Friday 25 April 2008

Islam Wetu Telu


Traditional beliefs in Lombok, Indonesia


Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, January 2008




“Allaaaaaah uh akbar…” Five times a day the Muslim prayer call rings out through the stands of palm trees from whitewashed mosques with brightly shining stainless steel domes. Men in skull caps and loose tartan sarongs make their devotions among the rice terraces and in the distance the broken cone of Gunung Rinjani shows purple against a clear sky.

The island of Lombok, to the east of Bali, is a place of perfect beaches and stunning scenery where tourist development is still low key and the “real Indonesia” is easy to find. It is sometimes described as “like Bali twenty years ago”, but this tag does neither island justice, for Lombok deserves to stand as a destination in its own right, and importantly, it has a very different culture. Bali is a Hindu island, while on Lombok the native Sasak people are Muslim.

Local legends tell that Islam arrived on Lombok in the 16th Century, brought ashore by a wandering Javanese mystic who built the first mosque near the north coast at the village of Bayan. Over the years as the new religion spread across the island it mixed with the web of local beliefs. A combination of indigenous ancestor and spirit worship, elements of Hinduism that drifted across from Bali, and the very basic tenants of Islam produced a belief system unique to Lombok. It was called Islam Wetu Telu, and a century ago the majority of Sasaks described themselves as Wetu Telu Muslims.

Wetu Telu means “three elements” in the Sasak language. Just what those three elements are depends on who you talk to, but people on Lombok will tell you that the trinity might be birth, life and death; conception, the egg and its hatching, or perhaps ancestors, god and human life. Wetu Telu Muslims had ceremonies to honour local spirits, to give thanks for harvest and to ensure rain. From Islam they took little more than the belief in an almighty god, and a vague notion of Mohammad as the prophet of that god. Corrupted Arabic prayers were uttered along with fragments of old Sanskrit or Javanese mantras; Wetu Telu Muslims celebrated only the most important of the Islamic festivals, they showed no interest in the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and abstained from food for only a few days during Ramadan. They brewed a fiery rice liquor known as brem, and many were happy to eat the meat of the wild pigs from the forest – both forbidden to orthodox Muslims.

But old traditions fade. After Lombok came under the control of the Dutch colonialists a more orthodox Islam began to take hold. It was still a tolerant and typically Indonesian form of the faith – far removed from the austere ways of the Middle East - but as the 20th Century progressed the subtle nuances and the twists of local flavour faded. In Lombok this new, orthodox religion was sometimes known as “Modern Islam”, but more often as Islam Waktu Lima – “Five Times Islam” - referring to the required number of daily prayers, and differentiating it from the “Three Elements” of Wetu Telu.

By the late 1960s there were very few Sasaks left who would describe themselves as Wetu Telu Muslims and the old beliefs seemed to have been consigned to the history books. But not entirely.

The greatest stronghold of Islam Wetu Telu was always the very place where Islam first took root in Lombok: the remote villages around Bayan on the north coast, beneath the towering outline of Rinjani.
Today tourists come to the area to take in the stunning views across tumbling rice terraces, or to start the arduous but rewarding trek up from the hamlet of Senaru, through the forest and on to the summit of Rinjani, Indonesia’s second highest volcano. They also come to see life in the deeply traditional Sasak villages that dot the area. But few realise that they are among people who have made a remarkable effort to preserve their Wetu Telu culture.

These days many Sasaks are a little reluctant to talk about Islam Wetu Telu, and even around Bayan many will insist that they are “modern” Waktu Lima Muslims, though they will admit to being far from strict with their daily prayer routine. An old myth about Wetu Telu Muslims is that they fast only three days during Ramadan, and the people of Bayan will make it clear that this was never true: they fast for about nine days. A full month without food or drink during daylight hours would be impractical for busy rice farmers they say.
Islam Wetu Telu still exists here, they will explain if you ask with polite interest, but these days it has been re-designated as a system of traditional adat, or “custom” alongside the orthodox religion. The people of Bayan celebrate each of the major Islamic holy days twice, once in the modern mosque, and then again a few days later in the old mosque – said to be the oldest on the island. This ancient mosque is close to the road on a low hilltop in the centre of Bayan. Built of bamboo and rough wood with a roof of shaggy thatch, it is only used for Wetu Telu ceremonies. When praying there the locals wear traditional Lombok sarongs and headscarves, and mark their foreheads Hindu-style with a dot of chewed betel nut known as sembek.
Those who maintain Wetu Telu traditions still hold celebrations to give thanks for the yearly rice harvest, and they still venerate the ever-present bulk of Rinjani as the home of powerful spirits. Residents of villages on the slopes will tell tales of people turned to stone for behaving disrespectfully up in the cool air above the tree-line – something trekkers might want to keep in mind.
And deep in the forest above Bayan, far from the modern mosques there are mysterious shrines, preserved since centuries past. Hidden in the dense undergrowth, along slippery paths are simple platforms of mossy stones. Most important is the Gedeng Daya, a place of huge importance for the Wetu Telu people. The shrine is the abode of spirits and is watched over by the Perumbaq, a guardian who lives in a simple hut nearby. Mysterious ceremonies are held here on certain nights of the year when the Perumbaq calls down the spirits from the mountain, and offerings are made.
There is a similar shrine, the Gedeng Lauq, on a stretch of remote coastline to the north, and this too is guarded by a Perumbaq. The position of shrine guardian is passed down from father to son, and the Perumbaq and his family are bound by certain taboos. They live in special house outside the main villages, and must always dress in traditional Lombok sarongs. The Perumbaq Lauq has long, uncut hair.
Traces of old Wetu Telu ways remain scattered throughout the villages of Lombok, but it is in the Bayan area that these things have remained strongest. Orthodox religion and deeply un-orthodox tradition exist side by side here in a strange marriage of convenience, with the mournful Arabic of the prayer call ringing out from the minarets of new-built mosques, while deep in the forest the Perumbaq guards the spirit shrine. Islam Wetu Telu still survives, and the people of the Bayan area are proud of their ancient traditions. And in case you were wondering, yes, they do still brew that fiery rice liquor called brem – it’s quite nice, though it will give you a terrible hangover…


