Thailand to Vietnam – Scambodia

Ok, I think for this entry I need to issue a disclaimer. I do actually quite like travelling and when I spent 2 weeks in Cambodia a couple of years ago, I loved the place. The following rant is the result of travelling too far, too fast. Also please forgive the holocaust gag. 

By the time we hit Cambodia, 6 weeks of constant travel had sent me madder than an octopus's nipple

To get into Cambodia you need to a tourist visa. Fortunately you can buy these at the border for around 20 bucks. Unfortunately this means there are scams. Nowhere in the world attracts crooks and scumbags like a land border – just look at Echuca-Moama.

The particular scam here is a deal between the tuk-tuk drivers at Aranyaprathet train station and a bunch of local berks who have bought some quasi-military uniforms and turned a travel agency near the border into an approximation of an immigration checkpoint. So the only way to get to the border is to get a tuk-tuk – the driver will assure you he is going to the real border but in reality will drop you at the travel agent’s – smile and tell the guy with faux uniform to piss off, then walk 500m to the real border where the real officials are, like all Thais not involved with tourism, polite and helpful.

Considering I had chest infection, had been up since 4.30 and spent 7 hours on a train not unlike one your Jewish grandad would be familiar with, I think I was pretty restrained.

            If you stop to think about it, and if you have crossed a few borders before, you will spot it a mile away. For a start, the only currency you can use at this scam border is Thai Baht… For a Cambodian visa. So unless Cambodia has decided to adopt the national currency of Thailand – unlikely because the two countries are virtually at war – this seems fairly odd. Also our passports hadn’t been stamped out of Thailand yet, so it would seem a little premature to be stamping into Cambodia. Anyway we avoided the scam and, feeling a little smug and worldly we bought our visas and walked across the border to the casino town of Poipet.        

             Waiting in the long line at Cambodian immigration, we got talking to Alison and Eric, an American couple who were also bound for Siem Reap. The word on the street (i.e the Lonely Planet guide book) was that a bus from Poipet to Siem Reap would take around 5 hours while a share taxi was only 2 hours. We decided to join forces and, with the addition of a Japanese student whom I shall call Honda, we elbowed our way through the nagging bus touts and set off for the taxi rank.

With five passengers, I had hoped to find some sort of minivan thingy and the guy at the rank sort of implied that’s what we would get. So when an aging Corolla pulled up I took no notice and presumed that the smiling driver who was talking to us in Khmer was a sort of village idiot who’s job it was to drive wrecked cars to a machine known as the cubinater while amusing tourists with his mad hand gestures and idiosyncratic attitude to personal hygiene.

No such luck. Four of us squeezed in the back while Eric, who had a gimpy leg from a rock climbing accident, got in the front and fell asleep. The sweaty little UN that was the backseat spent the two hours chatting in the usual vaguely annoying but inescapable way of travellers everywhere.

 “Oh we did Laos last year…”

“…if you get a chance, you have to go to…”

“it wasn’t touristy at all…”

Honda was an air pollution student who had been in Bangkok looking for evidence of smog that, for some reason involving words that apparently don’t easily translate from Japanese, accumulates there after being blown from China and India. And here I was thinking that Bangkok was just a dirty craphole.

The name Siem Reap means 'Thailand defeated'. Don't say I never teach you anything.

When we arrived in Siem Reap (“yeah, it’s a bit touristy you know? Not very authentic, but, like, a pretty mellow vibe… oh and you have to see Angkor Wat”), it was late afternoon and we checked into a hotel that Alicia and I had stayed at last year. An English guy had bought it and started doing it up. It was a cool place but he’d changed the name from the hilarious Wat’s Up Hotel (Wat as in Angkor Wat. Get it?).

We would have liked to stay in Siem Reap longer than one night to enjoy some cheap food and the lively little backpacker scene but it was Wednesday and we had to get to Phnom Penh to organise some Vietnamese visas before the weekend.

The following morning we hailed one of the unique and excellent Cambodian tuk-tuks, which are basically old fashioned carriages with their horses replaced by a Honda scooters, and caught a little bus to Phnom Penh. (Author’s note – all horses should be replaced with Honda scooters. I can steer a Honda but can’t make a delicious burger out of one. The reverse is true for horses.)

