Singapore

We decided to visit Singapore for two reasons: to visit Danny and Sonali, and to eat.

Singapore is a melting pot of Chinese, (mostly South) Indian, and Malay cultures and populations. Each group contributed their cuisine, to form the most diverse and the happiest one-party-ruled state in the world. (Note: in Danny's words, the Singaporean government taxes fun. Alcohol is very expensive. Also, there is still no gum. Also, no crime. You can't commit crimes. It is against the law.)

We moved to their very nice loft just outside Chinatown on Friday, and Danny took us to Lau Pa Sat, one of the famed hawker centers. (The Maxwell Center, featured in Anthony Bourdain's show and home to the famous Tian Tian Chicken Rice stall, is closer to their apartment, but has less variety. We had bubble tea there later.) Street food vendors in Singapore are inspected for health code violations; the modal score at the hawker centers seemed to be a B. We never saw a C -- we suspect the grades are A, B and shut down.

Adam had char kway teow, which was delicious and full of little surprises (e.g., clams) and starfruit juice. Bethany had papaya salad and noodles with roasted pork and little slices of egg roll. She declared Singapore to be food Disneyland.

So we moved on to the next land, and had a vegetarian dinner in Little India before a movie.

On Saturday, between huge meals, we went to the Museum of Asian Civilizations. It was exceptionally well done. They have almost the complete contents of a ship that sunk off Java in the 800's C.E.; it had come from Iran, been to China, and was on its way home. Most of the cargo was pottery made in China and the curators pointed out various features that had been developed just for the Persian market. For example, blue-on-white pottery with plant motifs was apparently really popular in Persia but not so much in China. The ship was carrying a number of one-off pieces like this that the curators think were samples from the Chinese potter for the merchants to take back and get orders.

Most exhibits emphasized the profitable intersection of cultures, a highlight in line with Singapore's self-image as the crossroads between civilizations. Nothing in the museum failed to dim our enthusiasm for further travel to Asia. (Except for Iran. American citizens have to go on package tours, which seems distasteful or boring.)

Sadly, the exhibits were [intentionally?] poorly lit and flash was forbidden, so all photos were lousy. Below is a pitcher from the Javanese wreck and a far-too-ornate royal sedan from Bali

Oh, and we went back to Lau Pa Sat, this time armed with our camera. Bethany had chicken rice, and got to try all the sauces, and Adam had a Hokkien dish described as "spicy noodles."

We ate at Lau Pa Sat late on an uncrowded Saturday afternoon, and it was fairly empty.

After the museum we stopped by a Buddhist temple that supposedly contains a tooth of the Buddha, but neglected to see the relic itself. The temple displays covered the life of the Buddha for curious tourists, but they did little to make the theology [?] more understandable.

Saturday night we followed multiple recommendations and went to the Night Safari, an organized tram ride through the Singapore Zoo. For the price of admission, you got to ride through various animal habitats, with stops to walk to see bats, flying squirrels and other largely nocturnal creatures in action. As expected, the cats all napped, but the bats were fun to watch and we got to hear one tapir shreek to locate another when the tram divided the two of them.

We caught the last subway ride home, but the only nearby food option was 7-11. This particular 7-11 did have dim sum pork buns available, but it was still the waste of one mealtime we'll have to make up in Singapore.

In conclusion, below are examples of the odd architecture of Singapore, and a statue of Sir Raffles, the British administrator who came from Java to organize the city. He stands in front of bank towers on the cleaned-up (but no longer commercially active) Singapore River.

Travel advice for complete idiots

Lessons:

1. You should look things up on the Internet. Failing this, you should ask people who work at venues through which you pass where things are.

2. You should write down the address of your hotel in a new, unfamiliar city. Do not assume that cab drivers are familiar with all city hotels.

On Thursday afternoon, we flew on Garuda Indonesia flight from Denpasar (Bali) to Jakarta. The flight was uneventful, save the delicious in-flight cuisine. The food on the plane, for a ninety-minute domestic flight, beat the previous night's dinner in Ubud.

