It has been night for some hours now, flying to Alaska. I lifted an eyelid of the plane and saw an ice blue sunset in the middle of the night. An icier, more luminescent blue erupted in a spout which shot up and, dissipating into a long line of anorexic dancers grew ever more thin, pulled between the gravity of the earth and the soaring spirits of ethereal realms. Waves began to form and break in a sky alive with a flowing and ebbing blue.
The city of Anchorage appeared under a blood swollen red moon.
Bangkok, Jet Lag, soil of my dreams, white tingles of energy, transformation with the first step onto Southeast Asia. Everything should be different now.
In our usual manner, we were probably the only foreigners on the plane who took the local bus to our destination. After floating around the sky for almost a day and a half, the disorientation is amazing. After dreaming of being here since early childhood, expectations so great, now brought suddenly to reality. We had a map that used Roman lettering. Minutes went by, streets went by. The map was out. School children tried to help. Streets kept going by and we could never figure out where we were, finally realizing that we weren’t going to because the street signs were in Thai script.
Bangkok is a frenzy. The tuk-tuks go tuk-tuk, everything on the road goes beep-beep, the bus fare takers on the buses are constantly clik-clicking the razor-sharp fare box which cuts the tickets and keeps the change, and the train has an extra jingle in its ching-ching. Singsong hawkers sing songs. The buses add a visual frenzy with their intense redgreenorangeyellow colors, all vying for attention like the instruments in a jazz band. Lunch hour brings people who bump and jam in the intense bargaining that occurs on the sidewalks. Some people are in a hurry, but it is hot, and no one looks angry or upset when they have to step..pause..step..pause, because being angry or impatient just makes you sweat. Time, like everything else, is s rhythm here.
The street we stayed on was comprised of dropouts from Katmandu, i.e. the traveler that goes to meet other travelers and stays in westernized, but poorer areas. They sat in restaurants that serve bland food, drink Thai beer and watch Rolling Stones videos all day. Drug dealers. The maid of the hotel pleading with a man across the hall to trade sex for drugs, he, finally gave in during loud rock music.
One street away, it was Bangkok, the Oriental city.
The area around the hotel was enjoyable to frequent. Markets carpeted the sidewalks and alleys. Each day, a cycle of markets would take place. The morning produce and fish market, the afternoon mobile vendors, and in the evening, clothes stores would pull their racks out into the streets.
There is so much care used in the displaying of food. Volcanoes of peppers and brussel sprouts, fans of dried fish, and sliced papaya, blossoms of pastries. The only ones who didn’t have to make displays look visually inviting were the voluminous women who sold durian. They didn’t need a better advertisement than their strong smelling produce, highly caloric and also an aphrodisiac, plopped down in a heap and hovered over with great arms and stomach.
We went in search of dinner one day, and after crossing a bridge found a block long, canal side eating place which was covered like a tent with odds and ends of metal and canvas. Smoke was rising, dogs and cats prowling for the frequently given handout, cooks scraping the oil out of their woks into large cans of grease which they would first filter down into another bucket for use in the future. An old woman was scooping water over herself, bathing, in the center of the area. The place felt so friendly, warm and homey.
A Thai boxing match sounded like a colorful way to spend the rest of the evening. The matches are fought to a four-piece band, two drums, an Indian flute and cymbals. The preliminary pump-up includes a Buddhist prayer and a yellow scarf placed on the heads of the fighters. They box both with gloved hands and bare feet in a graceful way to the music. As the fight progresses and the boxers fight more intensely, the band’s tempo increases to match it. After a while it is uncertain which controls the other. A cacophony comes from the frenzied betting going on in the stands; loud calls from a writhing group of men, arms raised with outstretched fingers indicating the amount of the bet.
Any visitor to Bangkok must experience a visit to the Grand Palace, the largest and most upkept Wat in the city. The first thing that is noticed is the quiet inside the fortress-like walls, almost oppressive coming from the opposite. Further into the Wat occasional refreshing breezes and the crystalline tinkling from thousands of metal pieces that were dangling from every gilded minaret and roof was enough in the day’s hot air to make it seem like Anarctica. It was malarial the way the hot oppressive air, cool breezes, the gold figure of the Buddah on cool marble inside the temple, burning sun, the tinkling of a verbalized breeze and the spring green of a tree made a spectacle of the skin.
