buffalo to me...

Oh, and one more thing about the houses. They each have a wooden carving of a water buffalo’s head stuck on the front, as well as a collection of genuine buffalo horns tacked to the front beam, again as a show of fiscal superiority. I didn’t quite appreciate the reason for all these horns when I first saw them, but I was to learn the hard way exactly what they symbolised... and where they came from.

Rantepao

Written: 23 October 1997

Rose and I tackled the area around Rantepao as a team, by taking public transport to interesting spots and then exploring by foot. Despite the smoke hanging round the mountains from the forest fires in western Sulawesi, we spent two days wandering around a number of different areas, marvelling at the houses (which, after two days, became more familiar than interesting, but were still fascinating) and checking out the area’s tourist-friendly sights and smells.

Without a doubt one of the most amazing things you can see in Rantepao is a Torajan funeral, but to put such an event in context it’s good to explore the area first. There’s plenty to see...

Lemo

Lemo is a classic cliff-grave and tau-tau site. There are balconies cut into the cliff-side where dozens of tau-tau figures stand, their arms outstretched in front of them as if in supplication. OK, there are plenty of tourist shops selling all sorts of toys and trinkets, and yes, the huts tucked away round the corner where the tau-tau are carved are little more than money-spinners, but the atmosphere of the place is pretty impressive; those tau-tau are disturbing whatever the environment.

Tilanga

Tilanga is apparently a waterhole, but it’s too dried up to be of interest at this time of the year. However, I mention it not because of the sodden turf that bore as much resemblance to a swimming pool as Kuta does to paradise, but because of whom Rose and I met there. Dawdling about the path between Lemo and Tilanga were two English girls, Jenny and Sarah, with whom we fell into step and conversation. This world being as small as it is, it turned out that they were from Poynton, a tiny town north of Macclesfield where I used to work, and they knew some of the people from the office; Jenny and Sarah will crop up later in this story, and in retrospect it was very good luck that we met up together. Life would have been much harder without their peculiar knowledge of pharmacies...

Londa

Further along the road from Tilanga is Londa, one of the most touristy areas we visited, but also one of the most atmospheric. To understand Londa, you should know about the four types of Torajan graves: the first, the grave dug out of a cliff, is used when there is a convenient cliff in the vicinity; the second, the cave grave, is used if there is a handy naturally formed cave around; the third, the hanging grave, is hung from a suitably high spot, such as an overhanging cliff that’s too dangerous to dig a cave into and where nobody will climb up to steal the body; and the fourth is the house grave, used when none of the other three can be built, where a hollow is dug in the ground, the body placed there, and a miniature tongkonan house is built over the grave.

Londa is a naturally occurring cave that’s full of coffins, some extremely recently occupied, with a large collection of tau-tau guarding the entrance. Young men with kerosene lamps guide you through the winding corridors for a small fee, pointing out delightful sights such as the coffin that’s broken open, allowing you to see the decomposing body inside, the skull that’s still got a few tufts of hair stuck to it, the coffins of children stacked up high in the roof of the cave... yes, it’s pretty gruesome at times, but it’s all a part of the Torajan lifestyle, and once you get over your western hang-ups about death, it’s fascinating.

Especially when there’s a tiny tunnel through which you can crawl for ten metres to get from one side of the cave complex to the other. It seems we can add claustrophobia to the phobias that my travelling has helped tackle, because even though the tunnel was so small in places that we had to crawl single file on our bellies, I didn’t freak out; even Jenny, a self-professed cave hater, managed to soldier through without panicking. I remember a particularly vivid part of Alan Garner’s book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen where the heroes have to crawl through a rabbit-sized tunnel, and although it used to send me into a cold sweat to read it, I now find myself crazy enough to crawl down pitch-black tunnels through to chambers filled with rotting humans and babies’ skulls. I never thought I’d end up saying something like that...

Palawa

Stone circles are another aspect of Torajan religion, with each stone standing for an important noble who departed this life. Some of the stone circles are ancient and covered in lichen, such as the one at Palawa, which is just down the road from a particularly impressive collection of tongkonan.

Bori

However the stone circle at Bori has been tidied up, cleaned and surrounded by a well-kept hedge and an immaculate garden, which rather spoils things... and then they charge you 2000rp for the privilege of going inside. So we opted not to pay, and instead settled for some snapshots from outside. Charging entrance fees is fine, but rebuilding the natural setting of a historical site to make it more appealing – and more hidden from non-paying passers-by – doesn’t get my vote, at least not in this case.

Pa’piong

There was another cultural experience that promised much but failed to deliver: pa’piong. This local dish sounds scrumptious; buffalo meat (or chicken) is mixed with a bunch of vegetables and a spinach-like leaf, which is stuffed into a bamboo tube and slow roasted over a fire for three hours, before being served with black or red rice. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately we all thought it tasted pretty disgusting, which was a bit of a disappointment. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

A Torajan Funeral

Written: 21 October 1997

Whatever the sights, there’s no doubt that the highlight of a trip to Tana Toraja – the area of central Sulawesi whose capital is Rantepao – is to visit a funeral. This is easier than it sounds; because the funeral celebrations take a lot of preparation, not to mention expense, the Torajans have two funerals for each death, much like the Balinese. The first one is a private affair straight away after the death, and the body is preserved in the house where it died until the necessary cash has been saved up for the second one, a much bigger, more public affair. Because the second funeral is effectively a huge party and can be held at any time, it tends to be organised for between July and October, when the relatives can come to visit more easily during the school holidays. This leads to the strange concept of the Funeral Season, which Rose and I were lucky enough to catch the end of.

It was pure luck, but Rose and I managed to get ‘invited’ to a medium-sized funeral in a place called Buntulepong, somewhere that didn’t even appear on the local maps. We had just returned to our hotel after our evening meal when this local guy called Sam rushed up and wondered if we would like to go to a funeral tomorrow, in his home village; we had no plans, and so we agreed. Of course our ‘invitation’ cost us US$15, but our cynicism was short lived; the three of us – the two of us plus a third girl from the same hotel – were the only tourists at the whole event. And what an event!

Torajan funerals are, by English standards, badly named; ‘funeral’, at least in English, is a word that conjures up images of black-clad mourners, weeping by a graveside on a cold winter’s day, the priest’s mournful words forming frostily in the air. In Tana Toraja they wear black, but that’s where the mourning ends; the second funeral is a celebration of the person’s life, of him or her making the step into the next world, where those left on earth make sure they send all the help they can to the person’s spirit.

The theory goes something like this. When a Torajan dies, the spirit journeys to a netherworld. Here it is judged, and one of the ways it is judged is on how successful it was in its previous life, and this is influenced by looking at the number of animal spirits that have been sent along with the person... in other words, the larger the number of animals that get slaughtered at the funeral, the better the spirit’s chance of getting to the Torajan version of heaven. And of course the best animal to get sent along for your journey to the netherworld is the water buffalo, the most expensive animal around. Is it any wonder that throwing a funeral can, literally, bankrupt a family? Still, it’s a hell of a way to blow the family fortune.

