Tuesday 28 October 2008

Salt of the Earth



The Nyadar Ceremony in Eastern Madura


Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, October 2008


http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/26/salt-the-earth.html


The village of Pinggir Papas is deserted. It is a stark place, near Sumenep in the far east of Madura, surrounded by a patchwork of glittering white salt pans, a barren and strangely wintry landscape, despite the fiery breeze.
Almost every adult in the village works in salt manufacture, a major industry here for centuries. On a normal day there would be dozens of figures at work out on the pans, raking over the drying crystals, shrouded against the blazing sun. But on this Friday afternoon in August there is no one, and in the village itself flimsy wooden doors are bolted and windows shuttered. The people of Pinggir Papas have important matters to attend to elsewhere.

The Nyadar ritual of Pinggir Papas is held three times each year between July and October, with dates specified according to the stages of the moon. The biggest ceremony comes in mid-August. The ritual is connected by legends to the coming of Islam, the founding of the salt industry and a history of warfare. It is at the heart of the salt makers’ identity.

The afternoon sun is dropping away to the west and the light is taking a copper-colored glow. The villagers are gathered on the banks of a muddy river that runs through the mangroves west of Pinggir Papas, the men dressed in sarongs and black pecis, the women carrying cloth-wrapped baskets. They are waiting for the fishing boats that will ferry them to the far shore, for Nyadar, though it is celebrated only by the people of Pinggir Papas, is held in the neighboring community of Kebun Dadap where the ancestors of the salt-makers are buried.
The ancestral tombs stand in a neat courtyard above the river. Kebun Dadap lies beyond the salty wastes of Pinggir Papas and here frangipani trees with sugar-white flowers break the fading sunlight. Red-tiled roofs and neatly painted white and green walls shelter the resting places of revered forebears. Most important of these is a man named Angga Suto.
Angga Suto – a local leader at some unspecified time in the early Second Millennium – is credited with both introducing Islam to Pinggir Papas, and inventing salt production. The story tells that he discovered the process after noticing that the seawater that filled his footprints in the clinging mud around the village evaporated to leave a crust of salt crystals. A commemoration of this man, and a thanksgiving for the salty prosperity of Pinggir Papas, is the focus of the Nyadar ritual.

Kebun Dadap, a village of simple white bungalows, is crowded. Nyadar is the most important time of year for the people of Pinggir Papas, and even those who have joined the huge Madurese diaspora return home for the celebration.
On a shaded pavilion outside the tomb compound, women are working to blend packages of leaves and petals – offerings for the ancestors – into one sacred mass. Each family has brought their own package, but it is handed over and added to the communal pile.
As evening approaches the crowd gathers before the gateway to the tombs. A dozen old men and women – direct descendents of the people buried here – hurry inside the compound to undertake secretive preparatory prayers. Overhead the sky is clear and pale and a full moon floats between the stands of bamboo.
A kyai – a village religious leader – conducts the waiting crowd through a chant of simple Arabic – la il aha il Allah – more and more urgently and insistently until the elders reemerge. Then the most dramatic element of Nyadar erupts: a hell-for-leather rush to enter the complex. All the usual conventions of deference collapse as men, women, young and old struggle to run through the narrow gateway and across the outer courtyard in search of a prime position within the inner sanctum. People push and shove, stumbling over gravestones and dragging others down with them. It looks more like a rugby scrum than a religious ceremony.
Once everyone is inside, a low hum of prayer begins to rise from the crowd. Offerings of petals and leaves are placed before the headstones, the tombs are doused with holy water from old brass pitchers, and villagers dab their ears and foreheads with rice-water – a strange echo of Hindu practice.
As darkness falls people filter back out and into the village and a bustling night market gets underway, the alleyways a mass of hissing paraffin lamps and glowing faces. But the people of Pinggir Papas do not return home. Instead they seek shelter in the houses of the Kebun Dadap locals – who play no other part in the Nyadar ceremonies – and begin to prepare for the second stage of the ritual.