That night we took a tuk-tuk to an Indian restaurant that was supposed to be great. The vehicle stopped at an address that we had given to the driver. No Indian restaurant was to be seen, just darkness. A walk across the street to the approximate address, into a dirt alley with a street number, past small children playing, was a hot plate vendor selling pakoras. Further on, there was an oasis in the midst, a glass enclosed air-conditioned room. A restaurant! Everyday reality turned into Aladdin's lamp where men wore turned up genie shoes.
Now I am feeling like the reclining Buddah, barely fitting into the upper berth of a train from Bangkok to Singapore. I am really doing this, but still seeing a fantasy, not living it. The pastoral life flies by through my eyes. I want to stay in every place I see...looking through a train window. Passing. An insect wing flew in the window, hovered for a moment, then flew back out.
A friend of the family was there to meet us at the Singapore station to drive us to her apartment. It was in a wealthy area of new high-rises, sadly, all of Singapore seems to be comprised of new high rises since the city planners razed most of the old city. The apartment was split level and very large. Oriental rugs were overlapping three or four deep and there were collections of art objects from all over the world. A mysterious, exotic, opulent and unmistakably beautiful woman, clothed and unclothed, was featured in numerous paintings throughout the apartment. She turned out to be the same woman we would stay with in Jakarta, and who owned this apartment.
Singapore is a totally modern city that seems a particularly futuristic one by night. Everything is lit and everything is now. Bubble elevators rise outside of buildings, lights flashing like a Coney Island amusement ride. Chinese lanterns give an orange glow to crowded outdoor restaurants. It is by far the cleanest city I’ve ever seen, and the food: Indian, Chinese, Malay, Nonya and Singapore style was indescribably scrumptious and seems to be eaten constantly.
The greeting in Medan, Sumatera after a short flight from Singapore, was a blast of hot air from the airport tarmac. Busses took everyone to the main terminal where we expected a thorough search of our belongings to take place after reading about customs agents wanting to confiscate tapes, some books, etc. In fact, it was very quick and not thorough in the least. It seemed that the weather was too hot for them to bother with much. After changing money, with a bit of difficulty, we began trying to flag down a motorized trishaw. Three stopped and vied for our overpriced fare. The winner took us to a filthy, muddy market where an older women helped us to get a bemo that took us to the real minibus which would get us to Brastagi. This must be called profit sharing.
The bus started out full yet the driver continued to stop at many other points to pick up at least 1/3 more passengers. Indonesian pop music was blasting out of the loud speakers, competing with baskets of squawking chickens. Vegetables and bags of rice were packed on the roof, as well as any space under the seats and in the isles. The first part of the ride was rather tame, apart from being compressed into a more Oriental sized person. Then the climb started to Brastagi. hairpin turns, careening through switchback after switchback, the driver sounding his horn almost constantly to warn other vehicles coming down the mountain that he was coming up the mountain.
The town of Brastagi was reminiscent of the old west, a wide dirt road with raised wooden sidewalks, hotels and storefronts on either side. A bit run-down, probably dusty, if the mud would ever dry up. It was like breathing water sometimes. The main market began where the sidewalk planks ended, in a place so thick with mud that it seemed impossible to shop in. The view out of town included a smoking volcano. Many towns have a mascot volcano, it seems.
The fruit market was from another planet. Green oranges that should have been called greens, rambutans, snakefruit, tiny bananas, giant bananas, young green coconut, jackfruit, fruits with hard exteriors that when stuck with a thumb would offer candy-sweet white fluffy stuff, hairy red berry-sized fruit, smelly durian that you have to get past the spikes before plunging into the soft, rotting, fruity onion-pudding insides.
A walk to a Batak village led up a small road to a cemetery on top of a hill. A gray-white ghost horse tended to grass around the gravestones which were made from the same tiles we would see in countless mandis throughout Indonesia. Plumeria, large-leafed fragrant flowered shrubs were standing sentinel next to each gravestone.
The path continued up the volcano, Mt. Sibayik, past a hook to the right and barking dogs, it turned into a town...turned into someone’s livingroom, a very intimate place where women were doing laundry and children were playing. It was the way I was stared at that made me feel this way. This was their home and we were walking through it, looking down at the ground.
Up the hill through the town, the path turned into a narrow way between stables, deeply grooved by the horse carriages, very muddy and well fertilized. As the trail ascended, it became more confusing, more Y’s and not enough answers. One wrong branch led through dense jungle. It was the first time I was overwhelmed with the feeling I was in a place that I had dreamed about since I was a child. Instead of staring and taking it all in as I did with photos in the Time/Life World series, I now got to walk through it. Through towering ferns and bamboo, the brazenly reflective yellow-green banana leaves and the crazy bird calls, soft squishy foot thud immediately swallowed up by deep layers of humus.
