Part 2: Blue is the color of paradise

On Friday, while we were still blissed out in our humid and internet-less pocket of the jungle, Mount Raung erupted, making international news and stranding thousands of passengers who were traveling through Bali and Lombok. When we arrived in the Surabaya airport on Sunday morning, just two days after Mount Raung started spewing clouds of ash, it was a madhouse. I set dad up with coffee and a seat in the Starbucks lounge upstairs and proceeded to fight tooth and nail for a seat on the first plane to Labuan Bajo (which had to transit through Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali).

After some bilingual beleaguering, we were miraculously only 5 hours behind our original schedule in getting from Kalimantan to Flores, with one night spent in the Surabaya airport rather than a backpackers in Bali.



Many families spent the night sleeping on the floor in the airport. While we were eating dinner at an airport restaurant I saw kids pushing their dozing dads around in trolleys. One might have thought that the airport was the place to be after a hard day of work. Those of us lucky enough to get an early flight the next day were all told the same thing: get in line at 4 am to confirm your seat on the plane.



By the time we got to the Bali airport our spirits were restored by the open, clean atmosphere and the promise of momentum in our journey.

Labuan Bajo: Day 10-17

On Day 1 in Labuan Bajo dad's immune system said, "hey, wait up for me" so we rested for our first two afternoons in the insanely beautiful villa where he had arranged for us to stay. My time was spent in the laziest postures imaginable reading "Eat, Pray, Love" (because of our proximity to Bali) while listening to the wavering sounds of the call to prayer, coming up to our mountain-side homestay from what sounded like the bottom of a swimming pool.

Recitation of the Quran (Sorry about the construction noises in the foreground.)

My thoughts after my first encounter with hot water in....a while, as I stood on our deck looking out over the best view in town were:

This must be paradise. For one, there's the view: turquoise, wind-wrinkled water disturbed by small islands rising out of the sea like the spine of a great mythical beast. Everything is clean and spacious. Even the recitation of the Quran (pengajian Quran) earlier was a clear, pitch-perfect sound ringing across the bay. One dark cloud hangs over the water, casting half the harbor in shadow and the other half in solid white, like glass caught in a glare. Up in stage right, the islands farthest off are in a spotlight of late afternoon light, dirty gold-colored like our thatched roof. A disembodied voice from the mosque falls loudly, proudly on Catholic ears - like those of the family taking care of this house while our German host is abroad visiting family. The geckos (called tokays) call in response - in protest, admission or in competition, it's difficult to tell.



In hopes that he would feel up to seeing some dragons (komodo dragons that is) on the second day, my dad and I booked a one day tour to Rinca island. He still felt sick the morning of, however, so I went alone to join the group and left him well-supplied with tissue, water and beautiful views. He left me with a long list of safety tips to use in the face of anything that might bite, sting or....breath fire? After reminding my sniffly, well-meaning father that I do indeed have a sense of self-preservation, I was off!


Amid a crowd of small puttering tour boats with varicolored tarp roofs, ragged corners flapping in the breeze (some boats have to replace their tarps after every outing) I found our group of six. There was one woman from near Jakarta on vacation in Flores, a German couple spending three months traveling Indonesia, two English teachers from England who had spent the last ten years traveling and teaching in Asia, two Indo tour guides (students from a local high school), and our smiling, silent boat captain. I met a lot of young people on this trip who were spending anywhere between three months to three years traveling (and sometimes working) around Asia. This revived my sense of adventure.

During the two hour ride to Jurassic Park, or, as they call it here, Rinca Island, the woman from near Jakarta and I tried conversing in Indonesian over the sound of the raucous motor but eventually we resorted to typing our questions and comments on notes apps in our phones.

At one point I got tangled up in some unfamiliar vocabulary and so we began a game of charades. According to her gestures of something large and flying with sharp teeth I gathered she was trying to communicate that we were passing Kalong Island, home of the flying foxes, huge bats which can be seen coming out of their caves at dusk by the thousand.

