Java tales - Jogja part II

Vignettes

We were seated on little plastic stools, huddled around the uneven light thrown by a propane lantern. I can’t even see what I’m eating, and except for my friend’s prudent admonition to watch out for the chilis, it doesn’t much matter exactly which morsel I choose. The dish is Gudeg, jackfruit cooked with plum sugar and chili, accompanied by the perpetual tempeh, tofu, rice, and unidentifiable vegetables. This is the only place that serves gudeg hot and spicy, I’m told, and it’s only open after midnight, which is why we are here on our little hockers, and it’s delicious.

We’re sitting at a little table in the corner, the three of us, my host, her friend and I. The place is called Boshe, and it’s a nightclub somewhere, for which we have donned the obligatory heels and mascara. We ordered a pitcher of beer and had a good view of the band. They were pretty good and pretty active, managing coordinated dances in heels to go with their covers of various pop hits, but still not too many people were dancing. Then the DJ started in, and I kind of expected it to fade into a typical club evening, standard hits, same kind of scene as everywhere else. But no, this club, in addition to its hyperactive band also had three ladies I think aspiring to be exotic dancers. The three were dressed in leggings, heels, and I guess you could call it a bustier. Basically, the women were each wearing a pair of metal cones. I’m pretty sure the left boob got good reception of Al Jazeera and the right one of CNN. Anyways, the girls were trying hard but came off as more frenetic than sensual, one of them so enthusiastic I thought she was getting extra points for flinging her extremities and assets twice as fast as the beat. They danced a number or two, went for a costume change, and came back in stockings and dessous. Hi-la-ri-ous: their counterpart, dancing away in the crowed, was another conversation piece altogether. Dressed head to toe in black, dangling chains and wearing a massive mask/facepiece ending in a pair of giant horns, balanced on half-meter stilts, it was if a bizarre alien were dancing in the back of the room, jerkily. Reminded me of the scene in Star Wars (the new version, I think) where they’re all in some bar with all the aliens…



“Excuse-me-can-I-please-take-a-photo-with-you?” the little girl asked, reading shyly from a piece of paper. We’re at Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple (in the world, says Wikipedia), and it seems like everyone, their grandmother, and their pet goldfish wants a picture of me. Yes, it’s because I’m so beautiful and charming that they think I’m a runaway supermodel. Just kidding. I seem to be pretty much the only white person here, and I’m pretty sure that’s my only qualification, but I’m getting school kids, families, women, men, pretty much anyone asking for a picture. I’m not sure why they want me on their vacation pictures, but if they bother to make the effort to ask, it’s all the same to me….



Once again I am clinging to the back of a motorbike, but this time, instead of a busy highway, we are heading up a steep incline on what in the West would be a one-lane road, but here serves dual-directional traffic. The poor bike labours up the hill, and understandably so. The grade is impressive, and even more so the small file of people bent over almost horizontally from the load they were carrying; they looked like pandan leaves but could have been anything. We pass terraced hillsides and small villages, we work our way through herds of schoolchildren and chickens, and after a twisty, muddy path, we arrive at our destination. It’s secluded in an alcove, protected by cliffs on both sides, buffeted by huge and crashing waves which slowly undercut the rock, leaving almost caves in the hillside. We explore the beach, venturing along the coast and scrambling over, under and through the sharp rocks. It’s a mixture of bouldering, caving, and wading through the water and the waves which soak us to the waist despite our best efforts. We work our way back, finding a perch from which to contemplate eternity. Another “beach” is merely the side of the cliff into which a staircase is cut, providing another excellent view both of the bay and of the hindu shrine cut into the hillside. The last beach is filled with fishing boats, narrow, outrigger boats which were responsible for our lunch, prepared for us as we sat on the beach and watched the little white crabs scuttle to and fro.



It turns out several of the beaches near Jogja have black sand, beautiful black sand stretching in both directions and pretty much covered by holidaymakers. There are horse-drawn buggies tearing up and down the surf, kids playing in the mud, families on mats provided by enterprising individuals selling roast corn, cold drinks, food, or flipflops, and no one seems daunted by the incipient rain. It’s growing dark off the coast, as we walk along the water, contemplating the almost pressing atmosphere and trying somehow to capture the mood on camera. And at some point we notice, like two fingers of a hand, little funnel clouds stretching downwards towards the water; still on the edge of the storm, they disappear, and we head back towards where our car is parked in case the storm moves in. We’re seated on one of these mats, enjoying our roast corn – after I thought I couldn’t eat any more following our fabulous dinner of barbecued fish fresh from the boat which we had enjoyed at the last beach – when we see the larger finger funneling towards the water. We can see the clouds rotating, see where the waterspout is beginning to form at the bottom and we are transfixed, trying our hardest to capture it on camera. As the little twister dissipates the storm rolls in, and the beach clears as if by magic, little mats are rolled up, trolley and horse carts pushed away, kids gathered and shooed towards the car.


