Words and Images

Hunting the Great Game in Gilgit Baltistan

2012-01-22T21:20:00.000-08:00

Looking for Traces of George Hayward and 19th centruy geopolitics in Northern Pakistan

Originally published in Humsafar, inflight magazine of Pakistan International Airlines, January 2012

http://www.piac.com.pk/

The minibus turns another corner on the narrow mountain road, and the valley opens ahead. The Ghizr River is a turbulent, cobalt-blue streak between smooth boulders; stark, iron-grey slopes rise on either side to snow-streaked ridges, and long lines of poplar trees line the irrigation ditches. The clear sky, arching over everything, is the colour of lapis lazuli.
From my seat in the minibus I peer out at the hard, stirring landscape. I am deep in Gilgit-Baltistan, heading west towards Gupis and the Yasin Valley. This wildly remote region, where the world’s three highest mountain ranges – the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush – lock together in a knot of sparring ridges, is Pakistan’s mountain fastness.
For decades trekkers, mountaineers, photographers and cultural tourists have journeyed here to take on testing trails and perilous peaks, or to seek out warm welcomes and old traditions in remote villages. But I am here in search of history, for Gilgit-Baltistan was the crucible of one of the most fascinating chapters of the 19th century, an episode steeped in romance, intrigue and adventure. I am heading deep into the Hindu Kush to trace echoes of the Great Game.

***

The Great Game – a term popularised by Rudyard Kipling – was the period of imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia when spying, soldiery and science were stirred together into a heady brew of adventure. From the early 1800s both powers expanded their reach into the region, by stealth as much as by outright conquest. The area that now forms Gilgit-Baltistan lay at the very crux of the entire Asian mountain system. It was a wildly remote region, but to have knowledge of its rivers, its passes, and its chieftains was to have the upper hand in the colonial game-play. And so a steady trickle of European and local travellers snuck into the region with hidden compasses and secret orders. They were spectacularly hardy men who crossed mountains with minimal equipment, shrugged off the threat of assassination, and spent months or even years away from home, just to bring back some titbit of information of interest to politicians and geographers.
The Great Game was a wildly adventurous episode, a boys’ own adventure story made real. And today, more than a century after the game came to an end, a hint of the old romance still endures in the mountains of Pakistan’s far north.

***

My journey had begun in Gilgit, the town that has always been the hub of these mountains. Today it is the place where the Karakoram Highway meets other tenuous roads, east to Skardu, and west to Chitral. It is also the terminus for one of the world’s most spectacular air journeys – PIA’s mountain-hopping flight from Islamabad.
In the heyday of the Great Game, however, getting here usually required a 22-day trek from Srinagar, across the Burzil Pass and the Deosai Plateau, and down the hair-raising Astor Valley. The first foreigner to record a visit came in 1866. He was a gloriously eccentric figure called Dr Gottlieb Leitner. A short-statured German academic, he had arrived in the area to study the languages, and made it to Gilgit with nothing more than three jars of Bovril in his pockets. Leitner was the first to sample the hospitality which still makes Gilgit-Baltistan legendary amongst travellers today. The locals treated him to a feast of roast sheep, and a rousing display of traditional music and dance; it was enough to convince him, and he spent the rest of his career championing their cause against the machinations of the distant masters of the Great Game.
Gilgit has grown exponentially since Leitner’s day, but wandering its bustling bazaars, I discovered that the frontier atmosphere and the old hospitality still endured. At every turn burly men with fair skin and pale eyes – a legacy, the locals like to claim, of lost legions of Alexander the Great – called me aside to drink sweet milky tea and chat.
The streets were a colourful chaos of gloriously decorated Suzuki minivans and buzzing motorbikes. Vendors pushed carts loaded with apples and pomegranates, and the smell of fresh bread and sizzling kebabs wafted out from the smoky chaikhanas. Here and there a stern, upright soldier or policeman trotted through the crowds on an elegant polo pony – for Gilgit is a stronghold of the unruly mountain version of the Game of Kings.

***

In the decades after Leitner a long litany of eccentric travellers, most of them British, visited the area around Gilgit. There was John Biddulph, the first British resident of Gilgit, who spent several lonely years there compiling reports and laying out rose gardens in the 1870s; he was followed by the Lockhart mission, a military expedition of stern men with plus-fours and magnificent moustaches, who sketched and surveyed their way up and down the same valleys that would tantalise trekkers of later generations. And then there was one of the best known of all Great Game figures, the mighty Sir Francis Younghusband.
Younghusband entered Gilgit-Baltistan through the back door, scraping across the Muztagh Pass in the Karakoram. He wrote of the view from the top of the pass that “For mountain majesty and sheer sublimity that scene could hardly be excelled”. Anyone who sees the high peaks of this upland wilderness today would have to agree with him.
Younghusband was bound for the fabled kingdom of Hunza for negotiations with its ruler, the Mir. His visit perhaps marked the highpoint of the Great Game – a Russian agent, Grombchevski, was loitering in the same area, and had also been courting the Mir, and the stakes were high. Ultimately it was the British who gained the upper hand. By the turn of the 20th century the Great Game was over, and the Gilgit region had been thrown under the rule of the Maharaja of Kashmir and his British suzerains.
But even so, in the villages and on the mountainsides of Hunza it is still easy to imagine the era when shadowy groups of men crept over the passes with small yak caravans and hidden map-making equipment.

***

My own journey into Gilgit-Baltistan was in the footsteps of one of the most mysterious of all Great Game figures. Three years after Leitner a strange, intense 31-year-old Yorkshireman named George Hayward arrived in the region. He had been sponsored by London’s Royal Geographical Society to explore the Pamir Mountains, but his previous attempts to get there – through the Northwest Frontier and Xinjiang – had been thwarted. Now he was trying to get through the passes beyond Gilgit. After wanding into the stormy political waters of the region Hayward found himself on the wrong side of just about everyone – the British, the Maharaja of Kashmir, and the locals. He was murdered in circumstances that have never been properly explained at the head of the Yasin Valley, west of Gilgit in 1870.
And so now, many decades later, I am tracing his final journey. It has taken me deep into some of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen, along the banks fo the Ghizr River, west from Gilgit towards the Shandur Pass, and then north into the remote, otherworldly Yasin Valley.
In Hayward’s day this was an independent kingdom; today it is still a world apart. The lower regions of the valley are thick with poplar and willow trees, their autumnal leaves glowing like molten copper in the sharp mountain sunlight. As I explore the small, stone-walled villages that dot the valley, the local people welcome me into their homes. I am treated to a spot of traditional culture at a village wedding, with the same kind of music and dance Leitner saw almost 150 years ago, and given sweet pomegranates and juicy apples at every turn.
The very last part of the journey takes me north along the valley to the tiny village of Darkot. This was the place where Hayward died – and the exact location of his death is still remembered by the locals: they call it Feringhi Bar, “the Foreigner’s Valley”. Hayward’s visit may have ended in catastrophe, but mine turns out very well indeed, with a warm welcome that Leitner would have enjoyed, and a mountain view that Younghusband would have appreciated.
Sitting high above the valley I look out on a sweep of rugged peaks, the white curve of a glacier, and a series of tantalising passes – west to Chitral, east to Ishkoman and Hunza, and north towards the Pamirs. History may have moved on, and the Great Game may be over, but the mountains have not changed.

Potholes, Puddles and Punctures

2012-01-05T23:35:00.000-08:00

A Javanese Motorbike Odyssey

Originally Published in Asian Geographic Passport November 2011

http://www.asiangeopassport.com/index.phtml

Skeins of white mist swept across the road and the engine of my motorbike strained as I leant through another uphill bend. Below me a convoy of trucks was struggling through the switchbacks, and a troop of macaque monkeys watched lazily from the verge as I passed, their olive-grey fur beaded with dew. The steep slopes of the tea gardens faded into the cloud on either side.

I had set out from Jakarta at first light, and now, four hours later in a filling morning, I was approaching the symbolic starting point of my journey – the 1500 meter Puncak Pass, the portal to the great green uplands of Java. A few more hairpins, a few more stands of threadbare pine trees, and I reached the watershed. As I rode across it the weather changed instantly. The chilly mist cleared and a great bowl of green land opened below, the red-tiled roofs of villas and villages huddling under stands of dark trees, the raised beds of onion fields patching the hillsides, and the smooth blue strip of the road rolling away into a lost distance. I was relieved that my bike had survived the first steep ascent, but a shot of nervous excitement sparked in my belly.

Java is the green, temple-studded loadstone of Indonesia, a rough oblong of land swimming on its side under the equator, and held in place by a pair of huge urban anchors at either end of its muddy northern littoral – Jakarta in the west, Surabaya in the east. Over the coming week I would be exploring the wilder spaces between these monumental metropolises, choosing the byways over the highways, steering clear of big city gridlock, and plotting a course that followed the mountain spine of the island.
The bike I was riding was not some throbbing Harley or high caliber trail bike; it was a little 100cc Honda, the ubiquitous step-through run-around known in Indonesia as a bebek, or “duck”. What it lacked in horsepower it made up for in utility; more than 5 million of these bikes are sold in Indonesia every year. I had a map of Java clipped under the handlebars and a full tank of petrol. This was easy rider, Java style; it would be a 1450-kilometre odyssey of puddles, potholes and punctures.

***

Little more than 24 hours later I was already wondering why I had ever started out on such a big journey on such a little bike.
My first day’s ride from the heights of Puncak had been exactly what I had had in mind when first I pored over the maps. I had bowled through the green belly of the Preanger Highlands – a soft landscape under a lavender chiffon of haze, where busy, coffee-cultured streams cut through palm-clogged gorges – then banked north though blue-tinted pineapple fields across the flanks of the Tangkuban Prahu volcano, tracing my way through a web of back roads between stands of tall bamboo and villages where bone-white mosques stood alone in the rice fields. At dusk I had rolled into the old royal city of Cirebon, on the edge of the Java Sea, where I fell asleep in a cheap hotel with visions of empty roads unrolling before my eyes.

The following morning I wandered Cirebon’s faded royal palaces, places of old Dutch tile-work and cobwebby corners, and breakfasted on a spicy local specialty called nasi lengko, a refreshingly sour mix of steamed rice, fried tofu, beansprouts, soy sauce and chili. And then I set out east along the main coastal highway, passing inlets clotted with candy-cultured fishing boats, before branching steeply uphill into the mountains.

It had looked an appealing route on the map – a line cutting straight up the flanks of the main volcanic massif of Central Java to the upland fastness of Dieng – and at first it was. The rumbling trucks and gritty fumes of the highway were soon forgotten as I looped back and forth through stands of cool forest.
But then the road went to pieces. It was as if someone had simply peeled the tarmac away to leave nothing but a strip of jagged, football-sized rocks, rising at a near impossible angle. And so now here I was, wrestling with the shuddering handlebars as I edged upwards in first gear, fervently wishing I had a bigger bike. The engine screamed; an alarming smell of burning rubber rose, and to make matters worse, it started to rain.
It was already late afternoon, and I was making agonizingly slow progress. There were no villages along this tortuous track; the thought of a puncture or breakdown here was enough to prompt panic, but it was too late to turn back. Great grey cataracts of rain washed around me, and the temperature dropped dramatically as I climbed. In places the road was so rough and steep that I had to get down and push the bike between the boulders. The whole trip began to seem like a very bad idea indeed.

But finally, with great relief, I crossed the threshold in fading daylight and returned to a smooth surface. The rain was still sheeting down, but for a moment an unearthly vista opened ahead: rank after rank of swollen pine-lined ridges with tin-roofed villages tucked against their flanks, all bathed in the amber syrup of a hidden sunset. I was deep in the mountain hinterland of Java now, some 2000 meters above sea level.
I rolled into the chilly, rain-lashed village of Dieng in a blanketing darkness, and just meters short of the guesthouse I got my first puncture. It couldn’t have happened in a better place…

***

The Dieng Plateau is a strange mountain fastness; a patch of marshy, table-flat land ringed by pine-covered ridges in the belly of an ancient volcano. It is a place of running mists, turquoise lakes, and fractured hillsides where volcanic mud bubbles from the fissures. It is also home to some of the oldest temples in Indonesia. Before the arrival of Islam, Java was ruled by a succession of Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms. In the 8th Century Dieng was a holy place, and hundreds of temples were built around the plateau.
In the bleached chill of the morning I wandered amongst the weathered remnants of this lost era while a mechanic in the village patched my punctured tire. And then I set out along a route that whipped in great arcs through the mountains, passing the neat little town of Wonosobo, and cutting between the giant peaks of Sumbing and Sundoro.

I had slipped into the rhythm of my journey now, momentum bearing me through little country towns with mosques and churches. Java is the most densely populated island on earth, home to 136 million people. But often, pausing on the elbow of some mountain road, I found myself wondering where exactly all these inhabitants were.

That evening I reached the old royal city of Solo, once the seat of the mighty Mataram kingdom, the last major power in Java before the inexorable ascent of the Dutch in the 18th Century. I was halfway through my journey.

***

Over the coming days I crossed more mountain passes, and passed through more stands of green forest. On the slopes of Gunung Lawu, high above Solo, I wandered amongst the strange freak-show of carvings at the Candi Sukuh temple, one of the last to be built in Java before Hinduism gave way to Islam in the 15th Century. Elsewhere on the same slopes I came to another temple, Candi Cetho, perched on a high promontory above the tea gardens. A hard wind was gusting up from the plains below, and whispering through the pine trees, and the rising basalt terraces seemed deserted. But there were piles of petals in the inner recesses: this was still an active place of worship, for the little hamlet at the temple gates is home to one of the last indigenous Hindu communities in Java. This inaccessible spot lay above the tideline of Islamic conversion.

I spent a night in the little hill resort of Tawangmanggu, and feasted on rabbit sate with peanut sauce – a traditional mountain dish in Java – and in a damp morning, with shifting strips of mist snaking over the slopes, I crossed the watershed into East Java Province. I was south of the main mountain chain now, and the countryside was lusher than ever. Mineral-laden run-off from the mountains gives Java some of the richest soils on earth; this is a place where fertility has reached the point of infestation: banana plants sprout unbidden in the ditches, and given half a chance roots and creepers will tear a road to pieces in a few short seasons.

***

The low murmur of chanting in Javanese, and the sweet whiff of incense rose in the hot morning air. A thunderstorm in the night had left puddles between the paving stones, but they were steaming dry in the sharp sunlight. I was at the tomb of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president. He died in 1970, and was buried next to his mother in his childhood hometown, Blitar. Today Sukarno’s reputation stretches beyond the secular: thousands of pilgrims visit his tomb – sheltered beneath a mighty Javanese joglo pavilion – to pray, scatter offerings of petals, and to absorb a little of the great man’s karisma.

I had spent the night in Blitar. It was the archetypal Javanese town with a grid of neat streets lined with colonial-era bungalows, a central alun-alun – a grassy square studded with huge banyan trees – and an easy pace.
I wandered through the town in the morning, feasting on the local delicacy, nasi pecel – rice with fresh greens, crackers, and a peanut and chili sauce that manages to be as fiery as a Sukarno speech and as fresh as a mountain breeze all at the same time. Then I clambered back into the saddle and headed north. My arms were scorched now from the long days of riding in the hot tropical sun, my bike was lagged with dried mud, and my map of Java was torn, stained and crumpled. But as I bore past the mighty Majapahit-era temple at Penataran, knee-deep in the rice fields north of Blitar, and rode onwards through stands of white-barked trees and long avenues of sugarcane, and down sandy tracks where old women in cultured sarongs ambled flat-footed between red-roofed houses, I was full of the sheer pleasure of the journey.

Many visitors to neighboring Bali are given the impression that Java is little more than an urban hell of monstrous megalopolises and howling highways. But most of the island – once you break free of the main thoroughfares – is a place of soft, calm greenery, warm light and sweet black coffee. It was my battered little motorbike that had let me access this world.

I was lingering over my journey now, eking it out, stopping whenever I saw a little bamboo warung – a roadside café – for coffee, fresh coconut milk or fried bananas. Darkness caught me on a rising road past the mountain lake of Selorejo, and the last prayer-call was echoing through the villages when I finally crossed another pass and my last stop – the mountain resort of Batu, southwest of Malang – appeared through the pine trees, a galaxy of lights strung across the hillsides.

***

I was on the home straight now. In a bright morning I took a rising road from Batu through fields thick with cabbages, potatoes, strawberries and everything else that will only grow in the temperate uplands of Java. Ahead the great cone of Gunung Arjuno, yet another of Java’s active volcanoes, trailed a fine white banner of smoke into a pale sky.

The engine of the bike was coughing and spluttering alarmingly on the gear changes, and a full service was overdue. But this was the final climb of my journey, and soon I reached the little pass above Canggar, hard under the flanks of Arjuno. It was all downhill from here.
The road twisted through dark forest, and on many of the corners I spotted coal-black monkeys, watching nervously from the branches. At one point, on a high saddle between two great gorges, a view opened of the distant Penanggungan volcano, the last sentinel of the mountain heartlands before the steaming northern coastal plains. I dropped through the final stands of wild forest, through the little town of Pacet, and back to a world of trucks, buses, grit and grime.

Towns coagulated into a continuous strip; the green spaces vanished behind strips of jerry-built shops. Train-lines sparred with the highway; the air thickened to an off-white murk, and jets roared low overhead, bowling for the airport of Indonesia’s second largest city. The end was almost in sight. A few more clanking bridges over pale canals; a few more ill-tempered intersections, and my journey through the heart of Java was over. Surabaya swallowed me up.

The Pilgrimage - Parabola Project II

2011-11-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Fictional Short Story "The Pilgrimage" published in Parabola Project Volume II

The Parabola Project

An Indonesia-set fictional short story, The Pilgrimage, by Tim Hannigan appears in Volume II of the Parabola Project literary anthology.

For more details see the Parabola website and the author Q&A: http://wordslikepictures.com/parabola/quickening/tim-hannigan

Journey to the Cradle Of Javanese Islam

2011-11-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

Kudus, Demak and Jepara, in Central Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe 08/09/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/journey-to-the-cradle-of-javanese-islam/464205

Smooth, white walls rise on either side of the narrow alleyway, the stonework cool to the touch. Small birds flit back and forth across the thin strip of blue sky above, and women’s voices echo from hidden courtyards. The alley makes a sharp turn to the left and the blank wall is punctured by a window with carved wooden shutters, but I can make out nothing through the darkness within.

I am lost somewhere in the Kauman, the old Islamic quarter of the Central Java town of Kudus, but only the glimpse of a blue becak rattling through the intersection at the end of another alley proves that I am still in Indonesia.

Far from the usual ramshackle openness of the typical Javanese kampung, this is a private world, where domesticity turns its back to the street behind bleached stonework. There is a hint of the Mediterranean and the Middle East about this place, recalling the area’s historic connection along Indian Ocean trade routes to far-flung lands.

East of the seething Central Java, Semarang, the coast abruptly bulges northward around the isolated up-thrust of Mount Muria. At the southwest foot of this ragged, 1,602-meter mountain stands a triangle of towns — Demak, Jepara and Kudus. Today this is the ultimate backwater, overlooked by the tourists and history buffs heading south for Yogyakarta and Borobudur. But in the 16th century, it was the anteroom of Islam in Java.

Clambering onto my motorbike, I head out along the highway from Semarang to explore this enigmatic area and to hunt out the hints of its history.

It takes some time to find my way out of the maze of Kudus Kauman and back to broader streets, but it is cool and quiet in the shaded alleyways, and this is a fine place to get lost. Eventually, I emerge on the lane that leads to the famous Menara Mosque, built in 1549 during the region’s heyday.

Although the rivers have now silted up and pushed the coastline away from Kudus and neighboring Demak, these were once among the most important ports of northern Java. Traders from China, India and Arabia arrived here, bringing with them new foods and new ideas.

Foreign Muslims had probably settled in these towns as early as the 14th century, but it wasn’t until the end of the 15th century that the region gave rise to Java’s first Islamic kingdom, Demak.

By the middle of the 16th century, this new power had superseded the crumbling Majapahit Empire, and pushed its influence deep into the hinterlands.

Kudus was part of the core Demak territory and a hub of its Islamic identity. It is the only town in Java with an identifiably Arabic name — Kudus is a corruption of al-Quds, the Islamic name for Jerusalem.

Despite its proudly Muslim identity, there is evidence of an older pedigree at Menara Mosque. The original elements of the mosque are lost beneath modern olive-green paintwork. But the surrounding courtyard walls and the tiered clock-tower are strikingly different. They are built of weathered red brick, rising in tapering columns — the style is unmistakably that of the Hindu temples of Majapahit.

Leaving the old town behind, I head back to the modern part of Kudus. Today, cut off from the sea and no longer functioning as a port, Kudus makes its living from cigarettes. Millions of Indonesia’s hallmark clove-laced kretek cigarettes are churned out by factories here each year, and an aroma of cloves and tobacco lingers over the town.

But it is lunchtime and I’m after other spices, so I pull up at Pak Denuh restaurant, a narrow, open-fronted eatery on a roaring roadside, which, I have been informed by locals, is the very best place to try soto Kudus.

The town’s best-known specialty is served up in a chipped white bowl, but the first mouthful is a delightful surprise. The soup is rich and creamy, with base notes of cumin and turmeric that, like the white alleys of the Kauman, make me think of lands on the far side of the Indian Ocean.

After a second helping of soto Kudus, I head back to the road and bear east along the main highway, before branching north at Pati for a long loop around Mount Muria. Like Kudus, Mount Muria’s name shows a link to the Holy Land: it is thought to be named for Moriah, the mountain on which Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son. The road streaks through bowls of green farmland and rears over outlying ridges, carrying me to the sleepy little town of Jepara, where I stop for the night.

Today, Jepara is the quintessential provincial Javanese backwater, with a grid of tree-lined streets where the rattle of the becak still rules over the roar of the motorbike. In the soft morning sunlight I wander along the riverside, where brightly painted fishing boats are unloading the night’s catch.

Greater fleets once sailed from this harbor. In the 16th century, Jepara was a maritime city-state within the bounds of Demak. It had links across the Java Sea to the Malay states of Sumatra and the Southeast Asian mainland and on three occasions sent armadas to attack the Portuguese outpost at Melaka.

Today, however, Jepara is best known in the folklore of Indonesian nationalism as the home of Raden Ajeng Kartini, the daughter of the local regent at the turn of the 20th century, now celebrated as a proto-feminist and nationalist heroine.

Jepara’s other claim to fame is as “the city of carving.” According to local legends, the art of woodcarving, practiced here and in Demak, was introduced by a Chinese craftsman, Ling Sing. The locals clearly took to the trade with gusto; as I head out of town I pass dozens of workshops where men sit chiseling away, cutting intricate designs into the timber.

From the carvers’ workshops I begin to make my way back toward the busy streets of Semarang. Flat rice fields stretch on either side and the outline of Mount Muria retreats into a yellow haze.

There is a final stop to make, at Demak itself. The onetime powerhouse of Java is a somewhat shabby stop-off on the main highway. By the end of the 16th century, the star of the Demak state was burning out and before long, the hub of Javanese power would shift to the southern heartlands as the Mataram kingdom rose.

Today few visitors would come to Demak were it not for its mosque, said to be the oldest in Java. It stands on the edge of the central square, roofs rising in three-tiered tiles.

I park my bike, pick my way to the edge of the courtyard and sit to watch the steady stream of pilgrims. As the anteroom of Islam, this whole region is a place of pilgrimage, studded with the tombs of holy men and warrior queens. This mosque is the most sacred spot of all — for some traditionalist Javanese Muslims, seven pilgrimages here amount to one journey to Mecca. But like the other places I’ve visited on my journey, the three-tiered roof hints at temple architecture and links beyond the bounds of orthodoxy.

This whole corner of Java, the onetime cradle of nascent Islamic power, I realize as I make my way back to the road across the hot tiles, is in truth a strange mixture, spiced like a bowl of soto Kudus with flavors from China, India, the Islamic world and, of course, from Java itself.

Ports, Potters and the Portuguese

2011-09-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

Morocco's Atlantic Coastline

Originally published in Khaleej Times WKND Magazine, 08/07/11

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/weekend/inside.asp?xfile=/data/weekend/2011/July/weekend_July37.xml&section=weekend

A salty wind is blowing from the west. The broad, white-capped sweep of the Atlantic stretches away along a fading coastline, and the blue sky is full of bone-white seagulls. I am standing on the corner bastion of the walled Portuguese quarter of the Moroccan port of El-Jadida. Below me the madcap jumble of the town stretches towards a distant line of palm trees, the honey-cultured sandstone glowing in the bright morning sunlight.

***

Morocco’s Atlantic coast is a world of wind, waves, fresh sardines and fiery sunsets. When the summer heat of the imperial cities of the interior gets too much, generations of travellers have headed west to catch the breeze, in towns steeped in maritime history.
For the past decade Essaouira, due west of Marrakesh, has been the Atlantic getaway of choice. But with ever larger hordes of sightseers clogging its white alleyways, those with a little more imagination are searching out quieter spots.
I have come to Morocco to explore a string of lesser known seaside towns, three alternative Essaourias that are nonetheless just a short hop from Marrakesh or Casablanca. My first stop is El-Jadida.

***

Below the ramparts I enter a tortuous network of tangled alleyway. The walled quarter is known today as the Cité Portugaise, though the Iberian incomers who built the place in 1506 knew it as Mazagan. They had chosen a spot where a kink in the long line of the Moroccan coast provided shelter for ships, come to load up with the produce of all North Africa.
The Portuguese held Mazagan for two and a half centuries, but in 1769 the Alawite sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah evicted them and built a sprawling medina outside the walls, dubbing it El-Jadida, “the New”. The old quarters were abandoned until the 19th Century when Jewish settlers from other coastal towns moved in.
Today it is a place where sunshine falls in molten pools, a cubist cityscape of pastel tones where weathered doorways open to elaborately tiled stairwells. Pink geraniums sprout from windowsills and black cats lounge in the heat. I wander between light and shade, dodging dead ends and ducking under crooked archways. Here and there I catch a tantalizing whiff of cooking from a shuttered window.
A handful of old townhouses have been turned into boutique guesthouses, and foreigners and middle class Moroccans scared off by the soaring prices for medina properties in Essaouira and Marrakesh have started hunting out El-Jadida bargains in recent years. But for now this is still a quiet place, and I am the only visitor when I explore the Citerne Portugaise, a church-like underground chamber of vaulted arches and shimmering water, originally built as a reservoir. It was for the surviving gems like this that UNESCO declared El-Jadida a World Heritage Site in 2004.
El-Jadida’s post-independence fortunes have been based in part on its dark-timbered fishing fleet. A short walk from the Portuguese gateway, and close to the entrance to the port, I find an enclosed courtyard where rival stalls serve up platters loaded with freshly-landed seafood for bargain prices. I opt for five salty sardines grilled over charcoal with a hunk of bread and a bowl of coriander-scented tomato sauce for the princely sum of Dh10.

***

The following day I make the short hop up the coast to the smaller town of Azzemour. Many Moroccan cities have their own color schemes; if Marrakesh’s is earthy red, and El-Jadida’s is honeyed yellow, then Azzemour’s is white and blue.
The medina here was also built by the Portuguese, but today it is a sleepy backwater. Casablanca lies just an hour to the north, however, and hidden behind heavyset medina doors there are a few stylish guesthouses here too. There are also dozens of artist’s studios, and the stark white color scheme of Azzemour is broken with bright splashes of color – murals daubed on blank walls by resident painters.
Elsewhere a crumbling Portuguese citadel looks out over the white roofs, a handful of cannons dotting the ramparts like beached whales, their carriages long since rotted out from under them. There is a strange kind of melancholy to these former Portuguese possessions which dot the world’s foreshores from Morocco to East Timor, the remnants of an empire of outposts.

***

The potter lifts another simple, uncast cup from the rack and with a few deft flicks of a wooden cutter he has sliced a tiny star-shaped hole in the creamy clay and paired it to a crescent moon puncture. Swiftly he begins to repeat the motif all over the smooth surface. He can turn out 150 of these pieces in a day he says casually, without looking up from his work.
From Azzemour and El-Jadida I have travelled 150 kilometers south down a stark coastline to another little-visited port, Safi, and now, just outside its bulky walls, I am exploring its most intriguing neighborhood – a hillside potters’ quarter. I am being shown through the process by a tall, lean potter named Mohammed – “Like the Sultan,” he says with a grin, meaning Mohammed VI, Morocco’s current king; “But not the Sultan of Morocco – the Sultan of the potteries!”
It is amongst the warren workshops and wood-fired kilns here – clustered around the white shrine of a local saint, Sidi Abdurrahman, patron of the potters – that the unmistakable Moroccan ceramics that show up in gift-shops and on restaurant tables all over the country are made. Clay is brought in from local quarries before being kneaded – by foot. Pots, plates, and all manner of other crockery are then crafted, decorated and double fired.
The potteries rose to prominence in the 18th Century after artisans arrived from the royal city of Fez. However, Safi’s modern ceramics owe their reputation to one man. In 1918 the Algerian-born, French-trained potter Boujemaa Lamali settled here, teaching local apprentices, reviving old patterns and color schemes, and pioneering motifs which have now become Moroccan standards.
The yellow and black plate I buy from one of the stalls after bidding goodbye to Mohammed features the classic olive kernel design, a Lamali invention.

***

Like the other towns I have visited, Safi was once a Portuguese outpost. But they were only here for 33 years, and they did little more than build a sturdy fortress, the Dar el Bahar, knock down all of the Almohad Grand Mosque except its minaret, and start work on a cathedral, which was never finished, and which the returning Moroccan forces subsequently turned into a hammam. The caretaker, who shares a name with the Saint of the Potters – Abdurrahman – points out to me the spot where the roof vaulting is still stained by the smoke from the charcoal used to heat the bathwater.
But despite the tit-for-tat mistreatment of houses of worship, Abdurrahman explains, Safi was long a place of tolerance. The Jewish communities of other Moroccan towns were confined to their own ghetto quarters, known as mellahs, but here they lived amongst their Muslim and Christian neighbors.
Today most of the Jews and Christians have gone, but there are still quiet corners, and in the evening the little paved square at the seaward edge of the medina fills with food stalls like a miniature version of Marrakesh’s iconic Djemaa el Fna. Unlike in Marrakesh, however, and unlike in Essaouira, just two hours down the coast, there is hardly another tourist to be seen.
I eat a tasty dinner of merguez – Moroccan beef sausages spiced with paprika and served up in a hunk of fluffy bread – from one of the stalls, and then make my way to the Corniche, a cliff-top walkway south of the old town. A pale moon is slipping up above the white rooftops, and an amber sun is sliding down in the opposite direction over the wind-chased Atlantic. Whirling flocks of black-winged swifts are dancing in the clear air.
This is the end of my Atlantic excursion, and tomorrow I’ll make the three-hour trip inland across the blistering plains to the hustling heat of Marrakesh. Maybe one day people will be proclaiming El-Jadida, Azzemour and Safi, “spoilt” and “too touristy”, but for now, I decide, they make a fine seaside sidestep off Morocco’s beaten tracks…

Walking on Fire

2011-09-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

"Gunung Bagging" - climbing Indonesia's volcanoes

Originally Published in Trek and Mountain Magazine, June 2011

http://www.trekandmountain.com/

I huddle in the darkness, tucking my hands under my arms and shrinking down inside my jacket. Through the gloom I can see Maman squatting over the stove to boil water for coffee while Cokie sits shivering nearby. I flick the switch of my flashlight and scan the surrounding vegetation. It is three hours since we left the tea gardens, and somewhere along the rough, muddy, and agonisingly steep trail, we have passed beyond the tropics. There are no more broad-leafed banana plants or jungle creepers; we are now amongst gnarled, crooked trees draped with the wispy, blue-grey lichen known in Indonesia as jengot angin – “the beard of the wind”. It is an hour before dawn, and from a village mosque somewhere far, far below, the first prayer call rises, very faint, but unmistakable through the clear, cold air.
Ahead the trail continues, onwards and upwards towards the bare, 3173-metre summit of Gunung Dempo, Sumatra’s third highest peak, a mighty volcanic eminence towering over the Pamesah Highlands.
With the coffee finished we scramble to our feet, stamping and slapping our sides to get the blood moving again. I ask Maman, a local mountain fanatic who has climbed Dempo fifteen times, how much further we have to go. Two hours, he says – and the air is getting thinner with every step…

***

Indonesia is a land of volcanoes. A great, 4000-mile arc of shattered green land stretching across the equator, it owes its very existence to tectonic violence. It is part of “the Ring of Fire”, where the Pacific and Indian Ocean plates are forced beneath the thick crust of the Eurasian continental plate. The western and southern flank of the archipelago is one long line of fiery mountains – known as gunung in Indonesian. There are 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, more than in any other nation, and many more extinct and dormant peaks. The tallest – Kerinci in West Sumatra – stands 3805 metres above sea level.
But despite this plethora of peaks, most visitors come to Indonesia for beaches, coral reefs and culture. For those who do pack a pair of boots, however, this is probably the place where you can tick off more serious summits in a short space of time than anywhere else on earth. And with the recent categorisation of mountains with a prominence of at least 1000 metres into “Ribus” (from the Indonesian word for “thousand” – ribu), on criteria similar to those used internationally for Ultras, and in the UK for Corbetts and Grahams, there is now a target list for would-be trekkers. It runs to 222 summits – it’s time to start “gunung bagging”…

***

Volcanoes are not like other mountains. That might seem an obvious statement, given that nothing in the Scottish highlands has a steaming bowl of sulphurous smoke at its summit, but there’s more to it than that. Volcanoes are formed, not by a slow crumpling of the earth’s surface, but by a single upwelling of molten rock. Because of this they often stand alone, towering in a steep cone above low-lying flatlands to a height of several thousand metres. For this reason an attempt on an Indonesian volcano is usually a short, sharp shock. There is little chance for acclimatisation, and in the tropics temperatures drop dramatically as you rise. You can start the day sweating at sea level, and then finish off shivering in the sunset at close to 3000 metres. This makes the effects of altitude particularly pronounced (though the chance for swift descents means that AMS is not a major risk on even Indonesia’s highest volcanoes).

Most of Indonesia’s volcanoes are “trekking peaks”, demanding no technical skill or specialist equipment to scale. But have no doubt, it’s a tough business. Lower slopes are almost always cloaked with thick, steamy forest where mud, leeches, and dehydration are the main concerns. As you rise, however, temperatures drop to teeter on the brink of freezing point, and final ascents are often over soul-sapping scree. But the fact that an Indonesian peak high enough to be worthy of a ten-day trek elsewhere in the world can be the object of a weekend outing, or just one chapter of a multi-mountain trip, makes “gunung bagging” an addictive pastime, and the experience of standing at dawn on the brink of a gaping crater, high over a sea of pale, creamy cloud, is always something to relish.

***

There are well-trodden trails to the tops of Indonesia’s best-known peaks. You can summit many independently, and local guides are usually easy to find. The highest concentration of accessible mountains is in Java, the England-sized loadstone of the archipelago. Gunung Pangrango, 3019 metres tall and just 50 kilometres short of the seething capital, Jakarta, is one of the most popular for weekenders. In neighbouring Bali, meanwhile, the mighty 3142-metre Gunung Agung is easily accessible too.
All these mountains have clear trails, kept well-trodden by gangs of student hikers, and visiting trekkers from overseas. Most can be tackled in a single hit from the trailhead. True summits are usually simply the highest point of a crater rim, a gravelly patch above a great stony hollow, often holding a cobalt-blue lake or a steaming sulphur vent.

If smoke and sulphur add a certain frisson to the summit experience, they add a similar tension to daily life in Indonesian too. Volcano slopes – with their rich soils and wet microclimates – are the most fertile places in the archipelago, and red-roofed villages huddle high on the slopes. The risk of eruption is the pay-off for the fertile fields (Java’s Gunung Merapi erupted violently in 2010, killing several hundred people). The dominating character of the peaks has given them a place in Indonesia’s belief systems too. Local traditions often see the craters as the receptacles of the souls of village ancestors, and many peaks have taboos and traditions of animal sacrifice to appease the spirits.