The Funeral Celebrations

We were welcomed like long lost family members when we finally arrived at the village, having traipsed through paddy fields and some stunning mountain views. Arabica coffee was offered – without a doubt the best coffee I’d had in Indonesia – and kreteks were passed around, for this is the way of the party. Guests are expected to bring presents, whether it’s water buffalo, pigs, food or cigarettes, and our gift of a large box of Gudang Garam kreteks went down a treat. And if we were concerned about breaching etiquette with our cameras, we needn’t have been; within two minutes of our arrival, the locals had whipped out their own cameras to snap the three white people who had come to pay their respects to the deceased.

The entertainment began in earnest at about 10am. Our first experience of what was to come was the screeching of pigs; strapped to long pieces of bamboo, the pigs were brought in, dumped on the ground and left to squeal at their fate. Seeing as the pigs were soon to end up as roast pork, the locals didn’t exactly worry about how they treated the bacon; animal lovers would have been horrified. And if the sound of squealing pigs was disturbing, the water buffalo took the spectacle from the unnerving to the downright shocking.

The smell of death is distinctive; it permeates utterly. We took a seat right by the rectangular area where the killing was to take place, and as the slaughtering continued, I couldn’t help thinking of Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four; at the end the hero is a broken man, sitting in his local café every day, drinking nothing but clove-flavoured gin, sweating clove-flavoured sweat, crying clove-flavoured tears... the smell of death, of blood and faeces and frightened animal, is similarly overpowering in its permeation.

The first water buffalo of the three we saw ritually murdered was the most intense sight; it’s amazing how the human mind accepts the unacceptable after a while. I made my mind up to watch; I am not a vegetarian and I have never had any inkling to become one, but I still have some morals when it comes to what I eat. I don’t want to stick my head in the sand, I want to know what it takes to kill an animal, what’s involved, and if I can live with that knowledge, I can continue to eat meat with a clear conscience. So I watched everything.

The buffalo is surprisingly calm as it is led into the arena. Its keeper pulls it along by a rope attached to the ring in its nose, a method of control it has been obeying since it was born; why should today be any different? Even the dismembered pigs strewn across the centre of the arena – killed elsewhere, as only buffalo are honoured enough to be killed in front of everyone – don’t worry the huge beast. It doesn’t seem to notice, or care, as its front left foot is tied to a rock outcrop in the middle of the arena. After all, its owner is there, the person who has been working alongside it in the paddy fields for years.

The knife is out before you know it; about six inches long, it’s the same type of blade that every farmer seems to carry in central Sulawesi. In the wink of an eye the young man holds up the knife for all to see, and in one quick, fluid movement he takes a swing and slashes a huge cut across the buffalo’s neck, as calmly as if he’s cutting through an inconvenient bush, or cutting down rice during the harvest.

The buffalo changes in an instant. Eyes roll in their sockets, searching for something, like a young child in a crowded shopping mall who suddenly realises that his mummy isn’t by his side any more. The buffalo’s legs jerk involuntarily, trying to run away from the pain, but its tied foot brings it crashing to the ground, convulsing. The cry of fear, loud and hoarse, becomes a loud gurgle as the buffalo throws its head backwards in a confused reflex action, turning the slit into a huge, gaping wound, pumping bright crimson blood into the arena with every heartbeat. Dust from the ground sticks to the buffalo’s hide, mixing with the blood and sweat, attracting flies in clouds as the buffalo gradually slows down, jerking less and starting to shiver.

Is it dead? It certainly looks like it, but after a couple of minutes its hind left leg starts to twitch spasmodically, and as the young man who made the cut walks over to the body and wipes the blade of his knife clean on the buffalo’s stomach, the beast reacts to the touch. It thrashes around, aware now that the creeping numbness is permanent, that it is dying, and for another two minutes its breathing changes from a gurgle to a hoarse coughing, a rattle that signals the final struggle; and then the beast lets its bowels go, its eyes change from panic stricken to glazed, and finally it’s dead.

Within ten minutes of the buffalo’s demise, the local boys have started to chop it up. It’s amazing how this previously proud animal soon becomes nothing more than an exercise in butchery, and somewhere there’s a point at which it ceases to be a buffalo, and becomes a selection of prime cuts and offal. Looking at the huge pile of red cutlets, it’s strange to think that just half an hour ago, every piece of bone and flesh had a function, every globule of glistening gut was essential to the existence of a water buffalo; now it’s off with the skin, slice open the stomach and discard the cud, chop through bone and sinew by taking huge axe swings with the butcher’s knife... bits of body fly everywhere as the flies home in on the smelliest parts, and odours of guts, blood and stomach contents fill the air. No wonder everyone smokes kreteks at funerals.

After the second and third sacrifices, I see steak, not slaughter. Western sensibilities about cruelty to animals seem out of place here; this is no more horrific than inventing factories where chickens, cows, pigs and sheep are murdered on conveyor belts. The roasted pig fat and rice for lunch tastes good, too; and the pigs are even killed quickly, with a knife straight through the heart. Unlike the water buffalo.

Tuak and Bemos

Many more sights made the rest of the day a fascinating glimpse into the Torajan way of life. Every half an hour the people from another village would arrive, bearing gifts of pigs and buffalo, cigarettes and food, parading themselves and their gifts round the arena, stepping lightly round headless carcasses and piles of excrement. A woman clad in a bright yellow dress guided the villagers, men first and then women, in a line round the edge of the arena, making sure that the details of every gift were noted down in a little book, so that every gift would be reciprocated at the next funeral; in this way a vague balance of payments is kept between villages, helping to prevent too much of an imbalance.

And then there’s the tuak, or palm wine, served in long, green tubes of bamboo and tasting rather like a fruity cider. If there’s one justification that living in the tropics is as close to heaven as you can get in this life, it’s the existence of palm wine. Certain palms naturally produce a sweet, sticky liquid, and if this is tapped in the morning, it slowly ferments during the day to produce a truly delightful alcoholic drink that’s perfectly in tune with the way serious drunks like to drink. For tuak starts off in the morning almost free of alcohol, and is as easy to drink as lemonade, but as the day progresses the alcoholic content increases, the taste becomes more intense, and by the end of the day it’s gone red and it’ll blow your mind. Drinking tuak all day not only rots your brain, it gets stronger just when you need more alcohol to give you the same effect; it’s nature and man’s self-destructive tendencies in perfect balance.

But surely the strangest experience, the icing on the cake, came on the way home after a day of celebrating, a day full of shocks and surprises. As the bemo rattled its way back towards Rantepao, the driver slammed on the anchors and swerved, Rose and Cora gasping in the front passenger seat. A kitten had run out across the road, and as the bemo backed up I saw a little girl cradling a tiny tabby kitten, its paws limp and lifeless as its head lolled unnaturally to the side, its neck broken. In the West there would have been tears, a difficult time for the parents and a tearful ritual burial in an old shoe box. But in Tana Toraja death has less of a sting, and there was no reaction at all. Instead the bemo driver found a stick and started digging a shallow grave, right there on the roadside.

