Potholes, Puddles and Punctures

A Javanese Motorbike Odyssey

Originally Published in Asian Geographic Passport November 2011

http://www.asiangeopassport.com/index.phtml

Skeins of white mist swept across the road and the engine of my motorbike strained as I leant through another uphill bend. Below me a convoy of trucks was struggling through the switchbacks, and a troop of macaque monkeys watched lazily from the verge as I passed, their olive-grey fur beaded with dew. The steep slopes of the tea gardens faded into the cloud on either side.

I had set out from Jakarta at first light, and now, four hours later in a filling morning, I was approaching the symbolic starting point of my journey – the 1500 meter Puncak Pass, the portal to the great green uplands of Java. A few more hairpins, a few more stands of threadbare pine trees, and I reached the watershed. As I rode across it the weather changed instantly. The chilly mist cleared and a great bowl of green land opened below, the red-tiled roofs of villas and villages huddling under stands of dark trees, the raised beds of onion fields patching the hillsides, and the smooth blue strip of the road rolling away into a lost distance. I was relieved that my bike had survived the first steep ascent, but a shot of nervous excitement sparked in my belly.

Java is the green, temple-studded loadstone of Indonesia, a rough oblong of land swimming on its side under the equator, and held in place by a pair of huge urban anchors at either end of its muddy northern littoral – Jakarta in the west, Surabaya in the east. Over the coming week I would be exploring the wilder spaces between these monumental metropolises, choosing the byways over the highways, steering clear of big city gridlock, and plotting a course that followed the mountain spine of the island.

The bike I was riding was not some throbbing Harley or high caliber trail bike; it was a little 100cc Honda, the ubiquitous step-through run-around known in Indonesia as a bebek, or “duck”. What it lacked in horsepower it made up for in utility; more than 5 million of these bikes are sold in Indonesia every year. I had a map of Java clipped under the handlebars and a full tank of petrol. This was easy rider, Java style; it would be a 1450-kilometre odyssey of puddles, potholes and punctures.

***

Little more than 24 hours later I was already wondering why I had ever started out on such a big journey on such a little bike.

My first day’s ride from the heights of Puncak had been exactly what I had had in mind when first I pored over the maps. I had bowled through the green belly of the Preanger Highlands – a soft landscape under a lavender chiffon of haze, where busy, coffee-cultured streams cut through palm-clogged gorges – then banked north though blue-tinted pineapple fields across the flanks of the Tangkuban Prahu volcano, tracing my way through a web of back roads between stands of tall bamboo and villages where bone-white mosques stood alone in the rice fields. At dusk I had rolled into the old royal city of Cirebon, on the edge of the Java Sea, where I fell asleep in a cheap hotel with visions of empty roads unrolling before my eyes.

The following morning I wandered Cirebon’s faded royal palaces, places of old Dutch tile-work and cobwebby corners, and breakfasted on a spicy local specialty called nasi lengko, a refreshingly sour mix of steamed rice, fried tofu, beansprouts, soy sauce and chili. And then I set out east along the main coastal highway, passing inlets clotted with candy-cultured fishing boats, before branching steeply uphill into the mountains.

It had looked an appealing route on the map – a line cutting straight up the flanks of the main volcanic massif of Central Java to the upland fastness of Dieng – and at first it was. The rumbling trucks and gritty fumes of the highway were soon forgotten as I looped back and forth through stands of cool forest.

But then the road went to pieces. It was as if someone had simply peeled the tarmac away to leave nothing but a strip of jagged, football-sized rocks, rising at a near impossible angle. And so now here I was, wrestling with the shuddering handlebars as I edged upwards in first gear, fervently wishing I had a bigger bike. The engine screamed; an alarming smell of burning rubber rose, and to make matters worse, it started to rain.

It was already late afternoon, and I was making agonizingly slow progress. There were no villages along this tortuous track; the thought of a puncture or breakdown here was enough to prompt panic, but it was too late to turn back. Great grey cataracts of rain washed around me, and the temperature dropped dramatically as I climbed. In places the road was so rough and steep that I had to get down and push the bike between the boulders. The whole trip began to seem like a very bad idea indeed.

But finally, with great relief, I crossed the threshold in fading daylight and returned to a smooth surface. The rain was still sheeting down, but for a moment an unearthly vista opened ahead: rank after rank of swollen pine-lined ridges with tin-roofed villages tucked against their flanks, all bathed in the amber syrup of a hidden sunset. I was deep in the mountain hinterland of Java now, some 2000 meters above sea level.

I rolled into the chilly, rain-lashed village of Dieng in a blanketing darkness, and just meters short of the guesthouse I got my first puncture. It couldn’t have happened in a better place…

***

The Dieng Plateau is a strange mountain fastness; a patch of marshy, table-flat land ringed by pine-covered ridges in the belly of an ancient volcano. It is a place of running mists, turquoise lakes, and fractured hillsides where volcanic mud bubbles from the fissures. It is also home to some of the oldest temples in Indonesia. Before the arrival of Islam, Java was ruled by a succession of Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms. In the 8th Century Dieng was a holy place, and hundreds of temples were built around the plateau.

In the bleached chill of the morning I wandered amongst the weathered remnants of this lost era while a mechanic in the village patched my punctured tire. And then I set out along a route that whipped in great arcs through the mountains, passing the neat little town of Wonosobo, and cutting between the giant peaks of Sumbing and Sundoro.

I had slipped into the rhythm of my journey now, momentum bearing me through little country towns with mosques and churches. Java is the most densely populated island on earth, home to 136 million people. But often, pausing on the elbow of some mountain road, I found myself wondering where exactly all these inhabitants were.

That evening I reached the old royal city of Solo, once the seat of the mighty Mataram kingdom, the last major power in Java before the inexorable ascent of the Dutch in the 18th Century. I was halfway through my journey.

***

Over the coming days I crossed more mountain passes, and passed through more stands of green forest. On the slopes of Gunung Lawu, high above Solo, I wandered amongst the strange freak-show of carvings at the Candi Sukuh temple, one of the last to be built in Java before Hinduism gave way to Islam in the 15th Century. Elsewhere on the same slopes I came to another temple, Candi Cetho, perched on a high promontory above the tea gardens. A hard wind was gusting up from the plains below, and whispering through the pine trees, and the rising basalt terraces seemed deserted. But there were piles of petals in the inner recesses: this was still an active place of worship, for the little hamlet at the temple gates is home to one of the last indigenous Hindu communities in Java. This inaccessible spot lay above the tideline of Islamic conversion.

I spent a night in the little hill resort of Tawangmanggu, and feasted on rabbit sate with peanut sauce – a traditional mountain dish in Java – and in a damp morning, with shifting strips of mist snaking over the slopes, I crossed the watershed into East Java Province. I was south of the main mountain chain now, and the countryside was lusher than ever. Mineral-laden run-off from the mountains gives Java some of the richest soils on earth; this is a place where fertility has reached the point of infestation: banana plants sprout unbidden in the ditches, and given half a chance roots and creepers will tear a road to pieces in a few short seasons.

***

The low murmur of chanting in Javanese, and the sweet whiff of incense rose in the hot morning air. A thunderstorm in the night had left puddles between the paving stones, but they were steaming dry in the sharp sunlight. I was at the tomb of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president. He died in 1970, and was buried next to his mother in his childhood hometown, Blitar. Today Sukarno’s reputation stretches beyond the secular: thousands of pilgrims visit his tomb – sheltered beneath a mighty Javanese joglo pavilion – to pray, scatter offerings of petals, and to absorb a little of the great man’s karisma.

