Motorcycle Blogs: Beachcombing in Jawa Timur

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GWM looking for the right guy in the wrong town

Few of the young men resemble their profile pics. In a crowded mall the far side of the city our protagonist meets with one such man. He’s a good two feet shorter than expected and still dressed in his drab brown work uniform. “Sales Executive” refers to his new job selling light fixtures at a householdware department store. He earns an equivalent to one hundred dollars a month, a quarter of which covers room and board.

The Internet chatrooms spliced with memories of National Geographic presented Indonesia with a false sense of the romantic, images of men who, strong and smooth and brown, strode perpetually half naked and virile across wet rice paddies. And while this is true of distant figures spied from the highway that cuts into the countryside, the image fails to consider their minds and their lives. Most of the city boys have little more experience of the world or hope to ever travel outside Indonesia. What remains is a small community, elite, spoiled, educated in private institutions in Jakarta, Singapore or Europa, they have drivers and housekeepers and little contact with local customs. Iggy is home for summer break before he starts graduate studies in Malmo. He arrives late to the café in the mall, dressed like a preppy schoolmate of Prince Andrew’s.

Sino-Indonesian, 24yo, 168cm, average build, English, Mandarin, Bahasa.
First impressions, he’s not your type. Iggy and you share similar enough interests and discuss a camping trip to Pulau Sempu on the south coast over the long weekend, an island nature reserve reached by chartered fishing boat. He books the train tickets; you pack the fruit, a salad and some bread. The taxi pulls up late Saturday morning. Although it’s Independence Day weekend, the train station platform is relatively calm, three young men in beige coveralls push and pull a towering wagon of cardboard boxes. Iggy and you have little to talk about. You watch the shanty houses pass below the window and the quiet scenes unwinding along the platforms of outerlying neighbourhood stations, motionless figures, expressionless faces. The countryside appears, the train climbs impercebtibly towards Malang. Iggy hastens you from the station onto a bimo connecting to the bus station where another bimo fills and continues south to Turen’s main market where a half hour ticks by as three greedy young entrepreneurs cram a black minivan to the brim. An old woman in the second bench exits at the last moment upset with the young driver’s behavior towards an elderly gentleman who refuses to board. He drives like a maniac. The road climbs a steep incline and the view looking back to the north stretches broad and green. The fields grow wilder in the mountains; the air cools, as the sky turns overcast. Iggy and you let out on the edge of the fishing village, Sedangbiru, where a visit to the conservatie bureau is required of foreigners and unsuspecting Indonesians. A robust man in a green-brown uniform sits behind a desk lecturing Iggy. ‘No fires, no guitars, bring your trash out with you. And you must pray to the island spirit before crossing.’ You must pay a small fee, followed with another payment to a parking attendant before approaching the muddy shore where you are lead into the tide to a tethered long wooden boat painted white and blue and yellow. The beach is a jumble of bright colorful boats snoozing beneath the low grey clouds. The boat’s owner is a handsome young speciman with a dazzling smile to whom Eddie passes the required taxi fee and takes down his cell number for the return journey. The engine revs hysterically.

An hour’s slog through the forest brings you to a small sandy strip along one edge of a wide almost circular lagoon. The crash of waves can be heard beyond the rocky ridge encircling the camp. Several tents lie scattered across the beach butted againts clumps of prickly shrubs and giant aloe vera. Young people play football on the shore, others cook tins of instant noodle over tiny camp stoves, a guitar is being strummed. Your little tent is unravelled and erected. The night sky enfolds around you. Iggy lights a few clever little candles, something he learned along the way, little energy drink bottles, a hole drilled in each screwcap through which is passed a soft rope, one end bathes in gasoline, the other end is ignited. He pulls from his duffel bag a bottle of red wine from Portugal. It’s absolutely delicious, a duty-free gift, the last of a case sent from a college buddy’s family’s vineyard in the Algarve. It’s been more than a year since you last tasted such a satisfying bottle of wine. You drink from re-used yogourt containers. You have a buzz. Iggy’s tales about London and his Spanish party animal roommates seem almost interesting. You’d warned Iggy that it was a one-man tent. The guitar strumming continues into the early morning but you’ve brought earplugs and eventually fall asleep inches from but never touching your tent-mate. In the morning beneath a hot fryp-pan sky, sand settled into every crevice, you boil water and enjoy a cup of coffee, sit perched atop the ridge where you can admire the froth of the ocean slamming into the island’s porous bank while the sun paints your skin a deep pink. You do not concern yourself with Iggy, it’s your weekend, and your less than satisfying job is two hundred kilometres away. An invigorating plunge in the lagoon reveals a swath of coral and the odd school of painted fish. You return to the ridge midday and seek out a sliver of shade in a cove protected from the wind and splash from where you sketch the Indian Ocean’s tumultuous ebb and flow, the dance of white foam on dark blue rocks, the sparkle of sunshine on a sapphire surface.

