Marruecos part 1: Madrid - Granada - Chefchaouen

Viva España: Madrid to Grenada to Algeciras

The whole point of taking the evening bus was so that A. could go to class, but she didn’t and we were still almost late. We had enough food to feed a small village in Africa plus the first day of a moderately-sized Indian wedding party. We proceeded to Granada without incident, except for the part of not being able to locate the Bolsilla de Santa Paula: particularly because it was a street and not actually a saint’s pocket.

Still rubbing the sleep from our eyes and arguing cantankerously about stopping for breakfast, we find a bus stop well populated by Asian tourists that we assumed it would take us to the Alhambra, but we and they were wrong, and it didn’t. I clutched my coffee like a dying person clutches the last piece of chocolate cake thinking happy coffee thoughts as we joined the ticket lines after the short ride up the hill. At 8h20 the lady sold us tickets for the 8h30 entry to the palace, and we galloped off over the cobblestones, dodging elderly tourists like walker-wielding obstacles.


View over Granada from the Alhambra

In barely two and a half hours we’d finished the Alhambra complex, palaces, gardens and all. It helped we were early, it helped we’d declined the audio guides, and it helped that the weather wasn’t too inviting, and that we were also not trailing small children. Still the Alhambra is gorgeous. It’s Moorish architecture, full of vaulted ceilings, mosaics, carvings and the beautiful arches that swept gracefully over fountained courtyards. If I’m ever rich and famous I’ll buy me a castle like that. Somehow, we imagined it would be huge instead of just big. It could have been Tuscany, for all we could tell. Perhaps we took the wrong bus?

Confronted with hedges the size of moving trucks, it’s easy to see the appeal. It’s like being a kid again, playing hide and seek among the labyrinthian trees. Imagine a hundred years ago, these hedges, these gardens. Orange trees and pomegranate trees are interspersed with flowers and hedges. A lumbering tour group of the newly wed, overfed and nearly dead obstruct the path, and we duck around the corner, and I admire a handsome Italian framed against the foliage – and soon we are free. There is a window in the gardens, set high in one of the many terraces and flanked by columns. From here, as from many places in the Alhambra, you can see the city spread gently across the hilltops. In the distance, the Sierra Nevadas; on the hill, a church; in between, pueblos blancos and new, ugly apartment blocks.

We spent the afternoon staggering from tapas bar to tapas bar. At one point, lost, looking the map, the stranger who stopped to help turned out to be none other than a childhood acquaintance. Small frigging world.

We sat on the bench in the sun. We’d just received complete and through advice on “Au Maroc” from the energetic Frenchman at the creperie on plaza de la universitad. The other half of the bench was occupied by a young Spanish guy, a future teacher looking (as of yet unsuccessfully) for a job, with friendly eyes and floppy hair, who wanted to know just why one needed the interrogative ‘do’ for the question ‘do you understand?’ and not just ‘you understand?’

I wonder how much a tapas bar represents the normal population – or what demographic thereof – in Grenada or elsewhere. It’s an undeniably social outing, but one which doesn’t perforce replace family togetherness.

Our attempt to get to Algeciras was doomed from the start. Direct bus, full. So we had tostadas and went for Málaga. Next bus was full, so we whiled away the time in an internet café where A. made friends with the shaved-headed Serbian involved in shady business in Barcelona. Finally, after a brief but notable delay near Algecrias, caused by the apparent but un-evident breakdown of our bus five minutes from the bus station, during which one grandmother complained incessantly, we followed a Moroccan couple and three Walesian hitchhikers (…into the bar, and the bartender asked, “what is this, some kind of a joke?”) to find all the ferries delayed. Thus: a nice night in the enchanting and beautiful little port town of Algeciras (read: it’s a shoddy dump with sketchy people. We stayed in.)


Entrée au Maroc

We decided to head to and through Ceuta—the Spanish enclave—rather than Tangiers, to save ourselves some time and the hassle. The ferry embarkment proceeded without problem, and we spent much of the ride taking the micky out of other passengers, with the desperate hope that none of them spoke German – but these were Americans, so I doubt it. Americans, as is widely known, do not learn foreign languages.

“The bus to the border is the Number 7. It costs 75 cents.” With our packs on our backs, looking somewhat muddled and confused, a man standing behind us interrupted our thoughts. Not only did this man know everyting there was to know about the bus and the border, he even took us to a money changer and deposited us at the bus station. “Remember: Number 7. You see number 9, you don’t go. You see number 7, you go.”

Ceuta, the Spanish enclave carved out of Morocco, is understandably a mixture of Spain/Europe and Morocco/North Africa. Distinctly Mediterranean, rougher around the edges, but with far more flair than Algeciras. The people look north African, the cars are Spanish., and across from the bus stop are the remnants of the old fortress: imposing battlements jutting out of the blue water. A construction worker dangling into the canal waved as he saw me taking pictures.

The border: the end of the line and we all pile out. Everyone’s on foot, most people don’t have baggage and anyways we’re pretty much the only northern European-looking people there It’s several hundred yards/meters to and through the border. A tall fence blocks off the ocean; to our right, the hillside. Cars and lorries are variously parked along rough lanes of concrete barriers. A chain link fence sometimes cordons off the pedestrians from the cars, and we trudge along behind large headscarved women and packs of young men. As our “guide” from before described it, we were “walking from Europe to Africa.”

Apparently pedestrians and cars were checked at the same guardposts, but there didn’t seem to be anything approaching a queue or any kind of order. Only once we were forced to go through a little gate to the side. The actual stampring process was uncomplicated but took awhile, seeing as how they were likely using the same computer system for the last hundred and twenty years. Two bored-looking functionaries with large moustaches like small furry animals and some kind of stinky incence typed mysterious numbers into a computer system apparently running DOS. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, and ma salaama! A further bored-looking guard wanted to see in my bag, but came disinterested after he heard I spoke French. “Vouz avez des armes?” he asked me. Do I have weapons? Do they ask this question to everyone, or only 20-something female white backpackers?

Taxi to Tétouan cost 120 DH, prix fixé. Our driver had blue eyes and spoke Spanish, but wore the Arab striped kaftan and deposited us at the bus station with little commentary. Tétouan was not the sleepy little town I’d imagined, but rather a big, sprawling thing, outgrowing its borders like a giant jam smear. As soon as we entered the station, we were accosted by an ostensible employee with no teeth who pretended to be insulted that we were anything but thrilled with him forcing his ‘help’ on us, and helpfully interrupting our consultation in every possible language he knew. Anyways, it was noon, and apparently the next bus was at three (a likely storey, but okay), but he disappeared and magically reappeared with three Frenchies (were they on special, buy one get two free?) with whom we shared the taxi.

