The last month and a bit

Hello hello again!

It's 7:15 pm on a Saturday night. Right now I'm sitting in an interesting little cafe just outside the visitor's enterence to the Kraton (Sultan's Palace) in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia. To be honest I don't know as much about the history of Indonesia as I should, only that they were colonised by the Dutch for a long time and proclaimed their independence shortly after the Japanese Occupation, so I'm still unsure as to why the official title is 'The Republic of Indonesia' when there are still plenty of Sultans around. Presumably they're just ceremonial figures now who get money from the government but who have no actual powers. Anyway, here I am in the cafe, looking at a window with water running down from tiny fountains on top making it look like it's raining outside, waiting for a Wayang Kulit (Shadow Puppet) show to being in the museum at the end of the street.

The last month and a bit has seen my passport stamped I don't know how many times, being in Sarawak, Brunei, Sarawak again, Sabah, Peninsular Malaysia and finally Java, Indonesia. I don't have pictures any more for most of it because I stupidly left my memory stick in the computer the other day and when I remembered I'd left it there it had already gone :( Luckily most of my pictures are already up of Facebook but not my ones from Borneo, but oh well. It just gives me yet another reason to go back there! I actually have a few posters from Sarawak though, free for tourists from the tourist information centre, so at least I have something 'visual' to remind me of it, and you won't believe how difficult it was for me to find a poster-tube to carry them in. They don't seem to exist in this part of the world so I settled for a 'drawing tube' (whatever that is, presumably something to keeps drawings in...) I found in a massive stationary shop in Miri.

Anyways, I'm deviating a bit here. So yeah, the last month and a bit. Well, I'll just quickly jot down what I've been up to, saying what snippets of memory come to mind first from each place and then later do another 'A Day in the Life of Hedd in Asia' sorta entries. OK, well, I went to the Niah Caves, which were very very big and very interesting. After my first few steps into the cave I slipped on some bad poo and cut my hand, which wasn't good because I'd left my mini first aid kit in the lodge thinking "what harm could come to you in a cave?" Luckily with a bit of spit to wash it out it didn't get infected. Inside the cave there was even more bat and bird poo and, as you might have guessed, quite a lot of bats and birds too. A little further in I saw a lone bird's nest harvester right at the very very top corner of the cave. Well, actually all I could see was the light from a candle but from that you know there must be a man up there too. Wait a second, I'll look on Google for some pics to give you an idea... there we go. So I went through a whole network of caves which were all inhabited in prehistoric times and at the very end I saw the famous 'death boat' painting, prehistoric paintings of their funeral rituals. Pretty interesting stuff. Then I waited for dusk for the 'changing of the guard', which is where all the swifts fly back into the cave to sleep and at the same time all the bats fly out to hunt for the night.

I got to Miri by bus the next day and guess who drove past the bus stop while I was standing there... the two guys from Chester I'd met in the Orangutan centre in Kuching! So they stopped and gave me a lift to their place for some tea and biscuits. They were heading off to Bario in the next couple of days and were in Miri patching up their Land Rover and meeting some old church friends. They were staying with a Chinese couple from their church, the husband of which used to work for Shell. That isn't surprising though - most people in Miri seemed to work for Shell as that's where the company was founded. A long time ago there was a guy who made a living buying fuel from abroad and selling shells in exchange. Then one day he hit an oil well on the hill behind Miri and created the company there and then. There's not much to do in Miri itself though, it's basically just an oil city with lots of big shops (although none of them, however big, sold poster-tubes) and garages to patch up Land Rovers. I stayed in a hostel run by an indigenous woman who's married to the man who used to fly the planes into Bario from Miri so the guys from Chester knew where to drop me off after the tea and biscuits because he used to fly the plane when John, the old doctor, worked there. Not that you'd need to know that... like I said, I'm just jotting down random memories that come to mind.

I went to Brunei for the weekend, which consisted of no less than four different buses and a boat ride. But it was definitely worth it. As soon as you cross over the border you know you're in 'oil capital' with the entire sea up to the horizon covered in oil rigs and on land there's nodding donkeys on every bit of free space between the roads and buildings. It's no wonder the country's so rich. They say money doesn't make you happy, but after being in Brunei I'm not too sure because the people there all seemed very happy and are without a doubt the most genuinely friendly strangers I've come across yet. I stayed in this strange Youth Centre place which was, well, strange but comfortable. Doing a bit of 'Jalan Jalan' (wandering around aimlessly) in BSB (the capital, which is where I stayed) is easy and all the 'sites' are within walking distance, although there really isn't much to see. There's this huge and very impressive white marble mosque with a golden dome, a water kampung (village) where most of the residents live, which is basically a huge crowded bunch of stilted wooden houses build on the river all crammed together. It's funny, because most of the houses in the country were huge (sorry to use the word so many times, but it's the best word to describe things in Brunei, apart from the country itself!) except for these ones in the kampung but it's not because the people living there are poor (it doesn't seem like there's any poverty in the country at all, unless you count the house servants, but then they're given everything they need by their employers) but because they just like the life there so carry on living in run-down houses but making a fortune at the same time. And what do you do if you're rich and live in a run-down house on a river? Play about in powerboats all day!

