Yogyakarta

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So at the end of the last blog I was in Yogyakarta, universally called “Yogya” (pronounced “Jogja”). This found me in the middle of Java, which is the most populous island on earth by a country mile. In other words, it has a population (over 120 million) about that of Japan in an island not much more than half the size of Victoria. Yogya is often called the “soul” of Indonesia, which I don’t think is meant to mean that it exists only as an epiphenomenon of the brain but rather that it’s Indonesia’s cultural, historical, religious and educational capital. It’s also apparently the place where the Javanese language is still spoken the most and in its purest form. It’s supposed to have a population of only around half a million, although I don’t know how you measure these things since as best as I can work out, Java is pretty much one giant city. I’ve seen some try to claim the title of “world’s largest village” for Yogya, which is quite apt as it’s got a nice feel, which is why it’s the most popular tourist destination on Java. Yogya has a number of (apparently) very good universities, some leading Islamic colleges, and of course the best place for Batik art and wayang puppet performances; but for tourists its main attraction is its proximity to the ancient Hindu temple of Prambanan and the equally ancient Buddhist temple of Borobudur. It was also near the epicentre of the earthquake in 2006 which killed six thousand people. Historically, Yogya was (I think) the capital of Indonesia during Dutch occupation, and for the first three years of Independence. The then-Sultan of the Yogyakarta Special Region served as Vice President under the Suharto administration for decades, and before that was instrumental in gaining independence - the handover of power was done in Yogya.




Sorry this blog is so late, I actually wrote it four days ago, but haven't been able to get on the Internet. I'm rushing to publish it now as the Internet cafe is shutting. The good news for you (or hte bad news if you're only reading my blogs to be polite) is that I've got the next one-and-a-half blogs written, so they should be up soon. Currently (Monday night, 23/03/09) I'm in Kota Bharu. My next blog is about Prambanan and Borobodur, and the one after that will be about the trip to Kota Bharu, or maybe all the way through to Bangkok.




I’m going to do these blogs a bit out of chronological order, because I think the temples require their own blog. This one is about the rest of Yogya, even though I saw the temples pretty much on the first day I was there.

The Sultan’s Palace dominates the city, sitting at the end of Marlioboro Street, which is kind of the main drag. Indeed most of the interesting part of the city is the two kilometres or so down this street from the train station to the Sultan’s Palace. Sosorowijaya street, the big tourist location, where I stayed, is a little street just off this Marlioboro. I liked this better than most tourist streets like Khao San Road in Bangkok or anywhere in Kuta, because it has plenty enough English speaking shops, tour companies, passable restaurants, etc., plus heaps of tiny little gangs to explore, but also plenty of local people, food stalls and stores. Indeed on a weekend it seems to be a bit of a place for local nightlife, and it was weird to me to see probably a hundred people sitting out the front of the Circle-K shop (the equivalent of 7-11) , just chatting and smoking cigarettes. It’s full of becaks, traditional pedal-powered trishaws, which are actually used by locals, not, as I first thought, just tourists, and even traditional horse-drawn carts. There was something quite soothing about sitting in a cafe watching the brightly decorated becaks move past, pedalled by sinewy little guys in pointy hats.

Even the touts are less persistent on Sosorowijaya street. Once you venture out onto Marlioboro Road though they are very persistent in trying to sell you Batik. At least they do this by trying to engage you in conversation, talking honesty about whatever connection they might have to your home country, before making up the stuff about a government-sponsored Batik exhibition which ends tonight, or whatever. In general terms, around the world, an honest start to a conversation is one that goes like this:

Them: Hello Mister. You look happy today. Where are you from?
You: Australia
Them: Oh, really, I have a cousin studying at Sydney University. Lives in Glebe.
You: Oh, really. I’m from Melbourne. It’s nice up there in Sydney, though. What is he studying....?

Whereas a dishonest start to a conversation is one that goes something like this:
Them: Hello Mister. You look happy today. Where are you from?
You: Australia
Them: Oh, really, whereabouts? Melbourne, Sydney ...?
You: Innaminca
Them: Oh, really! My cousin lives in Innaminca!


But it seems like their unwritten law is to only lie about the actual Batik art exhibition (the government doesn’t sponsor or sell Batik art, and if it did it wouldn’t do so through a little shop in a back lane; and sales that “end tonight” are the same all around the world). You can play a bit of a game with these guys to see how long you can draw them out before they mention the word “Batik”. I got to the stage where I would chat if I had time, and then just walk away without a word as soon as they mentioned “Batik”, because it gets a bit annoying. However I did want to buy some Batik, but I think I did get ripped off. Of course, getting ripped off in a place like Indonesia still means that you pay less than you would at home, and is bound to happen occasionally.

