"I'M SORRY, WAS I SHOUTING?"

Indonesia can be a truly beautiful land. You're probably imagining walking alone on pristine beaches or dipping your toes into a blue ocean, you might envision angry volcanoes or maybe a plethora of wildlife and rainforest canopies. These are all true depictions of this amazing country yet there are contradictions too, often separating the rural from the urban.

dredging rivers for the first time since the 1970's

These differences show themselves in a variety of ways The first of which is how, if you live in or visit the capital, that the Jakarta government can spend buckets of money cleaning up the waterways of the capital in an effort to reduce the annual flooding, yet at the same time not address the problem of trash and litter which is one of the primary causes of the blockages in the first place. There are absolutely no meaningful attempts to encourage recycling or repackaging and you will very quickly tire of seeing unbelievable ignorance in the form of plastic containers being casually tossed from car windows. This ignorance is not the consequence of a lack of either education or means as the behaviour comes from both public minibus  angkots and Mercedes alike.
There is a heartbreak attached to looking out over a sea of beautiful rice paddies, being tended by men and women in coolie hats which encourages you to consider simpler, earlier times but this image is then shattered by glancing slightly left and seeing a festering pile of plastic filled refuse. This is something many visitors to the 5-star hotels of Bali rarely see but something those who choose to travel into the heartlands will be only too acutely aware of.

a common sight in Jakarta

With the fourth largest population in the world, it often appears to visitors that the majority of Indonesia's residents believe that having a large family takes precedence over managing the resources needed to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of people living here. This lack of foresight then rears its head in the expanding borders of cities, need for housing and related facilities and the consequent reduction in green areas. According to statistics published by The World Bank, Indonesia's child mortality rate (under 5's) has dropped from 226 deaths per thousand live births in 1960 to just 27 in 2015 so the excuse of having big families to replace siblings who would statistically die really doesn't apply anymore. Increasingly,

I'd like to say this is unusual..it's not

the inability to care for, educate, and provide working opportunities to the populace provides the observer with too many examples of poverty such as beggars and sex trade workers, eager to make whatever living they can. Organised religions need to take their share or responsibility for this irresponsibility as much as the government.

This growing population also needs to be mobile as living in satellite cities and commuting to work requires transportation. Rather than focus on improving public transport, until recently the contradiction, unbelievably, was to even go so far as to make cheap, small engine cars available as an alternative to motorbikes, and this is on roads already congested and often gridlocked due to a lack of investment, lack of control over the quality and administration of the vehicles and owners, and the policing of these things. That many of Indonesia's roads are toll roads, one wonders how the money taken at the toll gates is used.

new toll gate in Karawaci made traffic worse

A nation suffering issues relating to health, Indonesia continues to make cheap, unhealthy food available to the masses and providing poor medical services to take care of a population is increasingly showing a gap between the haves and have nots.

Yet these contradictions, which are perfectly visible to, and well known by Indonesians, are passed off as "well, it's Indonesia" as if this caveat is a perfectly acceptable excuse. The problems are obviously heightened around the major cities whose reputations attract more and more people to flock towards the bright lights and potential rewards, but as with the story of Dick Whittington, the streets are more likely to be cess-pits than they are to be paved with gold. Every year the government go so far as to send a begging message to people on their way back from the annual Ramadan/Idul Fitri holiday not to come unless you have a job and lodgings.

Of course there are glimmers of hope. For the first time since the 1970's and as can be seen in the earlier photograph, the government is actually dredging the Jakarta waterways of the crap that is blocking them, something previous governments completely overlooked. Also Jakarta is finally going to have an LRT (light rail transit) and an MRT (mass rapid transit) train system in the next couple of years. But whether this is too little, too late will be the review of successive generations and with recent talk of moving the capital city to alternative locations which will surely only take the problems with it, One can only imagine the challenges facing those future generations.

Indonesia has in its hands the means to fundamentally address these issues. Clean up the high-level corruption that clogs the wheels of change and start employing people who can and will address the increasing problems. Clean up the police force and focus its attention on stopping the daily activities that snowball into ridiculous actions by Indonesians too long used to being allowed to get away with whatever they feel like. Get the religious leaders together to show that the abhorrent hardliners, whose pathetic attempts to unify the population over negative issues that will only divide the country further, will not work. At the same time, have those same religious leaders help to promote an understanding of what needs to be done with the social issues that are obvious influencing factors, and explain, using pictures where necessary, why. Dystopian futures are not science fiction, they are rapidly becoming science fact, we need actions to complement words.

Finally, and to finish this piece on contradictions on a lighter note, why is it that some Indonesians, who are averse to raising voices at the best of times, when in a quiet room insist on communicating with their friends/colleagues by shouting? Beats me...

A little bit of physics and a lot of luck

Have you ever fallen over? By accident I mean, not drunk? Depending on where and how, you know, raised paving stone, or misjudging distance for instance, it usually hurts like hell and bruises both body and, depending on whether you have an audience or not, ego equally.

Lets take it to the next level. Fallen off of something? Like a bicycle? Skateboard? Rollerskates? escalator? Grazed knees and hands are a minimum and I guess egos are again only bruised depending on the level of showoffiness.

Next step up, what about bumping into someone? Not in the metaphorical sense, I mean actually crashing body parts into body parts, and not in a bedroom sense either. It could be two people bending over to pick the same thing up and banging heads, or maybe concentrating too much on that Tinder profile while walking that you don't see the person coming in the other direction. Hurts.

At the centre of all of these events you will find physics and the numerous laws and principles that define the nature and properties of matter and energy such as Newton's First Law of Motion where A body continues in its state of constant velocity (which may be zero) unless it is acted upon by an external force. Thank you Big Bang Theory.

Now science was never my strong point so don't beat me up if, for instance, thermodynamics are also involved in any of those situations I described, it's just a device to bring me to the main part of this blog post. I was knocked off my motorbike on my way home from work two nights ago.

