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| Idiot Croft - Tomb Wanker. |
I now know how it feels to be Brad Pitt. I’m not handsome, rich or talented and I haven’t seen Angelina Jolie naked – at least not with my eyes open – but, thanks to an ancient temple in central Java, I do know what it’s like to be totally and utterly conspicuous.
Our minivan dumped us outside the Borobudur temple complex and the driver led us into the foreigners’ ticket office, where we paid ten times the local price for entry. It was still less than $10 and for that we got a coffee in an air-conditioned room with a plastic scale model of the temple. In a worrying sign that I’m going to be one of those annoying middle-aged men that you don’t want to sit next to on a plane, I looked at the model and said.
“Gee, it’s smaller than I expected but at least it’s air conditioned.”
The armed guard minding the coffee urn didn’t so much as smirk – tough room. Bewildered, I walked into the wet, hot afternoon and through mounds of plastic souvenirs so awful I almost bought something just to show everyone how bad it was (but then, maybe that’s what they want you to do). The place was going off, in an eleven hundred year old Buddhist temple kind of way, with cameras whirring and kids clawing at ancient stupas. As soon as Alicia and I walked into the throng, we could feel stares. We were two out of four whiteys in the joint and it probably didn’t help that I was wearing stupid blue ray-bans and that Alicia’s hair is so blonde that she can be used as an emergency distress flare if thrown high enough in the air. In Australia my 5’9” is considered borderline Oompa Loompa but here I was the tallest person around.
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| After an hour my smile was so frozen I could have hosted a game show. |
Due to a horror of being tanned, most fashionable young Indonesians wear long sleeves and jeans, although it’s generally well over 30 degrees. Looking around we saw that a lot of the gaggles of teenagers wore hoodies with ‘Study Tour’ written on them. It wasn’t long before the first teen was pushed into our path by her friends.
“Make photo?” She asked shyly. We agreed and the next hour was a procession of gigging high school kids yelling “Mr, make photo, where you from?” At one point they actually formed a queue. A couple of kids even asked for autographs although I think they were just as unsure why they wanted them as we were. Some of the kids spoke pretty good English and we learned that Borobodur temple is a well-known spot for school groups from around Java to ambush friendly foreigners in order to practice their English. This was actually part of a school assignment for some of them.
This happened in many parts of Indonesia, mostly with young men wanting to get pictures with Alicia who is so slim and fair you can actually read a playing card through her in a very bright room. When asked, most of them said that they wanted to take the photos back to their families to show off the pretty Australian girl they met. Imagine that, photos of Alicia and me stuck on walls in fishing villages and jungle towns in obscure parts of Indonesia – weird. I’m going to start doing it to people from Tasmania when I get home, just to freak them out.
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| The crowds at Borobudur temple. |
I guess I should tell you about Borobudur temple. First let me say that religious buildings just don’t do it for me. I’ve got nothing against them, there are just too many of them – like McDonalds restaurants and Collingwood supporters. If I see one more medieval cathedral, I’ll vomit and if I’m shown another brightly painted Chinese temple, I’ll set fire to it. You always feel like you have to be respectful and reverent.
“Ohh, doesn’t Jesus look particularly like Eddie Vedder on that cross,” or “Wow, the shade of red they’ve used on that dragon’s tongue is quite…red,” you whisper.
But something about the temples in South East Asia is really beautiful. Maybe because they’re crumbling and being slowly consumed by jungle, reminding you that no building, religion or empire can outlast nature, or maybe just because they’re covered in pictures of a chubby smiling man who reminds me of John Belushi. Whatever, they’re cool.
Jakarta is know by some as ‘the big durian’ which of course is an ode to ‘the big apple’ and, as we found out on the slow train from Yogyakarta the following day, may be the most apt (and clever) nick-name ever. Anyone reading who hasn’t been to Asia will probably be mercifully unfamiliar with this hateful fruit. For much the same reason as weapons-grade plutonium and the music of David Hasselhoff, I believe it is illegal to import durians into Australia. Because – and there’s no way around it – they smell like a gypsy’s foreskin. It’s just awful – sickly sweet and cloying with a hint of rotting flesh.
Soon after we pushed our way onto the train and found a seat the lady behind us cracked her first durian. From where I was I couldn’t see her and I honestly thought the seat must have been occupied by a dead pigeon covered in apricot jam. For most of our 6 hour trip she slurped and swallowed this olfactory equivalent of a leper’s underpants while I stuck my head out the window and quietly gagged.
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| Yogyakarta - the least ugly city in Indonesia. |
The view out of the window was quite beautiful in parts with rice paddies and stretches of steep jungle broken by small farms and wooden huts. That is until the train got anywhere near a city or big town. With the possible exception of Yogyakarta, Indonesia must have the ugliest cities in the world – dirty concrete streets between dirty concrete buildings and drains clogged with plastic bags and rubble. The more I see of South-East Asia the more obvious it becomes that huge areas of one of the most beautiful parts of the world have been irrevocably and unarguably ruined by the people who live there.
The combination of durian-stench and rubbish-choked rivers had put me in a less-than-perfect frame of mind to experience the tropical wonders of historic Jakarta. But that’s ok because there are none. It’s terrible. All the character and history of a supermarket loading dock combined with the cleanliness and order of a junkie’s moustache. Add to that the fact that it’s Islamic and therefore annoyingly difficult to get a beer, and you’ve got a pretty good candidate for the world’s biggest crap-hole so I was as surprised as anyone to discover that I really liked it. There are no real tourists in Jakarta, just backpackers passing through. The only other westerners are crusty old expats who slink from bar to bar wearing sunglasses and smoking imported cigarettes. I guessed they were probably involved in trafficking under-aged sex ivory, whatever that means. Alicia thought perhaps the oil industry, but I refused to believe they could be that evil.
I liked the big durian because it really didn’t care about me. Tourism in this huge city is an incidental thing. No one offered me tours or motorbike rental or eco-elephant jungle treks because there’s just nothing to see. We were free to just wander the city, choke to death and be run down by tuk-tuks wherever we chose. It’s a place to fly into, grab some under-age sex ivory and get out again. And that’s what we did – get out, I mean, not the other bit.
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| Prambanan - another, pointier temple near Yogyakarta. |
