Bengkulu

After my plans fell through for the Ramadan holiday last week one of the Indonesian teachers at my company invited me to his home-town in Bengkulu. He warned me several times that there was no A/C and the conditions were “very basic.” I waved it off and said nothing trivial like that would deter a seasoned traveller. Three days and four hours of airport delays later I had the opportunity to put my words to the test.

Robbi's mum and sisters were waiting for us outside the airport, which was packed with Benkulians returning home for Eid. All around us was jungle and there was a disgusting smell that came from the open drains in the car park. They were steaming in the heat even though it was around eight o'clock evening. I followed his lead and shook his family's hands while bowing my head so that it touched their fingers. His mum asked me if I spoke Indonesian with a very strong and difficult to understand accent. I said I spoke just a little in what must have seemed the most ridiculous accent of all time because it made everyone giggle. So far I had only seen the women and they were all wearing hijabs.

We got into a Toyota Avanza and took the scenic route back to the house down a long strip of beach which was clogged with fairground rides and fairy lights and street food. Towards the end of the of the beach was a long strip of darkness and Robbi told me there were 'many bullshit characters doing bullshits'  in that bit. Since his girlfriend Ardana had a curfew of 9 o'clock it would be impossible for Robbi to meet her that night and he complained that it wasn't his fault. Even so she was refusing to speak to him.

Whenever we played computer games in the evening at my apartment in Jakarta she would call him and ask him to say that he loved her before they hung up. Robbi confided in me that he had never even kissed or hugged a girl. Her idea of hugging was to 'hug hands.' He told me how in his culture it was very important for girls to be married before they turned 25 and that he only had two years left to raise about £1000 to pay a dowry to her dad and cover wedding expenses for the both of them. He said he longed to kiss her an asked if I had any advice. I declined to comment and told him a relationship like that was too far out of my experience. “If she isn't porking you, she's probably porking someone else,” didn't seem to fit. You never know though.

Before that I had heard about a strange marriage tradition in Indonesia where the families of the bride and groom tug a chicken to determine how much the groom has to pay to the family. Sometimes the groom's family gets a dodgy split and has to pay half his wages for the rest of his life to the wife's family. Maybe Robbi's situation could be worse.

We swerved around some chickens and down a dirt road then arrived at the house. It was white and had a sagging wooden porch with green tiles underneath. The jungle sprouted between the other houses dotted along the path and a long concrete trough of open drain water bordered the road on both sides.  We removed our shoes while Robbi's sister parked the car in the garage and his Dad greeted us at the door with some more hand shaking and jokes I could hardly understand. Inside there was a big bowl of rendang and a full cooker of rice waiting for us. The meat was buttery soft and the sauce was rich with only a bit of chilli, which was good because it would be a few days before we could finish it all.

After dinner all the women who had been wearing hijab earlier were walking around in their pyjamas. We  all sat on the floor in front of a TV from the 1980's watching an Indonesian sit com where a woman was crying about a dowry. On the way to the house we had stopped to pick up some snacks and I filled a bag with chocolate, crisps and instant noodles. I had to physically force Robbi's mum away from the till to prevent her from paying for it and snatch the money out the hand of the teller to replace it with me own. She called me a kind man and I said something unintelligible in Indonesian and everyone in the shop laughed at my accent/ horrendous grammar. Maybe they were laughing at the sentiment, because to them I was already a part of the family.

Before bed Robbi's dad invited me to attend a service at the Mosque at 6am the next day. I accepted so after trying on some “muslim clothes,” which apparently looked better than what I was wearing, I went to Robbi's room to get ready for an early night. His room just about accommodated his bed and an extra mattress that had been wedged in, blocking the door to the adjoining garage.  The walls looked as if they were once pink but had since faded to bare concrete and the roof was corrugated iron that radiated heat from the day. On the far wall was a table with one miniature fan plugged into the only socket. Robbi brushed a giant centipede off the mattress on the floor and told me I could take the top. I didn't argue with him.   

The next day I dragged my, already rancid, self out of bed and into my new clothes and we drove to the mosque. All the men went to the men's side and the women to the women's. I was surprised to discover that as well as being a civil servant Robbi's dad was also the imam at the mosque and lead the prayers, which were sung in Arabic. I managed to fake my way through all the prayer movements under the hot sun by copying people around me. Then I sat through a speech I didn't understand and we went to someone's house to eat 'tapai' and 'lemang,' which was rice grilled in banana leaves and some cereals which were with a very sweet purple sauce that I didn't really care for. I ate two portions to avoid looking rude.

