On making myself write again

I have hit something of a lull in my writing about Indonesia and our time here, at the halfway point of our year. Part of it came from the trip we took, the lengthy transport heavy crisscross of the country and the oceans that took me far from any internet and the desire to track it down in the small internet warungs ( called “warnets”) that appear all over the place here, in the smallest towns, where for about 30-60 cents an hour you can use a computer. Part of it, perhaps, is the normalcy of things now.

            We went to Semarang today, an hour bus ride from Salatiga, just for a trip. We had a delicious fish lunch in the Old City, where the Dutch influence resides in majestic and crumbling buildings and the ubiquitous canals, canals which must have been built by the Dutch purely out of nostalgia for home. Canals in tropical, very rainy, flood ridden-places are, quite simply, just a bad idea, and now the canals in Semarang, like the ones in Jakarta, are fetid and garbage strewn, very much not the sort of thing you might float down in a boat for a romantic tour of the city.  We saw a movie (“Unstoppable” – I loved it; I like movies more when I see them with my kids, but I would have liked this one anyway) and then went to Chinatown to check out the night market that is held there on weekends, and we wandered through the alleyways of Chinatown, stopping in the small Buddhist temples that appear from nowhere, festooned with red lanterns and offerings at the altars (crackers, coke, lots of incense, water, whatever people want to offer). We peered into shops, chatted with people on the street, bought stuff, ate delicious sate babi (pork sate – it was enak sekali). It didn’t feel foreign anymore, or exotic, or weird, and we didn’t feel that gut-level sense of dislocation that marked so much of our early visit. That’s what I mean by normalcy – the man fishing in the canal, the cat carrying intestines away from one of the vendors in the market, the fortune teller, the old Chinese men singing Karaoke under a tent, having to laughingly push off the becak drivers who always want to drive us everywhere, even the man we saw from the taxi, walking down the street, talking on his cell phone, and wearing exactly no clothes at all, none of it really seemed to mark the place as uncommon or unusual.  It starts to seem obvious, which is to say it becomes a little harder to write about.

            Perhaps part of it, too, is that the end point is suddenly real. We’re not planning our return home yet, or even really thinking about it, but at least for me it is a material reality in a way it wasn’t before. Laura is interested in a job in Bozeman, doing the ground work she needs to do for her applications, and my mind turns that way a little too. I am less driven about language learning than I was, even though I have so much more to learn, and I think that too has something to do with the move through the halfway mark. We live here, and now I see that we don’t live here, really, more clearly. It’s home, but not really.

            Even so, as I write this, it’s also the case that the time we’ve spent here puts us into positions to experience the place even more. I did a day long writing workshop with a group of people who work for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, protecting coral reefs and rain forests, working in partnership with local people and NGOs and the Indonesian government, trying to negotiate the complicated demands of such disparate audiences in all sorts of different texts. I was proud to help out an organization I admire deeply for its work in the United States, in doing desperately needed work in another country I have come to love as well. I attended a conference in Semarang where I met other people from all over Indonesia (and came to resent even further the intellectual colonization of Power Point). I can speak, which is glorious thing – not fluently, not about deep things, but I can talk to the taxi drivers and the people next to me on the bus and the guy at the banana crepe stand, and it’s like a key turning.  In small ways, the country is opening up to us – I say small, because the openings reveal mostly what we will never know about the place and people. Still, even that is progress.

            So I am writing this, and posting it, a blog mostly about nothing at all, because I have found the blog to be an amazing resource for clarity about the experience. Here are just a few of the things that I won’t have time to write about because I stopped writing for so long, but wish I would have explored more fully:

·      The illegal gold-mining and processing in the Southwest corner of Lombok where we spent several days, giant hand made rock-tumblers spinning everywhere all the time processing the gleanings from mines unsparingly exploited;

·      My first temper-tantrum all in Indonesian;

·      Being on the ocean for five days, where I determined finally that my next career with not be as a mariner;

·      Swilling arak (palm liquor, potent and delicious) during a ceremony in a “traditional” village in Flores, surrounded by children (one of them Graham) shooting off bamboo cannons, and dancers, who were simultaneously singing the 700 year history of their village;

·      Listening to the Belgian tourists on the boat describe how much better the “traditional” villages were in Sulawesi than in Flores;

·      The tirade given by the Hungarian man when we failed to see any Komodo dragons in the wild on Komodo Island (“Ve haf been traveling for three days to see the dragons”). We only saw the ones by the trash heap near the kitchen, bloated and immobile. (“Can you hit it with a stick to make it get and walk?”) He promised he would write a letter to the United Nations, complaining about their lousy World Heritage Site.

