Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan – divided into Millispheres

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population; around eight million but anywhere between four and sixteen million will do.

Back before Covid, when one could still contemplate traveling, my dream list of potential journeys included the Northern Silk Route through Central Asia.

In the 1980s Olive Newland had gone to Urumqi in the far west of China, traveling as an elderly Whanganui woman by herself. From Urumqi Olive took the southern route across the Tarim depression and over the Karakoram Pass and down the Indus to Pakistan. Olive survived only to die in a car crash in Westmere.

The Northern Silk Route follows where the life-giving waters of glacier fed rivers meet the desert lowlands, passing through the region that gave us the apple, peach, apricot, walnut and almond as well as cannabis and scented roses.

From Urumqi the northern route goes to Almaty in Kazakhstan and a decade ago my friend Blackie the cowboy carpenter arrived in Almaty on a flight from Amsterdam. Slightly drunk, wearing jandals and without a visa, Blackie had planned for his brother Mike, who was teaching in Kazakhstan, to help him get in – but Mike wasn’t there. Kazak customs were suspicious of all the different stamps in Blackie’s passport. “International traveler eh!,” sneered the uniformed customs officer in an oversized, braided Russian cap and Blackie caught a glimpse of his brother arriving as he was frogmarched onto the next flight to Schiphol.

Blackie never made it to Almaty but my friend Chris, the international English literature teacher, had spent a year working there as well as doing another stint in Uralsk, in Kazakhstan’s far west, where the temperature goes from minus fifty celsius in the winter to plus fifty in the summer.

Kazakhstan (2020 population 18 million) by my rules is too large to qualify as a millisphere and we ended up dividing Kazakhstan by watersheds into the millispheres of Aral, Balkhash and Kazak (see map).

Before examining Kazakhstan through my human geography model of the millisphere we should pause to look at Halford MacKinder’s influential 1905 “Heartland” geopolitical model. Mackinder saw the world through the lens of the British Empire. British control of its empire was only possible through being the world’s preeminent navy, he reasoned, and its ultimate threat was from the centre of Eurasia – far from Britain’s navy. Britain’s bogeyman at the time was Russia whom they feared would invade India – overland.

MacKinder’s mythical “Heartland” coincides with present day Kazakhstan. MacKinder’s homily that “whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and whoever controls Heartland controls the ”World Island” – being all of Europe and Asia – resonated with the postwar United States, inspiring a Cold War with the Soviet Union. If anyone controls the “Heartland” today it is China but MacKinder didn’t see China coming.

In 1991 the USSR shattered into the independent states we see today. The Baltic “republics” lead the way as the peripheral states broke away and when Russia finally declared independence Kazakhstan was left as the last member of the USSR.

Geopolitics credits geography with determining the rise and fall of empires – twentieth century thinking. The millisphere model credits human geography with revealing the relationship that we humans have with our environment – twenty first century thinking.

Central Asian physical geography starts with plate tectonics. Mountain ranges like the Himalayas, Pamir, Tien Shan and Hindu Kush thrust up as land masses collide and, like an old fashioned hub cap crumpling, depressions like the Tamin and the Caspian plunge to below sea level.

Of the three millispheres of Kazakhstan two (Aral and Balkhash) drain into inland seas and lakes – the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash respectively. One millisphere (Kazak) drains north into the Ob river in Russia which discharges into the Arctic. A common theme is the environmental degradation of these landlocked seas as rivers were harnessed for irrigation.

September 5, 2021September 13, 2021

Aral

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

The millisphere of Aral (a bit over four million) covers Kazakhstan’s Syr river watershed draining into the Aral Sea and stretches from the Caspian sea in the west nearly to Tashkent in the south-east. If truly defined on a watershed basis Aral would have to include the dry portion of the Aral Sea, in Uzbekistan, and the lower reaches of the River Amur.

By the end of the 20th Century the Aral Sea achieved worldwide notoriety by drying up completely. A diverse and abundant ecosystem was reduced to a desert in about a century.

It all started with the American Civil War disrupting global cotton production. Seeing an opportunity, Russia went into cotton – building a railway line from Moscow to Tashkent. Water hungry cotton required irrigating and the Syr and Amur rivers were harnessed. Shoddy industrialisation under the Soviets produced leaky canals and reservoirs and by the time the USSR collapsed in 1991 the Aral Sea was dry.

