Feel like I'm flying, I'm dying to say / "Want you forever and easy"

Time to eat my words.

A few weeks back I posted a comment on Lance Wiggs’ blog.

Lance had written some very positive words about Air New Zealand in the post:

A selection of reasons why Air New Zealand won the Airline of the Year in the Air Transport World magazine awards. Most of these refer to posts made here over the past three years, and the overarching reason is simply that Air New Zealand is a very well run business.

They have kept their fares low, and use a very simple fare structure. That means reducing some food services, but the lollies remain and, it seems, always will.

They have steadily got the details right – from the economy seats, to the check-in and seat back entertainment. The business class seats still rate, for me, as the best around, offering so much more than the competition.

(much more at the link..very much worth a read, and mostly he’s very right)

I commented, a little snarkily:

I’m flying ANZ for the first time in 7 years, this next week, from HK to NZ and I’m rather keen to see how they match up. To be honest the last time I flew them (from NZ to Melbourne), I swore I’d not ever fly them again. The plane was over-crowded, dirty, the inflight entertainment system was almost non-existent and the service utterly shocking.

In the interim I’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of kms with all sorts of airlines..some great (Sing Air with their usb ports and laptop power on all seats, Qatar, Air France), many average, and some awful (Malaysian comes to mind straight off, but nothing matches Viva Macau).

I’m looking forward to being very pleasantly surprised.

And I was.

There is some story, albeit brief, to both my original comment and my eating of words. Read on if you care, or skip to the last line if you’d rather avoid the verbosity.

I spend a lot of time travelling. I both enjoy it and its a part of my various jobs. From 1995 through to 2002 I went to Australia on business about 40 times, on either Air New Zealand, and Qantas, and I found myself flying to Europe and the US about a dozen times over the same time. I like flying and I like getting there in a good state, both rested and in a good mood. I like to arrive in a town, check into wherever I’m supposed to be staying, and head out. Mostly the airline is the reason why that is or is not possible.

I was pretty happy with our national airline up to about 1999. They got me there in one piece, the service came with a smile, and onboard they had pretty adequate food, entertainment and cabins. Then, that year, it all started of go wrong. It was fairly clearly linked to the Ansett fiasco (and yes, the Australians do have reason to be grumpy, however defensive New Zealanders were) as the airline went to pieces. I last flew Air New Zealand to Melbourne in early 2002. The plane was, without more than a cursory sorry, very late leaving, it was crowded, the food was almost inedible and the toilets looked like they’d not been cleaned for god knows how long. And worse, the in-cabin crew were unsmiling and repeatedly refused to respond to the bell-calls coming from me and other frustrated passengers.

I got off after a return flight that was little better and swore I’d never fly my national airline again. I’m not a patriotic soul and won’t support something simply because we share an accent.

Jump forward seven years, and I’ve flown countless miles on countless airlines in the interim. Some as I said in the comment, were brilliant. Qatar do everything right (apart from Doha airport, that is. It’s a dog. As is their awful habit of wandering through departure lounges randomly weighting carry-on like some sort of 7kg fascists), and Air France too are hard to fault. Singapore Air is thoroughly predictable: when times are good they tend to be rude and offhand; when times are tough, they get a rocket from management and re-learn the art of the smile, only to lose it again as the bottom line begins to improve. However, they have, without question, the best in flight entertainment system bar none.

I’ve done the awful (all Indonesian Airlines, Viva Macau, who use duct tape to hold together their loos, and the always awful Malaysian who simply exude rudeness in a way that, unlike the uber-cheap Indo bucket carriers, who you can mostly excuse as the Jakarta dollybirds (excuse sexism: sorry) in the cabins are paid a pittance, have to deal with 150 people physically pushing them out of the way as soon as the plane hits the runway, and the overwhelmingly bad survival odds each time they take off, they have absolutely no excuse for) and the pleasantly functional (Air Asia, who are really very good).

We’d wanted to fly Thai from BKK to AKL this time but the day I went to book the flight the price had doubled.

So Brigid spent some time online and we worked out that for less than the new Thai price we could get an Air Asia ticket to Hong Kong and spend a couple of days there (which allowed for some business in both directions) before taking the leap back onto Air NZ.

The word was they’d improved.

I’m always wary of the word.

HK, though, was reliably wonderful aside from the hotel putting us next door to a 24 hour bus stop wherein we discovered that all buses in HK have squeaky brakes, which meant when we sat down on NZ080 we effectively hadn’t slept for two days.

Grumpy.

We sat in our seats (63D & E if anyone cares) and asked the steward if they had eyepads as sleep was a necessity and usually highly unlikely on a full, as it was, 777. Of course, he said and returned with not only the afore requested pads but earplugs (these are both supplied as standard kit to every passenger on many airlines so no extra points for that aside from the big smile that went with it), but also with business class headsets (extra points earned) and the offer of a glass each of French champagne from the front of the plane (extra points being ladled on now). Yes.

He returned and said “here you go, Mr. Grigg”. Bemused, the woman in 63F asked if we’d just got married or something. We returned the bemusement.

After we took off another member of the cabin staff came past and stopped to ask us …just us … if all was fine. Uh, yes. Fine.

Would we like some more wine? Uh, yes? (no-one else was asked).

A few minutes later a woman called Ruth came to us (and I paraphrase, so I’m sorry Ruth ..my memory is not that good). I’m the crew manager. Is all ok? Yes. I bet you’re wondering why all the attention. Yes. Its because of a comment on a blog and a tweet. Uhh. We were contacted by three different people in the organisation and told you were about to fly with the airline and to look after you. Uhhh. We just want to say thank you for giving us another go and welcome back.

Nice.

Of course it may’ve been strategically better not to say anything to us and just to ramp up the service more subtlely, but as a way of making a grumpy ex-customer feel welcome and more than a little special, it worked some wonders. We glowed and we settled rather comfortably into our quite comfortable seats, as we were bought our meals of choice before the rest of the cabin. So, yep, it worked.

And nothing I’m saying here of course has anything to do with that pampering.

Ok, it has a little to do with it.

But, the simple fact is that, as above, Lance was very right. Mostly.

But, to the important stuff.

Yes, I’ve come around.

The seats (most importantly) were as comfortable as any I’ve had anywhere in recent years with far more leg room than the ever tightening squeeze of Singapore Air or many others. The crew lacked the sternness of years past as still found on all American carriers. They smiled and seemed to mean it, unlike the plastic of the rulebook bound SingAir or the simple lack of anything resembling a smile on Qantas or Malaysian (where the staff have this unfortunate habit of talking about non-Malay passengers in negative terms in Bahasa Malay (uhh…I speak it)).

And there was no call to pray to Mecca as there is every half hour or so, as you crave a beer on the bland airline of Brunei as you fly into the even blander state of Brunei.

The food was rather good, the wine was predictably wonderful, the movies were just fine (I liked the one about Winston Churchill even if it was factually random in a very HBO way) and it was a very pleasant flight. Without reservation.

No, make that a really bloody good flight. It worked. I’m happily sold and, all things as they should be, will probably make the BKK-HK-NZ route the default route when re-nesting, using Air New Zealand. Is that humble pie enough? Any chance of an upgrade when we fly back to HK? How about a radio show?

Ok two more major points winners:

The way that the airline tells you its fine to watch the movie from the moment they shut the doors is a huge winner. None of this ridiculous no headphones until cruising height drivel. Seriously, it’s 2010 and we’ve paid for in-flight entertainment. Thank you. Points.

And the fact that they tell you you can turn your cellphone on when the wheels hit the tarmac. The whole danger from cellphones thing on aircraft has long since been disproved and indeed large parts of the planet seem to have no issue with them in flight, and, whilst the very last thing I want, especially in Asia where the so-called handphones are used at an obsessive level and most folks carry two or more Blackberries or HTCs which are both used at the same time without break, is the endless bleeping of incoming texts, or loud conversation, for 11 hours, a little reality injected helps. Points.