***

The hint of Hindu practice in the Nyadar ritual may be more than a coincidence. Locals in Sumenep say that the people of Pinggir Papas speak an unusual dialect that “sounds like Balinese”.
According to legend, in the 1560s a Balinese army attacked Sumenep. A fleet of warships landed and Balinese soldiers torched fishing villages and advanced on the capital. But the Madurese defenders were victorious; the Balinese ships and camps were destroyed. Many of the invaders killed themselves rather than face defeat, but one small band fled from the battlefield to Pinggir Papas where they were given refuge on condition that they converted to Islam.

***

Saturday; the morning after the night before. The stalls of the night market have been cleared away; the alleyways of Kebun Dadap are silent and the villagers have returned to the area around the tombs. The ground is covered with upturned red and black baskets. During the night the Pinggir Papas people cooked a ceremonial meal of rice, chicken and eggs. This food, an offering to God and the ancestors, has been heaped on the platters known as panjeng that are the most important heirlooms of each Pinggir Pappas family. The red and black baskets have been placed over this food and the final stage of Nyadar is about to begin.
A group of elders in Balinese-style head-cloths enter the tomb compound to pray while the other villagers wait in the rising heat. Four ancient men are moving through the crowd. They are dressed in harlequin waistcoats dappled with rag-bag patches of color. On their heads are twists of gold and black batik. The hereditary duty of these men, called Pangolo, is to count the rice offerings.
As the elders return from the tombs everyone takes their place on the open ground under the trees, sitting cross-legged amongst the rice baskets, hands cupped in prayer. At the centre of the crowd the Kyai leads the ceremony, his head bowed. Clasped to his chest is a bulky object wrapped in tattered red cloth. It is said to be the sacred weapon of Angga Suto himself. The Kyai mutters a string of prayers and mantras. Fragments of different holy languages drift through the air: Arabic, Sanskrit and old Javanese.
When these prayers are finished the plates of rice – now imparted with the blessings of Nyadar – are uncovered and a chaos of chatter erupts as people hurriedly scoff a few symbolic mouthfuls. Then, with almost the same urgency that they rushed the tombs the night before, the rice is covered, wrapped and lifted onto heads and shoulders. The villagers dash to the river bank, eager to return to Pinggir Papas where the rice will be dried in the hot sun and a little added to the cooking pot each day throughout the coming year to ensure success and prosperity. Within half an hour Kebun Dadap is deserted, only a few scraps of leaves and paper to mark where the ritual took place.

For the people of Pinggir Papas the Nyadar ceremony is a celebration of their unusual heritage. Like so much in Indonesian religious practice, currents of older traditions run through it. For the locals however, Nyadar is very much part of Islam and the fact that their Hindu ancestors became Muslims as a condition of their asylum is an important point. But they are proud of their Balinese connection.

As the crowds disappear into the morning one Pinggir Papas man named Munir is still sitting in the shade of the pavilion in the graveyard, watching them go. He says that Nyadar is a sign of respect for the village ancestors, the leluhur, the people who came from Bali.
“Nyadar is the most important thing for Pinggir Papas people. Everyone must follow it, even if they have already left the village,” he says.
But Munir is not rushing back across the river to Pinggir Papas: he has lived in Kebun Dadap for a decade.
“My wife is from Kebun Dadap,” he says with a smile. “The Kebun Dadap people don’t join Nyadar, but there’s a connection between us because we stay in their village on the night of Nyadar.”
On that long murky night more than a few pairs of shy eyes meet over rice pots and panjeng. “There are lots of marriages between Pinggir Papas and Kebun Dadap people,” says Munir, grinning.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Travelling in Madura


Madura, Indonesia

Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, October 2008



http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/26/traveling-madura.html


There’s more to Madura than salt and ceremonies. The long, low island riding off the north coast of East Java has one of the worst reputations in Indonesia, renowned as a place of sharp tempers and sharper knives. Bull races, tasty sate, and even a certain much-mythologized quality in the local women fail to attract many visitors. For the most part Madura remains the butt of a bad joke. The reality is a different story. With two days to wait before the Nyadar ritual I set out to discover just how different.

It took four hours to drive the length of Madura by motorbike from Kamal in the west to Sumenep in the east, passing through fields of tobacco and Indian corn. Along the way I passed the head of the bridge that is gradually creeping across the Madura Straight and that will soon link the island with the Javanese mainland. It was dusk when I rode into Sumenep, the limestone hills inland rising stark against a fading sky.