I had spent the night in Blitar. It was the archetypal Javanese town with a grid of neat streets lined with colonial-era bungalows, a central alun-alun – a grassy square studded with huge banyan trees – and an easy pace.

I wandered through the town in the morning, feasting on the local delicacy, nasi pecel – rice with fresh greens, crackers, and a peanut and chili sauce that manages to be as fiery as a Sukarno speech and as fresh as a mountain breeze all at the same time. Then I clambered back into the saddle and headed north. My arms were scorched now from the long days of riding in the hot tropical sun, my bike was lagged with dried mud, and my map of Java was torn, stained and crumpled. But as I bore past the mighty Majapahit-era temple at Penataran, knee-deep in the rice fields north of Blitar, and rode onwards through stands of white-barked trees and long avenues of sugarcane, and down sandy tracks where old women in cultured sarongs ambled flat-footed between red-roofed houses, I was full of the sheer pleasure of the journey.

Many visitors to neighboring Bali are given the impression that Java is little more than an urban hell of monstrous megalopolises and howling highways. But most of the island – once you break free of the main thoroughfares – is a place of soft, calm greenery, warm light and sweet black coffee. It was my battered little motorbike that had let me access this world.

I was lingering over my journey now, eking it out, stopping whenever I saw a little bamboo warung – a roadside café – for coffee, fresh coconut milk or fried bananas. Darkness caught me on a rising road past the mountain lake of Selorejo, and the last prayer-call was echoing through the villages when I finally crossed another pass and my last stop – the mountain resort of Batu, southwest of Malang – appeared through the pine trees, a galaxy of lights strung across the hillsides.

***

I was on the home straight now. In a bright morning I took a rising road from Batu through fields thick with cabbages, potatoes, strawberries and everything else that will only grow in the temperate uplands of Java. Ahead the great cone of Gunung Arjuno, yet another of Java’s active volcanoes, trailed a fine white banner of smoke into a pale sky.

The engine of the bike was coughing and spluttering alarmingly on the gear changes, and a full service was overdue. But this was the final climb of my journey, and soon I reached the little pass above Canggar, hard under the flanks of Arjuno. It was all downhill from here.

The road twisted through dark forest, and on many of the corners I spotted coal-black monkeys, watching nervously from the branches. At one point, on a high saddle between two great gorges, a view opened of the distant Penanggungan volcano, the last sentinel of the mountain heartlands before the steaming northern coastal plains. I dropped through the final stands of wild forest, through the little town of Pacet, and back to a world of trucks, buses, grit and grime.

Towns coagulated into a continuous strip; the green spaces vanished behind strips of jerry-built shops. Train-lines sparred with the highway; the air thickened to an off-white murk, and jets roared low overhead, bowling for the airport of Indonesia’s second largest city. The end was almost in sight. A few more clanking bridges over pale canals; a few more ill-tempered intersections, and my journey through the heart of Java was over. Surabaya swallowed me up.

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Journey to the Cradle Of Javanese Islam

 

Kudus, Demak and Jepara, in Central Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe 08/09/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/journey-to-the-cradle-of-javanese-islam/464205 

Smooth, white walls rise on either side of the narrow alleyway, the stonework cool to the touch. Small birds flit back and forth across the thin strip of blue sky above, and women’s voices echo from hidden courtyards. The alley makes a sharp turn to the left and the blank wall is punctured by a window with carved wooden shutters, but I can make out nothing through the darkness within.

I am lost somewhere in the Kauman, the old Islamic quarter of the Central Java town of Kudus, but only the glimpse of a blue becak rattling through the intersection at the end of another alley proves that I am still in Indonesia.

Far from the usual ramshackle openness of the typical Javanese kampung, this is a private world, where domesticity turns its back to the street behind bleached stonework. There is a hint of the Mediterranean and the Middle East about this place, recalling the area’s historic connection along Indian Ocean trade routes to far-flung lands.

East of the seething Central Java, Semarang, the coast abruptly bulges northward around the isolated up-thrust of Mount Muria. At the southwest foot of this ragged, 1,602-meter mountain stands a triangle of towns — Demak, Jepara and Kudus. Today this is the ultimate backwater, overlooked by the tourists and history buffs heading south for Yogyakarta and Borobudur. But in the 16th century, it was the anteroom of Islam in Java.

Clambering onto my motorbike, I head out along the highway from Semarang to explore this enigmatic area and to hunt out the hints of its history.

It takes some time to find my way out of the maze of Kudus Kauman and back to broader streets, but it is cool and quiet in the shaded alleyways, and this is a fine place to get lost. Eventually, I emerge on the lane that leads to the famous Menara Mosque, built in 1549 during the region’s heyday.

Although the rivers have now silted up and pushed the coastline away from Kudus and neighboring Demak, these were once among the most important ports of northern Java. Traders from China, India and Arabia arrived here, bringing with them new foods and new ideas.

Foreign Muslims had probably settled in these towns as early as the 14th century, but it wasn’t until the end of the 15th century that the region gave rise to Java’s first Islamic kingdom, Demak.

By the middle of the 16th century, this new power had superseded the crumbling Majapahit Empire, and pushed its influence deep into the hinterlands.

Kudus was part of the core Demak territory and a hub of its Islamic identity. It is the only town in Java with an identifiably Arabic name — Kudus is a corruption of al-Quds, the Islamic name for Jerusalem.

Despite its proudly Muslim identity, there is evidence of an older pedigree at Menara Mosque. The original elements of the mosque are lost beneath modern olive-green paintwork. But the surrounding courtyard walls and the tiered clock-tower are strikingly different. They are built of weathered red brick, rising in tapering columns — the style is unmistakably that of the Hindu temples of Majapahit.

Leaving the old town behind, I head back to the modern part of Kudus. Today, cut off from the sea and no longer functioning as a port, Kudus makes its living from cigarettes. Millions of Indonesia’s hallmark clove-laced kretek cigarettes are churned out by factories here each year, and an aroma of cloves and tobacco lingers over the town.

But it is lunchtime and I’m after other spices, so I pull up at Pak Denuh restaurant, a narrow, open-fronted eatery on a roaring roadside, which, I have been informed by locals, is the very best place to try soto Kudus.

The town’s best-known specialty is served up in a chipped white bowl, but the first mouthful is a delightful surprise. The soup is rich and creamy, with base notes of cumin and turmeric that, like the white alleys of the Kauman, make me think of lands on the far side of the Indian Ocean.

After a second helping of soto Kudus, I head back to the road and bear east along the main highway, before branching north at Pati for a long loop around Mount Muria. Like Kudus, Mount Muria’s name shows a link to the Holy Land: it is thought to be named for Moriah, the mountain on which Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son. The road streaks through bowls of green farmland and rears over outlying ridges, carrying me to the sleepy little town of Jepara, where I stop for the night.

Today, Jepara is the quintessential provincial Javanese backwater, with a grid of tree-lined streets where the rattle of the becak still rules over the roar of the motorbike. In the soft morning sunlight I wander along the riverside, where brightly painted fishing boats are unloading the night’s catch.