I do feel the need to take issue with Lance’s claim to the Air New Zealand website. It’s one place they get a C. Singapore Air, at the higher level, and Air Asia, at the budget level, do it much better as do many others. Having booked via the Air NZ Hong Kong Kong website, it was next to useless when I tried to get information, or look at the possibility of changing a ticket.

And the airpoints. I get them on my credit card and they’re essentially useless, expiring before you get the chance to use them for anything worthwhile. Air NZ’s loyalty points system seems at best half-baked, but to be fair that comes in a time when most airlines seem to be rather desperate to ramp them back (Malaysian’s Enrich site has effectively, and dishonestly, been offline for redemption purposes for a year or so, citing some vague short-term issue).

So, yeah, Air New Zealand are quite good.

You said the things you did in the past / Were all because you're living too fast

The question I found myself asking over and over again this week in Singapore is “Where all the tourists?”. The question, of course, has an obvious answer, but still, in a place that is normally swarming with Ockers and Swedes in stubbies and Nikons, it was a tad disconcerting.

We could’ve swung a Moray Eel around at the normally overflowing East Coast Seafood and not hit a single Swede or elderly British couple (fondly remembering empires lost).

Bali has had a fairly substantial downturn in tourist numbers too, regardless of the ‘official’ figures you read. One only has to look in the restaurants, wander the streets, or look at the beaches to know that something ain’t right. But, unlike Singapore, Bali has a safety net, that being the always dependable Australian budget tourists. When all else fails (and Bali has been trying to move itself a little more upmarket in the last couple of years, with some success, hence the thousands of villas and the collapse in infrastructure in the new villa areas), it can always turn to the package tourists from the working class ‘burbs of Perth and Melbourne to swamp the island in their search for Bintang T-shirts and “platting of hair”, god help us all. And if you check the uglier side of paradise, primarily the hellholes of Tuban and Kuta, there are increasing swarms in the DVD shops and the Oz Steak Bars.

So Bali gets that…that and the niche tourists, like the not insubstantial pink tourist market and the European trust fund babies who come every year to add to the traffic mayhem.

Singapore on the other hand has really painted itself into something of a corner. It’s far too expensive for the low-end tourists from Geelong or Blackpool, and rather unwelcoming to the gay, and the wild and free Euro babies.

But for all that I rather like it. That is, I like it rather more than I used to like it. Sure it hasn’t put behind it all the things that have always driven me rather crazy about the place…the rules, the odd design overkill, the rules, the excessive orderliness, and the rules.. are all still scarily evident. But somehow it seems to have developed the beginnings of a soul, an edge, or at least it’s managed to pull that edge back to just underneath the politically ordained veneer that has stifled it for the best part of three decades. There are those who say it’s always been there, and maybe it’s just me, but either way, I’m happy to have finally made its acquaintance.

Rule number one in every Asian city is to sidestep or ignore the guides, online or in print. This rule just about translates worldwide but, from experience, is most especially relevant anywhere in Asia. There are, for example, some pretty worthy online guides to any experience you’d want to have in London, NYC or Sydney. Not so in Asia, where local knowledge or informed exploration are your only choices (perhaps excluding Bali where the established guide books are perhaps your best chance of avoiding the inevitable overcharging and scams that face a novice here, and there are really no reliable online guides).

Singapore in particular is a place where avoiding the restaurant and bar guides, tearing up Time Out, and dumping the Lonely Planet are really compulsory if you have designs on doing anything outside the square or seeing the something that isn’t ordained as the accepted tourist experience.

Our only foray into Time Out’s recommendations was a trip to Divine, the bar in Parkview, a building that, in a very Singaporean way, apes Deco to excess, but thoroughly misses the point and the essence of what they are doing. It ain’t the Chrysler Building as much as it tries.

In the same way its always worth taking a rain check on the gruesome swilling tourist / expat tack / sleaze along the river at Clarke Quay, Boat Quay and Robertson Quay.

Much more satisfying and, for want of a better, less overused word, sophisticated, are the groovy little bars found around the southern and eastern ends of Chinatown, in the maze of little streets full of intriguing design bureaus, bookshops, cafes, restaurants, boutique hotels, and, yes, bars.

Or the new, lets pass on the banana leafs and mass market slop please (like the awful Mutha’s in Racecourse Rd), cuisine orientated Indian eateries around Little India.

We always start our arrival into Singapore with a fight with the hotel. It’s a tradition. Hotel check-in staff are, almost without exception, rude, inflexibly rule-bound, and unhelpful. Service is little more than an early chapter in the corporate rule book they read and then forgot (I have to be fair, The M Hotel is been a happy exception….they even sent a girl to my room at 1am one night…Are you Mr. Rao said the smallish Indian lass. No, said I rather sleepily. She looked relieved when I shut the door, but I guess she still needed to track down the aforesaid Mr. Rao for the rendezvous. At The Meridian on Orchard (a dump if ever there was one, but reassuringly overpriced as hotels in Singapore tend to be) the doorman asked me if I’d need anything extra later? I simply pointed to Brigid and explained I was well covered.

And so, yes, The Amara said we could either have a smoking room with a double / king bed or a non-smoking with twin beds. That we’d ordered non-smoking with a king and pre-paid for such seemed irrelevant. If you want that, you need to pay $100 more…

No sir, yes ma’am, sorry sir repeated the rule bound James, a junior manager, as he remembered by rote, chapter 6 of the rule book, the one about loudly angry foreigners threatening complaints to all and sundry.

This is between you and your booking agent, sir.

We made a substantive (but very calm) noise and then made some more and said we’d be back in an hour for our double bed in a non-smoking room or we would make a fair amount more.

Noise works in Singapore. It ain’t properly covered by that chapter in the rulebook. No one complains in Asia, most especially in Singapore where national compliance is taught from birth in the state sanctioned birthing units, and then drilled in for the next two decades.

On return, we were gathered by the general manager and escorted to his desk. He said he had something to show us and we both expected it was into a soundproof room to allow us to make our noise as loudly as we wished before we were ignored again and herded to out defined twin room under threat of expulsion for non rule compliance.

But, no. Hell, no! I don’t know if it’s the lack of tourists, or the beginnings of a new national spine, or a re-written rule book (scribed by someone bought in to advise on these sorts of things), but he took us to the 16^th floor, the Club Floor, to a non-smoking king bed with a view (of a construction site to be sure but it’s better than looking through into another smoking room with twin bed, or worse, a non-smoking room with a double bed that we’d been refused).

Is this okay?

What’s the catch?

None. Would you like free Internet?

Yes.

What time is your flight?

7pm.

Would you like 4pm check out?

Uhh, yes. No catch?

No. It’s offered with our apologies.

To anyone who’s spent anytime in Singapore, the above is bizarre, almost certifiable.

Then Mr. Habim (that was he) let it slip:

I lived in Jakarta for 14 years.

Ahh, so you’ve encountered service before…….you bloody boat rocker, you.

Either way, it does make you feel better about Singapore.

I bought a 320GB travel drive in Funan IT, perhaps the best IT centre on the planet but also, traditionally, the rudest and most unhelpful.

Don’t buy that one sir..this is much better value, faster and cheaper.

I was floored again.

And then I got the warm and fuzzies, a glow of positivity, at the quite extraordinary new National Museum of Singapore, which, amongst very much more which I simply didn’t have the time for, leads you on a interactive history of Singapore quite unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere…with dozens of audio and visual alleyways that demand you go down them and I’m not one to refuse.

The impossible had started to happen. I began to feel good about Singapore (feelings that may only have been submerged since I’d spent several years there as an Air Force brat, in the days, when, as seems inconceivable now, New Zealand was tasked with defending the island.

