The minutiae of place

A couple Fulbright friends made their way to Magelang this weekend and we set out Sunday morning for the Dieng Plateau, a high and dry land of terraced fields, smoldering volcanic craters, metal-hued lakes, and squat, 9th century Hindu temples. It's arguably the coldest place in Java--maybe in all of Indonesia--and when we stepped out of the car following a sometimes harrowing three-hour ride, the air hit us like a very welcome bit of Northern Wisconsin. Oh, that was nice. Honestly, it felt like a very good late morning in Baileys Harbor or Eagle River, cool and bright, the sky a crisp blue and clouds cleanly white. The sunlight even looked different, and not just because it had rained every day for more than two weeks and I'd grown used to the gloaming. The light hit a little yellow, just right, ripening an already very green scene. Verdant. Earthy.


We headed for a loop around Telaga Warna, or Colored Lake, named for the prismatic rainbows that sometimes bounce off the sulphuric water when the sun hits it just so. We didn't see rainbows but we did see very green hues. Ambling along an improved trail that cut through some brushy woods, with the breeze coming up light and chill, the lake almost looked and felt like the Upper Midwest. We could have left and headed for a supper club.


From the lake, we made our way to Kawah Sikidang, a fairly typical Indonesian volcanic crater/tourist site: yellowed moonscape, steam venting off into the blue, crowds milling around bored with their own pictures.


What's different and pretty freaking wild about Kawah Sikidang is the broiling mud pit. Furious liquid death. Bubbling, churning, splashing gas-mud, sloshing around inside a little pond about 100 feet by 40. Steam roiling off the stuff, a makeshift little bamboo railing separating us and three dozen other visitors from a scalding end. Very impressive.


Afterward, we haggled a little with vendors at a nearby tourist market but nobody was in much of a buying mood. And the prices were pretty rigidly fixed.


We traveled to Dieng with a guide I'd met through a friend and he next took us to see several Hindu sites at the Arjuna temple complex. The guide is a friendly and of course smiling guy but he had two mildly maddening professional habits. First, he liked to disappear a little. Maybe to make a phone call. Maybe to chat with other guides. Maybe to daydream about the fine teas of nearby Wonosobo, or about the drooping flower trees whose leaves he said could be dried and smoked for a high the same as marijuana. Sometimes this disappearing act was no biggie--none of us needed to be lead around every site and relic--but other times it would have been nice to have him explain, say, the general history of the area.


Having said that, I have to acknowledge that it was sometimes better when he wasn't explaining things like general history. The real trouble with his style as a guide to history and historical objects is that he's almost completely fact-averse. Yes, he can talk about the mythological voodoo of long lost Java--an unsequenced litany of brave princes done wrong by beautiful princesses, of conquering rulers watched over by lion-creatures, of vague-ishly vague vaguery. And he can talk about the names and details of several temples. Lots of detail about the names, especially. They come from the Hindu Mahabharata epic (the same story told in the local leather puppet shows) and he wanted us to know each and every one. Sometimes even when we'd asked a different question. But he mostly avoided the harder ground of names and dates and anything like a historical narrative.


I've had the same experience, admittedly in more manageable doses, during battlefield tours at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Sometimes a site-specific guide is just too wrapped up in the minutiae of a place to provide a meaningful, cogent, historically minded overview ("The Third Artillery was using 10-pound guns made of polished Virginia steel; they had rifled barrels on two of five guns and the others were smoothbore ...") but Mas Aris took this to excruciating lengths. He just snowed us under. And when he wasn't snowing, he was dodging. Some of this was a language issue. His English is pretty good but has some holes, and obviously our Indonesian is nowhere near as good as his English. But this wasn't just a language issue. Aris, who exactly built these temples? The Hindus. And who were they; where did they come from? There are different informations, Mr. Brett. They say they came from the Indian dynasty and then to Java. They say. Who is they? The Javanese. And where do they say it? That depends, Mr. Brett.


