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THE
ONLY GUIDE TO & OUT OF
SADISTFAXION
GUARANTEED
WARNING:
THIS PAGE IS NOT MADE BY A TOURIST,
EXPAT, TOUR GUIDE OR AIRLINE STEWARD
13,000+ of islands are homes to Indonesian citizens, with dividers
inserted here and there in the form of waterways.
Just
one quick glimpse [boldface indicates the name of an island]:
a market of downtown Medan, North Sumatera; a row of houses
faithfully built according to the traditional Torajanese architecture,
North Sulawesi; kids preparing to sail in Nusa Tenggara;
the rainforest of Kalimantan; ripe paddies in its usual
golden hue enveloping a farmer of Madura; a fisherman at
sea in Maluku; a pedicab driver of Java; suburban
ducks of wherever; the Grand Temple of Bali; and an underwater
panorama of Bangka.
Indonesia
is basically people, and one maddening salad at that, because
its 250 million of citizens consist of 1,000+ different races,
ethnicities and sub-ethnicities. This makes saying "I
am Indonesian" a rather hazy statement; how, exactly,
do I look then? No space to house all sample pics of the
racial and ethnic diversities here, but at least you could glean
a bit of info about what 'Indonesians' mean in visual terms. Click
here for much larger pix of real-life faces of this republic.
| Real
Profile of Indonesia |
Indonesia:
Republic, with several dozens of live small kingdoms
within, several dozens more of the mummified ones, and hundreds
of the tracelessly deceased.
Independence:
August
17, 1945, plus other historical dates encompassing the clearing
off of the Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, British, Spanish, and
a dictator. There was also an independence from the United Nations,
although we would be pleased if you don't remind us of it now.
Banner:
red & white, AKA Poland's seen upside-down.
Coat
of arms: garuda ['ga-roo-da']. It's some
sort of a hawk and named after our first airline, or the other
way around.
National
anthem: Indonesia Raya, cranked-up by composer
Wage Rudolf Supratman, though some might opt for the song Clint
Eastwood by Gorillaz.
Zodiac
sign: Leo (or Rooster, according to Chinese horoscope).
Currency:
Rupiah ['roo-pee-hyah'], squeezed down to Rp.
Value
of the above: one Rupiah is approximately equal to nothing
whatsoever. One American dollar is, though, worth around 10,000
Rupiah today. Or maybe that was Wednesday.
Things
that you can get with one American
dollar: 2.5 packs of my cigs, or 100 soybean
cakes, or 5 bottles of Coke,
or 4 hours of surfing at a cybercafé.
Area:
over 9,000,000 kilometer square, more or less than 80% of it is
water, which is rather unfortunate since the salinity cancels
any use it might have served. The entire land of Indonesia is
around the size of one
quarter of United States. Is understandable if claimed as
the largest archipelago in the whole wide world, regardless of
whether it's true or is it a collective narcissism.
Main
island: Java. Some 132,187
kilometer square (as big as the State of New
York) of ancient architectural wonders, modern architectural
heartaches, and none of the above.
Largest
island: probably Kalimantan, or the landmass commonly
referred to by ancient Europeans as 'Borneo'; it is as
big as the whole France. There is also Sulawesi, whose
size is approximately the
same as that of North Dakota; and Sumatera, a
bit larger than California.
Capital:
Jakarta. The city of the Government,
the Parliament, the Show-Biz and the missing luggage.
Natural
resources: deforestry on islands like Sumatera and
Kalimantan, pesticidal agrarian in Java, beach parties in Bali.
Climate:
monsoon half of the year, dry season the other half - the problem
is they'd never tell which half is which.
Weather:
too hot for the pre-menstrual syndrome.
Population:
somewhat more than two hundred and fifty million people on land,
the rest is scuba-diving for a living or flying some F-16 for
fun.
Average
education: everybody I know had gone into universities and
never gotten out again.
Language:
Indonesian,
plus more than 200 ethnicity-based languages (vernaculars) and
thousands of dialects belonging to minority ethnic groups and
clans and tribes herein. A thumbnail chunk of the population might
be able to say "good morning" in English, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch,
German or French, but some travel writers said it is inadvisable
to ask them for direction.
Religions:
compulsory. Atheism is outlawed. Belief in God is the state's
foundation. Citizens must pick Islam, Roman Catholicism,
Protestantism, Hinduism or Buddhism as his or her personal-legal
religious affiliation. Agnosticism is criminal. Confucianism is
in practice, although some insist on seeing it as a philosophy
rather than systematic religion.
Political
ideology: Confusism.
Could
be reached by: cheap airline from New York via Beijing for
approximately US$ 800.00; a less nerve-wrecking flight via Frankfurt
for around US$ 1,200.00; economy class from Hamburg for US$ 475.00;
or for free, paid by our government, if you are a refugee on your
way to Australia.
Cost
of living: affordable in every sort of financial restraint,
as long as you are not Indonesian.
Accomodation:
backpackers'
lodges, prodigal tourists' rooms, five-starred hotels, your pen-pals'
houses. The latter wouldn't serve breakfast.
Public
transportation:
buses, cabs, pedicabs, trains, planes, ships, ferries, your pen-pals'
sisters' cars. The latter depend on their moods.
