Di Antara

Buku-buku dan dua potong ayam…
Surabaya is Indonesia’s second-largest city; much less crowded, much less dense, much less exhausting.

Unless you get lost inside a five-story, six-tower shopping mall trying to find a bookstore where you can on the one hand find a decent novel written in English, and on the other hand purchase yourself a good sturdy notebook in which notes can be taken easily without a desk around (the usual state of my interviews).  Neither of these tasks were easy, and I wandered around Tunjungan Plaza my only night in Surabaya endlessly trying to find both of these items – especially something to read to replace the incredible Durga/Umayi by Mangunwijaya which I finished way before I expected to. 

Strangely, the novels that I ultimately found available in huge quantities were English translations of Yukio Mishima’s works, at a Japanese department store.  I’ve read and enjoyed Mishima before so this wasn’t the most terrible thing, but it is a bit strange to find yourself choosing between Jackie Collins, picture books of automatic weapons, adaptations of Star Wars, Michael Crichton, and a Japanese nationalist who committed ritual suicide after launching a very abortive coup attempt in the 1970s.

I can’t say much about Surabaya – stayed in a very western hotel, visited a very western shopping mall where I have to say that Popeye’s Chicken never tasted better after eating muscular (read:  tough) ayam kampung in Flores for a week.  Maybe I had the bird flu on the brain, but something about picking up an unnaturally hefty chicken breast after three months of no American-style “chicken,” and my mouth was happy.

Babies and cigarettes…
Over the last two weeks, I lived in hotels, and this gave me some occasions to watch TV.  In Surabaya, I was met with the news of the terrible events in Sharm al-Shaikh, and mortified by all the details emerging from the second round of London bombings.  When I woke in the morning, I think I saw on one of the news tickers that small explosions had gone off in Turkey as well, and all I could pray for was a day without bombs, a hope that nothing is coming home to America, and that Indonesia can make it to one year free of major acts of terrorism.

But after watching enough Indonesian TV, I started to get a feel for what drives the ad market here.  You can tell what it is easily in America – it’s all cars, all the time, cars and maybe sneakers and soft drinks on occasion; but car ads are the most frequent, and the most intensely rotated.  “Like a Rock” is forever planted in the American subconscious.

In Indonesia, there are two ad forces most heavily in circulation:

1.  Cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. 
Tobacco is a big business in Indonesia, which I will go into more of when I talk about Madura.  But I would say literally 50-75% of all commercials on TV are for cigarettes – Djarum, Gudang Garam, Dji Sam Soe, L.A., Mild, Kansas, Sejati, and that’s about all I can remember off the top of my head.  These are all local cigarette brands, produced in Indonesia for Indonesians, by Indonesian companies.  If you think our tobacco companies are shameful, wait until you switch on the nightly news at ten o’clock, with an animated cube in the corner that first says “Metro TV” in red, and then revolves to show “Gudang Garam.”  I think half of the Indonesian TV channels now in business would shut down if the cigarette companies were to cease TV advertisements as they have in America for decades; no one would be around to pay for their programming.

2.  Expectant mothers, and recent mothers
This is another good 10-15% of the market for adverts.  All kinds of drink mixes and related products – we’re talking powdered milk and nutritional supplements.  Want your child to be strong?  Make sure they drink this kind of milk.  Want your son to grow up to become a wealthy, handsome corporate mogul?  Feed them this juice mix.  Want your fetus to be healthy and come out of you right?  Make sure you drink this nutrient supplement.  It must work pretty well – standing in line before a very expectant mother in a Carrefour last night, I saw a big basket full of those nutritional items.  Nothing like a little maternal panic to make some money.

Anyway, I don’t know anyone in Surabaya, so after I used a signal flare and a compass to navigate my way out of the mammoth shopping mall and walked ten km to the nearest taxi queue, I watched a few hours of TV in my hotel room.  Wow – after one year of grad school with no TV, I had forgotten what it is like to have sixty channels of TV.

***

And then I went to bed, and early afternoon, Sunday, connected up with a second facilitator, and off to Madura we went.

Welcome back to Maumere. 

I took that picture when I got off the plane.  I was not the first to take that picture, I’m certain, and given the immediate actions of the tourists I watched arriving as I departed, I will not be the last.

Anyways, back in Maumere, where the sun shines, there is a light breeze, and having a hotel parked on the beach is within your price range (or, at least the Bank’s).

Don’t want you to think I worked too hard after all, or sweated it out in mosquito-ridden huts in a dusty village.