We had planned to go to another service later in the day but as soon as we got back to the house I fell asleep for 3 hours and missed it. On Idul Fitri (Eid) it's tradition to visit all your friend's and family's houses and apologize to them for every time you may ever have wronged them and they are obliged to accept. It seemed like the perfect time to visit Robbi's girlfriend.

He permitted me to drive us there on his sister's motorbike since we could apologize to the polisi in the unlikely event of encountering them. When we arrived, her father and mother offered us food and welcomed us from their chairs but they didn't get up to greet us and after shaking hands avoided our eyes and found other people to talk to. The house was full of visitors. Robbi told me they hoped their daughter would find a richer husband than him. Their house was very similar to his but maybe slightly larger. We sat in the corner and I tried to talk to her brother who was an immigration officer but, like everyone else I had met apart from Robbi, he spoke no more than two words of English.

I asked his girlfriend why she didn’t speak English and she said because it was hard and she wasn't interested. I noticed that while they talked she touched his hand a few times and rested her head on his shoulder for a few seconds. After about 30 minutes the house was even more full and we decided to head back.

That night we made a plan to visit Robbi's uncle since he had never met a white man before and it was his lifelong ambition to take a photo with one (truly). While everyone talked, a pregnant cat came in off the street and noisily gave birth on the floor. After watching the scene in amazement I turned to everyone and told them a cat had just given birth. They turned around and just said “Oh yeah,” as if it was completely mundane. I was then warned several that it was a long drive to his uncle's house and that we would have to spend the night in much poorer conditions. I said no worries, what's good enough for your uncle is good enough for me.

His uncle's house was in the small village of Pajar Bulan. It had bare brick walls and the floor was bare concrete. He was a rice farmer and most the people I spoke to there were also farmers. There were ten to fifteen houses in a cluster surrounded by agricultural land and more jungle. Our lunch was rice with some assorted vegetables and I was able to speak to the person responsible for harvesting everything on the plate because they were all at the house apologizing for poisoning the food they sold him because it was Idul Fitri.

It was already evening and one of the farmers asked me if I like to play chess, When I said I did they went off and rounded up the 'best chess player in the village,' with an audience included, and brought them back to the house. They said the old guy was 'the best player,' but I couldn't tell if they were being serious because there were a few sly looks going on.

I had a splitting headache from the journey and the constant heat. I was also exhausted from having to get up shortly after sunrise after only quick bouts of poor sleep. After a year in Jakarta I had become unknowingly dependent on A/C. During the game I found it very hard to focus on the pieces.

After about 45 minutes, while I was thinking, I felt something wet and cold slap on my head and roll onto my shoulder. The crowd of observers looked at me with mild interest and someone pulled a black ghecko off my shirt. Robbi said the lizard was a good omen and shortly afterwards I noticed someone pointing out in Indonesian that I had a two-move checkmate available. To the astonishment of the crowd I played the mating line and everyone puzzled over the board for a few minutes before we shook hands.

They invited me to play some more games but I said I needed to lie down for a couple of minutes and asked where I was sleeping. Two or three people were already asleep on the bare floor in the living room and I rubbed the dent in my greasy hair where the lizard had fallen for luck. After a tense walk, Robbi's uncle lead me to the master bedroom where they had prepped the only bed in the house with a mosquito net and told me I would share the bed with Robbi since I was the guest of honour. Again, I didn't argue. I didn't get up until the next day either.   

In the morning Robbi's uncle asked if I would like to have a shower. In Bengkulu the shower was a tub full of murky water that came from a slow running tap and a bucket floating in the middle. The smell in the bathroom rivalled the smell in the car park of the airport. I had hoped the smell came from the toilet but I wasn't 100 % sure. Despite hints from other people in the house and my recent irresistibility to flies, I had claimed that I was too lazy to shower. I was in desperate need of one, but I was also suspicious. I asked if the water was clean and he said it was very clean and handed me the keys to a motorbike and told me to drive carefully.

Robbi jumped on the back and we bounced with the other bikes down a terrifyingly steep and rocky hill then drove over thin planks that were balanced on a threadbare bridge. After this we came into a clearing and drove down a trodden path through some jungle.

At the end of it we came to a dam in a river. I changed into some shorts that were in the seat of the motorbike and lathered up some soap with the help of Robbi's uncle who insisted on cleaning my back. While I finished showering he dunked his toothbrush in the water and cleaned his teeth. He asked me if I remembered to take my toothbrush and I said no so he offered me his. I told him I can only use a special toothpaste because I have sensitive teeth but thanked him for the offer. 

