Wandering into the Past in Old Surabaya

Surabaya's historic quarters

Originally published in Venture magazine, January 2011

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Venture-Travel-Magazine/110370632349708 

I pick my way through the puddles, step lightly over broken packing cases, and dodge a passing becak. The street is wet after the recent rain. Century-old shop-houses rise on either side with arched windows and narrow balconies. Shutters stand open to dark interiors full of bulging sacks. The red splash of a Chinese calendar shows in the gloom on a back wall.

I have made my way along this same street many times, camera and notebook in hand, hunting out historical relics and colorful photo opportunities, but there is always some side alley still to be explored. I duck down a likely one, and there right in front of me is a magnificent building that I have never seen before – two storeys raised on columns with intricate ironwork balustrades. A century ago it would have been the home of a wealthy Chinese trader. Today it is slowly crumbling; decades of traffic fumes have left a grey patina on the walls, and a ramshackle food-stall has sprouted from the façade. A limp “for sale” banner hangs over the entranceway. This is Old Surabaya, the historic quarter of what was once the most important city in the Dutch East Indies, and on every alleyway there are forgotten treasures like this, slowly giving way to dereliction with each passing wet season. This is why it’s a place where I love to wander, hunting out these melancholy reminders of a bygone age…

***

Surabaya, capital of East Java, Indonesia’s second largest city, and a swirling metropolitan mass of congestion and construction, is better known for traffic jams and shopping malls than for tangible history. But three kilometers north of the modern downtown is an area forgotten by more recent developments. This was the heart of the original city, a trading port that grew up on the banks of the Kalimas River. On the west bank a European quarter sprouted from the 17th Century, with Dutch-style, hipped roofs and sturdy walls. Across the water was Chinatown, a warren of steamy alleyways and red temples; to the north lay the Arab Quarter, built around the city’s oldest mosque, and along the river was the port, with its white schooners from Sulawesi and beyond. Though the whole place is slowly falling to pieces today, this is still one of the most extensive historical areas of any Indonesian city, with endless opportunities for wandering street photographers and history buffs.

***

Old Surabaya starts in Chinatown. The names of the roads here – Rubber Street, Tea Street, Chocolate Street – hint at past imports, and tucked between old shops and homes there are Chinese clan-houses with bowed rooflines, and temples built by the first settlers from the Chinese mainland, many centuries ago. The oldest – the Hok An Kiong – stands on the corner of Chocolate Street. It is dedicated to the Goddess of Seafarers. There is always a gaggle of old men hanging around here whenever I wander by, and they always call me in for a chat and a drink.

The biggest temple lies further north, on an alleyway of mechanics’ shops. The Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong is a complex of dark, smoky chambers where three-meter-high candles flicker in the incense-scented gloom and old women go quietly through their prayers. Dragons writhe on the roofs, and bug-eyed lions guard the gateways.

North of Chinatown there is a great maze of alleyways around Pasar Pabean, the biggest traditional market in Surabaya. Here ramshackle residential quarters sit cheek by jowl with ranks of fruit and vegetable stalls, and a massive, bustling fish market. But above the dust and noise and the Madurese women in bright bandanas hawking garlic and onions, there are the upper storeys of fine commercial buildings from the days when wealthy people did their shopping here.

***

I often pause here to take a photo or scribble a note, before hopping into a becak to carry me out to some other quarter. Becaks, the three-wheeled Indonesian version of the cycle-rickshaw, are the workhorses of Old Surabaya. Peddled by men with iron calf muscles, they carry both people and great bundles of produce. Many are spectacularly decorated, with metalwork painted in colorful patterns. A becak ride along narrow, potholed streets is the best ways to wend your way through the old city.

A becak often carries me to Ampel, the Arab Quarter. From the 16th Century onwards traders from the hard brown hills of Yemen settled here, opening shops to sell the produce of their homeland – dates, cloth, perfume and religious books. Their descendants are still here, and the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern Souk still lingers in the street that leads to the grand Ampel Mosque.

***

Much of the palpable history in Old Surabaya is fading slowly from the scene. Elsewhere – especially in Singapore and Malaysia – old quarters have been saved from collapse; Chinese-style buildings have been repainted in bright pastel colors, and one-time time colonial shop-houses have been turned into boutique hotels. As I wander through these alleyways, however, that kind of thing seems like a distant dream – though I hope that one day the authorities will realize the value of all this heritage before it is gone forever. For now, however, there is a gritty authenticity in these old streets, and the ever-present chance to stumble on some fresh surprise, some grand mansion abandoned to the ghosts, or some quiet family scene played out in halls that once must have echoed to the sound of accumulating coin, when Surabaya was a wealthy port mentioned in the same breath as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore…

And there is one part of the Old City where a direct link to that past still remains strong. Once I have toured the Chinese temples, ridden a becak, and bought a bag of dates from the great-grandson of an immigrant Yemeni, I cut west through quiet lanes until I reach the sluggish channel of the Kalimas. It is still a place for ships from other places to drop anchor, and on its final reaches, before the city gives way to the sea, I wander along a dockside lined with magnificent white schooners, still built to the lines of the original Bugis phinisi from Sulawesi. Here, a world away from the air-conditioned chain stores of the downtown shopping malls, barefoot sailors are padding up bouncing gangplanks, and tossing wrapped bundles down into dark holds, cargoes set for far off places beyond the Java Sea. Here, with the sun slanting away to the west and the becaks trundling homewards, the trade and the connections that first made this place a city continues – the original heart of Old Surabaya is still beating…  

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Making a Rare Connection in East Java

The Suramadu Bridge

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe 04/01/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/making-a-rare-connection-in-east-java/415023

“You know, I used to work breaking stones,” says Sutia, a 25-year-old Madurese woman, as she reclines in the shade of her little tented cafe beside the approach road to the Suramadu Bridge. “Really, just that, just breaking stones into little pieces for building. Now I have a warung. Nice, right?”
A steady stream of cars, buses and bikes roars past, heading south for Surabaya from the Madura hinterland. Every so often a vehicle pulls over beside the long rank of warungs and souvenir stalls, and a gaggle of perspiring sightseers clamber out, squinting in the hot sun, looking for a length of Madurese batik, a bowl of soto, or a kitsch tee shirt commemorating the enormous bridge they are about to cross.
Eying the potential customers, Sutia grins. “Madura is getting business from Suramadu,” she says.
Sutia and dozens of her compatriots from the villages around Kwanyar are reaping the rewards of an unlikely little tourism boom, a windfall of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Indonesia in recent years – the Suramadu Bridge, 5.4 kilometers of steel and concrete stitching two of the archipelago’s most uneasy neighbors tightly together.

The great green loadstone of Java and its unruly outlier, the long, low island of Madura, are separated by a narrow channel. But the gulf between the two islands is enormous, for Madura has a decidedly unenviable reputation.
In centuries past it was a wellspring of rebel princes who ransacked royal Javanese courts or turned mercenary for the Dutch East India Company. In more recent years economic migrants from its poor, dry countryside have crossed the straits to bring their gritty work ethic, their tasty soto and sate to towns and cities across the archipelago. But according to myths touted by many Indonesians, especially those from Java, the people of Madura are uncouth, uncultured, and possibly dangerous. Their homeland has always been a place to avoid at all costs.
But in June 2009 all that changed with the opening of the long planned, long delayed Suramadu Bridge. Comprising 28,000 tons of steel and 600,000 tons of steel alloy, and requiring an estimated outlay of Rp4.7 trillion, the bridge joins the northeast suburbs of Surabaya to the south coast of Madura (the name – Suramadu – is a contraction of Surabaya and Madura).
Suramadu was intended to encourage economic development in Madura, which was previously connected to the outside world only by rickety, rusty ferries. But the bridge is such a striking piece of engineering – with enormous suspension spans and a fine view from the apex – that it has become a tourist attraction in its own right. And with travelers from Surabaya and beyond now making tentative weekend outings across the water to discover that all those awful stories about Madura were wild exaggerations, locals have experienced a business bonanza.
Within days of the bridge opening to traffic the first stalls had sprung up along the sides of the four-lane northern approach road that connects the crossing to the nearby town of Bangkalan. Now, 18 months later, there’s a linear city of tented cafes and stalls stretching some two kilometers inland on both sides of the highway.

