We rushed through a great volcano valley and a thousand rice fields for six hours, until the driver threw us all out of the bus NEAR Pangandaran. It turned out that there's an entrance fee to Pangandaran, which the bus driver was not prepared to pay. I was a bit surprised, but paid the 2,000 required rupiah, and was allowed to walk into the village. The entrance fee thing is a very clear sign of Pangandaran being a popular place to go, but nevertheless I was the only person staying at the losmen I picked, at 10,000 rupiah per night for a huge double room with shower and a sit-able toilet, a table fan with settings ranging from mild breeze to out-of-control jet engine, unlimited coffee, tea and breakfast, as well as a personal waiter.
The whole place was really quiet and calm, which suited me perfectly. I really needed to rest for a few days, after having experienced a bit of an existential travel-crisis. During one of the rough rides on the Indonesian bus system, I found myself wondering what on Earth I was doing there, instead of being comfortably at home, doing what a sensible, young man like me is supposed to do; study and work. These strange thoughts disappeared slowly after a few days of postcard-writing and relaxation at the black lava beaches of Pangandaran.
There is a market in Pangandaran, but this being a fishing village, it is hard to find anything but creatures of the sea there. On a particularly lazy day, I managed to find an old woman who was willing, for 2.500 rupiah, to teach me how to properly carve a pineapple. I learned it, but I spend a lot more time carving an "ananas" than I spend eating it afterwards. There is also a nice park, according to the signs, a national park, south of the village. For 1.000 rupees, you can enter by foot and see a lot of large lizards, a couple of nice beaches, some funny birds (hornbills) and gibbons, which are apes with very long arms. The snorkelling in Pangandaran is bad, though.
Pangandaran has got a cinema, and judging from the menu on the days I spent there, it mainly shows Indonesian adult movies. These adult movies are a bit different from what one might have seen in other parts of the world. There is no doubt about that the movie is all about sex, but it is done with great subtilty.
I saw the movie "Akibat Bebar Sex", which means "Something Something Sex", and all the actors had names like Windy Chindyana and Yahya Khan. The first half of the movie was all sex, with kissing never shown as two mouths meeting, but by having a man and a woman hang around each other's necks and wriggling their bodies intensely. Sexual intercourse is shown by the man kissing the top of the woman's cleavage while she is moaning. All actors are dressed at all times.
The second half of the movie was very different. Suddenly the hero is run over by a car driven by the bad woman of the movie, and they went back to her place, where he got to kiss her cleavage. Just after that, the hero runs over the good woman of the movie (judging by Indonesian traffic, I am inclined to believe that running over people may be a normal way of meeting people in Indonesia), and they go home to her place, where they start a new and better life together, and she even somehow gets pregnant after he has kissed her cleavage a couple of times.
So far, so good. But THEN the bad woman shows up again, with her gang of bad men, very jealous, and they beat him up severely. Because of this, a lot of holes, apparently from his previous career as a drug addict, show up on his arms, and because of this he becomes HIV positive. He soon develops AIDS, which is presented as some kind of incurable coughing. He runs away from the hospital, coughing for the rest of movie, until he goes into an abandoned bus wreckage, and dies.
It was hard to be moved by the movie, since the music from the cassette player in the ticket counter outside drowned the sounds from the movie. The most interesting part of the movie, though, was observing the two girls in the back row getting up, screaming and yelling at their boyfriends which tried to get uhm... comfy during each and every "hot" scene of the movie.
You have not visited a country until you've been to the cinema there.
The satellite antennas in Indonesia point straight up. It was when I saw that I realized I was just about at the Equator. Another interesting detail of the antennas there is that they have drainage holes, in case of heavy rain!
In the morning of December 12, I left for Yogyakarta. It was scheduled to leave at 6am, which with Indonesian "jam karet" / "rubber time" usually means "sometime before noon". It left, however at 6:05, so I was very happy about not missing it. I had chosen to travel the picturesque way to Yogya, so 30 minutes after leaving Pangandaran we arrived at a ferry landing. From there it is a 3 hour very beautiful boat trip to Cilacan, with hundreds of rice fields 10cm above sea level to look at. No wonder a flooding in this area can cause large problems. A nice girl at the boat kept feeding me strange, edible things from a bag she had, and I still have no idea what it was. It sure tasted funny.
