Bali has almost seemed like a mythical place and my first glimpses of it were, in fact, quite dreamy. But that may because my first looks at the island were as I groggily woke up from my overnight-bus-ride-slumber. My first sight that morning was a beautiful view of the paddy covered hills. It made the volcanic mountains look like a green topographical map. Beautiful, but I needed sleep. I turned my head away from the window to get a couple more minutes of sleep, but before I closed my eyes again I caught sight of the ocean out the other window. Although it was early still and the beach relatively far from the road, I could see the light blue waves crashing on an offshore reef. Big waves- perhaps the one that originally put Bali on the map. I slept on and off for the next hour or two, from dreams to the dreamlike landscape. Every waking moment was spent admiring the beauty of Bali.

Arriving at our final destination of Ubud, it became apparent that Bali is totally unlike Java. Firstly, there’s a lot more foreigners in Bali, both tourists and expats. The Balinese, as a result, seem to enjoy a much higher standard of living than their Javanese compatriots. Secondly, its Hindu overwhelmingly Hindu rather than Sunni Muslim. The Hinduism is quite different from Indian or Nepali Hinduism, which is also readily apparent. Small offering dishes, constructed of leaves and filled with flowers, rice, and incense, litter the side walks and numerous shrines and lanterns. Supposedly, these are offerings to appease the spirits, since Balinese Hinduism is really a mix of native animism and the Indian religion. Meat, including beef, is on all the menus, as well. Bali looks different too. Its true what they say about art being an innate part of Balinese culture. From the family/clan compounds with their ornately designed temples, walls, and statues to the flower-draped shrines, to the peoples’ traditional dress, Bali is pretty aesthetically appealing. So far, Bali seems beautiful and unique.

We took another overnight bus last night, and arrived at our destination in ok shape. We checked out of our little room at a losman at noon, and walked to the ticket agency where we caught a ride by SUV to a bus garage. The floor on the bus was still wet from being mopped, and I was glad to find that the bus looked pretty clean. The automatic dispensers of air freshener above the seats worried me a little. I just don’t like an overly fruity car, and the idea of breathing in chemicals all night wasn’t too appealing. I thought about what was worse: below-freezing temperatures of Malaysian AC or an overdose of air freshener. I decided the latter was worse and tried (without luck) to see if I could shut off the dispenser. We were the first ones on the bus, and worried about how long it would take before the bus would actually leave. Surprisingly, we didn’t wait too long, but to our dismay upon leaving the garage the bus drove around Yogya for over an hour picking up passengers.

Finally, we were out of town, and the bus felt like it was finally going somewhere far away. I discovered that the foot rest attached to my seat actually popped up 90 degrees, parallel to the floor. Nice. Even though I couldn’t completely “kick my feet up,” since my legs are longer than 18 inches, it was definitely more comfortable having this seat extension. I caught a glimpse of the Prambanan ruins, and a little bit later the bus stopped at outside of a bus station for more passengers to climb on board. As we waited, a man with a guitar boarded from the front entrance. He began strumming, and then he started to sing. “Hmm,” I thought, “this is new.” He held out a container for donations as he left the bus. Another performer took his place. This one was a cappella, sputtering spit, and definitely worse than the first act. He shoved a bag in our faces. I don’t know why (maybe to make him stop), but Matt gave him a few small bills. Other salespeople boarded with trays filled with drinks and snacks. A man touched my arm with a steamed bun so that I could feel it was nice and warm. “Why would you want to buy a bun that he’s been putting on people’s arms?” Matt retorted, irritated with the long bus stop.

Soon with all singers and sellers off the bus, passengers settled into their seats, and our bus started rolling again. The bus maneuvered past other cars on a narrow road elevated above rice paddies. The sun slipped down the horizon and I into sleep. When I awoke, the bus had stopped for dinner. We were handed meal tickets and followed the crowds into a large dining area. Exchanging the ticket for a bowl, I walked towards the chafers and cautiously examined the food. I put some steamed rice, a splash of noodles, and a spoonful of a mystery tofu dish into my bowl. It was surprisingly and delightfully good, at least the tofu and rice. Back on the bus, Matt and I shared some wafer cookies before tucking in for the night. I awoke early in the morning when the bus stopped to board a ferry. As before, vendors hopped on board eager to sell their goods. Unfortunately for one guy, no one seemed to want to buy sunglasses at this early hour. Matt slept through the stop, and soon I fell back to sleep.

