Indonesia

[PhillyB]

I've posted on here before that I'm in the final stages of a book project that's taken up a couple of years on and off. i wrote the first 250 pages in about a month on a ship crossing the pacific ocean from long beach to sydney, and shortly after that i went back to school and haven't had time to touch it. now that i've graduated i've decided to finish it this summer, and after a week and a half with my wife and kid in scotland i flew east, across the middle east and south asia, to kuala lumpur and then into indonesia.

 

 

 

 

i've been in bali for almost a week, holed up in a hostel in south bali's kuta city (which is a fuging concrete jungle, a million degrees and not much fun at all) doing little more than writing, and until i took a break to do some exploring today i hadn't taken a single picture, which is highly unusual for me. i rented a motorbike and drove up north through the hectic streets of denpassar and into ubud, the arts district, which is pretty phenomenal so far, about ten degrees cooler and ten times quieter. the only real drawback is that 80% of the town is 50-year-old women that came here because it's where eat, pray, love took place, which is pretty lame.

 

anyway i wandered down to the end of monkey forest road to - you guessed it - a forest full of monkeys. except for the fighting and the fuging they were pretty docile and i got a few cool pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i've got a few more days on the island before i jet off to sulawesi to hang out with dead people and buffalo slaughters, so i should snag some pretty cool shots of some of the volcanos on the northern part of bali. thanks for reading.

[PhillyB]

thus far the most useful phrase i have learned, by far, is "raksasa laut - ikan cumi-cumi - menyerang kapal" or, "it's a sea monster attacking a ship." i get asked about it a lot, probably because it's not the generic southeast asian tribal tat that all the australians get while they're wasted in kuta.

 

other impressions:

 

* it's hot as fug here, over 90 degrees most days and equatorial humidity to match

* the experience of southeast asia being obscenely cheap is continuing to disappear… lodging can still be had for cheap (my awesome-ass hostel was $11 a night) but food and drinks have gone up and up. local beers are three or four bucks in restaurants.

* i've gotten frighteningly efficient at getting out of traffic tickets in foreign countries

* indonesian breeds nuclear mosquitos

* a hostel is a terrible place to write a book, because you're forever caught between being rude and concentrating on writing or being sociable and hanging out with awesome people from all over the world.

[cookinwithgas]

I spent a couple of weeks in Indonesia but it wasn't as much fun as you are having. Worked out of Jakarta but the client was out in the woods. Still a neat culture and you are about literally on the opposite side of the globe as North Carolina.

[Chimera]

Do police still raid hostels in Bali several times a week?

[PhillyB]

I spent a couple of weeks in Indonesia but it wasn't as much fun as you are having. Worked out of Jakarta but the client was out in the woods. Still a neat culture and you are about literally on the opposite side of the globe as North Carolina.

 

for a backpacking trip in SEA i'm having surprisingly little fun, but i think that's because i'm completely focused on this stupid book. i haven't really even done anything at this point.

 

however tomorrow i'm going to bike up to a volcano so that should break the trend

[PhillyB]

Do police still raid hostels in Bali several times a week?

 

haha i doubt it, everything seems to be well enough regulated that they don't have to

[PandaPancake]

If you're in Indonesia you should check out the hash house

Sent from my XT1080 using CarolinaHuddle mobile app

[Jakob]

PhillyB had done more this month than I have in my 20 years on earth..

 

 

Honestly though, I love the stories.. Keep us updated and I hope you have a fun time.

[PhillyB]

PhillyB had done more this month than I have in my 20 years on earth

 

traveling is cheap and very doable. traveling being necessarily expensive is a myth. airline tickets can be expensive to and from a destination, but budget airlines have popped up all over the place and if you know what you're doing it's not very difficult to get around on the cheap. it's not hard to spend less than 10 bucks a night on a hostel, even in europe. unless you go out to eat every night or drink assloads of beer you can live on 5 bucks a day in food and eat extremely well (going out to the store and buying food and preparing it with other backpackers in the hostel kitchen is one of the quintessential backpacking experiences, tbqh.) on a bare-bones budget, just staying in hostels, making your own food, walking instead of using taxis, and the occasional public transport to the next destination, it's not very difficult to live off of $15 per day. at that rate you could stay in southeast asia or south america for two months and it'd run you less than a thousand bucks.

 

do it motherfuger

 

oh and here read this article on how millennials are changing the way americans travel

[Jakob]

traveling is cheap and very doable. traveling being necessarily expensive is a myth. airline tickets can be expensive to and from a destination, but budget airlines have popped up all over the place and if you know what you're doing it's not very difficult to get around on the cheap. it's not hard to spend less than 10 bucks a night on a hostel, even in europe. unless you go out to eat every night or drink assloads of beer you can live on 5 bucks a day in food and eat extremely well (going out to the store and buying food and preparing it with other backpackers in the hostel kitchen is one of the quintessential backpacking experiences, tbqh.) on a bare-bones budget, just staying in hostels, making your own food, walking instead of using taxis, and the occasional public transport to the next destination, it's not very difficult to live off of $15 per day. at that rate you could stay in southeast asia or south america for two months and it'd run you less than a thousand bucks.

 

do it motherfuger

 

oh and here read this article on how millennials are changing the way americans travel

Amazing article. Almost everyday I think about leaving the states and going on a crazy adventure to explore a new continent.

[PhillyB]

this morning i woke at dawn and jumped on my motorbike, bound for gunung batur, a volcano in the northern reaches of bali. i had drifted into ubud on fumes two days before, so my first goal was to get petrol. luckily inability to find a gas station doesn't really matter here; every ten feet you run into a guy with old absolut vodka bottles filled with gas for sale, marked up slightly for the convenience. i found out right away, gave the guy 14,000 rupiah for a liter (which i think ripped me off, but he just nodded when i get gave it to him, so it was enough, at least) and then took off with a nearly full tank.

