Landing
at an airport in Indonesia, any airport in Indonesia, is always the same. It
may even be the same across the whole of the Asian continent for all I know. It
certainly is in every part of Thailand that I have visited. You must do
battle with hordes of porters and taxi drivers trying to persuade you to take
their overpriced vehicles to wherever it is that you want to go to, with most
touts using tried and tested cajoling tactics.
this photo wa taken on a day the airport was closed to taxis....and passengers
On
a previous trip back to Jakarta towards the end of my third year in Indonesia,
I still remember being told that a cab from the airport to my home town of
Gading Serpong would be Rp300,000, or $30 (I think that you’re starting to pick
up on the conversion rate that I’m using which, whilst not being accurate
enough for a money changer, is as near as damnit is to swearing). The actual
price at the time for this journey, using a metered cab, was closer to
Rp50,000, give or take a couple of thousand. When I pointed this out to the
tout in my pidgeon Bahasa he was most put out, both by my knowledge of local
taxi fares as much as my ability to use his language.
You
could always try to circumnavigate this process by staying in a hotel that
offers a courtesy car service which will pick you up from your airport or
station of choice, or you can try to stoically walk past them with a look of
determination on your face that says you know what you want and where you’re
going to go to get it. We decided to choose the latter approach.
The
last time we were here in Yogyakarta was for our mini honeymoon. On that
occasion we gave in and took an overpriced, non-metered taxi but this time we
sneaked our way through the taxi drivers and departing passengers and made our
way out to the main road to flag down a passing cab. As we were waiting, Yohana
struck up a conversation with a guy working in a roadside shop and talked about
the best direction for Malioboro, the street on which our hotel was
situated and he kindly suggested a suitable spot in which to wait.
I
have lived in Indonesia for more than five years now and I can say without a
shadow of a doubt that it is the friendliness, inherent in Indonesian culture
and which encourages these wonderful people to speak to random strangers, that
makes me want to stay forever. 99% of the time the chief reason for this
friendly banter is curiosity, a trait that while sometimes uncomfortable for
Westerners who aren't overly happy about being asked their inside leg measurement
as an opening question, does indeed grow on you. I have been drawn into
conversations in all manner of places, from restaurants to urinals, on subjects
as varied as my home town to how to shoe horses with one hand tied behind your
back.
Not
all Indonesians are that pure in their conversational intentions though, so
consequently it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between that friendly
banter I mentioned and someone who is sizing you up for a sting. Having had my
good nature bitten on more than one occasion, I tend to approach all
conversations with a healthy dose of suspicion but not to the point of
rudeness. If the end of the ‘where are you from?’ conversation ends up with a
request for money, I just use a tabloid journalist technique; make my excuses
and leave. So as I watched the guy approach us now I
still didn't know which way the conversation would go. As it happened, there
was no pretence at all towards small talk, it was just a question. ‘Need a
lift?’ and for a quickly negotiated $6 we were winging our way towards our
hotel.
I
should point out that my original holiday plans were for a solo trip. Every
year I have the opportunity for a break between contracts and this year I
decided that even though it meant a week unpaid, the benefits of an extra week
off would be worth that sacrifice. Yohana originally couldn’t have the same
time off from her job and her holiday year and mine do not run in sync, so it
was only at the last minute that she found she was able to get the time off
work to join me. Fortunately she was also still able to book seats on the same
flights as me, even paying the same price, plus I’d already picked double rooms
in each of the three hotels in which we’d be staying.
I
digress slightly but I really, really dislike
small beds. When I first left home at the ripe old age of nineteen, I rented a
room in a shared house in York. It was a box room in a terraced house, facing
onto the busy Bishopthorpe Road and only contained a tiny single bed, a chest
of drawers and a meter fed radiator. It is true what they say that we learn
from our mistakes as many was the cold, cold night that that meter needed to be
fed the fifty pence piece that I’d unwittingly spent on a kebab or a pint of
lager. With the exception of my first house on my own in Indonesia, where a
borrowed single bed was the extent of my initial furniture, it was the last
time where I spent consecutive weeks in a single bed. My dislike of single beds
reached its extreme when a year before I left the UK to work in Indonesia I
went so far as to buy a super king-size bed. The pretext was that the room it
was going in was big enough to house it but so huge was this thing you could
roll over three or four times and still not fall out of it. How I know this is
a story that would see me digress too far.