© Tim Hannigan 2008

Surabaya dusk 'til dawn


An exploration of Surabaya, Indonesia, after dark

Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, December 2007

5.30pm; Saturday. From the high rooftop of Tunjungan Plaza the sprawl of red-tiled houses curves away in all directions. A late flight to Jakarta is roaring westward through the paling sky, and the lights of the big advertising hoardings are flickering on. The sun – a crimson thumbprint in the murky air of the East Java capital – touches the horizon.
“Allaaaaaaah uh Akbar…” From the city below the call to Maghrib prayer rings out into the dusk. Night has fallen over Surabaya.
***
Every town shows a different face at night, and Surabaya, a vast collection of villages by day, seems like a real city after dark. Tonight I plan to stay awake until dawn, criss-crossing the city by motorbike, exploring its nocturnal side.
***
7pm; the traffic is at its thickest now, roaring through the web of one-way streets that wrap around Surabaya’s modern downtown. The crushing heat of the day has passed and people are outside, relaxing; cafes and ice cream parlors are packed. Taman Bungkul, one of Surabaya’s few public spaces, is crowded with families. Teenagers in baggy jeans practice their skateboard tricks on the ramps and railings, and kids play with the cheap plastic toys sold by wandering vendors. And I am hungry.
Food is a passion in Surabaya, and the best place to eat is on the streets. Since sunset the roadsides have been lined with makeshift cafes. Each has a specialty, from the ubiquitous nasi goreng, to obscure regional dishes. Some are mediocre, some are excellent, and some are famous. Roti Bakar Citras is in the latter category. On a roaring side-street off Jalan Kertajaya, wonky tables are set up along a narrow strip of pavement. I order a sweet coffee – the first of many tonight – and one of Citras’ famed toasted sandwiches.
***
9.30pm; north of the city centre, past the Heroes’ Monument, towering into steamy darkness, along dark streets to Chinatown… The thoroughfare of Kembang Jepun is closed to traffic, and plastic chairs and tables are set out under the red Chinese lanterns. This is Kya Kya, the al fresco dining strip held every night. At the end of the street a gaggle of women – of a certain age – are slyly knocking back Bintang beer and dancing enthusiastically to karaoke dangdut.
From Kya Kya I drive east, way out into the suburbs along streets where lamps burn in simple night stalls, and burly security guards lounge at the gates of middle class compounds. Jembatan Merr, the bridge over the Kali Jagir River, is packed. Pavements are lined with worn mats and low tables, crowded with young couples. Coffee again for me, and some steamed peanuts in a twist of old newspaper from a vendor. It is after 11 o’clock and I notice that the traffic has thinned, only a few motorbikes streaking through the night. I finish my coffee, drop a few coins in the cup of the buskers playing battered guitars, and head back for the centre.
***
Tengah malam – midnight. The downtown streets have an edgier feel. Shops and restaurants are closed, though here and there lights blaze in an all-night warung or internet café. Huge mobs of youths in skin-tight jeans and black sweatshirts crowd the pavements, vigorously revving the engines of their motorbikes. Every Saturday these motorbike gangs gather in Surabaya, racing along dark streets and cruising the city in convoy. I fall in among one of the gangs for a while, and they call out cheerily to me despite their sinister appearance: “Hello mister! Good evening!”
I make a sharp turn into a side street to avoid a police checkpoint and head north again. The streets of the Old City are eerily empty. I catch the smell of garlic and onion skins, and see one ghostly becak creaking through the night. This part of the city, with its narrow alleys and derelict shop-houses, is a creepy place at night and I am glad when I see bright lights on a street between Chinatown and the Arab Quarter. Men in rubber boots are lugging barrels of fish from trucks and tough Madura women are haggling over prices. The fish market has been open since late afternoon and the ground is slimy underfoot. The air is pungent with fish and kretek cigarette smoke.
***
Tiredness creeps up. The dark band of the Kalimas River cuts through the night as I speed along empty streets. The next two hours blur into a jumble of brief images: a pair of youths in hooded sweatshirts furtively marking a wall with graffiti; a group of men seated around a television in a narrow, blue-walled room; streetwalkers of questionable gender stepping suddenly from the shadows; the shark-and-crocodile statue that commemorates Surabaya’s founding myth starkly white in the darkness; an enormous transvestite in a limp red dress striding along the cracked pavement, and the shadowy outlines of becak, loaded with mysterious bundles, rolling through the gloom.
I am tired, and hungry, and surprisingly cold. I find a simple all-night café on Jalan Mayjend Sungkono. Indonesian pop music is playing on the stereo, and a boy with weary eyes serves me a bowl of Madurese soto and a cup of sweet, grainy coffee. A shining SUV pulls up on the street outside. Three obviously drunk men stumble out and order food. I have a good idea where they have come from: most of Surabaya may be sleeping, but there’s a place where there’s still something going on.
***
3am – Jalan Dolly. Somewhere among the graveyards and working-class kampungs on the high ground above the Banyu Urip Canal the narrow streets of Dolly and Jalan Jarak are packed. Taxis and motorbikes clog the road and the throb of high-volume dangdut music shakes the air. This is Surabaya’s most notorious corner, claimed – wrongly, apparently - to be Southeast Asia’s biggest red light district. Wonky neon signs glow along the shop-fronts and bright strip lights shine in big-windowed “guesthouses” where bored women with blond-streaked hair and short skirts lounge on sofas, waiting. I’m too tired to face the rough gloom of the dangdut bars, so I opt for a soft drink at a roadside stall. No one bothers me and the place seems lively, almost festive. But I remember the reports I read almost weekly in the Jawa Pos of trafficked women, some of them horrifyingly young, in the brothels here.
***
As I leave Dolly I sense a change in the rhythm of the night. The darkness is as heavy as ever, but there is a little more traffic on the roads: the people who have been awake all night are beginning to meet the early risers of the coming day.
Beside the river the Keputran vegetable market is a blaze of light. All night trucks have been rolling in from the East Java hinterland and porters squelch through the mud under enormous loads of carrots, onions and beans. The workers and stallholders seem to get through the night on a brew of ready humor, and I am met with cheerful greetings and bursts of riotous laughter. Then I hear something above the voices: the loudspeaker of a mosque across the river has been switched on and a taped prayer is playing into the darkness. The end of the night is within reach.
***
From the market I drive south through silent suburbs until I reach Mesjid al-Akbar, the Great Mosque, better known as Mesjid Agung. The summit of the Ottoman-style minaret is floodlit, burning like a candle flame against the blackness. As I arrive men in clean white shirts and loose tartan sarongs are hurrying up the steps and into the cavernous interior. I can hear the low hum of traffic on the toll road beyond the mosque, and birds are singing in the darkness. Through the arched doorway I see the men forming neat lines, facing towards Mecca, their backs to a faint white stain on the eastern edge of the night. A woman in a loose head-covering pads swiftly across the marble floor and suddenly the loudspeakers crackle into action. “Allaaaaaaah uh Akbar…” The men bow and kneel in unison; the night is over.
***
As I ride away from the mosque people are out jogging in the first light. Buses and trucks are rolling on the big streets now and a pearly color is leaching into the sky. The new day is beginning and Surabaya is showing a different face. But I am going to bed…

© Tim Hannigan 2008


A Journey through Turkey's Wild East



Across Turkey from Istanbul to the Iranian Frontier


Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 12/12/07
http://www.armeniandiaspora.com/archive/120014.html




The man behind the counter in Istanbul train station raised a quizzical eyebrow: "It’s dangerous in the East - Islamists, the Kurdish rebels, and it’s close to Iraq. Are you sure you want to go there?"
I smiled nervously and nodded. He shrugged and handed over the ticket – a ticket for a 30-hour train ride into Turkey’s wild eastern borderlands.
I did wonder if this was a sensible time to be making the trip: it was late autumn, and for weeks tension had been mounting along the Iraq-Turkey border, with the Turkish parliament threatening cross-border raids against rebel bases in northern Iraq. But I put such worries from my mind, clambered aboard the train and settled down for the long journey across Anatolia.

The splendours of Istanbul have been attracting tourists for more than a millennium and the package resorts of Turkey’s Mediterranean coastline seethe with sunbathers every summer, but I was heading for somewhere altogether different.
Eastern Turkey fades into a tangle of sensitive borders: Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Iraq. A geopolitical hotspot for centuries, invaded by Mongols and Russians in the past and riven by insurgency in recent decades, it’s not surprising that it has never been much of a tourist destination.
But it wasn’t stories of violence that I had in mind as the train rolled on past Ankara into the night: it was images of clear skies, jagged mountains and cobalt-blue lakes.

A long way from Istanbul

I was a long way from Istanbul now. There wasn’t a trendy wine bar or upmarket boutique in sight, and there certainly weren’t any girls in short skirts. Instead there were bulky women swathed in coal-black chadors, donkey carts in the alleys of the bazaar and a faint smell of spice on the gritty wind. Welcome to eastern Turkey.
Erzurum, where I clambered down from the train, seemed adrift in a huge landscape. From the minaret of the 5th Century citadel that loomed over the town I could see the sweep of empty yellow steppe to the north, and the ribbed brown hills, glowing in the October sunlight to the south.
Erzurum is an ancient city. A staging post on the Silk Route, it was repeatedly seized by invaders. The conquering armies left their marks on the town, and the arrow-straight main street is a thoroughfare through Turkish architectural history with ancient mosques and seminaries between the modern shops and cafes

The cosmopolitan secularists of western Turkey will tell you that Erzurum is a hotbed of aggressive Islamic radicalism. There are certainly more veiled women than on the streets of Istanbul, but it’s a remarkably friendly place, and everywhere I went the people offered warm greetings and cups of sweet black tea.

***

East of Erzurum the countryside was colder, and wilder. Great expanses of flat red-brown earth ran out from the road as the bus sped along the highway to Kars. Mud-walled villages stood in groves of poplar trees and small boys herded flocks of shaggy brown sheep over the broken soil. In the distance a long ridge of hills rose to a pale sky.
Kars is just about the most remote city in Turkey. Made famous by author Orhan Pamuk in his novel "Snow", for many Turks Kars is a synonym for cold provincial backwardness.
It was certainly cold when I arrived, just before nightfall. A bitter wind was howling along the grid of streets laid out during a period of Russian occupation, but there was real warmth in the people here. I ate a delicious dinner of stewed lamb and aubergine with tomato and fresh bread in a lokanta – a simple café. The waiter had worked in Germany as a young man and had picked up a little English there. He was eager to welcome me to his part of the country.
"People in Istanbul say it is dangerous here," he said. "We are poor, yes, but we are good people."

Towards the Frontier

The next morning the hills beyond Kars were covered with snow. The sense of winter rapidly closing in added a feeling of excitement as I clambered into a battered minibus heading towards the Iranian frontier.
The road passed villages hidden among willows and poplar trees. Ahead the great conical peak of Mount Ararat – where according to legend Noah’s Ark ran aground after the Flood - rose from a yellow horizon. Kurdish folk music played on the minibus stereo and a blue and white charm to ward off the evil eye dangled from the rear view mirror.
In the early afternoon I arrived in Doğubayazt, a wild little border town, twenty miles from Iran, clinging to a hillside above an empty plain with Ararat looming in the distance.
Doğubayazit’s most famous attraction stands on a high promontory above the town. The Ishak Paşa Palace is one of the most stunning buildings in Turkey. Built by a local chieftain two centuries ago, it looks out over the vast landscape of eastern Anatolia. The courtyard was deserted when I visited and the honey-coloured limestone of the columns and archways glowed in the afternoon sunlight.
As I walked back downhill towards the town three boys huddling behind a low wall out of the chilly wind called me over to ask my name and my country. When I returned the question about nationality they glanced nervously at one another and mumbled, "Turkey". But as I walked away they called me back and hissed, "We are not Turkish, mister; we are Kurdish."

The Kurdish homeland sprawls across the borders of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. For many years Eastern Turkey – the Kurdish heartland - has seen vicious fighting between the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK, who want to establish an independent Kurdish homeland, and the Turkish army. In the last couple of years there have been moves towards peace, but the increasing Kurdish autonomy over the border in Northern Iraq has made the Turkish government nervous, and reignited the aspirations of Turkey’s Kurds.

Abandoned churches, troubled past

The waters of Lake Van, a vast inland sea in hemmed in by rugged mountains, were as blue as lapis lazuli. The hillsides beyond the shore were dusted with snow, but it was warm in the bright sunlight. I was standing beneath the golden sandstone walls of the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross on the tiny island of Akdamar, a mile out in the lake.
I had caught a lift in a truck along the lakeside road, then convinced a ferryman to take me across despite the lack of other passengers.
The Kurds were not always the only troubled minority in eastern Turkey. A century ago the area was home to several million Armenians. As the Turks fought Russia in the First World War the Armenians were accused of having pro-Russian sympathies and deported en-masse to Syria. During the deportations hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, died. Many regard the fate of the Armenians as the 20th Century’s first case of genocide; for the modern Turkish government it is an issue still too sensitive for open discussion.
What is certain is that all that remains of centuries of Armenian culture in Eastern Turkey are enigmatic ruins like the church at Akdamar.
The church was beautiful. Inside its echoing chambers the delicate iconography could still be made out, a thousand years after it was painted. I wandered the island for an hour, then caught the ferry back to the mainland and hitchhiked into Van.