A little way up the road from Sutia’s warung a 34-year-old local man called Ayub is minding his stall. “If you come here on Sunday it’s so crowded,” he says; “there are tours from Surabaya, from Central Java. There was even a tour from Lombok the other day.” According to Ayub some of these travelers are heading for the sacred Muslim tombs at Bangkalan and Sumenep; a few might even be venturing for the untouched beaches and beautiful countryside of the island’s far northeast. “But most of them just want to look at the bridge. They come across, turn around and go back,” he says.
All of the stalls are owned by people from the immediate vicinity, and the whole network has been set up informally.
“You don’t need to pay anything to build a stall here,” says Ayub’s friend, a young woman called Juli; “this is the people’s land!”
And with minimal outlay on a few lengths of bamboo and a few strips of tarpaulin, a whole new world of opportunity has opened.
“Locals here used to work as various things,” says Ayub; “some were farmers, some had no job; a lot emigrated.” Ayub himself spent two years working in Malaysia, another two years as a food hawker in Jakarta, and more time crewing a cargo boat plying the waters of the Java Sea. But now, with a wife and two children in a village within walking distance of his new stall, he has happily come home. “Suramadu gave me that chance,” he says.
Outside more shiny SUVs and are pulling up. Housewives from Malang and families from Sidoarjo are bargaining over take-home trinkets.
“Java people used to be scared of Madura,” says Ayub, “because they never came here, they didn’t know. It used to be rare for anyone to come here without an important reason because it was slow and expensive. It cost more than Rp100,000 for a bus on the ferry; it’s only Rp60,000 now. They can come just for a look, so they know Madurese people aren’t so bad!”

The only losers have been the hawkers who once worked the vehicle ferries that slithered between Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak port, and the old gateway to Madura at Kamal, several kilometers west of the bridge. A few ferries still make the crossing, but traffic has slowed to a trickle and some of these traders have shifted their attention to Suramadu, and now wander between the stalls as they used to ply the decks of the ferries.
The prime spots have long been snapped up, but the expansion continues with new warungs popping up far inland. According to locals both sides of the road have their advantages – the inbound northern side is where most visitors stop to eat, but the outbound southern side is the favored spot for souvenir shopping and photo opportunities.

A kilometer from the bridge on that southern flank, where the road rises over the first bank of limestone hills, stands Pak Imam’s warung. Twelve months ago his was the final stall, but today it merely marks the halfway point of the strip. Pak Imam, who worked as a motorbike taxi driver in a nearby village before the bridge opened, has watched the burgeoning city of stalls grow around his recently refurbished warung where he sells tea, coffee, and traditional Madurese soto – yellow soup with rice and meat.
“Madura used to be an isolated place,” Pak Imam says. “The people here didn’t know anything; we were just farmers – or fishermen if we lived by the sea. But now we have the bridge we will know about the world; we won’t be ignorant anymore.”
From the threshold of the warung, with its rickety bamboo benches, steaming soto cauldron, and luridly colored soft drinks, the high-rises of central Surabaya show through the haze to the south. Pak Imam, noting the speed of development that has met the arrival of the bridge, acknowledges the potential downsides.
“Of course, if Madura becomes like Surabaya there will be traffic jams and pollution and we’ll all be stressed like city people,” he says, “but if nothing changed we wouldn’t know anything and we’d just be farmers and fishermen.
“There’s no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What I mean is nothing is all good or all bad; every good thing brings some bad with it, but as far as I’m concerned this bridge is mostly good, not just for Madura – for everyone...”

© 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

Surabaya's Chinatown

The history and architecture of Surabaya's Chinese quarter

Originally published in The Jakarta Globe, 09/02/09

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/life-times/article/8988.html

The chaos of urban Indonesia withdraws respectfully at the threshold of the Boen Bio temple. Jalan Kapasan, an arrow-straight thoroughfare that cuts across the north of Surabaya, is a maelstrom of bikes, becaks and bemos, but as I step from the cracked pavement through a lion-flanked gateway beneath a heavy, double-tiered roof, all that seems to fall away. Inside there is an air of cool, quiet calm.

Surabaya, the capital of East Java Province and Indonesia’s second biggest city, is well known as a place of gargantuan shopping malls and chronic gridlock. But a couple of kilometers north of all that stressful modernity is a crumbling old quarter, thick with the history of what was once the most important port of the Dutch East Indies. The biggest, and most architecturally rich, part of the old city is its Chinatown.

This hot morning, I have chosen to start my tour through Chinese Surabaya here at Boen Bio, because it is not your average Chinese temple. The difference is obvious as soon as I enter. The familiar dark, smoky fog and imposing statues are absent. This place, with its shuttered Dutch windows and shining expanse of tiled floor, is simple, almost austere.

An elderly man with a wispy white beard and gray eyes shuffles from the shadows. His name is Bio Kong; he looks after this place. Bio Kong explains just what is so unusual about Boen Bio. Most Chinese temples offer a deep red brew of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and ancestor worship. But this place is a purely Confucian temple, the largest in Southeast Asia, Bio Kong proudly tells me. Here the usual painted scenery and deity statues are replaced by simple carved tablets. Rows of delicate china cups filled with offerings of green tea are lined along the altar.

The temple was built in 1906 to serve Hokkien immigrants from Fujian, replacing an earlier building nearby. The floor tiles, Bio Kong tells me, were imported from Holland. He says that his own father came to Surabaya in the early years of the 20th century, and that Hokkien is his first language.
“But not many people here speak Hokkien these days,” he says sadly. And not many people come to Boen Bio. Confucianism, more a system of philosophy than a religion, came under suspicion in Indonesia in the past and many followers drifted away to join other faiths. But around 40 worshipers still come to the temple each Sunday. Bio Kong motions to a stack of folding chairs in a corner that will be arranged in rows for the sermon. A ceremony here, it seems, has a good deal in common with a Christian church service.

I leave Bio Kong carefully brushing the dust from between candles and teacups, and step back out into the rising heat of the morning. A hundred meters west of Boen Bio, a great red Chinese gateway spans the street, with a white guard lion at each corner and a pair of dragons writhing along the top. This marks the start of Jalan Kembang Jepun. The name means “Street of the Japanese Flowers,” a coy reference to the days when this road was lined with brothels staffed by pale beauties from Japan. It is still the center of Chinatown, but today it is lined with hardware shops and bakeries, and the Japanese flowers have all gone. So I make a right turn, dodging between rattling becaks, and walk north along an alleyway of dusty sunlight and dark workshops.

The smell of incense hits me before I see the Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong. This 18th century temple, hemmed in by decaying shophouses, is the largest in the old city, with a plethora of altars heavy with gilded Buddhas. Huge red candles, taller than a grown man, stand in flickering columns and fearsome guardian deities watch the doorways. Offerings of fruit stand in the patches of soft light and joss sticks leach steady coils of fragrant smoke. Strips of Chinese script hang from the walls and the ceilings are black with centuries of candle grease.
The temple is quiet this morning, with just one old woman praying in the smoky darkness. Many of Surabaya’s ethnic Chinese population have long since abandoned this quarter and its temples for the suburbs and Christianity. But as I head along a shady alley beyond the temple I glance through an open doorway and catch a glimpse of a family shrine marked with red and gold, indicating old traditions are still kept here.

Picking my way through ever narrower lanes I hear the sound of hammering and come across a workshop where stonemasons are etching gravestones with Chinese lettering.
Until 1994, the public display of Chinese writing was banned in Indonesia, part of a raft of anti-Chinese regulations from the early years of Suharto’s New Order — the same rules that saw the congregation of Boen Bio dwindle, and that by 1968 alone had seen some 160,000 Surabaya Chinese bow to official pressure to change their original Chinese name to something more “Indonesian.” These laws have been dropped now though, and signs in Mandarin mark these workshops.
I stop to speak to one of the stonemasons, working on an elaborate headstone. He is Javanese, he tells me, and cannot read Chinese. He shows me the scrap of paper from which he is copying the characters. I ask if he ever makes a mistake and he grins: “Never!”