So we learned a little bit about the place--probably not enough--and Mas Aris was friendly if enervating, and he made sure we got to see several temples and other objects, as the locals call the sites, before heading back home for an early morning date with sunrise at Borobudur.

Hawks lose! I know!

So some very, very good news from the SMKN1 guest house: WGN Radio streaming live. I've been having nothing but trouble with Skype and video chat and had sort of given up hope that I'd be able to follow the Hawks this season except in re-cap stories (Chris Kuc, your punishingly formulaic lede is waiting) and various blog musings. BUT. Logged in this morning and waited through a long bit of data processing pinwheeling, and then ... Wideman and Murray came through in crystal clarity. Heard the powerplay goal to tie it, then the OT loser. So what? One point, and the possibility of following these guys from 10,000 miles away. I'll take it.

Listening to the recap show now and afternoon prayers underway at the school mosque right behind my house. Pretty cool juxtaposition.

Haaawwwwks!
Assalamu'alaikum!

In the dark at Merapi

I live about an hour or so from Mt. Merapi, arguably the most active and most dangerous volcano in a country of active and dangerous volcanoes, and set out last night to see it up close for the first time. The news has been full of stories about increased volcanic activity at the mountain, and a couple friends from Magelang thought we might catch some highly photogenic lava flows at night. So we made plans, got a van, and, despite heavy rains all day, set out last night for a volcano monitoring station about four-and-a-half kilometers from the summit. Built by the Dutch in the early 1930s, the monitoring station is still manned full-time and it serves as one of the primary staging grounds for climbers and photographers visiting Merapi.

Anyway, there were five of us in the van--everyone but me a Magelang native--and the rain just kept coming. We drove south of the city and then eventually east, through increasingly water-washed roads. We stopped for directions, and then stopped again. We drove around some more and then stopped to ask for directions a third time. Do you guys know where we're going? Oh, yes. For sure, bro. So why are we asking for directions? It's hard to find. Do we have a map? No map. They never use a map.


Eventually we found a narrow blacktop road about as wide as a driveway and we followed this thing for maybe 45 minutes, a dark ribbon winding into pitch black, washed out in places, water coursing down the road and into the wheel-wells, carrying branches and mud and clumps of grass down past us. We drove up through a handful of small villages, the rain intermittent now, old men wrapped in sarongs sitting along the road, chickens and dogs running out of the dark and in front of the van. The road continued up. It got even darker. We followed the yellow headlights into the woods. My ears popped. The rain stopped.


And finally we pulled into a parking lot. The road dead-ended here. At the back of the parking lot, the monitoring post, an aging wooden building with wide windows looking out on darkness. A lone man sat inside at a desk with a CB radio, and when we met him he was looking out the windows into nothingness. He couldn't see a thing, we couldn't see a thing. All clouds. I kind of thought that might happen but my friends were confident we'd have a view on arrival. The most confident of them turned to me as we looked into black and said, We're just unlucky, bro.

The seismograph.

The guy manning the lookout talked with us for a while and let us see the underground survival bunker built by the Dutch and more or less maintained by the Indonesian government. A heavy cement cave, the place is carved into the mountainside and features several thick steel doors. The idea is to run like hell for the bunker if Merapi gets too pyroclastic and hope for the best. The lookout guy said the bunker can hold 50 people for three days, as long as there's enough oxygen and food and water stored away. Last night, the bunker was empty; nobody's too worried about a serious episode right now. On a scale of 1 to 4, the volcano alert system at Merapi is right now on 2, our guide said. If it gets higher, they'll pack in some groceries.


We got the guy's phone number and will check back soon to ask about the view. He said we should come in the afternoon, while it's still light, and stay until dark. He also sad we shouldn't come when it's raining. We said thanks and headed back down the mountain, following the world's longest driveway back toward Magelang. Flash-flood-washed and pot-holed, it carried us home. On the way, we didn't see another car for half an hour.