Later on that day we went to a music festival but people seemed to be more interested in me than in the music and throngs of people were crowding around me. They were asking where I was from and if they could take pictures with, or of, me and why I was in Pajar Bulan. Some of these people included Robbi's cousins who were lady-boys and his family was concerned I might be offended by them. I assured them it was fine to talk but they shouldn't get their hopes up for any dowries.

Then Robbi's sister wanted to sing a song on the stage and employed us as back up dancers. After the three minutes of awkward dancing we gathered so much attention that the family couldn't stand it any more and we left early.

Before we left Pajar Bulan, while we sat on the floor in the living room, Robbi's uncle expressed his concern that me and Robbi would fall out and cease to be friends and that we had to be careful. Why he thought this I have no idea. He then took one photo with me outside the house and I asked if he wanted another one but he said no.

While everyone loaded the car Robbi and I went back into the house to get some sunglasses I had left on the table. I looked at the family photos on the wall and he explained them to me. There was one picture of a young boy on the wall and Robbi told me he had died aged just thirteen or fourteen because he was racing motorbikes.

In the car on the way back everyone fell into a tired silence for a while. I asked Robbi if he had every raced any bikes when he was younger. He told me he had once but he had a horrible experience. He was driving down a very long, wide and quiet road on the beach and decided he wanted to test the high speed of his motorbike. He accelerated faster and faster and was enjoying the speed.

Then a child stepped out in front of him and there was a loud cracking sound. The motorbike weaved across the road until a car struck it from behind and ploughed over it before speeding into the distance without stopping. Robbi was thrown clear of the car and skidded to a stop at the side of the road. His skin was cut and bruised and he was bleeding a lot from his arm but he could stand up and walk around.

All he could think to do was look for the child so he paced up and down the road searching everywhere. Eventually he picked through some bushes and found a young boy of about eight years old who was alive but unconscious and was also cut and bruised. The road was empty again so he waited by the side and called his parents to come and pick them up. A man walked over and Robbi explained the situation and told him to run the child somewhere so that he could be taken to hospital faster. Then he continued to wait. After being picked up he explained the what had happened to his parents and they arrived at the hospital. It was the same hospital that the child had been taken to.

After being patched up and bandaged he was interrogated by the doctor about the accident and given little information about what state the boy was in. The doctor told him that the boy had no parents. The interrogation only stopped when they heard the boy crying in the next room.

I asked Robbi what happened next and he told me that there wasn't a lot that they could do since the boy had no parents. All that his family could do was pay for his medical expenses and give him some money and food. If the boy had been a girl there may have been an institution they could have been taken to but since it was a boy they would have to continue living as a thief as they had done before. Because of the strange nature of the accident it's possible that the entire thing could have been a botched scam by a local gang that went wrong because Robbi was going so fast.

He had to walk to school for a year after that and was never given his own motorbike again. He said the only reason he went in to school was because he had an inspiring English teacher and a passion to improve his English.

Later that night Robbi wanted me to Skype my friend in England who was thinking of applying to work in Indonesia. I called him up and said there was a local who wanted to give the lowdown. Robbi told him there is some bullshit in Indonesia but not 100%. Then my friend had to go to dinner.

In school

Because I am white I am contracted out to local secondary schools some mornings to teach English. Since the kids there care less an I do that just means I get to play on my phone in the corner while they watch films on their laptops and ignore the word searches I give them. One of them produced tgis animal from his bag and told me it was a cat.

Immi-negotiation

Petrol prices have just gone up by 2000 rupiah a litre ( about 10p). This has happened after the election of the new Obama-esque president Jokowi. The petrol prices used to be subsidised by the government so they actually lost money from selling it. Petrol is still cheap at under 50p a litre even after the price increase.

A day before this I received a call at about 9 o'clock in the evening from my co-worker. She told me not to go outside because she was just arrested in a blaze of camera flashes. She sounded a bit shocked and was in a bus full of other foreign people being taken to a 'shelter.' She said she had no idea what it was about. After I hung up I called an Indonesian friend who was on their way to my apartment and told them if there were any police on the floor to not bother knocking and also to lie if anybody asked her any questions on the way in. Next I phoned up my manager to ask what was happening.

