Korea
After an epic overnight climbing Mt. Agung and a boneshaking scooter ride back to Ubud and a bleary-eyed visit to the Ubud Palace for Barong dancing, it was time to leave Indonesia behind. Roxane and I loved it, and we’re planning to come back before we finish our travels.
Our overnight flight stopped in Hong Kong, where we reveled in the modernity and Western food and, most of all, free fast WiFi. We spent the midnight hours eating pizza and uploading photos before our ongoing flight to Korea.
Our primary mission in Korea was to visit Roxane’s mother, who would be on a business trip to Seoul. So we stayed nearby in the university district, at Lee & No’s Guesthouse. We were thrilled when we arrived to find a lovely house with a compact patio and koi pond and, most of all, free fast WiFi (watch, this will turn out to be a theme). The owner was helpful to the point of obsequiousness. It was wonderful at first – in a country where we knew nothing of the language and little of the customs, he was an invaluable help in figuring out how to do things we wanted to do. When Roxane went to the airport to meet her mother, he told her exactly what bus to take. When we wanted to mail some packages, he told us how to get to the Post Office and even wrote a note for us in Korean saying “I would like to mail a package to the USA.”
However as our two-week stay at the same guesthouse wore on, Mr. Lee proved to be ever-present and overhelpful. Once, when I was walking around with a packet of ramen I was about to prepare, he told me “Oh no, you don’t eat that raw! You have to cook it.” Yes, Mr. Lee, thank you. When I turned on the immersion heater and boiled water to pour over the contents in a bowl: “Oh no, you need to boil this one! Can’t pour hot water on it.” It’s OK, Mr. Lee, we have this same brand of ramen at home. “No, must be different, this one you boil.” Later I prepared another bowl for Roxane, leaving the spice packet out so she could season it to her own taste for spiciness. When Mr. Lee walked by he laughed “Ha ha, you can try like that but it won’t taste good!”
He woke the guests for breakfast every morning with the same classical music playlist. It was charming at first, but try going around for two weeks with Pachelbel’s Canon in D stuck in your head and you’ll see why this began to grate on our nerves. And he was constantly offering to clean our room, which we felt was perfectly fine, thank you very much. He became more and more insistent that “Any time you want your room clean, you tell me, I do it!” Finally after a week we let the poor guy clean. It wouldn’t have been a big deal except that it meant we had to tidy up the explosion of belongings that had poured out of our rucksacks during our time there.
We spent most of our time in Seoul, a remarkable modern, bustling city. In many ways it was a relief, a literal breath of fresh air after Indonesia. There is no risk in Seoul of stepping off the sidewalk into an open sewer, and the air does not swell with dioxins every day at five when people burn their trash. It is a proper city, and we understand cities just fine. Their metro system was fast and convenient, and by contrast with everywhere Indonesia, actually existed. But at the same time we understood Indonesia better than Korea. After five weeks there, I’d picked up almost five hundred words of Indonesian, and we were familiar with the customs and the cuisine (which was friendly to our needs as vegetarians). And we were frequently in tourist centers, where most merchants speak some English.
In Korea we often felt completely lost. We spoke none of the language, and signs were mostly in Hangul, the Korean script. So seeing a word or name written and hearing it spoken were two experiences completely divorced from each other for us. Korean cuisine is undergoing a mania for meat, triggered by Korea’s rapid transition from a poor country to a rich country. Further, Koreans actually seem to speak less English than Indonesians, despite the fact that English proficiency (and education in general) is very highly valued. This is mostly due to a shortage of teachers who are native English speakers.
These factors converged to create our most frustrating experiences in Korea. We would go to a restaurant and order food, either by using a picture menu or by saying a set phrase from our guidebook “We are vegetarian.” Then our dish would arrive piled high with ham or fish or dried squid strips. When the meat wasn’t piled high, it was cunningly hidden, as in the case of the fish cakes I mistook for yuba (tofu skin). It’s a good thing I love kimchi and bibimbap. The redeeming feature of Korean food, in my mind, was the profusion of side dishes. As soon as you sit down to eat, a number of small plates arrive. These are always vegetarian and mostly pickled. Kimchi is de rigeur- Koreans literally do eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Also common: burdock, water spinach, radish, mung bean sprouts, and cucumbers. These are typically refilled as you finish them, so it’s literally impossible to finish all your food. I also became quite fond of a very common street food called tteok bokki: rice cakes in a very spicy red sauce. These are not the dry, cracker-like frisbees that Americans buy in the health food isle. These are more like a glutinous rice gnocchi, in cylinders approximately one centimeter wide by three centimeters long. Vendors have trays full of them on display, and will serve them on a plate to eat there, or in a plastic bag with a toothpick to eat as you walk.
The highlight of our Korean food experience was a visit to Sanchon, a vegetarian restaurant in the Insadong tourist neighborhood. This is not just vegetarian food but temple food, and the founder is a former Buddhist monk who left his order to start the restaurant. A visit to Sanchon is as much an experience as it is a meal, but it is plenty of both. The only option is a set menu of twenty dishes, starting and ending with tea. We didn’t know this when we walked in, so we just looked at each other in happy bewilderment as a waitress kept piling our table with one small bowl after another of delicious, vegetarian food.
The food eaten at Korean Buddhist temples is heavily influenced by the rise of Confucianism centuries ago. The Confucians pushed the Buddhists out of the prime arable lands and up into the mountains. To cope, the monks had to turn from farming to gathering foods they could find in the wilderness. So our meal, inspired by this food, was heavy on mushrooms and ferns and burdocks. But there was plenty of variety and a great number of foods I could not identify.
The next surprise was at eight o’clock, just as we were finishing our meal. The lights dimmed and a woman in elaborate Korean dress appeared on the stage, a barely-elevated section of wooden floor centered among the tatami mats. She had long white sleeves extending far past her hands. She danced an eerie, off-tempo beat for a few minutes before tossing back her sleeves to reveal a pair of drumsticks. There was a drum set up in the corner, and she pounded out a vigorous solo. She was then replaced by another woman in different traditional dress who performed a different dance, and then another. There were three women in all, and they rotated onto stage between quick costume changes to perform a large number of unique short dances. The costumes were the best part of the show, though. They were largely simple shapes, but in bright colors and outlandish proportions. The performance was made all the better by the fact that we completely didn’t expect it.
The other surprisingly excellent experience we had in Seoul was meeting up with a couple of friends-of-friends, Erik and Seon-Hwa. As always when meeting a second-order friend, we didn’t know what to expect, but we got along wonderfully, and Rox and I wound up spending a lot of our time hanging out with them. They took us to a Korean baseball game, where an enthusiastic cheerleader led the fans in synchronized cheers. We went with them to a multilevel Korean spa — called a jimjaebong — that featured saunas inspired by nearly every sauna-using culture, from the Finns to the Native Americans to(questionably) the Egyptians.
Erik taught us a popular Korean card game called Go Stop. It’s played with hwatoo, or Japanese flower cards. These are a beautifully decorated workaround developed during a period when Japan banned traditional playing cards. Instead of four suits of thirteen cards, hwatoo have twelve suits of four cards, with each suit representing a month of the year and displaying a flower typical of that month. There are a number of games to be played with them, but Go Stop, usually played for money, is by far the most popular in Korea. In return, I taught Eric to play Tantrix, a fun tile game Rox and I picked up in New Zealand.
