Laos. Wen and I had wanted to go for ages as we’d heard nothing but great things about it. Now we’ve been. Read on.
1.
Our plane has touched down and is slowly taxiing to the gate. The pilot won’t be rushed as this is Laos and the next incoming flight is at least an hour away. And the gate is really just a parking stall where you walk to the terminal.
The other reason he’s going slow is someone probably needs time to wake everyone in the airport up. I can picture a harried air traffic controller who has been rudely jerked from sleep by the expected arrival of our plane and is now scurrying down to a boiler room and turning a massive crank to wind up the airport experience.
In Ottawa, the airport greets you with ads for high tech and defense companies. In New York, banks and software companies vie for your attention the moment you deplane.
In Vientiane – the capital of Laos – the first ad you see is for the local beer. The second ad is also for said beer. The third ad is for a cellphone company. And then you’re in customs, where, if you’re a Canadian it bafflingly costs $7 more to get a visa than for any other country’s citizens.
The whole visa process, which, with its four person, three step process that seems geared more towards full employment than border security, is a gentle introduction to the fact that Laos is a technically communist but really just autocratic state.
Don’t let the “Democratic” in “Laos Popular Democratic Republic” fool you. There’s one party. Above it is a politburo that reserve the right to issue binding decrees and it’s headed by a brigadier general (some customs officers grimly wear pins with his image).
This explains some of the subtle differences you’ll find in Laos versus almost every other country in the world. For example, there’s immigration control on domestic flights and the streets are routinely cleared for police-escorted motorcades of 30-something bureaucrats.
2.
We immediately flew to Luang Prabang. We bought our ticket in the airport and it included an escorted walk from the international terminal to the open-air concrete bunker that masquerades as the domestic terminal.
The flight to Luang Prabang reminds you that Laos is the poor child of Southeast Asia. Shortly after takeoff you notice that there are almost no paved roads on the outskirts of Vientiane, save the ‘highways’.
As you pass over Laos’ beautiful mountains, you’ll see countless notches cut in the landscape. 80% of the population is subsistence farmers and they routinely burn the rainforest to clear fields. With a rapidly growing population (up by 1/3 to 6.2 million in the past 15 years), their grandkids are not going to be able to live this way.
After a couple of stomach churning and neck bending turns (I think Mas Wings pilots train in Laos) you’re on the ground and in arguably the prettiest city in Southeast Asia.
Luang Prabang sits at the intersection of the Mekong an Nam Khan rivers. Historically it was the capital of one of the three Lao kingdoms. In the 19th century the French forcefully united them and added the ’s’ to the country’s name. (Despite what my sixth grade geography teacher insisted, it’s pronounced ‘l-ow’, not ‘lay-os’.)
Since it was a capital, there’s an old royal palace. It contains a litany of old buddhas, royal detritus and gifts from foreign dignitaries. Their Asian neighbours gave carvings and silver goods; the U.S. gave pens, radios and a scale replica of the Apollo Lander.
There are no photos allowed because it is a royal palace and no mere layman can photograph royal goods. This rule extends to the royal cars.
In their garage, a set of aging Lincoln Continentals and even an Edsel and a rotting Citroën sit stoically awaiting royal return. The mere act of painting them white and having the king ride in them has turned them into treasures that can only be captured by official cameramen.
The odd thing about all of this show of respect to the royal family is that they ultimately got no respect from their countrymen. The war in Vietnam spilled into Laos (the Ho Chi Minh trail was mostly in Laos) with America dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of World War II (there are over 8 million unexploded bombs in the country-more than one per person) and fomenting a good old civil war.
The royal family was split in the civil war bit ultimately they all lost and the communists won. The king died in captivity and there hasn’t been a royal family since the 1970.
You wouldn’t know this from the fealty shown to the king at the palace. You also wouldn’t know it because there’s not a single sign anywhere in the museum that explains the history of the country. Nor can you ever get a Laotian to explain their country’s history. They just smile and say something like “as you know, Laos has a complex history.”
Besides the royal palace, Luang Prabang has a lot of Buddhist temples. 34 in fact, and that, combined with the colonial buildings built by the French earned the city a UNESCO world heritage designation in 1995. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s also the year they paves the main road in the city and tourism took off.
Luang Prabang is a reverse Potemkin village; it has a population of 200,000 but everything a tourist wants to see is found on a narrow isthmus of land between between the junction of the two rivers and around nearby Phousy Hill. The fact that almost no one lives on the far side of the Mekong or Nam Khan rivers and no buildings are above three stories reinforces this sensation.
This means that you can take in many of the temples, the royal palace (and the baffling carvings from local stories that are found in an adjoining temple), walk all the main streets, take a boat across the Mekong and still easily make it up the hill to watch the sunset.
3.
So what else to do? Besides sitting in the cafes and sipping coffee (Joma and Ancient Hotel are recommended) or taking a cooking class, you could go hiking or ride elephants.
You can actually do both courtesy of one man, Markus. He is a character who has transformed tourism in the area.
In 1998 he quit a going nowhere government job in Germany and moved to Luang Prabang to open a restaurant. In 2001, unsatisfied with what was offered, he opened Tiger Trail to provide tours (hiking, biking, etc.) that would highlight and preserve the local culture. This was followed a few years later by the Lao Spirit resort (a beautiful place 35km up the Nam Khan; the bungalows have some of the best views ever).
Then in 2008 he sold most of his shares and bought an elephant preserve where he saves elephants from the logging industry.
It was at this preserve that Wendy finally conquered a pachyderm. We got to ride them (both on a howda and on their necks). We practiced our mahout calls (seung seung to bend on one knee and get on; pie for forward) and fed them and bathed them. We also learned that you should always approach an elephant from its right; some are trained to attack on the left and they can be unpredictable if you walk behind them.
We also learned that Laos uses to called the land of a million elephants. Given that Laos is only two million square kilometers and elephants consume 200-250 kg per day in food, this was more likely hyperbole than fact.
We also learned that the first rule of being a mahout is to never trust an elephant. This was revealed several times when our elephants (more frequently Wendy’s) would suddenly stop, lumber off to the side of the river or track and eat despite all the efforts of the mahouts.
On a different day we did a seven hour hike up through the mountains that are opposite the elephant camp across the Nam Khan. Despite hiking in near continuous rain (it turns out August is the rainiest month in Luang Prabang) this was one of the best hikes I have ever done.
It started in low-lying rice paddies, climbed through banana and jungle-covered limestone hills into Hmong villages and mountain pastures.
And finally it descended down to the other great thing to see in Luang Prabang-waterfalls.
4.
I don’t know what you think waterfalls in paradise look like, but for me they’re near identical to the Tad Sae and Kuang Si falls near Luang Prabang.
The Tad Sae is approached from the river, where it spills forth from many places in the banks. As you climb alongside it, you encounter numerous swimming pools and possibly the occasional bathing monk.
The Kuang Si falls are substantially further from town and best approached by scooter. The voyage takes you along the Mekong, through villages of jeering children and is only occasionally interrupted by confused chickens or water buffalo. There is mercifully little traffic as the road ends at the falls.
The falls start out as a bear preserve that leads to a series of miniature falls and pools. You can swim here despite it being the rainy season however the current is so strong that you can’t swim against it. it is extremely depressing to try and swim somewhere and end up further back from where you started – particularly when if you go too far back you go over a waterfall.
In North America this would be the perfect drowning machine; judging from the lack of bathers, the Lao seem to have a preternatural understanding of what ’swim at your own risk’ means.
At the top of the last pool you come to the main falls which explode out of the jungle in a furious torrent of water. In fact there’s so much water that it cascades downwards everywhere. No rock is too small to become a sluice and water tumbles from all directions. It is sublime.
5
After a week in Luang Prabang we took the let’s-call-it-eight-but-everyone-knows-it’s-at-least-ten-hours bus ride to Vientiane. It’s only 400 kilometers but since you’re winding along mountain roads it takes forever (those mountains only end maybe sixty kilometers from Vientiane). Fortunately, the scenery is spectacular and, if you spent the extra $2, you’re riding in the “king of bus”.
I can’t emphasize how beautiful Laos is. I’m definitely going to go back one day and hike around Ban Bangkalo and Ban Lakha in Kasi district. Jungle-covered limestone mountains plunge into forest and fields; farmers’ paths crisscross everything.
5.
The bus ride gives you time (lots of time) to reflect on how undeveloped Laos is. On the entire journey I saw one factory: a cement manufacturer.
As you traverse the country you see the goods of the same ten Western brands. There is not one chain store in the entire country – although some local bakeries, coffee shops and convenience stores are creating their own chains.
The people here are incredibly friendly (perhaps the civil war killed their desire to fight) but the flip side is there’s absolutely no sense of urgency on the part of anyone. The whole country trundles along at the pace of a small town while it’s neighbours battle for 21st century economic supremacy.
In addition, the quality of the Laos government’s fiscal and monetary policy is open for debate. There are signs that the country has gone through some mean inflation.
The smallest bill is 500 Kip (a great name for a currency) but you will almost never see anything priced in multiples less than 1,000.
In one shop we saw the following homage to their first sale in 1998-note the 1 Kip note.
Similarly, in one temple we saw 20 and 50 Kip notes folded into icons:
6.
You may be noticing that everything I’ve mentioned is about either Laos or Luang Prabang. I’ve said almost nothing about Vientiane.
And that’s on purpose. There’s not much to see in the city. There are a smattering of various petty bureaucracies and a few concrete temples. Nothing to write home about – and the Lao even acknowledge it themselves.
The main boulevard outside the Presidential Palace leads to a concrete gate built in the 1960s:
Here’s the description attached to it:
But all is not for nought. It’s a nice place to while away a day or two in cages as you prepare for your next adventure. It also has fantastic sunsets along the Mekong. This is big sky country:
8.
There’s one other very interesting facet to Vientiane – the people. Not the locals (great people, but you’ve already met them up north), but a curious mercenary capitalist class.
The city is full of 40- or 50-something white guys who are slightly overweight, have a lean, ex-military look with short cropped hair and they frequently carry laptops.