Since 2000 Kazakhstan has built dams to catch what water the Syr still discharges and now the “North” Aral Sea covers about 10% of the Aral’s previous area. Aquatic wildlife was quick to colonise the new lake. It has been estimated that the volume of water coming from a river the size of the Volga would have to run for several years to fill the Aral Sea again. UN funded German water engineers are working with the upstream countries (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and ultimately Afghanistan) but the Amur remains dry before it reaches the Aral.

Uzbekistan’s response has been to plough up the lake bed in its territory and plant salt tolerant shrubs in an attempt to mitigate the salt storms. Despotic Uzbekistan is also imfamous for its modern day cotton slavery.

My friend Chris, who spent a year teaching in Uralsk, in the north-west, had seen the rusting ships standing in the dry Aral seabed. “It’s tragic what has happened to the Aral, but it is just as sad for the Caspian”.

In the not too distant past the Aral Sea (31m above sea level) would periodically discharge into the Caspian Sea (26m below sea level). Isolated from the oceans for over two million years the Caspian had evolved unique species like the Beluga sturgeon, fished to near extinction for its valuable caviar. The only legal caviar on the world market today is produced in aqua-farms in Florida, USA, and, ironically, fertile eggs from Florida have been released in the Caspian and the Volga river in an attempt to reestablish populations.

“Oil wells flooded and leaking, pesticides, chemicals, heavy metals and untreated sewage spewing out of the Volga from Russia, you wouldn’t want to swim in the Caspian,” Chris said. The Caspian depression contains most of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas.

“And what about Baikonur?” Chris added when we discussed the environmental problems of Aral. Once on a three day taxi ride from Uralsk to Almaty Chris had passed near the Baikonur space launch site – the most costly project ever undertaken by the USSR. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, was launched from Baikonur.

After the Soviet Union collapsed Russia leased Baikonur from Kazakhstan and, allied with the United States, got paid to send American astronauts to the international space station – to which China is excluded. Baikonur has a rough and dirty history, dangerously discharging launch debris and causing health problems for nearby residents. Today scrap metal recovery is a local economic activity and there have been no launches since 2019 because of lack of funds.

Uralsk, where Chris taught, is right on the border with Russia and most people spoke Russian there (20% of the Kazakhstan population is Russian). Chris had planned to do one more stint in Kazakhstan but covid intervened. As of August 2021 Kazakhstan (population 19 million) is reporting 10,000 new Covid cases per day and has had over 11,000 covid deaths. Just across the border in China (population 1,440 million) they are reporting 50 odd covid cases per day and their total covid deaths stands at 4,600. What a difference a border can make.

April 20, 2019April 20, 2019

Jakarta

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by 1000th of the world population

The island of Java is only slightly larger than New Zealand’s North Island and has a population of 145 million (2015). Java can be divided into twenty millispheres, the smallest in area is the city of Jakarta, ten million (2014).

Jakarta lies at the centre of a metropolitan sprawl of over 30 million. Viewed from the air a patchwork of orange tile and rusting corrugated roofs are punctuated with high-rise concrete towers and the odd remaining rice paddy and coconut palm.

I’ve flown into and out of the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang. Both times Jakarta was a shock. The first time we’d leisurely worked our way along Java before making a run for the airport from Bogor, on the periphery. On a motorway a truck had lost a load of concrete pipes and we experienced a legendary Jabodetabek traffic jam. Food and drink venders appeared through holes in fences and worked the captive market. We made our flight – just.

Flying in from New Zealand and dropping into an area about the size of Auckland, but with twenty times as many people, was shock again, but it is surprising how quickly you adapt to a new environment. Centrally holed up near Jalang Jalang, next to a slum built under a motorway flyover, pretty soon we were eating street food again.

The first thing Indonesians ask you is: “dari mana?” and we’d reply “dari Zeelandia Baru” (from NZ). After that it was “how many children do you have?” and then “what is your religion?” Indonesians have no concept of not having a religion.

I once told an Indonesian dowager that I was a “non-monotheist”. “What is that?” she asked. I explained that everyone has some sort of concept of a God, some people, like Hindus, have multiple Gods, therefore if you accepted everyone’s Gods, then there can’t be just one.

She thought about this for a while, drew herself up to her full height and said, “No! There is only one God and it is Allah!” Occasionally we ran into a fundamentalist Sunni preacher, rallying the gullible with a sound system, usually with lots of menacing reverb. You could pick up the vibe, and the odd word like “Satan” and “Amerika,” and it was usually time to cut a track.