The
general plan for the week was to see some of the rich culture of Central Java,
the earliest area for trade between Indonesia and the Indian sub continent,
China, and Europe. The area is home to Batik, the distinctive, sometimes
garishly bright, colourful fabrics worn throughout Indonesia and especially on
Fridays in Jakarta. This, along with the museums;some of which depict Javan
Man, supposedly the closest link between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, were of
great interest. Plus I just wanted to relax, take some photos and write my
blog.
To
say that Yohana dislikes walking is something of an understatement. She comes
from that Indonesian point of view that believes that Andong (horse drawn
cart), Becak (a three wheeled bicycle in which two people can sit in a basket
at the front and the rider is perched, cycling, behind you), Bajai (a motorised
version of the Becak, called Tuk-Tuk in Thailand), Ojek (a motorbike taxi),
Angkot (a mini minibus that holds anywhere from one to seemingly thirty
people), Taxis, and trains, were all invented to remove the need for physical
exertion, but she agreed to do some walking and that if I wanted time to see
things that she didn’t, she’d just go shopping. I stopped short of broaching
the fact that with her particular brand of shopping she would need to cover a
few miles on foot in a market. So it was that the
deal was struck.
Yohana trying anything to get out of walking
The
flight to Yogyakarta would see us spend a
whole day and night just hanging out in Malioboro, following which we would
take the early morning train to Surakarta (now called Solo)
for a couple of days. The next stage would be a train North, to the coastal
city of Semarang for another two days before finally flying back to Jakarta on
Friday. Not so much an adventure as a carefully planned few days.
As
for the hotels that I’d booked, they were all pretty basic and budget priced
but I’d still plumped for AC instead of fans and made sure breakfast was
included. In addition, the first two had swimming pools which for the price was
an added bonus. The third, whilst not having a pool, had the added attraction
of a pub attached to it. I believed that I’d thought of just about everything,
especially with the World Cup showing every night.
There
is some trepidation involved in arriving at any hotel that you’ve booked. You
hope against hope that it is the same as it looked in the brochure or on the
page on the internet. Even worse, it could have been recommended by a friend
whose word you took and, even though part of you said that you shouldn’t
listen, you booked it anyway. One man’s meat is of course another man’s muckle.
Therefore driving across Yogyakarta, smiling at all of the beautiful hotels and
hoping yours would bear a passing resemblance whilst inwardly cringeing at the
awful ones, turning the corner onto Jalan Pasar Kembang, the street on which
our hotel was situated, was enough to encourage a couple of butterflies in my
stomach. If it were me on my own I’d make my complaints, if there were any, to
the manager and then put up with whatever I’d let myself in for. Now I had the
wife to think about too.
Those
initial thoughts dissolved as the Istana Batik Ratna came into view and
immediately struck us as perfect. The traditional Javanese fascia of the place
with it’s decorated teak panels, a well swept frontage (we were adjacent to a
busy main road) and working signage bulbs were all
pointers that we’d picked something right.
We were slap bang in the middle of one of Java’s biggest cities and yet this
hotel wouldn’t have looked out of place in the fresh hills of Puncak or the
lush fields of Ubud. All good signs.
Approaching
the desk and armed with our printouts from Booking.com, we were checked in with
the full knowledge that we couldn’t have the room until 1pm. A look around the
pool and breakfast area left us happy to pay for the room in advance which at
Rp412,000 per night, approximately $40, left me feeling good to have booked it
purely from Tripadvisor reviews. The key to why I had booked this hotel in
particular was not only the cost, it’s location adjacent to Jl. Malioboro, a
thriving market of a street specialising in Batik material, souvenirs and
traditional food were of equal importance.Top reason though was that It was
also directly opposite the train station from which we intended to make an
early start for Solo/Surakarta the following day. So at 9am, leaving our bags
at reception, we walked the few hundred yards towards Jl.Malioboro.