The city of Van was the last stop on my tour through Turkey’s wild east. It was a bustling place and the sprawling bazaar hummed with sights and sounds. Great bolts of coloured cloth hung outside tailors stores; pavements were lined with boxes of dates, nuts and apricots. The smell of fresh bread wafted from hole-in-the-wall bakeries, and the sizzle of grilling meat drifted out from kebab stalls. Old Kurdish men in black-and-white headscarfs hobbled along the alleyways, and shopkeepers called me inside to give me sweet tea and creamy feta cheese. Eastern Turkey might be the most troubled part of the country, but it is probably the friendliest. And despite the checkposts and army bases I saw in the region there was no hint of trouble, hostility or impending violence.

I spent 24 hours in Van then took an afternoon flight back to Istanbul. As the Turkish Airways jet roared up into the evening sky I strained my head to catch a last glimpse of the wild landscape through the cabin window. To the south ranks of hills ran on and on. Somewhere among them were the PKK camps and the troubled Iraqi frontier, but you’d never have known it.

***

Three hours later I was plodding uphill from the Golden Horn into the heart of Istanbul. The bars and upmarket restaurants were crowded; sleek modern trams hummed along the streets, and there were girls in short skirts.
I found a cosy little guesthouse amid the carpet shops in the shadow of the Blue Mosque. The young man on reception asked where I had arrived from and raised an eyebrow when I told him.
"The East?" he said, "But it’s dangerous out there…"
I smiled, finished checking in, and set about putting him right…




© Tim Hannigan 2008

Keeping Tradition


The remote island of Sumba, Indonesia,


Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, November 2007




Sumba eased up over the horizon an hour before sunset, long after the green hills of Flores had fallen away in the wake. Below deck the cargo of seasick pigs grunted unhappily. I leant against the rail of the ferry’s upper deck and watched the long, dark ridge of the island rising in the dusk.

Sumba is an island apart. Riding south of the main chain of Nusa Tenggara, the string of small islands east of Bali, it stayed aloof from the rest of the archipelago for centuries. Hinduism, Islam and Christianity did not cross the Sumba Straight; Dutch colonialists arrived only in the early 20th Century, and long after Independence Sumba kept the rest of the world at arm’s length. Today it remains one of Indonesia’s most intensely traditional islands.

The day after coming ashore in the little port of Waingapu I visited Wunga. Sumba is famous for traditional villages with soaring roofs of shaggy thatch, and according to legend, Wunga was the prototype. It was here that the first Sumbanese settled after arriving in the island sometime in the first Millennium AD.
A dozen houses, roughly built and roofed with great witches-hat peaks of dried grass, stood on an escarpment of old limestone, looking out over the strange, barren landscape of East Sumba. The place smelt of wood-smoke and chickens. Everything here was as it had been since the days of the Ancestors, the villagers told me. No modern building materials were used; even metal nails were forbidden and the floors and stilts of the houses were made of uncut branches bound with palm fiber. Ancestral tombs between the houses were built from unfinished stone, and the hand-woven cloth of the village was plain and unembroidered. All the people in Wunga followed the traditional, ancestor-worshipping religion of Sumba, known as Agama Marapu.

The Marapu Religion is a complex system of ritual and custom. The Sumbanese believe that they are protected by ancestral spirits – the Marapu – that dwell among the sacred heirlooms in the high roof space of the village houses. Life in Sumba is governed by strict taboos, and by the dualism of masculine and feminine. Elsewhere in Indonesia I had often seen Islam and Christianity making strange compromises with older beliefs to produce complex syncretism, but here in Sumba I was among people who followed a faith that belonged only to their own soil.

But Sumba is changing. The next day I traveled west by bus through the centre of the island. The landscape softened; there were more trees here, and small fields of red earth. Villages with high roofs stood beside the road, and enormous sarcophagi of carved limestone marked the burial places of venerated ancestors. But there were other buildings too: simple churches of whitewashed concrete.
Some guidebooks say that half the population of Sumba still follow the Marapu Religion. That was probably true a little over a decade ago, but the percentage of Sumbanese who declare themselves to be ancestor-worshippers is probably in single figures now.
When I stopped in the district of Anakalang – a place where village houses huddled conspiratorially on low hilltops and long ranks of buffalo traipsed through the fields – there were churches everywhere. Cheap crucifixes hung from the necks of village women with betel-stained teeth and it seemed that every child was called Maria or Matthias.

The first Christian missionaries in Sumba did not fare well. A Catholic outpost in the late 19th Century was abandoned after the local “heathens” proved too unruly, and the Dutch were too preoccupied suppressing headhunting, tribal war and insurgency to bother with conversion. But in recent years a majority of Sumbanese have become Christian.

Waikabubak, the main town in West Sumba, was a remarkable place. It had a scruffy main street with fly-blown warungs and dusty hardware shops, and men stalked through the market with long machetes tucked into the twists of woven ikat cloth around their waists. But what made it special was that on the little hilltops of the town were some of Sumba’s most traditional communities.
Kampung Tarung, a hundred meters up a narrow lane from the Waikabubak bus stand, was far removed from the busy street. It was a beautiful community with every house built in traditional style, adorned with buffalo horns from the bloody sacrifices that accompany Sumbanese funerals. The people offered me betel nut and invited me into their homes. They said that the village was an important centre of Marapu traditions. It was strange that it was right here, so close to the government offices and shops that constitute modernity in Sumba, traditions were at their strongest.

After a couple of days in Waikabubak I traveled south on a rented motorbike. The countryside poured away in interlocking spurs and ridges, running down to a lonely ocean. I followed backroads through dry forest, finding empty beaches at the end of rough tracks and carved tombs standing sentinel on windswept hillsides.
After pushing the motorbike across a river and climbing a steep footpath I reached the village of Sodan. Sumbanese villages occupy these defensive hilltops for good reason. Unlike other areas of Indonesia, Sumba was never unified by a local king. Warfare between neighboring villages continued long into the last century. Many villages still have a “skull tree”, the dead branch where the heads of slain enemies used to be hung; the last headhunting raids took place in the 1960s.
The thatched houses of Sodan were strung along a high ridge. This was still a stronghold of the Marapu religion, and I sat on a bamboo veranda chewing betel nut with one of the Rato, the Marapu priests. He explained that his role was to communicate with the Ancestors. The spirits, he said, sent messages to the living which could be read in the intestines of a sacrificed chicken or in the liver of a freshly slaughtered piglet.
The ridgetop fastness of Sodan was well-designed to hold out against change, but back at the bottom of the hill there was a new church. As I traveled further from Waikabubak the roads became rougher, the countryside emptier, and my arrival prompted near-hysteria in the villages that I visited. But always there were the crude concrete churches and the crucifixes.

At sunset I reached the fishing village of Pero, a Muslim enclave on the lonely southern coastline. I stopped the night in a simple homestay, and in the morning I woke under a billowing mosquito net to the sound of goats and chickens outside my window.

From Pero I walked west along the coast. There were no hilltops here, but the roofs of the thatched houses in the village of Tosi were almost as tall as the bending palm trees. There were great ranks of tombs built on the cropped grass beside the track. Tosi is one of the venues for the Pasola, ritual horseback battles held each year in February and March, but now the patch of grass where the riders fling spears at one another was abandoned.
The people in the village told me stories of the journey of the Marapu Ancestors from India, down through Southeast Asia and across the sea to Sumba. Then they told me they were Christian and asked for cigarettes. It seemed to me that they were at a sad and strange stage of conversion.

I wandered on along the coast. A little way beyond Buku Bani Kampung I heard the sound of a gong tolling in the trees. A boy in a red t-shirt was wading through the chest-high dead nettles and he called out to me.
“Come on, there has been a death in the village, come and see!” I didn’t want to intrude, but he was insistent.
Dozens of people were milling around in the glaring sunlight outside a traditional house. The tarnished metal gong – used to announce the death – was set up at the end of the bamboo veranda. People cleared a space for me to sit and gave me food and water, and a man in a black sarong with a twist of red cloth around his head explained that a young man from the village had died in hospital in Waikabubak the night before. His body had been brought back to the village and he would lie in the family home for three days while a tomb was prepared. When it was ready the body would be interred and buffalo, horses and chickens would be sacrificed – to join the spirit of the dead man.
It was dark inside the house, and it smelt of smoke. The body lay just beyond the doorway. He was swaddled in folds of rich ikat cloth and a single candle burnt beside his head. His face was beautiful and calm, with the corners of his mouth turned into the beginnings of a smile. The women of the family sat around him, mourning silently.
The man whispered to me, “There is no crying. This is what we believe in Sumba: when the body is still in the house we cannot cry.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because his spirit is still here, and crying and noise will make him angry and dangerous. We can cry after the sacrifices when he has already gone to the Ancestors.”
The eyes of the women were hollows of stoic sadness.
“What is your religion?” I asked dreamily.
“Christian,” he said, “we are all Christian here.”

Belonging to a “modern” religion is seen by many – both inside and outside traditional societies – as a requirement for full membership of an Indonesian nation and a modern world. But as I walked away from the village, through the trees and into the sunlight, I felt more confident of the future of Sumbanese traditions. Right now the island is in transition into the accommodating syncretism that characterizes much religion across Indonesia. In twenty years there will probably be no true followers of the Marapu Religion, but traditions will still be strong; they will still be building houses with the towering roofspace for the spirits and heirlooms. And as in the village I had just left, they will probably still be sacrificing buffalo for the spirit of the dead when it goes to join the Ancestors.