I’m really not that sure I’m comfortable with my new found affection for the place.

Oh operator's manual / I'd just fall apart without you

God knows how many times I’ve been to Singapore in the past few years, my overflowing passport seems littered with stamps from their reliably welcoming immigration staff (New Zealand could do well to send theirs to study how its done). Suffice to say it seems thoroughly routine these days and I’ve grown to quite like the conformity of it all after the often dysfunctional chaos of Indonesia.

Another reason to like the trip is the exit out of Denpasar. Ngurah Rai International Airport provides one with a bizarre mix of humour and frustration. The frustration comes mostly from the creaky bureaucracy of the place….the six levels of officialdom one has to pass to get out is just another sign of the bureaucratic overkill that Indonesia inherited from the Dutch which they’ve managed to add bewildering and confusing layers to with no rhyme or reason.

But even here the humour creeps in. On leaving the Indonesian resident has to pay an exit tax equivalent to two and a half times the average monthly wage. There are a variety of reasons put forward by the government for this but needless to say none stand up to much scrutiny and in a land like this if you have the right connections or bucks you can easily get an exclusion stamp. Indeed in Indonesia if you have the right connections you can become a government minister as recent statements by the Minister of Aviation are evidence, ability or commonsense being irrelevant to the job. But that is an aside.

You can also get an exclusion from the exit tax if you have a tax number, so, as usual, I wandered across to the Fiskal office with NPWP card in hand to get the exclusion stamp. When I arrived the two guys running the office were, like two spoons, wrapped together asleep on the floor. There was a pile of cash on the top of the photocopier next to them and the door was open. I banged on the window rather loudly and they woke, rubbing their eyes. I thought about offering them Rp20,000 for a posed asleep photo, for use herein, but thought that it may have been pushing it.

They studied the passport and our marriage certificate (married men can take their family out free, married women, even if they are the breadwinner, cannot. Women have a different status here, a mix, I guess, of an Islamic philosophy ingrained in the central government, and the saying heard here that the Dutch packed up logic and commonsense and took it with them when they left in 1949. You do wish that somebody would ask for it back).

Still yawning, the guy stamped my departure card without asking for the ‘processing fee’ others have had to offer.Upstairs, after the counter for airport tax, and the immigration officer, unsmiling, which is unusual these days as someone seemed to have implanted these formerly sullen guys with personalities in recent months, we wandered through into the departure zone and noted a couple of new shops to add to the grossly overpriced food and duty free outlets (champagne for US$120 a bottle anyone, or a bottle of water at five times the rate outside the doors of the terminal).

Yes there is now a brand new store selling pirate DVDs next door to departure gate 4. After a what-in-gods-name-were-they-thinking moment, and noting the endless displays of single packets of cigarettes (at twice the non duty free price), shitty Javanese made Balinese souvenirs, shitty Javanese made Australian Aboriginal souvenirs (why? I can’t answer that), and the large carved penises that if you look closely are bottle openers, you pass two more officials, one to take the airport tax sticker you were just given (to prevent the first tax collector stealing the money we are reliably told) and one to take the departure card that the first immigration officer studied earlier.

And you’re in.

I enjoy the flights to Singapore on Singapore Airlines. It’s a relatively civilized airline, unlike, say, the shitty Malaysian Airlines flights into KL (crap Airline, crap service, crap airport) full of Indonesians flying full of hope into Malaysia, about to have their illusions shattered by Malaysian labour practices.

SA offers practiced smiles, legroom and good food.

But mostly, on SA from Bali, I enjoy the people watching, and extra mostly that means the Russians, who feed from this onto some flight to Vladivostok or somewhere else northerly and obscure out of Singapore

They were there this time in some numbers and if you ever wonder who buys all that overly branded fake designer tack you find in the dozens of ‘Versace’, ‘Armani, ‘Paul Smith’ and ‘Prada’ stores that fill the streets of Bali, then look no further than the Slavic tourists heading home.

We also wondered how the two Japanese girls managed to get their breakfast boxes, complete with 300ml orange juices past the promised ‘heavy and through’ security and 100ml liquid paranoia with multiple x-rays. I guess it cost them a smile and perhaps a pastry or two.

Two and a half hours later, after an aborted landing due, we, were told due to crosswinds (I suspect an Indonesian airline would’ve landed anyway) which meant a massive surge upwards when we were less than 10 metres from the ground and a loud uneasy silence in the cabin, we were through the ridiculously fast arrival process and in a taxi on our way into Singapore city.

Step on the gas / And wipe those tears away

Just a moment of irony.

Having driven from Dubai to Abu Dhabi on Sunday (including being passed by a car, which we were reliably told, was a silver Corvette..solid silver that is), after a meeting we turned around to drive the 120 or so Kms back to the massive construction site that is Dubai.

Abu Dhabi sits on one of the world's bigger puddles of black gold, and we needed to fill up, quite urgently.

Easy? Well, no. The road from AD to D, almost until you reach the Dubai border, has absolutely no gas stations, and thus, stressing, with Greg, who was driving us, employing a shift into neutral on the slight downwards slopes that you encounter on the 10 lane freeway, to save that last few millilitres of gas, we eventually crawled into a packed ENROC station some 35km from Abu Dhabi's business centre.

It just seemed ironic...I guess you had to be there.

There’s no speech or language where the voice is not heard

The photo that’s been doing the rounds in Indonesia this past week or two is the one below.

It is, as you may have guessed, the last moments before going sub-terrestrial, of one of the Bali Bombers. Now, I’m not a supporter of capital punishment at all, even in this case, but I can’t feel any sadness at the death of these three. Or for that matter, though, any feeling that justice has been done either. The scary thing here is because of the bumbling way the Indonesian government handled this, they managed to turn these three from convicted murderers into minor celebrities here. The larger version of this image appeared in print, in various local newspapers was a little scarier being as it showed a much larger crowd. And it caused quite a stir, not least when it was revealed that several high ranking cops attended as observers.

But for all that it demands a little perspective. This execution had had a several week build up, and a massive media frenzy (both inside and outside Indonesia) had accompanied the days before and after the shooting. The funeral of Samudra and the others was widely expected to provide a focal point for the hotheads and pull a crowd of the ardent caliphate desiring believers (or wackos..call them what you will).

It, according to all reports, had a crowd of some 1000. We know they came from inside and outside the village:

Abdul Rahim, a key figure in the group, said: "Hundreds of us are waiting in Solo to come … but on the day of the execution there could be 1000 here."

In a country of 230 million.

Even allowing for the fact that most Indonesians living outside of Java would have found it hard to get there, there are still 130 million people in Java…so they managed, not even taking into account the local village population (200?, 500?) to pull one in 130,000 Javanese.

Huge. Your average wacko Church preaching the end of time in Alaska does much better than that, I’m sure.

Wandering around the top floor to Borobudur the other afternoon I offered to take a photo for two young-ish girls (20ish) who were climbing the central dome (quite contrary to the signs on the rather spectacular 9^th Century monument, but in Indonesia rules are at best vague). The two, from somewhere in the country…the monument pulls in more local tourists than offshore, and it pulls in a fair few of those…but likely Java were dressed as about 10-15% of girls their age are here, with modest clothing and ħijāb. I thought nothing of this, smiled and clicked the phone’s camera button.

They then giggled at the bulé, said thank you and asked to take our photo. I don’t get a ‘can I take your photo?’ request that often, it’s much more often the other way around. So I said yes and they clicked.

I thought nothing of it as they wandered away but then it hit me, how much my attitudes had changed since I’d arrived in Indonesia. I first came here as a visitor and later a resident I was shockingly naïve. Sure I’d seen folks in various Muslim attire and even known a few across the years to talk to. And had spent the early part of my life in Singapore.