Most of all, Erik and Seon-Wha taught us about Korean drinking culture, which is very over-the-top. Rounds are not counted in drinks, but by the number of different drinking establishments you visit. And the choice is not “Beer or soju?” but “Would you like to pour your soju into your beer or drink them out of different glasses?” Businessmen will often go straight from work to dinner and drinks with their buddies, then drink till the wee hours, finally visiting a jimjaebong to fall asleep in a sauna and sweat out the alcohol before showering and returning to work. It’s rude to fill your own glass, so your friends will keep it filled, preventing you from counting how many you’ve had. Unless someone shouts “One shot,” in which case you’re supposed to finish the remainder of your drink in one go.
The redeeming feature in all this madness is that Koreans always get food with their drinks. Not just pretzels and beer nuts either, but really tasty stuff like giant fruit plates or fried, sweet & salty spaghetti sticks. Eating slows down the booze and allows drinkers to stay out all night without getting plastered (usually). Of course, as mad as the drinking culture seemed, we had a tremendous amount of fun going out on the town with Erik and Seon-Hwa.
The other big highlight of the trip for me was visiting Bukhansan National Park. This mountain park is an hour’s ride on the metro from downtown Seoul, and is enormously popular, to the point where trails are opened and closed in a rotation system to allow certain areas to recover. I went on a Sunday, with David, a colleague of Roxane’s mother also visiting from the States. The trails were absolutely packed, sometimes feeling more like a shopping mall than an outdoor experience. There were big social groups on outings, all with matching shirts. There were couples and families going for picnics, and elderly folks decked out in all the latest, most fashionable hiking gear. Everyone was very fashionable in their gear, for that matter, and it was all very new. Normally I don’t like crowds, especially when hiking, but this was such a bizarrely over-the-top crowd to find on top of a mountain that I actually rather enjoyed it. David and I planned originally to summit Mt. Baekundae, but we made a wrong turn early on and wound up atop a ridge lined with an ancient wall, part of the long-ago fortifications of Seoul. A trail proceeded along the wall and got us back on track to Baekundae Peak, but after the third set of steel cables we had to pull ourselves along, we turned a corner and saw that the real climbing was still ahead. This was when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to get to the peak and back down in time. It was a good, strenuous hike, though, and I had a great time even though we missed our goal.
Climbing Gunung Agung
On the way from Makassar to Bali, I looked out the window of the plane and gasped. We were rounding the shoulder of a massive, nearly perfect conical volcano. It felt within touching distance, and its summit was not far below our cruising altitude. It was ringed at its feet by a layer of clouds. This was Gunung Agung (Mt. Agung), at 3,200 meters the highest mountain in Bali and also the holiest. I determined immediately that I had to climb it.
Fast forward a week and a half, and I was on the back of Komang’s scooter, catching a ride from Ubud to Pura Besakih, and hour and a half away. It was late afternoon and dogs wandered in the street as we whizzed through the villages. At one point Komang pointed, and off to the right, through the haze, I caught my first sight of Gunung Agung. It was every bit as imposing as I remembered.
I was apprehensive about this hike for several reasons. It would be my first overnight mountain ascent, I did not have a guide arranged yet, I was not sure where I would sleep until departing at midnight, and I would be hiking the more difficult of two main routes up a mountain known to be difficult.
Komang, my driver, had never been to Pura Besakih either, but when we arrived he talked to a cluster of men smoking and talking by the roadside. Turns out they were guides. Two got up and led me to a nearby counter with a twinkle in their eye that seemed to say “let the scamming begin.”
A guide is required to climb the mountain, they said. This I knew to be false, and put us on the wrong foot to begin with. There’s a guiding association, they said. That much was true according to my prior research. They were representatives of this association, and I had to negiotiate with them for my guide’s fee. Reluctantly I asked their price, not excited about the prospect of roaming this unknown temple-village alone searching for a freelance guide.
“Nine hundred thousand rupiah,” asked the lead hustler. That’s ninety dollars, or triple the fair price. I expected to have to negotiate down, but these guys were much tougher than the old ladies in the market, and would just grimace and say “not possible” to my low offers. Eventually I told them I would go get food and think about it, and this finally did the trick – seeing me walk away brought them down from six hundred thousand to four hundred fifty. Still a ripoff but I had made the fatal bargainer’s error of raising my offer too much, and too early, so I was stuck with it.
The purpose of the guiding association, by the way, is in theory twofold: it provides a fair way to allocate the small number of lucrative gigs available to the large number of poor villagers who want them, by operating a waiting list. It also provides support to guides who are injured or become old. In practice, my impression was that it was a way for a few clever older guides who had gotten tired of footwork to skim some money off their younger colleagues.
In any case, once a price was agreed upon and I sent Komang back to Ubud, scammer #1 became all chummy and led me off to a warung for dinner. A warung run by his wife, naturally. I was resigned to being hustled at this point, and he was perfectly happy to help me practice my mostly nonsensical Indonesian. So I paid a full dollar (scandalous!) for a plate of excellent nasi goreng. The wife and her friend were tickled pink when I asked for more chilies. “I told her buleh [white people] don’t like pedas [spicy],” confessed the friend.
As I ate and waited for my guide to show up it grew dark. Another man materialized out of nowhere and asked if I wanted to stay at his losmen [family guesthouse]. I declined – I would be sleeping only a few hours and did not want to pay for them. “No problem, you sleep in police station,” said my ‘friend.’ I didn’t really like the sound of that. I brought my hammock and had planned to sleep in it, but I still wasn’t sure whether it was acceptable to camp so close to the temple. Registration at the police station here is required for climbers anyhow, so I decided to go with the flow.
The officer on night duty was very kind and brought out some cardboard boxes to soften the too-short bench on which I slept. He even turned down the volume on the TV he had blaring Indonesian soap operas. The station was a single room, about five meters by five meters, with a desk and a whiteboard to list the day’s climber’s. I slept fitfully, and a few times in the night heard people come in, speak to the officer in Indonesian, and leave.
At midnight, right on time, my guide showed up. I met Gede briefly before going to sleep, when he dropped by the warung before evening gamelan practice at the temple. He got no sleep before meeting me, and I felt a little worried that he would be too tired for the ascent. But while I was still blinking the sleep out of my eyes, he was setting a blistering pace, just at the edge of my ability to keep up. We passed majestic Pura Besakih, with its enormous gates floodlit at night, took some stairs, and were soon on a brick path.
Soon Gede called a halt. We had reached a secondary temple and he would go in to make offerings and pray for safety on the mountain. By now I was huffing and puffing, and was glad of the rest. I sat on the temple steps, enjoying the cool air and the tranquility of the night. Ten minutes passed, and Gede bounded out. “Ok, we go?” We continued at the same hard pace, more steeply uphill now, and I started to wonder if I was showing the first signs of growing old. Here was Gede, five years younger, zipping along with no problems. I was swallowing my pride and about to ask him to slow down when I noticed something. Gede was always five paces ahead of me. If I slowed down, he slowed down to match, and if I went faster he’d step up his pace just enough to maintain a good distance. But he never looked back. I figure he could hear the change in my footsteps.
So I found a more comfortable pace and continue our ascent. The trail had no switchbacks or drainage, and so it was eroded into a deep gulley in many places, and had steep sections where a whole section of trail had washed away and clinging to roots and rocks was necessary to ascend.
Several times during the climb we reached a small shrine or some holy spot and Gede made an offering: incense and rice and a flower, packaged up in a tiny tray of bamboo leaves. Once we came upon a pile of such offerings in a seemingly random place. When I asked, Gede told me a group had come through a few days ago, but it had started raining heavily along the way, so their guide had deposited all of his offerings here and turned back.
We were making our way by flashlight at first, but by hour three we were out of the trees. The moon was three days past full and lit our path well enough for us to put our lights away. We stopped at another offering place that also serves as a base camp for those who wish to split the climb over two days. This was the first place I noticed that there was garbage everywhere. It was mostly plastic bottles and wrappers. Even Gede kicked his empty water bottle down the hill. “Maybe I get it on the way down,” he said when I remarked on it. I tried to pick up some of it, but it didn’t take long to fill up my daypack.
