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Jam Karet -
07/05/2006
The title is
Bahasa Indonesia and translates as "rubber time", i.e. "time is
flexible", or perhaps "we are lazy".
Jakarta is a really friendly and welcoming city, not at all
reflecting the dangerous, terrorist-on-every-corner media
image. On the downside it is hot, very hot, and doesn't really
have a centre, more like four or five
decentralised mini-hubs, connected by streets packed bumper to
bumper with traffic belching fumes into the already humid air.
We spent a day walking all over Jakarta, through Merdeka square
with the infamous national monument, a.k.a Soekarno's Last
Erection, and the park complete with exercise areas with boards
instructing how to exercise properly, as well as a reflexology
footpath and deer park. We walked along the Jl Gajah Madah up
to the old town of Kota, with its run-down colonial buildings
and bridges and finally back to Jl Jaksa, Jakartas mini-Khao
Sanh road, with restaurants, bars and shops catering to
backpackers.
Dancers at the Kraton, Yogyakarta
Moving on to Yogyakarta, the cultural capital of Java, we
arrived just in time for the Merpati volcano to start getting
angry just 25 km away, with many villages around the volcano
being evacuated in case of a major eruption. We also arrived to
see the weekly dance performance in the Kraton (palace). I
would like to wax lyrical about the performance but to me it was
just too slow to hold my attention. Around the Kraton were more
groups of children sent by the school to practise their
English. The palace itself is uninspiring from the outside, I
was expecting a grandiose building but instead found a small one
storey building with corrugated iron roofing. However inside
the detailed architecture and furniture makes up for its
exterior. In the same area as the Kraton is the Water palace,
where the King could relax and cool down in the pool or hide in
one of the discreet rooms in the tower and fondle one of his
wives. Between the Kraton and the Water Palace is the sprawling
bird market, selling all types of birds and all types of grubs
to feed to the birds. Back in our hostel we met a Czech couple,
Zuzana and Stana, and celebrated by drinking a few shots of
Slivovice.
Water Palace, Yogyakarta
Around Yogya are two ancient sites. The closest is Prambanan, a
collection of Hindu temples with the centre piece being a Shiva
temple straddled by smaller Brahma and Vishnu temples. The
style is very unlike Hindu temples in India and is more similar
to the ruins of Angkor or Bagan. The setting of lush green
gardens adds to the beauty and there is an additional site a
couple of kilometres away which requires a walk past the rice
paddies with the volcanoes in the distance.
Around Prambanan
The other site is
at Borobudor. This Buddhist temple is also pretty
impressive but more due to the intricate frescos and carvings
than the sheer size of the project. It is amazing how both
sites have withstood the test of time in Java, which has had a
turbulent history of wars between dynasties, wars with the Dutch
and other would-be conquerors as well as its fair share of
natural disasters. The entrance fee to both sites is around $10
for tourists, but of course, on both occasions we managed to
find a way in through the back door, as always keen to avoid any
economic racism.
Borobudor
From Borobudor we journeyed into the Central hills and up to the
Dieng plateau, a farming area in the hills with Hindu temples,
Islamic mosques and volcanic craters and sulphur pools. It took
a combination of four buses to get to Dieng. Unfortunately the
weather got worse and worse throughout the afternoon and by the
time we got to Dieng it was raining heavily. Our attempt to
reach the crater was abandoned as we took shelter under the
two-seater stadium at the football pitch and watched the road we
had walked along become a stream. We ran back along this
stream, hailed a bus and made the long journey back to Yogya.
Dieng Plateau
Heading further eastward we left Yogya for Probolinggo, in order
to visit the Gunung Bromo volcano. Again the weather was less
than clement and when we arrived in Solo the bus station was
under a foot of water. Still, by the time we got to Probolinggo
at 10:30pm, long after the last minibus to Gunung Bromo had
left. We decided to hitch and eventually arrived in Cemero
Lawang, on the edge of Bromo at 2:00am after a combination of
hitching, walking and a bargain ride in a minibus for the final
stretch. We had a brief rest on a bench and waited for signs of
life in the town. A friendly Papuan guy awoke in his hotel and
offered us a free pot of tea whilst we waited, let us leave our
bags there and lent us a torch (the batteries in mine were
flat). Just as we set out to climb Bromo for sunrise we met
another Czech couple and proceeded to get lost with them on the
Sand Sea looking for a volcano, not an easy thing to lose. As
it began to get light we found the path to the crater wall, left
the Czech couple and made it up there for the sunrise, which
never really rose due to the cloud cover. Still the view
was pretty amazing, both of the landscape and down into the
bubbling sulphur pool in the crater. At the top we met Zuzana
and Stana and after chatting whilst we descended and
accompanying them for breakfast we decided to head out together
for Bali.
Gunung Bromo
The trip to Bali was another exercise in patience as the bus
refused to go faster than 25km per hour and again nobody could
handle walking further than 10 metres so demanded the bus to
stop every 5 seconds. From the port in Java, Bali looks just a
stones throw away, you can almost see the people wandering
around. On the ferry we had a first taste of Bali as we were
hassled by touts lying to us about bus tickets and ferry tickets
and trying to sell us sunglasses and food for ridiculous
prices. Less sinister and more amusing were the small boys
diving off of the ferry and asking for "money coin" to retrieve
from the bottom. At the terminal in Gilimanuk we then had to
wait for a couple of hours for the bus driver to decide whether
or not he wanted to take us for the regular fare or whether we
would capitulate and pay him 4 times the price. Just as they
were getting nervous Monika and I played our trump card and
unleashed our chess set, which convinced them we were not
bothered what time we would leave.
We wanted to
avoid the touristic Southern part of Bali and so we headed for
Lovina on the south coast. Unfortunately when we woke up and
went to the beach in the morning we were very disappointed. The
beach was disgusting, rubbish strewn everywhere and full of
hawkers selling everything from bus tickets to pineapples. We
found one secluded part after walking through a pig farm and a
field of bemused cows. We started to swim and within 2 minutes
I had been bitten all over by sea urchins. We spent the rest of
the day relaxing on dry land. The next day we hired a motorbike
and toured the eastern interior of Bali. We visited the
beautiful Lake Batur and the temples of Kintamani and Besikeh.
Unfortunately we could not go inside the
temples as we did not have a sarong and we did not want to give
any money to the money-grubbing hoardes offering to lend us
one. The highlight of the day way riding through the rice
terrace, perhaps the most beautiful sight we have seen in
Indonesia, step upon step of flourishing terrace moulded to the
hills, with small roads weaving in between.
Rice terraces in Bali
All in all Bali was very disappointing. Whereas the people in
Java and Sumatra had been helpful and sincere, apart from the
touts (but where in the world are they helpful or sincere?), in
Bali everyone seemed to want to make money from you in some way.
Regardless of any terrorist activity, tourism in Bali surely
would not be sustainable under this pressure. One postcard
shows a beach in the south and each western sunbather is
surrounded by at least ten touts. We were glad to leave after
just three days.
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