by Jamie Maslin
Free-wheeling downhill towards me was Wim.
“That was quick!” I exclaimed as he pulled up next to me.
I couldn’t believe he’d managed to cover such a long distance over such difficult terrain and in only slightly longer than it had taken a motorbike. We chatted for a while before Wim set off again, disappearing from sight down a bumpy road into a landscape dominated, in the immediate valley, by orderly vegetable patches, behind which lay more mountainous uncultivated terrain. As I set off on foot, it just felt wrong. Here I was taking lifts from transport propelled in motion by the internal combustion engine, whereas Wim, through pedal power alone, had overtaken me. I continued on my way for about twenty minutes, soaking up the scenery, when, all of a sudden, the sound of a vehicle approaching from behind snapped me back into hitching mode. Lurching from side to side and bouncing up and down was an old red Jeep. I stuck out my hand and smiled. Being in such a remote location I had high hopes of getting a ride, and so it came as little surprise when the driver stopped to offer me one. By the looks of it, three generations of the same family sat inside, making for a tight fit. I squeezed in next to ganddad and two grandkids, a boy and a girl aged about three and five, respectively, while Dad drove and Mum sat up front.
None spoke any English but it was easy enough to establish where they were going: Malang. The further we went the worse the “road” became, until it could barely be described as such, more a partially cobbled downhill track that definitely required an off road vehicle to dive along—in Wim’s case his touring bicycle. He appeared in the distance through the Jeep’s windshield, standing high on his pedals to negotiate the crevices of the road. As we slowly overtook him he spotted me in the back. We shared a wave and a smile, and not long after he disappeared from sight behind us. It was the last time I saw him.
After much slow and painful driving we eventually made it down to much lower, flatter ground, where the road quality improved. Multiple rural villages and towns separated by characteristic Indonesian greenery passed by on our way to Malang, where I was dropped at a chaotic junction in the north of the city. The whole family took their time waving me goodbye, holding up plenty of agitated traffic in the process. When they finally pulled off, a flood of heaving cars, trucks, bikes and buses surged around their Jeep in a pincer-like move that seemed to swallow them up.
I didn’t have a particular destination in mind that I wanted to reach today; so long as I kept pushing in a northeasterly direction until nightfall, then that was good enough for me. In the end, daylight finally departed on my arrival in the eminently forgettable city of Jombang. Despite the effort, as the crow flies I had only covered sixty miles from Bromo—on paper a truly pathetic distance for a day’s hitching. I wondered if Wim had got further on his push bike? But no matter, it would take more than this to demoralize me today. Mt. Bromo had given me one of my most remarkable hitchhiking experiences ever.
Rain poured down as I walked through Jombang’s dark backstreets in search of a cheap hotel, and by the time I found one I was soaked—my hair slick, shorts waterlogged and feet squelching in my shoes. The weather may have left me cold but it couldn’t touch the warm internal glow of satisfaction I felt at having visited Mt. Bromo; and neither could the room I booked into. Lying back on a concave bed, in a mosquito-rich interior, I felt strangely satisfied. Sure, the accommodation could have been nicer; I could have covered greater hitchhiking distance too, and experienced more clement weather, but a better more fulfilling day, I really couldn’t have asked for. And for that, I fell gratefully asleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Forgotten Temple
The thing about hitchhiking in Indonesia, is you often require such a ridiculous number of lifts to get between two moderately spaced apart points, that from a writing point of view, huge swathes of travel time can never see the light of day on the written page, or if it does, can only receive but nodding recognition, betraying the often arduous effort that went into completing a given journey. So it was today, with no less than thirty-two separate rides stretching from pre-dawn to post-dusk, through the green rural heart of central Java, that I arrived, tired, bewildered, and weary, in the village of Borobudur, having covered barely 138 miles—an average of just 4.3 miles a lift.