Photo by Debby, who is much better at taking twister pictures than I am

On the way back we stop at a Javanese church, different, apparently, than other churches in Indonesia, itself a predominantly Muslim country. The nave itself is an open-air pagoda with a wide and relatively flat roof sheltering the pews and the altar; there is no one there when we approach. We proceed towards the back, where the sound of gongs, xylophones, and other instruments mingle with the chorus of voices singing songs of which I recognize neither the words nor the melodies; even the tonalities are foreign and eerie to me. The musicians and chorus are to one side, and between their shelter and the church there is a small, elevated stone temple, in front of which several people sit in rows. One by one they cross themselves, climb the stairs, kneel, pray, and retreat again from a statue bearing the face of Jesus and the body of a Buddha, perhaps a feature of the unique flavor of religions in these parts, a delicate mélange of various traditions and practices under the umbrella of a particular faith. We watch in silence, we attempt to photograph, and we ourselves retreat.


Photo also from Debby.

Solo, Sultans, and siomay - Jogja part I

I have to admit it, I always feel some trepidation when traveling to a new place, and even more so on my own. I have very rarely had extremely stressful or problematic travel experiences, but somehow, just having someone else around seems to lighten my mental load considerably, as we together figure out just how one gets to where we’re going. I also know that any place I have been before, pretty much without exception, is a place I would be perfectly happy going to alone; therefore, the issue isn’t being alone, it’s the unfamiliarity, for which there is an easy remedy: go.

In Java, unless it’s soup, you eat it with your hands. Or rather your hand, your right one, which you wash first in a bowl of water before picking apart your fish, mixing it with the spicy chili sambal and rice, and somehow managing to get a portion into your mouth without dropping it in your lap. I’d learned the art of one-handed sticky-rice-eating in Thailand, involving a hard ball of rice and just your thumb to pick up additional pieces, but here the rice isn’t sticky, and you need your whole hand. I suppose they could have found cutlery for me, but that would have ruined half the fun. I’m already the gringa/farang/ang mo/foreigner there, but I’m not about to be the only one using silverware.

So I went. I made it through immigration, delighted at an option of a 7-day visa for my one-week stay in Indonesia, which fit perfectly with the US$10 I had changed before I left Singapore (I had, of course, forgotten to bring along any of my US currency this time around). Except I realize upon receiving my visa that it’s valid for 7 days (duh), but that my stay, leaving one Tuesday and returning the next Tuesday, comprised 8 days, making me overstay one day. But I decided to deal with that later, and instead made my way into town, by means of a comfortable, fixed-price taxi. Maybe Egypt scarred me a little bit, but I have a residual reluctance to deal with taxi drivers in foreign countries, as tourists are favorite victims of taxi scams, and you are, in the end, in their car – something which itself can be dangerous in some places. But not in Yogya, and not in bright daylight, and we managed to find my host’s house without incident, where I was firmly and heartily welcomed.



N. and her family live in a typical Javanese house on the west side of town; a house of tiled floors and three bedrooms that I could see, a shared bathroom, a living room (the home of the pet turtle swimming aimlessly in the fishbowl), and a giant kitchen; N.’s mum baked cookies and biscuits as her business. N. generously gave up her room to me and the other Couchsurfer who would be coming the following day, and because she had some work to finish that afternoon, I was dropped off at Malioboro street to meet a friend of a friend from Singapore, and her friend, and it turns out that N. and one of the girls had met before and both had mutual friends. They swept me off to a late lunch of barbecueued fish (a whole fish, just for me, skin crystallized to crispy perfection, with sambal, costing a whole $2.30 including our three lemonades), and after a variety of stops including a grocery store for water and sunscreen, picking up L.’s laundry and waiting for V. at A.’s place, one of the many boarding houses arranged for students from outside Yogya, separated by gender, where L. had been staying, L. left for the train and V. took me off to a friend’s place, where there was to be a dinner.



We rode off into the proverbial sunset on V.’s motorbike, and I realized how much I liked the feel of the wind in my hair and the exhilarating bustle of traffic, which is a pulsing tangle of motorbikes, lorries, bicycles, pushcarts, pedal carts, horse carriages, and pretty much any thing else mobile or with wheels; lanes are taken as guidelines at best, and the most efficient strategy to turn left/right/around is basically to force your way slowly into traffic—blocking both lanes if need be—until the others are forced to let you through; motorbikes happily whiz by on either side and in between. I quickly discovered my favorite part of Yogya to drive through: on both sides of one of the rivers/canals, stone houses were set up and down the steep hillside, as if in a medieval European village. I hear it won prizes as an architechtural answer to what would otherwise be a slum, but I neither took pictures of it nor did I find out exactly what it was called. My googling suggests it might be called Kampung Kali Chode.