I've been carried from rugby fields, been struck by cricket balls and dislocated my shoulder trying to accomplish an eskimo roll in a kayak. I've crashed cars, fallen off bicycles, bruised my spine in a speedboat, been down to my last seconds of air while scuba diving and broke my big toe kicking a punching bag while learning Ju-Jitsu. But I've never been involved in a motorbike accident before.

I'm not sure that I overthink things but I definitely do think about things. When I decided to start riding a motorbike I was living in Chiang Mai in early 2009. It was a popular way to travel in a city with plenty of traffic, but organised road systems, and the decision to take the automatic moped rather than the Honda Phantom was decided as much by inexperience and price-per-day as it was by wanting to ride a mini Harley. I seriously wanted to ride the Phantom, I just didn't know how. Technically I didn't know how to ride the moped either but since it was fully automatic the worst thing I could do was over-rev the throttle.

which one would you choose?

A lot of my school mates (when I was a kid, not now I'm a teacher) rode 50cc motorbikes, I passed that by and went straight to driving cars. So with over 20 years of car driving experience, riding my first bike was fun but guided by common sense and an awareness that the protective cage around me had now disappeared. I also have a clear understanding of The Highway Code.

On arriving in Indonesia I was back on a bike inside a year but the conditions were remarkably different. I was still riding a fully automatic moped but the conditions of the roads; potholes, increased traffic, lack of signs, made riding a different challenge. South East Asia, with the possible exception of Korea (http://www.korea4expats.com/article-traffic-laws.html), also has a notable lack of Highway Codes. This means that rules of the road are more arbitrarily interpreted, by both drivers and authorities alike.

That video was of a toll road which doesn't allow the use of motorbikes, except in times of flooding... in some areas... maybe.

For a better idea of motorbikes, here's a video from Surabaya...

What was interesting in the second video is that most people are wearing helmets and not using mobile phones, this isn't necessarily the case in Tangerang and Jakarta.

These videos highlight that a person's understanding of road etiquette is only useful if the other users have the same respect. Where there is a lack of understanding, there is a driving test, where there is a flouting or disregard of the rules, there is the police and courts. So what happens if you find yourself in a country that has neither?

Of course I'm being argumentative. Indonesia does have a driving test but it is not essential to being able to drive. The driving licence may be purchased, illegally, and speaking to friends it would appear that a significant number of people go through this route. An equal proportion of people don't even bother to get an illegal driving licence, they just hope not to be stopped.

So what happens if you do get stopped by the police? Well in that case you just hand them the vehicle documentation and a folded up bank note and hope to talk your way out of anything. The highly unlikely worst case scenario is that if the policeman doesn't take the cash then it will mean a trip to the courthouse in the area in which you were stopped to pay an elevated fine.

Let me be clear, this is not some indignant tirade against the country in which I have lived for 6 years, rather it is an explanation of how things work. I now ride a Honda CBR 250cc motorbike, equipped with anti-lock brakes that I paid extra for and of all of the things that I have mentioned, the single biggest thing that I have taken into account before riding a bike and while riding a bike, is other drivers and what they might do. Indonesians are not bad people, they are a product of conditioning as we all are and where road use is concerned this area is not good.

Have you ever had that feeling, when sometimes you just know that something is going to hit you, or at the very least may hit you. Sometimes you just know you're going to be in trouble. That didn't happen to me. I approached a roundabout fully expecting that someone in the right hand lane may, instead of going all the way around to the last exit, may indeed head straight on, I was also aware that it was equally possible for a person in that right hand lane to pull off the stupidest of moves and turn left across the inside lane. I was in the inside lane, had slowed to take these things into account and then BANG! I'm lying on the road with a truck still seemingly trying to continue forward over my prone body, the only thing stopping this being the frame of my bike.

This truck had done just that, moved from the inside right to turn left at the roundabout. So even with all of my preparedness I still got hit. That I escaped with a swollen elbow and superficial cuts and bruises was down to the lack of speed on the part of myself and the truck.

Furthermore, the indicators on the truck weren't working, the truck driver had no STNK (vehicle documents) only a police slip proving the confiscation of those documents for the truck being pulled over earlier for another offense. In a slight case of irony, trucks are not even supposed to be on this particular road.

What would happen in the UK in this instance is that police would be called to the scene, drivers would exchange insurance documents, and injured parties would be taken, if necessary by ambulance, to a hospital.

What happened in my case was that I was assisted from my position by approximately 20 people, including local security guards, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. As I was able to stand and speak, and fortunately being only 2 minutes from home, I called Uchiel, my wife, to come and help out with language difficulties. The outcome was that the four guys in the cab admitted liability and agreed to attend a local garage to review the damage and agree on the amount to be paid. Insurance isn't mandatory in Indonesia, which means that most don't have it so "negotiations" are carried out privately. (http://www.expat.or.id/info/insurance.html)

The following day, the driver and his mate appeared at our house on return from the repairs garage and, having pleaded poverty, agreed to pay half of the total repair cost which they transferred electronically into our account there and then.

This post should serve as both information and a warning for what to expect in this situation. Had I not had the benefit of someone I knew at the scene, it would have been branded my fault just through me being a foreigner. Had I been more badly injured, who knows what would have happened. What I do know is that had the police been involved it would have cost us money too and we probably wouldn't have received any money toward the cost of the repair.

I choose to ride a bike. I enjoy it, it's easier to get from A-B in heavy traffic and I am aware of the pitfalls. Will I stop riding a bike? No. Will I be more careful? Well certainly at roundabouts, but I don't think that I'm a careless rider or I'd have had more problems in 6 years.

So in the words of the Hill Street Blues desk sergeant, "Let's be careful out there"

thanks to the original owners of the pictures and videos used here.

Operation Ketupat

Back in 2014, the Indonesian police decided to give a name to their security procedures during and immediately after Ramadan and they called it Operation Ketupat.

Ketupat is a boiled rice cake that whilst eaten throughout the year, is synonymous with  the Indonesian post-Ramadan holiday of Idul Fitri. It's therefore little surprise that the period of heightened  security procedures to 'protect' the large numbers of people travelling back to their home villages for the holiday, known as mudik, was given this moniker.