The
city is more commonly referred to by its shortened name of Yogya, or Jogja as
it is sometimes spelled, and it is a big city. It is home to a number of highly
thought of Indonesian universities and is also considered to be a creative
city, hence the Batik I guess. It has on its doorstep two very high profile
temples in Borobodur and Prambenan, both of which have UNESCO heritage status
and the city feels as different to Jakarta as black does to white. If the
cities were to be compared to animals, then Jakarta is a chamaeleon whereas
Yogya is more of a peacock. Yogya does still suffer from many of the same
problems that plague much of the archipelago; traffic, pollution, a
proliferation of litter, yet it also has a different ambiance which gives the
visitor a more engaged feeling. Jakarta is vast with no true centre to the city
whereas with Malioboro, Yogyakarta has it’s heart.
Walking
along the covered pavements, lined with shops on one side and hawkers on the
other, it is a testament to the durability of the locals that whilst everyone
is selling exactly the same products, they must all be earning enough to
support themselves and their families. Outside the pavements, the open streets
themselves are also subdivided. The central two lanes are for motorised traffic
such as cars and the more numerous mopeds and motorbikes. On either side of
these, next to the pavements, there is another lane given over to the horse
drawn ‘andong’ and their poorer cousins, the becak. All forms of small public
transport are open to negotiation with westerners, or at least non-Indonesians,
coming in for a usually less than subtle price hike. My wife is from the town
next to Yogya and even that is insufficient when negotiating with a Bule (non
Indonesian) by your side. To tour one side of Malioboro by andong would cost
you $5 or Rp50,000 in local cash.
We
enjoyed our morning enormously, stopping for a newly introduced Wall’s Magnum
pomegranite flavoured ice cream, haggling with a store owner for a baseball cap
to keep the intense glare of the sun away from Yohana’s head, passing the time
of day with locals who threw out random comments of ‘hello mister’ and at one
point undertaking a survey to help local high school kids practice their
English. Interestingly, the involuntary nervous reaction amongst teenagers
seems to be an uncontrollable fit of the giggles.
Something
that was pleasantly surprising was the number of obviously city council
motivated modern art pieces on display on the street. The theme was obviously
recycling, given the materials involved. Old and rusting paint cans had been
turned into a ball around one particular lamp post, plastic bottles had been
used to create a kind of sea monster and old water drums had been turned into
highly decorative shields. The sad part was this focus on litter didn’t seem to
have influenced the local populace to use the numerous rubbish bins any more
than the last time we were here.
Form
a culinary point of view, and whilst not particularly hungry, Yohana was keen
to try some of the food from her childhood that just isn’t the same outside of
the area in which you first try it. I consider myself to be from the North of
England (even though I was born in Bedford) and the singular truth is that the
national English dish of Fish and Chips is only at it’s best when served in the
North. At the risk of alienating myself, the North to me includes; North
Yorkshire, Cleveland, Wearside, Tyneside and Northumberland. On a good day it
may include very specific parts of Cheshire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester,
Lancashire and Cumberland but this hardly ever happens. So it is that Yohana
believes that certain foods are exceptionally associated with specific places.
This thought process was confirmed a second time on telling the staff at my
office where I was going on my contract break. “We want Bakpia(a sweet, doughy
ball) from Jogja!!” came the cry in unison. When I suggested that this would
mean me carrying it around for a further 5 days and that I could easily buy it
from Semarang, you could have been mistaken for believing I had committed an
act of unconscienable heresy.