On the 25th of January this year the former governor of Jakarta, “Ahok” Basuki was released from prison after serving two years for “blasphemy” for suggesting that the Koran didn’t say that Muslims couldn’t vote for non-Muslims. Ahok is a Christian and Chinese and the small, but influential, Chinese community is resented by many Indonesians. Ahok’s work stamping out corruption in the city bureaucracy had earned him enemies but his legacy is Jakarta’s “Smart City” initiative. Reports on smart-phones about crime, flooding, rubbish or potholes are now responded to in just over a day instead of the usual two weeks.

Last year a Buddhist woman who complained about the volume of the mosque loudspeaker was sentenced to eighteen months, also for blasphemy. Despite Indonesia’s secular, pluralist heritage, the coming Indonesian elections, in April this year, are being contested in the shadow of hard line Islam.

Social media smear campaigns have targeted the presidential incumbent, Joko Widodo (Jokowi), claiming he too is Chinese and a Christian. He’s not. He’s Javanese and a moderate Muslim but his campaign to stamp out corruption and modernise infrastructure also made him powerful enemies. In the hope of warding off Islamist political attacks Jokowi has chosen a Muslim Cleric, Ma’ruf Amin, as a running mate. Jokowi has been pressured to release from prison the radical muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who is the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah (responsible for the Bali bombing) and supports Isis.

Running against Jokowi is his 2014 opponent, former army general Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of the late dictator, Suharto. Prabowo is accused of committing human rights abuses during his military career. Prabowo’s Gerindra Party is behind the Islamist social media attacks on Ahok and Jokowi. Prabowo is the Trump/Bolsonaro candidate.

Jakarta stands at a crossroads between becoming a smart city or a medieval caliphate. The path it takes will be determined in the April election, Gods willing.

October 21, 2018October 21, 2018

Kejawen

Kejawen is the name I’ve given to the millisphere in south central Java which spreads from Cilacap, in the south-west, to the holiest place in ancient Hindu Java, the Dieng plateau, in the north-east.

I’ve passed through the “rice basket of Java” twice. The first time from Yogyakarta to Bandung by train. It appeared densely populated and highly productive.

Kejawen is differentiated from the north coast of Java by a line of volcanoes running east west. In the Indonesian language Kejawen means “Javaism”, and along with Yogyakarta and Surakarta, Kejawen is the essence of the Javanese culture which is described as having Animist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic layers.

On the east fringe of Kejawen and at the heart of “Javaism” are, the world’s largest Buddhist complex (Borobudur), and the world’s largest Hindu complex (Prambanan), both built of carved stone. Buddhist/Hindu competition is part of Kejawen history, and is retained in rituals, fasting and meditation.

Islam has only been in Java since 1500. It came in on the north coast, not long before the Portuguese arrived. The arrival of Islam did lead to the collapse of the old dynasties, to be replaced with sultanates, but the music, dance and art remained the same and the old gods lived on in Kejawen culture.

On the second trip we went the other way. Starting at the beach at Pangandaran we chose to travel on the day when millions of Indonesians travel home to their family for the festival of Idul fitri, at the end of Ramadan.

After a couple of hours of rat-running in an SUV through bad back roads we were dropped at a station, somewhere north of Cilacap, which is the only deep water port on the Java’s south coast.

Cilacap is where the Dutch fleeing the Japanese invasion launched from. Australia gave them a better welcome than today’s boat people receive.

Cilacap has a geothermal power plant, cement works and a huge oil refinery. The beaches are polluted and tourists are steered to nearby Nusa Kambangan (the Alcatraz of Indonesia). Tourist resorts on pristine tropical beaches share the island with a maximum security prison, where capital punishment is carried out.

Kambangan is where the Bali bombers and other terrorists met their maker, and foreign drug traffickers from Australia, the Netherlands, Philippines and Brazil have been executed. There is an American currently on death row there.

Originally built by the Dutch, Kambangan was one of the harshest in Asia, and is now used to keep political prisoners as well as murderers and drug gangsters. Tommy Suharto, the son of a past president, was detained there for masterminding the murder of a judge who had sentenced him for corruption.

The ticket seller looked nervous as our minder set us up in an air-conditioned waiting room. Hundreds of Indonesians waited outside. When the train pulled in I couldn’t see how any more people could get in, but somehow we were shoehorned in.

Because there were no seats, we stood in the aisle with our baggage, and a lot of other people. Food sellers worked the aisle, which they regarded as their territory, and standing passengers had to get out of their way, regularly. A trio of buskers came through just like it was an ordinary day at work. They were memorable because they had a girl singer in western style – no hijab. Busking is tough and usually only for the boys. A boy with deformed legs, shuffled through at floor level picking up the rubbish, which he later threw out an open window into a paddy field.