They give the impression of being in Laos as it is the place where some obscure form of earth needs moving: a fiber optic cable needs to be laid; a satellite uplink station needs to be built or a series of microwave towers are going up. These guys feel like hired guns who honed their skills building out Europe and America and their swan song is now calling from Asia.
9.
Reading the above, you might get the impression that I’m negative on Laos or think that it is backwards. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a beautiful country with unbelievably friendly people who are finding their own path in a complex world (and carrying some very complex cultural baggage). This is a also country where few people have any money but cellphones abound, you find satellite dishes in remote thatched communities and the locals have a nicer (and substantially cheaper) international bus service than most other nations.
10.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that one of the challenges Laos is going to face is that when your country moves away from agriculture, you just can’t get drunk all the time.
There are several hints that the Lao are perpetually getting wasted. When we took our cooking class the manual emphasized how important it is for the locals to drink whiskey with each other (ah, culture).
We asked our guide on our rainy hike where all the people were in the villages: he told us they drink whiskey when it rains.
And when we went to one of the waterfalls, a bunch of locals were having a picnic. Several Johnny Walker bottles littered their table.
I should mention that the local whisky (Lao Lao) is also filthy booze. I had a glass at one restaurant and it burned so badly that I poured it into a neighbouring planter. A mere whiff of this faux rubbing alcohol is sufficient to induce nausea.
11.
As mentioned in an earlier entry, Lao food is great.
We had a few additional great dishes. Fried bamboo with pork:
The Tamarind restaurant in Luang Prabang is incredible. Here you see their Ping Som Moo. It’s cured pork placed on a bed of garlic, then wrapped in garlic and barbecued in a bamboo skewer.
They also have an appetizer that lets you taste an assortment of local salsas and dips. You’re looking at jeow bong, jeow mak len (mild tomato salsa), jeow mak keua (smoky eggplant dip) and jeow pak hom (mildly spiced blend of coriander and garlic). It comes with khai pene: Mekong seaweed pounded into sheets and sundried with tomatoes, garlic and sesame
A few other recommended places to eat in Luang Prabang: The Blue Lagoon (thanks Colleen & Tom for the recommendation!) and Dyen Sabai (across the Nam Khan; they’ve their own free boat).
12.
A few random observations:
A)
Laotian has the same script as Thai. The Lao get Thai television and read it’s subtitled foreign movies plus listen to their tv shows. The result is that all Lao can speak/read Thai but not vice versa. Our hotel receptionist couldn’t explain why, rather she chalked it up to “same same but different”.
Incidentally, despite having a relatively lovely language, the Lao all answer their phone “hello” (versus sabai dee). It looks like this is one more culture that wont be adopting Bell’s desired “ahoy, ahoy“.
B)
While in Laos and Vietnam I was reading Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and John Sack’s M . Both talk about the omnipresent red dust that covers Vietnam and turns to sticky mud during the rainy season.
It also exists in Laos. I went for a run one night and found myself covered in a thin reddish film. And don’t even get me started on what it’s like to hike here when it rains:
C)
When we arrived in Luang Prabang we took a cab to our guest house. The airport taxi authority decided that we’d share the cab with another couple even though we were going to different hotels.
As we talked to them I felt like I was talking to my doppelgänger; it could have been me if I’d made a few different decisions.
In order to understand this, some background on me. I used to be a consultant but didn’t like it so did something else and eventually wound up at business school and then lived in New York. The Internet has also made me OCD: whenever I want to know something I instantly look it up (unless dining).
So imagine how I felt when we got in the taxi and it turned out that the other couple – who are a similar age to us – are also from New York. We asked them how long they’d lived there and it turned out to be many years except for “a few years in Boston”. This is alumni jargon used by Harvard Business School grads to test whether their audience might be receptive to their unique schooling.
I then asked if either of them happened to know the population of Laos. She turned to him and said “I’ll bet you hate not having the Internet here to look this up.” A shiver ran up my spine.
And then she said “pretend it’s a case or an interview problem”. Only consultants would ask someone a silly question like “how many people are there in Laos” as part of a job interview; calling your work a “case” is to a trick to make it sound more important than it is.
At that moment I realized that this guy was me in an alternate reality (preppy American Lindsay?) and I had to flee the car before the world collapsed in on itself.
D)
One of the odd legacies of the French is that the Laos play petanque. You will literally be driving through the countryside and stumble upon a group of men playing the game on the roadside. Perhaps it’s because the game is so suited to the Lao pace of life.
E)
One night in Luang Prabang we were walking along the Mekong when the power went out. The city went black and then the massive, swift river began to glow with the night. Previously invisible against the town’s lights, it was now the only source of illumination. Then the power flipped back on and the moment was irretrievably lost.
F)
One final comment on monks. They abound in Laos and you see them everywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear them drumming to the moon cycles:
It’s not that the prepubescent male Lao are remarkably pious, rather it’s about education. There are school fees in Laos (I don’t think the tax collection is good enough for the government to provide it as a full service; this is a country where places give their street address as “near the post office”) and if you can’t afford them you send your kid to a monastery to receive an education. When they’re old enough, they typically drop out of the monastery and get a job – with more skills than they would have otherwise picked up.
One of the joys of traveling is trying all the local cuisine. Wen and I took a cooking class in Luang Prabang Laos to get a sense of what food the local’s eat. (The class was at Tamnak Lao; very easy to find)
The class started with a visit to local Phoisy market to see what the local ingredients look like in bulk:
One of the local cooking sauces is Padak; it’s made from rotting fish so you can imagine what it smells like. It’s being gradually replaced with shrimp paste.
People buy this minced pork wrapped in banana leaves; it’s a poor man’s refrigerator.
Banana leaves:
Here’s a quick rundown on what we cooked:
Luang Prabang Salad – that’s minced chicken drizzled in mayo; beneath the veggies are salad leaves and watercress
Feu Khua – fried sticky rice noodles with chicken and vegetables. You fry the vermicelli and toss an egg in to create a pancake. You then chop it up, remove it from the heat and add it back to the rest of the ingredients after you’ve cooked them:
Chicken Larp:
Khua Maak Kheua gap Moo – fried eggplant with pork. Delicious and easy to make; recipe follows below:
Luang Prabang Jeowbong – a sweet and spicy but not hot chili paste:
It was a great day. Here’s chef Wendy with some of her creations:
And here’s the recipe for that fried eggplant; serves one person:
Ingredients:
60 grams pork
3 large spring onions (if small, use 3 extra)
1 Asian eggplant (long, not round)
2-3 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons oil
Directions:
Cut the spring onion into 2 cm lengths. If the white part is large, also cut in half lengthwise
Cut the eggplant into 3 cm lengths, then cut each piece into sixths
Crush the garlic in a mortar
Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in the work, add the eggplant and stir fry until it begins to soften and turn golden colour. Do not overcook and make eggplant too soft
Place the cooked eggplant in a bowl and set aside
Place the remaining oil in the wok, add the crushed garlic and stir until the garlic begins to change colour
Add the pork and stir fry until cook
Add the salt and sugar
Keep stir frying and add the oyster sauce, onion and cooked eggplant. Keep stir frying until the onions begin to soften
As I sit on the fifth floor terrace of the Illy Cafe, watching the sun set over the roofs of the city, I’m reminded of what is great about Hanoi. This is truly one of the prettiest cities in Asia.
The French, when not brutally oppressing the locals, tried to transport a bit of Paris to Hanoi. Many of the streets are line with trees that provide a pleasant shady cover as you walk down the streets.
Similarly, the legacy of French colonial buildings gives the city a feel that is very distinct from elsewhere in Asia. Some architects are now trying to combine the colonial buildings with a more modern approach, bringing another dimension to the city’s look and feel. Tanny Design has actually built a glass cube adjacent to a colonial building and the store stretches across both; the effect is striking.
The Old Quarter of Hanoi also provides a lot of the city’s charm. A maze of streets careen in seemingly arbitrary directions. Women ply the streets, carrying bamboo mats from which they sell everything fresh: sugar cane, dragon fruit, melons, rambutans, lychees, fish, crabs, snails, grapes, pomelos, chestnuts, oranges, mangoes, avocados, fried dumplings… The list could go on.
As you round street corners you stumble upon Buddhist temples, lakes, parks, markets and maybe even a cathedral or old city gates.
If you wander into those parks you may see comrades doing mass communal exercise. The women do lackluster aerobics. The men (and some women) jog. Older folks do calisthenics and stretches that make sense only to them.
However, all of this come at a cost. First, there are the ubiquitous touts. They are easily ignored and a mere nuisance.
The bigger issue is the traffic.
There is a complex rhythm to Hanoi. Every morning a flotilla of scooters and an army of buses and taxis fill its streets. Make no mistake that they are at war – with one another and amongst themselves.
Their weapons are the horn and the threatened inconvenience of an accident. The streetlights and lane marking of the city’s street form a trampled Geneva Convention.
If you find a good vantage point you can get a sense for how the battle unfolds. Buses are like tanks and plow their way through everything. The scooters are like fighter jets but instead of flying through gaps between clouds they’re seeking out pockets of empty space between other vehicles. (Note that this video is from the Illy Cafe; from there you can see the best and worst of Hanoi at once)
For the scooters this can mean driving the wrong way down the road, popping up on the sidewalk or running red lights. There is a kamikaze, zen-like calm to their movements: they will literally just drive into merging traffic, trusting that the experience will be like two schools of fish passing through one another. This technique, combined with many four way intersections that lack even a yield sign, means that all visitors will have ample opportunity to witness this situation.
Caught in the crossfire of this are pedestrians. And this is why some people hate Hanoi; it is literally a challenge to cross the road.
You have to follow the Kamikaze approach I described above as, in the rare instance that an intersection actually has a pedestrian crossing, it almost certainly will not be respected. Moreover, the sidewalk is almost always reserved for scooter parking, scooter repair or cooking, so you’ll frequently find yourself walking on the road as well as crossing it.
At the risk of introducing too many jumbled metaphors, you’ll quickly discover that you are the plankton of this automotive ocean and eaten by all.