Greater fleets once sailed from this harbor. In the 16th century, Jepara was a maritime city-state within the bounds of Demak. It had links across the Java Sea to the Malay states of Sumatra and the Southeast Asian mainland and on three occasions sent armadas to attack the Portuguese outpost at Melaka.

Today, however, Jepara is best known in the folklore of Indonesian nationalism as the home of Raden Ajeng Kartini, the daughter of the local regent at the turn of the 20th century, now celebrated as a proto-feminist and nationalist heroine.

Jepara’s other claim to fame is as “the city of carving.” According to local legends, the art of woodcarving, practiced here and in Demak, was introduced by a Chinese craftsman, Ling Sing. The locals clearly took to the trade with gusto; as I head out of town I pass dozens of workshops where men sit chiseling away, cutting intricate designs into the timber.

From the carvers’ workshops I begin to make my way back toward the busy streets of Semarang. Flat rice fields stretch on either side and the outline of Mount Muria retreats into a yellow haze.

There is a final stop to make, at Demak itself. The onetime powerhouse of Java is a somewhat shabby stop-off on the main highway. By the end of the 16th century, the star of the Demak state was burning out and before long, the hub of Javanese power would shift to the southern heartlands as the Mataram kingdom rose.

Today few visitors would come to Demak were it not for its mosque, said to be the oldest in Java. It stands on the edge of the central square, roofs rising in three-tiered tiles.

I park my bike, pick my way to the edge of the courtyard and sit to watch the steady stream of pilgrims. As the anteroom of Islam, this whole region is a place of pilgrimage, studded with the tombs of holy men and warrior queens. This mosque is the most sacred spot of all — for some traditionalist Javanese Muslims, seven pilgrimages here amount to one journey to Mecca. But like the other places I’ve visited on my journey, the three-tiered roof hints at temple architecture and links beyond the bounds of orthodoxy.

This whole corner of Java, the onetime cradle of nascent Islamic power, I realize as I make my way back to the road across the hot tiles, is in truth a strange mixture, spiced like a bowl of soto Kudus with flavors from China, India, the Islamic world and, of course, from Java itself.  

© Tim Hannigan 2011

The Bathing Place

 

Javanese Religion and the Jolotundo Temple

 

Originally published in Kabar Magazine Autumn 2010

http://kabarmag.com/magazine/2012/01/15/jolotundo-the-bathing-place/

There is a scent of incense on the damp evening air.  The temple is set into the green hillside: a facade of dark basalt fronted by a shallow pool full of slow-moving fish.  Water pours in continuous rivulets from spouts in the masonry, and on either side of the pool is a bathing tank.  Tiny freshwater crabs clamber over the stones, and black frogs squat like malevolent spirits in the dripping recesses. 

This place – the Jolotundo Temple, deep in the forest on the slopes of the 1653-meter Mount Penanggungan – is less than two hours by road from central Surabaya.  The chaos and congestion of the East Java capital seem a world away, but I am not alone in the green twilight: there are other pilgrims here.  Sitting at the edge of the pool I watch a man in a batik sarong pad over the stepping stones to a raised platform at the centre of the temple.  He settles himself cross-legged, lights an incense stick, and facing the empty plinth where the statue of some Hindu deity once stood, presses his palms in prayer.  In the bathing tanks – women to the left, men to the right – people are standing chest-deep in the cool, clear water.  Clearly something unusual is going on here; clearly Jolotundo is more than just another thousand-year-old relic of Java’s classical Hindu past.

Fresh from bathing a slim man comes and sits beside me at the water’s edge.

“My name is Muslim, and I’m a Muslim – easy to remember, right?”  He comes originally from Yogyakarta, the cradle of high Javanese culture, but is married to a Surabaya woman and has lived in the city for 15 years.

Muslim is a regular visitor to Jolotundo.  “Today I just came to bathe, but often I come to meditate, at night, from evening until morning.

“Javanese people believe there is power here.  This place is from the time of the Majapahit Empire.  We believe the remnants of Majapahit – the power, I mean – are still here.  It is a place where you can make a connection with your batin.”  Batin is a difficult word to translate precisely, meaning something along the lines of “inner spirit”.  Together with the idea of sacred power, held in places, people or objects, it is a key concept in Javanese mysticism – as are connections to Majapahit. 

In truth the Jolotundo temple predates that mightiest of Hindu Javanese kingdoms by some 300 years.  It was built in the late 10th Century under the Sanjaya Dynasty.  Inscriptions connect the place to Udayana, father of Sanjaya’s last ruler, Airlangga.  However, the Penanggungan Mountain, a perfect cone standing sentinel between the coastal plains and the volcanic hinterland, was certainly still important in the Majapahit era.  It was said to be the broken summit of the mythical Mount Meru, home of the Gods; there are other, later temples on the slopes behind Jolotundo.  Under successive dynasties the peak and its sacred places had a powerful hold, and even today, long after Hindu-Buddhist Java gave way to Islam, the idea of the bathing temple as a place of power, of sacred energy, still lingers. 

As a damp, leaden darkness falls and a cacophony of insect noise rises that power is almost palpable.  The static orange pinpricks of burning incense sticks show in the gloom and the meandering green sparks of fireflies fall like snowflakes.  More pilgrims arrive; the smell of incense thickens; naked forms, burnished in the light of oil lamps, move around the bathing tanks.

I pick my way through the dark forest to a small warung, a cafe built of bamboo in a clearing of smooth red earth below the temple.  It is owned by a man named Sembodo.

“We stay open all night; most people come to the temple at night.  The energy is best between midnight and 2 am.”  Pak Sembodo explains that the early hours of Friday morning is the best time to visit Jolotundo in any given week, but the most powerful nights of all are those of a full moon, or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day calendar coincides with the last day of the traditional five-day Javanese market week.

“On those nights it’s really busy.  You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes.”

***

Observers of Java are quick to label phenomena like pilgrimage and nighttime meditation in search of sacred energy as the preserve of those who follow the traditional belief systems known as Kejawen – and are just as quick to present Kejawen as the absolute counterpoint to the Islamic orthodoxy of mosques and headscarves.

In the mid-20th Century anthropologists indentified what they saw as a distinct division between the Muslims of Java: there were the Santri, those who followed global Islamic strictures closely, and there were the others, the Kejawen or Abangan, whose faith was more closely rooted in Java itself and for who Islam, if it had any significance at all, was just one thin thread in a knot of Hinduism, Buddhism, ancestor-worship and animism.  Never the twain shall meet, the theory went, and the idea of an absolute Kejawen-Santri division in Java passed out of academia, through the pens of mainstream writers, and into public consciousness.  And the leap to the conclusion that, with concrete minarets sprouting like wet season rice shoots, Kejawen must be on the retreat was as easy as skipping over the stepping stones to the Jolotundo bathing tank.

But something about this strange, powerful place in the damp forest on the slopes of a sacred volcano seems to challenge such absolute ideas.  Plenty of the nighttime visitors pray, orthodox-fashion, in the langgar, the little Muslim prayer room, behind Pak Sembodo’s warung after they have scattered an offering of petals at the temple.  And the place is clearly the preserve of neither Javanese nor of Muslims: there are Chinese Indonesians and Balinese Hindus amongst the pilgrims.

