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Highlights from Jakarta
One of the major highlights of my time in Jakarta is a culinary excursion to Bandung that I am taken on by my friend and former cabin mate Roi, who I met at the Yogapoint Ashram in Nasik, where we spent a month together two years ago, and by his friend/ex-girlfriend Melia. Roi wants to be a Buddhist monk. He also feels an obligation to care and provide for his aging parents. Roi is such a sweet man. I can’t guess what will happen for him next.
And that my friends is the long and the short of my Jakarta experience, five days trying to get somewhere I end up not wanting to be, in a fantastically crowded metropolis, with block after block of massive skyscraper apartment buildings looking for all the world like Coop City in the East Bronx, another place it is hard to get anywhere from and that no one really wants to be.
JAKARTA
TRAVEL DIARIES
Jakarta
Jumping-offs from Jakarta
Smoggy Skies
February 4, 2014
I am born of the city. THE City we would say. New York City. And before I arrive in Jakarta from Sumatra I have imagined it to be New York-like, far more say than artificial financial processing urban entities such as Hong Kong and Singapore. And although I’ve mostly been drawn to rural areas and village/indigenous people on my travels, Jakarta seemed to have enough about it from my pre-trip research that I chose to make it my base for five full days. Sometimes even I can be soooo wrong …
Jakarta, it turns out, is just an impossible city – tied with Dar es Salaam for least bearable city I have ever visited. To get anywhere more than a short walk in Jakarta is a major challenge. Many streets and intersections are flooded. It rain daily while I was there. Nothing but terribly crowded superhighways – with occasionally free high-speed bus lanes – connect the city. In places the highways are five lanes in each direction, with curiously close non-automated toll plazas where the travel lanes are constricted and narrowed for tedious hand-to-hand cash transactions and change making. The airport is 20 minutes away from downtown without traffic. At most times you must plan on it being a two hour trip.
My guesthouse in Jakarta is itself perfectly lovely, more or less centrally located at the end of an alley off a street with numerous street vendors, shops, and restaurants none of which I ever partake of, down the block from a very noisy mosque, along a fast flowing canal which fills with afternoon and evening rains. The neighborhood is near one of Jakarta’s major hospitals. During my stay three separate men show me the scars on their arms where veins were harvested before their open-heart vein-graft bypass surgeries. One such man is continuously smoking. I wonder how the operations are paid for and who makes the decision as to how the medical resources are allocated.
Aside from it being exceedingly difficult to get around in Jakarta the main attraction of the city appears to be shopping malls, each more depressing than the other. There is also a decent smattering of Kentucky Fried Chickens, Burger Kings, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts, all selling their products at U.S. prices.
The skies are smoggy all day.
There is a halfway decent national museum.
The highlight of my time in Jakarta is a culinary excursion to Bandung that I am taken on by my friend and former cabin mate Roi, who I met at the Yogapoint Ashram in Nasik, where we spent a month together two years ago, and by his friend/ex-girlfriend Melia. Roi wants to be a Buddhist monk. He also feels an obligation to care and provide for his aging parents. Roi is such a sweet man. I can’t guess what will happen for him next.
And that my friends is the long and the short of my Jakarta experience, five days trying to get somewhere I end up not wanting to be, in a fantastically crowded metropolis, with block after block of massive skyscraper apartment buildings looking for all the world like Coop City in the East Bronx, another place it is hard to get anywhere from and that no one really wants to be.
JAKARTA
TRAVEL DIARIES
Cambodia
Recollections from Cambodia
Floating Villages
Anghor, Cambodia
February 8, 2011
The city of Siem Reap is awash in tourists and everything is priced in American dollars not Cambodian rials, all of this commerce seemingly fueled by the draw of the Anghor Wat temples. That said, Anghor Wat is truly amazing and its scale incredible. The details, the carvings, the kilometer after kilometer of bas-relief drawings of historical and mythological stories, the absence of the use of any mortar on big stone sculptures and arches, the immense faces (at least 8×8) put together like matching adjoining blocks or puzzle pieces at the Bayon temple, over 200 huge Buddha faces, four on each spire or chimney, each facing in one of the four ordinal directions, each one different, eyes up, eyes down, eyes closed in meditation, smiling. Our tuk tuk driver took us around to more than half a dozen temples, waited for us, had lunch with us, mediated with begging children on occasion for us, from 8A to 3P, for all of $10.
