Nobody travels alone. Always there are other people, always there is your luggage, lost memories, mental gymnastics and spontaneous thoughts. E-mails in tropical internet cafes, a backpack and the mosquito net. Music and immense urban noise. But also the two of you, my companions, not heard in the story, always present in the reality of the journey. And the endless, all inclusive conversation of traveling in friendship. And do not forget, the writers and poets with their books and works. When I am on the road their voices echo in my mind. They disturb sometimes my search to find the way in the Indonesian Archipelago, on the peninsula of Malaysia, in the Kingdom of Thailand. Right from the beginning of the journey the Japanese poet Basho travels with me and also the ‘handkerchief birds’ that fly high in the sky. At times they are lost, they are however at the end my best help.
Part 1 is a reflection on the still not started journey, a meditation without end. And always again the same question in my ear ‘ why traveling.’ What is it, I would like to find when traveling around? In part 2, the story of the journey actually begins, although the story of traveling is at times lagging behind unknown memories from far back in time. However, it is always the desa, the waterfall or the rice field (sawa), the jungle, the talks in the hostel, which trigger the flow of thoughts. Part 3 is a short epilogue, a kind of confession. Actually, I would have liked to restart and redo the journey.
I would call these notes neither a travel story nor a travel guide. For information about countries and people in South east Asia many excellent guides are available. For the other things of life, I admit, I miss the appropriate language. The right words and the exact translations. The naming after of things. The calling and shouting. That is why it is at times a very quiet story with just a few words as in a haiku. Hopefully, the booklet works out as a tranquilizer for the reader at home, who does not feel at ease. Possibly it takes the place of a placebo for a proper journey not yet made. These are travel notes that live their own life without much concern about the reality, there outside in the field. Somewhere a huge screen hangs out that shows all things seen and written down. You will see shadows, silhouettes and with a hat shading the light you will discover people, animals and amazing things.
On Bali
We go visit Hindu temples on mountain tops, in walls of precipitous cliffs, in caves. We go to the monkey forest, the elephant cave, the Goa Gajah with its numerous niches and later to a colonial museum in Klungkung. The closely woven foliage hangs down from the tropical sky. The rain has painted the walls of the rock in black. Water seeps through crevices in the rock, drips incessantly into black ponds. This is a world dark as the soul. Where ever you go, a local guide will be there although the entrance of the temple is already guarded by a Siwas Pasupati, a big head of a grinning monster or by demons, raksasa sitting behind walls on the inside of the temple. Aren’t we protected against evil forces, or do they slip unseen inside the holy place together with us. Or even worse are we ourselves - not knowing, unaware - demonic figures? In the shade of the holy, evil is always around. However, the guide thanks his existence to you. He is your twin brother, your shadow and eats your soul or trades it off for his local little stories. If you don’t listen or follow his footsteps, your soul will not arise at all to the gods, to heaven. The tourist will for sure loose his soul, gets back the heart of a monkey. And he is everywhere, in the middle of the road, upon the little wall around the garden, on a low hanging branch of a tree, the monkey. He reminds us of the difference between him and us - so minuscule, so little that it is always blown up by us, exaggerated, made bigger than it is in order to chase away the monkey from the forest, from the world as a kind of apotheosis. Empty world full of people.