Not that bad

So I had my first taste of the dreaded Durian this weekend--a spiky fruit with a pungent smell that many Westerners consider a tad vomitous--and have to say it wasn't that bad. A little soggy but basically you're eating the pulpy covering of giant seeds that grow inside this hanging fruit.


The taste hints of fermented citrus and threatens putrefaction but if you can eat oysters you can probably eat Durian. Not the taste but the texture; it's the texture that really gets people with Durian. And the fruit definitely stinks: A heavy plant funk that reasonable people might say smells pretty well on the way to rotten. But get over that and you're in the clear. The fruit's decent and apparently I didn't even have great Durian. Too much rain. Drier Durian is tastier and, I'm told, has higher natural alcohol content. Not sure I'll be sitting down with a cold glass of Durian juice anytime soon to watch some badminton on TV, but nice to know a natural booze buzz can be had in a land where even bad beer like Bintang is almost $1.75 a can (warm) at the grocery store.

Hunting mice, buying bikes

After significant comparison shopping and two earlier close-call purchases, I am finally the proud owner of a gently used Yamaha Mio Soul motor scooter. Thing had about 4,500 kilometers on the odometer when we found it Sunday in Temanggung, a large village that my principal and several teachers from the school call home. Pak Heru invited me to spend the night Saturday with his family—Heru and his wife were welcoming their first grandchild home from the hospital—and to look for scooters. The guy is motorcycle and scooter crazy—he literally has three bikes parked in his living room and several others parked inside and outside his two homes—and he was determined to find a suitable scooter after a little too much screwing around the last couple weeks.

But before we could go bike shopping, we had some mouse-hunting to do. I spent part of the previous night in an upstairs guest room at Heru's house but gave up on it about 1:30 a.m. when it became clear there was at least one mouse and possibly several others living in the box spring. I could hear chattering and chirping and the enamel-metallic sound of little claw teeth on wire spring. Gross. And having just gotten over a late-night cockroach visit while sleeping, I wasn't in the mood to find some furry vermin sharing my pillow. I spent a restless night on the wood floor of an adjoining room and after breakfast told Heru I thought there was a mouse in the bed. A mouse?! In the house?! He was transformed into something like the maniacal tire-changing dad from A Christmas Story.

A physical change came over him and Heru became a kind of fevered mouse tracker. He enlisted two sons, two box cutters, several brooms, a ShopVac, a dress shoe, and a can of Indonesian Raid. We locked the bedroom door behind us and closed the windows--sealing the critter's death chamber--and then we went to work attacking the box spring. Cutting off the cloth bottom, poking into the springs, shining a Mag Light this way and that. We vacuumed out several nests, punched at the sides. We turned the box spring forward, then back. No mouse. More prodding, more cutting, and still nothing. Then, a black blur. The animal had been flushed. It made several laps inside the box spring ran until it finally bolted. The animal ran for the door and was trapped, it weaved back into the room, ducking a kick, dodging a broom swing, until it got under a desk. Heru's youngest son poked from the side and the mouse came scurrying out again, back across the room—I threw the dress shoe and missed—then doubled back, it's little feet ablur, racing for safety, when Heru stomped on its head. He just murdered the thing. Black dress shoe grinding into the floor, a gray-black tail twitching for a minute and then going still. Very, very dead mouse. Mouse brains, the whole bit. We tidied up, the youngest boy removing the carcass in a towel, and got the bed put back together. I am, Heru said, pausing as he often does after using the first-person, a mouse hunter. Well, you definitely hunted the hell out of that one, I said. No mouse, good mouse.

Rio cleans the Mio.

With the mouse dead and behind us, it was time to go bike shopping. Four of us went out, led by Heru's youngest boy, Rio, and we finally found the Mio Soul parked in the back of a nearby showroom. Heru immediately began working on the shop manager for a good deal. They went back and forth for about 20 minutes and the manager guy just wouldn't budge the last couple hundred rupiah. I pulled Heru aside and asked if the bike came with a warranty card; shouldn't the warranty card be good for a free checkup? If he didn't have the warranty card, he should give us the difference of a checkup in the price—about what Heru was asking for. Heru's gave me a look. You like bargain? Yes. Yes, I do. This made him happy, and it got him the deal he was after and we all shook on things and some of us went to get money. Like everything else in Indonesia, buying a scooter involved a lot of paperwork and stacks of cash but we eventually got it done and I drove off, following Heru and Co. to the nearest helmet store. We walked from there to a little restaurant for a celebration lunch, then headed home where Rio insisted on immediately washing the new bike.