The trip, like most bus trips, was boring and uncomfortable and made me wish I was on a train. Or a motorbike. Or a share taxi. Well maybe not a share taxi.

Downtown Phnom Penh.

We stayed in Phnom Penh, got some laundry done and paid $30 for our Vietnamese visa (the same visa in Australia costs $75 dollars and takes weeks) then we wondered around for a couple of days getting hot and bored like everyone else.

Phnom Penh is a fairly pleasant little city but the only tourist attractions are a torture museum and getting drunk. I wasn’t up to seeing the incredibly moving killing fields again and I was still ill from a chest infection I’d picked up on the train to Thailand, so I’d decided to have an alcohol free week. I did manage to watch my first and last world cup cricket match between India and Australia with a pissed drug runner from Perth named Costa.

When our visas were ready we jumped on the next bus going east. The trip was enlivened slightly when Alicia had her mobile phone stolen and by the time we passed through the grandiose Vietnamese border complex and reached traffic-choked Saigon we had covered more than 3000kms and crossed five countries in less than three weeks.

We were in need of a spring roll and a lie down.

 

Pretending I can read near the mighty Mekong River

Georgetown to Cambodia - Trains through Thailand

The train. Better than my last share house

One of my favourite things in the world is to spend the night on a sleeper train chunting (shut up, it’s a word) through South East Asia. Years ago, with my brother and other members of team zebra, I traveled from Bangkok north through the Thai jungle to Chang Mai in second class sleeper. It was great. You could sit in your cozy little bunk, open the window and smoke cigarettes, your knuckles gently dislocating against passing trees. Every half an hour a man with a silly uniform shimmied up the aisle with a bucket full of cold beer. The toilet was just a hole in the floor and you could amuse yourself by aiming for the train track as you swayed drunkenly through the night. Who needs a playstation?

           So when Alicia and I booked tickets on the 23 hour sleeper from Georgetown in Malaysia to Bangkok, I had hoped for the same train. After all, it was basically the same line - a 4000km length of track that runs from Singapore to northern Thailand.

            What we got however was, well, a Daewoo. I don’t mean metaphorically, you understand, it was just made by Daewoo. Unlike their cars, some of it was even made of metal. You couldn’t open the windows but that’s ok, I don’t smoke anymore and besides, my knuckles have only just healed.

            The first few hours, until almost the Thai border at Hat Yai, it belted rain. A few days later parts of southern Thailand experienced severe flooding. A friend of mine was stuck on Koh Samui for 3 days.

The Malay-Thai border crossing was trouble free, and by nightfall we were tucking into a big Singha beer and some really decent Thai food. It is impossible to get a bad meal in Thailand. This was food prepared in tiny caboose (I’ve always wanted to use that word) on the back of a rocking Daewoo in the middle of nowhere. Can you imagine if V-line started serving meals?

Soon after dinner the conductor came and performed a sort of grumpy magic act and in about 8 seconds had turned our restaurant table into bunk beds. I immediately jumped into the bottom bunk and, in the manner of all people who are mechanically curious but also idiots, broke something, and spent ten happy minutes making it worse and virtually severing an index finger.

“You’re not going to fix it you know. And look, you’ve got arterial blood on the pillow.”

Alicia had a point.

Luckily the conductor was alerted by the picturesque red mist spraying out of where my finger had been and effortlessly fixed the bunk.

Whether due to blood loss or the rocking motion of the train, I slept for 10 hours and woke up in the sprawling outskirts of Bangkok with a sore hand and a chest infection. I still loved it though.

The view from our hovel in Bangkok

After an hour or so tooling around the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road, we found a $8 room on the 427^th floor of a little hotel with no lift. Then we went drinking for a couple of days.

It is impossible not to drink too much beer and have fun in Thailand. I have seen women in full burqas staggering down Khao San Rd clutching a Chang and screaming Cold Chisel songs in what might have been Arabic at 11am. The beer is too good, the weather is too hot and the beer is too…beer. In certain parts of Bangkok even the water is beer, whatever that means.

A number of days later (I think it was between 2 and 9) we left for Cambodia.