At one point in Angkor I closed my eyes and saw the bas-relief drawings etched on my inner eyelids, and then opening them encountered a laughing orange robed monk from Phnom Phen who I instantly hit it off with, joking, and laughing together, taking one another’s pictures, and hugging one another. He told me in very broken English that his name was Green Hawk, something I cannot understand how he came by, other than saying the guides were speaking, and to mean and believe that quite literally.
I also had a series of very charming engagements with young children, notwithstanding the fact that the encounters were mediated by the children’s seeking of money. Over lunch, for example, I bought four little brass statues (that I’m sure were made in India) from one little girl who knew the capitol cities of all fifty states, flawlessly, and in another such event, at a quite different unreconstructed temple, more than a dozen boys followed/led me around, showed me their English homework, got me to correct some of it, and hit me up for a contribution to their school, or whatever it was I actually contributed to, but most of all were genuinely and immensely charming.
I have also encountered at least a dozen bands playing classic Khmer music that advertize themselves as being comprised of land mine victims, and indeed all of the musicians have limbs missing, leg prostheses in evidence, holding bows with the stubs of arms, or are blind. Although not widely reported internationally, there is even today a “small” border skirmish going on between Cambodia and Thailand that is the lead story in the local newspapers, and as a result of which casualties are being brought in to the local hospital.
CAMBODIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
Day One
My passage into this world was quite lengthy and strange. I remember thinking the fluid in which I floated was running out and that I was at risk. I became quite woozy, which I’ve never liked. My head was squeezed. I felt tremendous pressure. I was expelled into a world I had never imagined. I was slapped and twisted. I drew something cold inside my chest, not unpleasant, but rather cool. I hadn’t even known there were outsides and insides. It was chilly outside my form. The brightness bothered my eyes.
Everything was blurred and indistinct. My arms were pinned down. It was extremely loud. Temperature regulation was a hassle. I was cold. I was hot. The soft thick fluid was gone. Fish on a beach I thought. I wish I’d stayed inside I thought. I was very frightened. I wanted things to be as they had been.
Having said that, it was also tremendously interesting and different, enlivening. I had an awareness of other forms, which I’d never had before, a sense of my separateness, my empty aloneness, and my hungry vulnerability. All of my movements were jerky and unsmooth. I hardly knew myself and was in control of nothing. Trust was a big issue then … and would ever since. Life is such an improbable challenge. I wondered where I was before, before I was inside. I have absolutely no memory of that time, then or now, other than the blood, which makes me feel kind of lonely.
I felt lost. Not in pain, but vaguely uncomfortable, physically and emotionally. There were long periods of unconsciousness that were so familiar. It was the awareness that startled me. I waited. I waited a lot. There wasn’t much I could do about anything anyway. I had concerns and gripes, but was clearly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. At least I thought so then.
JOURNAL ENTRIES
The Jews are chasing me
The Jews are chasing me. And the Hebrews own me. The Jews send forth their messianic minions in earthly form, because that’s about all that’s left after the millennia, the holocaust, the pogroms, the Pale … some writings, some values, some proud history, some false pretenses. They won’t let go, these Jews. They’re like fundamentalists everywhere. They demand I recognize and accept the electromagnetic energetics I’m so familiar with as realities … and I do, only for me they are tribal, the DNA is tribal, the historic memories embedded in the inherited codes are tribal. The Jews also want land back. They demand I at least acknowledge being Jew-ish. And I do. And we cannot deny our wish that our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters are Jew-ish and when they marry Jewesses, they can say their children are Jewish. Bottom line is, go back enough generations and all of our ancestors are all African. I like that.