Later that day, I followed in a rain storm as Heru and Rio led me on a 45-minute ride back to Magelang. The scooter's now here, tucked back behind my little house, and greater Magelang and beyond beckons.

Buddha's heel

The 9th Century Buddhist temple at Borobudur, now a bona fide UNESCO World Heritage site and the most popular tourist destination in Indonesia, is about 20 minutes form my house. I finally got a chance to get over there this weekend and thought I'd share some images. The temple is pretty massive, hewn from volcanic stone taken from the nearby Mt. Merapi, and I visited mid-day. Normally, Westerners go for sunrise, when the sun comes up over Merapi and everyone gets Kodak pay-dirt, or for sunset, when the sun dips down behind the Menoreh Hills and sundry other Minolta moments are had.

This time I was traveling with a friend who's a lecturer at the local teacher's college in Magelang and he insisted that no self-respecting Indonesian gets up early or stays out late to see Borobudur. So we went went about noon and the place was like a blast furnace. All that lava stone really radiates some heat. But the temple is impressive anytime. I'll go back for a proper guided tour--maybe at sunrise, with my camera!--but what I learned this time is that Borobudur has three main levels, each representing a different phase of the life of Buddha. Visitors make three clockwise laps around the temple, following ornate stone carvings that tell the story of Buddha's transformation from wealthy and sheltered prince to transcendent thought-wave.

Eventually, the carvings give way on the third and final level to a series of stone stupas that represent lotus flowers. Inside each stupa sits a cross-legged Buddha. And in the center of the temple, at the very top, sits a giant stupa. This one, as I understand it, represents full enlightenment.

Tourists clamor all over the temple--a guard repeatedly warned people not to climb on the carvings or over the walls--and student groups approach Westerners to ask questions in English for class projects. Two middle school kids stopped me, both from Surabaya in far off East Java. The first, a talkative girl, asked all about America and Chicago and what I knew and liked about Indonesia. The other, a boy who didn't like making eye contact, wanted to know all about crime in America. Is it bad? What kind of crimes do people commit? Is there a favorite crime in America? I asked if maybe he wanted to be a cop someday. Yes, I do.

When we got to the top of the temple, my friend took me to a particular stupa and said if I could reach inside and touch the heel of the Buddha inside, I would have good luck and would be granted at least one wish. He said his own arms were too short to do it but mine looked about right and so I gave it a shot and stretched as far as I could and got ahold of Buddha's foot and worked my way to his heel and gave it a little rub and now have banked at least one wish.

But when I got back to school Saturday, my principal said I'd gotten it wrong. Yes, you get good luck if you reach in and give Buddha a rub. But not his heel, he said, You're supposed to grab his crotch. Which I didn't do, and which my reach simply won't ever allow. I think I'm fine with that.

How 'bout some Java in Java?

Last week I visited Yogyakarta, the cultural capital of Java and the home of several highly regarded Indonesian universities. The city's a kind of living museum of Javanese culture and it's the entrepot for most people traveling to see the Borobudur and Prambanan temple complexes. It's also pretty much ground zero for all things batik. The place is a sea of batik: Everyone is wearing it or selling it or both. People on motorcycles, the guy driving the bus, the kids walking home from school, the woman carrying a baby swaddled in batik. The city's also home to a huge sultanate palace, the country's most important gamelan, and traditional dance and leather puppet troupes that are the toast of academic cultural scavengers the world over.

