Friday, January 30, 2015

Neighborhood Digest

We’ve moved to our forever home and have been exploring the new neighborhood.  Here are some things that I’ve learned.

I think I mentioned how street addresses often don’t make a lick of sense.  Stroll down a typical street and see the house address change randomly from #2 to #26 to #81 to #7.  It makes getting anywhere in a cab or by walking just maddening as you never really know how close you are to your final destination.  

We think we discovered why.  It seems that house numbers aren’t set up according to any sort of grid or plat.  Duh.  It seems house numbers are assigned based on the order they were constructed on a street.  So, #1 was the first house on the street, #2 the second house built and so on, no matter if #2 is actually seven lots away.

It sort of makes sense in a short-sighted, ordinal sort of way, but no sense from a city planning view.

There is a kicker, too.  If you tear down a house and rebuild a new house or even significantly remodel a house, you get a new address.  So, say our forever home used to be #3, but it was gutted and rebuilt on the exact floor plan.  Our new house number may be #34.

 Here is something you don’t see back home.  This is a Secret Asian Man image of a man at a mall scrubbing the curb of the entrance by hand.  Not hosing it off. Not sweeping, but scrubbing with a scrub brush.  The difference between how private and public spaces are treated is remarkable.  

Walking the dog early the other morning, it must have been trash burning day.  We walked past 6 or 7 small unattended fires burning in the gutters.  Leaves, branches, plastic bags, cups, all the detritus of a city wafting into the morning air.  The ashes blowing down the street, adding to the grime.  Probably soiling the curbs of the mall, who knows?



This is likely the saddest thing that I’ve faced in a long time.  This is Bonita.  She is a macaque monkey who lives on a platform in the park nearby. She belongs to the family on the far side of the park.  She is fed a good amount of food and they seem to look after her, but it is still a pretty sorry existence.  



A few dinner time conversations have been held about how to spring the monkey.  None of the scenarios end well for us, or the monkey, so we walk by this suffering daily.  I’d like to befriend the neighbors to get the full story and I’ve asked our house staff to find out all they can.  I guess we’ve got some time







I’m told of an even sadder activity.  A few years ago, it was all the rage to take these monkeys and chain them little toy cars, dressed up in clothes.  The owners would then cut the eyes and the backs out of a baby doll head and fit them over the monkey head and then train the monkey to roam around a park begging for money.  This, to me, is just the epitome of creepy.  I’m not sure if people pay for the novelty or to make the scary, monkey-baby go away.  I’m told they cracked down and banned this, so it is not as common anymore.  I don’t have my own image, but here is what I’m talking about.


Maybe, that was how Bonita started out? Maybe, that was how our neighbors got their big house.  On the backs of Bonita and her friends.  

We drove by her the other day.  Mrs. S.A.M. said, “That monkey looks so sad.”

Our driver said, “Yes. I think it because she not have a friend.”

Yeah, that could be it. It could also be that she’s chained by the neck to a pole in the middle of a city of millions.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Appeasing the Gods

Once upon a time, on big island on a bigger ocean there were two lovers who wed. One’s name started with the letters T-E-N-G….  The other’s ended with the letters G-A-R. Their full names were lost to time or at least lost in the translation between my guide Benny and me.


The names are important in that these two came together to form the Tenggar clan in east Java. 

The two tried for years and years to have a child but they were unable. They prayed very hard to the god in Mt. Bromo and their prayers were answered with a son.  In fact, they were answered further with 24 more children in the span of their years.  


Sometime after the birth of their 25th child, the god came to them and asked them to give thanks by sacrificing one of their children to the volcano atop Mt. Bromo.  Though they were grateful for their answered prayers, people being people, they were unable to part with any of their children.  


Their refusal angered the mountain god greatly and the god being a god, went all Kaiser Sosei on them, laying waste to their settlement and killing all twenty-five of the kids.  


S.A.M returned to Surabaya and after the work was done took a trip to Mt. Bromo about 4 hours from Surabaya.  The goal was to see the sunrise which entailed leaving the hotel at midnight and enduring a rather uncomfortable car ride up to a base at Penanjakan. The roads are not made for smooth travel or sleeping in a car. There are lots of starts and stops and bobs and weaves. In Penanjakan we switched to a 4x4 for a trip across the lava sands and up the other side of the crater about 1500 meters above the lava field.