The idea is that during this time everyone needs to be aware that places that are usually heavily populated may now be deserted, so residents need to be careful in how they lock up their homes and belongings and the police need to be extra mindful of criminal activity.

There is also the increased numbers of people travelling to take into consideration. It's a time when trains are packed to Indian-style capacity, aeroplanes have been booked up months in advance and roads that are already gridlocked can stay that way for an even longer period of time. It is because of this that understandably cynical Indonesians have given the name of Operasi Ketupat to the Indonesian police's unique form of either a) fining someone for breaking the law, b) tax collection, or c) mugging, depending on your point of view.

In a country that imposes its laws in what can best be described as a laissez-faire manner, and that where the size of the punishment seems to depend on your ability to pay, this period sees police roadblocks and gauntlets set up to take advantage of all the people who are not following the dubious details of a Highway Code that, if it exists at all, is known only to a select few.

I know it's idealistic, but to change this will require some very simple rules on the part of the governemnet and the police.

1. The people need to know, very clearly, what the rules of the road are and the punishment for breaking them.
2. Rule breaking needs to be dealt with consistently and fairly
3. There can be no money changing hands, instead payment should be made where there is an ability to track that payment, either at a courthouse or an office set up for the recording of these payments where transactions are electronic.
4. Genuine drivers licences and insurance certificates should be pre-requisites, along with vehicle maintenance certification.

What would you do with a Wetwang?

So what would be your answer to the title question? Would you eat it, offer it as a service to someone, or live in it? 

The fact is that I love names. Indeed the whole aspect of naming someone or something sould require imagination or knowledge, or it may be something as simple as a feeling. Depending on your cultural background there may be a ritual involved where perhaps the first thing that you see following the birth of a child is used, or, for the sake of posterity, the taking of your father's name and adding a number at the end.

In his book "Notes From a Small Island", the author Bill Bryson takes great delight in highlighting some of the more unusual place names that may be found on a trip around the UK. I am ever curious to know how places wind up with the names that they do. Sometimes it's a simple process of moving from an olde English name where -brook, -ton, and -ford all have meanings to their suffix (eg. the ending -ton, as in Darlington, could mean homestead). The name of the village of Wetwang in this blog's title, and also my favourite place name ever, is supposedly derived from an old Norse word meaning "Field for the trial of a legal action".

Our own names and family names are equally fascinating. It would appear that my family surname of Stoker has a number of possible origins. Firstly it may be attributed to an inhabitant of the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Examples of this could be, say, Lyndsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac or David Coverdale of Whitesnake, but probably not Hannah Montana . Secondly, the job of a stoker was to put coal into a furnace so it could come from that, or there is even a link to arsonism too. I've been able to go back 4 generations on the Stoker family tree with no sign of residency in Staffordshire however my brother lives there nowcoincidentally and neither is there a link to stoking or arson.

Before Indonesia I lived for a short while in Thailand and the general feeling is that most short surnames are from indigenous Thai families whereas the longer surnames are more often linked with Chinese immigrants. The Thai nicknames are much more visual and often relate to something around you. If you wish to convey size, you might use a nickname for something that represents that size.

Western names are generally family linked in the surname but the first and middle names are not averse to representing the parents love of sport or gardening, or even the city of conception.  Here in Indonesia that doesn't necessarily have to be the case as families are not bound by the same constraints. Depending upon your ethnicity you may have one or more names and none might represent any familial link. This freedom allows parents much greater flexibility and only recently I came across Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. Indonesia is blessed with such different tribal and religious ethnicities that it is reasonable to find many varieties of names and structures. My wife falls into the cateogary of only having one name, Yohana, but due to the need to synchronise forms and paperwork on her passport it says Yohana Yohana and she only refers to herself on social media with my family name.

When we do eventually get around to having a family I can only hope that propriety isn't our only focus and we choose something suitable...

Good days and bad? Put them into perspective.

As with any job it would be naive to think that all days will be good days. It took me a long time to work out that the job that I was doing previously was giving me less and less satisfaction and, if I'm honest, encouraged me to spend more time than I should have in continuing, and to put less and less effort into it. I had been inspired when I started on the road to becoming an area manager in the pub trade and benefitted from working with some incredible people, many of whom I am fortunate to still call friend.

In hindsight there were numerous other reasons for this trajectory as my personal life was in perhaps even more disarray than my professional one and trust me when I say that that's saying quite a bit!

Suffice it to say that it was a risk in leaving the UK and heading to Chiang Mai to take the CELTA. It could have amounted to an intense month spent learning the disciplines of the EFL teacher but with nothing at the end of it, or even worse the discovery that teaching was as equally demoralising as working in the pub/restaurant trade.

The CELTA was as tough as I'd been led to believe but I can unequivocally confirm that it, and the following 6 years that have brought me to where I am now, have been some of the best years of my entire life. Sure there have still been good days and bad days, there always will be, but even the bad days aren't all bad, are they?

Today has been one of those mixed days but the way it started was just the warmest justification for why I chose this new path. I arrived to find this photo on my desk and signed by the students on the back. Somehow puts everything else into perspective.

I was once told that if you have a bad day, write it down and it becomes the benchmark for all future bad days. If ever a day is worse than the one that you wrote down, that replaces your previous benchmark. I can heartily recommend this to anyone struggling for perspective and who wants to enjoy each day as much as they can...

The house....now 8 months on

There's a scene in the trailer for the upcoming Marvel superhero movie "Ant-Man" where the camera pans back from a dramatic train wreck, presumably involving our hero, to actually show the crash to be a child's 'Thomas the Tank Engine' set. It's very effective and evidently all a matter of perspective.

I had a similar feeling yesterday when Yohana and I went to check on the progress of the house. As those of you who've read the previous blog entries know, we bought the house from viewing plans and a model and it was interesting to get a better perspective.

