"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...

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

Saying good bye to Uchiel at the gates to the check-in desks, next stop was to find KLM. A quck x-ray of my bag later and I saw an official looking guy and approached him with a look of what I hoped said good day my man, i'm looking for something and i think you can help me, rather than I've just had a run-in with an obnoxious pillock and am still stark raving crazy.

"Can you tell me where KLM is please?" I asked in Bahasa Indonesian. "Gone" replied the man in English while at the same time gesticulating in a way that reminded me of an Italian stereotype rather than an Indonesian one. "You're too late, next one tomorrow" he said with an air of finality and turned to talk to the colleague on his left. "er, no" said I, holding out my e-ticket, but at the same time holding back my exasperation "It's tonight and I need to check in". Obviously annoyed that he'd been challenged, he turned to me once more and glanced suspiciously at this piece of contradictory evidence......

At this point let me just tell you that there was only one flight going out at 01.05am, it was going with Garuda, rather than with KLM due to their partnership and we were stood opposite the Garuda check-in desks.

........"Try down there" he said, pointing to the next departure hall, "they'll know." and so off I wandered in the direction he was pointing. Halfway down the next departure hall, with no sign of KLM, I stopped and asked another airline official. This conversation explained everything I had discussed with the first chap and, excusing himself, this new guy went off to consult his superior due to his perplexion at the information I'd been given.

The culmination of this was that 5 minutes later I was trapsing back to the Garuda desk where I had spoken to the first guy. Looking around with a view to giving him my best Paddington 'Hard Stare', where did I see him? Yes, behind the Garuda check-in desk! You've got to laugh, evidently.

Next stop in the airport process is the passport desk. This is pretty much pot luck as sometimes you get straight through and sometimes you get asked a leftfield question. It's possible you may also be asked to donate to the Injured Passport Officials Holiday Fund. Today fell into the second cateogary.

When you arrive in Indonesia, you retain the departure section of your arrival card for when you exit the country. Mine had actually been stapled into a page of my passport by an incredibly organised immigration guy who saw me in from Singapore. You could be forgiven for thinking that this would be pretty straightforward. "Where's your departure card?" he asked me in Bahasa Indonesian. "There in my passport" I replied in Bahasa Indonesian. "This isn't correct" he shot back at me in Bahasa. At this point I became possessed by a moment of pure Bahasa Indonesian greatness and proceeded to tell him the story of my last entry into Indonesia and how the card came to be there. Whether it was my Bahasa or the fact that he really couldn't argue with the actions of a colleague, he had no choice but to somewhat reluctantly let me through.

The next two hours were spent having a couple of beers and a cigarette in Royals Cafe near the final x-ray check and passing time chatting to a Dutch research scientist and his wife in the departure lounge before being called 30 minutes late for the flight......

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.