For a quasi-car geek, this is a great place to come because all the 4X4s are vintage Toyota Land Cruisers from the 70s.  This must be where they come to be put out to pasture. There are hundreds of them in varied states of repair. Some looked complete. Others like mine look good from the outside but the inside is lacking dashboard lights and working speedometers and working seat belts.  


Benny apologized for the deficiency, but reassured me that I was safe.  “You’ll be fine, because the driver is my friend!” And he gave him a big old hug.  And off we raced into the night along with hundreds of other motorcycles and 4wd trucks.


At the bottom of the mountain , I was encouraged because I saw clear skies and stars up above. We arrived at the top of the main crater at about 4 am.  In true, Indonesian fashion, because this is a major tourist destination, there are food vendors set up and doing a booming business even at 3:30 am  We stepped inside a stall and pulled up a bench and grabbed fried bananas and hot ginger tea, served family style to any takers.  It seemed nearly all the local tourists were feverishly smoking cigarettes in preparation for the big climb later.  Me, I just breathed when I could.  


45 minutes before sunrise we made our way a short distance to the sunrise viewing area.  As the day dawned, though it was clear that we were only going to see fog and mist.  5 hours of dozing in the back of a car for nothing.


Back down to the crater floor and across to the center where a new cone rises.  This is the active portion of the Mt Bromo.  There’s a 2 km hike and then 245 stairs that lead up to the crater rim. There is an option to skip the hike and hire one of the hundreds of ponies to take you up to the stairs.  I felt like a walk and the small ponies looked rather ridiculous carting around some of the larger people.  



The people and the horses use the same trail and it seemed heavily trafficked. It did make me wonder how a culture that dislikes dog partly out of concern that dogs poop everywhere, can hike through sand infused with horse dung in a pair of flip flops.  It don’t make no sense.


There is a Hindu temple near the base of the mountain. It is run by the Tenggar clan. Every year on the 1st of August they hold a sacrifice ritual. They’ve moved beyond humans, though.  Apparently the god is okay now with freshly killed animals and vegetables. They haul the whole buffet up the steps and hurl it into the crater.


There are some resourceful folks who climb down into the crater and catch all the bounty falling out of the sky. I suppose tourists aren’t going to want to look down into a crater full of decaying carcasses and rotting vegetation. But it makes me wonder if they don’t know about their god’s anger problem.  This taunting just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.  



Speaking of disasters that are slowly unfolding. Long time readers may recall the Lupindo mud eruption that I spoke about the last time I was here.  We stopped by on the way home. This is a video I took standing on 35 feet of mud that has been oozing out of the ground after a fracking accident in 2006.  The damage extends to square miles of toxic, stinking mud that oozing out of the ground at a rate of 10,000 cubic meters per day. It is projected to keep flowing for the next 50 years.


Most all the people in the buried settlements are gone.  My driver tells me this is a place where the lady boys hang out at night. During the day a few remaining folks hang on waiting for some sort of settlement.  It is such a depressing place.  

Talk about a group of people who could benefit from some ritual sacrifice.


Tuesday, January 13, 2015

From the Tropical to the Mundane

From last post’s tropical to this post’s mundane.

S.A.M decided we needed a bank account.  Most people we’ve run into just use their U.S. accounts and withdraw cash with an ATM or cash checks.  But after putting down some roots it’s become more evident that an Indonesian bank account would be quite helpful.

One is the safety of our staff.  We’ve been paying them in cash and at the end of the month we send them home with small bricks of bills.  If we could transfer the money electronically, it would be a lot more secure.

There are also lots of extra discounts linked to a local bank account.  If you buy a meal at a restaurant you can save 10 or 15% just by using a card from a local bank.  The local Krispy Kreme has good deal going now. 6 donuts for the price of 4.  Just for telling them you’re a customer and showing them your card.

Also, for reasons that are unclear to me, the use of credit cards has not caught on to the same degree as back home.  Many places don’t take credit cards or if they do, they charge upwards of 5% for the privilege.  Plus, often they won’t take credit cards from foreign banks which makes it hard to buy things like airline tickets or hotel rooms.  You can, though, freely transfer money electronically from account to account with no fee and almost instantly. Wire transfers are much more common.

