So This is Indonesia...

Hello at last! My sincere apologies for being absent for so long. Don’t worry – we didn’t get captured by pirates or arrested by rogue police. We have just been enjoying the best that Indonesia has to offer – which on the small island of Lombok does not include internet service. But I have so much to tell you! And so little time to do it in!

A note about the upcoming blogs. I’ve grown tired of the normal journaling. All that “And today we did blah blah blah then we did blah blah blah and stayed at blah blah” has really grown old. So for the next three months I’ll be experimenting with a new idea, treating my journaling (and therefore my blogs) as a continuing story, more abstract that exact with more impressions than dates and facts. Basically, get ready for some new writing. I hope it is an enjoyable as my past blogs. Only one way to find out! So off we go…

This is the story of three girls, three countries and three in months. For us, the story starts in Denpasar, Bali on April 9th. Lisa and I flew into Indonesia on a dinky plane out of Darwin, Australia. Our two month journey through New Zealand and Oz was finished. My mind soared higher than our plane. The two months prior seemed to me to be baby steps, just extended vacations, preparing us for the real travel that lie ahead. No more English speaking countries. No more contacts from back home now living conveniently where we would be passing through. I was ready. The time was now.
Adding to my excitement was the addition of a new member to our traveling party. Our former roommate and close friend, Desirae, would be eagerly awaiting our arrival in Denpasar. She would be at the end of 30 hours of travel that would take her from San Francisco to Hong Kong and finally to Bali. She was the travel veteran in our midst having spent some time in South East Asia a few years before.
Anticipation, worry, anxiety and excitement were in high degree when our plane finally touched down. We stepped off the pane and into Indonesia. Indonesia! It did not disappoint this soaring soul. The airport was filled with the sweetest smell, familiar yet foreign, dense and light and permanent. It wasn’t until we came across a makeshift shrine in an otherwise boring airport hallway that I finally identified the smell – incense. The air was sweet and heavy with it. I smiled.
We moved like cattle along with other arriving foreigners. My eyes were peeled for Desirae. We had no idea where we were meeting her. The gate? The baggage claim? But first we had to get our visas. Visas in Indonesia are given upon arrival. After rushing to find an ATM for the rupiah (Indonesian currency) needed, we passed through this process with amazing ease. Soon we had both our visas and our baggage in hand and were headed for the door. I whispered a silent prayer that we would find Desirae with no problems. It was a prayer that was quickly answered. Her smiling face was the first we saw as we exited the building. We hugged and smiled and sized each other up. Our adventure awaited us just beyond in the dark, dark night.
The air was dense with humidity. Sweat ran down my back. There was some confusion concerning our ride into town. Desirae had gone to some trouble to secure a ride and now he had inexplicably disappeared. I could see the frustration written on her face but she handled it well and we had soon found another ride. We were headed into Kuta, Bali with our lives and belongings strapped to our backs. We had no idea where we were going, where we would stay or where we should be dropped off.
Oh but I love a new city at night! It intensifies the mystery, magnifies the appeal. Foreign signs, foreign faces are all bright lit in the moment the headlights find them then just as suddenly, they are gone. The sounds – horns beeping, the music thumping, the bells from the cidomos (small wagons drawn by impossibly small horses found everywhere here). People call out, glasses tink. My eyes take it all in. My ears perk up at the newness of it all.
Then we are being dropped off in the middle of a roundabout and pointed towards our “destination,” a street supposedly packed with hostels. We stagger forth – three inconspicuous girls, packs on our backs, extra bags strapped to our chests. It’s heavy. We are hot. We are unsure as to where we are and must look completely lost for a local guy with chocolate skin and a mob of wavy dark hair walks up and says, “What you looking for?” We don’t know – a place to stay? And off he goes navigating the narrow labyrinth of streets easily. We follow as best we can.