A UNESCO World Heritage site and the world’s largest Buddhist monument, the huge pyramidal Borobudur Temple rises majestically from an expansive fertile plain enclosed by three towering cone-shaped volcanoes and a distant jagged ridge of limestone. Considered one of Southeast Asia’s greatest Buddhist relics and the single most important piece of classical architecture in Indonesia, this ninth century temple was for a long time completely buried and forgotten under hundreds of years of tangled jungle growth, until it was rediscovered and unearthed in 1815 by Englishman, Sir Stamford Raffles. I had heard much about Borobudur, and couldn’t wait to see it for myself.
My final lift of the day was on the back of a scooter, ridden by a charming local girl wearing a headscarf and a long overcoat, who spoke good English and worked at a local bank—where I met her while using its ATM. She dropped me at a little hotel opposite an extensive parkland that contained Borobudur. Despite the park’s close proximity, Borobudur remained hidden, shrouded by foliage.
The hotel was another grubby place to crash, with no shortage of cockroaches or stains on the bedsheets; but on the upside, it was cheap, included a breakfast of fried eggs and coffee, and all guests received a three dollar discount voucher redeemable off the entrance fee to Borobudur, which cost the equivalent of fifteen U.S. dollars for non-Indonesians.
I set off for the temple at dawn, and was surprised to be offered a complimentary cup of tea by the security staff at the entrance gate, taking the edge off the entrance fee—oh, how the little things make me happy. The park was quaint, manicured civility, with long stone paths, beautiful lawns, towering specimen trees and lovingly tended flowers and shrubbery, all shrouded in a gentle morning mist. According to my map, a major path circumnavigated Borobudur itself, from which four additional straight paths led inwards towards the temple, approaching it from the four points of the compass.
It took a while ambling about before I located the major eastern approach route. Split down the middle by a raised bed of shrubs, and lined on either side by palms and other tropical trees, it channeled my gaze towards a distant staggered staircase leading up a lush green hill, where, poking through the slowly evaporating mist, was Borobudur. Obscured by much of the park’s surrounding trees, little more than Borobudur’s central bell-shaped stone stupa tower was visible from afar. Known as the sacred path, the eastern approach route was traditionally used by Buddhist pilgrims, who on arrival at Borobudur would proceed in a clockwise direction around its enormous base—repeating the process on every one of the enigmatic pyramid’s nine graduated tiers, to finally reach the top. Ascending it in this ritualistic fashion is symbolic of the path from the earthly world to enlightenment, and apparently encompasses a walk of over three miles; but no matter how big on paper, as I gradually approached the base of the hill on which Borobudur sat, I began to wonder whether the place was somewhat over-hyped. It’s just, when looking from below, it was difficult to gauge a true sense of its scale, as little of it was visible. And so, as I climbed the hill, my expectations were somewhat subdued as to what would greet me at the top. Ascending the final stairs and stepping out onto a broad terrace, Borobudur’s majesty finally revealed itself, and my pessimism evaporated in an instant.
Sprawling in front of me was a magnificently detailed temple, meticulously constructed out of dark volcanic stone on a truly colossal scale, whose staggering width seemed completely out of proportion to its moderate height, creating an intriguing squashed pyramid. Built around and completely enveloping an existing hill, it was constructed on a giant, generally square base, the simple geometry of which was broken up by additional square forms jutting sideways from the overall structure, leaving it resembling a Buddhist mandala. (A spiritually significant Bud
dhist and Hindu symbol made up of concentric squares with a circular central point). Stairways led up from the center of all four sides, and also gave access to nine terraces, comprising the pyramid’s individual levels. Stretching their entire length were finely carved bas-reliefs, and above them, squatting in little alcoves, hundreds upon hundreds of Buddha statues, all wearing the same timeless expression of the stoically unmoved. It was remarkable, and I was very lucky to be sharing it with but a handful of other early risers whose diminutive figures could be seen on Borobudur’s various levels, providing the perfect scale of reference to the structure as a whole.
The traditional three mile concentric climbing to the top seemed too much like hard work, so I skirted around part of the temple’s lower base to get a sense of its presence, then headed on up. Scaling the stairs, I fixed my gaze on the temple itself, with a mind to only turning around and looking at the vista behind me once I’d made it to the summit. Ornate stone archways separating the different tiers passed overhead, then came multiple bell-shaped stone stupas of the upper levels, inside which life-size statues of the Buddha could be seen, visible through lattice brickwork. Finally I arrived at the upper terrace and slowly turned around.