As well as the wealth of one-day wonders there are mountains that demand a more sustained assault. Gunung Rinjani, towering over Bali’s eastern neighbour, Lombok, is Indonesia’s second highest volcanic mountain – at 3726 metres – and one of its very finest trekking peaks. Most people tackle the mountain over three or four days, summiting in the early hours of the morning on the second day before traversing the huge caldera and descending into the jungle. Another headline star in the ranks of Indonesia’s fire mountains is Semeru, Java’s highest peak, accessed by a three-day route across the wild Bromo-Tengger Massif.
But all of these mountains are just for starters. There are hundreds more – Inerie, Ile Boleng, and Tambora out amongst the islands of Nusa Tenggara, forgotten Javanese giants like Argopuro, and little-known peaks in Sulawesi and Maluku. And then there’s the 1200-mile, volcano-studded stretch of Sumatra, home to Kerinci, Marapi, Leuser and the mighty Gunung Dempo…

***

Two days have passed since I arrived in the little upland town of Pagaralam with my eye on Gunung Dempo. The mountain, rising sheer from the forests and plantations, swimming in and out of cloud, and casting a long shadow across the rice fields, is a tantalising prospect. But despite its huge height this is not one of Indonesia’s well known peaks, for it stands far from any of the major tourist trails, and seven hours by road from the regional capital, Palembang.
I had struggled to find information about routes to the summit before I arrived, but then, in a typically Indonesian piece of good luck, I ran into Maman. A serious 27-year-old trekker with an enviable string of Ribus under his belt, he grew up in the shadow of Gunung Dempo, and cut his teeth on its high slopes. He told me the he was planning to make yet another ascent the following day with a friend from Palembang, Cokie, and invited me to tag along. We made our way by motorbike to a ramshackle climbers’ hut, 1000 metres above sea level on the fringes of the huge state-owned tea estate that skirts Dempo, spent the evening drinking endless cups of coffee, and then two hours after midnight – following traditional Indonesian practice of aiming to summit at dawn – we set out along one of the toughest forest trails I’d ever seen.

And so now here I am, struggling up through the thinning trees, lungs burning and thighs throbbing, reaching for withered branches to support myself, as thin, pearly daylight begins to leach out over a vast, inverted cloudscape. The last of the forest gives way to stunted scrub, and knuckles of grainy rock replace the tangled roots of the lower trail. We’re just short of Dempo’s false summit, Maman says, so we stop to watch a steely sun slip into a pale sky cut with skeins of charcoal cloud. Dempo stands just three degrees south of the equator, but at 3000 metres in a sharp breeze it is shockingly cold, and with sunrise over we press on, crossing the false summit – an unprepossessing hillock cloaked in tangled bushes – then dropping to a small plateau before making the final slog up a stony slope to the crater rim.
The altitude is sapping all of our strength now, and we move silently, finding our own pace, searching out meandering paths over the rocks with short footfalls. And then, with a few final, staggering steps, I’m on the crater rim. A deep bowl of broken rock the colour of builders’ rubble opens below me with a blue-grey pool in its belly. The bitter wind is driving in from the northwest; shreds of cloud rush across the crater, and, with the rising sun at my back, for a moment a “glory” – my own swollen shadow ringed with a rainbow halo – shows on the far ridge.
Leaving Maman and Cokie huddling on the edge of the overhang I pick my way to the highest point of the rim, and look out on the surrounding panorama. Away to the west I can see the distant blue line of the Indian Ocean coast, backed by descending green ridges. In the east Pagaralam and the tea gardens are hidden beneath a sheet of cloud.
Another Ribu bagged, I think happily to myself. But beyond this crater I can see a long rank of other unnamed summits, and in the opposite direction the dark bulk of Gunung Patah – a wildly remote jungle peak that Maman pioneered just last year – shows above the cloud. There are plenty more still waiting to be climbed…

The Accidental Tourist

2011-08-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Fate of Northern Pakistan's Tourism Industry

Originally published in Khaleej Times WKND Magazine 17/06/11

http://www.khaleejtimes.ae/weekend/inside.asp?xfile=/data/weekend/2011/June/weekend_June59.xml&section=weekend

“The Tenth of September 2001was a busy day,” says Manzur Karim; “there were many foreign tour groups, many Americans.”
I am sitting sipping sweet tea amidst the dusty trinkets and sun-bleached postcards in Manzur’s Hunza Shangrila Handicrafts Shop on an alleyway off the bustling bazaar of Gilgit, the ramshackle mountain town at the heart of Pakistan’s far north.
I have been in Pakistan for less than 24 hours, after arriving on a bone-shaking bus ride across the Khunjerab Pass from China. Any apprehension I felt on arrival in one of the world’s most troubled nations has dissipated with my first morning stroll through Gilgit: so far I have encountered only cheerful invitations to drink tea; the cup that Manzur offered is my fourth since breakfast.
I haven’t, however, seen any other foreign tourists – hardly surprising, given Pakistan’s atrocious media profile. Bombs in big cities are so common that they hardly merit a headline, and this, of course, was the country where Osama bin Laden was recently run to ground.
But it wasn’t always this way. A decade ago Gilgit-Baltistan, the mountainous region of Pakistan’s far north, was high on the travellers’ wish-list. A minor tourism boom had followed the opening of the Karakoram Highway, a high-altitude road linking Islamabad with China, to foreigners in 1986. By the turn of the century an estimated 30,000 foreign tourists were visiting Gilgit-Baltistan each year.
But then came “the war on terror” and everything changed.
As I sip my tea Manzur reminisces about the pre-9/11 days when foreigners were a common sight in the bazaar. Today he scrapes a meager living from domestic tourists, but has never thought of giving up.
“We’ve been doing this for 35 years,” he says; “so how could we change?”
Manzur has another motivation for continuing to fly the flag for Gilgit-Baltistan’s moribund tourist industry: sky-scraping ridges, rough roads, and unusual demographics – this is the only part of Pakistan dominated by Shia and Ismaeli Muslims – have kept the region almost entirely isolated from the troubles affecting the rest of the country. Arriving overland from China, meanwhile, allows visitors to bypass down-country trouble spots.
“Why don’t tourists come here anymore?” Mazur wonders, gazing out at the bustling bazaar. I am here to try to answer that question.

***

An hour later I am sipping yet another cup of tea in a plush office in the deserted riverside hotel of PTDC, Pakistan’s state-owned tourism development corporation. Birds are singing in the trees outside.
PTDC’s Gilgit manager, Shahid Nawaz Khan, shakes he head sadly.
“When I first joined this industry everyone was interested in tourism. After 9/11 this has become a big problem. People who joined the tourist industry in the 1990s are too old now to join the army or government service, and it’s difficult to do anything else in the private sector. Basically we’re all just sitting around waiting for the good times to come back,” he says.
Shahid admits that mistakes were made during the 1990s: “No one was interested in sustainability because people thought the industry would keep growing year by year,” he says. But he also wrestles with a deep sense of frustration.
“The international media shows only the negative things, but what has that got to do with Gilgit-Baltistan?”
As I wander back through the bazaar I can’t help but feel that he is right. This certainly doesn’t seem like a dangerous place. Brightly decorated Suzuki minibuses roar along bustling streets; a heady aroma of grilling kebabs fills my nostrils, and when I raise eyes above the jumbled rooftops I can see the sharp sunlight shining on the high peaks beyond the town. It is time to head for the hills.
The next morning I clamber aboard an overloaded minibus bound for Yasin, a remote mountain valley some sixty miles west of Gilgit. Soon we are rolling along a narrow road above a cobalt-blue river. Women in pillbox hats and purple headscarves watch shyly from the wheat-fields as we pass.
Yasin is a wild and beautiful place that even in the 1990s saw few foreign visitors. For two days I make my way north along the valley. In every village I am welcomed like a long-lost friend. The former Taliban fiefdom of Swat lies just 100 miles to the south, but with huge mountains blocking the way, I might as well be on another planet.

***

After my unworldly sojourn in Yasin, Gilgit seems like a buzzing metropolis, all the more so as a fast-paced polo tournament is underway. This not the genteel sport favored by English aristocrats: Gilgit-style polo looks like a sort of no-holds-barred rugby on horseback.
From the midst of a roaring crowd I watch the two five-man teams – drawn from the ranks of the police and the army – thunder back and forth to a soundtrack provided by a trio of traditional drummers and pipers. In the end the army wins – as they usually do in Pakistan...
To my surprise there are a handful of other foreigners at the polo match, and most of them are – like me – staying at the Madina Guesthouse. A little oasis of calm in a walled garden at the heart of the town, the Madina was once a busy institution on the travellers’ circuit. These days it barely survives on the custom from a trickle of hardy over-landers in the summer months.
“I don’t really know how we survive,” says Habib ur Rehman, the assistant manager; “every year we think it will be the last, but somehow we get just enough to keep going for one more season.”
One thing that keeps Habib hopeful is the impressive dedication of his cousin, Yasir Hussain, Deputy Director of Tourism and the Environment for Gilgit-Baltistan.
Yasir drops in for breakfast on his way to the office the next morning, and over yet more tea he tells me about his hopes for the future. With the rest of Pakistan facing such an uncertain future, Yasir says, Gilgit-Baltistan’s land border with China is a lifesaver, allowing travellers to visit the region without worrying about security. But it is crucial, he tells me, for sustainability and community involvement to play a part in any resurgence of tourism in these wild mountains.
“We have to facilitate the recovery of tourism if we want peace to continue here. If communities are busy then there is no time for conflict,” says Yasir, smiling and sipping his tea.

***

From Gilgit I head back north towards the Chinese border, through the fabled Hunza Valley, a mountain fastness that stands out even amidst the generally jaw-dropping scenery of Gilgit-Baltistan. Village houses huddle amongst the poplars trees, their flat roofs strewn with amber apricots, drying in the sharp sunlight. Stupendous snow peaks tower to inconceivable heights on either side.
Karimabad, the eyrie-like traditional capital of Hunza, was once the centerpiece of Gilgit-Baltistan’s tourism industry. The view from my guesthouse garden alone – down over concertinaed terraces to the river, with the full 7788-metre might of Rakaposhi rising in the distance – would attract hordes of camera-toting trippers were it in any other country.
Indeed, a decade ago, as a steady stream of tourists rolled into Karimabad, many commentators complained that it was being “spoilt”. Today, however, the village is a place of bankrupt gift shops and empty hotels.
“Nothing today, nothing yesterday, nothing tomorrow,” says Moimin, a blue-eyed carpet salesman with a store on Karimabad’s narrow main street when I ask how business has been. Then he breaks into a grin and shrugs: “But Hunza is still peaceful.”

***

I linger over the final days of my journey, heading north from Karimabad towards the border, stopping in the little villages of Gulmit and Passu, places of sunshine and dusty lanes where rickety suspension bridges criss-cross the surging river and the snouts of huge glaciers push right down to the highway.
Since that first cup of tea with Manzur in Gilgit many other locals, remembering better times, have asked me plaintively, “Why don’t tourists come here anymore?”
Glib replies to that question spill all too easily off the tongue, but up here in the mountains, with the sunlight shining like molten copper through the poplar leaves, phrases like “Taliban” and “suicide bomb” cease to have meaning. I cannot answer the question myself. Why don’t tourists come here anymore?

Reaching Sumatra's Mountain Paradise

2011-07-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

Pagaralam and Gunung Dempo, South Sumatra

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 31/05/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/reaching-sumatras-mountain-paradise/444298

Thin daylight is seeping out over Sumatra. I am just three degrees south of the equator, but high on the slopes of Gunung Dempo, it is bitterly cold. A sharp breeze is cutting through a sky streaked with cloud. Far below Pagaralam and the rest of the Pasemah Highlands are buried beneath a blanket of creamy haze, while away to the south the dark hulk of Gunung Patah looms from tiger-haunted forest.
It is almost four hours since we started our climb, struggling upwards through a tangle of roots and creepers, but now we have broken free of the tropical forest. Stunted bushes, strung about with the gray-green lichen known as jengot angin, “the beard of the wind”, dot these stony upper slopes, and we pause for a moment to watch a cold sun slip swiftly up over a vast inverted cloudscape.
My two companions – a local mountaineer called Maman, and a student hiker from Palembang called Cokie – shiver and thrust their hands deep into their pockets as we take in the view. Then we turn our backs to the panorama and pick our way onwards, upwards in the thinning air. Somewhere ahead, still out of view is the summit of Sumatra’s third highest mountain.

***

My first view of Gunung Dempo had come two days earlier, from the more benign environment of the ripening rice fields on the edge of the sleepy little upland town of Pagaralam. Rising 3173 meters from a fringe of forest, it was a tantalizing prospect. But before tackling the summit I wanted to explore the region that surrounded the peak – the Pasemah Highlands, a beautiful, but little visited corner of South Sumatra.
Seven hours west of the steamy provincial capital Palembang, the Highlands are surrounded by the mountains of the southern Bukit Barisan range, far from tourist trails and beaten tracks. Pagaralam, the only real town in the area, lies some 600 meters above sea level. There are tea gardens and strawberry farms. If this place was in Java it would swarm with city folk every weekend; as it is, I seemed to have it almost to myself.
In the 19th century the clans of the Highlands had a ferocious reputation for hostility to outsiders, but things seem to have changed, for the villagers around Tanjung Aru, a hamlet of wooden houses on the outskirts of Pagaralam, were very friendly, and they pointed me in the direction of the region’s most famous and enigmatic attraction.
Carved megaliths dot the rice fields all over these South Sumatran uplands, hulks of rough basalt chiseled into the shapes of men, elephants, bulls and tigers. I found one of these carvings a little way outside Tanjung Aru. At first it seemed like a chaos of loops and ridges, weathered by centuries of monsoon rains. But as I stood back it resolved itself into the form of a man, locked in the coils of a huge serpent. No one knows who carved these strange statues, or for what purpose. The oldest are thought to date back some three thousand years.

The more recent buildings of the Pasemah Highlands are remarkable too. The next day, in the village of Pelang Kenida, south of Pagaralam, I saw some of the finest examples of traditional local architecture. The houses here were built of lengths of rough-cut timber, raised above the ground on stilts – a precaution from the days when wild tigers sometimes strayed into the settlements from the forest. The gables were topped with a V-shaped motif representing a set of buffalo horns, and the walls and buttresses were marked by long strips of floral patterning, and mandala-like whorls. Once all the houses in the region were decorated this way, the villagers told me, but today the old skills have been forgotten. The surviving carved houses are already half-a-century old, and when they succumb to rot and termites these traditions will be lost forever.
The art of woodworking for village houses might have been lost, but another craft is still in full swing on a narrow side-street in the Pagaralam market. In a string of little workshops artisans make the emblematic local dagger, the kuduk. Back in more bloodthirsty times these were used in warfare; today they are still an essential possession for a man of the Pasemah Highlands. In a dark, smoky space at the back of one of the workshops two men were hammering a glowing blade, fresh from the forge, into shape. Pausing from their work they told me that they can make about 15 of these knives in a day’s work.

***

Once I had toured the gentle countryside around Pagaralam, it was time to tackle that looming, unavoidable peak – Gunung Dempo. I had been lucky enough to cross paths with Maman, a local mountaineering fanatic. He told me that he had climbed volcanoes all over Indonesia, but Dempo was still his favorite. He was heading for the summit yet again with a student friend from Palembang, and he invited me to tag along.
The trailhead lay high above Pagaralam, on the edge of a vast tea estate. This estate was first established in the colonial era. The descendants of these Javanese transmigrants, shipped in by the Dutch to work on the plantation, still live in neat white villages amongst the tea bushes.
We spent the evening drinking coffee in a ramshackle mountaineers’ hut on the edge of the forest. As darkness fell and a pale moon rose over the highlands, Maman explained that for local people a sacred aura still surrounds the high slopes of Gunung Dempo. Like so many mountains in Indonesia it was traditionally viewed as the receptacle for the souls of departed ancestors, ruled over by a deity called Puyung Raja Nyawe. The Pasemah Highlands have long since converted to Islam, but a belief in evil spirit tigers still lingers. These beings, known as masumai, are said still to haunt the forests around the mountain; they can shape-shift, transforming themselves into beautiful women to lead travellers astray.
Unsurprisingly, Maman said, many locals are reluctant to climb the peak!
Watching out for shape-shifting ghost tigers we set out after midnight, following an agonizingly steep uphill trail into the jungle...

***

We have passed beyond the tropics now, and it is stunningly cold, even with the first light of dawn at our backs. As we cross the first, false summit – a low hillock in a dense thicket – and scramble down a steep slope beyond towards a stony plateau, studded with little cairns and clumps of wind-burnt bushes, I struggle to catch my breath in the thin air. Villagers sometimes make pilgrimages here to sacrifice goats and chickens to the mountain spirits, Maman says.
The summit is almost in reach now, but altitude and exhaustion are taking their toll, and the final ascent over stony slopes is painfully slow. And then, at last, we reach the crater rim, and a great bowl of broken rock with a pool of slate-gray water at its base opens below. Shreds of dark cloud streak past, and dust devils pirouette across the scree.
Away to the west, beyond a mesh of interlocking green ridges, I can make out the pale line of the Indian Ocean coast. North and south the long line of the Bukit Barisan Range runs on, and to the east the dense covering of cloud, blanketing Pagaralam and the tea gardens, is turning a coppery gold beneath the rising sun. It is a magnificent panorama, and as I stand there I am sure that the cold, the aching legs and the risk of marauding spirit tigers were all worthwhile.

England's Royal Cuisine

2011-07-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

The fine dining of aristocratic England

Originally published in Maxx-m Magazine, September 2010

http://www.maxx-m.com/

Queen Elizabeth II of England likes nothing better than to eat a simple piece of grilled chicken with a fresh salad, according to one of her former palace chefs. But things were not always so down-to-earth at the Royal Table; in fact, the history of royal cooking and eating in England is a tale of gluttony and excess on a magnificent scale, of groaning banqueting tables and rigid dining formalities, and of gourmandising refugees from mainland Europe bringing their culinary arts to the palaces of the British Isles. And though high-end dining in England – and especially in London – today is a grand tasting menu of global influences, old echoes of royal institutions linger on amongst formal dinners and high teas.

English cooking has long been the butt of many a bad joke. Many foreigners believe that the country’s cuisine is at best hearty, earthy and rustic – from Cornish pasties to Lancashire hotpots – and at worst a series of crude heart-attack inducing horrors like soggy chips and deep-fried Mars Bars. In short, nothing fit for a king. But that is all the stuff of the commoner’s table; in the royal courts and stately homes things were always much more refined – if no less unhealthy.
One of the very first cookbooks written in English is the late 14th century Forme of Cury (“cury” being Old English for “cookery”). With some 200 mind-boggling recipes written out in quill pen on sheets of soft leather by “the Master Cooks of King Richard II” it is a window on the extravagance of royal banqueting. There are recipes for the elaborate edible sculptures that adorned the tables of guests of the Plantagenet court, expensive demands for rare spices shipped all the way from Indonesia, instructions for stuffing and roasting whole pigs, sheep and deer, and even dishes made from whales, seals and dolphins.
A Forme of Cury recipe for roast geese with “Sauce Madame” tells cooks to “take sage, parsley, hyssop and savoury, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes, and fill the geese with them. Sew the hole so that no grease comes out, and roast them well, and keep the dripping that falls from them. …” And all of these greasy goodies were sanctioned by “the masters of medicine and of philosophy” of the court!

England – and indeed Europe – never really developed the individual royal dishes seen in so many Asian countries. This was in part because the royal houses of Western Europe so often intermarried and traded places; English dynasties were at various times largely of Dutch or German descent. But if these pan-European royals lacked their own culinary specialities, what they had was an eating culture of formality and expansiveness. And very often the food itself was French. Even today the menus for many of the banquets that the Queen hosts in Buckingham Palace are printed in French, and French method and technique still informs the royal kitchens.
This French connection in the cuisine of the courts became stronger after the Napoleonic Wars. In fact, the concept of the public restaurant is in part a consequence of the French Revolution. Gallic chefs from the royal palaces and aristocratic chateaus were left unemployed when their bosses got the revolutionary chop. Some set up the first high-class eating houses in Paris for paying diners; others crossed the English Channel to seek employment with the kings and aristocrats of Britain.
The United Kingdom’s first celebrity chef was a Frenchman. Alexis Soyer, who was born in Paris, came to England in 1830 and worked in the kitchens of princes, dukes and marquesses. He cooked a royal breakfast for 2,000 people on the morning of QueenVictoria’s coronation.

Today the royal household still employs its own brigade of chefs who cater for the family on a daily basis, and who prepare the food for the great state banquets held for visiting dignitaries at Buckingham Palace.
These banquets are the direct link to the extravagant past hinted at in the Forme of Cury. Though whales and dolphins and whole pigs are off the menu today, classical French method and formal English service are still the watchwords. After Champagne to accompany the toasts, fish and meat courses are served on platters of silver gilt and dessert courses come on fine porcelain with port and more Champagne, while a chamber orchestra plays from the balcony and liveried bearers trot between the tables.
Things are less grand on a normal day. According to Darren McGrady, a former royal pastry chef, and for four years the personal chef to the late Princess Diana, the Queen takes high tea every day; Diana was a fan of tomato mousse and stuffed eggplant, and the young princes like to tuck into a decidedly down-to-earth cottage pie.
All of this royal dining, formal or otherwise, is shut off to members of the public – except those invited to partake of tea and cucumber sandwiches during the Queen’s summer garden parties.
But the places outside the palaces that maintain the closest connections to the original French-influenced royal and aristocratic dining traditions of England are the grand old hotels of London. The Ritz, the Dorchester, the Savoy and Claridge’s are the bastions of the formality that has long surrounded English royal dining. All have their own royal connections, especially Claridge’s, while the Ritz is the most famous place to take in public the kind of high tea the Queen is served in private each afternoon. Her great-grandfather Edward VII often took his own tea at the Ritz, as did her mother.
And while there are none of the great specifically royal cooking styles of Asia, here and there a dish of royal descent has slipped into the diet of the general English public. The Victoria sponge – two layers of fluffy cake sandwiched with a layer of strawberry jam – is what Queen Victoria took with her own afternoon tea. Coronation chicken – shredded chicken meat with mayonnaise and curry spices, an eternal sandwich filling for English picnics – was invented by the celebrated cook Constance Spry for the current Queen’s coronation in 1953. And last of all, it’s worth remembering those Continental connections from the post-French Revolution days of Alexis Soyer: Prince Charles’ favourite chef is said to be an Italian, Antonio Carluccio.

Little Tibet

2011-06-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

The remote region of Spiti in the Indian Himalaya

Originally published in the Khaleej Times, 29/04/11

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/weekend/inside.asp?xfile=/data/weekend/2011/April/weekend_April99.xml&section=weekend

The bus lurched around another hairpin bend, and a terrifying void opened to the left. Hundreds of feet below I could see the river, a streak of turquoise in a landscape the colour of wild horses. Crumbling ridges rose on either side, and the pale mountain sun burnt coldly in a hollow sky. This was the Old Tibet Road, one of the most spectacular – not to mention terrifying – highways on earth. I gritted my teeth, ignored the chasm below, and focused on the stark mountains beyond. I was on the very brink – quite literally – of my destination: the remote upland fastness of Spiti.

***

Hard on the Tibetan border in the Indian mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, Spiti is a world apart. A long valley, walled in by sky-scraping ridges, its language, landscape and culture are more Tibetan than Indian. But while its better known northern neighbour, Ladakh, has long had a prime place on the travel map with direct flights from Delhi ferrying in thousands of visitors each summer, Spiti has slipped beneath the radar.
As a sensitive border region it was only opened to outsiders in 1993; there is no airport, and the rough roads (it is a two day trip from the Himachal capital Shimla, or a 16-hour jeep ride from the tourist hub of Manali) has kept all but the most adventurous at bay.
It was the promise of epic mountain scenery and authentic Tibetan Buddhist culture that had led me to brave that bus ride. News of an expanding network of locally run village home-stays, meanwhile, left me confident of finding somewhere to stay.

***

The next day, with my nerves scarcely settled from the jolting journey, I met the key mover behind those home-stays and wider efforts to develop sustainable community-based tourism in Spiti.
Sonam Tsering is a pint-sized force of nature, a sometime trekking guide, restaurateur and all-out enthusiast for his own Spitian culture. Over a steaming bowl of phakste, Spiti-style dumpling soup, in his Kunzum Top Cafe in the village of Tabo, he shared his views.
According to Sonam the slow development of tourism in Spiti has been a blessing in disguise. Tabo is the hub of what passes for a tourist industry here, but it is home to nothing more than a dozen guesthouses and a clutch of cafes.
“The most important thing is sustainability,” he said, citing the ugly plethora of concrete hotels that swamp Manali and the Ladakhi capital Leh. “And it is also important that the first benefit should be for local people. This is the thinking behind the home-stays; it spreads the benefit so it’s not just here in Tabo. There are home-stays now in even the most remote villages.”
While not running his restaurant or helping home-stay owners Sonam’s other cause is the preservation of Spitian culture. Concerned that traditional music was vanishing from village festivals, he and a group of friends have set about learning to play – and to record – Spitian folk songs. As night fell over Tabo he reached for a khokpo, a long-necked Spitian guitar, hanging on the wall, and smiling modestly – “I’m not very good yet!” – he began to pluck a wiry rhythm.

***

The monk settled himself cross-legged on a pile of dusty blankets, turned the first strip of elaborate Tibetan script, and with a gentle clearing of the throat began to chant in a low rumbling voice. I was the only other person in the little chamber of the protector deity in the ancient Buddhist monastery of Dhankar, 20 kilometres west of Tabo. The monk’s name was Chumpa, and a few minutes earlier he had found me wandering alone in the courtyard and invited me to watch his lonely morning puja ceremony.
When he was finished I stepped outside into the sharp sunlight. This tiny monastery village was perched in the very teeth of the mountains 3894 metres above sea level. The air here was thin and the light was sharper than glass. Alpine choughs with glossy black wings twisted in the cold thermals, and far below the blue-grey river was braided into a mesh of channels on the valley floor.
Spiti’s name means “The Middle Land”, reflecting its past as a place between more powerful neighbours: Tibet, Ladakh, Kullu, and Kashmir – and these days India and China. Buddhism probably arrived here in the 7th Century, amalgamating with the ancient Bon religion of the mountains. Today most of Spiti’s 10,000 people belong to the Gelugpa order of Tibetan Buddhism, the Yellow Hat sect of the Dalai Lama.

***

From Dhankar I travelled onwards into the Middle Land, sometimes staying in village home-stays recommended by Sonam, sometimes bedding down in the simple guesthouses attached to Buddhist monasteries. In the stony side valley of the Pin National Park, the snow leopards said to haunt the upper slopes eluded me, but the snow-streaked mountain scenery was worth the detour. Spiti is prime trekking country, and the Pin Valley is the starting point for the week-long hike into the neighbouring Kullu Valley.
Further west I passed through Kaza, the administrative capital of Spiti, and the only place in the valley where concrete and tin predominate over packed earth and poplar wood. From here a strip of winding tarmac led north past another ancient hilltop monastery at Ki to Kibber, claimed to be one of the highest villages on earth. It was a cold place where ibex horns decorated the doorways and prayer flags snapped in the running breeze. In the evening herdsmen brought yaks down from the hillsides and there was a smell of wood-smoke and livestock. This was the edge of a wild world that runs east for many hundreds of kilometres – the world of the Tibetan Plateau.

***

My escape from Spiti would take me across the 4551-metre Kunzum Pass to Manali. But first I doubled back east to seek out one of the remotest of all the village home-stays, 20 kilometres up a side valley in the hamlet of Lalung.
For my final days in Spiti I was the guest of Tashi Bodh Khabrik and his wife Dolma. They have been taking in travellers for the past two years, and they were the best of hosts. I was given a room with a roof of poplar branches in a corner of a whitewashed village home.
Over a dinner of momos – Tibetan dumplings – in the cosy kitchen-cum-living room that is the heart of every Spitian home, Tashi told me how the villagers club together to take care of their combined flocks of goats and yaks. Each family has only a few animals so people take it in turns to take the entire four-legged population of the village out to graze before returning each beast to its individual owner at nightfall. In winter, Tashi said, the dirt track down to the main valley was often blocked by snow for months on end; beyond the village there is nothing until the Tibetan border.
Here in Lalung, amongst the narrow lanes, the poplar-lined irrigation ditches, the endless cups of tea and the cheerful calls of “Joolay!” – the standard Spitian greeting – the journey into the Middle Land along bone-shaking mountain roads seemed more than worthwhile.

Ghosts of Brittania

2011-05-30T05:16:00.000-07:00

Searching for traces of the British Empire in Bengkulu, Sumatra

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/03/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/ghosts-of-britannia/431893

The little hilltop is thick with vegetation. To the east the dark hills of the Sumatran hinterland rise under banks of pearly cloud; to the west the wind-chased expanse of the Indian Ocean rolls away towards an empty horizon.
I scramble through the undergrowth, searching for some trace of the building that once stood on this riverside hillock on the outskirts of Bengkulu. There are fragments of brick and concrete, and here and there a chunk of rough-hewn limestone. Mosquitoes needle at my ankles and I beat a retreat to the bright sunlight.
A bulky middle-aged woman waddles across from a nearby house to ask what I’m looking for. Her name is Eni, and she tells me that the remnants of something do indeed stand on this overgrown hill in the Pasar Bengkulu district.
“Something from the Japanese era, or maybe from the Dutch era,” she says. The fragments of brick and concrete suggest that she might be right on both counts, but long before those foreign occupiers another nation flew its flag over the river here. This spot was the site of Fort York, the first British outpost in Bengkulu.

Bengkulu, occupying a little knuckle of land and presiding over a 400-kilometre sliver of coastal territory is modern Sumatra’s sleepiest provincial capital, but for 140 years was an anomalous pocket of British territory. Two centuries later I am here to hunt down the traces of this forgotten episode in Indonesian history.

***

The first servants of Britain’s East India Company reached Bengkulu in 1685 after being kicked out of Java by the ascendant Dutch. They hoped that the place would prove to be a honeypot – an essential stopover for China-bound shipping and a fertile garden for lucrative pepper crops. Instead Bengkulu turned out to be an unremitting economic black hole, losing the Company £100,000 a year. It was the original Southeast Asian hardship posting.
The Sumatran climate proved catastrophic to foreign constitutions, and Fort York, the outpost that once stood on that little hillock, had a particularly insalubrious location.
“Some unusual malignity infests our air and strikes at all,” wrote the governor Joseph Collet in 1713. In search of a better climate Collet abandoned Fort York and had a new garrison built, a couple of kilometers further south. After bidding goodbye to Eni, that’s where I head, following a coastal road beneath ranks of tilted casuarina trees.

Much more remains of Fort Marlborough than of its predecessor. Rising in hunks of off-white masonry like slabs of mildewed wedding cake, it dominates the old part of Bengkulu. Rusting cannons, stamped with English coats of arms, lie like beached wales in the courtyard, and the ramshackle red roofs of the town sprawl away inland. The views are fine for modern tourists, but for earlier generations of foreigners with no chance of a quick escape this was a bleak and lonely place. Many drowned their sorrows in drink. Governor Collet and his 19 assistants went through a staggering 900 bottles of claret a month, prompting appalled company directors in Calcutta to declare that “It is a wonder to us that any of you live six months.”
Not all British residents of Bengkulu succumbed to drink and disease, however. William Marsden, who was here in the 1770s, wrote The History of Sumatra, the first major scholarly work in English on Indonesia. The most famous Englishman to call Bengkulu home also made the most of his time here. Thomas Stamford Raffles – famed as the founder of Singapore – was governor of Bengkulu for six years.
On arrival in 1818 Raffles declared that “This is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld”. The buildings were collapsing, and most of the officials were drunk – or dead. During his term Raffles did his best to reform Bengkulu.

A hundred meters from Fort Marlborough I find one of his civic works. It is a chunky neoclassical monument which Raffles erected to Thomas Parr, an earlier governor who was beheaded in his bedroom by disgruntled locals. From here I wander on along sleepy streets half-swamped in tropical vegetation. At many of the junctions stand concrete models of tabot, a Bengkulu icon. Once a year these tottering wood-and-paper models are paraded through the streets and toppled into the sea. The tabot ceremony falls 9 Muharram, a date usually commemorated by Shia Muslims. The celebrations in Sunni-majority Bengkulu are usually attributed to the British influence – the soldiers of the East India Company were mostly Indians, many of who were indeed Shia. But the ceremonies also show a link to earlier Hindu traditions.

Passing another British monument – to Captain Robert Hamilton who died in 1793 – I come to the great sweep of Pantai Panjang, Bengkulu’s “Long Beach”. Choppy waves are surging onto the sand and the sun is dropping west across an achingly empty ocean. I cut back northwest through the lanes to the European cemetery, the place where all too many of Bengkulu’s British residents ended up. Pale headstones stand at crooked angles and barefoot children are using the tombs as goalposts for a football match.

Hundreds of British soldiers and civilians – including Raffles’ four young children – were buried here. Today it is a strangely tranquil place. Many of the inscriptions have vanished over the years, while others were replaced with amateurish replicas during an ill-considered refurbishment in the 1990s. But there are still traces of small tragedies. One hulking vault outside the main cemetery is the resting place of a 10-day old child and of his mother, who died five years later at the age of 25. Another commemorating Captain Thomas Tapson who died in 1816 was “erected to his Memory by his much afflicted friend Nonah Jessmina”, hinting at a cross-cultural love affair.
As I wander around, scribbling notes and taking photos, the gang of children drift away from their ballgame to follow me. They come here to play football most afternoons, they tell me, but they know nothing about the tombs. No one has ever explained to them about the history of their hometown, and they do not even know the nationality of the people buried here.
Once I start to explain they quickly take an interest, and they drag me around the marked tombs demanding to know exactly who is buried where. They take a particular delight in the graves of small children, though they assure me that none of them have ever seen a ghost here.

Having done my small bit for historical awareness I head back to Fort Marlborough to watch the sunset. The British departed Bengkulu in 1824 when they organized a territorial trade-off with their Dutch rivals, swopping the town for the Malay port of Melaka. The fort remained a garrison for Dutch troops but the place was so remote and insignificant that it was chosen as a suitably far-flung exile for Sukarno during the years of anti-colonialist agitation.
As I clamber back onto the ramparts and look out towards a fiery western sky a young woman sitting with her friends on one of the parapets calls me over and we fall into conversation. Her name is Riani and she has recently returned to Bengkulu after several years in Jakarta. She comes from village 200 kilometers to the south on the old frontier of British territory. To my astonishment, she tells me that in that part of the province the local Malay dialect still contains a few English words: blanket, school, pocket and try. Almost two centuries after the Union Jack and the red standard of the East India Company flapped down the flagpole here for the last time, it seems that something still remains…

On the Trail of the Great Game in the Hindu Kush

2011-05-10T04:50:00.000-07:00

Travelling through Northern Pakistan in the footsteps of George Hayward

Originally published in Globe, the magazine of the Globetrotters Club, May 2011

http://globetrotters.co.uk/globe-magazine.html

On a bright autumn morning I set out walking along the Yasin Valley, high in the Hindu Kush Mountains in the wild borderlands of northern Pakistan. Stark, iron-grey slopes rose on either side towards a cobalt-blue sky. In the lower reaches of the valley the poplar trees were flaming brushstrokes of copper-gold in the sharp sunlight, and the voices of children and the bleating of goats carried on the still air.
My destination – the end-point of a year of research and travel – lay twenty miles ahead in the little hamlet of Darkot, last settlement before a high pass that led towards Afghanistan. I was travelling in the footsteps of the 19th Century British explorer George Hayward, heading for the spot where, in 1870, he was brutally murdered while trying to reach the Pamir Mountains.

I had first come across brief accounts of Hayward’s strange story in books about “the Great Game”, the cold war of spying and exploration fought between Russia and the British Empire in the turbulent spaces of Central Asia in the 19th Century, and had been fascinated ever since. Like all the explorers who travelled in the region in the heyday of empire, Hayward straddled the boundary between espionage and scientific endeavour. But unlike his contemporaries – men with stiff upper lips and flying moustaches – he was somehow more modern, more intense. The motives for his murder remain a mystery to this day.

The first journeys in my quest to find out more about this intriguing figure had taken me to the British Library and the Royal Geographical Society in London. But once I had leafed through Hayward’s letters, squinted at the squiggles of his spidery handwriting, and rifled the reams of conflicting reports on his death, I had hit a rockier road.
For three years, in his desperate attempts to reach the Pamirs, Hayward had criss-crossed the high mountains of Asia, passing through the Karakoram in winter without a tent, being held hostage in Kashgar and falling out with the Maharaja of Kashmir, before finally coming to a sticky end in the Yasin Valley.
Over the course of four wonderful months 140 years later, I rode rickety buses through Kashmir, hitchhiked across Ladakh, crossed Xinjiang during a total communications black-out enforced by the Chinese government, and now, finally, I was approaching my goal.