The town is packed. Every road is lined with seemingly endless and identical shops filled to brimming with the touristy knickknacks such a town requires – sarongs and shirts in every color and texture, elegant pottery with inlaid glass, tacky phallic sculptures, knock-off wallets and authentic wares. The owners cry out the same effortless stream of words – “Hel-lo! You want? Good price – cheap for you my darling!” We stare wide-eyed. It’s too much for the senses. A flood of bad karaoke, loud music and strange voices.
Our guide leads us to two hostels, both full. Across from the second is an out of the way place whose name I am still unable to recall. It’s quiet and clean if a bit shabby. Finally, after a combined time of just under 48 hours of traveling, we spend our first night in Indonesia in a hostel never mentioned in a Lonely Planet but which turned out to be worth every penny of the $7.50 per night (and that’s per room – not per person!).
Our good fortune started there and I am happy to report it is following us still. That hostel was located in a quiet area (or quiet for Kuta at least!) within range of several good restaurants and just a short walk to the famous Kuta Beach.
Kuta was a time of introduction and adaptation to foreign travel. As our bodies adjusted to the humidity, our eyes adjusted to the crowded streets, our ears to the foreign voices and our feet to the pockmarked roads and cracked sidewalks. We adjusted to our daily doses of malaria pills. We adopted the automatic “No” response to the hagglers, our eyes straight ahead, never pausing to look unless we were truly interested in buying.
We adjusted to the food. There are delightful dishes of rice and noodles. Nasi goreng is the most common local dish – a fried rice with cabbage, carrots, and whatever else they happen to have in the kitchen. You can get this breakfast, lunch or dinner. I’ve had it many times and many places and not one of them is the same. Mie goreng is a fried noodle dish much like the rice dish above. They have a unique and exotic spicy flavor – not the burning heat of Pad Thai or the spicy warmth of Mexican food but a subtle flare that increases as you eat. Lisa is in love with the vegetable entrees here. There are plenty to chose from – gado-gado, cap-cay, ola-ola – all of which are a mixture of a local spinach, carrots, onions, and garlic served with different sauces and in different ways.
The fruit is abundant as well served with almost every breakfast you have. We quickly became addicted to the local pancakes which are thinner and sweeter than the American version and almost always have bananas or pineapple mixed in. The Bali coffee has proven to be an addicting drink as well.
We brave the narrow streets to walk to the beach. I’m excited expecting calm, clear waters and powdery white sand. Hawaii has spoiled me immensely. I am immediately disappointed. Kuta Beach is a long expanse of powdery sand infiltrated with garbage and muck. The waves break clean and beautiful just offshore but to get to them you would have to swim through some of the most polluted water complete with floating trash and a filmy surface. Adding to this lack of appeal is the over abundance of hagglers. You can stop to scratch your backside without 10 haggard looking men and women bombarding you with offers of jewelry and massages and pedicures. With their tattered Western clothing and sullen faces, they wander up and sit or squat beside you and beginning rubbing your feet and saying “Massage? Cheap for you – morning price!” I learn from Desirae that “morning price” means that you are their first customer and they believe that the first customer is lucky. If that customer is a good experience, the tone is set for the day.
These people make me tired. There was no novelty in this. Poverty is a disease that lurks in the shadows and begs with its eyes. These people are trapped in a lifestyle that offers no upward progression but even as I thought about their dire straights and my blessing abounding, I grew impatient and weary of their endless need. Already a callous was forming on my heart. I chalked it up to self preservation. What else could I do?
So this was Kuta and Bali to me – a maze of emotions, impressions and incense. Everywhere were the modern conveniences my eyes were accustomed to – McDonalds, Starbucks, Quicksilver – but it was all built around monuments and shrines from a people and culture that lies just beneath the filmy surface of tourism and modernization. It is as simple as the offerings placed on each doorstep every morning – small boxes made of banana or palm leaves about 2 in by 2 in with no top that contain bright flowers, bits of rice, bottle caps and toys. Gifts to please the gods and appease the demons. Gifts that are crushed under foot, run over by mopeds and eaten by stray dogs but are never the less dutifully and unquestionably offered every day. They are the gifts of a people who neither embrace nor deny the changes around them. Instead they simply add the new on top of the old, mixing the tradition with the tourism.