Sumenep is the antithesis of all the negative myths about Madura. A refined and truly friendly town, here the familiar “hello mister!” was always backed up with a polite and interested engagement as I walked along the quiet streets.
Sumenep was once the centre of an independent kingdom and the town is still home to a fine kraton and a royal mosque. Locals are eager to point out that the reputation of Madurese as rough-spoken and aggressive only applies to the people from the west of the island. They are also genuinely proud of their courtly heritage, and the royal tombs on the hilltop of Asta Tinggi outside the town are a place of pilgrimage.

After a night in Sumenep I headed onto the back roads. In the port of Kalianget I paused in the shadow of derelict warehouses. This place was once the centre of the Dutch salt industry, and the roads were lined with colonial villas of shuttered windows and white columns.

The Madurese have been troublesome neighbors for centuries. During the Majapahit and Mataram eras Madura’s royals proved hard to control, refusing to pay tribute and sometimes crossing the Madura Straight at the head of rebel armies. This reputation as a wellspring of renegades and rabble-rousers, coupled with large-scale immigration from Madura in more recent years, goes some way to explain the nervousness felt by many Indonesians about the Madurese. On their own territory though, they are strikingly hospitable.

I made my way to the empty beach at Lombang at Madura’s eastern tip. There was no one about but a lone coconut seller snoozing under the trees behind the great expanse of yellow sand and bright, wind-charged ocean.
Beyond Lombang the light streamed through stands of palm trees and the road bent away in a strip of smooth blue asphalt, leading me to the village of Dasuk on the north coast. Here the narrow lanes splintered in different directions amongst the ricefields.
Stopping to ask directions, a man named Mosa’i invited me into his family compound, a place of soft sunlight and grinning children. The villagers were eager to chat, offering me tea and posing self-consciously for photographs.
Later Mosa’i led me to another hamlet where topeng dance masks have been made for centuries. The skill is a hereditary one, passed from father to son.
The villagers were amused by Madura’s fearsome reputation. It was true, they said, that all Madurese men knew how to wield the traditional sickle known as a clurit – in cultivation and in battle – and there had been conflicts in the past. But, they pointed out, there had been bloodshed everywhere in the past – even in England.
As I sat on a white veranda chatting with Mosa’i and another man named Hari, the sunlight slipped away from the village and the sky paled behind the palm trees. They invited me to stay the night, but the Nyadar ceremony was the following day and I wanted to return to Sumenep.
I left with an invitation to return the next time I was in Madura – and there surely would be a next time – and rode away along the field boundaries into the dusk.

******

Anyone thinking of visiting Madura would do well to contact Kurniadi Wijaya of the Sumenep tourist office. He’s a licensed guide and can organize tours, but will be just as happy to chat and prime independent travelers with invaluable information.He can be reached on 081 79330648 or at kurniadi@consultant.com


© Tim Hannigan 2008

Sunday 12 October 2008

The Place of White Wood



Fictional short story

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 12/10/08

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/12/short-story-the-place-white-wood.html


Three hundred years ago:

The coastline was long and pale and unmarked. A lean strip of sand faded in both directions and the branches of the trees behind it were white like bones. The schooner swung on its anchor rope in the running current beyond the turquoise of the shallows. They had ridden there through four tides; four times the flat stretch of grubby brown reef, picked over by white birds with long black legs, had opened between the boat and the hot shoreline, and four times it had been covered by bright, breeze-cut water.

The boy’s name was Salem. He was thirteen. He squatted on the warped planking of the deck where it swept towards the high white prow, squinting in the hard light, peering at the shore. The coarse ropes of the rigging slapped against the mast in the wind and the schooner smelt of tar and salt and sweat.
The other men, five of them, were sleeping through the white midday. They lay among the ropes and baskets at the rear of the deck. They were lean, sun-scarred men with thin, muscled arms and deep lines on their faces. They wore only short sarongs and white head cloths, bound loose over cropped black hair.
Salem squatted, and shaded his eyes and squinted at the long coastline. It was marked by nothing. There were no promontories or river mouths; no swelling headlands reared from the shore and there were no villages. But they were waiting for something.