As we got closer to the top, it was Gede whose breathing became labored. The air starts getting a little thinner around 3,000 feet, though not severely enough for altitude sickness. I felt a teensy bit of schadenfreude as I powered on past him after feeling so slow this morning. I was also excited to have some time to myself on the mountain. “You can wait here,” I said, “now that we’re out of the forest, the path is clear.”
“I cannot,” said Gede, “It is my responsibility.” So I simply widened the gap by as much as I could, expecting he’d catch up when I stopped at the top.
I crossed a couple of false summits, dimly making out the figure of my guide on the trail whenever I looked back. I was navigating a rather sharp ridge, with loose gravel on either side, so I walked carefully. When the last peak came, it was obvious from a distance – I could see the neighboring peaks along the crater rim. When I reached the top, the view down into the bowl was staggering – a sheer drop of easily fifty meters.
We arrived about half an hour before sunrise, enough time to bundle up against the wind, which was quite cold. Among my hiking snacks was a bag of Goldfish crackers, a ripoff at five dollars but a blessing at twice the price. It was great to have one of my favorite salty snacks from home after this long climb.
The sky around us was clear, but below and all around was a layer of cloud. To the east, Gunung Rinjani on Lombok peeked above the white sea. These clouds prolonged and exaggerated the sunrise, granting it all sorts of colors and shapes and providing a constantly-changing sideshow. With the advent of airplane travel it has become commonplace to see cloudforms from above, but it is a rare thing to watch them from above for long enough to see them change. I watched many cumuli build into towers, change shape, and melt back into their foundations. Most dramatically, I was able to see twilight crepuscular rays. The sun, not yet risen from my perspective, cast rays of light between gaps in past-the-horizon clouds and into the atmosphere high above my head. When sunlight has a near-miss with Earth before racing off into space, this is what it looks like: massive, hanging timbers of pink in the blue twilight, converging at infinity.
I heard a shout, and then a whoop. Across the crater rim I could see a tiny cluster of figures. They must have taken the other popular route, up from Pura Pasar Agung. Gede, performing a final offering, kept quiet, and so did I. Let them believe they were the only ones up here this morning. We had passed a Jakartan couple and their guide on our way up, but they were far behind and we had this highest peak to ourselves, since there is no route from one side of the rim to the other.
I insisted we hang around after the sun rose, to wait for decent light for some landscape photographs. But really the most beautiful thing after the sunrise was the way the clouds raced west from the sea onto the land as points east became warmer.
We started down before too long, though, so we would not get caught in the heat of the day. On the way down we met another group, two Australians, their guide, and their guide’s dog. “He always brings his dog,” Gede told me. I was very impressed – after a tremendous ascent on sharp lava that would have torn most dogs’ feet, this mutt was charging right on ahead of his master, having the best time in the world. They were tired and had missed sunrise, but we encouraged them to try and make it at least to the first false peak.
Further down, we met the Jakartans, exhausted, demoralized, and a long way from the top. One of them had never been trekking before. Them, I encouraged to turn back. And maybe take a nap on the way down.
Lastly we met the King of Ubud and his entourage, climbing to a holy spring temple part way up the mountain to fetch holy water for a ceremony.
Pura Besakih in the daytime appeared transformed. The silent, solemn monument I had skulked past at midnight became a sprawling complex of temples and sub-temples. It was filled with tourists and enterprising vendors. I was followed for a few hundred meters by an adorable seven-year-old. “Buy some postcards meester?” she asked, and would not take no for an answer. “Five for fifty thousand,” she said. “No.” “Forty thousand.” “No.” “Thirty thousand .” I gave her a piece of candy from my pocket and immediately she stopped her pursuit to open it. Nice trick. Later I met a woman selling the same postcards. “Is that your daughter back there selling postcards?” I asked. “She is a good seller, very persistent.”
The woman replied “Yes, that’s my daughter. You want to buy some postcards?” The salak does not fall far from the tree, it seems.
Gede had offered to drive me back to Ubud on his scooter at a cheaper rate than I would have gotten asking around to strangers at Pura Besakih. When I saw his scooter, I understood why he could offer such a discount. First he had to pull his single rear view mirror out of some back room, wipe off the dust, and reattach it to the bike. Then we drove to the garage on the way out of town, where a guy gave it a look over, tightened the chain and filled up the rear tire. It was a rough ride, and between the sorry state of the scooter and Gede’s sleep deprivation, I was seriously concerned for our lives. But two hours later, we arrived safely in Ubud.
(See a GPS track of this route)
Out and About Ubud
When we arrived in Ubud, one of the first things we did was to rent scooters. A month ago, when we were first here we hired a driver named Komang along with whom we got very well. We told him offhand that we’d be traveling Indonesia for about a month before coming back to Bali. With uncanny timing, the same day Roxane and I landed on our return to Bali we received a text message from him asking how we were. We both remarked on what an astute businessman he was to remember when we’d be coming back.
We’ve actually had many interactions like that, where somebody we hired has kept in touch after the fact. From what we’ve read and observed, Indonesians in general don’t have the clear division between business and friendship that we do in the States. Even a simple purchase is an opportunity to chew the fat and make a new friend. Negotiations can have an aspect of socialization to them, and everything is very dependent on personal connections. If we’re, say, in a taxi, and mention we want to go snorkeling, the driver will always, without fail, say “I have a friend who rents snorkels, he can help you out.” Or maybe we’re eating at a warung, the owner might have a friend who can guide us at a popular tourist attraction, or maybe sell us some batik.
These “friends” almost certainly pay a small commission for the business, and we often resent being handed around like a commodity. But as far as we could tell, we didn’t get lower prices by negotiating directly. So when Komang got in touch I figured “what the heck, this is how business works here,” and asked him if he had a friend who rented scooters. Inevitably, he did.
With one scooter for Tracy, and one for Roxane and me to share, we were able to visit tourist attractions much more easily. Roxane really likes visiting temples, and I expected I would like it too, but so far I’ve found that one Balinese temple is remarkably similar to another. Still, we did visit a few remarkable ones, in particular Gunung Kawi, which has several massive cliff carvings estimated to be about 800 years old. The most interesting thing about this temple, whose name means “Poet Mountain,” was the lovely valley in which it sat, with terraces growing rice for future offerings, a clear stream running down the center, and a waterfall at one end. The sun was low as we walked around, and the cliffs glowed.
I befriended a shy child named Made, who hung back from the gaggle of youths who clamored for me to take their picture and show them on my camera. Later I sat with an old man with a slingshot who was keeping birds off the nearly-harvestable rice. Turned out he is Made’s grandfather, and he invited me to visit his family compound. With visible affection Made clasped his grandfather’s hand as he hopped from one step to the next, over hundreds of steps as we climbed out of the deep valley. “He climbs these steps every day,” said the grandfather, also named Made (*see below). I collected Roxane and Tracy, and though we have by now started to suspect the motives of anyone who offers unasked-for kindness, we decided to take Made’s offer at face value.
His house was around the corner, and after being introduced to his family, he insisted we sit on the raised platform in the center of their walled compound while he brought us tea and we talked to everyone. I was giving my Indonesian a workout since most of the family was short on English, but the oldest and clearly most successful son spoke well. He was a stone carver, and he brought us some examples of his work. For once we felt like we weren’t being sold anything, but he was genuinely proud of what he did. His brother, also a carver, brought some of his own work. He carved coconut shells in intricate patterns as lightbulb covers. His work was less sophisticated, but we praised it just the same. It was a really pleasant time, an experience of the instant friendliness for which the Balinese are known, without the moneymaking undercurrent that (for us) detracted from so many otherwise friendly interactions.