The next time I woke up we were in Bali. Through my sleepy eyes I saw expanses of bright green rice terraces out of one window and on the other side of the bus Matt pointed out huge waves barreling just offshore. It was stunning. We drove through small villages and I was introduced to the charming stonework prevalent throughout island. Quaint yet chunky, the carved roof ornaments and idols made for enchanting looking structures, each dotted in offerings of flowers, rice, and incense sticks.

We began to pass more buildings than fields and I knew our bus ride was almost over as we neared the city Denpasar, Bali’s transportation hub. At Denpasar we hopped off the bus and onto a bemo—a modified van with benches along the sides instead of the usual rows of seats. After about 10 minutes our driver pulled over and flagged down another bemo heading further inland to Ubud, our final stop, to take us the rest of the way. To our driver’s dismay, he wasn’t able to find any extra passengers along the way, but I was glad to have the bemo to ourselves and not have to shift the luggage to make room for other people. I enjoyed the scenery as we left the town and drove into smaller villages in the middle of rice fields, some specializing in a single craft such as stone carving or silversmithing. Eventually workshops gave way to gift shops, and we had arrived in Ubud. By the time we checked into a hotel in Ubud, it had been about 24 hours since leaving our last one in Yogya. And we’re looking forward to staying here, for a few days at least.

To add to a few things from Matt’s posts, it was interesting to see a few different looking (to our unprofessional eyes) Buddhas today.  I think they mostly were just different to us though because a few still had intact arms and hands so we could actually see what position it was sculpted in (fingertips touching in an “s” shape).  As for the covering up of panels, I think it’s a shame and maybe they could have just taken them out and sent them to a museum where they could have been appreciated or at least preserved instead of just covering them up with plain bricks and left to the elements.  Oh well.  The highlights for me were the stunning views of the valleys below and especially a group of school children who had visited the temples seemingly for the express purpose of practicing their English.  It was fun to talk with them, especially since we didn’t have to worry about being asked to look at a batik gallery or anything.  And I just thought it was funny their teachers brought them to Borobudur to practice their English.  Not a bad idea!  We talked with a couple groups of 10-15 kids for about 5 or 10 minutes each, answering their scripted questions, “What is your opinion of this place?” “What type of animals do they have where you are from?” “What are schools like where you are from?” and asking a few of our own.  I was especially surprised when I asked them where in the world they would like to go visit and the common response seemed to be that Indonesia had plenty of interesting things to see and do without having to leave.  Very patriotic.

 

This morning we ventured to nearby Borobudur to see the famous temple in the early morning light. We woke up too early and drove for about 45 minutes from our guesthouse in Jogja, arriving just as the sun was coming up. We hired a guide at the entrance and made our way up the hill on which the temple is situated. Our guide told us way more than I think almost anyone would care to know, but I’ll share some of what we learned throughout the post. The first thing is that the structure at Borobudur probably wasn’t a temple, as a temple implies an internal space or room for teaching/meditation. What we saw was more likely just a collection of stupas. The stupas were pretty interesting as there were dozens of smaller hollow ones w/ Buddhas inside encircled around a large solid central one; supposedly, it was designed to be a giant mandala. It was several stories with stairs connecting each individual level, and enclosed within a large square floorplan. I realize my architectural descriptions aren’t too good, so I’ll move on.

Borobudur 

The building is pretty old, having been built in the 8^th century by Buddhists, although it has many Hindu elements as well. It was discovered by Sir Thomas Raffles (of Singaporean fame), who had the entire hill excavated to uncover the ruins. Today, what we see is mostly restored. Besides sitting under a hill of dirt and trees for a millennium, earthquakes and eruptions from the nearby volcano occasionally cause damage, as did a bomb by an anti-Suhaerto group a couple decades ago. Interestingly, some panels depicting Kama Sutra scenes have been covered up by the ultra-conservative Indonesian government, who consider the reliefs pornographic. Most of the reliefs are pretty cool though, depicting everything from Indian people to Buddhist stories. Beyond the history though, the coolest thing about Borobudur was it aesthetics. Granted, its been restored to the tune of 25 million USD, but its still an awesome site. I think the hollow stupas are really cool, especially compared to the usual plain white mounds that most stupas are. And although most of the Buddhas are missing heads or arms, they are distinct from any others we’ve seen. Some of their hands are in interesting positions, while some are sitting in unusual postures. Additionally, the scale, age, and detailed reliefwork make Borobudur deserving of its World-Heritage site.