The country is completely dry (Islamic law) so there's no night-life at all. The Ex-pats who live there usually go to Miri for the weekend if they want a drink or to go clubbing, so in Brunei the only things that are open until relatively late (1 am latest) are the cinemas. I watched a film in this (sorry!) huge shopping centre. It was called Butterfly Lovers, and it was basically the story of Mulan for the first third and Romeo & Juliet for the rest. It was a good laugh though, one of those 'new-style' Chinese films with a mixture of soppy love, jokes, kung-fu and pretty scenery. There was a lot of hype about it there though because the main actor was from Brunei (on the right in the picture), the first from the country to appear on the big screen. In fact, the premiere of the film was in that very cinema only a few days before. After it had finished I needed to make my way back to where I was staying. It was a few miles away and I'd gotten the bus there so was a little stuck as to how to get back. So I asked a guy sitting outside a cafe how to get there and he offered to give me a ride, free of charge, which I gladly accepted. It's things like that that doesn't happen anywhere else I've been to, they'd usually always want to squeeze some money out of you but in Brunei they don't seem to care about that. Oh, I haven't talked about the palace! Well, I didn't see much of it as it's mostly hidden behind a load of trees but it's - you guessed it - HUGE! I mean, this really is huge, I think it's actually the biggest palace in the world or something. And all around the fence were these posh lamp posts all covered in gold leaf. So to sum up Brunei: small country, big buildings, lots of money, happy people. It kinda reminded me of St. Petersburg... well, the building at least, all big and covered in gold leaf. But Russia's a big country... and the people didn't seem awfully happy either...

Four buses, a boat ride, a swim in a public pool and a flight later I was in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia. Here, I met Felicia, a friend of Elaine from college, whom I would be staying with for the next two weeks in her kampung in the jungle. I learned Kadazan-Dusun karaoke songs, rubber-tapped, made rice wine, went to a Christening, cleared an undergrowth-covered hill-side with a machete to later plant fruit trees there instead, had my hair cut by the native chief's son, swam in the river, chilled with youths at a Christian camp, sang 'Y Sguthan,' 'Gaseg Ddu' (the old version) and 'Ar Gyfer Heddiw Bore' to everyone's delight, watched Malay and HKese DVDs, cooked ayam sambal, went to the village's Catholic Mass (don't tell Auntie Jan!), drew with the neighbour's kids, tried to teach some girls to Salsa, ate dog (and very tasty it was too), chatted with the village sergeant and the visiting pig-seller... lots of things I wouldn't normally do basically! Everyone was very friendly and accommodating and, in true Asian style, offered you food (too much to mention) and drink (either 2nd grade rice wine, 1st grade rice wine, distilled rice wine or beer...) when you went to visited which, along with me being polite enough to finish everything put in front of me, meant my relatively flat stomach I had when I arrived what with all the walking I'd done in Sarawak and Brunei was, by the end of the two weeks, very much visibly fatter. And it wasn't unhealthy i.e. fried like most food out here, it's just because of the sheer volume of food and drink and the fact that, besides what I mentioned above, we mainly just relaxed on the veranda to take shade from the sun all day. Some of the food was absolutely stunning and I felt quite privileged to eat some of it. For example, one night when we went to the neighbour's house I was given, as always, a whole array of little treats. One of them I remember in particular though. It was a stew with only four ingredients: a jungle deer you catch using a bamboo trap so as to keep it fresh; a fruit you have to climb the highest tree to pluck; and a type of chestnut and mushroom only found deep deep in the jungle. And that's it, it was all boiled together and it tasted delicious. Apparently it's only allowed to be eaten by men to make them strong but it just goes to show how much effort they put into making their food and how they can totally depend on their surroundings.