Five hours later we disembarked at a crowded siding. At the nearest warung I celebrated being able to sit down with a kopi susu and an Indonesian clove cigarette as school kids practiced their English language skills on us.

A student from the warung joined us on the bus to Wonosobo up in the hills. She wore a uniform and a white hijab and as the bus climbed a forested ridge she asked earnest questions about Zeelandia Baru (New Zealand). Yes we have volcanoes in New Zealand too, I told her. In the distance pale blue silhouettes of volcanoes disappeared into a smoky tropical sunset.

October 15, 2018October 21, 2018

Semarang

A New Zealand friend recently returned from Semarang, Indonesia, after searching for the bridges her father had built in the Dutch East Indies after WWII.

She had visited the Tawang Semarang railway station where her father’s drawing office had been. This European architectural conception of the Orient expressed in twentieth century materials is still used to this day. When I had passed through Tawang to catch the train to Surabaya in 2012 a small orchestra filled the heritage station with middle-of-the-road Javanese music. The station might have been sinking but it was doing it in style.

The old Dutch port area of Semarang (metropolitan population 6 million), is slowly sinking into the Java Sea. Build on quaternary volcanic deposits which are still consolidating, subsidence is accelerating because of groundwater extraction.

It is estimated that half a million cubic litres of water were pumped up in 1900. By 1975 it was one million, in 1990, nine million and in 2000, thirty-eight million. The ground is now sinking at around 10 cm per year.

Within walking distance of the station stand many heritage buildings including Toko (Cafe) Oen, pretty much unaltered since the day the Dutch owners left. Periodically buildings were inundated by seawater and services broke, further polluting the canals. There were changes of canal drainage flows and buildings cracked and deteriorated. The only good news was that North Semarang was not subsiding as fast of North Jakarta – also because of groundwater extraction.

I too had come to Semarang followinging family history. During WWII, when the Japanese occupied Java, my grandmother had been interned at the women’s camp there.

As a child, you were protected from stories of what happened in Java during the war, but you could tell by the tone when adult conversation strayed into those times when visitors brought back memories of “the Indies”.

First the men were taken away by Japanese soldiers and the women and children were left on the plantations. Some Javanese were friends and loyal staff, others allied with the Japanese. My grandmother rounded up the girls, cutting their hair and dressing them to look like boys, and they, and the other children, started walking. Accounts vary as to where they thought they were going, but soon they were rounded up and taken to Semarang.

This small group was luckier than some. The Japanese concept of “comfort women” extended to the Dutch and sometimes women were taken without their consent. There was an infamous incident early in occupation where a household of women, and their daughters, spent two weeks as sex-workers in their own home, serving passing Japanese soldiers, before an officer put a stop to it.

In the camps the conditions were hard, shelter was primitive and food was short. The women in Semarang camp were interviewed one at a time and offered work as comfort women. Naturally they would get paid, they were told, and a few took up the offer, or came under the protection of an officer by becoming his concubine. Mostly it was the Javanese and Chinese women who had been prostitutes before the war who worked as the comfort women. After the war some of the Japanese who carried out sexual violations in Java were summarily executed by Dutch husbands.

Both my grandparents were shaped by their experience in the camps. By all accounts my grandfather barely survived. My grandmother took on a leadership role; organising, working hard and surviving.

In a tower block in Gouda in the Netherlands I once met a an elderly man who had been a boy in the Semarang women’s camp. “We were lucky,” he told me. “The Japanese didn’t distinguish between us Jews and the other prisoners. In Holland, the rest of my family didn’t survive the war.”

We had dropped into the coastal heat of Semarang from the cooler Dieng Plateau. An elderly ukulele player in a batik shirt and capo made from a pencil and rubber band laid down some Arabic sounding riffs, collected a small contribution from every passenger and hopped off the bus at an intersection. We passed dusty slums, built on steep slopes, where, during the rainy season, landslides sometimes took homes, possessions and lives.

October 13, 2018October 21, 2018

Surakarta

The Surakarta metropolitan area (population 3.7 million) is on the Bengawan Solo river whose upper catchment climbs the volcanoes which mark the boundary of the millisphere I call Surakarta – a bit under seven million.

Surakarta is where Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo is from, and where he ran his furniture manufacturing business. Commonly known as Jokowi he was the mayor of Surakarta from 2005 to 2012 before moving on to be governor of Jakarta in 2012 and president of Indonesia in 2014, becoming Indonesia’s first president who did not come from an elite political or military background.