Within five minutes of arriving on Rinca Island I could tell it was going to be one big tourist trap. There was a lot of bureaucracy for very little time with the dinosaur cousins. All park guests had to crowd into a small office to meet the director of the park (who referred to himself condescendingly as Uncle Louis) and undergo a small interview: what is your name, nationality, purpose of visit, date of departure...etc. I don't know why I am continually amazed by Indonesia's bureaucracy and inefficiency. I suppose I had higher standards for a world heritage site such as Komodo National park, but that turned out to be a mistake on my part.

We saw two dragons in the first ten minutes of our tour (in the shade near the office) and spent the next two hours trekking through a barren land where, if I were a komodo dragon, I probably wouldn't want to lounge around. But the entrance was pretty grand!



Finding Nemo

On the eve of Idul Fitri we booked a 2-day tour on a diving boat with a company called Wicked Diving. After dinner that night at a delicious Indonesian restaurant called Pesona Bali, we heard the sound of dozens of teens revving their motors as they passed in a deliberately ear-splitting motorcade. There was obviously some celebratory spirit in the air mixed with some protest perhaps of all the white foreign tourists literally cutting an expensive, posh path through their town. It was as if they were suddenly expressing their anger on an occasion that would draw the attention away from their true underlying feelings.

With high spirits we rose the next morning to see yet another world beneath the surface. One of the things we liked most about this company was that they packed as many dives/snorkel trips into a day as was humanly possible. This averaged about three for me and four for my very enthusiastic dad (having acclimated to the tropics, I now get cold even quicker than I did before.) Before even entering the water we saw schools of flying silver fish jumping in synchrony over the gentle waves.


I loved watching the dive instructors speak in their highly technical instructions with their own divers sign language before each dive. The general vibe of the group was almost feverishly excited. We sheepishly raised our hands when asked who the two snorkelers of the group were. Everyone around us was at least on their 10th or even past their 100th dive. Although we didn't have the proper camera to capture the marine marvels, the pictures below, taken by a diver in the group who graciously shared his pictures with everyone, capture most of what we saw higher up on the reef. What we saw was turtles, the corrugated lips of giant clams, universities of fish so colorful that my dad joked that perhaps the less colorful fish had an inferiority complex, cowry shells, an eel, many wavey, tentacle-y animals that shrank back into their rocks when our instructor dove down to point them out and lots and lots of beautiful coral. One of my favorite sights was watching the waves from below the surface moving like a clear cloth that two people were raising and lowering above my head.

The divers talked about the sensation of catching a drift of fast-moving water as flying underwater. We didn't catch any particularly strong currents from where we were but I loved the image they placed in my mind.


All photo and video creds to Florian Faucher, my new diving friend from France. Note to self: invest in a GoPro camera before embarking on another underwater venture.


The photographer himself, haloed by fish.


Dad was reading "The Sixth Extinction" on this trip and remarked that our snorkeling tour could be improved if they showed us more of the rapidly disappearing coral reefs. As it was, we were looking at some of the healthiest coral reefs in the whole world in Komodo National Park. Right up there with the location/inspiration for Finding Nemo, the Great Barrier Reef.



Another interesting observation from my biologist dad was that blue is one of the more rare colors to find on land. Maybe that's part of the appeal of hydrangeas for me. Maybe that's also what made the blue starfish and schools of fish we saw so striking.







A manta ray - truly a majestic sight. It had a wing span of maybe 6 feet and all the while it was passing below us (this probably wasn't the same one) I couldn't help but hear the Darth Vader theme song playing in my head.



Snorkeling brought out an awe and reverence in us both, I think. My dad and I have done some traveling together in the past but this was one of the most ecologically and culturally diverse places we have explored together. I'm happy that we still share a love of traveling and that we're able to continue our tradition. I was so grateful to be able to share my greatest adventure with him.

Part 1: Sh! We're hunting mushwooms

During this Ramadan (June 18th - July 16th) my dad came to visit me in Indonesia. My school had six weeks off between final tests and the start of the new semester so my dad came for an 18-day visit during which we travelled to the far (well, sort of) reaches of the archipelago. 