That was over two weeks ago and I am already looking at the end of this amazing stay in Indonesia. I have much, much more to tell you but I’m sure this will keep you busy for a day or two while I finish writing the second part of our journey – our trip to Lombok.

I hope this finds you all happy and healthy. I miss each of you and love you all. Keep in touch. Until next time…

Love from the road

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle...

Well, our time in Oz grows short. We will leave Cairns today to fly to Darwin, our last stop before heading to Bali on Wednesday afternoon. We've had a great time Down Under full of surprises and chance meetings all of which has led to very long blogs. I'm sorry for the increasingly length but hey - you can't rush a good story! On that note, here's another long tale for ya...

Australia is a persistent place – the people, the land, the animals. They are all seemingly comfortable with overcoming horrendous hardships at every turn. This is a land where people mingle with ancient reptiles, where the world’s oldest rainforest (Daintree Rainforest) meets the world’s largest living organism (the Great Barrier Reef), where the cities sit peacefully next to an unforgiving sea. Yes, this is a land steeped in persistence and I love it for that.
This last weekend we took a trip through the very heart of persistence into a jungle that has continued to grow and prosper in a world that is increasingly hostile to pristine wildernesses. The Daintree rainforest sits north of Cairns about 2 hours. It reminds me of one of those pictures of a face that, upon closer inspection, is actually made up of hundreds of smaller pictures. Daintree is at first glance a living, breathing green mass of impenetrable trees but as you get closer this mass becomes manageable – or at least approachable. Vines as thick and as intricately woven as ropes hang from trees whose tops remain out of sight. It seems a violent place – full of trees and plants that will poke you and prod you and otherwise torture you if carelessly brushed against or unknowingly stumbled upon.
Take for example the aptly named “stinging tree” or the equally ambitious “wait-a-while.” The stinging tree has quite innocent, almost inviting heart-shaped leaves. But this little ‘bugger’ is a heartbreaker. Each leaf is covered in tiny hollow needles just dying to embed themselves in your flesh should you have the bad luck to come in contact with one. We were told that thus accosted the needle creates a ferocious burning that can last for several months – yes, months. A friend of our friends had the misfortune of getting too close for comfort and brushing a leaf with her exposed thigh. The pain was such that later that day she cut the same thigh with a knife (eventually requiring stitches) and didn’t even notice immediately because the stinging tree’s sting so significantly reduced all other afflictions.
The wait-a-while doesn’t have the nastiness of the aforementioned demon but causes irritation in the same degree. This wily little vine snakes away from a palm-like plant and hangs at shoulder or ankle length, just perfect to snag an unsuspecting hiker. And snag it does! This vine is armed with barbs facing upward so that once embedded in the skin, hair or clothes the victim must back up (or wait-a-while) as they remove the barbs and untangle themselves from the vine.
And these are just the plants! I won’t go into the spiders the size of your fist, the multiple deadly snakes, the crocs lurking in every creek or the cassowaries waiting to slash open your exposed skin with one death-like kick from their taloned feet. (And, no, I did not just make up a monster or quote some line from the Jabberwocky. A cassowary is an emu-like bird with dark black feathers and a blue neck and horned head. I promise – I can’t make this stuff up!) All of this violence and danger is covered nicely by the most brilliant and lively shades of green you could imagine. If ever you desire to get a true-to-life prospective of how small you are in the grand scheme of things, take a walk up Cooper’s Creek or stand beside a strangler fig the size of a small building. Perspective, I must say, comes in shades of green.
But don’t be alarmed by the flora and fauna I described above. Those are nature’s scary stories – much like the ghost stories about abandoned houses told to children at night so that they won’t go wondering into unsafe places. Nature doesn’t plot against our survival – it merely tries to survive. If anything, be encouraged that in this day and age of corporate ladders, insurance scams, mobility and mass media that there remains a place so uncontrollably and undeniably wild that our dominion and domain shrinks to insignificant and poorly paved roads cutting the tiniest of ribbons through a world we can’t fully understand, categorize or replicate. I dread the day when man decides he has learned all there is to learn. Thank God that I live in a time where knowledge is bountiful but forever lacking, where the root of a tree still captures my imagination and the deep blue-green of a creek still thrills and scares me. If ever you desire to get a true-to-life prospective of how small you are in the grand scheme of things, take a walk up Cooper’s Creek or stand beside a strangler fig the size of a small building. Perspective, I must say, comes in shades of green.