There are two ways to get to Siem Reap in Cambodia. One is convenient and comfortable but can cost upwards of $9 which is how I found myself standing outside our hotel at 5am. I hadn’t even realized there was a 5am and had to google it just to be sure it wasn’t some sort of hoax.

Pre-dawn Bangkok is a strange and worrying place. Lost backpackers with warm Singhas hanging from dangling arms wobble their way home, wondering how they had spent their whole budget for 6 weeks in Loas on a hangover and herpes. Face-masked street sweepers battle rats the size of Toyotas and shiny-toothed taxi drivers quote ambitious prices to lure drunks to the early morning ping pong shows.

One driver in a rusty little cab told us that it was better to let him drive us to Siem Reap, a mere 400km away. He showed us with misplaced pride photos of the little car, boot open and stuffed with backpacks, with about 16 nervous-looking Germans crammed in the back seat, probably thinking, “Zis vas not in ze brochure”.

Alicia eating a cricket on Khao San Rd

            We had to walk away from the tourist ghetto to find a taxi that would take us to the station for less than an airfare to Bhutan, but we got there on time. I managed to purchase the appropriate ticket and find the platform without swearing at anyone - most unusual for me when traveling before breakfast.

            The train left on time just as the thick smog on the eastern horizon became a shade lighter than the thick smog covering the rest of the sky, this I believe is called a Bangkok sunrise. Or is that a sex act? Anyway the train was old and slow with no air-con and windows that opened so far that you could cheerfully decapitate yourself trying to take photos of the back half of the train. It was about $2 dollars for the 7 hour trip to the Cambodian border at Aranyaprathet.

After about an hour, the endless slums of Bangkok, um, ended, and we were tootling through green paddy fields interspersed with patches of jungle and an overloaded scooter or two - the ubiquitous and pleasing backdrop to most South East Asian train travel. I knew this would be our last train trip for quite a while - Cambodia only has one cargo train that leaves from somewhere not very interesting and arrives 17 hours later at somewhere even less interesting 45 km away - so I decided to enjoy it.

As we got nearer midday and the border, the landscape dried out and turned to flat scrub scattered with Eucylypt plantations. The smell of gums, the brain-melting heat and the brown grass could very nearly have been country Victoria - the mallee maybe. Except people from Wycheproof don’t have conical hats and Honda scooters.

So we arrived, sweaty and wary, at the Cambodian border - according to our guidebook a place rife with scams.

Malaysia – A Great Place to be Kicked to Death

Idiotson Crusoe

Four days in Singapore had cost us a third of our budget and partial use of my liver so we decided to get out. I had wanted to start the trip at Singapore’s cool old Keppel Road station but after a hot, frustrating day investigating we discovered a hitch. To buy a ticket in Singapore you have to pay in Singapore dollars – fair enough. If, however, you catch a bus 30 minutes to Johor Barhu in Malaysia, you pay in Malaysian ringgits. So a ticket to Kuala Lumpur is about 40 dollars or 40 ringgits, which would be fine if the conversion rate was about the same, but 1 Sing dollar buys over 3 ringgits so the price of the ticket is triple. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Singapore is weird. Also, you can’t book tickets in advance so we jumped on a bus from central Singapore and tootled over the mile-long causeway that joins Singapore to mainland Asia. The bus station and the train station were clean, efficient and – most surprisingly – in the same building. Sometimes in Indonesia they had been in different provinces – the bus station in Surabaya, Java is actually in East Timor and Jakarta’s central train station is on one of Jupiter’s moons.

It was disconcerting and I was waiting for the catch, so I was almost pleased when we were told that, because you can’t pre-book tickets on Malaysian trains unless you do it 24 years prior to departure, there were no sleeper beds left and we would have to spend 18 hours in a seat. Facing backwards. Luckily, there would be a half hour stop in Kuala Lumpur station, which was probably in the Philippines. 

An early morning view of Penang from the ferry.

            Malaysia might have the best food in the world. Thai food is great but even breakfast can be eye-wateringly spicy and I’m told the food in India is fantastic but three hours after you eat it your bottom explodes and you die. So the mix of Indian, Thai, Malay and European food coupled, almost uniquely in South-East Asia, with food hygiene levels that involve more than a sponge that is washed bi-annually in a river, it’s got to be pretty good. Which is why I was a little surprised to find myself having my first meal in Malaysia in a Burger King in KL Sentral station. But we only had half an hour to change trains and I wanted to put on a little last minute bum fat before spending the night in a seat.

