Java I – Jibbed!



The aftermath of the recent eruption of Mt Merapi.

Ok, so here’s the thing. I’ve never fallen for a scam while travelling, I mean except for the usual ones like, “Coober Pedy’s really worth a visit”, or “Adelaide is actually quite lively”. But on the whole I’m vaguely proud of the fact that I can usually seem to pick a bullshit artist – takes one to know one and all that – so when the ‘professor’ in Yogyakarta who had ‘studied in Sydney’ and was donating the profits to ‘victims of the volcano’ wanted to give me a ‘special last-day discount’ on the Batik art he was hawking, my oldest-trick-in-the-book-o-meter should have been on DEFCON 5.

We had spent the previous two weeks in Bali, where the locals are too friendly to rip you off, and Lombok, where they’re too high on mushrooms to remember how, so perhaps I can be forgiven for being a little gullible. Also, the previous couple of days had consisted of spending 6 hours waiting for a flight from Lembar on Lombok to Suraybaya on the eastern end of Java with Lion Air – who are shit – and then spending a night in Surabaya – which is the city equivalent of Lion Air – then catching an all-day, stinking-hot train to Yogyakarta. With 135 million people, Java is the most populated and developed island in Indonesia and it feels like it – a traffic-clogged urban sprawl of sweaty people and belching trucks. Just seeing it out of a train window was tiring. It was time for some culturally responsible souvenir therapy. 

The 'professor' and I in Yogyakarta. Should have punched him while I had the chance.

            Batik art is a form of traditional Indonesian painting which is very time-consuming, very skilful and usually done by people in jungles with bits of wood stuck through their faces. All of this work produces a fabric of usually vividly coloured fabric that looks almost exactly like what MC Hammer made his pants out of in 1991. In addition, it is perhaps the only form of fine art in the world that can be safely ironed, a fact which impressed me inordinately at the time. In hindsight, I realise that your average oil painting just doesn’t wrinkle in the first place.

            After what I thought was some pretty shrewd bargaining, we were the proud owners of a couple of rather nice Batik paintings, and it wasn’t until I spoke to yet another ‘professor’ (no wonder Indonesia’s so poor, there are 200 million professors and only 27 people who can grow rice) on the street the next day that it dawned on me that we may have been duped. It turns out that there is a legitimate, government-run art gallery that only opens twice a week and sells exactly the same paintings for a quarter the price.

            Shit.

            To cheer ourselves up we thought we’d spend a day in a minivan with two French people. We didn’t know there would be French people when we booked the tour. Otherwise, of course, we wouldn’t have gone.

            Yogyakarta is known largely for two temples nearby, Borobudur and Prambanan. Borobudur is an immense tiered pyramid in the style of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Bagan in Burma, all of which were built over 1000 thousand years ago, while Prambanan is a complex of pointy Hindu temples which sometimes liven things up by falling on people.

            An even older bigger pointy thing near Yogya also kills people – Merapi volcano – and we would be going to see that first. The minivan headed out of central Yogya and into the hills. On the outskirts of town we began seeing evidence of the recent eruption. Bridges were washed away and at one point the road was still being excavated by barefoot workman with wicker baskets and shovels. Where the road had been re-cut through the grey drifts, the van passed between 6 foot high walls of ash. This grey sludge had mostly been washed down the river from the mountain that was lost in cloud, still 20 km away.            

The higher we walked up the mountain the worse the devastation became.

            We continued climbing and entered an area of cool misty hills, jungle and rice paddies. In the few years before the eruption this area had become the sight for eco-resort hotels – the launching point for hikers and local tourists looking to escape the lowland heat. It was beautiful, but everywhere there were traces of the eruption – gardens smothered by the toxic ash, grey mud in the fields. As we got nearer the top the trees began thinning until there were only dead silhouettes looming out of the mist and by the time we got as far as damaged road would let us, there was no green left at all. Near where we parked were the remains of four motorbikes that had been caught in the pyroclastic flow and welded to the asphalt – their frames bent and every piece of plastic and fleck of paint blasted off them – and we were still several kilometres from the top of the mountain. 

Giggling kids climbed all over the ruins of this house as their parents posed for photos.

On 25^th October 2010 the volcano cracked the shits and in the next month killed 353 people and completely wiped away several villages. People 30 km in Yogya hardly saw the sun for months and the falling ash killed crops and choked rivers. The whole area now is grey sludge broken only be skeletal trees and sections of houses sticking out of the toxic ash.

            And souvenir stands, because the whole thing had been turned into a tourist attraction. Old women sold cans of coke to panting Chinese tourists climbing the ruined road past charred brickwork. Someone had built a noodle stand. People asked strangers to take photos of their families in front of the melted remains of a 1970s television set in the blackened ruins of someone’s lounge room. The names of the dead from each village were printed on glossy signs displayed in the information hut. It could have been an advert for Pepsi. The girl working there told said there were 47 people killed and one still missing in this village alone. Then she asked me where I was from – she wanted someone to practice her English with.

The whole thing was strange and a little wrong. Like having sex at a funeral or enjoying yourself at a Maroon 5 concert. After the sombreness of Mt Merapi I needed to be mobbed by pretty young Indonesian girls for a couple of hours.

Luckily we were on our way to Borobudur temple.

Night time in Yogyakarta.