Visiting my Indonesian home, my family, my friends, "my" corner of Indonesia was, of course, a requirement for this trip. Although I spent my first three months of training in another village very different from this one, Karawang is really the base for all of my comparisons and my dad had to come here. Therefore, after meeting him at the airport my host uncle turned right back around and braved yet another three hours of gritty traffic (Jakarta seems to be in a state of constant rush hour at every time of year except holidays, like the one we would experience at the end of our trip, Idul Fitri, during which time it was an eerie ghost town). 

My dad's first three hours in Indonesia were spent in Jakarta traffic. Over the course of our trip my dad had many funny reactions to Indonesian culture and customs (Dad: Are there ANY traffic laws here?; How many times a day are we going to hear the mosque (the call to prayer)? Me: Five. Dad: Are you sure? I think it's been more than that already...) but my favorite of his reactions was caught on film while we were making our way from the airport the first afternoon:

I shall record what we did, saw and thought about during our travels to three out of 17,000 islands in Indonesia in two separate posts. My dad will also be sending me a guest entry to post, so I will leave most of the observations of my stomping grounds in West Java to him. 

My dad and some of my host siblings

In brief, it was surreal and exciting to introduce my dad to my host family and they seemed equally excited to meet him. My host dad, Abi, flexed his English skills and told my American dad all about the town, our neighborhood and the school he and my host mom run next door. In a culture that reveres parents so much, my dad was treated as an honored guest (if a very tall one. Many kids and adults alike were struck speechless by "how tall all Americans are." My dad confirmed their suspicions that this is an indisputable fact.)

In Indonesia there are two equally important cultural traditions I have seen that you should observe above all else: respect your elders and bring lots of gifts whenever you visit. In the weeks leading up to my dad's arrival, my family and friends were not passive when it came to reminding me to remind my dad to bring gifts, or, "oleh-oleh". Ergo, he came with one modest backpack of essentials for our two-week trip and one very large red suitcase packed to the gills with ONLY gifts. These were gifts not only for my family, but for neighbors, teachers and anyone else who I might have "forgotten". This red suitcase represented at least a month of my mom's time, energy and creativity, as she made (from scratch) shirts and purses for my host family. I think I've mentioned before that I live with a very large family here. (Refresher: my host parents have three biological children and, with me, five adopted kids. In our extended family there is also an uncle, housekeeper - who's really part of the family - and constant flow of family friends who stay here as well. On average there are twelve people staying in the house at any given time). It was wonderful to be able to say thank you in a small way from my American family to my Indonesian family who have made my experience here so unforgettable and most certainly wonderful that I have such creative, gung-ho parents who were able to help me articulate this sentiment with gifts and visits.

My dad's connecting flight from Japan was delayed so we only had one full day at my site. After that we spent three days touring Bogor, a near-by city famous for its botanical gardens. We went with my counterpart and another groovy teacher one the first afternoon then met up with my host sister and friend. 

Syifa, Alwin and dad.

Really cool tree in the Bogor Botanical Gardens.

 

One evening Syifa, Alwin and I left my dad at the homestay to rest after a long day of garden ambling and went out to see a boarding school put on a wayang performance. It was modernized or perhaps customized to this obviously musically-inclined group of middle school-aged children with the addition of an electric guitar and sound board.

Gamelan modern

And while we're on the topic of traditional music in Java, back in May at a martial arts festival in Karawang I heard another instrument native to Java called trumpet silat. 
Trumpet silat
 

Me and Syifa 

Kalimantan: Day 5 - 9

We flew from Jakarta to Pangkalan Bun (Pan-kalan-boon) on Tuesday, after four days spent between Karawang and Bogor. Syifa and Alwin, my Karawang compadres, saw us off to our Jakarta-bound shuttle. Later, I almost caught pneumonia from the air conditioning on the plane. Pangkalan Bun has only one military airport, so that is where we flew into. From there we paid a pre-set rate of 90.000 rupiah for a taxi to get to our eco-lodge called Yayorin. Small and spread-out are two words that come to mind to describe what we saw of Pangkalan Bun. We stayed in the secluded Yayorin eco-lodge, which could have doubled as a meditation retreat, at the book-ends of our trip to Tanjung Puting national park. Yayorin is a forest and orangutan conservation program which does educational outreach to the local population by traveling to schools and inviting groups to their lodge. Our means of travel through the park was a small puttering two-storied boat called a klotak. This is where we would spend the next three nights and four days - on board a boat going deeper and deeper into the jungle. 