The prospect of another evening on a remote beach surrounded by wannabe rockstars prompts Iggy and I to pack up camp and explore the side trails for quieter reaches. A trailhead hidden under large crisp brown leaves leads into a quiet opening in the forest. Iggy feels scared and is useless leading the way. He follows me towards the sound of crashing waves, crossing fallen tree trunks and brushing aside spiderwebs, to reach a broad sandy beach. A broad bay at lowtide reveals a rocky stretch of coral and sponge. Iggy and I are returned to our boyhood exploring the tidepools, collecting odd seashells and holding up for each other strange discoveries, black spikey urchins, white foot long slithery worms, palm sized hermit crabs with hairy legs and stylish condos. I scour the beach for white and purple shells to make a necklace while Iggy searches under rocks for a tastey shellfish. I prepare a fire and surprise Iggy with a few platic pouches of chilli sauce to acompany the salty delicacies, oversized green and yellow booger-like creatures.

I wake early to the rhythmic swoosh of ocean and sand. The tent feels stuffy. I take my matt and my novel, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and lie on the beach. The tidepools have disappeared; hightide fills the bay with rocking waves clawing at the soft sand, at the tiny fragments of shell and coral to produce a calming pitter-patter. I’ll remember this sound. A black figure floats headdown tossed in the waves close to shore, a figure with black hair, perhaps a dog. I walk closer. It’s a monkey. Its chest is bloaded, it’s head flung back beneath the surface. I try to imagine the events leading to its demise. Was it dead before it entered the water? Was it killed or did it die naturally? Strange, yesterday while exploring the bay I’d had two thoughts; first, how the setting would be perfect for a detective film, the body of an unknown woman washes ashore in the opening scene - it’s always a woman - and later after witnessing several monkeys swinging in the trees along the shore, I wondered whether in Indonesia there existed a species that could swim, like the sloth in the Amazon. The drowned creature is tossed a few times upon the beach but ultimately dregged back out to sea.

Midday Iggy and I begin our return journey, an hour’s slog through the forest, a quick boatride to the mainland, an hour and a half looping through the village aboard a bimo searching for passengers. In Turen we transfer bimos and fifteen kilometres outside Malang come to a halt in a long line of traffic festooned about a holiday weekend carnival in a village unprepared to accommodate so many tired and impatient engines. The two-hour drive to Malang has stretched into its seventh hour when Iggy and I alight the last coach bound for Surabaya. There are over ninety passengers aboard the bus. I pay the taxi-ride from Purabaya bus station and bid Iggy a goodnight at the gates to his parent’s humble mansion. I decline any further invitations of his. And vow never to rely on public transport in this third world paradise so long as I have my own wheels.

Indonesian, 19yo, slim build, Art Student.
Eddy is still a teenager but there’s little threat of things turning serious. He works in Bali, does web design for an internationally recognized artist, and is spending a short while at home to see whether his college professors require any further assignments before issuing his diploma. Eddy’s cute, his shoulder length thick black hair conceals serious acne, his slim build gives the illusion of height and an expensive trip to the dentist has straightened his gleaming white smile. His conversation is that of a typical nineteen year old but so are his long smooth legs. In the short term the latter characteristic prevails and you spend an increasing amout of time together. You show Eddy the seashells you collected at Pulau Sempu and he suggests a visit to his hometown, a fishing village on the north coast. The next Friday within an hour of finishing work, the two of us are packed and zipping our way northeast through Gresik. Eddy drives slowly, the highway still teaming with big trucks; my rucksack starts to grow heavy. The night air grows cool and beyond Lamongan a quiet countryside awaits us. At half past ten we pull into Tuban, a tidy town centre with well cared for curbs and a spacious park where an outdoor foodfair is still serving. We meet Eddy’s cousin and order before returning to his quiet home, a cramped old building where the walls do not reach the ceiling, where a grandfather lies sleeping on a couch in the frontroom and where Eddy’s cousin’s wife sweeps the floor in the dining area where Eddy and I shall sleep the night. Exhausted, you pass out on the floor for a moment. Eddy and his relations drink cold sodas and watch a popular drama series. “Eddy,” I whisper, “Are we spending the night here? I’m thirty years old and I work full-time so I can afford some level of comfort. I cannot spend the night here.” Eddy explains to his cousin that we would prefer a hotel room. His cousin is understanding and thankful and hops his big old vespa to lead us to a nearby hotel. The night is not over yet.

