Jakarta

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

Jabodetabek

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.

 

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.

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.