I return to the western end of Jalan Kembang Jepun, marked by another dragon-capped gateway. Just beyond the gateway is the Kalimas River, the crooked spine of the city, sluggish and brown, here in its final reaches.
The river is spanned by Jembatan Merah, the Red Bridge. This bridge — clogged with traffic today — is a key location in Surabaya folklore as the claimed site of the mythical battle between a shark and a crocodile, a sura and a buaya, that gave the city its name. It was here too, in October 1945, that the British Brig. Mallaby was assassinated, opening the ferocious Battle of Surabaya and ensuring that the area became a key place in the story of Indonesia’s independence.
The bridge also marks one of the key divisions of the old city — the boundary between Chinatown and the Dutch colonial district.

The oldest records of a settlement at the mouth of the Kalimas River actually come from the chronicles of wandering Chinese seafarers in the 13th century, and there were Chinese trading communities in the vicinity from the city’s earliest years. Until Surabaya came under Dutch control in the 17th century the main Chinese settlement was along the coast at Gresik. But as Surabaya grew, more Chinese traders arrived, settling on the east bank of the Kalimas, across the water from the Dutch. Official hostility during the New Order years had long-established precedents.
During the colonial era Chinese were considered “foreign Orientals,” a step up the legal and social ladder from mere “natives.” But allegations of clannishness and financial acumen made the colonial authorities nervous. In Surabaya and other cities the Chinese were confined to specific quarters, banned from owning property elsewhere. Until 1918 Surabaya’s Chinese were not allowed to live or work outside the network of teeming alleyways east of the Red Bridge. This restrictive policy actually helped create Surabaya’s distinctive Chinatown.

I pick my way south from the Red Bridge, sweating in the heat. This area was the real heart of the old Chinese trading quarter, and there are many fine buildings with heavy columns and sagging rooflines. There are Chinese clan-houses as old as Surabaya itself here, and peering through dark doorways I see piles of rough sacks and red candles flickering in the gloom. Twenty years ago there were tentative plans to restore this part of the city — perhaps with the sanitized tourist markets of Singapore’s Chinatown in mind. But the idea was forgotten in the economic collapse of the late 1990s, and today arched windows and delicate balconies are crumbling under a century of grime. The names of the alleyways here hint at a past when goods were unloaded straight from the river — Rubber Street, Tea Street, Sugar Street and Chocolate Street.

On the corner of Chocolate Street stands another temple — the Hok An Kiong. Smoke wafts from incense braziers outside, and a pair of ferocious looking warrior statues flank the imposing red doorway. In the inner chamber elderly women in loose cotton blouses bustle around the altar, lighting great bunches of joss sticks, bowing and kneeling.
An old man named Budi offers me a place to sit and a much-needed glass of water. This temple, he tells me, is the oldest in Surabaya, dating from the early 18th century. Like the names of the surrounding streets, the Hok An Kiong has its roots in ocean-going trade: the temple is dedicated to the guardian goddess of seafarers.
After chatting with Budi and catching my breath in the shady interior of the temple I hop into a waiting becak and rattle through the last of the narrow streets to Pasar Atom. This decidedly unglamorous warren of hole-in-the-wall shops is at the bottom of Surabaya’s shopping mall hierarchy. It is a favorite haunt of lower-middle-class Chinese Indonesians, and its top floor food court has some of the best Chinese food in the city. It also marks the southern boundary of the historic Chinatown. But there is one more place I want to see before my tour of Surabaya’s Chinese history is over.

From Pasar Atom I head south by motorbike, pausing on Jalan Jagalan, a little secondary Chinatown with its temple and traditional apothecaries. Rising above the rooftops in a quiet suburb nearby I see my final destination.
The architecture is unmistakably Chinese — three tiers of green tiles and red buttresses rising into a hot sky. It is a new building — not unusual; there are other modern Chinese temples in Surabaya. But it is only when you get close enough to see the object at the very top of the pagoda roof that you realize what this place actually is. The triple-arched outline of shining brass at the crown of the building reminds me for a moment of the dragons on the gates of Chinatown. But it is not a dragon; it is the Name of God — in Arabic. This is a mosque.
The Mesjid Cheng Hoo was built in 2002 by the Chinese Muslim Association of Indonesia as a radical expression of a fact once almost taboo: that there have long been Chinese Muslims in the archipelago.
Chinese connections with Indonesia predate the coming of Islam — at least as far back as the 7th century Sriwijaya Empire — and the earliest references to many Indonesian cities come from Chinese archives. Later, some Chinese settlers married into local Muslim aristocracies. And Chinese travelers may actually have played a significant role in bringing Islam to Indonesia. The Cheng Ho Mosque is named after the famous Chinese Muslim admiral who sailed through the archipelago in the 15th century. There is even a theory — a controversial one — that Sunan Ampel, one of the legendary early emissaries of Islam in Java, and unofficial patron saint of Surabaya’s Muslims, was actually from China.

The courtyard is completely deserted in the midday heat. Clouds are beginning to gather to the west of the city.I pause in the shade of the mosque, relishing the ghost of a cooling breeze that passes through its open archways. Everything about the design of the place reminds me of the temples I have visited earlier in the morning — the colors, the columns and the bowed rooflines. But the circular windows are filled with intricate Arabic tracery. I decide that this is the perfect place to end my journey through the architecture of Surabaya’s Chinese past — with a reminder that the Chinese connection in the history of this city, and this country, extends far beyond the confines of Chinatown.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Hello Dolly!

Surabaya's notorious red light district

Originally published in Kabar Magazine, December 2008 

Saturday, midnight; most of Surabaya is sleeping. The skeleton crew, the handful of people who stay awake all night – becak drivers, petty hustlers, traders in the Keputran vegetable market – have settled into their bleary-eyed rhythm of endless kretek cigarettes. Somewhere past the towering outline of the Shangri-La hotel I turn my motorbike onto a narrow, rising street. The upmarket shops of the main road fall away; alleyways lead off into working-class kampungs and thin men with high cheekbones sit smoking in the light of hissing kerosene lamps. I lose my way in the tangle of roads and find myself in the heavy darkness of a sprawling graveyard. Figures move furtively between white gravestones in the insect-clouded gloom. Stories of ghosts and jins aside, the graveyards are the place of the night’s lowest and most sordid commerce, and I am glad when I come amongst the houses again. I stop at a crooked junction, peering left and right. A man in a grimy vest raises his head from a roadside bench. At this time of night, in this part of town, I could only be looking for one place: before I ask, he raises his hand and points towards the distant rumble of dangdut music. “That way Mister, Dolly.”

Dolly. Tell Indonesians anywhere from Kupang to Banda Aceh that you live in Surabaya and there’s a fair chance that they’ll nod suggestively and say, “Dolly, Mister, I bet you go to Dolly every night.” And no level of protest will convince them otherwise. People say that Dolly is Asia’s biggest red light district. It’s not (the largest lies in Bombay’s vast Kamathipura slum); it’s not even the biggest in Southeast Asia – according to connoisseurs of the Bangkok night. But for better or for worse, in popular myth Surabaya takes the title.

A hunchback dwarf waves me into a grimy parking space beneath a crooked concrete building.

“Looking for a girl, mister?” he leers at me, but I shake my head and walk out onto the crowded street. The air is trembling with the grumbling bass-lines of bad karaoke. The rumours and notoriety create an image of Dolly as a vast, glowing palace of illicit pleasures, a place to boggle the eyes and weaken the knees. But really it’s just two scruffy streets – Jarak and Dolly – among the graveyards on the high ground above the Banyu Urip canal. The daily life of the working class kampungs goes on oblivious around them in the markets and corner warungs, the schools and Muslim prayer halls.