The first hotel looks pleasant enough, quiet, half empty, but the front desk assures us that there are only a/c rooms available, at twice the cost of a fan room. I’m too frugal and the temperature too cool to warrant such extravagance. Eddy’c cousin leads us across town from one hotel to another; either too expensive, full or closed for the night. We’re all set to book into a cheap guesthouse, a decaying heritage building that looks more like a Daoist temple than a hostel, when the receptionist realizes his late night guest’s companion is a foreigner. “Sorry, no foreigners,” he returns Eddy his money, says he doesn’t have the government paperwork to allow foreigners, try the hotel down the road, he suggests. I didn’t encounter these problems in Sumatra. The next two hotels are closed. Eddy’s cousin bangs at the gate at our last hope. A light turns on. A guard leads us into the reception lobby where a small Chinese woman with a sleepy, disgruntled face looks at my I.D. and Eddy’s. She wants my passport. It’s in my employer’s protection, I have Eddy translate, all the information she needs is printed on the kitas. She is adamant. She needs a passport or she will have problems with the police. Call the police, I tell her. She looks at the clock, past one in the morning. I’m confused. I can’t reckon why in this out of the way town where undoubtedly fewer than a dozen foreigners turn up to each year, that there is a problem. Is she making it up? I want to be the bully in the movies with money and power who always gets his way.

I apologize to Eddy’s cousin for taking so much of his time and tell Eddy I still have the energy to continue to Bulu. There we’ll have our own bedroom so long as somebody’s awake to open the gate. Traffic is slow along the coast highway, wide trucks queue behind night-shift construction. I weave through the headlights and tail lights, a sharp wind cuts across our path, the highway climbs a low rise through a forest where the wind grows fiercer. “Slow down,” Eddy calls in my ear, spying the silhoutte of fishing boats tethered along the beach, “we’re almost there, the road should be on the left soon.” In the dark sleeps his village, a few thousand souls, crowded in dirt-floored shacks, dreaming aboard creaky boats, flung across the back seats of peddy cabs, in simple brick and mortar homes built quickly and simply, all drifting off. A narrow paved road climbs a gentle slope away from the beach. Following Eddy’s directions, I pull into a dirt lot surrounding an open pavilion, a musholla or assembly hall of sorts from which extend several alleys hardly wide enough for a scooter. Behind the pavillion Eddy rings a bell by a brass gate tucked to the near corner of a leafy yard. A lean young man, a caretaker, shows us inside the simple guesthouse where he too stays. I am soon sound asleep on a hard bed in a quiet stuffy room, a small electric fan guards against the mosqitoes.

Late morning my friend walks with me across the dirt yard of the pavilion, a weekend meeting place for little boys too immersed in their games to notice a buleh in their midst. Where the road starts to climb towards the market at the far end of the village stands a broad white house belonging to more of Eddy’s relations. On the front stoop two old women sit on a tattered rattan bed frame selling vegetables. Three generations of women smile when Eddy calls inside the door. They scurry about the back room and instruct the two of us to sit. The front room is a simple rectangle of cement. There are no paintings, no photographs, only a single conventional looking clock hangs on the wall, the white paint has yellowed from cigarette smoke. A young man lies face down across a thin futon. His wife, the youngest woman of the house, serves us coffee and jakwe. Her nine-month old boy crawls about the frontroom’s rugs. His older brother appears in the doorway to investigate the scene. The man lying prone on the futon shifts position but remains unconsious of the impromptu gathering. The great grandmother crouches in the doorway and sings imitating danduk music to which the young child propped up by his mother begins to wobble and shake a free form interpretive dance.