·      Our amazing tour guide in Flores, and our great driver there, and the five men who sang beautifully 60s rock anthems on the steps of our restaurant in Bajawa;

·      The keynote speaker at the conference from Bowling Green State University, an expert on jazz, who said he would improvise his paper in the spirit of jazz, and said nothing of interest for ½ hour, and annoyed me tremendously by his clumsy cover of laziness pretending to be creativity;

·      The tendency of Indonesian conference presenters to run out of time to discuss the topic of their paper because they are so comprehensive about the theoretical background and the methodology (all excruciatingly detailed on Power Point);

·      The incredible student performance, and the faculty follies (which I played in as well) that demonstrated a kind of department spirit and camaraderie that I envy, and that seems impossible to imagine among American students and faculty;

It’s like that, a list that reminds me why I need to write the blog, because it always helps me notice what I forget to notice, what passes me by like it’s just obvious. I so easily get tricked into seeing things as normal.

Image to save for a future metaphor

       In a bungalow on a beautiful and quiet beach on the south coast of Flores, Laura and I watched from our bed as a spider wove a web inside the top of our closed mosquito netting.

We're back

            Lost a little blog momentum in the three week hiatus through a big chunk of eastern Indonesia, a bus, boat, car, plane, train extravaganza that was marked by moving. We started on a 24 hour bus ride from Salatiga to Lombok, which required a 12 hour drive on an express bus from Solo to the tip of east Java, a 45 minute ferry ride to Bali, a five hour bus ride across Bali, a five hour ferry ride, and then we had an hour taxi to our hotel in Lombok, where we arrived on Christmas Eve exhausted and overwhelmed. The most extraordinary part of this leg was the bus ride in Java, on a bus which a woman I met later compared to the busses in Harry Potter, that suddenly get skinny and survive the passing. We were in the front seats of a bus ride that started at 8 PM; I thought the front seat would be the best seat, with the best view, but it was really the best view of our impending death. Everything comes back to an island 1/3 the size of Montana with 130 million people – on mostly two lane highways, with bus drivers who are in a hurry.  Motorcycles were seemingly invisible to the drivers, forced off the road (they seem quite resigned to this) on multiple occasions. I could not sleep for most of the night for multiple reasons:

1. I could not close my eyes to the driving, which caused enormous amounts of adrenaline to course through my body. I was almost killed that night by several trucks, cars, busses and various other hazards of the road, headlights flashing frantically at our driver just before the bus got skinny again and suddenly appeared back on the right side (the left side here) of the road.
2. “No smoking” in Indonesia can be interpreted in multiple ways. Most typically, it means, “no smoking unless you really want a cigarette in which case nobody is going to stop you.” On the bus, “No smoking” meant “No smoking unless you are one of the two drivers or the guy on board to help them,” all of them sitting in the front, puffing furiously. Of course I believed that their nicotine could be the difference between survival and death, so we said nothing.
3. Graham.
4. Graham.
5. Graham, who after about three hours in any moving vehicle suddenly turns into a kind of gremlin. He becomes frantic, panicked about not being able to sleep, uncomfortable, and resentful of any forces that have conspired to put him in this situation (obviously only in order to torment him), those forces being me, Laura, and Seamus, depending on who is in closer proximity. At about two in the morning, speeding somewhere through East Java, I very nearly just told the bus driver to let Graham and me out, and that we would figure things out from there.
6. The seats, which were somewhat spacious, sort of, but also broken.
7. Gnawing hunger. About 10 o’clock in the night, and about 10 o’clock the next morning, we stopped for the most god-awful food I have eaten since we landed in Indonesia. Perhaps like the busses the food was sort of magic, food that stops your hunger without your even having to eat it. We had plates full of stuff that we couldn’t identify, and we sort of just stared at them, a little depressed, already exhausted.

We arrived safely, however, and spent a marvelous Christmas on a beach in Lombok, rifling through stockings that Santa somehow got to us, eating fresh seafood, snorkeling, sleeping, on a nearly unvisited part of the island. It was so quiet, and so relaxing, and so perfect, after the semester we had, that it wiped out the memory of the bus trip (which we avoided for the way home by booking a flight).

            I just wanted to announce our safe return, and wish a Happy New Year to any readers who are still with the blog. And if my Grote friends read this, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I can’t believe you picked the first Grote ski trip for the year I will not see snow.