A small man appears at my side. “Mister…” he nervously struggles to muster some spoken English. “Mister… I… English… you – girl?” He seems relieved when I reply in Indonesian and tell him that I just want to take a walk and perhaps a beer. Surprisingly, it seems quite normal to come to Dolly “just for a beer and a walk”. This is not a place of coercive street side solicitation. There are no scantily-clad hookers lining the pavements; the women lounge passively on the sofas behind the windows of the “guesthouses”. It seems that Dolly is not all about sex – not entirely anyway - for this is the only place for after-hours drinking in Surabaya. Jalan Jarak is grimy and rough-edged, but there’s no air of violence, and little sense of sleaze. The bars are dimly-lit and noisy, and the crowds on the street are cheerful young men – people who could never afford to drink in the over-priced and pretentious nightclubs back in the heart of the city. There are shops and stalls selling peanuts and cigarettes, and food stalls with sizzling woks.

Dolly is Indonesia’s most famous example of an official tolerance zone, known as lokalisasi: a government-sanctioned ghetto of sex industry. Between 1500 and 2000 women work in the brothels here, and the wider service industry of the district employs hundreds more. Rumour has it that the police take an enormous nightly cut of the profits from each brothel, but business goes on, unabated.

The Oldest Profession has a long history in Indonesia, particularly in port cities like Surabaya. The first official tolerance zones – with the women given weekly medical examinations - were created by the Dutch during the 19th Century in an attempt to curb rampant venereal disease among the military. Stern Christian morals saw the sex trade pushed into darker shadows in the early 20th Century (with a consequent surge in levels of syphilis), but lokalisasi policy was reinstated by the government of independent Indonesia in the 1950s. Dolly was officially sanctioned in the 60s, but there had been an informal brothel kampung in the area since the turn of the century, and the nearby graveyards had long been a place for late-night assignations. The quarter is named after one of the first madams of the area.

***

I step into the sticky gloom of one of the bars. Light is kept to a minimum in here, but the torn fittings and red-raw eyes of the drinkers still show. An aging woman with a hard face and too-tight jeans is leading a ragged band through dangdut classics while a gaggle of outrageously drunk men stumble on the greasy dance floor. I take a seat and a man sitting at the next table leans over to me in a cloud of boozy good-nature. He presses a bottle of over-chilled Guinness on me and tries to teach me to swear authentically in Javanese. He tells me that he lives nearby and comes to Dolly most nights – “Sometimes for a girl, sometimes just to get drunk.” He explains the way the quarter works: Jalan Jarak is mostly for drinking. There are brothels here, but they are second-rate, with older, cheaper girls. Jalan Dolly itself, a narrow alley at right angles to the main street, is all about business.

“The girls on Jarak are cheap,” he slurs, raising his beer, “but they’re ugly! On Dolly – beautiful, but expensive!” Once he’s happy with my pronunciation of the “J-word” I take me leave.

Jalan Dolly itself is different. Here the brothels are tightly packed and small men tug at my arm and hiss in my ear all the way down the street. Sickly strip lights blaze behind the windows and girls with bored, unhappy faces sit with folded arms, waiting. I see one girl sitting cross-legged on the floor eating rice from brown paper. She looks troublingly young. I had been becoming quite endeared to the cheerful atmosphere of the place, but when I see her I remember what Dolly is really about. The women here do well by the standards of sex workers in Indonesia, with regulations and fixed periods of annual leave, and more time off when the whole quarter piously shuts down during Ramadan. But they all come from backgrounds of grinding poverty and there are plenty of reports of under-age girls and trafficked women. HIV is an ugly presence – one report says that 8% of the women in Dolly are infected. Walking back towards Jarak I glance to the left and see another foreigner slumped on the sofa of one of the brothels. A girl with blond-streaked hair is sitting picking her nails, ignoring him. He is too drunk to raise his head and I hurry on, not wanting to recognise him as someone I know.

The hunchback dwarf takes the parking fee from me and grins. “Happy, mister? Happy in Dolly?”

“Happy enough,” I say and ride homewards. 

 

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Ampel: The Holy Heart of Surabaya

The Arab Quarter of Surabaya

Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, December 2008

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/12/12/ampel-the-holy-heart-surabaya.html

The light falls in dusty sheets and the alleyway smells of perfume and rosewater. Narrow tables are piled with bundles of cloth and bags of pistachios. There are stacks of Arabic books; colored prayer beads hang from racks above doorways, and ranged along counters are glass jars full of sticky, amber-black dates from the palm groves of Tunisia and Iraq. The traders, sipping tea or frowning over account books, are Arabs; tall men with the bruise of devout prayer on their foreheads. But this is not Marrakech or Damascus; this is Ampel, the very heart of the Javanese city of Surabaya.

Ampel, sometimes known as the Arab Quarter, lies north of throbbing tangle of highways and shopping malls at the modern centre of the East Java capital. It is surrounded by the old parts of what was once the principal city of the Dutch East Indies: Chinatown, the Pabean Market, and the Kalimas harbor. But it is Ampel, or rather the mosque of the same name, that is the oldest place of all. The first record of a settlement named Surabaya comes from the mid-14th Century, and the Ampel Mosque, dating from 1421, is the oldest identifiable point in the city, the hub from which a metropolis has grown.
The mosque was built by Sunan Ampel, one of the Wali Songo, the nine, semi-mythical holy men who spread Islam in Java. According to the standard history, Sunan Ampel came from the Champa kingdom of southern Vietnam. His father was a wandering Arab Sayyid, and his aunt was a Cham princess who married the Hindu king Brawijaya of the Javanese Majapahit Empire. Following his aunt to Java, Sunan Ampel was given land on the banks of the Kalimas River where he built a mosque and set about converting the locals. His descendents eventually helped to topple Majapahit.
An alternative theory suggests that Sunan Ampel was a Chinese Muslim, but this is a controversial claim. And it is best not mentioned in the alleyways of the quarter that takes the Sunan’s name; here sometimes even his Champa connection is excised, making him a pure Yemeni Arab.

Close to the port, Ampel became a ghetto for later foreign Muslims who arrived in Surabaya. The earliest Dutch maps of the city record it as a Malay, rather than Javanese, area. But there were not only Malays in the teeming alleyways around the mosque. Acehnese and Ambonese settled here, as did Bugis and Bajo from Sulawesi. More exotic immigrants came from further a field – Indians, Persians and Chinese Hui Muslims. But the people who truly made the area their own were the Arabs.

There have been Arab trading communities in the ports of Southeast Asia for centuries. Today the names of the shops that line Jalan Sasak, the anteroom of Ampel, hint at a past of spice, sandalwood and cargoes bound for Aden: Mesir, al Hudah, Ma’ruf, Abu Yaman.
An elderly Arab named U’ess who owns a shop selling sarongs on Jalan Sasak says that his grandfather arrived in Surabaya in the early years of the 20th Century.
“They came for business. They sold cloth and sugar,” he says, explaining that most of Surabaya’s Arabs trace their ancestry to Yemen, a poor place from which there was good reason to emigrate. U’ess is also quite certain that Sunan Ampel was a Yemeni.
Two doors down another Arab named Usman says his family have been in Indonesia for many centuries; his own parents came to Surabaya not directly from Yemen, but from the old spice-trading Arab community in Ambon.
“Ampel is not only for Arabs,” says Usman; “it’s mixed. There are Malays and Bugis. Most of the people here are immigrants, but it is the Arabs who are famous.”

And the Arab shopkeepers of Ampel trade on their fame. The whole area functions as a religious emporium, the place to go for anything remotely Islamic from a carved Pakistani Qu'ran stand to a bag of Tunisian dates to break the Ramadan fast.
The centre of this commerce is the narrow alley known as Jalan Ampel Suci, a classic Middle Eastern-style souq or covered bazaar. Roofed in against dry season heat and wet season rain, and lined with hole-in-the-wall shops selling all manner of exotic goods, it could be a back alley of Cairo.