Throughout the night a succession of men on motorbikes appear from the darkness to sit chatting and drinking coffee in the flickering lamplight of Sembodo’s warung.  Some come to bathe; others only to “refresh” after a long day in an office or campus in the cities of Sidoarjo and Surabaya.  Many of them wear dark, heavy jewels set in rings of tarnished pewter – amulets, little receptacles of the same kind of power that surrounds the temple. 

A stocky, long-haired man named Syafik talks of the fleeting glimpses he has had of jins and spirits in the forest; a student called Martin smiles as he offers me a cigarette and asks, “Am I the first Kejawen Christian you’ve met?  There are lots of us...” and a Catholic from Sidoarjo asks, “Mas Timothy, do you believe in the Other World?”  In the noisy silence of the forest, the warung floating alone in the blanketing darkness, I answer in the affirmative…

All of them agree that I should take a midnight bath at the temple, but despite the endless cups of coffee tiredness creeps up, and a brief nap on a bamboo platform behind the warung turns into a full night’s sleep...

***

The air is fresh in the morning.  Lean, wiry men with sickles and hoes over their shoulders and thin dogs at their heels stalk up the potholed road towards the rough terraces on the mountain.  The temple is deserted, only burnt-out incense sticks and scattered petals to hint at what went on in the night.  Visiting Jolotundo on a quiet weekday, you would probably assume it was just another Sunday picnic spot – with a ticket booth and a few concrete benches – and unless you asked you would never hear the story of the friend of a friend who had the baby she had long been trying for only after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday.  This is the kind of thing that is easy to miss in Java.

I peer down into the bathing tank.  The water shimmers in the washed-out green light of the forest and I can see that the gargoyle from which the flow emerges is a naga, the serpent of Hindu mythology often associated with rivers, rearing up with its hood half-open in two flapped ridges and its brow menacingly wrinkled.  Muslim, the pilgrim I met the previous evening, told me that the water here is the second best in the world, after that from the holy Zamzam Well in Mecca; one of the late-night coffee-drinkers at the warung said it ranked third after Zamzam and the mouth of the Ganges.

As I sit pondering this, the first of the day’s pilgrims arrive at the temple.  These people are not the amulet-wearing mystics of the hours of darkness.  The women, giggling and fluttering, are dressed in white headscarves.  The men wear tartan sarongs, embroidered collarless shirts and crocheted skullcaps.  They have the purple bruise of devout prayer on their foreheads and when I skip down over the stones to talk to them their speech is peppered with affected Alhamdulillahs.  They are, unmistakably, Santris.

Their leader is a man with a sparse tuft of beard at his chin.  His name is Safi’i.  He has completed the Haj, the ritual journey to Mecca – a pilgrimage far longer than the three kilometer trip up the bumpy road to Jolotundo from his home village on the lower slopes of the volcano.  But something still draws him here.

“The water is good.  I come here to bathe to stop myself being stressed.”

While the men splash in the right-hand tank – with, it must be said, a little less solemnity than the visitors of the previous evening – the girls flutter at the edge of the pool.

“I want to bathe,” says a young woman called Holifa; “they say the water here makes you strong.  But I’m scared it will be cold…”

***

On the one hand you could view the Jolotundo bathing temple as a place so powerful that its draw reaches out across the Kejawen-Santri divide.  But as the little orthodox party drift away like white ghosts, carrying old Aqua bottles filled with spring water, I am left with a bigger idea.  This place simply makes a mockery of arbitrary religious categorizations made by anthropologists, journalists and even by the participants.  There are no absolutes in religion in Java; there are no concrete boundaries between faiths; only tangled threads.  Sitting cross-legged under the trees I try, on a back page of my notebook, to categorize the people who are drawn to Jolotundo, but the groupings splinter and multiply beyond the point of usefulness: there are Kejawen traditionalists, esoteric modern mystics, Majapahit fetishists, the casually curious, Santris, Balinese, Christians, Chinese – and now at least one foreigner…

***

It is midnight.  I make my way up from the warung to the temple.  The forest is a wall of insect noise and between the treetops the narrow strip of sky is smeared with stars.  The noise of running water fills the air.

   Four men are sitting at the edge of the pool.  They are three Javanese and a Balinese man named Widiyasa who have driven up together from Surabaya.  They have just finished their ceremony.

   Why, I ask, have they felt compelled to come here in the middle of the night?

   “This is a good place to make myself pure, to clean myself,” says Widiyasa.  “There is still something here from Majapahit time.”

   “The power, you mean?” I ask.  I can see nothing of Widiyasa’s face in the darkness and would never recognize him if we passed one another in a Surabaya shopping mall.

   “There is more than that,” he says; “actually Majapahit itself is still there, still complete; you just cannot see it unless you have sixth sense.  At night the condition is better.  Between midnight and 2 am we say the gate is open; that is the time when there is something really special here...”

   When Widiyasa and his friends have gone, lighting the way back to the road with their mobile phones, I am alone in the darkness.  It is 1 am.  The gate is open.

   I tiptoe over the stepping stones and up the slippery ladder to the edge of the bathing tank.  The masonry is cold and wet and here the noise of running water is a roar.  I undress, shivering in the starlight, and drop into the cool, clear water...

©Tim Hannigan 2010

Healing Waters

The Jolotundo Bathing Temple, near Trawas, East Java

Originally published in Asian Geographic Magazine, May 2010

http://www.asiangeo.com/latest_issue.html

The clearing, deep in the forest on the steep western slopes of the Penanggungan volcano, is full of gentle sound – insect noise, bird calls, and the ceaseless rush of running water. A scent of incense cuts across the earthy smells of the jungle.
The temple, a façade of mildewed basalt fronted by a shallow pool, is set into the steep green hillside. Clear, cool water, straight from the heart of the mountain, pours from spouts in the masonry, just as it has done for more than a thousand years.
This place, Candi Jolotundo, two hours south of Surabaya, the seething capital of East Java, was built in 977 AD under the great Hindu Sanjaya kingdom, the same dynasty that built the more famous Prambanan temple in Central Java. Today, long since Sanjaya faded from the scene, and long since the Hinduism of old Java gave way to Islam, the temple is still known by local people as a place of power, pilgrimage and healing.

Jolotundo was always a bathing temple, and the modern pilgrims who make their way up the steep, potholed track through the forest from the hot, dusty cities of Sidoarjo, Surabaya and Mojokerto say that its water has healing properties.
Drawn from underground springs, the water is cool, clear and sweet. Some of the most regular visitors to Jolotundo are people with health problems.
A man named Ajianto, from nearby Sidoarjo, says he has come here almost every day since suffering a stroke several years ago. The stroke affected his speech and his balance, but, he says, regular dips in the chilly, stone-lined bathing tank at the temple help greatly to relieve his symptoms. Other visitors echo his story with tales of back aches and asthma cured after bathing here.
The water – both in its drinking quality and its healing power – ranks with the best in the world. One local man, Syafik, says it is bettered only by the water of the Zamzam well in Mecca, and the source of the Ganges in the high Himalayas.