They negotiated the fare (40 DH per person, and we split the cost of the sixth seat), and squeezed into the back. “En effet, la sixième place, où est-elle?” I asked, as A. was practically sitting in my lap. Our “guide” wanted backsheesh, but I let the French guy argue with him and contented myself with sucking my gut in and trying to make my hips smaller to accommodate everyone. The ride was spectacular: rolling hillsides, farms, fields and animals, and with a chain of fog-covered mountains to our perpetual left. Little villages dotted the landscape here and there, and it was all as pastoral and bucolic as a 16th century Dutch painting. The driver drove like his car was on fire AND someone was trying to steal his bobblehead, dodging lorries and busses as if in a slalom. I contemplated the screw—what remained of the door lock—the missing door latch and the screwdriver jammed in apparently to keep the window from falling down, and wandered if anything was keeping the door shut as we were thrown around the corners and I against the door.

Chefchaouen is apparently the weed capital of Morocco, and as soon as we get out of the cab someone was already pushing. We declined and trotted off after the Frenchies. Their hotel was nice but full; the one next door was confusingly priced: 50 DH/person for a shared private room or 70 DH per person for a bed in a dorm, and had only one room for one night but could maybe let us sleep on the roof. No, thank you. So we ended up at the hotel we had wanted to go anyways, where the quixotic owner insisted on his broken German and we on our respective Spanish and French, which he spoke considerably better.


A doorway in Chefchaouen

Apparently the square around the castle thing is a giant tourist trap. We’d heard about a couple of recommended restaurants, but the directios were useless so we wandered out of the square to find something, anything – and ended up at the recommended restaurant anyways! There we met three girls from the Basque country in Spain, and after lunch we migrated for tea and coffee, with a mixed Spanish/English/German discussion on pretty much everything.

Besides the marijuana, Chefchaouen is renowned for its beautiful blue medina. The walls, the stairs, everything is painted a stunning and varying shade of cobalt and azure blue, so after sending off Las Españolas we wandered about until we found some shoes and some picnic snacks for dinner.

I guess you could say I didn’t get much out of the first / only full day in Chefchaouen: right away I was hit with a fantastic bout of Funny Tummy / Touristas / whatever you want to call it, and was as feeble as your grandmother without her walker. It didn’t help that someone yelling in Russian, which subsided briefly after I pounded on the wall with my fist, interrupted both the night before and the early morning. Honestly.

Anyways, the whole “being sick” thing resulted in me looking as if someone were pulling my teeth without anesthetic while I turned a lovely shade of green. It was like high school biology all over again. I got to schlep myself up and down the medina, culminating in the crowning moment when I “redecorated” the pavestones in front of the café. Being sick, at least this kind of sick, is like walking around with a very heavy blanket. Everything is a huge effort, and sometimes the edges get fuzzy. It could have been the dates, or the olives, or more likely just a random fluke. I’d made it through most of Asia with no problem, so I guess it was my turn.

We met Las Españolas for lunch and tea, which means they had lunch and I had nothing, looking about as green as my mint tea. We took our tea at the smaller plaza within the medina. From somewhere, loud Arabic pop music was blaring, and somewhere behind us, a backgammon or cards game progressed loudly, eagerly followed by a crowd of young men. We sat outside on the square in the sun with the other tourists (as a side note, that’s a good way to spot a tourist at a hundred yards: tourists sit in the sun, locals in the shade), including a pack of Argentineans who communicated with walkie talkie and insisted on filming strange things. Everywhere young men. The plaza was picturesque and almost empty. The young guy seated on the step stood out starkly against the whitewashed walls, and we sipped our over-sweetened mint tea.

As expected, I slept away the afternoon, and the evening, and well into the next day like a drugged puppy at the pet store. How to tell I’m sick: I sleep for fifteen hours straight. However, this is a poor diagnostic tool as this feat is nothing special for your average university student. Because Las Españolas had helpfully fetched our bus tickets the night before, we had time to meet for breakfast before heading to the gare routière.

Up behind the medina, through twisting alleys where the day before we had seen three tiny newborn kittens, carefully watched over by several respectively tiny children (“ils sont nos chats!”), up behind the tourist shops I suppose the residents live, though it’s hard to tell if the place isn’t simply one giant tourist bazaar. Signs of inhabitants exist; there are alleys with no tourists, some smelling of dank water, but most or all as lovely; and by the river, a dozen women stand bent over buckets doing their laundry at the metal stands built for this purpose on the banks. They ostensibly have washing machines at home, but as water is so expensive, they prefer to do the washing there.


Another typical Chefchaouen shot

Tales of Timor-Leste - Part 3

Going East: Dili --> Baucau --> Com --> Walu Beach --> Com --> Dili




Early Monday morning (meaning: noon) we headed out on a five-day tour of Timor, armed with our much beloved white diesel tank, nine litres of water, various kinds of food and drink calculated to last a day or so, a minisucle map of Timor-Leste in our guidebook, and some vague recommendations of where to go and what to do.

The drive out of Dili is the same we had taken to the beach a few days earlier: after heading towards Jesus, you pass the “strip” of beach restaurants, wave happily at the Bangladeshi UN soldiers in dashing beige and robin’s-egg-blue camouflage uniforms guarding Ramos Horta’s house (though I can’t imagine what landscape they wanted to blend into with those babies), put your car in first gear to inch up the steep slope behind several massive trucks covered in people like a giant human chia pet, and you’re on your way. It’s got to be one of the more beautiful drives I’ve done in a very long time: a winding narrow road is cut into the hillside, threading its way through emerald hills. Above, the mountains are shrouded in mists; below, the ocean glistens off to the horizon in the deepest blue. White beaches are visible here and there, and the traffic isn’t heavy. I’m driving the first leg, which means that, per our agreement, I’ll likely only be able to appreciate the scenery on the way back, as this time I am so concentrated on the road that every second I take to steal a glimpse at this astounding beauty is the one second likely to lead me into a pothole at speed, or be the one second I find a massive truck barreling down at me. The road is pretty good, but a perfect surface can easily become a massive hole, a complete missing section, or the tricky gaps which seem to lurk in the shadows. Holes in the shadows are almost impossible to see unless you’re barely moving. Then there is oncoming traffic, goats, cows, chickens, and water buffalo on the road. It’s an obstacle course in some areas and a breeze in others. I drive only as fast as I can see, which hits a maximum of 80 kph, mostly hunched over the steering wheel to peer under the tinted section which I suspect was intended to supplant sunglasses, but mostly just obstructs our vision.


On the road


The coastal road is interspersed with stretches directed inward, through dusty villages, banana trees and mangrove swamps supposedly hiding crocodiles. We climb and sink, like giant breaths gaining and losing altitude. For ten kilometers the road is an arrow: straight and smooth. Shortly afterwards it becomes linguini noodle, thin and twisted, and we become James Bond’s martini: shaken, not stirred.