A paved footpath leads off the road around the side of the house along a crest in the hillside through a peaceful neighbourhood of simple wood shacks painted in bright blues and greens and yellows, crowned with claytile roofs. Eddy wants a quick visit with his paternal grandmother. Her home is one of the poorest, its walls woven from bamboo or rattan. She is tiny and wrinkled, a beautiful grandmother, and lives with Eddy’s youngest Uncle who looks young and very handsome for his years and suffers from epilepsy. There are no windows and no toilet or bath or running water. The house is meant for shade and protects them somewhat from the rains. The earth floor is swept clean. A broken shard of mirror, a dirty comb and a calendar with Islamic terms hang from the wall. Eddy’s grandmother returns with two glasses of cool and refreshing Es Cao. A brave pair of young boys follows after the bule and stands at the door watching, each holding nonchalantly a small hen in his arm. Behind the house a gentle slope covered in dry grass leads to a large cemetery spreading across the middle of the village almost down to where the road meets the coastal highway. Goats munch among the tombstones. The debris of stranded kites shakes in the tree branches.

The beach is not like those on tourism brocures; rather, strung with garbage, it’s a parkling lot, a public toilet, an access to the sea and her withering bounty of fish. Eddy and I look for seashells, and turn our heads from fishermen squatting in the tide between the striped hulls. Across the busy coastal road from the local fish market, a covered blue and white pavilion where early afternoon a couple men and women remain with a few fish left to sell from their baskets, Eddy points out another relation’s address. The middle-aged couple are sitting out front, enclosed by a miniature jungle of potted plants, palms, ferns, cactii, tropical flowering species, and pleasently protected from the sand and grime kicked up along the road. Eddy hasn’t spoken to this Aunt and Uncle in several years. They are well-off, live in a spacious house with fine old furniture, tiled floors, I’m reminded of visits to my great Aunts and Uncles’, whose homes appeared little changed from the pages in their photo albums, the very smell denoted a simpler, less chaotic, less adulterated way of life. The middle-aged couple offers us a cold drink. Do I like fish? They own a fishmarket up the road and invite us to return for supper. The Uncle shows me to the small paved backyard where he’s growing miniature frangipani and bright prickly cactii. He tells Eddy and I about a beach down the coast a few kilometres back towards Tuban. It’s easy to find. Beyond barren fields and dried-up fish farm pools appears a jut of coastline covered in dark green trees. Eddy thinks he’s been here before with his mother when he was little. It’s quiet. A narrow strip of sand divides the rocky shore from the grassy bank. My friend helps me search the tide for pretty seashells. Amazing how the husk of a dead creature can be so beautiful. The sun lowers revealing the blue-grey outline of Gunung Muria, a mile-high summit on a peninsula famed for its wood furniture. A group of young fishermen unabashed in only their short underpants squat along a high bank above their boats resting at day’s end.

It is a confusing maze in the evening, light from open doorways, I follow Eddy through the back lanes to an Uncle’s house. A covered alley leads to a high iron gate and to the grand front entrance of the village’s finest home. A stout woman greets us covered in an unrevealing bright floral gown. She has big bulging eyes and her long hair is dyed an unnaturally dark black, which makes her appear all the more unsettling. Images of an Olympic track event flitter across a large plasma screen at the base of a wide curving staircase the far end of a spacious livingroom. She shows us in. We sit on the thick cushioned rattan sofa to the woman’s left and are offered litchi and starfruit. An older less made up woman brings us each a glass of iced tea. The evening call to prayer is concluding. A loud megaphone brings to life the high-pitched squwak of several caged birds upstairs. After a long wash and a short rest we are served several seafood dishes, fish of varying size, in soup, fried, spiced, and some tasty squid black as ink, accompanied with coconut rice and Tempe. A text to Eddy’s mobile instructs us that our dinner is ready at his other Aunt and Uncle’s down by the fishmarket. Their young maid shows us in, Aunt and Uncle are off playing badminton, their young children sit mute before the TV set.I’ve eaten enough for three this evening and sleep well.