The path again divided into two very intimate paths. The one taken ended with a man holding a rifle, as much as saying, “Who are you and what do you want?”. He turned out to be a hunter who led us at a very fast clip to the correct path up the volcano. It was getting late and the deluge was coming, so about 3/4’s of the way up, we decided to head back.
There was a certain time of the day, late afternoon was one, that was supposed to be a good time to visit the spirit caves. It was now raining and through the cloudy mist in this mountain town, an umbrella was as effective as it would be in a steam room. Searching path after path, cliff after cliff, never seeing a spirit cave. I guess we were not in the right state of mind.
There was an extra cycle to the day here. Clear in the early morning, then later in the morning the mists and volcano smoke would begin their ghostly traveling, curling around mountain tops, zooming into valleys, engulfing groups of people, and playfully following us down hilly roads. By mid afternoon, the rains would start and continue until it was dark, when people’s nightly quest for snacks and dinner would begin, walking through muck from the day’s rains.
The Batak long house village of Pecerin was located right across from the only ritzy hotel around. This hotel complex was its own little village and could have been in Florida from the looks of its high fence, security, golf course, swimming pool, the works. The Batak village just looked like any, but the people became exceedingly unfriendly as we entered the town. Children were getting out of school, a nightmare of children with palms outstretched, asking for money. They didn’t need it from the looks of them, but the tourists from across the street would probably give them money when they came in groups to sample a taste of the “wild Sumatera Batak tribes” in between the other “9” on the golf course. Village people gave us dirty looks. One child took a stick and hit the back of my legs with it, then was yelled at by an elderly woman. Throughout all the travels, other than a weird man or two at a bus stop, this is the only place we have seen this kind of behavior.
Time to leave. The bus ride to Prapat became spectacular as we began to descend on a cliffside road to Lake Toba, a large crater lake. Batak longhouse villages could be seen on the coast far below on one side and the lake on the other, a phenomenally clear aqua in the shallows and a rich blue in the deeper areas. In the center of the lake, a lush green rose up to the top of an ancient volcano, slightly blurred by the mists.
Prapat is a quaint, touristy town with a beautiful view of the lake and surrounding mountains. It was almost dark and time to sleep before the next leg of the trip to Bukittinggi. We found an overpriced hotel at the top of a cliff and after settling in, decided to go out for something to eat. What was many stairs to go down, out to dinner, became a controlled, terraced waterfall on the return.
After the last couple of bus rides, we decided to splurge a little and buy tickets for a regular sized 2 by 2 seater that would have room for long legs, like the kind seen in the USA all the time and like the kind seen always going the other direction here in Sumatera. The bus departure time left enough time to grab a bit of breakfast at a nearby restaurant, but as the plates were set down a screaming child came in and motioned to us that the bus had arrived. Food was thrown into plastic bags and we ran down the hill to the “big” bus. The bus, however, was the same kind of minibus, the kind that as many people as possible are crammed into the bench seats. The driver explained that this bus was going the stop where the big bus could be caught. Not that we really believed this, and we had paid for our ticket a price which was not by any means unreasonable, so we sat in the only 
two seats left, next to the back door where the hawker usually sits. The plastic bags were pulled out and the meal continued by trying to get fingers to mouth between bumps, while getting rice all over and looking out into the jungle. Durian dangles on the elbows of giant trees, bananas, Batak longhouses and bright spring-green rice paddies, bananas, Batak longhouses, and bright spring-green rice paddies, mist bananas, Batak longhouses, smoke, dark green rice paddies, mist, banana leaves, smoke, mist yellow lights in the longhouses and green-black rice paddies. Moist chills, earth exhaling clouds that began to gather around a classically shaped volcano at dusk.
At first thinking this was going to be a long trip of hanging on tightly around curves, and no sleep, later getting into the flow of it and nodding off. This was NOT an express bus, stopping many, many times throughout the night just on the road and in stations. At one of the station stops, we talked with students over coffee, about our countries, Tina Turner, books and U.S. politics.
The bus reached Bukittinggi at four a.m. We sat in the station until 5:15 drinking sweet coffee, eating fried bananas, and occasionally trying to communicate with a sleepily group of people. It had been raining and even the eating area was steamy, but the kitchen was a sauna, bustling with women cooking over giant black kettles, and carpeted with small children. The toilet (kamar kecil - small room) was a walk down a dark hallway and out into the backyard to a structure about 4 1/2 feet tall, no ceiling, and a hole in the bottom. It was very much the typical bus station toilet - dark, muddy, and smelly. I was glad there were no lights.