 

it took an hour or so to get there… halfway there the road ascended perceptibly, if slightly, and continued to do so for mile after mile. i drove into clouds and my ears popped, and i wished i'd brought a jacket… it was cooling down considerably. as i got higher and closer i kept trying to catch a glimpse of batur or some other tell-tale peak jutting through the mist to show i was near, but no such luck.

 

and then i popped around a righthand corner, out of the clouds suddenly, to an intersecting road, and i stopped and gawked, because on the other side of the road there was nothing, just a sheer drop-off and a sweeping valley below, magnificent batur exploding from its plains far below, a lake-filled caldera to its right, ringed by several more jagged volcanos. absolutely magnificent.

 

 

 

 

 

after getting hassled by wannabe mountain guides and the occasional woman selling burnt offerings to batur (which i believe is bali's second most sacred mountain) i carefully navigated the road to the shores of the lake far below, where i found a nice little carpark on the water and got to stretch my legs and take a few pictures. i am normally a crafty bargainer and a seasoned expert at politely shutting down the sales pitches before they can begin with just my body language, but i met my match and ended up buying a leather bracelet from an old lady when she approached me at the lake. whatever, she was nice and it was two bucks.

 

 

 

 

i grabbed more gas on the way back - 8000 Rupiah (roughly $0.60 USD) gave me half a tank of gas, which got me all the way back to ubud. petrol is cheap here and motorbikes get great gas mileage. the only hiccup was when i tried to pass a convoy of slow-moving dump trucks winding their way back up the crater. passing stuff was routine but this time it bit me in the ass. one of the trucks swerved to the right and pushed me to the side of the road going around the corner, and a pickup was coming in the opposite direction, so i had to shoot for a narrow space on the shoulder to the right of both of them, and i hit it, realized instantly it was loose sand, skidded, jammed, my arm into the retaining wall, realized there was a drainage ditch hidden there, and wrestled desperately with the bike to keep it from falling in. i kicked a foot against the wall and pushed, and then a biker passing the same same truck saw me and slowed to stick out a hand, which i grabbed, and gunned it, caught solid ground, and lurched off onto pavement, yelling "kasih!" over my shoulder. and then i headed back to ubud, pausing only to put in my earbuds so i could jam to audioslave the rest of the way back.

 

excellent day.

[PhillyB]

the last couple of days have been incredible. i buckled down and got a ton of work done on my book and then took off on a plane from bali (which i judge finally as incredibly overrated, with a few bright points) to sulawesi, that oddly shaped island in the sunda archipelago that i remember gazing at in the atlas as a kid and becoming strangely obsessed with it, an obsession that never stopped as i spent the next twenty years taking in its lore, from the old nautical epics filled with south seas savages to the great naval transits in the celebes sea to the blair brothers' documentary of the tana toraja and their cult of the dead back in the 80s.
 
going to this island was a 20-year dream come true.
 
 

 
makassar, which is one of indonesia's oldest ports and the home of the legendary bugis sailors, known for generational piracy under iconic black-sailed skiffs. frightened dutch sailors began circulating the term "bugis man" which entered english lexicon as the boogeyman, which is where that term comes from. anyway makassar was a bustling old town, frenetic but with a backwater charm that seems lacking in a lot of other southeast asian cities. i only had two days here, which was hardly enough, and i honestly was so taken by its homey waterfront scene choked with warungs (local restaurants) and food stalls and families out to watch the spectacular sunsets that i seriously considered eating the cost of my ticket to toraja land far in the north and just staying in makassar instead.
 

 
 
but tana toraja was too much to pass up. the toraja are world-renowned for their funerary practices, which are, in short, three-day spectacles that involve massive buffalo slaughters in honor of deceased social elites, bullfighting, and massive, zombie-like funeral processions.
 
i am sad to say that i did not get to witness any of these events. i took a long, winding night bus 10 hours north into the depths of south sulawesi, jumping off in rantepao, the center hub of the toraja region, and found out that i'd missed the good stuff and that a new funeral wouldn't start until after i'd left to return to makassar. the only option was watching elaborate preparation processes, which would've been interesting, but not worth the entire day and $70 it'd take to do.
 
so instead i did some independent trekking, which is more my style anyway. i rented a motorbike and took off up into the hills. the torajans, besides their funerals, are known for their iconic boat-shaped houses, which look something like bananas on stilts. seeing them is a bit like spotting the empire state building for the first time (or maybe that's just me.) seeing them visibly, tangibly, in giant clusters, is something special.
 

 
 

 
 

 
i wandered into one village that was reported to have cliffside graves. once the torajans are done with their funerals, the dead are placed into caves, hollowed-out rocks, or in intricate wooden coffins that are attached to the sides of cliffs. they are placed visibly and accessibly so relatives can visit them, bring them offerings, keep them company, etc. (it's not uncommon to see little kids playing catch with grandma's skull.) in addition, life-sized, realistic effigies called tau-tau are constructed to represent the deceased and placed in nearby nooks in the cliffs. strange traditions to us, to them, quite normal. photographing the bones was an odd experience simply because it was so culturally appropriate to be near human remains lying around in open boxes. i worked my way into a limestone cave that curled down into blackness, illuminated by my iphone flashlight, which was almost entirely absorbed by the cave, leading to some creepy skull-on-a-random-pile-of-rocks moments.
 

 

 

[Jackofalltrades]

I always love and thoroughly enjoy reading these write ups. I'm living vicariously through you.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using CarolinaHuddle mobile app

[PhillyB]

a few more random shots from a string of torajan villages high in the south sulawesi mountains