My manager told me there was an 'immigration check' going on and that it was nothing to worry about. I continued to check in on my co-worker by text to make sure she was OK. Turns out the 'immigration check' is just the police teaming up with immigration to round up as many foreign looking people as they can then scare the shit out of them. Once everybody is suitably terrified with whispers of 'detention' time because of the long process involved to check visas a 'deal' is offered. My co worker was eventually released at 3:30am after my manager arrived and chatted with the officers for hours before paying an undisclosed bribe.

For some reason I escaped the check. I took a taxi to the door that day as I was feeling lazy and that may be why escaped it. The officers did knock on people's doors but as I am high in the building I suppose they were feeling lazy too. I'm glad that in the UK people can't get rounded into buses for looking different to the ethnic norm because that 'immigration check' is about the most corrupt thing I have ever witnessed. Some of my Indonesian friends told me that those immigration officers may lose their jobs soon under the new government and that the money they make will work towards a retirement fund. It is also possible that they needed to reach an end of year target that they hadn't achieved. Either way if any of the new petrol money went towards reducing corruption like this I think everyone living in this 'developing' country would be happier. Well, the foreign people at least.  

First bribe

I was thrilled to experience my first bribe yesterday. My friend was driving us to get dinner in the evening. As we pulled onto the main road a policeman waved us down. My friend had forgotten to turn her lights on. Since it was a woman driving I was expecting the guy to just tell us to be careful and wave us on. Instead he smiled at us both and said. 'Wow, you have a very handsome boyfriend.' For some reason I instantly took to the guy and smiled right back.  He chatted to us for a bit about where we were going and recommended a few restaurants.
Then the policeman told us he would unfortunately have to give my friend a fine and set a court date for her to appear at next week because she wasn't using her lights. Poor guy looked pretty cut up about it but he said he really didn't want to do that and gave us a wink. When he asked for my friends driving license he gave a subtle nod towards her purse. As soon as she withdrew 50,000 (£2.50) a couple of cm past the edge of the leather it had disappeared up his sleeve with an action that looked like a magic trick. Then he glanced at the driving license and told us to have a safe journey.

My favorite websites were blocked the other day (imgur and reddit). When I tried to access them a little message popped up up saying that I could call the provider if I thought it was blocked wrongly. Since neither of the sites contain pornographic material (which is always blocked in Indonesia) I called up the provider and asked them to unblock it. The woman on the phone said the block had come from the government and that there was nothing she could do. I used a proxy to go on reddit and try to find out what had happened. Turns out that a conservative Muslim minister (Tifatul Sembiring) was about to go out of power and decided to fuck up the internet before he got ousted. It also had a link to an article about the politician that showed various tweets and statements from him saying he was too pure to ever touch a woman who wasn't a family member of his. He then accused Michelle Obama of forcing him to shake hands with him when she visited Indonesia. A video showed him jabbing someone else out of the way in order to shake her hand. Since I found all this out through reddit, the block probably had nothing to do with pornography. It was just a political attempt to choke free press.
Sembiring came up again later that week in one of my lessons. According to my students he is part of the same muslim union that banned Lady Gaga from entering the country because of satanic symbols in her performances. He was also instrumental in jailing a an Indonesian singer after a personal sex tape was found on his computer by someone who stole it from him. Then my students showed me images on the computer of 'Paris Hilton-y' type Indonesian celebrities in scantily clad clothes next to campaign posters. In some of the photos they looked like they were in bars. The women were very popular on Indonesian TV. Can't help but think if they got some decent porn in they could get rid of that shit.

Last weekend I went to a '4d' cinema. It engineers the fourth dimension by wiggling the seat around in a way that makes my amateur chiropractor/hairdresser appear to have the fingers of an angel. It also squirts you in the face with water every time something wet comes on the screen.  Towards the end of the film this seemed to have a deliberate delay so that when I put my hand over  the nozzle to block the jet of water nothing came. As soon as I thought it was safe and put my hand down it let a big squirt rip into my face.

To further satisfy my lust for water I also went to sea world with one of my students and his friends from work. At the petting aquarium I got to hold a starfish and even touch a shark. There are some photos floating around somewhere from one of the guys we went with but he has yet to upload them anywhere. This is despite the fact he took about 1000 photos a minute like a true Indonesian. The student works with a fashion company and all his fashionista friends and him were too nervous to touch the sharks. There were some instructions in Indonesian I didn't understand but I decided to have a go. When a sizeable one swam past I leant over the edge and ran my hand down its back. As I turned around to smile at everyone the bugger snapped around so quickly with its teeth bared I leapt about two meters away from the tank. 