I had been to Pakistan before, but this was my first return since the recent turmoil which has tipped the troubled nation to the very brink of the abyss. Coming in the footsteps of a fellow countryman who was beheaded by the locals didn’t, I had to admit, seem like the luckiest of pilgrimages, but in the ten days since I arrived on the stomach-churning Karakoram Highway from China I had met nothing but warm welcomes and hot cups of tea. The ramshackle town of Gilgit, capital of Pakistan’s far north, had been a place of firm handshakes and wild polo matches, and the Hunza Valley had been achingly beautiful. Yasin itself was a place of sharp light and gifts.
It was late afternoon when I shambled into Darkot, a cold, stony village of flat-roofed houses beneath scored brown slopes. A ragged glacier curved to the west and the trail to the pass that Hayward had been trying to cross when he was killed bent away to the north.
But today Darkot seemed a world away from the political troubles of both the 19th century and the modern era. Gaggles of friendly children led me to the house of the local schoolmaster, Mohamed Murad. He was completely unperturbed by my arrival and invited me to stay the night, though he later told me I was the first foreign traveller to visit Darkot for more than a year.
After plying me with fresh bread and salty mountain tea Murad and another kindly teacher named Abdul Rashid led me to the spot where Hayward was killed – still known today as Feringhi Bar, “the Foreigner’s Valley”. It was a strangely beautiful spot, a patch of goat-cropped grass beneath a buckled apricot tree with the mountains all around. There, in the company of Murad, Abdul Rashid and a local farmer called Badal Beg I was treated to an impromptu picnic and a taste of the warm hospitality for which the rugged uplands of northern Pakistan are rightly famous.
It was, I decided as I sipped my tea looking out across the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, a fitting end to my pilgrimage…
***
The full story of George Hayward’s wild life and violent death – and of Tim Hannigan’s own travels in Hayward’s footsteps – is told in Murder in the Hindu Kush, published by the History Press. You can find out more about the book at www.murderinthehindukush.com, and you can see more of Tim’s travel writing and photography at tahannigan.blogspot.com

Over the Bridge

2011-04-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

Exploring Madura's Backroads

Originally published in Venture Magazine, April 2011

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Venture-Travel-Magazine/110370632349708

It is 8am and Surabaya’s morning rush hour is going at full tilt. A turbulent maelstrom of bikes, bemos, buses and SUVs is grinding through the heart of the gargantuan East Java capital, Indonesia’s second largest city. I, astride my motorbike, am in the thick of it, and I’m looking for a way out. Fortunately I know exactly where to find one.
I weave between the wobbling commuters and head north along hectic streets. Soon I’m riding along a new highway. Two years ago this was a road to nowhere, petering out amongst the fishponds and kampungs, but now it’s a mainline to fresh air and green fields.
The Suramadu Bridge rises ahead, a great hump of concrete and reinforced steel vaulting across a five-kilometer-wide channel. I pause at the toll gate to hand over the Rp3000 fee, and then hit the throttle and blaze across the spans. To the left an expanse of pale water opens. I can see the great fleets of cargo ships at anchor off Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak port. The sky arcs overhead; I cross the apex of the bridge, the breeze whistling in the orange suspension cables, and drop down into Madura.
I whizz past the ranks of new gift stalls that line the approach road, make a U-turn to access a little side lane I discovered on my last visit, and am soon riding through rice fields. Glossy banana plants line the ditches and ranks of palms and bamboo march towards the distant ridge of limestone hills. The air is clean and full of the smells of fresh vegetation.
Beyond a small village in a shady grove of trees I park my bike at the roadside and scramble up a steep rise to the top of a stony outcrop where I sit back in the rough grass and breathe deeply. Insects whistle softly and birds are singing. A warm breeze carries with it a whiff of salt and freshly tilled soil, and green treetops expand in all directions around me. There is not another human being in sight. I smile and glance at my watch – 9.30am. Only an hour and a half has passed, but I am already deep in Madura’s tranquil countryside, and Surabaya is nothing but a distant smoggy smudge on the southwest horizon…

***

I first visited Madura more than four years ago. I was living and working in neighboring Surabaya at the time and it seemed like an obvious place for an out-of-town weekend adventure by motorbike. It was only when I told my Indonesian friends and colleagues my plan that I learnt about Madura’s atrocious reputation.
The island is Java’s closest neighbor, a 140 kilometer-long hulk of low hills, forests and fields riding offshore like a ship at anchor, but no other place in Indonesia has such a negative reputation. According to my friends Madura was hot, dirty and disgusting. The local specialties sate (miniature kebabs) and the soto (hearty soup) were tasty, but those were the only things that counted in its favor. The Madurese people, they said, were rough, rude, aggressive, and quite possibly dangerous. I’d be lucky if I made it back in one piece.
When I discovered that none of them had actually been to Madura, I was all the more determined to go and see for myself. And how glad I was that I hadn’t listened to the slanderous stories! I soon discovered that Madura was a beautiful island, a tranquil retreat from big city chaos, and a place where sandy back-roads through the palm trees led to deserted beaches. As for the local people, they were warmly welcoming and full of humor. The only thing my friends in Surabaya had been right about was the sate and the soto – they were delicious!
Before long this much-maligned island was my first choice for an escape whenever the heat and noise of Surabaya wore me down. I would ride my motorbike to the Tanjung Perak port, drive aboard the rusting car ferry to Kamal, and then blaze away for a weekend of exploring.
I tried to convince other people that they should cross the Madura Strait and see for themselves, but no one would listen. Negative prejudices about the place run deep in Java, where rebel princes and mercenary armies from Madura caused headaches for the rulers of the ancient Majapahit and Mataram kingdoms, and where Madurese migrant workers in modern cities are often viewed with suspicion.
But now it has become a whole lot easier to reach Madura, and for the first time a few other inquisitive explorers are discovering the truth about this misunderstood island…

***

On 10 June 2009 the monumental Suramadu opened to traffic. Long planned, long delayed, and costing Rp4.7 trillion, it is the first major interisland bridge in Indonesia and a feat of engineering to boggle the mind.
The idea behind the bridge was to boost the economy in Madura, but the bridge has had another side effect. There is no more waiting at the ferry port, no more traffic jams; getting to Madura is suddenly quick and easy, and inquisitive Surabaya residents and travelers from further afield are starting to visit. Most don’t get much further than the end of the bridge where a mass of souvenir stalls and cafes has sprung up to serve this unexpected tourist trade, but there’s a whole island waiting to be discovered.
My own favorite Madura journey – one that I repeat whenever I get the chance – is a full circuit of the island. I ride first along the main southern road through the towns of Sampang and Pamekasan. In the dry season the countryside takes on an ochre-tinted dustiness, but after the rains it is overwhelmingly green. The road passes through open, airy forest, winds over the knuckles of the limestone hills, and bends along the stony foreshore.
The best place to be based for an exploration of Madura is its most easterly town, Sumenep. People in Java will tell you that the Madurese are uncultured and crude, but this little royal city is a refined, charming and friendly place. It was once the seat of a Sultan, and is home to a kraton, a palace, the last one still standing in East Java Province (of which Madura is a part). There are Dutch-era villas in the backstreets, a mosque with the most striking and unusual gateway I’ve ever seen (it looks like a pyramid of yellow and white icing), bustling covered markets, and a hilltop royal graveyard full of sacred tombs. The whole place has a sleepy charm, with the rattle of the becak (pedicab) still ruling over the roar of the motorbike once you leave the main roads.
But it is the countryside beyond Sumenep that shows Madura at its very best. Tobacco fields and dense forest give way to sprawling stands of palm trees and the road finally stutters to a stop at a huge, empty expanse of yellow sand backing a blinding blue ocean. This is Lombang Beach. On the weekends families from Sumenep drive out to drink fresh coconut juice and to dip a tentative toe in the ocean, but on a weekday you’ll have the place to yourself.
Beyond the beach the countryside is wilder and more rugged with stony fields running right down to the shore. This part of Madura looks more like the Mediterranean than Indonesia, and as I travel along the bumpy lanes here I can sometimes imagine that I’m on some sun-bleached Greek island.
There’s softer countryside and another beach at Slopeng, due north of Sumenep, and villages hidden in the trees where they still make traditional carved masks for wayang topeng dance performances. This is where some of the very best pieces on sale in craft shops in Bali and Yogyakarta are made.
I love to ride my bike along this north coast road, past fishing villages with brightly painted boats jostling in narrow inlets, empty beaches and white-walled settlements where they make fine batik. Eventually the hills on the left fall back to wider, broader rice fields with pale mosques standing knee-deep in the greenery, and the road turns south through Bangkalan, the main town in western Madura. And from there it’s just a short hop back to the bridge.
I’ve been doing my best to champion Madura as a travel destination ever since my first visit. It’s always been a hard sell, but thanks to Suramadu’s bridge over troubled waters there’s no longer any excuse not to make the journey along the island’s unbeaten tracks to empty beaches, quiet corners and warm welcomes. One day soon the world might catch on to Madura’s potential as a travel destination; you might want to get there first, before everyone else…

***

Today I have no time to make the journey east to Sumenep. This is just a spur-of-the-moment coming up for air, of the kind I’ve often been making since Suramadu opened. I scramble back down the hillside and climb back into the saddle, passing on through more shady villages and open fields where farmers are plowing with yoked brown cows, and then turning back onto the broad approach road to the bridge. But before I pay the toll and return to traffic jams and diesel fumes I have one more stop to make. It’s 11.30am, almost lunchtime, so I pull over at a roadside warung for a bowl of soto – it is delicious, after all…

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Wandering into the Past in Old Surabaya

2011-04-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

Surabaya's historic quarters

Originally published in Venture magazine, January 2011

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Venture-Travel-Magazine/110370632349708

I pick my way through the puddles, step lightly over broken packing cases, and dodge a passing becak. The street is wet after the recent rain. Century-old shop-houses rise on either side with arched windows and narrow balconies. Shutters stand open to dark interiors full of bulging sacks. The red splash of a Chinese calendar shows in the gloom on a back wall.

I have made my way along this same street many times, camera and notebook in hand, hunting out historical relics and colorful photo opportunities, but there is always some side alley still to be explored. I duck down a likely one, and there right in front of me is a magnificent building that I have never seen before – two storeys raised on columns with intricate ironwork balustrades. A century ago it would have been the home of a wealthy Chinese trader. Today it is slowly crumbling; decades of traffic fumes have left a grey patina on the walls, and a ramshackle food-stall has sprouted from the façade. A limp “for sale” banner hangs over the entranceway. This is Old Surabaya, the historic quarter of what was once the most important city in the Dutch East Indies, and on every alleyway there are forgotten treasures like this, slowly giving way to dereliction with each passing wet season. This is why it’s a place where I love to wander, hunting out these melancholy reminders of a bygone age…

***

Surabaya, capital of East Java, Indonesia’s second largest city, and a swirling metropolitan mass of congestion and construction, is better known for traffic jams and shopping malls than for tangible history. But three kilometers north of the modern downtown is an area forgotten by more recent developments. This was the heart of the original city, a trading port that grew up on the banks of the Kalimas River. On the west bank a European quarter sprouted from the 17th Century, with Dutch-style, hipped roofs and sturdy walls. Across the water was Chinatown, a warren of steamy alleyways and red temples; to the north lay the Arab Quarter, built around the city’s oldest mosque, and along the river was the port, with its white schooners from Sulawesi and beyond. Though the whole place is slowly falling to pieces today, this is still one of the most extensive historical areas of any Indonesian city, with endless opportunities for wandering street photographers and history buffs.

***

Old Surabaya starts in Chinatown. The names of the roads here – Rubber Street, Tea Street, Chocolate Street – hint at past imports, and tucked between old shops and homes there are Chinese clan-houses with bowed rooflines, and temples built by the first settlers from the Chinese mainland, many centuries ago. The oldest – the Hok An Kiong – stands on the corner of Chocolate Street. It is dedicated to the Goddess of Seafarers. There is always a gaggle of old men hanging around here whenever I wander by, and they always call me in for a chat and a drink.

The biggest temple lies further north, on an alleyway of mechanics’ shops. The Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong is a complex of dark, smoky chambers where three-meter-high candles flicker in the incense-scented gloom and old women go quietly through their prayers. Dragons writhe on the roofs, and bug-eyed lions guard the gateways.

North of Chinatown there is a great maze of alleyways around Pasar Pabean, the biggest traditional market in Surabaya. Here ramshackle residential quarters sit cheek by jowl with ranks of fruit and vegetable stalls, and a massive, bustling fish market. But above the dust and noise and the Madurese women in bright bandanas hawking garlic and onions, there are the upper storeys of fine commercial buildings from the days when wealthy people did their shopping here.

***

I often pause here to take a photo or scribble a note, before hopping into a becak to carry me out to some other quarter. Becaks, the three-wheeled Indonesian version of the cycle-rickshaw, are the workhorses of Old Surabaya. Peddled by men with iron calf muscles, they carry both people and great bundles of produce. Many are spectacularly decorated, with metalwork painted in colorful patterns. A becak ride along narrow, potholed streets is the best ways to wend your way through the old city.

A becak often carries me to Ampel, the Arab Quarter. From the 16th Century onwards traders from the hard brown hills of Yemen settled here, opening shops to sell the produce of their homeland – dates, cloth, perfume and religious books. Their descendants are still here, and the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern Souk still lingers in the street that leads to the grand Ampel Mosque.

***

Much of the palpable history in Old Surabaya is fading slowly from the scene. Elsewhere – especially in Singapore and Malaysia – old quarters have been saved from collapse; Chinese-style buildings have been repainted in bright pastel colors, and one-time time colonial shop-houses have been turned into boutique hotels. As I wander through these alleyways, however, that kind of thing seems like a distant dream – though I hope that one day the authorities will realize the value of all this heritage before it is gone forever. For now, however, there is a gritty authenticity in these old streets, and the ever-present chance to stumble on some fresh surprise, some grand mansion abandoned to the ghosts, or some quiet family scene played out in halls that once must have echoed to the sound of accumulating coin, when Surabaya was a wealthy port mentioned in the same breath as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore…

And there is one part of the Old City where a direct link to that past still remains strong. Once I have toured the Chinese temples, ridden a becak, and bought a bag of dates from the great-grandson of an immigrant Yemeni, I cut west through quiet lanes until I reach the sluggish channel of the Kalimas. It is still a place for ships from other places to drop anchor, and on its final reaches, before the city gives way to the sea, I wander along a dockside lined with magnificent white schooners, still built to the lines of the original Bugis phinisi from Sulawesi. Here, a world away from the air-conditioned chain stores of the downtown shopping malls, barefoot sailors are padding up bouncing gangplanks, and tossing wrapped bundles down into dark holds, cargoes set for far off places beyond the Java Sea. Here, with the sun slanting away to the west and the becaks trundling homewards, the trade and the connections that first made this place a city continues – the original heart of Old Surabaya is still beating…

High Road to Hunza

2011-03-11T00:29:00.000-08:00

Travelling in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

Originally published in Asian Geographic Passport, December 2010

http://www.asiangeopassport.com/

Say you’re going to Pakistan for a holiday and most people will think you’re joking – or crazy. Chronic instability and bomb blasts in major cities have seen the South Asian nation drop off the world travel map in recent years. But here’s the good news: Gilgit-Baltistan, in Pakistan’s mountainous far north, remains totally unaffected by the troubles further south. The region has some of the most jaw-dropping upland scenery on earth and is home to some of Asia’s most hospitable people.

Until recently Gilgit-Baltistan was known as the Northern Areas. According to locals this led not just foreign travellers but even domestic tourists to confuse this peaceful region with more restive areas such as Swat, which also lie in the north of Pakistan. So let’s clear up the confusion once and for all: the only danger you’re likely to face in Gilgit-Baltistan – besides the stomach-churning mountain roads – is of tooth decay from the endless cups of super-sweet tea you’ll be offered.

Gilgit-Baltistan is defined by its mountains. This is the place where the world’s highest ranges – the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush – lock together in one mighty knot. The region contains the greatest concentration of peaks over 7000 metres anywhere in the world. Icy giants loom over journeys in Gilgit-Baltistan, but you don’t need to be a mountaineer or a hardcore trekker to make the most of a trip here. Backbone of the region is the Karakoram Highway a mindboggling 1300 kilometre strip of tarmac that winds along perilous gorges all the way from Islamabad to Kashgar in China. As long as you’ve got a strong head for heights you’ll get views from the window of a bus or jeep that you’d have to hike days to enjoy in other parts of the world.

Capital of Gilgit-Baltistan is the town of Gilgit, the hub of the mountains where tenuous trails north, south, east and west come together. It’s a charmingly ramshackle place, hemmed in by hard brown peaks. The chaotic markets are full of chatter in a dozen languages, and the scent of grilling kebabs. Here an invitation for chai (Pakistani milk tea) from a stranger in the street can be taken at face value and a stroll through the bazaar will be a succession of warm greetings and hearty handshakes.

If there’s a polo match on while you’re in Gilgit don’t miss it! The “game of kings” is a passion here, but it’s a world away from the gentile sport played by British royalty. In Gilgit-Baltistan they play free-style polo, best described as wrestling-cum-rugby on horseback, and there are few more thrilling sights that the two five-man teams going at full tilt in a welter of hoof-beats and dust. If you visit in July you can catch the famous Shandur polo tournament, a three-day contest played on the saddle of a 3735 metre pass.

A trip west from Gilgit will lead you to the beautiful valleys of Ishkoman and Yasin – remote fastnesses where saw-toothed ridges rise above thickets of poplar trees and willows. This is an area almost untouched by tourism where you’ll be taken in by local villagers and given a place to sleep in the family guestroom. Like many people in Gilgit-Baltistan the residents of these valleys are tolerant Ismaili Muslims, members of the Shia sect led by the Aga Khan.

Head east of Gilgit if you’re looking for serious trekking. Skardu, a bleak township on the banks of the Indus River, is the heart of the Karakoram. This area was once part of Tibet, and though the people are Shia Muslims now, they still speak a Tibetan dialect. Here the superlative extends both horizontally and vertically – the longest glaciers in the world outside the polar regions snake beneath K2 and a clutch of other monstrous mountains.

But for scenery that surpasses all, travel north from Gilgit, along the Karakoram Highway. Here an ice-blue river cleaves a deep valley between two kingdoms – Nagar on the east bank, the fabled fastness of Hunza on the west. The landscapes are of a kind usually only found in the cover art of fantasy novels. Impossibly high mountains, Rakaposhi, Ultar, Golden Peak and Diran, tower over mud-walled villages where amber apricots dry on the flat roofs. Irrigated terraces are a blaze of white blossom in spring or a flaming furnace of reds, yellows and golds in autumn. The people of Hunza – also Ismailis – are famous not only for their hospitality but also for their music, and for the fiery liquor they brew from their home-grown apricots. Karimabad, once the seat of Hunza’s royalty, is the main settlement, but don’t miss the chance to head further north. Where Pakistan begins to fade towards China you’ll find the villages of Gulmit and Passu, and the even more remote side valleys of Shimshal and Chapursan, wild, beautiful, and overwhelmingly hospitable places. Up here, with memories of thunderous polo matches, of breathtaking roads, and of a pomegranate, a cup of tea or even a bed for the night offered by a chance-met stranger, the idea that Pakistan is a dangerous, hostile place will seem almost ridiculous.

Making a Rare Connection in East Java

2011-02-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

The Suramadu Bridge

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe 04/01/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/making-a-rare-connection-in-east-java/415023

“You know, I used to work breaking stones,” says Sutia, a 25-year-old Madurese woman, as she reclines in the shade of her little tented cafe beside the approach road to the Suramadu Bridge. “Really, just that, just breaking stones into little pieces for building. Now I have a warung. Nice, right?”
A steady stream of cars, buses and bikes roars past, heading south for Surabaya from the Madura hinterland. Every so often a vehicle pulls over beside the long rank of warungs and souvenir stalls, and a gaggle of perspiring sightseers clamber out, squinting in the hot sun, looking for a length of Madurese batik, a bowl of soto, or a kitsch tee shirt commemorating the enormous bridge they are about to cross.
Eying the potential customers, Sutia grins. “Madura is getting business from Suramadu,” she says.
Sutia and dozens of her compatriots from the villages around Kwanyar are reaping the rewards of an unlikely little tourism boom, a windfall of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Indonesia in recent years – the Suramadu Bridge, 5.4 kilometers of steel and concrete stitching two of the archipelago’s most uneasy neighbors tightly together.

The great green loadstone of Java and its unruly outlier, the long, low island of Madura, are separated by a narrow channel. But the gulf between the two islands is enormous, for Madura has a decidedly unenviable reputation.
In centuries past it was a wellspring of rebel princes who ransacked royal Javanese courts or turned mercenary for the Dutch East India Company. In more recent years economic migrants from its poor, dry countryside have crossed the straits to bring their gritty work ethic, their tasty soto and sate to towns and cities across the archipelago. But according to myths touted by many Indonesians, especially those from Java, the people of Madura are uncouth, uncultured, and possibly dangerous. Their homeland has always been a place to avoid at all costs.
But in June 2009 all that changed with the opening of the long planned, long delayed Suramadu Bridge. Comprising 28,000 tons of steel and 600,000 tons of steel alloy, and requiring an estimated outlay of Rp4.7 trillion, the bridge joins the northeast suburbs of Surabaya to the south coast of Madura (the name – Suramadu – is a contraction of Surabaya and Madura).
Suramadu was intended to encourage economic development in Madura, which was previously connected to the outside world only by rickety, rusty ferries. But the bridge is such a striking piece of engineering – with enormous suspension spans and a fine view from the apex – that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. And with travelers from Surabaya and beyond now making tentative weekend outings across the water to discover that all those awful stories about Madura were wild exaggerations, locals have experienced a business bonanza.
Within days of the bridge opening to traffic the first stalls had sprung up along the sides of the four-lane northern approach road that connects the crossing to the nearby town of Bangkalan. Now, 18 months later, there’s a linear city of tented cafes and stalls stretching some two kilometers inland on both sides of the highway.

A little way up the road from Sutia’s warung a 34-year-old local man called Ayub is minding his stall. “If you come here on Sunday it’s so crowded,” he says; “there are tours from Surabaya, from Central Java. There was even a tour from Lombok the other day.” According to Ayub some of these travelers are heading for the sacred Muslim tombs at Bangkalan and Sumenep; a few might even be venturing for the untouched beaches and beautiful countryside of the island’s far northeast. “But most of them just want to look at the bridge. They come across, turn around and go back,” he says.
All of the stalls are owned by people from the immediate vicinity, and the whole network has been set up informally.
“You don’t need to pay anything to build a stall here,” says Ayub’s friend, a young woman called Juli; “this is the people’s land!”
And with minimal outlay on a few lengths of bamboo and a few strips of tarpaulin, a whole new world of opportunity has opened.
“Locals here used to work as various things,” says Ayub; “some were farmers, some had no job; a lot emigrated.” Ayub himself spent two years working in Malaysia, another two years as a food hawker in Jakarta, and more time crewing a cargo boat plying the waters of the Java Sea. But now, with a wife and two children in a village within walking distance of his new stall, he has happily come home. “Suramadu gave me that chance,” he says.
Outside more shiny SUVs and are pulling up. Housewives from Malang and families from Sidoarjo are bargaining over take-home trinkets.
“Java people used to be scared of Madura,” says Ayub, “because they never came here, they didn’t know. It used to be rare for anyone to come here without an important reason because it was slow and expensive. It cost more than Rp100,000 for a bus on the ferry; it’s only Rp60,000 now. They can come just for a look, so they know Madurese people aren’t so bad!”

The only losers have been the hawkers who once worked the vehicle ferries that slithered between Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak port, and the old gateway to Madura at Kamal, several kilometers west of the bridge. A few ferries still make the crossing, but traffic has slowed to a trickle and some of these traders have shifted their attention to Suramadu, and now wander between the stalls as they used to ply the decks of the ferries.
The prime spots have long been snapped up, but the expansion continues with new warungs popping up far inland. According to locals both sides of the road have their advantages – the inbound northern side is where most visitors stop to eat, but the outbound southern side is the favored spot for souvenir shopping and photo opportunities.

A kilometer from the bridge on that southern flank, where the road rises over the first bank of limestone hills, stands Pak Imam’s warung. Twelve months ago his was the final stall, but today it merely marks the halfway point of the strip. Pak Imam, who worked as a motorbike taxi driver in a nearby village before the bridge opened, has watched the burgeoning city of stalls grow around his recently refurbished warung where he sells tea, coffee, and traditional Madurese soto – yellow soup with rice and meat.
“Madura used to be an isolated place,” Pak Imam says. “The people here didn’t know anything; we were just farmers – or fishermen if we lived by the sea. But now we have the bridge we will know about the world; we won’t be ignorant anymore.”
From the threshold of the warung, with its rickety bamboo benches, steaming soto cauldron, and luridly colored soft drinks, the high-rises of central Surabaya show through the haze to the south. Pak Imam, noting the speed of development that has met the arrival of the bridge, acknowledges the potential downsides.
“Of course, if Madura becomes like Surabaya there will be traffic jams and pollution and we’ll all be stressed like city people,” he says, “but if nothing changed we wouldn’t know anything and we’d just be farmers and fishermen.
“There’s no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What I mean is nothing is all good or all bad; every good thing brings some bad with it, but as far as I’m concerned this bridge is mostly good, not just for Madura – for everyone...”

Truth and Fiction on a Dutch Colonial Plantation

2011-02-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

Review of The Tea Lords By Hella S Haasse

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/12/2010

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/arts/truth-and-fiction-on-a-dutch-colonial-plantation/413787

The Tea Lords by Hella S. Haasse “is a novel, but it is not ‘fiction’”, writes the author in a vital note, tucked away at the very end of the book. Factual histories often focus on the big figures – princes, revolutionaries and governors-general – and leave the lives of the bit players to writers of historical fiction. The Tea Lords, straddling the strange gap between these genres, focuses on the “side-lights” of Indonesia’s colonial past – the lives, loves and losses of a dynasty of Dutch tea planters in the uplands of West Java.
Hella S. Haasse is the grande damme of Dutch literature. Now 92, she was born in Batavia (modern Jakarta) and spent the first two decades of her life in what was then the Dutch East Indies. During a sixty-year career she has written many novels, some drawing on her own background in Indonesia. But in The Tea Lords she has done something a little different.
The book – originally published in Dutch in 1992, but only now available in a crisp English translation by Ina Rilke – spans the lifetime of Rudolf Kerkhoven, scion of an established family of planters in Java. The book opens as the young, idealistic, and ambitious Kerkhoven completes his studies in Holland in the 1860s and returns to Java to be inducted into the mysteries of the tea trade. But the core of the story lies in Rudolf’s struggles to establish his own remote plantation, Gamboeng, in the damp uplands south of Bandung, and in his marriage to Jenny, daughter of another old-established Dutch dynasty in Java.
All this makes for the bones of a conventional family saga – and indeed, that is how The Tea Lords is arranged, with a galaxy of cousins and uncles scattered over the green Javanese mountainsides, with sibling rivalry, overbearing patriarchs, and dark secrets.
But Haasse did not simply invent these people. A man named Rudolf Kerkhoven really did found a plantation at Gamboeng (tea is still grown in the area today), and really did marry a woman called Jenny, and the book is driven by large excerpts from their own letters and journals. This original approach at times makes The Tea Lords a frustrating read.
In her afterword Haasse notes that the quotations have not been invented; rather they have been “arranged to meet the demands of a novel”. But this can lead to confusion – how much has the author meddled with the chronology? How often has she edited what appear as verbatim excerpts? And in its attempts to combine aspects of both fiction and non-fiction, the book sometimes stumbles. Passages about the technicalities of tea growing and the background of the main families, which in a history book could have been comfortably described, here have to be forced unrealistically into the mouths of the characters. Thoughts and emotions, hinted at in the original letters, take a strangely flat tone when Haasse expands them, and the blurring of the line between real quotations and invented dialogue often leaves the drive of the narrative hidden behind a mist of ambiguity. It’s hard not to feel that The Tea Lords would have been stronger as either pure fiction, or pure history.
But despite this, the disjointed strangeness of the book’s structure manages – perhaps unintentionally – to convey the disjointed strangeness of the lives it depicts. Whole generations of Dutch men and women – like the characters in this book – were conditioned to think of a far-off Holland as “home” while living out most of their lives on some steamy plantation in Java. They did not consider themselves the active agents of a colonial project as we might regard them now, and in detailing their private concerns, their petty arguments, and their fears Haasse conveys this idea convincingly. It is unfortunate that the Indonesians who feature in the book are little more than crude caricatures of loyal retainers and devoted maids, but the author didn’t have their letters and diaries to draw from, so this was probably inevitable.
The greatest strength of The Tea Lords is in its atmosphere: if the conversations are sometimes stilted, the descriptions of the landscapes are anything but, and a powerful sense of the sheer, overwhelming greenness of the Javanese countryside pervades the book. The portrayal of Jenny Kerkhoven’s fears, frustrations and eventual descent towards madness, meanwhile, offers an unsettling glimpse into the darker currents beneath the petty world of the colonial social scene.
In the final third the book subtly changes pace. Haasse begins to quote ever larger chunks from the archives, often without bothering to embed them in her own prose. Yet as the 20th Century opens and the key characters move towards old age they suddenly take stronger shape and become more sympathetic, and the terrible toll that plantation life has taken on their relationships and their happiness becomes clear.
The Tea Lords’ unusual nature does at times make it a difficult book, and readers may well be left with many frustratingly unanswered questions about the real-life people who inspired it. But by the time the book reaches its quietly sad closing scene – in the cool, green forest of Gamboeng – it no longer really matters whether it is truth or fiction.

Adoring Adonara

2011-01-05T07:05:00.000-08:00

The little visited island of Adonara in Nusa Tenggara

Originally Published in Bali and Beyond Magazine November 2010

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/

Larantuka, a town of white churches at the eastern tip of Flores, is the end of the road. This is the point where bus travel finally gives way to boat trips. But though this Catholic stronghold is the terminus of the Trans-Flores Highway, for anyone with a taste for adventure it is just the start of the real journey.
From the dockside, with its baskets and bundles and white wooden ferries, a view of a mirror-smooth private sea opens, and offshore lie the first landfalls of the Solor and Alor Archipelagos, the string of small islands that form the furthest extremity of East Nusa Tenggara province. To the south stands the long ridge of Solor, a small island with a big history; beyond it is rugged, mountainous Lembata, famed for its traditional whaling village at Lamalera on the south coast. Further afield, beyond the horizon, lie volcanic Pantar and the pristine coral reefs and dark, myth-filled hills of Alor. But before all that, rising in steep green hillsides just across the Flores Strait, is Adonara, the most easily reached of this tantalizing chain of islands, but perhaps the least visited.

Small, sun-bleached passenger boats will carry you from Larantuka across clear turquoise water to Waiwerang, the capital of Adonara. It is a tiny township of rusting tin roofs and sagging palm trees, and once the ferry departs an air of tropical torpor descends. Adonara is close enough to Larantuka to visit on a day trip, but there are a couple of simple guesthouses here if you want to spend the night.
Waiwerang’s name means “Water from the Land” in the local language, and it is named after a hot spring that bubbles out of the ground not for from the jetty. This geothermally heated water shows that fiery forces are at work beneath Adonara’s green hills, and a glance east along Waiwerang’s sleepy main street reveals the volcanic apex of the region – Ile Boleng, the 1659 meter mountain that looms over the island.

Despite its remote location, Adonara was close to the epicenter of some of the earliest European involvement in Indonesia. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed through this way in 1522, and according to local tradition the first Portuguese missionaries arrived even earlier – in 2010 the Catholic community focused on Larantuka celebrated its 500th anniversary. In 1561 the Portuguese arrived in force and built a fort on Solor, and another on the north coast of Adonara. From this unlikely outpost they controlled the traffic in fragrant sandalwood from nearby Timor, and spices from Maluku further north. It was only when the Portuguese lost ground to the Dutch in the 17th Century that Solor and Adonara became a lost tropical backwater once more. Today the only echoes of this Portuguese past are in the strong Catholicism of these islands, and in the devotion shown to an ancient Portuguese idol of the Virgin Mary, known here as Tuan Ma.

Beyond Waiwerang Adonara is a place of steeply folded hills and thick palm forests. Despite the greenery this is a dry island by Indonesian standards. Maize, rather than rice, is the main crop here. Great piles of yellow corncobs are heaped outside red-roofed village houses, and the local staple food is jagung titi, a sort of squashed popcorn!
The potholed road east of Waiwerang leads through villages and cornfields with the soaring slopes of Ile Boleng looming to the left. To the right lie a string of pristine white beaches. Head down a bumpy red track to Pantai Ena Burak on a weekday and you’ll likely have the strip of blinding white sand, backed by palms and black basalt outcrops and fronted by a skyline view of the hills of Solor and Lembata, all to yourself. Small white boats chug against the current offshore and the bright blue water surges onto the shore.

Today the people of Adonara are a mixture of Catholics and Muslims. The two communities live side by side, and there are often interfaith marriages, for they share the same adat traditions, the customs and belief systems that predate the arrival of foreign religions on Adonara. Bride price here is still paid with heirloom elephant tusks, imported from mainland Asia centuries ago. The most valuable of the tusks can be worth as much as Rp50 million, and a marriage between aristocratic families can require a payment of ten such pieces!
Traditions are at their strongest in the hills of Adonara. Though the island is peaceful now, local men still carry long spears when they go into the forest, an echo of times when rival clans were often in conflict. In the villages of the Koli area, high amongst green, palm-clad ridges, with a view of Ile Boleng’s smooth cone rising to the east, there are traditional ceremonial buildings.
In Lama Nepa hamlet the roof of the Koke-Bale, the thatched building traditionally used for planning battles in times of clan warfare, is decorated with a carving of the dragon which was slain by the village’s founding fathers according to legend. In another building nearby one family has the hereditary duty of minding a sacred sword, said to have belonged to the dragon-slayer. Sacred power and ancestral spirits are said to linger around this rusty heirloom; an offering of food and tuak, palm wine, are placed before it each evening.
Tuak, made from fermented coconut water or lontar juice and quaffed from a hollowed out coconut shell, is the beverage of choice in these villages, but before drinking, anyone whose parents have already died will deliberately spill a drop of the sweet liquor onto the ground – an offering to the ancestors.

More folklore surrounds that mighty, dominating volcano peak that towers over Adonara. Each year, at the start of the wet season, elders from the villages on the lower slopes head up to the summit of Ile Boleng where they toss chickens into the deep crater as offerings. The volcano, locals say, must be fed like this each year to ensure that it remains good tempered. Perhaps its hunger was not satisfied in 1982 – the last year that it erupted, spilling smoke and ash high into the tropical sky.
Today the mountain is dormant, and the climb to the summit is one of the most rewarding hikes in Nusa Tenggara. From the cool, green village of Lamalota a black trail leads through dense forest, past small gardens in quiet clearings, tangles of thorny creepers and wild avocado and guava trees. Villagers grow vanilla in the undergrowth and the branches are full of green parakeets and other birdlife more reminiscent of Australia than of Bali and Java. Taboos surround the flanks of Ile Boleng – no salt or fish may be carried to the summit, and on the slopes even discussion of maritime matters, boats or whales for example, is forbidden.
Beyond the forest the trail leads over steep, stony slopes before finally reaching the crater lip. Circuit this great gaping chasm of fractured red rock to the very summit and you’ll find a swelling view of a wild island world. Far below all of Adonara, from Ena Burak’s white shore, to the green, village-speckled interior, opens. To the south Solor rides like a ship at anchor, and to the east Lembata broods, with Ile Boleng’s twin, the steep cone of Ile Api, rising over the shore. And beyond to the west lie the mountains of Flores. The view makes the climb more than worthwhile, and that panorama of isolated islands is a tantalizing widow on other potential adventures in this beautiful, little-known corner of Indonesia.

Hidden Timor Village Shares its Secrets with Tourists

2010-11-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

The traditional West Timor Village of Boti

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 02/11/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/hidden-timor-village-shares-its-secrets-with-tourists/404542

The minibus was full of the sour scent of betel nut. I was crammed into the front passenger seat between the driver and two old men with thin, wiry limbs. All of them were wearing heavy, knee-length sarongs of local ikat cloth, and their voices were blunted by the wads of scarlet betel they were chewing.
Outside the forest was cool and damp and green and the road was full of red puddles. We were bouncing along a mountain road southeast of the little West Timor town of Soe; my fellow passengers were talking about the Raja, the King. The new raja was keeping the adat – the traditions – very strong, they said. He couldn’t speak any Indonesian. He had actually been second in line to the throne, but his older brother had moved out of the kingdom and had “entered Christianity” and so lost his right to rule.
It was a simple enquiry from the driver about my destination that had kicked off this tantalizing conversation; the “king” in question was the hereditary headman of Boti, the remote village towards which I was heading. On a high promontory above a sweeping panorama of mist-chased hills the driver paused and pointed. Far below a clutch of pale roofs showed between the trees.
“There it is,” he said; “Boti!”

***

Boti, about 50 kilometers from Soe, is West Timor’s most famous traditional village, known for its unique “independence”. Under a succession of self-styled rajas the hilltop community there has kept the outside world at bay, rejecting first Dutch colonialists and Protestant missionaries, and then the Indonesian state with its education, language and infrastructure.
But the previous Raja, father of the present incumbent, demonstrated that he was not simply some hostile isolationist. Indonesian government services and prescribed religions might have been rejected, but there was one outside influence that Boti had allowed in, on its own terms: a little low key tourism. The place was, I had heard, not only a bastion of traditional Timorese culture, but also a model for responsible cultural tourism.

***

I bade goodbye to my betel-chewing companions at a roadside market, and a youth with a motorbike took me several kilometers further along a rough track. A stony river bed was as far as he could go, so I shouldered my pack and continued on foot. The sky above was pale and bleached, and beyond the hissing of the river there was a tapestry of birdsong.
It was an uphill walk to the village. Pigs and chickens foraged in the undergrowth, and here and there a neat little house with shuttered windows stood in a clearing of packed earth. A clutch of wide-eyed schoolchildren led to the threshold of a beautiful half-wild garden. Tall palms towered overhead; between them stony flowerbeds were stepped down the hillside between crooked pomegranate trees.
At the end of the path stood what passes for a palace in Boti – a little wooden cottage with a wide veranda. Outside the dark doorway a gaggle of village women were chatting and chewing betel nut. They reacted as if they had been expecting me. In a few moments I was sipping sweet coffee, and the women – Mama Tua, the Queen of Boti, foremost amongst them – had resumed their conversation. Their heavy beads and bangles clicked together as they spoke.

Guidebooks and tourist brochures make much of the idea that Boti is completely cut off from the rest of Indonesia, but this is not entirely true. Many villagers – including Mama Tua – do speak some Indonesian, and the new generation of Botinese children are enjoying an Indonesian education in the government school on the edge of the village. Other hints of Indonesia seep in too – though sometimes a little late. In the gloomy front room of the Raja’s house, amongst the doilies and old armchairs, hangs a formal portrait of President Suharto, of the kind displayed in homes and offices everywhere a decade and a half ago.
The royal house stands in the inner sanctum of Boti, ringed by a fence of brushwood. Two families live here, Mama Tua later told me, her jewelry clicking. In total 70 households come under the direct rule of the Raja, and “315 souls” still adhere to Boti’s original ancestor-venerating Halaika religion.
According to legend the first people of Boti descended from a nearby mountain called Lunu. Legend also states that the royal bloodline is mixed with that of the birds, and as distant cousins small birds are offered protection in the village. This was the explanation for the excess of birdsong I had noted on the walk in.
“When they are being hunted in other villages the birds fly here to be safe,” said a young man of the royal family named Pah.

As the light thinned into the evening I wandered through the village. It was studded with traditional Timorese buildings, the beehive huts known as ume kbubu, which simply means “round house”, and the conical meeting places known as lopo.
It is unsurprising that a place as beautiful and peaceful as this draws interested visitors, and the guestbook showed that there had been around 200 separate tourist arrivals in the past year – a trickle, but a steady one.
The cornerstone of the little tourist economy here is the hand-woven ikat cloth made by village women. Ikat is everywhere in Boti, as blankets, scarves and sarongs. In other villages in the region the arrival of a tourist often launches the hard sell, but in Boti the community shop – a low, thatched building – is simply left discreetly unlocked, and visitors are free to wander in at will and pick up a few pieces at a fixed price.
To accommodate these travelers there is a simple village guesthouse, and after a meal eaten by lamplight under that portrait of Suharto, that’s where I slept. There was no electricity here, and the night was thick and velvety as I settled down under an ikat blanket to a chorus of insect noise and falling rain.

***

In the cool, clean light of the morning, I met the Raja, Nama Benu, known as Bapa Tua. He was a lean, upright man in his forties, with long, frizzy hair bound back in a loose ponytail (all married Boti men must wear their hair uncut). He welcomed me, and then left Pah to translate any questions. I was not entirely convinced that this total royal lack of Indonesian was genuine – most of the other Botinese of Bapa Tua’s generation speak it quite well – but it was a powerful statement of Boti’s determined independence.
It is striking that that independence is coupled to a remarkably confident approach to tourism. The rough roads keep visitor numbers low, but those that do arrive are handled with an understated calmness that the slick professionals of bustling resorts would do well to learn from. Payment for food and accommodation is left at guests’ discretion, as is the choice to buy a piece of ikat – though few go away without at least a small sampler in their backpacks.

My own stay in Boti was only a short one, and after breakfast I thanked the Raja and made my way back out of his little realm towards modern Indonesia. Pah saw me to the gateway. As we walked he told me that many people in Boti’s outer orbit, the hamlets of the lower hillside, had become Protestants and abandoned the older traditions.
“But not us,” he said; “we follow only what came from before, what has descended.” As I took one last look at this strange, dreamy place, deep in the hills, I felt that between their confident cooption of tourism and the rule of Bapa Tua, they would continue to do so for a long time.

Indonesia's First English Newspaper

2010-10-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Java Government Gazette

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 25/10/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/entertainment/indonesias-first-english-newspaper/403206

The Jakarta Globe might be Indonesia’s newest English language newspaper, but which was its first? Many people will assume that it was the Jakarta Post (founded in 1983); those with longer memories might recall the now defunct Indonesian Times (launched in 1974), or the Indonesian Observer (founded in 1955). Fans of historic trivia might even suggest the short-lived Independent, a weekly newssheet printed in Jakarta at the end of World War II during the Allied reoccupation of Indonesia. But in truth the inky ancestor of all those publications and more first rolled off the presses almost 200 years ago. Its name was the Java Government Gazette.

In 1811 Britain occupied Java and ousted Dutch colonial forces from the East Indies. The invasion was a far-flung sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars then wracking Europe: France had annexed Holland, making Dutch overseas possessions de facto enemy territory in British eyes. For five years Java and a scattering of other archipelago outposts were under a British administration based in Jakarta, then known as Batavia.
Under the energetic Lieutenant-Governor, Thomas Stamford Raffles (who later went on to found Singapore) there were all sorts of changes – Indonesian traffic today travels on the British-style left thanks to laws laid down in this period, for example. One of the first innovations was the launch of a weekly newspaper.
An entire printing press was shipped in from Calcutta, but before the first edition hit the newsstands the chief printer, Dr Hunter, succumbed to Batavia’s notoriously insalubrious climate, and it was his young assistant Amos H. Hubbard who oversaw the launch of the Gazette.
Hubbard came from a family of venerable American newsmen. His father was the proprietor of the Norwich Courier in Connecticut, and his older brother, Thomas, had worked as a government printer for the British in Calcutta. Hubbard was printer and acting editor of the Gazette for its entire run.
The first edition of the Java Government Gazette was delivered to subscribers on 29 February 1812, and for the next four years it appeared without fail every Saturday. It was a broadsheet, more or less the same size as your modern Globe, though it usually ran to only four pages, and needless to say, full coloration was a distant dream.

The paper’s principal role was as a government mouthpiece. The first column of its front page was usually taken up by the latest pronouncements from the Lieutenant-Governor on issues as diverse as the official prices of opium and arak, slave laws and the value of the official paper currency. A strap-line under the imposing masthead declared that all such notifications were to “be considered official, and duly attended to accordingly by the parties concerned”. Many Dutch citizens remained in Java during the British interregnum and these notices usually also appeared translated into Dutch.

But there was more to the Gazette than mere pronouncements and propaganda. Its pages were usually scattered with intriguing advertisements for everything from “handsome second-hand carriages” to pickled herrings, from “Superior French Claret” for 18 Spanish dollars per dozen bottles to “valuable men and women slaves”.
There were also lively correspondence columns featuring haughty discussions of moral issues such as slavery and dueling, flowery poems from contributors – and the occasional bout of literary bickering.
There was also plenty of local news. Dramatic reports appeared of bloody British victories over local rulers in Palembang and Yogyakarta, while descriptions of more peaceful encounters – usually penned by Amos Hubbard himself – were full of intriguing color. In March 1812 the Gazette reported a picnic hosted for the Sultans of Cirebon in Batavia. The entertainment consisted of a “Malay dance” which did not go down well with the European observers: “Their uncouth attitude and gestures surprised the English spectators, whilst they evidently delighted the Javanese nobility”. Afterwards the guests were ferried to a specially constructed bamboo bungalow on stilts in the middle of the Ciliwung River to engage in a spot of fishing.
Later the same year the Gazette carried its first sports report, covering the results of the first annual Salatiga Horse Races, held in the hills of Central Java. The $100 Kraton Stakes was won by Lieutenant Hunter, while Lieutenant Black’s mare Skinflint bolted, and a pony named Sultan threw its rider.
There were also unintentionally hilarious editorials passing judgment on the standards of dress amongst Batavia’s resident Dutchwomen, and ethnographic reports on Balinese princes and Kalimantan tribes from intrepid English travelers.
The second half of the paper was filled with international news, which came second-hand, and very late indeed. The copy was usually lifted wholesale from any Calcutta and London papers that arrived with passengers disembarking from sailing ships at Batavia’s teeming harbor. News of the wars in Europe was often six months out-of-date.
From time to time, when a particularly exciting batch of overseas newspapers arrived in town a “Special Edition” of the Gazette was hurried out midweek. Editor Hubbard also oversaw the publication of the “Java Annual Directory”, which included full listings of government officials, laws, services, and private businesses, and was available to Gazette subscribers for eight Java rupees (non-subscribers had to pay the full 12 rupees).

In 1815 in far away Europe the Napoleonic Wars came to an end; Dutch sovereignty was re-established, and Britain agreed to hand back the Indonesian territories it had seized four years earlier. Raffles left for England in early 1816, and later in the year Dutchman Godert van der Capellen arrived to oversee the return of Dutch control.
The Java Government Gazette limped on for a few months, but its front pages were peppered with adverts for passages to England and for auctions of English homes and household goods. Its readership was vanishing, and the number of columns filled with Dutch text rose.
The last ever edition went out to the dwindling body of subscribers on 10 August 1816, almost exactly five years after the British first arrived in Java. The paper was replaced shortly afterwards by the Dutch-language Bataviasche Courant.

Today the role of the Java Government Gazette as the forerunner of modern Indonesia’s entire English language print media is largely forgotten, and back copies are few and far between (though there are collections in the British Library and in the Dutch National Archives).
As for what happened to the erstwhile editor, Amos Hubbard – he did not join the initial English exodus in 1816. What he did after the Gazette folded is not clear, but a rather sad little “situation wanted” advert near the bottom of Page One of the last edition offers a clue: “A YOUNG MAN, who understands the Dutch Language, would have no objections to engage himself in any of the Merchant Houses – for particulars enquire at the Printing Office”.
Hubbard evidently did find a position – and a lucrative one too. The following year he chartered a ship, filled its hold with his own purchases, and headed home to America. It was probably the best decision he could have made – he would have had rather a long wait for the next editorial position on an English language publication in Indonesia to become available...

***

News from the pages of the Java Government Gazette

Sacred Cows and Burning Widows
29 February 1812
A Gazette correspondent offers readers a tantalizing glimpse of life in Bali:

The Bali people pay divine honours to the Cow; they do not make use of its hide, nor will they sit upon it from reverential respect. The wife burns herself with the body of her deceased husband, she ascends the funeral pile, adorned with flowers, and holding in her hand a dove, which she liberates. On the bird’s flying off she leaps voluntarily into the fire.

Toothless and Clueless Thieves Flee
25 April 1812
A pair of Indians go on the run from Surabaya:

On Saturday morning, the 25th April, 1812, deserted from Sourabaya, two Bengal servants, both named Peerbuccus, after robbing their employers to a considerable amount. One of them is a robust looking man, about 35 years of age, and has lost many of his front teeth; he speaks the Malay language tolerable fluently, and has rather an effeminate voice. The other is a very tall, thin, black, miserable looking creature, has no one good quality to recommend him and may be easily known from his great stupidity which approaches nearly to idiotism. Any person giving information so as they may be apprehended, shall be handsomely rewarded...

New Fashion Hits Batavia
2 May 1812
An editorial praises the latest trend amongst Batavian ladies:

At the entertainment recently given at Batavia it was remarked how great an improvement has been introduced in respect to the attire of the Dutch Ladies since British authority has been established. The Cabaya appears now generally disused and the more elegant English costume adopted. We congratulate our friends on the amelioration of the public taste, because we see in it the dawn of still greater and more important improvements...

Poison Pen Writer Says Sorry
12 December 1813
A court-sanctioned apology from a foul-mouthed tax dodger, who “neglected to pay certain duties at Batavia”:

I JOHN WILLIAMS WELSH, formerly known by the name of John Williams, commanding the ship Claudine, do this eleventh day of December 1813, before the Supreme Court of Judicature in Batavia, declare that on the ninth day of April 1812, I did at Sourabaya write a most false, malicious, abusive and threatening letter, addressed to Messrs WALLIS and Co. Prize Agents for the Captors of Java, and I do acknowledge that I wrote this letter under the impulse of passion, for had I at the time been capable of reflection, I must have been sensible that I had no reason whatever for using such gross and improper language...

Rumble in the Jungle
14 December 1814
A gruesome report of a fight between a tiger and a buffalo, a traditional entertainment laid on for guests by the sultan of Yogyakarta:

A Royal Tyger, one of the largest and most ferocious of the species, was enclosed together with a very fine Buffaloe of the true fighting breed, within a strong circular fence of about thirty yards in circumference. For some moments they stood on the defensive, each seeming unwilling to begin the fight; the appearance of the Tyger during this interval was highly characteristic of his nature; he seemed perfectly aware of the prowess of his adversary, and would fain have avoided the impending contest – his furious eyes which glared like fireballs, darted in wistful glances around him, apparently in search of the means of escape or of a less powerful antagonist on whom to wreak his vengeance. Mean time the Buffaloe stood as if conscious of superiority, steadily awaiting the attack of his formidable adversary. This state of inaction might have lasted for some time had not the Buffaloe been aroused to furious pitch of irritation by the application of bunches of nettles attached to long bamboos, which with the assistance of chilly water which was poured on him from above seemed at once to exhaust his caution and forbearance; he roared with pain and indignation, spurned the ground he trod on, and then darted with inconceivable velocity on his wary antagonist , who avoided his horns and fastened on his neck, which tore in a dreadful manner. As soon as the Buffaloe disengaged himself he charged again but with equal ill success, the Tyger still avoided the fury of his onset, yet seldom failed to inflict some terrible wound upon his opponent. In this manner the battle raged for nearly an hour, when the Buffaloe, contrary to the usual result, was completely defeated, and was obliged to be withdrawn from the scene of action...

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Across the Roof of the World

2010-10-19T03:11:00.000-07:00

A Journey in Ladakh

Originally Published in The Epoch Times, 08/09/10

http://epoch-archive.com/a1/en/uk/nnn/2010/09-Sep/08/012_Travel.pdf

The wheels of the truck were inches from the edge of the road. Stark rust-coloured cliffs rose on either side, and far below an angry grey stream churned between tumbled boulders. I swallowed hard and looked up at the clear blue sky as we edged around the hairpin bend, shifted gear, and began to roll towards the valley floor.

I was riding into the heartlands of Ladakh, India’s wildest mountain fastness, in fine style – installed in the luridly decorated cab of a Kashmiri cargo truck. Thirty minutes earlier the driver, Hussein, and his assistant Altaf, had taken pity on me, waiting for a bus at a desolate roadside, and had stopped to give me a lift. By accepting their offer, I now realised, I had put my life in their hands – this road was little more than an overgrown goat path, edging along cliffs above bloodcurdling chasms.

My nerves were on edge and my eyes were fixed firmly on that narrowing strip of sky all the way down to the bottom of the gorge. We crossed the murky Indus River on a rattling suspension bridge and the road to Leh opened ahead, a strip of smooth blue tarmac cutting through a landscape the colour of wild horses. I breathed easy at last; Altaf smiled and patted me on the shoulder, reached under a pile of blankets at the back of the cab and took out a ripe melon. As we bowled eastwards with the mountain breeze coming in at the window he passed me slice after dripping slice.

***

Ladakh lies hard on the Chinese border northeast of Kashmir. The whole region is more than 3,000 metres above sea level, and the two tenuous roads that link it to the rest of India are blocked by snow for eight months of the year. This is a world apart.

Geographically and culturally Ladakh belongs not to the Indian Subcontinent, but to the Tibetan Plateau. Here there are stark, iron-coloured mountains, villages huddled in stands of willows and poplars, and bone-white Buddhist monasteries. The 270,000-strong population are Tibetan Buddhists, and their language is a Tibetan dialect. Indeed, until the turmoil of the 20th century saw old trading routes across high passes abruptly severed, the region had closer links to Lhasa than to Delhi. Today, however, it remains one of the most open and accessible places for visitors keen to see the ancient Buddhist cultures and the striking scenery of High Asia.
Many visitors arrive in Ladakh by air, but I had made my own entry from the west, taking a Jeep across the Zoji La from Kashmir, and making my first stop in the world of Tibetan Buddhism at the lonely outpost of Lamayuru. It was a spectacular place to start my journey through Ladakh.

The monastery here is the oldest in Ladakh, built in the 10th century by the great Buddhist missionary Rinchen Zangpo when Ladakh was ruled as part of Western Tibet. Its whitewashed prayer halls and weathered stupas are slotted among the crags of a rocky outcrop. Mud-walled houses nestle against the lower slopes; faded prayer flags snap in the sharp breeze, and the whole place is adrift in a vast, empty landscape.

I was shown around the monastery – and offered my first cup of salty butter tea (a Ladakhi speciality and an acquired taste to say the least) – by a young monk named Tashi. I spent the night in a simple guesthouse in the village, and the next morning I hitched that hair-raising lift with the truck drivers.

Altaf and Hussein – who were carrying a load of electrical goods all the way from Delhi – took me to Leh, the Ladakhi capital. In the 16th and 17th centuries the town was the seat of the Nyamgal Dynasty who ruled over an independent Ladakh, allied to their Tibetan neighbours. It was only when it was captured by the expansionist Hindu ruler of Jammu – later to become the first Maharaja of Kashmir – in 1834 that the region found itself more closely tied to the Indian scene. Ladakh remains administratively a part of the troubled state of Kashmir today, though many Ladakhis would rather see their homeland ruled directly from Delhi as a Union Territory.

For centuries Leh was a caravan town, a crossroads on a feeder branch of the fabled Silk Road. Yak trains from Tibet arrived to trade pashmina shawl wool with Indian merchants, and long strings of Bactrian camels lumbered down over the passes from the desert outposts of Xinjiang with jade and silks.

Today those old roads are closed, but Leh still has an international buzz. This is the hub of the tourist trade that has grown in the three decades since the Indian government threw Ladakh open to foreign visitors. There are trekkers, culture-vultures, spiritual tourists and mountain lovers in town, and 300 miles from the closest urban centre, it is an outpost of outlandish sophistication marooned in the wilderness, home to the best cappuccinos in the Himalayas.

But despite all this, a hint of the old Silk Road romance remains. A spectacular mud-walled fortress looms over the town; in the narrow alleys the descendants of Turkic traders from Kashgar and Yarkand still do business; and rising across the Indus Valley the white ridge of the Stok Kangri range still flares brightly in the afternoon sunshine.

***

The final stage of my journey through Ladakh would take me east through a stepping-stone string of monasteries, and across a skyscraping pass towards the forbidden Tibetan frontier. In the hilltop monastery at Thikse, some 20 kilometres from Leh, I shivered in the dawn as the maroon-clad monks lined up for their morning puja ceremonies – a welter of clashing cymbals, booming gongs and rhythmic chanting. There were more stops at more monasteries – Stakna, standing sentinel between the flanking ridges of the Indus plain; Chemrey rising from a nail-bed of poplar trees; and Takthog, slotted against the back wall of a narrowing side valley – and then, riding in the back seat of a hired Jeep, I crossed the dizzying saddle of the 5,289-metre Chang La, claimed to be the third highest drivable pass in the world.

It was downhill all the way on the other side through broken, fractured landscapes where chubby marmots watched the passing Jeep from the stony roadsides. And then my final destination appeared ahead – a long lozenge of bright water under a vast sky.

Pangong Lake, a 130-kilometre stretch of clear, salty water, lies 4,250 metres above sea level. Once it was a junction on ancient trade routes – north towards Yarkand, east towards Lhasa. Today, it is the ends of the earth and a suitably stunning place for the culmination of a Ladakhi adventure.

The Jeep stopped at a cluster of seasonal cafés at the windswept head of the lake and I scrambled alone up the hillside to take in the view. The waters were a vivid turquoise in the shallows, deepening to the colour of lapis lazuli further out. Flocks of delicate, red-legged seagulls – incongruous here in the high mountains – fluttered on the near shore, and across the water a great bank of ribbed brown hills rose. To the east the lake narrowed between rugged buttresses, and in the furthest distance a conspiratorial cluster of snowy peaks huddled. A sensitive international border straddles the lake; those mountains lay deep inside Chinese-ruled Tibet. Sitting, shivering on that windy hillside, I felt deeply grateful for the window into the Buddhist heritage and the wild landscapes of the wider Himalayan world that my journey through Ladakh had given me.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Britain's Atlantic Edge

2010-10-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

Walking the Southwest Coast Path in Cornwall

Originally published in Maximillian Magazine, August 2010

http://www.maxx-m.com/home.php

From the high outcrop a sweeping panorama opens. Behind me a deep bay is backed by sheer cliffs, rising to a patchwork of tiny stone-walled fields and heather-clad hills. Ahead an expanse of coastline stretches west beneath granite buttresses. White seabirds twist and turn in the breeze, and 100 meters below the Atlantic Ocean surges against jagged black rocks.
I catch my breath, squinting in the bright summer sunlight. In the far distance I can see the spot I am aiming for – a jutting headland marked by a bone-white lighthouse. I still have a long way to go.
This is the wild coastline of Cornwall, Britain’s most westerly county, and I am making my way along the most dramatic and challenging section of the walking trail known as the Southwest Coast Path.

Windswept, storm-lashed, and wading knee-deep in the Atlantic at the tapering southwest extremity of the United Kingdom, Cornwall is a place of raw, rugged beauty. Villages of whitewashed stone cottages huddle at the mouths of narrow valleys, and brightly painted fishing boats work from tiny harbors and cobbled slipways. Inland, scattered farming hamlets give way to rolling moorland studded here and there by mysterious megalithic monuments dating back to the Iron and Bronze Ages. Most Cornish people once made their livelihoods from fishing, farming and mining, but today this is one of Europe’s most popular travel destinations.
The water may be a little cold for tropical tastes, but Cornwall has beaches to rival anything in Southeast Asia, with fine shell sand and clear turquoise waters. This shoreline is open to the full brunt of the Atlantic and offers the UK’s best surfing, and there is excellent seafood.
But I am not here to lounge on a beach or stuff myself with fresh mackerel and mussels – I’m here in search of a more healthy activity. Cornwall is prime hiking territory. The biggest prize is the Southwest Coast path, and I am tackling its most westerly section, the 67 rugged kilometers between the seaside towns of St Ives and Penzance.

Cornwall has been a tourist destination for more than a century, but in the last decade – as surf culture went mainstream, gastro-tourism rose in popularity and the local arts scene gained an international profile – this has become one of Europe’s coolest destinations. There are boutique hotels and Michelin Star restaurants where once there were only fish and chip shops and old fashioned guesthouses.
St Ives – as famous for its art galleries as its beaches – is high on the hip list. A jumble of white-walled buildings and narrow alleyways clustered around a sandy harbor, this is a place where the light and the colors seem more Mediterranean than British.
But head out along the coast path west of St Ives and boutique galleries and Beautiful People are soon forgotten; Cornwall’s most enduring attraction is its landscape, and this coastline is some of its most dramatic. My first day’s walking is exhilarating but exhausting, with steep descents to hidden coves, and sharp climbs through fields of jumbled boulders, always with the Atlantic roaring on my right.

There are many ways to tackle the Southwest Coast path, although only those with time to spare and iron limbs attempt the full 1014 kilometers from Minehead to Poole. The hardiest hikers carry their own gear and camp out. But these days there is an easier option. Several local companies organize self-guided walking holidays. You can get help planning your itineraries if you need it; your accommodation – usually in family-run guesthouses – is booked for you, and each morning your heavy baggage is transferred on to your next destination. All you have to do is set out walking.

After the rugged wilderness of the first day, my own second day on the trail leads through the industrial ruins around Pendeen, once the heartland of the Cornish tin mining industry. Tin was mined along Britain’s Atlantic edge from the earliest days – Cornwall’s flag, a white cross on a black background, represents the pale tin emerging from the dark ore. The 18th and 19th Centuries were the industry’s heyday, but with the discovery of more accessible deposits in South America and Southeast Asia mining disappeared from this coast, and today only ruined engine houses remain.

The key turning point – quite literally – of the coast path is Land’s End, Britain’s most westerly point. Besides a few offshore islands there is nothing between these honey-colored granite cliffs and America.
My final day of walking leads me beyond Land’s End along softer southern shores, passing hidden coves with intriguing names – Porthcurno, Penberth, Porthchapel. Cornwall, like Scotland and Wales, is part of Britain’s Celtic Fringe, a region less influenced by the successive waves of invasion and immigration that swept into England. Until the 18th century people here spoke their own language – still preserved today in these place names.
All along this coastline I see fishing boats – from large trawlers heading for the offshore grounds to tiny open boats hunting mackerel, lobsters and crabs close to the cliffs. Cornwall has some of Europe’s best seafood, and these days it also has the restaurants to match this raw material. At the forefront of the growth of the Cornish food scene was celebrity chef Rick Stein, based in the north coast village of Padstow. Other famous chefs, like Jamie Oliver, have now opened restaurants in the county, and there are fine dining options and inviting gastro-pubs in villages and fishing ports everywhere.
It is the thought of a fine fish dinner that keeps me going through the last stages of my own walk, through the picturesque village of Mousehole with its boat-filled harbor to the genteel Georgian town of Penzance. I am tired and sunburnt, but three days breathing clean sea air, and hiking up and down those steep cliffs has left me invigorated – and once the aches and blisters have healed, I know that there are still 947 kilometers of coast path to be explored...

Across the Roof of the World to Pangong Lake

2010-09-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

A Journey in Ladakh

Originally in published in Maxx-M, August 2010

http://maxx-m.com/home.php

The smooth strip of the road winds away across a vast, empty landscape. In the distance iron-colored slopes rise to jagged ridges; beyond the village tawny brown hillsides descend towards a narrow gorge, and above everything arcs a huge sky. There is a sharp breeze from the southeast. It snatches at the threadbare prayer flags of the thousand-year-old monastery and sets a copper bell, hanging from the thatched eaves of the main hall, ringing into the surrounding silence. Alpine choughs with glossy black wings twist and tumble in the cold updrafts.
I am 3390 meters above sea level, looking out from the upper terraces of the Lamayuru Gompa, a remote Buddhist monastery in the wilderness of western Ladakh. The monastery, perched on an outcrop of toothy rock, and the little village of whitewashed houses that cling barnacle-like to the slopes below, are adrift in a vast and empty landscape that extends for hundreds of kilometers in all directions.
I catch my breath in the thin, clear air after the steep climb from the road, then begin my clockwise circuit of the monastery, spinning the prayer wheels set into the masonry as I go.

***

Ladakh is many things to many people: an adventure playground for trekkers; a place for cultural tourists to sample the traditions of an age-old community; a richly spiritual land for those intrigued and drawn by the rhythms and complexities of Buddhism; and above all a destination for anyone impressed by dramatic landscapes.
Ladakh lies at the most northwesterly tip of India, hard against the Chinese border, and riding on the backs of the more accessible mountain regions of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. This is a land apart. Cut off from the monsoon weather systems of the Indian Subcontinent by the full might of the Himalayas, little rain or snow falls here. Barren mountains rise above wind-scoured valleys where bone-white monasteries cling to sheer cliffs, and where villages huddle in stands of glacier-fed poplar and willow trees. All of Ladakh, including its main town, Leh, lies more than 3000 meters above sea level.
This extreme altitude long kept this mountain fastness isolated from the rest of India and the rest of the world. It still does. There are only two roads into Ladakh – one across the stomach-churning Zoji La Pass from Kashmir, and another south to Himachal Pradesh through even wilder country. Winter snows keep both of these roads closed for much of the year.
Although the Indian government first allowed foreign travelers into Ladakh in the 1970s, those rough, tough roads long kept it the preserve of hardy backpackers prepared to endure the bone-shaking two-day bus ride from Manali during the brief summer season. But reaching Ladakh is much easier than it once was. The short flight from Delhi to Leh – served regularly by Indian Airlines, Kingfisher, Jet and others – is one of the most spectacular on earth. You can breakfast on parathas and chai in the steaming heat of the plains, then head for the airport, cross the full breadth of the Himalayas and settle down to Tibetan-style butter tea and momos for lunch in a hotel on the roof of the world.

***

I have chosen to enter Ladakh the dramatic, old-fashioned way – by road from Kashmir – and my first stop is the tiny village of Lamayuru. The monastery here is the oldest in Ladakh. Buddhism first spread north from India across the mountains towards China sometime in the First Millennium. It put down strong roots in the chilly world of the Tibetan Plateau – of which Ladakh is a part – mixing with the indigenous Bon religion of these uplands to create the unique character of Tibetan Buddhism, with its lamas, its prayer wheels and gompas, and its wild whorl of demons and protector deities.
I am shown around Lamayuru’s silent chambers, with their bright murals, smoke-darkened silks, and offering-scattered altars, by a young monk called Tashi. He tells me that the monastery was built by the great Buddhist missionary Rinchen Zangpo who spread the faith throughout the western parts of Tibet. Today the place is home to around 200 monks, drawn from villages all over Ladakh.
Once Tashi has left me I am alone in the wind beneath the snapping prayer flags. Each flag is stamped with a Buddhist mantra, and each time it flaps in the wind its prayer is carried heavenward.

***

From Lamayuru I journey on eastwards into the Ladakhi heartlands. Although region is part of India today, it was not always that way. For many centuries Ladakh was ruled from Tibet; later it was an independent kingdom. It was only in 1834 that it was annexed by the Hindu ruler of Jammu, bringing it into the Indian sphere of influence for the first time. But the culture of Ladakh remains more closely tied to Lhasa than to Srinagar or Delhi. The religion, the language and the landscape here is Tibetan, and for many visitors to Ladakh that is its biggest attraction.
After a stopover in the little village of Alchi, with its poplar-lined irrigation channels, ancient monastery and rows of bright brass prayer wheels, I continue east along the banks of the Indus. This river is the backbone of Ladakh, entering the region from across the Chinese border, and continuing west to the Pakistani frontier.
Following the Indus I arrive in Leh, capital of Ladakh and a place that mixes creature comforts with age-old color, where there is fine food and top-notch accommodation and air links to the outside world, but where more than a whiff of the romance of the Silk Route and the days of camel caravans still lingers.
Leh was always a crossroads. It grew up as a junction on the trading routes between Kashmir, Tibet, India and Central Asia. A century ago long trains of loaded mules, yaks and twin-humped Bactrian camels regularly struggled into town under loads of Chinese silk, Indian tea and Tibetan shawl wool.
The caravan trade is no more, but there is still a buzz about the town with international travelers from all corners of the world mixing in the old quarter’s maze of mud-walled alleys with monks from nearby monasteries, Kashmiri salesmen, and nomadic Drokpa tribesmen. A rugged, prayer flag-strewn fortress rises over the streets.
Leh is home to the best accommodation on the Tibetan Plateau. A far cry from the days when Yarkandi camel-men bedded down in the caravanserais of the old bazaar, the outlying suburb of Changspa – a mesh of quiet, poplar-shaded lanes – has some excellent accommodation. Hotel Omasila is a boutique hideaway that has its own brand of “Ladakh style”, with traditional murals on the walls, and fine views from its flower-filled terrace. There’s good food in some surprisingly sophisticated little eateries, tucked down these same lanes – from hearty Tibetan staples like momo (meat or vegetable-filled pasta dumplings) and thukpa (thick noodle soup) to cakes and cappuccinos that you wouldn’t normally expect to find 3500 meters above sea level.
Leh is also the first stop for those who come looking for spiritual solace in Ladakh. There are yoga and meditation courses, Buddhist retreats and ayurvedic treatment centers amongst the poplars and willows.

***

I am looking for my own soul food out in the wilderness beyond the town. Across the Indus Valley the long white line of the Stok Kangri Mountains rises; north across the Kardung Pass is the upland desert of the Nubra Valley. But I am heading for somewhere even more remote – on the far side of a dizzying pass, running right across the Tibetan border, is the long turquoise lozenge of the Pangong Lake.
I set out from Leh, stopping at more ancient monasteries to see monks performing morning puja ceremonies with conch shell horns and clanging gongs, and then I cross the 5289-meter Chang La Pass.
This is the third highest motorable pass in the world. I am travelling in comfort in a hired jeep with some fellow travelers from Mumbai, but the air is so thin at the top that we are all left feeling faint. On the other side it’s a long descent through a stark, fractured landscape of tumbled boulders, sharp ridges, and steep scree slopes. Wild horses watch us from the roadside; plump marmots peer from their burrows or lounge on smooth rocks in the thin sunlight.
And then the lake appears, and we all draw breath. The color is intense in the sharp light, turquoise in the shallows, deepening to a rich lapis lazuli blue further out. A breeze is blowing and flocks of delicate white water birds crowd the shores.
I leave my companions huddling over tea and soup at a simple lakeside café and scramble up the mountainside. The lake, a narrow strip of salty water, runs 130 kilometers away to the east, crossing an international frontier. The conspiratorial cluster of white mountains I can see rising in the far distance lie deep inside Chinese Tibet. It is a staggeringly beautiful place, and a suitable culmination for my journey through the stark wilderness of Ladakh. I button my jacket against the wind, close my eyes and listen to the sound of silence…

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Echoes of the Silk Road in China’s Wild West

2010-09-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

Travelling in Xinjiang, China

Originally published in Maxx-M Magazine, June 2010

http://www.maxx-m.com/

The smell hits me as soon as I step down from the train in Kashgar: a scent of melons and pomegranates, an odor of livestock, a whiff of spice and a waft of grilling kebabs. It is the perfume of Central Asia, letting me know that though the flag fluttering in the clear blue air above the station concourse might be unmistakably Chinese, I have arrived in another world. Welcome to Xinjiang, China’s Wild West.

Xinjiang province is vast, fully one sixth of China’s huge landmass. A land of deserts and mountains with an indigenous population of Turkic Uighur Muslims, and a history traced with the trade routes of the old Silk Road, it has always leaned more to Samarkand and Bokhara than to Shanghai and Beijing. Today it is a place where the romance of a past of camel caravans and cultural collision lingers. Even the names of the geographical features here have a tantalizing resonance: the Kun Lun, the Tien Shan, and the Taklamakan.
As I step out of the station in Kashgar, a city steeped in history, I catch sight of a distant line of ethereal mountains, levitating over the desert horizon. Excitement lies ahead.

Kashgar was once a key junction on the Silk Road, the two-way trail that carried goods, technology, ideas and religions back and forth between Europe and Asia. Roads from the east were forced north and south around the Taklamakan, the world’s second largest shifting sand desert, only to rejoin at Kashgar. And if there was ever an identifiable point on the Silk Road where east met west, then this was it: Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and Islam; all of them at one time or another dominated here, while Turks, Mongols, Chinese, Indians and Arabs all added their own dash of spice to the melting pot. This was an international city long before anyone had coined the term “globalization”.
Riding at anchor between the mountains and the sands, modern Kashgar is still a junction for rough roads to outlandish places. International highways lead from here across dizzying passes into Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan, and the sounds of the Silk Road still echo in the narrow alleys of the Uighur old town, and in the thronged thoroughfares of the iconic Sunday Market.
Every week for centuries, farmers and craftsmen from surrounding villages have flooded the eastern edge of the city for a bazaar on a grand scale. Here there are carpets and walnuts, silks and scarves. The market ground is a cacophony of voices as vendors proclaim their wares and men in pillbox skullcaps and women in heavy brown headscarves haggle in the hard-edged Turkic gutturals of the Uighur language. A few kilometers south of the main market is another slice of Central Asia – the livestock bazaar, where all the best horses and cattle in Xinjiang are traded in a stony field between ranks of tall poplar trees.

After my own exploration of the markets I retreat to the quieter quarters of Old Kashgar, wandering for hours in a tangle of narrow alleyways lined with traditional courtyard houses. Old men in calf-length jackets and crooked turbans totter by; the occasional donkey cart loaded with watermelons clatters past, and small children smile and wave shyly from courtyard doorways.
Eventually I find my way out into a mass of food stalls on the edge of Old Kashgar’s central Id Kah square. There are juicy kebabs, mounds of fluffy plov – rice cooked with dates and spices – samsa, little baked parcels of lamb, and great rounds of flatbread scattered with sesame seeds. As dusk falls over the city and flocks of pigeons turn in the pale sky the prayer call rises from the Id Kah Mosque on the edge of the square.

The medieval past might be close at hand in Kashgar – the inlaid tombs of its ancient kings still stand in the poplar-studded suburbs – but this is also a modern city of 340,000 people and a hint of cool is creeping in. After exploring medieval alleyways you can kick back in Fubar, a bar run by Japanese transplant Hiroshe Kuwae that does the kind of informal cool you don’t often find in the provincial China. Across the street meanwhile, there’s cake and some of the best coffee on the Silk Route in the modernist Karakoram Café, run by an incongruous Singaporean, the charming Christin Tan. Kashgar is a long way from the Lion City, but when I drop in for a latte, Christin tells me that Xinjiang has more in common with the Southeast Asian city state than meets the eye. Both places, she says, were founded on multiculturalism and international trade.

Kashgar is the hub of southwest Xinjiang, but there is much to see beyond its oasis boundaries. To the southwest lie the outer flanks of the Pamirs, a sky-high mountain range that traverses international borders. Threading through it is the Karakoram Highway, the tenuous strip of tarmac that links China to Pakistan. It leads past Karakul Lake, a sheet of cobalt-blue water ringed by towering snow peaks, and onwards to Tashkorgan, a town at the very limits of China’s vastness. Inhabited by wiry Tajiks, people who look more like Spaniards than Chinese, it is a place of cold winds and clear skies.
And then of course there is the desert, the mighty Taklamakan. I set out to explore the string of oases that runs east from Kashgar. These are towns in sight of the mighty white wall of the Kun Lun, northern rampart of the entire Himalayan mountain system. Villages with vine trellises and pomegranate orchards line the approach roads, and in the empty country beyond twin-humped Bactrian camels stalk, dark silhouettes against the desert. The sunlight here is sharper than glass, cutting through the leaves of the poplar trees and catching on the sequins embroidered into the headscarves of the women.
In Yengisar, the first stop east of Kashgar, there are traditional knife workshops and a fine visage of Mustagh Ata, the highest peak in the Kun Lun. The next stop is Yarkand, once the terminus of a feeder route of the Silk Road that ran across the mountains from India. Here too there are endless lanes lined with mud-walled houses, and all the sights and sounds of a Central Asian bazaar.

Xinjiang has always been on the periphery of the Chinese world, slipping in and out of imperial control as dynasties waxed and waned over the centuries. Sometimes – as in the 1860s when a Turkic warlord named Yaqub Beg ruled the country from Yarkand – it was independent; sometimes it was uneasy Chinese territory. Today the state shares many traits with its more famous southeastern neighbor, Tibet. Here too the local population is restive and resentful of organized immigration by ethnic Han Chinese; here too there is political unrest and heavy-handed government control. But though there are tight restraints on telecommunications, unlike in Tibet foreign visitors are free to wander widely in the province.

From the bazaar town of Karghilik I hire a driver to take me into the mountains. Above the banks of the chilly Tiznaf River, I climb a high ridge and look out over a mighty vista of ribbed brown rock and striated white ice. The clear sky is chased with mare’s tail clouds and behind the southern ridge of snow peaks lie Kashmir and India. It is a tantalizing thought, and it is only reluctantly that I descend and continue my journey to the last stop of my Silk Road odyssey.

Hotan lies some 400 kilometers from Kashgar. To the north is the full breadth of the Taklamakan, with lost cities and buried civilizations beneath its sands; to the south lie the mountains. Despite the wild location Hotan itself is a startlingly modern city, but it is also scene of the biggest of all the traditional weekly markets in Xinjiang. Kashgar’s Sunday Market, back at the start of my journey, was a heady enough whorl, but this is something else. Here there are bolts of colored cloth, men hawking raw, unpolished jade, sifted from the banks of the nearby desert rivers, and women, elegant in long, sweeping skirts and headscarves tied high at the backs of their necks.
The old towns of China’s Wild West may be modernizing, but though a visit to this part of the world is no longer the litany of dreary government hotels and bad food that it once was, there is still a romance, a ruggedness and an authenticity that is hard to find in so many other places steeped in heady history.
With the market over it is time for me to leave Hotan, and leave Xinjiang too, but that magical scent that first hit me in Kashgar, and the memories of sharp sunlight falling on white mountains, on the tile-work of medieval tombs, and on the glistening, ruby-red seeds of fresh pomegranates, lingers with me long after I have left.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

The Bathing Place

2010-06-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

The Jolotundo Temple and Religion in Java

Originally published in Kabar Magazine, June 2010

http://kabarmag.com/blog1/stories-from-edition-5-kabar-indonesia/

There is a scent of incense on the damp evening air. The temple is set into the green hillside: a facade of dark basalt fronted by a shallow pool full of slow-moving fish. Water pours in continuous rivulets from spouts in the masonry, and on either side of the pool is a bathing tank. Tiny freshwater crabs clamber over the stones, and black frogs squat like malevolent spirits in the dripping recesses.
This place – the Jolotundo Temple, deep in the forest on the slopes of the 1653-meter Mount Penanggungan – is less than two hours by road from central Surabaya. The chaos and congestion of the East Java capital seem a world away, but I am not alone in the green twilight: there are other pilgrims here. Sitting at the edge of the pool I watch a man in a batik sarong pad over the stepping stones to a raised platform at the centre of the temple. He settles himself cross-legged, lights an incense stick, and facing the empty plinth where the statue of some Hindu deity once stood, presses his palms in prayer. In the bathing tanks – women to the left, men to the right – people are standing chest-deep in the cool, clear water. Clearly something unusual is going on here; clearly Jolotundo is more than just another thousand-year-old relic of Java’s classical Hindu past.

Fresh from bathing a slim man comes and sits beside me at the water’s edge.
“My name is Muslim, and I’m a Muslim – easy to remember, right?” He comes originally from Yogyakarta, the cradle of high Javanese culture, but is married to a Surabaya woman and has lived in the city for 15 years.
Muslim is a regular visitor to Jolotundo. “Today I just came to bathe, but often I come to meditate, at night, from evening until morning.
“Javanese people believe there is power here. This place is from the time of the Majapahit Empire. We believe the remnants of Majapahit – the power, I mean – are still here. It is a place where you can make a connection with your batin.” Batin is a difficult word to translate precisely, meaning something along the lines of “inner spirit”. Together with the idea of sacred power, held in places, people or objects, it is a key concept in Javanese mysticism – as are connections to Majapahit.
In truth the Jolotundo temple predates that mightiest of Hindu Javanese kingdoms by some 300 years. It was built in the late 10th Century under the Sanjaya Dynasty. Inscriptions connect the place to Udayana, father of Sanjaya’s last ruler, Airlangga. However, the Penanggungan Mountain, a perfect cone standing sentinel between the coastal plains and the volcanic hinterland, was certainly still important in the Majapahit era. It was said to be the broken summit of the mythical Mount Meru, home of the Gods; there are other, later temples on the slopes behind Jolotundo. Under successive dynasties the peak and its sacred places had a powerful hold, and even today, long after Hindu-Buddhist Java gave way to Islam, the idea of the bathing temple as a place of power, of sacred energy, still lingers.
As a damp, leaden darkness falls and a cacophony of insect noise rises that power is almost palpable. The static orange pinpricks of burning incense sticks show in the gloom and the meandering green sparks of fireflies fall like snowflakes. More pilgrims arrive; the smell of incense thickens; naked forms, burnished in the light of oil lamps, move around the bathing tanks.

I pick my way through the dark forest to a small warung, a cafe built of bamboo in a clearing of smooth red earth below the temple. It is owned by a man named Sembodo.
“We stay open all night; most people come to the temple at night. The energy is best between midnight and 2 am.” Pak Sembodo explains that the early hours of Friday morning is the best time to visit Jolotundo in any given week, but the most powerful nights of all are those of a full moon, or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day calendar coincides with the last day of the traditional five-day Javanese market week.
“On those nights it’s really busy. You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes.”

Observers of Java are quick to label phenomena like pilgrimage and nighttime meditation in search of sacred energy as the preserve of those who follow the traditional belief systems known as Kejawen – and are just as quick to present Kejawen as the absolute counterpoint to the Islamic orthodoxy of mosques and headscarves.
In the mid-20th Century anthropologists indentified what they saw as a distinct division between the Muslims of Java: there were the Santri, those who followed global Islamic strictures closely, and there were the others, the Kejawen or Abangan, whose faith was more closely rooted in Java itself and for who Islam, if it had any significance at all, was just one thin thread in a knot of Hinduism, Buddhism, ancestor-worship and animism. Never the twain shall meet, the theory went, and the idea of an absolute Kejawen-Santri division in Java passed out of academia, through the pens of mainstream writers, and into public consciousness. And the leap to the conclusion that, with concrete minarets sprouting like wet season rice shoots, Kejawen must be on the retreat was as easy as skipping over the stepping stones to the Jolotundo bathing tank.
But something about this strange, powerful place in the damp forest on the slopes of a sacred volcano seems to challenge such absolute ideas. Plenty of the nighttime visitors pray, orthodox-fashion, in the langgar, the little Muslim prayer room, behind Pak Sembodo’s warung after they have scattered an offering of petals at the temple. And the place is clearly the preserve of neither Javanese nor of Muslims: there are Chinese Indonesians and Balinese Hindus amongst the pilgrims.

Throughout the night a succession of men on motorbikes appear from the darkness to sit chatting and drinking coffee in the flickering lamplight of Sembodo’s warung. Some come to bathe; others only to “refresh” after a long day in an office or campus in the cities of Sidoarjo and Surabaya. Many of them wear dark, heavy jewels set in rings of tarnished pewter – amulets, little receptacles of the same kind of power that surrounds the temple.
A stocky, long-haired man named Syafik talks of the fleeting glimpses he has had of jins and spirits in the forest; a student called Martin smiles as he offers me a cigarette and asks, “Am I the first Kejawen Christian you’ve met? There are lots of us...” and a Catholic from Sidoarjo asks, “Mas Timothy, do you believe in the Other World?” In the noisy silence of the forest, the warung floating alone in the blanketing darkness, I answer in the affirmative…
All of them agree that I should take a midnight bath at the temple, but despite the endless cups of coffee tiredness creeps up, and a brief nap on a bamboo platform behind the warung turns into a full night’s sleep...

The air is fresh in the morning. Lean, wiry men with sickles and hoes over their shoulders and thin dogs at their heels stalk up the potholed road towards the rough terraces on the mountain. The temple is deserted, only burnt-out incense sticks and scattered petals to hint at what went on in the night. Visiting Jolotundo on a quiet weekday, you would probably assume it was just another Sunday picnic spot – with a ticket booth and a few concrete benches – and unless you asked you would never hear the story of the friend of a friend who had the baby she had long been trying for only after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday. This is the kind of thing that is easy to miss in Java.
I peer down into the bathing tank. The water shimmers in the washed-out green light of the forest and I can see that the gargoyle from which the flow emerges is a naga, the serpent of Hindu mythology often associated with rivers, rearing up with its hood half-open in two flapped ridges and its brow menacingly wrinkled. Muslim, the pilgrim I met the previous evening, told me that the water here is the second best in the world, after that from the holy Zamzam Well in Mecca; one of the late-night coffee-drinkers at the warung said it ranked third after Zamzam and the mouth of the Ganges.
As I sit pondering this, the first of the day’s pilgrims arrive at the temple. These people are not the amulet-wearing mystics of the hours of darkness. The women, giggling and fluttering, are dressed in white headscarves. The men wear tartan sarongs, embroidered collarless shirts and crocheted skullcaps. They have the purple bruise of devout prayer on their foreheads and when I skip down over the stones to talk to them their speech is peppered with affected Alhamdulillahs. They are, unmistakably, Santris.
Their leader is a man with a sparse tuft of beard at his chin. His name is Safi’i. He has completed the Haj, the ritual journey to Mecca – a pilgrimage far longer than the three kilometer trip up the bumpy road to Jolotundo from his home village on the lower slopes of the volcano. But something still draws him here.
“The water is good. I come here to bathe to stop myself being stressed.”
While the men splash in the right-hand tank – with, it must be said, a little less solemnity than the visitors of the previous evening – the girls flutter at the edge of the pool.
“I want to bathe,” says a young woman called Holifa; “they say the water here makes you strong. But I’m scared it will be cold…”

On the one hand you could view the Jolotundo bathing temple as a place so powerful that its draw reaches out across the Kejawen-Santri divide. But as the little orthodox party drift away like white ghosts, carrying old Aqua bottles filled with spring water, I am left with a bigger idea. This place simply makes a mockery of arbitrary religious categorizations made by anthropologists, journalists and even by the participants. There are no absolutes in religion in Java; there are no concrete boundaries between faiths; only tangled threads. Sitting cross-legged under the trees I try, on a back page of my notebook, to categorize the people who are drawn to Jolotundo, but the groupings splinter and multiply beyond the point of usefulness: there are Kejawen traditionalists, esoteric modern mystics, Majapahit fetishists, the casually curious, Santris, Balinese, Christians, Chinese – and now at least one foreigner…

It is midnight. I make my way up from the warung to the temple. The forest is a wall of insect noise and between the treetops the narrow strip of sky is smeared with stars. The noise of running water fills the air.
Four men are sitting at the edge of the pool. They are three Javanese and a Balinese man named Widiyasa who have driven up together from Surabaya. They have just finished their ceremony.
Why, I ask, have they felt compelled to come here in the middle of the night?
“This is a good place to make myself pure, to clean myself,” says Widiyasa. “There is still something here from Majapahit time.”
“The power, you mean?” I ask. I can see nothing of Widiyasa’s face in the darkness and would never recognize him if we passed one another in a Surabaya shopping mall.
“There is more than that,” he says; “actually Majapahit itself is still there, still complete; you just cannot see it unless you have sixth sense. At night the condition is better. Between midnight and 2 am we say the gate is open; that is the time when there is something really special here...”
When Widiyasa and his friends have gone, lighting the way back to the road with their mobile phones, I am alone in the darkness. It is 1 am. The gate is open.
I tiptoe over the stepping stones and up the slippery ladder to the edge of the bathing tank. The masonry is cold and wet and here the noise of running water is a roar. I undress, shivering in the starlight, and drop into the cool, clear water...

History on Sabu Island

2010-06-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

Captain Cook and the remote island of Sabu, Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/06/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/travel/history-and-lethargy-on-sabu-island/378141

The island lies to starboard in the grey light of the dawn – a streak of pale sand and a dense wall of lontar palms. I watch from the upper deck of the ferry as a concrete jetty materializes from the shoreline, marking the location of Seba, capital of the tiny island of Sabu, one of the most isolated of all Indonesia’s scattered landfalls.
Two hundred and forty years ago another vessel approached this same shore. It was not a rusting ASDP ferry, but an English sailing ship under the command of the celebrated Captain Cook, returning from his first successful exploration of the Pacific. Cook had stumbled upon Sabu, a dot in the ocean halfway between Timor and Sumba, by chance, for at that time he noted, it was “so little known that I never saw a map or chart in which it is clearly or accurately laid down”. Still, he was glad to have found it, for he was short of supplies. The island was, he wrote, “a most pleasing prospect from the sea”. After 15 hours on a ferry, it still is.

The arrival of the ferry from Kupang marks the busiest day of the week in Seba. But by the time I have settled down in one of the little township’s simple home-stays a damp, tropical torpor has returned. Electricity is only available here during the hours of darkness, and even motorbikes are few and far between. Children play amongst the puddles as a thin rain begins to fall.
There is, however, a certain buzz around Seba these days. For years Sabu, with a population of around 60,000, was an appendage of the Kupang Regency, administered from the East Nusa Tenggara capital, 250 kilometers to the east. But last year it became a regency in its own right.
Sitting drinking coffee outside his house on Seba’s muddy main street as the rain continues to fall, local Arman al Gadri tells me that the upgrade to regency status has been welcomed in Sabu, raising hopes of increased development. The biggest problem that the island faces, he says, is transport. One or two ferries a week connect the island to Kupang, but it’s an exposed crossing, and in the wet season the island can be cut off for weeks. Air links are even more tenuous: the tiny Merpati plane that serves Sabu sometimes only makes it to the island a couple of times a month.

There were no ferries at all when Captain Cook arrived in 1770, but treaties had already been signed between the Dutch and the rulers of Sabu’s five principalities, and Seba was home to an official resident, Johan Lange. Marooned at his lonely outpost Lange was the archetypal corrupt colonialist, and he issued threats until Cook and his men paid the locals in cash for their supplies – cash that Cook was convinced was destined for Lange’s own coffers.
The Dutch had become involved with Sabu in the previous century. In 1674 nervous islanders had massacred the shipwrecked crew of a Dutch vessel, and in seeking revenge Dutch forces formed an alliance with the king of Seba and set out on punitive raids of the neighboring principalities.

The next day I visit the spot where Sabunese defensive architecture defeated those early Dutch attackers. Some twenty kilometers east of Seba, the hilltop village of Hurati is abandoned now, a place of crooked trees and crumbling foundations. But the sturdy surrounding wall that the Dutch failed to penetrate still stands. They were forced to accept a nominal payment instead of total conquest as recompense.
Though the arrival of the Dutch is usually seen as the first European contact with Sabu, Captain Cook noted in 1770 that “many of the people can speake Portuguese, but hardly any one Dutch”, and as the Portuguese had been present on neighboring Flores long before the Dutch arrived on the scene, it seems likely that it was they who made the first landfall here.

The following day I head for the hills on a borrowed motorbike. Cook declared that most of the Sabunese were “heathens and others of no religion at all”. Today, with the exception of a handful of Muslim Sabunese-Arab families in Seba, the majority are nominal Protestants, but old traditions are strong.
In the hilltop kampung of Namata, south of Seba, the original ancestor-worshipping Jingi Tiu religion still lingers. When I arrive most of the villagers are out at work in the surrounding fields, but a woman named Hi’a tells me that during Jingi Tiu ceremonies people from around the island, dressed in traditional ikat cloth, descend on Namata.
The houses have long thatched roofs. According to legend the first settlers came originally from India – and the Sabunese do indeed often look decidedly Indian. When they came ashore they turned their boats upside down for shelter, and traditional Sabu houses still symbolize these makeshift dwellings. On the outskirts of the village a picture of a European sailing ship is carved into a slab of grainy yellow sandstone, another echo of those early European contacts.
From Namata I follow a rough road south into rolling hills grazed by sheep and horses. Sabu is a dry island – “indifferently water'd in the dry season” according to Cook – where maize is the staple crop and drought is a real risk.
On the stony southern coastline I reach the village of Ege. There is a foreign connection here too, for locals say that Ege means “English” in the Sabunese language. At some uncertain time in the past, they say, a British ship ran aground near here, and the sailors received a rather warmer welcome than the unfortunate Dutch of 1674. They were housed by the locals while they repaired their ship and remembered fondly when they went on their way.
There are echoes of a more recent and less happy historical episode at Ege too. The old village – surrounded like Hurati by a formidable wall of black basalt – is abandoned now. Two local men, Daud and Lido, take me there. The place was used as a fort by the Japanese occupiers during World War II.
“We know from our grandparents that the Japanese time was the hardest time of all,” says Lido, pointing out the loopholes for rifles that the soldiers knocked through the walls; “people had to work for them from six in the morning until six in the evening without food, and if people did something wrong they would tie them up and leave them in the sun. But then the British came back and chased them away!”

Over the next two days I travel the back roads of Sabu, finding warm welcomes and fine white beaches where seawater is left in upturned clamshells to evaporate and make salt. Bumpy tracks lead to hilltops offering swelling views to rocky shores, to the off-lying hulk of Raijua Island, and to the empty horizon beyond.
Captain Cook noted that the people of Sabu were addicted to betel nut – and they still are; smiles here have an extra dash of red color. The other lifeblood of Sabu is the lontar palm, which provides sweet sap for making sugar and palm wine, described by Captain Cook as “a very sweet agreeable Cooling liquor”. On other islands people hack steps into the trunks to get at the harvest, but in Sabu there is such respect for this “tree of life” that locals wish to do it no injury and bind smooth pebbles to the trunk with twists of dried leaf for footholds instead.

Captain Cook sailed from Sabu on 21 September 1770, bearing west past the tiny, uninhabited islet of Dana, said to be home of ancestral souls in the Jingi Tiu tradition, and heading for Java. As the island fell behind, Cook called his men together and swore them to secrecy about the place they had just visited for fear of arousing Dutch jealously in Batavia. As I make my own departure on the returning Kupang-bound ferry, watching the white beaches and lontar-clad hills fade to a dot on the empty horizon, it seems like the secret is still well kept.

Healing Waters

2010-06-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

The Jolotundo Bathing Temple, near Trawas, East Java

Originally published in Asian Geographic Magazine, May 2010

http://www.asiangeo.com/latest_issue.html

The clearing, deep in the forest on the steep western slopes of the Penanggungan volcano, is full of gentle sound – insect noise, bird calls, and the ceaseless rush of running water. A scent of incense cuts across the earthy smells of the jungle.
The temple, a façade of mildewed basalt fronted by a shallow pool, is set into the steep green hillside. Clear, cool water, straight from the heart of the mountain, pours from spouts in the masonry, just as it has done for more than a thousand years.
This place, Candi Jolotundo, two hours south of Surabaya, the seething capital of East Java, was built in 977 AD under the great Hindu Sanjaya kingdom, the same dynasty that built the more famous Prambanan temple in Central Java. Today, long since Sanjaya faded from the scene, and long since the Hinduism of old Java gave way to Islam, the temple is still known by local people as a place of power, pilgrimage and healing.

Jolotundo was always a bathing temple, and the modern pilgrims who make their way up the steep, potholed track through the forest from the hot, dusty cities of Sidoarjo, Surabaya and Mojokerto say that its water has healing properties.
Drawn from underground springs, the water is cool, clear and sweet. Some of the most regular visitors to Jolotundo are people with health problems.
A man named Ajianto, from nearby Sidoarjo, says he has come here almost every day since suffering a stroke several years ago. The stroke affected his speech and his balance, but, he says, regular dips in the chilly, stone-lined bathing tank at the temple help greatly to relieve his symptoms. Other visitors echo his story with tales of back aches and asthma cured after bathing here.
The water – both in its drinking quality and its healing power – ranks with the best in the world. One local man, Syafik, says it is bettered only by the water of the Zamzam well in Mecca, and the source of the Ganges in the high Himalayas.

This easy referencing of both Islam and Hinduism is central to Jolotundo’s enduring attraction for Javanese people in the 21st Century: this is a key place for people who follow the tangle of Hindu concepts, Islamic formulas, ancestor veneration and spirit appeasement known as Kejawen, the traditional Javanese religion and the counterpoint to modern Islamic orthodoxy.
Many of Jolotundo’s visitors are followers of Kejawen. For traditionalist Javanese people the concept of sacred energy, kesakten, contained in people, places and objects is important, and Jolotundo is a place of great power.
Pilgrims bring offerings of petals, known as sesajen, in little trays of woven paper or leaves. They light slim red incense sticks, and settle themselves to meditate on the temple’s central platform. Meditation, known as semedi, is the way to access the power of places like Jolotundo, and the best time to do it is at night.
Remote and isolated though the temple is – it lies several kilometers beyond the nearest village – there are people here every night. The time when the healing power of the water is said to be at its strongest is between midnight and 2 am. The power is particularly intense, pilgrims say, in the early hours of Friday morning, and still more so on the night of a full moon or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day week meets with the last day of the five-day Javanese calendar.
“On those nights it’s really busy. You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes,” says a local stallholder named Sembodo.
One midnight visitor claims that in the darkness Jolotundo becomes a gateway to another world, while another whispers more tails of healing: a woman from Sidoarjo had been trying for a baby for years, he says, but only had her wished-for son after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday.
In the intense, cocooning darkness, filled with the sound of running water and marked only by the orange pinpricks of incense sticks and the meandering green sparks of the fireflies, even a skeptic might believe such stories…

In Pursuit of the Dragons of Alor

2010-05-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Traditional belief, myths and legends in Alor, Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/05/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/in-pursuit-of-the-dragons-of-alor/373491

In the fishing village of Lanleki on the island of Alor I met an old man who had seen a dragon. His name was Achmad; he wore a white Haji’s skullcap and he told his tale simply, sitting in the narrow front room of his little house. Outside the hot wind rustled in the palm trees and the children of Lanleki jostled in the doorway, more interested in the foreign visitor than in hearing Haji Achmad’s familiar story.
He had seen the dragon forty years ago, he said, long before he made the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. He had been walking along the narrow path that leads to Lanleki when the dragon emerged from the sea and chased him through the trees. It had horns like a buffalo and seven flickering tongues…

Alor is a place of pale beaches and dark, myth-filled hills. The most easterly landfall in the stuttering island chain of Nusa Tenggara, like many parts of Indonesia it has gone through incredible changes in the last century. In 1938 the American anthropologist Cora Du Bois visited and recorded an island where people knew little of money and spoke no Indonesian. Though there was a long-established halo of Islam around the coast, in the hills Protestant missionaries had met little success and most people worshiped only the spirits of the countryside. Dutch colonialists had supposedly pacified the island at the turn of the 20th Century, but clan warfare and even headhunting were still very much current concepts.
Seventy years later roads have snaked into the hills, whitewashed churches have sprouted in remote villages and most of the population has become nominally Christian. The island capital, Kalabahi, has filled with buzzing motorbikes; there are daily flights from Kupang and even a nascent tourist industry. But as I was to find out, Alor is still a place where old beliefs and customary adat traditions hold strong, and where there is no distinction between history and myth. This is an island that could still be marked on the map with the words “here be dragons”...

I first heard about dragons in Probul, a village in the hills behind Lanleki. An old man there had told me that in the days before Christianity there had been many dragons – he called them naga. Mostly they were invisible, but they were dangerous if not appeased. Then there was Haji Achmad’s story, in which the dragon was unmistakably a real thing. If I wanted to learn more about dragons, Haji Achmad told me, I should go to the village of Alor Kecil, on the other side of Kalabahi Bay.

Alor is smaller than Bali, and with a population of just 168,000, but it is perhaps the most linguistically diverse place in Indonesia. As many as 17 separate, mutually incomprehensible languages are spoken here, and distinct dialects are numbered in the hundreds.
There is a similar diversity of culture, with the creation myths of one village often meaning nothing to the people of the next. But there are certain threads that run throughout the island. The moko is a bronze, hourglass-shaped kettledrum, thought to have originated in the ancient Dongson civilization of northern Vietnam. Just how the moko reached Alor, where the “lost wax technique” used to decorate the drums was never known, is a mystery – locals claim that they sprung fully-formed from the ground – but they are a key motif of the island. When the Cora Du Bois visited they were the main form of currency and even today they are used to pay wedding dowries.
Another common connection is the misbah, a round altar of rough stones at the heart of each village. This is still the focus of the lego-lego, the Alorese circle dance performed at weddings and other celebrations, and in the not-too-distant past it was the place where heads taken in warfare were placed. And now it seemed that I had stumbled on another connecting thread – the dragon.

Alor Kecil lies at the western tip of the rugged peninsula that bulges to the north of Kalabahi Bay. Offshore rides the little islet of Pulau Kepa, location of Alor’s first dive resort; in mid-channel rises the volcanic cone of Pura Island, while beyond it is the dark coastline of Pantar.
Like Lanleki, Alor Kecil was a Muslim village with modern concrete houses and tin-roofed mosques in the shade of huge banyan trees. But here too there was a misbah, with a few buffalo skulls resting on its weathered stones in lieu of human heads. There were rumah adat – the lineage houses of each of Alor Kecil’s five clans – and as I picked my way through the village I spotted dragons everywhere. There were dragons carved into doorframes; dragons woven into pieces of local ikat cloth, and statues of dragons outside the modern community hall.
Sitting outside the lineage house of the Suku Bao Raja, Alor Kecil’s royal clan, I met a young man named Jason. I asked him about the dragons. The dragon, he said, was the protector of the village. It had come originally from the ground in the hills to the north, but today it lived in the sea. I repeated Haji Achmad’s story and Jason was unsurprised.
“People do see the dragon, but not often. It’s usually outsiders who see it, not locals,” he said.
The dragon was not the only mythical presence around Alor Kecil; there were also Sea People. In ancient times, the story goes, the Sea People were regular visitors to their brethren on the shore, and though these days they stay beneath the surface, one of Alor Kecil’s tribes, the Mang Lolong, still claim to maintain a connection with them. A popular rumor has it that a few years ago a foreign tourist, diving near Pulau Kepa spotted an underwater village full of mermen dancing the lego-lego in the blue depths beyond the edge of the reef.
Jason said that all of the people of Alor Kecil and the surrounding settlements are descended from a man who rose from the earth in a place called Bampalola in the hills above the coast. Following his directions I traveled up a steep track that wound between the ridges.
Bampalola itself was a modern village with a school and a mosque, but a kilometer downhill through the maize fields, on a high promontory at the end of a razor-sharp ridge, stood the old village, Lakatuli. Many villages in Alor shifted from defensive hilltops to more convenient locations once the age of clan warfare was over; no one lived in Lakatuil now, but the place was still used for adat ceremonies. Tall thatched roofs rose above bamboo-floored platforms. Elaborate carvings on beams and banisters were picked out in white and ochre, and there were dragons chiseled into the woodwork.
Looking at them I was reminded of a grainy black-and-white photo in the anthropologist Cora Du Bois’ 1944 book, The People of Alor. It was a picture of an Ulenai, the carving used in that era to represent the village guardian spirit. Though the Ulenai lacked the stylistic touches clearly borrowed from Chinese art that I had seen on the carvings in Alor Kecil and Bampalola, it was very obviously a dragon.
Du Bois had written of ancestor myths and guardian spirits that “this whole concept will undoubtedly become the center of revivalistic cults when Alorese culture crumbles as it inevitably will under the impact of foreign colonization”. But it seemed to me that nothing had crumbled, let alone been revived. The idea of the dragon as a powerful protector, and a real entity, had probably never faded from the scene in the villages here.

From Bampalola I returned to the coast and the hamlet of Alu Kai, just east of Alor Kecil. In the front room of a clan house with a carved dragon in the corner two of the village elders, Pak Amir, and Pak Mo, told me more about dragons and sea people – they called all this “history” rather than “legend” and made no distinction between the wilder tales and the stories of the arrival of Islam in Alor from Ambon and Makassar.
The dragon first appeared from the earth in Bampalola many centuries ago, before the birth of mankind, they said. The first man rose in the same place later and his descendents traveled downhill to the shore where the founder of Alu Kai hamlet, Jai Manu, married a princess of the mysterious Sea People named Eko Sari. Pak Amir and Pak Mo themselves, it seemed, were half-merman!
While they talked children gathered in the doorway, just as they had done in Lanleki. Pak Amir smiled.
“It’s important for old men to talk; if the old men just keep silent then how will the children know their own history?” he said.

There was one more place to visit in my pursuit of the dragon myths of Alor. At the tip of the stony headland beyond Alor Kecil, Pak Amir had said, was a shrine dedicated to the dragon. Chickens and goats were routinely tossed into the sea there as offerings, he said.
Leaving the road and the houses behind I picked my way through stony fields and thorny scrub. It was late afternoon now and a dense, humid heat had risen. Insects buzzed in the undergrowth and I could hear the sea, hissing onto the rocks nearby. I lost my way in the web of pathways until I met a tall, barefoot man named Haider who led me to the shrine.
It was a small structure, a low tin roof sheltering two shelves painted with long, black dragons, and on the top level a heavier, cruder dragon carving. The ground around the shrine was scattered with old coconut husks. A bunch of dried goats’ ears hung on a rusty nail. It felt like a place of dark magic.
People often came here to make offerings to the dragon, Haider said, not only local villagers but also big men, police chiefs and politicians from Kalabahi looking for the protection of the mysterious beast.
The spot where the dragon was fed lay beyond the shrine, a ledge of scaly, reptilian black rock over deep blue water. The dried carcass of a chicken hung from a branch. It was a strange, faintly unsettling place, and as the afternoon sun slanted away over the hills of Pantar I peered down into the water, half-expecting to see a horned, seven-tongued serpent rise from the depths. In the 21st Century the myths and legends of Alor are, it seems, still powerful enough to impress a skeptic…

On Foot Through Sulawesi's Traditional Heartland

2010-05-14T03:59:00.000-07:00

Walking from Mamasa to Toraja,

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, April 2010

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/beyond_bali.html

The mountain village was full of sound: running water, the voices of children, buffalo lowing in the rice terraces, and goats bleating in the pine trees on the higher slopes. But there was no traffic noise; the nearest surfaced road was a full day’s walk back across the mountains.
I was sitting in the shade outside Ibu Maria’s house in the hamlet of Timbaan, enjoying the cool of the evening, and watching the first stars appearing in the pale sky above the pine-studded ridges. I had begun my solo trek that morning. There were two days of walking ahead of me, but if the landscapes I had seen already were anything to go by, the aches and blisters would all be worth it.

***

Sulawesi, the great, spidery, four-legged island that lies northeast of Bali, is one of Indonesia’s most intriguing destinations. It has a hinterland of green mountains, and clear coral seas offshore. Sulawesi’s most famous attraction is Tana Toraja, an upland fastness in the centre of the island’s southwest “leg”. Home to mountains, tumbling rice terraces, and traditional culture, it stands out even amongst Indonesia’s myriad wonders.
Most visitors to Toraja make their way directly from Sulawesi’s capital Makassar by bus or air, but I had chosen an off-beat route, one that would entail three days of walking through the mountains from the remote neighbouring region of Mamasa. I was slipping into Tana Toraja through the back door.

***

Like Toraja, Mamasa is mountainous. But while Toraja is now well connected to the outside world, Mamasa remains spectacularly remote and virtually untouched by tourism. There are no air links, and the 100-kilometre journey up from the main coastal highway took five hours along a narrow, potholed road.
Mamasa Town is a small place with a bustling market beside a shining river. I spent a night there, before shouldering my backpack, and setting out, along the track to Toraja.
Mamasa shares many cultural links with its more famous counterpart across the mountains. Most people adopted Christianity during the last century, but pre-Christian traditions are strong, especially in the rites that accompany funerals. As I plodded along the track, I passed open pastures where horses and slate-blue buffalo grazed, and village houses of elaborately carved wood, painted in interlocking patterns of black, red and gold. These houses are known in Mamasa as banua sura.

The trail led into rising forest, and I sweated uphill to reach a high pass, topped with a cluster of banua sura. Behind me I could see the long, mist-cut sweep of the Mamasa Valley; ahead, hidden behind ranks of interlocking ridges, lay my destination – the Toraja heartlands.
It was all downhill to Ibu Maria’s house in Timbaan. This kindly, middle-aged lady keeps a few rooms in her home free for any trekkers who pass. For a modest fee I slept on a lumpy mattress, and dined on rice, stewed vegetables and fried river fish. Ibu Maria even managed to dig out a dusty bottle of Bintang beer from a cupboard. There was no electricity and no fridge, but the cool mountain air had chilled the beer perfectly.
The following days led me through more beautiful landscapes. Villages of wooden houses stood beside bubbling streams and mist smoked over pine-covered hillsides. Gangs of village children chased after me, begging to have their photos taken. The route was easy to find, running along an unsurfaced track above a swift-flowing river, and there was no need for a map. On the second night I slept in a family home in another peaceful mountain village. I had now reached the fringes of Tana Toraja. The houses here had enormous, soaring roofs, and were decorated with buffalo horns. The third day’s walking took me over another high pass and down to Bittuang where I shambled, a little footsore, onto a surfaced road and caught a bus along green valleys to the heart of Tana Toraja.

***
Tana Toraja is beautiful. Rugged limestone peaks rise above forested valleys, with spectacular terraced rice fields on the lower slopes. Given the landscape it’s easy to see how the area stayed free from outside interference for centuries, and it is this that has made Toraja so special. Traditional ways are remarkably strong here.
Toraja’s villages are famous, and display some of the most spectacular traditional architecture in the world. The houses, known as tongkonan, have huge arched roofs, rising to high peaks. They are said to represent the boats that carried the ancestors of the Toraja people to Sulawesi. A typical Toraja village has a rank of these tongkonan, faced by another row of smaller buildings, designed for storing rice – the staple food.
A few villages, such as Ke’te Kesu near Rantepao, have been developed for tourists with car parks and gift shops. But from the high hillsides of Toraja you can pick out the arched roofs of countless villages, poking out from stands of trees; few of them have ever been visited by sightseers.

The people of Toraja kept invaders at bay for centuries, and they kept foreign religion at arm’s length too. Long after other parts of Sulawesi had converted to Islam and Christianity, Toraja was still a bastion of ancestor worship, known here as Aluk Todolo. Despite the efforts of Dutch missionaries in the early 20th Century, when Indonesia gained its independence in 1949 there were only a handful of Torajan Christians. These days most Torajans are nominal Catholics, but old ways are still maintained, especially when it comes to funerals. In Toraja people are buried in caves and cliff faces. Lifelike effigies of the dead are placed in niches close to the tomb, looking out with blank eyes across ricefields. These are known as tau tau, and some of the most striking can be seen at Lemo, south of Rantepao.
Death is taken seriously in Toraja, and huge investment is made to ensure that the deceased receive a good –and bloody – send off. During funerals dozens of buffalo are sacrificed to ensure a successful journey to the afterlife. Tourists are welcome to attend, and wandering around Rantepao you’re sure to hear of forthcoming ceremonies.

***

After resting my blistered feet in the little town of Rantepao, I hired a 100cc motorbike and headed for the hills. From the mountain eyrie of Batu Tumonga I looked out over spectacular vistas of rice terrace and forest and spent a night up there, sleeping in a traditional house. In the morning a sea of white mist had filled the valley and the sun rose pink over the distant ranges.
Tana Toraja, and it’s remote neighbour Mamasa, were some of the most beautiful and fascinating parts of Indonesia I had visited, and the route I had taken to get there was a perfect way to reach deeply traditional communities. But my feet were still sore, so when it was time to leave I took the easy option – I caught an air-conditioned bus back out of the mountains and down to Makassar.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

In the Shadow of Ile Boleng

2010-05-06T05:36:00.000-07:00

The remote island of Adonara in Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/04/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/in-the-shadow-of-ile-boleng/371749

The old man leading me along the forest trail carried a long spear over his shoulder. He moved quickly, pausing from time to time to cut aside a dangling creeper, pick wild guavas or shinny up a palm tree to cut fresh coconuts.

Distant voices echoed through the trees as smallholders carried out conversations over kilometers of forest. The old man joined in, shouting in a tone pitched to carry through the creepers, “It’s Wilhem; I’m going to the mountain.”

Pak Wilhem was indeed leading me to the mountain, Ile Boleng, the 1,659-meter peak that looms over the dense palm forests of Adonara, a small, remote island in East Nusa Tenggara.

My first view of the island had come three days earlier as I stood on the deck of a small ferry, chugging away from Larantuka, a town of white churches at the eastern tip of Flores. To the south, across a strait of bright blue water, lay the long ridge of Solor. Closer at hand Adonara rose steeply from the shore. As the ferry rounded the island’s southwest corner, Ile Boleng came into view, a perfect volcanic cone rising into thin white clouds.

Adonara is the first island in the Solor group, a chain of isolated landfalls between Flores and Alor. Few people visit, but it is a beautiful place with white beaches, a forested interior and villages where people live according to old traditions.

After spending the night in a simple guesthouse in Waiwerang, a sleepy fishing village that passes for the main town of Adonara, I headed east along the coast. It was harvest time, and freshly cut maize, the staple crop here, was heaped in the roadside villages.

The picture-perfect Ena Burak Beach lay at the end of a rough red track, a strip of blinding white sand, flanked by warty outcrops of black basalt. The sea was a shifting sheet of cobalt, and across the water the hills of Lembata rose under an empty sky.

In the shade of a thatched wooden shelter at the top of the beach I met a local man name Herodes, who was sharing a picnic with friends. They invited me to join them, and as we picked at freshly grilled fish and crunched on jagung titi, the local staple made from crushed, dry-roasted corn, Herodes told me about Adonara’s culture.

The island is home to a mix of Muslims, who hold sway on the coast, and Catholics, who dominate in the hills. For people of both faiths local adat , customary tradition, holds strong; village ancestors are still venerated, and tuak (alcohol made from fermented coconut water) is quaffed at every opportunity.

Despite their remoteness, the islands of the Solor archipelago have been in contact with the outside world for many centuries. The area became a hub of commerce in the early 16th century after the Portuguese arrived in eastern Indonesia and tapped into the trade in sandalwood from Timor and spices from Maluku. Portuguese soldiers built forts on Solor and Adonara, while Catholic missionaries set about converting the locals. The Portuguese eventually lost ground to the Dutch, but their legacy remains among the Catholic majority in these islands.

There are other traces of outside influence, too. Bride prices are still paid with heirloom elephant tusks, originally imported from mainland Asia. Adonara’s traditional music is quite unlike that of other parts of Indonesia; instead of clanging gamelan and trilling flutes there are wiry rhythms plucked on a simple guitar-like instrument and plaintive, rough-edged singing. It sounds remarkably like the music of the Middle East, hinting at the Arab traders who passed through these islands even before the Portuguese.

The next day Herodes invited me to visit his mother’s village, Koli, deep in the palm-clad hills. There were both mosques and churches in Koli. In the nearby hamlet of Lama Nepa a local man named Anthony showed me the rumah adat, simple buildings of bamboo and thatch central to the pre-Christian and pre-Muslim traditions of the area.

According to legend, the village was founded by two brothers, Patti and Bed, who were granted the land after slaying a man-eating dragon that had plagued settlements on Adonara’s north coast. The rumah adat traditionally used for planning clan warfare in Lama Nepa is still topped with a carving of a Chinese-style dragon.

In another building, the Lango Belen, an heirloom sword said to have belonged to the dragon-slaying Patti, is guarded by a family who inherited the task from their forefathers. Each evening an offering of food and tuak is placed in the right-hand corner of the home for the spirits of the ancestors.

As we rode back toward Waiwerang in the insect-filled dusk, Ile Boleng was clear of clouds, the last of the sunlight illuminating the mouth of its steep crater. I decided it was time for me to take a closer look at the mountain. So early the next morning I hitched a ride to the village of Lamalota, where I met Pak Wilhem, who was to guide me to the summit.

The forest trail led to a clearing where Wilhem kept a few goats and grew a little corn. We stopped to snack on wild avocados then pressed on uphill, Wilhem moving swiftly with his spear over his shoulder. All men take a spear with them when they go into the forest, he said, a local custom that can be traced to Adonara’s past tribal warfare.

Beyond the last stand of trees, the trail rose steeply between sharp rocks. It took an hour to reach the crater rim. There we met four men with a pack of thin yellow dogs. They were hunting feral goats, chasing them into the crater before bringing them to bay on the steep cliffs.

Wilhem and I made our circuit of the volcano’s lip, scrambling up the outcrops toward the summit.

Wilhem explained that local people believe the volcano, which last erupted in 1982, must be fed each year to ensure it stays dormant. Offerings of freshly slaughtered chickens are tossed into the fractured hollow of the crater during the early months of every wet season. The peak is also surrounded by taboos. You cannot bring fish or salt to the high slopes, and uttering words connected with the sea — “boat” and “whale,” for example — is forbidden.

We looked out from the summit over a vast panorama of pale water and dark islands. To the west the green hinterland of Adonara was dotted with white villages. Wilhem pointed out Koli, the area I had visited the previous day. To the north the Flores Sea shone yellow in the sunlight, while to the south Solor lay like a ship at anchor. Behind it I could pick out the damp hills of eastern Flores. In the opposite direction Lembata lay under a blanket of pale clouds.

There was a small white boat cutting across the channel far below — but I remembered not to point it out.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

2010-04-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

A Sacred Mountain of Java

2010-04-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, April 2010

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/beyond_bali.html

In the deep green forest on the slopes of the Penanggungan volcano the cool air is filled with the sound of running water and the scent of incense. At the end of a steep, potholed road, surrounded by a thicket of tall trees and tangled creepers, stands Candi Jolotundo. This Hindu water temple is over a thousand years old, but even today, long since most of Java converted to Islam, it is still attracting a steady stream of pilgrims. In the damp niches, people place Balinese-style offerings of leaves and petals; on the temple's central platform of carved basalt, men sit cross-legged in meditation. And in the bathing tanks on either side — women to the left, men to the right — people stand in the cool, clear water, bowing their heads beneath the rivulets in search of blessing and the energy of this sacred place. There are Balinese migrants, Chinese Indonesians, and a few local Christians amongst the visitors, but most of the pilgrims here are Javanese Muslims. This temple, and the steep mountain from which its eternal water supply is drawn, is still seen as a place of power today, as it has been throughout Java's history.

On a clear day you can see Gunung Penanggungan from the center of Surabaya. This 1,653-metre mountain stands like a sentinel at the edge of the volcanic hinterland that is just an hour and a half away by road from the crowded East Java capital.

For hundreds of years, Penanggungan was one of Java's most sacred mountains. According to legend, when Hinduism first arrived in Indonesia, Mount Meru the mythical home of the gods was shifted to Java. But the peak suffered some damage in transit: the base broke away to form Mount Semeru in the Bromo-Tengger Massif, while the smooth summit tumbled some 60 kilometers to the north to form Penanggungan.

It's easy to see why this peak had such a grip on the imagination of ancient Java. Rising steeply from the hot yellow coastal plain in a perfect cone and flanked by a series of smaller attendant summits, it dominates the local landscape. Under successive Hindu dynasties it was a pilgrimage destination and the focus of intensive temple building. Today the remains of some 81 temples dot the forested slopes.

Oldest is the sacred bathing place at Jolotundo on the western slope of the mountain. A facade of dark, carved basalt set into the steep hillside, it dates from the time of Sanjaya, the dynasty also responsible for Java's biggest Hindu monument at Prambanan. Built around 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions connect the place to Udayana, the king of the old unified kingdom of Bali who was married to a Sanjaya princess. The natural spring here, fed by pure mountain mineral water, was probably considered sacred long before the temple was built, and of all Penanggungan's temples it is the one still most venerated today.

Visit at any time and you will see people who have driven up from the nearby cities to bathe and to fill bottles with the water said by locals to be second in quality only to that from the Zam-Zam well in Mecca. In fact, you'll probably be encouraged to take a dip yourself - and you should! Mystical powers aside, the cool and clean water is incredibly refreshing. But for those serious about accessing Jolotundo's power, locals say it is necessary to visit after dark, between midnight and 2 am. Every night but especially when the moon is full this remote place deep in the forest is busy with visitors.

There is another sacred Sanjaya-era bathing place on the eastern side of Penanggungan. Follow a rising, narrowing lane off the roaring Surabaya-Malang Highway and you'll reach Candi Belahan, known locally by its more racy name, Candi Tetek, the Breasts Temple, for the obvious reasons; the supply of sacred spring-water here emerges from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. This place is said to be the memorial for Udayana's son Airlangga, the last and greatest of the Sanjaya kings. Pilgrims still come here today also, and local villagers use the shallow pool that stands before the temple's brick facade as a public bath.

After Airlangga's death in 1049, Sanjaya split into two warring kingdoms, and East Java was not unified again until two centuries later under the Singosari realm, based not far from Gunung Penanggungan near the modern town of Malang.

Singosari made its own additions to the sacred geography of Penanggungan, the most striking of which is Candi Jawi, which stands southeast of the mountain in the village of Prigen. A tall tower of carved limestone; it is nonetheless overshadowed by the mountain that inspired it.

But it was under Singosari's successor, the mighty 15th century Majapahit Empire, that temple building on the sacred slopes of Penanggungan reached its zenith. The mountain's enigmatic purple cone, rising from the coastal haze, would have been visible from the Majapahit capital some 30 kilometers to the west at Trowulan. As pilgrims made their way up ancient pathways towards the sacred summit, masons carved cubes of rough basalt into plinths and statues and set them on laboriously leveled terraces all around the slopes of the mountain.

The Majapahit rule lasted less than 200 years, and in 1543 Gunung Penanggungan was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak. No more temples were built on the steep slopes and the more remote of the Majapahit constructions were reclaimed by the forest, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s. But the mystical draw of the mountain and its bathing places has endured — and continues to do so today.

Modern pilgrims can find places to stay in the nearby hill resorts of Trawas or Tretes, small towns with fine views looking out across the shining green rice terraces and stands of thick forest towards Penanggungan. But the closest accommodation to the mountain is a kilometer downhill from the Jolotundo temple at PPLH, an environmental education center deep in the forest that also has some neat little bungalows for visitors.

And this is the place to start from if you want to make your own way up to the home of the gods, the very summit of the sacred mountain. Though it's a tough and sweaty climb, Penanggungan is one of Java's most accessible peaks — a day hike rather than an expedition. After seeking blessings with a bath at the Jolotundo temple, hikers can follow a path through the steamy silence of the forest before emerging eventually in the thick scrub between the main mountain and its attendant peak of Mount Bekel. Here the trail, winding through stands of tall yellow grass, leads to a succession of small Majapahit temples before rising sharply for the final sweaty slog up the bare stony slopes to the summit.

The hard work is worth it. From the rim of the shallow crater, the view opens over the green landscape of East Java. To the north the cities of Sidoarjo and Surabaya can sometimes be made out beneath their blankets of yellow haze; the lower slopes of the mountain are cloaked with a dense green forest that gives way to the shining terraces and red-roofed villages of the farmland. And to the south the great bulk of the Welirang volcano massif towers over Trawas and Tretes. It's easy to understand why the people of old Java saw this place as the home of the gods.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Catholics Flock to Flores’ Larantuka for 500th Easter Parade

2010-04-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

The Traditional Easter Celebrations in Eastern Flores,

Originally published in the Bali Times, 09/04/10

http://www.thebalitimes.com/2010/04/12/catholics-flock-to-flores%E2%80%99-larantuka-for-500th-easter-parade/

Nuns in grey habits stand squinting in the sunlight beneath the banana plants. Offshore, white boats, overloaded with spectators, jostle and try to hold their position in the furious current that flows north through the narrow strait. From the seashore chapel of Tuan Maninu mournful lamentations in OldPortuguese rise into the air, and the blustery tropical wind snaps at the black flags of the Catholic brotherhoods. It is midday on Easter Friday in Larantuka at the far eastern end of Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, and the little town’s famed Easter procession is about to begin.

Larantuka is the one of the oldest centres of Catholicism in Indonesia. The Portuguese first visited Flores – and gave it its name, meaning “Flowers” – in the early 16th Century, and enthusiastic missionaries soon followed. By the end of their first century in the island they claimed to have converted around 100,000 locals.

But by the 17th Century the Portuguese were already in decline as a naval power, and when in 1613 a Dutch frigate arrived near Larantuka and bombarded the fort on the small neighbouring island of Solor, then the main Portuguese settlement, the occupants quickly conceded defeat and many of the soldiers retreated to the Malay Peninsula port of Melaka. The priests, however, were left behind in Larantuka.

At midday the congregation emerges from the little chapel, old women in black blouses carrying candles and rosaries. The focus of the procession is a black-draped casket containing the centuries-old statue of Christ, known here as Tuan Maninu, one of a pair of devotional objects that are at the heart of Larantuka’s Catholic identity. The casket is carried to a waiting outrigger fishing boat, and then, pursued by a swarm of black canoes, and watched from the flotilla of overloaded ferries offshore, it is paddled south against the current to the heart of Larantuka town. There it is brought ashore near the former Raja’s residence, and paraded to the Cathedral, where it is placed beside Larantuka’s other votive object, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, known here as Tuan Ma. Tuan Ma is the focus of intense worship in Larantuka and the surrounding small islands.

Though Flores remained a Portuguese possession until the 19th Century, it was largely forgotten as Lisbon’s fortunes continued to decline. The pocket of Catholicism at the far end of the island became isolated and fossilised. Prayers were still said in Portuguese and Latin, the mixed-race descendents of early settlers who married local women kept some kind of Iberian identity alive, and the statues of Tuan Maninu and Tuan Ma became the object of a cult that mixed Catholicism with local lore.

When Portugal finally ceded Flores to the Dutch in 1859, on condition that it remained Catholic territory, the new missionaries were dismayed to discover what they called “an island of baptised heathens.” But in Larantuka, at the far end of the island, a strangely old-fashioned Catholicism remained strong. In 1887 the whole town was consecrated to the Virgin Mary.

At the end of the first procession the faithful flock into Larantuka’s grand cathedral, the overspill seeking shade in the gardens outside and listening to Bishop Franciscus Kopong Kung’s sermon through crackling loudspeakers. As a heavy tropical dusk descends on the town the casket of Tuan Maninu and the tall, velvet draped statue of Tuan Ma are carried out of the building to follow a candlelit processional route through the town, stopping along the way at chapels dedicated to each of Larantuka’s main clans. The statue bearers wear the tall, pointed hoods still used today by penitents in Easter processions in Spain and Portugal (a mode of dress given unfortunate connotations when it was misappropriated by the Ku Klux Klan), and the murmuring of prayer rises from the crowd.

This year’s Easter celebrations in Larantuka were bigger than usual, for according to local tradition 2010 marks the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Catholicism, and of the statues of Tuan Ma and Tuan Maninu, in the town. According to one local myth the statues were miraculously washed ashore from a shipwreck and were made the object of devotion by the ancestor-worshiping locals. There are, however, records of the arrival of Portuguese missionaries – with devotional idols in tow – in the very early years of the 16th Century.

According to local officials some 15,000 pilgrims from throughout Flores and beyond visited Larantuka during the celebrations. The procession was also joined by the Portuguese ambassador to Indonesia, Carlos Manuel Leitao Frota, and by Indonesian Defence Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro. Extra ferries to Kupang were laid on to carry returning pilgrims home.

The procession goes on long into the night and a strange atmosphere of mournful calm descends on Larantuka. Soft candlelight flickers and across the channel the hills of Solor and Adonara are dark silhouettes against a starlit sky. As the vast crowd slowly circuits the town, the statue of Tuan Ma borne along in the flow, prayers and hymns shift back and forth and the soft shuffling of feet rises to an insistent whisper.

It is long after midnight when the procession finally makes its way back to the cathedral. Pilgrims walk home along empty streets, greasy with melted candle wax, and the statues are returned to their respective chapels and locked away out of sight – until next year.

Light of the Gods on Bali's Peaks

2010-04-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Lempuyung Temple and Mount Seraya, Eastern Bali

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 31/04/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/light-of-the-gods-on-balis-peaks/366857

The chain of steps, cutting a narrow band through the damp green forest, rose above me. Sweat dripped from the tip of my nose; rustling and chattering in the undergrowth hinted at unseen monkeys, and a cool, cloying mist rose from the rice terraces below. It was not long after dawn, and I was picking my way up the pilgrimage route to the highest station of the complex of temples known as Pura Lempuyang that stud the green flanks of the fractured volcano standing sentinel on Bali’s eastern promontory. Somewhere ahead of me, on the very pinnacle of the peak, was the Puru Lempuyang Luhur, 1060 meters above sea level and the eastern directional anchor of the Balinese compass. Some 1700 steps lead to the summit, but I had long since lost count of how many I had still to climb.

My first view of the mountain had come in the lavender light of the previous evening. Traveling north by motorbike from Amlapura, administrative capital of Karangasem, Bali’s most easterly regency, Gunung Lempuyang and Gunung Seraya, two cleaved halves of the same upwelling of basalt, rose like bruised knuckles above a rumpled rug of rice fields.
Bali’s overdeveloped south might leave many newcomers wondering just whether the luscious tropical island of myth really exists, but in this wilder eastern region I found no lack of green vistas and volcanic views. The area is dominated by the mighty cone of Gunung Agung, the 3142 meter lynchpin of Bali. But this evening Agung was lost in cloud and I was more interested in its smaller neighbor, Lempuyang-Seraya, the double peak that once overshadowed Bali’s most powerful Hindu kingdom. Karangasem today is one of Bali’s poorest regions, with drought-plagued agriculture and little tourism income. But in the 19th Century this terraced, volcanic territory was the seat of a mighty dynasty.

My first stop north of Amlapura was a pleasure garden laid out by the last king of Karangasem in 1947. Tirtagangga – the name means “Water of the Ganges” – was a place of clear pools and stepping stones. A mildewed pantomime of statues – gurning demons, bug-eyed warriors, belching boars and writhing royal nagas – spilled rivulets from artfully hidden spouts.
After spending the night in a guesthouse a stone’s throw from the gardens I woke at first light, and thirty minutes later was standing at the foot of that interminable flight of steps, bending their way out of sight towards the summit of Lempuyang.
The scattering of temples that make up the Lempuyang complex comprise one of Bali’s Kayangan Jagat, the nine directional temples which give the island its own unique set of cardinal points. Lempuyang is synonymous with the east in the Balinese scheme.
The rest of Bali seemed to fall away behind me as I climbed and when I finally reached the little temple compound at the summit it was drifting alone in the cloud. There were damp ceremonial umbrellas and altars wrapped in checked cloth. Shaggy palm trees rustled in the breeze. The temple was not totally deserted though; a local man, Pak Arya, had spent the night meditating at the temple. He told me that the name of this place – Lempuyang – was a contraction of two old Balinese words, Lempu and Hyang. It meant “the Light of the Gods”. As a mob of olive-colored monkeys emerged from the bushes and began a swaggering circuit of the temple, Pak Arya spun me a tall but tempting tale. When American astronauts on the first mission to the moon looked back on the Earth behind them they saw an unexplained light shining from one spot – Lempuyang.
“The Light of the Gods!” said Pak Arya with a grin, warding off a monkey.
Light of the Gods aside, there was one brief glimpse of the light of day as I descended, passing white-clad pilgrims struggling up the steps: for mere seconds the cloud cleared and Lempuyang’s giant neighbor, Mount Agung, loomed to the west in a deluge of bright sunlight.

At the foot of the steps I climbed back into the saddle and took a back road, skirting the northern flanks of the mountain. Agung appeared again against a pearly sky as I threaded my way through the fishing villages and low-key dive resorts around Amed. The sea was dotted with bone-white fishing boats under triangular blue sails. In Bunutan village I stopped to watch a crowd of men betting over cockfights in a shaded pavilion. The air was thick with the smell of clove smoke and feathers and tattered wads of money passed hands after each bloody bout.
The road led on, bucking over promontories and dipping into shallow bays. To my right the twin peaks of Seraya and Lempuyang loomed in the cloud, while offshore the dark hills of Lombok rose.
At the height of their powers in the 18th Century the Karangasem kings crossed that strait and annexed Lombok, placing its Muslim subjects under Hindu rule. So it remained until the end of the 19th Century when the Dutch appeared on the scene and wrested Lombok away, and then, not long after, conquered Karangasem itself.
Admiring the view as I rode I took a wrong turn and ended up in a little hamlet of yellow dogs and fighting cocks. A man called Gede called me over, and before setting back on the right road he plied me with roasted corn and sweet coffee. The blue waters of the Lombok Strait lay below us. Gede was a farmer, though in this hard, eastern landscape there is not enough water to grow rice. All that grows here, he said, is the corn on which I was chewing. The people here had little cash, and life was hard, so when foreign investors came sniffing out bargain plots for future villa developments, as they had recently begun to do, they took interest. But they were also wary, Gede said, and were doubtful about the merits of the kind of intense development seen in other parts of Bali. There are no luxury villas on this coastline – yet.

Bidding goodbye to Gede I continued on my journey. To the right the mountain emerged from the cloud again – it was Seraya that I was looking at here, 100 meters taller than its temple-topped twin. The mountain stayed in view all the way to Ujung, the final point on my circuit of Bali’s easternmost peaks. This was another water palace, built in 1919 by I Gusti Bagus Jelantik, the second-last king of Karangasem.
The sun was slanting away to the west now, with soft light shimmering on the water of the pool and on the white marble of the central pavilion, a private chamber where the royals had once retreated from the eyes of the world. Today there were no more fluttering princesses, only locals from nearby Amlapura, out for an afternoon jog around the pool.
I climbed a flight of steps to a skeletal folly of relief-covered marble. The water palace lay below me, white walls, Dutch shutters and Balinese friezes in a mass of green trees. And beyond, propping up a slab of milky cloud, stood the two-peaked massif that had been the fulcrum of my journey, Lempuyang-Seraya.

A Fanciful Take on Artist Spies

2010-04-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

Book review of "Island of Demons" by Nigel Barley

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 26/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/artsandentertainment/a-fanciful-take-on-artist-spies/365986

The artist Walter Spies was not shy about taking liberties himself, so he would probably be amused to know that more than a few liberties have been taken with the facts of his own life story in the interests of turning it into rollicking historical fiction.

More than 60 years since Spies’ death, writer and anthropologist Nigel Barley has raided the archives and made him the subject of his latest novel, “Island of Demons.” Spies was German, but he will forever be associated with his adopted home, Bali, and this book is about the man and the island.

Spies first came to Bali in the 1920s, and was foremost among the shifting community of European bohemians who lived there in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule. His story is well known — accidental founding father of touristic Ubud, more important for his influence on both local artists and on the world’s ideas about Bali than for his own paintings, arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Dutch for homosexuality, jailed again at the start of World War II as a German and killed when his prisoner-of-war ship was torpedoed.

Barley reportedly had intended to use all this detail for a biography, but then decided it would be more fun — for both writer and reader — to turn to fiction instead.

And fun it is. The book is narrated by another real-life foreign figure from Bali’s artistic past, Spies’ contemporary, the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet. Opening as an aged Bonnet (the real one died in 1978) begins to tell his tale to a young American, the book then turns into the saga of Bonnet’s formative years, his arrival in Bali and his falling in with — and falling for — Spies.

There’s plenty of sparky dialogue and some genuinely laugh-out-loud comic moments. The characterizations of the key foreign players in the early years of modern Bali — Miguel Covarrubias, Margaret Mead and others — are sharp and at times deliciously cruel. The most effective character in the book is not Spies himself, but Bonnet. His gawkiness, the faint sense that he is an outsider to the pretentious Ubud set and the way he manages to be both prudish and debauched at the same time — with furtive nighttime excursions to Denpasar in search of beautiful young men in contrast to Spies’ overt homosexuality — builds subtly and endearingly without the reader noticing.

But there are problems with this book. Barley gleefully states in his introduction that he has played fast and loose with chronology and time in the interests of narrative. But having made the decision to write fiction instead of history, he has failed to go one step further and make a plot — generally a prerequisite of a novel.

As a consequence, “Island of Demons” sags in the middle, turning into little more than a series of well-written and very funny vignettes as historical figure after historical figure is shoehorned in and caricatured. What is needed is a sense of building tension, of the threat of the dour Dutch authorities bearing down on Spies and his carefree clique as the book progresses. But it is absent, and when Spies is arrested for homosexuality 320 pages in, only prior knowledge has given the reader warning.

The other flaw is the failure to address what could be called “the case against” Walter Spies. While he was clearly not the slavering pedophile of colonialist propaganda, the idea that his relationships with young Balinese men could have been predatory and exploitative should have been given more than the brief touch it receives. And his role in the creation of the carefully constructed and enduring myth of uniquely paradisiacal and artistic Bali — one that manages both to glorify and to patronize at the same time — could have done with a sterner appraisal.

But despite these flaws, and despite the book’s flabby midriff, “Island of Demons” does remain a highly amusing read. Barley’s style, which somehow manages to be as light as air while bandying about words like “pandiculate,” is a delight, as is his comic coining of new terms — “co-varrubious” for the overly affectionate Miguel and Rosa Covarrubius, for example.

The scene setting, the rich color of Bali’s landscapes and the rhythms of its dance performances are very well done, and the last chapters — detailing the war, the Japanese occupation of the East Indies and its aftermath — are suddenly and unexpectedly poignant, adding a final weight to a book that had otherwise been only pleasurably frivolous.

“Island of Demons,” although not entirely successful, is ultimately rather like Spies himself: though flawed and at times frustrating, in the end it is hard not to be charmed.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

The Fast Track to Tianjin's Roots

2010-03-21T02:39:00.000-07:00

By High-speed Train to Tianjin, China

Originally Published in the Jakarta Globe, 18/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/the-fast-track-to-tianjins-roots/364266

The sleek white train slips smoothly out from under the arched roofs of Beijing’s South Train Station. Speed, time and the outside air temperature are registered on a digital display at the front of the carriage – within seconds we are doing 60kmph, then 70, and upwards, past 100. Outside it is just 3C, but the carriage is warm as we streak through the outer suburbs of the Chinese capital past smokestacks and factories. Wintery sunlight slants in from the right and soon we are passing farmsteads, electricity pylons, flat brown fields and ponds scaled with ice. Six minutes into the journey and we are already out of the city and doing 325kmph. I am riding what is reportedly the fastest conventional twin-track train in the world between Beijing and the neighboring city of Tianjin.

China, covering half a continent, is a land of long rail journeys, and the trains that make these transcontinental trips are exceptionally well-run. But none of the long-haulers have the wow-factor of the speed-machines that make the short run from Beijing to Tianjin. Until recently the 114 kilometer trip took an hour and a half, but in August 2008 a new line was opened and the journey time was slashed by two-thirds. The trains that shuttle back and forth every half-hour have an average top speed of 330kmph – though the record is an eye-watering 394.3kmph.
I have barely settled into my seat when the smooth transition from suburbs to fields repeats in reverse: smokestacks, factories, then a river and a forest of glass skyscrapers. Exactly 29 minutes after slipping out of Beijing we slide to a halt in the echoing cavern of Tianjin Station...

***

But is there actually anything at the end of the line to make this turbo-charged trip from Beijing worthwhile? On this chilly winter’s day I step out of the cozy cocoon of the carriage, pull on my hat and gloves, and set out to see what Tianjin has to offer.
Lying near the mouth of the Hai River, Tianjin has always been the key maritime gateway to Beijing. Britain’s first official mission to the Manchu court arrived through Tianjin in 1793, and by the end of the 19th Century various foreign powers had been granted trading concessions in the city.

Shivering in the sharp sunlight I dodge the taxis that crowd the station forecourt, skip over a steel bridge across the Hai River, and seek out what remains of the concession era architecture. The streets are neat and orderly, and here and there a bank, church or hotel in unmistakably European style looms over the pavement – all balconies and colonnades. But as so often in 21st Century China it can be hard to sift the authentic from the fake. What I think is a hundred-year-old French townhouse reveals itself as a cunning concrete construction, the frontispiece of a new housing development.

There is more of the new as I double back north to the riverside. Here enormous glass towers rocket into a pale sky. Tianjin might be overshadowed by Beijing, but it is still China’s sixth largest city, close to the forefront of recent economic growth. I hurry along the walkway beside the wind-ruffled river, passing old men in flat caps, fishing in the icy water.
Crossing the neoclassical Bei’an Bridge – with golden Venuses on the parapets – I continue until I reach the Monastery of Deep Compassion, a 17th Century temple where enormous Buddhas stand in smoky halls. The forecourt is busy with old women, lighting incense sticks and bowing before the images, but it’s too cold to linger so I follow the river back to the south.
The original walled garrison city of Tianjin stood on the west bank of the Hai River, guarding one of the most important junctions for waterborne traffic in China. To the east trading junks charted the coastal waters and plotted courses to more distant lands – Japan, Vietnam, and even Indonesia. Meanwhile the river gave access to the Grand Canal, the inland waterway that linked Beijing to the southern Yangzi Delta.
Traces of this centuries-old city still stand. One road in from the riverside is Guwenhua Jie – “Ancient Culture Street”. Once again it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake, but the pedestrian street is a mass of red lanterns, dragon-chased roofs and kitsch Chinese trinkets. Through a narrow arched gateway between the souvenir stalls is the Temple of the Goddess of Seafarers. I’ve visited temples dedicated to this same deity in Indonesia, and curiosity draws me inside. Much is familiar, though in wintery Tianjin there is no soft tropical heat; here the incense smoke coils into cold, dry air.
At the end of Ancient Culture Street I take a break from the chill for delicate cups of green tea and a plate of steamed meat dumplings – baozi, a Tianjin specialty – then pull my gloves back on and head for the heart of the old city. The Drum Tower, a double-tiered pavilion atop a cube of gray stone, is the last remnant of the old fortifications. The walls of old Tianjin were destroyed, not by bulldozing modern developers, but by vengeful European soldiers. In 1900 a peasant uprising, known as the Boxer Rebellion, saw attacks on foreigners across northern China. When the crumbling Manchu dynasty offered its support to the rebellion a multinational European army attacked in response. The victorious Europeans leveled the old walls when they captured Tianjin.

***

Heading south from the Drum Tower – pausing in a covered arcade to buy manhua, another Tianjin specialty, a twist of sweet, crispy fried dough – I return to shining streets and towering office-blocks. It will be dark before long; temperatures will plummet far below freezing, and it will be time for a 330kmph ride back to Beijing.
Tianjin is far more manageable in size than the capital. In a chilly afternoon I have made my way through its sights – and with that 29-minute train ride it has been easier to reach than many outlying suburbs of Beijing itself. And there are plenty of traces of the old here to make the trip worthwhile – though as so often in China the boundary between restoration and recreation, between heritage and theme park, is hard to pinpoint.
But as the sky pales in the west, I stumble into a completely different quarter of Tianjin. Taking a side road in the direction of the river I find myself amongst bare, black-branched trees. The road becomes a dirt track, plied by old men on bicycles. This, it seems, is the plot for some new development; the narrow alleyways are only just being cleared.
Out on the wasteland I see men in heavy coats and peaked caps. Their bicycles are propped against nearby trees and each man holds a small yellow-beaked bird. As the sun sets behind the skyscrapers, the men fling the birds skywards. They rocket up and up vertically in the cold air, and then, at a whistled command, turn summersault and plummet in a long sweeping dive to their master’s hand and a pinch of grain. It is a simple, timeless sport, and watching them as dusk falls I realize that for all the high-speed trains and skyscrapers the old China is always there to be found, not in “Ancient Culture Streets” or over-restored temples, but in places like this...

Savoring the Taste of Amritsar's Holy Nectar

2010-03-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

The Sikh Holy City and the India-Pakistan Border

Originally Published in the Jakarta Globe, 10/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/savoring-the-taste-of-amritsars-holy-nectar/362865

A roar rose from the crowd: “Jai Hind!” Up with India! From a hundred metres away an equally passionate response bounced back like an echo: “Pakistan Zindabad!” Long live Pakistan! The sun was slanting across the Punjab and I was pinned in the middle of a mass of flag-waving Indian patriots. Just to the west exactly the same thing was going on – except there the flapping flags were those of Pakistan. On the road beneath me abnormally tall Indian soldiers with ridiculous red headdresses were prancing, preening and high-kicking like cockerels. On the same road, just beyond an imposing gateway, similarly attired Pakistanis were going through the same theatrical motions.
Something very strange was going on here. I was at the Wagah Checkpoint, the only official crossing in the entire length of the hyper-sensitive border between India and Pakistan. But the evening border-closing ceremony that I was watching looked more like an exercise in camp choreography than a display of bitter enmity...