Expanding in front of me and reaching out to the distant horizon, was the fertile agricultural basin of the Kedu plain, a green vista consisting of a medley of rice paddies, fields of sugar-cane and coconut palms. Shrouding the scene was a delicate blanket of slowly evaporating mist, which climbed skyward from the earth like some great ethereal spirit. Trees glistened; their dew-heavy foliage sparkling like precious stones in the low morning sun. Through the hazy vapor the distant mountains could be glimpsed: three perfect cones, two dead-ahead and one to my left, which along with the jagged range behind and to my right, gave the plain a paradoxical feeling of both extreme spaciousness and enclosed security.
Stories from the Buddha’s life and other Buddhist tales are immortalized in the stones of Borobudur, as is an unintentional, although highly valuable, historical record of Javanese life from a millennium ago. Ships with billowing sails, flamboyant dancers, towering elephants, voluptuous maidens, regal kings and fearless warriors line the embellished walls. At the base of the pyramid, in an area known as the hidden foot, are carvings of man’s most elemental desires. These particular reliefs were only discovered during a UNESCO restoration project and were originally intended to remain unseen by the temple goers, buried in the earth as part of the structure’s foundations, despite them being every bit as intricate as carvings elsewhere. The UNESCO team decided to leave four panels exposed for posterity.
While studying these, I was practically mobbed by a mixed group of teenage students on a school trip; not to study the temple as you might imagine, but so they could practice English with the foreigners found around the place. Everyone wanted to chat and have their photo taken with me, so I obliged them for a while until the group dispersed in favor of some foreign new arrivals. Over in a corner, sitting by themselves on a bench, was a young European-looking couple of the hippie variety. I ambled over to say hello, meeting Lucy from France and Edgar from Lithuania, the latter of whom sported a head of flaming red dreadlocks. They were traveling overland together through Southeast Asia and had arrived in Indonesia by way of a ferry from Malaysia. This was my plan but in reverse, so I inquired as to the ferries’ costs, regularity, and departure locations.
“If you go from Sumatra then you have to leave from Dumai. There used to be ferries further north but low cost airlines have put them out of business,” explained Lucy.
“They’ll probably cease from Dumai soon too,” added Edgar.
This was an interesting development. The next big Indonesian island that I would come to, and my last en route to Malaysia, was Sumatra, but on it I had hoped to travel much further north than Dumai in order to visit Gunung Leuser National Park, an area where it is possible to see orangutans in the wild. But with no ferries leaving north of Dumai, this was now unrealistic. Sumatra’s roads were, apparently, even worse than Java’s, and the ones I needed wound much of the way to Dumai through dense jungle—a route with reportedly nothing worth stopping off at along the way. Distance-wise, Dumai was about a week of hitchhiking away, and the orangutans about a week after that. I just couldn’t justify it. I would have to leave for Malaysia from Dumai. The orangutans could wait for another visit.
I got moving soon after, heading up a road with a slight gradient away from Borobudur village, into a steamy morning. On spotting me, several well-meaning locals frantically pointed back towards the village where the bus terminal was. Five minutes later and a small black car pulled over whose driver gave me a ride to the next cross roads. A lift on the back of a motorbike soon followed to the town of Salaman, and from there I scored an excellent ride in another car, this time driven by a super friendly young couple: Lisa and Andi. Despite their Western sounding names, both were Indonesian. Of the two, Lisa spoke the best English. They were heading west to the town of Kebumen, about fifty miles away.
“Have you tried our famous Durian fruit?” asked Lisa, after plying me with several mangosteen—a delicious purple-skinned tropical fruit about the size of a small orange, with several white segments and a wholly unique tasting pulp.
“No. But I’ve heard they’re disgusting. Is it true?”
“For Westerner I think so! They say it smells like, how you say, bad feet.”
“Would you like to try one?” asked Andi.
“You’re not exactly selling it to me you know; but yeah, why not.”
