Indonesia on the Street

Jogjakarta, Java, Indonesia

Erin and I have just arrived in Jogjakarta and are staying in an actual hotel room, not on the street. Thank you, thank you, we do deserve your applause. The Indonesian Christmas/New Year’s rush is abating and things are returning to normal — meaning that we can now drift around without ever making plans or thinking anything out more than a day in advance, and find all the facilities we need available to us. We even were able to get train tickets to Jakarta today, not on economy class, nor even on business class, but on a prestigious air-conditioned express Executive Class train.

In the last couple of days, Erin and I visited 1100+ year-old temples at Prambanan:





And Borobudur:







There isn’t much to say about those places that these photos won’t render inadequate. We had a sober New Year’s Eve in Borobudur in a hotel full of sober Muslims who were partying in that special, desperate way that sober people have of partying. We were equally sober, but at least we had the good sense to sleep and not to try to dance sober.

I actually have no idea if any of the sober people danced; we were in bed before 10:00 because we were getting up at 5:30.

That night in Borobudur brought us through our New Year’s exile and the next day we were able to come back into the city. Jogjakarta is a fantastic city, and we’re both happy to have a couple of days to just hang out here and enjoy the streets. (As I sit here typing, Erin is also writing a post on her web-log at www.erinmillar.ca about Indonesian streets — it’s nowhere near as good as the post you're currently reading, but it’s probably still not bad. Feel free to check it out.)

Many of you know that I’m a bit of a nut for city planning. I won’t harp on the subject for too long, because I know how my planning conversations with my brother can bore all bystanders until their tongues hang out and their eyes roll back in their heads. I’m going to take three paragraphs to talk about it, and then I promise I’ll go back to talking about Indonesia like a normal human being.

In the past week I’ve seen a very instructive contrast between Solo and Jogjakarta, which to my mind fully vindicate Vancouver’s downtown streetscape policies (which conform to the ideas of new urbanism).

Many of Solo’s streets are too wide, have buildings set back too far from the streets, have blank walls facing the street far too often, and have huge spaces between the access points at different buildings and complexes. The result was that many of Solo’s streets were dead and boring as all hell. If it wasn’t for all of the cart-borne vendors filling in the spaces, even the main streets would have had tumbleweeds blowing down them.



Jogjakarta’s streets, on the other hand, are a chaotic riot of beautiful, vibrant urban life. I’m sure there was very little planning involved in making the streets like this; the city began with a solid framework of streets of varying width, most of them narrow, and frequent enough that there are few large blocks. Then a developing-world entrepreneurial class with little regard for the needs of vehicular traffic was unleashed on it and allowed to fill it in at whatever densities the local non-car-owning population considered economical. The streets contain no dead space; they are densely populated, and they contain hundreds small of small businesses in narrow shop fronts and hundreds more smaller businesses run out of carts and rolling down the street on the backs of bikes.



Okay, I’m done blathering.

Erin and I spent a good couple of hours wandering around today, first through the streets and back lanes of Sosrowijayan (some of which are less than 2 meters wide) and then down Jalan Malioboro, Jogjakarta’s main shopping street. Between the intense riot of activity and interactions with the friendly locals, we had a thoroughly entertaining time. Sure, the locals are often friendly because they’re trying to sell you something and they’re not always up-front about what it is they’re selling, but they’re good sports and they can usually take no for an answer.

Jalan Malioboro is one of the best streets I’ve ever been on in my life, although it’s fairly useless as a transportation artery. The west side of the street is a wall of narrow shop fronts, mostly containing small businesses retailing all of the bricabrac and whathaveyou of everyday Indonesian life. Immediately to the east of the shop fronts is a narrow channel of pedestrian traffic, crammed with people shopping and walking, but not getting anywhere particularly quickly. To the east of them, occupying a great deal of sidewalk space that the pedestrians would love to be using, are small merchants selling more bricabrac and whathaveyou from tables.

I bought a belt from one sidewalk vendor for $4.00, marked down from $8.50, because I’m a foreigner (yeah, right). He then tried to convince us to visit his family’s marionette manufactory just to look, not to buy.

To the east of the tables is a lane of traffic, choked with becaks (bicycle taxis), horse-drawn carriages, the odd motorcycle and the few braver pedestrians who actually want to get somewhere. Separated from this flow of traffic by a narrow median is the one-way two-lane main road for petroleum-powered vehicles, most of which aren’t going anywhere particularly quickly. I’m not sure what was to the east of that; it was hard to see. It’s fair to guess that in most places it was a mirror image of what is on the west side of the road. For at least part of the road, a relatively pedestrian-accessable shopping mall stretched down the west side, but Jalan Malioboro carried vibrantly along in spite of it. It’s too strong a street to be ruined by one shopping mall.