However never had I been immersed, for a very long time in such an alien culture to my own. We pride in ourselves in New Zealand and Australian at our diversity and multi-culturalism but the real truth is that we are mostly conservative folks out of the European grand tradition of what we see as liberalism, with a few bits of exotica around the edges to make ourselves feel diverse. And those bits around the edges are expected to divest themselves of where they came from, apart from a token nod here and there, over a generation or two, if they want to stay.

So to come and live in a society where I was the alien, and expected to conform was a shock.

I have to be honest, when I first delved into Java (Bali is different, there isn’t quite that cultural abyss to deal with..some but not absolute…2 million smiling tourists a year does that to an island).

But Java, yeah, especially once you leave the mega-opolis of Jakarta, is something else and we are taught in the west to be wary...no, more than that...terrified of it, and photos like the one above and the media, and relentless travel warnings all play their part.

This is, we a told, a nation that is 90% Muslim.

The reality, of course, as those girls are evidence, is quite different, dramatically so. And the Muslim mass, ħijāb or not, or the thousand variations of that religion that make up that 90% figure, are a million generous and welcoming kilometres away from that miniscule turnout at the funeral, or the travel warnings written in the comfy offices of Canberra and then transcribed without really any understanding of what they might actually mean, in further comfy offices in Wellington.

And so, this week, for perhaps the thirtieth time over the past four years, Brigid and I went back to Java. This time it was different. We’d decided to make our trek to the last beach at the end of the road, Jepara, by road trip from Yogyakarta, through the highlands of Jawa Tengah to Semarang and then north. The last part we’d done many times and much of it is a shitty endless stretch of endless road works.

The first bit, though was new to us both. So we’d contacted Ali, our driver (after the brief thought to hire a car had been dismissed) and said drive on down please.

We were staying as many times before at the Grand Hyatt in north west Jogja. It’s a big old sprawling behemoth, with a big curling swimming pool that goes under rock pools, waterfalls, bridges and down steps, and is a refreshing place to enjoy a snog with th’wife and a Bintang after a day in the grime of Javanese factories.

Last time we were there together they had a Mexican evening and I managed to stand next to a mass murderer, Suharto, a first for me.

This time, there were two events of note. Firstly there was an Audi convention. This meant that as we checked in Audi-less, our Hyatt Gold Card meant nothing. I flashed it and you could see the girl thinking ‘No TT, no upgrade’ thus we ended up on the ground floor.

The other event of note was the Cigarette Sales Convention. Anywhere else in the world post, about 1970, this would be a low-key event, so as to avoid negative comments verging on abuse. Not in Indonesia. Here the folks proudly wore their khaki uniforms with large Marlboro branding on the back and a dozen other badges on the front. And they sat in the restaurant for breakfast puffing with some pride. In fact the guy at the next table managed to eat, text on one phone, talk on the other one (important people always have two here) and smoke half a packet.

Ali arrived about 8 and we headed off.

I really had no idea what to expect. It was only 100km or so but in Indonesia, depending on the traffic and the quarries they often call roads that can take a while.

Ali said 2 hours would do it, which was ok, and happily it took a wee bit less than that. The road was little worse than large parts of the national roading system in New Zealand, albeit with the usual fairly hefty dose of homicidal maniacs. Fortunately the maniacs drive at a slower speed than the maniacs in the west, 80 km/h being a fairly high speed.

Ali had one of those in the front TV / DVD players that are so popular here..watching a sinetron, or singing karaoke, whilst swerving past or avoiding belching trucks and buses is quite the thing to do. He offered to put it on.

But since we’d not been this way before we demurred, deciding, for a variety of reasons, on the view.

The thing about Java is that it mostly consists of areas of unspeakable grime which, without warning, mutate into areas of unspeakable beauty. And so it was as we left Jogja and went uphill. But the higher we went the lovelier it seemed to become, and even the grimy bits, like the almost alpine desa of Ambarawa with it’s mix of Chinese Temples, towering Christian Churches and stately Mosques, seem quite pretty and aloof from the chaos of the bigger towns down the hill.

And it, as always in Java, hits me how clean, if you can call grimy clean, Java is compared to the trash that sadly covers Bali now. The rivers, excluding the big cities, run garbage free unlike any in Bali these days.

No, Java has a beauty and a serenity that runs counter to the fact that it’s the most populated space on Earth and the Javanese are, even in the mega-cities, perhaps the most gracious, welcoming people I’ve met. Not once have I felt as threatened as I do on an average Saturday night downtown in Auckland or Sydney. Not once have I felt the threat that the western media, paranoia and travel warnings tell me I should feel in this island where I am not just a minority but a bizarre oddity representing something that people can mostly only imagine from images and the mass media which offers them as twisted a view of the west as we have of places like the hills of Jawa Tengah. Where evil Muslim madrassahs are supposed to fester.

The next day, having worked our way through the endless concrete road works out of Semarang, being rushed to preempt the rainy season and the flooding that washes out the old bitumen road every year, we found ourselves back in the car, a shitty Izuzu Panther that shuddered above 60km/h and has broken back seat springs which twisted my back in a way that has meant I’m still stuffing painkillers in my mouth.

TV? No thanks Ali. So Ali put on a CD with a selection of some of the worst songs ever recorded, all cover versions mind, and off we trotted to visit Borobudur.

Borobudur was / is quite something. I think both Brigid and myself felt that we’d been remiss in not making the 15km trip there in past trips to the area, but there you go, and we’d made it now.

Outside it was your typical slightly rundown Indonesian tourist attraction. Lots of stalls selling the same sorts of things and dozens of folks who swooped on the tourist from the moment he or she alighted. We found our very own permanent attachment just after we got out. Brushing aside the masses wanting sell us fans/ books/photos/ things that made noises / dolls and everything else we’d never need, he introduced himself as Ali. Another one..but as one would guess Alis are never in short supply in Java. He was short, had shocking teeth, all smoke stained and broken but he grinned widely through them and offered us his miniature stone Buddhas. Do we need these…no…sorry…ma’af, pak, tak mau..

Only Rp100, 000 said he….

tidak, pak

We wandered in and Ali followed.

You have KITAS? He asked…

Ya…

Ali pointed us to the locals’ entrance, where it was Rp9,000 (80c) rather than the tourist gate (US$11) and I smiled gratefully at him

Rp70,000? He said…

I was not that grateful.

He wandered in and pointed us in the direction of the big grey pile of ancient stone up the hill. A couple of wheeled trains sat by the gate with hopeful Indonesian families sitting in them. They were not, it seemed, going anywhere fast so we walked up the hill.

Borobudur was everything I’ve ever thought it might be. It was awe inspiring and we stood at the top of 1200 years (much of it spent covered up and lost) looking down at the clouds and the Indonesians, kids, army guys, families and students wandering around with obvious self pride in this monument to centuries of civilization, back to the time when Europeans were still thinking about working out stone castles and this was constructed, as were the other great monuments in the region. To the great Hindu Kingdoms that ruled this region and the Islamic armies that drove them east to Bali.

We walked down the stairs, the trains had still not left and the families still sat hopefully (Indonesians understand patience in a way I will never) and Ali was waiting.

Good, eh?

Ya..

Rp50,000?

Tidak, mas.

As we walked out in search of the carpark, the swarms came at us again, but many more. The batik fans now came in all sorts of sizes and there were t-shirts. Ali brushed them away.

Rp30,000?

No.

Anda berasal? said he.

New Zealand..Selandia Baru I replied. Anda?

Dari Indonesia, Bapak, he replied.

I smiled at that, how could you not, and looked for the car.

Tempat pakir disana, pak, he said and pointed towards our car.

Rp20,000?