Editor’s note: the loyal reader may lament the many discussions of traffic on this blog. We think it is an important topic to discuss as:
a) it has a disproportionate impact on the traveller
b) traffic plus environmental degradation (partially caused by traffic) are going to be huge issues these countless have to deal with in he 21st century. Many of the female street vendors in Hanoi wear masks (and this is also a business opportunity; witness the Hello Kitty smog mask)
Addendum: the other big issue Vietnam is going to have to deal with is a big, imbalanced population. Vietnam currently has 86 million residents. By 2050 this is expected to stabilize at 115-120 million. Unfortunately, the culture favours boys. There are currently 112 boys for every 100 girls (said another way, ~6% of pregnancies that produce girls will be aborted); in some areas the ratio is 135:100 (15%). The government is making it illegal to do anything to determine the gender of your baby before it is born.
2.
Vietnam is a country on the up and up. As you come into the city from the airport there are literally billboards coming out of the rice paddies. They advertise everything you’d expect in an industrializing economy: rebar, steel pipes, construction banks and beer.
The city is ringed with modern highways (if only modern highways meant modern driving) and high tech assembly plants from all the big players (e.g. Canon, Foxconn, Panasonic). Hanoi’s skyline is starting to be dotted with skyscrapers (thankfully the Old Quarter has been preserved so far) and new houses abound. A new rail link is being built to connect Hanoi with the port in Ha Long Bay-where a massive new suspension bridge connects the port to the expressway.
But this is only a prelude of what is to come. As you take the bus to Ha Long Bay you pass many different signs showing the various industrial/residential cities the government is planning to build in what are now fields. Similarly, new 20 foot wide, five storey houses line the road like gapped teeth. None have any windows on their sides, in almost gleeful anticipation that one day the road will be a canyon linking cities of industry.
Vietnam has a large population, cheaper costs than China and a better demographic dividend. Hanoi is a canvas as to how they plan on using this.
However, it’s not going to happen overnight. Many Vietnamese are still relatively poor-although moving in the right direction. You’re reminded of this when you see people getting their hair cut in the street:
You also see this in the massive discrepancy in prices between local and foreign/diplomat food. This is the only place in the world where I’ve had two meals that were two orders of magnitude difference in price. And in he same day to boot!
I bought a Banh Mi sandwich on the street for $0.75. Later that day we has dinner at The Green Tangerine (more on it later) for $75.
Similarly, the currency has a stunning range of notes. The smallest is 1,000 Dong, about five cents (some ‘entrepreneurial’ shopkeepers will price goods in odd multiples of 500; you’ll eat the change as the coinage doesn’t exist). The largest I’ve seen in common usage is a 500,000 Dong note – about $25.
3.
But let’s not forget that Vietnam is a communist country with no plans to change. As you walk around the city you may pass through Lenin Park. In both the city and the countryside you’ll see inspirational propaganda posters about how the state is creating a modern, clean, family-friendly country.
As you walk the streets you might see banners celebrating a state anniversary. When we were there it was the milestone 65th anniversary of Vietnam (65 sounds about as exciting as “Canada 125″). As a prelude to the final celebration, the week we visited they were feting the 65th anniversary of the Public Security Force. I wish that the FBI or the RCMP was able to have a similar day.
And then there’s Uncle Ho’s mausoleum and neighbouring museum. Alas, they were closed during our visit.
4.
John McCain’s fingerprints are all over Hanoi. He was shot down in 1967 and landed in Truc Bach Lake (Hanoi has many downtown lakes). There’s a concrete memorial commemorating the local anti-aircraft regiment’s vigour and accuracy (you find these across the city in the random locations where a plane crashed).
Later you can visit the Hanoi Hilton where he was interred. The museum is a fascinating piece of propaganda.
Its focus is on how awful the French were and how courageous the incarcerated comrades were in surviving their venal captors. There are many red flags and in the old execution room, some martial music plays to stir up patriotism.
The museum then turns around and infers that the shot down American pilots who spent he war there whiled away their days playing basketball, cooking and reading. There’s a photo of John McCain receiving medical care. What’s not mentioned is that he received some of his wounds from his captors who purposely delayed his medical care and that he can no longer raise his arms above his head.
Some similar propaganda occurs regarding the number of aircraft show down. The Vietnamese claim 3,700:
One of the most interesting neighborhoods we saw was just north of the Gustav Eiffel-inspires train bridge. Not a lot of tourists go there as it entails crossing eight lanes of traffic.
After surviving the crossing, we walked through a massive market and disappeared into a web of narrow alleyways. The alleyways were fascinating as the traditional one story hovel is being replaced by four and five story buildings overhanging the alleys and sometimes only inches apart from their neighbors. Between the houses, the cramped quarters and the bundles of wires overhead, I felt like I was in a William Gibson novel.
Since we were one of the rare visitors to this part of the woods, we soon found ourselves being followed by children or asked to take photos of locals.
Our goal was to make it to the river. After a few false starts – and one very scary dog who hates white males – we made it. There’s not much to see, but we did learn that the poorest of Hanoi’s poor live there on boats.
6.
The reason we came to Vietnam wasn’t to see Hanoi but to get down to Ha Long Bay. We spent two days/one night there and had a joyful, surreal and confusing time.
The place is one of stunning beauty. The ragged, jungle covered limestone mountains jut out of the water and seem to stretch endlessly in all directions.
As you pass them, the changing perspective is fascinating; it feels like curtains of rock are sliding past one another in different directions.
And you can’t miss how the different angles of light transform how the mountains appear.
The confusing factor is the sheer volume of people who are on the water. An even mix of westerners, Vietnamese and upwardly mobile Chinese congregate in hundreds of boats.
When we visited a famous cave, I counted 22 junks and innumerable smaller boats. You had to walk counterclockwise as even looking the other direction meant that you were blinded by flashbulbs.
At night we moored in a cove with forty other boats (you can safely assume that each has 20 people and there are other similar coves).
When leaving, we passed through a channel against an armada of boats that likely could have evacuated the entire Allied force from Dieppe.
Our bus back to the city used every available seat – including the jump seats in the aisle. We were four abreast (and almost all Westerners) in seats that were designed for an average height of 5′7″. Charming it wasn’t (I recommend spending the extra cash to ensure that your tour takes a coach, not a minibus, down to Ha Long City).
There are too many people in Ha Long Bay and it is compounded by the curious habit of the tour groups to take everyone to exactly the same places – even though they told us there were other interesting places.
The surreal aspect of the trip was the evening’s entertainment. The Vietnamese love karaoke and have decided that every evening each boat should ‘make a party’ and sing karaoke.
Our boat was full of Brits, Vietnamese and Chinese and three cultures collided that night.
I sang a rousing redition of Guns ‘N Roses ‘Sweet Child O ‘Mine’. I sounded like a teenage choir boy whose voice was beginning to crack and had just been kicked in the nuts.
However, my falsetto garnered cheers from he Asian audience. When it ended, the computer algorithm that scores your song gave me a perfect 100! More cheers ensued. A cabin boy came up and congratulated me twice on how well I sing (this is not true-ask anyone who has done karaoke with me).
We finished our karaoke around 10, but the poor renditions of Celine Dion covers (an Asian favorite) continued until 11.
As I wrote this, I still feel a bit confused.
(And, if anyone ever wants to see it, I’ve got an awesome video of Wendy singing Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World”)
7.
Vietnam has also introduced me to a new fruit. I’d never had a custard apple before I came here. My mouth is drooling as I think about it’s delicious sweetness.
8.
Back in Apri, Wen and I went down to Washington to visit our friends Beth and Beau. We mentioned that we were planning on traveling for a while and might go to Vietnam. Beau immediately told us that his favourite French restaurant in the world was there. Four months later, we’ve been and we agree with Beau that The Green Tangerine is one of the best places we’ve ever eaten.
The restaurant has a lovely atmosphere. It’s an old colonial building set just off the street. You can eat in the building or the courtyard outside.
The settings are impressive but the menu is more so. The husband and wife team behind the restaurant have tried to combine elements of French and Vietnamese cooking into a new set of dishes. Sometimes they miss a bit, but most of the dishes are incredible. Here’s what we ate:
Duck breast carpaccio in kumquat sauce served with orange and peppered chocolate sauce. This dish was a little too sweet (could have used twice as much duck or half as much orange)
Fig tempura stuffed with goat cheese, nuts and grape presented on Vietnamese spiced bread. Fig tempura is one of the tastiest things I’ve ever had
Pork rolled in O Mai and cognac served with vegetables baked in oven and a pyramid of vermicelli stuffed with Vietnamese herbs. The perfect balance of heavy (pork) and light (vegetables)
(Dessert) Spicy necklace from the Far East: pineapple in curry, kumquat in Cointreau, tamarin fritters, black olive & honey sherbert plus cherry tomato baked with ginger. This was a set of flavours I’d never tried before – tomato & ginger? olive & honey? Who knew it could taste so good
The one dish we didn’t get a chance to try but would have loved to: rabbit in mustard and wasabi paste.
If you go, the restaurant’s at 48 Hang Be, just north of Hoan Kiem lake. Bookings are recommended, but Hanoi quiets down after 8:30; if you stop by then you should get a table relatively quickly.
A couple more comments on the food.
This is another country with delicious coffee. It’s quite bitter and sometimes the locals have flavoured it with a bit of cocoa or chocolate (only mildly) to smooth out the taste.
Every dish you try comes with one of the nicest garnishes I’ve ever seen. You get a little bowl of salt and pepper, a calamansi lime and occasionally a few slices of chile pepper. You squeeze the lime into the dish (removing the seeds) and then mix it all together. Voila, a tangier, spicier version of salt & pepper:
9.