On Lombok
Further into the mountains at the end of a winding road we reach the traditional Sasak village of Senaru. We make a stroll in the early morning. It is cool and everywhere in the gardens flowers colorfully blossom, perfuming of freshness. In the villages en route nobody shows up – no sign of life. Nobody there? The people labor on the land, look and see, behind the trees in the rice fields. The UNESCO has donated a present to the last small village where the road ends at the fence around houses. A water work and sewerage. Previously the women carried water down from the mountain to the village. Now they stay in the village, the water flows all by itself to their homes. As a counter effort they preserve the village in traditional style. It is fenced with a high fence, poles of bamboo and it is marked as cultural heritage. At the entrance hangs a sign of the generous donor. A guide of the village tours us around. He starts to talk after we have put our donation in a box clearly visible for all people young and old standing around. We write our names in a guest book, a ritual they like to watch. Old men without teeth, breast feeding mothers and little children, they look at it. They are inspectors of the UNESCO who now pass their time in idleness as guardians of the past. The houses form streets and blocks, are built without written draft. The guide shows us the inside of a house on poles and with walls from bamboo woven mats. Inside is a space for rituals and prayers, the extended family lives in the room remaining next to it. Outside we see constructions in which the rice is kept and closed off against the vermin creeping in from all sides. Air tight constructed if not the rats were not that inventive. They gnaw a way through, as everywhere they do in life. They share with the people the storage of rice - without permit. Bamboo is used for everything and here also for the drainage of water from the roofs of the houses. The paths between the wooden houses are sandy and muddy in the rainy season. This way the people live here already for hundreds of years between the rice and the chicken, without water and sewerage. What is in our mind to lock these people in their traditional life? Like in a zoo or is it a prison with free entree? I tell the guide that I learned at school already about the culture of the Sasak and that I dreamed one day to go there. He stares at me and I think ‘of what did he dream when he was a little boy? That once upon a day tourists from far away countries would come along and listen to him, to his story?’ He invites us to come inside where people sit on the floor and eat cakes and sweeties. We tell him that we would like to continue our journey, while we look around to all those men with eye troubles and their fellow men, the half blind and the blind.
On Sulawesi
Not far from the little town of Rantepao in Tana Toraja one reaches the village of Lemo. The bus stops down by the road. We walk uphill. It is early in the morning. A rocky cliff steeply rises over the rice fields, still in the shade of itself. High up in the cliff there are hollows, niches fenced with wooden balconies, a theater where you see well dressed-up puppets sitting motionless on chairs, images of the dead of the village, the so called tau tau. These puppets form an authentic and almost lively community, a peculiar mixture of silence and rigid strictness. Every year the puppets are clothed anew in their favorite death garments. Often in white, the color of sorrow or the eternal life. However, the tropics destroy the tau tau, eat through their clothes, waste the tightly woven threads into worn shreds. And the dampness of the tropics penetrates deeply into the bones of the dead. A bit further away the bodies of the dead or what rests of them, hang loosely with white bones halfway out of their coffins, which are attached highly to the cliff. The bones do not matter any more - the tau tau do - give the impression of being neglected by the living. I do not feel an urge to look with the light of a torch into the niches. The smell of moistness and the rotten is slightly macabre.
Downhill are the rice fields, silvery spots, artistically spanned by a network of wires with shining tins against the glatik, the little rice birds. A confusing mathematics, an arbitrary construction, a brainwave to disturb the birdies. One pull at the wire and the birds fly up. A moment later they are back between the fragile rice plants. As in vain a kite is being launched, day after day, every hour, incessantly a game is played with the god of the wind. However, there is no wind here beneath the cliff, just the sky and the clouds reflecting in the water of the fields between the little dikes. A woman winnows with a sieve the grains of rice. At times she pulls the wire. Admiral sailing ducks – penguin ducks as Alfred Wallace mentions - dive on an invisible sign underwater, disappear and come back to the surface head swaying/ shaking. Between their fatty feathers water dripping pearls. The ducks clean the fields of the young paddi, they open and close ajar lines of dark water. They don’t hear the light sound of the swaying tins neither are they disturbed by the industrious little rice thieves. They do their job and have a good duck life.
In a small cottage on a little dike between the rice fields two young men have their working place, their shop. They carve little images from hardwood, they sell one image to me for the prize of a package of kretek( tobacco of spices). It is the sculpture of a sitting man with an inward looking, sad face. He meditates on his country, on the fate of his fatherland, the carver said. And he thinks of his delicious kretek.