At the age of twelve Jokowi started work in his father’s workshop, experiencing three evictions during his childhood. As mayor he initiated an interactive relationship with the people of Surakarta, making regular, unannounced visits (Blusukan) to markets and slums. Surakarta (the city that does not sleep) included “informal” flood-prone settlements along the Solo river, which the city wanted to turn into parks.

We had stayed a few days in Surakarta in 2007. In the shade of the Sultan’s palace, in the middle of town, I’d escaped the heat and sketched an elderly gamelan orchestra playing on brass gongs, from big to small, and tapping with hammers on wooden xylophones, each with their own rhythmic part. A few middle-aged dancers practiced their moves. It was more restful than being hauled through the batik fabric markets.

In the hot crowded market a woman with a headscarf and a microphone was haranguing a crowd. I picked up the words “America” and “Satan.” New York’s twin towers were still fresh in all our memories. Back at the backpackers I sat drawing tropical fish in an ornate aquarium with carved teak surrounds, while drinking Kopi Susu (local coffee with sweetened condensed milk, in a glass), and smoking Indonesian cigarettes. Ten large goldfish glowed under the fluorescent light, and a few, mostly Dutch, travellers came and went.

It was in Surakarta that we first started using warungs on our own. These informal, roadside restaurants with oil-cloth covered tables and rough benches, presided over by a cook, with a wok and an LPG burner, turned out mouth-watering classic dishes that were cheaper than at the “real restaurants”.

Surakarta has undertaken a “more participatory” resettlement approach than other Indonesian cities. Slum dwellers were issued with city resident cards before being forced to give up their central sites and move to locations without services, and some unauthorized squatter settlements were brought under city control. Under Jokowi, street vendors were relocated to new markets, and he renovated old ones, freeing up traffic. Jokowi brought some of these policies with him to Jakarta.

Corruption is legendary in Indonesia. It is estimated that the Indonesian government that left power in 2014 stole as much as US$ 12 billion. Jokowi came in with a promise to fix Indonesia’s failing infrastructure and to pay for it he initiated a tax amnesty in which Indonesians declared US$ 366 billion of previously undeclared assets.

In Surakarta, a decade ago, you got by with cash, now, with phones and apps the informal economy is being moved into the taxable economy.

In 2007 we took a tour up a volcano to where tea was grown, ostensibly to visit an ancient Hindu temple. The brilliantly variegated Javanese coleus, now know as Solenostemon scutellarioides, grew beside the road. The gardens lining the rain-fed rice paddies on the fertile volcanic slopes were a “permaculture” mix of coconut, cashew, cloves, tobacco and vegetables, tended by small kampongs (villages). Down below lay the Surakarta metropolitan area under a heat haze of burning plastic.

We found Indonesians remarkable secular, animist even, but in a country of 260 million, and climbing, there will always be extremists. In 2016 a suicide bomber, riding a motorcycle, blew himself up at the gates to the Surakarta police station, chanting ISIS slogans, and there are fundamentalist Indonesians who have as many children as possible, because “God wants a world of muslims.” It might be what God wants but it is not what, already crowded, Java needs.

On September the 11th 2018, thousands of anti-Jokowi protesters walked down the main streets of Surakarta under the #2019ChangePresident banner.

Jokowi faces many challenges. Population growth is number one. Corrupt families and religious fanatics are other challenges Indonesia faces in the 2019 election.

September 23, 2018September 25, 2018

Bengawan Solo

My father’s parents’ marriage certificate has them married in “Madioen” (Madiun) East Java in 1918. There is a black and white photo of my twenty-one year old grandmother, in a long, black skirt, standing by a steam train in the American West, travelling to join her intended husband in the Dutch East Indies.

Grandmother Mieke was from the family Ankersmit, who owned the Deventer (Netherlands) cotton factory, and the estate that went with it. Grandfather “Freik” was the son of Abraham Frederikse, an Amsterdam doctor. Freik was not an academic and, being handy with his hands, was sent to the Deventer School for Tropical Agriculture.

A decade ago my travel companion and I passed through Madiun on a train. The Dutch-built railway followed the flats between the volcanoes. Closely spaced villages (kampongs) with orange tile roofs were ringed by fertile rice paddies following what contours there were. Here and there stood tobacco barns and brickworks making roof tiles. Coconut palms and tropical spices, fruits and vegetables filled the spaces between. By all accounts it was paradise in 1920 when Java had a population around 30 million and there were still wild tigers, elephants and rhinos in the teak-forested hills – now the population of Java is approaching 150 million.