His father called this blank coastline the Place of White Wood. Salem understood the name now as he looked out across the reef to the thin trees beyond the sand. They fronted a thicket of deep, dust-green, but their trunks and branches were the colour of the palest ash on the hearth in the morning. No hills or mountains rose inland and all that Salem could see of this unknown country was the empty beach and the white-boned trees.

Salem was of the Bugis people. They traded back and forth between the Islands in white boats. Salem’s father was born in Makassar and Salem was born in Bima. He had seen many ports before his tenth birthday, but he had never been this way before, had never travelled on the route his father had learnt from his grandfather: due south across empty ocean to the Place of White Wood.

The journey had been long. After Sumba the sun had beaten away to the north behind them and at night great smears of stars twisted above the schooner’s snapping rigging. Once, in the middle of the ocean, they passed a strange piece of shoal ground, all boiling white water under a wheeling chaos of seabirds. But beyond that there was nothing, and the trade wind chased them south and the men spoke less and the light was sharper every day. Salem came almost to believe that they were the last men on earth, aboard the last boat in the ocean. And then they smelt the land. It smelt of charcoal and honey.
They anchored off the edge of the shallow water and the schooner swung to the current and the rigging rattled in the breeze and the reef opened and closed and opened and closed in the tide.
“When will we go ashore?” Salem asked.
“Not yet,” said his father.

He watched the coastline and his eyes ached and flickers of darkness played at the edge of his vision. The slack of the high water at midday came and went and the flow of the tide changed and the dark blotches of the reef began to show in the shallows. And then, quite suddenly Salem saw the people.
First there was just one upright outline, black against the white of the sand at the water’s edge. Then another came slowly from the edge of the forest. Then another, and another, and two small ones, and another until there were nine of them: black silhouettes moving very slowly in the yellow heat. Salem could see no cloth and no colour; they looked like fragments of the blackest of the forest’s shadow that had broken free and drifted onto the salt-crusted shoreline.
Salem hissed through his teeth. “Look! Look! There are people!”
The men shifted and stretched among the ropes and baskets and Salem’s father hitched and retied his sarong, peering at the beach.
“We’ll go ashore now,” he said.

They paddled across the reef in a pair of small canoes, dipping the paddles into the bright water. The smell of charcoal and honey came stronger. The canoes ground onto the hot white beach and they stepped lightly over the hissing edge of the water. The black figures were standing in ragged formation on the sand, looking towards the Bugis.
“Come on,” Salem’s father said. Each sailor took one of the rough bundles from the canoes. “Go quietly,” he said, and they moved towards the black men, and came to stand before them in their own rough alignment.
“As-salaam aleikum,” Salem's father said.
The man standing before him did not reply. None of them replied.
Salem stared, shyly, nervously.
They were all naked – four men, three women, and two children, and they looked like no people Salem had ever seen. Their skin was the colour of coal dust and it did not shine in the sunlight. Their long arms hung loose at their sides; their thin legs bulged in odd places and their bodies formed heavy blocks against straight spines.
Salem’s father unwrapped the cloth bundle he carried. Inside were a pair of iron axes and a long-bladed knife for cutting cane. He held them out to the black man at the head of the group, who took them, handled them uncertainly, then passed them back to the others behind him. Salem’s father hissed and called the crewmen forward, taking each of the bundles, unwrapping them and passing what was inside to the naked stranger. There were more knives and axes, and some strips of good cloth, and blocks of rank tobacco. The black man handled each object, and passed each to his companions until all of the bundles had been unwrapped. Then without speaking or nodding or making any acknowledgement all nine turned and moved away slowly down the beach with their strange, bow-legged gait, carrying the gifts with them, axes and knives swinging loose at the end of long, thin arms.
The Bugis watched them go for a moment, blinking in the sunlight.
“We can work now,” said Salem’s father.