‘If we don’t bury the cat, then this bemo will have a crash sometime in the next two weeks,’ explained one of the locals, jammed into the back of the bus alongside me. Apparently cats have a special meaning in Toraja, and as the driver finished off his work, everyone seemed to consider that that was the end of it; the child whose pet it was didn’t bat an eyelid as we shot off, leaving rubber and black exhaust as the only sign that anything had happened. I’d read about Buddhist attitudes to death and I’d seen Christian funerals, but I’d never seen people react so calmly to loss of life before, and that wasn’t just when it came to cats.

I sometimes wonder if life would be easier if we didn’t fear death so much. It happens to us all; acceptance would be a wonderful thing if it weren’t so difficult. But then the image of a water buffalo with mad, rolling eyes comes back, and I can’t help but suppress a shiver. Perhaps it’s just too late for me to learn to accept death so calmly?

Unwell in Tana Toraja

Written: 22 October 1997

Wednesday started like a typical Indonesian Disaster Day. I’ve already discovered that travel in Indonesia won’t let a week pass without something going wrong, but I thought that after my recent food poisoning and horrific bus journeys, I was due a respite. Think again.

I woke up with liquid stools, presumably due to the roasted pig fat I’d tried at the funeral the day before, but they didn’t seem that serious, so I popped a couple of Imodium, drank plenty of water, and prepared to tackle the day. Just as I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes, Rose in the next door room made a discovery of her own in the bathroom: a Peeping Tom looking through the window of her bathroom while she was taking a mandi. Sometimes I wonder how lone women travellers manage to cope with the unwelcome affections of the local populace – something us men don’t have to put up with – but I soon found out; it was a good job that the pervert made good his escape, or he would have been a dead man. Luckily Rose had spent long enough travelling through Asia to take it all in her stride – ‘You just have to get used to this sort of thing,’ she said – and after a few strong words of complaint to the management, we went to pay for our rooms.

Only to discover that they were charging us more than we’d originally agreed on our arrival. There’s a ten per cent government tax that all hotels have to put onto their bills, and if you don’t make sure that tax is included in the price when you book in, you’ll get it slapped on at check-out time, which is fair enough; the thing is, we’d specifically agreed that tax was included in the 8000rp per night rate, so what was this 8800rp per night business on the bill? Still, unless you’ve got something in writing, you’re on shaky ground, and often it’s not worth the argument, so we grumbled that we weren’t very impressed, but paid anyway. After all, you just have to get used to this sort of thing.

Our next destination was the tourist office in town. Bolstered by our amazing funeral experience, Rose and I had decided to go to another with Jenny and Sarah, who wanted to see a funeral but hadn’t wanted to go on the day that they slaughtered the water buffalo; as today was mine and Rose’s last day in Rantepao – we both had tickets for the 8pm overnight bus to Ujung Pandang – we’d booked a guide for 9am to take us to a funeral in Tallunglipu, just up the road from Rantepao. So, there we all were, at the office to meet our guide, only to get told to come back at 11.30... which didn’t particularly surprise me. You just have to get used to this sort of thing, you know.

Phones and Pharmacies

We decided to take advantage of the extra time on our hands by making some phone calls. Indonesia has many public phones, but they use phone cards and can’t make international calls, so most tourists nip down to the Wartel, an office with a number of phone booths from which you can make a call anywhere, and pay afterwards in cash. Rose needed to call Garuda, the Indonesian airline, to try to change the date of her flight from Ujung Pandang to Denpasar, so we popped into the Wartel, asked the price per minute to call Ujung Pandang – 1020rp per minute – and she dialled into the nightmare of Indonesian bureaucracy. She’d already tried once, the day before, but this time she actually got a human operator, and after going through the rigmarole of trying to get him to change her flight details – a pain, because he kept trying to tell her to ring these other numbers, which she’d already done, discovering nothing but answerphones and unobtainable tones – she asked him to confirm her new flight details. ‘You need to ring this other number to do that,’ he said, as Rose’s knuckles whitened around the already gasping receiver. Whether she actually managed to change her flight, I never found out. But I did learn a valuable lesson: airlines come in strata too, with Garuda down in the murky depths somewhere. One day computerised booking will reach the archipelago... but until then, you just have to get used to this sort of thing.

And to add insult to infuriation, Rose discovered that the telephone’s computer had charged her 1800rp per minute, a considerable difference from 1020rp on such a long phone call, so she spent half an hour arguing with the dopey assistant, who rued the day she’d ever crossed swords with such a feisty American tourist. She still didn’t care, of course, and Rose ended up having to pay the full price, but by this stage I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach, both at the way the day was turning out, and at the severe indigestion bubbling through my colon.

So I went to the chemist and tried to explain what I wanted: some Oral Rehydration Salts. The assistant seemed rather confused when I tried to explain what I wanted, and after a while I figured it might be easier if she pointed me towards the diarrhoea section in the rows and rows of pills on display, so I could look for myself. So I asked her if she could do just that (an easy enough question, as the Indonesian word for diarrhoea is diare), but I wasn’t prepared for her response. ‘We don’t have diarrhoea in Indonesia, sir,’ she chirped, and I suddenly found myself totally lost for words. I mean, what can you say to that?

So I gave up and instead bought some bottles of Gatorade from the supermarket, which seemed to contain the sugar and salts I needed. And in a move that could only happen in the happy world of travellers, everyone fished out their spare ORS packets and diarrhoea tablets; how many other people do you know who regularly carry such medication around with them?

The Funeral

Finally we met our guide, Paulus, and walked for over an hour to get to the funeral. It was a much bigger affair than the previous, more intimate event, and there were many more tourists, some of them even dressed in skimpy garb that would offend in Europe, much less an Indonesian funeral. However, we found Paulus to be more informative than Sam, but so he should be; Paulus was a professional, and as a result the whole thing felt rather more like a tour, unlike the previous day when we’d genuinely felt welcomed into the community.

Much to Jenny and Sarah’s chagrin we saw more buffalo getting their throats slit, and to their credit they watched. There were processions, singing, roasted pig fat for lunch, and there was the problem with my guts. Discovering that the funeral was running out of water and couldn’t spare any for the toilet, I hailed Paulus and explained that if I didn’t get to a toilet soon, the buffalo wouldn’t be the only ones spilling their guts everywhere. Thankfully he said, ‘No problem, I live just 600m away; you can go there.’ And so we set off.

It was the longest 600m of my life, but we got there in time. Just.

The rest of the funeral was interesting, but paled in comparison with the one in Buntulepong. We saw buffalo fights, where two buffalo run amok, trying to gore each other, and quite often rushing off into the crowd, who run away like characters out of Hemingway’s Fiesta. We saw Torajan kick-boxing, or sisemba, where young men tie themselves together by the wrist into pairs, and teams of pairs tackle each other with flying kicks and roundhouses. And finally we saw the long road home, through paddy fields and back to Rantepao.