MISCELLANEOUS
Three revolutionary white male US political leaders gone b4 their usefulness was exhausted
I cannot understand what I am still doing here when three of my heroes and models – all better, younger, braver and more useful men have perished. Please meet Tim Carpenter, Alan Berkman, and Steven Brion-Miesel.
POLITICAL
04 – Aaryn Lavole
After delivering the wampum shells to the museum/library/cultural center at Akwesasne, and having had a very nice conversation with a woman who works there, vacations once a year on the Cape, and is very involved in a language immersion school and the Mohawk powwow on Cornwall Island, I intentionally took a “wrong” turn away from the border to smoke the last of my Vermont grown marijuana and not cross the border with any cannabis.
I then turned the car around onto the side of a very remote road to face downhill, and got out of the car to do the pipe ceremony, when coming down the road was a woman in a wheelchair.
“Not something you see everyday,” I said, and thereupon met Aaryn. Aaryn pronounces Akwesasne completely differently than I do and laughs when I say it. After about an hour together I consider her one of my closest friends and this magnificent human being is but what cold my attention to her was that she was in a wheelchair and was rolling down the hill in her wheelchair. In the middle of fucking nowhere. I’ll tell you the rest of the story later Uh Oh.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
Soul’s Journey 2023
Grandmother’s Sendoff
“The first night I was ever completely alone in the forest I was already a grandmother. Later that night the heavens opened and the earth and the rooted ones drank the waters and I stepped out of my tent into the rain and mud barefooted and did my spinning jiggle dance. May that which I felt in those moments be with you in mind and in spirit on your travels among the living and the dead. May you be as one on your way with our blessing. Walk in beauty.” Author unknown.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
Stories from Australia
I leave Jakarta as fast and far behind as I can, flying to Perth in Western Australia, where I spend the night at a real hotel, eat in a real restaurant, drink water from the tap, talk easily with folks who speak almost comprehensible English, and catch an early bus the next day for the six hour ride to Mount Barker, in the Porongurups, and a short but important rendezvous with Joy, her son Loren, and Joy’s brother Clyde who have spent the prior week together at the family retreat working and reworking a huge deck and porch they have designed to expand two full sides of the house they built with Joy and Clyde’s father before he died in a horrible car crash on these very roads just days before Loren was born in 1986.
I am wearing my US Boat to Gaza T-shirt under an open throated button shirt as I get to the bus station in Perth such that only the last three letters of the word “Boat” show, and when I look in the mirror at the station what I see resting above my heart is the word “tao,” the path, and I feel reinforced by this guidance, that I am on the great path, as it must be, and as we each and all are, the great Dharma unfolding and revealed with every footfall.
The time in Australia feels like a transitional interlude on the symphonic pathway of this particular voyage. It is a long hike for just a few days to a place I have been before, but the meaning of my presence to Joy and her kin far exceed the “travel value” of my time there, visiting the resting places of Joy’s parent’s ashes and the home she physically built with her family, particularly her father, to share in and experience the energy that adheres to Cuming clan sacred ground, as I did in Scotland, and to be present for and with Joy on her 58th birthday celebration in Perth amongst friends from her life when Joy was fourteen and her family moved here through the early years of Loren’s life as an infant and child before the Cape called them back to the U.S. I marvel at Joy’s, Clyde’s, and Loren’s energy, skill, and devotion, as they work (exceedingly hard) together. I serve as camp cook and dishwasher, a role I relish before we return to Perth to stay with Sarah and Bruce Campbell who share their home and interests with great grace, to a party for Joy hosted by Clyde, Sue, and their gifted son Darby, and to all too brief a time with Dawn Meader who guides us to Bali – visit her website – where less than 72 hours after leaving Jakarta – most of that time seated in planes, buses, and automobiles – Joy and I arrive amidst the mountains, rice terraces, and lovely souls of Sideman.
AUSTRALIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
Munduk
Our second venue in Bali is at an eco-resort called Village in the Clouds. We set off from Sideman around one P.M. intending to get to Munduk, which we’ve noted on some correspondence or other is where Village in the Clouds is located. I’ve consulted our rudimentary Bali roadmap and found Munduk on the southwest coast, which we judge before setting out to be a five or six hour drive from Sideman at most. We begin our journey first visiting a huge volcanic lake and caldera that is stunningly beautiful (although mostly obscured by clouds), taking the requisite photographs, and then driving along the rim of the crater before heading down to sea level on the north side of the island. It can’t be more than 10 miles as the crow flies from the volcano’s rim to the sea and our plan is to get to Munduk by circumnavigating the island on what looks like a decent flat road along the shoreline. Unexpectedly, driving steadily from the volcano’s ridge to the sea takes us about three hours, not the thirty minutes we anticipated, and once at sea level we find ourselves in a solid line of traffic, still moving very slowly, maybe creeping is more accurate, and when the skies open for the daily late afternoon deluge we pull into a very touristy restaurant and bar right on the beach in Lovina.
During the course of dinner we ask the waiter how long he thinks it will take us to get to Munduk and he asks us to show him where on the map is this Munduk I am referring to. So I show him the Munduk I’m headed towards and he shows me two others. And the light bulb finally goes on, the Munduk where Village in the Clouds is located is not at sea level, and is appropriately named “in the clouds” because it is in the Munduk the waiter has shown us high in the mountains.
Well that saves us a long useless drive we both chide and congratulate ourselves about as we head out toward the Munduk in the mountains on a road that would be immensely challenging under ideal conditions, no less in the dark, in the rain, in thick fog and clouds. And when we do finally reach the village of Munduk we absolutely cannot find Village in the Clouds. We drive passed town up the road. Nothing. We make U-turns that are beyond precarious and drive down the road. Nothing. There are places in the road that when we stop we cannot get traction enough to go forward and must back down in the dark, sometimes with me outside the vehicle calling wheel turning directions to Joy who is backing up blind until a flat enough section of road is found to get enough traction to reestablish our uphill climb. We see no open stores, no open restaurants, nothing but shuttered houses. And when we do by good fortune come upon one tiny open shop selling cigarettes, soda, water, and bananas I get out to try to explain what we are looking for to the owner. “Village in the Clouds” I say, drawing the words out slowly and forming the shape in the air with my arms of the A-frame houses we expect to find there. And the shopkeeper says to me with a heavy accent but in absolutely perfect English, “I know every resort and accommodation in this village and on this road. I am a tour guide. What you are looking for is not here. Don’t you have a cell phone and the phone number?”
Well, yes, I tell my newly found guardian angel, we do have a cell phone and even a phone number but we have not been able to get through on it. “Here, perhaps you can give me the number and I will try on my phone,” the guide says. And just like that, in mere moments, he and I are talking with the owner of Village in the Clouds, who also speaks beautiful English, and explains to us that “munduk” means hill in Balinese and that the resort is a solid hour away. The guide urges us to go no further up into the mountains. It’s 11:00 P.M. The roads are precipitous in the daytime under clear skies. We have not reached the peak. Traversing it will be dangerous. Guesthouses are available nearby where we can stay and leave in the morning.
But such is simply not our way. Joy and I are in complete agreement on this as on so much else this trip and we take leave of our guide offering him our gratitude … and money for his time and phone minutes, which he refuses. “It was my destiny to help you,” he says. “I will call in ninety minutes to make sure you have gotten there.” Which he does, and which we have not given our speed, cautions, and a few wrong turns, although we do finally arrive at Village in the Clouds, where we are greeted by Josep, the co-owner, at about 1:00 A.M., hugged, told that our “friend” from Munduk has been calling concerned for us, and guided by Josep to our architecturally beautifully designed and fantastically located A frame. We’ve been driving on the road other than the dinner break for twelve hours. Joy has done all the driving.
BALI
TRAVEL DIARIES