A dose of wilderness to such a degree can leave one feeling shell-shocked and bland. You’ll stare at normal trees and flowers with a kind of disappointed air. You’ll dream about the sounds and smells of that magical place only to wake to ho-hum sunlight and the clinks and clanks of everyday life. But it’s worth this apathetic feeling because it serves as a reminder that something wild is always lying just beyond the horizon. That the mystery and the grandeur of raw earth and wind and rain is never truly out of reach. I read recently that to realize how small you are, you must realize how little you actually have. Case in point – what gifts could I bring to the rainforest? Nothing more than to leave it alone. To tread lightly and softly. But what gifts did that rainforest give to me? All the green in the trees, all the life in the earth, and all the air that I was breathing! And it gave it willingly. How’s that for a shade of perspective?
Basically, this two day reprieve into my own private Walden Pond left me thinking about all things great and small. It was a perfect place for thinking. Our temporary residence was the Crocodylus Lodge, a scattering of basic bungalows of unique construction cut into the dense forest with a conscious effort to disturb as little as possible. The frames of these bungalows were large, smooth logs over which green canvas tarps were stretched. The ‘roof’ was water-proofed tarp, the walls were of a more mesh-like material so that I awoke both days to filtered sunlight and the silhouettes of trees and vines crowding around the bungalow. Birds called out from the bush throughout the night and, though it was unnerving at times, it fit the natural ambiance of the area.
This place – and this weekend – was owed entirely to our generous hosts, Steven and Kelly Real, and their true-blue Australian buddy, Warren, and his fiancée, Hazel. Warren was a natural tour guide with a full arsenal of hair-raising and hilarious stories as well as tons of facts and information about the trees, fish and animals that call the rainforest home. I felt like a kid on a field trip and I must have been just as annoying with a constant stream of questions. Warren drove us patiently to every worthwhile lookout and beachside view. He let us take seemingly thousands of pictures from every angle possible.
Our first day took us almost all the way to Cooktown through Aboriginal villages full of vacant-looking locals sitting on porches and wandering the streets. We drove through rocky ‘streams’ (that looked much more like rivers to me), up steep inclines and across sand dunes in Warren’s 4 wheel drive Land Cruiser. All the while the forest stood calmly around us as if breathing in and out in the same way it has done for millions of years. That day was highlighted by exotic sampling of local cuisine – we ate the bright green butts of an ant called, you guessed it, the green ant which tasted strongly of lemon – and catching a glimpse (and plenty of pictures) of a 6 foot Amethyst Python crawling lazily up an embankment.
Day two was even more engaging. Warren took us on a 5 hour hike up Cooper’s Creek (and by up, I literally mean up. We walked through the creek which was ankle-deep to “We’re going to have to swim this part” in depth.) The way was rocky and slippery but we sloshed along under vines and fern trees and past pools which were a rich cobalt blue. Our reward was nothing short of magnificent. Alexander Falls, a plummeting masterpiece of white water and black rock, whose top looked impossibly high, the water gushing out of a tree-lined ridge. We stood beneath its crystal waters and smiled broadly. It was cold and fresh and all the things a waterfall is supposed to be at the end of a long hike. It was a truly spectacular weekend, a gift from people whose hospitality and generosity had already left me eternally grateful. North Queensland with her magnificent forest and much-needed relaxation turned out to be yet another crown jewel in our stay in Australia.

This will probably be my last blog from Oz. I'll do my best to keep the blog up in Southeast Asia but it might prove to be a little more difficult. Don't worry about us if I haven't posted in a while. Lisa has a new computer to add to our toys in tow - so hopefully I'll write plenty on that. Which means multiple posts when we finally do get a chance to use an internet connection.

I hope you are all enjoying spring weather and good health. Keep in touch. Miss and love you all.

Fairwell for now - We're back on the road...