On the Quiet


Sumba has always been off the beaten track. Early European explorers missed it altogether and even today few of the island-hopping tourists who skip through the rest of Nusa Tenggara make it across the strait.
It’s hard to see why. Visiting Sumba’s wild landscapes and ancient cultures requires no Indiana Jones-style expedition: you can fly there in an hour from Bali. Tentative, low-key tourist development over the last 10 or 15 years has left a handful of little castaway resorts marooned around the wild coastline. One of them, hidden in the coastal wilderness of Northwest Sumba, is the Newa Sumba Resort.
The word “resort” conjures images of inappropriate swimming pools and karaoke bars, but Newa is not like that. There are just a few simple rooms of cool, dark-paneled wood in three buildings with soaring Sumbanese roofs at the end of a long, narrow road through the dry scrub. It is a place of white seashells and sun-bleached wood in a wild garden of roses and bougainvillea at the head of an empty white beach.
You would never know the resort was there unless someone told you: it is several kilometers back along the coast to the west of the little fishing hamlet at Waikelo where the inter-island ferries dock; to the east there is nothing. The thick, low forest around Newa looks, smells and sounds more like outback Australia than Indonesia, and at night the darkness is heavy and thick. It would be hard to find a more private or remote spot.
Newa is owned by the family of a local man who bought a patch of wilderness and built the resort a decade ago, and the place runs with quiet efficiency. The staff buy fresh fish, meat and vegetables from the village markets, and there is little to do but eat, swim and read.
On the clearest of clear days a yellow ghost of Sumbawa island shows faint above the horizon to the northwest but usually the only connection to the outside is the sight of a small plane, banking and coming in to land at the little airport at Tambolaka, ten minutes drive inland from Newa.
There are several flights a week to Bali, and an hour and a half after leaving the little resort you can be in the mayhem of downtown Kuta. There are few visitors though, and chances are you’ll be alone in splendid isolation on the empty coastline.


© Tim Hannigan 2007

Melting Pot of East Java


The old quarters of Surabaya, Java, Indonesia
Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, November 2007


Indonesia’s second biggest city, the capital of East Java, and the closest major urban centre to Bali (just a 30 minute flight away), Surabaya stands on the north coast of Java between the towering green volcanoes of the interior, and the long, low island of Madura offshore. Originally an outpost of the great Majapahit Empire, and later the principal trading port of the Dutch East Indies, Surabaya was only eclipsed by Jakarta as Indonesia’s premier city in the 20th Century. A place with such an illustrious past should have something to show for it, and Surabaya certainly does. But the city is endlessly bad-mouthed by tourist guidebooks, and few visitors bother to stop there. This is a real shame, for those who take the time to go beyond the bustling downtown area with its plethora of shopping malls, banks and international hotels will find another city altogether where the pulse of the old world still beats.

The backbone of Surabaya is the Kalimas River, (“River if Gold” in Indonesian). It snakes through the city from south to north finally emerging into the Madura channel in the great port at the head of Surabaya. The modern heart of the city is the network of wide avenues around Jalan Pemuda. It’s here that you will find the malls and the hotels, but the original settlement lay some two kilometres further north, an area which still oozes with history.

As a port city Surabaya was always a melting pot, and even today its diversity is obvious in the faces of the people. Immigrants flocked to Surabaya over the centuries, as traders, manual labourers and fortune-seekers. The biggest minority has always been the Chinese and today Surabaya’s old Chinatown sprawls into quiet alleyways around the thoroughfare of Jalan Kembang Jepun. The main street is marked by great red and green Chinese gates, guarded by lion statues. Turn right or left here and you will find rows of quietly decaying shop-houses. They are not restored or prettified for tourists like in Singapore, but peer through the dark doorways and you will catch glimpses of candles burning before family alters, and sacks piled against walls in the warehouses of old-style traders. Here and there a bowed roof of heavy ceramic tiles marks a Chinese clan house.
Most of Surabaya’s huge Chinese population is Christian now, but Chinatown is the heart of the old Chinese religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The aromatic smell of incense hits you long before you reach the centuries-old Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong temple on a narrow alleyway north of Jalan Kembang Jepun. Here huge, three-metre high candles burn in the darkness, and worshippers kneel and bow before bronze statues. Offerings of fruit stand on the alters, and joss sticks leach thin coils of sweet smoke. Not far away another temple, the Hok An Kiong is full of bright red and gold colour. This area has some of the finest examples of old Chinese architecture, and the street names hint at the old import-export trade of the area: Rubber Street, Chocolate Street, Sugar Street and Tea Street.
Further north from Chinatown is the vast Pasar Pabean market, one of the biggest traditional markets in Indonesia. At its heart is a huge covered area full of vegetables. The ground underfoot is thick with onions skins and the air is rich with the smells of garlic and spices. Tiny, cheerful women in bright clothes dash about the market carrying huge loads on their heads. At the western end of Pasar Pabean is a bustling fish market where every afternoon the freshest catches from the Java Sea are sold. Wander through this area and you will see everything from tiny prawns to huge tuna fish and even sharks. North and south the market sprawls on through tiny alleyways where everything imaginable is sold.

The streets of Old Surabaya are far removed from the traffic chaos of downtown. Walking is a pleasure here, but an even better option is to travel by becak. This is the heartland of the old-style pedicab, a human-powered passenger tricycle. becak drivers loiter on every street corner, their vehicles often spectacularly decorated. For a few thousand rupiah you can travel at a leisurely pace through the alleyways.

Beyond Pasar Pabean is another area full of echoes of Surabaya’s trading past. The Arab Quarter is a warren of narrow streets knotted around the great Ampel Mosque, the oldest and most sacred in Surabaya.
Like the Chinese, the Arabs – most originally from Yemen – arrived in the city over many centuries, drawn by the trade routes that carried spice and other goods across the Indian Ocean. The area, known as Ampel, became their ghetto, and even today it has all the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern bazaar. Hole-in-the-wall shops are presided over by tall, hawk-nosed men selling Tunisian dates, pistachios and sultanas. Brightly coloured prayer beads and embroidered rugs hang from the awnings, and the scent of rosewater and perfume cuts the air. The heart of the Arab Quarter is the narrow pedestrian alleyway that leads to the mosque. Covered in like the souks of Damascus and Marrakech, and hung about with bright cloths, batiks and beads, it eventually opens to the courtyard of the Ampel Mosque, built by Sunan Ampel, one of the venerated holy-men of Java. Sunan Ampel’s grave is next to the mosque, and the garden with its low frangipani trees is always busy with pilgrims.

If Surabaya is famous for one thing, it’s food. And though the modern city offers plenty of opportunities for fine dining, the old quarter gives a chance to sample more traditional cuisine. There is mouth-watering Arab-style roast lamb on sizzling hotplates from simple cafes in Ampel; on any street in early evening the delicious scent of sate (skewered chicken, beef or lamb) sizzling over charcoal whets the appetite, and all manner of sweet concoctions are available. But the ultimate in al-fresco dining can be had every night back in Chinatown. Jalan Kembang Jepun is closed to traffic and as the sun sets the street takes on a new name: Kya-Kya. After dark Kya-Kya bursts into action as a huge spread of food stalls and outdoor cafes. Take a seat at any of the tables laid out on the tarmac to try traditional Chinese, Indonesian, and even Western food. Seafood is a speciality. Street entertainers wind their way between the tables and you can reflect on your day of wandering amid the history of the old city.
There is no doubt that Surabaya is a rewarding stop for culture vultures, photographers and inquisitive wanderers, and when you’re done with old city, there are some great shopping opportunities in all those malls!




© Tim Hannigan 2008

From Jakarta to Surabaya on a 'bebek'


A journey by motorbike from Jakarta to Surabaya, Java, Indonesia


Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 16/09/07




The engine of my motorbike strained as I headed through the last hairpins toward the summit of Puncak Pass.
Behind me, yellow haze was creeping up from the direction of Jakarta; on either side wisps of mist were sliding over the tea gardens and ahead lay more than 1,000 kilometers of road.
The previous morning I had unloaded my 14-year-old Honda Astrea -- a 100cc bike meant for pottering around town -- from the train at Jakarta's Kota station. A pedicab driver at the station gate had asked where I was going. He was surprised when I told him: ""Surabaya"".
Indonesia's largest and second-largest cities are like a pair of urban anchors at either end of the north coast of Java.
I had lived in Surabaya for almost a year, and I had visited the capital a number of times, but I wanted to explore the space between, the heartland of the world's most densely populated island.
For me there was only one way to make the trip: by the ubiquitous little motorbike known in Indonesia as a bebek -Easy Rider, Java-style.
It was a week-long journey that would take me through startlingly beautiful landscapes of forest, rice terraces and volcanoes and along remote rural lanes and congested highways.


Hot water, remote coastline

After crossing the 1,500-meter Puncak Pass I traveled on past Bandung and arrived, a little saddle-sore, at dusk in Cipanas, a village at the foot of Mount Guntur near the town of Garut.
The place name means ""Hot Water"", and as darkness fell and an unseasonable downpour pattered over the roofs I washed away my aches courtesy of the village's principal attraction.
Geothermal activity in the looming volcano ensures that every hotel bathroom in the place is blessed with a constant supply of steaming hot water, and a chest-deep sunken bath tub instead of the usual chilly mandi tank.
Next morning I headed south along back roads through endless green hills and villages among the trees. At midday I reached the coast where an empty sweep of gray sand ran away into the haze in both directions.
There was no traffic on the potholed road as I traveled on eastwards. The coastline here was too wild and storm-lashed for fishing, and the soil was too poor and thin for much agriculture, but it was beautiful country to drive through.
The sun was already sinking low when I drove into Pangandaran. Strung out along a narrow isthmus with sandy beaches on each side the resort is West Java's answer to Kuta.
But in July 2006 a powerful offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami that devastated the western side of Pangandaran, killing hundreds of people. Many hotels have reopened, but the damage was still plain to see, and the place felt rather forlorn and abandoned. I checked into an empty hotel and went to bed early.