It’s still dark out, a perfect absence of noise fills the cool air in the single still hour between morning prayer and morning chores. Eddy and I ride into the fields behind the village and loop around to the coast road. The stern silhouettes of breezy palm trees, lone figures, quiet shacks and rocking boats against a flawless sky are inspired with soft shades. A hazy golden disc rises between the masts. Chest deep in mercurial surf, a line of fishermen pass among the hulls unloading the night’s catch. Dawn describes the crabs rustling among the rocks, goats munching along the bank and the churning soup of saltwater and sand. Eddy follows my directions up a side road I’d spied in the next village by the beach. We pass a cyclist’s wideload of hay and an old ox-cart pulled by two gaunt milky cows. Traveling the backroads is traveling back in time. The village market fills a small front yard where a half dozen women are gathered. The bovine traffic wandering the rooad outnumbers the villagers scattered along curbside sundry shops. A warung tucked inside a garden hidden behind a grass matted wall advertises coffee and pecel rice. A jovial pair of women serve a row of customers seated along a bench striped with sunlight breaking through chinks in the wall. Eddy answers the usual barrage of questions on my behalf. There’s been only one other foreigner to their village many years ago. We leave our bike and stroll into the lanes, uneven dirt paths littered with goat droppings and cow pies. Often the paths disappear altogether and we ask permission to cross a villager’s verandah. Inquisitive smiles ask if I am looking to buy property in the village. There’s no running water, no toilets. A few wells stand in common courtyards from which robust women fetch pales full to feed their livestock. In the back lane seperating the village from the vast fields of corn and wheat figures squat discretely. Still, it would cross my mind to live in such a place. I stop to photograph a few cottages. To more questions Eddy explains that their homes are unusual to me. Do the villagers recognize the beauty in their simple construction, the contrast of blues and reds, the woodwork on the doorways?

A text message from Eddy’s big rich Uncle sidetracks our intentions to return home for a nap and a quiet afternoon on the beach. His driver fetches us to a restaurant specializing in ayam kampung, free range chicken. Eddy’s Uncle is a large man with a round face topped with oily grey hair. He orders me an entire chicken and two tall glasses of iced tea and sits across from me encouraging me to shovel every last morsel. He's a forceful, pushy businessman, the type who's all to quick to use his car horn. Eddy and I pass out in the back seat, waking an hour later on a windy country road through a dry hillscape beneath a soft blue sky. Detours circumventing village weddings in the back country lead us deeper into the countryside, meandering, asking directions. It is as I'd expected, a long drive to nowhere, to a shabby looking municipal outdoor pool, cracked pavement and pine needles, childrens' laughter and a row of walk-in closet-sized sulfur baths.

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The now familiar ride south to Malang is less an adventure, moreso a commute, I burrow out of the wind behind Eddy, the highway’s humm on the wheels sifts away the work day’s trifles, the familiar factories emblazoned with fluorescent bulbs, wheel cart warungs stationed along the curb and sleepy villages zipp past. Eddy’s a slow driver. It’s half past eleven before we reach our hotel in Batu. I’d booked the room over the phone anxious of another evening scouring for accomodation. 50,000Rp in East Java doesn’t get you as far as it does in Sumatra but I’m too tired to mind the thin mattress and the stuffy fan-less air.

I know how to read maps and after years of traveling I’ve a strong intuition for finding adventure. The highway that wraps around the back of Gunung Butak climbs from Batu in a series of tight curves and arcadian views, hugs a river through colourful hamlets, watermills, rice terraces and an attractive slope planted with tea leaves pruned as meticulously as one finds in Shizuoka. The road zips through the village of Songgoriti, a blur of colours and sunshine, before reaching Pujon where a road less taken forks left, our motorbike jostles along the potholes. I don’t mind my simple job, the crap city I call home and my shared housing as long as every weekend is this utopic, my body wrapped around the suzuki’s frame, gearing up, down, like a fish bound to the current, I want this road, this moment to last forever. Farmers work hunched in the dewy fields, the sun rises above Gunung Kawi, the rain clouds quickly evaporating. In the Javanese countryside, a weekend’s tour offers moments of time travel.

Two hours at a leisurely pace soaking in the broad expanses of green, flowered with little white mosques and homes painted pastel hues, all glistening beneath a deep blue sky, we reach the main road to Blitar. The curbs are kept surprisingly clean, moreso as the roads lined with lush greenery approach the centre of town where a million dollar monument stands in honour of former president Soekarno. Crowds of tourists mill about the street among snack food vendors, horse and buggy drivers and becak drivers. We lose ourselves down the side streets of shop fronts simultaneously bright and dust-covered and discover a warung perfect for lunch, stuck in the mid 70s, including its patrons. Eddy orders curry and for me a bowl of lodeh. A young father plays with his son on a plastic slide to one corner of the restaurant. I let my gaze wander over the myriad jars and containers filled with dried goods and ask my friend to translate various menu items. For a nation that abstains from alcohol, they’ve an imaginative list of cool drinks.