Surabaya’s Arabs may have kept the exotic atmosphere of their neighborhood, but most use Indonesian as their daily language. A teenage shopkeeper on Jalan Ampel Suci named Abu Bakar claims that Arabic is his first language. But a jab in the ribs from his assistant, a Javanese girl called Fitria, prompts a sheepish grin.
“I do know Arabic,” he insists, “but not one hundred percent yet. All Arabs must learn Arabic, but it’s very difficult…”
Abu Bakar and Fitria argue for a minute about the origins of Sunan Ampel, but eventually repeat the official line: he was half-Arab, half-Cham.

The souq runs north for 200 dark, perfumed meters before opening into the sunlight of the mosque courtyard. The Ampel Mosque is no longer the largest in Surabaya, but it is the most sacred. The old teak-wood core is hidden beneath later extensions; shining expanses of marble floor open at the head of white steps beneath tall, lighthouse-like minarets, and between prayers, people snooze in the cool interior where fugitive breezes cut the tropical heat.
But the real focus of this place is not the mosque but the cemetery that lies in its shadow. Here, beneath hibiscus and frangipani trees, a world away from Arab traders and formal prayers, is the grave of Sunan Ampel himself. There is a murmur of voices here, quieter but more insistent than the shrill wailing from the loudspeakers on the minarets. Sitting cross-legged amongst the tombstones are dozens of people, each making their own private prayer to the Sunan, or to the members of his family enshrined nearby. And these people are almost all Javanese pilgrims. The Wali Songo are hugely important for traditional Javanese Muslims, and people travel long distances to visit their tombs, places where the currents of older powers meet with those of Islam.
This graveyard is the sacred heart of Surabaya. It is also strangely paradoxical: the tomb of a Cham-Arab, or possibly a Chinese Muslim, the oldest point of the city, surrounded by a neighborhood of Yemeni Arabs, and yet a place that is uniquely Javanese.

A small man with a thin moustache and a green sarong is leaning against the wall at the back of the graveyard. He is in his early forties and he comes from Cirebon in West Java. His name is Wayudi. He has traveled here as part of an organized tour, stopping in Demak and Kudus along the way, visiting the sacred graves of the Wali Songo.
“The Wali Songo are special for everyone in Java,” he says. “They were the first Muslims.” For Wayudi the mosque, the souq and the Arabs are not important; it is the tomb that matters: “If you pray at the graves it can make you happy and successful. All Javanese people know this.”
And Wayudi is quite sure that Sunan Ampel was neither Chinese, Cham or Arab. “He was Javanese,” he says.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Surabaya dusk 'til dawn

An exploration of Surabaya, Indonesia, after dark

Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, December 2007

5.30pm; Saturday. From the high rooftop of Tunjungan Plaza the sprawl of red-tiled houses curves away in all directions. A late flight to Jakarta is roaring westward through the paling sky, and the lights of the big advertising hoardings are flickering on. The sun – a crimson thumbprint in the murky air of the East Java capital – touches the horizon.

“Allaaaaaaah uh Akbar…” From the city below the call to Maghrib prayer rings out into the dusk. Night has fallen over Surabaya.

***

Every town shows a different face at night, and Surabaya, a vast collection of villages by day, seems like a real city after dark. Tonight I plan to stay awake until dawn, criss-crossing the city by motorbike, exploring its nocturnal side.

***

7pm; the traffic is at its thickest now, roaring through the web of one-way streets that wrap around Surabaya’s modern downtown. The crushing heat of the day has passed and people are outside, relaxing; cafes and ice cream parlors are packed. Taman Bungkul, one of Surabaya’s few public spaces, is crowded with families. Teenagers in baggy jeans practice their skateboard tricks on the ramps and railings, and kids play with the cheap plastic toys sold by wandering vendors. And I am hungry.

Food is a passion in Surabaya, and the best place to eat is on the streets. Since sunset the roadsides have been lined with makeshift cafes. Each has a specialty, from the ubiquitous nasi goreng, to obscure regional dishes. Some are mediocre, some are excellent, and some are famous. Roti Bakar Citras is in the latter category. On a roaring side-street off Jalan Kertajaya, wonky tables are set up along a narrow strip of pavement. I order a sweet coffee – the first of many tonight – and one of Citras’ famed toasted sandwiches.

***

9.30pm; north of the city centre, past the Heroes’ Monument, towering into steamy darkness, along dark streets to Chinatown… The thoroughfare of Kembang Jepun is closed to traffic, and plastic chairs and tables are set out under the red Chinese lanterns. This is Kya Kya, the al fresco dining strip held every night. At the end of the street a gaggle of women – of a certain age – are slyly knocking back Bintang beer and dancing enthusiastically to karaoke dangdut.

From Kya Kya I drive east, way out into the suburbs along streets where lamps burn in simple night stalls, and burly security guards lounge at the gates of middle class compounds. Jembatan Merr, the bridge over the Kali Jagir River, is packed. Pavements are lined with worn mats and low tables, crowded with young couples. Coffee again for me, and some steamed peanuts in a twist of old newspaper from a vendor. It is after 11 o’clock and I notice that the traffic has thinned, only a few motorbikes streaking through the night. I finish my coffee, drop a few coins in the cup of the buskers playing battered guitars, and head back for the centre.

***

Tengah malam – midnight. The downtown streets have an edgier feel. Shops and restaurants are closed, though here and there lights blaze in an all-night warung or internet café. Huge mobs of youths in skin-tight jeans and black sweatshirts crowd the pavements, vigorously revving the engines of their motorbikes. Every Saturday these motorbike gangs gather in Surabaya, racing along dark streets and cruising the city in convoy. I fall in among one of the gangs for a while, and they call out cheerily to me despite their sinister appearance: “Hello mister! Good evening!”

I make a sharp turn into a side street to avoid a police checkpoint and head north again. The streets of the Old City are eerily empty. I catch the smell of garlic and onion skins, and see one ghostly becak creaking through the night. This part of the city, with its narrow alleys and derelict shop-houses, is a creepy place at night and I am glad when I see bright lights on a street between Chinatown and the Arab Quarter. Men in rubber boots are lugging barrels of fish from trucks and tough Madura women are haggling over prices. The fish market has been open since late afternoon and the ground is slimy underfoot. The air is pungent with fish and kretek cigarette smoke.

***

Tiredness creeps up. The dark band of the Kalimas River cuts through the night as I speed along empty streets. The next two hours blur into a jumble of brief images: a pair of youths in hooded sweatshirts furtively marking a wall with graffiti; a group of men seated around a television in a narrow, blue-walled room; streetwalkers of questionable gender stepping suddenly from the shadows; the shark-and-crocodile statue that commemorates Surabaya’s founding myth starkly white in the darkness; an enormous transvestite in a limp red dress striding along the cracked pavement, and the shadowy outlines of becak, loaded with mysterious bundles, rolling through the gloom.

I am tired, and hungry, and surprisingly cold. I find a simple all-night café on Jalan Mayjend Sungkono. Indonesian pop music is playing on the stereo, and a boy with weary eyes serves me a bowl of Madurese soto and a cup of sweet, grainy coffee. A shining SUV pulls up on the street outside. Three obviously drunk men stumble out and order food. I have a good idea where they have come from: most of Surabaya may be sleeping, but there’s a place where there’s still something going on.

***

3am – Jalan Dolly. Somewhere among the graveyards and working-class kampungs on the high ground above the Banyu Urip Canal the narrow streets of Dolly and Jalan Jarak are packed. Taxis and motorbikes clog the road and the throb of high-volume dangdut music shakes the air. This is Surabaya’s most notorious corner, claimed – wrongly, apparently - to be Southeast Asia’s biggest red light district. Wonky neon signs glow along the shop-fronts and bright strip lights shine in big-windowed “guesthouses” where bored women with blond-streaked hair and short skirts lounge on sofas, waiting. I’m too tired to face the rough gloom of the dangdut bars, so I opt for a soft drink at a roadside stall. No one bothers me and the place seems lively, almost festive. But I remember the reports I read almost weekly in the Jawa Pos of trafficked women, some of them horrifyingly young, in the brothels here.