We pulled over by a lone roadside shack where several spiky fruits the size and shape of heads were dangling on strings from the shop’s overhead wooden shutter. Lisa and Andi walked carefully from fruit to fruit inspecting them with a discerning eye. This seemed like serious business. The day before, a truck driver had picked me up and stopped at a total of four different stalls to inspect their Durian, but, unimpressed, decided not to purchase one. I knew that Durian fruits were considered a delicacy in Indonesia, and as such expensive, so when Lisa and Andi settled on one I tried to pay.
“No,” insisted Lisa. “It is our gift.”
The woman working the store placed the fruit on a bamboo table and with a machete prised it open—splitting it into four sections, each consisting of a white fleshy casing containing a slimy-looking yellow pod.
“Take one,” insisted Lisa with excitement.
I did.
“Try not to smell it before you eat it!” she instructed with a laugh, which of course meant I became acutely conscious of its aroma.
It was odd smelling, that’s for sure. To me it didn’t so much bring smelly feet to mind, more a suggestion of vomit. I took a tentative nibble, and in so doing recalled a television travel show I had seen on Indonesia where the presenter had enthused that the Durian’s taste was “quite heavenly.” Well, if that’s what heaven’s like, then you’re welcome to it. It was like a fermenting, slightly alcoholic, onion-flavored custard. Like the sound of that? No, didn’t think so. But Indonesians go mad for Durians—although unfortunately, not today. Since Lisa and Andi purchased the Durian for me, they took the merest of bites, purposefully leaving me the lion’s share. I had no desire to continue, but put on a brave face and polished it off—along with the contents of my water bottle to wash away the taste.
Our next stop was a police station in a town called Purworejo where Andi had, as he put it, “some business.” He seemed a bit cagey when venturing this information so I didn’t pry as to which side of the law his business was on, and waited in the car while he and Lisa disappeared inside. Ten minutes later and they returned. We drove for another hour or so through more green fields and villages, before pulling over at a little roadside shack constructed from split bamboo. Here Lisa and Andi insisted on buying me lunch, and very nice it was too. A delicious meal of duck and soya fritters, served with cucumber and a spicy spinach-like vegetable came our way, as did a shared pot of tea, served in little patterned glasses. It
was the most I’d eaten in days.
“What is your job?” asked Lisa.
“Writer,” I answered, which elicited the standard impressed response, with mutual nods of the head shared between both of them. I didn’t want to spoil their illusion by explaining the reality of scraping by in all manner of less glamorous sounding professions, and so for the next few minutes indulged them, and myself, in a thorough massaging of my ego.
“And what is your job?” I asked Andi afterwards.
“I am secret service.”
“Ah, like James Bond,” I responded.
“No,” laughed Lisa. “James Bond is handsome!”
I gestured to Andi’s face. “What’s your problem?”
They both laughed.
Further up the road and we stopped at another police station, this time in Kebumen. Andi went inside again and came out moments later with several cops in tow who it turned out wanted to meet me, shake hands and say hello.
Kebumen was as far as Lisa and Andi had planned to travel, but instead of dropping me on the main road out of town, these wonderful people insisted on driving me a further thirty miles to the town of Buntu.
“Are you sure?” I asked Andi as we set off.
“Don’t worry. Your luck will be my luck.”
I hoped so, and was touched by his generosity.
We arrived in Buntu by late afternoon, having spent most of the day on the road in order to cover a total of barely eighty miles.
I could have just stood still at Buntu, gesturing for a ride north to the city of Purwokerto, but I seemed to have far more luck in Indonesia when I took the initiative and hiked along the road. Within minutes a car pulled over. Inside sat three young guys in their late teens: two up front and one in the back, currently using a laptop. By the time we arrived in Purwokerto it was raining with such ferocity that is seemed likely to tear through the roof of the car. Outside was a world of water. Streets were flooded, pedestrians were crammed in together sheltering under awnings, and cars and trucks crawled through river-like conditions. Few bikers currently braved the downpour, even those with ponchos. I hardly wanted to get out, but this was the end of the line.