A few other notes:
In the airport, there’s a sign reminding you that no murder weapons – like laser guns – are allowed on the plane
This, like Bali, is another place where women do manual labour. We saw an almost all-female paving crew. However, all the taxi drivers are male and all the street peddlers are female
Speaking of taxi drivers (and all commercial drivers in general), they’re quite proud of the fact that they don’t work in the fields. They show this pride by not clipping a few of their finger nails (which would be impossible if you were a farmer)
When I die and go to hell, my version of it will entail that I am a Hanoi bus driver forced to drive all day and listen to the saccharine and soporific local pop music
If you go to Hanoi and want to buy some silk-made goods, head to the area around the cathedral in the Old Quarter. For restaurants and cafes, explore there or go north of Hoan Kiem lake (ideally at night, when the lake is it up). The Hapro Bon Mua cafe on the lake is a great place for a coffee and people watching
At night, you can see people burning offerings (usually fake money) in the street:
I’m pretty sure the national sport is badminton. It’s played in all the parks and as you walk around the national stadium (where a massive picture of Uncle Ho ensures he has the best seat in the house to all matches) you can’t help but notice that badminton gear is the most popular item for sale. It’s also the only town on earth where good badminton players can skip the line at restaurants and bars…
Have fun watching the professionals dock the boat upon return to the Ha Long City public pier. The docking procedure consists of ramming into the parked boats ahead of you and then wedging them apart by driving into them. If you look at the corners of the stern of each boat you’ll notice that they are much more worn than the rest of the boats; now you know why
The hotel was playing the Vietnamese equivalent of MTV over breakfast one day. They seem to be taking the “if you plant a million seeds, some of them will grow” approach to figuring out what is popular. Kitschy pop videos (picture emasculated boy with overstyled hair giving plush toy to his girlfriend) would be juxtaposed with the hard core rap of Tra Xanh. Quite amusing
Editor’s Note: what follows is the possibly incoherent rant of a man who has been at the airport for too long with too little sleep and too much caffeine.
Dear Kuala Lumpur,
You fancy yourself a modern city, seeking to eclipse Singapore as the gateway to Southeast Asia. However, if you’re going to do this, we need to talk about two things.
Taxis and rules. Let’s start with taxis.
Taxis are the ambassadors of the cosmopolitan metropolis. They’re the first thing that those Western businessmen/tourists you so desire will see, so it’s very important that you get them right.
Let me share with you an example of how not to do it, provided courtesy of you yesterday.
You should endeavour that your taxi drivers do not get pulled over by the police for dangerous driving. We tourists are never impressed by turns taken so recklessly that your country’s judiciary feels a need to interfere in the situation.
Secondly, the driver should really aim to get you to your destination. This precludes dropping tourists off at a random location on a similar sounding road in a city they’ve never visited. Your driver may think that dropping a person off on “Jalan Tun Perak” when they’re supposed to be at “10 Jalan Perak” is close enough to count as a success, but it’s really not. Cab driving is not tiddly winks and close (although these two locations are over 2km apart) does not actually count.
Another “teachable moment” from today.
Your taxi drivers also need to know their airports. When you tell the taxi driver at 4:45 in the morning that you’re going to “Terminal L at KLIA for an Air Asia flight” and show him this on the ticket, he has to get you there. He cannot drop you off at the wrong terminal at 5:30 when your flight is at 6:30 – and why, pray tell, did you decide to make the terminals 20km apart so that no one can possibly get from one to the other if there’s a mistake?
But it’s okay, because now that I’ve got all this extra time on my hand before my new $400 flight, we can chat.
So let’s talk about part 2: those rules you’re so proud of.
I’d suggest that it’s not a deterrent when you make incoming flights cheerfully broadcast on their intercoms “ladies and gentlemen, drug trafficking in Malaysia is a serious penalty punishable by death.” How you brutalize your petty criminals is your sovereign right, but given that you’re transmitting this at the end of the flight it is likely not the credible deterrent you are looking for.
Similarly, your Kafka-esque network of rules can be baffling. Witness the paths in KL Park, where the paths deposit you at an area where you must take your shoes off to cross a tile structure near a wading pool or a little lady starts blowing the loudest whistle in the world. This is followed by the lady then blowing again if you go in the wading pool if you’re over the age of 12.
Can’t we all just get along? You’re not going to get that high tech export-driven powerhouse you so desire if you threaten accidental waders with the whistle of death.
I have spoken and now I am at peace with Kuala Lumpur.
When I was a kid, I thought that ‘Yogyakarta’ was a stupid name. I mean, here’s an island (with the same name as the street I grew up on, hence the youthful interest) with a capital called Jakarta (birthplace of the American president!) and – on the same island – they name one of the cities almost exactly the same thing. Did they run out of names? It would be like if Toronto was called ‘Nottawa’.
But then I realized that the lack of original names applies more to Canadians and Americans (after all, how many of our cities are named after somewhere in Europe? Half of New York state seems to be named after Egyptian towns) than Indonesians. And now I’m in Yogyakarta (or ‘Jogjakarta’ – a name that would have endured even more contempt from a young Lindsay – or even ‘jogja’) and I’m falling in love with the city.
2.
It’s not immediately obvious why someone might fall in love with Jogja. It’s a city of 500,000 people with no landmarks. The first time you walk down the street there’s a 50% chance you’re going the wrong way as there’s nothing to orient yourself to.
Some of the sights in the town are downright forgettable. The water palace is a temple to the power of deferred maintenance and concrete brutalism to reduce even the most advanced cultures to nothing. You can walk the grounds and gaze upon brackish water and dirt masquerading as gardens.
Similarly, the sultan’s palace illustrates that mass production means we’re all sultans now. His collection of pottery is roughly akin to the gifts traded by middle class families at weddings (however, he did have a much nicer collection of palanquins than the average homeowner). Many a disappointed child roams the grounds of the cruelly labelled ‘palace’
It’s precisely this lack of truly majestic downtown sites that make the city so worth visiting. There are no grand buildings fighting for your attention so you’re forced instead to appreciate all the little things that make Jogja so great.
3.
As good a place as any to start is with a walk along the river. We wandered along the river between Juminhan and Senopati roads and had a great time.
You immediately notice a Javanese love for two things: flags and potted plants. The narrow, high traffic paths along the river’s edge are overgrown with flag-bearing standards and potted plants, creating an explosion of colour.
As you walk along the river, you’re greeted by some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Not a lot of foreigners come down here and everyone wants to say hi. Parents bring their children to say hi and kids follow you from the other side of the river.
As an aside, I’ve never seen a country where the media coverage of the population is so different from the population itself. If you just watch the news you might conclude that Indonesia is full of firebrand fundamentalist clerics launching hotel-and-then-hellbound suicide bombers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a nation of people trying to pull themselves out of poverty and straight into a globalized 21st century. At times, walking along the river you’ll see how far there still is to go for one part of the population: there are public toilets and at one end there’s even a well.
4.
Another area that absolutely must be visited is Kotagede. The area is famous for two things, the first being silver.
If you go to H&S Silver, you can take a tour of their factory before buying 92.5% pure silver at what Wen assured me are prices about 1/3 of home. Make no mistake-despite all the work being done by hand, this place is a factory. The craftsmen have four months to learn their trade and then they pump out dozens of identical pieces a day.
However, it’s still charming to watch everything be made. I particularly liked the step where a local fruit is crushes to become the soap used to polish the silver.
Note that H&S Silver does primarily traditional designs. For something more contemporary, check out Borobudur Silver. It’s not technically in Kotagede, but also has a small workshop attached.
The other interesting aspect of Kotagede is it’s architecture. It’s one of the best places to see examples of traditional Javanese architecture.
At first this feels like an exercise in looking at roofs.
However, as you get deep into Kitagede you can wander down it’s flag-covered alleys (totally safe; the high traffic levels would bring a smile to Jane Jacobs’ eye) you start to catch glimpses of the wooden shutters and whitewashed walls.
Occasionally you’ll come to an open door and catch a glimpse of life inside. From what I can tell, every house has a central courtyard and, more often than not, an overhanging roof (it rains a lot and violently here) that will be dangling at least one bird cage.
A word on the birds: the Javanese love them. They’re everywhere. You see scooters in the street with the driver bearing a covered bird cage off the side. Many businesses have them outside their windows. The trishaw drivers will flap their arms in bird mimicry to entice you into a short, overpriced ride to the bird market.
But back to Kotagede. If you go far enough you’ll eventually find the factory-cum-showroom of Monggo Chocolates, an artisanal choclatier. Try the Ginger chocolate; if you can’t find the place, you might find their chocolate at the local Circle K.
To get to Monggo you’ll also pass the royal graveyard and ruins of the old Javanese palaces. Along the way you can see the local market and dangling trees that have been paved into place.
On the way back you can gawk at the Javanese house of R Pesik. Apparently he runs DHL Indonesia and chairs some ASEAN development group; when not doing that he lives like a modern day Javan king.
5.
The other thing to see in Yogyakarta are it’s temples. About 40km away is Prambanan, the largest Hindu temple in the world. It’s been rocked over the years by earthquakes (most recently in 2006) meaning that a lot of it is being restored. Since the government appears to be using the same folks who built are building the Sagrada Familia, there are a couple of generations to go until the restoration is complete.
Prambanan is the main temple complex, but the property also includes the Menwu temple. This too was damaged in 2006 and is now held together by the same construction materials it was built with over 1,000 years ago.
Interestingly, the temple is Buddhist but the carvings here include Hindu gods. It looks there was a gradual transition away from Hinduism for the Javans.
6.
The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno is famous for one of his paradoxes. If Achilles is chasing a tortoise, how does he ever pass it? After all, it takes time for Achilles to move; during the time he moves forward, the tortoise also moves forward too; how can he catch up?
As you climb the many terraced levels of Borobudur, each slightly smaller than the previous, you’ll have time to ponder a similar paradox. Since each level takes a little less time than the previous, will you eventually come to a level that will take infinitely little time to see?
Or maybe you won’t think about this paradox at all because you’ll instead be mesmerized by the incredible carvings topped with buddhas that grace each of the lower layers. They’re amazing and make you grateful that someone at the UN creates these lists of protected world monuments.
As if the carvings weren’t enough, when you get up higher up the levels become a series of stupas.
Each contains one Buddha as this denuded stupa shows:
Borobudur is easily in the top 10 most amazing places I’ve ever been. Try to arrive at 3:30 so that you can be there for sunset. It took is two hours to walk each level clockwise once (you’re supposed to do it three time oh of respect, but we just ran out of time).
