Semarang, Java, Indonesia. February 21, 2016.

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Semarang, Java, Indonesia. Feb. 21.

Yesterday we crossed the equator and the crew and staff held the ceremony to initiate the pollywogs into King Neptune's favoured cadre. I failed to convince the poker players that we now had to play counterclockwise.

Borobudur is the goal for most people today, and it's a long round trip with unpredictable traffic. Those trying to do it by cab are going to have a very tight day.

Because of the tight time line and long distance, everyone is in a hurry to get off. Those headed for Borobudur all headed for the gangway at once, and between line jumpers, hallway creepers and elevator cheaters, the line snaked about two hundred very crabby people deep. It was difficult exiting the terminal as well - there was a crushing gauntlet of vendors, tour hawkers and taxi drivers and if anyone stopped to look at a souvenir stall or talk to a taxi driver, it caused another bottleneck. Batik and shadow puppet displays slowed progress to the tour buses as well.

Some guy had piggybacked on Elliott's bus tour booking and there was a red herring sign, similar to Elliott's, made by the other guy to try to fill his tour. Most of us made it to the bus with only a little confusion, but one guy was suckered by the wrong sign and headed off to join the wrong tour. His wife raised the red flag, and Cheryl knew exactly where to look. Between lost sheep and pedestrian bottlenecks, we left only an hour late.

We had a police escort, absolutely essential for those on a schedule. These are tourist police, no sidearms, although they have all the other equipment, from sirens to handcuffs. They were standoffish, and we simply referred to them as The Boys.

The Boys could do equally well driving Montreal cabs or running the Daytona 500. They know exactly where their bumpers and side mirrors are, and they pull head-on into oncoming traffic, lights flashing and siren whooping, to create an extra lane for the bus between the lines of slow-moving trucks, single-driver cars, tuktuks and motorcycles. If traffic fails to yield, they roll down the windows and wave their arms angrily. One truck up ahead failed to move out of the way for some time, and when The Boys finally forced it over towards the shoulder, they drew abreast of the truck and the passenger cop shook his fist at the driver, and threw a full water bottle at the truck, bouncing it off his windshield for emphasis.

We asked if the locals didn't rather resent this intrusion and special treatment. Judging his audience carefully, our guide Ichbal said the the people pretty much accepted the intrusion of VIPs as part of the price for gaining tourist dollars. When we made some jokes back, he figured it was safe to tell us that VIP stands for Very Ignorant People.

Ichbal gave a running commentary and history lesson as we wended a painful route out of town. It was a sobering part of the drive, through slums and urban decay and piles of forgotten and rotting detritus. Squatters' hovels are thrown up anywhere, everywhere and any which way.

People on another tour reported several concrete drainpipes along the side of the road waiting to be installed in the parallel ditch. The construction crews clearly had long ago forgotten that they had been left there. These are huge pipes, two meters in diameter and maybe five in length. On some, tarps draped both ends of segments, and one enterprising squatter had bricked up one end and installed a door and window in the other. The closest we've seen to this creativity was the stacked abandoned shipping containers outside a Peruvian port. Doors and window frames had been cut out with acetylene torches.

A four-lane toll highway took us out of town and into the foothills, through the hilly and thick rainforest, headed for the lush central plateau. Halfway up, the transmission got cranky. Ichbal was perturbed; he had chosen the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz bus specifically because it reportedly had the most recently refurbished transmission.

We pulled into a gas station and the driver, the helper and a passerby started poking around, the three of them carrying various tools and lengths of wire back and forth from underneath the rear axle. In the meantime, the guide assured us that another bus was on the way, just in case. After much tinkering, the driver triumphantly cranked up the engine, and after a bunch of test shifts and checking and rechecking of the integrity of the repair, we were off again. Almost another hour lost.

Without the escort, our trip would have been doomed. There is little extra space on the mountain roads once off the toll highways, and forcing a third lane on the two-lane, two-way roads was often a challenge even for the police car.