So, I looked around and asked around and got the inside scoop from a colleague who warned me that there would be some frustration.  There are a number of local banks, but I went on recommendations and the fact that I saw branches and ATMs everywhere.  My friend told me the branch that he went to which was also a branch where many expats go, so they have a lot of English speaking staff.

Off I went in pursuit of a rekening. That’s Indonesian for Bank Account.

Step 1.  I ducked out of work early to head to the suggested branch.  I was told getting and account could take a while so I allowed 2 hours.  I arrived at the bank at 3:09 pm to find the doors closed and the last customers filing out.  They close at 3 pm every day.  Huh.  Strange for a bank.  The bank is in a mall though and they’re open on Saturday.  The staff at the door assure me that the bank will open at 9 AM.

Step 2.  I return the next day at 9:45 to find a line of 60 other people who must have been told the bank opened at 9 AM, too.  It opens at 10.  Curiously, there is a neat and tidy queue winding down the mall until 9:55 when stragglers walk up and crowd at the door.  Just like in the streets.  When the doors open, the queue collapses and there is a mild crush toward the counter.

Step 3.  I make my way to the Customer Service Counter which, thankfully, has a smaller line.  I take a number I wait my turn.  Two men roll up with a small trolley and 2 one meter cubes of cash.  They’re guarded by what appears to be a 17 year old in a guard uniform holding an AK-47. They take the cubes o’ cash into the back room.  The armed teen waits outside.

My number is called.  I stepped up and made my request for a bank account.  I showed them my documents and all things seemed to be in order.  Something changes my agents mind, though, and she asks where I work.  I tell her and she says that that is kind of far away from this branch and that they usually only service customers in the immediate area.  I ask her if all the banks are linked with computers.  She assures me they are.  I ask if I can’t then just open an account here.  She tells me I cannot.  I say that I can walk to my work from here, maybe it is close enough?  She shakes her head and offers me the location of another branch closer to where I work that is not open on weekends. I tell her where I live which is actually further away from this bank.  She tells me that, alas, I live on the wrong side of some arbitrary boundary. She gives me the name of several branches, one of which is in another mall close to my house.  She thanks me for coming.

Step 4. Banks in malls are open when malls are open, and if malls are open on Sundays, then so are the banks.  I decide try again at the mall close to my house.  I find that there is no such bank branch there as she claimed, but only an ATM.  Grrrr.

Step 5. I go to another mall nearby.  Have I ever mentioned that there are more than 93 malls in this city. Not strip malls, either.  Full on, multi storied, multi-anchored malls with fountains and marbles and countless escalators. This will be my 3rd mall in 3 days.

Step 6. I walk into the customer service area and I ask to open an account.  The woman looks at my documents and says that yes they can help me.  She stands up and switches spots with a young man.  “We are exactly the same.  I will help you now.”  I think it is because his english is better.  

I have to mention that this man is gorgeous in a completely feminine way.  Definitely a man, but with sparkle.  Glittery rings and tasteful accents on his shirt. It is stunning.

He confirms that they can help me and he pulls out the needed forms and starts filling them out. He asks me some questions.  There is light banter with the other woman who seems to be advising him. Everything seems to be going smoothly.  

He gets up to have the bank manager sign off on the account and he returns with a dejected look.  “I’m sorry, Mr. S.A.M, but my manager says we can’t open an account because you don’t have an Indonesian Tax ID number.”

I ask, “Why do I need one of those? I don’t pay Indonesian Taxes.  I don’t get paid in Indonesian money. My friend just opened an account with this bank and he didn’t need a number.”  

He and the other woman nod their heads and agree with me. Off he goes to confer with the manager.  
He returns.  “I’m sorry, Mr. S.A.M, but we can’t open an account because you don’t have the proper ID.  Maybe you can get a proper ID from your boss.”  The woman next to him quickly disagrees with this and sends him back to the manager to explain the manager’s errors in thinking.

He returns looking more confused.  “I’m very sorry, Mr. S.A.M, but the reason we can’t open your account is because you don’t have a Indonesian Tax number. If you get that number, then we can open an account for you.”