My Funeral

By this stage my energy levels were pretty low, so Rose and I headed off to a restaurant in town, one we’d been frequenting a lot. I soon began to perk up, and Jenny and Sarah wandered in to say goodbye; conversation flowed, time ticked on towards eight o’clock, when our bus would leave, and then things suddenly started to go badly wrong. Paling and failing, I rushed off to the mandi, lost my toasted sandwich to the plumbing, and only just managed to drag myself back to the table.

‘I don’t think you’re in any state to travel,’ said Rose. ‘Want me to change your ticket?’

‘Umm. Yeah, I think you’re right. Thanks,’ I murmured. Things began to look bleak; the room started to spin as Rose went to the bus station, returning with an endorsed ticket for the next night. ‘When you’re ill, hang the plans and stay put,’ I thought.

‘Are you OK, Mark?’ asked Jenny, who was sitting on my right. ‘You’ve gone awfully pale, you know.’

I felt confused. My lips sagged and trembled, and wouldn’t work. Cold sweat kicked in, and a familiar feeling started to grip my stomach.

‘Dunno,’ was all I could manage. And then I had what alcoholics call A Moment of Clarity, and realised that I was going to throw up. Badly. ‘Bag. Gonna be sick,’ I blurted out, grabbing a plastic bag I’d used to carry my bottle of water.

Jenny was superb. She held the plastic bag – a good, thick Australian bag, I noted with relief – while I threw up violently and copiously, idly wondering where the hell all that food had come from. I didn’t know where I was, the reflex of the upheavals confusing the brain and muddling the mind.

Jenny: ‘Someone get a doctor. Hey Mark? Do you wanna lie down? On the floor? Mark?’

Sarah: ‘Fuck, I’m glad I’ve got some beer left. I need it now, having seen that.’

Jenny: ‘Yeah, same here. Never seen someone throw up so much. Where’s the doctor? Come on, you lie here.’

Cold floor, my head resting on my arm. Where’s the clear-headed feeling you normally get after being sick? My bare forearm on the tiled floor is leaving a patch of condensation on the white ceramic. I don’t want to think about my stomach. Pins and needles shoot through my arms and legs, and I can’t clench my hand: I’ve no energy, no muscle control. ‘Burning up,’ I mumble.

Jenny feels my forehead. ‘He’s bloody freezing. Where’s the doctor, Sam?’ Sam? What the hell’s Sam doing here?

‘How is he?’ I recognise Acu, a local we’ve met over the last few nights. Good man. Not a doctor, though. There’s a crowd around, smart people in smart clothes, looking concerned but spectator-like.

‘Was there blood in his vomit?’ That must be the doctor: well-dressed, young Chinese woman in a pink dress, glasses, stumbling English[1]. The girls think it’s amusing: ‘I wasn’t exactly looking, you know. I’ll check... the bag’s over there, in the bin.’

‘Nothing but chillies and tomatoes, I think.’

Doctor: ‘We should take him into the back. To a bed.’

Sam and Acu, one under each arm, and I’m in a back room while the doctor’s writing something on a pad. ‘Injection, yes, and some pills.’ Oh God, my worst fear: an injection in a dodgy backwater, and the clean needles I’ve carted across the world are back in my hotel.

‘I’ll go with her to check you get the right medicine,’ says Jenny. She’s a pharmacologist, I remember. A piece of sanity to grab onto in this spinning room.

Time passes, voices reappear. ‘Had to get them to find some stock that wasn’t expired,’ says Jenny. ‘Got some.’

The jab goes in. Things start to swing back to normality.

Jenny: ‘The jab is an anti-spasmodic, to stop your body muscles going crazy; your heart’s been palpitating, you’ve had a body chill and this jab will stop the gut wrenches. Then there are antibiotics to kill the infection. I’ve checked the leaflets; they’re strong, but I’m familiar with them all. It’s not a problem.’

And then, mercifully, I slept...

[1] Many thanks to Lina Peters, who kindly emailed me to say that the doctor who helped me is called Dr Terry. So here’s to you, Dr Terry – thanks for your timely jab!

Java

Ujung Pandang to Surabaya

Written: 24 October 1997

Following my sudden illness, I found myself with a bonus recuperation day. There were bananas, biscuits and conversations with a delightful Canadian couple who had moved into Rose’s old room; I hadn’t managed to say goodbye to my American friend, as she’d had to catch her bus while I writhed on the floor, which was a great shame. We’d meant to have a pizza in Ujung Pandang and to swap books when I’d finished the last few pages of mine on the bus – she had a John Irving book, A Prayer for Owen Meany, that I would have loved to read, especially after she described his other books to me – but I didn’t even have an address. Such is life.

Still, I was just happy to be alive, and by the time the bus was ready to leave that evening, I almost felt better, if a little fragile. Jenny and Sarah were on the same bus south, and the journey passed pretty uneventfully, arriving at the bus station at some awful hour in the middle of the night, from where we shared a taxi into town, taking the girls to a dodgy hotel, and me to the docks. I had a boat to catch.

Pelni. Ah, how I missed you! I had no ticket and no idea where to go, but I eventually found a company representative who told me the boat left at 7am, and the Pelni office opened at 8am.

Hang on, run that past me again...

‘So I can’t buy a ticket, then?’ I ventured.

Oh yes I could, from the ticket touts, who are technically illegal, but who work in collaboration with Pelni. I got a ticket for 73,000rp, only 3000rp over the odds, and bustled onto the KM Tidar, bound for the port of Surabaya on the island of Java. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, but then again, the efficient connections you get with Indonesian transport never cease to amaze me, even if the transport itself often leaves something to be desired.

I wasn’t the only one to catch the boat from Sulawesi to Java. Apart from the people – not as many as on the Flores-Sulawesi ferry, I was pleased to find, meaning the toilets worked and there were plenty of free beds – there was half the cockroach population of Indonesia, who decided to settle down in the same corner as me. Every time I rolled over I heard the familiar crunch of cockroach shell, and opening my packet of biscuits[1], I had to shoo the hordes out before they had me out of house and home. I don’t mind cockroaches that much – they die, eventually, just like other insects, and at least they don’t bite – but I’m less keen when they turn up in numbers. And they tickle, which isn’t much fun.

I also found A Prayer for Owen Meany tucked away in my backpack, put there by Rose as she caught her bus south. It brought a tear to my eye, and gave me something good to read as we sailed south. What a kind thought; such are the good parts of solo travel.

[1] After my previous Pelni trip, I took my own food and ate Pop Mie (Pot Noodle to you and me) in the cafeteria. Those biscuits saved my life... eating Pelni food after my last batch of food poisoning would have been fatal.

Surabaya to Yogyakarta

Written: 25 October 1997

In Surabaya I shot straight through from the ferry terminal to the train station, bought my ticket and settled in for the Indonesian train experience. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not quite British Rail.

