Last Monday morning, after racing between the different terminals at Kuala Lumpur airport, I got back to Indonesia after a few days in Goa, India for my friend’s wedding. While the wedding was great fun, I learned that Indian weddings are spectacles for all five senses. I couldn’t do it justice here with a written blog post, even with photos.
Back at work, my colleagues asked me to take one more work trip inside of Indonesia to East Java and Sulawesi Island. Our Arabica coffee business has five units in Indonesia, and those are the final two I had not visited.
I planned a week and a half long trip, with weekend stopovers in Yogyakarta and Bali, the last two locations at the top of my places to visit list for Indonesia. The capital of East Java is Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city. I did not know much about Surabaya, but I was pleasantly surprised. From the little time I spent in the city I perceived a large, modern city, with nice public areas and some fine old buildings. My work in Surabaya went well. I only wish I had more time to go around the city and visit some of the natural sites outside of the city, including Bromo volcano.
Yogyakarta (known as “Jogja” in Indonesia) is an old city on the southern side of Java. The sultan of Jogja is revered so much that the province is an autonomous zone with the sultan retaining much political power. The city, like Bandung, is known for art and culture. In addition, Jogja and surrounds have some of the best-preserved Hindu and Buddhist temples and complexes in all of Indonesia. These were the main draw for me to the area.
The temples are more than 1,000 years old. I’m sure they have gone through extensive restoration. At Prambanan, the Hindu temples site, every stone panel in the walls is etched and carved with scenes from Hindu epic tales. From afar the temples look big, dark, and imposing. Almost like downed alien spaceship necro-temples. However, when you get close, they are beautiful, and you can see all the details and design elements of the impressive structures. Inside the largest of the temples was a statue of a four-headed Brahma.
While Prambanan is a series of temples spread out and existing in harmony with each other, each venerating a different god, Borobudur is one giant temple dedicated to The Buddha. It is built on a hill, so you walk up through successive levels of walls and gates before you reach the top, wilt bell shaped domes each housing a different sitting Buddha statue. It’s more like a Mayan pyramid than a freestanding Asian temple. The Buddha is everywhere at Borobudur. If a stone panel is etched, it’s with a scene from his life. There are statues of the Buddha all over the place. Some are decapitated; some with his head still on his shoulders.
There is a lot of affinity for Hinduism and Buddhism in Judeo-Christian societies. The sentiment is not lost on me at all. When I was first indoctrinated in the ways of Judaism, even as a particularly stupid first grader (for many years I thought that the man on the front of the Quaker Oatmeal container was a picture of God), there was never a time when I thought, ‘Wow, this all makes so much sense.’ I always doubted this omnipotent God in the sky thing. This guy (sorry, being or “Lord”) controls everything, yet is judging our actions. Makes sense. But I can still do whatever I want, and if my caffeine-deprived father gets grouchy enough on Yom Kippur, God will forgive me. Until next year, at least. Also, how does God know what I’m thinking or saying if he doesn’t speak English and we must talk to him in Hebrew?
Christianity is even more asinine with the trinity and the son being the same person as the father. I once ate a pickle at a Jewish deli and asked my Catholic friend if I was eating Jesus. She really didn’t like that. The compounding layers of contradiction and logical fallacies are astonishing in their scope, and I wish I knew how these religions have managed to steep so many people in willful ignorance. In Hinduism, there are three gods, and they work in balance with each other. There’s a creator, a sustainer, and a destroyer. The destroyer doesn’t seem so malevolent to me though. If there are three gods and they work in conjunction, can they just be thought of as the same God? Since they create, sustain, and destroy, do they do anything at all? Are they everything and nothing all at once? Are they just a metaphor for the universe? It is so much more fluid and understandable and rational. Buddhism is often explained as more of a philosophy of life than a religion and preaches moderation and the path to enlightenment. At its most superficial level there is nothing supernatural about it at all. The man in the funny hat on the Quaker Oatmeal container or the real man who once took a nap under a nice tree? I’ll take The Buddha.