Private
transportation: cars, special utility vehicles, motorbikes
and bicycles are for rent. Drivers' licenses issued by any European
or American state is valid, but driving at the wrong side of the
road is not. (Clue: Americans drive at the wrong side of the road,
that is right. English people drive at the right side of the road
- which is left).
Traffic
control: often on vacation. At some places, invariably the
busiest streets on business days, traffic is regulated by Fate.
Cultural
tourism:
palaces,
festivals, weddings,
temples, mosques, churches, archeological sites, traditional
markets, the internet.
Ecological
tourism: villas, slum.
Waterworld
tourism: diving, sailing, surfing, swimming, fishing, getting
splash bath in the hotel.
Wildlife:
certain sections of any zoo; the Nusakambangan island (our very
own Alcatraz); and somewhere between my bedroom and the backyard.
Afterlife:
we have some wholesomely beautiful, totally authentic, and absolutely
creepy Chinese cemeteries and haunted hotel rooms along the shore
of the Southern Javanese sea. (I'm not kidding. Those are
tourist destinations if you are Indonesian.)
Rural
tourism:
several thousand acres of rice fields, a lot of busy villagers,
cart-pulling horses and cows and water-buffaloes, and occasionally
a painter.
Urban
tourism: taxi drivers.
Food:
edible for the initiated. But there is always a Mc Donald's and
a Pizza Hut every few meters from wherever you are.
Beverage:
basically we would love to ban alcohol. But we make this sacrifice
to give the German tourists a little bit of home. They rarely
leave their rooms anyway.
Special
tourists, disabled: a lot of helping hands and feet and
mouths, especially mouths; so you don't have to worry about mobility
and such even though public places are not yet modified to suit
your need.
Special
tourists, cloved cigarette smokers: you're in Paradise.
Special
tourists, senior citizens: see the "Special tourists, disabled".
Special
tourists, junior citizens: perambulators are absolutely
unrecommended for pedestrians.
Special
tourists, G.I. veterans: no, sir, there is no such a place
named Saigon here.
Special
tourists, World War II veterans: gosh, you really are nostalgic
about anything, aren't you?
INDONESIA:
30 SECS TOUR
In
whichever order: Farmers of the
island of Sumatera on their way to another thankless, hardest
work for any day; a cottage in the island of Sulawesi
that only tourists would live in (locals prefer condominiums);
something ornithologists could name (I can't); the lighthouse
of South Anyer, West Java; a rather nondescriptive snapshot
of the street in Bogor, West Java, though one of the men
on bikes there carries the traditional bamboo baskets full of
vegetables; Balinese beach of Benoa, with white sandy sand
and my fetish in a row; Balinese seafarers on its way to Kiel,
Germany, for a yearly oceanrace; fog-bound Mount Bromo, East
Java, whose main attraction is (it to you?)
sulphur; the Indonesian way to serve vitamins to tourists (locals
opt for bottled little pills); closeup shot of a Central Javanese
gambyong dancer; a ritual dance of the Nias islanders.
Ceremonial
dance of Nusa Tenggara; a West Sumateranese dancer;
a Yogyanese colleague of hers; Pulau Seribu (literally
anglicized: 'The Thousand Islands'), i.e. a number of tiny specks
of landmass near the Jakartanese harbor; a Sundanese bride
[West Java]; Tanjung Perak ('Cape Silver') port of East Java;
an overpoetical shot of a traditional fisherman of Maluku
(used to be known as 'the Spice Island' when dinosaurs still stayed
out of Jurassic Park [the movie]; the Kuta beach in Bali,
local boats and women on their way to a temple; a Solonese
[Central Java] couple on their wedding day -- yup, our wedding
dresses are black; a Balinese dancer flashing a huge smile
with some tourism business in mind -- probably the photographer
looked like from somewhere like Tinseltown.
The
National Monument in Jakarta -- the capital city where
everything happens and nothing is done; farmer's kids at very
early A.M. in Bengkulu, Sumatera -- on a Sunday or holiday
they help their dads in the rice fields, so do they after school;
a colonial building in Jakarta that needs a little love and a
lot of cash for maintenance; a fruit vendor among dozens of competitors
in a traditional market of Malang, East Java; a typical
restaurant wherever it is; pedicabs of any Javanese town -- except
in Jakarta, where they are sort of in a guerrilla situation against
the cops; a smalltowner's front porch -- caging rare singing birds
used to tell of your social rank back then in old Java; a Yogyanese
'bakso' mobile vendor -- the thing consists of some meatballs
and noodles and tomato sauce and oceans of patience if you happen
to catch him in a bad mood; a farmer of Klaten [Central Java],
working the classical way with water-buffaloes from dawn 'til
dusk -- and it might not even be his own land there he's toiling
hard on.
Faces
of Indonesia:
there's Sarah Sechan, once an MTV veejay; a farmer; Megawati
Sukarnoputri, Indonesian President from 2002 to 2004; a rural
kid; Ari Wibowo, an actor; a clot of female factory workers
in a protest rally against George Bush, Jr,'s war on Iraq; Yayuk
Basuki, former tennis champ; fisherfolks of Bangka island;
a Junior High School class; underage factory workers that still
don't have any choice but to follow the cash; a CEO of some big
company; cops handling participants of another protest rally;
a Balinese dancer; rural home industry workers, mostly women;
Ade Rai, athlete; Sophia Latjuba, model.
CONTINUE
TO:
Java For the Clueless - Everything
About Indonesia - History
of Indonesia
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