Upon arrival in the Jakarta airport, we collected our luggage in Terminal 2. Adam had remembered that Terminal 2 is the domestic terminal, and so we had to get to Terminal 1 for our Lufthansa flight to Singapore. We waited (and waited and waited) for a yellow interterminal bus, pausing once to see if a cabbie would take us. Adam asked a cab driver, who said, "Terminal 1!?" shook his head, and drove off. The bus arrived about one hour before our international flight was to depart. We went to Terminal 3, the budget terminal in Jakarta, and then (ever so slowly) to Terminal 1. As we approached Terminal 1, Adam asked the man seated next to him:

"Excuse me, do you know where Lufthansa departs?"

Reply: "Oh, that's in Terminal 2, the international terminal. This [Terminal 1] is all domestic."

Whoops. We continued our tour of the Jakarta airport, with visions of a missed flight and a wasted night (and day) in Jakarta melting like hallucinations on the bus windows.

We returned to Terminal 2 (not 50 meters from where we had waited for the bus) with about 40 minutes to spare. Thankfully, the efficient Germans allowed us to fly and we departed for a brief jaunt to Singapore.

...

Upon arrival to Singapore, we rushed a little and luckily caught the last train from the airport. The station agent saw that we didn't have time to buy tickets, and so waved us through, telling us to pay at our arrival station. At the arrival station, we explained that we had no card, and so the station agent opened the gate for us, asking for nothing. Welcome to Singapore.

We hailed a cab in the Bugis area, and asked to be taken to the Moon Hotel.

"What's the address?"

Well, the address was something Adam had planned to look up while at the Jakarta airport.

The cab driver asked three other cab drivers, none of whom knew the hotel, drove around several blocks, and let us go for a fare of $10.25 and a stern lecture on the importance of writing down hotel addresses.

We walked to two coffee shops, looking for Wifi in order to find the hotel address online. No luck. Adam walked into a backpackers' hostel and asked to use their Wifi. The receptionist, a smoking old man, indicated that the only internet was on a nearby computer, and was for guests only. (He also was unfamiliar with our hotel.) A few minutes' pleadng and offers of cash didn't persuade him to let Adam use the computer.

Downstairs, a friendly curry shop cashier pulled out his iPhone, looked it up, and wrote down the address. We hailed another cab, and ($8.00 later) arrived after midnight at the world's most efficiently laid out hotel room:

The bathroom was right behind the bed headboard. The bed took up the width of the bedroom. A desk pulled out from under the only table in the room. It was not a room for two people who are embarassed by each others' bodily functions.

And apparently in Singapore there are smaller hotel rooms.

We met up with Danny Hidalgo and his girlfriend Sonali the next day, and spent the next two nights in their much more spacious apartment. Story to be continued.

Ubud, Bali

We were in Ubud for Valentine's Day and Bethany's birthday. We arrived on the 14th in the early afternoon, and walked to a cafe down some creekside walking paths. (It should be noted that we stayed in Penestaran, on a hill about ten minutes walk from downtown Ubud.) We arrived at the cafe, which was like any other but featured southern Indian food, and sat next to the only other occupied table, at which two men were discussing real estate deals. On the walk to the cafe, we passed workers on a creekside construction site. Oh, and all around our villa people were working on some new housing construction. On the way back from lunch, Adam wished a shopkeeper good afternoon and was asked if he was looking to buy a house. No, he wasn't.

Our general impression is that Ubud is experiencing a housing boom ["obviamente"] as westerners and other rich types move to Ubud to find themselves or live in harmony with nature or undertake spiritual healing. A creekside sign we passed read (paraphrased only slightly) "Two-bedroom for sale. Perfect for large family or yoga studio." You might remember Ubud as the town in which Elizabeth Gilbert finds her man and her senses in Eat, Pray, Love. She meets and starts sleeping with a Brazilian diamond dealer [Nigerian Yahoo scammer was rejected from the manuscript as too upstanding and honest], and meeting traditional healers to take their potions and talk over her problems (i.e., she got divorced).