I flew from Kota Kinabalu with the very comfortable budget Air Aisa back to where I was nine weeks previously: Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. I got the SkyBus to the KL Sentral then a local train up north to Petaling Jaya, one of the districts of KL I'd gotten to know quite well after staying with Shu Haur. I went to a sate restaurant, ordered a lycee juice and waited for somebody I'd never met but had heard a lot about - Alina, my mum's dorm mate from when she was in AC. Lots of you might not know that my mum, my sister and I all went to AC... that's right, we're an 'AC legacy' family (!) but I tried not to spread it about in AC. Well, now you know. Anyway, my mum went to AC from '75-'77 and lived in the castle. Back then the dorm mates were all co-years. I'd met one of her other dorm mates a couple of times before, Marit from Norway, but not Alina. It was going to be interesting to get to know her, and who knows, maybe I might be able to dig up a few secrets from my mum's past at the same time! It turned out that Alina was very cool (I asked my mum if she was 'cool' in AC, she said she supposed she was but they didn't use that word back then!) but very worrisome! She was constantly afraid something bad would happen to me but I tried to explain that after being out here for about 18 weeks I knew what I was doing. I was staying in her auntie's house with lots of her family members who were all typically accommodating (i.e. in a very good way) and they all insisted I persuade my mum to come and visit one day soon. Well, I said, when Air Asia starts flying direct from Europe to KL, which they plan to start doing this next year, then it might be a real possibility. Alina was working the next day so I spent it with two of her sisters and their families around the sleepy Malay district of Shah Alam. With the first sister and her step-granddaughter we did what Malays to best: shopping! We went to the biggest shopping centre in the whole of Malaysia and it was very, very... you know what the next word will be! But not being the best shopper in the world (or, if you want to save money, then you could actually call me the best shopper in the world!) I only bought a Christmas present for my dad. Later, with Alina's older sister, I had a good ol' chat about SE Asian politics with her and her husband (they're convinced I'm an under-cover policeman hunting down political opposition members because!) and later visited the - OK, I'll use a different word this time - enormous blue Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Mosque, Shah Alam's landmark. With my sarong and kufi and a little lying to the guard that I was thinking of converting (again, don't tell Auntie Jan!) I was able to go right inside to the prayer hall, and very impressive it was too. She remembered mum from when she came to visit Alina in AC and, again, insisted she came to visit Malaysia. The next day we drove to the airport and, after reminiscing about the old AC - James Mendelssohn, rubbish food... things never change - I was on yet another plane, this one bound for Jakarta.

I was appalled to find out lots of people don't know where Jakarta is - yes, you know who you are! If you're reading this and you don't know where it is then shame on you! What's the capital of the most populated country in the world? Beijing. The second most populated country? New Delhi. The third? Washington D.C. And the fourth? Well, that'll be Jakarta. Indonesia, the 4th most populated country in the world and the 16th largest country in the world has a population of 235 million, and Java, one of it's 17,508 islands where Jakarta and its other major cities and where I'll be spending about four weeks traveling from West to East, is the most populated island in the world. And you can feel it, too. It lives up to its reputation: fume-choked cities and beautiful volcano-laden countryside. Jakarta, formally the Dutch centre of it's East Indies colonies, is chock-a-block with building, cars, motorbike, buses and people. I came to Indonesia hoping for some culture - music, dance, puppet shows. There were a few good museums in Jakarta but not much else, which gave me much needed time to catch up with people after three weeks of being without communication and to finally sort out my university business. Oh, and I watched the new James Bond there too, which I thought was OK but some of the scenes were virtually exactly the same as the last one only with a different girl and in a different country. And I also went to the Indonesian National Mosque which was - yep, you know already. But this really was, as you can see from the picture of inside the prayer hall. The guards were more than welcoming to visitors here and although I didn't really want to take a picture while they were praying mine almost forced me to! I've kinda taken a shine to mosques after being here, it's just such an important part of life here. You hear the call for prayer four times a day (and once at night if you're unlucky!) so you know you're always close to one and they're normally very impressive both outside and inside and the guards are usually very friendly and welcoming to visitors. There are some things I'm definitely going to miss after coming home, not least the food and the weather, but the mosques are also up there, as are other temples. I mean, after you've seen twenty Chinese temples, Hindu Candis and Muslim mosques in one week you're kinda fed up of them but I can see myself after a couple of months at home wanting to go to the mosque in Birmingham or something just to see one again!

After Jakarta I went to Bandung, the 'Paris of the East', which was another business city but it did have a certain charm about it and a very good geological museum. Then it was on an eight-hour train ride off to Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Java, where I could finally hear some gamelan and watch some wayang kulit, which I've already done and can't wait for this next installment. But more on that later, I'm sure you've all had enough of reading for now! Next time I'll tell you about Prambanan, which I'll go to in a few days, and Borobudur which I'm saving for my birthday before heading to Solo, another cultural capital where I'll, at last, have a chance to play some gamelan myself after all these months.

'Till then,
Enjoy.