(Also, the hotel is owned by the airline, so you get airline pastries for breakfast - a humorous touch)

OK, the beach was not all fun and games.  It was fun to laze and read a book after a day of rambling around dusty inland villages.  But not much in the way of games.  This isn’t really a beach where you’re going to go for a nice brisk morning swim.  Walking around in the water at low tide the first time, I kept thinking to myself “This is a rocky beach.  My feet hurt.  Those volcanoes must have left a lot of rock behind millennia ago.”

That would be wrong.  The sharp rocks I was walking on were not sharp rocks; they were eroded cement.

A few Americans are still thinking about the tsunami in Aceh, but I bet almost none are thinking about the Flores tsunami. An earthquake in the Flores Sea, followed up by a tsunami in 1992, killed thousands (not hundreds of thousands, fortunately), and wrecked infrastructure in many places, but especially in Maumere.  I think there was hope that Flores with its varied terrain and attractions would become something of a second, less trafficked Bali (although it would need to be Bali number three – Bali number two is the island of Lombok, to Bali’s east)  After the currency crisis in the late 90s and the Bali bombing in 2002, that possibility seems unimaginable at this stage. 

Here’s where the eroded cement comes in; after the tsunami, the waves moved inland and re-claimed 15 meters of beach.  The cement that was nicking my bare feet was leftover from whatever people had built out into the water before the tides terrifyingly surged up onto the island. 

The longer-term impacts on Maumere as a city are really fascinating.  This is a place where km after km of beach is not settled by the wealthy and privileged.  Women and their children were meandering about at low tide for shellfish to pick and take home for dinner.  Fisherman had parked their boats up and down the beach, seemingly free of charge.  Children played, and I even got trailed by a barking dog when I strayed into its territory while out for a stroll.  The rich don’t want this beach; so, it belongs to the poor.

I look at that fact, and for a moment I say “Forget development.  If you want to get wealthier, this beach won’t be yours anymore.  This beach will be mine.”  And who is to say what the people here really want – to eke out an existence in this quiet, low employment, low energy, and low stress town of 60,000 (probably about the population of my immediate neighborhood in Jakarta).  Or to charge about in SUVs pitching to tourists why they should deal with annoying guides driving them to and fro as they go visiting “traditional villages?”  It’s not for me to answer that question, but I don’t like SUVs rattling about at home, and I certainly don’t enjoy them here.

A language lesson…and some liquor
Here is the internet’s only Bahasa Sikka-Bahasa Indonesia-Bahasa Inggris dictionary:

Apang Gawan – Terima Kasih – Thank You

Hama-Hama – Sama-Sama – You’re Welcome

Mo-AT – Bapak – Mister

Du-A – Ibu – Misses

Bao Sa-AYE – Sampai Jumpa – Goodbye and have a good day

These are a few important phrases when you are rolling around in quiet villages, talking to locals for whom Bahasa Indonesia is at best a second language. 

Don was my “local facilitator” translating all of my questions about decentralization laws and village governments to the mostly village elites that I interviewed.  He also helped me find my way to decent seafood, bargain for nice prices on the local sarung ikat cloth to bring back home (the secret?  Walk Away!), and know where to get whatever I needed in Maumere.  Don is a native of the town, living the next island over now in Kupang, Timor Barat (the other half of East Timor’s island) with his wife, and soon baby (good luck!).  Don wasn’t just a native of Flores or Maumere – he’s a native of the neighborhood where many of the hotels and airline ticket offices are located.  On the last day in town, Don picked me up and took me over to meet Du’a Dela Santo, and we may as well have walked. 

Don and his mother also fixed me up with a couple of bottles of Moke, that being the liquor distilled from the fruit of palm trees in the backyard stills of countless Florenese homes.  There is quite a lot of moke sold in Flores, but basically no moke industry.  People from the villages who live in Maumere bring some back when they go home, and sell it on the streets…in emptied out bottles of Bintang Beer, with corn cobs to plug up the bottles.  I’m serious.  I’ve got two bottles of the stuff sitting here if you don’t believe me, and I’m wondering what it will do to my head when I drink more of the stuff.

(Party at the International House, September 6…maybe call the CU student ambulance, too)

Actually, I really mean more of the stuff because I already had a taste.  Here is the still in Desa Watugong that I visited. 

Not much of a flavor to it really; and after having a gulp from a hollowed out palm nut shell, I can’t say I felt like I had much of a buzz on, although the locals were certain I would be all mabuk and on my ass by the time I made it back to the road.  These kind of stills are all over the villages, people cooking up the booze first for their own consumption, and whatever surplus they can manage for sale.  We were trying to find the former kepala desa (it literally means ‘village head’) of Watugong one afternoon, and wandered back onto his property looking for him.  We decided to wait, and the place to wait was…underneath his still.  He didn’t turn up.  Maybe he had gone off somewhere to sell his moke…or, perhaps, drink it.

