Israel versus Idul Fitri

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In New Zealand in the 1980s there was a newspaper cartoon strip called Bogor about a marijuana-smoking hedgehog. I don’t know why the hedgehog was named Bogor, but now I’ve been in a town called Bogor in Java. I don’t know why the town is named Bogor either.

I flew into Jakarta on an almost empty plane from Singapore. The line for the Yogyakarta flight was full to bursting and I think the Air Asia crew were feeling sorry for us going to Jakarta because they gave everyone on board free food and water! Perhaps I should mention that there had been a terrorist bombing in Jakarta just a couple of months prior, while I was still in Sulawesi. In Java the attempted rip-offs started before I’d even left the airport. I was going to stay in Bogor figuring that it would be quieter than Jakarta (wrongly as I discovered), and I knew there was a bus that goes straight from the airport to Bogor which is rather handy. There were taxi drivers waiting at the terminal exit like vultures.
“Where are you going?” I was asked.
“To Bogor”
“I will take you there, only 500,000”
“No, I’m going on the bus”
“There is no bus”
“Of course there’s a bus”
“No, the bus isn’t running because of the Muslim holiday”
“In that case I’ll take a bus into Jakarta and catch a train to Bogor”
“No, there are no buses at all”
“Well I’ll just go ask about that at the information centre”
“Its closed…everywhere is closed!” (an all-encompassing sweep of the hand was supposed to prove to me that all the surrounding airport shops were closed when they were quite patently open for business. It was a weak ploy).
Of course the information centre was open and there was a bus going to Bogor which I caught. Bogor was insanely hectic. The Muslim holiday of which the taxi drivers spoke is the Idul Fitri which goes for an entire week. Everyone it seemed had left Jakarta and ended up in Bogor. The traffic around town was the worst I’ve ever seen in an Asian city. It was not a pleasant place.

The only things of any interest in Bogor are the Kebun Raya (botanical gardens) and the zoological museum within the garden’s grounds. The gardens are amongst the oldest in Asia. The Dutch Governor-General von Imhoff built a summer house here in 1744 and named it Buitenzorg meaning “free of care”. It was the British though who constructed the gardens around Buitenzorg. The idea was first mooted by Stamford Raffles who had his fingers in every pie in southeast Asia, from founding Singapore to discovering the world’s largest flower. The gardens were eventually set out by Professor Reinwardt, another well-known name in Asian zoology, in 1817. Then the Dutch returned to Java and expanded the gardens even further and more magnificently to cover an area of over 200 acres. Sadly the gardens, once one of the greatest tropical gardens in the world, are no longer at their best. It seems the Javans have taken the name “free of care” a bit too literally. The amount of rubbish can be excused due to the hundreds of visitors pouring in with the holiday, but the care of the grounds themselves seems to have been almost abandoned. Some parts like the Mexican Garden and the famous avenue of giant trees are still nice, but when walking through most of it it just feels like a regular city park that’s been left to run a bit wild. It was quite sad and disappointing.

The Bogor Zoological Museum was alright for a wander around in but the two reasons I wanted to visit were both missing. One of the two Indonesian coelacanths in museums is at Bogor and I was hoping it might be on display but it was not; and there was supposed to be a Flores giant rat on display as well but that wasn’t there either. Lonely Planet had steered me wrong once again.

I only stayed in Bogor for one night and then set off for the mountains of Gede-Pangrango National Park by Cibodas. The trip there should be a breeze but the entire highway was in gridlock. It took five hours to make the two hour trip to Cipanas, and then it took two hours to travel just seven kilometers to Cibodas. What was worse was that because everyone was off work for Idul Fitri, the national park was full of people. Normally its busy there on the weekends when as a birder you’d want to avoid the place, and very quiet during the week, but now there were thousands of walkers and climbers. And the thing with Indonesians is that they always travel in big groups, carrying radios, and they are always yelling. Not yelling to each other, just yelling and screaming at the forest apparently, for no discernible reason. Not surprisingly there were no birds along the main trail. The guards at the entrance had said I could only go to the waterfall (which was where everybody else was heading to dump their rubbish, that being the Asian way) but the hot springs and summit were off-limits, so I said I was only going to the waterfall but then just went up to the hot springs anyway because that trail was almost empty. The hot springs were really amazing, not just pools of hot water like I was expecting but actual waterfalls of boiling water spilling down the hillside enveloped in great clouds of steam. I’ve never seen boiling waterfalls before and it was quite a remarkable sight.

I was staying at Freddy’s Homestay where all the birders stay, as do most other tourists because it’s the only place listed in Lonely Planet even though there are a number of other accommodations in town. Freddy is a grand purveyor of balderdashery. Half the time I didn’t know what he was talking about and wondered if he ever knew what I was talking about. His stories changed constantly, even in the middle of conversations. His sons were both bird guides and he said that guides were a requirement in the national park. This is standard in Indonesia and I was fretting a bit about having to pay the asking price of 500,000 per day for their services but then it turned out that in actual fact guides aren’t necessary in Gede-Pangrango which was a relief.

Cibodas isn’t so much a town as a string of stalls, all selling the same items - some have avocados, some T-shirts, some little cages of rabbits, guinea-pigs and hamsters. Everywhere there are potted plants lining the roads too, but I could never figure out if they were for sale or just town beautification. There is a botanic gardens at Cibodas as well, which was established by the Dutch in 1889 for experimenting with plants in a cooler climate than that offered by the Bogor site (Cibodas being at 2000 metres and Bogor at 260 metres altitude). One of the plants famously grown there are strawberries, the ones here being very small and very sweet like they’re covered in sugar. In contrast to the Bogor gardens, the Cibodas gardens are very well-cared for and a pleasure to explore (or at least they would be when its quiet, but I was constantly being mobbed by Indonesians which made my bird-watching efforts rather difficult).

Once I could get more or less clear of the people on the smaller side trails on the mountain I started finding lots of nice birds, many of which were endemic Javan mountain birds. My favourite was the Javan tesia which like the stubtails in Timor and Mt. Kinabalu is a tiny ground-dwelling bird like a mouse, but then the tesia was eclipsed by the stunning pink-headed fruit dove which really does have an outrageously bright pink head. On the non-bird side there were mongooses, Horsfield’s tree shrews, several squirrels, and two species of leaf monkeys but sadly I didn’t see any Javan gibbons here, probably because of all the people around. One particularly cool thing I saw was on one wandering when I found a tiny little tree frog about half the size of my little fingernail, sitting on top of a dead leaf on the ground, on the underside of which was a spider three times the size of the frog. It would have made a fantastic photo but just as I was going to take it the batteries in the camera died. I quickly changed them for the spare ones, but discovered they were dead as well! Then the frog jumped and the spider rushed up onto the top of the leaf but luckily just missed his prey.

Gunung Gede-Pangrango was somewhere I could have stayed for a week longer because its just the sort of place I like (once Idul Fitri was over at least). All there is to do is get up, go the forest and wander round looking for animals all day, then go to sleep and repeat the next day. Also this was the only montane site I would be visiting in Java so anything I didn’t see here I wouldn’t see elsewhere (like the Javan hawk-eagle, which I missed out on!). But the other side of that is if I’d spent longer there I wouldn’t have enough time to visit the lowland sites, so I had to move on before Idul Fitri was over. Not the best time to be on the mountain but you make the best of things.

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Photos

Javan hawk-eagle (Spizaetus bartelsi)
this one is at the Ragunan Zoo in Jakarta because I didn't see any wild ones :(

Comments

[ke-chu]

maymay
ose q mal omo van a poner a un tigre disecado osea q mal aaaa