Approaching the plateau between the mountain ranges, the main roads have all manner of buildings crammed in wherever there is room, a solid line of buildings and narrow laneways. Nicer homes are abutted by shacks and stalls anywhere they can fit, whether on the edges of the cliffs or on the edges of the pavement. Shack additions jut as close to the pavement as they can get away with (meaning traffic whizzing by right outside your front door), and unconcerned people lounge in cafe chairs at the pavement's edge.

Open country, though, is achingly beautiful. Bright sunshine glints off a million shades of green in rice fields, groves of rubber trees, fields of all kinds of trees and bushes and plants: mango, guava, banana, clove, coffee, cocoa and avocado all fill the rich soil of the high plateau, which sits in a great rectangle in central Java, flanked by mountain ranges and cornered by four partially active volcanoes.

Another long drive and we reached Borobudur, our goal for the day. The tropical rain began about five minutes before we arrived, and it was coming down in buckets as we made the dash from the bus to the convention center guarding the entrance to the temple grounds. We were all issued throwaway ponchos which, by the time we began the climb to the base of the temple, were no longer necessary. The heat and humidity escalated quickly as the sun reappeared, and dragonflies filled the air, reflecting rainbows from their wet sparkling chitin.

This is a quite remarkable and unique Buddhist temple built in the 8th century using massive blocks of volcanic stone. Like the pyramids, the methods of quarrying, transport and assembling the monolithic rectangles remain an engineering mystery. It was built by the Buddhist kings of the Sailendra Dynasty to repopularise Buddhism at a time when the Hindu influence was growing throughout Indonesia. Rediscovered only a couple of decades past, It lay hidden under the lush jungle, forgotten, for a thousand years. It has been meticulously excavated and cleaned up, and it is now a huge religious and tourist draw to the area. It is covered with intricate bas-relief, sculpture, and detailed gargoyles for drainage (watching them after the heavy rains, they clearly do their job well, jets of rainwater shooting out of their mouths with great force).

The levels of the temple represent the four levels of Buddhism. The faithful climb to the first level, do a circuit, then climb to the next. The last accessible level is Nirvana, and one repeats the process until either reincarnation or enlightenment is achieved. I climbed to the very top and did the circuit, priding myself on at least symbolically having reached Nirvana.

The area was packed not only with tourists, but with dozens of schoolchildren on field trips. Many of these kids regarded the foreigners with goggle-eyed fascination, and some of the braver ones approached the tourists with shy requests for photos.

I ran into Martin, one of the dealers from the casino, who was acting as an escort for one of the ship tours. Martin is about 6'7" and slim, with big glasses and a huge and friendly grin, and the slight, short boys regarded him with nothing short of awe while the gaggles of hijab-wearing schoolgirls covered their mouths and giggled, staring wide-eyed. Remember, this is a part of the world where I feel tall.

Height, white hair, facial hair, body hair and wrinkled faces are all oddities to the locals, and some tourists could not walk five paces without a selfie request. I myself was approached for several group and individual photos, and I would make the kids laugh happily when I made faces at them after the photos were taken.

I had the most fun with the young teacher in charge of a gaggle of Muslim girls, all about ten or eleven. He approached and asked if the girls could do their English homework with me. I agreed, and a very pretty, very shy young lady read me questions from her handwritten list. Her classmates crowded around to listen and look as she recited her lines, the ink from her list running into the paper because of the recent rain. She became bolder as we worked through her list, and I made her laugh by making odd faces between questions. The young teacher was grateful for the opportunity and he limply shook my hand several times in enthusiastic thanks. We all posed for group photos at the top of the monument and I was given many happy waves and shy smiles.

Jane did not climb what they call the largest single monument in the southern hemisphere. But she did find the elephants having their bath. She had heard their happy trumpeting and followed the noise to find the big bathing pool and a mahout riding the elephants in and out of it.