When we bought the house we knew there was a small piece of land at the back of the house that we would eventually build on. The plans showed it as garden but it really isn't big enough to be that. The length of the house, hell the overall size isn't exactly what we needed, but the location and size of houses that we did want were outside our current budget so this was the compromise. Anyway, we knew that we'd eventually build onto the back but only really on seeing the show house did we truly realise the limited space we'd have to play with, especially in the kitchen area. So it was that Yohana and I started finding prices for the building of a small kitchen extension before the house itself is even finished.

First stop was the developers who are actually building the house and the rest of the cluster. It made sense as for one, they have architects and for two, they're in the middle of building the house! They were really helpful, especially considering that when we first bought the place they told us that small changes to the original design were impossible. Now they were happy to start knocking down walls and adding doors where previously a door couldn't be found. As it was a hypothetical situation we asked about a two story extension that would utilise the spare land at the back of the house. This would give us the extra space in the kitchen, a third upstairs bedroom, bringing the downstairs bedroom into the living room and adding a "maid room". Many families in Indonesia employ maids and whilst we don't have need for this facility ourselves, it would make the house more attractive if it comes to selling it in the future.

The developer came back within a few days to say that it would cost 30% of the original house purchase price. Considering it was giving nowhere near 30% extra size we thanked them for their offer and went away to rethink some stuff.

The culmination of the last few weeks of negotiation have been Yohana meeting with builders to discuss the work and negotiate the prices. The reason for Yohana doing all of this and not involving me in the meetings is trying to avoid 'Harga Bule' which loosely translated means 'westerner price' which sees everyone; contractors, retailers, street hawkers, inflate their prices when they see they're dealing with a westerner. The situation now is the contractor who is building the row of shops on the front of the cluster, as well as the cluster's communal swimming pool, is also building a one level extension to our kitchen and is working alongside the builders of the original developer from whom we bought the house in the first place. The added benefits are that the house will still meet the original December handover date, we won't have to start extending the kitchen after we've moved in, and the cost of the kitchen extension, including all tiling work, is 3% of the original house purchase price.

Pak Haji showing Yohana the kitchen extension while a guy makes what looks like a spear (seriously, it did)

To put the whole 'Harga Bule' thing into some sort of context, this was the first time I've been on-site in two months and while we were there we were offered many additional extras, some of which already come in the agreement! We did agree to a door which will lead to the space where a future maid room may be but which for now will be a small BBQ area and the upstairs above the kitchen extension will have to wait for a bit.

The difference between a house and a home is all about the people, the atmosphere and the decoration so we're now thinking a lot about that side of things (the decor, not the people) and anyone who follows me on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) can see some ideas of things we like.

Here are some more photos taken yesterday....

National Sport

Every country has a national sport. Well, most do anyway. Here's a quick quiz and see if you can get them right. I'll give you the country and you tell me the sport. Ready?

1. England

2. Wales

3. Scotland

4. Canada

5. Sri Lanka

6. Chile

7. India

You can find out how you did at the end of the post, and I'm guessing you're in for a surprise?

When I was at school all sports were considered 'fair game', as it were. The UK has been responsible for the creation of many sports and games; badminton, baseball, cricket, rugby, snooker, tennis, darts, football, table tennis, netball, golf, bowls, curling, and squash to name just a few and a cursory glance at some stats (I may have been gender or team specific) says that we're world number one in only 4 of that list.

The first secondary school I attended had a great attitude towards sport and games. If you were inclined and showed enough interest, the Physical Education Department would offer their help and resources to help you to do it. So it was that I got to play football, cricket, both codes of rugby, track and field athletics, basketball, volleyball and swimming. On top of this we were able to do lots of outward bound activities such as orienteering, hiking, sea surfing in kayaks, and mountain climbing, basically cause we had a great bunch of PE teachers. I will be eternally grateful to Chris Booth and John Hacking, the teachers, for their interest in us.

It was surprising that when I moved schools at 14, the new school only focused on cricket and football, even though in some ways it was in a better part of the country. I can only guess this was down to interest, or the lack of it, and the calibre of the PE dept.

Technically Indonesia doesn't have a national sport. Some may argue football or the martial art Pencak Silat, but in 1992 Indonesia won 5 medals at the Barcelona Olympics and since then it has been the de facto national sport. It could have been much, much different though as four years earlier Indonesia won it's first ever Olympic medal, a silver, in the archery competition.

Looking around, and especially teaching the youth of the country, one might be forgiven for thinking that electronic sports and games are king in. But when you look at how badminton can very quickly be set up and equipment not needing to cost the earth, it's easy to see the appeal.

Currently, football in Indonesia is in the doldrums. The professional football association is beset by problems relating from bad organisation to rumours of corruption and this has an effect on the teams and the fanatical supporters.

Indonesia is about to spend huge sums of money in building facilities for the 2019 Asian Games, including a velodrome complete with tennis courts. But many sports are elitist and expensive so I can't help wishing the focus was on getting to kids and giving them similar opportunities to those that I had.

I was lucky enough to meet some members of the current Indonesian men's badmnton team recently and I laughed at how even though we invented the sport Brits aren't very good at it when compared with Asians. They in turn joked that Indonesians are good because many don't work. Joking aside, if more people here were able to access the sports for free, rather than paying huge sums of money for facilities that will only be used by a ridiculously small proportion of the population, we might see a few more Indonesian world champions.

Quiz Answers 1. football, 2. rugby union, 3. golf, 4. la crosse and hockey, 5. volleyball, 6. rodeo, 7. hockey

sources:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/9438973/Sports-invented-by-the-British.html

"Takeaway beer" or "take away beer"?

Wandering around the internet looking for examples of extreme, crazy, or extremely crazy laws, I found these;

Only a qualified electrician is allowed to change a light bulb in Victoria, Australia

In Canada, by law, one out of every five songs on the radio must be sung by a Canadian

In Florida, it is illegal to pass wind in a public place after 6pm on Thursdays

In all of these instances, I find it hard to disagree. Anything electrical is potentially life threatening. Who among us hasn't screwed in that bulb only to get a vivid surprise when the bulb springs to life, indicating our lack of forethought where surging volts of death are concerned? Secondly, if we all started doing the jobs of electricians, they might be encouraged to take up secretarial work, or policing, that's not a good idea.