7.
To get to Borobudur and Prambanan I recommend getting a driver. It’s only about $45 for a driver for the full day and the odds of you actually finding your way are about zero. Also, you ten don’t have to negotiate traffic like this:
Your driver will also demonstrate a ritual that is presumably used to reduce corruption. All parking lots charge a flat rate and require you to buy a ticket on the way in. But you won’t get out until you give the ticket back to a different guy on the way out. Maybe it’s a way to reduce corruption; maybe it just means more jobs for the boys.
As you drive around, you may get a sense of how Indonesians love stuffing anything into a truck. At various times we saw the following in the beds of pickup trucks:
A giant bull
Horses
Hundred of chickens
Hundreds of pounds of sugar cane stacked high and wide enough that there was no way the driver could have seen anything
Indonesians have a keen sense of trucks as tools (vs. the North American badge of membership to the clan redneck).
You might also see some begging at streetlights. No one just asks for money at the lights: the Javan version of squeegee kids clean your car with a feather duster; some people ’serenade’ you with a tiny ukelele. And the ladyboys just dress up in their finest to surprise you.
8.
Jogja is also the first place in Indonesia where I’ve seen youth culture. The whole city is a (government-supported) canvas for street art. The emphasis is on figures and in contrast to North America, you do not see people scrawling their own tags over everything.
If American youth culture was once about cars, the malt shop and the drive-in, the Indonesian equivalent is the scooter and the Internet cafe. Everywhere you go you see scooters lined up outside them.
There are more scooters in Indonesia than people in Canada (and I don’t have any proof of that, but I’m sure it’s true). There are scooter garages where you can pimp your ride by giving it a new paint job or fancier decals. And choosing a fancy helmet is a sign of your personality.
The other place you can show your personality is at one of the youth-oriented clothing shops. Many are found on cuz road. Ironically, all look similar: one or two high contrast colours, bold signage and a plethora of stickers on the door.
In fact, this mimics a challenge Indonesia has: perfect competition. Every time someone has some success selling something, it seems like five other identical shops open up right next door. Witness these shoe shops selling exactly the same set of shoes:
Good for the consumer, but tough to really raise your overall standard of living.
9.
One thing that Wendy and I did was go to the mall (actually two of them).
Why did we go to a mall after flying halfway around the world?
Well, first, it’s Ramadan here and one of the few ways to get a solid meal during the day is to go to the mall (we weren’t alone; I quite enjoyed watching a woman in a hijab casually sip her coffee in public at the mall).
Secondly, when you watch how people shop I feel like you get a sense of who they are, where they’re at and where they want to go.
Here are some observations from our faux-shopping:
a)
The locals here have huge sweet tooths. The ‘jellied goods’ section is larger than the meats section of the supermarket:
b)
Pricing rules seem to be different here. Consider that the single serve Timtams below are cheaper per unit than a pack of eight:
c)
Wandering through the mall gives you a sense of how lax Indonesian respect for copyright law is.
We saw a ‘Polo’ store where not one good was over $20 and there was a sale on ’strippers’ (I’m confident they meant stripes).
RIM’s Blackberry is a popular target for the Shanzai producers. Here’s their official logo:
Now witness these knock-offs:
By the way, the fact that China and Taiwan can create functional knock-off cellphones should give everyone pause as to their coming economic might. Businesses are going to have to be very careful about what they offshore vs. what they keep in-house and secret.
d)
The Indonesian woman has her own unique concerns. Consider the whitening deodorant and shampoo bottle that features no hair (to be fair, 90+ percent of deodorant is not whitening and almost all the shampoo bottles show women with lustrous black-and only black-hair).
e)
All the banal Western brands are here, albeit with package sizes and tastes that cater to local flavours. Many packaged goods also come in single serve sizes (although you can only buy those at traditional hawker markets, not at the mall):
f)
Shopping at the mall shows how sophisticated some of the companies here are. If you use your special Citibank Visa to buy select stores’ private label brands you get 5% (!) cash back.
Similarly, I was amazed when I dropped off $1.50 in laundry and was given a computerized claim ticket:
Contrast this with the scene elsewhere in Yogyakarta where brass weights are used to mass your fruit and ducks congregate outside the local cellphone retailer.
As Bobby Zimmerman said, the times they are a-changing.
10.
And now a treatise on drinking jungle cat poo.
Loyal readers will recall that in an earlier post I mentioned that I saw raw coffee luwak a.k.a. coffee made from civet poo – but that, alas, I was not prepared to try it.
Well, I am no longer a luwak coffee virgin.
When we were at the mall, the local Excelso coffee offered the coffee for only 65,000 Rupiah – about $7.50. This is the best price I’ve seen anywhere, so I thought I’d give it a try. When I ordered it, the waitress beamed with pleasure and gleefully told me that I was making an “economical” decision.
My joy rose when the coffee came; in order to prove that it really is jungle cat poo coffee, they provide you with the empty coffee bag attesting to its provenance. As I flipped through it, I felt like an otaku unboxing a phone.
As for the coffee, it was damn fine. It was one of the smoothest and lingering coffees I’ve ever had. I didn’t want it to end.
I’m also going to call it the second best cup I ever had. The best was the Kenyan at Clover’s Cafe in Brooklyn; the citrus infusions made the cup literally taste like orange juice by the time I got to the bottom.
11.
In closing, a few random observations.
a)
I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing this as a smooth jazzy bass line syncopates with the afternoon call to prayer. It’s an alluring sound that personifies the forces pulling at this society.
b)
There’s a cliche that white people find it difficult to tell Asian people apart. When I was a consultant, the new hires ha to make a comedic video and one year it featured two Asian consultants who worked 50% of the time by pretending they were each other. After the video was shown, one of the (white) senior partners walked up to a third Asian consultant and congratulated him on such a fine performance.
I’ve realized that the same applies to Asians with white people. At a restaurant in Prambanan, the waiter brought us the food of a different white couple. Twice. In a restaurant with only three couples in it.
The same thing happened at lunch again today except that there were only two couples in the restaurant.
c)
At the gas stations here, gas is only 50 cents a liter. Plus there are segregated prayer rooms for Muslims.
d)
Nobody walks here. There are sidewalks but they seem reserved for scooter parking or repair.
It might be due to the heat-which reduces Westerners to useless puddles of goo. It might also be a status thing (I’ve got a scooter!) as there’s still almost no one on the street at night.
e)
In addition to not walking, almost nobody wears shoes. At any given moment, 99% of the population is wearing sandals. The only people I saw wearing shoes worked at the mall.
f)
The quintessential local dish is gudeg (jackfruit) curry. I dragged Wendy to Lesehan Borobudur on Marlioboro road so that I could try some. It’s a great experience as you take your shoes off and eat on mats right next to the street.
Unfortunately there was no cutlery. Watching me try to eat my curry reduced locals to peels of laughter. Wendy’s blog has the definitive treatise. All I can say is imagine watching a child eat with a fork for the first time. It wasn’t pretty, bit it was hilarious. And delicious.
The other great dish to try here is Opor Ayam – a chicken curry in coconut sauce.
g)
The quintessential drink is a bandrek tea. A cousin is the kraton. Both are jasmine teas spiced with cloves, ginger, cardamon, cinnamon and nutmeg, served with a lemongrass stick as a stirrer.
h)
Yogyakarta has almost every type of transport known to man. Alongside such mundane forms as bus, taxi, train or the ubiquitous scooter are hundreds of trishaws (called becaks) and horse-drawn carriages (called andong). True fan of equine transportation may even find he odd jitney.
Alas, I found myself unable to take a becak as it brought back too many memories of my old job as a rickshaw runner.
i)
I’ve mentioned how people wanted to say hi when we walked down the river. In fact, as we’ve walked around town, lots of people have wanted to chat or have their photo taken.
I’ve come to the conclusion that having their photo taken makes people feel that they truly exist as someone outside their group of friends has noticed their existence.
These construction workers were adamant that we take their photo even though we have absolutely no idea who they are and will almost certainly never see them again:
Similarly, one day as we were walking down the street a guy asked us if we would pose for photos with him and his family. We did and I shudder to think of what story he made up behind the photos. But everyone’s happy now.
j)
Bali and Yogyakarta have given me one of life’s little pleasures: the discovery of a new fruit. Until I came to Indonesia I had never tried the aptly-but-unfortunately named snakefruit:
You peel away the interior to reveal two dry, smooth halves, each of which contains a nut. When you bite into each half they are very dry but also sweet. If you ever come across one, give it a try.
k)
And finally, a word of warning on traveling here if you are Dutch or French (like 90+% of the tourists). You may go native. Common symptoms are hirsutism and a propensity to batik or beaded shirts. Here is a subject:
Make sure that you travel with someone who is immune to this and carries the appropriate book of runes or spells to help you break out of Indonesia’s trance.
According to Doni (more on him later), about a million years ago, Mt. Bromo was 4.5 km high. But then, in a huge explosion that must have put Mt. Pinatubo to shame and caused a few of our Australopithecus elders to wonder why the Mastodon hunt was getting so much better, it blew up.
A huge caldera-with an elevation roughly half that of the prior mountain-was created. It kept erupting for a while, ejecting more lava and hot mud, until it had no more strength left. For a while the mud kept coming up but could only partially fill the caldera and Mt. Bromo is now a sulfurous rump of a volcano that pouts steam daily and erupts hot mud every 5-10 years.
The volcano proper is in the caldera, a few hundred feet below the rim and across a wide swath of dusty land known as the sand sea. From the rim of the volcano you can glance down and see (and smell) the steaming sulphur below. In the other direction you gaze across the residue of past eruptions. The walk up also gives a clue as to how violent some of these previous eruptions were.
2.
A few hundred (or maybe thousand; it’s not important) years ago the first humans came up to the mountain, took one look at the fertile soil and decided it was for them. Since then, they’ve been terracing every square inch of land that’s not downstream of the volcano and living a slightly-better-than-subsistence lifestyle.
Many of the locals still ride horses; by day they either take them down to the savannah in the caldera to graze or cut feed there for them and manually hike it up the steep switchback trails.