Basically, if you sell ragweed but could convincingly explain that it contained only pure locally-sourced organic ingredients that had properties that ancient shamans knew about but that the western medical cabal was only beginning to rediscover for its healing properties ... you might look into hanging a shingle out in Ubud.

Also, there were plenty of art galleries. Woodcarving, batik, and silversmithing are local specialties. In fairness to Ubud, there are other adventures like bike riding and whitewater rafting right outside of town that we could have enjoyed. Sadly, we only were in town two days.

We went to a fantastic Balinese dance performance on Tuesday night with the troupe Semara Ratih, then stopped for dinner at a warung filled with locals. We enjoyed the show very much, and the food was pretty good and plenty spicy. The taxi (Indo: taksi) driver back to our villa was very friendly and chatty. In all, a good beginning to Ubud.

On Wednesday, for Bethany's birthday, she decided that we should take a batik class. We walked to town and showed up a tad bit late, sweating and panting, but the class had already been filled. (Sidenote: batik.) We decided to reserve a spot in the next day's class, and sat on the step chatting with the instructor/resident artist.

As we sat chatting, a student from the class walked up to the artist and said, "They said you could help me draw a whale. I have a friend who's focusing his healing practice on whales, and so wanted to make him a whale to focus on." [She may have said, "is focuing on whales in his healing..." or "is focusing on whales in his healing practice..." ] Instead of replying, "Please rearrange and re-select the English words you have just spoken so as to remove the complete nonsense," the artist helpfully traced a whale outline.

We rehydrated on advocado juice (usually made with chocolate in a smoothie-like drink), soda water, and lemonade before setting off for the Monkey Forest. In the Monkey Forest are protected groups of ... monkeys!

There are also some great temples that are rather over-the-top in a style unique to Balinese Hinduism.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Ubud, past every craft gallery imaginable. The town does have some wonderful temple architecture.

However, the heat once again became difficult, as the breeze at street level died around noon. We got lucky in finding an upstairs restaurant with cooling breezes and very good pizza (and passable nasi campur and poor salad). It's Black Beach, near Jl. Raya Ubud.

We luckily had our own pool at the villa, which helped fight the heat.

Birthday dinner was pretty bad. We went to a nearby hotel's restaurant, and sat down (as the only customers) amid construction noise. Someone in the back was using a power sander. We asked the waitress if he might stop until the end of our dinner, though we fully understood that the evening is a cool time of the day and optimal for work. The staff conversed for a good few minutes, and the sanding stopped.

Two minutes later, drilling commenced. We finished our cocktails and asked them to wrap our food so we could leave. We took our food home. Bethany's food was passable; Adam's was memorably described as "grilled tofu in black salt sauce."

We spent the next day at our batik class. Bethany, seen below hard at work, painted a beautiful array of flowers. Adam provided evidence for the argument that artistic skill isn't hereditary, and that perhaps the schools should have more art classes beyond the sixth grade. It was a seascape, or something.

Finishing batik early, we drove to the Bali airport on Thursday afternoon to begin our reintroduction to rich country living.

Pemuteran, Bali

Back when I [Adam] was planning this trip, I looked for a way to escape the crowds of south Bali and go somewhere a little off-the-grid and a little off-the-beaten-path. In Bali, I narrowed the options between Amed, on the eastern shore, and Pemuteran, on the north shore. I knew they weren't close to the airport, but I didn't know just how far they were.

We met a driver at the Denpasar airport for a five-hour drive over windy mountain roads. Lonely Planet promised a three-to-four hour drive. Their author also did a very perfunctory survey of Pemuteran, giving recommendations for zero restaurants.

Our villa in Pemuteran was set back quite a way from the main road. The villa owner advertised it online as 700 meters from the house to the beach, and her instruction manual at the house read 900 meters. We decided that it was a full kilometer. We were the last left before the mountain, at the end of small community of houses, in which lived families, their dogs [anjing], their cats, and some chickens [ayam]. Oh, and cows. They farmed corn and coconuts, as far as well could tell.