Buddha inside a stupa

reliefs 

On a sidenote, in our travels we’ve learned that Unesco/World Heritage designations don’t necessarily make something worth seeing. There’s a lot of things listed under these two categories and a lot of them are junk. But I’d say Borobudur was worth the visit, if not deserving of being the most-touristed place in Indonesia. One last tangent: guides and locals at Borobudur, like guides and locals at almost every touristy site we’ve seen claim that their attraction is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I’ve heard people say that everything from the Taj Mahal to Niagara Falls is one of the Seven Wonders. If we believed all the guides and touristy flyers, we must’ve seen at least 30 “Seven Wonders of the World” sites on this trip alone. I guess there’s all the new Seven Wonder lists that people have made up (Seven Natural Wonders, Seven Wonders of Asia, Seven Modern Wonders, etc, etc.), but its still a pet peeve when people claim their site “____________ is one of the seven wonders of the world.” Anyways, I don’t believe that Borobudur was on Ptolemy’s list of seven, but it was pretty cool to see.

 

We budgeted at least three days for Yogyakarta (abbreviated and pronounced as Jogja), but one full day was enough for us. Tomorrow, we’ll do a morning trip to Borobudur and then its on to Bali. We saw pretty much everything we wanted to see today. We checked out the Sultan’s palace in the morning, along with a couple adjacent and uninteresting museums (unless you have an interest in paintings of royal carriages or seeing royal sitting areas). The palace wasn’t too interesting, although we got to see part of the weekly gamelan performance. The royal family of Jogja still lives in a part of the compound and is still somewhat respected. I guess the Jogja sultan was the man back in the late-colonial days, during the push for independence. He gave refuge to freedom fighters and rebels in his palace. The Dutch knew the resistance was operating out of the palace, but never took any action out of fear of enraging the local population. I guess its similar to some of the militants in Iraq that hide in mosques and stuff; the US military knows where people are but cannot attack a mosque for obvious reasons. The sultan was also up in the Soekarno-Hatta clique when the independence movement was taking shape. The only other interesting thing we saw today was the bird market. Within the regular city market was a couple blocks of just birds. Pigeons, canaries, doves, tons of cages of all shapes and sizes, as well as boxes and boxes of grasshoppers and maggots for feeding. Wandering around, we also saw plenty of other animals for sale: squirrels, rabbits, fish, and lots of turtles. What Indonesians’ do with all these animals I don’t know. It seems too poor a country for keeping pets, but the cuisine doesn’t seem as adventurous as Chinese. Anyhow, that’s Jogja in a nutshell, or a day rather. The only thing I left out is the eight million people who are trying to sell batik or steer you towards a batik shop or gallery.

Fear—of strangers, of being embarrassed, of threats to personal safety—is the travelers usual, if often unadmitted, companion.

-Paul Fussell, The Norton Book of Travel

I was scared coming to Indonesia, especially arriving in “The Big Durian” Jakarta itself. All the news from here is bad news, the latest being the widespread flooding the past few months. Reading my guidebook, it seems flooding disabled the city in 2002, 2003, and 2006 as well. The Jakarta Marriot was bombed in 2003 along with the Australian embassy in 2004. Massive protests erupted in 2003 and 2005 against proposed hikes in fuel-prices. Nothing compares though to the riots that erupted twice in 1998. On the back of the Asian Financial Crisis and a massive devaluation of the rupiah, Jakartans turned their anger on their city and its Chinese residents. Many burned out and destroyed buildings can still be seen around the city today, as the riots nearly leveled the capital. The small, but wealthy Chinese community was scapegoated for many of the problems and they bore the brunt of the violence, as victims of murders and rapes. On a sidenote, Chinese in Indonesia have had a rough history, also being massacred by the Japanese and by Indonesians under the Dutch. With several tsunamis and a couple of Bali bombings in the past five years, the rest of Indonesia doesn’t have much of a better reputation than Jakarta. But I’ve never heard anything good about Jakarta. Just bad stories of violence: getting mugged while out walking, getting robbed by taxi drivers, having your bags slashed while on a bus. All the stories and all I’ve read even prompted us to reserve a room ahead of time, so we could just go straight from the airport to our hotel. But after two days here, I can say its not that bad. It’s not a beautiful city or one with a whole lot to do, but its not the hell-hole people have described it as. It crowded and crazy, but people have been friendly and helpful. The food has been pretty good. And today we saw the best museum we’ve seen since Greece, or at least Turkey. Who’d expect Indonesia’s National Museum to be nicer and have better exhibits than Thailand or Singapore? Coming here, my fear was similar to the fear I had before arriving in Cambodia- a country with a violent past, which nobody ever had anything good to say about. And nothing bad happened to us in Cambodia, in fact we had a good time. This isn’t to say that nothing bad won’t happen to us here in Indonesia, as we could get mugged or have something stolen while in Indonesia. And I’m not saying fear is irrational- you won’t find Baghdad, Gaza, or a host of other dangerous regions on our itinerary. Thus far while traveling, we’ve tried to be careful and cautious, but we’ve been lucky and fortunate too. But regardless of what has happened or what will happen, my point is that you never really know about a place until you go there.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain. – Mark Twain