Yogya also has some of the air-conditioned shopping malls for the beautiful people, for which Jakarta is much more famous. The main mall on Marlioboro street has a McDonalds which serves rice in little packages to go along with the fried chicken. Inside the shopping centre though, you’d think you were in any of the big shopping centres in Melbourne or Sydney, except that the air-conditioning is turned up much colder. Indonesians don’t seem to have got the hang of air-conditioning, and always turn it up so as to give you hypothermia. I think the point of this is to allow them to wear cool-looking jackets. I know that their neighbours, the Singaporeans, are famous for living in air-conditioned flats, taking air-conditioned trains to their air-conditioned offices during the week and to air-conditioned shopping malls or air-conditioned gyms; but I don’t remember whether they set their air-conditioners to mimic a balmy winters day in Greenland. Anyway, the point is that most of the advertising and the shop names, brand names, etc., seems to be in English, and they sell much the same stuff that any other shopping centre sells.

So I went to the Sultan’s palace. The price includes a local guide, but you have to pay extra for a camera license, to be allowed to take photos. The guide knows more than you want to know about all the various past Sultans. The point is that the Sultans all take their role as champion of Javanese culture very seriously, and everyone loves the Sultan. The national government tried to diminish the role of the Sultan, but the people resisted. The current Sultan is running for president in the elections in July (not the April elections which are different). As I mentioned the previous Sultan was very influential in the founding of independent Indonesia. There’s all sorts of symbolism in the artwork, much of it Hindu, such as statues of snakes and suchlike which represent various numbers which when read backwards give the year of the coronation of that Sultan, in Javanese numbers. The guide wasn’t able to explain to me how the Javanese calendar works, but I think the point is it’s only got 350 days, and dates back to the arrival of Hinduism in Java.

Being a Muslim, the Sultan is not allowed to drink alcohol, but he has a special drinking house reserved for offering foreign dignitaries a small drink. Also being Muslim, he’s only allowed four wives. The current Sultan, being modern, only has one wife (and four daughters, hence no heir, according to the guide, which disagrees with wikipedia), but previous Sultans have had up to nine, I think. The rule about only four apparently doesn’t apply to them because they’re Sultans. Apparently one of the Sultan’s daughters lives in Sydney. The guide thought it quite amusing that another one of the daughters is so fat that when she got married her scrawny little commoner husband couldn’t perform the traditional ritual of carrying her into the ceremony on his shoulders. There is of course displays of some intricately patterned Batik, some photos about different ways to make Batik, and collections of all sorts of paraphernalia given to the various Sultans over the last few hundred years by various nations, like a grandfather clock from Holland, a tea set from England, etc. They also have a wayang show, without the shadows, which I watched along with about 100 school children on excursions from Singapore and Malaysia.

Sometimes it pays to just ignore touts, ie everyone who tries to say hello to you. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s kind of a personal choice. On leaving the Sultan’s palace, trying to navigate by my woefully inadequate map and the non-existent signs on the way out (unlike the way in), I was stopped by someone who told me I was going the wrong way. Of course this is a common ruse, but since I didn’t know which way to go, and the way he was suggesting looked just as likely, I went that way. He followed me, and started chatting.

After a while I told him that I wasn’t interested in buying anything, paying for a tour, seeing Batik, hailing a becak or anything like that. He told me that this is fine and he just likes practising his English and showing people around. I said he could do what he wanted but I wasn’t going to pay him anything, and he was fine with this. I was still dubious, in fact I was sceptical right up until the moment we parted company about three hours later after he’d shown me several interesting sights. I really think he was genuine. At most he got free entry to the Water Palace. Maybe there was some hope of commission at the puppet-making place we walked past, but he didn’t push me to go in at all (and of course I didn’t buy anything). I think he really just wanted to better his English, which was passable already.

We went through the “bird market” which actually sells pretty much any animal you can think of smaller than a dog, from insects through to snakes. I couldn’t identify most of them, except a few puppies, some weird-looking cats (perhaps wild?), some weird gecko things, a bunch of owls, insects (as food for ones pets), chickens, lots of other birds, snakes, lots of small owls, skinks, etc. Most of these of course were crammed into tiny cages in ways that we’d think of as quite cruel.

The Water Palace includes a bunch of ruins, and a palace used by the early Sultans’ families for swimming. I don’t know if the information the “guide” gave me was correct and he was a bit uncertain anyway, but you get what you paid for. These are well worth seeing and are a good vantage point for looking out over the city. The baths themselves are quite nice and there were a number of arts students there practising drawing the plants and the pool. There are three pools, one for the Sultan’s daughters, one for the Sultan’s wives, and one other one, I forget, I think for the Sultan’s favourite wife. The Sultan himself didn’t swim but sat in a little tower up the top watching. The pools are all shallow, since Indonesians don’t know how to swim, remember? These baths and the ruins were of course only used by the early Sultans.

This is right next to the “underground mosque” which isn’t all underground. I didn’t quite work out how much of it was actually underground, but there’s an underground entrance. The interesting thing about this mosque is that it’s circular, meaning that most of the faithful are in fact not facing Mecca when they pray. I like to imagine that it was built by someone who secretly hated Muslims, to make sure that God couldn’t hear their prayers because they were facing the wrong way, or perhaps to try to get a laugh watching them all trying to find qibla (even if they don't play scrabble).