Engine troubles at high altitude


Twenty-four hours later I was colder than I had imagined was possible in Indonesia, shivering over a bowl of soup in a guesthouse in the little village of Dieng, 2,000 meters up in the clouds of Central Java.
Not far from Pangandaran I had crossed the invisible border between West and Central Java. This boundary is not just an administrative one: it marks the division between the Sundanese-speaking western part of the island, and the Javanese-speaking east.
Under cloudy skies I had traveled east and north, and up through the cabbage and potato fields north of Wonosobo into the cold air of the mountains.
Java is an island of volcanoes. Great conical peaks had loitered on the edge of my journey since Jakarta; now I was deep among them.
The Dieng Plateau is a perfectly flat table of marshy ground in a collapsed crater surrounded by pine-covered ridges. It was a strange place of shifting mist, and was bitterly cold.
Perhaps it was the sudden departure from the tropics, or perhaps it was the severity of the inclines on the way up, but after hundreds of trouble-free kilometers, the bike had suddenly developed a problem.
It had spluttered and shuddered into Dieng and I made my way straight to a grimy mechanic's workshop. One of the upsides of Java's famously high population density, and its love affair with motorbikes, is that you are almost always within walking distance of some roadside shed where a man in oil-stained overalls can patch a tire, clean a carburetor, or fix a fuel pump in a matter of minutes.
While my bike was being repaired I wandered around the plateau on foot. Dieng means ""Abode of the Gods"". Scattered across the plateau are the last handful of the hundreds of Hindu temples that once stood here.
Built in the 7th and 8th centuries, before the rise of the great Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, they are the oldest temples in Central Java. The temples are small, but in the running mist and stinging cold, an air of mystery hung around them.
Fresh from its high-altitude service, the bike ran smoothly back downhill the next day, all the way to the huge 9th-Century Buddhist temple at Borobudur.
With its nine tiers of intricately carved limestone, Borobudur is the apex of the Javanese architectural tradition, and the most visited tourist attraction in Indonesia.
From Borobudur it was not far to Yogyakarta with its royal palace, warren of narrow alleyways, and easy-going atmosphere. That night as I sipped a glass of cold beer and pored over my map in a busy little cafe full of European backpackers I realized that I was over halfway through my journey.


*****

The next day I traveled along remote roads. Java is the world's most densely populated island, and this overcrowding is apparently at its most intense in the fertile countryside of Central Java, but as I paused to take in the views across the fading ranks of hills I wondered exactly where all the people were.
Sometime in the early afternoon I crossed into East Java, and passed the town of Pacitan on its perfect horseshoe bay. The road was narrow, winding through forested hills with long views down to perfect, deserted bays. There was almost no traffic, and few villages.
Mosquitoes began to bite at my ankles, and behind me the sun slipped down into the milky cloud. Darkness was falling and it was still many kilometers to the nearest town.
I had started late from Yogyakarta and I realized I should have stopped the night in Pacitan, but it was too late to go back. I pressed on into the dusk.
And then I got a puncture. A moment of panic rose; it seemed that it couldn't have happened in a worse place. But luck was on my side, and just around the next corner was a roadside shack and a crudely painted sign: tambal ban (tire repairs).
A boy in a red t-shirt patched the tire as the heavy darkness came down and expressed astonishment at my journey. When he was done I drove on into the night. Occasional lights marked lonely hamlets, but this was wild countryside, and it would have been a bad place to break down.
I was glad when I reached the top of a high hill and saw a broad plain far below, scattered with lights. Half an hour later I drove into the town of Trenggalek.

The home straight

I did not have far to go now, and the next day I took a leisurely pace through the rice fields to Malang, 450 meters above sea level.
Malang was a retreat from the heat of the plains for the Dutch colonists; a few fragments of their architecture remain and the air is still fresh.
The bike was coated in dust and mud by now, and my arms were burnt from long days driving in the hot equatorial sun, so I was glad to rest for the afternoon.
The following morning I took the high road past the hill resorts of Batu and Selekta, through a patchwork of small fields full of all the vegetables that will only grow in the cooler air of the mountains: carrots, cabbages, onions and potatoes.
A brisk breeze was sweeping the smoke from the distant peak of Gunung Arjuna into the running cloud. I crossed a low pass and dropped into dense forest and thick mist, returning to sunlight at the village of Pacet from where I descended again to the heat of the plains -- and to the chaotic traffic of Java's main roads.
On the edge of the town of Sidoarjo the road rose to cross a canal, and I caught a distant glimpse of the swelling dome and Ottoman-style minaret of the al-Akbar mosque.
The building, a distinctive landmark, marks the southern edge of Surabaya, and five minutes later as it slipped by to the left, the afternoon light reflecting from the blue-green tiles, I knew I was home.


© Tim Hannigan 2008

Putting Indonesia's diverse cuisine on the map

Restaurant review of "Red Pepper", Jakarta. Written with Sascha Pries

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 05/08/07

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2007/08/05/putting-indonesia039s-diverse-cuisine-map.html-0

What kind of restaurants do you see when walking through a Jakarta shopping mall? There is a plethora of Western fast-food chains; northeast Asian cuisine is abundantly available, and even obscure world foods are easy to find.
The grand opening of Burger King in Senayan City, with masses queuing for a taste of flame-grilled burgers was one of the biggest culinary events in Jakarta this year.
Yet, Indonesia is renowned for its own rich and diverse cuisine, combining global influences from India, China, Arabia and Europe with unique local methods and ingredients.
So why is Indonesian food so poorly represented in the restaurants and food courts of Jakarta’s shopping centers?
Red Pepper Restaurant in Plaza Indonesia was until recently a typical representative of the international trend, with the usual array of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Western food. All that has changed with its July reopening.
The restaurant, which is styled as an upmarket food court with counters serving different dishes, has relaunched with a new concept: Indonesian “hawker food”.
“We change our concept every five years,” said, Lily Setiadinata, who opened the restaurant with her partner Shinta Hidayat in 2001.
“There is international food everywhere and we wanted to bring Indonesian food onto the market,” she said, adding that the great diversity of the Indonesian cuisine deserves recognition, not least in its home country.
Red Pepper still offers some international food, but the new emphasis is on dishes from across the archipelago. There is satay (miniature chicken kebabs with peanut sauce) from Madura and Sumatra, different soups and noodle dishes, classic Yogyakarta gudeg (a spicy meat dish with rice), fried duck and all kinds of brightly colored desserts.
Usually sold from streetside warung and kaki lima (food stalls and mobile carts), the dishes are now available in a comfortable air-conditioned setting.
Soft lighting, a deep red color scheme and fancy installations plus comfy upholstered chairs make for a relaxing and loungy atmosphere.
To create an authentic concept, the experienced restaurateurs collaborated with famous Indonesian food outlets, like Bebek Yogi in West Jakarta, and now offer a culinary tour through the best regional cuisine.
“It’s a great concept to bring together all these different influences,” said Pak Yogi, from Bebek Yogi.
Lily and Shinta hope that this opening will be the start of bigger things. “We want to make Indonesian food famous worldwide,” said Lily.
“We hope eventually to have Red Pepper franchises throughout Indonesia and beyond; in Singapore, Malaysia and even America.”

'Dr Love': Promoting sex education in an innovative way

Profile feature on "Dr Love" and the launch of a new sex education program in Indonesia

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 05/08/07

http://old.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20070805.C01

There's a new airline in Indonesia. But this is not yet another budget carrier: This is Love Airways, a multimedia sex education program, brainchild of Dr Wei Siang Yu, better known as "Dr Love".
The flamboyant, 37-year-old medical doctor is a familiar figure in his native Singapore, where he has started a sex education hotline, fronted a popular late-night adult "edu-tainment" TV show, and launched a website, radio program and magazine.
His unique combination of snappy dress sense, kitsch gimmicks and media savvy has been a huge success in his home country.
Dr Love is the youngest of six children. When he graduated from medical school in Australia he was just plain Dr Wei, but his unbridled enthusiasm and quirky ideas ensured he did not stay that way for long.
In 2001 Meggpower, his "bio-communication" company, launched a hormone-monitoring service that alerts would-be mothers by cell phone text message (SMS) when they are ovulating, and Dr Love stepped into the spotlight.
In 2002 he created an innovative "wireless sex education platform" in Amsterdam for the Dutch Health Promotion board, a question-and-answer hotline on sex-related topics, using the medium of the SMS.
The system was a success, allowing bashful youngsters to ask awkward questions anonymously without having to face parents, teachers or medical professionals. The hotline was soon up and running in Singapore too.
Dr Love, a self-styled "sexpert" in oversized black spectacles, has become the public face of everything sex-related in Singapore. The hotline was followed by a high-profile sex education radio program, Sex in the Air and Dr Love has been the key figure in the Singaporean authorities' campaign to raise the island state's worryingly low birth rate.
In 2003, his "Love Boat" set sail, a cruise to a luxury resort staffed by sex counselors for Singaporean couples wanting to have a baby. Dr Love regularly holds fertility seminars, and in 2005 he launched the Love Airways television show,
The Love Airways network keeps expanding. There is a website at www.loveairways.com, and in 2006 a Love Airways magazine hit newsstands. The magazine, in unmistakable kitschy, teen-mag, Dr Love style, is full of medical advice, lifestyle stories and tips -- all decidedly risqu‚ for up-tight Singapore.
And then there is Dr Love's much-discussed reality TV concept, Dr Love's Super Baby Making Show, which would see 10 couples competing under Dr Love's guidance to conceive a child in the fastest possible time. There are plans for the show to launch in the United States.
*****
And now it's Indonesia's turn. In collaboration with Fiesta Condoms, Dr Love has launched a wireless sex education network here too.
Confused and curious Indonesians can send their queries -- and Dr Love is at pains to emphasize that no question is too outrageous -- by SMS to +65-94DRLOVE (+65-94375683).
The questions will be answered by a panel of experienced Indonesian doctors, and will be used to compile a database of frequently asked questions that will power "Nova", yet another Dr Love innovation.
Nova -- in the form of a glamorous computer-generated woman -- will be Indonesia's first automated "sex education avatar".
At the moment she is awaiting takeoff on the Love Airways website, but once the database is complete she will use artificial intelligence to answer sex questions from young and old alike.
Sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy are serious issues in Indonesia; Dr Love believes that there is a lack of decent sex education available here.
He hopes that Nova and the hotline will provide a much-needed service.
Dr Love is aware of the sensitivities surrounding the subject of sex in Indonesia, but he is keen to insist that his projects have nothing to do with pornography or imposing Western values on the country.
"We are answering the questions people want to ask," he says. "This is sex education for Indonesians by Indonesians ... it's not about putting foreign ideas into Indonesia."
Dr Love certainly has no qualms about bringing his message to conservative countries -- which he believes are often those that need it most.
Next stop for Love Airways is notoriously prudish India, a country where a public kiss can lead to prosecution, as Richard Gere recently found out.
But Dr Love has no hesitations. He has bigger plans for Indonesia too: An Indonesian edition of the Love Airways magazine is planned to launch later this year, and he hopes that Nova will become a national celebrity.
"I want to see Nova on television, in magazines, on the radio," he enthuses, "this is just the start."
Dr Love himself remains unmarried and childless.