***

As I leave Dolly I sense a change in the rhythm of the night. The darkness is as heavy as ever, but there is a little more traffic on the roads: the people who have been awake all night are beginning to meet the early risers of the coming day.

Beside the river the Keputran vegetable market is a blaze of light. All night trucks have been rolling in from the East Java hinterland and porters squelch through the mud under enormous loads of carrots, onions and beans. The workers and stallholders seem to get through the night on a brew of ready humor, and I am met with cheerful greetings and bursts of riotous laughter. Then I hear something above the voices: the loudspeaker of a mosque across the river has been switched on and a taped prayer is playing into the darkness. The end of the night is within reach.

***

From the market I drive south through silent suburbs until I reach Mesjid al-Akbar, the Great Mosque, better known as Mesjid Agung. The summit of the Ottoman-style minaret is floodlit, burning like a candle flame against the blackness. As I arrive men in clean white shirts and loose tartan sarongs are hurrying up the steps and into the cavernous interior. I can hear the low hum of traffic on the toll road beyond the mosque, and birds are singing in the darkness. Through the arched doorway I see the men forming neat lines, facing towards Mecca, their backs to a faint white stain on the eastern edge of the night. A woman in a loose head-covering pads swiftly across the marble floor and suddenly the loudspeakers crackle into action. “Allaaaaaaah uh Akbar…” The men bow and kneel in unison; the night is over.

***

As I ride away from the mosque people are out jogging in the first light. Buses and trucks are rolling on the big streets now and a pearly color is leaching into the sky. The new day is beginning and Surabaya is showing a different face. But I am going to bed…

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Melting Pot of East Java

The old quarters of Surabaya, Java, Indonesia

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, November 2007

Indonesia’s second biggest city, the capital of East Java, and the closest major urban centre to Bali (just a 30 minute flight away), Surabaya stands on the north coast of Java between the towering green volcanoes of the interior, and the long, low island of Madura offshore. Originally an outpost of the great Majapahit Empire, and later the principal trading port of the Dutch East Indies, Surabaya was only eclipsed by Jakarta as Indonesia’s premier city in the 20th Century. A place with such an illustrious past should have something to show for it, and Surabaya certainly does. But the city is endlessly bad-mouthed by tourist guidebooks, and few visitors bother to stop there. This is a real shame, for those who take the time to go beyond the bustling downtown area with its plethora of shopping malls, banks and international hotels will find another city altogether where the pulse of the old world still beats.

The backbone of Surabaya is the Kalimas River, (“River if Gold” in Indonesian). It snakes through the city from south to north finally emerging into the Madura channel in the great port at the head of Surabaya. The modern heart of the city is the network of wide avenues around Jalan Pemuda. It’s here that you will find the malls and the hotels, but the original settlement lay some two kilometres further north, an area which still oozes with history.

As a port city Surabaya was always a melting pot, and even today its diversity is obvious in the faces of the people. Immigrants flocked to Surabaya over the centuries, as traders, manual labourers and fortune-seekers. The biggest minority has always been the Chinese and today Surabaya’s old Chinatown sprawls into quiet alleyways around the thoroughfare of Jalan Kembang Jepun. The main street is marked by great red and green Chinese gates, guarded by lion statues. Turn right or left here and you will find rows of quietly decaying shop-houses. They are not restored or prettified for tourists like in Singapore, but peer through the dark doorways and you will catch glimpses of candles burning before family alters, and sacks piled against walls in the warehouses of old-style traders. Here and there a bowed roof of heavy ceramic tiles marks a Chinese clan house.
Most of Surabaya’s huge Chinese population is Christian now, but Chinatown is the heart of the old Chinese religion, a blend of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The aromatic smell of incense hits you long before you reach the centuries-old Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong temple on a narrow alleyway north of Jalan Kembang Jepun. Here huge, three-metre high candles burn in the darkness, and worshippers kneel and bow before bronze statues. Offerings of fruit stand on the alters, and joss sticks leach thin coils of sweet smoke. Not far away another temple, the Hok An Kiong is full of bright red and gold colour. This area has some of the finest examples of old Chinese architecture, and the street names hint at the old import-export trade of the area: Rubber Street, Chocolate Street, Sugar Street and Tea Street.
Further north from Chinatown is the vast Pasar Pabean market, one of the biggest traditional markets in Indonesia. At its heart is a huge covered area full of vegetables. The ground underfoot is thick with onions skins and the air is rich with the smells of garlic and spices. Tiny, cheerful women in bright clothes dash about the market carrying huge loads on their heads. At the western end of Pasar Pabean is a bustling fish market where every afternoon the freshest catches from the Java Sea are sold. Wander through this area and you will see everything from tiny prawns to huge tuna fish and even sharks. North and south the market sprawls on through tiny alleyways where everything imaginable is sold.

The streets of Old Surabaya are far removed from the traffic chaos of downtown. Walking is a pleasure here, but an even better option is to travel by becak. This is the heartland of the old-style pedicab, a human-powered passenger tricycle. becak drivers loiter on every street corner, their vehicles often spectacularly decorated. For a few thousand rupiah you can travel at a leisurely pace through the alleyways.

Beyond Pasar Pabean is another area full of echoes of Surabaya’s trading past. The Arab Quarter is a warren of narrow streets knotted around the great Ampel Mosque, the oldest and most sacred in Surabaya.
Like the Chinese, the Arabs – most originally from Yemen – arrived in the city over many centuries, drawn by the trade routes that carried spice and other goods across the Indian Ocean. The area, known as Ampel, became their ghetto, and even today it has all the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern bazaar. Hole-in-the-wall shops are presided over by tall, hawk-nosed men selling Tunisian dates, pistachios and sultanas. Brightly coloured prayer beads and embroidered rugs hang from the awnings, and the scent of rosewater and perfume cuts the air. The heart of the Arab Quarter is the narrow pedestrian alleyway that leads to the mosque. Covered in like the souks of Damascus and Marrakech, and hung about with bright cloths, batiks and beads, it eventually opens to the courtyard of the Ampel Mosque, built by Sunan Ampel, one of the venerated holy-men of Java. Sunan Ampel’s grave is next to the mosque, and the garden with its low frangipani trees is always busy with pilgrims.

If Surabaya is famous for one thing, it’s food. And though the modern city offers plenty of opportunities for fine dining, the old quarter gives a chance to sample more traditional cuisine. There is mouth-watering Arab-style roast lamb on sizzling hotplates from simple cafes in Ampel; on any street in early evening the delicious scent of sate (skewered chicken, beef or lamb) sizzling over charcoal whets the appetite, and all manner of sweet concoctions are available. But the ultimate in al-fresco dining can be had every night back in Chinatown. Jalan Kembang Jepun is closed to traffic and as the sun sets the street takes on a new name: Kya-Kya. After dark Kya-Kya bursts into action as a huge spread of food stalls and outdoor cafes. Take a seat at any of the tables laid out on the tarmac to try traditional Chinese, Indonesian, and even Western food. Seafood is a speciality. Street entertainers wind their way between the tables and you can reflect on your day of wandering amid the history of the old city.
There is no doubt that Surabaya is a rewarding stop for culture vultures, photographers and inquisitive wanderers, and when you’re done with old city, there are some great shopping opportunities in all those malls!

© Tim Hannigan 2008

From Jakarta to Surabaya on a 'bebek'

A journey by motorbike from Jakarta to Surabaya, Java, Indonesia

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 16/09/07

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2007/09/16/jakarta-surabaya-039bebek039.html-0

The engine of my motorbike strained as I headed through the last hairpins toward the summit of Puncak Pass.
Behind me, yellow haze was creeping up from the direction of Jakarta; on either side wisps of mist were sliding over the tea gardens and ahead lay more than 1,000 kilometers of road.
The previous morning I had unloaded my 14-year-old Honda Astrea -- a 100cc bike meant for pottering around town -- from the train at Jakarta's Kota station. A pedicab driver at the station gate had asked where I was going. He was surprised when I told him: ""Surabaya"".
Indonesia's largest and second-largest cities are like a pair of urban anchors at either end of the north coast of Java.
I had lived in Surabaya for almost a year, and I had visited the capital a number of times, but I wanted to explore the space between, the heartland of the world's most densely populated island.
For me there was only one way to make the trip: by the ubiquitous little motorbike known in Indonesia as a bebek -Easy Rider, Java-style.
It was a week-long journey that would take me through startlingly beautiful landscapes of forest, rice terraces and volcanoes and along remote rural lanes and congested highways.