So, the dinner. We spent a lot of time going in circles in the rain, finding a whole bunch of people, none of whom had ever heard of the street were looking for, and a bunch of gas stations which didn’t sell beer, and after getting completely soaked and particularly lost, we had to call in for rescue, where we were greeted with warm clothes and the smell of cooking food. Now, I’ve maybe met three Hungarians ever outside of Hungary, but here I show up at this party and all of the sudden there are three of them, in Yogya! Added to the mix were three Malagasy/French (I don’t think I had ever even met a Malagasy before, and again, here were three!), and of course a compliment of Indonesians. The boys were busy on the balcony, cooking up tempeh, roast eggplant, chicken, and some kind of dish with green bits; those of us inside were responsible for the musical entertainment, consisting of a singalong to acoustic and electric guitars accompanied by drums. Cognizant that I am staying at someone’s house, though, we beat our retreat before midnight, and I fell asleep to the sound of the lizards on the wall.

We hear the blaring of horns behind us, and we have barely enough time to look behind and/or swerve to the side, as far as possible, before the bus swoops by in a gust of wind and splatter of mud.

After a hearty breakfast of Indonesian porridge – it tasted vaguely of coconut and pumpkin, seemed to be kind of a thick semolina or flour pudding kind of thing, with some indiscernible red gelatinous fruits on top. I have no idea what it was, but it was delicious – we headed off on our first expedition, N. and I. We went to Solo, which, at about 60 km from Yogya, is about an hour and a half on a motorbike. And the stretch, as I read later, is one of the more dangerous roads in Java. It’s a busy thoroughfare, two lanes each direction, of which the “slow” lane is mostly inhabited by the motorbikes, and the “fast” lane by lorries and busses, who, horns screaming, bear down on the traffic in front of them and send everyone scattering to the side. We were almost run off the road at one point, and on this stretch, there isn’t a lot of shoulder. But we made it alive, sore butts and all, to Solo, a smaller, quieter version of Yogya, hosting not one, but two Sultan’s palaces which are still inhabited by the current King and family, although these no longer hold political power—compared to Yogya, which is still actively ruled by its Sultanate. We toured the palaces and finished with a yummy lunch of… something… consisting of tofu cubes, egg, noodles, cabbage, tempeh (?), and a sweetish sauce to the blare of Indonesian comedy shows on TV before hitting the road back. Of course, the road back was just as much fun as the road there, except soggy and rainy.


Water palace

That evening, my “roommate” arrived, named after a French Impressionist painter and herself with impressive tattoos, coming from a month in Bali and moving on soon to Jakarta, Singapore, and elsewhere. She spent the next day on her own, heading for the silver markets and the shopping street, and we made our way into Yogya proper for some sightseeing – this time Yogya’s Sultan’s palace, the water palace, and the underground mosque. The underground mosque was, for me, the highlight of the “sightseeing” places we visited – it was just so cool and mysterious, it felt like a mix of Indiana Jones (where he’s in the temple in Petra, kind of) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Pity some of the building was damaged by the earthquake. It’s a popular spot for wedding photographs, and understandably so.


The underground mosque

Lunch was something called Siomay, fish dumplings, eggs, cabbage, and other things of choice served with spicy peanut sauce and a mango smoothee. And due to my inevitable fatigue and concurrent addiction to coffee, we set off for what has to be the coolest café ever. It’s not much more than a set of benches and little street food stalls on the side of a bridge overlooking the train station, but it served the most unique coffee I’ve ever had – coffee with a piece of charcoal served in it. The charcoal, I’m told, does something special to the caffeine and the taste, but is mostly something to avoid while drinking, as those things are pretty bleeding hot. That evening, N. took us to her “hang out spot”, somewhere far away on the other side of town, consisting of a bunch of low tables under little shelters by a river, where one can order coffee, food, and smoke shisha; I had my coffee and my fried bananas with chocolate.


The Siomay place

Friday morning I found myself on a bus to Prambanan, the large Hindu temple(s) outside of town with J., an Indonesian from East Kalimantan studying in Malacca, Malaysia, on holiday in Yogya. We felt that it was obligatory to go to the temples, and so we went, I with my little broken camera and his giant one. The place had about a fifth of the tourists of Angkor Wat, mostly Indonesian tourists, though from our vantage point of one of the minor temples, we were able to observe, with barely restrained hilarity, a group of Japanese tourists who appeared to be wearing more or less anything they could find on their heads to shield them from the sun; the women looked colorful and extravagant with their shawls, but the clear winner was the gentleman in shorts, sandals with socks, and a t-shirt wearing a scarf across most of his face and wrapped around his head. He looked like Lawrence of Arabia meets Tom Cruise from Risky Business. We also managed to spend a good half hour amusing ourselves, J. and I, closely followed by our laughing audience, by trying to take the perfect jumping picture in front of Prambanan. This is not as easy as it looks if you’re doing it on a timer and not a multiple-shot exposure, so each time we ran over to the same spot, tried to time the jump precisely, ran back to look at it, and started over again.


The tourists

There is some kind of traditional game in Yogya, often for the tourists but also for locals, which involves being blindfolded and trying to walk between two trees about ten metres (30 feet) apart; it is said if you make it, you get your wish. Sounds easy? Somehow walking in a straight line through a gap is harder than it sounds. Legend has it that there’s something about the trees that ‘deflects’ these attempts to cross through, and in my two tries and J.’s one neither of us made it.


Coffee with charcoal