In Cilacan there is an oil refinery, and LOTS of guards to make sure noone does something stupid, like blowing the refinery up to damage the (then) corrupt government. After leaving this prison-like bus stop, there's a five hour bus ride to Yogyakarta, which is a BIG city, with just about 3 million citizens. Like most cities with millions of people in it, this one also boasted a KFC restaurant, so I very much liked it.
I was also very happy about finding a room WITH a bath at the Anda Guesthouse, for only 8.000 rupiah per night. I stayed right in the middle of the city, so lots of things to see and do were around. Yogyakarta seems to be something like the cultural capital of Java.
I attended a democracy festival, where a play which seemed to critisize the government rather harshly were shown. People who say things in public which the government doesn't like them to, have shown a tendency towards being arrested and/or disappearing completely. In Yogya, however, it is possible to get away with it. This is because Yogyakarta is a "special district", for historical reasons, where the Sultan has more actual power than the Indonesian government does. Fifty years ago, when Indonesia fought for independency from the Netherlands and communism, the previous Sultan helped Sukarno and his forces. For this Yogyakarta was rewarded a special status and liberty, different from the rest of the country.
The play was very modern, with beautiful costumes, and I even got a box of complimentary snacks for free, because I snuck in a door in the back, going past the loooong line of people waiting to get in, and ended up in some kind of VIP lounge, with the Sultan sitting smiling just a few seats in front of me. I must have looked very VIP in my worn-out clothing. The whole thing seemed to be sponsored by Sun Silk Shampoo, so a big thanks to them for the snacks!
For 15.000 rupiah, I got a whole-day semi-guided trip by bus to Borobodur, Prambanan and the Merpati volcano. Borobodur is one of the largest Buddhist complexes in the world, only second after Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It is built on top of a hillside, which makes it look really impressive for size, since you can't tell that most of the inside of it is just the top of a hill. All the walls are covered by stone carvings, showing the story of Buddha's life. It's fun to notice that all the angels protecting and caring for Buddha are depicted as naked women. The top plateau of Borobodur is called Nirvana, although it's not THAT hard to climb up there. UNESCO has paid for the restoration of the complex, and it is on their World Heritage List.
After this we were supposed to go to Kaligari to have a look at the Merapi volcano, but the clouds didn't want us to, so all I saw was the valley formed by floating lava, at the foot of the volcano. There is still occasional leaks of poisonous gases from the volcano, and white flags here and there mark spots where people have died from this.
Finally we went to Prambanan, which is one of the world's larget Hindu complexes. Java had a time of greatness early this millenium, in which two kings, one Buddhist and one Hindu, competed about having the greatest religious monument, hence Borobodur and Prambanan just a few kilometres from each other. The best thing about Prambanan was that now it was raining like crazy, so for a long time I was the only person in Prambanan. I was so alone there that I didn't even have to take off my shoes to go inside the temples, and I could take some funny pictures of the statues inside, while I waited for the rain to stop.
As soon as the rain stopped, I was assaulted by a school glass, of 14 years old girls. I spent a long time letting them have their picture taken with me holding them in lots of different ways. When I thought I finally had done my duty, having been photographed with all of them, one of the girl insisted that she wanted a photograph with me and her WITH her wearing sunglasses. So, I had to go through a new round of photos with all of them with sunglasses on. They all said "I like Norways" and demanded to have my address at home. So I gave it to them, and finally they let me go.
I don't know whether it was the strange food from the boat, or the surprisingly cold rain at Prambanan that did it, but when I came back to the guesthouse, I was very, very sick. I had to lay down on the bed and do nothing except feeling sorry for myself for hours. So I decided to stay in Yogyakarta until I was well again, before continuing to the Bromo volcano. It is better to be sick in a big city than in a mountain village.
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Two days at the toilet later, I was fine again, and could explore the city further. One of the main sights in Yogya is the Water Palace, which are the ruins of an ancient harem, which has become inhabited by lots of Indonesians throughout the years. On Sundays there's a huge bird market, where you can buy yourself a sparrow, an owl or any other bird, as well as cages in all sizes and the yucky worms birds like to eat. I really wonder what they use all the birds for. Some are probably for food, but others... Well, I don't REALLY want to know, afterall.