Some things are the same: the ‘bing-bong-bing-bong’ over the loudspeaker is based on Big Ben’s chime, the station sells overpriced snack foods, and there’s a Dunkin’ Donut in every corner. But in England you would never have men working right above the heads of the crowd, painting the tin roof a silver hue, hanging on by nothing more safety-conscious than a toe curled round a rafter. And in a major station with six platforms, you would definitely have bridges between the platforms; here you just plonk across the tracks, making sure you don’t step in front of an express train. So it goes; when life is cheap, protective measures are expensive.

The train itself was like something from another world. I had an economy ticket – a bargain at 4500rp (about 80p) for a seven-hour journey right across the island – and luckily I managed to get a seat, as the train was originating in Surabaya. This proved fortunate; later on in the journey there would be no seats free, and people would have to stand, or sit on the floor, not unlike the commuter run at home but with much longer travel times. I had worried that seven hours on a train would be boring, but I was wrong, very wrong.

A continuous stream of people wandered down the central aisle, some of them selling food, some of them beggars with bowls and no legs, others busking, but all of them trying to turn a buck, with more joining the train at every station. One young man with his string box and tambourine was so awful at singing that he made a fortune; aware of how infuriating his singing was, he serenaded each booth until he got some money, safe in the knowledge that everyone would pay up, eventually. Then there was the guy with the portable karaoke machine, who was intent on letting the public get their own back on the busker, and there were even some beggars who had expensive clothes and no obvious physical ailments. And talking of clothes, one guy got on with a whole rack of dresses and shirts; he probably had a changing room and a full-length mirror tucked away somewhere, too.

But top of the pile of surreal hawkers was the dictionary man. He wandered along the aisle, selling dictionaries for English into Indonesia. Who on earth is going to buy a dictionary on a train? Imagine my amazement when he walked back down the aisle with an almost empty box; perhaps he’d come across a bunch of people with Bali belly who desperately needed paper. I couldn’t think of any other explanation...

McDonald’s, Indonesian Style

Written: 3 November 1997

I arrived in Yogyakarta to a flourish of westernisation. I found a cheap hotel without too much ado, and after six weeks of forests, valleys, small villages, rice and noodles, I was mesmerised: Yogyakarta has McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, shopping malls, TVs and CD players. These things have been constant companions in my life since the year dot, and after six weeks away from the tourist trail, I was so amazed by their reappearance that it felt like rediscovering technology all over again. It’s a powerful drug, westernisation; I wanted to flash the plastic right there and then, to buy some music, some computer hardware, or some trendy clothes that didn’t look they’d been dragged backwards though the rainforest.

And McDonald’s was there, Ronald holding out his hands just like the tau-tau, enticing the tourists in. For Yogya (pronounced ‘Jogja’) is a tourist town par excellence, and although at first glance it seems that there aren’t that many tourists, look again; there aren’t necessarily that many white tourists, but there are plenty of Indonesians and Malaysians visiting the malls and the junk food stalls.

But it’s not quite the same McDonald’s as we’re used to back home. Java is a Muslim island, and McDonald’s here is halal; it has the halal sign plastered on its food packaging, on its publicity, and on the certificate from the nation’s Islamic leaders that proves that McDonald’s might be lacking in nutrition and redeeming qualities, but at least the meat has been bled properly. Then there are all the differences in the restaurant itself: there’s McDonald’s chilli sauce, which is an essential part of Indonesian cuisine western or otherwise; the McRice meal, an addition to the McRange that I gave a wide McBerth after my recent problems; the area in the centre of the restaurant where the tables and chairs give way to six-inch high tables and floor mats, so people can eat their Big Macs in their favourite manner; the sign above the door that proclaims, in Indonesian, ‘Thank you, please come back tomorrow,’ a rather more optimistic version of the more western ‘Please come again’; the automatic question ‘Do you want ice?’ when you buy a drink, a result of the dangers of drinking iced drinks in a country where the water is dodgy and can only be purified by boiling, not freezing; then there’s the fact that the most popular dish with the locals is chicken, cooked just like Kentucky Fried Chicken – Big Macs come in a poor second; and finally, the large number of staff who are ready to take away your tray, which is noticeable compared to Europe, where labour costs are much higher. But it’s still McDonald’s, with the same taste, the same gut-plugging effect, the same wonderful fries... and all at a price that’s truly Indonesian, with a Big Mac meal going for 6900rp, or about £1.25.

Not that Yogya was just McDonald’s, oh no. On the second night I went to Pizza Hut with four others from our hotel, and I swear that it was one of the most delightful meals I have ever had. Cheese, bread, meat that doesn’t kill you... it was worth paying the western prices for the thrill of the taste sensation. It confirms what I’ve been suspecting for some time; Indonesian food is OK, but sometimes, only comfort food will do.

Yogyakarta

Written: 3 November 1997

Yogyakarta is a famous tourist centre for a number of reasons, but the most impressive – after batik, for which the city is very well known, but which has been exported enough not to be uniquely Yogyakartan any more – are the temples and buildings in the surrounding area. I spent a whole day exploring the Sultan’s Palace, watching some Javanese dancing and examining the batik shops, but this was just a stepping-stone on the way to the two serious sights of the area: Borobudur and Prambanan.

I tackled both temple complexes with the help of Tim and Bjorn, a couple of Belgian reprobates[1] whom I’d met at the hotel, and who had been just as keen to sample the delights of Pizza Hut and McDonald’s as I was. Swiftly proving themselves to be good company, we combined lazing around and cultural tourism in a way that only those with plenty of time and nothing better to do can. The fact that I was to spend a good ten days in Yogya waiting for a package that had never been sent[2] was frustrating, but the Belgian boys made it more than enjoyable.

Cycling in Yogyakarta

The other ‘cultural’ event that we managed to experience in Yogyakarta – putting aside our junk-food visits – was a bicycle trip round the local villages and farms. For a tourist tour it was pretty damn good; Tim, Bjorn, myself, and our local guide headed off on the most astoundingly painful bicycles for a bone-rattling and arse-bruising trip into the paddy fields, and I have to say I learned a lot. Try the following, none of which I knew before cycling round Yogya. I mean, I didn’t even know how rice grew until I took this tour...

- Yes, rice. If you’d asked me before Yogya to tell you all I knew about rice, I would have told you it grows in waterlogged paddy fields, and, err, that’s about it. But does the rice grow in the water or above water level? Does it grow in sheaths, like corncobs, or like wheat, or what? Well, here’s the complete guide to growing rice.

Rice has a three-month growing cycle. Seeds are sown in a soft field by the traditional sower’s-parable method, where they are left for 25 days to form baby shoots. These shoots are then transplanted into a new paddy field, where they are spaced out with 20cm between each shoot, measured using a bamboo stick with notches cut into it.

The field is left for three months. Fertiliser is added in the first month, when the water level is kept high, and the field is allowed to dry up during the second and third months.

By the end of the third month the rice has grown to about three or four feet high, and the seeds are in clusters at the end of the shoots, exactly like wheat or barley.

