Travel notes

70-300

"18,ooo islands, as many prisons or as many places of retreat" ...

was the first travelogue entry about Indonesia.

Life offers you, provided you believe in its miracles, unique experiences. I found Jakarta as a western city (located in the far east), suffocated by its own beliefs and desires - 10 million inhabitants (over 20 million in the conurbation), contemporary architecture (built chaotically), fast traffic, high real estate prices, lack of public spaces, a few shopping malls lining the city and overcrowding it during the discount season.

A city that lives like a man who knows in advance when he will meet his end. Urban planners predict that 2014-2015 will be the period when all the roads, in the conurbation, will be permanently blocked by the excessive influx of cars (many new) and the lack of infrastucture (which nobody thinks about). Later I realized - in Indonesian culture there is no such term as "crowded".

If a ^Bojo1 village, for example, becomes over-agglomerated, it expands and forms another village, but organically linked to the first one. All this in a country where the population is 260 million (in Java 1,000 per^km2, and in Papua only 7 per^km2), where the per capita income is 2,600 US dollars, but where 70% of the population lives on 2 US dollars a day, and where a teacher's salary is no more than 180 US dollars, in a country that has 5.000 km long on the equator, but only 60% of the islands are populated - Java contains more than half the number of inhabitants - in a country where 4 million cell phones (preferably BlackBerrys) "ring", but more than 80% of the islands have no electricity and the vast majority of villages have a TV set that "breathes" skin whitening product ads every 7 minutes. All this is only informative as long as you don't experience it first hand. When you enter the 'atmosphere', the dizzying whirl of cities or the god-like silence of a forgotten village on a magnificent island, events occur that short-circuit your Western logical thinking. One of the questions that 'wake you up' is: which island were you born on? If you somehow feel that English helps you answer that question wherever you are, you're at a loss to make yourself understood here, because hardly anyone speaks anything but Bahasa Indonesia (or 300-400 other languages).

So you learn the language... so you can answer the question.

At least.

As you study, you realize some amazing things; this language is only 60 years old (imposed in 1942 with the Declaration of Independence, and is obviously rooted in Javanese and Old Malay) so for only 10% of the population it is the mother tongue, it has influences (in pronunciation) from Dutch and English colonizers (present in the world's largest archipelago since the 16th century).

In Bahasa Indonesian grammar is very simple; we have the same form for singular or plural, adjectives do not change form, there is no verb to be (it is implied), no past and/or future forms of verbs. That's why (or also for this reason) they live intensely in the present. If you manage to ask a local if he has been to Europe, he will answer suda if he has (the only valid past tense for any answer) or beloom, a kind of "not yet". This openness to a possibility is fascinating by the very nature of the results it generates, by which I mean optimism, a possible better future, an open door to which, if you answer "no", you have also locked it. This is closely related to space and time - you feel the limitlessness in any discussion you engage in. The only limitation is imposed, with great respect, by the word munkin , which could (somewhat) possibly be translated (in the sense of "Gods willing").

Nothing of what is to come is certain, you will always hear this word, as a reverence to the mystery of the future. Obviously against this backdrop the architecture is largely ephemeral, bamboo and biodegradable materials are used in response to excess humidity, limited funds or imposing tradition. Public spaces are spontaneous. You can have unlimited surprises in relation to this subject. Public places become where people meet or make exchanges, from the "broken trunk" to the deserted boat on the beach, from the makeshift wooden bench (where you can also grab a snack) to the space between two ricks (which if you block the traffic, no one minds). But exchanges can sometimes even take place directly on the water, as in Banjarmasin's floating market, in an empty spot where 10-12 ^warung2sline up in the evening, or simply on the street, which is very quickly laid out every evening and becomes a market place where you can find everything from fruit to ready-made food. It is obvious that Western thinking has become part of this culture and induces (definitive) mutations "imposing" a different way of relating to public space.

For the time being (happily) only in big cities. And to come back to the language, in Balinese there is no such word as "paradise", perhaps because they live it intensely moment by moment.