The Yogyakarta airport is a bit labyrinthine and too big for its clothes. After I wound through the check-in and security areas I emerged into the terminal. It’s just one big waiting room that doubles as a food court. The place was packed and loud. It had been raining all day, and many flights were delayed. All the seats were occupied by people or bags. Every announcement was made in Indonesian, Javanese, and in English. It was cacophony.
I went into the lounge at the far side of the terminal. The Borobudur Lounge. The only resemblance to actual Borobudur was the centuries of wear and tear. The pleather chairs were torn. The cloth sofas were stained. There was no where to sit. Half of the lounge was a smoking area anyway. Used plates, silverware, and glasses were piled up on every available surface. The food was long gone. Many people were watching videos on their phones without headphones, which infuriates me.
I managed to find an open seat and I sat down. It was right in the flight path of the AC and it was too cold to sit there. Must be why the seat was empty in the first place. Underneath the AC there was a seat with a backpack on it, so I asked the man in the seat next to it if it was his backpack and he moved it. That seat wasn’t suitable either. The AC periodically dropped big fat droplets of water on my head.
Like most flights, mine was delayed. There was a large contingent of Caucasian people milling about and continuously checking the flight board. They were probably on the delayed flight to Bali. The lounge had big windows looking out at the tarmac. Yogyakarta airport has no jetways. All the planes park right in front of the terminal and passengers just walk to and from the planes. It was dark out and pouring rain. The airport workers were handing passengers airport umbrellas for the walk to and from the airplanes. During my time in Indonesia, I’ve noticed a tendency for Indonesians to stretch flight baggage allowances. One bag of seven kilograms or less often turns into two bags of about 10 kilograms, and one carry-on and a personal item often becomes four bags of varying sizes. Add the passengers invariably watching something on their cell phone in one hand and trying to hold the umbrella in the other, and watching these poor windswept passengers trying to make it to their planes was quite entertaining.
Eventually the Bali flight was called and the anxious Caucasians all stampeded the door. I was left in an emptier lounge. Their dirty plates were strewn all about the place, but it was quieter, except for the annoying program on the television set. My flight was called about 30 minutes late and it was my turn to don the big umbrella, put my head down, and charge from the gate to the plane.
The flight was empty. In my row of six I was the only passenger. As we took off we zipped by a row of Boeing 737 MAX 8’s looking very sad in the dark rain, all grounded due to safety concerns. The ascent was very bumpy. The entire experience of departing from the Yogyakarta airport seemed to me what it would be like to have to flee a country going through a bout of unrest and violence. The airport would be crowded and hard to navigate. Services and amenities would be sparse. There would be a lot of waiting and some other very agitated passengers. Finally, you will have to waltz out on to the tarmac with big planes off to your left and your right shining their lights into your eyes and their engines blasting loudly. Your flight departs in the darkness with very few other passengers and there will be turbulence. The rain is a necessary element. Everything is more dramatic in the rain.
Sulawesi is an hour ahead of Java, so it was close to midnight when we landed. The Makassar airport is larger than Yogyakarta’s so we deplaned via a jetway directly into the terminal. Despite the modern amenity of the jetway everything felt very surreal. I was on Sulawesi Island. It is literally about as far as you can get on Earth from Cortlandt Manor, NY. The only person I’ve ever known who wanted to go to Sulawesi was Christopher Columbus, and he couldn’t even find the place. I knew nothing else about Sulawesi. Is there electricity? Is the sky blue; the clouds white? Are the natives cannibals?
Turns out, Makassar is a pretty normal place. It’s a city with an airport, nice people, roads and highways, electricity, running water, and mediocre business hotels. Just like the rest of Indonesia, they eat chicken, fish, noodles, and rice, all slathered in spicy sambal (chili pepper) sauce. Sulawesi Island is shaped like an inkblot getting blown away by the wind. Makassar is at the southern edge of the western “leg” of the island. However, the good coffee is grown in the highlands, closer to central Sulawesi. On Tuesday I would be driving up the western “leg” of Sulawesi to our up-island buying and processing stations.