            Around dawn we rolled into Butterworth station and walked down a clearly labelled walkway and straight onto a ferry which left immediately on its 15 minute trip to Georgetown on the island Penang. Just like that. Travel in Malaysia is ace.

The ferry had a viewing deck and the early morning sun shining on the historic port of Georgetown was pretty enough to make me forget the crushed vertebra and dislocated pelvis the 18 hour train trip had given me.

            After an hour strolling around the picturesque old town and generally getting lost, we found a great old hotel that looked like it hadn’t been renovated – or vacuumed – in 70 years. But it was cheap and had things modern hotels don’t offer like high ceilings, a hat stand and a fan that you have to turn on with a crowbar. We dumped our bags and went out in search of food.

After four days I had to be surgically removed from this chair.

            If there is a better place on earth to hang out, eat food and drink beer than Georgetown, I haven’t been there. The food is great and cheap, the beer is cold and, unlike Thailand and Indonesia, there are no coral reefs or indigenous craft workshops to feel guilty about not seeing. In fact the only touristy sight is an historic ruined fort built by some silly white people 5 thousand years ago or something and, despite being big and imposing, there’s nothing inside but a rusty cannon and a tree so you can see it in 20 minutes and get back to your noodles.

We sat on the water’s edge at what amounted to a boozy open-air shopping plaza food court and ate plates of $2 dumplings while slurping on enormous Tiger beers and watching cruise ships and thunder storms pass from horizon to horizon. One day we rented a scooter and rode most of the way around the island, racing around smooth windy mountain roads. I felt like Valentino Rossi. Except with a passenger. And a 100cc scooter. And very little idea how to ride properly. But still, it was fun and at one point we stopped at a national park and swam at a nice beach. On the way home we even saw monkeys and big monitor lizards. Then we got drunk and ate something on a skewer. 

Oh, chimpanzee that...

            The next day a man kicked me in the shins so we went to Thailand.

            I’ve taken night time wanders through Naples and Bangkok. I’ve been hopelessly lost in Cambodian forest villages and towns in Eastern Europe where the basic unit of currency is an AK-47. Once I even went to Morwell. But until our last night in Penang I had never been physically attacked. We were walking back to our hotel after a hard day’s sitting around and found ourselves in an unlit, empty street. A wild looking Malay guy with long hair and an unbuttoned shirt paced up and down the footpath not far in front of us. Bringing all my special services training to bear, I completely failed to notice him until he was about 30 feet away.

“Shit, that guy’s dodgy. Let’s just keep walking,” said Alicia.

I had wanted to stop and ask him to be Godfather to my first child, but I decided she had a point. As we walked past he gave me a full-force Muay Thai style kick to my right shin.

I guess he wanted me to fall down so he could kick me to death, steal my wallet and touch Alicia in the pants. Either that or he had taken offence to my anklet. It was so fast and odd that I had walked about 20 feet past him before I realised.

“Oww,” I said bravely and walked quickly around a corner to a crowded street, also bravely.

He didn’t follow and it all seemed more funny that scary. I don’t think we narrowly avoided an organised ring of criminal masterminds operating a kick-and-grab credit card scam. I just think the guy was mad as an onion. And if all you have to pay for staying in a jungly paradise ringed with beaches, full of great food, cold beer and cheap hotels is a weekly kicking, then I still think it’s a good deal. It would probably discourage German tour groups too, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Alicia considering an Evel Knievel style canyon jump in the Penang hills..

Bintan – Probably the Worst Island in the World

Beer. The only answer

Well dear readers, when last you left me I had just woken up on an empty ferry in northern Indonesia with no wallet or bank cards. I bet you’ve all been staining your trousers waiting to hear what happens next haven’t you, you little blog-whores?

            First let’s get something straight – Bintan island in northern Indonesia is just awful and if I ever hear you’ve been there for any reason I will personally knee you in the kidneys, ok?