The houses nestled amongst the fields are a scene of bucolic bliss and the people are incredibly friendly; we were greeted with hellos everywhere we went. However, I found myself wondering how difficult it must be to live at 2400m above sea level without electricity (it gets very cold and the mountains make the days shorter) next to a continuously erupting volcano and maintain such a positive outlook.
3.
Over the past twenty years or so foreigners have discovered Mt. Bromo and they have carved out their own ritual. They developed an existence that coincides with the daily weather pattern. Here’s how it works:
5:30 pm – tourists coalesce at the somethingerather Indah hotel to watch the sun set over the valley and compare oversized cameras.
Most will fail to turn around and therefore miss out on the arguably more spectacular sunset taking place over the valley two kilometers below:
6:30 pm – the few restaurants in town are full and the fog begins to roll in. Soon the stars are hidden and it takes too long to get your meal.
8:00 pm – everyone is asleep or going to bed. For the first time in the day silence descends upon the town. It’s somewhat eerie, particularly because there is no background noise: no highways, no airplanes. Just a constant silence.
3:00 am – the constant silence is broken by the sound of underpowered lawnmowers lacking mufflers and masquerading as minibuses burping, farting and groaning up the mountain. These corral tourists and take most of them to waiting jeeps to be ferried across the sand sea of the caldera and up the opposite ridge to watch the sun rise.
Since Wen and I did not want to watch the sun rise with over one hundred other people (we later heard that people yell at each other to get out of the way for photos as the sun quickly rises) we decided to get an extra hour of sleep and then try a different route. Unfortunately, the hurricane strength roar of the lawnmowers trucks meant that we didn’t really get any sleep. If I was a resident of the town, I think I’d hate the automobile.
4:00 am – we’re up and off for a hike up to an observation platform on Mt. Penanjakan. The fog has moved out overnight and thousands of stars shine in the clear sky above us. As we hike we see occasional shooting stars and the sun begins to slowly rise in the east:
4:45 am – we’re making our way up a narrow path with only our headlamps to guide the way. After about 30 minutes we’re up at the top and the sun begins to rise. Mt. Bromo and friends appear in the soft light that briefly exists after the sun is up but before the first rays reach inside the caldera:
6:00 am – the fog starts to roll in again. As it hits the hot air above the actual volcano it’s pushed slightly upward, but the power of the volcano is nothing compared to the sun and can’t stop it from spilling in.
6:15 am – we’re on our way back down and, in the light, realize that we’d climbed up through a field of wildflowers:
We also realize just how pretty the town is juxtaposed with the caldera:
7:00 am – this is the last you’ll see of the valley for a few hours as the fog is about to set in:
9:30 am – anyone awake at this hour will believe that they will never see the volcano and contemplate calling their travel agent as the fog is so thick that nothing is visible.
11:30 am – the fog has cleared and you can walk down into the valley and up the 247 step-topped slope to the edge of the volcano proper. On the way as you cross the sand sea you can’t help but notice how similar the terrain is to the prairie. This could almost be Alberta or Wyoming (or maybe southern Chile):
On your way up to the volcano, you may see a couple of dust devils winding across the sand sea:
From the top of Bromo you can either turn around or walk along the volcano’s lip across to an adjacent peak and down. Either way, you have to get back to Indah’s for that 5:30 pm sunset
4.
If you go to Bromo, I would advise you to book ahead. I would also strongly suggest avoiding what Wendy and I did. To help you, let me detail out for you itinerary;
6:00 pm the day before: get in a beemo (one of those Mitsubishi glorified diesel lawnmowers mentioned above) in Bali and start steaming towards Java
8:00 pm the day before: we find ourselves waiting in the middle of nowhere outside a gas station in western Bali watching baffling Indonesian soap operas and awaiting our coach to Probolingo
8:30 pm the day before: we’re on the coach! It’s so cold and bouncy that we can’t sleep
Midnight: the coach stops for a free buffet dinner of rice and cold noodles
1:30 am: the coach arrives in the Probolingo bus station. There is no one around except a few touts who kindly offer a bus to Bromo for a mere six times the normal fee. Since there is essentially zero accommodation, and zero is precisely the bargaining leverage we have, we agree
1:45 am: we’re in another damn beemo rocketing up the mountain. Our intrepid driver and his silent sidekick (I never did figure out what he was responsible for) have the windows down and are chain smoking to stay warm. The combination of cold mountain air and clove-tinged cigarette smoke keeps up awake
3:00 am: we arrive on top of the mountain. We are asked what hotel we are staying at. We don’t have one. Our drivers go door to door to every hotel waking up the night porters and asking if a room is available. None are. After trying every hotel we look at a homestay. There’s a cheap room with no shower and a more expensive one with an en suite shower/toilet combination. We take it and all asleep without noticing the revolting stains on sheets that have almost certainly never been washed
3:15 am: we’re awakened by the roar of the stupid tourist buses described above
For the love of god, book ahead and don’t stay at the homestay with paper thin walls on the main tourist road.
5.
So, on to Doni.
Wen and I are sitting in the whatever Indah hotel’s cafe after a day of walking in the crater; I’ve left my camera out. We’re sipping on few hot gingers (literally ginger root and steaming water) when I hear “nice camera, I use a similar one to take my photos.”
I glance up to see an Indonesian man talking to me, but he doesn’t look like the other Indonesians around here. He’s wearing a lot of high end outdoor gear; maybe a North Face or similar jacket and some trekking pants with solid looking boots. Actually too solid for the easy hiking around here.
“Let me show you some photos I’ve taken,” he says and pulls out a nicer-than-99%-of-the-other-phones-in-Indonesia Nokia and starts to show me some pictures.
The first one is of Krakatoa, except that it’s erupting at night and it’s a long exposure showing both lava flow and a lightning bolt striking the hillside. Bright red lava and a stream of white light gently fade into the silhouette of the volcano and the black night.
The next is a photo of an acidic lake taken at an impossible angle. As he assures me that “anything you leave in the lake is dissolved within an hour,” I can’t help but notice how the colours are popping off the screen.
This is Doni Wijayanto. He’s not bragging; it turns out that he’s a chatty seismologist cum nature and photographer lover who also runs a volcano tour company on the side.
He’s not trying to sell us anything, rather he wants to talk photos and Indonesia. Volcanoes to start.
Turns out he’s watched a lot of them erupt. So have some of his colleagues; he’s still alive, some of them aren’t.
He also knows every bloody volcano in Indonesia (no small feat in an archipelago of 120,000 islands). He had a contract with National Geographic for a few years. One year they wanted a volcano that was erupting near water with people fishing nearby. Doni thought about it and remembered a place he’d been back in ‘88. He called up a friend there and it turned out an eruption was occurring; Nat Geo scrambled a crew.
But it’s not just volcanoes.
Want to see a Javan rhino? One-horned rhino? Sumatran Tiger? Elephant? Rafflesia? Doni’s seen and photographed them all; he can tell you where to go.
Looking for a remote beach? Cultural event? Backcountry hiking? Again, Doni.
Maybe you want to understand Javanese history? The nuances and symbolism of Indonesia’s flag and emblem? Yup, Doni is there for you.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Doni’s got a very pregnant wife and two young sons, we might have just kept going on for hours. As it was, he had to go.
If you’re ever looking for interesting adventure in Indonesia, be sure to look Doni up and tell him Wen and I say hi.
On the last day in Bali, the locals were gearing up for Independence Day, which occurs August 17. The Balinese were kicking off a weeklong festival that would culminate in a parade and an open offer for anyone to climb a greased palm tree (Seriously; I wish I could be there).
The first event was a 15.6 km boat race that conveniently ended about 200m from our hotel. We ambled down to the beach just in time to catch the first boats arriving. They were fun to watch; the crews both paddle and sail at the same time:
The whole scene had the atmosphere of a country fair, albeit with some very Indonesian touches. Instead of cotton candy and candy apples there were boiled quail eggs and raw peanuts:
The heat meant that almost everyone stood in the shade, but the spectacle of the boats landing on the beach was too much to keep the crowd away and it spilled down to the water’s edge. Amazingly, despite the blazing sun that was reducing us Westerners to puddle of water, the Balinese were out in full regalia: jeans, jackets and scooter helmets.
The whole thing was quite fun and safely went off, no doubt because of the representation of at least four different branches of Indonesia’s many-tentacled security apparatus:
Ubud is a beguiling place. When you arrive – even in the dark of night – you can’t help but be charmed by the place. The streets are lined with shrines and standards; every house has a carved stone entrance and tropical flowers blossom astride ubiquitous offerings to the gods.
As you drive the streets (or if you are sane, your driver drives) looking for your guest house, you snatch glimpses of massive temples. And then finally you turn down what looks to be a dreary alley and suddenly you’re in the comfort and pleasure of a Balinese hotel.
But this blog post will not be hagiography as Ubud is not without its warts. The place has some of the worst traffic on earth, the most aggressive touts and, in July/August is packed with obnoxious southern Europeans (Italy-I’m looking at you!). Plus the side streets are thronged with semi-feral dogs that seem to have been trained to bark vociferously at tall white males.
2.
Everyone who visits Ubud has to go see the numerous temples that dot the town. The craftsmanship in the stone carvings and the doors is incredible.
3.
From the moment you arrive, Ubud is obviously a charming place, but it’s also a bit of a trickster. For the more you explore, the more you realize that its real charms are hidden and won’t be given up so easily.
For example, you’re walking down the main street. You come to a set of stairs that lead down to a small stream. You walk down the stairs and find that it’s a canyon where two streams come together.
Overhead a rickety concrete bridge (I didn’t think you could say that until I saw this one) links a cafe that has been terraced into the hill and the street. It crosses one of the streams, which also runs through a thicket of morning glories that are cascading down from the trees above.
As you walk along the banks of the stream, you come to a temple that can only be accessed by wading across the stream.
Later, while sipping a delicious ginger tea (just ginger root in hot water) at the previously mentioned terraced restaurant, you’ll watch an old lady place offerings in the temple.
4.