This easy referencing of both Islam and Hinduism is central to Jolotundo’s enduring attraction for Javanese people in the 21st Century: this is a key place for people who follow the tangle of Hindu concepts, Islamic formulas, ancestor veneration and spirit appeasement known as Kejawen, the traditional Javanese religion and the counterpoint to modern Islamic orthodoxy.
Many of Jolotundo’s visitors are followers of Kejawen. For traditionalist Javanese people the concept of sacred energy, kesakten, contained in people, places and objects is important, and Jolotundo is a place of great power.
Pilgrims bring offerings of petals, known as sesajen, in little trays of woven paper or leaves. They light slim red incense sticks, and settle themselves to meditate on the temple’s central platform. Meditation, known as semedi, is the way to access the power of places like Jolotundo, and the best time to do it is at night.
Remote and isolated though the temple is – it lies several kilometers beyond the nearest village – there are people here every night. The time when the healing power of the water is said to be at its strongest is between midnight and 2 am. The power is particularly intense, pilgrims say, in the early hours of Friday morning, and still more so on the night of a full moon or a Kliwon Tuesday, when the second day of the seven-day week meets with the last day of the five-day Javanese calendar.
“On those nights it’s really busy. You have to queue to bathe, for two hours sometimes,” says a local stallholder named Sembodo.
One midnight visitor claims that in the darkness Jolotundo becomes a gateway to another world, while another whispers more tails of healing: a woman from Sidoarjo had been trying for a baby for years, he says, but only had her wished-for son after bathing here at midnight on a Kliwon Tuesday.
In the intense, cocooning darkness, filled with the sound of running water and marked only by the orange pinpricks of incense sticks and the meandering green sparks of the fireflies, even a skeptic might believe such stories…

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Sailing Surabaya's River of Gold

The History of Surabaya's old port district, Kalimas

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/11/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/sailing-surabayas-river-of-gold/338890

Surabaya was once a name to conjure with. A century ago the East Java capital was one of the great port cities of Asia, a place mentioned on docksides and in the pages of romantic novels the world over in the same breath as Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. This might surprise many modern residents and visitors, for though it is still Indonesia’s second biggest city Surabaya has very much faded from the world map. Today I am setting out on foot in search of echoes of the maritime past that once made it the most important city of the Dutch East Indies.

A floodtide of cars, motorbikes and becaks is streaming across Jembatan Merah, the Red Bridge that connects Surabaya’s Chinatown with the old colonial quarter. No one pays much attention to the strip of murky brown water that oozes beneath the bridge, but this waterway, Kalimas, the River of Gold, was key to Surabaya’s trading past.
Dodging through the traffic I take a left at the eastern end of the bridge and find myself walking along a dusty, potholed track beside the river. There is a smell of fish and mud. To the right a rank of crumbling warehouses – hipped roofs and stout columns betraying their Dutch pedigree – are all that remains to show that this was once one of the busiest wharf-sides in Asia.
From its earliest beginnings Surabaya was a port. Local legend has the origins of the city in an epic battle between a shark (sura) and a crocodile (buaya) somewhere in the vicinity of Jembatan Merah. More tangibly the city’s founding is officially dated to 1293 when a wandering Chinese fleet was defeated by a local army nearby, but the first historical records of a place named Surabaya only appear a century later – as a key entrepot of the mighty Majapahit Empire.

Without a natural harbor Surabaya grew as a roadstead port. Sheltered from the storms of the Java Sea by the long, low island of Madura to the north, sailing schooners could anchor safely in the channel beyond the mouth of the Kalimas River. Only the smallest of the trading ships could navigate the mud-banks to come upstream, so most cargo was unloaded into open boats then hustled up the Kalimas to the trading houses and markets on the now decaying wharf along which I am walking.

“River of Gold” was always a somewhat hyperbolic name. Today the dropping tide is showing slabs of slimy grey mud. The water is the color of cappuccino, and the only boat in view is a battered green tender ferrying passengers from one bank to the other. The riverside is lined with flimsy wooden shacks. A lean, grinning man reclining in the shade calls me over. His name is Mahmud, and like many of the people now inhabiting this part of Surabaya, he is originally from Madura.
“They’re all from the Dutch time,” he says, waving towards the flaking white warehouses. “A lot of Dutch tourists come here to take photos of them.”
I glance up and down the wharf, half-expecting to see a gaggle of sweating sightseers from Amsterdam, but I am the only foreigner in sight, and with a smile Mahmud concedes that by “many” he really means “a few”.
Nearby a posse of thin, barefooted men are unloading sacks of dried fish from a truck into the dark, dusty interior of one of the warehouses. Watching over them is a Chinese man who says that his father bought this warehouse fifty years ago, at a time when the fortunes of the old Kalimas Wharf had already faded.
I walk on. Here and there a drooping bougainvillea bush gives a splash of bright color to the scene, but this area, once so prosperous, is now home to the poorest of industries – recycling of old bottles and sacks, and the gathering of garbage.

After the decline of the Majapahit Empire Surabaya became a rowdy city-state on the fringes of the Mataram Kingdom. Despite a series of sieges and rebellions the goods – and the money – continued to flow up the Kalimas, from the spice gardens of Maluku, from the river ports on the jungle fringes of Kalimantan, from Sulawesi and beyond. The first Dutch trading operations were set up in the late 17th Century, and in 1743 Mataram ceded full sovereignty of the city to the Dutch East India Company. The scene was set for Surabaya to become the biggest and most important of all Indonesia’s colonial cities.
Development of the sugarcane industry in the 19th Century saw the port grow into a teeming, cosmopolitan metropolis. Many of the now crumbling warehouses that line the river date from this time. The seafaring writer Joseph Conrad came to Surabaya during its heyday. He set part of his novel Victory in the city.

The vibrancy of that era seems far away as I cross to the left bank of the river. Here there is a chaotic market where bulky Madurese women are haggling over baskets of bananas and mangoes. Trade still goes on here, but the produce has been brought in by land; the river, slithering past to the right, is ignored. Beyond the market I find myself picking along a narrow, walled-in alleyway beyond which I enter a kampung, a working class village-within-a-city. I am greeted with a near-hysterical chorus of “hello misters!”
Beyond the kamung walls I can see stacked tiers of shipping containers. Surabaya is still a port – a big one – but changes in the world of seaborne trade in the late 19th Century ensured the death of the old riverside wharfs.

With the arrival of fast steam ships with schedules to keep an old-fashioned roadstead port and a narrow river served by open boats was woefully inadequate. At the same time railways to carry sugar straight from the mills in the south of the city to the port were laid. The Kalimas River became hopelessly congested. Sometimes it was entirely blocked with small, overloaded craft, and to make matters worse the sandbanks at the mouth of the river could only be negotiated at high water. It could take days to load or unload a ship. Something had to be done, and after lengthy debate the building of a modern, deepwater port was finally sanctioned. In the 1920s the new harbor of Tanjung Perak was built, north of the old riverside wharfs. Now even the biggest freighters could come alongside to be loaded straight from the dock. Kalimas was relegated to the sidelines, and the collapse of the sugar industry in the 1930s was its final death knell. The river silted up; the warehouses were locked and left to crumble.

But something still remains. I have lost sight of the river, but the excited kampung-dwellers point me down the narrowest of side alleys: “That way mister, there are lots of boats!”
I emerge in the evening sunlight on a crowded dockside. The huge international cargo ships now moor at Tanjung Perak – I can see the skeletal outlines of the cranes there, stark against the evening sky – but smaller inter-island traffic still comes to the river. The narrow waterway is crammed with boats. Evening sunlight falls on rust, flaking white paint, high prows and frayed rigging. There are decrepit tramp steamers and amongst them older wooden vessels. Some of them, though leaking diesel from the bilges, still have the graceful lines of pinisi, the sailing schooners of Sulawesi that were the original trading boats of Indonesia.
The first of these old wooden boats that I pass is, to my disappointment, no longer a working vessel. A man lounging on the steeply sloping deck tells me that it has been bought by a resort on Flores. When restoration is complete it will ferry tourists to the dive sites of the Komodo National Park. But the next boat is still trading, though it is being loaded not with spice or sandalwood but with boxes of instant noodles, bound for the islands of the Kangean Archipelago east of Madura.