***

The tide was low in the evening and the whole reef was dry and flat and long. The sun had fallen away into the west over the empty ocean and the fading light had a purple tone. The wind had gone now and the sea was smooth offshore and the men were out on the reef, filling their baskets.
Salem was on the sand, cooking the fish they had caught over a fire beside the beached canoes. He had had to go a little way into the forest to collect the wood for the fire. The ground was dry underfoot and the branches were full of the calls of strange, unknown birds. The forest was open and he could have walked away into it quite easily. The trunks of the trees were white.
Salem’s father came up the beach from the edge of the reef with another basket of sea cumbers. They were strange things, neither animal nor fruit nor plant, but they fetched a good price with the Chinese traders of the Islands.
Salem’s father sat down beside him where he knelt to tend the fire. “Did you go into the forest?” he asked.
“Just a little way, not far.”
His father nodded. “Be careful in there.”
Further down the beach the black figures had appeared again, but they did not look towards the Bugis and they were moving away slowly along the coast in the other direction. The women walked along the very edge of the reef, pausing to pick at something from time to time; the two children trotted ahead of them. A pair of lean, yellow dogs came down out of the trees and loped behind them.
“What are these people called?” Salem asked, watching them go.
His father shook his head; “People of White Wood. I don’t know what they call themselves.”
They were just black shapes on the fading shore now. “They… they are people aren’t they?” Salem asked, uncertainly.
“Surely.”
“But they don’t have any villages? Any towns? Do they have kings?”
Again his father shook his head. “Nobody knows.”
The fire crackled and Salem turned the fish on the cross-branches he had rigged for cooking. There was a band of pale orange light along the horizon and the rigging of the schooner, riding offshore, was stark against the sky. Flocks of black birds were beating along the line of the coast. Salem glanced back at the forest. It was very dark now, but the trunks of the foremost trees were whiter than ever.
“What is behind the forest?” he asked.
“Nothing,” his father said, stretching out on the cooling sand. “My father told me that when our people first came here they went with the black men. They wanted to meet their king because they wanted to ask permission to work on this coast. The black men took them into the forest.”
“What happened?”
“They travelled for many, many days.”
“Did they meet the king?”
Salem’s father smiled. “There was no king. There was nothing but forest. It did not end; it went on forever. They travelled for many days, always in the forest. Sometimes they crossed shallow rivers, but the water was not good. My father said that when the black men made camp at night they did not even have blankets; they just slept on the ground with nothing to cover them.
“Eventually, when they were already far from the sea, our people realised that the black men were not taking them to their king, or to their village; they were not taking them anywhere: they just didn’t know how to tell our people to stop following them.”
The black people were just thin stick figures in the distant dusk now, still moving on down the beach away from them.
Salem nodded in the direction they were moving, “What is further on, along this coast? There must be ports or villages.”
His father reached out towards the fire – “Is that fish ready? Don’t burn it!” –then he looked on down the coastline and shook his head. “There is nothing. My father told me that this coastline goes on forever.”
The other Bugis were coming in off the reef now, lugging their loaded baskets of sea cucumbers towards the beach, following the good smell of the cooking fish.
“I don’t understand,” said Salem, watching them. “Our people are everywhere in the Islands. If this place has good fishing, and if there is no king, why don’t we build villages here?”
Salem’s father smiled and his teeth showed white in the smoky dusk. “Because,” he said, “this is not our country.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Monday 6 October 2008

Madura – a Much Maligned Island.


The little-visited island of Madura


Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, October 2008


People warned me not to go to Madura. It was hot and dirty, they said, with nothing to see. And the inhabitants of the long, low island that lies off the north coast of Java were rude, aggressive, and possibly even dangerous. But none of the people who told me these things had ever been there. I was looking for an off-the-beaten-track destination easily accessible from East Java, and the terrible rumours only made me inquisitive: I went, and I discovered how wrong people were about Madura…

Madura is dwarfed by its southern neighbour, Java, but it is a big place, 160km long and 35 km wide. The gateway to the island is the sprawling East Java capital of Surabaya, a thirty-minute flight from Bali. Madura is just twenty minutes from Surabaya by ferry across a narrow channel crowded with shipping, but it is a world away from the hectic metropolis.
Madura is overwhelmingly rural, with small, orderly towns, far removed from the gridlocked cities of Java. A ridge of low limestone hills runs its length, cloaked in dry forest, and the level plains are a patchwork of rice fields and villages. And as I travelled east from the ferry port at Kamal, the first thing I noticed was just how beautiful it was. The fields were heavy with ripening rice, running out to banks of dark trees, and neat clusters of whitewashed, red-tiled houses stood back from the road. Inland there were craggy outcrops of weathered stone, and by scrambling to the top of one of these I was rewarded with a fabulous panorama of forest and fields sprawling south to the pale blue of the channel. There was no sign of the filth and squalor people in Java and Bali had warned me of; in fact it all seemed remarkably neat. And as for the infernal heat – well, this was Indonesia after all, so of course it was hot, but a light breeze was stirring the treetops, and there was not even a whiff of traffic fumes!
I travelled on eastward sometimes passing close to the coast, sometimes bending inland. In the late afternoon I reached my destination, the little town of Sumenep.