Hot water, remote coastline

After crossing the 1,500-meter Puncak Pass I traveled on past Bandung and arrived, a little saddle-sore, at dusk in Cipanas, a village at the foot of Mount Guntur near the town of Garut.
The place name means ""Hot Water"", and as darkness fell and an unseasonable downpour pattered over the roofs I washed away my aches courtesy of the village's principal attraction.
Geothermal activity in the looming volcano ensures that every hotel bathroom in the place is blessed with a constant supply of steaming hot water, and a chest-deep sunken bath tub instead of the usual chilly mandi tank.
Next morning I headed south along back roads through endless green hills and villages among the trees. At midday I reached the coast where an empty sweep of gray sand ran away into the haze in both directions.
There was no traffic on the potholed road as I traveled on eastwards. The coastline here was too wild and storm-lashed for fishing, and the soil was too poor and thin for much agriculture, but it was beautiful country to drive through.
The sun was already sinking low when I drove into Pangandaran. Strung out along a narrow isthmus with sandy beaches on each side the resort is West Java's answer to Kuta.
But in July 2006 a powerful offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami that devastated the western side of Pangandaran, killing hundreds of people. Many hotels have reopened, but the damage was still plain to see, and the place felt rather forlorn and abandoned. I checked into an empty hotel and went to bed early.

Engine troubles at high altitude

Twenty-four hours later I was colder than I had imagined was possible in Indonesia, shivering over a bowl of soup in a guesthouse in the little village of Dieng, 2,000 meters up in the clouds of Central Java.
Not far from Pangandaran I had crossed the invisible border between West and Central Java. This boundary is not just an administrative one: it marks the division between the Sundanese-speaking western part of the island, and the Javanese-speaking east.
Under cloudy skies I had traveled east and north, and up through the cabbage and potato fields north of Wonosobo into the cold air of the mountains.
Java is an island of volcanoes. Great conical peaks had loitered on the edge of my journey since Jakarta; now I was deep among them.
The Dieng Plateau is a perfectly flat table of marshy ground in a collapsed crater surrounded by pine-covered ridges. It was a strange place of shifting mist, and was bitterly cold.
Perhaps it was the sudden departure from the tropics, or perhaps it was the severity of the inclines on the way up, but after hundreds of trouble-free kilometers, the bike had suddenly developed a problem.
It had spluttered and shuddered into Dieng and I made my way straight to a grimy mechanic's workshop. One of the upsides of Java's famously high population density, and its love affair with motorbikes, is that you are almost always within walking distance of some roadside shed where a man in oil-stained overalls can patch a tire, clean a carburetor, or fix a fuel pump in a matter of minutes.
While my bike was being repaired I wandered around the plateau on foot. Dieng means ""Abode of the Gods"". Scattered across the plateau are the last handful of the hundreds of Hindu temples that once stood here.
Built in the 7th and 8th centuries, before the rise of the great Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, they are the oldest temples in Central Java. The temples are small, but in the running mist and stinging cold, an air of mystery hung around them.
Fresh from its high-altitude service, the bike ran smoothly back downhill the next day, all the way to the huge 9th-Century Buddhist temple at Borobudur.
With its nine tiers of intricately carved limestone, Borobudur is the apex of the Javanese architectural tradition, and the most visited tourist attraction in Indonesia.
From Borobudur it was not far to Yogyakarta with its royal palace, warren of narrow alleyways, and easy-going atmosphere. That night as I sipped a glass of cold beer and pored over my map in a busy little cafe full of European backpackers I realized that I was over halfway through my journey.

*****

The next day I traveled along remote roads. Java is the world's most densely populated island, and this overcrowding is apparently at its most intense in the fertile countryside of Central Java, but as I paused to take in the views across the fading ranks of hills I wondered exactly where all the people were.
Sometime in the early afternoon I crossed into East Java, and passed the town of Pacitan on its perfect horseshoe bay. The road was narrow, winding through forested hills with long views down to perfect, deserted bays. There was almost no traffic, and few villages.
Mosquitoes began to bite at my ankles, and behind me the sun slipped down into the milky cloud. Darkness was falling and it was still many kilometers to the nearest town.
I had started late from Yogyakarta and I realized I should have stopped the night in Pacitan, but it was too late to go back. I pressed on into the dusk.
And then I got a puncture. A moment of panic rose; it seemed that it couldn't have happened in a worse place. But luck was on my side, and just around the next corner was a roadside shack and a crudely painted sign: tambal ban (tire repairs).
A boy in a red t-shirt patched the tire as the heavy darkness came down and expressed astonishment at my journey. When he was done I drove on into the night. Occasional lights marked lonely hamlets, but this was wild countryside, and it would have been a bad place to break down.
I was glad when I reached the top of a high hill and saw a broad plain far below, scattered with lights. Half an hour later I drove into the town of Trenggalek.

The home straight

I did not have far to go now, and the next day I took a leisurely pace through the rice fields to Malang, 450 meters above sea level.
Malang was a retreat from the heat of the plains for the Dutch colonists; a few fragments of their architecture remain and the air is still fresh.
The bike was coated in dust and mud by now, and my arms were burnt from long days driving in the hot equatorial sun, so I was glad to rest for the afternoon.
The following morning I took the high road past the hill resorts of Batu and Selekta, through a patchwork of small fields full of all the vegetables that will only grow in the cooler air of the mountains: carrots, cabbages, onions and potatoes.
A brisk breeze was sweeping the smoke from the distant peak of Gunung Arjuna into the running cloud. I crossed a low pass and dropped into dense forest and thick mist, returning to sunlight at the village of Pacet from where I descended again to the heat of the plains -- and to the chaotic traffic of Java's main roads.
On the edge of the town of Sidoarjo the road rose to cross a canal, and I caught a distant glimpse of the swelling dome and Ottoman-style minaret of the al-Akbar mosque.
The building, a distinctive landmark, marks the southern edge of Surabaya, and five minutes later as it slipped by to the left, the afternoon light reflecting from the blue-green tiles, I knew I was home.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Beguiled by Becaks

Indonesia's three-wheeled, peddle-powered public transport

Originally published in Kabar Magazine May 2007

http://kabarmag.com/blog1/2009/01/16/beguiled-by-becaks/

“…and a small squadron of the tricycle-rickshas called betjaks. As soon as they sighted Hamilton and Kwan most of the betjaks creaked into motion like a flock of ponderous birds, wheeling towards them. Hamilton regarded them with some fascination, as everyone did for the first time, with their black canvas hoods, their sides painted in hurdy-gurdy colours with pictures of volcanoes and wayang heroes, and lettered with names such as Tiger and Bima, they belonged to another time…”

Christopher J. Koch was writing of 1965, that simmering era of impending violence, when he penned those lines in his novel The Year of Living Dangerously. They belonged to another time even then, and yet, more than forty years later only the old Dutch spelling has changed, and the becaks are still creaking into ponderous action throughout the kampungs and alleyways of Java.

The becak is the Indonesian incarnation of the ubiquitous pedicab, or cycle-rickshaw, found everywhere from New Delhi to Taiwan, and even now as a tourist attraction in London’s Soho, and parts of New York. But it is Indonesia, and especially Java, (perhaps along with Bangladesh) that is the true heartland of the pedicab. The becak is as much a motif and symbol of Indonesia as the silhouette of a wayang kulit puppet, or the smell of a clove cigarette.

The becak, a three-wheeled peddled-powered bike with a passenger seat is the descendant of the original hand-pulled rickshaws that originated in Japan in the 19th Century. The design and style varies from country to country, and even from city to city, but in Indonesia the passenger sits up front, with an uninterrupted view of the busy streets. Despite the best efforts of municipal governments becak still provide transport and employment for millions of people across Indonesia, people like Hilal.