Somewhere before Baucau (130 km from Dili), we notice the engine is acting weird. Occasionally the power steering goes out, usually around steep corners. Shortly thereafter, this loss of power steering is accompanied by three idiot lights of unknown meaning and various colors. At least it’s not the oil light, but they remain a mystery. A kind of rattling commences at some point, followed later by a high-pitched whine, almost as if our horn were stuck (think Little Miss Sunshine). We call home and try to limp on into Baucau, which we are able to without further incident and only moderately worsening symptoms, where we are supposed to be looking for the workshop of the Bishop of the Diocese. Since we have zero Tetum abilities, we cruise around a bit cluelessly, our car rattling along, taking a few moments to sit and contemplate and plot our further progress. We turn to Peace Dividend Trust, an NGO who makes it its business to know everyone’s business-es, that is. They compile business directories and also provide matching services, so if you need 100 kg of soybeans in Los Palos or a goat in Viqueque, you can call them and they will find someone who has that. More pertinent for us, they know who does or sells what in Baucau, and they will either know our shop or know a different one, so we find their office on the main drag and they helpfully provide us with directions to a guesthouse and an informative map.

Despite the map and everyone’s best intentions, we never end up finding the workshop of the Diocese, instead landing at a shop of a tiny but competent man. M. explained our problem in Portuñol, and thankfully the symptoms were easily evident upon the mechanic giving our ride a go himself. He climbed barefoot up onto the bumper and more or less completely into the engine compartment, where he sets about busily dismantling something. M. goes in search of a cola and I ensconce myself in the trunk, waving at schoolkids as they pass and hoping nothing serious is the matter. Finally, the guy comes grinning back to us, holding up what is quite evidently a broken screw, which he had fished out of the depths of our engine compartment; somehow, he had known where to look. His enthusiastic dismemberment and reconstruction of or enginy bits cost the grand total of eleven dollars, the amount a white person would reasonably spend on a meal in Dili. Our host said we were gouged. Oh well.

Glad to get that checked off our list. Driving away, it was clear that the problems with the power steering, the rattling and the idiot lights had been alleviated, so we settled down for dinner and bed. Early in the morning we headed down to the beach in Baucau, which is not in Baucau but rather quite a bit outside and below it. There was, of course, barely a soul as we got down there, and we spent a good bit of time splashing around in the clear waters. Driving back up the hill, however, we were confronted again with the persistent whine from the day before. Thankfully we’re still in Baucau and can go see our mini mechanic if need be. We park the car in front of the house and lift the hood experimentally, leaving the engine running, but it’s hard to tell where the sound is coming from. But after we killed the engine we realized the whistling was coming from the radiator, and after we let it cool off we were able to refill the poor thing, which desperately needed it, and were able to be on our way, and the whistling was n’er to be heard again.

From the terrace of our little café where we had brunch, we had a good view over the old town of Baucau. Much built by the Portuguese, Baucau bosts a long street lined with shops, cafés and a market, upon which our mechanic and our café were both located. On one side is the former Mercado Municipal, a giant construction in (I guess) sort of neo Romanesque style, reminding me of the tomb of the unknown soldier in Rome, but much much smaller. And also, sadly, burned and dilapidated; the structure, cutting a handsome silhouette and gracing the cover of our map, had seen better days. Below the Mercado were the former gardens and their former fountains, and all of this a bittersweet memory of other days, yet beautiful still.

From Baucau we headed out to Com, which is pretty much the end of the road. It’s a hamlet boasting a handful of guesthouses and a giant shiny resort with overpriced rooms but (thankfully) cold beer. I hope the place fills on weekends, because we were the only white people there. We settled on one little guesthouse boasting a two-room bungalow (of which we had one), a broad porch with several chairs, and a location directly at the water. Hordes of screaming kids were perched like birds on a wire on a big driftwood log, and the occasional family of pigs would wander by on the beach. Fishers came and went. As soon as I went in the water I was surrounded by a pack of little girls, Agnès, Angelina, Maria, Dora. They take turns trying out my snorkel (failing utterly to grasp the concept, instead diving too deep and filling the snorkel with water), asking me questions in Tetum. We counted to ten in English together. Whatever I did or said, they did or said.

In the evening, sitting at the seawall and reading, they came again. They’d been enthralled by M., spending a good half hour hiding behind the fence, watching his every move and giggling furiously every time he glanced in their direction. Shyly they gave him a giant shell as a gift. Recognizing one of the little girls from before I played the pied piper, walking in patterns or along the wall with a string of little girls in my wake. They serenaded me with songs and generally had a good time.

The next morning we headed out to the beach behind Tutuala, which involved taking the coastal road up into the hills beyond Com. It looked like a road that went absolutely nowhere, but in a land with so few roads, the fact that one existed meant that something had to be on the other end. We were less sure, however, when the paved track gave out and left us with a muddy two-track seemingly leading into more nothing than before. We passed a couple of the traditional houses, narrow and on stilts, almost like a tree house in size and form. We couldn’t figure out how anyone got into them. The roofs carried a necklace of shells; it seemed like the houses themselves were like tall sentinels, not necessarily sentient but nevertheless present.


A traditional house

“You remember how to change a tire?” M. asks me. Somewhere between Lospalos and Tutuala, a gentle fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap told us we had a flat, so we pulled over in the middle of the village and set about finding the tire iron, the jack and the handle. We get the spare off the back, but as soon as we make a go for jacking up the car, the entire village, it seemed, had assembled, and a few of the stout and stalwart young guys appropriated our tools and set about changing the tire. First the jack wasn’t sufficient to get the car up high enough, leading to a creative construction involving beams of wood and rocks to support the undercarriage enough for them to figure out how to jack it up higher. Removing the lug nuts was also not simple, and at first they were turning in the wrong direction, but soon all was sorted out and fixed, with an entire assembly of small kids watching the process. When we looked like we might be getting out money or something to thank them with, the “leader” held up his hand, saying only, “no” and shooing us on our way.

Tutuala is a tiny town perched on a hillside, overlooking the sea. On top of the hill, where we thought the road continued on down to the beach, we instead found a kind of villa. It looked abandoned, and the outbuildings were actually abandoned, giving the place a haunted feel. Dilapidated gardens spoke of better times, and tethered horses grazed where once there was topiary. Why did no one live here? Who owned this place? It had, with no exaggeration, a million-dollar view: behind, the tree-covered hills and mist-covered mountains; before, in 270-degree panorama, views of the sea and distant Indonesian islands. Not that Timor-Leste really needs rich foreigners, but the spot was perfect for a luxury villa, and easily reachable if one adds a helipad.

With the strong sense that we could count on the locals in case of any further problems, we set off to Walu beach. The only problems with counting on this aid were the twin facts that (a) we were driving out of civilization into an even more sparsely inhabited area, meaning the odds of someone running across us was slim, and (b) we had just used our only spare tire, which belonged to the few remedies available to our immediate disposal. And to top it off, the “road” down to Walu beach should not be called a road. It’s basically a strip lacking in trees and undergrowth, hugely rutted and covered in rocks. It’s even slower going than the road to Hatubilico, and at 8km, it took us a jolting good half hour to cover the distance, and all the while as we are bouncing up and down so much that you’d want to cling to the “oh shit handles,” (as my family affectionately terms the handles in the car) to avoid concussing your head on the ceiling. It’s hard to give an adequate report of how terrible this road is. Some people have reportedly gotten out and walked because they couldn’t handle the ride up or down. The last stretch was relatively smooth and straight, which I enthusiastically bounced down before coming to a complete halt before the tree which had fallen across the road, blocking it completely. Someone had helpfully beat back the undergrowth enough that we could drive around the tree, but no one had bothered—or had wanted—to cut the tree itself.