Sumenep is definitely the best destination in Madura, a grid of clean, lazy streets where brightly decorated becak (pedicabs) trundle by. It was here that I chose to spend a couple of nights. Virtually no tourists visit Madura – perhaps put off by the ill-informed stories of Indonesians from other parts of the country. But there are a few simple hotels scattered through the towns, and it took no time to find a bed.
Sumenep was a wonderfully friendly town. People were not used to foreign visitors, but they were eager to chat and as I wandered the streets I was met with warm greetings. It seemed that the negative stories I had heard about the Madurese people were far from the truth.
Sumenep has a handful of interesting sights, and the next morning I wandered from the crowded traditional market at Pasar Anom to the remarkable Mejid Jamik, the town’s oldest mosque. The mosque was built in the 18th Century by the ruler of East Madura, and it is fronted by a remarkable tiered gateway of stark white edged with yellow. It seemed to glow in the morning sunlight. Not far from the mosque is the keraton, the palace, a miniature version of the famed royal houses of Yogyakarta and Solo. I wandered the cool hallways, admiring the fine woodwork, and the decorations of the little pavilions in the courtyard outside, shaded by towering banyan trees. I found more notable architecture on an airy hilltop on the edge of town where the members of the old royal dynasty that once ruled Madura are buried. The mausoleums were crowded with pilgrims who come here to pray at the graves, and to make offerings of delicate flower petals.

Sumenep was a charming little place, and I wondered why it saw so few visitors, but once I headed out into the countryside beyond the town I became more bemused by Madura’s lack of tourists. The eastern part of the island is gorgeous. Narrow lanes wind through stands of tall palm trees, and cut through level rice fields of rich emerald green; side tracks open suddenly to gentle coastline and blue water, the horizon marked by the offshore islands of the tantalising Kangean Archipelago.
At Lombang Beach at the eastern tip of Madura a great sweep of yellow sand lies in front of a bank of whispering casuarinas trees, and following the rough track north along the coast from there, I found many other tiny beaches, utterly deserted beside the wide blue of the Java Sea. The next day too as I travelled on along the north coast road, passing through fields, palm stands and bustling fishing villages with inlets crowded with traditional white boats, I passed many stretches of clean, empty sand.

Madura is famous for a few things. Its crafts are renowned. In the little hamlet of Tajjian I was shown the intricately carved and decorated masks known as topeng, used in the dance versions of the great Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Villagers in East Madura have passed the skill of carving from generation to generation for hundreds of years, and traders from Yogyakarata and beyond still make their way there to buy the pieces. Madura is also famous for its batik. The silks and cottons here are decorated with some of the most elaborate and intricate designs anywhere in Indonesia. Motifs of birds and flowers in rich, deep colours are the norm, and in the batik-making village of Tanjungbumi with its warren of whitewashed alleyways, I was shown some of the most gorgeous pieces of cloth I had seen, far more impressive than the staid, formal designs of mainland Java.
Another famous Madurese export is its food. Throughout the archipelago simple stalls sell sate and sotto, renowned Madura specialities. But of course, locals will tell you, it is only on the island itself that you can taste the little kebabs of skewered chicken, and the deliciously fresh-tasting chicken soup as they should be eaten.

And Madura is famous for one more thing; indeed it has only one acknowledged tourist attraction: bull racing. As an agricultural heartland cattle have always been important on Madura, and out of a fun way to plough the rice fields a spectacular, high-octane sport developed. Every year in the Dry Season great championships are held in the towns of Madura where teams of two bulls and a man race a astonishing speeds across a hundred-metre course.