It is early afternoon, and Hilal, a wiry man in his early thirties, born and raised in Surabaya, is eating his lunch. He hunches over a bowl of oily bakso – noodle soup with meatballs – and a glass of sweet iced tea, sweating in the yellow heat, at a tatty little foodcart on Jalan K. H. Mas Mansur on the edge of the old Arab Quarter of the East Javanese Capital. He has been awake since well before dawn. He rose in the darkness for the first prayers of the Muslim day in his house on a narrow alleyway not far from the great Ampel Mosque, sacred heart of Old Surabaya. Then he went out into the blue pre-dawn light, limbs still aching from the day before as he strained at the peddles of his becak. His first passenger was a regular customer, a woman from the Quarter who Hilal takes each day to the dawn vegetable market. After that he fell into the typical slow hours of a becak driver, waiting on street corners, chatting with friends, rousing himself from time to time to try to solicit a fare. In late morning he took an Arab trader to the mosque for midday prayers, and later he will take the same man to the shop of a partner in another part of the Old City.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of becaks in Indonesia, but this was not always the case, and despite their timeless image, they are actually a relatively recent addition to the urban landscape. Before the Second World War becak were virtually unknown. There had been tricycles used for transporting goods for many years, but it was only in 1936 that the first passenger-carrying becak hit the streets of Jakarta. The Dutch authorities took an immediate dislike to the new invention, worrying about safety and congestion, and setting the tone for government attitude to becaks until now. They might have acted to stamp them out altogether, but History intervened.
In 1942 the Japanese Imperial forces landed in Indonesia, ousted the Dutch, and brought about an even more oppressive form of colonial rule. While Indonesian national identity felt its way towards the light, cities choked. The Japanese tightly controlled availability of petrol, banned private ownership of motor vehicles, and eventually strangled the old bus and tram networks. It will no doubt pain commuters who deal with the gridlock of modern Jakarta and Surabaya to know that both cities once had comprehensive and efficient public transport systems. The only major source of urban transport that survived under the Japanese was the horse-drawn dokar, which filled the roles served by both becaks and taxis today. But a horse was an expensive commodity, difficult to feed at a time when many people were going hungry, and they soon began to disappear too. Enter the becak, until then an oddity and a novelty. Cheap, low maintenance, and requiring no fuel other than the strength of its driver, the becak soon became the main – sometimes the only – form of public transport. Post-war turmoil and the protracted independence struggle meant that organised transport networks never really recovered; bolting the stable door was no use after the horse had gone, and dokars never returned in any numbers. But the becak proliferated. By 1953 there were an estimated 40, 000 in Surabaya alone, and by 1981 becak drivers constituted some 3% of the workforce of that city. In the 1980s there were well over 100, 000 in Jakarta.

Mid-afternoon, and Hilal is idling with friends at the point where Jalan Sasak widens at the gate of the long covered bazaar that leads to the Ampel Mosque. It is a good place to find a fare as worshippers and shoppers who come to the area to buy the religious paraphernalia sold by the Arabs of the Quarter must pass through the mob of becaks when they leave. Hilal has pushed his grimy red baseball cap back on his head and is lounging on the passenger seat of his becak. He has been a becak driver for five years. Before that he worked in a small warehouse south of the Arab Quarter in the old Chinatown, carrying sacks and moving boxes for a salary. Little by little he scrimped and saved until he could afford to buy his own becak, not so expensive, he says, at one million rupiah brand new. Hilal is happier as a becak driver. It’s hard, peddling in the blazing heat of the day, but he is his own boss, and there have been days when he has earned as much as fifty thousand rupiah: far, far more than he ever made when he worked for a wage. But like many in Indonesia, he dreams of a life abroad. He has a cousin in Korea who works in a factory there, complains about the bitter winter cold, but sends meaty remittances back to his family in Surabaya. Someone once told Hilal about the tourist rickshaws in London, and he wonders if he could emigrate there to work. But he has grave doubts about the cost of shipping his becak.

No one seems sure when, or why it started, but becaks have become a canvas for the deep-seated artistic urge of Indonesia, and are often spectacularly and idiosyncratically decorated. They are given names (anything from mythical figures to boy-bands), and painted in kaleidoscopic colours. In Yogyakarta – a becak stronghold – the mudguards of the heavyset becaks there often carry complex and well-executed pictures, while the leaner, longer becaks of Surabaya come in a multitude of patterns. There is a wild array of colour schemes, from Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes, through Coca Cola and Manchester United to the regalia of various political parties (PDI-P is a favourite of becak drivers, perhaps because the bull makes a fine decorative motif rather than because of any particular political sympathy). Tassels sometimes adorn peddles and the wooden slats of the passenger seats often carry bright floral designs, hinting at classical Islamic art.

But despite their visual appeal, becak have always had a rough ride from the authorities. Since the first prohibitive traffic laws in Dutch Batavia in 1940 they have been seen as the enemy by those who wish to impose order on city streets. From an early stage city councillors complained about becaks. They sometimes righteously suggested that they were a symbol of human exploitation, ignoring the fact that the becak is a form of independent self-employment available even to very poor people like Hilal. But the principal complaint was always that a trundling becak clogs the city streets, impeding the progress of the air-con Kijangs of the rich, and that they are unsightly, despite their bright colours, unbefitting of modern Indonesia. Registration schemes across the country have attempted to reduce the numbers of becaks, as have police crackdowns on illegal operators. In the 1980s under Soeharto the first major attack on Jakarta’s becaks took place. Unregistered becaks were regularly confiscated and destroyed, and finally in 1988 Bylaw 11 was passed by the City Council, banning them altogether from the city streets. Some forty thousand beautifully decorated becaks, the pride and livelihood of their drivers, were impounded in the name of progress and toppled from barges into the murky waters of Jakarta Bay.
In Surabaya too the road of the becak has been rocky. Becaks, and their notoriously rough-spoken drivers, often economic migrants from Madura, are the bugbear and the butt of jokes of people who like to see East Java’s metropolis as the next Singapore. Their manufacture was outlawed in the 1980s and periodic purges have targeted unlicensed drivers. They have been banned from the major roads of the downtown area so the glittering facades of the multiplying shopping malls are not sullied by the reflection of a quietly rolling becak.

But the becak endures away from the multilane highways, rolling through kampung alleyways too cramped for a taxi and beyond the bemo networks. In Jakarta too they cling on in quieter residential areas, despite ongoing official hostility. They have even received support from unexpected quarters in recent years. Environmentalists praise the becak as a totally green form of transport, and point to their increasing appearance in European and North American Cities. In any case, the becak still fills a gap in the infrastructure of urban Indonesia, and as long as there are narrow side streets and people willing to haggle with a dark-faced, grinning man with iron calf muscles for a sedate, gently rattling ride over potholed tarmac, they will exist.

It is evening, and soon the maghrib prayer call will echo out over the red tiled roofs. Hilal is straining at the peddles. He has taken one last fare further south than his usual territory, beyond Pasar Atom, and now he is heading back towards Ampel with tired limbs, back towards his wife and five-year old son. The sun has dropped far into the West as he crosses the smooth metal of the train tracks and he catches the smell of goats from the rough kampungs beside the rails. Throughout the Old City, and across the whole of Surabaya off the main roads, and indeed all over Java, becak are riding slowly into the dusk.

At the end of The Year of Living Dangerously as Hamilton, the hero of the book, flees an imploding Indonesia the image he carries with him is of a becak, creaking its way through the kretek-scented darkness. The Year of Living Dangerously is long past, and many more dangerous years have come and gone; both Sukarno and Soeharto have faded from the scene and urban Indonesia has changed almost beyond recognition. But in the quieter side streets of the nation’s cities, with the rattle of a tin bell and the creak of an ill-oiled chain, the becak is still rolling, making its way slowly into the 21st Century.

© Tim Hannigan 2007