Down to the good stuff: Walu beach. Imagine white sands four or five meters deep, picturesque rocks jutting out of deep blue and turquoise water, cliffs or rocks or shoreline gracing the edge. Close your eyes and really imagine it. Then take a look at the pictures and realize it isn’t just hyperbole. It was beautiful, spotless, untouched—and empty. Paradise for us alone. We found our “eco-resort,” which, contrary to our expectations, did promise to be able to feed us, and made off for the beach. M. took a nap so I was on my own for a bit, splashing about in the surf before finding a suitable rock to lizard on. Somewhere off to my left, a big darkish thing was in the water a few meters from the shore, which I initially assumed to be a log—until it moved. I was too far away to really see properly what it was, but I had heard quite a bit about Timorese crocodiles, of which there are both salt- and freshwater varieties, so I wasn’t too keen on finding out what it was. When M. eventually showed up and went for a walk, his first order of business was taking a closer look at our moving log. So he sets off down the beach, and I watch. When he gets somewhat near to whatever it is, he quickly turns around and begins jogging back, looking over his shoulder every now and then. What IS that thing?

An ox.

There was an ox, or a water buffalo or however you want to call it, wallowing in the cool waters near the shore. A perfect beach, and the only bather is an ox.


Walu beach near Tutuala

It turns out that the eco-resort, or this area in particular, also boasts a few lovely and huge caves, so after breakfast the next morning we arrange to go visit them. Accompanied by our two machete-wielding guides, we reach the mouth of the cave after a brief climb, and they ask me for a dollar, which they place at the entrance. The caves are almost invisible from afar, appearing as cliff faces more than anything. The flora in this area consist of trees, low, scrubby bushes, but not a lot of thick growth. Still, it’s good there’s a trail there, which was not always easy to see amid the dead leaves. The caves themselves were a good three meters or more at the entrance, opening up in the back to five or six meters in height. Near the cave mouth are some petroglyphs dating back at least 500 years. Heading into the main cavern with a weak torch, I was able to illuminate only my next step and not much more. Every time I swept my feeble beam across the ceiling, a kind of trembling followed the path of the beam, and the air seemed to vibrate with the bats disturbed by the light.

The road back to Com seemed to take half the time of the road there, but that seemed to be the norm on our trip. We stayed one last night in Com and left early the next morning to return to Dili. Our wheels were still on, our engine still running, and the scenery still beautiful.

Tales of Timor-Leste - Part 2

Maubisse, Mt Ramelau and Hatubilico

I’m not sure whose idea it was to have the road zig zag up the mountain. Almost immediately past the market in DIli, past the other market and the mikrolet loading station, the road climbs steeply into the hill, clinging to the corners as if hanging on for dear life. It’s a “good road”, meaning, the potholes don’t come all that often, the road is ostensibly sealed, and you can, at most times, fit two cars for dual-directional traffic. Notwithstanding, the space between two cars and the respective edges of the road isn’t significant, and it’s a bit of a nerve-wracking endeavor. The road climbs and climbs and climbs, hairpinning back and forth above Dili. On each side, accessible from staircase-like little steps or trails, are houses and even the occasional palatial building. Mikrolets, buses, trucks of all kinds, 4x4s, and even the occasional taxi venture up this road into the mountains of Maubisse; below, Dili in all its grubby glory stretches along the waterfront in both directions ending at the Jesus statue in the East, and with the wisps of Autauro visible in the distance. It doesn’t take long before the city becomes a distant view, and the vistas are more green hills, forests, and little streams running along the waterway.

Our endless ascent in view of the city eventually becomes only little thatched buildings and rice padies, with cattle and increasingly horses visible in the muddy fields and paddies. Goats, children, dogs, and chickens line or, alternately block the road, but almost nothing looks like something you might term a settlement. Occasionally, roadside stands would sell a few vegetables or bananas or the ubiquitous greens, or litres of gasoline in old water bottles. Sometimes, the road would disappear entirely, to be replaced by a muddy, rocky stretch with massive potholes. Almost worse were the sections where a narrow strip of pavement continued through the rough patch, with the respective potholes dropping off deeply to each side. There is no good path through it and it’s a bumpy ride either way. At one stretch, a group of youths had placed some branches on part of the road, and waved us aside; when we stopped, the one of them peered into the window. He had on a baseball cap perched high on his head, or maybe not, and a pair of jeans; he grinned. “Money,” he said. We didn’t really understand. “Money, one dollar?” he continued hopefully. “No, I’m sorry,” we replied, and continued. I couldn’t tell if they were shaking down the road on principle, or if they were just opportunists seeing a pair of Malei (foreigner). Traffic became more sparse, which was a relief, as the potholes often forced one or the other lane into oncoming traffic, most curves were blind and the trucks seemed improbably large for the road. People walk along the roads, and when school lets out, the trickle of pedestrians becomes a steady stream of schoolchildren. On the road before Maubisse, we suddenly found a truck coming around the corner in our lane; in the truck’s lane, a line of schoolgirls dived screaming into the ditch as the truck sped past. If they hadn’t jumped, they’d have been hit.

Maubisse was the first thing you might call a town that we had seen, discounting Ainaro (which one shouldn’t, but Maubisse is considerably bigger); it had a church, whitewashed and solemn among the hills. The air was cooler, blowing in from somewhere higher up and bringing mist, moisture and the chill of the mountains; after the almost oppressive heat if Dili, I relished the goosbumps and the beads of moisture on my arm. Guesthouses ringed the church, boasting beautiful gardens and the quiet serneity of a place—from my perspective, at least—far away from anywhere. A crowd of kids collected around us, posing for photographs, and waiting eagely for their chance to see their faces in the tiny screen of the digital camera.

From the church, a winding road heads down to towards the marketplace, dropping violently, as if the pavement were rippled, giving us place to park amidst the several stalls selling veggies and bananas. We head towards the “only” restaurant in Maubisse, recommended in garbled portuñol by the old man at the guesthouse. It’s behind the market stalls, dimly lit and containing a few tables and plastic chairs. Before the window, a row of women sit, chewing betel and selling their wares. We sit next to this window, and only a few inches away but separated by the pane of glass is an old man, with wild eyes and wild hair. He waves, saying something in Tetum. I wave back, but he persists, waving wildly. I don’t know what he wants and can’t find it out, so I preoccupy myself with my coffee and ignore him and the curious stares of the market women.