As I make my way along the dockside crewmen from other boats call out to me. They come from all over Indonesia; many are from Kalimantan, or from the distant islands of Nusa Tenggara – Flores, Timor and Alor. Their destinations too are scattered across the archipelago.
A sailor greets me. His name is Abdullah. He comes from Banyuwangi at the eastern tip of Java. He is one of eight crewmen on an old wooden ship carrying onions to Bali.
The journey will take three days. “Now it’s the season of big waves,” says Abdullah, “so sometimes it takes longer.” From Bali they will sail another three days north to Makassar, then south across the Java Sea to Jakarta, then east along the coast, back to Surabaya. These are some of the oldest trade routes of the islands.
Abdullah makes Rp50,000 a day. “Not enough to buy cigarettes,” he grumbles, and he rarely sees his wife and three children, back home in Banyuwangi.

A little further along the dock men are padding along the narrowest of wooden gangplanks carrying huge loads onto another old wooden boat. They are bound for Balikpapan in Kalimantan, and they invite me onboard, laughing at my tentative steps along their precarious gangway. Onboard there is a smell of tar and diesel, salt and rotten wood. In the hollow belly of the ship there are bags of cement and bundles of reinforcement bar for building; on the roof of the wheelhouse there are orange septic tanks, and in a hold beside the engine room in the stern there are boxes of mineral water and biscuits. I am shown up a worn wooden ladder to the wheelhouse where the captain, Pak Subur, is watching over the loading of the ship.
“We always carry a mixed cargo like this,” he says, “and we don’t go until the boat is full. We make a loss if it’s not full.” Subur is 51 years old and comes from Kalimantan. He has been sailing on these wooden cargo boats all his life. The wheelhouse is starkly bare. There is only the wheel, and a tarnished copper bell hanging from the ceiling.
“On modern ships they have radar, compasses, radios. They need to look at maps before they go. They think they know about the sea, but they don’t.”
I am astonished. Doesn’t Subur even have a map or a compass?
He smiles and shakes his head. “We know the way.”
Subur has a small, dank cabin next to the wheelhouse; the other 12 crewmen sleep below. The name of the ship is Usaha Bersama – Joint Effort. Looking out from the wheelhouse I can see the mouth of the river, and beyond it the hazy line of Madura with the big freighters moored in its lee. Subur will sail that way the day after tomorrow, at midnight on the high tide. It will be three days – without navigational equipment – to Balikpapan.
Surabaya’s Kalimas River may no longer be at the center of world trade, and its warehouses and wharfs may have long since decayed. But there are still ships like Subur’s, plying routes that existed long before the sugar industry and the colonial era, and even before Mataram and Majapahit.

As I nervously edge back down the narrow plank to the quayside one of the crew, a dark young man from Ambon, calls to me.
“Come with us, mister, to Balikpapan. There will be big waves, and for sure you’ll be scared, but it’s nice on a boat like this.” I’m not quite sure if he is serious, and I have other commitments to stop me running away to sea this time, but for a moment, in the late afternoon on this venerable old dockside, it’s a tempting offer…



© Tim Hannigan 2009

A Pilgrim on the Holy Slopes of Gunung Penanggungan

Climbing Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/10/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/a-pilgrim-on-the-holy-slopes-of-gunung-penanggungan/333875

The forest was silent in the gray pre-dawn light and the stone slabs at the edge of the bathing tank were slippery underfoot. Someone had been here ahead of me, for there was already a scent of incense in the air, and a fistful of pink petals in the green niche beside the waterspout, but for now I was alone. I undressed and dropped into the icy, chest-deep water. This was the sacred bathing place at the Jolotundo temple on the forested western slopes of Gunung Penanggungan. Suppressing a shiver I did what countless pilgrims before me had done and bowed my head under the stream of cold, clear water pouring from mouth of an algae-covered gargoyle, then clambered out, dressed and set out uphill towards the summit.

***

Gunung Penanggungan stands sentinel on the northern fringes of East Java’s volcanic hinterland; on a clear day you can see its smooth purple cone from the shopping malls of Surabaya. This 1653-meter mountain was long considered one of Java’s most sacred peaks. According to legend, when Hinduism arrived in Indonesia Mount Meru, the home of the gods, was shifted from the Himalayas to Java. Unsurprisingly the mountain suffered some damage during transit. The base broke away to form Gunung Semeru, Java’s highest peak, while the top fell 60 kilometers to the northwest to become Penanggungan.
My journey – by motorbike – had begun the previous day at another sacred bathing place, Candi Belahan, on Penanggungan’s eastern slopes. This temple dates from the late 11th Century, and is said to be the memorial of the great King Airlangga of the Sanjaya Dynasty. To find it I had branched off the howling Surabaya-Malang highway, and within minutes was deep in the Javanese countryside. The temple’s rather racy local name is Candi Tetek, the “Breasts Temple”, and the reason is obvious: the water that feeds the shallow pool here emerges in two ceaseless streams from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. When I arrived a pair of truck drivers were unashamedly soaping themselves under this ancient power-shower.
“Come on mister!” they called to me; “take a bath, the water’s good here!” To their disappointment I only dipped my toes in the pool before heading on along rising roads through the little hill resorts of Tretes and Trawas. To the south the towering slopes of the Arjuno-Welirang volcano massif swept away into dark cloud; to the north Penanggungan itself stood stark above the concertinaed rice terraces.
At the end of a steep, potholed track through the trees I came to Candi Jolotundo. This temple is the oldest and most sacred on the mountain, and also the best starting point for the climb to the summit. Built in 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions suggest that it was the royal bathing place of Airlangga’s father, Udayana, king of the old unified Balinese kingdom that once held sway over east Java.
I could smell the incense and hear the sound of running water even before I saw the temple. It was set into a steep, forested hillside behind a pool full of huge, slow-moving fish. In a deep, walled-in tank three men were bathing, but they were not merely washing themselves like the truck drivers I had seen earlier. They stood upright, heads bowed and palms pressed together in prayer. Incense sticks fumed in the damp recesses of the façade and an offering of petals floated in the water. On the temple’s central platform a young man in a white tee shirt was meditating, eyes closed, the afternoon sunlight slanting through the forest behind him.
One of the bathers emerged shivering from the tank.
“Is it cold?” I asked
“It’s not too bad if you jump straight in,” he replied. His name was Rozi. He lived in Surabaya and often came to the temple with his friends. “The water is good,” he said, “and it’s a good place to meditate. You can be close to god here.”
Another man, Aji, sitting in the shade of a pavilion nearby said that he drove up here from his home in Sidoarjo almost every day. He had a problem with his shoulder, “But after bathing here, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. Both Aji and Rozi were Muslims.
“This used to be a Hindu place,” said Aji, “but now it’s universal.” Nonetheless, the incense and the petals were still a strong echo of Hinduism.
“You should take a bath,” said Aji; “it will make you strong!”