If
further proof were indeed needed, it came in the form of a warung halfway along
the opposite side of Malioboro to where we had started. These warungs, or
street food stalls, with no stainless steel prep benches or colour-coded
chopping boards, defy everything that my years in catering ever taught me. It
is easy to think that you’re going to walk away with a stomach parasite that
will eventually push tendrils so far through your body and into your brain as
to make you want to voluntarily listen to Justin Bieber songs, on repeat. But
in five years I can guarantee I have never wanted to voluntarily listen to the
Biebs. Something that I would suggest is that if you’re a vegetarian, or more
importantly a vegan, this may not be the place for you, and by that I don’t just
mean Yogyakarta. The warung at which we stopped, selling only Lumpia (spring
rolls), offered 3 varieties; Egg and vegetable, chicken and vegetable, or just
vegetable. Yet they are all prepared in the same space, using the same
equipment and then cooked in the same oil. Indonesians just don’t see food
issues and dietary restrictions in the same way that westerners do. I have
never once come across an Indonesian who is lactose intollerant, a celeriac or
allergic to nuts. I guess they must be there, I’ve just never met one. The
crowd here was, I kid you not, five people deep, always a sure sign that you’ve
hit the jackpot of whatever it is you’re looking for. There were other places
selling Lumpia, but this one was obviously the best. Rp3,000 bought you a single
Lumpia of your choosing, and I still don’t see how they made a profit once you
add in the chillies and garlic. It was also here that I undertook the student
survey, grew a beard to rival Father Christmas and mastered 3 new musical
instruments, we waited that long. It is another Universal Constant that the
longer you wait for something, the better the outcome. Here
was the proof.
Hurriedly
walking along the street, clutching our long awaited spring rolls, we were
looking for a stall that sold Javanese Coffee (a sludge of the most
perfectly balanced coffee in the world) where we would also be able to eat our
prized lumpia and we soon found ourselves in luck. We ordered our drinks and
opened the packet of six huge, piping-hot spring rolls, accompanied by a bag of
volcanically hot green chillies and, more importantly, a small plastic bag full
of pureed garlic. On biting in to one of these rolls of joy, dipped in soft
garlic flesh and supported by an explosion of pleasure/pain that can only come
from the tiny, green cabe rawit, the only expression that comes to mind is the
currently overused vernacular of OMG!! These deep-fried parcels of pastry,
containing a mixture of beansprouts, chicken, julienned vegetables and spices
were surely too good to be true. Having left Yogya and able to reflect on the
experience, it was still nothing short of spiritual.
After
this the rest of the day was spent crashed out by the hotel’s small swimming
pool before retiring to the room for a well earned afternoon sleep. The room
was basic but clean and the bed more than comfortable. 7pm arrived far quicker
than we’d hoped but hunger was starting to kick in. We showered and dressed and
once more made our way back to Malioboro and to the Legian Garden Restaurant.
We’d
noticed this place earlier in the day, a first floor building perched on the
corner of a street leading off Malioboro. It looked interesting, was
strategically lit and would offer a great view of Malioboro’s night time street
life. We made our way up the marble stairs and along the veranda to a window
table. The menu had a variety of Indonesian and western foods but the emphasis
was on the local dishes. Yohana chose Nasi Gudeg, a dish of steamed rice and
jackfruit famous here in Yogya while I went for a sate with rice. There were
three to choose from chicken (ayam), beef (sapi) or goat (kambing) and I went
for the latter as it makes a much more flavoursome dish.
The
waitress returned with the Gudeg and a few moments later with my sate. “sate
sapi” she said as she put down the earthernware pot with the sate sticks on top
and a burning coal in the chamber below. “I’m sorry” I said, “that’s not what I
ordered.” “What did you order?” she enquired. “sate kambing” I replied. “Yes,
this sate kambing” she responded with a huge smile that could also have been a
nervous grin. There is a choice to be had here...on looking at the meat on the
sate sticks, I knew it was beef and on tasting it it was unmistakeably beef. I
could have called the waitress back and got her to change it but by that time
Yohana would have finished and it really just wasn’t worth it. The sate was
perfectly edible and was served with both a peanut sauce and a sweet soy sauce
mixed through with red chilli slices. A cold Bintang beer helped to wash it
down and 30 minutes later we were on our way back to the hotel. As we left the
restaurant, there was just enough time for a little more street food. Yohana
spied a Wedang Ronde stall which would make a suitable dessert. It’s a strong,
sweet fresh ginger tea that has pieces of white bread, freshly roasted peanuts
and small pieces of jelly, all served in a bowl with a spoon. Ideal to soothe
the colds that we had both been nursing on and off for the last week.
We
fell into bed exhausted and full, sleep immediately taking the pair of us and
both looking forward to a train journey to the historical Surakarta the next
day.