There are no parking lots for cars on Jalan Malioboro. I can’t remember seeing anywhere whatsoever to park a car. The street does fine anyway.

As far as I can tell, the two best things you can do in an Indonesian street are to ride in a becak, and to eat bakso, but never at the same time. You can get a becak ride clear across Jogjakarta for about $2.00 if you speak 50 words of Indonesian like I do, and if you have exactly my level of stubbornness. I’m sure that more persistent tourists are able to get it for half the price I can, and I’m even surer that the locals are paying a quarter of what I pay.

Even at $2.00, it’s good entertainment value for money. Becak seats are always slightly too narrow to fit both mine and Erin’s asses comfortably; we are wide-assed people. I’ve seen as many as four Indonesians share one, but only when at least one of them is a child and another is a particularly skinny teen, and the four have no boundaries of personal space between one another. If you can cram yourselves into one, the discomfort is worth the ride.

Becaks move through the city at a leisurely pace, but they are considerably quicker than walking, even when the man pedaling the becak weighs a third as much as his cargo, as is always the case when Erin and I are riding. This is largely because becaks have their own rules of the road and don’t have to wait to cross streets like pedestrians do. Becak drivers have a firm belief that they have the right of way over absolutely everyone else, regardless of the color of the traffic lights. Other drivers may not agree with this belief, but Indonesians drivers are reluctant to murder the 1 to 5 people riding in each becak, so the question is resolved by fiat in the becak drivers’ favour.

There is no better way to see an Indonesian city than in a becak. They move slowly enough that you can see all the details, but quickly enough that you will eventually get to where you’re going. More importantly, you don’t have to constantly watch for who might run you over, like you do when walking; you can just sit back and take in the scenery and trust the becak driver and whatever divine beings you believe in to worry about the traffic.

Bakso is another Indonesian urban delight that takes a fair amount of faith to enjoy. The moving or semi-stationary carts that sell the stuff have no running water, leaving it an open question as to how they cleaned your bowl and silverware after the last diner. It’s well worth your while to put your trust in your divine beings and your immune system and dig in, though.



Bakso is assembled before your eyes out of yellow noodles, pieces of pre-fried tofu, balls of daging sapi (cow meat), and broth ladled out of the cart’s broth bucket. You then add crushed chilis to taste. A healthy portion of bakso (i.e. one small enough that it can’t overwhelm your immune system) will run you about sixty cents. If you have a bowl for lunch, you’ll be fucking starving by the time six o’clock rolls around, as I am now.



So I’m going to go get supper. I end this web-log post with my remaining bakso photos, accompanied by five minutes of whale song.

(Please imagine five minutes of whale song while looking at the following photos.)

Muslims Behaving Erratically

Solo, Java, Indonesia

So here I am in a Hotel Ibis in Solo (formerly Surakarta), Indonesia. Ibis is a reasonably nice European hotel chain, which in Indonesia is priced like a shabby small town motel in Canada — meaning, several times our normal budget of $10 to $20 a night.


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Our room looks European. It’s slightly smaller than is reasonable, so all of the furniture has a decidedly vertical orientation. The bathroom is also very European; the fixtures are all very modern, the showerhead is aimed at the hair of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Dutchman who is not here, and the bathroom is small enough that if someone (Erin) opens the door while you’re showering, you can’t get out of the shower until she has fully closed it again. But all in all, the room is very comfortable, except when the air conditioning is set to 13 degrees, like it was when we arrived.

As happy as I am for this tiny European vacation in the middle of my Indonesian trip, this isn’t where we planned to stay. I am fairly convinced that this is the only hotel room in the entire city that wasn’t booked last night. And it’s not just Solo where the hotels are slammed; we can’t find anything available for the next several days in Jogjakarta either. Today we called at least 15 different hotels listed in our guidebook, and they were all full. This is an especial problem because we can’t stay here anymore — tomorrow, the Hotel Ibis Solo is fully booked.

This problem isn’t caused by a massive influx of foreign tourists. I think I saw three white people today. It just turns out that the period between Christmas and New Year’s is when Javanese people travel around their island. I had no idea.

I suppose I should have guessed that Javanese people couldn’t be as happy and friendly as they seem to be if they didn’t take some vacation time at least once a year. Everyone needs a vacation. I just had no idea that they all took their vacation in the same places I want to go to and at the same time.

It also seems odd that that time is governed by the birthday of our Lord, Jesus Christ, whose mother was a Virgin, and who died on the cross for our sins, amen, because most of these people aren’t really into JC, the sufferin’ saviour. From what I can see, the locals here do most of their praying under domes surrounded by loudspeakers mounted in tall towers that erupt into wailing song early each morning. I guess what I’m saying is, they’re Muslims. And for Muslims to plan their holidays around Christmas is, to my mind, unconscionably weird.