The rice is then cut down, and the seeds are removed by one of two methods: they are either bashed against wooden planks by energetic young men (the method we witnessed and, indeed, tried for ourselves), or they are stamped on. Whatever the method, the result is bags and bags of light brown seeds, the kernels of which are the traditional grains of rice; at this stage some are put aside to sow into empty fields, starting the process all over again.

The rest of the grains are laid out in the sun to dry for three or more days, depending on the weather; there are concrete slabs all over Indonesia, covered in yellow grains drying in the hot sun. Once dried, the chaff is separated from the kernel by throwing the grain up in the air from a round, flat bowl; the wind blows away the chaff, leaving rice. They sometimes stamp on the dried grains instead to separate the rice out, but it’s a more common sight to see women tossing the grains like tropical versions of the American gold panners.

And that is where we get rice from. Thank you Yogya, for teaching me something that I really should have known in the first place...

- The Pancasila. Ah yes, the Pancasila. On a large sign in every village in Indonesia are the five points of the Pancasila, a kind of creed for the Indonesian Republic, that was first put forward by President Soekarno in 1945, when he fought the Dutch for an end to colonialism. The five points each have a symbol, and they go together with the garuda to make up the main coat of arms of the Pancasila. Believe in it...

- Star: This represents faith in one god. This god can be anyone – Christ, Buddha, Siva, Allah, whoever – as long as it’s not subversive. People like the Torajans, with their animist views, have special permission to worship their idols.

- Chain: The chain ring symbolises humanity, a sign that Indonesia is part of the unity of humankind.

- Banyan Tree: This represents a united Indonesia, a coming together of all ethnic and religious groups into one united country. Incidentally, it’s also the tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, but I don’t think that’s relevant to its inclusion in the Pancasila, seeing as Soekarno was a Muslim.

- Buffalo Head: The symbol for democracy, or at least Indonesia’s interpretation of it. It’s a democracy based on village deliberation, a governing of local issues by locals while the government makes all the important, nationwide decisions. Most Indonesians describe their country as a democracy, but this is a semantic subtlety; the government throws elections every few years, but seeing as the ruling Golkar party has the power to choose the opposition party’s policies, leaders and election candidates, the balance is a little one-sided. Combined with Golkar’s control of the media and its huge election resources, it comes as no surprise that President Soeharto tends to get around 70 per cent of the vote every time an election is called, as he has done since he turfed out Soekarno in the 1965 coup. This isn’t a democracy that we would recognise in the West, though things do seem to be changing, albeit slowly.

- Rice and Cotton Stalks: These represent social justice, or that a just society will provide adequate food and clothing for all its people. That presumably doesn’t include all the beggars in the trains...

- The Siskamling is a good example of the people’s part of this democracy in action. In every village, at midnight, ten locals meet in a building called the Poskamling according to a rota, and tour the village, checking for any law-breakers, like thieves or murderers. If they find anything they call the police, but it’s a clever way of taking the onus off the police to be everywhere all the time, and makes the people think they’re responsible for upholding the law; Siskamling means System (sistem) Security (keamanan) Environment (lingkungan). Of course, the people are powerless over the government’s human rights and environmental policies, but nobody seems to complain that much, as presumably the Siskamling would have something to say about that...

- Brick making is a manual process in Indonesia; of course it is, as labour is cheap. Bricks are made from a mixture of clay and water, stuffed into a simple five-brick mould, and turned out onto concrete to dry in the sun for a week. That’s all there is to it, and a good brick maker makes 500 bricks a day, worth 50rp each. Even breeze blocks are made this way: manually.

- Tempe is a local delicacy, made by boiling soya beans for three hours, stamping on them, leaving them overnight, boiling for another three hours, mixing them with yeast and packing them in banana leaves. After exactly three days – no more, no less – the tempe is ready to eat, lightly fried in oil with garlic and salt. It’s actually rather pleasant, but don’t risk eating out-of-date tempe: it goes mouldy like there’s no tomorrow, which will almost certainly be the case if you eat it.

It wasn’t a bad haul for a day’s cycling. We also invaded a school and thrilled a classroom of children with our strange ways – which wasn’t scheduled: Tim and Bjorn just rode into the school and wandered into a classroom – and we saw peanut farms, corn fields, sugar cane, soya bean plants, teak trees, banana trees... and plenty of other weird and wonderful parts of the Indonesian countryside that you wouldn’t spot from a speeding bus.

It was almost worth the sore buttocks, which hurt even more than after the buses in Flores and Sulawesi. Which is saying something.

Fort Vredeburg

The other venue of note in Yogyakarta is Fort Vredeburg in the middle of town. This Dutch colonial fort is pleasant enough for its classic architecture, but more interesting are the three rooms of dioramas depicting the history of the independence movement (a diorama, I discovered, is the name given to a model of an event in time, such as the signing of an important document, or the invasion of a building).

The dioramas are interesting more for what they don’t say than what they do. As should be expected from a dictatorship, the version of the story told in the Vredeburg is, well, rather biased. The first room tells of the early history of Indonesia, from the underhand Dutch capture of the local sultan and his exile to Sulawesi, to the creation of the health service and education system, right up to the beginning of the war. The second room shows the brutality of the Japanese invasion and occupation, and the end of the war. Both these rooms are captioned in both Indonesian and English, and both are reasonably fair.

But the third room is only captioned in Indonesian, and depicts the struggle for independence against the scurrilous Dutchmen and their underhand collaborators. Every Dutch soldier is depicted as mad with blood lust, and every Indonesian as heroic, of course. But I couldn’t help wondering why the captions were solely in a language that most foreigners wouldn’t understand...

[1] Our relationship is probably best summed up by the fact that Tim and Bjorn said they’d buy me two large beers each if I shaved off my beard, so I did. Fickle, vacuous and college-boy stoopid it might have been, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting heartily drunk on my last night in Bali, at someone else’s expense. It seems that if I run out of money, I can always count on my facial hair to bail me out...

[2] My computer had died, and Acorn were kindly sending me a replacement, but it turned out that they couldn’t send it to the Post Restante in Yogyakarta as the parcel company refused to send it to anywhere that didn’t have a phone number. I would have to wait until Singapore to receive the replacement, which was hard to handle for such a technology addict.

Borobudur

Written: 27 October 1997

The temple complex of Borobudur, about 30km northwest of Yogyakarta, contains the biggest single Buddhist temple in the world; there are larger complexes elsewhere, notably in Cambodia, but none of the individual temples themselves are as big as the one at Borobudur. And it’s absolutely massive; covering the top of a hill in a square that’s about 120m by 120m, this huge construction is built in a series of layers, getting progressively smaller as you get to the top; if you think of a square-bottomed pyramid that’s made up of thick layers, you’re not far off. And if the size doesn’t impress you, around each layer is an open corridor, smothered with sculptures and stone reliefs absolutely everywhere you look. It’s stunning.