After sea world we walked down 'The Bridge of Love,' which had a much nicer Indonesian name that I've forgotten. It was a big heart shaped bridge out into the ocean which a load of lovers had painted there names on or carved them into the wood. It was totally gay. When we stopped for coffee some of the fashionistas showed some concern about what I was wearing. They said the tattered shorts and poorly fitting 'I Love Singapore' T-shirt just didn't accentuate my natural style. I looked at my student and asked him if he knew what time it was. 'Makeover time,' we said in unison.

The sight of all the fish in the aquarium and our time by the sea got us hankering for sea food. We went to a fancy place in Ancol Mall where you could choose your own fish or crab/lobster from the tank. I saw a particularly large crab make a bid for freedom and manage to flop out of its container. I immediately knew that this was the bastard I wanted to eat and told the waiter to take it to the kitchen straight away. The satisfaction of seeing the same crab on my plate a few minutes later was profound. It was pretty expensive for Jakarta though at around £8.

The next weekend I saw the new Spiderman film with my fashion designer student and he acted as my stylist and picked me out a new 'semi-format' outfit for after the film. I proudly wore my new style out of the mall and  showed it to my housemate who said it was 'all right.' I later wore it out with a female friend and she told me I looked 'very gay,' so I might just pop the outfit in a drawer for a while.

I had a hair cut the other day in a nearby mall. At £4 it wasn't the cheapest place on offer but the signs were written on the wall and I'm sick of paying the 'bule' price for everything. A taxi costs £1.50 to Puri from Tanjung Duren. I know because I took one the other day. When I was waiting for a taxi back an Ojek (motobike taxi) driver called me over and asked where I was going. I told him and he said it would cost £6. I laughed in his face. When I tried to barter down he refused to budge at all. While we were chatting an Indonesian walked up and asked the driver's mate to go to a location that was even further than Tanjung Duren and he got offered a price of £1. The driver spoke zero English and unfortunately my grasp of Indonesian isn't good enough to explain why he was being a prick so I walked away and he didn't try to call me back with a reasonable price. I waited for a taxi and the price was £1.50 on the meter again when I arrived back home. Even though I get paid double what non-native teachers at work get the Chinese Indonesian who took an Ojek for a lower price than I could get probably earns more than me as Puri is a very rich area.

The haircut I got was worth paying a little extra for though. The hairdresser cut throat razored the peach fuzz off my face and even turned out to be an amateur chiropractor. When he finished cutting and shaving me he gave me a massage on my neck and face then suddenly without any warning snapped my neck around like you see action heroes do to villains in films. The difference was that when I opened my eyes I wasn't hell, I was in Jakarta, so kind of a little bit in hell. I felt three clicks in my neck like when I click my knuckles but in places that I didn't even know existed till he cracked them. I was still reeling from the experience when he snapped my neck round the other way and cracked the other side. I've woken up with a stiff neck every morning since and will never go back there again but it was still an interesting experience. 
Another interesting experience was taking the bus. When I read leaflets and my companies' information packet about the city they said that buses are only 7p. 'Wow' I thought, 'How fantastic, such cheap public transport!' I didn't realise that a 'bus' is just some dick head with a gutted out minivan that's been painted red with 15 people shoved in it and often with about 12 people hanging off the side. One such bus pulled up alongside my house-mate one day when he was on his way to the gym and the driver pointed to the roof. He got off at the first sharp corner and wasn't charged at all.  

Sitting on the bus to Puri one day, my nuts sweated so that my trousers became a bowl of bakso (look it up) and I thought to myself 'I can't bear another second of this shit.' Everyone who's view wasn't blocked by a sweaty body was staring at me for being white. The 'bus' stopped every time someone grunted and one person squeezed off and another two squeezed on. The driver snatched 7p from everyone who got off and spent every second he wasn't snatching thumbing through the notes and mouthing numbers as he counted the stack of money that he kept clenched in his hand. We passed a huge heap of rubbish over an open drain and the smell of sweat blasted away with the smell of old nappies and food rotting in the heat. Through a haze wafting from someone's armpit I looked through the window and saw some boys who looked no more than thirteen years old sifting through the rubbish looking for valuables then loading it onto carts that they wheeled away. Many of them weren't wearing gloves and it was thirty three degrees. The driver stopped for about 15 minutes to wait for more customers but as I looked at the kids and sweated a pool onto the floor I thought that life could always be worse. I called out when my stop came up and the driver pulled over and I paid the fee- 20p. Fucking bastard.