I found all of them, and a lot more besides.
The wide blue yonder: exploring a remote corner of Indonesia by motorbike and backpack.
I’ve been in and out of Indonesia for a decade and a half now, sometimes wandering the outer reaches of the archipelago as a backpacker; sometimes living and working for extended periods closer to the heart of the country as an English teacher and a journalist, and I’ve still got a geeky enthusiasm for all things Indonesian. There’s a past and a present that are equally colorful. There’s a music scene that might just be the most multifaceted in the universe. There’s food that’ll have you scurrying for second helpings (or, occasionally, recoiling in terror!). There are mountains to climb, football hooligans to dodge, urban chic to admire, and always a new journey to be plotted—these days usually with a whole legion of hip local travel bloggers to give you inspiration.
But the single best thing about Indonesia is just how much Indonesian people like to talk. It’s always dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about any country, let alone one this big, but I can safely say that talking is one thing that unites Indonesians—whether they’re smartphone-toting mallrats in Jakarta, or villagers in the wilds of Nusa Tenggara. Wherever I’m wandering, when locals lounging in some roadside warung shout “Hello mister!”—the standard greeting for a passing foreigner—if I pause to chat, once they’ve stopped laughing at the concept of a bule (“whitey”) speaking Indonesian with a (sort of) East Java accent, I’ll often find myself still there two hours later, still shooting the breeze. And when the topic is Indonesia itself, there’s always plenty to talk about…
CHAPTER 1
INDONESIA TODAY
A social media-mad nation where old ideas of status and respect still run deep, where easygoing welcomes offset fierce national pride, and where everyone from Sabang to Merauke speaks a single language—which might not be quite as easy to learn as you’ve been told, and which has a youth-speak version that’ll make your head spin. Indonesia today is a frenetic, and at times contradictory, place with an energy all of its own.
INDONESIA IN A SNAPSHOT
It’s a very long way from one end of Indonesia to the other—3,274 miles (5,269 kilometers), in fact. The space between those far-flung points is filled with a magnificent chaos of islands—approximately 17,508 of them, but who’s counting? Seriously, who actually is counting? Previous estimates of Indonesia’s island tally have ranged from a mere 13,667 all the way up to 18,307. What matters more than any precise number of islands is the staggering diversity of human experience that’s going on, right now, within this vast archipelago. Indonesia is home to something like 255,462,000 people, but once again, who’s counting? (Actually it’s Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics in this case). Scattered across that 3,274-mile, 17,508-island space, they range from Internet entrepreneurs to subsistence farmers, from classical musicians to supermodels, and from LBGT activists to religious evangelists, all living out myriad lives to a soundtrack that spans the gamut from dangdut to death metal.
Indonesia’s national flag, Sang Merah-Putih (“The Red and White”), is a potent emblem, closely associated with the country’s bloody struggle for independence from the Netherlands in the 1940s.
FROM SABANG TO MERAUKE
Start at the top: drifting off the northernmost tip of Sumatra you’ll find a ragged little scrap of land by the name of Pulau Weh. Its main town, Sabang, is one of the proverbial poles of the nation. When Indonesians want to invoke the entirety of their supersize homeland they say “from Sabang to Merauke” (Merauke is a small eastern city close to the border with Papua New Guinea). It’s a bit like when Brits say “from Land’s End to John O’Groats”—except that there’s no way in the world you could cycle from Sabang to Merauke in 48 hours…
Lively hip-hop street culture in the Javanese city of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest.
Pulau Weh is the perfect image of a tropical island, and right at this very moment, in one of the guesthouses back from the beach in the village of Iboih, there’s bound to be a gang of hip twenty-somethings from a big Indonesian city, chilling out after their latest dive excursion, and doing their best not to think about heading back to school or the office next week. And see the one with the laptop? She’s working on a post about this trip for her travel blog.
Modern urban Indonesia is a gritty counterpoint to guidebook images of timeless rural traditions.
Swing up, out, and southeast down the length of Sumatra with its cities shining like bright constellations in a great green emptiness. In Medan there’s a mob of teens queuing for the cinema in the glitzy Sun Plaza shopping mall, and down across the equator in Palembang there’s a couple on a first date in a floating restaurant on the banks of the River Musi. Head on southwards, across the Sunda Strait to Java, and before long you’ll see a smoky smudge up ahead, with a forest of slender skyscrapers rising into clearer air. It’s Jakarta, a massive maelstrom of energy raging above a sludgy tide of traffic. The richest and the poorest, the most radical and the most conservative, and people from every corner of the country and many corners of the globe—they’re all here, and most of them are stuck in that traffic. In a TV studio in the west of the city, a short way off the Jakarta-Tangerang toll road, there’s a glamorous celebrity waiting in the green room of a daytime chat show, and back in the center of town, on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise office block, an intern in an advertising agency is sucking at a cup of take-out coffee and sneaking a look at a blogpost about Pulau Weh he just saw linked on Facebook…
HEADING EAST
Up over the mountains to Bandung, where, in a garage in a northern suburb, there are four skinny kids with electric guitars who, though they don’t know it yet, are going to win an MTV Asia award in 18 months’ time. Onwards, eastwards, weaving in and out of the looming volcanoes that run the length of Java, the sprawl of red-tiled roofs that makes up Yogyakarta appears below. The heart of the city is an old royal palace, still home to a reigning sultan and still governed by ancient protocol. But a little way north, on a busy street near the Gajah Mada University campus, a gang of students are planning an anti-corruption demonstration over bowls of noodle soup—although one of them is a bit distracted by something about Pulau Weh that he’s reading on his iPhone…
Another world: in the hugger-mugger mayhem of the big cities, it’s easy to forget that much of Indonesia still does look just like those glossy guidebook images—a world of forests, mountains and rice terraces, like these in East Java.
In Surabaya the members of a vintage motorcycle club are planning a weekend road trip to the mountains, and in Banyuwangi a group of absurdly talented buskers are singing
