Cilacap

Despite our close proximity to Mt. Merapi, we remain relatively unaffected by the eruptions that have claimed the lives of almost 200 people now. The tall and very stalwart Mt. Merbabu which stands between Salatiga and Merapi has protected us from anything more serious than a couple of dustings of ash and some hazy skies – nothing more dramatic than you’d experience in a typical Bozeman fire season. When you get beyond Merbabu’s shadow however, things get nasty quick. On the drive to Cilacap where Seamus and I spent the weekend with his class, we were stunned by monochomatic views of the landscape -- every leaf, every blade of grass, every stalk of rice literally coated in ash. On the far side of Magelang which is out of the evacuation zone but in direct line with the volcano, ash was piled up 6 – 8 inches on the road. Trees and stands of bamboo collapsed under the weight of it, crashing into houses, bringing down power lines, and blocking roadways. By the end of the adreneline packed drive (all drives in Indonesia are adreneline packed to be honest), one of our drivers had to hang out the window in the dark while barreling down a mountain road, to splash water on the windshield, clearing the rain-soaked ash which blocked the driving driver’s view.


Drama aside, the trip to Cilacap was well worth it (I can say of course not having been the one hanging out the window). Mountainview School hosts an annual service trip for its students. Cilacap, located on the southern coast of central Java was selected as a site this year for the first time. Cilacap (pronounced chill-A-chop) is a pretty rough and tumble town. For those who can find work at one of the oil refineries, the Holcim plant or the sugar factory, life is pretty good, but for those who can’t, it’s a rough go. We arrived to a fabulously Javanese reception after seven junk-food fueled hours on a bus. Because of the ash and rain, we were at least two hours later than expected but that did not deter the crowd of well-wishers who waited at the Mayor’s house to welcome us with gamelan, traditional dance, lots of well-amplified speechifying, and an elaborate dinner that included fish-too-spicy-to- eat and stir-fried cow’s tongue. The Mayor was not there to greet us because he is in jail, a fact which remained cloudy throughout the weekend despite several attempts get the full-story. After dinner and an incredibly long presentation on the depletion of the mangroves which grow in the lagoon, the seventeen students and seven adults were split up among the crowd for our homestays.

I will say one thing about Cilacap, they know how to treat their guests. Javanese take an incredible pride in being good hosts and most are pretty good at it but the people we met in Cilacap took this to an entirely new level. We were fed pretty much non-stop, and not just bags of chips, we’re talking picnic boxes with yellow rice and fried noodles, huge platters of cakes and rolls, boiled bananas and boiled peanuts, ginger tea and fresh fruit juice. Whenever there was a pause in the conversation, here would come the ibus, arms laden with goodies. My host family was truly amazing, generous and kind. I complimented the grilled fish we ate for breakfast on the last morning, and arrived at the bus for our return trip to find an igloo cooler filled to the brim with fresh seafood to take home. The thing would have cost $400 in the US. Seamus’ host family was a bit more traditional in their diet but he claims that he pushed the cow brains to the side of his plate so delicately that no one noticed. The previous morning he was served chicken foot soup. We’re still laughing about that one.

After far too short a night’s sleep, the students reconvened at the harbor for a 90 - minute boat ride to the small island where the kids would be teaching English and helping with a construction project. A short distance through open water brought us to a gorgeous mangrove forest (I don’t know if that’s what you call a bunch of mangroves, maybe just mangroves). It may have been sheer exhaustion, but the students were very quiet making for a wonderfully peaceful ride. This of course came to a screeching halt when we got to Kampung Luat. Situated in a small fishing village, foreigners are a rare sight and great groups of kids came running to meet the boat when we arrived.

It was really interesting to watch the Mountainview students’ reaction to this new environment. Mountainview students by-in-large are a pretty well-heeled group. The two-room school house which was the site of the service project was about as basic as you can get -- no electricity, no playground, a hastily constructed bridge of two by fours connected the buildings when the water rose during rainy season. While I’m generally not one to brag on my kid, Seamus was a stand-out. The camp counselor in him kicked in and no sooner had he jumped off the boat was he surrounded by a herd of kids, shaking his hand and trying to say his name. While many of his fellow students checked their Blackberries, listened to their ipods and shuffled around nervously, Seamus was right in the thick of it, handing out goodie bags, gluing art projects, shoveling dirt. If one of the reasons to travel is to see the world through a different lens, it was a gift to watch Seamus come to life in this new, strange place.

The trip back was considerably more eventful. About half way through the construction project (the kids were helping to re-grade an area prone to flooding), the boat captain announced that we all needed to board the boat immediately because the boat was sinking which generated two results: 1. a wide-spread, very loud panic among the students and 2. a still baffling counter-intuitive rush to the board the sinking vessel. Turns out the boat was not actually sinking but the tide was going out and the state-of-the-art coast guard vessel on which we had arrived could not make the trip out with the weight of all of us on it. Half of the students were quickly unloaded onto a local fishing boat that was by far the least sea-worthy thing I have ever seen and off we went. Sure enough, not a quarter of the way back, our vessel ran aground, more teen-age panic despite the fact that we were in about 3 feet of water, and the rusted, ramshackle pop-eye boat held together with shoe strings and duct tape had to do a quick u-turn to tow us out.

This was where it got really amusing. Indonesians (I’m generalizing here) are very accustomed to dealing with things going wrong, much more so than Americans -- cars that break down, stoves that don’t work, frequent blackouts -- so when something does happen, they have absolutely no hesitation jumping in, regardless of their understanding or lack thereof of the task at hand. Ok, maybe it was just a guy thing. I can’t say. In any case, seconds later, every Indonesian man on both boats was on the bow of one or the stern of the other throwing ropes back and forth, yelling instructions, etc. We were yanked from our muck pretty quickly but without a motor, we had no steering capacity, and no one took this into consideration so every time we had to turn, which was quite frequent in the Heart of Darkness-esque mangrove forest through which we floated, the pop-eye boat would chug ahead, accelerate through the curve, and our vessel would crack the whip at top speed into the opposing bank. More teen-age panic, lots of squealing, and the first boat would have to stop, turn around, rearrange all of the ropes, and hit the throttle to release us from the muck, resulting in a facefull of big black blasts of exhaust. The 90-minute trip took 4 hours on the return. Oh, and did I mention, the entire time we were being rained on by a continuous stream of volcanic ash from Mt. Merapi?

The rest of the trip was far less eventful. A ‘friendly’ game of basketball was played between the schools, to the cheers of several hundred Cilacap students and after a quick nap, we returned to school for dinner (more food) and performances by the Cilacap students. Seamus and his class were asked to share a performance from their country for which they were woefully unprepared but two brave young women did a relatively inoffensive hip-hop routine (oh hot damn…this is my jam) and were joined by the rest of the class for a very entertaining if imprecise version of the wakka wakka dance. Not exactly a up to the standards of the choir singing traditional Indonesian folk-songs but well-intentioned. The next morning was spent at the high school in cross-cultural exchange which, for this generation, basically means exchanging Facebook information. All in all it was a terrific weekend and while Cilacap might not be a top vacation spot in central Java, Seamus and I will certainly remember it fondly.