About five kilometers beyond Maubisse, the road to Hatubilico splits off from the main street, and we look back on the road from Dili as a happy memory. This road, insofar as you can call it such, was more or less flattened collection of stones, sending us bouncing and jolting along up and down and around. Sick of slipping and scrambling I put on the four wheeled drive, and the remaining eighteen kilometers more or less proceed in first and second gear, taking over an hour. The hills fell away to either side in verdant green. On the corners, a waterfall or stream trickled down across the rocks and into the distance. Occasionally, a traditional hut would appear out of the mist, clinging to a hillside, forlorn amid a backdrop of white, only to disappear again. We could have been in the middle of nowhere; near and far there were nothing, not even houses the last few kilometers. An old woman and a small boy were carrying heavy sacks, heading into the mist, and the kid flagged us down. We cleaned out the back seat and they pileed in. The old woman is wrapped in a tais, traditional skirt, her head wrapped in another cloth, with lips stained crimson from betel juice. The kid hung on the back of my seat with giant eyes, staring with excitement at the rumbling brumbling diesel motor pulling us along the mists. We stop at the next cluster of houses and let them back out; as soon as we are stopped, the entire youth population of the hamlet piles out and surrounds our car, calling out in Tetum, grinning and whooping wildly. We wave goodbye and continue on.

They say the temperature drops with the sun; it also drops with altitude, and the air turned chillier the higher we went. A couple of times we stopped by passerby and asked “Hatubilico?” Always, they waved us on. We reached the town, wondering how we would ever find our guesthouse, our pousada, when we saw the giant yellow structure with a sign to that effect. It was in the “middle” of town, past the small cemetery of concrete crosses huddled on a flowered knoll and across from a shrine set high into the hillside and accessible from a set of irregular concrete stairs shrouded in flowers. We parked. We knocked. We wandered around, peered in the windows, knocked again, tried all the door handles, and still no one. Eventually two younger guys wandered by, and after we managed to explain what we wanted, one of them jogged off down the road, returning with a pair of keys.

“We found the Shire,” M. said, referring to the land of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. We had found a town with no tourists, no restaurant, no café, no post office, and no electricity. We followed the one path down towards the cemetery, looking out over the valley and the mountains beyond. Next to the cemetery, an older guy was digging around in a flower or vegetable bed, looking at us with some measure of suspicion. A pony tethered nearby let me stroke its nose, though the halter had rubbed its face bloody it was still friendly. On the other side of town, rolling down from the mountains and set in a giant green carpet adorned with rocks was a little stream, which passed under a stone bridge to continue down into the valley. Wildflowers were everywhere, and only the occasional crosses set into the side of the road—and the frequent cemeteries—gave hint of a haunted past.

On the road we ran across César, the son of the pousada-owner, who agreed to guide us up Mt Ramelau—we’d meet at 4 AM—and told us his mum would cook us dinner at nine; the dinner, as it turned out, arrived on its own about 7:30, carried by a small procession of little kids. The pousada itself was a solid structure, newly painted a bright yellow, and featuring many small rooms with many small beds. Communal toilets and showers downstairs. A big room at the end of the hall offered an impressive view out over the valley, boasting a table, a set of chairs, several low couches and, surprisingly, several treadle-powered sewing machines made in china. The funny thing about the big room with the sewing machines is that nothing matched. There were at least two different patterns of wallpaper, both yellow, and a different pattern on the ceiling. The ceiling itself wasn’t straight, and nor were the several columns parallel or perpendicular to each other, the walls, or the ceiling. We ate our dinner of cabbage, potatoes, meat of some kind, and rice with a certain relish, prepared our things, and went to bed.

At 3:45 our alarm went off, and we groggily got up, got dressed, and got packed. The moon was mostly full and we could see without a light, so we spent a good bit of time gazing over the moonlit valley, attempting unsuccessfully to take pictures of said moonlit valley (as you can imagine, the pictures were predictably just black), and eventually going back to bed as 4:30 rolled around and César still wasn’t there.

Sometime around 6:30 I awoke to someone looking in our door (which I thought we had locked), knocking and demanding insistently we get up and go: César had arrived. Apparently 4:00 means 6:30 around here, or our mixed portuñol-English-(his)Tetum had led to a misunderstanding. M. gave me the keys and wedged himself in the back, as César directed me and the car up the steep and steepening hill. The road lurched up into a green meadow in the pre-dawn, the road curving suddenly around almost imperceptible corners, and I desperately hope my sleep-fogged brain reacts sufficiently. At one stretch the wheels don’t grip, and despite the fourwheel drive the car begins sliding left with each attempt. I finally roll back a bit and give it another go, hoping to get enough momentum to make it up. Coming around another curve, I see with dismay what looks to be a washed-out corner—not too uncommon—looking like a dangerous bridge which I am convinced will crumble under my car. César gets out and guides me slowly around the left-hand corner; my right bumper is almost brushing the rock face. We make it.

We make it up to the meadow, scaring off the few grazing horses at our approach, and begin the climb up a set of incongruous stone steps. For my part, several months of good food and no sports have taken their toll, and I find the hike a challenge, though the path itself is neither particularly tricky nor particularly steep, and I need a lot of breaks. César bounded up like a mountain goat and even M. was soon out of sight up the hill, but my legs wouldn’t get me up any faster.

The valley fell around us like a set of green curtains. Trees, and trunks of former trees scattered the hillside. We could see for practically forever, and everything was a brilliant, emerald green. Little wispy clouds floated by, hinting at fog to come. Towards the top, an abandoned hut stood forlornly amid several wooden crosses; I didn’t dare ask what had happened here, but César did tell me the crosses were grave markers. There were several along the path. At the point I wanted to send the others off, so they wouldn’t have to constantly wait for me, they pointed to the crest of our hill—which I was sure was just the next of several ridges—saying “that’s the top”.

And the top it was. Unfortunately, for all we saw at that point, it could have been a statue of the Virgin Mary set in or on a cloud; the mist, by now, had rolled in and completely obscured the view. We sat on the top, and we could have been sitting on the edge of the world. Beyond us was nothing; the ground fell sharply away below us, but even after five meters the view became a milky white. Nothing. But as we sat, munched our rolls, drank our water and caught our breath, for a few seconds at a time the mist cleared and we were granted glimpses of the incredible valley so very far below.

Our descent, predictably, took almost no time, and soon we were back at the pousada, consuming our breakfast—coffee and rolls had been left for us—as an old woman with a betel-mouth wandered in and out, tested the sewing machines and grinned furiously every time I looked at her. A betel-mouth looks as if she had recently bitten a live animal or moonlighted as a guest star in a vampire movie—it’s all a bit disconcerting to be viewing over breakfast. We tried to find someone to pay for the rooms, eventually driving down to their house and finding the same old woman. M. paid her for the room but, as we discovered most of the 18 kilometers later, as she forgot to ask for the keys and he forgot to give them, we had taken the keys with us.

