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.
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.
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
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.
(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!)
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