No I said, and pushed a Rp10,000 note into his hand..for your help. Terima Kasih, Pak Ali..hati hati..

Ali did a happy little skip, shook my hand and ran off looking for someone else to help.

Writing this, and working online to clarify names, I realized just how little data there is available about Java. Type Java into Google and most of the hits come from the programming language...even Wikipedia has the island as second on it’s google ranking. And this island, the 13^th largest in the word, with one of the world’s largest cities on it, and the centre of the 4^th most populous nation in the world, has a far smaller entry (1969 words) than the programming language (6425 words).

We know nothing about it apart from some idea that we need to be scared of it.

We need to be very afraid, not necessarily of those people in the top photo but of the arrogance, blinkers and ignorance that add to that fear.

Technorati Tags: Java

Fly the friendly skies

I felt sorry for the guy in the Airbus office at Jakarta’s Domestic Terminal 1, Zone C. There he was, in a grotty little, dark and rather dirty room just before the luggage carousels. Like most offices in places like this here, the paint was stained from years of smoke, there were wires held by duct tape on the walls, and a hand written name on the door: Airbus Liaison.

He looked French, and likely was, and whilst his friends had been sent to New York or Sydney or Shanghai, this poor guy had drawn the short straw and, because Mandala Air and Air Asia had both bought reasonable numbers of his company’s product, he’d been shuffled off to one of the hell hole airports of Asia.

To be fair, parts of Jakarta’s expansive airport are almost ok. Terminal 2 (International and Garuda) has passable lounges & cafes, clean toilets, and like most international airports around the world now, free (and very fast) wifi.

However Terminal 1 seems stuck in the age it was built, the mid 70s, after which it won awards for its design (and the bones of that design are still evident..but only just these days...however it’s potentially quite stunning). It was meant as a Sukarno showpiece back in the day when he was starting ludicrous wars and trying to take over the world, whilst quietly bankrupting his own nation. They’d not got around to starting the place before he was deposed, so instead, like much of Jakarta it stands as a monument to the corruption and gross failures of his successor. The grandeur of it all is still there in the long open fingers that take you to and from the departure lounges with gardens in between. Sadly, half the light bulbs seem always blown, the paint is chipped and grey, wires hang everywhere and it feels now like a third world military barracks rather than the centerpiece of anything you’d want to admit to.

1C is inhabited by two airlines that we’ve used. One, Air Asia, was one of the ones exonerated from the recent random inspections of aircraft at this airport (on the other hand 7 of 9 Garuda aircraft were grounded on the spot....which throws major question marks over its attempts to get back into Europe which, some would say, wisely, banned all Indonesian Airlines from its airspace a couple of years back).

Air Asia is Malaysian essentially and remains one of the few airlines here I’m comfortable boarding, even if their flights tend to be random in their departure times, as are all in this country.

The other in this sub-terminal that we’ve used is the afore mentioned Mandala Air. These were the guys that, when their plane crashed into a suburb of Medan in Sumatra, famously gave the relatives of each victim a bag of rice and few litres of kerosene, to kind of act as a sorry token and a memorial to their charred relative. I guess it saved on a more permanent marker or a park.

But to be fair, again, they, on the surface at least, seemed to have upped their act..got a fairly aggressive management team, including a New Zealander (lets not mention Ánsett), and bought a bunch of new planes to replace the some of the 1970/80s vintage 737s...hence the poor guy in the Airbus office.

That said though, last time we flew with them, less than a year back, they left 15 minutes early, seemingly without all the passengers, and forgot most of the onboard safety demonstration....not forgot the parts of it, but forgot to do it.

So, I was hoping that with all the hype they’ve had, flash new offices and so on, they’d resolved all these sorts of things.

We flew from Bali to Jakarta on Air Asia...on time, clean and professional. To Terminal 1C.

The terminal is an absolute shocker, and rates as the worst I’ve seen...Penang and Macau are the other two shockers we’ve seen in the region....Penang because it’s filthy and run down, and Macau because it’s just dull with terrible food. Terminal 1C is all those things and much more, including being very smoker friendly without AC.

It may be the only airport in the world is smoking, via the advertising everywhere inside, is actually encouraged.

So, after a day in Jakarta, we struggled out, through gruesome traffic...2 hours for a 30 minute drive, to check in for the Mandala flight to Semarang. After the taxi driver tried to take us across to the wrong terminal (I’d happily go via Terminal 2 but it was not to be), we eventually struggled into 1C and went to check in.

Delayed...5 hours. The normal practice in Indonesia is for delays, and there are many, perhaps most flights, to be notified by SMS txt to passengers. Mandala it seemed had known about this for a while but not bothered. But we had our allocated seats, 13B & 13C. Cool....I’m not superstitious..or wasn’t.

With no a/c, and only a few broken seats in the smoke filled terminal, we asked if we could sit in the lounge?

Not unless you pay.

Really?

Yes...and go away.

Can we talk to the manager?

No.

So we sat and fumed, I obviously took photos of the staff, and then we decided to wander outside for a stroll / think.

Outside was the airline’s sales office, so we strolled in and explained to a girl, our problem and asked if we could go into the lounge for the next few hours.

No.

Who do we talk to?

The manager, inside.

He won’t see us..who do we complain to?

Saying nothing, she got up and walked away, and from the other end of the counter began talking about us to others, pointing and laughing at us.

Fine, thought we, it’s got a/c, comfortable seats and the counter is a perfect place to stretch out and read for a few hours. That, as we’d placed ourselves there, they were no longer able to access customers from that half of their office was really neither here nor there.

So out came the books and magazines and we smiled at them and settled down. Eventually about 40 minutes later, a guy came and sat down and asked if he could help. Yes, we said and explained our problem...

Why don’t you go to our lounge?

Really?

Yes..free of charge

And off we went, towing our bags behind us, to the Mandala lounge...through the smoke filled rooms and into the wee room with free water and pastries. The lady said she’d tell us when it was time to board so I settled down to surf a bit, and read...and I wrote a rather more conciliatory version of this post than the one that appears here now.

A couple of hours later the nice lady came out to say that it had been slightly delayed again and the flight would board at 6.50. And we each got a piece of KFC and some rice...ta...I think...

At 6.55 I wandered up to the desk to ask when the plane was going to board...6.50 says she. It’s 6.55 I say. Run she says...

So run we did, checking the sign at the x-ray machines..Gate C5..so down to C5, where the sign over the door says RI292..correct, and in we go to five or so confused looking non-Indonesians and a young girl behind the desk.

Ke Semerang? I ask?

She smiles and giggles.

After a minute or so we sensed that something was wrong so we wandered out. C4 had a sign on the gate with a flight to Semarang, but with a completely different number & time and marked as cancelled. So I walked in, looked around for a Mandala staff member however none was to be found anywhere. There were, however lots and lots of people with KFC boxes. Brigid suggested that, pursuant to normal Indonesian airport disinformation and confusion, this may be it.

After a minute or ten, someone arrived and grabbed a microphone.

RI292 to Semarang boarding now..here.

With a great deal of being pushed, quite violently by the KFC engorged masses, as the rush turned into a scrum and a brawl (and whilst Mandala’s just arrived staff member looked vacantly on and did nothing) we finally found our way to the door of the plane and went on board. It was, joy, one of those very ancient 737s that Indonesian airlines are so fond of, usually passed down through several owners. We walked down the aisle...11, 12, 14......

We held tickets for 13b and 13c but they didn’t exist. The hostess seemed not to care either way. So we sat in 15c & 15d and waited. And we waited as the brawl to get on tumbled past our seats and no-one asked why we were sitting in their seats. No-one at all.

But three other people turned up with the same seat numbers for the same non-existent seats that we’d been allocated. That made five who wanted the seats.