There are three layers in the temple, representing the three divisions in Buddhist cosmology, namely the world of desires, the transitional sphere, and the sphere of perfection and enlightenment. The idea of Borobudur is that walking through the corridors and layers represents the journey through life, from the world we live in through to enlightenment, and students of Buddhism would walk through the monument as a way of appreciating the philosophy behind their religion. In all honesty, unless you’re a Buddhist expert it’s going be less of a spiritual journey and more of a cultural one, and the subjects of the thousands of reliefs and sculptures will mean precious little... but in the end, that matters little.

For it’s the scale of this whole exercise that’s astounding. The reliefs alone would stretch for three kilometres if laid end to end. There are 1460 individual narrative reliefs and 1212 decorative reliefs. The first layer is covered up by stone walls; they’re not sure why they were covered, but it’s an indication of how Borobudur wasn’t created for show, but for spiritual purposes. The second layer is dominated by 504 statues of Buddha, in various hand poses. The third layer, which is circular rather than rectangular and creates a pleasing aspect at the top of the structure, contains 72 lattice dagobs (stone stupa-shaped constructions that look like large hand-bells), each containing a Buddha statue inside the lattice.

Everywhere you look are more sculptures, statues, stories and dagobs, and you can walk around the whole complex for a considerable time without repeating yourself. The sheer labour involved in building Borobudur is amazing, but little is known about the actual construction, rather like the Pyramids and Stonehenge.

So, Borobudur is astounding; indeed, it’s worth visiting Java for Borobudur alone. Having read about Buddhism and its history and practice, it was good to see some concrete examples of what the Buddhists achieved, architecturally speaking. The most famous Buddhist monuments might be in Cambodia, Thailand and India, but Borobudur is still unique, and the fact that it is a stone’s throw from the amazing Hindu complex of Prambanan is simply icing on the cake.

Even if you’re not interested in Buddhism or the history of religion in Indonesia, Borobudur is still an amazingly atmospheric place to explore. It’s even more incredible to think that until the start of the 20th century, the whole complex was in complete ruins, buried under rainforest and the detritus of volcanic eruptions. Between 1907 and 1911 the Dutch ran a restoration project, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the complex was fully rebuilt by UNESCO, leading to World Heritage status in 1991. Hats off to the archaeologists who pieced the puzzle back together; it was well worth the effort.

Prambanan

Written: 30 October 1997

Not far from Borobudur is Prambanan, some 10km east of Yogyakarta. Prambanan is a Hindu temple complex, and as with Borobudur, not that much is known about who built it and when. It’s interesting to note that these two huge complexes are so close together, were built at roughly the same time, and yet are from two completely opposing religions; Buddhists and Hindus don’t agree on a lot of matters, but the chief dispute is about where Buddha came from. Hindus maintain that Buddha is the last reincarnation of Vishnu, after the reincarnations as Rama and Krishna; Buddhists, however, believe Buddha was the Indian Prince Siddhartha, a real person rather than the reincarnation of a Hindu god. Over this difference, the religions fell out.

One answer to the riddle of having opposing religious structures built at the same time is this: around the time that Borobudur and Prambanan were built, there was a marriage in the ruling classes between a Hindu and a Buddhist lineage. This was back in the eighth century AD, but by the 14th century Islam had invaded Java and forced the Hindus and Buddhists into Bali, which is why Bali is predominantly Hindu today. The temples fell into disrepair and a huge eruption by nearby Mt Merapi in the 16th century shook them to the ground, leaving only piles of rubble that were discovered by western invaders and scientists in the early 19th century.

The reconstruction of Borobudur is an astonishing feat, but Prambanan is an even more impressive feat of modern puzzle solving. Whereas Borobudur is a large temple on top of a hill, it’s more wide than high; Prambanan however is more typical of Hindu temples, with the largest temple stretching 47m into the air. The piles of rubble that the archaeologists had to work bore absolutely no relation to temples at all, and having no idea what the finished product should look like, it’s amazing that they were able to rebuild what they have. It took over 35 years to restore the 18 temples that now stand, but there are plenty more in the complex; there are 240 in all, but the money is beginning to dry up for the project, and there are still piles of rock and rubble dotted all around the area.

The 18 temples that have been restored are quite amazing, though. Prambanan has two areas, an outer and an inner, and all the inner temples – 16 of them – have been rebuilt. There are three main temples, three smaller temples in front of these, and a number of smaller ones to complete the symmetry. And as with Borobudur, the stonework is all carved, depicting stories from the Hindu scriptures.

Possibly the most impressive part is that you can walk inside these temples, structures that are held together purely by gravity, not concrete. The biggest temple, that of Siva, contains four rooms with four statues inside, while the others contain one room and one statue (where the status hasn’t been sold or stolen, that is). Here’s a list of the main temples at Prambanan:

- The temple of Siva, the Destroyer: The four-armed Siva – the two back arms destroy, the two front arms rebuild – is husband to Durga (also known as Kali), the woman who is traditionally depicted with many arms. Siva and Durga begat Ganesh, the God of Knowledge, who has an elephant’s head. The statues inside the Siva Temple are of Siva, Durga, Ganesh and Agastya, an incarnation of Siva. In front of the Siva Temple is the temple of Nandi the bull, Siva’s transport.

- The temple of Brahma, the Creator: He has four heads. In front of Brahma’s pad is the temple of the swan, his vehicle.

- The temple of Vishnu, the Protector: Vishnu also has four arms. The temple in front of him is the temple of the garuda, the mythical phoenix-like eagle who crops up all over Indonesia, and after whom the national airline is named.

It’s hard to say which was more amazing, Borobudur or Prambanan. I think that Prambanan is more impressive, visually, but Borobudur is more incredible when you think of the amount of work involved. On the other hand, if all the temples at Prambanan were standing, that would be fairly awesome too...

Whatever, they make modern churches look positively pathetic.

Dieng Plateau

Written: 5 November 1997

The package that I’d already spent a week waiting for in Yogyakarta still hadn’t arrived, despite (or perhaps because of) me visiting the post office every day, so the boys and I decided to make a break from Yogyakarta, for me to get away from the bloody poste restante, and for Bjorn and Tim to do something worthwhile before heading back to the beach in Bali. Our chosen destination was the Dieng Plateau, northwest of Yogya and up in them there hills, if only for the reason that the heat in Yogyakarta is steadily building up, and we fancied a bit of cool, mountain air for a change.

The bus journey to Dieng was long and arduous – at least, it was for Tim and Bjorn, who haven’t quite mastered the survival technique forced onto me by Sulawesi’s crushing buses. Tim was especially unlucky; he managed to get one Indonesian in the last bus who seemed obsessed with putting his hand on Tim’s knee. The Indonesians are a very physical people – it’s common to see young men with their arms around each other, in much the same way that it’s common to see girls holding hands in England – but it still freaks out most westerners to have a local feel your leg or clasp his mitts where the sun doesn’t shine. It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, too...