Canada has produced some awesome songsters. Leonard Cohen, Alanis Morissette and Joni Mitchell are just some of the amazing musicians from the land of maple syrup, so the chances of having to listen to Justin Bieber or Celine Dion that often seems within tolerance levels.

As for Floridian flatulence, well chances are that you're only going to be adding to the unnecessarily high methane levels if you go around casually bottom burping so maybe it should be enforced globally?

None of these laws would stop me from enjoying my time in these countries but that is where they differ from Indonesia's recent decision to remove bottled beer from sale in Minimarts.

The government of recently elected President Joko Widodo seems to be doing all it can to appease it's conservative coalition partners. To protect the morals of young people in a 90%-plus Muslim populated country by removing the temptation from the purchaser and the Minimart sales staff, is something I could live with. 

However, as far as I have been able to determine, the ban only applies to the "local store", not the supermarkets, even going so far as to specify that any supermarket with more than 12 square metres of sales floor area may continue to sell beer as long as it is located in an area next to the checkout.

So I'm perplexed at having visited the four big supermarkets in my local area this weekend; Hypermart, Farmers Market, Giant and Carrefour, to discover that they have all removed beer from their shelves and when asking a member of staff about it I was greeted with thinly veiled contempt. And laughter. 

 



It is not a need for alcohol on a daily basis that drives me, just the need to be able to enjoy a cold, frosty pilsner in the comfort of my own home whenever I feel like it. This is why I have less of an issue with the minimarts being banned from selling it. But why the need for supermarkets to jump upon the same waggon? 

Sure, beer is still available in restaurants, but at marked up prices and not the comfort of my own home. The agreement to allow Bali to be exempt from the law, on the grounds of disrupting tourism, is so shallow it resembles a beer stain. Tourism is a driver throughout the archipelago.

I also don't believe it's 'Creeping Sharia', a term that suggests Indonesia's slow move to that kind of  government. Rather, it's probably similar to visas and other red tape where the right hand refuses to take any interest in what the left is doing.

The House...now 6 months on

Having just returned to Indonesia from an extended trip to the UK, Yohana and I thought we'd go and take a look and see what's changed with the house that we have bought 'off plan' and which is being built from scratch.

Our expectations were pretty low, especially as Indonesia's rainy season seems to have been extended, but we got a pleasant surprise.

Not only has quite a lot of building work gone on (they are making good headway with ours), we were able to take a look inside one property which is the same as ours will be and should allow us to start making plans for fixtures and fittings.

We'll also be able to speak with the site architect about immediately extending the rear of the house to increase the size of the kitchen and master bedroom.

Currently they are targeting December for a handover which means we'll only need to extend the rent on our current place for 6 months.

the land in the foreground is for phase 2. Our house is over at the back, far right

Add caption

Chuffin' Hell It's Cold! - UK Trip February 2015 part 1

I was thinking about my parents the other day. Things with Dad's cancer are deteriorating and Mum is Dad's nurse, which obviously isn't easy even with the help they get from the amazing Herriot Homecare girls, the wonderful sitters who allow Mum a few hours respite each week, Macmillan nurses, and the doctor. Additionally, I haven't seen my parents since October last year and whilst Skype is great, it doesn't make up for seeing someone in the flesh. So I spoke with Uchiel and we decided that a trip back to the UK was a good idea.

Next step was resolving work issues and I asked Katherine how many holiday days I had left. If I was living in the UK I guess I could travel to Leyburn on a Friday after work, spend the weekend and then maybe even travel back home on a Monday morning. But living 8,000 miles away needs a tad more planning.

It turned out that I had three days left to take before the end of my contract in June so, with the use of the Saturdays at either end as my 'Saturdays off' and Nina very kindly allowing me to take a couple of days unpaid, I went ahead and booked the flight.

Last October, Uchiel and I flew with Lufthansa and they managed to lose one of our cases for four days. Because of this, I was reluctant to use them again as I planned on bringing some perishables back so I booked with KLM, one of the better prices on skyscanner.co.id. As it happened, two days after booking the flight I received a telephone call from Lufthansa with a most generous offer of 250 Euros as compensation for the situation with the lost luggage. In light of them doing that, it certainly made up for the experience and I would now happily book with them again. (I know that sounds a bit nonchalant, but in my opinion the offer more than made up for a) the loss of the bag and b) the three months of waiting for some resolution to my complaint!).

Anyway, I was now booked with KLM meaning I would travel with their flying partner and Indonesian national airline, Garuda, from Jakarta to Amsterdam, and then on to Newcastle. The return leg would include an extra stop in Singapore and all this for 15 million Rupeah. The original price on Skyscanner was 13.2 million but I waited a few hours before booking and the price went up and then there were the "administration costs" for the company Skyscanner forwarded me to. (it's also interesting to note that the flight actually cost 6 million, the other 9 million was tax and admin costs!)

The Soekarna-Hatta to Schipol leg of the journey would take twelve and a half hours with an extra ninety minutes to get to Newcastle. Added to a layover in Amsterdam of three hours this was still going to be the fastest I had ever done a trip to the UK. The reality was a one hour delay in reaching Amsterdam but a thirty minute reduction in the time to Newcastle due to a very nice tailwind meaning I shaved half an hour off of an already quicker trip. Result!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Uchiel gave me a lift to the airport where I needed to check in at about 10pm. We left with enough time to navigate the complicated entry to the airport, caused by works to create a new MRT terminal, and to get something to eat together. Having parked, we made our way to the new Bakmi GM restaurant in Terminal 2's arrivals section, pushed my case into a redundant space next to a table for two, and off I went to the counter to order the food. I'd only been stood there two or three minutes when this Indonesian guy wearing a Songkok started having a go at me for bringing my case into the restaurant. I'd previously noticed this guy when we arrived as he was loudly complaining to a waitress about something equally inconsequential so I new he wasn't anything to do with the running of the place. I was also quite taken aback by his attitude, as it's really unusual for outbursts of anger, especially over something trivial.