The gender roles in Bali seem to have some hard and fast rules. Any carpentry/construction will be done by men. Any manual labour will be done by women (you see them shoveling or carrying firewood on their head all the time. We even saw one carrying steaming corn).
If something is to be sold and it’s a perishable or dry good, it will be by a woman. If it’s transportation, it will be a man.
And when it comes to smoking, that’s for the men only. In fact, we were on a plantation tour and one of the offerings being placed had a cigarette in it. I asked about it and the (male) guide remarked “we treat our gods like men!”
5.
Another charming scene:
You’re standing on the bridge in Ubud. You notice that down below you there appears to be a temple in the jungle next to the river.
You walk back and try to find a path down. The first route is a dead end, taking you directly to the river’s edge, but it suggests another route.
You successfully find the temple but then notice that there’s a path alongside it.
It turns out that the temple is built at the junction of two streams and the path climbs the ridge behind it. Soon you’re walking amongst grass and palms and gazing down the jungle on either side of you.
You keep climbing and the landscape finally opens up into a series of rice paddy terraces. This being Ubud, there’s a restaurant where you can grab a drink and sit next to paddies to enjoy the view . (This being Ubud there are also countless art galleries nestled amongst the rice paddies).
6.
In fact, sometimes it feels like all of Bali is just a giant irrigation project.
If you look at a map of central Bali, you will see a lot of water:
And as you walk around the towns, you’ll turn a corner or pass a house and suddenly find that you’ve been walking over a stream without realizing it:
When you’re in a town you can wonder about why there’s so much irrigation, but it become obvious when you hit the countryside and see all the rice that’s been planted:
This island is the perfect place to grow rice and the locals have built a complex network of dams, canals and waterways to do so (perhaps that’s why the Dutch wanted them as a colony).
7.
We took a tour of a coffee plantation to see how all the local drinks are made. Other than tourism, Bali’s economy is based on exporting coffee, cloves and a few other spices.
At the place we visited, they roast small batches of coffee by hand:
We also learned the difference between the male (top photo) and female coffee beans. Every bean has to be sorted and then the stronger-tasting male beans are blended with the female to flavour the coffee:
This place also happened to make Lewak coffee. That’s a much pleasanter way of saying “coffee made from the dung of civets who ate coffee beans:”
Entertainingly, the guy who runs the place used to throw away any civet dung that they found. Then one day he was watching the Discovery channel and saw a program saying that civets only eat the best beans and an enzyme in their stomach flavours the coffee uniquely. Now they process the dung and sell it at premium prices.
You can’t make this shit stuff up.
8.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you the drullet. Or maybe the mullock if you prefer. Basically, this guy had the silliest haircut I’d ever seen: bangs on the front, dreadlocks at the rear of his mullet, so I had to snap a photo.
Now before you start saying that I’m mean, let me admit that I have bad hair and it takes one to know one. Or perhaps, I should say that I had bad hair.
I didn’t shave for a while and then turned it into a dodgy stache just to bug Wen. This worked, but she promised never to kiss me until I shaved it; it was gone the next day:
Since then, I’ve gotten a haircut as well (always a unique experience in a country where you don’t speak the language), so take a minute to appreciate the above photo and what could have been.
9.
Bali is one of the most colourful places you’ll ever visit – and I mean the flowers, not the language:
10.
Hello! Hey sir, you need taxi? How about tomorrow? Maybe just look? Good price for you! You like sarong/t-shirt/carving/massage/<insert good or service here>?
Bali has a couple of issues. First, there’s no free land; that was exhausted years ago.
Second, there are too many people. The average couple has four children; the government is trying to get that down to two but finding it hard going.
Combine this with a society that has a complex culture (architecture, food, ornamentation, clothing, etc.) but no technology (other than irrigation ditches, everything’s imported here) and you’ve got an employment situation.
There’s no free land and the existing plots can’t be split much smaller. There are no manufacturing jobs so you’ve got to work in the tourism industry.
And the barriers to entry there are pretty low. After all, taxis/massages/crappy t-shirts are basically fungible: one is the same as the other. As a result, everyone tries to get to you at the moment you might make a purchase decision so that you won’t accidentally go elsewhere.
Hence touts are everywhere.
You walk down the streets of Ubud and ever thirty feet someone asks you if you want a taxi. Some bastard taught the locals that if you don’t get it now, ask the person if they want the taxi tomorrow instead. One guy even had this on a sign: one side said “taxi?” and when you said no he flipped it over to reveal “maybe tomorrow?”
In Lovina Beach we had guys bicycle up to us and ask us if we needed taxi service. Throngs of women offered us massages on the beach – even though they could see that we had turned down their compatriots – and insisted that “we come to them” if we needed one.
At first it’s kind of funny but ultimately it’s sad. If you’re Balinese, a lot of your life is going to be spent alternating between pitching services nobody wants and waiting around for someone to pick your service. Such are the limitations of a tourism-based economy.
11.
There’s actually one manufacturing industry in Bali: textiles. It’s a cottage industry making sarongs and custom suits for tourists and locals alike. However, it really is just a cottage industry – take a look at the sewing machine used by one of these places.
I literally think my grandmother may have used that machine. And I saw these everywhere I went; they were in all the different seamstresses’ shops.
12.
Driving in Bali is an interesting proposition. The island, which is only 150 km long, has a population of over one million and not a single highway. The streets are clogged with diesel trucks and buses battling with an army of scooters.
Since the island is basically a ridge of volcanoes, a straight rode is a rarity. Your driver (and again, I highly suggest that you leave the driving to someone else) will demonstrate his manhood by bravely overtaking all traffic.
The unspoken rules of the rode state that a bus or car has right of way over oncoming scooters, so he will not hesitate to face them down in a game of chicken. Sometimes he may even play chicken with an oncoming bus. This game is substantially less fun.
At times you’ll approach a three or more way crossing that is not marked. If the gods are willing, you will not stop. If they are less happy, you may find yourself cut off by scooters. Just close your eyes.
If you’re particularly lucky, as we were, your driver will also serenade you with music. Our driver chose to forsake traditional Balinese folk music for European techno. Between the techno, coffee and cigarettes, we got to our destination in what must have been record time.
13.
Sunset at Pura Tanah Lot is a bit of a cliche that every tourist must do. And, since you’re a tourist, make sure you do it. It’s spectacular.
14.
If you’re looking for a good meal or food experience, I suggest the following:
Ubud: grab a coffee at Tutmak
Ubud: try the chicken curry at Murni’s Warung down by the river. Sit on the balcony with a 60 foot drop to the river below; the jungle sits across from you
Ubud: have dinner and watch a show in the temple next to the lotus pond of Cafe Lotus. Remember, you’re a tourist and are allowed to do this without shame. Spend the extra $10/person to sit at an outdoor table. Revel at the Balinese’s mastery of the xylophone
Lovina: try the coconut and lemongrass ice cream at Jasmine Kitchen. They claim it’s world famous and, if not, it should be
Lovina: have breakfast at Akar. The croissants and coffee are great; sit in the back next to the pond
Lovina: walk down the beach at night until you find a place that will make you dinner on the beach. If you eat early you can catch the tail end of the sunset. And remember you’re there for the experience, not the food
15.
Bali is a combination of Hindu and Buddhist. Unfortunately, this means that they consider the swastika to be a sacred symbol. It is everywhere, but please don’t think it’s for a certain type of tourist…
16.
Indonesia’s currency is the Rupiah. It has been devalued massively over the years, to the point that everyone seems to carry a calculator around because there are three unnecessary zeroes at the end of every note.
in fact, inflation has been so bad, that the government has had to reduce the value of the metals in their coinage. Here’s a shot of the old and new 500 Rupiah (between $0.05 and $0.06 depending on the prevailing exchange) coins:
What you can’t tell from the photo is that the newer coin is taped to the table as it’s lighter than air and would otherwise float off.
17.
This island is a special place. Come visit, just not during August.
Ubud is a beguiling place. When you arrive – even in the dark of night – you can’t help but be charmed by the place. The streets are lined with shrines and standards; every house has a carved stone entrance and tropical flowers blossom astride ubiquitous offerings to the gods.
As you drive the streets (or if you are sane, your driver drives) looking for your guest house, you snatch glimpses of massive temples. And then finally you turn down what looks to be a dreary alley and suddenly you’re in the comfort and pleasure of a Balinese hotel.
But this blog post will not be hagiography as Ubud is not without its warts. The place has some of the worst traffic on earth, the most aggressive touts and, in July/August is packed with obnoxious southern Europeans (Italy-I’m looking at you!). Plus the side streets are thronged with semi-feral dogs that seem to have been trained to bark vociferously at tall white males.
2.
Everyone who visits Ubud has to go see the numerous temples that dot the town. The craftsmanship in the stone carvings and the doors is incredible.
3.
From the moment you arrive, Ubud is obviously a charming place, but it’s also a bit of a trickster. For the more you explore, the more you realize that its real charms are hidden and won’t be given up so easily.
For example, you’re walking down the main street. You come to a set of stairs that lead down to a small stream. You walk down the stairs and find that it’s a canyon where two streams come together.
Overhead a rickety concrete bridge (I didn’t think you could say that until I saw this one) links a cafe that has been terraced into the hill and the street. It crosses one of the streams, which also runs through a thicket of morning glories that are cascading down from the trees above.
As you walk along the banks of the stream, you come to a temple that can only be accessed by wading across the stream.
Later, while sipping a delicious ginger tea (just ginger root in hot water) at the previously mentioned terraced restaurant, you’ll watch an old lady place offerings in the temple.
4.
The gender roles in Bali seem to have some hard and fast rules. Any carpentry/construction will be done by men. Any manual labour will be done by women (you see them shoveling or carrying firewood on their head all the time. We even saw one carrying steaming corn).
If something is to be sold and it’s a perishable or dry good, it will be by a woman. If it’s transportation, it will be a man.
And when it comes to smoking, that’s for the men only. In fact, we were on a plantation tour and one of the offerings being placed had a cigarette in it. I asked about it and the (male) guide remarked “we treat our gods like men!”
5.