And the aircraft staff wandered around taking little notice or caring that there were not only several people with tickets for non-existent seats but also too many people for the plane’s seats, real or otherwise.

People seemed to squeeze in somehow but as we reversed out to taxi one guy remained standing.

Once again, nobody on the aircraft seemed to care particularly until he decided to make a noise and demand a seat. Moving a baby onto its mother’s lap they found a place to seat the guy as we headed towards the runway.

We, Brigid and myself ,were seated in the emergency seats...beside the exit. It’s standard practice on these flights for staff to explain to the occupants the emergency procedure and check to ensure the floor is clear. In our case they did neither, preferring to chat amongst themselves.

And then we flew.

And, when we landed, the whole aircraft shuddered and the engines screamed as we quite clearly landed far too fast (having landed at least 200 times on commercial flights around the world over the years I trust my instincts on this) and, considering the infamous Garuda flight into Jogja a couple of years back when the same caused quite some loss of life, you’d imagine this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again…but it did and the passengers as a whole were rather shaken by the experience.

The crew said nothing.

Returning to Jakarta few days later we wandered along to the Mandala lounge, with the day’s boarding pass for the flight returning from Semarang and asked if we could perhaps, as (suffering) Mandala customers, wait in the lounge for our Air Asia connection, and offered to pay.

No she said...the lounge is only for Mandala customers, and you are not as you’ve landed...and I guess it clearly won’t be us again as it will be a cold day in hell before we return to Mandala

These guys are banned from the skies of Europe and one can reasonably see why. Their staff were rude and incompetent (with one exception) and their boarding and on-board systems and procedures were at best described as appalling.

One wonders what their maintenance is like.

Technorati Tags: Airlines,Indonesia

Like a Glittering prize / Always on a clear day

Warning: Shanghai virgin alert.......

The train from Shanghai’s airport to the city was very fast.

In fact, they claim the Maglev train is the fastest in the world and since you hit speeds of 430 km/h it’s hard not to find that rather believable. Yep, it’s an impressive tube of high tech and the level of that tech is nailed when one passes the train going the other way at a joint 860km/h..faster than most jets.

The whole world shudders when that happens.

That said, the bits at each end are a disaster. To get on the train you trudge about a  kilometre through poorly signposted tunnels, with virtually no trolleys in sight (we found one eventually, with a bumpy wheel), to buy your tickets ($6 each...can’t really grumble about that) and are then faced with a grey, non air-conditioned, standing room only waiting room. When the train is ready to board you then battle, now trolley-less, through a massed rush to a single narrow escalator (no lifts a-la Hong Kong, Singapore or KL) and, once down, face an unbending conductor telling you loudly and very firmly in either shrill Shanghainese or Mandarin (don’t expect me to know which) which door to enter (the one farthest away naturally).

At the other end you are dumped in an industrial wasteland / building site some distance from the city centre, face another narrow escalator, a walk across a few  roads to a taxi rank and then 45 minutes in relentless traffic, admittedly over some of the more astounding bridges I’ve ever seen, to your hotel.

And that really sums up China, I guess.

Shanghai is astounding. There is no other word for it...well maybe mindblowing. Either way I’ve seen nothing like it and I’ve been to many of the world’s larger cities. There is nothing quite quite the same as sitting at M on the Bund, where Brigid took me for my birthday brunch, high up amongst a row of large early 20^th century commercial buildings, in which, clearly, no expense was spared in design or construction by the financial institutions of the occupying powers in the years before it all came tumbling down, now topped by large Chinese flags, looking across the Huangpu River, with its boats with massive electronic billboards to the futurism of Pudong’s skyscape. It’s a city of not just massive contradictions but overwhelming visual drama.

There are, they say, 1042 high rise buildings, with new ones every week.

 

We were lucky in Shanghai, we had the guiding hand of our old friends, Philip Kelly and Tracey Lee, who’ve been living there for some months, to lead us. It doesn’t matter how many guide books one owns, local knowledge is, as always, absolutely everything.

So we found ourselves, on my birthday evening (Philip having given me, as a gift, a magnificent print of a photo he’d taken of Detroit meister, Paul Randolph..Brigid gave me a MacBook Pro 17” but that’s another post)  at an astoundingly good  Hunanese restaurant, Lost Heaven, where we drank New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whilst eating, and at pretty good prices (Shanghai, like Hong Kong, was not by Western standards expensive, even at the higher end) and from there to Constellation, a long narrow bar with a killer cocktail list that could easily have slipped out of that golden late night era that was Auckland’s High Street circa 1995 (you had to be there I guess).

The next night we were taken to LAN, a four story bar / restaurant complex designed and themed by Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier in a rather dramatic way, from the Jellyfish Tank to the infinity long room. The place was surprisingly empty which suited us and we were taken on a guided tour of the whole place and wandered from theme to theme, and ate (modern pan Asian ..but isn’t everything) for probably a quarter of what it would’ve cost us in anything approaching the place in Australasia.

My earlier experiences of China were in the south..in Guangdong, and the psyche seems quite different further north. Whilst in Guangzhou I found the populace as a whole extremely gracious, helpful and generous. Shanghai is different though. There we found the pushiness and rudeness that we’d been warned about earlier but not encountered. People pushed, no threw, you out of the way, they yelled at you in what I can only assume is the legendary local dialect, and the driving....in particular the taxis, who seemed unable to see a red light no matter whether it had been red for one minute or three and simply careered through pedestrian crossings with horn blaring, and people jumping in every direction.

A bit like Bali really, except here every does it. And at least in China there seemed to be some rules and some people trying to enforce them.

And we saw fights...lots of them...the most dramatic being two guys in a pet market fighting over something which ended with one throwing turtles at the other! Not for the faint hearted. Clearly the Shanghainese are a little more highly strung than their southern compatriots.

The river divides the city into two clear halves. There were several ways to cross the river..taxi of course, the ferries, and foot and bus. But we chose the most exciting. This was my birthday after all.

Just about every guide to Shanghai recommends the train under the river. Why do  they recommend it? Is it the thrill, is it a glass viewing tunnel (which would give one a view of brown sludge judging by the river), is it a tech blast?

No, none of those..the recommendations all come because it is so unbelievably awful it can’t be missed. So we had to do it.

In Shanghai terms it was quite pricey..about US$4 a head, but after wandering around trying to find the booth, we handed over the dosh and got our tickets. They included a complimentary pass to the Shanghai Museum of Sex!

And down we went, we three and three happy German backpackers, until we came across the train, except it wasn’t really a train it was a wee capsule and in we all went and off we went through a tunnel lit with what locked like a neon lighting show left over from some early 20^th Century future tech show. It was, as they promised, so truly awful it needed to be seen. And then, just to emphasis that point, two blow up rubber ghosts popped up and everyone began to laugh.

  And it was over. We decided to give the Sex Museum a raincheck and we walked out into the sunlight and the base of the Pearl Tower, with busloads of Chinese tourists swarming around, touts offering to take your photo (folks from the villages, bussing in for the Chinese National Day holiday, likely don’t always have digital cameras for those shots to take back to the village) and a bunch of milling Australians looking for the Bund.

We wanted to go up the Jin Mao Tower, the 5^th highest building in the world, partially so we could look at World Financial Center, recently opened and the 2^nd tallest in the world, partially because the other had huge queues and partially because the deco-ish geometric stainless steel structure really appealed.

 Wondering into the wonderfully named Superbrands Mall, a faceless relic of a Stalinistic past, like the No.1 Department Store across the river in Nanjing Lu, we worked out, as we were buffeted by the holiday crowds, that both the map and the eye showed a short walk to the Jin Mao and headed off.