I admit I wasn't in the best of moods as travelling to the aiport is a grating experience. From the amount of traffic on the road to get there, the unnecessarily complicated entry to the airport that I mentioned earlier and the attempts to park the car which are always stunted by the inability to drive of a significant percentage of the population, I was just looking forward to a relaxing bowl of fried rice with my wife, not having to put up with this git.

For a few monents I stood there in two minds. I'd already verbally established, in a defiant manner, that I wasn't moving my case a) just because he'd told me to and b) at least not before ordering our food, but it was his final demand that I was to just make sure that I "do it!" that left me with the indecision. Part of me wanted to just leave the queue, gently take him by the throat and nut him. Another part of me wanted to continue the debate, regardless of the gawking onlookers. Thirdly was the choice to allow others to accept that this guy was some sort of FPI-following, Westerner-hating imbecile and just ignore him. I really was livid at this point and I quickly left the queue, went back and collected Uchiel and the case,and explained to waitress on the way out that due to the behaviour of said gentlemen, they wouldn't be receiving any of our money. She was so apologetic and the sneaky grin on his fifty year old face that he made no attempt to hide nearly caused me to lose complete control.

Five minutes later, sat with some chicken and fries in the nearby A&W, I'd had the chance to calm down and we got to discussing normal stuff. But in the back of my mind I couldn't get over the guy's behaviour and that it is also the first time in six years that I've experienced it....

New Year's Resolution

I’m not a gym kind of guy. Never have been. In the past my exercise came from a fairly active lifestyle and a lot of golf plus I have always loved to swim and play badminton. However, Indonesians see nothing wrong with calling someone fat, in fact Chinese Indonesians take this as a compliment reflecting their financial status which allows them to buy so much food. So when students recently started to refer to me as fat in adjective description exercises in class I decided to take action.

Yohana’s membership with Gold’s Gym was coming to an end and she’d heard about a new place that had opened called The Springs Club. Now let me tell you this is not just a gym, this place is huge. Not only is there an outdoor, olympic-sized swimming pool with an adjacent kids pool and four hot water jacuzzis next to it, inside they have a fully equipped gymnasium, a room for classes such as yoga, MMA and such like. On top of this they have four indoor tennis courts, eight indoor badminton courts, a squash court that can alternatively hold two table tennis tables, a basketball court and futsal pitch. The changing rooms have hot and cold plunge pools to go with the saunas as well as personalised lockers and power showers.  Finally there is a downstairs restaurant and an upstairs cafe. Admittedly they serve the same menu and it would be nice if the cafe were just that and the restaurant a bit more elaborate, but it’s all well cooked and presented if not particularly healthy.  Oh I should also add that Indonesia’s fascination with karaoke has ensured that there are two karaoke rooms that we can use one hour per day....for free. So after all of that exercise you can sing your heart out for an hour too!

There are currently about 300 members paying a variety of subscriptions. We chose the husband and wife package which gets us six months membership for Rp5,500,000 (aproximately £300) and we also get personalised parking passes, a free polo shirt each but only one gym bag which was weird when it’s a two person package.

Mornings are particularly busy and then the housewives descend on the place for an hour but there have bveen times when i’m the only person here and Indonesians vampire-like fear of the sun ensures it’s a private olympic-sized pool for much of the time!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas 2014

There aren’t that many things I don’t look forward to really. There are the obvious things of course, like dental appointments or the first day of every month when the mortgage payment goes out, but apart from that I like to think that I’m an optimistic and forward thinking kind of chap.Christmas has always held a particular fascination for me and everyone from my parents to ex girlfriends will tell you that I used to get into....well let’s call it a state of hightened anticipation.

This year would be my first Christmas in five years that would be spent in our own house in Indonesia. Well, rented house, Yohana and I will have to wait until December 2016 to spend it in our very own. In 2009 I went to East Java, in particular rafting in Probolingo, climbing the active volcano that is Mount Bromo and chilling in Bali, 2010 was spent visiting my parents in the beach resort of Goa, India, 2011 saw me back in the UK whereas 2012 was our honeymoon in Bali. Finally 2013 was Uchiel’s first experience of Christmas in the UK.

It was on that last trip that we bought a Christmas tree. Prices on Boxing Day, the name for the 26th of December in the UK, always drop to embarrassingly low levels for anything Christmas-related with stores trying to improve their cash flow and as such we ended up with a 6ft, black, fibre optic lit tree with an incredible array of decorations for next to nothing. This waited patiently in the UK until our most recent trip back in October when we were able to bring it back with us in what amounted to a large golf club bag.

To help decorate, we invited a few friends round on the 30th November with a little-needed ruse of providing food and drinks. The surprising result, considering the amount and variety of alcohol available, was that both the house and the tree looked fantastic, right down to the snowman on the front door!

The bottom of the tree was gradually filled with a number of presents so that when Christmas Day finally arrived, with blue sky and sunshine and a much appreciated 28 degrees at 8am, It made for a truly memorable Christmas Day morning. It’s impossible not to think of family at the most family-orientated time of the year, but Skype is a marvelous thing and, if the connection is good, can nearly make you believe you’re having a face to face conversation.

Christmas Day lunch was originally going to see us cooking for a couple of friends who’d chosen to stick around Jakarta, but a change of plans saw us heading for the definitely-not-Christmassy-at-all Tony Roma’s steak restaurant in Jakarta. Back home for the evening, those same friends arrived bearing wine and New Zealand beer (courtesy of Colm’s recent trip there) and a great evening was had supported by loads of cheese and finger food.

Indonesians, even the Christians, don’t seem to see the holiday season in quite the same way as Westerners do. The feeling that the season is just a marketing event is as unavoidable as it is becoming back in the UK and obviously the lack of snow doesn’t help. But Australians have been celebrating Christmas on beaches for long enough and I too am happy to forgo the snow and bad weather. I Just wish the family could have been here for it.....