Erin and I left Bali on the 27th of December, partly to escape the coming New Years’ rush. I know I didn’t tell you guys, but the decision came suddenly. I had assumed that we would stay on Bali — Erin writing, me adding to my giant earwax ball — until New Year’s at least, but Erin got bored of writing and decided that we would leave Bali the instant I felt well enough to leave.

You see, I had been sick. My mind knew we were in the tropics, but my body missed Christmas at home, so I developed myself a really good cold, with a fever and everything. One day I got so chilled that I went for a walk in Bali wearing a hoodie. The other tourists thought I was nuts.

Anyway, Erin got sick of writing, and I got sick of being sick so the very first instant that I felt like I could get on a bus without dying, I did, and we left Bali. I got into a taxi and then into a bus, then a boat, then an economy-class train for six hours (a special treat) and then a pedicab and then another bed. Then Erin and I got up at 2:00 AM to climb a volcano to watch the sun rise, then Erin lost her awesome camera but had it returned to her by a man who only wanted $30 as a reward, and then we got into another economy class train for nine hours and got to Solo, Java, Indonesia, where we got the last hotel room in town.

Just before the economy class train pulled into Solo, Java, Indonesia, we met one of the most irritating and friendly men I’ve encountered on this trip. He was friendly in an aggressive, nearly bullying way, demanding that we answer his questions and refusing to leave us alone, no matter how much our body language (and later, our mouths) told him we were exhausted from being in the 9th hour of a train journey on a day when we woke up at 2 AM to climb a volcano.

Thrusting his wispy Muslim beard into our faces, he demanded to know what our religion is, and when we told him none, he demanded that we explain to him why so many westerners he met said they had no religion. Then he asked whether it was true that there were many devils in the United States. Devils? I asked, and he smiled and his eyes got wider and said, yes, devils, he had seen men flying across the sky on TV, was this not a fact? I wanted him to fuck off so badly that I nearly told him so.

When the train pulled into Solo, he tried to arrange a cab ride for us and finally, I was able to convince him to fuck off, telling him that I wanted to look at the train schedule before leaving the station, and that we were perfectly capable of arranging our own cab. He apologized for annoying us, we assured him he hadn’t annoyed us and that it was nice meeting him, he left, and we proved to be utterly incapable of arranging our own cab.

Walking out of the train station, we were adopted by a man who had both a lisp and the impression that he spoke English. He decided that he would arrange a cab for us and it took me at least ten minutes to understand that the low, low price he was offering was $50. We were unable to deal with the cab driver without the help of this middleman, so we left and found pedicabs who would take us for $2.

Being both overweight and overburdened with luggage, Erin and I decided to be nice to our cab-pedalers and ourselves and get two cabs. At first it was fun, being slowly but peacefully pedaled through the nighttime streets. Halfway across the city, though, my cab got a flat and slowed down, and lost Erin’s cab in the traffic. Then, riding around on one flat tire, my pedicab driver got lost. It took me about six undirected, wandering blocks realize that we had only told the one driver our destination, and the reason my driver seemed so confused was that he had no idea where he was supposed to take me. Finally, I told him where I wanted to go and he took me to the hotel where Erin was nervously sitting in her pedicab, wondering when or if I would show up. The hotel was full.

We went to a second hotel, this one, where they told us that not only were they full, but every hotel in town was full. Then they said they’d try to figure something out, and we sat our filthy, sweaty, volcano-hiking and economy-train-riding bodies on their nice lobby couches and waited. Erin took a shit in their pristine lobby toilet. Then the receptionist told us they had a cancellation, and we were in. We showered, flopped down on our beds and turned on the TV, and BBC World News told us that a few days ago, Hamas felt it would be a good idea to fire rockets at Israel, and Israel responded with their usual subtlety. Now the whole Middle East is up in arms.

On this end of Asia, we’ve got confused Muslims going on vacation for Christmas and booking all of our hotel rooms. On the other end of Asia, we’ve got some other Muslims (less confusedly, but no less inconveniently) fucking up whole countries where we hope to stay.

And God fucking help you if we decide to go to your town. First Bangkok and their crazed souvenir-toting revolutionaries, then Mumbai and their hotel-occupying gunmen, and now this. Erin and I are the fifth and sixth horsemen of the apocalypse. If we even book a ticket to your city, war, famine, pestilence and death will put you on their itinerary. If we even think about a place, in some way it will get fucked up. I swear, the whole reason Vancouver has been under three feet of snow for the last few days is that Erin got homesick over the holidays. Watch the news for Jakarta — I’m sure that sometime in the next week it’s going to get hit by a volcano or get buried in ten feet of dogshit or something equally awful.