On the way back I happened across a massive election campaign. I think this was for both the April election and the July elections. It seemed to have a massive party atmosphere, with people all in good spirits. The traffic was a nightmare as it seemed that everyone in town suddenly decided to congregate on the one stadium where it was being held, with a constant stream of traffic, in becaks, motorcycles, busses, trucks, and even the occasional car. I didn’t work out quite what was going on, but remembering the standard warnings about political gatherings or large groups of people, and mainly because I couldn’t understand a word of what was going on, I moved on.

Being in Yogya I felt compelled to see a real wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performance. It’s the thing you have to do in Yogya even if you don’t want to. The Sonobudoyo Museum has a performance of the Ramayana (? I think, there wasn't much information about what it actually was) from 20:00 - 22:00 every night, so I took a becak there, because I was too lazy to walk. There was a vendor out the front selling food, which was pretty awful ... their nasi ayam goreng (chicken fried rice) was a massive bowl of white rice with a little bowl of chilli, and the a piece of chicken that must have been a bantam, probably one that got picked on at school for being too tiny. Oh, this was accompanied by a tiny bowl of vegetables, mainly cucumber slices and raw cabbage. Anyway, it was cheap, and killed some time before the performance.

You can probably imagine the performance for yourself. It’s like watching shadows that change every five minutes or so, for two hours, while listening to someone chanting monotonously in Javanese, accompanied by hitting on wood and occasional music. The shadow thing works well though and it’s easy to sit back and imagine that you’re at the cinema watching a really really boring cartoon in Javanese, or, if you have less imagination, watching a Javanese TV show about shadow puppets without subtitles on a very large black-and-white TV. Of course at the end some guy with buck teeth and an “I love New York” T-shirt cornered me to try to sell me the shadow puppets, so I left. Perhaps this is why most of the other tourists (there were only about 10 to start with) left before the end of the performance. Or maybe they were just bored.

So I walked back, up Marlioboro road at 22:00 on a weeknight. The shops and street vendors had pretty much all closed. People were setting up a few new food stalls as if preparing for nightshift. Homeless people and beggars were setting up beds in front of stores. People were sitting around in groups smoking, in the way which is normal in Indonesia but would be viewed with suspicion in Australia, since we seem to think a group has to be walking somewhere or drinking something or playing something to be legitimate. A group of six young women, five in headscarves, and two young men, one strumming a guitar, were having a bit of a sing-along, obviously weirdly embarrassing songs from their reaction. It was kind of cool to see the street without all the vendors and Batik con-artists. Yogya is quite cool at night, it seems a nice place in that regard although the mid-afternoon sun does have quite a sting to it. It hardly rained at all the whole time I was there. Probably the weirdest thing about the city is that the airport seems to be in the centre of town, so a couple of times a day you hear a loud roar a bit like a lion, particularly a lion which can do a good impersonation of a jet plane landing, and for the first day or two you think that the volcano must have erupted again, until you realise where the airport is. There’s plenty of things that could be worse about a city, so I quite enjoyed Yogya.




For some reason the train speaker system right now is playing The Eagles “Hotel California” quite loudly. I’m not sure if that’s a terribly popular song here, but it’s a nice change from lightly played Indonesian karaoke videos. Hmm now there’s a great big long announcement in Indonesian, of which the only words I understood were the Indonesian words for “welcome” and “station”. It went on for ages so maybe it was important. No doubt I’ll find out. The problem here in the more civilised parts of Indonesia is that so many people speak English, so I haven’t really picked up any more Indonesian since I left Flores which must be nearly two weeks ago. One English-language song which seems to get played a lot on the local radio stations or TV, I think (I’ve of course heard very little local radio or TV), it’s even on a TV add for something to do with mobile phones, is “Song for Gaza” by Michael Heart (whom I hadn’t heard of before). I wonder if this gets played a lot back home, or if Indonesia plays it as a bit of solidarity with the rest of the Muslim world? The funny thing is I think the first place I heard it was on West Timor, so it’s at least partly cultural I guess.




So after Yogya I took the night train to Jakarta, and a taxi straight to the ferry terminal for the ferry to Batam, which is an Indonesian island near Singapore. This meant that I saw virtually nothing of “the Big Durian” as expats call Jakarta, but by all accounts this wasn’t much of a loss. It was kind of exciting to see skyscrapers though, the first time I’d seen them since Darwin. There were certainly some lovely mansions along the riverside, out of the taxi window. But I can’t claim to have anything interesting to say about Indonesia’s capital, which if you include the greater metropolitan area of the surrounding cities, has almost as many people as Australia.

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Photos

Sultan's palace
the spock ears symbolise wisdom

Sultan's palace
wayang puppets

Sultan's palace
wayang performer with his ceremonial kris

Comments

[Norman]

nice blog
Daniel, this is an awesome blogs...I enjoy reading your blog specially when your were in my hometown Yogyakarta. I should have give you my home address so you can rest or maybe asked my friends to take you around. Me as Indonesian has not travel to other part of Indonesia, and you have visited the place I haven't been to...enjoy the rest of the trips...