So, sure, I went to Yogyakarta to see some sights. But I really went to do some shopping. And topping the absolutly-fucking-must-have-and-can't-live-here-without list was a French Press. When I visited a friend in Seoul two years ago, he and his wife were making their coffee using a stove-top percolator. I thought this was maybe an affectation, like they were eschewing Western convenience for more earthy living in the Far East or something. Like, Who needs appliances? We're in Korea! But I think I had it all wrong. If Korea's anything like Indonesia, at least when it comes to coffee, I now officially understand the percolator. You literally cannot buy a coffeemaker anywhere in Magelang. Can't be done. They don't even know what you're talking about. Coffeemaker? Hmm. You mean rice cooker? No, I mean coffeemaker.

I couldn't find the word for coffeemaker in my dictionary (a bad sign), so tried making up a compound word: kopi pembuat, literally "coffee" and "maker." No good. I'm pretty sure "maker" as I tried using it is more like a person who makes something. The appliance store staffers I tried asking got very funny looks on their faces and started giggling. No kopi pembuat, mister. Which meant no real coffee for my first week-plus in Magelang, which meant drinking the instant coffee mixes that are widely sold and consumed here as coffee. These are really just bad, single-serving instant coffee packages that serve as sugar-delivery solutions, maybe three parts sugar to one of coffee. After about three sips your teeth ache and you feel bad about yourself and you switch to tea but the tea's full of sugar, too--nobody drinks anything but hot and cold sweet tea here--and pretty soon you're asking for teh tawar, which means tea without sugar, literally "bitter tea," and nothing's worse than mildly disliking the tea, getting zero caffeine benefit from it, and being asked all the time why you don't put some sugar in it.

So I really needed some coffee and figured that since there was no chance I'd ever find an electric coffeemaker and even less chance I'd ever find filters for an unobtainable coffeemaker, I had better buy a French Press. I figured if you could find a French Press anywhere in Central Java it would be in Yogyakarta, and I was right. Inside a big mall anchored by the French so-called hypermarket Carrefour, I found a Starbucks. Right inside the door. And they had three French Presses, everyone of them marked up beyond all decency. I could have bought a small coffee plantation for what they were asking. But I took the least expensive one to the counter and handed over most of my volunteer stipend for the month and they threw in a half-pound of coarse-ground Starbucks coffee. It's source? Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Shelling out for the press.

I've been happily drinking this re-imported export coffee for more than a week now and feel much better. (Ad copy: “The carbon footprint of this organic and fair trade coffee is … .”) I've even found some Coffeemate creamer so all is pretty much right with the morning around here. But now that I've calmed down and can think a little more clearly, I've started giving some thought to how a country known for high-end coffees from Sumatra and Sulawesi and, uh, Java could have almost no meaningful coffee tradition of its own. One obvious explanation is that people here prefer tea, even if the Javanese actually prefer sugar, and I'm going against the cultural grain by insisting on drinking American-style coffee. I understand that. But what doesn't completely square is the availability of so much shitty coffee. You go to the grocery store and they have an entire aisle of instant mixes and fine-ground Folgers equivalents that some people just stir right into hot water. They have candied mixes and about eight kinds of powders and four kinds of creamers. Who is drinking this, and why?

I asked a friend who grew up in Magelang and who recently spent a couple years in Amsterdam. She suggested that Indonesia has always made coffee for export—a cash crop first cultivated by the Dutch—and it's never been a truly native drink. The best stuff goes overseas and Indonesians are left with second- and third-rate coffee that has to be cut with natural and artificial sweeteners. Interesting, but she still couldn't quite explain who drinks this bad coffee or why. Why this sort of half-measure, highly artificial kind of coffee—sterile, homogenized, intensely packaged—when loose-leaf teas, often made with water cooked over charcoal flames, can be had from just about every food cart in the country? Is there an aspirant class of Indonesians who see in bad coffee a link to Western affluence and modern, processed-food convenience? My friend looked at me with consternation. I'm not sure what you mean, Brett. And please stop shouting. It's not polite.

I didn't think I was shouting.