(That’s going to be it for pictures in this post.  I was conserving battery power as I managed to fry out the charger for my camera during the trip.  I’m also not comfortable with taking pictures of villagers in settings like this – I’m not artful enough to portray poverty tastefully)

Cuisine in Flores was underwhelming.  I ate at Rumah Makan Jakarta, Rumah Makan Sarinah, Rumah Makan Borobodur, all very cozy locations at the harbor.  But, I may as well have been back in Java – it was all ayam bakar and ikan asam manis, just like it might be here. 

The culture here uses pigs in ceremonies all the time, so I was expecting there might be restos selling pork products and I could get some locally flavored pork ribs (shhh….don’t tell my Jewish friends and family!).  But, no, not really.  Apparently they just save the pigs for the ceremonies, and that’s the only time they eat pig.  Someone had even stopped by Don’s mother’s house that week and made an offer on the sow that was sunning itself in her backyard when I visited.  So, no curious locally-flavored cuisine for me.

Didn’t you come to Flores to work?
Oh, but I did.  Five days, ten interviews, about 35 pages of notes.  It was hard to do much more than that.  Life here just doesn’t move very quickly.  We could have run around like madmen and tried to interview everyone in site asking zillions of questions, but nothing else would be moving that quickly – it would be like some experiment in relativity where I’d be getting real old real fast and everything around me would be aging slowly. 

That’s how life is in Flores.  People work – they keep cattle, they grow rice and cassava and coconut and palm and corn.

(not to neglect tamarind - it was asam season and everyone was breaking tarmind shells in their yards)

They drive transport buses with annoyingly souped up horns and dirty English phrases in colorful letters on the front windows. 

They are catching fish, and sharpening their machetes for days out in the fields. 

Some of them go to offices that are just as relaxed. 

This place is a little bit plugged into the grid of the tourist economy, but once you get past the hassles of the airport and the bus station, just like the world has forgotten much of what’s going on in this city, it also forgets you.

Errr, sort of.  Rolling through these villages, I caused a lot of rubber-necking, a lot of “hello mister,” even some squeals.  Especially shocked when I declared “Bao sa-aye!” as I roll by.  These are places that Pak Bule the white man just doesn’t penetrate most of the time, even if they are a fifteen-minute motorbike ride from “the city.” 

But mostly, life goes on here.  While I interview the kepala desa in Watugong, I hear chickens clucking and children carrying on at the school across the street in one ear, and a way old school typewriter clacking away in the other ear.  It’s the typewriter in one ear and construction of the new village office going on in the other when I get to Nele Wutung later in the week, that is to say, not all that different (although Nele Wutung was visibly wealthier than Watugong – and before the Suharto-era ended, governed by leadership that was much more corrupt; coincidence?).

In that village, when we were finished one afternoon, I asked Don what was up the hill we were on.  He said “the end of the village.”  So, I asked him to take me up there – and the bike fought its way up the steep hill where the pavement had long ago given up and started returning to dust. 

And there it was – a grotto at the top of a stone staircase, with an empty space for the Virgin Mary.  I immediately wonder about who the poor sucker is that has to drag the statue up there when the occasion requires it.  People come up to the end of the village to pay their obeisance when Mary is on display, and then they must turn around and wander back down into it – the end of the village doesn’t lead anywhere – it just takes you back into the wilderness, and no one really wants to go there.

Indeed, there is no end of the village.  It stretches onward, blowing with the dirt past the signs that say “selamat jalan dan terima kasih!” as you leave every village.  But, when you get to Maumere there are still pigs running along on the beach, goats chewing up the grass on the soccer pitch, and chickens dodging traffic.  Old women still have teeth stained with betel.  And young men may lounge on the street corners in jeans instead of sarung, but they are still lounging, with that expectant look that says “What next?”

Don’t have the answer to that question – don’t want to have the answer to that question for anyone but me.

But let me tell you, when I strolled up the beach, I decided to go back inland and walk down the main road off the beach on my way back.  At one stage, I came to a sign across the road from me, and it said “Maumere” in white letters across a blue background. 

There was another sign pointing away from me, and I turned back to look as I passed it.  And there was the exact same sign, but with a red line drawn crosswards.  I guess that sign, indicating the place I had just walked from, meant “Not Maumere.”

And in this place where some clown of a civil servant can simply draw a line across a sign and say what is and is not the city, and what is and is not the kampung, we know it’s all a lie – this place is no city – it is all kampung.