Alicia and I searched the boat thoroughly and, after a brief interlude of high-impact coarse language and unjustified racial slurs, we collected our remaining possessions and climbed onto the dock. We would have to find a ride to the nearest phone and cancel my stolen Visa card. After checking our respective pockets for local currency, we decided to indulge in some breakfast Nasi Goreng.

NG in Indonesia is routinely awesome – spicy and fresh, it always comes with a giant prawn cracker just like I used to get for free at my local Chinese restaurant if I ordered over $20. It cheered me up, but only a little bit.

On the main road behind the dock we found a bemo (a tiny van fitted with wooden bench seats and used as a taxi) and after some animated miming we were bouncing across the island towards an internet café in the main town of Tanjung Pinang. At 8am the joint was full of hunched teens in headsets playing some God-awful game involving either druids or machine guns or possibly both. After buying the minimum 1 hour of internet time, I spent exactly 3 minutes transferring all my money out of my bank account and left. I still had to cancel my card so we caught another bemo to the centre of town.

Even the boats are shit in Bintan

On an ugly street in the middle of an ugly part of town, we found an ugly Chinese-style business hotel complete with concrete fountains full of depressed-looking turtles and asked to use the pay phone.

“No.”

“Is there anywhere in town where I can make international calls?”

“No.”

“Why is that turtle so sad?”

Shrug.

It started to rain.

            After a prolonged squelch through town, I found a shop selling used mobile phones. The guy spoke a bit of English and after some negotiation I purchased a secondhand Nokia and a SIM card for around $15 and succeeded in canceling my card. For the next three months I would be reliant on Alicia’s goodwill to access my cash – I’d have to be nicer to her.

Our hotel that night was too terrible to even talk about so we booked a ferry to Singapore the next morning. We had a couple of days to kill before the next available boat so we decided to find some nicer digs. Down at the port, some guys offered us a couple of motor bike cabs to the east-coast beach resort of Trikora. After some negotiation they agreed to drop us at place called Shady Shack which consisted of a bar/restaurant and four huts built directly on a grey beach. The whole place looked like it had been put together in an afternoon by Bear Grylls – it was sweet.

The cabbies demanded double what we had agreed on and started getting a bit agro but I bravely hid in the bar until they got bored and left.

Due to its proximity to Singapore, Trikora beach has become a popular weekend getaway for Singaporeans and expats. This has pushed prices up and coming straight from Java the $25 room price was a shock. For that we got a mozzie net, cold running water and the South China Sea lapping at the beach directly under our veranda, so I guess it was ok.

            After dumping our bags, we went for a wander up the beach and found a resort obviously catering to wealthy Singaporeans and Chinese. It had bungalows perched on concrete stilts several hundred metres out to sea and the restaurant menu featured shark fin soup and sea turtle. The turtles were on display in overcrowded plastic tanks next to the kitchen. I briefly considered freeing the turtles and punching the owner in the cock but then remembered I’m a massive coward.

            When we strolled back into our hotel bar, there were half a dozen tense-looking backpackers watching the TV in silence. Images of floating cars and shattered buildings filled the screen – a tsunami had hit Japan. The hotel owner translated as we watched the disaster unfold.

North-eastern parts of Indonesia were being evacuated and locals were being told to find high ground. I got my map of Indonesia out. Although we were a long way west of the affected islands, our beach directly faced southern Japan. It was going to be a tense night.

Very pretty, but hardly ideal shelter in a tsunami

We sat with a couple of pommy girls watching the tragic devastation and listening to the waves lap the beach twenty metres from where we sat. Our hosts assured us there was nothing to worry about – we were too far away, apparently – and anyway, there was no transport and no higher ground anywhere close.

            We woke the next morning high and dry with a burning desire to get off Bintan. Unfortunately the only way to do so, we were told by the apologetic owner, was to walk to the main road and hitchhike the twenty-odd kilometres into town. We hiked up to the main road in the heat and waited for a ride. Nearby there was a little shop in the middle of the farms and tropical scrub. By this time I had learned the Indo for ‘can I have a big water’, ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re crazy’. As I approached the counter, the three staff giggled and hid.

            “Um, can I have a big water please?”

            There were more giggles before a small water was produced.

            “No. Can I have a big water please?” I was fast running out of vocab.