Sometime past one of the last groups of houses, we were suddenly surrounded by a mob of kids yelling “photo! Photo! Photo!” Not really wanting to stop and not sure what they wanted we continued. But the mob didn’t give up, and soon we had an entire flock of children running after our car, shouting and screaming. Several of them made it at least a kilometer or two, which of course gives you some indication of how fast we were going that they could even keep up. Here and there we passed villagers transporting various goods with ponies; the ponies, for their part, were not particularly excited about the passing car but we managed not to set off any major wrecks or scare off anyone’s pony. After the eighteen kilometers of rocks and potholes, the main road—with its crazy traffic, trucks, mikrolets, potholes and missing bits—seemed like an Autobahn in comparison and we set off happily.

Sometime after Maubisse I took over the wheel, and of course, promptly the sky fell in and we found ourselves inching through a deluge. The road is narrow and set very closely to the hillside, and there is nothing that one might confuse with a ditch, a culvert, or any other means of dealing with rain; the result of this, of course, was a waterfall streaming onto the road at every corner. The potholes became small lakes, which one could never tell if they were potholes or puddles. Rocks and shrubbery were washed into the road, and as we continued, we had the impression that more of the corners and edges of the street had crumbled since we passed the first time. Even stopping the car and waiting for the deluge to pass didn’t seem to help, so we continued. As a highlight, however, were the stretches where the road was completely missing, to be replaced by muddy troughs where the wheels had passed, which by this time had filled with water. Ready, set, go! M. hit the accelerator and we went skidding through the mud, splashing up water on over the roof and generally enjoying ourselves immensely. Mit Gewalt geht’s. Finally, finally, after what seemed an eternal number of hairpin turns, we made it back to Dili as the rain cleared.

Tales of Timor-Leste - Part 1

Part 1 - Touchdown in Dili

We arrived in Dili on the morning flight from Singapore, looking curiously at our fellow passangers—many of whom turned out to be Cuban doctors—and endlessly curious at what this country would bring. We waited for our visas, looking with wide eyes at the UN police, somehow excited that they came from different countries yet were somehow here; and everyone on the plane, it seemed, had something to do here. Only a few of them looked like they could be holidaymakers or tourists. We chatted about skiing in Switzerland with the South African in line for the visa in front of us, but without asking what brought him here. Visas are available to pretty much anyone on arrival for US$30, and each person’s name, passport number, and other information is entered by hand into a large ledger book, whereupon the visa itself—a large stamp with blanks to be filled in by the actual immigration officer—is issued. We retrieved our bags and found Juvenal, “Juvy,” our host’s driver, and set off through Dili.

My first impressions of Dili is that it is unlike anything I’ve seen so far. The people selling fruits and vegetables on the side of the road were familiar, but the general state of things were more reminiscent of pictures I’d seen of African villages than of anything I’d seen so far in SE Asia. A few burned-out or destroyed buildings were to be seen, here and there, a marked contrast to the Palacio da Governo (or however it’s called)—still splendid, despite being a historic Portuguese colonial building in a country with a rough history—and the done-up waterfront promenade, full of people out for walks and cuddling couples. A giant zig zag of one-way streets, though I was soon lost on the many corners and turns we had taken from the airport, the city is actually quite small and not too difficult to navigate. One stretch of road seemed to be a giant open-air market, congested with taxis and motorbikes and everyone on the streets, hauling around produce and hawking water and gasoline.

Our host lives on the south side of town, in buildings set amid leafy gardens—a mini jungle—and featuring a large terrace with large bamboo furniture. We’re shown our little bamboo-hut, a simple two-room affair offering all the comforts we need and a mosquito net to boot; the (bucket) bath is just around the corner. We’re given the keys to a little blue SUV with which we immediately and enthusiastically fell in love, and we set off, armed with the map in the Lonely Planet, to tour around Dili. The one-way streets are confusing, driving on the left is confusing, and watching out for kids, pedestrians, carts, motorcycles, people who suddenly stop, change lanes or do much of anything suddenly and/or without signaling, and the traffic lights we almost never see complicates the driving a bit, but we each take a turn and are soon on our way, with only minor detours (and a complicated reverse movement). The good thing about driving, though, is if you do something relatively “crazy,” i.e. stop suddenly, decide you really wanted to turn and so skip across several lanes to do so, or reverse by backing into traffic and blocking both directions, traffic adjusts, you’re not honked at angrily or glared at by the police, because everyone is doing the same thing.

Another point of mention is the continued presence of the UN, who, it seems, spend all of their time and likely inordinate quantities of gasoline driving about the city. Every fifteen seconds you see another UN vehicle, most of them “Polis”. Sometimes it’s just the U or just the N (as the other letter has fallen off). Perhaps they get awards for how many times they can drive every street in Dili in one hour, but at least none of this all even looks halfway serious.

We park at the promenade, walking past the fruit and the fish markets, seeing groups of young Timorese in school uniforms just hanging out, sitting around and chatting; here, it’s mostly separated by gender, though one young pair is visible strolling along the sand and another young pair—as a grinning boy hinted—was hiding in the bushes. A lot of people were just hanging around, watching the football game or just sitting, and empty bottles and wrappers littered the low grass and weeds. A falling-down statue paid homage, I assume, to independence, but the words were faded and grass was beginning to sprout from between the pavestones. The heat was oppressive and we moved sluggishly, sweating profusely; athletic-looking types jogged up and down the promenade and performed painful-looking contortions.

We drove up to see Jesus, perched high on a hill on the East side of town, built by the Indonesians a symbolic 27 metres tall, to represent Timor-Leste as Indonesia’s 27th province. It’s a nice (read: sweaty) hike up there, but the views are stunning, and the white sandy beach on the back side looks promising, curving along the inside of the cove and shimmering promises of white sand and solitude. The mountains stretch up above, here a deep, vibrant green, almost glowing. Sitting up on a hilltop and looking out to sea is like watching the stars – it gives a prescient sense of one’s own insignificance.

Juvy picked out our dinner, a massive Tuna fish the length of his arm and surely destined to feed another ten or fifteen people, plus chicken and chips and rice and vegetables – yet somehow, despite massive quantities of food we did them justice. The restaurant was directly on the water, graced by a gentle breeze as we perched on moveable furniture. Dili seems to be a very small world, so it was almost unsurprising to run into people our host knew, and only slightly more surprising to run into one of the few people with whom I’d made contact. It’s a city of 300,000, of which only a portion (though a noticeable one) are foreigners, so it’s not surprising that everyone knows everyone.

Our first full day out on our own sent us on a few errands before we headed out for the beautiful coastal road towards Liquiçia (pronounced, I think, LI-ki-sah). The road is a narrow two lanes, barely wide enough for dual directional traffic, and crumbling a bit at the edges like a bit of toast. Leaving town it winds its way along at the base of the hills, passing properties owned by oil companies and something which looks like a factory or manufacturing area, sprouting ugly steel out of the flat ground like metal insects; heavy trucks carry the product on down the road. But shortly thereafter the scenery gives way to little thatched bamboo huts sprinkled among the grassy shores, more or less with the look that most tropical beach resorts try—and fail—to imitate. We see little houses or structures rising out of mounds of earth, like meter-tall anthills sprouting a wooden and thatched canopy. Are these houses? My guess is some kind of underground storage, but perched not much above the water table, that doesn’t seem likely. After a straight stretch, misleadingly enticing us to believe we could go faster—this when we still believed the challenge of the road was its curves, and before we learned better—we were surprised to see the cars in front of us at a standstill; they’d stopped to negotiate a particularly tricky pothole.