The millisphere of Bengawan Solo (2014 population seven million) includes the Madiun River catchment which joins the Bengawan Solo at Ngawi before flowing through Bojonegoro and discharging into the Java Sea just north of Surabaya. The headwaters of the Bengawan Solo itself drains the neighbouring millisphere of Surakarta (Solo), to the west.

The Bengawan Solo is an important site for hominid remains and Ngawi is where Dutch archeologist Eugene Dubois, in 1896, found fossil remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (Java Man). Dated at one million years ago, Java Man is the first evidence of hominids outside Africa or Europe. Zig zag marks on a freshwater clam shell, found nearby, is thought to be the oldest man-made marks in the world.

In 1940, Surakarta musician, Gesang Martohartono composed the song “Bengawan Solo,” which was popular with the Japanese soldiers occupying Indonesia during World War II. The soldiers brought “Bengawan Solo” home to Japan after the war, where it became famous and a hit throughout Asia, then worldwide.

When the Japanese forces arrived in 1942, first Freik was taken away to the men’s camp in Bandung, then Mieke to the women’s camp in Semurang. Their two sons had already gone to the Netherlands for their education and their daughter managed to catch one of the last passenger ships leaving for the United States, where she met her future husband. It was not until after the end of the war that they heard from each other again. By then it was apparent that it was all over for the Dutch in Indonesia and the family dispersed to Holland, Switzerland, California and New Zealand.

In 1948, in the lead up to independence, when Dutch forces still held the major cities, Indonesian factions, positioning themselves to become the new government, clashed in the “Madiun affair”. Sukarno’s republican forces put down an Indonesian Communist Party municipal uprising in Madiun, imprisoning 36,000 and executing 1000 communists. This skirmish finally played itself out in 1965, in “the year of living dangerously”, when Suharto and the army finished off another million “communists”. American agents were involved in both affairs.

Indonesia’s development model under Suharto was one of corruption and joint ventures with foreign companies. Japanese plywood factories and the like went into business with various members of the Suharto oligarchy, who became fabulously wealthy. Tommy Suharto bought a sheep station in the South Island of New Zealand.

The Bengawan Solo, Java’s longest river, was once much longer, extending into Sumatra and Borneo during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower, and, in fact, it once flowed in the opposite direction, before the line of volcanoes coming out of the Java Trench tilted it the other way.

Today the Bengawan Solo Water Resource Management Authority has to cope with annual cycles of flood and drought in an environment subject to intense industrialisation, agricultural development, and population growth. Wet season flooding is compounded by the river’s sediment load from volcanic debris and erosion, including from illegal logging. Industrial pollution and untreated effluent from urban areas means the water is not drinkable like it was only a century ago. Potable water is in critically short supply in the dry season.

A joint venture between ExxonMobil and Indonesia’s Pertamina recently announced significant finds of oil and gas around Bojonegoro. This will enrich a few and further degrade the Bengawan Solo for the millions living along it.

September 10, 2018October 13, 2018

Malang

I call this millisphere Malang after the largest city in the southern East Java. The millisphere of Malang (nearing ten million, mostly Javanese) includes Malang City (0.8 million) and Batu, Bitar, Kediri, Pacitan, Ponorogo, Trenggalek and Tulungagung cities and regencies.

About ten years ago I went there for no other reason than Malang was where, during World War II, the Japanese occupying forces had captured my grandparents and sent the women and children to a camp in Semarang and my grandfather to Bandung, where he nearly died.

Wanting to follow the route my ancestors took, by the Java Sea, we had crossed from Singapore to the Riau Islands in Indonesia and into another world. At Tanjung Pinang we bought tickets and at Kijang we caught a Pelni government ferry to Surabaya, via Jakarta. Over the next two days and one night we learned that most of the other passengers were Indonesian immigrants, who had been arrested in Malaysia and who were being sent home to Java.

In the Midday heat, at Surabaya wharf, we were drafted off from our fellow travellers, who were loaded onto army trucks, and we set off by taxi to the bus station with a new friend from the ferry. Jacob gave us our first lesson about catching buses in Indonesia; just get on and as soon as the bus is full it leaves; there will be a conductor and you pay, in cash, on the road; watch out for the buskers on the buses, they are crooks, but always pay them, but only a little amount, we were informed.

Soon the full bus to Malang was barrelling down the Surabaya southern motorway, for about an hour, before the highway disappeared into a sea of mud at Porong, where, a year earlier, a mud volcano, had started erupting. An Indonesian oil and gas drilling company, PT Lapindo Brantas, had been drilling nearby and, many believe, caused the break-out of pressurised mud. PT Lapindo is owned by Golkar Party chairman and Indonesian rich lister, Aburizal Bakrie, who still denies responsibility. 30,000 people were displaced by the mud. Some locals are cashing in on “mud tourism” as Indonesians come to see the world’s largest mud volcano and still no one has been compensated.

