Motorbikerides

Yogjakarta:

Streets full of cars and other motorbikes, so many gas-powered and pedal rickshaws cutting closer than imaginable. The smell of gas and warmth and the wind whipped up by our movement. Weaving through the trucks stopped at lights. Illogical patterns and left-side driving. Passages through tunnels in the walls around the palace area. Families of two, three, four and a dog on one scooter. Food vendors on the sides of the road and narrow and uneven or absent sidewalks. Chaos and control.

Rural outskirts:

Long flat runs through the rice fields. Greens brighter, greener than anything I have ever seen. Chickens in the road, roosters. Bicycles packed high in the front and back with long strands of something- sugarcane? Their riders shaded under wide cone woven caps while my hair mats down under a motorcycle helmet. Up into the mountains, smaller roads, steeper and rocky. Open homes and people spilling slowly and occasionally out. Getting lost. Help from a group of young men, one who leads us back to the main road, too much construction here. Too steep, I get off and walk sometimes just to make sure. Higher the greens are darker, the trees thick. Caught in a downpour of huge drops of warm rain, we stop up at a café that is someone’s house, are offered shelter, water, fried tofu in the simplest living room. On the way back, clearer views of tiered fields for cultivation, more palm trees, more rain.

Bali:

A hand on Katie’s waist and one on the phone, pulled in tightly to track directions. Amazing to me that Google Maps works out here. Bright colors between palms and banana trees, Hindu gods at the end of the street and shrines and offerings from the sidewalks and tall bamboo Penjor poles curve into the open sky and dangle flowers and coco leaves above our heads headed towards Ubud. Dogs in the streets too, so many more here on Java that she points them out. They are unafraid. The sun is hot and my toes burn, but my upturned helmet fills with rain when we rest and drink fruit things in town. The roads to the temple are similar to outside Yogja, but better travelled. More advertisements. More people, so many more people in the smaller shop-lined streets up to the monkey forest that getting back on the road is a relief. Sunset over the rice fields and through the outline of residential homes. Taillights stretching and dancing.

Indonesian Otherness

My travels had brought me in the past to a fair amount of places where I did not speak the language and a few places where I couldn’t read the street signs, but Indonesia is the first place that I have ever been where my difference is immediately apparent. It feels embarrassing to say it, but I have been traveling exclusively in alien places populated by other white people.

It is one of the first things my gracious hostess mentioned, as we wandered the inner grounds of the Water Palace in Jogjakarta. She warned me that people would approach us and ask to take our pictures. She told me this with the weary voice of someone who had been living in and studying the country for some time, someone who speaks Indonesian and lives the culture and has devoted a good portion of her life to studying aspects of its evolution. She also told me this as a redheaded white girl in a city people who are decidedly not.

At first I shrugged it off, how annoying could it be? But as the days progressed it did become trying. Being called out on your otherness was uncomfortable for me, and surprising, and her response seems not only natural but assertive. Why would you want to take my picture?

I visited the temple at Borobudur, a gorgeous 9^th century pilgrimage site. I went at sunrise when the changing sky mixed with the sounds of Islamic call to prayer and the whole scene was watched over on high by hundreds of Buddhas. Some of these had lost their heads to (mostly Western) museums, clamoring for a piece of this ancient spirituality that continues to be relevant.

Amid all of this overlay of religion, time, worship and tourism, people of all types hiked up and down the temple site, some armed with selfie sticks. I had a few hours before the bus would bring me back, so I spent a fair amount of time sitting and looking out. I was approached by dozens of people, families, and schoolchildren. Some asked, some didn’t, some pretended and some simply focused and snapped as many pictures of me as they could. I watched other Americans and Europeans get cycled through all the members of huge groups for individual portraits.

I suppose I was surprised because I just didn’t think seeing someone who looks like me would be exotic to anyone. I knew I would be immediately identified as a tourist, someone who could afford to pay for services. I was a millionaire in rupias, after all. But this was different. I had known the privilege of being a part of the everywhere-culture that invented the internet and dominates the global media. I had naively thought that this type of experience of otherness was out of date, belonged to a different time. I thought it was limited to the imperialism and orientalism I studied in my cozy forward-thinking California university. I was wrong.

An important reminder to people like me, who speak liberally without really understanding, and who remain, through it all, in a place of privilege. Were I Asian American, African American, or any other color American this would be an entirely different feeling. Art, music, new culture and new places are eye-opening in reference to what we know, but I hope this human experience can better inform my perspective at home.

Soundscape, Indonesia

There is a constant rolling wave of sound in Jogjakarta that is like nothing I have ever heard.

It is not the hum of machines, that varying Bb of refrigerators and idling cars. It is not the vague or imagined buzz of wifi hotspots and cell phones and data shooting through the air. It isn’t even the uniform honking of city traffic or background music or people talking, laughing, living.

There is a baseline that isn’t sound at all, but the thickness of equatorial air and the wingsounds of insects. To breathe is to walk in water even without rain, and the this slight heaviness touches your lungs, your heartbeat, the sound and mass of the liquid moving through your ears to keep you steady.

Above this is a rolling, non-percussive overlay of a singing language, motorbikes that have never imagined mufflers, middle-ringing rickshaw bells and the echo of all of this through unimaginable mazes of walled residential roads between main two-lane thoroughfares.

The first night I spent in here was the first night I spent in Indonesia. After over 26+ hours of travel and the crossing of multiple time zones, I didn’t sleep deeply. I drifted in and out, in the heat, with the insects and my confused body. I finally woke up for good at 4:30, when a few buildings away in the inner sanctum of the neighborhood of my guesthouse, men were being called to prayer.

While I had heard Muslim call to prayer before, it had never been so pervasive. In the week I spent in Indonesia I would become almost used to it, and I imagine it becomes like a reminder of passage of time, but lying in my bed beneath a single cool sheet, the room entirely dark, and the waves of amplified and acoustic call and organic response transported me from my hazy no-place state to right where I was. Prayer continues for quite some time, and I lay and listened to it coming from nearby and then farther away, mixed in with the sounds of roosters crowing and of water falling somewhere, before the motorbikes started to carry people away.

Every city, every country and culture, has a soundscape. Indonesia and Jogja’s are natural, effortless, in my experience singularly unaffected by extra-developed sound of background music and advertisement. The music I heard in the country was acoustic, the call to sale in the market like the call to prayer. No absence of sound, but rather a unified roll of it, held together by warmth and patient air.