I found her at the base of the monument, after I almost made the mistake of going out the rear exit of the temple grounds in search of the bus. Hawkers selling their trinkets waved me away from the wrong exit, pointing the other way around the temple, saying, "Bus, bus!" Distressing them, I went the other way because of my psychic pull to Jane and my occasionally eerie ability to find her in a crowd. I indeed found her easily, and she led me back to the bathing elephants.

Only one was still bathing. The others had finished and were restrained. As I had been when I saw the hobbled elephants at the Hindu festival in the hot Kochi afternoon, I felt disheartened and depressed to see the chained, distressed animals, more so when Jane explained how happy they had seemed while bathing.

Two were clearly uncomfortable at best, a small one yanking at its ankle chain, trying to move forward, the larger one whipping the slack chain about with its trunk. Magnificent and intelligent creatures, it's hard to see them so unhappy and confined.

Backtracking to the bus was a little tricky, and when we realised Bob was still missing, I bet that he had taken the wrong exit, as I nearly had. After a long wait, and anxious discussion about returning to the ship in time, we left Ichbal, the police and Bob's wife Lena behind to search for Bob and we headed to the nearby restaurant for our Javanese buffet.

The food was excellent, varied, fresh and hot, and mostly identifiable. The beer was cold and our busload put a serious dent in their inventory after the hot climb and walking about the grounds in the heat and humidity. Ichbal, Bob, Lena and The Boys turned up, and Bob took the good-natured ribbing pretty well.

While bills were paid and toilets visited, Jane and I wandered the restaurant and examined the decor, which included several caged exotic birds, a lovely garden hidden out back, and a startling collection of wooden masks. Signs and some jumbled English from a waiter indicated that they had been perhaps used in theatrical productions or traditional ceremonies at one time. I noticed one had a €30 price tag. We picked a favourite, unique among the others, and clearly handmade and painted. It was very dusty and I haggled it down to $25 US, to which the proprietor agreed too readily. Sigh. My bargaining skills are still lacking.

Off on the return trip with a comfortable time cushion for all-aboard. The Mercedes ground its gears a couple of times, making us nervous, but the wire-and-pliers job held together. At one point on the toll road, the driver pulled over and quickly hopped out. This scared the crap out of everyone, but Jane, peeking out the back window, assured everyone that the driver was just having a quick pee on the rear wheel, out of traffic. He leapt right back into the pilot's seat and had us back with an hour to spare.

The evening monsoon kicked back in as we reentered Semerang - the bus threw up eight-foot waves and motorcycles and scooters were lost in the mighty spray, only to exit safely, albeit wobbly, like surfers at the end of the curl.

Again, not a pretty place when talking architecture and quality of life. The world outside the urban areas is beautiful, with lush rain and cloud forests and vast terraced rice paddies nestled on the volcanic plateau, where the 4 semi-active volcanoes occasionally and obligingly spew nutritious ash all over the landscape. Great for the rice, coffee, tobacco and rubber trees. Not so great for the water supply, or the shacks and the people in them.

It is a shame we lost all the poking-about time, but catching up to a missed ship can break the bank, depending on your situation and location. As it happened, we left more than an hour late as two of the ship's excursions were unable to get back in time.

We get a sea day tomorrow, then the next day will be more of the same hurry-up to get to and from the caldera of Mt. Bromo, an active volcano which blew a large quantity of ash and gas just a couple of days ago. We thus expect access to the area to be restricted.

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Photos

Semarang
Rain ponchos for everyone!

Semarang
I want one for the garden!

Semarang
Borobudur Temple.

Semarang
More temple.

Semarang
Temple detail...one of thousands.

Semarang
Elephants enjoying their bath.

Semarang
Sadly, they are chained.

Semarang
New mask!

Semarang
Isn't he just the cutest?

Comments

[Willem and Ellie]

Semarang
What an extensive story about your trip to the Borobodur. The place Willem was born is about 20 miles away. Still the same ill organized mess as we remember from our trip 10 years ago. But the scenery and the food both are plenty compensation for the non organized way of living. But in Indonesia they live by the day.