I would need my strength to climb the mountain the next day, so I decided to take his advice. I spent the night a kilometer downhill from the temple at PPLH, an environmental educational center which also has eight neat little bungalows for visitors, and then, after that strengthening early morning dip at the temple, I headed for the summit.
The trail led through cool forest, then across a stretch of terraces studded with pale green banana plants. Ahead, the bald yellow summit of the mountain rose; to the left was the rocky outcrop of Bekel, one of Penanggungan’s four smaller outlying peaks.
Beyond the patch of farmland the trail rose into dense undergrowth. I was dripping with sweat by the time I came to the first temple. This was nothing more than a pair of small masonry stumps, but further on I came to another temple, this one a series of five basalt platforms rising to a crooked altar. Still higher up, on the saddle of land between Bekel and the main mountain, I found another three ancient places of worship. Struggling through the undergrowth I felt a little like Indiana Jones, but all of these places were well cared for. The surrounding vegetation had been cleared, and petals and ash showed that someone was still worshipping here.
There are at least 81 temples scattered around these slopes. Most date not from the time of Udayana and Airlangga but from the later Majapahit Kingdom. After the collapse of Majapahit the mountain was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak and the temples fell into disuse. They were “discovered” by European archeologists in the 1930s, though local villagers had always known about many of them.
Beyond the last temple – Candi Sinta – the scrub fell back. The trail here was a steep, ragged thread of yellow soil across slopes blackened by a recent wildfire. I had been hiking for almost two hours now and the sun was high overhead. Glancing back I could see the forests and fields of the lower slopes fading into a sea of yellow haze. A hot wind was whipping the dust into the sky and high above a dark-winged eagle turned on a thermal.
The slope grew steeper and steeper, and the ground rougher and rougher, but finally, sweating and gasping, I made it to the summit with its sunken crater. The mountain was adrift in the haze, but as I sat catching my breath the faint, dreamy sound of a traditional gamelan orchestra drifted up from what must have been a village wedding somewhere in the trees below.
The summit was a bleak and windy place of dry yellow grass, marked with the empty cigarette packets and burnt-out campfires of other hikers, but sitting there, listening to the distant gamelan and thinking of the cool water pouring into the pool at the Jolotundo temple – where I would certainly be taking another bath after my descent – the ancient idea that this was the home of the gods didn’t seem quite so farfetched.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Motorcycling to the Temples Of the Singosari Kingdom

Travelling around Malang, East Java

Originally published in The Jakarta Globe, 18/02/09
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/motorcycling-to-the-temples-of-the-singosari-kingdom/307771

Driving up to Malang from East Java’s steaming coastal plains is like coming up for air. The humidity and traffic fumes clear; expanses of rice pasture open beyond the road, and in the distance, forested hills rise into murky cloud.
People have been making this refreshing uphill journey since the colonial era, and with three days to spare I have decided to follow the well-trodden route by motorbike, stopping along the way to explore relics of East Java’s past.

My first stop is in the village of Prigen, not far from the little hill resort of Tretes. Rising through tapering tiers of cut basalt in a neat, moat-lined garden, is the 14th Century Candi Jawi temple.

Candi Jawi was built in honor of Kertanegara, the last king of the mighty Singosari kingdom that once ruled these parts. The temple, restored in the late 1930s, is imposing despite its modest size, but it is somewhat overshadowed by the nearby cone of Gunung Penaggunan, the outer bastion of East Java’s mountain core. Today the volcano is fading rapidly in the haze, and the higher peaks to the south are hidden in cloud.

The clouds follow me onwards uphill towards Malang. The town lies in a broad bowl between the vast Bromo-Tengger massif to the east, and the similarly huge Arjuna-Welirang volcano complex to the west. But today there is only heavy cloud to mark where these behemoths lurk. The mountains of Java have something in common with the ghosts said to dwell in the forests of Javanese folklore: you know they are there; you just can’t always see them.

I stop in the market town of Singosari, little more than a suburb of Malang these days, but once the cradle of the Singosari dynasty.
In the 12th Century East Java was divided between two powerful kingdoms – Kediri and Janggala. But in the following century these states were replaced by a single realm, centered here in Singosari.
Singosari was founded in 1222 by Ken Angrok, a rebellious commoner, claimed by legend to be the son of the Hindu god Siva. He rose from nowhere, murdering the king of Kediri and taking control of all East Java. The dynasty he founded ruled for most of the 13th Century, and fostered the development of the high Hindu-Buddhist culture of late classical Java.

Today there is still a fine reminder of this royal past in the back lanes of Singosari. Like Candi Jawi, the eponymous Candi Singosari is a monument to King Kertanegara who died in 1292, murdered in a palace uprising. The Singosari kingdom fell with him, but a prince, Raden Wijaya, fled to Madura, and from there set out on a campaign that, within two years, would lead to the founding of the greatest of all the Javanese kingdoms – Majapahit.

I wander around the temple, admiring the grimacing, bug-eyed shrine guardians above the doorways, and wondering what Hindu statues once stood in the vacant recesses and chambers. The place is quiet and I can hear the sound of crowing roosters and chattering children from amongst the red-tiled roofs beyond the temple garden.
I return to the road and continue into Malang as a hint of evening chill descends, and homemade kites tug upwards into the breeze above suburban rooftops.

***

In the cool of the next morning I clamber back onto my bike and head east. The mountains are still unseen ghosts today, and thick cloud is slipping down from the Tengger highlands.
In the village of Tumpang, 20 kilometers from Malang, stands Candi Jago. This temple was built in 1268 to commemorate Kertanegara’s predecessor, Vishnuvardhana.
It has never been restored (beyond having a large tree removed from its upper levels in the 19th Century), but it is perhaps the most interesting of all the temples of the Singosari dynasty. Candi Jago has five levels, each banded by decorated friezes. There is a world of interest in these ancient cartoon strips, and I pick my way slowly around the levels, followed by a gang of cheerful schoolchildren, demanding to have their photos taken.
I oblige, and then get back to the carvings. There are the usual fantastic creatures: pot-bellied dwarfs, demons and women with tails. But there are also glimpses of daily life in 13th Century Java. There are domestic pigs and roosters, and men reclining in the shade of simple pavilions. There are also village temples with multi-tiered thatched roofs, and long lines of women in sarongs, heads turned in conversation, offerings of fruit balanced on their heads. I feel a spark of excitement as I recognize the scene: it could be a temple ceremony in Bali today.

In the countryside beyond the temple there are apple orchards and villages of neat white bungalows. But the threat of rain has rolled further down from the hidden mountains, so I make my way back to town and take refuge in a relic of a much more recent stage of Malang’s history.

Malang came under Dutch control in the mid-18th Century, developing as an administrative centre and a refuge from the heat of the coast. There are relics of this era in the city’s cathedral, and in the fine colonial mansions that still stand on a few of the suburban avenues. But with the rain now pouring down I take shelter in another colonial throwback.
Toko Oen restaurant, not far from the bustling town centre, has scarcely changed since the 1930s – with slow-moving ceiling fans, equally slow-moving waiters, low chairs and homemade ice cream. It’s a charming place, but as I settle down to coffee and cakes, it strikes me that it seems to belong to a past every bit as distant as that of the Singosari temples.