Still, the journey was worth it. Way up in the mountains, Dieng certainly gets cold; in winter it even gets frost at night. This might be pleasantly refreshing after the lowlands, where lifting your little toe can bring you out in a sweat, but it does have one disadvantage: the mandi water is so cold that taking a wash is almost unbearable. Tim went for a mandi in Dieng, and his shrieks as the icy water ran down his neck made the local mosque’s loudspeaker broadcasts look positively pathetic. Bjorn and I decided we’d rather smell instead.

Dieng is an ancient volcanic caldera, one that isn’t about to erupt again, but which still provides some interesting thermal areas. The volcanic soil is very fertile, and everywhere you look – on the plains, the hillsides, in the steep valleys – there are fields, but they’re not your usual rice and corn fields: they’re full of potatoes. This makes the price of French fries in the restaurants pleasantly cheap, and the local landscape is quite fascinating. While turquoise and green lakes effervesce with sulphurous fumes, pits of boiling mud bubble and steam vents roar into the clear sky, farmers go about their daily business, planting and harvesting, digging and irrigating. It’s a strange sight.

And stuck in the middle of the plateau, surrounded by fields, are yet more Hindu temples, smaller than their Prambanan counterparts but in a picture-perfect setting. The Candi Arjuna complex, a collection of about five semi-ruined temples, stands in the middle of the plain, and other more solitary temples are dotted around the area. The three of us spent a whole day exploring the Dieng Plateau, though we decided not to bother with the famous sunrise tour – getting up at 3.30am is always a tricky experience to actually pay for – and instead spent the next day making our way back to Yogya, in preparation for the hop to Bali.

And that’s when I found out that my package, for which I had been patiently waiting over 12 days, wasn’t coming in the first place. Oh well, it’s not as if the partying in Yogya was boring...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 12 November 1997

So, that was Indonesia; I’m now in Singapore, getting over my last dose of Indonesian food poisoning, which has proved more obstinate to move than anticipated. And what do I think of my first real Asian experience? I wish I knew.

I can’t decide whether I love or hate Indonesia, which probably means I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s certainly been infuriating, but it’s also been satisfying. It’s been hard work, but it’s been uplifting. It’s been boring, but also exciting. It’s a paradise, but it’s ruined. I’ve had easy travelling, logistically speaking, and very hard travelling, physically speaking. Indonesia is a contradiction. If I think about the bad times, then I’ve hated Indonesia with a passion, for its invasively friendly people, its rammed buses, its unceasing heat, its cultural destruction and its repetitive food. But the good times have been great: Gunung Rinjani, the Bada Valley, the Togian Islands, Tana Toraja, Java’s temples... and the list goes on. So will I go back one day? Probably... but not definitely.

For now, though, I have a more pressing problem. Where do I go next?

Planning for Southeast Asia

Just as I have very little physical baggage left over from the good old days of London smog, I have precious little emotional baggage too. If you’d asked me two years ago whether I’d like to visit Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, India and Nepal, I’d have jumped up, kissed you and screamed, ‘What do you think?’ Now, faced with the glorious choice of where to spend the next eight months – which can be anywhere, as long as I end up in Delhi for my flight home – I’m a bit stumped.

Why? One reason, and one I can’t ignore, is the health aspect. Travelling’s not a lot of fun when you’re passing out in restaurants, rushing off to the toilet at every opportunity and burning a temperature; and, possibly worse, any illness brings you down psychologically, and that lasts a lot longer than the physical effect. I spent an awful lot of my time in Indonesia under a cloud of illness and lack of energy, which can’t have helped the experience. Is the rest of Southeast Asia going to be the same?

I have met plenty of people who have come through Asia the other way. The impression I get from them[1] is that Singapore has no soul, Malaysia is too Muslim, Thailand is touristy, Laos is lovely, Vietnam is very easy travelling, Cambodia is carnage, and Myanmar is magnificent... but India and Nepal are in a totally different league, especially if you’re into trekking. So do I spend time in countries that might potentially disappoint, or do I go straight for the jugular and head straight for the Indian subcontinent? Or do I explore the rest of Southeast Asia first, no doubt finding some wonderful places and experiences, but gambling away time that I could be spending in a guaranteed hotspot like the Himalayas?

One thing’s for sure: after this long on the road, very little surprises me and very little makes my jaw hit the ground, and that’s a concern. So a third possibility would be to go home, save the cash, work for a while, and then get back into the travelling, all fresh and keen. But this assumes two things: that I’ll want to travel again after I get back home, and that I want to go home this early in the first place. I don’t think either of these things is particularly applicable.

So here’s my plan[2]. In total accordance with the Asian inability to make decisions, I’ll play it by ear. I’ll float into Malaysia and check it out, then I’ll make my way up to Bangkok somehow – either by flying from Singapore, or by going overland – and make a decision there. I have to buy a flight to India at some stage, as the land borders of Myanmar are firmly closed; Bangkok is the best place in the region for buying flights, so it makes sense to make my decision then. Most likely I’ll be casting around for ideas in Thailand, too; I suspect the heat is affecting my ability to plan properly.

Having the world at your fingertips has never been so confusing. Still, it could be worse. I could be working for a living...

[1] Impressions that were not that accurate; Singapore does have a soul and Malaysia is a delight, but Thailand was indeed too touristy for me. I didn’t make it to the rest of Southeast Asia, so I can’t comment on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or Myanmar, but the other travellers were right about one thing: India and Nepal are definitely in a different league.

[2] You can find out which route I eventually took in the My Travels section.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Kuta

Balinese Public Transport

Learning Bahasa Indonesia

Ubud

Curse of the 60-day Visa

Types of Traveller

Ampenan

Gunung Rinjani

Indonesian Peace and Quiet

Sumbawa

Labuanbajo

How to Survive Indonesia

Bajawa

Indonesian Habits

Moni

Loneliness on the Road

Maumere to Ujung Pandang

Ujung Pandang

Bada Valley

Togian Islands

Wild Mood Swings

Poso

The Torajan People

Rantepao

A Torajan Funeral

Unwell in Tana Toraja

Ujung Pandang to Surabaya

Surabaya to Yogyakarta

McDonald’s, Indonesian Style

Yogyakarta

Borobudur

Prambanan

Dieng Plateau

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Kuta

Balinese Public Transport

Learning Bahasa Indonesia

Ubud

Curse of the 60-day Visa

Types of Traveller

Ampenan

Gunung Rinjani

Indonesian Peace and Quiet

Sumbawa

Labuanbajo

How to Survive Indonesia

Bajawa

Indonesian Habits

Moni

Loneliness on the Road

Maumere to Ujung Pandang

Ujung Pandang

Bada Valley

Togian Islands

Wild Mood Swings

Poso

The Torajan People

Rantepao

A Torajan Funeral

Unwell in Tana Toraja

Ujung Pandang to Surabaya

Surabaya to Yogyakarta

McDonald’s, Indonesian Style

Yogyakarta

Borobudur

Prambanan

Dieng Plateau

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading