Author: jdewyze

American and Un-American

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Sometimes I’m thrilled to find the footprint of American culture far from home. Sometimes I love when it isn’t where I’d expect it. We’ve already experienced both in Bali.

Ride-sharing is the American export I love more than words can express. Uber doesn’t exist here, but one of its Indonesian offspring, Gojek, has been serving us daily. It liberates us, a mind-blowing improvement over the ways we got around last century. As long as we know where we want to go or can pick a landmark in the general area, we just type that into the Gojek app,and a driver in a clean, air-conditioned vehicle materializes, usually within five minutes. We never have to worry about finding a taxi, a constant source of stress in the bad old days. The rides typically cost $2-$3 for a 15-minute trip; maybe $10 for one that lasts an hour or more.

Alas, even though Bali looks tiny on the map of Indonesia, we’ve learned that far too many rides anywhere take at least an hour. I started writing this paragraph on a 40-mile journey from our home-exchange berth to the Banyu Wana Amertha waterfall in northern Bali. In Southern California it might be a 60-minute jaunt. The Gojek app predicted it would take two hours here, and it wound up being two and a half. Neither Steve nor I can think of any place we’ve ever visited that matches this level of vehicular constipation — the result of unloosing hordes of motorcycles and scooters and cars and trucks on narrow, two-lane roads (almost all there is on the island). Slogging through that in a Gojek car isn’t a lot of fun, but my mind reels at the alternative: being tempted to rent a motorbike. That would almost certainly lead to our death or permanent incapacitation.

We took Gojek cars Tuesday to and from the spiffy beach community of Seminyak, where we prowled the shops, popped into a super-fancy hotel, and spent two blissful hours hanging out on heavily padded chaise lounges under a big red umbrella on the wide sand beach.

Wednesday we took a Gojek to the Garuda Wisna Kencana “cultural park” in Bukit, the pendant of land that hangs off the southern end of Bali’s most populated region. We’d heard a bit about the center and hoped it would introduce us to some of Bali’s history and artistic traditions. After suffering through 80 minutes of ghastly traffic, the driver took us deep into a beautiful wooded area and deposited us at the entry complex of what appeared to be a theme park.

This map posted near the ticket booths provided as much information as we would find anywhere. It’s not much. We paid about $8.50 each for all-day tickets, then spent the next four hours exploring what turned out to be more weirdly, wackily different from the Anaheim and Orlando institutions than even Walt could have imagined. What we figured out by the end of our stay is that you go to GWK for two main reasons.

One is to see the giant statues of Hindu gods. These are colossal bronze creations. The biggest, Vishnu riding his eagle Garuda, stands taller than the Statue of Liberty or Christ the Redeemer in Rio.

The park contains a couple of other representations of Hindu superheroes. This Garuda looms over “Garuda Plaza.”

You also come to watch the 30-minute performances that take place every hour in a shaded amphitheater. These were delightful, including samples of both a sinuous, flashing-eyed duo…

…and the comic lion-dog barong dance, accompanied by gamelan players who appeared to be having great fun.

Besides gaping at the foot of the statues and watching the dancers perform, Steve and I also checked out the gift shop… …and ate a basic lunch on a pleasant terrace overlooking the city. We were very excited about catching a 35-minute film that screened every hour in a little movie theater; surely it would fill in some of the blanks in our understanding of Bali and its history, I thought. But the film instead was an animated drama that depicted how Arjuna came to be Vishnu’s airborne chauffeur. The drama centered around young Garuda’s having to free his mom who was tricked into being enslaved by the evil witch, Kadru. It was cute and fun but about as educational as a Saturday morning cartoon.

We also spent a lot of time searching for information about the megalithic stones that to me made the whole complex feel a bit like a modern art installation. Why were THEY here? What were they? Our 2021 edition of Lonely Planet Indonesia, incredibly, didn’t even mention the GWK cultural park. In the first-floor lobby that underlies the gigantic statue of Vishnu riding on Arjuna, we found some historical photos that hinted at why. The center apparently was only inaugurated in the fall of 2018, and we imagine the guidebook went to press before that. After our visit, we found a bit more information on Wikipedia, which explained that the park began as a government project, then construction shut down when the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 90s. A Balinese real-estate developer finally stepped in to take over the project and finish it. But nowhere in the park or online could we find an explanation for those monoliths. (Our theory is that the land originally was a rock quarry, and the monoliths were remnants of the original stone. But we don’t know if that’s right.)

Americans don’t do theme parks or other tourist attractions this way. We give visitors lots of explanation and information. The absence of that at GWK didn’t bother me. I liked the reminder that I was immersed in a place very different from the one back home.

Love letter

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Dear Man in Seat 61,

I don’t remember when I learned about you, but it didn’t take long for me to love you. I assume you must have started your eponymous website by reporting on train travel in the UK and Europe — time tables for the major routes, how the system worked in each country, how to buy tickets, and so on. Pretty soon you had expanded to cover the whole world (as far as I can tell). Thanks to you, I’ve been able to plan train trips that took Steve and me from Singapore up the Malay peninsula (2016); from Tibet across China to Beijing; from Kars to Cappadocia in Turkey; and many others. Your wise words guided me in 2018 when I was figuring out how to get us around India, a country whose railway system contains countless traps for the innocent. Thanks to your passionate recommendation, we rode the World Heritage Bernina Express from Switzerland to Italy in the fall of 2021. (That was the ride on which Steve actually GOT Seat 61! Talk about channeling your spirit!)

And thanks yet again to you, on this trip I figured out how we could travel from Yogyakarta to Bali by train and ferry.

Whenever I follow your guidance I’m astonished by how detailed and accurate the information is. All the photos (and often videos) help manage my expectations. For example, I knew that the Argo Willis, which would carry us from Yogyakarta to Surabaya (Indonesia’s second-largest city, on the eastern coast of Central Java), was a premium (“Eksekutif-class”) train.Its comfortable reclining seats, clean toilets, and functioning power made that ride a pleasure. I knew that to continue on from Surabaya to Ketapang on Java’s eastern tip our only option was an “Ekonomi-class” line but those trains were “perfectly safe and comfortable,” you assured us readers.The bench seats on the one we took were plain, and it was all but impossible to avoid playing kneesies with the plump young woman who faced me for the first four and a half hours of the ride. But any train that posts a photo of its conductor has to make you feel you’re in competent hands.We left Surabaya just three seconds after 5:30 a.m. and pulled into Ketapang six hours and 59 minutes later — a minute ahead of schedule.

I had printed out your instructions for what to do when we got off the train and they enabled us to roll our suitcases to the Bali ferry (a few blocks away) as nonchalantly as if we were regular commuters.

More recently I’ve noticed that in addition to all the train info, you sometimes have interesting opinions about hotels. I don’t always follow your advice, but I was thrilled with the result of doing so in Surabaya. The cleanest city in Indonesia and an important commercial and industrial center, it alas offers little in the way of tourist attractions. We only spent two nights there to break up the long overland (and sea) journey to Bali. You had written that the Majapahit Hotel was THE place and stay and added,, “Don’t argue, trust me on this.”

Built in 1911 by the son of the man who co-founded Singapore’s legendary Raffles Hotel, the Majapahit today remains an oasis of glorious gardens, murmuring fountains, and gleaming hard wood.In 1945 it also was the setting for a key event in the birth of Indonesia as an independent country. So when you declared, “Even if you’re on a budget, splurge here,” I complied. What a bargain splurge it turned out to be: $89 a day for a lovely suite in a setting that enticed us to abandon our normal hyper-driven sightseeing and spend a whole day chilling out.

We took dips in the pool and lounged next to it, napping and writing. We marveled at the enormous variety of choices at the breakfast buffet. In that elegant room, we ate all our other meals, and I enjoyed a superb massage in the hotel’s spa. We went to bed early and awoke feeling refreshed and ready to face Monday’s long journey.

From the ferry dock in Bali, sadly, we had to take a Gojek car, All our Indonesian train rides are now behind us. As long as I can ride the rails, I can only hope you will carry on, continuing to serve those of us who still love this transportation niche; who still think it’s one of the most interesting ways to move through the world.

Sincerely yours,

Jeannette

Holy Yogyakarta!

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I feel bad about shortchanging the magnificent temples we visited Friday; I mentioned them so briefly in my last post. Steve says the one at Borobudur was the most impressive religious structure he has seen anywhere. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’d put it at least in the top five. To make up, here are a few postcards from the day.

We spent the morning at Borobudur, built more than 1100 years ago and woefully vulnerable to the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that regularly devastate this area. For centuries it survived only as a pile of rubble buried by jungle. People started reconstructing it about 200 years ago, and although that’s still a work in progress, the largest Buddhist temple on earth has now been largely resurrected.

We lucked out by being assigned a great guide. Hatta grew up playing hide and seek with his friends in the ruins almost daily. Today he’s great at explaining Borobudur’s sophisticated architectural design, essentially a pyramid composed of several distinct levels. Thousands of carved stone panels line the lowest ones, and they tell the complicated story of Siddhartha — how the Indian prince become the Buddha and how his teachings reached Indonesia. The structure thus functions like a gigantic graphic encyclopedia, rendered three-dimensional in volcanic stone.

As you climb up the stairs through all the levels, they become shallower, another lesson: the more one learns, the easier it becomes to progress. At the top two final levels are filled with a forest of stupas, each stupa sheltering a Buddha, except for the huge one that crowns the whole magnificent construction. (It contains nothing.)

Nowhere in the complex is there any place to sit and meditate. Meditation takes the walking variety, weaving through the stupas, where the mind quiets and turns to the surrounding landscape, a mix of vibrant green life and potential violent death.

Now I’m going to short-change a temple again, this one Prambanan, the complex we visited in the afternoon.

It’s also more than 1100 years old. Its buildings are enormous. Some say they’re the most beautiful Hindu temples on earth. That may be so, but it was the Buddha’s stone cathedral that stole my heart.

Ups and downs

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Yogyakarta is the cultural and religious heart of Indonesia, the ancient power base from which Javanese overlords long dominated much of the archipelago. Rich temple complexes and brooding volcanoes surround the city, and a sultan still lives behind palace walls fronted by sacred banyan trees. We couldn’t miss all that, so I built a two-and-a-half-day visit to Yogya into our Indonesian itinerary.

Getting there Wednesday from our lodge in the Sumatran jungle was an ordeal. We left in the dark (5:45 am), and although traffic was a bit lighter than on the inbound trip, the ride still took almost three hours. Our two-hour flight to Jakarta was on time, but we had to wait more than three hours to board a second flight, then sat on the runway for a long time before we could take off. We thus landed a half-hour late, around 7:15 pm. Until four years ago, getting from Yogyakarta’s airport into the citwas easy but then the government built a fancy new airport on the sea shore, far from town, without giving much thought to how passengers would get back and forth. There’s a train, but it runs infrequently. (Being late, we missed it.) The other alternative is by car.

Gojek and Grab are the Uber and Lyft of Indonesia, and I had downloaded apps for both to my phone. While Steve waited for our suitcases to tumble onto the carousel, I tried to input my Chase Sapphire Visa info into the Gojek site. It seemed to accept the information — but it wouldn’t store it. A small consolation was that the bags did show up, and we headed for the exit, where a phalanx of taxi and other ride touts shouted invitations. I spotted a slender young man in a Grab uniform, opened the app on my phone and asked if he could help us. To my delight, he showed me which buttons to push to call a car, led us outside to the spot where it would arrive, assured us we could pay the driver in cash, and helped us into it. That was the good news. The bad came from Google maps, which said the ride to the Airbnb unit I had booked would take more than an hour.

It was almost 8 pm by then, and Steve and I hadn’t eaten anything in hours. The road was narrow, and cluttered with construction, a shocking amount of traffic, and countless stoplights. I spent much of the ride berating myself for not having reserved a room at the fancy hotel friends had recently stayed in and loved. The Phoenix would have a nice restaurant that was still serving, I felt confident. But I had picked a place on Airbnb in the hope it would put us closer to daily life in a vibrant community. Indeed when we finally reached our street, a head-spinning number of people still jammed it. I took this photo looking up our street around noon the next day, but it was just as crowded well into every evening.

When we pulled up it the first night, many folks were hunkered in the dark around street-food vendors. But neither Steve nor I felt bold enough to forage for dinner among them. The Airbnb unit proved spacious, cool, and immaculate, but its only cooking instrument was an electric kettle. I suppose we could have just showered and fallen into bed, but we were starving and afraid of being awakened by even sharper hunger pangs at 2 in the morning. So we entered the convenience store next door and prowled its four aisles searching for anything we could imagine dining on. (Candy bars? Nope. Dried sausages? Maybe but ugh.) I finally spotted a sign advertising chicken chili dogs. We ordered two, watched the uniformed Indonesian teenage checker warm them in her countertop microwave. Back in the room we wolfed them down with some chips — the lowest culinary point to which we’ve sunk in years.

The next day, as if by magic, everything we tried worked splendidly. We used the Gojek app to take us across town for less than $2.50 (again paying in cash). We enjoyed a delicious breakfast in a cafe recommended by Lonely Planet, then walked a block or two to a travel agency where a charming young woman (Daisy) helped us arrange a day trip Friday to the two most important temple complexes in the region.

Daisy said the finger symbol signified wishing each other good luck.

She also told us how we could put money on our Gojek account at any Indomaret or Alfa convenience store (which we did easily later in the day). For sightseeing in the city center, she suggested starting at the complex known as the Kraton — the official residence of Yogya’s reigning sultan.

We had figured we would walk, but it was after 10, and the temperature was already well into the 80s. So when a tuk-tuk driver called out to us and said he’d take us there for a little over $3, it seemed irresistible. The ride reminded me how much fun it can be to tear across town in a tuk-tuk. Seated in front of the driver, you feel reckless and exposed and you try not to think about what would happen if you were to crash. Instead you savor the cool breeze and conserve energy while seeing almost as much as you would on foot.

By the time we got to the palace, Mario had convinced us he’d be thrilled to wait and chauffeur us to wherever else we wanted to go. He urged us to take as long as we wanted to explore the Kraton. It’s worth some sustained attention. We couldn’t enter the sultan’s living quarters, but the public spaces are enormous, a bit run down but reminiscent in their scale of the Forbidden City in Beijing. A few nice little museums provided insight into some of the sultanical rituals. Most diverting was the performance by a full traditional Javanese (gavelan) orchestra that was accompanying a classic shadow puppet performance. The stage was arranged in such a way that you could watch the shadowy action on one side of the screen…

…then move to observe the puppeteer doing his complicated work on the back side. I’m not sure we’ll see another such show while we’re here, so I was grateful for this glimpse of Indonesia’s iconic art form.

We crammed a whole lot more into the 24 hours that followed. Much of it was marvelous or at least exhilarating. We soaked up the levels of beauty and meaning in the temple complexes in Borobudur and Prambanan. Prowled the network of narrow byways that cut through our neighborhood and other parts of Yogyakarta. Shopped in a superb batik emporium. Found a tiny laundry that for $6.50 washed and ironed and folded close to 4 kilos of our sweat-drenched clothes.

We had a few more dark moments too. One night we got lost on a long, ill-conceived walk to a restaurant that, once we got there, was too full to admit us. Too late we learned you have to make a reservation at least a couple of days before you want to dine there on the classic Javanese cuisine overseen by a famous Yogyakarta transvestite. Her image is on the billboard in this photo:

For a few nightmarish moments, I thought we might wind up facing more mini-mart chili dogs, but we found an okay alternative. We fared worse finding a good place to eat the next night.

I’ll just say for me the low points of independent travel interweave with the delights to enrich the overall fabric of my experience. If there are moments I’m not happy, I’m always paying attention. I am never bored.

The man of the forest and the folks just outside it

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Monday night over satay chicken and fried tofu and a bottle of Bintang beer, Steve and I talked about the orangutans of San Diego. The zoo has a big colony of them, located not far from the entrance plaza. Over the years I’ve probably passed their enclosure dozens of times; I know what they look like. But I had only the vaguest notion of where they came from. Now that I’ve been there, I can tell you: orangutans in the wild are much more beautiful than I could imagine; of all the great apes, they look the most like movie stars.

Getting to them also defied my expectations. It was much harder than I braced for. The Sumatra Orangutan Discovery center’s website had described its full-day trek as “moderate” and suitable for families. What they might have added is, “Be prepared to spend several hours climbing up and down narrow, extremely steep and vine-choked paths that are especially treacherous after a heavy rain.” We’d had a brief but thunderous downpour Sunday night, so the ground was still soaked and the sky still gray when we set off around 9 am with a 27-year-old guide named Dani and his assistant, 25-year-old Dian.

That’s Dian on the left; Dani is on the far right.

At first the going was delightful, the path flat and wide. It wound past fish farms and vegetable gardens and a couple of guys harvesting palm-oil nuts.

We crossed one of the many bridges spanning the Sungai Bohorok River,and Dani explained how the infamous fruit of the durian tree (wildly popular throughout Asia) is grown and marketed.

It starts as one of these innocent seeds but grows into a spiky, smelly monster.

The terrain got rougher as we entered a rubber plantation, where locals still tap every tree every day in order to extract what appears to be a ridiculously small amount of latex.The forest smelled delicious and it thrummed with a symphony of percussive insects.

At the start of our trek, Dani had told us it would take 30-45 minutes to reach the entrance to the national park. It actually took an hour and 45 minutes (another example of the elasticity of Indonesian schedules? Or were Steve and I just pathetically slow?) By the time we passed through the gate, we were climbing in earnest.Within minutes Dani pointed to some orangutan nests high overhead, empty at the moment but recently occupied.Soon we came upon a small knot of people murmuring with excitement at the proximity of two bright orange forms moving through the nearby trees.

Orangutans — their name derived from the Malaysian words for man (orang) and forest (utan) — are the most solitary of the great apes. Once the males mature, they’re like bears. They spend almost all of their lives alone, hanging out with females for only a week or two to breed. And single, receptive girls are mind-blowingly few and far between. Both partners lose interest in sex once the female becomes pregnant, after she has given birth, and throughout all the time she is teaching her offspring everything it needs to know to survive on its own — a process that takes roughly 6-8 years. The youngster we came upon was several years old, swinging through the canopy for the sheer jolly fun of it.

Mom never let him disappear from her sight, but she also kept an eye on us. When she descended the tree and looked like she might approach us, all the guides urgently ordered everyone to move back. Some part of my brain thought, “She’s probably strong enough to rip me apart,” but another part felt riveted by the shocking intensity of her glossy red fur.

We watched the pair for a long while, then hiked on, stopping for lunch at one point. That’s when I discovered the red stuff dripping from a couple of spots on my lower legs. Leeches had profited from my failure to wear long socks. (“Blood donation!” Dani crowed.)

More tough climbing followed. I was ready to beg for directions to the quickest route down the mountain. But I couldn’t resist one last detour to see another orangutan mother with a much younger baby, this one even more adorably fuzzy.We finally broke away and descended in earnest around 2 pm, my knees by then grievously annoyed by what I’d put them through.

Happily, we didn’t have to walk all the way home but clambered into big tires lashed together for a tube ride back to town. Sadly, our cameras were packed into a big plastic bag so we have no photos from the raft, but this is what the river looks like.

We had considered venturing out on another trek on Tuesday to see the largest flower on earth — the so-called “corpse lily” (Rafflesia arnoldi) that blooms in a forested area about 10 miles from Bukit Lawang. The bloom had ended, however, a few weeks earlier, we learned, so we opted to spend our second morning in Sumatra instead touring a couple of the nearby non-touristic villages. This turned out to be an excellent choice. The morning was cool and sunny when Steve, Dani, and I piled into two “tuk-tuks.” Steve and I have ridden in similar conveyances throughout much of the developing world, but we’d never seen anything quite like the Indonesian variety — basically overgrown sidecars grafted onto motorcycles. They’d be hellish on any real Indonesian road trip, but they were comfy enough for our purpose.

We buzzed along the wide irrigation channels that run through some of Bukit Lawang’s villages. Naked little boys swim in them; ladies in dresses and headscarves stand in the waist-high water washing clothes.We rode for a bit, stopped and strolled, took in the spectacularly fertile landscape around us. Dani pointed out the rows of sprightly peanut plants growing along the edge of the rice fields. He explained how to tell when the rice was ready for harvesting — only three months after the seedlings are stuck in the flooded fields. Besides rice, so many things grow in this rich volcanic soil you could probably spend a week taking it all in. We saw fields of cassava…

,,,and cacao trees…

…little girls harvesting palm-oil tree fronds to be made into roof thatching…

…palm-oil frond stems drying in the sun to be made into brushes.

We made a quick stop at the home of a tofu-making couple, but we spent more time visiting one of the local brown-sugar artisans. He owns a small parcel of land containing a number of sugar palms. These have to be climbed daily to collect the clear sweet juice.

You go up the tree using a bamboo pole cut with toeholds.

If someone were not a pious person living in a very Islamic neighborhood he might ferment the liquid and turn it into palm wine. Here, however, the juice has another mission.

Cooked in a wok over a wood fire for several hours, it turns a dark caramel color. We watched as the master completed a batch. He set up bamboo forms while stirring the wok and checking the consistency of the syrup.When he judged it to be just right, he poured the thick goo into the molds…and it soon solidified into a puck of concentrated fruity sweetness.I found it delicious, not as crunchy as the brown cane sugar in my kitchen at home, but containing more complex layers of flavor.

Dani told us the sugar-maker wraps his sweet disks in banana leaves and sells them to some of the local shops. He makes very little money for all this work. By world standards, he’s very poor. So are most of the residents of rural Sumatra, but for what it’s worth, by the end of the day Steve and I had concluded this was the nicest place to be poor we’ve ever visited.

The local orangutans strike me as somehow similar. They’re critically endangered. Less than 14,000 are thought to remain on Sumatra. Given all the factors that threaten them, given their agonizingly slow reproductive rate, experts think they’ll be extinct within 50 years. It’s depressing. But for the moment, if you’re an orangutan, you wouldn’t want to trade your paradise for San Diego.

The road to Bukit Lawang

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I did not come to Indonesia to do road trips. But now that I’ve done half of one, I can say at least they’re educational. If like Dorothy, you want visceral assurance you are NOT in Kansas, a drive through parts of Sumatra delivers. Our experience Sunday afternoon also solved a mystery for me, namely I had been unable to imagine how it could take four hours to go 65 miles in a nicely maintained Toyota SUV. Now I know.

We wound up on the road trip because we wanted to see orangutans in the wild. Steve and I have tracked both chimpanzees and gorillas (in Uganda), and we’ve hung out with bonobos in a sanctuary in the Congo. There’s only one other species of great ape in the world — orangutans — and they live only on two Indonesian islands. My first impulse was to seek them in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, recommended by Lonely Planet as the best choice for observing the hairy orange guys in the wild.

When I started planning this trip back last October, it looked like we could easily fly to giant, exotic Borneo from Java (the island that has long been the center of power in this country). Connections on one of the best of the many small domestic airlines were good, and I found a trekking outfitter who seemed respectable. This all fell apart, however, when the flights on the good airline vanished from the Internet (and for the month or two in which I was obsessively checking, they never reappeared. Who knows why). We could only fly to Borneo on a mediocre airline at an inconvenient time. Frustrated, I shifted gears and set my sights on the jungles of Sumatra.

I learned we could fly from Jakarta on one of the better outfits (Citilink) to Medan, the biggest city on Sumatra (and the third largest city in all of Indonesia). I also connected with a well-reputed outfitter just outside Gunung Leuser National Park — one of the richest rainforest ecosystems in the world. (It’s home not only to orangs and other primates but also tigers, rhinos, elephants, and leopards.) I booked a room in the Orangutan Discovery lodge ($23 per night). For an extra $50, the manager said a driver would pick us up at the Medan airport and transport us the 65 miles to the lodge. This seemed reasonable.

Happily, all our travel connections went flawlessly, until we walked out to where the driver was supposed to be holding a sign with our name. There was no sign of him…

Sadly, we were not from the Fuso shop.

…but he did show up after an hour, apologizing and explaining that a truck had overturned on the highway. We piled into Hari’s small SUV, and he announced the drive usually took four hours. This sounded astonishing but also kind of fascinating. How could it?

At first the mystery deepened, as Hari bombed along at 60 miles per hour or more on a well-maintained tollway. But it wasn’t long until we left that and turned onto the main (maybe only?) highway to Bukit Lawang, our destination. The asphalt wasn’t in horrendous condition but it threaded through one human beehive after another; moreover most of the bees appeared to be buzzing around on some kind of wheeled contraption: bicycles and cars and trucks and buses and a vast army of motorbikes, each carrying between one and five people between the ages of newborn and ancient.When you’re all barreling over two narrow lanes, driving becomes vastly more freestyle than anything you ever see in the US or Europe, People thread their way up the wrong side of the road. Many folks favor straddling the faded middle divider line, probably to enhance their readiness for passing. Not passing is NOT an option. You simply must get around all the barely motorized vehicles carrying improbable loads.All this chaos feels remarkably dangerous, and we saw direct confirmation that, yes, it is. We passed the large truck whose crash had delayed Hari. Someone had somehow got it upright again, but it was still stuck by the side of the road. Further along, we whizzed by a demolished motorbike whose driver was still struggling to get up from under it.

Apart from all the scary bits, it was an interesting ride. At times we drove through palm-oil forests. Vast tracts of native rainforest have been torn down to make way for these squat, heavy-crowned trees bearing seeds from which oil is squeezed to fry all the zillions of tasty Indonesian tidbits. If I hadn’t know that Indonesia contains more Muslims than any other country (and Sumatra is known for its especially religious ones), the ride would have educated me. Every minute or two, we passed another roadside mosque — many topped with amazingly colorful and/or flashy domes that contrasted sharply with their homey bases. My head swiveled, too, at all the broad rivers we crossed, most the color of coffee with cream.

The further we drove, the more the road condition deteriorated until at times we had to slow to a cautious creep over the most busted-up sections. Around 5:35 the light was starting to dim and I cringed at the thought of it vanishing altogether as we rattled along for another 75 minutes. But then Hari piped up that we were almost at our destination! Indeed we bounced over dirt road for only a few minutes, entered a jungly stretch of road, and then stopped at a sign for the lodge next to a dirt path leading into a thicket of green. The sun still hadn’t set when we greeted the owner.

For all the ruined stretches of pavement and the death-defying traffic, just a bit over three hours had passed since we left the airport. So why had Hari told us it usually takes four? I suppose it’s possible he was trying to prevent our being disappointed if an eastbound truck turned over like the westbound one that had delayed him. I think it’s more likely, however, we’re in a part of the world where people relate to the interval between numbers on a clock differently than they do in San Diego. I suspect time is vaguer here; less precise. If so, that’s a good thing to be reminded of at the start of our sojourn.

Departing soon for one of the spiciest, shakiest places on the globe

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That would be Indonesia, land of thousands upon thousands of islands — 14,000? 17,000? I’m not sure anyone knows. Also home to more humans than only three other countries (India, China, and the USA.)

Situated on the Ring of Fire that rims the southwestern Pacific Ocean, Indonesia also is arguably the planet’s most geologically unstable country. Earthquakes, killer tsunamis, exploding volcanoes (Krakatoa!) — it’s all routine. That’s not why I had no strong desire to go there for a long time. It was more just ignorance. I had no clue what was there.

Now that Indonesia has worked its way up to the top of Steve’s and my Want to Visit list, we’ve been reading a lot and getting more excited the more we’ve learned. Varying wildly from one island to the next, I’ve come to wonder if Indonesia won’t feel a bit like Poseidous, the watery planet Steve and his co-author Roy Wysack created in their (fictional) guidebook for exoplanetary settlers (the Handbook for Space Pioneers).

Over the next three weeks, we’ll barely scratch the surface of the place, sleeping on only four of all those islands (Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Flores). We’ll make our way among them on airplanes, trains, boats, cars, and motorscooters. With luck, the land and sea will behave themselves throughout the course of our visit. But whatever happens, I’ll do my best to share some of what we experience.

Time travel

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’m embarrassed. The message that went out yesterday was a mistake, a “re-publication” of the very first travel post I ever produced, back in February of 2010, when Steve and I were starting our 41-hour transit to South Africa. It happened because I’d been fiddling with some of the blog’s design elements (something I almost never do). Among other things, I added a “category cloud” to the right-hand column. It’s a list of the categories I’ve assigned to most of my posts over the years. I liked the idea that if someone is going to a place I’ve written about, it should help them quickly and easily find what I had to say about it.

The problem, however, is that if a blog writer forgets to select a category, WordPress automatically declares it to be “Uncategorized.” Seeing that word in giant letters on the list bothered me. (I was pretty sloppy about categorization in those early years.) So I went in and changed the “uncategorized”on that very first report to “South Africa.” When I updated it, WordPress treated it like a new post — and sent all my loyal subscribers a (confusing!) email.

Sorry!

Steve and I won’t actually be setting out on our next adventure until May 11, when our destination will be Indonesia — the fourth most populous country on earth. We’ll only get to a handful of its 17,000 islands, but highlights should include tracking orangutans and komodo dragons in the wild, visiting the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and relaxing during a weeklong home exchange on Bali. Indonesia will be the 81st country I have visited.

I’m startled to reflect that South Africa was the 30th. Steve and I have covered a lot of ground since then. And this fall we’re planning to return to South Africa, along with some other places in the southern half of the continent. I promise to try to categorize everything properly.

And to refrain from sending out any emails when I screw up.

Hailing to the big chiefs

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I probably never would have visited the Presidential Libraries in Southern California were it not for our friends Donna and Mike Guthrie. Donna is an imaginative traveler with a passion for big creative projects. To name just one, she and Mike recently visited every National Park in anticipation of a big birthday. Among their current missions, they are targeting all the Presidential Libraries. They started with Harry Truman’s (in Independence, MO) and Lyndon Johnson’s (in Austin, TX), then suggested that a few friends from San Diego might accompany them on a short excursion to all (two) of California’s Presidential Libraries. Steve and I privately wondered how much fun this would be. Those facilities celebrate the lives and administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, neither of whom we ever came close to idolizing. But we assented, and the experience surprised us.

It was so interesting and entertaining I felt driven to write this post (one of my rare reports on adventures At Home.) Three days into the new year, we left San Diego for the Reagan facility, located in Simi Valley (about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.) Traffic was good and it took only about 2.5 hours to reach the sprawling property, set amidst lovely rolling hills. This is not the site of the famed Reagan Ranch (that’s further north, near Santa Barbara), but rather land acquired by Reagan supporters to house the complex. We grabbed a quick lunch in the cafeteria, then spent several hours making our way through the head-spinning concentration of films, photographs, artifacts, memorabilia, and exhibits documenting the 40th American president’s life.

What quickly charmed me was the fact that this facility is not merely a Great Man Monument but also an excellent history museum — one focused tightly on the 90-plus years when Ronald Reagan was alive in the United States of America (1911-2004). I was paying at least some attention to the world around me for at least part of that period, but it was amazing to see how much I’d forgotten, and fun to have it be brought back to life. The museum conjures up moments that shook the world — the internationally televised demand Mr. Gorbachev tear down “that wall” is an example.

A section of “that wall” stands outside the museum.

Others, like Reagan’s Golden Retriever, Victory, wagging his 3D tail next to his animatronic master on the ranch are sweetly mundane. I found almost everything engaging.

You can’t actually take a ride with Ronnie on the ranch, but you can say you did.

The Reagan museum/library also immerses visitors in some settings most of us have only glimpsed. You get to walk into a life-sized reproduction of the Oval Office the way it looked during the former movie star’s administration. Even better: you can board and stroll through the very first Air Force One. Kennedy rode in its presidential cabin on his way to that fateful rally in Dallas; LBJ was sworn in as his replacement on the return trip, JFK’s corpse close at hand. Nixon and Kissinger plotted their strategies on this plane when they journeyed to China for the first time.

After touring the Reagan site, we spent the night in Pasadena, then headed south the next day with Yorba Linda programmed into our Google maps. It was on a modest Yorba Linda ranch that Nixon’s father erected a home for his young family, using a mail-order construction kit. A year later the Nixons’ second son, Richard, was born in the building. It’s way too small to hold a Presidential Library; the large museum/library structure lies just a short walk away. But having the family home located on the property somehow makes it feel intimate and meaningful.

The Yorba Linda building in which President Nixon was born.

No one in our little group was ever much of a Nixon fan, and we’d thought we might breeze through the complex in an hour. To our surprise, we wound up staying for almost three hours and concluding it was the better of the two sites. The years when Nixon sat at the highest levels of American political power were at least as epic as the Reagan’ years, and the displays seemed better organized and more coherent. Moreover, the Nixon facility feels less hagiographic, more balanced, with extensive attention given to the Watergate break-in, the subsequent cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. No presidential aircraft live here, but in this Oval Office replica — decorated as it was when Nixon occupied it — no rope barriers prevent guests from strolling up to the replica of the room’s famous Resolute Desk and taking the helm, if just for a moment.

Here I recapture the moment when I find out I’m likely to be impeached.

If you had asked me on New Year’s Eve what I thought of both Reagan and Nixon, my reply would have been withering. But the libraries reminded me of what I can easily forget: both men were complex characters, brimming with qualities both admirable and odious. Here are two examples of things I learned about Richard Nixon that enriched the way I think of him. In a section filled with pictures of his early childhood, a display explained that by 14, the future president knew how to operate a motor vehicle, and every morning he would get up early, drive to the produce market in Los Angeles, stock up on fruit and vegetables, return to Whittier, and set up what he’d bought in his family’s fruit stand. Then he’d go to his classes at the high school. Caught up in the Watergate, he may have been vindictive and paranoid and conniving. But he was also once that spunky kid.

I found maybe an even better example at the display explaining the recording system Nixon ordered set up in the White House. It captured everything at all times. Visitors to the Yorba Linda facility can select various recordings to listen in on. The damning one in which President Nixon ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in is not among them. The one I chose instead captured one of Nixon’s daughters, I think Julie, calling him to talk about whether the family could go out to a restaurant for a dinner on Valentine’s Day. She sweetly suggests that Trader Vic’s has a nice secluded table and good food. He seems willing to make his girls happy, but kind of clueless. He says she should check with “Mommy,” and if Mommy wants, they can all go out to Trader Vic’s. The museum shares this absolutely private, pedestrian moment and reminds those who listen that Tricky Dick also could be a good dad and a nice guy. That’s some accomplishment.

Finnish fun

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Part of why I booked us a session at the Löyly sauna was because I thought I might be desperate for bloggable material, desperate enough to try roasting myself and jumping into the freezing Baltic Sea. 

Not that there’s anything to dislike about Helsinki. Here was our first view of it, approaching on the ferry from Estonia:

But it’s not much older than San Diego and looked perhaps less interesting. On our first full day (Friday, Sept. 23), Steve and I followed our pattern and roamed the streets, guidebook in hand. The weather was nippy but dry, and we spent more than five hours taking in many of the major sights.

A striking contemporary church called the Temple of the Rock draws a steady stream of tourists.
Helsinki residents have an enormous music center…
Lovely parks…
And waterfront food tents offering inexpensive and interesting snacks.

It was all pleasant, but not much to write home about, nor did our outing Saturday to the island fortress known as Suomenlinna provide any of what you might call excitement.

You reach it via a short ferry ride.
The fortress didn’t much impress us, but we enjoyed strolling around the islands.

On Sunday, our last full day, we did a test run on the tram from our apartment to the central train station, a magnificent building to which fast airport trains connect frequently.

Helsinki’s central train station matches any we’ve seen elsewhere.

Then we walked to the central library nearby. It opened less than three years ago, and I can attest: both its design and contents are spectacular; it’s no mere book repository but rather a comprehensive cultural center.

You can borrow musical instruments and experiment with them in a sound-proof studio. Or play video games with your friends, or work on sewing projects, or fabricate a prototype.
Readers can luxuriate on a celestial upper floor.

It made me briefly imagine moving to Helsinki just to get a library card. Instead we walked to the National Museum of Finland a few blocks away. The exterior looked almost grim. But inside we found the polar opposite of that boring grand ducal museum in Lithuania. The Finnish institution grabbed our attention with one clever exhibit after another. In a room that focused on medieval times, for example, the push of a button showed what x-rays had revealed about each of the carved wooden religious statues in the room — which trees they were hewn from, the original paint job, etc. Pushing a button in another gallery devoted to portraiture transformed some of the portraits into our (sort of) doppelgängers. (That’s Steve in the middle; I’m on the right.)

Some effects were simple but moving: a scroll of photos taken of individual Finns every single year from 1900 to the present.

In other rooms we learned about the Finnish love of coffee and the passion for heavy metal (along with headphones with which to listen to some of the country’s most famous headbangers.) Another video montage let visitors watch how the landscape around Helsinki evolved over centuries, compressed into just a minute.

We would have lingered but had to hustle to our sauna appointment. Steve, who hates both extreme heat and cold, had to be talked into this, but acceded, a good sport as always. I thought a sauna visit was important because saunas are such a big deal in Finnish culture and elsewhere in this part of the world (particularly Estonia). I’d read all my life about how these far-northern Europeans enjoy getting overheated then jumping naked into snowbanks (while beating themselves with birch switches?!) I’d always dismissed this custom as being somewhat deranged. When would I ever have a chance to get more insight into it?

Visiting a sex-segregated facility, where the ladies and gents (usually naked) swelter separately seemed creepier than patronizing a sauna where Steve and I could don bathing suits and sweat together. The upscale Löyly offered this option. Housed in a low-slung wooden building on the waterfront, it took about 20 minutes to walk to it from our flat. An inviting bar and restaurant takes up a big chunk of the complex.

But we went inside and from the front desk, we collected towels and a locker key, then followed the instructions to each enter the changing room designated for our sex. After donning our swimsuits and showering, we met up and found the first of the facility’s two sauna rooms. 

We pulled on a clear glass door and climbed up a steep set of steps to find a dimly lit L-shaped space lined with two levels of benches. I was startled by how packed it was. I’d had to make a reservation for 3:15 precisely, which I’d assumed was intended to control overcrowding. But the benches were so full it was hard for us to find a space to squeeze into. Once we did, I sized up the folks around us in the gloom. The vast majority looked to be in their 20s or 30s, with young men outnumbering the women. Some exchanged short comments with each other, and we heard some British accents, but clearly this wasn’t a conversation space. In short order, I started sweating, and the heat intensified whenever someone threw a dipper of water into the heating contraption at the base of the steps. After maybe 5 minutes, I was ready to get out.

We knew Löyly had two types of saunas, one “Finnish-style” (where the heat is produced with electricity) and a more traditional wood-fired one. The smell of burning wood in the second made it clear which was which. The wood-fired sauna felt at least as hot as the first had been, and it was even darker. Again we groped to find a perch. This time we struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to us, an Ohio native who worked for a Finnish company and was visiting Helsinki for a business meeting.

She’d already gotten into the sea a couple of times, she told us; her evident survival inspired me. When I felt close to fainting from the heat, I signaled to Steve I was ready to take the plunge. At Löyly, you don’t literally jump into the Baltic (actually the Gulf of Finland); rather you walk to the end of a platform and descend a ladder. Normally, I’m someone who can’t enter a 75-degree swimming pool without shrieking. But this water was so cold it belonged to a different realm.

Unlike any swimming pool, there was no getting used to this cold — so intense it would suck the life out of anyone who lingered long. To the extent my brain was functioning, it registered amazement I was still breathing. I even treaded water; took a few strokes. After maybe 15 seconds I climbed out and stumbled back to the wood-fired sauna, which warmed me up as efficiently as it had the first time. After a while I went outside and re-entered the ice-water. Steve wouldn’t immerse himself, but at least he put his feet in.

I would have cycled between the heat and cold a few more times, but we had to shower, dress, and move on to our final dinner before starting the journey home. Steve ordered sautéed reindeer, while I savored little whitefish known as vendace, breaded, fried, and served on a mound of buttery mashed potatoes.

Both were delicious, as was virtually every meal we ate in all four countries on this trip. I felt so relaxed it was almost surreal, and it was hard not to credit the sauna for that. It took a little while, but I had learned something I didn’t expect, and not just about saunas.