***

I had arrived that morning in Amritsar, the major city of Indian Punjab. The Punjab is the breadbasket of north India, and the train that brought me from Delhi had rolled over rich yellow plains. Irrigation canals stalked by long-legged cattle egrets carried water to fields heavy with maize and millet, and herds of dirty-white cows raised storms of pale dust on rutted tracks.
Amritsar itself was the archetypal North Indian city. A mob of hungry rickshaw (pedicab) drivers besieged me at the colonial-era station and the streets were a maelstrom of bikes, trucks and buses. But there is something that makes Amritsar special. This is the holiest city of the Sikh religion.
Sikhism, the newest major world religion, was founded in Punjab in the 16th Century by the man revered by Sikhs as the first Guru, Nanak. Rejecting both the major faiths of the Subcontinent, Guru Nanak declared “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim”. His new religion was monotheistic, rejecting idolatry and the Hindu concept of caste, but also many of the strictures of Islam. Today there are around 25 million Sikhs worldwide.

After escaping the rickshaw drivers I headed for the old city, following a thickening flow of pilgrims to the heart of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple.
I left my shoes at the gate, covered my head with a bandana – as required – and stepped across the threshold into a world of gleaming white marble. Ahead lay a great square pool of water, shining in the midday heat. Pilgrims in saffron turbans fell to their knees on the polished tiles, pressing their palms together and bowing their foreheads to the floor. They were praying towards a building at the very centre of the complex: reached by a narrow causeway and seeming to float on the water was the Harimandir, the Golden Temple itself.
Amritsar, meaning “Pool of Nectar”, takes its name from the tank that surrounds the temple. The earliest shrine here was built in the late 16th Century by the fourth Sikh Guru, but it was expanded and embellished repeatedly over the centuries. Today it is the most important pilgrimage centre for Sikhs from around the world.
All Sikhs, no matter how wealthy, are expected to do charitable service in their gurdwarras (temples). In the halls around the temple cheerful volunteers were working in communal kitchens, preparing free meals for anyone who was hungry – pilgrims, tourists, and the local poor, regardless of their religion.
Most of the men had tall turbans and thick beards. The final Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, sanctioned five obligatory symbols that would make Sikhs instantly recognizable. Known as the Five Ks, these were kesh, the uncut hair and beard; kanga, a comb, worn tucked beneath the turban; kachchhera, a knee-length undergarment; kara, a steel bracelet, and kirpan, a sword or dagger.
Guru Gobind also compiled the Sikh texts into the holy book of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, declaring that the book itself would be the eternal 11th Guru. A copy of the Granth is kept in the inner sanctum of the Golden Temple where a party of black-turbaned priests were keeping up a continuous recitation. The walls of the temple were lavishly decorated. It was like being inside a maharani’s jewel box.
After being the centre of a powerful Sikh empire in the 19th Century, Amritsar and the Punjab fell to the British colonialists, and in the nascent independence movement that grew in the early 20th Century the region saw its fair share of unrest. In fact, one of the key events in India’s independence struggle took place just a few hundred meters from the Golden Temple.
Shedding my bandana and recovering my shoes I made my way to Jalianwalla Bagh. This garden is an open space, hemmed by the close-packed walls of the old city – just as it was on April 13 1919 when a huge crowd, swelled by ill-fated pilgrims, gathered to protest a draconian new act passed by the British, which, amongst other things, banned protests of this very kind. After a short stand-off troops led by one General Dyer opened fire on the unarmed protestors. Hundreds were killed, but the massacre helped to galvanize the wider independence movement.
But independence brought bloodshed to Amritsar that made the carnage at Jalianwalla Bagh look positively tame. When the Subcontinent was partitioned between Muslim Pakistan and officially secular but Hindu-dominated India, the Punjab too was sliced in half and a new, arbitrary border driven through the belt of agricultural land between Amritsar and the neighboring city of Lahore. Across North India Muslim refugees headed west and Hindus and Sikhs traipsed east. The migration was accompanied by horrific communal massacres. Refugee trains from the west arrived in Amritsar station with not one passenger still alive; trains from the east arrived in Lahore in a similar blood-soaked state.
Partition left Sikhs separated from many of their holy places in what became Pakistan, and it also left two huge countries with a shared history but a spectacularly troublesome modern relationship. Nuclear rivalry, religious animosity and a bloody past – none of it made the Wagah Checkpoint, some 20 kilometers west of Amritsar, sound like a place for a family outing. But as I emerged from Jalianwalla Bagh it seemed as if that was just where dozens of sightseeing Indian families were preparing to go. I joined them, catching a ride in a minibus out through the fields and villages, and soon found myself in the thick of the cheering crowd on the viewing terraces as the soldiers postured wildly down below.

It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. The soldiers preened and puffed in a caricature of huffing fury. They stomped and strutted to face their Pakstani counterparts – with timing of such perfection that close, and friendly, cooperation was obviously required – then whipped around and marched away, noses in the air like teenage drama queens. All the while the two crowds cheered and waved their flags as if they were at a football match. And then, as the sun finally slipped down behind the sagging palm trees in the direction of Lahore, the two flags were lowered, the gate was slammed shut and the performance was over for another day. Pakistan and India might not be the best of neighbors, and the countryside around Amritsar might have a terribly blood-stained past. But amidst the rancor the daily border-closing ceremony at Wagah, with all its pantomime silliness, is still guaranteed to raise a smile – and smile I did, all the way back to Amritsar in the dusk...

Hard Labor in a Ghostly World: East Java's Sulfur Mines

2010-03-21T02:03:00.000-07:00

A Journey to the Ijen Plateau, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 03/02/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/hard-labor-in-a-ghostly-world-east-javas-sulfur-mines/356302

The rising road is a mess of pebbles and potholes, and the engine of my motorbike strains as I wend my way between the ruts. It is an hour since I left the neat, sleepy little town of Bondowoso, riding first between luminescent rice terraces and red-roofed villages, and then uphill into the forest. A few more lumps and bumps, a few more steep switchbacks before the road suddenly levels and a view of a lost world opens below. Surrounded by dark ridges is a swathe of rolling forest under a veil of yellow haze. Welcome to the Ijen Plateau.

The chain of volcanoes that runs the length of Java ends in style in the mighty Ijen-Raung Massif. Rocketing from the rice terraces this mighty complex of peaks – flanked by the 3332-meter Gunung Raung in the west and the 2800-meter Gunung Merapi in the east – can be seen from Bali on a clear day.

Rolling down through the trees I reach sleepy Sempol, the main village of the Ijen region, home to the men and women who work on the surrounding coffee plantations. On the outskirts of the village is the Arabica Homestay, a guesthouse owned by one of the coffee companies, and the overnight base for my journey to Ijen. More than 2000 meters above sea level the air here is fresh and invigorating, and a cup of sweet local coffee is all I need to recover from the bumpy ride from Bondowoso before I head out to explore.
Beyond Sempol the road rises through tiers of glossy-leaved coffee bushes. When I reach Pos Paltuding, the trailhead for the hike to the Ijen crater itself, the sky has darkened. It’s hardly ideal weather for an afternoon stroll, but I set out along the trail anyway. Within minutes a torrential downpour has begun, and I duck beneath the dripping roof of a concrete shelter beside the path.
Despite the inclement weather the trail is busy – not with hikers, but with workers, surely some of the toughest men in Java. The Ijen crater is an active volcano, and it produces a continuous supply of high-grade sulfur, an important ingredient in sugar production and pharmaceuticals. The mining operation here continues as it has done for generations – completely without mechanical aids. Some 400 men head up the steep slopes each day to collect sulfur from the crater, and then carry it in wicker baskets along the five-kilometer trail to a weighing station at Pos Paltuding.
As I sit shivering in the rain I watch a steady stream of workers trotting downhill, loaded baskets balanced on creaking bamboo poles across their shoulders.
One of the men takes a break to join me. His name is Aripin. He is 41 years old. While the workers on the surrounding coffee plantations are ethnic Madurese, Aripin says, those who work on the mountain are mostly Osing Javanese from the Banyuwangi region. Aripin himself comes from the village of Licin on the volcano’s eastern slopes. He carried his first load of sulfur from Ijen at the age of 12, following his own father.
Aripin explains that he is paid for the sulfur by weight – Rp 600 per kilogram. Most men carry two loads of between 60 and 100 kilograms every day. I try to do the math on my fingers. Aripin helps me out: “I make about 80,000 rupiah most days.”
This puts his income above that of many graduate office workers in the cities, but when I point this out Aripin laughs: “Are any of those office kids strong enough to do this job? I don’t think so! The money is good enough, but you need both mental and physical strength. How much you make is up to you; you can’t do well unless you can motivate yourself.”
Aripin works fifteen days out of each month, sleeping with the other workers in a hut on the mountain slopes. The other fifteen days he spends with his wife and two small sons in Licin. “I can make enough money to live on in 15 days.”
The rain is still sheeting down, and an early twilight is falling. “Come back in the morning,” says Aripin; “the views are better.” It is sound advice and I follow him back down the muddy trail.

***

The mountains are dark facades in the dawn under an empty sky. I hurry uphill, falling in with the gangs of sulfur carriers. The trail winds through the pines and to the east a view over thickly forested slopes opens. I pass Aripin heading rapidly downhill. He was awake at 4am; he has already lugged his first load up from the crater.
I reach the rim as a morning haze is creeping up from the forest. The slopes here are bare of vegetation, and far below I can see the cobalt-blue lake that fills the belly of the Ijen crater. Rising from its shores is a plume of thick white smoke.
The trail down to the crater winds steeply over a landscape like builders’ rubble. Long trains of men are sweating uphill under heavy loads.
A man named Saudiq pauses to catch his breath and chat. He is carrying 70 kilograms, the first of his two daily loads. The strongest workers of all, he says, can carry as much as 125 kilos. Like Aripin, Saudiq has no complaints about his income. “It’s enough to live on,” he says with a wry smile, “but this is hard work…”
Just how hard is obvious down at the sulfur vents: with nothing but old handkerchiefs for protection from the hellish fumes men are hacking at the fresh, candy-colored deposits and loading their baskets.
“I usually make about 2 million rupiah a month,” says one man, pausing from his work; “one million for food, and one million for fun!” he adds with a suggestive leer. It’s not a job I could ever do – walking back up the steep trail to the crater rim carrying nothing more than a camera is enough for me!
The rain has returned when I reach the trailhead, and I head east on a steep, deteriorating track. The dripping forest is full of furious insect noise, and I recall the tale a National Park Ranger back at Pos Paltuding told me: travelling along this same road by motorbike one moring, he saw a black panther emerge from the undergrowth. It watched him for a long, fearless moment before vanishing into the trees.
I am too busy concentrating on the dreadful road to look out for big cats. Rivers of rainwater gush along the ruts and my bike bounces over fist-sized rocks. Finally the road levels, and as it does the rain suddenly stops. I am in the village of Licin, close to Banyuwangi. Ahead of me the dark hills of Bali rise above a slate-gray channel, and behind, fading into blue cloud, is the eastern wall of the lost world of Ijen…

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Braving Ghosts in Lawang's Haunted Hotel

2010-01-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

A night in an East Java Hotel with a spooky reputation

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 12/01/10

http://thejakartaglobe.com/culture/braving-ghosts-in-lawangs-haunted-house/352241

Thunder crackled ominously and rain lashed down from a leaden sky. The headlights of the trucks plying the Surabaya-Malang Highway were orange smears in the dusk; I needed to stop for the night.
The hotel loomed up to the right, a five-storey hulk of salmon-pink masonry towering over the low-rise town of Lawang. “Hotel Niagara” read the sign above the door.
“Yes, we have a room available,” said the man at the desk, adding, with what could have been a sinister smile, “It’s on the third floor.”
The third floor? Wasn’t that where they said the locked room never rented to guests was located? I put the thought from my mind and followed the receptionist past an empty dining hall and up gloomy flights of tiled stairs. There was a faint smell of furniture polish and old wood.
The room was at the back of the building. It was enormous, with a high ceiling and its own balcony. The receptionist handed me the key. “Breakfast is included,” he said, and turned away, his footsteps fading along the dark corridor. Breakfast? I had to get through the night first…

My arrival at Hotel Niagara, seemingly plucked from the opening scenes of a scary movie, was entirely appropriate. The suggestion of spending a night there had prompted near hysteria amongst my otherwise rational Indonesian friends. The century-old colonial relic, about 70 kilometers south of Surabaya, was haunted, they said. Many years ago a Dutch woman had thrown herself from one of the balconies – or perhaps she had been brutally murdered there by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. But whatever the details of the story, all agreed that the building was the abode of terrifying spirits. The fifth floor, rumor had it, was so riddled with malevolent ghosts that it was closed to the public; there was a room somewhere in the hotel that had a tendency to fill with blood at night, and of course, there was that locked room on the third floor…
All that only made me more determined to go and investigate.
“Just make sure you sprinkle salt under your bed,” suggested one friend – an apparently failsafe anti-ghost measure. “And don’t be surprised if you don’t wake up in the same place where you went to sleep,” added another…
It had all seemed rather silly at the time, but now I wasn’t so sure.
At the back of my room was a locked door. I tentatively slid the bolt. Behind it was a flimsy sheet of wood. It gave way slightly to my touch and a gust of icy air rushed over my fingers. Could the notorious locked room lie behind it? Apparently not: there was another occupied room beside mine; the sheet of wood merely blocked an old dividing doorway. But there were plenty of other spooky corners. At the head of the stairs was the entrance to the old elevator shaft. Again the teak-and-glass doors creaked open to my touch; again there was a gust of icy air followed by a nervous retreat.
The way to the floors above was blocked by a “do not enter” sign, and beyond it a sturdy metal gate. Through the bars I could see a corridor, and doors, half-ajar in the gloom. The fourth and fifth floors were decidedly off limits. What was up there? The bleeding room? The ghost of the Dutchwoman?
Night had fallen. I went back to my room and turned on the television. No lank-haired demoness crawled out of the screen. I took a shower. No blood poured from the taps. I settled down under my blanket. Was that the distant sound of mournful singing in Dutch, or just Indonesian pop music from the television in the next room? I wasn’t sure, but before long I was fast asleep…

Ghost stories aside the Hotel Niagara certainly has an interesting past. Today the little town of Lawang is just a string of concrete shops. Modern travelers from Surabaya merely shoot a nervous glance at the haunted hotel and head on to Malang, but in the colonial era Lawang itself was an upland retreat of considerable renown.
The hotel was originally built at the turn of the 20th Century as a private villa for a wealthy local Chinese businessman, Liem Sian Joe. The architect, Fritz Joseph Pinedo, was also responsible for various notable buildings in Surabaya, but for the villa he eschewed the usual Indo-Nederlands style for what could best be described as proto-art deco with Latinate touches. Five storeys high and with an elevator, it was a cutting edge design of its time.
The building remained a private residence until the 1960s when Liem Sian Joe’s family, fallen on hard times, departed for the Netherlands. The villa was sold and turned it into a hotel. But most of the original features remain – the tile-work, wood paneling, vaulted ceilings and the windows, still bearing the “LSJ” motif of the original owner.
Unlike other colonial era hotels in Indonesia, the Niagara has not been restored; it has been preserved. And though the balconies may be a little mildewed and the elevator out of order, with the simplest of the 14 rooms costing only Rp75,000 per night it’s both authentic and cheap – and there’s always the chance of a haunting thrown in.

Clear-headed questions are best left for the morning, and after waking up in exactly the same place where I went to sleep I set out to quiz the hotel staff.
Two uniformed young men, Adi and Gunawan, were cleaning the room next to mine. Were the ghost stories true, I asked them.
“I’ve been working here for two years,” said Gunawan, smiling at the familiar question; “I’ve never seen or heard or felt anything.”
“I’m still new here, but neither have I,” added Adi.
But what about the rumors – why were the upper floors closed?
“They’re under renovation,” said Gunawan.
And was it true about the locked room on this, the third floor?
They laughed: “Nonsense – we use them all; you can see if you want…”
According to Gunawan the lurid ghost stories had their origins in nothing more than the fact that the Niagara is an unusual old building. “And the people who say those things are always people who have never stayed here,” he added.
Their smiles were certainly reassuring, but I glanced in the direction of the locked gate and the forbidden floors. Could it be a pact of silence? Could they be hiding something? Don’t be so silly, I told myself, and headed downstairs to check out.
A young woman named Ratti was on duty at reception.
“I’ve been here for seven years; I stay in the hotel 24 hours a day and I’ve never seen anything strange, and neither have any guests that I know of,” she said, adding with a cheeky smile, “Did you see anything?”
“Well, no…”
“Floor five was never renovated when they converted the building to a hotel, and it’s not safe. Floor four we used to use, but now it’s just for storage. That’s why they’re closed, not because of haunted rooms, or anything weird like that.”
I paid my bill and Ratti bade me a cheery farewell. I went outside and started the engine of my motorbike. The sky was already dark with rainclouds. Apparent lack of ghosts notwithstanding, the Hotel Niagara had certainly been an interesting place to spend the night, and at least I would be able to disabuse my friends in Surabaya of their wild ideas.
There was another reassuring smile from the security man at the gate, and I glanced back over my shoulder for one last look at the towering pink-and-white façade. The lights were on on the fifth floor…

© Tim Hannigan 2010

A Pakistani Mountain Adventure

2010-01-17T02:01:00.000-08:00

Travelling in Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan,

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 22/12/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/a-pakistani-mountain-adventure/348760

Another gust of turbulent wind rushed up the valley and the suspension bridge – a rickety, meter-wide tangle of frayed wires and weathered planks – swayed wildly. Far below the Hunza River churned its cold course. I clung on desperately, and for the first time since arriving in Pakistan I felt like I was in danger...

Violence and unrest in the region has seen Pakistan – once a hot-spot for adventure travel – drop off the world tourism map in recent years. But as I would discover the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan has remained unaffected by the troubles plaguing the rest of the country, and the welcome to travelers there remains one of the warmest in Asia.

My journey had begun in Gilgit, eponymous capital of the region. The international news pages had been full of tales of violence in Pakistan for weeks, and after stepping down late at night from a long-distance bus from China I slept fitfully, wondering what exactly I was doing here. A stroll in the bazaar in the bright sunlight of the morning saw all my apprehensions evaporate. The delightfully chaotic streets hummed with Central Asian smells – fruit, spice and grilling meat – and an endless succession of piratical-looking men offered hearty handshakes and cups of chai (Pakistani tea). Going anywhere in Gilgit in a hurry was impossible – chai and chat at every turn were an obligation.
Until recently Gilgit-Baltistan was known as the Northern Areas; the new name was chosen specifically to distinguish the region from more turbulent spots like Swat and Peshawar. Everyone I met in Gilgit was eager to stress that this place was somehow different – there were no Taliban here!
Gilgit lies at the point where the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the three behemoths of the greater Asian mountain system, come together. The region has the world’s highest concentration of peaks over 7000 meters. This wild geography creates a wild atmosphere, and nothing is as wild as a local polo match. The Game of Kings as it is played here is a world away from the gentile sport of British royalty. On my first afternoon in Gilgit I watched the Army’s Northern Light Infantry team beat the Police in a thunderous hour of dust and horse sweat. There are no rules in Gilgiti polo – the five-man teams simply gallop back and forth to a soundtrack of skirling pipes and drums. The horsemanship was incredible, the pace was blistering, and when the army won the crowd went wild.

Safely reassured that I was not crazy to be travelling in Pakistan I headed west to the remote valley of Yasin. The road cleaved to sheer, snow-streaked mountainsides above the cobalt-blue waters of the Gilgit River. In the villages the leaves of the willows and poplar trees were a blaze of red and gold in the autumn sunlight.
Despite being culturally and geographically separate, when India and Pakistan gained their independence from Britain, Gilgit-Baltistan was technically part of Kashmir. India still claims the region, and as a disputed territory the Pakistani government has never accorded it full provincial status. Locals complain of years of neglect by Islamabad, and it was only during the presidency of General Musharaf that there was investment in infrastructure in hidden valleys. Ten years ago only a dirt track led to Yasin.
It was a beautiful place beneath a high, clear sky. For three days I travelled north on foot, and in every village I was welcomed into homes, given a place of honor and fed to bursting on coarse bread, yoghurt and pomegranates. The idea that Pakistan was a hostile country began to seem absurd. The people of Yasin are Ismaeli Muslims, followers of the Aga Khan. Many locals like to ascribe Gilgit-Baltistan’s tranquility to the fact that it is the only part of Pakistan where Shias and Ismaelis dominate. In truth geography probably has more to do with it: Yasin is just 150 kilometers from the former Taliban fiefdom of Swat, but with ridges of sky-scraping mountains in between it might as well be on another planet.

From Yasin I returned to Gilgit and headed north on the Karakoram Highway. This fabled strip of tenuous tarmac snakes 1300 kilometers from Islamabad all the way to China, crossing the 4733 meter Khunjerab Pass en route. The road led me to Hunza, a fairytale kingdom in the high Karakorams. The Hunza Valley is flanked by truly enormous mountains – Ultar, Shishpar, Diran, Golden Peak and Rakaposhi. The light was sharper than glass. In the villages apricots were drying on rooftops and local Ismaeli women smiled and greeted me in English – a startling experience for a foreign man travelling in Pakistan.
Hunza was once the centerpiece of northern Pakistan’s tourist industry, and in the main village of Karimabad I realized just how badly people have suffered here. Suicide bombs and Talibanization belong to another world, but they have stemmed the flow of tourists along the Karakoram Highway. The handful of hardy adventurers who make it to Karimabad these days are outnumbered by empty guesthouses, bankrupt gift-shops and one-time tour-guides gone back to their fields. Over an incongruous cup of cappuccino in a cafe owned by his family a local businessman called Javeed told me how bad it has been. “People will not starve, because they have land so they can go back to farming. But it has been tough. Tourism was basically the lifeblood here and people got used to it,” he said.

From Hunza I would continue north on the Karakoram Highway, back into China, but I had one final stop to make in Pakistan. The little village of Passu lies beneath the snout of a huge glacier and a wall of glowing granite spires. Gilgit-Baltistan is famous trekking country and Passu is the starting point for one of the best day hikes in the region, a route that crosses and re-crosses the Hunza River – on a pair of hair-raising suspension bridges...
The first bridge – built to connect summer fields on the far bank with the villages around Passu – was some 500 meters long, and the construction did not inspire confidence. Lengths of rusty cable were loosely lashed together and splintered strips of planking slotted between them. There were gaps of more than a meter between some of the footholds.
With my heart in my mouth I crossed to the far shore, but when I arrived at the head of the second bridge, a few kilometers downstream, things seemed much worse. The wind was howling and I could see the bridge swaying wildly back and forth. Beside it – like a grim warning – hung the remnants of an earlier crossing, all snapped wires and dangling planks. The prospect was terrifying. I took the first tentative step. Beneath me the cold, gray water rushed past. Flurries of dusty wind rushed up the valley. The bridge lurched. Panic rose and I clung on for dear life until the wind eased.
When I finally reached solid ground I slumped onto a rock to settle my nerves. As calm returned I watched two locals trotting merrily across the bridge in opposite directions, pausing to chat midstream. As I watched them I began to feel a bit silly. The bridge had certainly looked an alarming prospect, but in truth it had carried me high above troubled waters. It was, I realized, much like Gilgit-Baltistan itself, floating serenely hundreds of meters above the troubles of the rest of Pakistan...

Exploring China's Wild West

2010-01-17T01:40:00.000-08:00

Xinjiang, China's restive Central Asian province

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 15/12/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/culture/exploring-chinas-wild-west/347563

There is a smell of goats, fresh bread and melons. A cacophony of bleating animals rises, mixed with conversations full of hard-edged Turkic gutturals. A small boy clambers deftly onto the back of an unbroken, barrel-bellied pony, and reining it back sharply he somehow stays in place as it gallops wildly over the stony ground. Horse-trading elders with beards and skull caps look on with approval and begin to count wads of tattered money. Above everything arches a vast Central Asian sky.
I am in China, but here, in the Sunday livestock bazaar on the outskirts of Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest corner of Xinjiang, I have to keep reminding myself of that fact.

Xinjiang is China’s Wild West, a state of deserts and mountains peopled by Muslim Uighurs, and leaning more to Bokhara than Beijing. It has long had a troubled relationship with the rest of the country, slipping in and out of effective Chinese control as imperial power waxed and waned over the centuries. Today the tensions continue. In July this year protests by Uighurs in Urumqi, the state capital, turned violent and a government crackdown followed. But unlike in neighbouring Tibet the government has kept Xinjiang open to tourists. As I arrive in Kashgar on a long-distance train, rolling though vineyards and pomegranate orchards, there has been a state-wide telecommunications shutdown for over four months and army trucks bearing anti-separatist slogans are rolling on the streets. But I am free to go wherever I like, and the first place I head is Kashgar’s famous Sunday Market.

Kashgar stands astride the ancient Silk Road, the much-mythologized trade route that once linked China with Europe. From here trails led east along the fringes of the desert, and west over mountain passes. For centuries people, religions and ideas passed along the caravan routes. The Uighurs’ Turkic ancestors dropped out of the mountains in the 6th Century. Before them Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity had travelled west; a few centuries later Islam arrived.
Today a hint of this old romance survives – the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan lie within 150 kilometres of Kashgar, and trade goes on in weekly markets across the region. In the Kashgar Sunday Market I see carpets, fruits, and embroidered cloth, mixed in with everyday metals and plastics. Women in sparkling headscarves jostle with old men in embroidered pillbox hats.
But the Chinese government is determinedly dragging Xinjiang into the mainstream. The market has now been corralled into a modern complex, and beyond it new high-rises tower over the remnants of the old mud-walled city. In recent years swathes of the Uighur old town have been bulldozed, and immigration from other parts of China has been encouraged. These moves – and the dominance of immigrant Han Chinese in the job market – have only increased tensions. English-speaking Uighurs I meet on my journey whisper their disquiet in hushed, paranoid tones. One man at the Sunday Market explains the resentment at the destruction of old Kashgar. “There is no privacy in a Chinese apartment,” he says; “our traditional houses are built around a courtyard so we all live together, but with privacy. We don’t want to live in apartments.”

Looking for something a little more authentic I head to the livestock bazaar. It is a glorious chaos of goats, donkeys, horses and sheep and haggling men in fabulous hats. I am hoping to see a camel or two – real evidence that I am on the Silk Road – but to my disappointment there are none. I console myself with a plate of greasy kebabs and plot my onward journey.

From Kashgar I head east. Human habitation in Xinjiang has long been squeezed into the narrow margin between the mountains and the desert. A string of oases runs along what was once the southern branch of the Silk Road. My first stop is Yarkand – a place once as fabled as Samarkand or Xanadu. During Xinjiang’s periods of independence from Chinese rule Yarkand was usually the capital city. It was also the terminus of skeleton-strewn caravan trails over the mountains from India.
Today it is a backwater. A Uighur old town of mud alleyways remains, and a dusty graveyard of royal tombs studded with the faded flags of mystic Sufi cults sprawls behind a medieval mosque with a vine-shaded courtyard. A modern Chinese town of arrow-straight boulevards dominates, but away to the south I can pick out the faint white line of the Kun Lun mountains, the back wall of the entire Himalayan mountain system.
From the next oasis, Karghilik, I take a taxi into those hills along a road that leads, eventually, to Tibet. An army check-post by the chilly banks of the Tiznaf River is as far as I can go, but I scramble up a steep brown slope to take in the view. A mass of brown mountains, ribbed and scored with dark shadow, spreads east and west. Behind them, rising in a glittering white line is the backbone of the Kun Lun. This was the barrier that Silk Road traders from India once had to cross en route to Kashgar, Yarkand, and my own final destination – Hotan.

The road to Hotan blazes across stony desert, the mountains floating to the south. The vast void that surrounds it makes arrival in Hotan a strange experience, for here, at the very limit of China’s vastness, is another large, modern town. As a Uighur heartland the Chinese government has been particularly keen to integrate Hotan with the rest of the country. Roads from the north now plough straight across the Taklamakan Desert, and from next year a railway line will link it to Kashgar. A Uighur man I meet at a kebab stall hisses “When the railway is ready we will be finished – Hotan will be all Chinese...”
But something remains here: a week has passed; it is time for Hotan’s own Sunday Market. Nothing has been regimented here; the bazaar sprawls over a vast area, filling all the lanes and alleys of the old quarter with a mass of colour and commerce. There are sections given over to cloth and carpets, to the jade mined from the banks of nearby rivers, to animals and even tractors! Donkey carts clatter through the crowds, the drivers calling out “Bosh! Bosh!” – coming through! – and when I am tired of wandering I feast on laghman (Uighur noodles) and slices of fresh watermelon.
And as I leave the market I spot something – it is what I had hoped to see a week earlier in Kashgar. A small boy is leading a pair of shaggy, twin-humped Bactrian camels through the crowd. They are enormous, lumbering beasts, and they pass through the chaos unperturbed, noses held arrogantly high, and disappear amongst the trucks and buses. I stare after them as they go, now sure, despite the political tensions and the heavy-handed Chinese modernisation, that I am in Central Asia, and on the Silk Road...

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Malaysia's Upland Retreat

2009-11-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

The Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Originally published in the Jakarta Post, 08/11/09

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/11/08/malaysia’s-upland-retreat.html

The tropical haze of the Malaysian lowlands clears as the bus rolls along a rising road flanked by walls of dense green jungle. Here and there, where the mass of creepers and branches opens at the corner of a hairpin bend there is a brief glimpse of purple hillsides marked with skeins of white mist. Eventually the road levels out and the forest falls back. Neat little bungalows with red roofs and rose-filled gardens appear and the slopes of the surrounding ridges are marked with the dappled tiger stripes of tea plantations. Welcome to the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia’s best-known hill resort.
The Highlands – floating some 1500 meters up in the green hills of Pahang State at the heart of the Malaysian Peninsula – were first developed as a temperate, high-altitude retreat by the British colonialists in the early decades of the 20th Century. I am following in their footsteps, though with modern Malaysia’s excellent roads, getting to the Cameron Highlands now involves only a painless four-hour bus ride north of Kuala Lumpur, rather than the minor expedition of the colonial era.
The bus eventually rolls into Tanah Rata, a sleepy little town of quiet cafes and mock-Tudor cottages surrounded by forested hills. I check in to the charming Father’s Guesthouse, a converted British house on a flowery hilltop. The air here is deliciously fresh, and as I settle down to a welcome cup of local tea in the neat garden the memory of big city sweat fades away.

Wherever the British colonized they sought out places in the hills that offered a climate reminiscent of their temperate homeland. These “hill stations” remain marooned all over the uplands of Asia, a flotsam and jetsam of empire, enjoyed for their climate as much today by domestic tourists and international travelers as they once were by the colonialists.
The Cameron Highlands were named after William Cameron, a surveyor who first marked the stretch of elevated land while taking bearings of the surrounding Titiwangsa Ranges in 1885. Cameron noted the excellent potential of this remote, forested plateau for both agriculture and tourism, but it was only in the 1920s that the area was first developed as a hill station after the demand for a cool retreat from Kuala Lumpur outstripped the cramped resort facilities of the nearby Bukit Fraser.

Tea and Strawberries

In the misty cool of the next morning after a cozy night’s sleep under a pile of blankets I set out to explore on a rented motorbike. The main road north of Tanah Rata winds smoothly through forest studded here and there with hotels and golf courses. Beyond the little town of Brinchang I take a side road that winds along steep hillsides clothed with a strange mix of tropical and temperate vegetation – banana plants and pine trees. From a high corner a swelling view opens across distant ridges, dark under a damp gray sky. The nearer slopes are quilted with swathes of tea bushes, and down below I spot the red roofs of the Sungei Palas tea estate.
It was not only for holidays that the British headed for the hills. In 1929 a planter named J.A. Russell bought a sweep of land in the Cameron Highlands and set about clearing the forest. Tea, he discovered, grew excellently in the cool climate, and the company he founded, Boh, was a great success. Other planters followed, but Boh remains one of Malaysia’s biggest tea producers. Its three estates, scattered beneath the ridges, are open to the public.
All over the bright green hillsides are dots of color – workers, waist-deep in the tea bushes, picking the young tips from the upper branches. Though lowland tea picking is largely mechanized, on these steep slopes it can only be done the traditional way, with handheld clippers and a wicker basket. Each bush is picked once every three weeks, and this constant trimming gives the slopes a strange, sculpted look.
The Boh company not only grow tea; they also prepare and pack it, and inside the estate factory I watch the process. First the freshly picked leaves are left to whither for a day; then they are shoveled onto great mechanical rolling machines that break down the cells to release the flavor; next the already bruised leaves are left to ferment and darken, bringing a richness and color, and finally they are dried with hot air to halt the process. Each of these stages has to be carefully calibrated and the finished product is tasted and blended by experts with years of experience – and all for a cup of tea!
Inside the factory stocky Indian men in red uniforms hurriedly shovel the leaves from rolling machines to drying racks, and from conveyors to sacks. There is a rich, dark aroma to the place. Between this and its other factories Boh produces some 4 million kilograms of tea a year – which amounts to 5.5 million cups of tea every day!

***

Riding back from the tea gardens I pass a richly decorated Hindu temple, rising in the South Indian style to a candy-colored, god-encrusted pyramid above the threshold. The Cameron Highlands are home to the familiar Malaysian triumvirate of ethnicities and cultures – Malay, Indian and Chinese. Many of the first Indians here arrived to work on the burgeoning tea estates; Chinese market gardeners came to practice their own agriculture on a smaller scale. Further down the road I visit the cool, incense-scented Sam Poh Chinese temple, built in the early 20th Century by these farmers, and then I make a stop at the nearby Big Red Strawberry Farm. In the temperate climate the early agriculturalists found success growing crops more familiar in Europe than the tropics – strawberries, roses and camellias. These are all still grown here today, and there are farms, many with their own gift shops, all along the road between Brinchang and Tanah Rata. In the Big Red Strawberry Farm’s cafe I indulge myself with a gut-busting strawberry waffle...

Into the Forest

But there is more to the Cameron Highlands than tea and strawberries. In the cool quiet of the following morning I set out on foot, branching off the road beneath the guesthouse and picking my way over a tangle of exposed roots along a narrow path. Soon I am alone in the heavy green light of the forest.
All around Tanah Rata a network of numbered trails wind through the trees. This is excellent walking country, though it’s worth letting someone know where you’re going. In 1967 the great merchant of Thai silk, Jim Thompson, set out for an afternoon stroll along one of these trails – and never returned. Rumors of murder, suicide and tigers abound, but no one really knows what happened.
Hoping not to share a similar fate I press on. The dense canopy is full of noise: whistling birds, creaking insects, and the distant chattering of monkeys. I can smell the scent of moist earth and leaf mould. Light slants through the branches and the lower levels are full of bright-winged butterflies and dark shadow. From a gap in the trees at the top of a steep rise there is a vista of endless hills, fading into pale cloud. This is part of the great swathe of forest that still fills much of the heart of Malaysia.
The trail winds along hillsides and through dense thickets. I feel like I am moving deeper and deeper into the forest, and Jim Thompson’s disappearance begins to play on my mind. And then I hear voices coming though the trees. The trail emerges into watery sunlight in a broad clearing. Some 20 neat little wooden houses are stepped up a slope of clean, cropped grass. Children in multicolored tee-shirts scamper between the buildings and roosters crow from beneath the verandas. Strings of laundry flutter in the breeze. This is an Orang Asli village, a community of Malaysia’s “original people”, those whose ancestors lived in the forests here even before the mainstream Malay population arrived.
I sit down on to catch my breath and look out on the village and the wall of trees behind it, and suddenly I realize that the history of the Cameron Highlands stretches back far beyond colonialists, strawberry farmers, tea planters and holiday makers, deep into the forest...

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Sailing Surabaya's River of Gold

2009-11-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

The History of Surabaya's old port district, Kalimas

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/11/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/sailing-surabayas-river-of-gold/338890

Surabaya was once a name to conjure with. A century ago the East Java capital was one of the great port cities of Asia, a place mentioned on docksides and in the pages of romantic novels the world over in the same breath as Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. This might surprise many modern residents and visitors, for though it is still Indonesia’s second biggest city Surabaya has very much faded from the world map. Today I am setting out on foot in search of echoes of the maritime past that once made it the most important city of the Dutch East Indies.

A floodtide of cars, motorbikes and becaks is streaming across Jembatan Merah, the Red Bridge that connects Surabaya’s Chinatown with the old colonial quarter. No one pays much attention to the strip of murky brown water that oozes beneath the bridge, but this waterway, Kalimas, the River of Gold, was key to Surabaya’s trading past.
Dodging through the traffic I take a left at the eastern end of the bridge and find myself walking along a dusty, potholed track beside the river. There is a smell of fish and mud. To the right a rank of crumbling warehouses – hipped roofs and stout columns betraying their Dutch pedigree – are all that remains to show that this was once one of the busiest wharf-sides in Asia.
From its earliest beginnings Surabaya was a port. Local legend has the origins of the city in an epic battle between a shark (sura) and a crocodile (buaya) somewhere in the vicinity of Jembatan Merah. More tangibly the city’s founding is officially dated to 1293 when a wandering Chinese fleet was defeated by a local army nearby, but the first historical records of a place named Surabaya only appear a century later – as a key entrepot of the mighty Majapahit Empire.

Without a natural harbor Surabaya grew as a roadstead port. Sheltered from the storms of the Java Sea by the long, low island of Madura to the north, sailing schooners could anchor safely in the channel beyond the mouth of the Kalimas River. Only the smallest of the trading ships could navigate the mud-banks to come upstream, so most cargo was unloaded into open boats then hustled up the Kalimas to the trading houses and markets on the now decaying wharf along which I am walking.

“River of Gold” was always a somewhat hyperbolic name. Today the dropping tide is showing slabs of slimy grey mud. The water is the color of cappuccino, and the only boat in view is a battered green tender ferrying passengers from one bank to the other. The riverside is lined with flimsy wooden shacks. A lean, grinning man reclining in the shade calls me over. His name is Mahmud, and like many of the people now inhabiting this part of Surabaya, he is originally from Madura.
“They’re all from the Dutch time,” he says, waving towards the flaking white warehouses. “A lot of Dutch tourists come here to take photos of them.”
I glance up and down the wharf, half-expecting to see a gaggle of sweating sightseers from Amsterdam, but I am the only foreigner in sight, and with a smile Mahmud concedes that by “many” he really means “a few”.
Nearby a posse of thin, barefooted men are unloading sacks of dried fish from a truck into the dark, dusty interior of one of the warehouses. Watching over them is a Chinese man who says that his father bought this warehouse fifty years ago, at a time when the fortunes of the old Kalimas Wharf had already faded.
I walk on. Here and there a drooping bougainvillea bush gives a splash of bright color to the scene, but this area, once so prosperous, is now home to the poorest of industries – recycling of old bottles and sacks, and the gathering of garbage.

After the decline of the Majapahit Empire Surabaya became a rowdy city-state on the fringes of the Mataram Kingdom. Despite a series of sieges and rebellions the goods – and the money – continued to flow up the Kalimas, from the spice gardens of Maluku, from the river ports on the jungle fringes of Kalimantan, from Sulawesi and beyond. The first Dutch trading operations were set up in the late 17th Century, and in 1743 Mataram ceded full sovereignty of the city to the Dutch East India Company. The scene was set for Surabaya to become the biggest and most important of all Indonesia’s colonial cities.
Development of the sugarcane industry in the 19th Century saw the port grow into a teeming, cosmopolitan metropolis. Many of the now crumbling warehouses that line the river date from this time. The seafaring writer Joseph Conrad came to Surabaya during its heyday. He set part of his novel Victory in the city.

The vibrancy of that era seems far away as I cross to the left bank of the river. Here there is a chaotic market where bulky Madurese women are haggling over baskets of bananas and mangoes. Trade still goes on here, but the produce has been brought in by land; the river, slithering past to the right, is ignored. Beyond the market I find myself picking along a narrow, walled-in alleyway beyond which I enter a kampung, a working class village-within-a-city. I am greeted with a near-hysterical chorus of “hello misters!”
Beyond the kamung walls I can see stacked tiers of shipping containers. Surabaya is still a port – a big one – but changes in the world of seaborne trade in the late 19th Century ensured the death of the old riverside wharfs.

With the arrival of fast steam ships with schedules to keep an old-fashioned roadstead port and a narrow river served by open boats was woefully inadequate. At the same time railways to carry sugar straight from the mills in the south of the city to the port were laid. The Kalimas River became hopelessly congested. Sometimes it was entirely blocked with small, overloaded craft, and to make matters worse the sandbanks at the mouth of the river could only be negotiated at high water. It could take days to load or unload a ship. Something had to be done, and after lengthy debate the building of a modern, deepwater port was finally sanctioned. In the 1920s the new harbor of Tanjung Perak was built, north of the old riverside wharfs. Now even the biggest freighters could come alongside to be loaded straight from the dock. Kalimas was relegated to the sidelines, and the collapse of the sugar industry in the 1930s was its final death knell. The river silted up; the warehouses were locked and left to crumble.

But something still remains. I have lost sight of the river, but the excited kampung-dwellers point me down the narrowest of side alleys: “That way mister, there are lots of boats!”
I emerge in the evening sunlight on a crowded dockside. The huge international cargo ships now moor at Tanjung Perak – I can see the skeletal outlines of the cranes there, stark against the evening sky – but smaller inter-island traffic still comes to the river. The narrow waterway is crammed with boats. Evening sunlight falls on rust, flaking white paint, high prows and frayed rigging. There are decrepit tramp steamers and amongst them older wooden vessels. Some of them, though leaking diesel from the bilges, still have the graceful lines of pinisi, the sailing schooners of Sulawesi that were the original trading boats of Indonesia.
The first of these old wooden boats that I pass is, to my disappointment, no longer a working vessel. A man lounging on the steeply sloping deck tells me that it has been bought by a resort on Flores. When restoration is complete it will ferry tourists to the dive sites of the Komodo National Park. But the next boat is still trading, though it is being loaded not with spice or sandalwood but with boxes of instant noodles, bound for the islands of the Kangean Archipelago east of Madura.

As I make my way along the dockside crewmen from other boats call out to me. They come from all over Indonesia; many are from Kalimantan, or from the distant islands of Nusa Tenggara – Flores, Timor and Alor. Their destinations too are scattered across the archipelago.
A sailor greets me. His name is Abdullah. He comes from Banyuwangi at the eastern tip of Java. He is one of eight crewmen on an old wooden ship carrying onions to Bali.
The journey will take three days. “Now it’s the season of big waves,” says Abdullah, “so sometimes it takes longer.” From Bali they will sail another three days north to Makassar, then south across the Java Sea to Jakarta, then east along the coast, back to Surabaya. These are some of the oldest trade routes of the islands.
Abdullah makes Rp50,000 a day. “Not enough to buy cigarettes,” he grumbles, and he rarely sees his wife and three children, back home in Banyuwangi.

A little further along the dock men are padding along the narrowest of wooden gangplanks carrying huge loads onto another old wooden boat. They are bound for Balikpapan in Kalimantan, and they invite me onboard, laughing at my tentative steps along their precarious gangway. Onboard there is a smell of tar and diesel, salt and rotten wood. In the hollow belly of the ship there are bags of cement and bundles of reinforcement bar for building; on the roof of the wheelhouse there are orange septic tanks, and in a hold beside the engine room in the stern there are boxes of mineral water and biscuits. I am shown up a worn wooden ladder to the wheelhouse where the captain, Pak Subur, is watching over the loading of the ship.
“We always carry a mixed cargo like this,” he says, “and we don’t go until the boat is full. We make a loss if it’s not full.” Subur is 51 years old and comes from Kalimantan. He has been sailing on these wooden cargo boats all his life. The wheelhouse is starkly bare. There is only the wheel, and a tarnished copper bell hanging from the ceiling.
“On modern ships they have radar, compasses, radios. They need to look at maps before they go. They think they know about the sea, but they don’t.”
I am astonished. Doesn’t Subur even have a map or a compass?
He smiles and shakes his head. “We know the way.”
Subur has a small, dank cabin next to the wheelhouse; the other 12 crewmen sleep below. The name of the ship is Usaha Bersama – Joint Effort. Looking out from the wheelhouse I can see the mouth of the river, and beyond it the hazy line of Madura with the big freighters moored in its lee. Subur will sail that way the day after tomorrow, at midnight on the high tide. It will be three days – without navigational equipment – to Balikpapan.
Surabaya’s Kalimas River may no longer be at the center of world trade, and its warehouses and wharfs may have long since decayed. But there are still ships like Subur’s, plying routes that existed long before the sugar industry and the colonial era, and even before Mataram and Majapahit.

As I nervously edge back down the narrow plank to the quayside one of the crew, a dark young man from Ambon, calls to me.
“Come with us, mister, to Balikpapan. There will be big waves, and for sure you’ll be scared, but it’s nice on a boat like this.” I’m not quite sure if he is serious, and I have other commitments to stop me running away to sea this time, but for a moment, in the late afternoon on this venerable old dockside, it’s a tempting offer…

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Sumba: Sensations Succeeded

2009-11-18T05:12:00.000-08:00

Visiting Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, November 2009

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/beyond.html

It was my parents’ first visit to Indonesia, and I wanted to take them somewhere truly special. I pored over my map of the archipelago in the weeks before they arrived and considered the possibilities. Their visit was a short one, and the remote depths of Papua, the dense forests of Kalimantan, and the green uplands of Sumatra were too far away. But then my eye fell on an insignificant-looking island tilted south of the main chain running east from Bali. I had been there before and knew that it was one of the most strange and fascinating places on earth, and better still, there were direct flights from Denpasar. I would take my parents to Sumba.

Sumba is part of Nusa Tenggara, the Islands of the Southeast. This region is probably the most fascinating part of an entirely fascinating country, with gorgeous scenery, empty beaches and some of the best diving in the world. But for me the attraction has always lain in the diverse cultures of these islands. Among the nominal Muslims and Christians there is a wealth of traditions and beliefs that predate foreign religion. Sumba, isolated from the other islands of Nusa Tenggara, remained almost free of outside influence until well into the 20th Century. Even today this is a place where ancient ways are strongly preserved.

After a brief rest in Bali and a short dash through the western part of Flores, we landed from the ferry in Waingapu, capital of East Sumba. The recent launch of Transnusa Airlines has opened up the islands east of Bali for short visits, and you can fly from Denpasar to Waingapu or Tambolaka in Sumba. But for me the best way to arrive is by sea, watching the long, low bulk of the island rising slowly above the horizon after the green hills of Flores and Sumbawa have fallen away behind. According to the legends this is how the first settlers saw Sumba as they reached the end of a long island-hopping journey from India, hundreds of years ago.

A day after our own arrival we visited the place where these first Sumbanese settled. Sixty kilometres north of Waingapu, the isolated village of Wunga stands on a high escarpment ridge with spectacular command of the rolling countryside. The landscape of East Sumba is striking. Here the thick vegetation of the tropics gives way to an expansive tableland of brown savannah; it could be Africa.

Wunga is a special place, for as the fabled location of the first settlement in Sumba, old traditions have been meticulously maintained here. A dozen houses are built to the original design, with towering roofs of grass thatch. These roofs are a familiar sight in Sumba, but in Wunga even the low walls are made from woven grass, and there is no cut or shaved wood used in the construction. The ancestral graves that dot the village are made from simply piled slabs of uncut limestone, unlike the finely carved tombs that stand in other areas. Even the cloth, woven on traditional looms, is plain here, without dye or embroidery. And while elsewhere on the island many villagers have adopted Christianity and blended it with their old beliefs, the people of Wunga cling steadfastly to the old Marapu religion.

Marapu is the name given to the sacred ancestors, the first people of Sumba, and they are the focus of the old religion. The towering rooftops of the traditional houses are the home of their spirits where the clan heirlooms are kept along with the drying rice. The Sumbanese priests, known as Rato, can communicate with these ancestor spirits, and read the omens that they send in the internal organs of sacrificed chickens and pigs. Funerals are hugely important events in Sumba, for they mark the moment when the deceased goes to join the ancestors. Pigs, buffalo and horses are sacrificed to join the spirit on its journey.

From Waingapu we travelled west to the sleepy little township of Waikabubak. West Sumba is wetter than the east. Rice grows here in neat terraces, and there are stands of palm trees between the fields. Waikabubak is a remarkable place, for on the low hilltops above the main streets and bustling market stand some of the most traditional villages on the whole island. Kampung Tarung, just a couple of minutes walk from the heart of the town is the biggest and most important, but there are others: Bodo Ede, Tambelar, Waitabar. These are some of the best villages on Sumba to explore, for the villagers are used to visitors. Some speak English, and they are very welcoming, often inviting you into their homes – and perhaps offering you betel nut. The nut, with accompanying catkin and lime powder, is a key part of hospitality on Sumba. Years of chewing the stuff that give the old people of the island mouthfuls of red teeth, but trying it once or twice will produce nothing more than a numb tongue and a mouthful of scarlet spittle. My mum had a go – and said it was disgusting. After that when villagers offered she accepted politely and slipped it into her pocket – “for later!”

From Waikabubak we explored remote villages among the green ridges and valleys to the south. Traditions were strong here, and in many of the places they had seen few foreigners. Here the land ran away to a coastline of white shell beaches where turquoise waves broke on the offshore reefs. They were gloriously empty, the sand unbroken by footprints, and not a hawker in sight.

My mum wanted a souvenir from Sumba though, so back in Waikabubak we bargained in the market for a length of traditional ikat, the cloth woven by the women of the island on their back-strap looms. Every area has its own distinctive designs, with the more elaborate styles coming from the east. But we chose a piece from the west with simple, abstract patterns.

We had tickets for the short flight back to Bali from the little airport at Tambolaka, north of Waikabubak, but we still had three days to spare. On the recommendation of a friend I had booked rooms at the Newa Sumba Resort, on the north coast near the little port village of Waikelo. We arrived in the evening to find it a place of spectacularly splendid isolation. The resort has just a few cool rooms of dark varnished wood in buildings with high Sumba-style roofs. There were no other guests, and no one else for miles around, for the place stands on its own strip of perfect beach facing an empty ocean and surrounded by dense, dry forest. It was utterly peaceful, and for the next two days we did nothing but read and swim, watching the sun falling into the west and listening to the sound of the waves and birds in the trees behind the beach. It was the ideal place to reflect on our journey through the remarkable culture of Sumba – and strategically located despite the illusion of castaway remoteness: Tambolaka airport lay just ten minutes away, and Bali an hour beyond that.

As the plane banked upwards through the morning air my father craned his head to catch one last glimpse of Sumba as it faded behind us.
“I think that’s the most amazing place I’ve ever been,” he said. I smiled to myself: I had succeeded.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

The Lost Ticket

2009-10-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Fictional Short Story

Originally published in the Jakarta Post, 18/10/09

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/10/18/the-lost-ticket.html

The police post floated alone like a candle flame in the humming Jakarta darkness at the southern entrance of Gambir train station. Behind it was the great black void of Merdeka Square where Monas blazed in a smudged strip of yellow light. The night was thick and heavy and full of mosquitoes.
A lone policeman stood in the open doorway of the police post, smoking and staring vacantly out at the streaking orange of the passing headlights. He had changed out of his uniform and was wearing dirty rubber sandals, a gray tee-shirt and a pair of blue shorts that showed thin, hairless calves.
“Pak? Selamat malam…” Viktor stood at the foot of the police post steps.
The policeman turned his head very slowly down towards Viktor. He had a lean, carved face, a slight hollowing beneath his cheekbones and a bristling crop of up-brushed hair. He raised the cigarette to his lips and flicked his head back questioningly.
Viktor shifted the rucksack on his shoulder. He could feel the narrow strip of sweat that had oozed down the length of his spine.
“Pak, I lost my ticket; they told me to come here to report it.”
The policeman turned his head and slowly blew out a long draught of smoke. The room behind him was a hollow of sickly yellow light. Viktor could see a shifting cloud of mosquitoes milling around the 40-watt bulb.
“Where are you going?” the policeman asked.
“To Semarang. I’m going home.”
He flicked the cigarette away and the little orange spark arced into the blue-black darkness. He narrowed his eyes for a moment and peered at Viktor, then a fraction of a smirk showed on his face and he turned into the room, muttering, “From Semarang.” He drew the S out and ran hard into the rest of the word.
Viktor followed him up the steps. The room was bare and the walls were dirty and cracked. In a little recess to the left of the door was a desk. On the desk was a typewriter. Above the desk, framed behind a piece of dirt-speckled glass, was a mildewed sheet of paper proclaiming the honesty, helpfulness and patriotism of the ideal policeman of the Republic of Indonesia. Another cloud of mosquitoes swarmed over the typewriter.
The policeman dragged his feet across the floor so his sandals slapped against the grubby concrete. “Which train?”
“Bromo Anggrek. Nine-thirty.”
The police post was open through and through with the back windows gaping onto the blackness of Merdeka Square. There was a kind of silence to the place, though the squealing and roaring of the trains and the ceaseless bleating of the cars and bikes was like a flood. Viktor and the policeman stood knee-deep in traffic noise.
The policeman fiddled in the top drawer of a gray filing cabinet in the corner. The metal beneath its grey lacquer had rotted and an acne of rusty boils had bubbled through. He took out a form, a photocopied sheet of limp, yellowish paper, and came slowly back across the room. He sat behind the desk with the typewriter. Viktor sat on the dirty orange plastic chair opposite with his back to the door. His clothes felt clammy and damp.
The policeman took out another cigarette. “Better to go by aeroplane,” he said.
Viktor looked at him. There was a certain grayness under his black eyes that came from drinking and not sleeping at home, but his face was strong and hard. He narrowed his eyes as he lit the cigarette and a hurried rope of blue smoke spiraled upwards in front of the framed proclamation of honesty and helpfulness.
“Flying is expensive,” Viktor said, quietly.
Even more quietly, looking down at the photocopied form, the policeman said, “Don’t be stingy, ya…” then looked up, and smirked. “Semarang, eh? Originally from Semarang?”
“Yes.” Viktor could feel his armpits sticking to his shirt with sweat.
The policeman shrugged. “Your ticket, was it stolen?”

***

Suddenly the ticket just wasn’t there. Viktor had been standing in the echoing hall of the station, on the lower level under the tracks where noise and voices washed off the walls in waves. With two and a half hours until his train, the ticket was gone. The little blue sheet, with perforated edges and the time and date and seat number all printed in pale gray, a centimeter to the right of the boxes allocated for them, wasn’t in his hand. It wasn’t in the wallet he kept on a keychain in the pocket of his baggy shorts. Or in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. Or in his rucksack on top of the folded pair of jeans. The hall had suddenly seemed very, very noisy. There were bright lights over the stalls where they sold chocolate-bread and water and peanuts, and girls in pink head-scarves were laughing at each other. The ticket wasn’t on the floor. It wasn’t in any of Viktor’s pockets, and no one had brushed against him – at least he didn’t think so.
Viktor phoned his mother and the whole roaring mass of Gambir Station turned around him in a whorl of dulled colors.
“Ma,” he said, cell phone clamped to one ear, finger pressed into the other; “My ticket – it’s lost...”
Five hundred kilometers away in Semarang she panicked for him for a moment, then abruptly told him to buy another ticket.
“I don’t have enough money, Ma.” Suddenly he felt lonely, and almost hysterical, and wanted very badly to be at home. He heard other voices in the background over the phone, coming, he guessed, from the space by the porch where his mother kept pot plants and liked to sit in her nightdress and drink coffee late at night and early in the morning.
“What… wait a minute…” and then, “Tante Susan says they’ll give you another ticket if you can remember your seat number.”
“I remember it; it was 13c in coach 6…”
After that he had shouted though slats of rough-cut glass at the information counter and a man with thick glasses told him to go to another office. Then there had been a low room with brown walls and a television showing a soccer match through a cataract of interference in the corner. There were two tall girls with glossy hair arguing with a man behind the low counter. Another official with a moustache and a white skullcap was watching the television and speaking into a heavy green phone at the same time. Viktor sat there, and other people came in and out and the girls were still arguing shrilly with the man behind the counter, and the man in the skullcap made more phone calls and watched the soccer and three times he raised an abrupt finger to Viktor and said, patronizingly, “Be patient, ya…”
When there was only an hour and a quarter until his train Viktor had sat forward and said, as firmly as he could, “Pak?” and the man had looked away from the soccer. He sat right back in his chair, tilting the white skullcap on his head to show a threadbare hairline and a purple bruise and said, bluntly, “What?”
Tante Susan was right: they could give him a slip to replace the ticket, but first he needed to report the loss to the police and bring the report sheet back to the office.

***

The policeman sighed and pulled himself upright in his seat, cigarette fuming between his lips. He slotted the photocopied form into the typewriter. The mob of mosquitoes above the desk danced wildly and shifted their whining black thunderhead closer to Viktor. Some of them broke off. He could feel the frantic nettling where they bit at his bare legs. He rubbed at his calves with the edge of his sandals. The policeman was also wearing shorts, but he was not itching or scratching.
“Identity card,” he demanded from the corner of his mouth.
Viktor passed it to him; he glanced at it and began to type, very slowly, with stabs of his rigid index fingers.
The policeman read out the lines to himself, speaking more slowly when he had to type in the details. “On today – fri-day se-ven Dec-em-ber – this person, an Indonesian citizen-slash-foreign national…” There was a clatter from the typewriter as he blanked out one of the options.
“Name – Vik-tor Tan-jo-no.” There was a punching noise as the keys smacked onto the paper: thwack, thwack, thwack. “Place-of-birth – Sem-ar-ang, date of birth – nine-Mar-ch-19-89,” thwack, thwack, thwack.
The policeman punched harder at the keys as he worked down the page. The mosquitoes went wild. “Religion – Chris-ti-an; occupation – stu-dent,” THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.
Outside the night was roaring. Another policeman, in uniform, came through the doorway. He was flabbier than the man at the typewriter and his shoulders slumped beneath his epaulettes. He looked at Viktor then tilted his head questioningly at his colleague.
“Lost ticket,” he said, smirking.
The new policeman shrugged. “Better to go by aeroplane.”
The other sniggered. “Didn’t want to. Stingy.”
Viktor felt that same lonely hysteria that he had felt when he had stood on the station concourse and called his mother. He itched his legs more frantically.
The man in the uniform passed through the room and out of the open back door. “Up to him,” he said as he stepped outside. Viktor could see the firefly of orange light where he stood smoking in the gloom.
The policeman had filled in the details of the “lost baggage”.
“It’s not baggage,” said Viktor; “it was a ticket.”
“No problem.” The policeman took up his cigarette again. Slowly he unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and laid it on the desk before him. He signed it on the right side and then, with a backwards nod and pursed lips, he twisted it towards Viktor. Viktor glanced over the form as he signed on the left. The policeman had spelt his name wrong and none of the typed-in details met the photocopied lines.
The policeman took back the form and straightened it with theatrical care, then he took out a chunky rubber stamp and a bleeding inkpad from a drawer and laid them delicately alongside it, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He did not stamp the sheet, but he folded his hands together and leaned forward and looked directly at Viktor’s sweating face for the first time.
“Now,” he said, gently; “I cannot give you the form until you show me the replacement ticket from the station office.”
“But they said in the station that they can’t give me the ticket until I have the report!” As Viktor spoke he heard in his own voice the shrillness of a man accused of something he didn’t do.
The policeman leaned back in his chair and smiled slowly. “What can I do?” He opened his palms. “How about if I give you the report, and you’re lying, and you didn’t really loose the ticket?”
“But Pak, why would I do that? They told me in the station I had to get the report sheet first; the ticket can’t be replaced until I have it.” The mosquitoes had bitten the thin skin on Viktor’s ankles.
“You have no evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“Better to go by plane.” The voice came from behind him; Viktor hadn’t seen the other policeman, the flabby, uniformed man, come back into the room. “Flying’s small money – for you. But you were stingy.” He sniggered.
“But how can I get the replacement without the report?”
The policeman rocked right back so the chair was against the wall under the framed sign and his knees were hooked under the lip of the desk. He slotted his hands behind his head and repeated, gently, “What can I do?”
Viktor understood, but suddenly, and unexpectedly, he was angry. He said again, holding himself very carefully, “But how can I get the replacement without the report?”
The policeman said again, “What can I do?”
“Better to go by plane,” said the other policeman from the back of the room.
There were forty-five minutes until Viktor’s train. The policeman leaned against the wall. Viktor sat on the grubby plastic chair, the mosquitoes swarming around him. The report form, unstamped, lay on the table between them, and the police post floated alone like a candle flame in the night.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

A Pilgrim on the Holy Slopes of Gunung Penanggungan

2009-10-16T00:34:00.001-07:00

Climbing Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/10/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/a-pilgrim-on-the-holy-slopes-of-gunung-penanggungan/333875

The forest was silent in the gray pre-dawn light and the stone slabs at the edge of the bathing tank were slippery underfoot. Someone had been here ahead of me, for there was already a scent of incense in the air, and a fistful of pink petals in the green niche beside the waterspout, but for now I was alone. I undressed and dropped into the icy, chest-deep water. This was the sacred bathing place at the Jolotundo temple on the forested western slopes of Gunung Penanggungan. Suppressing a shiver I did what countless pilgrims before me had done and bowed my head under the stream of cold, clear water pouring from mouth of an algae-covered gargoyle, then clambered out, dressed and set out uphill towards the summit.

***

Gunung Penanggungan stands sentinel on the northern fringes of East Java’s volcanic hinterland; on a clear day you can see its smooth purple cone from the shopping malls of Surabaya. This 1653-meter mountain was long considered one of Java’s most sacred peaks. According to legend, when Hinduism arrived in Indonesia Mount Meru, the home of the gods, was shifted from the Himalayas to Java. Unsurprisingly the mountain suffered some damage during transit. The base broke away to form Gunung Semeru, Java’s highest peak, while the top fell 60 kilometers to the northwest to become Penanggungan.
My journey – by motorbike – had begun the previous day at another sacred bathing place, Candi Belahan, on Penanggungan’s eastern slopes. This temple dates from the late 11th Century, and is said to be the memorial of the great King Airlangga of the Sanjaya Dynasty. To find it I had branched off the howling Surabaya-Malang highway, and within minutes was deep in the Javanese countryside. The temple’s rather racy local name is Candi Tetek, the “Breasts Temple”, and the reason is obvious: the water that feeds the shallow pool here emerges in two ceaseless streams from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. When I arrived a pair of truck drivers were unashamedly soaping themselves under this ancient power-shower.
“Come on mister!” they called to me; “take a bath, the water’s good here!” To their disappointment I only dipped my toes in the pool before heading on along rising roads through the little hill resorts of Tretes and Trawas. To the south the towering slopes of the Arjuno-Welirang volcano massif swept away into dark cloud; to the north Penanggungan itself stood stark above the concertinaed rice terraces.
At the end of a steep, potholed track through the trees I came to Candi Jolotundo. This temple is the oldest and most sacred on the mountain, and also the best starting point for the climb to the summit. Built in 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions suggest that it was the royal bathing place of Airlangga’s father, Udayana, king of the old unified Balinese kingdom that once held sway over east Java.
I could smell the incense and hear the sound of running water even before I saw the temple. It was set into a steep, forested hillside behind a pool full of huge, slow-moving fish. In a deep, walled-in tank three men were bathing, but they were not merely washing themselves like the truck drivers I had seen earlier. They stood upright, heads bowed and palms pressed together in prayer. Incense sticks fumed in the damp recesses of the façade and an offering of petals floated in the water. On the temple’s central platform a young man in a white tee shirt was meditating, eyes closed, the afternoon sunlight slanting through the forest behind him.
One of the bathers emerged shivering from the tank.
“Is it cold?” I asked
“It’s not too bad if you jump straight in,” he replied. His name was Rozi. He lived in Surabaya and often came to the temple with his friends. “The water is good,” he said, “and it’s a good place to meditate. You can be close to god here.”
Another man, Aji, sitting in the shade of a pavilion nearby said that he drove up here from his home in Sidoarjo almost every day. He had a problem with his shoulder, “But after bathing here, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. Both Aji and Rozi were Muslims.
“This used to be a Hindu place,” said Aji, “but now it’s universal.” Nonetheless, the incense and the petals were still a strong echo of Hinduism.
“You should take a bath,” said Aji; “it will make you strong!”

I would need my strength to climb the mountain the next day, so I decided to take his advice. I spent the night a kilometer downhill from the temple at PPLH, an environmental educational center which also has eight neat little bungalows for visitors, and then, after that strengthening early morning dip at the temple, I headed for the summit.
The trail led through cool forest, then across a stretch of terraces studded with pale green banana plants. Ahead, the bald yellow summit of the mountain rose; to the left was the rocky outcrop of Bekel, one of Penanggungan’s four smaller outlying peaks.
Beyond the patch of farmland the trail rose into dense undergrowth. I was dripping with sweat by the time I came to the first temple. This was nothing more than a pair of small masonry stumps, but further on I came to another temple, this one a series of five basalt platforms rising to a crooked altar. Still higher up, on the saddle of land between Bekel and the main mountain, I found another three ancient places of worship. Struggling through the undergrowth I felt a little like Indiana Jones, but all of these places were well cared for. The surrounding vegetation had been cleared, and petals and ash showed that someone was still worshipping here.
There are at least 81 temples scattered around these slopes. Most date not from the time of Udayana and Airlangga but from the later Majapahit Kingdom. After the collapse of Majapahit the mountain was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak and the temples fell into disuse. They were “discovered” by European archeologists in the 1930s, though local villagers had always known about many of them.
Beyond the last temple – Candi Sinta – the scrub fell back. The trail here was a steep, ragged thread of yellow soil across slopes blackened by a recent wildfire. I had been hiking for almost two hours now and the sun was high overhead. Glancing back I could see the forests and fields of the lower slopes fading into a sea of yellow haze. A hot wind was whipping the dust into the sky and high above a dark-winged eagle turned on a thermal.
The slope grew steeper and steeper, and the ground rougher and rougher, but finally, sweating and gasping, I made it to the summit with its sunken crater. The mountain was adrift in the haze, but as I sat catching my breath the faint, dreamy sound of a traditional gamelan orchestra drifted up from what must have been a village wedding somewhere in the trees below.
The summit was a bleak and windy place of dry yellow grass, marked with the empty cigarette packets and burnt-out campfires of other hikers, but sitting there, listening to the distant gamelan and thinking of the cool water pouring into the pool at the Jolotundo temple – where I would certainly be taking another bath after my descent – the ancient idea that this was the home of the gods didn’t seem quite so farfetched.

Travelling to the Dizzying Heights of Ladakh

2009-10-02T02:47:00.000-07:00

A Journey through Ladakh, India, from West to East

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 30/09/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/traveling-to-the-dizzying-heights-of-ladakh/332455

I had been waiting at the roadside for an hour, shivering in the thin air. Behind me the poplar trees of the Chemrey Valley looked like a distant oasis; ahead the road swept away over barren slopes towards the mighty 5360-meter Chang La Pass. White lizards scurried over the rocks and no vehicles came past. Beyond the Chang La lay the fabled Pangong Lake, the remote strip of lapis-blue water that I hoped would be the highlight of my journey through Ladakh, northwest India’s high-altitude wilderness. But if I didn’t get a ride soon I would have to turn back. And then I heard the sound of an engine, straining through the switchbacks. I was on my feet in an instant, just at a shiny white jeep rounded the corner…

***

Ladakh lies hard on the Chinese border in the stark mountains of the Karakoram Range. To the southwest is Kashmir, of which it is technically a part; to the east lies Tibet, to which it is far more closely tied by history and culture. It is one of Asia’s most prized destinations for adventurous tourists.
I had arrived in Ladakh from the west, travelling through hills the color of Tibetan wild horses. My journey would take me to a series of ancient gompas – Buddhist monasteries – and then finally, I hoped, to Pangong Lake.
My first stop was the isolated village of Lamayuru, with its whitewashed gompa perched on a toothy ridge. As I made my way up the steep steps I found myself gasping for breath. Like much of Ladakh, Lamayuru lies well over 3000 meters above sea level, and here in the trans-Himalayan rain-shadow there is little moisture. Buddhist prayer flags snapped in the breeze and glossy black alpine choughs wheeled in the thermals.
I was shown around the silent, incense-scented halls of the gompa by a young monk named Tashi. He told me that Lamayuru is home to some 200 monks from all over Ladakh. The gompa, he said, was over a thousand years old, and had been built by the great Tibetan missionary, Rinchen Zangpo.
Ladakh has long been part of the wider Tibetan world and for many centuries it was ruled from Lhasa. Later it was an independent kingdom under the powerful Nyamgal Dynasty. It was only with its annexation by the Hindu ruler of Jammu in 1834 that Ladakh found itself more closely tied to the Indian scene. But as I looked out from the gompa courtyard on barren mountains that ran all the way to Tibet, lowland India seemed as far away as the Indonesian tropics.

From Lamayuru I continued east along the River Indus, the backbone of Ladakh. I spent a night in the little village of Alchi, a cluster of traditional houses and an ancient gompa between irrigated fields, then pressed on to Leh, the Ladakhi capital.
Leh originally developed as a mountain crossroads, a meeting point of treacherous trade routes from Tibet, India and Central Asia. As late as the 1940s camel caravans were still crossing the Karakoram passes, but Indian independence and wars with Pakistan and China saw the borders sealed. Ladakh was closed to the outside world until the 1970s when the first tourists were allowed to visit. For many travelers today Ladakh is the next best thing to Tibet, or perhaps, with its well-preserved culture, even better.
In Leh the caravanserais of old had been replaced by guesthouses and giftshops, but there was still a hint of historical romance. The town lay in a nail-bed of pale green poplar trees; the mud-walled palace of the Nyamgal kings loomed over the dusty bazaar, and the descendants of Muslim traders from Turkestan still kept small shops in the alleyways.
I found a cheap guesthouse in the old town. Over a cup of salty yak butter tea – an acquired taste to say the least – in the traditional kitchen with its ranks of shiny copper pots and pans, Padma, the charming proprietress, told me of the changes she had seen in Leh over the decades. Despite relying on tourism for a living, she had concerns about sustainability and the speed of development – the outskirts of Leh are already marred by ugly concrete hotels. Also, like many Ladakhis, Padma complained about Ladakh’s status as part of Kashmir State – a legacy of 19th Century treaties between the Raja of Jammu and the British colonialists. Despite sharing no cultural ties, and having no involvement in the political unrest of Kashmir, Ladakhis are ruled from Srinagar. For Padma and many others it would be better for Ladakh to be governed directly from Delhi as a Union Territory.

When I asked in Leh about visiting Pangong Lake, replies were doubtful. Public transport is almost non-existent; a permit is required and regulations demand that foreigners must travel on an organized tour with at least three other people. I wanted to travel alone. The travel agent who helped me arrange my permit looked at me askance when I suggested hitchhiking. “Well, you could try…” he said.
Try I would, and the next day I set out, stopping off to watch a prayer ceremony at the gompa-topped hill of Thikse before catching a rattling local minibus, full of cheerful villagers who welcomed me with the universal Ladakhi greeting – “Joolay!” – up the side valley of Chemrey. The bus dropped me in the last village. The light was shining on the white ridge of the Stok Kangri mountains as I set out walking, picking my way to the lonely roadside beneath the towering hairpins of the Chang La.

***

The jeep screeched to a halt and a very surprised head in reflective sunglasses appeared from the passenger window.
“Where on earth are you going?”
“Pangong Lake!” I said; “can I have a ride?”
They were a party of wealthy Indian tourists on a daytrip from Leh, and despite their surprise at finding a foreign hitchhiker at this wild spot, they made room for me amongst the picnic baskets. I smiled all the way up the snow-streaked slopes to the dizzying summit of the Chang La Pass. My companions seemed less happy – they were suffering from headaches and nausea, mild symptoms of altitude sickness brought on by the elevation. A little shortness of breath was all I experienced.
Across the pass marmots and wild horses watched us from the roadside as we passed, and then, finally, the lake appeared in a blaze of bright blue. One glance and I knew the journey had been worth it. The Indians dropped me at a little cluster of tented camps at the head of the lake and I picked my way up the steep hillside to take in the view. The waters below faded from aquamarine in the depths to pale turquoise in the shallows. Flocks of delicate white gulls – incongruous here 4250 meters above sea level – flickered over the shore, and beyond there were bony brown hills under a vast sky. The wind from the east cut like a knife and the light was sharper than glass. It was a truly stunning place. The lake here was barely a kilometer across, but it ran eastwards for 134 kilometers, deep into Tibet. The upwelling of white mountains I could see in the far distance were inside Chinese territory, beyond the forbidden frontier. But shivering and smiling on this bleak hillside I was sure that the view from the other side could be no more beautiful than this…

© Tim Hannigan 2009