So each morning (or noon, or evening), we ventured forth through a one-kilometer stretch of "hello!" "how are you?" "where are you going?" "where are you from?" from both children and parents. We replied in a mixture of English and Indonesian. Once we were followed by a small entourage of children, who all chorused "selamat jalan!" when we wished them goodbye. The exchanges grew less frequent as the days passed; the novelty of two white people from America always walking probably wore off. [Most people got up and down the road on motorcycles or scooters or bicycles. It may have seemed odd to them that the Americans always walked.]

The walk might have been pleasant if the humidity and heat were lower. We did enjoy arriving at our destination, and once took a restaurant owner's offer of a ride home.

The restaurants were all at the beach, far from our house. To satisfy some curiosity, here are some shots of nasi goreng [fried rice], nasi campur [mixed rice], and gado-gado ["mix-mix"]. Gado-gado is the picture that is in fact least mixed.

Yes, Indonesian food is delicious.

If we felt lazy, our housekeeper would prepare us dinner from a list of items, to be served on our porch with candlelight.

We were pampered by a staff of five: a housekeeper, a groundskeeper, the poolboy, the night security guard, and the supervisor. We mostly just interacted with our housekeeper, who made our breakfast and three of our five dinners. Her name is Iluh and she's a very good cook (better than the cooks in many of the hotel restaurants). We guess her age to be somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two, and she'll no doubt one day run a string of famous Balinese restaurants somewhere.

The other staff people we met only one or twice daily, upon awakening or on our walks. They all lived somewhere nearby on the road.

Here are some pictures of the villa. It's a two-bedroom, two-bath, but we only used half of it. One walks up a stone path with the pool on the right and the house entrance on the left, then turns left to enter the house. Breakfast and dinner were eaten on the porch near the koi pond. From the porch, downstairs, and upstairs, one can see over the pool and to the mountains behind. Over the course of the day, and as clouds came and went, the mountains turned multiple shades of green.

On Friday morning, Adam went running and stopped to pick up a price list from a dive operator out at the beach. The dive operation had been founded in 1991, run by an Australian who hatches and raises juvenile sea turtles and who works to revitalize damaged offshore reefs. (The entire town of Pemuteran had been founded only in the 1960s when the Indonesian government resettled small communities adversely affected by a volcano eruption from one side of the island to the northwestern tip.) After lunch, we both stopped by the shop and signed up for a Discover Scuba course for the next day. The staff person who signed us up was Amanda, a very friendly ex-pat Brit. She found that we were on a honeymoon and related how she and her husband married only shortly before they moved to Indonesia (with a stop in Cambodia) to start second careers as dive instructors.

So for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday we went scuba diving. It was fantastic; very much like swimming around one's own tropical fish aquarium. Our trips were led by Adrian, Amanda's husband who resembled Mick Jagger, and Amanda herself. We dove at Bio-Wreck and at Close Encounters (after an introductory shore dive), and spent time underwater meeting fish of difficult-to-imagine color combinations. Each turn around the coral (which has rehabilitated with the help of very low electrical current and sunk metal objects), you spotted a new fish and thought, "That's the most colorful/odd-looking/beautiful fish I've ever seen!" Your opinion then held until you spotted the next fish.

Unfortunately, we don't have an underwater camera. If we go get scuba-certified, we'll have to price them.

Living in quiet, rural Bali did leave us with a number of bug bites (and heat rash), but it was otherwise very enjoyable.

We did have to leave, unfortunately. About one dozen more coral gardens in the bay (and more out at Menjangan Island) will have to be explored another time.

We had arrived during a Hindu holiday during which families left colorful flags and offerings in front of their homes.

We left on Tuesday, a non-holiday, for the four-hour drive to Ubud (made longer by traffic). On the way out, we stopped for monkeys bathing in the ocean. Our driver, from Pemuteran, claimed it was only the second time he'd ever seen that.

We also stopped to try durian, the famously smelly Southeast Asian fruit. It tastes like a mix of onion and vanilla, with yellow flesh that is the consistency of yogurt. We probably won't try it again.