In the research I did, the villages in Flores came across looking much less encumbered, and much less corrupt, with much for zeal for the reform that works so hard everyday to take grip in this country.  But there’s that cynical part of me that wonders if local political leadership has ceased much of its official theft here because there just isn’t that much to steal.

But enough punditry; you can read the report in 2006 sometime if you’re really interested in all that.

…Sudden Stars
The first thing I really sat back and pinched myself about, assuring myself I was not dreaming, was that, yes, there are stars up in the sky tonight over Moni. 

If I stick my head out the door in the evening in Jakarta, there are no stars to see.  There is haze high up, and light reflecting off the sculpted towers that ring my residence – BNI, Four Seasons, Indosat.  But nothing to look up and see.

Here in prosaic and calm but tourist-savvy Moni, there are stars shining in the sky, more than I can count.  And constellations, none of which I can recognize, because I am in the Southern Hemisphere, and all of the reference points they teach us at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium when we are little just don’t measure up down here.

Seeing something vaguely inviting, but not being able to make it out, as I feel with these stars, perfectly encapsulates this condition I face when I arrive in Moni.  There is nothing I like less than the prospect of arriving at a place for the first time at night.  I like touching the ground somewhere with plenty of daylight, giving me the chance to walk around and starting to make two and two equal something it’s supposed to equal.  At night, the world flattens out, colors disappear, and points don’t connect.

But, I was dragged to a boarding house with the claim that everything else in town was filled (probably true), and paid my US$7 for a night; and also paid my US$6 for a ride up to the top of The Mountain.  And what else is there to say about Moni?  That it gets cold, too an uncomfortable level at night?  That’s it’s a lot less busy since the Bali bombing? Moni is a small little town that has the good fortune of being on the only “highway” through the island of Flores, and is also sited next to a natural wonder of the world.  That’s all there is to it.  Some people farm; others learn enough English to take money from people like me, and hang out the rest of the time.  There ain’t much more to say.

But at night, there were *stars*.

Getting There is Half the….Half the what?
I arrive in Moni after working my way from the airport to the bus station in quiet little Maumere.  Maumere’s airport is easily the most third world travel location I have ever been – we step off the plane onto a tarmac and walk to a dusty, hot and crowded room, fighting our way to the baggage claim.  The biggest concern at this airport is not homeland security; it’s whether the baggage going on the planes is going to be too heavy for them to take off.  They are weighing everything here not so that they can collect a fee for overages, but so the puttering engines can get you off of terra that may not necessarily be so firma.

At the bus station, still seated in an SUV “taxi” I rapidly have the arms of seven different punters reaching into the backseat and trying to take my bag (which is heavy, because a certain Indonesian World Bank staff-member who shall remain nameless has tricked the intern into dragging 15 editions of reports to the other end of the archipelago for his two Flores-based friends who will be in Jakarta two weeks later; apparently, hazing is not haram) so they can drive me to Moni.  I ask when they leave; they all say 5 PM; it is 3:30. 

The bus station is hot, and I see a van pulling away.  I point, a man jumps out of the van, grabs my bag, throws it on the top of the van, and crawls up after it…and then the van starts to pull away.  I am still standing in the driveway of the bus station.  I charge, leap, grab onto one of the back railings, which many people will ride upon during our journey, and shout for them to let me on.  This gets some puzzled looks, and there’s definitely a lack of comfort with the fact that I am speaking Indonesian; not because I am speaking Indonesian poorly – but because these folks are probably speakers of Leo or Sikka or one of the other tongues that disunite this small island within itself, let alone from the rest of Indonesia.  (later I am to learn that only two of the local languagues have words for thank you; you’re welcome).

Then they let me on the bus; I say I want to go to Moni.  They scoop me on board, piling me into the back (di belokang, that is) bench with five other people.  And then they stop again.  And the driver makes a dozen people get out.  And they unload their cargo, and there is a bunch of shouting I don’t understand, and the dozen people look displeased but unsurprised, and I have the back bench to myself, and we are on our way.

Over twisting and turning roads, through mountains, bump bump bump – way high, down low, but never too slow.  All manner of things are being thrown up onto the top of this bus – at one point on the way back to Maumere, a squealing pig, all four legs tied together.  But usually, just a half dozen kids, young folks, who as the bus is accelerating around an unguarded curve up on a mountain, are moving themselves from the top, to the side, to the inside of the bus, with no care in the world.  When one does this, I shake his hand, hoping whatever blessing is keeping him where he wants to be in this world will rub off upon me. 

The weirdest moment came when we rounded one curve.  An older looking man, shirtless, a machete in his hand, looks at the bus knowingly – it turns, he hops on, machete still in his right hand, and climbs up on back.  I never quite figured out when he jumped off, and perhaps he is still with me.