Exploring a couple areas of Jarkarta today, I found that it reminds me of India in many ways: hot, smoggy, more men than women out, no crosswalks, familiar sounds of the rough sputtering motor of three-wheelers, and the smells of food and oil simmering along sidewalks lined with a hodgepodge of ramshackle food stalls. Only Jakarta is not as crowded, not as dirty, and not as loud. And I didn’t see a single cow. It’s not that I have found Jakarta to necessarily be like India, but there are things that have reminded me more of India today than any other place we’ve gone since leaving the sub-continent.

Last night we hopped over the equator with a short two-hour flight from Johor Bahru to Jakarta. Having arrived in Jakarta late last night, today was our first taste of Indonesia. This morning we hailed a cab to take us to the Maritime Museum. I thought it would be a good place to begin to understand the city, since it got its start as a port (known as Sunda Kelapa in the old days, Batavia under the Dutch, and Jayakarta under the British). The cab ride was sweltering. It was only around eleven in the morning, but it was unbelievably hot. Phuket was so humid, sometimes it felt like we were breathing water. Then Malacca and Singapore were just plain hot. But Jakarta seems the worst of both worlds- super humid and crazy hot. Not only was it unbearably hot, but the traffic was just gridlocked. The six kilometer ride took over twenty minutes in the congested polluted streets. Tons of exhaust, no order on the roads, and large pools and puddles settled on the low-lying parts of the road.

We made it to the old watch-tower which used to direct traffic over the old harbor. The tower was closed, but it was cool to see. The tower is surrounded by a small stone square complete with cannons still in place, but it just overlooks a polluted canal and tons of traffic these days. We walked over the Maritime Museum, but it was also closed. I got a few photos of the old building though, which was some consolation. We checked out a nearby market which was kind of disappointing. Chinatown was next on our list of things to see/do. We would’ve walked but didn’t want to walk through the flooded areas we had to drive through, so we took another cab. The cab driver didn’t know exactly where we wanted to go, so he dropped us where we thought was close. After wandering around a bit in the heat, we stopped for some drinks. Nobody had a clue where the two Chinese temples our guidebook mentioned were. Leaving the café, we decided to just go back to our guesthouse. It was hot, nobody (including us) knew where we were, and Joylani and I were both getting irritable. But as we were leaving, I asked an older man sitting on the steps of the café if he knew of the temples and he did! He pointed us in the right direction. We had actually passed it a couple times in our wanderings, but had missed it since it consisted of just a small road set back behind some small alleyways from the main road. We didn’t go in the temples as they were mostly filled with homeless. Walking around Chinatown was interesting though. It was run down and there weren’t a ton of Chinese people everywhere. Joylani said it was the least amount of Chinese people in a Chinatown she’d been to, adding that it was quite a contrast to the sterilized Singapore Chinatown. At least we got to see what Chinese people here eat, which is always exciting. We saw bowls of small turtles, a table of skinned frogs (next to the table of live frogs), but I couldn’t find the monkey meat I’d heard about. Aside from what we saw, anti-Chinese sentiment is incredibly strong in Indonesia (especially Jakarta) and I will write more about this and the other violent events of Jakarta’s recent past in tomorrow’s post.

mmmmm….skinned frogs

After Chinatown, we headed over to the National Monument, which is actually just a large square with an incredibly huge tower in the middle of it. It is joked to be Soeharto’s “final erection” referring to the dictator’s last accomplishment before being forced out of office. We took an elevator up to the top which afforded awesome views of Jakarta’s skyline and endless urban sprawl. I should add smoggy to that description as well, as it was some of the worst smog we’ve seen.

me holding Soeharto’s “final erection”

watching the Jakarta police practice dealing with mock protesters for the upcoming Olympic Torch relay (from the top of the tower) was mildly interesting…nothing like watching a bunch of police peel off from their column to disable a terrorist food cart.

Below the monument is a simple museum chronicling Indonesia’s history through dozens of dioramas. It was a pretty weak and propagandized museum, but it was interesting nonetheless. By this time we were pooped and we took a rickshaw back to our guesthouse. We crashed for a few hours before venturing out again for some dinner later. First impressions of Jakarta/Indonesia: hot, crazy, good food, cheap, and interesting.