The elder Made really wanted us to attend a tooth filing ceremony for one of his extended family the following day, and we planned to, but in the end we did not have enough time.
It was unsurprising that we met a family with two carvers. In Bali crafts are often associated with a certain area, and our new friends lived in Tampaksiring, one of the centers of stone, bone, shell and wood carving. Riding down the main street we saw shop after shop of intricately hand-made objects, in particular earrings and other piercings. The most impressive were complete buffalo or bull skulls, with horns attached, where the bone was drilled through in whirling, lacey patterns. They were a bit reminiscent of the holes punched in wayang kulit puppets.
Many of the artisans along this street have an export relationship with one or more Westerners who bought their products for sale overseas. Though they were happy to sell over-the-counter, it seemed that everyone’s sincerest hope on seeing me enter the shop was that I wanted to become their “American friend” on whom they could count for frequent wholesale orders. Sporting a full beard and cargo pants, I have never been asked so many times if I was a businessman.
*Side note about Balinese names: Depending on caste, everybody’s given name is based on their birth order. So a first son is Wayan, a second son Made, and a third is Nyoman. It can get a little confusing.
Live in Ubud
We first stayed in Ubud on our arrival in Indonesia, and loved it. So we were excited to arrive here again on our way back from Gili. We even stayed at the same hotel, Ubud Terraces.
When we arrived we met Tracy, a friend from San Francisco whom we arranged to meet here. She’s just arriving in Indonesia from Thailand, and we’re leaving soon for Korea. But for the next six days we’ll have company that not only speaks our language but also shares our accent and our general frame of reference about the world. It’s surprising what a relief that can be after months of travelling.
One of my still-unfulfilled hopes for Bali was to see some traditional dancing here, and our timing was great. The night of our arrival there was a performance of Legong, generally considered the most refined of the Balinese dances. It tells a story from the Mahabharata, an epic poem originating from India. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata can be considered as the Indian equivalent of the Odyssey and the Iliad. The Ramayana tells primarily the story of a warrior’s adventures returning to his lost love, while the Mahabharata tells the story of warring kingdoms. However, the Mahabharata alone weighs in at ten times the length of both Iliad and Odyssey combined, and is a palimpsest of centuries’ worth of stories overlaid in a complex story-within-a-story structure. So one could probably find analogues of almost any other story within it.
In the story told by the traditional Legong, a princess is kidnapped by the king of a neighboring kingdom. Her brother tells the king he will go to war to get her back. The princess begs the king to release her and avoid a war. The king is even visited by a bird of ill omen, but he refuses to release her. There is a war, the king loses, and the princess is freed.
Legong tells this story in a very abstract way, and without reading the program I would have had no idea what was going on. Even having read the program I was often confused. Roxane and I were frequently whispering to each other “Is that the bird of ill omen? The things on her arms look kind of like small wings.” “But that other guy had bird feathers in his headdress!”
The stars of the show are three women – two legong and one condong. They arrive on stage intricately bedecked with gold brocade and with heavily kohled eyes. They dance mostly with their arms and hands and eyes. They will flutter their pinky fingers sideways with an incomprehensible delicacy or wave fans. But what I felt was most fascinating about this dance was the way the dancers held their eyes dramatically wide open and flicked their attention first left, then right. With their wide eyes so heavily outlined, this gesture was clearly visible even from the audience, and conveyed a surprisingly delicate range of emotions.
Meanwhile a gamelan orchestra played the score. I had been introduced to gamelan in college and found it dull to the point of falling asleep during a concert, but tonight’s performance was lively, even frenetic. About ten men on each side of the stage played solely percussive instruments. One side played small gongs while the other played xylophone. They played quickly and intricately, whirling their hammers in hand during the occasional space between beats. It was as much fun to watch as listen to. Even so, gamelan by its nature is very repetitive, and even though I found the performance lively, interesting and at times deafening, at times I felt hypnotized by the rhythm and had to yank myself back to full consciousness.
Another night Tracy and I went to see a wayang kulit performance. Wayang in general means a puppet show, and wayang kulit is shadow puppetry. It’s performed with a white screen backlit by an oil lamp, and the puppets are made of buffalo hide elaborately perforated to illustrate the finer features of the characters. The more important ones have articulated arms, and a very few have a movable mouth.
The performance we saw was another Mahabharata tale, this time about a king whose people are being killed by a monster who demands a human sacrifice to stop his killing. A mighty prince from the neighboring kingdom volunteers to be the sacrifice, but when the time comes he fights the monster and his horde of demons. With help from his friends he kills them all. It’s a simple story, and we were briefed on it before the performance, but even so I often did not understand what was going on. In this, though, I was not at such a large disadvantage over the Balinese, since wayang is performed in Kawi, an old and elaborate dialect that hardly any modern Balinese know.
In wayang there is a clear division between good characters and evil characters, and also between the refined (heads upturned) and the crude (heads downturned). But as our guide at the wayang museum in Jakarta was quick to point out, there are crude characters who are good, and refined ones who are bad, just as in life.
Each side also has two clowns. The older of the two good clowns is known as a source of wisdom and truth. He is also known for his enthusiastic farting. Besides farting to advising the royal characters, the clowns come on during interludes and speak in Indonesian and English, so we understood many of their antics.
The music was not as good as two nights before at the royal palace, and the screen was a bit grimy, but it was a fun performance anyhow.
The last performance we saw was back at the palace, this time a Barong dance. The Barong is a huge doglike creature that represents good and protects people. In the Barong dance, the evil with Rangda, who eats children, with the coterie of girls who help her perform spells, faces off against a good wizard. After he defeats her in a test of magic, she turns herself into a monster. In response the wizard becomes the Barong and kills her.
This probably would have been my favorite performance if I wasn’t half asleep from climbing a volcano all night (more on that in my next post). The Barong is played by two men in a large costume like a Chinese dragon. The head is a wooden mask that opens its fanged mouth and clops dramatically. The dramatic range they conveyed through such a simple mask was really amazing, and by the end of the show I felt a real affection for this gentle beast. The fight scenes were dramatic, the music was good and the scene where a half-dozen young girls perform a spell in the woods was downright eerie. But I was running on fumes, and several times I found myself waking abruptly from a ten-second micro-sleep when the music changed or a character did something different or my head intercepted my neighbors shoulder.
All in all, some great performances, and I was glad I got the chance to see them before we left. Ubud is a great place to see dance and music, with seven or eight shows every night of the week. I only wish we could have seen more of them.
Gili Air
West of Lombok is a string of three tiny islands, each maybe a kilometer and a half long. Gili Air is the easternmost one, and the scene is balanced between Gili Trawangan, where ravers pop party pills all night, and Gili Meno, where you are better advised to pop malaria pills because the central lake breeds mosquitos. Air suited us just fine, with neither mosquitos nor techno to keep us from our sleep.
No motor vehicles are allowed on any of the three Gilis, so horse cart or bicycle are the only alternatives to hoofing it yourself. Fortunately we enjoy walking, so even though we arrived rather late, we trekked along the beach to find our hotel. Restaurants along the way provided oases of light to see by. They line the beach, providing individual bamboo platforms with cushions and low tables that ooze ambience. The views, across the water to the volcanic hills of Lombok, aren’t bad either.
We planned to motivate bright and early the next morning to get to the dive center, since our primary plan here was to dive. The easy pace of the island had already got to us though, and despite rising early we were seduced by a lazy breakfast into missing the first dive. The second dive of the day was cancelled because today is Friday and the mostly Muslim staff was in temple. So it was afternoon before we arrived on Hans Reef.