The hidden purpose of this “field research” trip
Okay.  Two of the eight case studies being used in the report I am writing are from the island of Flores.  I even visited and researched an update of an unresolved situation described in one of the villages that was studied two years ago. 

But, really, ever since I cracked open a Lonely Planet and saw a photograph of the lakes at Kelimutu on the island of Flores, I have wanted to come here.  And, with that in mind, I pushed and pushed at work to get to make the trip, and there I was.

Flores is a strange island.  Perhaps you’ve heard about the discovery of the "hobbit-sized" Flores Man.  Well, if not, you have now.  (Actually, I think it was a woman.)  There was also the dwarf Flores Elephant.  I think if you could clone these somehow, they’d make a nice chic pet for the Paris Hilton set.  Speaking of flesh-eating lizards, the Komodo Dragon’s home is also next door; sometimes, it crosses the water, and visits the western end of Flores.  The point I am trying to drive home is that Flores is a unique place. 

But take away the dragons, the pet elephants, the pet human ancestor remains.  Take away the surf and the jungle, most of the mountains, the twisting and turning roads, the good scuba locations at Pulau Besar a two hour boat ride from Maumere.  What have you still got?

You’ve got Kelimutu.

Three lakes up in the mountains.

Try to imagine you are the person who millennia ago first discovered this spot.  What went through your mind at that moment? You don’t know exactly what a volcano is, or what it does, or what it leaves behind.  You don’t know how lakes form up in the mountains like this, or how such perfect walls got hollowed out of the rock.  You certainly don’t know anything about chemistry, and how they make colors bloom forth in our natural world. Perhaps you’ve developed a system of belief; is it ready for this?  Could you understand what you were looking at?

I’m still not sure I do.

There is the blue lake, water more sky-colored than anything on the horizon. 

You can see the “red” lake in the background, too.  Here’s me trying not to fall in while taking a picture of myself hovering over one of its walls.  The lake is supposed to be “red” but it’s really more of a reddish-brown, and strictly appears black in these photos because of the sun.

Those two are right next to one another, separated by what must be a thin wall of rock, the blue and red-brown not quite ever coming together.

And off on its own is the black lake, its waters murkiest of all, it’s location off the horizon in just such a way that you need to wait until at least noontime to get some sunlight down on it.  And, frankly, I just didn’t have time to sit for five hours.

But here’s the crazy part; the lakes change color every so often.  The volcanic life that is going on underneath the lakes and rain from above will inject new minerals into the waters; blue will go green, black will get brown, reddish-brown will changes to really red.  The lakes would be a holy site for the locals on their own without any of this; the changing colors must have made this setting seem even more awesome to the people who got here before the rest of us with our cameras and our chemistries. 

On the way down…on the way back
We got up to the top of Kelimutu at about 5 AM, just as the sun was beginning to rise.  Me and three other tourists beat two locals up the hill who wanted to sell us coffee.  I wasn’t buying.  The sun rose intensely, and just the mountains all around on the horizon were beautiful enough to merit their own attention. 

But there were the lakes.  Look, here’s another shot.  And another.  It’s worth taking a couple of different looks at. 

It was a pretty quiet bunch of us up there for about an hour, and then we were intercepted by a gaggle of Indonesian bank employees who were on some kind of family retreat trip from Flores’ larger towns, along with a couple of annoying western European tourists who were photographing *everything*, including themselves with all of the children of the bank employees, one-by-one.

A little before eight, I started working my way down.  I decided I was going to make a hike of it.  It turns out that a couple who had come up with me in the oh-so-freezing-cold truck had also decided to do this; and they were Americans.  And, oh this is rich, one of them was an undergraduate classmate of Ms. Anna Fewell, my occasional travel companion in Jakarta.  It is a small, small universe.  Of course, it could just be that there are like 100 Americans every generation who choose to make a vocation of Indonesia; Anna, her friend Andy, and I, are three of those 100. 

“Wouldn’t want to be in any club that would have me as a member.”

Karen and Andy and I hiked down 15 KM, but Karen was certain it was more like 20.  The specifics are not important.  The mountain left my legs feeling like marmite.  The mountain, I say, but it was really more like hill after hill after hill, a gigantic volcanic structure.  Tropical palms giving way to leafy deciduous trees, giving way to bamboo forests, giving way to perfectly terraced rice paddies. 

I wanted to take a nap amid all the walking; but I didn’t necessarily want to leave.

But, it was time to go.  Cram myself into the back of another van, with another carsick child, and four more hours of rounding curves, once again in the dark, ready to return to Maumere to get to work, the, um, “real” purpose of this whole journey.