When we emerged from the enchanted grove of Yayorin on Wednesday morning, my dad was already a little wobbly due to his first bout of illness (a mixture of the flu and an upset digestive system). Ali Mashouri, the director of our tour company (Dolphin Tours) and our tiny, sharp-as-a-nail guide Nina picked us up and drove us out of Pangkalan Bun. We went straight to our departure point in Kumai, a small river-side town (which means town by the river) just 30 minutes from Yayorin eco-lodge.

Several boats were huddled together in the dock, all with a bottom section for 4-5 local crew members and a top section for 1-4 bules (the average ratio we saw was 2 tourists: 5 crew members. It felt a little excessive.)

As we left Kumai we passed these buildings, which Nina told us were used to house sparrows. Are they really that bird-crazy in Kumai that they would spend millions of rupiah building concrete houses for sparrows? No. Actually, they are collecting the nests the sparrows make from their spit, which is then sold to other Asian countries like Japan in the form of soup. Sparrow-spit soup is believed to cure all ills and make you live hundreds of years, or something like that and there is a good market for it, so the buildings are quite a good investment in the end.

It's easy to become immune to the soul of summer when the eternal spell of heat and humidity never lifts. Going down a river, however, on a klotak with the sounds of the jungle surrounding you and a completely clear sky of stars every night, wiped clean of smog, light pollution and even the regular human sounds that keep you from losing yourself in the painting behind the glass, reminds you again what the child of summer looks and sounds like. 

By the second day of our river tour I was expertly pulling my pants off and on without getting them wet in the tiny wash closet where we took our cold bucket baths in the mornings. Somehow the lack of elbow space and simple focused mindset that this task required made me think that I could be happy waking up every morning to this routine. I could be very happy with a life of bucket baths and the sensation of a vehicle of transportation regularly rumbling beneath my feet, if I were to find such an opportunity after the Peace Corps... 

During our trek into the heart of the jungle we did see the usual suspects:

But the real stars of the show were the mushrooms! 

Everyone flocks to see the great beasts unique to this region: komodo dragons and orangutans, but we found that going off the beaten tourist track to look for species of a different size and splendor showed us a world very different from the one highlighted in guide books. In doing this we even had a semi-dramatic encounter with a young male orangutan who had purportedly lost in a fight with the lead male in his clan and was therefore aggressive because he had something to prove. (Fyi: orangutans are generally not aggressive because of their social structures but our guide knew that this specific one might be because of his situation and personality. If you're unsure, it's probably best to run in the other direction because adults weigh upwards of 300 pounds and that's quite an advantage). While dad was fumbling for his camera to get a video our guide Nina said very emphatically, "no, we need to RUN." 

Now who can say that they saw around 30 species of mushrooms, some foot-high worm-made mud houses, a white and black butterfly called Idea (pronounced ee-deh-ah) like rice paper floating in its own breeze, trails of army ants thick as a solid black line which you must jump over or else feel the fires of hell in your foot, wasp nests like upside-down terricota vases with an opening at the bottom shaped like a sunflower and were chased by an aggressive adolescent orangutan through the Borneo jungle on their vacation? Not too many people, I'd suppose.

One of my favorite splendors was watching fireflies decorate the canopy above the river where we spent our final night of the boat tour. The canopy was as black as the sky because there was no light pollution to distinguish them. The only light was the reflection of the upside down world in the murky pool of light spilling from our boat and the silent blinking lights in the trees. Which were fireflies and which were stars? It was difficult to tell.

Magical forest sounds 

(There are two videos in this post that may not play on a phone. You may only be able to access them on the web. There are also three links to audio files hosted on an external site. Don't miss them!)