Indonesia: For Whom the Beer Froths and other musings

By Daniel Pope

Indonesia is an exotic and exciting place to live. This an entertaining collection of experiences and observations from an Englishman who lived, loved, and drank beer, quite a lot of it, in the country for twenty years. Most of the articles first appeared in a local English-language magazine, but this collection contains the ‘ones that got away’ and weren’t published because the editor wished to avoid ruining the readers’ breakfast, upsetting the advertisers, or being trolled by animal lovers. Everything that happened in these stories is true. Events have been given a satirical twist whenever possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Pope
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463165959

Daniel Pope

Daniel Pope was born in Oxford, UK, and had a variety of jobs before becoming a drop-out at the age of thirty. He moved to southeast Asia and began earning his living through the English Language - writing, copy editing, translating and teaching. That was also the time that he started living.

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Preface

Indonesia is an exotic and exciting place to live. This is a collection of experiences and observations from an Englishman who lived, loved, and drank beer, quite a lot of it, in the country for twenty years. Most of the articles first appeared in a local English-language magazine, but this collection contains the ‘ones that got away’ and weren’t published because the editor wished to avoid ruining the readers’ breakfasts, upsetting the advertisers, or being trolled by animal lovers. Everything that happened in these stories is true. Events have been given a satirical twist whenever possible.

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The Long Way Home

It began with a motorcycle accident. I lost control of my rented bike while rounding a cliff-top bend and landed in the roadside gravel, just short of a steep drop into the sea. That near miss was merely a portent of coming catastrophes.

The coastal roads of Indonesia’s Bintan Island, lesser known neighbour of Batam, that sinful playground for Singaporean weekenders, were deserted and shouldn’t have posed a problem for even the most unskilled of riders. I put my accident down to my being unaccustomed to carrying heavy baggage on the back of a bike. I also discovered how nastily gravel can shred a bare knee.

It was because of that shredded knee that next day I was hobbling onto a ferry operated by state-owned shipping firm Pelni for the three-day journey back to Jakarta, where I worked as an English Language instructor.

My occupation should indicate why I wasn’t flying. Back in the mid-1990s, in the days before budget airlines flew to other cities and occasionally into the sea or mountainsides, ships were the cheapest form of inter-island transportation. And teaching didn’t pay much. Especially not to those new to the game. This also explains why I was travelling economy class.

The prospect of spending three days on a narrow bunk in the innards of a Pelni ferry, crammed together with a crowd of staring fellow passengers, is bleak at the best of times. While I was luckier than those spreading out their blankets in cramped corridors or stairways, I was constantly swatting flies away from my festering knee and crushing cockroaches underfoot. Also, my legs were not as sound against the lurching of the deck as I had supposed. I had soon had enough, and I abandoned ship at Batam, a mere three hours later, just as the gangplank was being hauled in.

I decided to take the more comfortable overland route, which meant first getting to Sumatra via a mere nine-hour journey on a small air-conditioned ferry. Limping off that boat, I caught a touch of the sun. Being a newcomer to the tropics, I had never experienced such scorching sunlight. The complete absence of shaded shelter was unbearable and caused me to panic. Being British, I should have waited patiently in the queue, which was more of a shoving mob, to board one of the minibuses that had arrived to pick us up. To say that I jumped the queue would be incorrect. In my desperation, I obliterated it, leaving people to pick up themselves and their strewn belongings.

Roads to the city of Pekanbaru, capital of Riau province, were not the best in Indonesia in those days. The bus ride was even choppier than the seagoing vessels I’d been on. As our convoy lurched, swayed and bucked onward, I perspired heavily and clung to the seat in front of me.

Then I encountered some good fortune. I say this because it was the bus ahead that tipped over onto its side, not ours. No such luck for the boy standing in the dust next to the wreckage with blood dripping off him, or the bloodied girl clambering from a shattered window, or the injured soldier helping a distraught old woman to her feet. But we didn’t stop. We extended no assistance. Our bus just lurched on by. The fallen on this trail were left where they dropped.

A stopover in Pekanbaru seemed sensible and The Lonely Planet Indonesia guidebook directed me to a backpacker hotel that promised comfort, cheer and cold beer. To get there, I boarded a public minivan. The vehicle was cramped and crowded but the passengers were enormously helpful, bundling my bags on for me, squeezing themselves further back to give me room, and providing conflicting but altogether useful directions to the hotel.

I found it heart-warming that people could be so helpful to a stranger. I thanked them heartily, shaking a clutch of proffered hands as I reached my stop, hopping from the vehicle with my bags. It seemed appropriate to wave as the vehicle sped off. Such splendid people. It took me a few seconds to discover that I had been waving goodbye to my wallet.

After spending an hour on a public phone cancelling credit cards, reporting a stolen ID, and getting a friend to wire me money (I had some cash stashed separately, but not enough to get me back), I finally reached the hotel selling the cold beer. Time to relax.