Right away we realized how spoiled learning at Bunaken made us. The bottom was not completely covered in coral, there were not solid walls of fish, and the visibility was not effectively infinite. Still, there was a good deal of coral in several large outcroppings, called bombies. And it was our first dive since being certified, excitement enough in itself. We saw a bunch of neat stuff, including a foot long sea cucumber that looked like something out of Dune.
Our next dive, the following morning, was a training dive, the “Peak Performance Bouyancy” course. In diving, a number of things affect your bouyancy: body fat, wetsuit, weights, and tank. You add air to your buoyancy control device to balance things out so you have neutral bouyancy, but each time you fill and empty your lungs your bouyancy increases and decreases. Breath control allows you to use these changes to move around easily in the water, or prevent them from moving you when you don’t want them to. This is especially important when you want to get close to a reef or a delicate organism without disturbing it. You can use your breath to lower yourself gently in like an elevator, and then back out again without using your fins.
So we learned and we practiced skills. First was swimming through a one-meter square frame without touching, then swimming through upside down without touching. These were both made difficult by the bulky tank on each of our backs, a protuberance we have not yet internalized. Next we had to swim over top a snorkel planted in the sand, then pivot up and snatch it with our knees. The final test was to hover unmoving in the water while we passed a one-kilo weight back and forth. This is tricky because it requires anticipating the weight with a big inward breath in order not to sink immediately. It also requires holding an extra pocket of air in the lungs while otherwise breathing normally.
After learning these new skills, we started off on a fun dive, then another at two o’clock. The second dive was further away, at Shark Point. The site was disappointingly crowded with trash at the surface, and down below there was low visibility and a strong current. We had to swim extremely hard just to stay in one place, something generally inadvisable as it exhausts tank air faster. But the rest of our group found an interesting bombie, and we were obliged to wait, regulators and masks shaking as if in a strong wind. Swimming back far enough to actually see anything was beyond our strength.
It was halfway through this disappointing dive that I made what was, for me, the sighting of the trip: a cuttlefish! These squidlike creatures have fascinated me for years. They are said to be as intelligent as octopodes, and have skin that can change color and texture very rapidly and dramatically. Normally they use this to match their surroundings, but some scientists think they may communicate with each other this way also. I was the first to spot this one, and was both proud and jealous when the other divers crowded around to see. Amazingly the creature did not squirt ink and disappear, but hovered effortlessly and precisely in place, staring back at us and flicking from mottled grey to brown to dark red to mottled green and so on. Cuttlefish can also change their skin texture between spiky and smooth, an ability our new friend was also proudly displaying.
I could have stayed and watched for the rest of the dive, but someone spotted a turtle, and we swam off to see it. Beyond it was another turtle, and another. All had beautiful patterned shells, but none of them changed colors.
The food on Gili Air was surprisingly very good, despite the small size of the place. There was a wide selection of restaurants serving food from all around the world. As much as I enjoy eating local food, there are approximately four traditional indonesian dishes accesible to me as a vegetarian: nasi goreng, mie goreng, nasi tempe / tahu, and gado-gado. I was a little sick of this and treated myself to pizza, a strangely ubiquitous dish on this island. After a series of disappointing experiences in New Zealand, I swore off pizza, but here they baked it in a brick oven until the dough was crispy as the cheese browned beautifully on top. It was much better pizza than I had any reason to expect.
I could easily have stayed on this island much longer, relaxing and diving and snorkelling and eating good food. But we have only six days left in Indonesia, and we promised ourselves we’d see more of Bali. More importantly, our friend Tracy from San Francisco will be meeting us in Ubud. So once more we boarded the lovely Perama ferry, a wooden pinisi with two decks and a little faux beach in back for sunbathing. I’m writing now from the deck of that boat, watching Mt. Agung in Bali approach off our starboard bow.
Padangbai
The bus trip to Makassar was long and winding, and our driver was a passionate, conflicted man. He could never decide which he loved more, the gas pedal or the brake. Fortunately there was a conductor on the bus, and he was well-prepared for the chronic nausea that resulted. He had a pile of small black shopping bags to hand out to sufferers. One simply needed to ask for “plastik.”
On a particularly twisty bit of road, with the sounds of vomiting all around us, Roxane finally succumbed to motionsickness. I followed the example I had seen on our last bus and made my way to the rear to throw it out the window. My luck was bad, though – with all the trash filled gutters we’ve seen all across Indonesia, the one time I want to throw a bag of puke out the window of a moving bus, we’re on the equivalent of Main Street, Sulawesi. All around were sparkling sidewalks and well-tended yards. I just couldn’t bring myself to drop a barf bag in someone’s yard, so I waited by the window until we crossed a bridge. I swung and threw . . . And heard a wet splat as the bag hit a strut at thirty miles per hour. Oh well, the next rain will clean it up.
The ride got easier after that, and we watched the architectural transition from Torajan style homes to the more practical but still elegant Bugis houses of the south. From the bus terminal there was a surprisingly long ojek ride into Makassar proper before we reached our hotel. Our drivers balanced the scooters surprisingly well despite each having a large Westerner and a large Western backpack perched awkwardly on the back.
From Makassar we flew to Bali. When we left here we swore never to return to Kuta, where the traffic and agressive hawkers made our last stay unpleasant. Also, leaving the airport, we were determined to skip the expensive taxis and catch a bemo. Once we got walking, though, we were enjoying ourselves too much to stop, so we just kept wandering north and wound up, naturally, in Kuta. From there it was easy to catch a bemo to downtown Denpasar, and then another, and another, and another. Each time we changed vans the new driver tried endlessly to convince us to hire him to take us all the way to Padangbai for a higher price. each time we refused, but with all the transfers and all the arguing it took quite a long time to arrive, and we were exhausted.
We didn’t expect much of Padangbai, a little port town whose only claim to fame is as the departure point for ferries to Lombok. But when we arrived, we were so charmed by the peaceful beach with its line of fishing boats and a vegetarian restaurant that we decided to stay an extra day.
The next morning we started by wandering around town. It didn’t take long to see most of the place, and we were just finishing up near the town gate when Roxane spotted a little staircase leading up into the woods. Naturally we climbed it. The stairs continued long after we thought they’d stop, and led us high onto a hilltop where we finally arrived at a cellphone tower. Disappointed at first, we continued around the side and discovered the trail continued onto a ridge. We followed this little path for hours, expecting at any moment it would peter out or descend back to Padangbai. We crossed grazing land, met two women and their cow, saw a family temple, and finally came to another cell tower! From here we descended the east side into another bay entirely, Labuhan Anuk. From the hill we could see bulk freighters crawling in to a long pier, and the huge white spheres and tanks of a petroleum transfer site and we figured this was purely a working harbor. But when we got closer, we saw a big group of tourists swimming from an offshore platform and getting towed around behind a speedboat. Indeed, when we finally reached the bottom of the hill we found this bay was another, even smaller, tourist attraction.
After lunch we returned to Padangbai and went snorkelling at Blue Lagoon before dinner. The next day we boarded a Perama boat for the five-houe trip to Gili Air, off the Lombok coast.
Tana Toraja: Mud Trekking
The night before we were set to start trekking, it rained buckets. Not your run of the mill buckets, but big sheep-dipping buckets. Buckets you might use to put out a forest fire. All night it poured, and in the morning it was still going. But right in line with our guide Gibson’s prediction, it stopped by nine and we were able to go out.