It wasn’t to be. We walked across the road and were quickly diverted into a loop into the other direction. We walked and followed the signs which said in several languages that we were going the right way despite our eyes telling us we were walking away. At issue were vey large road works which seemingly are part of the massive (and I mean absolutely massive) building projects that are redefining central Shanghai, partially for the Expo 2010, and partially just because that’s the way it is: In China they build and do so in a way we can’t comprehend in the rest of the world.

So we walked..we walked further and further away, through the spotless, groomed parks that fill the city, across multi-laned roads, dodging taxis accelerating through red lights into scattering pedestrians, until eventually we swerved back and, having watched a fight between a courier on his electric tricycle and a office person in his pressed white shirt, we got to the base of the 5^th tallest building in the world. The sign on the side said ‘no climbing’ so we decided not to and went it.

One of the things I like most about very tall buildings, and I’ve done a few, is the speed of the lifts. The lamented WTC in NY had, until now, the fastest I’ve experienced but the Jin Mao, from the basement (why is it that lifts to the top of tall buildings often leave from the basement?), is like a rocket. Seeing that this was the week that China had put another man in space, it seemed somehow appropriate. I wonder if the thought occurred to the two lift attendant girls who were busy checking their hair and makeup in the stainless steel walls on the way up? No, I guess not.

The view of course was incredible and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. I bought a badge I think (I like a souvenir) but lost it. It said something about Pandas but there were none there, that I’m sure of.

We decided to get a taxi back and headed across to the French Concession to eat more. The day before Isabella and I had walked main drag in the Concession..looking at the Hugo Boss and Gucci shops before wandering south. I had an urge to visit the famous site of the first Congress of The Chinese Communist Party which was a block or two in that direction. Brigid had gone fabric scouting and I needed to see this, at least so I felt an affinity with my Shanghai Tang red stared baseball cap I’d bought a few days earlier and because, well, I was in China, so you do these things.

Bella and I wandered past antique stores, Starbucks, several rather pricey looking design stores with Stark and Herman Miller chairs, a Porsche showroom and a cluster of expensive cafes and restaurants until we came to it. It was free to enter so we went it, with me trying, under my breath, to explain to Bella what this placed was about. It was impressive, fusing technology with understated design and it did some justice to a place, regardless of your politics, where one of the most important political parties of our time fused it’s first manifesto. We walked through until we came to a life-size diorama of the congress, with it’s dozen or so participants. Standing at the table was a young man. Isabella asked who that was..Mao Zedong I said. Wasn’t he an evil monster Bella asked very loudly?

I shut her down rather quickly as several stern young men looked angrily in our direction. Were we headed for re-education or a lifetime of floor scrubbing in some western new town.

I rushed her downstairs where the looks seemed to have abated somewhat and I bought a souvenir..a Mao keyring and we walked outside where I noticed an Amway presentation in the park over the way. It seemed oddly appropriate as was the fact the CCP’s congress happened in a precinct with some of China’s most desirable property now and we sat down in a Coffee Bean cafe new door to ponder these things and the fact that Mao no longer appears in any High School text books in the city.

And that’s Shanghai I think. A vast vision of the future overwhelmed with it’s long past history but not quite sure how to treat it’s more recent past. Or at least as best as I  could figure out in a week there.

As in Guangzhou I had no problem accessing most web sites. I read Wikipedia’s Tiananmen pages and watched video of both that and Tibetan protests. My friend Philip said that in his exclusively, aside from Tracey and he, Chinese residential compound, the free internet periodically came up with a blocked page, but if one waited a minute or two and tried again it usually came up. Any censorship seemed very half hearted. I, on the also free, very fast broadband in the serviced apartments we were in, was able to access everything aside from Huffington, who notoriously pissed off the Chinese some time back. So is the blocking of websites overstated? I can’t say that, but on both my visits to China, in two regions, I had no real problem in or out of hotels.

What else? Well I loved the cynical twists on revolutionary art and communist icons which we saw in the hip young designer shops in the back alleys of the French Concession...Mao with first generation gameboys and the like. And I wish I’d been able to comprehend some of the literature in the vast Chinese language bookshops..although I could look at the graphics books with some awe. As I did at the high end DVD copy shops with it’s box sets of art-house directors (I bought a box of 43 Hitchcock movies, beautifully packaged for around US$30, and collections of classic music videos for a buck a disc)

Then there is the long neon Vegas like overstatement of the designer mall strip that is Nanjing Lu, complete with hustlers offering you watches, strange roller-skating devices, bags and them scuttling as a cop arrived.

And even a week wasn’t close to enough...on the last day we discovered the missing modern art museum...missing because every day we’d run out of time and missed getting there. So, with Beijing and the north beckoning too I think Shanghai will be a destination I’ll need get to again, hopefully rather sooner than later.

The never-ending joys of being in Asia....

Technorati Tags: China,Shanghai

Confucius has a puzzling grace

The defining moment of the last two weeks in China and Hong Kong came not when I wandered into the Vegas-of-the-Orient (at least as far as the night-time electricity bill goes) that is Shanghai’s Nanjing Lu for the first time; not when we climbed the 88 floors of the deco steel framed Jin Mao tower (with an internal lobby of the same height); not when we indulged ourselves in the cuisines of the world (often at incredibly low tariffs); and not when we watched the Chinese National Day fireworks, all 23 minutes of them, from Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. Although all those things, and much more, floored me...and I’ll get to some of them, in this post or next, none defined my trip.

No, the defining moment for me was far simpler. It happened outside the little boutique hotel in HK’s Cheung Wan district, on our second to last night, a few days back, when I got to call the police.

It’s a silly thing, but I’ve been building to it for a while. Back in a mall in Kuala Lumpur, hot, bothered and very tired in June, I lost it and threatened to call the police after a dispute with shop staff over an attempt to, how shall we say, rip off a customer. Hell...I wasn’t even the customer, but that’s beside the point. It was an invigorating moment though and many is the time, especially here in Bali, where one would like to ‘call the police’ to sort out the petty retail rip offs that seem to be the norm rather than the exception. Unfortunately in Indonesia, you’re more likely to end up having to pay the cop as well.

I can be as hot tempered as John McCain (but I don’t want to let that irrational volatility near any red nuke-linked buttons...thus putting a gulf between John and myself).

However I finally got my chance. A taxi picked us up from the airport train at Central Station, and, laden with bags from too much shopping in the lanes and markets of Shanghai we stuffed ourselves in, putting bags on laps and the like.

Upon arrival at the hotel, a fairly short distance, he demanded over double the displayed fare...too many bags he said. Since a) he’d not helped us in any way, b) he was demanding monies for our shopping bags and Brigid’s handbag and so on, and c) it ran contrary to the wording on his displayed tariff sticker, we said a resounding no and proffered the correct fare. After starting in English, he started yelling at us in Cantonese and gesturing wildly...refusing to let our bags go. Call the police I screamed…and he did...thinking, and this is conjecture, that we’d happily hand over the rest of the cash to this rather clearly praying-on-tired-tourists rogue instead of facing the cops. Having faced down, once or twice, the cops of Bali and Kings Cross, both of who are philosophically, and in practice, closer to Kowloon’s triads than the Hong Kong force, I wasn’t worried.

And neither should I have been. The clearly bemused officer who turned up a few minutes later was both pleasant and keen to move on. First up he said that the taxi driver spoke no English…which was somewhat odd as he’d clearly had a grasp of the tongue a few minutes back. Secondly he too was confused as to how the guy could charge as he did based on the published tariff but said that it was written so as to be open to some liberal interpretation. We stood our ground, the cop didn’t quite know what to do and little happened until I pulled out a notebook and began to write the driver’s taxi number and name down….this non-English speaking driver seemed to understand the phrase:

I’m going to report you to the Tourism Authority and ask that they revoke your license.

With that, he grabbed the correct money and took off in a hurry, no doubt back to the station looking for less feisty passengers.