Pothole. If the name originated because the holes were the size of pots, the Timorese variety needs to be called bathtubholes. Sometimes there was even more hole than road, and sometimes even then there wasn’t even enough shoulder to avoid the damage and we had to ease the car in and hope nothing on our undercarriage got stuck. It’s not that you have to slow down for rough patches, you have to come to a full stop and inch your way across. An added obstacle to driving is relatively small, usually black, brown, grey, or mottled colored, and tends to wander over the pavement, sometimes halting in the middle, with an apparent supreme indifference to death on four wheels bearing down on it: goats on the road.

We reached Liquiçia, deciding to go on to Maubere, porque no? As we trundled on our merry way, a bit of tantalizing beach caught our attention, and we determined that it was absolutely necessary we test out said beach for general swimability and because we were sweating, almost literally, buckets. Of course, as any little girl who plays soccer knows, changing in public without being arrested for indecent exposure is not problematic but looks ridiculous, so by the time we had each made it into our swimsuits we had attracted a noticeable crowd. And upon discovering that (a) a dip was sufficient and (b) the current was strong such that we left it at that and changed back into our civvies, the entire shade shelter near our car was filled with two dozen grinning faces watching our every move.

On the road again. We made it to Maubere, we made it past Maubere, and eventually turned around to have a gander at the Portuguese fort on our way back to Liquiçia, where we stoped for Nasi and veggies, and coffee. Squinting in to the sun and already sweating profusely, we wanted to have a look in, and take pictures of, the town of Liquiçia. Eleven years ago, in April1999, when over two thousand internally displaced were taking shelter in the church in Liquicia, members of various armed militia, with either overt or tacit cooperation with Indonesian military and police, attacked the church.

“They started to shoot everyone. Men whom they found outside the Parish house were hacked down. The militia members were accompanied by Kodim troops and the Brimob elements. They entered the residence of the church and they started to kill people with machetes and shoot people in the house. At the time there were still women, children and men in the complex. They started to kill the men first because they were closer to the door. The men had pushed the women and children to the back.”

Brimob troops assisted in the attack by throwing tear gas into the parish house, forcing the refugees to come out. As they ran from the church, they were hacked with machetes and knives, or shot. Pastor Rafael’s account continues:

“I saw the Brimob members break the parish house window and throw tear gas repeatedly into the Parish house until those who were sheltering inside ran out because they could not stand their eyes hurting. As the community ran out of the Parish house the Militia started to kill the men, but they did not kill the women and children. The children and women were allowed to leave the complex, whereas the men were hacked down.”

From the Robinson report, p.194, from the deposition of Pastor Rafael dos Santos.

The exact number of casualties is not known, as the bodies were taken away and dumped or buried in unknown locations, but many sources place the figure at between 30 and 60. Everywhere I go I hear ghosts. I didn’t ever know these peoples, but I have read many of their stories and the feeling of walking on hallowed ground stays with me as I walk the dusty streets. The place has a desolate, almost abandoned air; it doesn’t seem like anyone actually lives here, and there is barely a soul to be seen near and far. A row of buildings forlornly stretches up the hill, but we head instead towards the broken-down football pitch and what might once have been a playground for children. There are no children, and cows graze on it now. We take pictures of some baby goats in the gutter next to the street, and a few of the almost deserted-looking place. A few old villas hint at better times long gone, a few rolls of barbed wire here and there hint at darker times not too distant, but none of it holds many hints as to what the future might hold.

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

Templing in Cambodia - part I

“May I ask you a question?” my roommate asked, as I stared at him bleary-eyed and uncomprehending. I’m still on autopilot, desperately trying to function while waiting for my brain to boot up. I grunt something affirmative. He strides to the fridge, yanking open the freezer door to reveal something fabric-y and blue in the back left corner. “Whose coat is that?” I look sheepish. “…and the better question, WHY is it in the freezer??”

Um, yeah. So about that……

I’m hunched unhappily in the corner, as once again I have failed to grasp that I need winter clothing in Asia to counter the frigging air conditioning. I feel like a small, disgruntled animal huddled on my half of the bench, “sleeping”, if that’s what you call being horizontal at 3 AM with your eyes closed. But since I’m shivering there is no sleep, so instead I am lying there and thinking happy thoughts of coffee and mattresses. The bench pokes me in the side, in the back, wherever, so I give up and move to the floor. I’m wearing everything I’ve got, more or less, using my sarong as a blanket and my raincoat as a jacket. As it is not currently raining in the airport, my poor jacket is not particularly effective.

Departure lounges—i.e. couches—are only available to those lucky souls with boarding cards, which we do not have, and so we are forced to spend the happy hours from 2 until 4 AM cold in the corner. “White nights” are always terrible, as the lack of intervening sleep means that it’s all just one super duper unending long day.



Cambodian immigraion is thorough. Arrival card, departure card, health form, customs form, visa application. I know my passport number now by heart, scribble it everywhere, claim not to have foreign currency or swine flu and queue up for the apparently extensive visa process. They employ about fifteen people: one to take the passport, one to open it, one to look at it, one to look at the forms, one to compare the forms to the passport, one to take your money, one to stamp the form, one to stamp the passport, one to stick in the visa, one to stamp it, one to hand it back. Yay for countries with low wages. Somehow we manage to be pretty much the very last people in line at immigration and thus the last people out, where we are greeted by a mob of drivers looking hopeful and holding signs with various names. We are neither Ms Melissa nor Ms Bzewski or whatever else was there, but we did manage to locate the youngish fellow with my friend’s name on his sign. Somewhere since exiting the plane (directly on the tarmac) the sky has fallen in, and a few fat drops turn into an apocalyptic downpour: the world, in fact, might actually be ending if this storm is any judge. The parking lot has turned into a lake and the rain seems to be falling sideways in sheets. Our driver dashes across the parking lot, already completely soaked. We expect him to come back with a car, but to our dismay we see him leaping about in a plastic poncho, trying to secure the side panels on and dry out the inside of his poor tuk tuk.



The ride has to have been one of the more miserable ones we’ve undergone – though considerably more comfortable for us than for our driver. Despite the plastic panels we were still steadily getting soaked. Strong winds buffeted the little trailer. I wondered if we would end up in a ditch some point, and the massive (and very close) lightning made me wonder if a tuk tuk would function as a faraday cage the same way a car does. I grew up in an area with lots of and quite dangerous lightning, and we learned how to tell how far away the lightning is by counting the number of seconds between the flash and the boom. As the speed of sound lags the speed of light, you can calculate that every three seconds is about a kilometer away, and every five seconds a mile. Considering that lightning can easily strike anywhere in a 2-mile (3.2 km) radius, anything less than 10 seconds is both close and dangerous lightning. This was what we like to call 1-second-lightning.