Our drive on Tuesday morning was without incident. We drove for six hours on paved roads. To our right were rice paddies, corn fields, and small craggy mountains covered in green trees and bamboo groves. On the left was the ocean. Specifically, the Java Sea and the Makassar Strait between Sulawesi and Kalimantan (what Indonesia calls the island of Borneo). We stopped for coffee at a restaurant overlooking the blue waters.
Our first stop was Polewali, alongside the sea. All around Polewali are the beginning of the mountains. Polewali was selected as the site for our coffee wet mill for one reason and one reason only: the blinding sun. Out back behind the mill we have a large football field sized patio. The ground is lime white and blinds you with sun rays. This is perfect for drying wet coffee beans and locking in the flavor that joe guzzlers love all around the world. From Polewali, our buying station, in Sumarorong, is two hours up into the mountains.
From the wet mill we began to drive up, switching back and forth as we got closer and closer to the top of the hills. First, I saw cocoa trees along the side of the road, then trees filled with duku fruits and ripe rambutans. All of the roadside stalls were selling bunches of rambutan and buckets of duku. Many of them had durian also and the rank smell permeated the car as we passed each fruit stall. Higher up, closer to the top of the mountain the stalls shifted from fruits to vegetables. There was squash, chayote, some avocadoes, and maybe mangosteens. I was not seeing as many fruit trees. After an hour of driving up we reached the crest. Not only could you see the mountains of central Sulawesi, but you could also see the sea, only 20 km to the south.
From the top, we started driving down into the valley below. There was a river that we crossed over a few times on one lane-bridges. The river was diverted at many points to flood terraced rice paddies. Many of the homes on along the side of the road and up in the hills were extraordinary examples of traditional Sulawesi craftsmanship. Rectangular wooden homes are stilted, and a long, concave roof, which looks like the hull of a ship, is perched on top. The roof comes to a point at either end, and these points are sometimes so far out from the walls of the house that they need their own supports. These supports often have carvings of bulls or other creatures. I later learned that some of these are not houses, but are instead tombs for the remains of entire families.
We descended further into the valley and the paved road turned to dirt. Then we started driving up again. After two hours we arrived in Sumarorong. Our buying station is cliffside with a beautiful view of the valley, river, and rice paddies. Coffee suppliers come from hours away to sell us coffee here at the buying station. When I make these visits, I observe the procedures and processes of the staff and ask them questions about every facet of their work. The goals is to design and implement systems that make their job easier and enhance the information and data that the company is capturing.
I find it fascinating that two people, from opposite sides of Earth, who don’t even speak the same language, can work together for the same goals. Sometimes when I visit these sites my co-workers treat me like a dignitary. On Wednesday on the workers had his wife prepare a big fish lunch for us at his house. It was good, but they only did it because I was visiting. Their house looks over rice paddies and they have rigged up this string and bamboo system that clatters bamboo poles together out in the field when someone pulls on the string. This scares birds away. While I appreciate the hospitality and the respect, it’s truly them that I admire. They face a lot of adversity, but they have mastered their aspect of the company’s operations, and I am there to learn from them.
Right now it’s mid-day on Friday, which is prayer time for Muslims. On Fridays all of my co-workers go to the mosque and I stay at the warehouse and blog about them going to the mosque on Fridays. If I was back at the rice paddies up-island I’d probably be sitting on my co-worker’s terrace conducting my own symphony with the string and bamboo noise makers.
Tomorrow I travel to Bali for a quick visit to an island I’ve heard so many wonderful things about. I’ll be back at work in Medan on Monday, before a final trip to Jakarta on Wednesday, and the long flights back to the Americas on Friday and Saturday. On Monday morning I’ll be heading for Nicaragua to start my next project there. I will be in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Honduras until the end of June.