Among the assortment of backpackers and skinflint holiday-makers, invariably Dutch, I got talking to a German who was riding his motorbike across Sumatra. Just why he was doing this, I never did find out, but he had some fascinating tales. During the night, for reasons unknown, he fell through my door as I slept, trod on my scabbing knee, apologised for intruding, and staggered out again. I didn’t really hear his apology. I was distracted by the agony of all that healing undone by the dirt-encrusted sole of a German motorcycle boot.

My next night’s sleep was aboard a bus heading for Jakarta, a 36-hour journey. Reclining in my seat, with the lights out, I began to drift off to the gentle sound of crunching gear changes. But this was not a regular bus. This was an ‘executive’ one. And as such, it had certain dues. Unpaid in this case. Had I known that the bus company had not paid the thugs who ruled the territory we were passing through, and consequently that our safe passage could not be guaranteed, I would not have been so relaxed.

The abrupt sight of an asteroid shooting just inches past by my left ear was accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and screeching brakes as the driver halted the bus, then thought better of it and proceeded to the next village. There was a hole where the window had been and a bloodied empty seat where the unlucky passenger had been sitting. A brick chucked at a speeding bus will do that. We spent two hours at the village police station.

I reached Jakarta without further incident. Perhaps my sudden return to prayer had helped. I was a week late back to work from my Bintan holiday. I soon had trouble remembering the actual holiday but not the homeward journey. My injured knee began to heal nicely, though for many weeks I had to contend with a scab resembling an elephant’s kneecap.

And what did I learn from this succession of mishaps and near misses? Nothing. As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t put a foot wrong. I made it through those slings and arrows. And I’d still recommend travelling around Indonesia on a budget. You just have to learn how to rough it and be lucky. Seriously. (October 7, 2013).

Trains, Planes and Other Perils

As a lifelong train enthusiast, I felt a great sense of achievement upon making the journey across Java by all three classes of train operated by Indonesia’s state-owned railway company, PT Kereta Api.

I commenced the trip back in 1997 at the end of a holiday in Bali, with a short ferry ride across the Strait of Bali to the port town of Banyuwangi on the easternmost end of Java. From there I took the executive class train, with its airliner-style seating and plastic-tray meal service, to the East Java capital of Surabaya. Next, onward to Yogyakarta by economy class, with its wooden benches and bustling make-shift food stalls; and finally to Jakarta by business class, on cushioned seats cooled by oscillating wall fans.

The journey, lasting two days with a stopover in Yogyakarta, was pleasantly uneventful, with lots of time for reading and gazing out at rice fields. But for me, at that time, the paramount benefit was that trains don’t take off and land.

During the economy-class leg of the journey, it was always a surprise to be moving at all, since much of the time was spent stopped in sidings to allow higher priority classes of trains to overtake us. Economy class carriages in those days were bursting at the seams with activity. They were like mobile markets, with clamorous vendors streaming up and down the aisles, selling snacks and drinks and souvenirs.

Passengers sat everywhere, as did their luggage, consisting mostly of stacks of tied-up cardboard boxes and rolled-up matting. Animals abounded too, especially in my carriage. Most notably a goat, which teetered and tottered in the aisle, all the while looking cranky. Practically everybody chain-smoked, even the goat, a problem alleviated by all the windows being wide open to the clattering of the wheels.

I could have avoided this discomfort by flying, railway enthusiasm aside. However, there was a critical reason why I had chosen to go by train, or more precisely to not go by air. That was my upset stomach.

In India it’s called Delhi Belly, so here it must be Bali Belly. All expatriates, unless they eat exclusively in hygienic hotel restaurants, get stricken with it. I first got it from a plate of fried rice bought from a street vendor in Jakarta. I was new to the tropics and easy prey for the abundance of unfamiliar and thriving bacteria. For the next three days I couldn’t stray further than a thirty-second sprint away from a lavatory and for several months afterward the very smell of fried rice was traumatic.

The next time a tummy bug hit me, I was in a taxiing Garuda Indonesia aeroplane at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. We were about to take off for Singapore, where I went every two months simply to fly straight back to renew my Indonesian tourist visa-on-arrival. We were strapped into our seats, fully secured for take-off, the aircraft queuing for the runway. This was not the ideal time for an onslaught of bowel trouble.

It came like a hammer blow. Within moments I was in an agony of constriction. I began to grimace, my white-knuckled fingers clawing the ends of the armrests. I broke into a cold sweat, stiffened, prayed to God, writhed, breathed deeply like a woman in labour. I focused insanely on letting nothing evacuate my body. Anyone watching would probably have interpreted my action as an intense fear of flying rather than an intense fear of crapping.

So, here was the dilemma. I could unbuckle and dash down the aisle for the toilet, causing consternation inside the plane, an aborted take-off, and 380 passengers to be very pissed off with me. Or maybe I could hold on till actual take-off before making the dash. Maybe then we’d just continue on after the cabin crew had wrestled me out of the toilet and handcuffed me to my seat. Just what were the regulations? Another option was to just stay strapped in until the inevitable happened and I soiled myself. Hopefully it wouldn’t sound like a bomb ripping through the fuselage, so severe was my bottling-up.

A decision was needed quickly as I squirmed and clutched my seat cushion for dear life. I decided that in no way could I just let my insides surrender. Aside from having no change of clothing for the streets of Singapore, a city