            The girl blushed and fumbled as she exchanged the small water for a big one. I had never had such an effect on anyone. It was disconcerting.

            “You’re crazy,” I said as she took my money.

            Well. I have never said a funnier thing. The whole shop burst into hysterics. People were laughing and screaming. I backed off slowly, considering a career in Indonesian standup comedy.

            After half an hour standing beside an empty road, a grey van pulled up.

            “Tanjung Pinang?”

            “Ok.”

            Half an hour later the van delivered us in air-conditioned comfort to the dock. Through our usual mash of Bahasa and English we learned that the driver had not been planning to go that far but had made a special trip. At the dock he wouldn’t accept any money. People are great.

On the ferry to Singapore. Saucy minx

 Going from Indonesia to Singapore is like leaving a nightclub toilet and going to a dinner party at a dentist’s house. The food’s pretty good and if you drink the water you wont die, but after twenty minutes you’ll be bored enough to pierce your own testicle. We spent three days in the ‘pore and it was fine. We met some nice people, ate tasty food and drank reasonably priced beer at the city’s many hawker centres. Oh, and there’s the world’s most fantastic ukulele shop where I spent an hour playing a little banjo-uke so sweet that I wanted badly to marry it and start a little twangy family.

Clearly I was going insane. It was time to go.

The sacred love between an idiot and his instrument

Jakarta to Bintan – Robbery on the High Seas

Leaving Jakarta

There’s probably an old sea shanty warning of the perils of boarding a ship that shares it’s name with a Nigerian prostitute, I thought, as Alicia and I stepped aboard the Lambelu at Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok dock.

Two days up the Sumatran coast, Bintan island was to be our last stop in Indo before we hit Singapore. The Lambelu is one of the Pelni ferries that for years has been happily chugging millions of Indonesians and the odd backpacker around the archipelago. Recently their popularity has decreased due to budget airlines and the fact that Pelni boats sometimes fall over and drown everyone. However this only happens in extreme conditions such as cloudy weather and Tuesdays and their safety record has improved markedly in recent years due to the implementation of advanced safety systems like rudders and maps.

            We caught a crowded bus and spent an hour sitting on the dashboard smiling wanly as we battered trough the smog and congestion of central Jakarta. Jumping a couple of motorbike taxis, we swerved toward the dock, our backpacks neatly removing wing mirrors as my driver chatted cheerfully in Bahasa Indonesian.

Jakartarians, or whatever, tend to have a kind of insane friendliness that reminds me of that drunk guy I get talking to in the bar of every small-town Aussie pub. The guy who buys you seven ouzo shots and insists you come back to his mate’s house to smoke bongs and listen to Twisted Sister and then at 3am starts accusing you of sleeping with his ex-wife or stealing his dartboard before screaming, “Only joking. You’re a good egg, Mark,” and slapping you so hard on the back that his dartboard falls out of your jacket. Or does that only happen to me?

Anyway, our bikes dropped us off and after a medium-length self-guided tour of Jakarta’s biggest cargo port we found our gate and strode up a pleasingly rickety gangway onto the Lambelu.

Home sweet home

Our cheapo ticket entitled us to a vinyl mattress each on an open-plan lower deck we shared with a couple of hundred people. It was 2 hours before scheduled departure and already families sat on their beds slurping instant noodles and slapping bent playing cards down between crossed legs. Men with bad teeth lay smoking with one arm shielding their eyes from exposed fluro lights. Women carrying urns full of hot water stepped over sleeping children.

“Pop-mi, kopi,” they rhymed, trying to sell their noodles and coffee before we sailed.

            Our deck was just above the waterline and tiny portholes let in no natural light. Screaming kids and teens listening to tinny Indo pop on mobile phones vied with TVs  locked to staticy gameshows for title of most annoying noise in the world. With no ventilation, cigarette smoke hung in the air, almost obscuring the ‘no smoking’ signs. It was still better than an Air Asia flight. I loved it. 

The neighbours

It was time to find the helipad.