At the Sultan's Palace, which is open for visitors, I saw two dance performances. One was the Indonesian Aerobic Championship (if I have understood it right), which was a bit different from the Norwegian version. In all acts there were four women in tight outfits, sweating synchronously. It looked a bit like the phenomenon "Workout for elders" which can be seen on Norwegian TV at strange hours of the day. The other show was more fascinating, Some Indonesians with very elaborate make-up, masks and golden outfits did a traditional dance, based on stories from the Ramayan. The most incredible part is how the dancers are able to curl and wave with their toes while dancing.
In the evening I once again went to the movies, this time to see "The Rock". There I learnt where movies go when they die. They go to Yogyakarta and are shown over and over again, with crackling sound and a fuzzy picture, and with unexplainable cuts to next scene each time someone in the movie is about to say something important. It's not really bad, because there are almost no people to watch it anyway. Strange, really, in a country with more than 200 million people in it. There's a population counter by the railway station in Yogya, going up by one for every 10th second. Very much like the "Foreign debt" counter at Times Square in New York City. In Indonesia they are proud of having the fourth largest population in the world, and proud of the number growing really fast. People means capital here.
From Yogyakarta it's just about a full day, 25.000 rupees bus ride to a village near Bromo. It's a scenic ride, with lots of great landscapes and mountains along the road. I stayed at Hotel Bromo for 5.000 rupiah, shared bath but with an infinite supply of warm blankets, for the cold nights that can be experienced at this height, even just below the Equator. They serve the worst buffalo steak I've had anywhere, but the warm water in the shower makes up for it. Actually this was my first hot shower for a couple of months, since leaving Nepal...
My sickness came back, and I went below the blankets to work off some fever through sweating. After a while I was awoken by some incredible noise. "Damn receptionists!", I thought, and tried to shut off the sounds with my pillow. 20 minutes later I was about to lose my mind, so I went downstairs to complain. Then I discovered that the noise actually came from the neighbourhood mosque, just next door. I was told it would soon be over, and I had the worst cheese toast I've had anywhere, and then it was silent again.
Early, before three o'clock in the morning, on December 18 I got up and got a ride with a pickup truck up to Camaro Lawang, midway up Bromo. I had decided to be at the crater of Bromo at sunset, so it was necessary to be up early. It was pitch dark, so I am sure I didn't walk the shortest way up the volcano, but after some back-and-forth I was soon able to find my way just by following the noise from about 200 people, mainly tourists and guides, who was on their way up as well. Some were dressed in winter clothing, others in shorts and t-shirts, and they were all freezing cold. I walked to another small top nearby and watched the sunrise from there. It was beautiful, but not as nice as the postcards claimed it would be. After the fog had conquered the top and all the other people had left disappointed by the lack of spectacularity, I climbed up to my first volcano rim ever.
The volcano is not very nice. There's no vegetation around, the whole area is VERY smelly, and your eyes burn because of the sulphuric acid in the air. On the bottom of the crater there are cracks from which poisonous smoke comes up. Still, I liked it. A lot.
At the plateau below the crater, there's a Hindu temple, with lots of swastikas, evil-looking statues and the works. There didn't seem to be anyone home, be that gods or people, so I just walked the 8km back to the guesthouse. The walk did me well, and back "home" I met the Smith family from Melbourne, who seemed to be nice people. They eventually turned out to be my rescuers when I came to an Australia Open-infested Melbourne, so this was a lucky encounter! More about them will come later.
Having experienced two days of cold weather for the first time since Nepal, I booked my ticket to the beaches of Bali, 25.000 rupiah, and took a last walk in the Probolinggo valley. The valley is pretty narrow, and VERY steep. The highest volcano here is Semeru, at 3676m. I'm not sure about the altitude at the guesthouse, but it may have been just above 1500m. From there you can look down the valley, where there is a major thunderstorm almost every night. It is fascinating to listen to thunder and watch the lightening from above, and it's certainly nothing you can see many places. Here, though, there's often just a few seconds between each lightening, and the air is very electric.
Another fascinating detail in this part of the valley was the "Cliffhanger farmers". Fertile soil is a treasure everywhere, also at the equator. And with all the volcanos in the area, the soil here is very fertile. And the Indonesians know how to take advantage of it. This is one of the places where watching the farmers harvesting their fields actually is very exciting. The reason is that some places the fields are at an angle of much more than 45 degrees, so that the farmers actually have to work on the fields while hanging in ropes secured at the top of the field. Ok, I know it sounds strange, but go and have a look, and you will see what I mean. It is an impressive sight!
But enough about the mountains. Let's go to the beach.