Our first stop was the buffalo market, held every six days in Rantepao. This is where many of the buffalo used in funerals come from, though since now is low season for funerals, the cattle most in-demand are young ones that people will buy to raise themselves. A buffalo, once bought, is thoroughly pampered. Often a child is assigned to take care of it, washing the buffalo frequently, feeding it grass by hand, and bringing it to wallow in mud pits. Despite the good treatment, the buffalo are not generally kept tied up when they’re not being led someplace by the nose, as they could easily damage the walls of the rice terraces, causing a cascading disaster.
By numbers and drama, though, the market was dominated by the pigs. There were pens along one side where pigs and skilled men shared space, the pigs dwindling gradually in numbers as the men swiftly trussed them to bamboo poles and handed them out of the pen. Others waited to take the pigs to the selling area, where long aisles of proto-pork lay prone, ready for purchase. Most were quiet, almost asleep, but plenty squealed protest against their no doubt uncomfortable position, making the aisles a tremendous cacophony of pig noises. The pigs that don’t sell get brought back to the farm to run around another week, so no doubt the quiet ones were veterans of the market who already knew what to expect.
After visiting the market, we set out by bemo (public minbus) and then ojek (motorbike-taxi) to reach our starting point, which was approximately the spot where the road became too rough for the motorbike. We had a little distance on the road before turning off through a village and onto a forest trail that Gibson knew. This trail was steep and evidently used as a shortcut to walk between villages, though we didn’t see much evidence of recent use. The locals generally prefer to get around in vehicles, which are cheap because gasoline is heavily subsidized here. In fact, I asked our guide what the Indonesian word for hiking is. He said he had pondered the same question with a German expat he had guided several weeks ago, and the conclusion they came to is that there isn’t really such a word, since Indonesians don’t have a tradition of hiking. The best they could come up with together was “buleh masu kampung,” or “white person visitng the villages.”
The trail was muddy and slippery with last night’s rain, and we slipped often – Roxane at one point accidentally pulled a garden hose / irrigation pipe loose, releasing more water all across the trail until we fixed it. We tromped through palm forest and a cacao plantation, coming out eventually in a rice paddy, which we traversed atop the dikes separating each terrace until we reached another road. We rested and snacked at a pondok, a shady gazebo-like structure usually erected by local youths as a meeting place, hangout, and respite from the midday sun. These are everywhere alongside Tana Toraja’s roads, and we often see people lounging or sleeping in them as we drive by.
We stayed the night in the village, at the house of Gibson’s cousin. Shortly after greeting us, the cousin had to head out to a church function. Interestingly, a majority of Torajans are now Christian, and though the church has ended or altered certain beliefs, it finds the core of Aluk To Dolo to be compatible with Christianity, and so people here happily practice both sets of beliefs.
The rain set in again, and we neglected to bring our playing cards or Tantrix, a tile game we brought from New Zealand and have been playing a lot lately. The family was busy, so we spent an intensely boring hour or so staring at the walls. Boring walls they were, too. Torajan homes are sparse, generally with no furniture and few wall decorations. Here the only hanging objects were a failed clock and a series of pages ripped from a calendar of Jesus images. Finally Gibson found a deck of dominoes hidden in a corner, and we gambled with the candies we brought to give the children until Gibson had won all of them from us.
The family also didn’t eat with us. Evidently a common way to honor guests in Indonesia is to serve them first. However, once everyone had eaten, our hosts finally joined us upstairs. Only the father of the family spoke a little English – his parents spoke none and his children, who were no doubt learning it in school, were too shy even to come over and accept candy from us, let alone say anything other than a squeaky “thank you” after we walked over and practically forced it on them.
So we all spent an awkward hour beaming and nodding at each other, managing to express silently that we were mighty pleased to meetcha dontcha know. Then the grandmother of the house offered Roxane some betelnut, something she’s been dying to try. This broke the ice but good. As grandma demonstrated how to put together the three ingredients, then chew them and stick the wad under the lip, our hosts kept giggling at this buleh who found such a commonplace thing so strange and new. This in turn set Roxane off laughing until she could barely keep the black wad under her lip. But she gamely held it and spat (as with chewing tobacco) for several minutes before finally spitting it out.
Now that the ice was broken, I felt more confident uncorking my stammering Indonesian and pouring forth a description of Roxane’s and my journey. It seemed like people mostly understood me, so I kept going, and had a very nice evening of practicing my language skills, though mostly when our hosts spoke I needed them to repeat it a good three or four times before I understood fully. It was very handy having Gibson with us to fill in words I didn’t know in Indonesian. After we exhausted talk of places travelled and our family members, we wound up on the topic of politics. I was able to express that “Bush liked war” and “Obama is smart and speaks good,” but when I tried to explain why bailing out General Motors would be a bad idea for the long-term health of the American economy, my command of the language failed me completely.
The second day was even muddier than the first. There was no more forest path. Instead we were walking among the rice terraces all day. This had its own appeal – the terraces are intricately and cleverly built to maximize cultivable land and also allow easy control of the water level in each paddy, which has to be adjusted constantly throughout the growing season. From one paddy to the next, water is held back by a small earthen dike that rises just as high as the highest level the water will reach. A notch is cut somewhere along the wall to allow excess water to flow through. These notches are always offset from each other so the water slows between each one, preventing it from building up too much velocity, which would erode away the walls.
It was along top the sturdier of these many interconnecting dikes that we made our way, crossing the bigger waterways on rickety bamboo bridges. Our feet were utterly filthy, it was hot, and once Roxane slipped into the mud of a paddy. I thought “What have I done? I’ve finally got her out trekking with me, and the conditions are horrible! She’ll never coming hiking again.” But as a matter of fact she was having fun in spite of the difficulty and wanted to do it again soon.
We returned to our hotel in Rantepao after lunch and sat around playing games, drinking tea, and sorting pictures. In the evening Gibson brought over a jug of the local homebrew, called tuak or palm wine, and a couple of friends who also guide. We spent the night drinking the sour, milky-colored stuff from cups that Gibson never allowed to reach less than half full. At some point another local friend showed up uninvited and already wobbly, and said “Ah, I see you have palm wine! Okay, I’ll help you out. But,” and here he looked much afflicted, “please don’t get me drunk!” He was a cut-up, though, and received in good humor.
The next morning, as we were readying to catch our eight-hour bus back to Makassar, we got a text message from Gibson: “I am sorry I cannot meet you to say goodbye this morning. I am sick, maybe because of palm wine last night.”
Tana Toraja, Land of the Boat-Shaped House
In Central Sulawesi, high in the mountains, is Tana Toraja, the remote enclave of the Torajan culture. Probably originating in Indochina, these people arrived here hundreds of years ago and started building their houses in the shape of boats, ostensibly to remind them of the boats that brought them there, though such a reminder seems bizarre so far from the ocean. Others say the shape of the houses is reminiscent of the horns of buffalo, a very important animal to the Torajan people. Tana Toraja is difficult to reach. From Makassar, one of the main entry ports of Sulawesi, we took a winding ten-hour bus ride, an old man puking matter-of-factly next to us the whole time. There is a plane you can catch to the small local airport, but its schedule is “once a week, so long as the plane is running.”
But when we arrived in Rantepao, the main town in Tana Toraja, the guide we hired was waiting to greet us, and at the adorable family-run guesthouse where we’d be spending the week, we had a welcome drink of some local fruit reminiscent of strawberry. We took a quick liking to this place, enough so to ignore the fact that dinner took two hours to prepare. Who cares? It was delicious.
First thing the next day we saw the most important ritual in Torajan life, a funeral. Unlike a Western funeral, these are large, public affairs where everybody from the surrounding village shows up throughout the day, bearing trussed-up pigs as gifts. There were only two of us, so our gift to the hosts was a case of cigarettes, a traditional gift of friendship for men. Women are generally given betelnut.