The Underwater World of Jacques (Daron) Cousteau.....(transferred from my old "Ikyosan" blog from september 2009)

Indonesia is a land where the things that can kill you are nearly too numerous to mention. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, bombs, spiders small enough not to see, but poisonous enough to end your life, snakes, monitor lizards that can detach their jaws to swallow you whole and actual, real life dragons. So with this in mind I thought I’d head below the waters for a holiday.

Most of the other teachers at EF were heading for Bali or the Gili Islands for the Idul Fitri break (The end of Ramadan has a public holiday to celebrate the end of fasting) but I wasn’t really interested in going somewhere so touristy. What I wanted after 5 months teaching was a completely relaxing holiday away from the masses and the thought for this came from a conversation with two of the teachers, Jeff and Chloe.

Jeff and Chloe along with two departed teachers had been to an island called Pulau Weh off the North coast of Sumatra at Christmas and done their PADI Open Water Scuba Diver course. This to me seemed like a perfect idea. I’d seen the pictures and the island is pretty remote with the only people really going there to dive, so about 8 weeks ago I booked the ticket.

As it’s a national holiday and I’d left it until relatively the last minute, the air tickets were quite expensive at 2 million rupeah (£125) for the return. I reckon if I’d booked a few weeks earlier I’d have got it for half that. Anyway, three weeks before departure a new teacher arrived at EF. Lucy Hiscocks is from Bristol and is already qualified to Advanced Open Water level and once she knew I was diving asked if she could join me.

So it was that on the 19th September we had a taxi arrive to pick us up at the house for the journey to the airport. We were booked on the 9.05 flight from Jakarta on Java to Banda Aceh on Sumatra with a short stop in the Sumatran capital of Medan to pick up/drop off passengers before catching a connecting ferry to Pulau Weh island.

Arriving at the airport around 7.20 we discovered on entering the departure lounge that the flight was delayed for 2 hours and this quickly progressed to 7 hours! The culmination of this was that instead of arriving in Banda Aceh with sufficient time to catch the 4pm ferry to the island of Pulau Weh, we were now going to have to find a hotel in Banda and leave the following day. This was to prove relatively easy but the first 3 hotels we tried were full and you get that little “Mary and Joseph” feeling that you’re going to be spending the night in the open air. (I should point out that the Mary and Joseph analogy is used for effect, Lucy and I are neither a couple or pregnant with the next Messiah). Checking into the 100 rupeah a night twin bedded fourth hotel, we dumped the bags and headed out to grab some food and were delighted with the chicken sate with lontong and sauce.

The taxi that brought us the 45 minutes from the airport had charged us 70,000 (£4.50) and seemed pretty reasonable so we agreed to a pick up to the ferry terminal for 100,000 the following morning. This was immediately cancelled when we found the chancer was overcharging us by 60,000! And again so it was that a great guy called Evan picked us up and gave us his card for the return when we got back to Banda Aceh a week later. I must mention his business card which had a picture of a beautifully sleek Mercedes SLK on it. I can only assume this was his other car because the one he arrived to pick us up in was a battered old Toyota with ill fitting doors.

It took no more than 10 minutes to get to the ferryport and we’d left early due to differing reports on ferry sailing times. These ranged from the typically British sharp intake of breath followed by lots of head scratching and consultation of similarly perplexed people to the extremely knowing look with a firm “yes, 2, o’clock” reply.

I never really know what to make of responses to questions in foreign languages. All of the phrase books give you excellent language points for asking questions but the analysis of the response if you don’t truly understand the language is entirely open to interpretation. Let’s take the two scenarios above, firm response coupled with a positive facial response equals definite whereas perplexed, shrugging and checking with confederates equals not sure? I’m starting to think that both actually mean “what is he going on about?” And the firm reply and look means you just go away faster.

This thought process was encouraged when at 12 noon on arrival at the ferry terminal having been assured by Evan there was a 2pm sailing, the first chap we met assured us the ferry wasn’t sailing today and would we like to go back into Banda Aceh and stay at his friend’s hotel for the night and get the following morning crossing. This was starting to get annoying. There were maybe 20 or so other people in the terminal who showed no sign of wishing to stay at this chaps friend’s hotel but neither was there any real sign of positive commercialism either. No food stalls catering to the captive market. No ticket office selling ferry crossing tickets etc. So we did what most Brits do in a situation like this, we sat down and refused to accept the potential inevitability.

As we sat there we were joined by 4 Indonesian guys. Encouraged by the opportunity to practice their English and accepting free cigarettes we soon found out that there was indeed a sailing but not until 4pm so armed with an English – Indonesian dictionary, Lucy’s practical Bahasa notebook and a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Indonesia we spent the next hour and a half trying to discuss everything from the state of play in world economics to comical Indonesian swear words.

We were joined later by a modern day Robinson Crusoe and his girl Friday. Will and Mel were twenty-something dive instructors from Scarborough who worked 6 months of the year on Pulau Weh and 6 months at Perentian in Malaysia. They were a fantastic source of information and great company on the wait for the ferry, in fact on the ferry crossing too and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d already booked with Rubiah Tirta Dive School I’d probably have gone to Lumba Lumba Dive School with them. I do hope our paths cross again.

Finally arriving on Pulau Weh 33 hours after setting off we got a taxi with a family of 3 obnoxious Scots from Aberdeen. The saving grace of having them in the cab was that it saved us money. Sometimes I meet people I just don’t like and the bloke was a bore, the older of the two women was a complete space cadet and her younger sister was possibly a sandwich short of a picnic too. When it turned out the bloke and the older woman had worked for EF as teachers in China I nearly cried.

Jeff Eide, who had left EF at the end of his contract 2 weeks previously, had extended his tourist visa and headed straight for Pulau Weh. He met us off the taxi and helped us to get some accommodation straight away. I’d planned on accommodation costing us around 100,000 (£6) a night following advice from the Lonely Planet so to be told that the rusticly attractive bungalow overhanging the sea with it’s extremely comfortable–looking veranda hammock was going to be 40,000 (£2.50) between us was perfect. Jeff was trying to barter it down to 30,000 but I just didn’t have the heart.

