When I was 16 years old, I went on my first overseas trip. I went to Vietnam on a history study tour with my public high school, Albury High, for 14 days.
My family didn’t have a proper camera then because nobody was into photography. It wouldn’t be for another two or so years until I would have a proper digital camera, so my photos were taken on two cheap disposable cameras with plastic lenses. Each camera had 24 exposures on it, and one had black and white film and the other colour. I had barely taken any photos in my life before this trip. Now it’s unthinkable to me that I travelled for 14 days and only took 48 photos!! I would sometimes take up to 150 photos a day in Indonesia! These basic sorta-blurry photos almost make it look like I was over there 30 years ago instead of only 8.5 years ago!
The Vietnam trip was pretty remarkable for me. My family had never gone on any international travel. My dad had gallivanted around a little when he was in his teens on the scant money he earned from his odd jobs, but since then, nothing. In our small-ish “regional city”, back then we had two Chinese restaurants and newly opened Thai and Indian restaurants were pretty revolutionary. I’d never in my life tried Vietnamese cuisine and the population makeup of our town was far from being racially diverse. I’d also only been in a busy big city a couple of times in my life (but Australian “big” cities are obviously a far cry from Asia’s large cities, population wise).
At that stage of my youth, I thought I wanted to go to university in Albury and become a speech pathologist. I hadn’t really thought seriously about moving away to one of the more prestigious universities in the cities, though it was starting to tick away in the back of my mind.
I was honestly shit scared about going to Vietnam, even with my cool teachers and school friends, and at one point I almost thought about dropping out of the trip.
Sometimes, when I was on the road in Indonesia and even in Eastern Europe, I think about how lucky it was that I went…
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A tsunami memorial in downtown Banda Aceh, consisting of rainbow coloured poles on an empty block of land.
View arriving by boat into the Banda Aceh port of Ulee Lhee, where the tsunami first hit the Sumatran shore. The port is now surrounded by stone walls intended to give some protection to the harbour in the event of another large wave.
These locally made “KM 0 wet coconut cakes” were on the tables at a little eatery in Ipoih, Pulau Weh. Though a soggy cake doesn’t sound good, perfectly moist cakes are… these little cakes were beautifully moist and filled with fresh grated coconut. I took a few home for after dinner snacks. I love that the packaging has a photo of the giant bathroom-styled kilometre zero monument that I wrote about earlier.
Zen Inn, Padangbai, Bali
I’ve been backpacking around Indonesia and Malaysia for 2.5 months now, so I’ve stayed in my fair share of cheap but clean guesthouses, dirty losmen, flashpacker hostels and wherever else one can rest your head for (ideally) less than $10 a night (no airports or train stations though, like I did on my Europe trip in 2006).
Most of them are very basic affairs. Bare walls, creaky old beds, a mandi or cold shower in the bathroom and a Western-style toilet if I’m lucky. However, some of them have a fair bit more colour or panache than others.
So here’s some recommendations and photos of some of the cooler places I have stayed so far on this journey…
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So I’m finally going to write about Komodo Dragons, one of the main reasons we obviously went trekking out to the Komodo National Park. We were lucky… we saw about 15 of them on Rinca Island (because we went on the two hour trek in the morning… the best time to see them) and probably about four at Komodo Island in the afternoon, mostly near the ranger’s huts. These are vicious beasts, and we got soooo scarily close to them. At each of the islands, you have to trek with a guide, who carries a long stick with a forked end with him. But seriously. If a 3m long 80kg komodo decides he’s hungry, our 50kg early-20s scrawny Indonesian guide and his magic komodo stick was not going to do much except become a crunchy hors d’oevre.
Had to give the kids props for their optimism though I must say. Our guides were also very well trained on answering hundreds of questions from us about the dragons and other wildlife in the national park.
And one of our guides did use his stick to prod one of the dragon’s tails to wake it up, so I guess it serves a safety purpose, yeah?
We learned a lot about the dragons, but here’s a quick lesson about these freaky big carnivorous lizards for y’all.
They are the main predators on the islands where they live (Rinca and Komodo). There’s also a small population of them on Flores island. They aren’t found anywhere else in the world. They can live as long as 50 years and are the largest living species of lizards in the world. They have razor sharp teeth, strong claws and septic saliva. They’ve killed humans on a couple of occasions.
Want more? Wikipedia it.
Septic saliva action! They bite their large prey, the prey is weakened by bleeding and the infection spreading through their body from the saliva… the komodo stalks them until they die, then they all tuck in. They can survive by eating only once a month, if they get a nice big meal.
A female guards her nest. The females dig lots of deep holes with their big claws, and only lay eggs in one of the holes. The rest are decoys. Sometimes they take over the burrows of other animals to save digging time. Once the baby komodos hatch (after nine months), they have to scramble into trees and live off bugs until they are at least five years old… otherwise, the other older dragons might eat them. Brutal!
This is komodo poo! It’s white, because the komodos eat all the bones of their prey (except sometimes the skull), so they get lots of calcium, hence white poo. That’s another indication of how powerful their teeth are… they can chomp through bone!
We learned a lot more about the dragons, they are really amazingly fascinating and freaky creatures. And you can only see them in the wild in Komodo National Park, so it’s definitely worth the trip (not to mention the stunning scenery out there, the amazing snorkelling in the park, etc etc etc etc… go!!!).
If you want to go, Rinca is your best bet for spotting dragons, because it is a smaller island with a similar komodo population to Komodo Island… so they are less spread out. Also, the morning is the best time to go, because they are often out sunning themselves. Before travelling, you should check out what time of the year it is in terms of the mating cycle as well, to optimize your chances of spotting dragons.