Nevertheless, we made it alive to our guesthouse, a comfortable and well-appointed little place between downtown and Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, serving hot breakfast (mmmm, omlette, yummmm), halfway drinkable coffee, and banana milkshakes. Still recovering from our drive and our night at the airport—I for my part guzzling coffee—we could happily have stayed half the morning there had our airport pickup driver not approached us and suggested we make our way to the temples. Visiting the temples requires some means of transportation: you rent a bike, or most likely, a tuk tuk and driver for the day, who will take you from place to place. Our driver proposed a 3-day tour and a fair price, so we set off.

Liberally quoted from Wikipedia:

The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to the magnificent Angkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument. Many of the temples at Angkor have been restored, and together they comprise the most significant site of Khmer architecture and have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visitor numbers approach two million annually.

Angkor wat itself was built for the king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and capital city. As the best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre since its foundation—first Hindu, dedicated to Vishnu, then Buddhist. The temple is the epitome of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. Another famous temple is the temple of Bayon, whose distinctive feature is “the multitude of serene and massive stone faces on the many towers which jut out from the upper terrace and cluster around its central peak. The temple is known also for two impressive sets of bas-reliefs, which present an unusual combination of mythological, historical, and mundane scenes.

Interested parties can follow the history of the period, but the main point is that Angkor was the capital for several centuries, excepting about a hundred years at one point, and that the era spans periods of alternate Hindu and Buddhist dominance. Some temples belong to one faith, others to the other, and some have been converted. Some temples are mountain-temple style, with concentric stacked levels leading to an upper area with multiple shrines; others are more laterally constructed; others are a combination. Based on the style of the columns, the lintels, and the decoration, the temples can be dated to various reigns. Some temples are constructed of brick, others of sandstone, others of limestone.



We started off with the littler temples, which offered the opportunity of clambering about more or less solitary, with perhaps one or two other sweating and red faces visible. The first temple-mount we visited offered supreme views of the bucolic countryside: many people live and work inside the park, raising cattle, cultivating rice, and operating the massive syndicates supplying tourist goods to the little children who hawk them at any opportunity.

In fact, the recurrant theme of our visit was the following: we arrive at any temple in our tuk tuk. Our driver explains which temple it is and where he will wait; meanwhile, an entire pack of women and small children have descended upon us. “Hey lady! You want cold drink? You want scarves? I have lots of colors? Hey lady! Ladyyyyyyyyy! Buy from meeeeeeeeeee!” Tiny children proffer postcards and reed-bracelets, respectively 10 for 1 USD, and they dog our heels like a pack of hungry Chihuahuas. We ignore them and proceed, but they persist: “when you come back, you buy? If you buy, you buy from me!” We suspect this latter promise means something different to them than to us; as we are not buying, it is easy to promise that if we were to buy, we would do so from them. I also met one little girl who could rattle off the same spiel in alternating French and English. Some of the kids will ask where we’re from. One of them, upon hearing I’m American, replied “CapitalWashingtonDCpopulationthreehundredandsixtymillion”. I wanted to test them: “What is the capital of Spain?” I ask, and immediately comes the response: “Madrid!” while another child chants in the background: “Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao, Malaga, Sevilla….” Ok, let’s think. A hard one: “what is the capital of Latvia?” They seem stumped, then one: “ Riga!” The children don’t learn this in school, they learn it from the tourists. At least they go to school in the morning, even if they are out selling in the afternoon. As soon as you start to talk to them, they drop their schpiel and actually talk to you; still, perhaps I’m cynical, but I fear even this apparent openness is a tactic to win “friends”: all of the sudden, they switch back to “ladyyyyyy! Buy from meeeeeeee!” which followed us everywhere.

One of my favorite temples was a ruined “jungle temple”: a flat-built temple, mostly falling down, and trees growing out of portions of it. And best of all: no one else in sight. The temple itself was huge, with room after room after room, flanked by galleries reminiscent of roman architecture, and beautiful carvings. The temple at Bayon was also magnificent, but full of tourists. Our sunset view turned out to include several hundred other tourists, but was nevertheless beautiful.



Cambodia seems obviously poorer than Thailand, with an obvious lack of 40- and 50-year olds, a multitude of children, and a dearth of future opportunities. Our driver, a guy a little younger than I am, told us that even if you can pay the fees to go to university, there’s no work; sentiments echoed by another guy I met who was looking for work in Dubai or elsewhere in the Gulf. Anywhere where there’s work.

The night markets and old market proved a pleasant change from the aggressive hawkers at the temples; they would come to you only of you expressed obvious interest in their wares, rather than trying to drag you into their shop. They would bargain but with a smile, and if you remember how much you would pay for the same stuff in the US or Europe, you’ll come away satisfied. Cambodia runs a parallel economy: both dollars and real are accepted at more or less the same exchange rate; but the influx of tourists has created tourist prices and a tourist economy separate from that which the locals pay. An excellent curry with rice will cost about $4 in a white-linen restaurant but so will standard “fried noodles with vegetables” or “fried noodles with meat” at the ubiquitous restaurants in the park; the same meal would cost about a fifty cents if you could manage to eat it “on the street”. So where $4 is less than you pay at home, just knowing that they are gouging you sometimes takes away from your appetite. The price-value relationship, therefore, is entirely subjective.




Our last night in Siem Reap, we went to a massive, and I mean massive concert. Cambodia’s “Number 1 singer” was playing in an open-air extravaganza. We rolled in late, which meant that we spent at least half an hour “rolling” in wall-to-wall motorcycles inching forward. Trying to get a tuk tuk through that was an exercise in patience and creativity; traffic congestion was exacerbated by all the people who had despaired of ever getting further and who had parked more or less where they were. Still, we edged the tuk tuk up to where we could at least hear and kinda see the concert, so if worst came to worst we could stay there. We wanted to stay together as a group, so leaving S. with his bike and us girls forging off on our own was out of the question – how would we ever find him again? Still, he parked, and we edged our way into the foray. The place was decked out as if at an amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and food stalls everywhere. The balloon toss game was apparently also popular, as stalls for that lined the roadway for several hundred yards. B. tried some kind of meat on a stick, and all of us had boiled eggs which had been injected with some kind of pepper sauce (quite excellent) and sugarcane juice, plus traditional merengue pastries similar to those I knew in Thailand, consisting of a thin crepe-like batter cooked into small pancakes, spread with sugared egg white and cooked till crispy. We also acquired a groupie, a little boy who was fascinated with us and insisted on having his picture taken with us. I think many Cambodians don’t understand the ‘point’ of taking pictures – I think they think it’s just to take a picture and then see yourself on the screen, rather than for us touries to keep and look at later.


More to come…. I hope….