To call it basic may be a bit of an understatement, the only interior furniture was a double bed shrouded in mosquito netting and a stand fan plus some strategically placed nails for hanging clothes on. The bungalow was attached to another next door occupied by a French guy and his son and both units shared a squat toilet and a bucket shower. I hope the description of squat toilet needs no further explanation but a bucket shower is just that, a big container of water and a bucket to tip the (cold) water over you. This would no doubt not be to everyone’s taste, but to me it was as close to ideal as I could have hoped for. Lucy sleeps in a sleeping bag liner (like a little cocoon) so the double bed posed no problems plus I have a girlfriend in Jakarta and Lucy’s tastes run normally to Aussies for some bewildering reason.

It’s also worth stating again that this is an island nearly totally dedicated to diving and with a little sightseeing thrown in. The beaches aren’t the long stretch of golden sands you find in Bali and Lombok, rather they’re small patches of sand and broken coral ideal for a walking entry to dive the area and according to Michael my dive instructor the island has hardly changed in 10 years. You won’t find posh villas and 5 star hotels and instead of Starbucks you get freshly made Aceh coffee and homemade doughnuts for 4,000 (25p) for one of each made by one of the village women. Personally I find it a double edged sword in that I hope it remains this way for many years to come.

Having dumped our bags in the bungalow we followed Jeff to the Rubiah Inn, the only place open in Rubiah due to the recent end of Ramadan, and met some of the Islands other tourists, Manuello and Guillermo from Spain, Christof and Wolfgang from Austria and a Swiss couple whose names unfortunately have escaped me. I had some Nasi Goreng with a huge piece of chicken and a can of beer and a can of coke and called it a night. The food was more expensive than in Jakarta but only just more and the beer at 20,000 represented the fact that we were in a strongly Muslim area where alcohol is actually illegal. Many more people would arrive over the next 24 hours both foreign and local tourists but these were the guys who greeted us.

I couldn’t believe how quickly I was relaxing, so much so that I woke at 6.30 the following morning and just lay in the hammock. There is something fundamentally right about being on this type of island and relaxing on this type of furniture. At 8 I headed to the dive site with Lucy to find out the scores on the doors with the dive course. Yudi the owner’s son and the man I’d been liasing with was nothing like I expected. A skinny bespectacled Indonesian bloke in his mid 20’s, he was reassuringly warm and friendly. I would start my course that very same day with Guillermo as my partner and dive buddy. Filling in the time before 1pm we had free use of the fins and snorkels so Jeff, Lucy and I snorkelled over to the nearby Rubiah Island marvelling at the clarity of the water and the fish. The coral in this area was devastated by the 2004 tsunami and Rubiah Tirta dive school have made it a mission to help rebuild the coral in this conservation area.
Michael the dive instructor is a 40 year old German guy who’s been coming to Pulau Weh for nearly 10 years and whilst I had no reference point for dive instructors found him to be funny, positive, informative, patient and encouraging, not exactly traits I associate with Germans I’ve met to this point. Both Guillermo and I had previously done introduction dives so had a rudimentary knowledge of the principles involved but the course was to be extremely thorough and day one saw us doing basic skills and any thoughts of staying close to the surface saw us doing a 35 minute Open water dive to 12 metres.

Every dive finishes back at the Dive Shop which is the communal centre of the area. All the divers gather around to drink tea and eat sugar puff biscuits courtesy of the shop whilst cleaning your gear of the accumulated salt water and setting up for the next days dive. This really is a great opportunity to flick through the reference books and identify the fish you see as well as share stories of your personal adventure and experiences. This particular day we saw giant clams, star fish, lion fish, sea slugs called nudibranches, pipefish, clown fish (the ones in Finding Nemo), featherstars and long spined sea urchins.

I can only relate learning to dive with learning to drive a car. The equipment is varied and some of the techniques are complicated. You need to get your head around basic physics, chemistry and biology as well as mathematical equations to know what’s happening to you. We would have to complete the course and 6 dives within 4 days as Guillermo was leaving on Friday and had to have time to rest before flying. Each day was a mixture of theory and practical concluding with the final exam on Friday that we both passed with flying colours. The feeling of both satisfaction and relief was tangible.

Days 3 and 4 saw us doing 2 dives each day and the two dives that we did on the morning of day 4, the Friday, were amazing. The last one in particular was at a dive site called Arus Paleh. This translates as The Bastard Current and it was easy to see why. As we approached the surface following our dive we had to have a safety stop at 6 metres to get rid of excess nitrogen. This entailed holding on for all we were worth to a rock in a current so strong it was not only dragging us away from our hand hold, it was even loosening the breathing regulator in our mouths! At one point the rock Guillermo was holding broke away in his hand and I think the poor guy was hyperventilating in his effort to get back.

Having completed the course I was a little disappointed not to have seen a reef shark. They are getting rarer due to being hunted for their fins which sell for excessive amounts on the black market, but I’d seen plenty of other things including turtles, rays and moray eels. I was given a good price for a tutor-less fun dive of 15 euros so signed up for one more dive which allowed me to go out with some of the more experienced people. Diving with and Indonesian dive buddy I’d been at around 22 metres, a little over my allowed depth when my buddy gave the signal for shark and there about 3 or 4 metres away was the receding body of a reef shark. The experience was both dramatic and rewarding and when I also saw a turtle pass within a couple of metres of me ensured I would return and immediately arrange a week in February or March to return for more.

The week has been one of the single most relaxing weeks I’ve ever had. Thoughts of days sat in a car on the M25 and arguing the toss with belligerent pub managers and even more sycophantic business managers seem so far away that I have to remind myself that I have only been doing this a few short months. Playing volleyball with a group of Germans, eating basic food in basic surroundings, learning new skills have all been great and even revising for tests didn’t detract in the slightest from the experience. I think a good indicator of any trip is the people you meet and the friendships you make and by that account this has been special.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the teaching but Pulau Weh has quickly found a place in my heart and I am already looking forward to coming back.