Our detoured bus wound through the congested main streets of little towns before Jacob told the driver to drop us at a crossroads. Dusk was falling rapidly, but, don’t worry, motorbike taxis would turn up and take us to Trawas, Jacob assued. He was right. Soon we were weaving down the centre line, with no crash helmets, passing trucks and vans. The air was warm and you could smell the tropics.

The people at the PPLH Seloliman environment centre/backpackers were astonished that we made it so fast from the midday ferry.The next day was Indonesian independence day and we were dressed as Indonesians and we shouted Merdeka (freedom) along with Indonesian Greenies from Surabaya.

Further up the volcano were, spring fed, ancient Hindu, stone bathing pools, divided between men. The pools contained a gaggle of Javanese transvestites, who made much ado about my white shin, but fortunately they were just leaving. Javanese volcanic soil and tropical climate produces spectacular growth and I observed that the local farmers were even better gardeners than the Greenies at the eco-centre.

The taxi to Malang, slowly passed marching lines of brightly uniformed school girls and we arrived in the centre of town as the parade reached the town hall. There were lots speeches and tan police uniforms and military marching bands and red and white flags flew everywhere.

The latest news from Malang is that 41 of the 45 members of the Malang City Council had been suspended by the government anti-corruption commission for taking bribes paid out by the former Malang mayor.

After a day of self-touring we lucked into Mollys, the Malang community art worker. We witnessed a live broadcast of Malang buskers at a radio station and a rock band at a trade show where we had to shake hands with smiling people in tan uniforms and it was Mollys who guided me to the stream under the main road where children swam, just like in my father’s youth. I paused to sketch the scene before being asked to leave – the women wanted to bath.

August 27, 2018

Far-east Java

The island of Java (population 145 million, 2015) can be divided into approximately twenty millispheres. Starting at the far eastern end of Java, it takes the Indonesian regencies of Banyuwangi (1.6m), Situbondo (0.7m), Bondowoso (0.7m), Jember (2.4m), Probolinggo (1.1m) and Lumajang (1.0m) to make up the millisphere of Far-east Java (7.8m).

In 2012 my travel companion and I journeyed from Jakarta to Surabaya during the month of Ramadan. From Surabaya we went by train to Probolinggo and then took a taxi-van up the Tengger volcanic complex to see Mt Bromo, which had last erupted only the year before. Around the caldera rim, growing in the grey volcanic ash, strawberries, onions and cabbages thrived at high-altitude.

Tourist numbers had climbed back to their pre-Bali bombing highs. In 1996-97, before the Asian financial crisis, tourist visits to Bromo peaked at 130,000; during 2001-02, after the Bali bombing, numbers had dropped to 45,000.

These volcanoes, which includes Semeru, the highest mountain in Java, are home to about 100,000 Tengger people. This ethnic group share the same Hindu religion as the people of Bali and had been driven into the hills by the arrival of Muslim Madurans in East Java in the nineteenth century.

The Tengger people have coped with the arrival of the tourist hordes by writing their own development plan, enforced by community law. No land can be sold, or leased for more than a year, to outsiders and the Tenggerese handle all the transport, accommodation and catering. Every morning the mass descent into the caldera and across the sea of sand, in the dark, to observe the sunrise on the volcanoes may seem chaotic but the Tenggerese are in control and the environmental impacts have not been all bad. Tourism has resulted in higher incomes for the Tenggerese, who can now afford LPG and kerosene for cooking instead of cutting their forests for firewood.

Sandwiched between the island of Bali and Mount Bromo, Far-east Java tends to be a place tourists pass through and it is less crowded than the rest of Java. The highway wound through what appeared to be national parks. Coffee trees and workers huts shared the park with the flora and fauna, with no clear separation between conservation and the economy. Beside the road women turned tobacco leaves drying in the sun.

We had planned to meet up with friends in Bali, but we were running ahead of schedule, so we rested up in Kalibaru, a small town, a short trip away from the Bali ferry terminal at Banyuwangi.

Beside the busy highway we found an unprepossessing motel which backed onto rice paddies and coconut palms. By a spreading Banyan tree we discovered the motel swimming pool, fed by a freshwater spring. Apart from a few frogs we had the unchlorinated pool to ourselves.

After a couple of days almost everyone in town had waved to us, and, between swims in “our” pool, we’d managed to have a close look at Kalibaru’s market and eateries and at the coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves growing outside town.