More Central Java

Conversation on Tuesday night:

B: "Maybe I should charge the camera battery."

A: "Yeah."

B: "It seems full. It's not good to charge it when it hasn't run all the way down."

A: "It'll be okay."

So on Wednesday we visited two of Indonesia's most important archeological sites, with a camera battery on (failed) life support.

We awoke at 3:55 AM, and got ready for our driver (booked on Tuesday through Rumah Guides, also recommended). That morning we learned the hour of the morning call to prayer next door, because it tolled at 4:15 AM as we waited in front of the villa for our driver.

Our driver Tony showed up and proceeded to speed us to the Borobudur site for the sunrise. (Our friend Katie had recommended it.) He was a very good driver, and quite fun:

"That's the cookie market ... [pause] ... I don't know why Indonesians get up at three AM to buy cookies."

"Indonesians get up at three usually ... [B: "When do they go to sleep?] .... That's a good question. Seven?"

We paid extra at a hotel adjacent to the Borobudur site to ascend the levels of the Buddhist temple early and watch the sun rise over the valley. The sun rose just to the right of Mount Merapi [Fire Mountain], an active volcano that exploded last in 2009.

We stood on the uppermost circular level surrounded by cross-hatched stupas, inside of which sat buddhas (some headless). In the valley below, cottony mist wrapped around dark blue fields and green hills.

We walked down each level of the temple in a clockwise manner, passing scenes that turned from the sublime to the material and then to the carnal (but nothing like the stone pornography of Konark). Our early admission at the hotel included a light breakfast at the hotel, where we learned the bahasa words for cat (kucing, who cried loudly) and cruel (bengis, when Adam disapproved of Bethany's idea to give the cat some cheese).

Oh, and remarkably little is known about Borobudur, except that it was built sometime from 650 AD to 750 AD, and that it was soon abandoned, perhaps because of yet another volcanic eruption nearby. The monument was damaged by volcanoes, earthquakes, and a bomb set off by opponents of Suharto, but rebuilt by UNESCO and the Indonesian government in the 1980s. The process of taking the million of stones apart and resetting them was detailed in a museum on the grounds.

We left for another nearby Buddhist temple and the Hindu temple Prambanam at about nine. En route, Tony explained that he learned most of his (very good) English through exposure to American culture and lots of American TV. He really likes American Idol because it's fun to see put-downs, especially of the deluded talentless. By comparison, Indonesian Idol judges are just too polite. He remarked that Jennifer Lopez is a good judge, which exceeded his expectations given her thin CV and limited time in the music industry relative to Paula Abdul. He has also seen Toddlers and Tiaras, but finds it disturbing and awful.

Tony's family is originally from Sulawesi by way of Papua, which makes him a victim of Indonesian women's prejudice in favor of light skin. (We found whitening cream in Plaza Indonesia, right next to the sunblock. It's unclear whether this preference is another Indian import.)

He laughed at some of the bahasa indonesia that Adam knew, as it's rather elaborate, stiff, and formal. We discussed subtleties in bahasa, such as the difference between "cuisine" (masakan) and "food" (makanan). He's an all-around good guy, and we're a little sad that he can't accompany us for the rest of the trip.

The Hindu temple had also suffered recent earthquake damage, and as a result was partially closed. We shared our visit with several school groups, and decided (because Adam is bengis) not to engage in the two dozen interview requests from children approaching us.

We managed to take one picture when leaving the Brahma temple...

... and then the camera died.

We walked around to some other temples, but most we being rebuilt or were in worse shape than Borobudur or Prambanam.

On Tony's recommendation, we tried an Indonesian restaurant/art space in hopes of delicious (and more spicy) food. For lunch, we communicated "medium spice" to the waiter, hoping for more peppers. Unfortunately, he updated his prior belief on the reasonable amount of white people spice downward, and a white person "medium" was not spicy at all. For dinner, we returned (it turned out to be very close to our villa) and asked for "very spicy" [sangat pedas] and were rewarded with very delicious food. Lesson: always try to judge your host's prior beliefs.