Now the search for a place to stay began with a walk in the dark to central Bukittinggi. One place on the top of a hill seemed intimate, having only a few rooms for rent, where the wife cooked meals and the guests ate in a common dining room. Yes, it was intimate. The walls were made out of 1/8 inch masonite and at times we felt that we were having an orgy with the German couple in the next room. The owners were nice, but the husband was a real flim-flam man. We heard from one of his guests that he would take his boarders on paid tours, stop every 1/2 mile or so for something to eat or drink, and of course, he forgot to bring any money.
There were no cars or motorcycles to be rented here, but an extravagant option was open; renting a car and driver to take a countryside tour of the area. The vehicle was an old Australian Holden with a small fan on the dash and bad brakes. The route planned was to go through scenic areas and then to ask the driver to stop when we wanted to take a photo of fantastically sculpted rice fields or breathtaking views. Many times the car took so long to stop that it glided into the main subject of the photo. There were many one-street Minangkabau towns, where the houses were a mix of the quaintest of Dutch and Indonesian architecture.
As we were riding in the Holden and serpentining around a volcano and through a hilly countryside, fecund and green, I began to romanticize - an easy thing to do here anyway. I could hear Kiri Te Kanawa’s soaring voice singing “September”, one of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” and had visions of the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously reeling through my brain.
A swift stream flowing in a gully next to the road brought me back. The stream flattened into a river near the bottom of the volcano, then a lake. The river near the lake was quite an active place; women doing their laundry, people bathing, and children playing. The most popular game was to hang onto long ropes which were tied to a bridge and ride the rushing water until they were swept away towards the lake. Immediately past this refreshing scene, over the bridge, was a burnt out desert surrounding the lake. The Holden quit. We got out and looked under the hood of on of the simplest cars in the world. He flipped a lever, and since the car had no reverse, we pushed the car around to go back the way we came.
The early morning market in Bukittinggi is exceptionally colorful. Bright hued umbrellas covered stacks and stacks of red chilies and other vegetables. The second try at ordering Nasi Padang, a plate of rice surrounded by small bowls of all the foods displayed in the front window of a restaurant or the food stall, was more successful. On the first attempt, we did not quite understand why we got so much food and what exactly we were paying for. The only cost is whatever is eaten from the bowls. Any sauce, used to flavor the rice was free. A small eating stall under an umbrella is ubiquitous throughout Indonesia. Restaurants made up of 5 square feet, pots steaming on braziers, a bench and narrow table that never had four legs the same length, towel napkins soaking in murky water, and always a smiling face when the food was served, the smile widening as complements were paid to the cook. Most places like this had excellent food.
Railroad tracks ran on the outskirts of the market and it is there we met a schoolgirl, dressed in the national schoolgirl white shirt and gray skirt uniform. She asked if we had a minute so that she could practice her English. After talking for a while, she invited us to accompany her home. We followed her down a very muddy path, through a rundown poor market along the railroad tracks. The vendors here were selling just a few odds and ends; a couple of chipped cups, a pan, matches. Her house was 1/2 km more. Friends came by, brothers came home and we all talked, with a dictionary as a translator, over a few cups of coffee. They all accompanied us back to our guest house. On the way, we passed a soup vender that she recommended we try. This Soto Ayam was indeed, a very tasty soup.
From Bukittinggi, we wanted at first ot go to Pelambang, a large industrial oil town in the middle of the South Sumateran jungle. Photos of it were reminiscent of a transplanted Gary, Indiana and descriptions sounded like the colors from Apocalypse Now; vermillion fires from the refining plant smokestacks towering above a dense green jungle. Instead, the stop became Lahat, a small town in a dry plain between the jungle and the coastal mountains where there were interesting menairs up in the hills nearby.
The route went through some mountains, which alone can be rather exhilarating. The roads are narrow, have no guardrails and the bus companies employ very competent kamikaze drivers who take turns sleeping on the floor at the back of the bus, using a bag of rice for a pillow and then taking their hand at the wheel. Add night plus rain and the trip becomes hair-raising. Multiply the broken windshield wipers with the driver deciding to turn the headlights off so that he could see better through the rain and soft prayers emerge from a new member of the first religious faith I could think of at the time.
The driver finally stopped and found he could not repair the wipers. Another bus was flagged down and that driver agreed to escort us, our bus following his, very closely, for a while until the monsoon resumed. The other bus got further and further away and we were back to square one. At this point, I decided that the best thing to do was to go to sleep, because I did not want to be conscious anymore, plus I remembered hearing that if the body is relaxed when an accident occurs, it is less likely to be broken into a million pieces. I went to sleep.