There were no bull races when I went to Madura, but I didn’t care. I had discovered that the island had a wealth of other attractions. There was beautiful countryside, pleasant, slow-paced towns and a cluster of historical sights; the food was good and the traditional crafts were still practiced as they always had been, without the effects of mass tourism. The coastline was dotted with clean, unspoilt beaches, and the whole island was the ideal place to sample a traditional part of Indonesia completely untouched by tourists. And above all, the people were delightful. Everywhere I went there was open hospitality and good humour.
As I made my way back to the western part of the Island, and back across the channel to the chaos of Surabaya, I was very glad I hadn’t listened to the terrible rumours.


© Tim Hannigan 2008

Sunday 5 October 2008

The overlooked attractions of Central Java's north coast


Semarang and the Gedong Songo Temples

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 5/10/08


http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/05/the-overlooked-attractions-central-java039s-north-coast.html


The gunpowder smell of fresh rain in the night air hit me as I climbed down from the train in Semarang. By the time I reached the station gates and had clambered into a waiting becak (pedicab), a thunderous - and highly unseasonable - downpour had begun.

I peered from beneath the becak's dripping hood as it rolled along the empty streets. This was an old city, and I caught glimpses of heavy Dutch rooflines, crumbling columns and arched windows. Shadowy figures sheltered beneath shuttered balconies, and other becaks rolled swiftly through the wet night, their drivers straining urgently at the peddles.

I stopped at the only place open on this dark street: a cafe in a high-ceilinged old building with slow-circling fans. The walls were decorated with photographs of Semarang in years past, and the cafe was known simply as "No. 29" (opposite Blenduk Church). I ordered a plate of juicy sate and a glass of iced tea, and sat peering out at the wet darkness. The rain continued to fall.

Semarang is not high on any must-see list for travelers. Overshadowed by its southern counterpart, the touristic behemoth of Yogyakarta, it's easy to forget that this coastal city of 1.5 million people is the capital of Central Java, and one of the oldest settlements in Indonesia.

With a couple of days to spare I had decided to eschew the more obvious attractions of Yogyakarta to see what this lesser-known place and its surrounds had to offer - if only it would stop raining!

Colonial history, Chinese culture

To my relief, the dry season returned the following morning. I picked my way over the puddles back into the old part of the city - still sometimes known by its Dutch name, the Outstadt.

While Yogyakarta is a truly Javanese city, Semarang is the archetypal port, built on colonialism and immigration.

Semarang's history can be traced back to the first millennium - ancient by Indonesian standards - but it was in the colonial era when trade networks spread from the harbors of Java that it came into its prime.

The ruler of the ailing Mataram kingdom, Amangkurat I, ceded Semarang to the Dutch in 1677 after they came to his aid against the Madurese renegade Trunajaya. Semarang soon developed into a seat of colonial government and commerce.

The loudest echoes from this era can be felt around Jl Jendral Suprapto, the street that my becak had rolled along through the rain the previous evening.

The atmospheric gloom had cleared with the dawn, but what had been ominous silhouettes in the wet darkness, now revealed themselves as fine 18th and 19th Century buildings.

This was an area of hipped roofs, stocky columns and some of the finest Dutch domestic architecture I had seen in Indonesia. Best of the colonial buildings was Gereja Blenduk, the domed Church of Immanuel opposite the cafe where I had eaten the night before. Built in 1753, it is still one of the most important Protestant churches in Semarang.

Its heavyset white clock towers and red brick dome were bright against a clear blue sky.

Wandering along narrower alleyways south of the church, I found my way to the edge of the river that once carried trading ships into the very heart of the city. This was an area of tiny doorways and outdoor kitchens. Fighting cocks preened themselves haughtily under wicker baskets and finches twittered in bamboo cages hanging from trees.

I followed the river south to the 18th Century Tay Kak Sie Chinese temple. It is an impressive building with dragons writhing along its bowed roofline. Inside, old ladies raised bunches of smoking joss sticks before the altars while old men with bony knees sprawled on benches outside. The air was thick with the heavy scent of incense.

Semarang has a large ethnic Chinese population. There is a suggestion that the name of the place may be a corruption of that of the famous Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who came here in the 15th Century and to whom another temple on the outskirts of the city is dedicated.

Across the river I wandered into Chinatown. Here there were old shop-houses and more temples at unexpected street corners. Flashes of red and gold showed above the counters of pharmacies and hardware stores.