            Here’s a hot tip. All reasonable sized ferries have helipads. They’re always at the very top of the ship with great views and the crew never lock the gates or check for people up there. I found out by accident once on a ferry to Tasmania and I haven’t looked back. The Lambelu was no exception. We watched the sun dissolve into the Jakarta haze while cranes lazily loaded containers onto huge freighters. By the time the ship smogged its way out of the harbour we were a couple of hours behind schedule and the sky was dark. I found a little platform aft of the starboard mizzen f’c’sle and stood in the breeze pleased with the way my pirate talk was coming along and hoping to God I was on a poopdeck.

            If you don’t like boat travel, you’re an idiot and we can’t be friends anymore. As the sea breeze flushed the Javan smog out of my lungs and navigation buoys twinkled red and green I had a feeling of traveling that you don’t get from buses and planes. It was rad. A couple of hours later, the fishing boats had thinned and Jakarta was a faint gleam on the clouds behind us. I returned to quarters, brushed the cigarette ash and dandruff off my bed and turned in.

Jakarta from the helipad

The next day we made some friends and I tried to eat something’s head.

As the only foreign devils on aboard, we naturally drew some attention. I say we but it was really Alicia. She is so pale that soon after we met I took a flash photo of her and she had to be rushed to hospital with 2^nd degree burns. When the photo was developed, you could clearly see her spleen and parts of her small intestine. Under state and territory law she is banned from walking through long grass on days of total fire ban. People notice her.

We woke up hungry. We had brought snacks and packaged goods with us but I wasn’t sure I could stomach a chocolate and marshmallow breakfast… No wait, I totally could. But the guy at the Pelni office had said that there was food included in the ticket price. The group of people behind us soon came back bearing polystyrene containers of something that smelled eggy and good. On seeing the drool pooling on my chin one of our neighbours gestured for us to follow him. He led us to a little hole-in-the-wall where a queue had formed to collect trays of steamed rice, boiled egg and chili sauce – the breakfast of champions.

            We spent the day using a combination of English, Bahasa, guidebooks, a map of Indo, mime, and a ukulele to chat to our ever-expanding group of friends. At lunch time we were taken up to the counter and each got a tray of rice and about a quarter of some little fish. My quarter was all head. I’m not bad with eating silly food. I’ve had moth in Thailand, fertilized duck egg in Vietnam, chicken feet in Korea and jellied eel in east London – once I even tried Red Rooster – but I just can’t come at fish head. It’s all eyeball juice and face.

It's what's for dinner... and lunch

After lunch the menfolk invited me upstairs for coffee, leaving the girls to knit and chat about their periods or whatever it is that girls do. I was glad of the opportunity to wash the gill-snot and cheek from between my teeth. The deck was full of men playing cards and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. After a couple of cups of coffee, the rest of the guys excused themselves and left me with the bill for 10 coffees and a couple of packs of ciggies. At 4 bucks I wasn’t complaining.

            We were due at Kijang on Bintan island early the next morning but late that night there was a commotion and I gleaned that we were arriving several hours early. I can only assume that, contrary to Pelni company policy, the captain had not gotten lost or crashed into any reefs, thereby ruining the schedule. I stood on deck and watched the boringly competent captain pilot the ship into port.

Waiting on the dock were a couple of dozen guys wearing dirty blue vests. As the ship came within leaping distance the men surged onto the lower deck. Minutes later they were on our deck, puffing and yelling. After a short discussion with a family near us, one of the blue-vests shouldered a huge load of boxes and jogged towards the exit.

Mostly big young guys, they were porters charging a few cents to cart luggage to the dock. They were hugely strong and moved quickly, hoping to make two or three trips. Soon our deck was empty and cleaners had begun stacking mattresses and attacking the toilets with mops.

According to our all-seeing, all-knowing Lonely Planet guide, Kijang was tiny with no accommodation. We had planned to get a taxi or hitch straight to Tanjung Pinang on the other side of the island as it seemed the only place that might offer some food and a bed. While Alicia guarded the bags from overzealous porters, I found a member of the crew – the first I had seen all trip. He spoke a bit of English and told me that the ship wouldn’t depart until the next night so we were welcome to crash on a mattress until dawn. Sweet.

I woke the next morning to find that my wallet had been nicked. Bintan island had taken its first swipe at my sanity.

Java II - Stinky Fruit and the Rock Star Treatment

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

Prambanan - another, pointier temple near Yogyakarta.

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.