A short drive out of town leads to Panataran, a group of Majapahit temples dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth century, and displaying East Java’s finest example of Hindu friezes. Eddy and I spend a couple hours wandering the complex, exploring the mythical and historical scenes, deciphering flora and fauna, gender and social class, native and foreign dress and laughing at our interpretations.

Our journey moves on early afternoon, riding southwest of Blitar, cutting through cultivated plains and sleepy towns, following a trickling riverbed, climbing a dry hill country eventually leading to sweeping views of the south coast. The road descends steeply into the quiet fishing village of Tambakrejo, a grid of sleepy side streets bisects a main road of small shops and stalls tucked into garages or erected on front curbs. The ashphalt curves and follows the beachfront, a broad stretch of sand, home to a strip of wood shack eateries tucked in the shade of tall flowering trees. With an old woman’s kind permission, we pitch our tent behind her family’s warung with a view of the punding surf, a handful of beach goers dare each other in the quick ebb and flow. The beach stretches for over a half mile penned in to the east and west by tall bluffs grown wild with prickle bushes and criss-crossed with walking trails. A shallow river empties into the ocean the backside of the village leading to a sweep of rocky shore inhabited by poisonous black anemones like landmines carefully avoided by the many men out scouring the tide for squid. Eddy and I nap along the sandbank and wake just as night falls. We find our way to a warung and rouse the owners who seem a little surprised to have customers. The family’s living quarters hide behind a thin board that reaches several feet lower than the roof’s cobwebbed beams. While the elder daughter fries up a couple fish, her mother lounges on a cot in the far corner of the dwelling talking to a neighbour who’s poked his head in the side door. It’s dark and feels like a stage set in an old black and white. Satiated on local ikan goreng, my friend and I sit quietly together outside the tent and listen to the surf anticipating the next giant surge.

Beyond the shadows of the bluff dawns a rosy orange blush, catches among the tree branches, traces each leaf in silver drops of light, the beach distinguishes herself, each and every grain of sand, and the surf rolling across the rocks shimmers. A rooster leads his hen among drying cobs of corn. The glass box of a bensin stand and its glass bottle contents glimmer like the display window at Tiffany’s. Eddy and I climb on the bike and ride into the hillscape. My curiosity of side streets and unmarked paths leads us behind a block of hillcrest bungalows, the road dives like a rollercoaster track, hooks and pitters out to a dog eared trail leading to a cemetery perched on a ragged slope milling with locals. It is cutom, Eddy explains, to visit the family graves the weekend before Ramadhan. Young frangipani with delicate white blossoms watch over the uneven ground of plots laid shoulder to shoulder, the blue paint of wooden grave markers peels and the wood begins to wrot. There are so many graves in Java.

Rolling hills stretch for miles. I stop to admire the patchwork of gold and yellow and brown, the unfurrowed land, the early morning clarity. A lone wood shack stands in the foreground casting a dark shadow like a Dutch oil painting. A cloud’s shadow plays across the fields, and over the barns. I veer off down another backroad pursuing any lost and forgotten crags amid this densely populated island.
One road leads to another, climbing, rolling, falling, curving into the unknown, into unmapped communities, adventures. Eddy and I lose our way beneath a herd of fluffy white sheep clouds, admire the crisp coloured homes and wild gardens, and scrounge for fallen tamarind next to a back lane temple.

Around mid-day we return to Tambakrejo to discover the beach packed with youths, boys who’ve nothing better to do with a free day than perform spin-outs, revving their motorbikes mercilessly through the sand. A few metres from the tent, an SUV’s tailgate lies open exposing a loud stereo. The occupants are oblivious to my glare, oblivious to the sound of the waves. Eddy and I fetch a couple skewers of barbecued fish at a small row of market stalls up the road and sit surrounded by larges circles of teenagers and young adults. To survive, I’ve learned to zone out the crowds, to ignore every other minute a new stranger’s “hello, mister, where are you going?” In the process, however, I feel I’ve become an altogether disagreeable person. The figures smiling, laughing, smoking, chatting, passing time on the beach do not exist, haven’t lives of their own, struggles, dreams. They are two-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs. In the evening, after a walk atop the bluffs to admire a fleet of fishing boats belly dancing in a lapis lazuli bay, the beach returns to herself, conscious once again of her crashing waves, her shifting grains of sand, and burrows of side-stepping crabs. My memory fills the beach with the afternoon’s crowds, fills my head with shadow puppets.