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Huge potential for Bali as super yacht destination

Feature on the super-yacht industry in Bali

Originally published in The Bali Times, 02/08/07

http://www.travelcomarine.com/balinauticalnews/balinauticalnews_bali_post_article.html

The super yachts of the super-wealthy could bring millions of dollars in income and investment to Bali, according to the founders of Bali-based Travel Co. Marine.
The super yacht industry is growing rapidly and Bali is well-positioned to reap the benefits believe Niel C. Hempsey and Alvin G. Edmond, who recently opened a new office in Serangan.
“The market’s growing and people are now looking for new destinations,” said Edmond, adding that as a stopping point between Singapore and Darwin – major super yacht ports – Bali was ideally located.
Both men worked as super yacht captains for the likes of Ivana Trump and Jim Carrey for many years before coming to Bali, and they hope that the island will become a hub of super yacht cruising in Southeast Asia.
The traditional base for the huge, multi-million dollar motor yachts, owned by film stars, business tycoons and royalty, is St Tropez in the south of France. “They’re based there in the summer, then they head south in September,” said Edmond. “The traditional winter destination is the Caribbean, but more and more boats are coming east,” he added.
According to Hempsey and Edmond visiting super yachts bring large amounts of money into local economies as the boats need extensive supplies, services, and huge amounts of fuel, and the owners look for luxury treatment.
“That’s what we’re trying to do at Travel Co. marine,” said Edmond, adding that the company aimed to provide a full service, and could enable super yacht owners to negotiate the bureaucracy involved in bringing a boat into Indonesian waters. “The more we look after them the longer they’ll stay,” he said.
“At the moment lots of these yachts are coming from Phuket [in Thailand], down to Singapore, then straight down to Darwin. They’re bypassing Bali,” said Hempsey.
Bali has become an increasingly fashionable and up-market tourist destination in recent years with a huge increase in exclusive hotel and villa developments. Its status would be an obvious attraction for the owners of super yachts, said Hempsey. However, prohibitive government regulations and a lack of facilities mean Bali is missing the boat.
“Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore have huge marinas now, Phuket and Langkawi are important yachting destinations, so why not Bali?” said Hempsey.
Bali is already a popular destination for smaller sailing yachts, which Hempsey described as the main basis of Travel Co. Marine’s business at the moment. “The super yachts, that’s more of a vision for the future,” he said.
At the moment most visiting boats dock in Benoa harbor, which as a commercial port does not have ideal facilities for super yachts, said Hempsey, adding that Travel Co. marine would be providing offshore moorings at Serangan. And the fees and regulations for cruising permits and for docking are off-putting, even for billionaires. According to Hempsey and Edmond the authorities need to simplify procedures, and encourage investment in marina facilities.
“The government here don’t understand the amount of money they’re turning away,” said Edmond. At the moment, boat owners wanting to keep their vessel in Indonesian waters for more than six months a obliged legally to import the boat, incurring huge duties. If this and other rules were dropped Bali could reap huge benefits, according to Edmond.
“People will keep their boats here permanently if it’s cheap enough. That would mean millions of dollars for the local economy,” he said.

A major new marina is under construction at Amuk in Karangasem Regency, according to officials. There have already been publicity campaigns for the project in Miami and Australia, said I Nyoman Magi, the public relations officer of Karangasem Regency.
The marina will be able to accommodate private vessels, but at present the main focus of the development is to encourage commercial cruise ships, said I Gusti Ketut Saji, head of Karangasem Transportation Office. “We do have plans to provide specific facilities for super yachts in the future, but it is not our main focus at the moment,” he said.

But Hempsey and Edmond hope that the services provided by their company and others on the island, will be the first stage in developing Bali as a major destination for the ocean-going elite, and that there will be a change in official attitude. “We’re the beginning,” said Edmond.

The new Travel Co. Marine office is housed in the clubhouse of the Royal Bali Yacht Club at Serangan, of which Alvin G. Edmond is also commodore. He took over the position after the club had dwindled to only four members after the first Bali Bomb. “I just said ‘we can’t allow this to happen’” said Edmond, adding that the club now had 90 members, and was growing rapidly with its own sailing dinghies based on the beach at Sanur, and two larger cruising boats at Serangan. The club will hold its first annual regatta at Serangan on the first and second of September this year with races for all manner of wind-powered craft, from cruising keel yachts to traditional Balinese jukung boats. According to Edmond the event has attracted wide sponsorship and he hopes it will become a major event in future years.
The club is run by volunteers and both Edmond and Hempsey, also a member, are keen to stress its inclusive nature.
“Our next project is to get a youth training scheme going for local kids,” said Edmond. The training would be provided free for Balinese children, he said; “We already have the boats and the facilities, now we’re looking for a teacher.”
“This is not designed to be a rich ex-pats’ club,” added Hempsey; “the training scheme will be a way to give something back.”

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Dreamland to Be Renamed ‘New Kuta Beach’ as Pecatu Area to Get Resort

News story on a resort development in South Bali, Indonesia

Orginally published in The Bali Times, 02/08/07

http://www.thebalitimes.com/2007/08/02/dreamland-to-be-renamed-%E2%80%98new-kuta-beach%E2%80%99-as-pecatu-area-to-get-resort/

PECATU, Bali ~ A long-dormant resort area on the Bukit Badung in southernmost Bali is getting a multimillion-dollar rebirth as massive developments come onstream, creating thousands of jobs and a boom for the island’s tourism, officials said this week.However, local businesspeople at Dreamland Beach, the area’s most famous tourist attraction, fear they may lose their livelihoods as an upmarket resort takes shape, they said.
The 400-hectare Pecatu Indah Resort site is the property of PT. Bali Pecatu Graha, a company owned by Hutomo Mandala Putra, better known as Tommy Suharto, son of the former president.
The company acquired the land in 1995, and work on the project began in 1996 but came to a complete halt following the Asian financial crisis the following year.
“At that time all the roads were laid, the golf course was ready with five holes, all the irrigation was ready, but after 1998, work stopped completely and it was all lost,” Arturo Seril, the project manager for the development, told The Bali Times on Wednesday.
Pecatu Indah remained dormant until 2004, he said.
“There was good investment potential, so we started work again,” said Seril, adding that the project now employed around 200 staff.
“Most of them are from the original workforce. We took the loyal ones on again when we restarted, and we paid their salaries for the whole time they had been laid off,” he said.
The developer has sold nine plots to investors including New Kuta Golf, whose course recently opened with nine of an eventual 18 holes. On completion time, Pecatu Indah Resort will include at least five luxury hotels – the Westin has bought land and is to build; leading local tea company Sosro has also invested and plans to branch out into the hotel sector with its first property in Pecatu - around 2,000 houses, an international school and hospital and shopping and entertainment attractions including a “Waterbom” park of the type in Tuban, said Seril. An estimate of the total value of the development was expected in the company’s financial report at the end of this year, he said, but previously reported figures have put the investment at some US$330 million.
Another developer, PT. Panorama Development Utama (PMA), has already started work on a 21-villa complex called Hole 17, set in the midst of the golf course and whose prices average around $1 million, PMA chief financial officer T. Sivanathan told The Times.
“We plan to be completed and sold by the end of 2008. It’s all going to happen [quite quickly] - if you came back in five years, you wouldn’t recognize the place,” he said.
Meanwhile, there is a shortage of fresh water in the arid Bukit area, and although at present the development is supplied with mains water, Seril said it would eventually be self-sufficient, using desalinated seawater.
“Water is a problem here; that’s why we are building desalination plants,” he said. The first plant would be operational in September, providing 3,000 cubic meters of fresh water a day, said Seril, adding that more desalination plants would be needed as on completion, the resort would use around 12 000 cubic meters of water daily.The popular Dreamland surfing beach lies within the Pecatu Indah Resort, and Seril confirmed rumors that the locally run cafes and guesthouses on the beach would be removed in coming months. The beach would remain open to the public, however.
“These illegal warungs (local cafes) were constructed during the financial crisis when there was no work going on with the project,” said Seril.
“But we’re not just driving them away. We are putting up more beautiful warungs for them close to the beach,” he said.
Seril said the closure and relocation of the warungs would be organized by the local banjar (community).
“We are working with the Pecatu village officials, and the new warungs will be donated to them,” he said.
The beach itself will eventually be entirely free of any developments, according to Seril, and an international restaurant and spa named Kelapa will be built on the cliff-top, with construction planned to start in the next few months.
“As soon as we drive out the warungs, construction on the restaurant will start,” he said.
Seril said the beach would be referred to as “New Kuta Beach.”
“Its Balinese name is Cimongka. Dreamland was the name given to it by Australians,” he said, adding that Bali Pecatu Graha had named it New Kuta Beach since the original launch of the project.
The development has caused alarm among some of the Pecatu villagers who work at the beach. Once a nudists’ and surfers’ secret, Dreamland has become one of the most popular beaches in Bali in recent years, and a thriving, informal service industry has grown up on the cliff-side.
According to locals, there are 38 locally owned businesses at the beach, each employing between three and five people. The first were established in the 1980s, said one warung owner who gave his name as Rocky, adding that the original buildings were removed by Bali Pecatu Graha when the company bought the land in 1995.
Most of the people who had worked at the beach took jobs with the company, he said, but were laid off when construction stopped in 1998.
“So we came back to the beach and built the warungs again.”
Each of the warung owners will be allocated a position in a strip of small concrete shops being built on a raised platform along a dry riverbed that leads to the beach, and will be provided with legal papers for the property, locals said.
“We know there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have any legal rights to the land here, so it’s a good thing that they’re going to give us the documents for then new warungs,” said another warung owner who also spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity.
“But I don’t think those new places are going to be good for business. It’ll be different from now - there’s no view and I’m worried that tourists will stop coming here,” he said, adding that he had received no confirmation of when the existing businesses would have to close.
Some foreign tourists at the beach expressed concern at the plans to relocate the warungs.
“It’s a bad move, I reckon,” said a tourist from Byron Bay, Australia, who gave his name as Col.
“This place is magic as it is. The idea’s ridiculous. It will take away the simplicity of it. I won’t come back,” he said.
But Jack, a surfer from Perth had a different perspective.
“I’ve been coming here for about five years, and it’s changed so much. There’s too many cafes on the cliff now, and too many people. I reckon the place is already spoilt, so maybe just getting rid of them all is for the best,” he said.