Another charming scene:
You’re standing on the bridge in Ubud. You notice that down below you there appears to be a temple in the jungle next to the river.
You walk back and try to find a path down. The first route is a dead end, taking you directly to the river’s edge, but it suggests another route.
You successfully find the temple but then notice that there’s a path alongside it.
It turns out that the temple is built at the junction of two streams and the path climbs the ridge behind it. Soon you’re walking amongst grass and palms and gazing down the jungle on either side of you.
You keep climbing and the landscape finally opens up into a series of rice paddy terraces. This being Ubud, there’s a restaurant where you can grab a drink and sit next to paddies to enjoy the view . (This being Ubud there are also countless art galleries nestled amongst the rice paddies).
6.
In fact, sometimes it feels like all of Bali is just a giant irrigation project.
If you look at a map of central Bali, you will see a lot of water:
And as you walk around the towns, you’ll turn a corner or pass a house and suddenly find that you’ve been walking over a stream without realizing it:
When you’re in a town you can wonder about why there’s so much irrigation, but it become obvious when you hit the countryside and see all the rice that’s been planted:
This island is the perfect place to grow rice and the locals have built a complex network of dams, canals and waterways to do so (perhaps that’s why the Dutch wanted them as a colony).
7.
We took a tour of a coffee plantation to see how all the local drinks are made. Other than tourism, Bali’s economy is based on exporting coffee, cloves and a few other spices.
At the place we visited, they roast small batches of coffee by hand:
We also learned the difference between the male (top photo) and female coffee beans. Every bean has to be sorted and then the stronger-tasting male beans are blended with the female to flavour the coffee:
This place also happened to make Lewak coffee. That’s a much pleasanter way of saying “coffee made from the dung of civets who ate coffee beans:”
Entertainingly, the guy who runs the place used to throw away any civet dung that they found. Then one day he was watching the Discovery channel and saw a program saying that civets only eat the best beans and an enzyme in their stomach flavours the coffee uniquely. Now they process the dung and sell it at premium prices.
You can’t make this shit stuff up.
8.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you the drullet. Or maybe the mullock if you prefer. Basically, this guy had the silliest haircut I’d ever seen: bangs on the front, dreadlocks at the rear of his mullet, so I had to snap a photo.
Now before you start saying that I’m mean, let me admit that I have bad hair and it takes one to know one. Or perhaps, I should say that I had bad hair.
I didn’t shave for a while and then turned it into a dodgy stache just to bug Wen. This worked, but she promised never to kiss me until I shaved it; it was gone the next day:
Since then, I’ve gotten a haircut as well (always a unique experience in a country where you don’t speak the language), so take a minute to appreciate the above photo and what could have been.
9.
Bali is one of the most colourful places you’ll ever visit – and I mean the flowers, not the language:
10.
Hello! Hey sir, you need taxi? How about tomorrow? Maybe just look? Good price for you! You like sarong/t-shirt/carving/massage/<insert good or service here>?
Bali has a couple of issues. First, there’s no free land; that was exhausted years ago.
Second, there are too many people. The average couple has four children; the government is trying to get that down to two but finding it hard going.
Combine this with a society that has a complex culture (architecture, food, ornamentation, clothing, etc.) but no technology (other than irrigation ditches, everything’s imported here) and you’ve got an employment situation.
There’s no free land and the existing plots can’t be split much smaller. There are no manufacturing jobs so you’ve got to work in the tourism industry.
And the barriers to entry there are pretty low. After all, taxis/massages/crappy t-shirts are basically fungible: one is the same as the other. As a result, everyone tries to get to you at the moment you might make a purchase decision so that you won’t accidentally go elsewhere.
Hence touts are everywhere.
You walk down the streets of Ubud and ever thirty feet someone asks you if you want a taxi. Some bastard taught the locals that if you don’t get it now, ask the person if they want the taxi tomorrow instead. One guy even had this on a sign: one side said “taxi?” and when you said no he flipped it over to reveal “maybe tomorrow?”
In Lovina Beach we had guys bicycle up to us and ask us if we needed taxi service. Throngs of women offered us massages on the beach – even though they could see that we had turned down their compatriots – and insisted that “we come to them” if we needed one.
At first it’s kind of funny but ultimately it’s sad. If you’re Balinese, a lot of your life is going to be spent alternating between pitching services nobody wants and waiting around for someone to pick your service. Such are the limitations of a tourism-based economy.
11.
There’s actually one manufacturing industry in Bali: textiles. It’s a cottage industry making sarongs and custom suits for tourists and locals alike. However, it really is just a cottage industry – take a look at the sewing machine used by one of these places.
I literally think my grandmother may have used that machine. And I saw these everywhere I went; they were in all the different seamstresses’ shops.
12.
Driving in Bali is an interesting proposition. The island, which is only 150 km long, has a population of over one million and not a single highway. The streets are clogged with diesel trucks and buses battling with an army of scooters.
Since the island is basically a ridge of volcanoes, a straight rode is a rarity. Your driver (and again, I highly suggest that you leave the driving to someone else) will demonstrate his manhood by bravely overtaking all traffic.
The unspoken rules of the rode state that a bus or car has right of way over oncoming scooters, so he will not hesitate to face them down in a game of chicken. Sometimes he may even play chicken with an oncoming bus. This game is substantially less fun.
At times you’ll approach a three or more way crossing that is not marked. If the gods are willing, you will not stop. If they are less happy, you may find yourself cut off by scooters. Just close your eyes.
If you’re particularly lucky, as we were, your driver will also serenade you with music. Our driver chose to forsake traditional Balinese folk music for European techno. Between the techno, coffee and cigarettes, we got to our destination in what must have been record time.
13.
Sunset at Pura Tanah Lot is a bit of a cliche that every tourist must do. And, since you’re a tourist, make sure you do it. It’s spectacular.
14.
If you’re looking for a good meal or food experience, I suggest the following:
Ubud: grab a coffee at Tutmak
Ubud: try the chicken curry at Murni’s Warung down by the river. Sit on the balcony with a 60 foot drop to the river below; the jungle sits across from you
Ubud: have dinner and watch a show in the temple next to the lotus pond of Cafe Lotus. Remember, you’re a tourist and are allowed to do this without shame. Spend the extra $10/person to sit at an outdoor table. Revel at the Balinese’s mastery of the xylophone
Lovina: try the coconut and lemongrass ice cream at Jasmine Kitchen. They claim it’s world famous and, if not, it should be
Lovina: have breakfast at Akar. The croissants and coffee are great; sit in the back next to the pond
Lovina: walk down the beach at night until you find a place that will make you dinner on the beach. If you eat early you can catch the tail end of the sunset. And remember you’re there for the experience, not the food
15.
Bali is a combination of Hindu and Buddhist. Unfortunately, this means that they consider the swastika to be a sacred symbol. It is everywhere, but please don’t think it’s for a certain type of tourist…
16.
Indonesia’s currency is the Rupiah. It has been devalued massively over the years, to the point that everyone seems to carry a calculator around because there are three unnecessary zeroes at the end of every note.
in fact, inflation has been so bad, that the government has had to reduce the value of the metals in their coinage. Here’s a shot of the old and new 500 Rupiah (between $0.05 and $0.06 depending on the prevailing exchange) coins:
What you can’t tell from the photo is that the newer coin is taped to the table as it’s lighter than air and would otherwise float off.
17.
This island is a special place. Come visit, just not during August.
Wen and I have spent the past few days in Semporna. It’s on the eastern tip of Sabah (Borneo) and, for most people, is a gateway to the diving on Malbu and Sipadan Islands.
We didn’t get our act together for Sipadan (only 120 people get to dive per day; you either go with a high-end resort or a local dive company that makes you dive many times on Malbu before giving you a Sipadan permit) so we did a day trip to Malbu Island.
(That’s not actually Malbu; it’s the mainland on the way and I just like the photo)
It’s an interesting place as it (and to a degree Semporna) is full of Filipinos; almost no Malaysians live there. They’re also Muslim Filipinos who have fled to Borneo because of Abu Sayaf in the southern Philippines. Now they live in stilted houses on the islands and offer homestays/teach diving:
The diving’s not bad. On one side of the island there are some man-made reefs where they’ve sunk various mesh containers into the ocean. Unfortunately, Wen couldn’t clear her ears, so I ended up doing all the diving by myself.
I saw moray eels and some of the biggest angel/sail fish I’ve ever seen. At one point a massive group glided by. The highlight was swimming through a school of over 1,000 Jackfish. At one point they completely enveloped our group and were performing figure eights around us.
In the afternoon we dived on the opposite side of the island where there are natural reefs. The coral was not stunning, but the wildlife was. I saw a weird fish that was camouflaged with the ground, maybe three inches long and had webbed iridescent blue wings (possible a dragonet?). There were multiple eels, crabs, scorpionfish and a lionfish.
The best part though, were the turtles. One was sitting under a piece of coral; I was able to swim down and stare into its eyes and look at its shell, flippers and beak. Just after seeing it a large turtle came gracefully swimming by, appearing from and then disappearing into the murk. As we were rising we saw another turtle and then one was swimming on the surface just as we were coming back in the boat. Beautiful animals.
Tourism is small potatoes in this sleepy city of 133,000 (only in Asia can you find sleepy cities of this size). The real business is fishing:
Most people do not fish on these major boats though; instead they’re literally living on and farming the sea. Stilt houses are everywhere, even in the middle of the ocean.
I was left with the sensation that these people are one typhoon away from having nothing and the government only tolerates it as they’re Filipino. I can’t help but think that in 15 years they’ll have moved everyone off the water and onto land or back to the Philippines.
Every day, the fish are brought into a central market in the Semporna harbour. The central market is also the main dock that the locals use to come into the mainland. There’s a fish auction hall, a few cheap restaurants and lots of stalls selling everything a local might need (food, clothing, sundries and dried sea things):
The harbour itself is great. It’s surrounded by numerous islands – some mountainous – and continually trafficked. Boats – almost every single one different as they’re all handmade – fly around taking people to and from all the different islands/stilt houses:
I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time in Semporna, but you can easily spend a day exploring it and another diving on Malbu.
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