“But, I’m confused.  Why didn’t my friend need a number when he opened his account?  Where would I even get such a number?” And, given the state of bureaucracy, how long would that even take?

Pretty man looked at me sympathetically and said, “....Or, you could come to the branch that I work at during the week and we can open an account for you no problem.”  He gave me the address of his place.  

I told him I was confused. “So, if I want an account from here today, I need a special number, but if I come to your branch tomorrow, I don’t”  He empathized and looked equally confused. “Yeah.  Different branches have different rules, I guess.”  

His partner assured me of the same and we parted ways.

Step 7. I return to the bank branch that he and his coworker staff during the week.  It is close to the nightly cake market.  From 2-7 am people sell small cakes and cookies for consumption the following day. It is also wedged in the heart of one the main red light districts of the city.  I’m beginning to understand why the banker man is so beautiful.  He may have a side job with a short commute. Today he is dressed more bankerly, but there is definite lip and eye liner.  His nails are long, freshly buffed and polished.  He and his fingers are impossibly long and thin.  I’m going to call him Skeezix.


It’s first thing in the morning, and while I wait, women stroll in and deposit the night’s take into the banks of ATMs on the wall.  Must have been a busy night.

Skeezix and his partner Any are happy to see me. Just like before, Any starts helping me and then they switch seats. As promised, they go about opening an account with only a few complications.  They scold me for not signing my name exactly as it appears on my passport. I’m made to sign everything again.  

The manager here has fewer rules and in fact, I don’t know that they were even consulted.

Skeezix pulls out a sheet of numbers and asks me if I want to pick out my own account number.  He answers my blank stare with “Maybe you have  lucky number?”   I take a look and try to find a number that’s sure to attract more money into my account. I wish I were more numerologically literate. Perhaps my luck would change.

I give them my money and they give me a receipt and just like that, I’ve got an account in under a week's time.   All I need to do is return in 1 week and pick up my ATM card and activate it.  


Wednesday, January 7, 2015

There I Was...

“There I was on the island of Borneo.”

Ever since I was a kid and watched those Saturday morning cartoons, Mr. Peabody and Underdog, and the like, I imagined myself saying those words in some stuffy, high-brow accent with a glass of scotch and a cigar.  Well, okay, I was 7, so maybe not the scotch and the cigar, but definitely the accent.

40-odd years later, I made it...there I was on the island of Borneo. Or, as the Indonesians call it, Kalimantan.  We took a second holiday break to cruise into orangutan territory for 3 days and, boy was it interesting.

We’d been told by several people that the river trip into the National park was a nice relaxing way to see orangutans and other jungle wild life. We headed out after New Years on Trigana Air.  One of two airlines you’ve never heard of that fly to Pangkalan Bun.  If you’re watching all the coverage of the Air Asia loss, you’re watching all the hustle and bustle of PKB itself.  

Our plane was an antiquated 737 with rubber floors and worn out seats.  It makes one wonder why this oxidized aluminum tube stayed aloft, but Air Asia’s newer jet did not.  But, we did get a meal which beats many domestic airlines here and back home.  

We were met at the airport by our guide who took us to the dock about 20 minutes away in a town call Kumai, so named because in the olden days of the port, people would boat in with their wares and yell to the people on the shore, “Kumai” which means “Come here.”

It is a busy port and a pretty low lying town, but when you enter town there are a number of tall grey buildings about 6 or 7 stories tall.  When we exit the car, all we can hear is birds screeching. Our guide told us that the tall grey buildings are full of swallows.  They play recordings of swallow “songs” at full blast to attract the real swallows to build their nests.  They harvest the nests and sell them to the chinese to make soup with them. They get 500-600 dollars for a kilogram of low quality birdsnest.  High quality bird’s nests fetch upwards of $1500 dollars a kilogram. Not a bad take for mud and swallow spittle.  What makes a high quality bird’s nest?  You’d have to ask a swallow or a chinese food fetishist.

We used the Borneo Eco Tours company  which is one of several outfits who run similar trips.  All the trips are about the same in terms of amenities and itinerary.  3 days/ 2 nights.  You and your party get a boat that can sleep up to 10.  Some have A/C in private cabins, some have futons on the deck.  Most all have flush toilets.  

