Apparently the age of the internet café is over, ended by near-ubiquitous smartphones and data coverage. And so my search for somewhere in North Sulawesi to write this blog took me from Tomohon to the regional capital Manado, via a barbershop and a car stuck in a hole, and now to a dark and smoky room of teenage boys playing violent online games.
I’m five weeks into travelling in Indonesia, during which I’ve seen much of the islands of Java and Sulawesi, but even that has meant leaving huge swathes of this enormous archipelago for another time. To get so far I had to fly, of which more in another blog; suffice to say for now that I’ve decided to fly once every two years (rather than never), hoping that this approach will be more sustainable for me at a personal level, and that the idea of taking fewer flights rather than none will be easier for others to replicate.
After my first flight in four years, then, I arrived in Jakarta, where I was hosted by Anton, who I met through Couchsurfing. Anton is part of the large Chinese community in Jakarta, and has set up an eponymous college which prepares students for maths exams for international universities. as well as coaching Indonesia’s international maths olympiad team. As ever, I appreciated having a local host to introduce me to a rather formidable city (11 million and counting); by myself I would not have found a massage parlour overlooking a darkened hall containing 74 foot reflexologists doing their work, nor would I have drunk fresh melon juice at the top of a downtown skyscraper.
Jakarta was also where I made my first forays into Bahasa Indonesia, thenational language, which rightly has a reputation for being easy to learn – with no plurals, conjugations, or declensions. I had learnt a little in advance, and was bizarrely complimented on my accent as early as the airport bus. I’ve carried on learning vocabulary since then – particularly when I’ve had English-speaking acquaintances – and now speak it here most of the time. It’s made life easier, and has of course allowed me to get to know people better than when I usually travel. I think I’ve been more sympathetic towards Indonesians than I would otherwise have been – it’s harder mentally to ‘other’ people when you can understand what they are saying. Regardless of language, practically everyone I’ve met in the country has been exceedingly friendly: smiles and offers of help all round.
From Jakarta I travelled east through Java to Yogyakarta (known as Jogja), Surakarta (aka Solo), Malang, and the wealth of truly stunning historic sites surrounding them, such as 9th-century Buddhist Borobudur or Hindu temple complex Prambanan. To describe them all would take at least another blog post, but I can make two general impressions. Firstly, how much of a minority I represented as a foreign tourist, clamoured around by Indonesian visitors looking for selfies (partly down to visiting in the middle of the rainy season). Secondly, how these ancient sites often seemed like sanitised havens plonked in the middle of busy, noisy, modern towns. Part of me wanted them to feel more connected their environs, like an English village church might be. But that’s not how Indonesia is; a tiger economy that’s raced to World Bank middle-income status necessarily sees rapid and sometimes ugly change, and accepting all the faces of Indonesia has been part of my travel experience.
It was also in Java that I became cognizant of quite what an effect Dutch colonisation had on Indonesia, and indeed in creating it in the first place. The country has scores of cultures across a huge region that need never otherwise have been brought together. Jakarta, for example, only really became significant as the first Dutch capital. Even Bahasa Indonesia is a form of Malay that was introduced by the Dutch as a lingua franca. All around the country, the grandest buildings, ancient monuments aside, tend to be colonial – they are still often emblazoned in orange, as are post offices. And when locals saw me as a foreigner walking through their rural villages, they would often simply call out ‘Belanda’. or ‘Dutch’. Becoming more aware of the ongoing importance the colonial period has on every aspect of Indonesia was shocking. This of course is the way of colonisation all over the world, and will be no news to a lot of people. However, for some reason (speaking the language, or perhaps just life experience) I’ve understood its effects in Indonesia more than before.
Another unavoidable aspect of Java is its volcanoes: they loom up on all sides of its cities and its fertile rice paddies, from Krakatoa in the west, to Bromo in the centre, to Ijen in the east. Climbing Gunung Ijen (‘Lonely Mountain’) was particularly memorable; I left my guest-house at 1am in order to descend into the crater at night, and see the ‘blue fire’, a huge sulphur vent that is constantly alight with an indigo flame. A couple of hours later the sun rose over the crater lake, an body of intense turquoise-green stretching towards jagged peaks in the distance. Ijen is also remarkable for a more sobering reason: the 50-odd miners that haul huge loads of sulphur out of the crater. They are at the same time hugely impressive – they make two runs a day, carrying up to 120kg on their backs – and horrifically exploited: the Chinese company that employs them pays around 5p per kilo, doesn’t pay for their transport, and leaves them to live in unheated huts on the slopes of the mountain. I haven’t otherwise seen a lot of absolute poverty in Indonesia, but the miners’ lifestyle was a long, long way from the prosperity of the cities.