We left Jogja early on Thursday to fly to Bali and drive the five hours northwest from the airport.

We're now in Pemuteran, Bali, playing our roles as colonizers. The two of us are in a three-bedroom deluxe Dutch-owned villa attended by a staff of six. It's a little awkward. And awesome.

Jogja

Monday ended our sojourn in the sprawl of Jakarta. It is spread out, oh so spread out, and so walking around only got us a brief tour of our upscale neighborhood. We did what all decent upper-class Jakartans do on Sunday night, and went to the mall - Plaza Indonesia - for dinner. Walking there and to the food court, we passed a live outdoor concert at the Hard Rock Cafe.

And the next morning we took a short walk past the Obama Fan Club. As you'll recall, Jakarta is where the current president learned socialism, Marxism, fascism, communism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, dictatorship, defeatism, lefthandedness, Islam, Islamofascism, sharia law, hatred for America, and general Otherness. He lived here for a few years of elementary school; we didn't make the short trip to the nearby school that has a plaque in front of it commemorating the event.

We did, however, come across his fan club on Jakarta's backpackers' row, Jalan Jaksa.

On Julia's advice, we didn't linger in Jakarta. We flew on Monday to Jogjakarta (also spelled Yogyakarta, Djogjakarta, and variants) and began the phase of the trip in which we stay in private villas. The villa [Pondok Terra, recommended] had its own private pool and garden.

We did, however, manage to stay in a nice little neighborhood and thus passed families going about their business whenever we walked anywhere. We called out hello, and sometimes got to answer "Dari mana?" ("[You're] From where?"] (Dari New York di Amerika.)

On Tuesday, we walked to the kraton, or castle, of the local sultan. I should repeat that we walked, which was not a terribly bright idea. It was very, very hot, and the sidewalks are uneven and crowded. [When we first arrived in Indonesia, a lead article in the Jakarta Post covered a protest of pedestrians against motorcyclists using the sidewalks as traffic lanes. We haven't observed pedestrians being hit at all, but they're not terribly well-respected. Parked motorcycles and cars, along with warungs (food stalls) and idling locals seem to crowd most sidewalks, forcing us as pedestrians to carefully step into the motorcycle lane and walk around them.] A ride in a becak (bicycle rickshaw) also would have cost only $2.

The palace was full of interesting statues [Indo: arca] and small exhibits.

The sultan himself is still around, and still enjoys some political authority. He's Sri HB X, the "HB" standing for some very long name that I'm too lazy to look up. [Update: Hamengkubuwono.] Unfortunately, he doesn't currently have any sons, and there's presently a split in the royal family. (This split results in rival admissions entrances to the kraton, one for Rp. 5,000 where you see very little, and one for Rp. 15,000 where you can see much more.)

Though the Sultan of Yogyakarta employs thousands of locals inside the kraton for ceremonial roles (including some soldiers) and preserves important local Javanese culture, it's unclear how he makes his money. It can't be by admission fees alone. Also unclear is what authority he has. (Yeah, we didn't pay for a tour guide. Oh well. The Internet can teach us.) An article in the Thursday Jogjakarta paper said either that he hasn't yet begun to think about which presidential candidate he'll endorse in the 2014 election, or that he hasn't yet begun to think about whether he'll run for office (president?) in 2014. Adam's bahasa indonesia reading ability is not yet very good, even with the help of a dictionary.

We saw our first gamelon performance, which was "spectral" (Bethany's term).

Lunch was at another mall (in a chain restaurant called Es Teller) where Adam voiced his disappointment that Indonesian food hadn't been as spicy as he'd anticipated, then proceeded, not two minutes later, to bite into a little green pepper that made him cry and temporarily made half of his mouth numb. Do not challenge the pedas.

We took a becak ride home with a driver who managed to pull into large busy intersections and just wait while chaos and large motorized vehicles swarmed.

The next day we visited the temples [Indo: candi] of Borobudur and Prambanam, driven around by a guide that was a big fan of American Idol (and not a big fan of Indonesian Idol).

In closing, some cool Javanese statue, puppets and mask: