By PHIL JARRATT
IT’S possible there’s a black cloud tracking me at the moment, and it’s bringing more than rain into my orbit.
As if the very real threat of drowning (see last week’s LOB) wasn’t enough, things started to go slightly turd-coloured soon after crossing the Java Channel.
Despite the 4am start, I was in high spirits on a beautiful clear morning as our Garuda flight cut through East Java and descended into the lush green mountains of the Central Java plateau.
It had been almost 40 years since we last visited the cultural capital of Yogyakarta, ending a series of buying trips to the then-hippie haven.
At the time along Marlioboro Street you could buy just about anything either side of the law, but my innocent purchases were batik shirts, which you could mark up about 400 percent and stuff enough of them in your luggage to fund the next ticket.
But aside from that, it was fun to be there. The coffee houses and bars of Yogya were the crossroads of Europe and the East. You could meet anyone in a bar or on the street and strike up a friendship for life, or at least a companion for the night. It was a magical, exciting village/city.
So anyway, that’s gone, but there still exists a vibrant arts and media culture framed within a pleasant provincial environment and some of Java’s architectural masterpieces, which occasionally pop onto the radar in gaps in the usual ugly Indo urban sprawl.
Our mission was to go surfing at a remote bay on the south coast beloved of some of Noosa’s best longboarders, a kind of home away from home (‘kasih, Huesni), but I’d built in a Yogya day and night either end, so that we could re-acquaint ourselves with the old part of the new Yogya, and introduce ourselves, and long overdue, to the wonders of Borobodur.
Call it a Womens Weekly Discovery Tour, take the piss, I don’t mind. Worse will happen.
We checked into a cute boutique hotel mid-morning and headed straight for the Sultan’s Palace, where we hoped to hear the orchestra play in the kraton as it has every day since imperial times. But we were given bum times, so we strolled the grounds and the showrooms anyway, and saw mostly empty display cases or faded photos of unnamed royal personages.
As an exhibition, The House of Bottles could have given it a huge lesson. As it turned out, the Sultana family apparently had a monumental blue and split the palace property. Go through one turnstile and there’s nothing, go through another entrance on the other side and it’s heaven. Well, heaven can wait.
It started to rain and I started to ache. We checked out a few galleries on the way back to the hotel but I was starting to fade. I threw myself in the pool to straighten out, but half an hour later my leg had started to swell up like a pumpkin and I was shaking in a fever.
The root cause was a small abrasion on my shin bone, the result of colliding with a heavy object (log, rock, who knows) in a mud-brown torrent issuing from the Pererenan Rivermouth as I tried to cross it after torrential rains more than a week earlier. The wound had almost healed, but here it was creating havoc around my body, as only happens in the tropics.
Our driver to the surf (a long drive) was to pick us up at 7am, but at 5am, following a night of fever and little sleep, I realised I had to call the jam off. I’m no doctor (reminds me of a couple of funny old jokes) but I know from years of flesh wounds in remote parts of the tropics, that if a wound infects you can’t take it lightly. Bummed beyond belief, I pulled the pin on the surf trip and waited, shivering and sweating in the hotel room, to get better enough to fly.
To get any flight out that week, we had to upgrade to business class, which I gladly did, although as any frequent flyer will tell you, the only advantages of this on domestic flights are a couple of millimetres of leg room and the chance to get some of your money back by guzzling as much booze as you can in the airport lounge. Indonesian domestic lounges, being in an Islamic country, do not serve alcohol.
Now I mean no disrespect, and I do not want a fatwah, but the man sneaking past the full prayer room to the adjacent men’s toilet at approximately 5.30pm, 5.45pm and 6pm last Friday, bearing a package in a plastic bag and a bottle of red Fanta, was me, and my mission, as I sat on the dunny seat, was to replace the red Fanta with the somewhat similarly coloured goon bag Hatten Rose. Not my finest moment, nor a fine wine for that matter, but any port in a storm.
Despite the rose, and despite the Bintang I managed to wrest from the stewardess in flight, I arrived in Denpasar at midnight with a throbbing leg, a fever, a headache and a bad attitude. When the Garuda business class arrivals guy ushered us into a waiting lounge and took our baggage claims, I was delighted to wait with my aching leg up while he did the work.
I was not so delighted when we waited almost forever to be given some one else’s bag.
“This is not my bag,” I said, probably a little tetchily.
“It belongs to someone else, and he now has my bag.”
“Oh, he go home already. Everybody go home already. Only this bag left.”
If my bag didn’t have my heart meds and chargers in it, maybe I would have accepted the last bag standing concept and gone home with it. Who knew what treasures lay therein?
But I didn’t. I went into a room and started filling out forms as night turned into day, and everything in my body hurt a little more.