In temporary but well-built bamboo huts circling the yard, the villagers sat eating cakes and drinking tea while in the center a team of men butchered a pile of buffalo carcasses. This same yard, now slick with mud and blood, would be cleaned off by evening for the ritual dances.
Meanwhile the pigs continued to arrive squealing and strapped to bamboo poles, carried first by motorbike or scooter and then on the shoulders of young men. They were brought to the back yard, behind the kitchen where neighbor women in blue ran the massive operation of keeping everyone fed. Out back the pigs are slaughtered and put on a wood fire to singe off the hair before they are butchered. A special butcher mixes the meat with blood and spices in tubes of green bamboo, which will be cooked in the fire and served to guests. Our guidebook advises, tongue-in-cheek, not to slip in blood at a funeral, but it is in fact very good advice. The ground was so slippery it would have been very easy to misstep and tumble into a pile of organs.
The purpose of all this gore is to provide the deceased with transport to paradise. The more animals sacrified – and buffalo are worth more than pigs – the faster the spirit will travel to paradise. The spirits of the animals are literally considered as transport for the spirit of the person.
This transport is so important that a family will often wait to hold the funeral until they can afford enough buffalo for a proper send-off. At the equivalent of two thousand USD per head, it can take several years to save enough. In the interim, the body is kept in the family home and treated as a real person. The family brings it food and drink at mealtimes, talks to it, and will provide comforts the deceased enjoyed during life, such as turning on the television or bringing cigarettes. Indeed, the deceased is not really considered to be deceased until his or her journey to the afterlife is begun by the funeral ceremony. Modernity has added one important thing to this tradition: formaldehyde. According to Gibson, in the old times people felt the smell of decay was a pleasant reminder of the dead person for whose funeral they were scrimping and saving. But bodies are now routinely embalmed, which I have no doubt is a big improvement. It does, however, mean that newer graves must be built larger. More on that later.
The smoke and guts got to us after a while, and we certainly weren’t anxious to stick around for lunch, so we moved on. Speaking of lunch, you may wonder where all the leftovers go. At upper class funerals, more than twenty-four buffalo may be sacrificed, and all that meat can’t be eaten at the funeral. Some of it goes to pay the butchers, the announcers, and other people who help make the funeral happen. The rest is donated to charities for the poor, who in turn sell it to shops where it is bought by the public.
Our next stop was a cave grave, where the dead are taken after a funeral. These are generally carved, one per family into a rock face by hand with iron tools, though naturally occuring caves are also used. Until the introduction of formaldehyde, these were small affairs, maybe a meter square, as only bones remained to inter after the body decomposed at home. Now, though, a whole body must be buried, and newer caves are dug two meters square. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize this octuples the amount of stone to be removed!
Accompanying these caves, high on the cliff face, are tau-tau - effigies of the dead. These are afforded only to upper-class people, and only if they sacrifice at least twenty-four buffalo. They are carved from wood and depicted with both hands out. One hand symbolizes the offerings the deceased receive, not just at the funeral but periodically afterwards. The other symbolizes the blessings the deceased is able to bring its relatives in return. It is for these requests to erstwhile relatives that these practices are known as aluk todolo - literally “religion of ancestors.”
All these practices apply only to people who have reached a certain age. Babies who die before they grow teeth are not given the elaborate funeral. Instead they are quietly taken away, within an hour of death, by a family member to a special tree. A hole is carved in the trunk of the tree and the baby is placed, inside. The hole is then covered with a woven door, which will eventually fall off as the tree grows. By that time the hole will have closed up and the tree will hold the baby in its metaphorical womb, placed upside-down as it was in its mother’s womb. The tree, as it grows, helps the baby’s spirit to grow as it wasn’t able to in life, until it can reach paradise. Like the cliff faces, one tree can hold many graves. The one we visited had about seven visible at various heights, and Gibson pointed out several scars in the tree where older graves had healed over.
Our final visit of the day was to a traditional village composed of tongkonan, the traditional boat-shaped houses I described earlier. These are wooden houses built on stilts, with massive swooping bamboo roofs that rise at front and back as they stretch beyond the house proper. A row of houses is built facing a row of rice barns, which have the same roof but are smaller and lack stairs. Instead, a bamboo ladder is lifted when needed to retriece or store rice. This, along with the very smooth stilt legs, affords some protection from mice for the three hundred kilos or more of rice stored in these structures.
Since lifting machinery is generally unavailable in these villages, houses and barns are first built using tongue-and-groove techniques on the ground, then disassembled and rebuilt piece-by-piece atop the stilts. Elaborate but repetitive carvings are made on all external panels in the traditional colors of red, yellow, black and white. These are made from ash, clay, and limestone mixed with water. The roof is lashed together from alternating layers of bamboo chopped in half, and is quite waterproof even after it is colonized by a community of ferns and the occasional orchid, which form a green mat across the top of the roof. All these elements are so ritualized and common across all tongkonan that it can be hard to tell them apart!
On our second day we did a little walking and visited some hanging graves. These are graves built into the walls of a natural cave, where platforms are built to hold the small tongkonan-shaped coffins used to carry remains from the funeral. These coffins are not maintained, but are left to decompose. This happens at a faster rate than the composition of the bones themselves, so frequently a coffin will break or fall, spilling its bones. The family will tidy things up and put the bones back in order, but the remains (and the tau-tau, which is maintained periodically) can only be touched once a year during a ritual held after harvest. So for the remainder of the year the bones sit scattered. Then there are some piles which no longer have a coffin, and are arrayed neatly on the ground. Walking through this dripping limestone chamber, being stared at by skulls, Roxane and I felt as if we were in an Indiana Jones movie.
This feeling was enhanced by our next stop, to see a group of standing stones erected in a group. Like almost everything in Tana Toraja, these are part of funeral rituals – a stone is erected each time a funeral is held in a village. One of the stones has been dated to be four hundred years old.
Back in Rantepao, we walked into town for dinner at a small restaurant. Dark fell while we ate, and on the walk back we discovered that Rantepao has no streetlights! We walked on a narrow sidewalk in the dark, with a gaping ditch on our right. I was watching carefully to make sure I didn’t step into it, when I walked straight into a two-foot hole in the sidewalk in front of me! I was surprisingly unscathed, but poor Roxane, walking behind me, saw me vanish abruptly from view. Once she helped me out and we established I was fine, we both collapsed in a fit of giggles. I was very lucky the ditch wasn’t running with foul water at the time, as most of them are.
Learning to Dive in Sulawesi
Roxane and I came to North Sulawesi to learn how to scuba dive. We showed up in Manado, recently host to the World Oceans Conference, and spent the night in a tidy but windowless room at Hotel Celebes. By way of contrast, breakfast was served on the glassed-in sixth floor, with a marvelous view of the harbor. We lingered a long time while we called around to dive centers in the area. The big attraction here is Bunaken Island, with loads of good dive spots. We chose to go with Thalassa, based on the mainland but as close to many of the dive sites as any place on the island.
We made a brief junk-food run in Manado before starting the thirty-minute trip out to Thalassa. It’s a surprisingly clean and pleasant mini-metropolis that holds 400,000 souls but doesn’t feel like it. One of the first things you notice coming from Java is the proliferation of crosses. There are still plenty of mosques, but the Dutch missionaries made more inroads here, and Christianity seems to eke out the majority. The next thing you notice is the swarm of baby-blue bemos, privately owned minivans that serve as a vastly undercapacity transit system. There seemed to be about three vans circling the city for every passenger. They made up easily the majority of all traffic.