© Tim Hannigan 2007

South Sulawesi: Entering Tana Toraja via the 'back door'


Trekking from Mamasa to Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia


Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 22/07/07




The straps of my backpack cut into my shoulders and my legs ached as I struggled up the last steep rise through the pine trees.
Ahead of me lay another two days of walking along 50 kilometers of mountain track, and I began to wonder if this was a good idea. As the ground levelled and a cooling breeze ran in, a heartening view opened in both directions.
Behind me the long green curve of the Mamasa Valley ran away to the west, and ahead, beyond an army of interlocking spurs and ridges, lay my destination: Tana Toraja.


*****

The highland fastness of Tana Toraja in Sulawesi is famed for its traditional culture. Most visitors arrive by bus or air from Makassar, the capital and main gateway of Sulawesi, but I had decided to slip in through the back door, a route that meant three days of hard walking through remote mountain villages.
From Makassar I travelled north by bus, following the coast road. The blue water of the Makassar Strait shone in the sunlight; inland, knobbly limestone hills rose from the plain.
In the town of Polewali I transferred to a passenger jeep. Soon I was peering out through the mist at high forested hills.
The journey from Polewali to Mamasa is less than 100 kilometers, but the road is a wild one, doubling back and forth up sheer hillsides and dipping into sodden valleys. It took more than five hours, and I reached Mamasa long after dark.
Mamasa town is the capital of the region of the same name, a bustling little place beside a shining river, hemmed in by green hills.
Mamasa is sometimes known as West Toraja, and it shares many characteristics with its famous neighbor across the mountains. There is beautiful upland scenery, a host of traditional villages, and some remarkable architecture.
But Mamasa has no air transport and the road from the coast is terrible. It is far more remote than Toraja, and almost untouched by tourism.


Reaching the summit


The next morning I took an ojek (motorcycle taxi) east along the valley. The mountain air was clear. Horses and buffalo grazed on the cropped pastures between the pine trees. The road deteriorated the further we went, and at the tiny hamlet of Pa'kassasan the driver left me. I shouldered my backpack and started walking.
The track wound gently though villages, some with beautiful traditional houses. The houses of Mamasa are known as banua sura, and are similar to the famed tongkonan of Toraja, decorated in blacks, reds and golds.
Beyond the last village the road began to climb steeply through the creaking forest. I sweated and my pack felt terribly heavy, but eventually I reached a tiny cluster of wooden houses called Pasapa.
The name means ""summit"" in the local language, and that's just what it was. I could see Mamasa far behind me, gray cloud now rolling in, and ahead was the road to Toraja.
After a cup of sweet, dark coffee in a little shack by the roadside I set out downhill through the forest to the hamlet of Timbaan where Ibu Maria, a kindly middle-aged lady, runs a simple homestay for passing trekkers.
Timbaan was a peaceful place at the head of a long valley. I sat outside the rickety wooden house resting my tired feet in the afternoon listening to the sounds of the village: children's voices, the crowing of roosters and the lowing of buffalo from the terraces below the road.
A century ago all the people of the Mamasa area followed their own ancestor-worshipping religion. The first Dutch missionaries did not reach the valley until the 1920s, but as in Toraja the majority are Christian now.
As well as a simple church, Timbaan had a tiny mosque with a rusted steel dome. But there was no electricity here, and no loudspeaker to amplify the muezzin's call to evening prayer in the purple light of dusk.

'It could have been Scotland'


In the morning I set out downhill. The highland landscape was surreally beautiful, wisps of damp cloud smoking off the hillsides and layers of thin mist clinging to the pine trees.
This was a strange place where tropical and alpine worlds met. I passed through hamlets with palms and banana trees, then entered tall stands of sweet-scented spruce.
At lunchtime, after crossing the Masuppu River and climbing steeply through rice terraces I reached the village of Ponding, the last in Mamasa district. I stopped to chat for a while with Dr Teddy, a charming young Jakarta native. He and another doctor run the little clinic that serves the valley.
I plodded onward uphill. The sun was shining brightly now and the water glittered in the rice fields. The road was in a terrible state, surfaced with jagged, football-sized boulders.
I was astonished that vehicles ever managed to pass this way, and I was happy to be on foot, not bouncing in the back of a jeep. Even so, I was glad when I reached the village of Paku where I stopped for the night in a family home.
Somewhere after Ponding I had crossed the invisible boundary from the new province of West Sulawesi, and I was now on the fringes of Tana Toraja.
Paku was another perfect mountain village, full of gentle sound, and after a simple dinner of rice and fried fish I fell asleep listening to the rain pattering on the tin roof.
It was uphill again in the morning through cool shade. An hour out of Paku I reached a pass where the track was a mess of yellow mud. Here I felt far from the tropics. There were no houses or rice terraces; only mist, pines and a cool breeze. It could have been Scotland.
Indonesia reappeared a couple of hours later as I shambled into the big village of Bittuang. Suddenly after three days walking along a rough track the road surface changed to asphalt, and soon I was sitting in a passenger jeep, racing through the hills towards the Torajan heartland.

Sheer cliffs, epic funerals

Tana Toraja needs little introduction. Sprawling over the mountainous hinterland of South Sulawesi, it stands out even in Indonesia's spectacular myriad of traditional cultures. Stunning scenery and tumbling rice terraces, villages of remarkable tongkonan houses, sheer cliff faces where mysterious effigies stare out from carved niches, and wild funerals when buffalo are sacrificed combine to make Tana Toraja one of the most fabled destinations in the archipelago.
Arriving on foot through seemingly endless mountains, it was easy for me to see why strong traditions had survived here, cut off from the outside world.
Apart from a brief and unhappy occupation by Bugis warriors from the coast in the 17th Century, Toraja remained utterly isolated until last century.
It was only in the early 1900s that the Dutch colonial authorities fought their way in and took control.
Enthusiastic Protestant missionaries arrived in 1913, but they met with scant success: Two decades later there were fewer than 2000 Torajan Christians, and even at Indonesian Independence the majority still clung to their traditional Aluk Todolo religion, a blend of animism and ancestor worship.
Now the majority in Toraja are Christian, but the new faith has accommodated many old ways. The dead are still buried in caves; effigies, known as tau tau, are still carved and placed in cliff face niches and, most importantly, epic funerals of bloody sacrifice are held every year in the dry months of July and August.


*****

After resting my blistered feet for a night in the busy little market town of Rantepao I hired a motorbike and set out to explore.
Some of the traditional sites around Toraja have been geared up for tourists. At the village of Ke'te Kesu there are souvenir stalls and a ticket booth, and likewise at the cave graves of Londa and Lemo.
But these are no mummified vestiges of a culture. Head out on the network of winding lanes that lead into the hills and you will find that almost every village has a rank of spectacular tongkonan houses.
The buildings are said to represent a boat, with an arched roofline and a high decorated prow and are often adorned with tall columns of buffalo horns, a symbol of status, and protection from evil spirits.
They are always aligned north-south, and are faced by a row of rice barns, carved and roofed in similar style.
I spent a night sleeping in a tongkonan in the cool air of Batu Tumonga, a tiny village high on a mountainside. The views were spectacular, and in the silent darkness the lights of Rantepao glittered far below and a yellow moon rose behind the hills.
In the morning I rode on, often losing my way among the rice fields and stopping in nameless hamlets to admire the buildings and chat with the friendly villagers.
I could have spent weeks exploring the area, but my time was running out. That evening I rode back to Rantepao, and left Toraja, heading back to Makassar the usual way -- by bus!