We sprung for the deluxe package, which included mosquito nets and the A/C option and better mattresses.  Now, this was closer to deluxe camping than to a deluxe hotel.  There were showers, but they pull the water right out of the river.  They’ll heat it if you ask. The A/C only works until the generator goes off which is about 10 pm.  It is a great way to get off the grid, though.  No phones. No TV. No internet.  We had the realization too late, that if anything happened in the rest of the world, no one could reach us or knew where we were.  We’ll change that next time we head out.

There was an english speaking guide,  a captain, one crew and a cook who accompanied us. They were all amazingly attentive. The cook was great.  Everything we ate was delicious and they accommodated our dietary needs with no problem.

The first day we headed up the Sekonyer River, so named because a schooner sunk at its mouth
many years ago. We made one stop at an orangutan feeding station.  They’re trying to get these animals back into the wild, so they move the feeding stations further into the jungle and space out the feedings more.

Or, so they say.  I wonder how much money tours like ours bring in and what the interest is to make the orangutans truly wild.  I also wonder as their habitat is being chewed up an an astonishing rate by palm oil plantations and hard wood harvesting,  if this is truly an achievable goal. Nonetheless, we were able to get really close and we did see some orangutans in the wild and off the feeding station, so maybe it’s working.

At night, we moored on the side of the river under a full moon and played cards. We turned in early and rocked to sleep in the quiet. The only disturbance was a squad of boats hauling gravel for gold mining from mine upstream at 2 am. But it was cool to wake up with the birds and the primates.

The second day we caught two more feeding stations, including Camp Leakey, founded by Dr.  Galdikas for Orangutan research.  She, Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall all studied under the same mentor and were each assigned a primate to study.  She got orangutans and has studied them for the longest continuous period of research of any mammal.  


The highlight of the trip was at Camp Leakey when we got caught in an afternoon downpour.  We had just reached the feeding station when the rains came.  Out came the umbrellas and ponchos.  One female was eating and then ambled over toward the benches we were sitting at.  With one swift move she plunged into the crowd of people and snatched an umbrella from tourist to protect herself from the rain.  When a ranger came and got the umbrella back, she grabbed a branch and held it over her head.  It seems that Orangutans hate getting their faces wet.



The orangutans were the highlight, but we also saw proboscis monkeys, gibbons, lemurs, macaques, crocodiles, monitor lizards, wild boars, three-colored squirrels, hornbills, king fishers, and more butterflies than I’ve seen outside of those little museum exhibits. 

I'd often wondered how they get that camera footage on nature shows, but out there in the jungle there is just so much of it. Ants the size of quarters. Colonies of ants number in in the millions creating vast ant-superhighways up and down trees. Pitcher plants.

We saw this wasp that had just stunned a cicada. It proceeded to lay eggs inside the stricken bug and then buried the thing alive, so that when it's eggs hatched they'd have something to eat.


I'm telling you. It was a zoo trip through Disney’s Adventure Land!  An E-ticket ride.  If you’re in the area, you gotta do this trip.

And to think, there I was on the island of Borneo.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

New Year's Eve


New Years Eve in Jakarta is a pretty big deal.  It is not an official holiday, but they set up music stages up and down the one main road in the city effectively closing the street.  It is like an amped up  version of car-free day. No one can get anywhere after 2 or 3 so everyone goes home early.  


Everywhere in carts on the street, fireworks and noisemakers are for sale.  Anyone can get fireworks for cheap, cheap, cheap. And good fireworks, too! Some nice roman candles and rockets. You can get an armful for 20 or 30 bucks.  If you’re Indonesian, probably a lot less.  


So, a nice pyrotechnic display is accessible to the average guy.  


Now,  there are a number of larger public displays around town, but you really don’t need to go looking far.


The hour before midnight the sky is lit up across town with tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of private fireworks displays.  The air is filled with whistles, booms and cracks. It must be what a war zone sounds like. I can only imagine what it must have looked like above the trees, looking out across the city. I found a video, that give some idea, but I don’t think this does it justice. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrCqk13kwtE)


We got together with some friends for drinks and launched our own rockets adding to the cacophony.  We couldn’t really see much of the other displays, but we could hear them.  It’s my goal to see them next year.

Happy New Year!