In Thailand (Ayuthaya)
The wind blows strongly and we ride on the bike bent forwardly, fighting the wind. At the entrance of the large temple compound we put the bikes against the wall and lock them. I walk away, look back and see an object of abstract art. A bike in an Asian town. People in motion and on the move. Squares full of biking people. Rolling on, turning around, pedaling. Man on a bike, an on-going insect. We walk through the park of temple ruins and climb the towers and temples, that invite us to mount, to step the stairs. Across the lawn raking women with hats tied with a shawl to their chin lie around and together. Temples become ruins, women carry on life - forever. All of sudden I feel the hand of history, of what is gone but still present. Of the vanity to resist time in constructions of stone. Building temples of stones, not wood as if they can endure time and withstand decay. To erect towers as tokens of sovereignty. Or did the builders already know how beautiful the ruins would be. Did they love stones that decompose as we do, who are here and now biking around? Love for stone that pulverizes as earthwork and fades away into a brown of the earth. Stone that will be overgrown by grasses, where grasses unhindered creep over the foot of the towers, of the temples, of the upward going steps. Where a tree embraces with roots a stone head of the Buddha. And where towers start to slide down due to their age, hanging oblique or crumble down in the grasses. This is a city which becomes earth and grass. Here history breaks down into dust. The DNA survives, the women in the lawn are its witness. Heavy and with a rake in their hands they don’t let themselves sweep from this earth. Without women the city is nothing else than the past. Now the city still lives in stone and grass, breathes and moves in the wind thanks to the women. When we ride back, I stop and step from my bike, buy a very tiny, silvery image of the Buddha.
Java has become densely packed, a country of more than one hundred million people and innumerable mosques, small Muslim schools, cities, desa’s, rice fields, tea and coffee plantations. In multitude, everything identical, but different and everywhere itself. Hidden and secretly as she shows herself, a historical melting pot of religions, sovereigns and subdued people. Herself repeating everywhere, pearls on a string, one worn out the other shining and at times one missing, an empty place, where the string once was broken or gone loose. And always too the ritual of praying, the singing of the muezzin, chaining the minutes, the hours, the days till the very last day. The praying forwardly on knees in the mosque - the way bamboo bends. Or on a mat, inward looking, alone, inside the house or in the backyard of the compound. In order that nobody will observe, only Allah will hear and listen. Java, one large, extended desa anywhere outside the tumultuous cities with their tentacles, that strangle the countryside. With the feet in the water, hidden under the palm trees, hovering in the valley, lifted over the steep cliff, attached – a nest of little birds, shrieking and swinging, perfuming of bakso’s and warungs between the little straws, the alleys and gangs, the clay of the path to the rice field. The desa, squatting in the land, her imprint in the earth. The gamelan.
On Java near the Merapi
In the mountains we reach two small temples, Candi Ceto and Candi Sukuh. At the background the green tea plantations on the slopes and higher and further away the Gunung Merapi. There are no tourists. Just us. Sukuh with its steep stairs reminds us a moment of pictures of the Inca temples. What is wrong with me? Did I sleep the night with my head on a history book and do I search again and again the wrong pages? Under a little roof, no more than a shelter the god Bima presents himself as energetic as a black hole in heavens. Candi Ceto has a floor of stone turtles laid into a design of a giant bat. This is far from the city, this is far back in history, close to nature. Almost deleted by time, survived outside the hectic of the hustle and bustle of towns and cities. Souvenir and survival, witness and trace. Submerged memory of the ancient India, of pre-Islamic life on Java. So earthly and vigorous, so invincible strong of character and nature. Mysticism survived in stone for whom it sees and didn’t know.
The Borobudur
The Borobudur or how to write the name in this language. Well known, close by, within reach of the bus. Built by hands of humans or angels, taken back by nature and covered up. And then, nature buried the semi divine architects. For centuries turned in upon itself, silently, lost into the earth. Afterward excavated and restored – back to the stone age, sculptured for the eternity of the Now. Monument on the world heritage list, inevitable for the traveler of today. What does he do with his film or photo camera, apparatus to deny Nothingness, to bring the mobile to a stand still and to mobilize the immobile. The Borobudur surrounded by full parking places and a big fair of shops and sellers of strings of beads, images made of stone or hardwood, woven batik cloths and tropical fruits. Hey, there is the entrance and I shuffle to the dollar window for a ticket and the guides loitering around with their detective story of the Borobudur for how many times already? The immense Borobudur, the architectural colossus of stone, the wrapping of earth, with all its water pipes and stony monsters, its endless galleries and sublime stories in sculptured stone, stories under a gray heaven and the Nirwana itself on the highest level, its three circles and stupa’s without sculptures. That is how the enlightenment will be, the restoration of Emptiness, a rotation around Nothingness, and high above the gray sky. And inside, the inner impenetrable, a hill of earth, massive as a sign that also there the human being seeks a mainstay, an anchorage in vain. Under the clouds the temple colossus becomes gray, gets dark folds of the skin, becomes a motionless elephant in the twilight.
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