© Tim Hannigan 2007

Beguiled by Becaks


Indonesia's three-wheeled, peddle-powered public transport


Originally published in Kabar Magazine May 2007

http://kabarmag.com/blog1/2009/01/16/beguiled-by-becaks/


“…and a small squadron of the tricycle-rickshas called betjaks. As soon as they sighted Hamilton and Kwan most of the betjaks creaked into motion like a flock of ponderous birds, wheeling towards them. Hamilton regarded them with some fascination, as everyone did for the first time, with their black canvas hoods, their sides painted in hurdy-gurdy colours with pictures of volcanoes and wayang heroes, and lettered with names such as Tiger and Bima, they belonged to another time…”

Christopher J. Koch was writing of 1965, that simmering era of impending violence, when he penned those lines in his novel The Year of Living Dangerously. They belonged to another time even then, and yet, more than forty years later only the old Dutch spelling has changed, and the becaks are still creaking into ponderous action throughout the kampungs and alleyways of Java.

The becak is the Indonesian incarnation of the ubiquitous pedicab, or cycle-rickshaw, found everywhere from New Delhi to Taiwan, and even now as a tourist attraction in London’s Soho, and parts of New York. But it is Indonesia, and especially Java, (perhaps along with Bangladesh) that is the true heartland of the pedicab. The becak is as much a motif and symbol of Indonesia as the silhouette of a wayang kulit puppet, or the smell of a clove cigarette.

The becak, a three-wheeled peddled-powered bike with a passenger seat is the descendant of the original hand-pulled rickshaws that originated in Japan in the 19th Century. The design and style varies from country to country, and even from city to city, but in Indonesia the passenger sits up front, with an uninterrupted view of the busy streets. Despite the best efforts of municipal governments becak still provide transport and employment for millions of people across Indonesia, people like Hilal.

It is early afternoon, and Hilal, a wiry man in his early thirties, born and raised in Surabaya, is eating his lunch. He hunches over a bowl of oily bakso – noodle soup with meatballs – and a glass of sweet iced tea, sweating in the yellow heat, at a tatty little foodcart on Jalan K. H. Mas Mansur on the edge of the old Arab Quarter of the East Javanese Capital. He has been awake since well before dawn. He rose in the darkness for the first prayers of the Muslim day in his house on a narrow alleyway not far from the great Ampel Mosque, sacred heart of Old Surabaya. Then he went out into the blue pre-dawn light, limbs still aching from the day before as he strained at the peddles of his becak. His first passenger was a regular customer, a woman from the Quarter who Hilal takes each day to the dawn vegetable market. After that he fell into the typical slow hours of a becak driver, waiting on street corners, chatting with friends, rousing himself from time to time to try to solicit a fare. In late morning he took an Arab trader to the mosque for midday prayers, and later he will take the same man to the shop of a partner in another part of the Old City.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of becaks in Indonesia, but this was not always the case, and despite their timeless image, they are actually a relatively recent addition to the urban landscape. Before the Second World War becak were virtually unknown. There had been tricycles used for transporting goods for many years, but it was only in 1936 that the first passenger-carrying becak hit the streets of Jakarta. The Dutch authorities took an immediate dislike to the new invention, worrying about safety and congestion, and setting the tone for government attitude to becaks until now. They might have acted to stamp them out altogether, but History intervened.
In 1942 the Japanese Imperial forces landed in Indonesia, ousted the Dutch, and brought about an even more oppressive form of colonial rule. While Indonesian national identity felt its way towards the light, cities choked. The Japanese tightly controlled availability of petrol, banned private ownership of motor vehicles, and eventually strangled the old bus and tram networks. It will no doubt pain commuters who deal with the gridlock of modern Jakarta and Surabaya to know that both cities once had comprehensive and efficient public transport systems. The only major source of urban transport that survived under the Japanese was the horse-drawn dokar, which filled the roles served by both becaks and taxis today. But a horse was an expensive commodity, difficult to feed at a time when many people were going hungry, and they soon began to disappear too. Enter the becak, until then an oddity and a novelty. Cheap, low maintenance, and requiring no fuel other than the strength of its driver, the becak soon became the main – sometimes the only – form of public transport. Post-war turmoil and the protracted independence struggle meant that organised transport networks never really recovered; bolting the stable door was no use after the horse had gone, and dokars never returned in any numbers. But the becak proliferated. By 1953 there were an estimated 40, 000 in Surabaya alone, and by 1981 becak drivers constituted some 3% of the workforce of that city. In the 1980s there were well over 100, 000 in Jakarta.

Mid-afternoon, and Hilal is idling with friends at the point where Jalan Sasak widens at the gate of the long covered bazaar that leads to the Ampel Mosque. It is a good place to find a fare as worshippers and shoppers who come to the area to buy the religious paraphernalia sold by the Arabs of the Quarter must pass through the mob of becaks when they leave. Hilal has pushed his grimy red baseball cap back on his head and is lounging on the passenger seat of his becak. He has been a becak driver for five years. Before that he worked in a small warehouse south of the Arab Quarter in the old Chinatown, carrying sacks and moving boxes for a salary. Little by little he scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy his own becak, not so expensive, he says, at one million rupiah brand new. Hilal is happier as a becak driver. It’s hard, peddling in the blazing heat of the day, but he is his own boss, and there have been days when he has earned as much as fifty thousand rupiah: far, far more than he ever made when he worked for a wage. But like many in Indonesia, he dreams of a life abroad. He has a cousin in Korea who works in a factory there, complains about the bitter winter cold, but sends meaty remittances back to his family in Surabaya. Someone once told Hilal about the tourist rickshaws in London, and he wonders if he could emigrate there to work. But he has grave doubts about the cost of shipping his becak.

No one seems sure when, or why it started, but becaks have become a canvas for the deep-seated artistic urge of Indonesia, and are often spectacularly and idiosyncratically decorated. They are given names (anything from mythical figures to boy-bands), and painted in kaleidoscopic colours. In Yogyakarta – a becak stronghold – the mudguards of the heavyset becaks there often carry complex and well-executed pictures, while the leaner, longer becaks of Surabaya come in a multitude of patterns. There is a wild array of colour schemes, from Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes, through Coca Cola and Manchester United to the regalia of various political parties (PDI-P is a favourite of becak drivers, perhaps because the bull makes a fine decorative motif rather than because of any particular political sympathy). Tassels sometimes adorn peddles and the wooden slats of the passenger seats often carry bright floral designs, hinting at classical Islamic art.

But despite their visual appeal, becak have always had a rough ride from the authorities. Since the first prohibitive traffic laws in Dutch Batavia in 1940 they have been seen as the enemy by those who wish to impose order on city streets. From an early stage city councillors complained about becaks. They sometimes righteously suggested that they were a symbol of human exploitation, ignoring the fact that the becak is a form of independent self-employment available even to very poor people like Hilal. But the principal complaint was always that a trundling becak clogs the city streets, impeding the progress of the air-con Kijangs of the rich, and that they are unsightly, despite their bright colours, unbefitting of modern Indonesia. Registration schemes across the country have attempted to reduce the numbers of becaks, as have police crackdowns on illegal operators. In the 1980s under Soeharto the first major attack on Jakarta’s becaks took place. Unregistered becaks were regularly confiscated and destroyed, and finally in 1988 Bylaw 11 was passed by the City Council, banning them altogether from the city streets. Some forty thousand beautifully decorated becaks, the pride and livelihood of their drivers, were impounded in the name of progress and toppled from barges into the murky waters of Jakarta Bay.
In Surabaya too the road of the becak has been rocky. Becaks, and their notoriously rough-spoken drivers, often economic migrants from Madura, are the bugbear and the butt of jokes of people who like to see East Java’s metropolis as the next Singapore. Their manufacture was outlawed in the 1980s and periodic purges have targeted unlicensed drivers. They have been banned from the major roads of the downtown area so the glittering facades of the multiplying shopping malls are not sullied by the reflection of a quietly rolling becak.

But the becak endures away from the multilane highways, rolling through kampung alleyways too cramped for a taxi and beyond the bemo networks. In Jakarta too they cling on in quieter residential areas, despite ongoing official hostility. They have even received support from unexpected quarters in recent years. Environmentalists praise the becak as a totally green form of transport, and point to their increasing appearance in European and North American Cities. In any case, the becak still fills a gap in the infrastructure of urban Indonesia, and as long as there are narrow side streets and people willing to haggle with a dark-faced, grinning man with iron calf muscles for a sedate, gently rattling ride over potholed tarmac, they will exist.

It is evening, and soon the maghrib prayer call will echo out over the red tiled roofs. Hilal is straining at the peddles. He has taken one last fare further south than his usual territory, beyond Pasar Atom, and now he is heading back towards Ampel with tired limbs, back towards his wife and five-year old son. The sun has dropped far into the West as he crosses the smooth metal of the train tracks and he catches the smell of goats from the rough kampungs beside the rails. Throughout the Old City, and across the whole of Surabaya off the main roads, and indeed all over Java, becak are riding slowly into the dusk.

At the end of The Year of Living Dangerously as Hamilton, the hero of the book, flees an imploding Indonesia the image he carries with him is of a becak, creaking its way through the kretek-scented darkness. The Year of Living Dangerously is long past, and many more dangerous years have come and gone; both Sukarno and Soeharto have faded from the scene and urban Indonesia has changed almost beyond recognition. But in the quieter side streets of the nation’s cities, with the rattle of a tin bell and the creak of an ill-oiled chain, the becak is still rolling, making its way slowly into the 21st Century.

© Tim Hannigan 2007