Semarang's modern center lies to the south of all this history, focused on the broad expanse at the heart of Simpang Lima, a five-road intersection lined with hotels and malls.

Shopping is not my scene, so after tracking down an edible souvenir, the local speciality known as wingko babad - small, sticky coconut-flavored cakes - I retreated north and took refuge in another relic of the colonial age.

Toko Oen is a venerable institution, a restaurant that has hardly changed since it opened its doors in 1936. The heat and traffic noise seemed to stay respectfully outside and four superannuated Chinese women sat dabbing at homemade ice cream at a table near the door. I slipped into a creaking wooden chair and settled down to read the newspaper over coffee and cakes.

Hindu temples at high altitude

The next morning I headed for the hills. Yogyakarta may have Borobudur, but Semarang has its own classical temples within easy reach of the city.

A battered local bus carried me south. Ahead, the ghostly outline of Gunung Ungaran formed like a photograph from the haze, and soon we were rattling along a rising road through green forests. Just beyond the little hill resort of Bandungan, 45 minutes from Semarang, I left the bus and took a motorbike taxi up a narrow lane through fields of cabbage and potatoes, into the clouds.

It was a weekday afternoon and the cool hamlet of Duran, 1200 meters above the sizzling coastal plain, was deserted. I left my bag in a little caf* on the edge of an empty car park at the end of the road, and made my way uphill to the temples of Gedong Songo.

Strung out among the pine trees and terraces above Duran, these 8th Century Hindu temples have a truly stunning location. And as the light faded and skeins of damp mist crept down the high slopes, I was the only person there to enjoy it.

Gedong Songo means "nine buildings" in Javanese, something that may puzzle modern visitors: There are only six distinct temple groups. It is said that the name has its origins in the dubious counting skills of early Dutch surveyors who ignored the more evocative local name: Candi Banyukuning, Temples of the Yellow Water.

These finely decorated temples were dedicated to the worship of Shiva. Bug-eyed demons grimaced above entranceways and naga or dragons flanked the steps. In the wall, niches carvings of Ganesh (Shiva's elephant-headed son) and the goddess Durga had survived, all with swollen bellies and tilted hips.

Inside the empty inner chamber of one the buildings, a small pile of petals and a curl of incense ash showed that someone was still venerating these places.

I picked my way along the white stripe of the footpath, zigzagging through the forest. The valley below had disappeared under smears of bruised cloud and the pine trees hung limp in the damp air. There was a faint odor of sulfur. I found its source - and that of the temples' old name - at the bottom of a narrow ravine where smoke was issuing from the cracked rocks, and steaming water was bubbling in shallow, yellowish pools.

There was a small bathing pool here where the geothermally heated water was at perfect bath temperature for this cool climate. After a relaxing dip I hurried downhill and found a clean, quiet guesthouse in the village.

Mountain vistas at dawn

A crimson stain was seeping along the eastern edge of the morning as I hurried uphill at first light. The blue mist of the evening had gone and the only mark on the slopes was the sulphury smoke from the hot springs.

It was cold and I kept moving swiftly until I reached the temple on the highest ridge. Shards of sunlight were spilling across the mountainside now and a warming breeze was lifting from the valley.

A sea of pale cloud all but covered the landscape of fields and forests below, but I could just pick out the faded mirror of Rawa Pening Lake away to the south. Beyond it, rising in a smooth purple cone was the high summit of Gunung Merbabu, and peering over its western shoulder, trailing a smudge of pale smoke, was the belligerent peak of Merapi. To the west another pair of high volcanoes - Sumbing and Sundoro near Wonosobo - were slipping away into the rising morning.

Semarang might not have a kraton (palace) or endless reams of batik, but it has palpable relics of another side of Javanese history. And if the dignified remains of the Gedong Songo don't match the giddying splendor of Borobudur, they do occupy one of the most stunning locations in Java.

As I sat there, alone and untroubled, the warmth of the new sun on my face, the sound of insects creaking in the forest, I thought of the hordes of sweating sightseers that would already be swarming up the steps
of Borobudur, just 50 kilometers to the south. I was glad that I had come here - and it had stopped raining!

© Tim Hannigan 2008