We took a taxi to Thalassa, about half an hour outside of town. After signing up for the Open Water Diver course, we sat down to a free buffet lunch. Our first impression was: Holy Holland Batman! All the other divers seemed to be from the Netherlands, and mostly spoke to each other in Dutch. They were also all experienced divers. Some had five hundred dives under their weight belt, and everyone had at least thirty. We were the only ones who could remotely be called newbies. Combine that with the fact that everyone else was over fifty and we felt out of place. But the staff were really friendly and made us feel more at home. We stayed at the 4 Fish guesthouse in the nearby village, run by a pleasant (you guessed it…) Dutch couple. It was a bit beyond our price range, but close to the dive school and totally relaxing. The main area of the house was a massive deck jutting out of the hill, with plenty of shade and breeze and views of palm trees.
As part of the four-day course, we each received a textbook to study during the evenings. Roxane made fun of me for diving right into studying before we even finished lunch, but I’ve been wanting to take this course for years and was thrilled to finally start. Years ago I took an introductory dive, and it was such an amazing experience I wanted to do it again. But without much good diving around home, I had delayed and delayed until now.
The next morning we went to a classroom where we watched a cheesy video that reiterated everything we’d learned the night previous, with a too-slow audio track and a heap of bad jokes. Then it was off to the pool for our first skills session – learning our way around the gear, breathing for the first time underwater, and using an alternate air source. Break for lunch, and then out in the water for our first real dive! I hadn’t expected to dive on our first day, and was thrilled.
Off Bunaken island, just a few feet under the water, the wildlife was just amazing. There was a vibrant coral reef swarming with fish of all kinds. Right off the bat we saw a giant clam with crazed red-and-white markings. There were so many creatures around, what I felt most was that I was in an aquarium. Growing up, I would frequently visit the Boston Aquarium with my parents or grandmother. They have a huge tank in the center of the bulding that spans three floors and has a constantly circulating water flow. If we arrived at the right time we got to watch a diver plunge in from the top and swim around amongst the sharks and angelfish and countless other exciting creatures. I always loved this moment, and drifting in these warm waters I felt just like that guy. Drifting we were, too, since the currents at our dive site were quite strong. It was often frustrating, as I would just become interested in something and then it would be gone. Or rather I would be gone, sucked along by the current. Made it hard to concentrate on one thing, but also ensured we saw lots of different critters. The water was clean and clear, despite what we had heard about wind-blown trash from Manado spoiling the otherwise perfect waters here. Most likely the trash at Krakatau had primed us for the worst, and not finding it, we were happy.
The second day was much like the first, and the third like the second, and the fourth like all of them. We walked ten minutes through the small village to Thalassa, watched videos, practiced in the pool and the ocean, ate delicious lunches with people with whom we would soon have something in common, walked “home,” and studied or napped the rest of the evening.
Dinners were another exercise in being the minority. Besides Jan and Inika, our hosts, we were joined by a Dutch diving couple who also stayed at the guesthouse. Though our hosts spoke excellent English and tried to keep us in the loop, the older couple were not as fluent, so conversation, for us, frequently devolved into incomprehensibility. We’d smile vaguely and wait for some piece of it to be translated. It was an interesting experience, as an English speaker. I’m used to my mother tongue being the lingua franca amongst foreigners here, and I felt like I was getting a chance to feel what it’s like for those travellers who don’t speak it. The food was good, and the cook did a great job making vegetarian dishes for us.
After four days, we received our certification card, which allows us to dive with a PADI operator anywhere in the world. I was surprised how quickly the time went, just as during our dives I was often surprised how quickly our hour or so of air ran out. Never too surprised, thankfully, or I might have had to practice breathing from an alternate air source for real.
We spent our last day taking a tour of North Sulawesi by car. For a place that looks like just the tiny tip of a peninsula, it was surprisingly large. The terrain is hilly and on heavily terraced fields they grow coffee, cocoa, chiles, corn, onions, cabbage, carrots and of course rice.
Next stop: Tana Toraja, home of buffalo-sacrifice funerals and boat-shaped houses.
Jakarta the second time
After Krakatau we returned to Jakarta for a couple days. We checked off the last tourist sites on our list of things to do in the “big durian.” First was Kota, the old town centre in the north, with many Dutch colonial buildings. On the way there we passed a cluster of large banks. Outside, we were confused to see several men hanging out on the sidewalk selling bricks of small bills (one thousand, five thousand, and ten thousand rupiah). Some of them had really large amounts of money just sitting on a wagon unattended. It would have been ridiculously easy for someone to snatch these and zoom off on a scooter, and yet no one seemed to worry. Asking around later we learned two things. First, going into the bank itself is a painfully time-consuming process. It can often take hours to get called to the head of the line. Second, robbery is evidently very uncommon here. Evidently it’s common, when buying a car, to go to the bank, wait in an interminable line, and withdraw the full amount. They give you shopping bags in which to carry all the cash — there’s a lot of it because the largest banknote in Indonesia is worth about 10 USD — and you carry these big obvious sacks of money out the front door and across town to the dealership. The dealer, of course, counts it all twice, which takes up whatever time you might have had left in the day.
All this also helps explain why we’ve found that everyone in Indonesia is really reluctant to break bills, and sometimes doesn’t even have the change to do so. It’s because getting small money involves either a long trip to the bank or a fee paid to these men on the street who provide a secondary market in banknotes for those who are strapped for time.
After checking out the town square in Kota and the wayang kulit (shadow puppet) museum, we walked north to Sunda Kelapa, a pier from which sail pinisis, traditional wooden sailing boats. These boats are still actively used in trade, though they mostly have motors now. On the way to the pier we attracted even more than our usual portion of stares. In addition to being white, and on foot, we were walking through a distinctly working-class neighborhood typical of a port. On both sides of the street, men sewed huge tarpaulins in open shops that spilled onto the sidewalk. Other shops sold boat gear or fishing supplies. Everyone seemed to wonder what we were doing here – presumably most tourists take a cab from Kota. But we were left alone, which suited us fine.
Closer to the port we approached the open sewer that Jakarta pleases itself to call a river, and the stench of the river combined with the exhaust of countless scooters and bajaj was nearly enough to make us turn back. Still, we made it to the port, and it was beautiful. There was about a kilometer of huge wooden boats packed cheek-by-jowl, painted in many different colors but mostly variations on white, red and green. Skinny, muscular men shuffled quickly across bouncing timbers from ship to shore, carrying sacks of concrete across their shoulders. Nearby, a handful of men in their underwear hand-washed their clothes in a ditch filled with rainwater. We expected the longshoremen to be unfriendly or at best indifferent to us, but many of them smiled shyly as we took their picture, never stopping, of course, in their work. A few who were idle at the moment tried out what English they had: “Hello mister, where you from?” The light was low and soft, and the whole place had the relaxed feeling that comes from the approaching end of day.
We hired a couple of cyclists to carry us back to the bus station and rode the Transjakarta back to our hotel, with a stop along the way for reflexology, doxycycline, and candy bars.
Our second day in Jakarta, we visited the National Museum. If you go, don’t let a confused cabbie take you to the National Monument instead. It’s a great museum, two wings and five stories full of cultural and historical artifacts from all the very different areas of Indonesia. They’ve got a cool pre-history section too, highlighting the discovery of Java Man and the evolution of homo sapiens.
Our flight was the evening of that second day, and although we allocated a full hour to reach the airport, less then twenty-five kilometers away, and planned to arrive two hours before departure, the suffocating traffic meant it took over two hours and we nearly missed check-in. Our taxi spent the majority of that time waiting on on-ramps to merge onto a toll road. Once we reached the toll road, traffic actually moved at nearly the speed limit.