From Java I travelled to Sulawesi (formerly known as Celebes). I can’t help mentioning that it is a particularly crazily shaped island whose geography has always fascinated this cartophile.
On Sulawesi I first spent a week in Tana Toraja, in the southern highlands. As well as being situated in beautiful wooded mountains rolling from one valley to the next, Toraja is home to a remarkable culture that places a big emphasis on death. Funerals are bigger celebrations than weddings, and can take a year or more to plan; the one I visited lasted five days, and I saw twenty pigs being slaughtered, with an unfortunate buffalo and deer to follow the next day. Well-off people can be buried in vaults dug into rocks (costing £10,000 or more), and the largest rocks might contain twenty graves. Toraja was animist until recently, and while it is now staunchly Christian, buffalo horns and wooden buffalo heads, are still put on the sides of houses, graves, and even the occasional church altar.
I took the opportunity to do some trekking in the hills of Toraja, walking first from Tandiallo (in nearby Mamasa) to Bittuang, and later from Baruppu to Batutumonga. For both walks I passed through many wonderfully situated villages, with lots of traditional Toraja houses, with their high. boat-shaped, sloped roofs, and intricate carvings. In both trips I was invited to stay in local homes, which were shared with up to around 20 extended family members, and had the chance to spend time with my hosts, whether playing volleyball, teaching games from Jewish youth groups days, or chatting over freshly-ground coffee they had grown on their own plots. There were however some long, hot days walking, and the locals’ sense of ‘jauh’ (far) and ‘dekat’ (close) was sometime frustratingly changeable: the village of Bittuang, over approximately half-hour intervals, was 10km away, then still 10km, then 3km, then 6km, and finally 2km.
It was rather depressing to see that in most of the villagers’ houses I visited, the centre of attention, which everyone usually sat to face, mesmerised, was the television – even when it was showing adverts and had the volume turned so low as to be unintelligible. Something similar seems to occur to a lesser extent in the cities, where Indonesians of all ages spend huge amounts of time poring over their smartphones, often checking Facebook or WhatsApp. I am very much aware that it’s easy for me as an outsider to be judgemental, but I think the tech addiction is stronger here than in the UK. I’d posit that could be a result of so much technology having appeared in a much shorter amount of time than in the west, where we’ve had decades to adapt to its temptations. At times it seems as if most people in countries in Indonesia have been dealt the shitty bits of western-led globalisation: foreign-made but poor-quality clothes; pop music in a western idiom which often doesn’t move beyond three chords; single-portion plastic sachets of Nescafé that clog up the waterways. In my less optimistic moments I wonder what the continuation of this modernising trajectory looks like, and whether it’s a dystopian future in which billions of people around the world stare rigidly at Facebook, all the time.
In part to escape the reach of the network, I headed from Toraja three days north, to the Togean Islands, which lie in the gulf between Sulawesi’s east and north arms, which don’t yet have (much) phone coverage – and which also happen to be beautiful tropical islands. This was a conscious departure for me: I usually go for mountains and walking over sea and beaches, but wanted to try something different. I reached the islands by public ferry from the town of Ampana: a wonderful six-hour journey that was a liberation not just from phone signal for also from the heat of the mainland and the ugliness of urban sprawl. I spent three days on the island of Malenge, and three on Una Una (an active volcano). Both fit the tropical paradise box, but I was most amazed by the snorkelling: as a tropical reef-virgin I was blown away by the quantity, colour, and richness of the Attenborgisch corals and fish. I did veer on the side of boredom on the islands, but was grateful for the reminder that even a tropical paradise isn’t always exciting and perfect: I know I’ll miss it in a couple of months, but it also showed me how much I also miss about life at home.
So the grass is often greener on the other side. Although not, to strain a metaphor, for the animals of North Sulawesi. I visited the market in Tomohon, where, alongside all parts of pigs, one can buy butchered snake, bat (wings pre-detached) and dog. Fortunately for one pescatarian, the grilled fish options are also tasty.
I’ll soon be back in Jakarta, ready to return home. My six weeks here have been a fascinating insight into the huge spectrum of cultures that form this composite nation, if more of a reminder than I expected of the ways in which Indonesian culture has moved towards our own. For all that, after spending over a month on two of the world’s biggest islands world, it still feels like I’ve only scratched the surface of this remarkable country.