Lahat. Why after all these years have I not written about Lahat? It is not a good memory. It is about a man who tried to take over our lives, threatened us and caused us to leave the next morning before sunrise. Unfortunately, there were also some very sweet people we met there who we ended up not seeing again.
The long back seat on the bus was comfortable to stretch out on during the ride way down through South Sumatera’s lowland jungle to the way off the beaten path town of Martapura. Someone woke me to please move. A grieving family and a person near death was then laid across the seat. They tried to help him hang on until he reached his birthplace where the bus stopped on the side of the road and they got off with much help from everyone on board.
The stop at Martapura was on a dusty road near a military barracks. Drunken soldiers taunted us. A man, also walking along the road told us not to stop and ask questions here, then pointed to a place to stay. It was clean and pleasant, reasonably priced and frequented by Indonesians. There were no other foreigners here and we were quite the attraction. So much so that the first thing we did when entering the room was to plug up all the peepholes in the wall with kleenex. This had became a room warming ritual in Sumatera. Of course the next morning the little wads of kleenex were always on the floor.
The next night as I lay sleeping under green mosquito netting, I awoke with a feeling that I was being watched. Opening my eyes and clearing the haze of dreams there was, after several blinks, still a boy peering in the decorative and functional air slats that were all along the walls near the ceiling. I screamed “Tidak, babi” (No, pig - an insult) The boy ran and we moved the ladder he was standing on after jumping out the window because the door had been jammed. We should have stayed and charged admission, but had to leave to meet up with our friend in Jakarta.
It was town news that we were leaving. As we stood waiting for the bus that night people began to gather until there was a vast, friendly crowd surrounding us. They asked questions and spoke of their relatives who had gone to America. The bus finally came and we were rushed on the the long trip to Jakarta.
There was only one main road through South Sumatra and after the Wet it is was a long and slow trip, especially on the segments of dirt road. I awoke in the middle of the night, being tossed about, thinking at first I was in a ship, then after opening my eyes realizing that the bus was tipped to the left about to slip into a ditch while trying to leave enough room for another bus to pass. I opened the window and a dank smell crept into my nostrils. Through dreamy, lazy eyes in the middle of a jungle night I peered into the croaking of crocodile sized insects, clammy humidity, and the spring green of headlamp lit banana leaves arching over the road. All of this was surrounded by a heavy, thick almost palpable blackness.
In the early morning darkness, the bus stopped at a station in a one dirt street town located in a swampy flatland. The bus driver got out, put down a blanket in the mud and began to play some sort t of game with a few other people. We stayed here for a long time. It must have been a long game. A vendor clanged by and stopped at the bus. He was selling a breakfast of purplish-black sweet rice porridge (bubur ayam), a very fitting taste of the night. A while later I went into the station. Women were in the kitchen preparing breakfast. I suddenly felt as if I was turned inside out, transported into some other life. It may have been the soft light highlighting the rounded stone walls of the hearths, the humid, buzzing kitchen full of women and babies, the vats of food cooking in large iron pots over open flame fires. It was the feeling a child has when ther comforting mother pulls a soft, warm blanket over them in the middle of a cold night. Everything becomes right.
Morning, lazy mud colored rivers winding through a vast lowland jungle, a place I wanted to keep riding through forever. It felt like home, but again, I was not living in it. This would have been the place, though given our present state of mind - paranoid, alone, not knowing the language, no one able to speak English - that we kept going and proved if not to be intrepid travelers, to be at least as green as the jungle.
The bus went all the way to the Sunda Strait, where near the beach was a large station and a long wait. It finally continued on a very scenic trip along the coast to the ferry port, where it just pulled on to the ferry. The passengers piled out of the bus and onto the deck. Anak Krakatoa could be seen in the distance. Plastic wrappers could be seen floating in the foreground. Many people here still dispose of plastic wrappers the same way they had been used to throwing out banana leaf wrappers. Same motion, different result. It is heartbreaking. A people so much in tune with the land. Plastic.
It was a sea salt flavored trip, splashed by waves, trying to eat the air, talking with people, including a student who lived in Pelembang and was going back to the university in Jogya, Java.
The dried out, baked west shore of Java was quite different from the green jungles of Sumatera just right across the Strait. Longboats were anchored around the port, just a small town. What a way to come to a new land. Easing up to it in a kind of embrace, like the feeling of gently putting your arm around someone’s shoulder that you care about.
Cookbooks