On the day that we decided to make a dash for Bali and the rendezvous with our friends we discovered that it was also the end of the post-Ramadan holiday week and public transport was crowded with Indonesians returning to work.

When the train pulled into Kalibaru it became apparent that there wasn’t any space for two more travellers. A baggage car at the end of the train had a door open and there were people inside. Boarding from the tracks posed a problem. Pushing my travelling companion up lacked decorum but I doubted if any of the stunned Indonesians would ever see us again.

At the far end an agitated guitar player sat on a piece of cardboard; most buses and trains in Java had travelling buskers. Uniformed train conductors appeared occasionally to shout abuse at the glaring guitarist, who had cleary transgressed.

Still recovering from the ignominy of her entrance my travelling companion sat sulking on her baggage, but a little while later we were crossing the narrow strait to Bali and joining the tourist hordes.

August 8, 2018November 4, 2018

Kyoto

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly one-thousandth of the world population. Around seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to examine human geography.

Kyoto prefecture (2015 population 2.6 million) is too small to qualify as a millisphere. Kyoto is part of the Kansai region (23 million) which includes the city of Osaka (8.8 million). Kyoto combined with neighbouring Shiga prefecture (1.4 million) gives a total population of 4 million.

The Shiga prefecture surrounds Lake Biwa (the largest freshwater body of water in Japan) and is within commuting distance from Kyoto. Shiga recently considered changing the name of their prefecture as one strategy to attract tourists away from Kyoto.

Kyoto has more visitors every year than either Mecca or Disneyland and is now suffering from “over-tourism”. Mecca has 15 million pilgrims annually (four million for the haj) and Disneyland Anaheim, LA has 18 million paying visitors every year.

Because of its history and its temples Kyoto was already a popular destination for the Japanese and visitor numbers hovered around 40 million per year from 1975-99, hit 50 million in 2008, and by 2015 there were 57 million tourists, around half of them foreigners, bringing US$9 billion to the city that year.

In 2003 there were only five million foreign visitors to Japan, which then launched the “Visit Japan” campaign. By 2017 there were 27 million foreign visitors, 85 percent of them from Asia. Three-quarters of Japan’s foreign tourists come from just China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

In 2005, on a stop-over on the way to Europe, I was one of those foreign tourists. Tourism locations around the world are popular for a good reason and Kyoto’s reason is it’s temple gardens. The reason I wanted to see them was quite prosaic; I was a landscape gardener and had seen photos of famous Japanese gardens.

I knew that these minimal, natural but somehow stylised compositions had their design rooted in the Japanese culture and the Shinto and Buddhist religions. Once while grappling with the aesthetics of rock placing, in New Zealand, I found myself climbing up a stream bed after a summer flash-flood. The way the rocks and sand had been rearranged read like a static representation of the forces of nature and seemed pleasing to my eye. I decided then that one day I wanted to make the landscaper’s pilgrimage and see the rock gardens of Kyoto.

At Osaka airport we were met by Masami, from nearby Mie, who had stayed with us in New Zealand when she had toured our country. Personifying the Japanese spirit of Omotenashi (hospitality) Masami shepherded us by rail to Kyoto and a hostel, stayed the night, took us around some prime sights, went back to work, and returned on the last day to put us back on the plane at Osaka.

It was winter and the off season in Kyoto. Snow had recently crushed bamboo, rushes and grasses and then melted away. Black crows called from the trees and white herons waded in the cold Kamo River. We headed for Rokuon-ji Temple to see the pavilion, papered with gold leaf, reflected in its landscaped pond.

At the top of my list was Rhoan-ji with its garden of rocks and raked sand thought to represent who knows what. Around the back (I didn’t realise that there was a back, or an approach) there was a water-basin. The inscription on the stone basin said “I learn only to be contented”. Masami translated it as “I learn so I will not want.” More to the point I thought.

“Learning should be for its own sake, not for profit or gain” … “Learn only satisfaction,” in other words be content with what you have.

At Daitoku-ji my preconception of the Japanese garden was shattered. One garden was dedicated to Sorin Ohtoma (1530-1589) a Christian feudal lord from Kyushu. Viewed from a corner of the garden, rocks are arranged to hint at the reclining form of a cross – a cross “burdened on the multitude of the world, symbolised by the numberless grains of sand.”

These days the multitudes are the flag following, selfie-stick wielding tourists, feverish to photograph everything, desperate to consume the next experience, and caring little for the consequences. One solution to “pollution by tourism” is to stay at home.