Before sunrise, a chorus of voices erupts from the small mosque across the street. Monday morning marks the beginning of the Muslim month of fasting. A dozen boys dressed in slacks and clean tops, heads covered like their fathers in traditional prayer hats, cross to the beach, chattering and banging small pots. They perch on a fallen tree trunk and watch the sky fill with day’s early light. Eddy and I sweep out the tent, roll up the blankets and mattress and stuff the supplies into my rucksack. The air is cool, the weather partially overcast. We make our way towards Blitar and follow the road signs indicating Malang. In Sumberpucung, mid-morning, we eat a late breakfast in a sleepy warung not far from Karangkates Reservoir. Eddy recalls he and his family came here when he was little.

Traffic is busy through Malang, narrow inner-city streets clogged all too easily, becaks pedal slowly down the shoulder, cars from side streets pull out unconcerned with traffic flow, large cargo trucks gear down and shake, their heavy bulk a curious example of inertia. Motorbikes glide through the current. Approaching the main road through town, the road north to Surabaya, a sign posted on a grassy median catches my attention, a white circle with a white band cut across a black motorbike; no motorbikes allowed. I squeeze onto a narrow lane running parallel with the almost empty highway. The otherside of the manicured median I spy the odd bike zipping along. A Bemo driver cuts into the lane unconcerned with small fry motorbikes and I veer quickly around its back bumper and slowly up its right side. Ahead a break in the median provides entry to the highway. I’m driving with the flow of traffic, maybe thirty-five km/h, as I make for the entrance but have to wait as a couple of motorbikes, appearing from behind a thick curtain of fir trees, race past at twice my speed. “Watch out,” Eddy yells in my ear. I’m watching the highway but still driving. Straight ahead smack in the middle of the highway’s entrance stands a lamppost.

I see it with a few metres distance but cannot veer onto the highway or the side lane. I am stunned, too slow reacting to use my foot brake, my hand squeezes the brake but with two passengers and a heavy rucksack our momentum is too much. It happens very quickly. Eddy and I are thrown a couple metres off the bike. He lands on top of me, unscathed. My jeans are torn at the knee and my elbow is bleeding. I’m pulled off the street. A bystander brings me to the curb and helps Eddy with the bike. The wind’s been knocked out of me. I remain hunched over on all fours moaning for breath. I instruct Eddy to rub my back. I’ve torn the muscle in my ribcage near my diaphragm. The front of the bike is bent and wonky and the engine won’t restart. A young soldier in a dark brown uniform stands over me holding an assault rifle talking to no one. Eddy tells me later while we sit waiting in the mechanic’s lobby that the young officer was spouting off foreigners. But that nobody was paying him any attention.

I take the next two days off work and see a doctor. The man is incompetent and I am a fool to follow his recommendation for an x-ray. I just need some strong painkillers. But the pills despite their high price are useless. Getting in and out of bed, up or down from a chair, sends a bolt of excrutiating pain through my body. It’s more than two months before I can use the gym and three months later I’m still frightened to drive the city streets.

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Photos

the lagoon
my little trusty tent at bottom right

Eddy & I
auditioning for Abercrombie & Fitch

Bulu
setting out

Bulu
sunset

Bulu
dawn

fishing boats, Bulu
at dawn

Independence Day long weekend
sunrise over the fishing boats, Bulu

the coast near Bulu
early morning

Comments

[david]

G-d Bless
You are so ALIVE.

[Roger]

nice weekend
A nice adventure to read about--so little happens and yet so much does. Do you ever feel that your eyes are full? That you've seen and experienced so much, so much more than we who remain closer to home, that it all begins to blur to merge in your memory, in your ability to feel each beautiful, uncomfortable, wonderful moment? Hugs and love Roger

[olivia]

wow!
To be honest, you description is "misleading". I was born and grew up in Jawa Timur. Your story makes Jawa Timur looks like an exotic place. Well, it is not. But, I'm not blaming you. I once travel to Japan and I fell in love with everything about it, but unfortunately, most of Japanese people do not agree with me. They see their country as a boring land and will jump out of it if opportunity is knocking.