***

The next morning I head back for Surabaya along the back roads. I ride to the hill resort of Batu, then turn south into a high landscape swollen with neat little vegetable plots.
The mountains that have been only a rumor for the last two days have emerged to prove their existence. Ahead of me the great peak of Welirang marks the western buttress of a ragged bank of mountains.
I cross a narrow pass then continue down into dense, green forest where leopards are still said to hunt. A little way below the pass are the Cangar hot springs. I take the opportunity for a relaxing soak in the thermally heated pools, surrounded by cool jungle – a fine place to ease the aches of three days on a motorbike.
Refreshed, I ride on downhill along a deserted road. Suddenly, I emerge on a narrow saddle of land, the forest pouring away on either side. The view across the ridges and valleys is spectacular, and rising in the distance is Gunung Penanggunan, the sentinel peak that I saw two days earlier at the start of my journey.I park my bike and sit down at the edge of the road, dangling my legs over the void. The forest below is deep and impenetrable, and I wonder idly for a moment about those leopards. The distant volcano is stark against the sky, its ribbed upper slopes free from cloud. I can make out the plains beyond it, and I can imagine the heat and congestion that I will face on my approach to Surabaya. I stretch out and decide that all that can wait for a little while longer.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Semarang and the Gedong Songo

The attractions of North Central Java

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, January 2009

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/bnb_jan_09/beyond.html

As the orange glow of the sunrise gradually spreads to the east and the wisps of mist clear from the steep pine forest-covered slopes, a spectacular view opens. Below the red rooftops of the hamlet of Duran the mountainside falls away through terraces of cabbages and onions – exotic vegetables here in Indonesia which only grow in the high altitude cool. Through the pale haze that cloaks the valley below, palm-lined ridges and amphitheatres of green rice can be made out, and further to the south the Rawa Pening Lake catches a dulled reflection of the morning sky. Beyond that, rising stark above the streaks of cloud that blur the landscape of Central Java, is the great purple cone of Gunung Merbabu, a 3000-metre high mountain. Loitering behind it, it is just possible to pick out the smoking summit of Gunung Merapi, the most active volcano in the area, while to the right another pair of huge conical mountains, Gunung Sumbing and Gunung Sundoro, seem to float on a sea of white haze. Closer at hand the sunlight begins to streak through the pine trees, lighting the intricately carved stonework of the ancient Hindu temples, known as the Gedong Songo, that lie scattered across this high hillside.

While the World Heritage Site temples of Prambanan and Borobudur in the southern part of Central Java attract hundreds of visitors every day, fifty kilometres to the north the older temples of Gedong Songo rarely make it onto visitors’ itineraries. They might be small in stature compared to the splendours to the south, but those who make the effort to follow the steep road through the cabbage fields will be amply rewarded. The Gedong Songo occupy one of the finest positions anywhere in Java, high on the rugged slopes of Mount Ungaran looking out over that mighty vista of volcanoes. And while Borobudur and Prambanan swarm with sightseers from first light every day, if you visit during the week, chances are you’ll have the Gedong Songo to yourself.

Gedong Songo means “Nine Buildings” in Javanese. The name might cause modern visitors to scratch their heads – there are only six temple groups spread over the slopes above Duran village, and though some of the groups contain several individual structures, no count will reach a tally of nine. It seems that the early Dutch surveyors who first mapped the site in the 19th Century made a mistake and the name that they gave the “nine” buildings was later translated into Javanese for local maps. But the locals around Gunung Ungaran had another more evocative, and more accurate, name for the place: Candi Banyukuning, the Temples of the Yellow Water.
The Gedong Songo temples were built in the 8th Century and are some of the finest of the early Hindu temples in Java. Their design – rising tiers, an inner chamber, and decorated facades – was a prototype for the classic Javanese architectural style that reached its greatest heights at Prambanan, two centuries later. And in their remote location, up in the cool pine forests, the Gedong Songo temples have survived remarkably well for more than 1200 years.

The temples lie at the end of a narrow lane some seven kilometres from the pleasant hill resort of Bandungan. A path leads from the entranceway with its cluster of simple cafes serving tasty sate kelinci (skewered rabbit kebabs with peanut sauce) and hot coffee sweetened with condensed milk, up through the narrow terraces where hill folk work tending plots of vegetables. The first of the temples is a bulky building with a yoni – cosmic symbol of femininity – in the gloomy inner chamber (its male counterpart, the lingam, is missing). But the best carvings are further up the hillside at the second and third temple groups. Here there are carvings of the elephant-headed god Ganesh and the goddess Durga looking out from niches in the walls, the craftsmanship still obvious after more than a millennium. The backdrop of pine-clad slopes makes an atmospheric setting, and the faint scent of sulphur in the air adds to the otherworldly atmosphere.
The source of the smell is in a nearby ravine where geothermal energy from the active volcano behind the temples sends acrid smoke hissing from cracks in the rocks and brings yellow-tinted water bubbling to the surface in shallow, steaming pools. The colour of this naturally heated water is the source of the old local name for the temples. A small swimming pool has been built at these hot springs. The waters are said to have healing properties and on weekends locals from the coastal city of Semarang and beyond make the journey up into the pine trees to bathe here. On a weekday afternoon though, you can enjoy this natural spa treatment alone for the princely sum of 5000 rupiah.

The other temples stand beyond the hot springs, on a steep ridge surrounded by trees. This is where the early morning sunlight first falls after dawn, and it is from here that the bird’s-eye view across the valley is at its best. There are more fine carvings, and inside some of the buildings you’ll find offerings of leaves and petals and a little pile of incense ash, a sign that long after the great Hindu kingdoms of Java faded from the scene, someone still venerates these sacred places. With their stunning, atmospheric location it’s easy to see why.

***

You can get to the Gedong Songo temples from the popular tourist town of Yogyakarta, less than three hours to the south. But the nearest city is Semarang on the north coast, just 45 minutes away. Semarang is often overlooked by guidebooks and tour routes. It is true that the city has none of the royal palaces and artistic highlights of Yogyakarta and Solo, but it is one of the oldest cities in Indonesia, and it is a good place to see traces of a different side of Java’s history.
Semarang was an important trading city in colonial days, and in the narrow streets around its winding river there are some of the finest examples of Dutch architecture anywhere in the country. Sprawling in either direction from the thoroughfare of Jalan Jendral Suprapto are alleys lined with old shops and warehouses with stocky columns and high shuttered windows. Red-tiled roofs and arched doorways still offer a faded echo of the older quarters of Amsterdam. The finest of all the old buildings is the 18th Century Immanuel church, better known as Gereja Blenduk, the Church of the Dome.

One of the most atmospheric of all Semarang’s colonial relics is the venerable Toko Oen restaurant. Inconspicuous on a busy street, once through the doors you are back in the 1930s – the decade when the place first opened. With old wooden furniture, slow-turning ceiling fans, top-notch ice cream, and tasty homemade cakes and biscuits from tall glass jars, it’s the perfect place for afternoon tea.

Elsewhere in the city there is a sprawling Chinatown, dotted with temples full of red and black tones, pungent incense smoke, and old women praying before gold statues of the Buddha – and needless to say there is some fine Chinese food.

Semarang might not offer the instant attractions of Yogyakarta, and the Gedong Songo might not rank among the wonders of the world, but this little-visited corner of Central Java is well worth a detour to escape the crowds – and to see some of the most beautiful landscapes in Java.

© Tim Hannigan 2008