Mike and I had bought some martabak (pancake) on the street in Bima. Bima is on Sumbawa Island. We’d ended up there because while we’d been able to get flights out of Bali to go to Komodo National Park, there hadn’t been any empty seats coming back, so we’d had to catch an eight hour ferry to Sape then ride an overburned bus around twisty mountain roads, where each valley seemed to alternate between lush green rice fields and dusty abandoned ones, while listening to Celine Dion and other classic power ballads. An interesting detour, despite a brush or two with death where we were sure the bus was about to plunge down a cliff, but hey.
So we were in Bima for one night only. According to the ticket seller on the bus, life there was pretty hard. He had four kids and he said it was way too expensive for them to go to school. It was a struggle. He’d talked to me on the bus about it passionately in Indonesian. I hadn’t understood everything he said, but I did understand that the local district heads thought that was a problem that was just too hard to solve. Also, he was expected to pay the same fees as people who were much wealthier than him, and who had only one child, he said.
So here we were, eating martabak in the park in central Bima, dusty from the road and myself feeling a little bit of that guilt that often comes here when someone foists a problem on to you that you have no ability to solve. We’d had a good dinner though, the night was cool, we weren’t in the office and the martabak was tasty, so there was plenty to smile about.
Then we spotted some local kids running around wearing garbage bags as makeshift costumes, which gave us even more laughs. I asked one of the boys what he was trying to be and he replied “Dracula”! They were charging around, scrambling over and jumping off all the run down civic structures in the square.
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At dusk, hundreds of thousands of fruit bats lift off Pulau Kalong in Komodo National Park and fly off to the surrounding islands to search for food. It’s an amazing sight, difficult to capture the full extent on a camera in the dark on a tiny fishing boat with no tripod. But wow, it was pretty damn cool. Just a stream of bats against the darkening sky.
My trip to the Komodo National Park off Flores was amazing and we saw lots of Komodo Dragons (yay!), but I’m still fairly tired and not feeling the writing mojo tonight since my dear friend Mike caught his plane back to the states tonight and I’m going to miss him bunches and bunches, so will make full posts about all the amazement later.
Sunset overlooking the Melaka Strait.
Am about to make lots of blogs about Melaka/Malacca (will stick to one spelling from now on, just making it clear it’s the same place) in Malaysia, where I just spent the weekend, as well as a day in Singapore. OMG I took so many photos and ate so much food! Prepare for Melaka overload.
Here’s some pics of the UNESCO heritage listed town centre to get us started.
PS. The blog will get back to its regularly scheduled Indonesia blogging soon! Been away so much lately!
Local kids playing soccer on the beach at Pelabuhan Ratu.
I never would have considered myself “an outdoors type”. But after two months in Jakarta, shuttling from one airconditioned space to the next in airconditioned taxis, trying to avoid breathing the polluted air outside, I was feeling a little crazy.
In Sydney, you escape the city or work stress by relaxing down by the harbour or at the beach or in one of the stunning parks that overlooks the water. I actually spent quite a lot of time outdoors in Sydney, and even when driving I would have the windows down, gulping down that coastal air.
So it was absolute bliss to escape Jakarta this weekend to Pelabuhan Ratu, just a couple of hours out of Jakarta by car, to BREATHE and just be OUTSIDE all weekend! I didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, I just wanted to feel alive! We hired a driver and escaped when the others had finished work at midnight on Friday… a night time dash down windy roads through little villages to our destination.
Dubbed the “crazy house” by some, the “Dr. Seuss” house by others, we were crashing a 10-bedroom-and-god-knows-how-many-bathrooms house set high on a clifftop overlooking the beaches and the jungle. It was called Karang Aji Villa, and you can visit the website to see more pictures and to try and understand just how mad it was.
There were more people than beds, so I crashed on a sofa outside (yes, so desperate was I for the outdoors, I even slept outside despite not having a mosquito net). The mozzies were annoying, it was pretty hot, and I didn’t have a good sleep, but the things that woke me besides the sqweetos didn’t disappoint. The crowing of a rooster alerted me of the sunrise, and lying on my sofa I had a panoramic view of the sun coming up over the Indian Ocean, the water dotted with fisherman’s boats. And just like everywhere else in Indo, you can’t escape the loud loud loud morning prayers…
We didn’t get the full grasp of the crazy house until the morning. It was a psychadelic mix of Balinese-style wood carvings, bright plastic panels, stained glass, statues, bamboo furniture and tiny spiral staircases, all the way up to a somewhat wobbly “viewing platform”. I’ve never seen anything like it. But the views were gorgeous.
We were sharing the house with friends of a friend of ours who were celebrating a birthday. They were all Australians (except for one Austrian… she just needed a few more letters), and they were all doing interesting work here in Indonesia as part of the AusAid Youth Ambassador program.
Partying at the “crazy house”.
So we spent most of the weekend swimming, chilling, eating (including fresh grilled fish, of course), playing a bit of beach soccer until we noticed all the glass and nails and stuff in the sand, drinking, wandering a bit, talking a lot, reading, being rained on and not caring. And breathing lots and lots of relatively fresh air.
And I finally feel like I have seen some of the “real Indonesia”. As in, not shopping malls. Rice paddies, little villages, plantations, extreme dangerous driving, fishing boats etc etc. I want to see so much more.
But it was nice. Invigorating. Much needed. I was so busy relaxing I didn’t even take that many photos. I’ve been slack as lately. I have more, but Flickr is being even slacker than me so I might have to post them later when it decides to stop being fickle.