All of this is rather irrelevant, unless of course you were a participant or one of those lucky bystanders who saw us all yelling at each other.

But the story does take this somewhere else in that I was / am intrigued by the policeman’s uniform. In 2008 the constabulary of the Special Autonomous Region of The People’s Republic of China that is Hong Kong has a uniform that is, except in detail, exactly the same as the iconic uniform that British colonial police forces wore across the Empire in the last few decades of it’s life.

Which to me really sums up Hong Kong. I absolutely love the place...it’s one of the most exciting, vibrant and cosmopolitan bits of dirt on the planet. So much has been written about HK, there is little I can add beyond the fact that every corner you turn ramps up that excitement just a little in a way I’ve rarely found in a western city, aside from maybe New York, but that’s a big maybe (but found have in the east in a few places…for me I guess it’s those formative years as a toddler in Singapore).

But for all that it’s an oddity stuck in a time warp placed in a bump located in a pimple on the torso of a superpower. I’m sure at many levels things have changed quite dramatically since 1997 but on so many levels they haven’t too. It’s so very hard not to think of Hong Kong as a part, still, of the British raj. It looks, thinks and behaves like a bastion of the old empire, albeit a part that, in 150 years, the British never really quite managed to extract absolutely from China. Take Stanley, on the southern sea facing coast, the name aside, you’re still in the cafés drinking Newcastle Brown Ale on a boardwalk that, if you overlooked a couple of tiny details, like the PLA garrison on the point (much smaller than the British had in the same barracks I’m told) you could be in Brighton.

For the city, a small dot, against the mammothisity (I invented a new word) of China next to it is both futuristic and rooted in a past that is supposed to be long trashed. But I suspect that it’s that past, the British Empire and the stern administration of that from dusty Whitehall, that gave the city it’s future. Singapore, Malaysia and India are evidence too, that for all the uglier side of British colonialism (The Opium Wars for example….you go to war with a country if they resist your attempts to subjugate them all as junkies), they were the least ugly of all the European powers when it came to pillaging. I wandered through, of all things, the Hong Kong Medical Museum (the Sun Yat Sen one I wanted was closed) and in places like that the pride and the sense of lineage with their past, which is uniquely Hong Kong, is fairly evident.

Of course, after wondering about all that then you go back onto the streets and do the things that people do when visiting a place where 70% of the world’s luxury goods are sold…shop, and eat the food….Gunga Din’s in Wyndham Street offered us fantastic, complex, North Indian; and then the next night we stumbled across Cecconi’s in Elgin Street (we were actually looking for the place next door…Brigid wanted to study the walls but we happily walked into the wrong door and sat down anyway), which not only floored us with it’s food (like the Pan seared scallops with cauliflower puree, sundried tomato and chorizo…oh yes…) and service, but actually wiped one of the main courses off the bill at the end as a bonus. Or the food found on the streets or in the MTR stations. As our friend Felix said, in Hong Kong not only do you get what you’ve paid for, but often you get far more than you’ve paid for.

And sometimes you get less

The common wisdom is that Hong Kong is very expensive …they’ve not been to Australia and New Zealand. Maybe it is for the average Hong Kong salary / wage earner but so much was ludicrously inexpensive and little was beyond what you expect to pay in Australasia…even the ever present designer goods (a pair of Armani jeans was about half what you’d pay for a pair of Workshop jeans).

And our hotel room, a tech hotel, no less with every gadget known to mankind, including free blistering fast in-room wi-fi, was about $100 a night…then again if you really want to do things like the shoddy overpriced tourist trap of the Peninsula Hotel’s High Tea, it can get pricey, especially when it includes stale. I guess it’s your call…..

But as a Hong Kong newbie (this was my second visit) I just loved wandering the streets with my mouth open, I loved Hollywood Road with its Chinese antiquities (both real and not) and the Communist memorabilia on Cat Street (mostly as phony as the claim to such in the mainland these days), and walking the god knows many stairs up from Hollywood Rd to the elusive Sun Yat Sen Museum

And I watched the psychological tussle between saving ones physical self and going into just one more shop that Typhoon Hagupit caused amongst so many young Hong Kongers down there in the shopping mayhem and mecca that is the chaos of Causeway Bay.

The shopping generally won out as did the taxi drivers who tossed an extra $20 danger charge onto the fare…I bet that prick from Central Station was there.

 

Technorati Tags: Hong Kong,Asia

Take my advice / it's either live or die / you gotta be strong if you wanna survive

Of our two weeks on the road (almost), Jakarta was the highlight..simply because that was where the tethers were loosened...where I was allowed to indulge my desire to do what the others had been doing, and buy something for myself…Brigid sent me off to buy a travel iron.

Not that I want a travel iron, mind, although they are handy wee things when on the road (Indonesian hotels get funny about supplying these in room even from room service), but I guess she felt that I would be happily satiated by its purchase…I’d want no more from the trip and stop complaining about the shoes or the very cool Chinese starred cap I’d wanted in Kuala Lumpur but been dissuaded from buying (you have a hat already…but you have a skirt already…that’s different..).

No, Jakarta had that extra something. *

*(the above of course is grossly unfair and I’d like to point out I got three shirts in Penang…and a road map in Kuala Lumpur)

And thus it was appropriate that we arrived in Jakarta the day the big sales started and if any city is about malls and shopping, I guess Jakarta is it. And our first hotel was actually attached to a mall.

Yes, malls…we did a few. Not just in Jakarta but everywhere, but the Big Durian is the city of malls..some eighty they say. However, after you’ve wandered past half a dozen Gucci or Hugo Boss or Versace stores it’s hard to get too excited.

Jakarta always feels a little like a wasted opportunity. I’ve always felt that each time I’ve left, after I’ve shopped and eaten, and I've done that more than a few times sadly. So this time, I determined to do something more with my time.

I’d always wanted to check out the old port to the north so I pushed the idea over the huge breakfast at the Mulia (whence we had moved too...more Versace), and we hopped in a cab and said Sunda Kelapa please…the Maritime Museum. The driver hesitated. Are you sure? Yep…it is, after all, a museum and one of Jakarta’s oldest buildings. It’s an area, which some three hundred years ago, was one of the most important bits of real estate in the world, from where the all powerful VOC ruled the vast wealth of the East Indies, and where the Portuguese traded with the Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran before that.

And thus I wanted very much to see it. Blake was keen but the others a little less so and as we rode north from Kota, they suggested we turn back from the slightly mean streets we were going through. But I was determined, and pretended I'd not heard, and onwards we went until we came to a stop in a fairly run down market square.

The driver asked a guy the directions and he smiled, gestured around and said that this was it. We looked around…sure there was an old cannon or two…but this was it?

It seems it was indeed. The guy we asked introduced himself…he was Trenggono and he was the custodian. Little, round and very cheerful, he was also a Professor in Indonesian History and offered to guide us. As in all things Indonesian there was no doubt a price involved somewhere but, hell, this was a real life Indonesian academic to take us through the oldest buildings in the oldest part of the biggest city in the 4^th biggest nation in the world.

The Maritime Museum, or Museum Bahari to use its correct name, dates back to about 1650. Coincidently the book I was reading at the time contains a drawing of the area around the turn of the eighteenth century and the building is clearly evident as it is in this map of old Batavia. Used as both a warehouse over the years (including by the Japanese during WW2) and a fort, clearly this building has some historic importance, not only for the Indonesians, but also for the Dutch..and indeed the letters VOC are branded everywhere..on doors, on the wall and on the cannon. So it was fairly disappointing to see the state of disrepair it was in. Windows were falling off, walls crumbling and drains full of garbage. It may have lasted some 350 years but it’s time is short if something isn’t done, and the two governments are guilty of the gross neglect..surely the Dutch people are able to move past their guilt for their past sins in Indonesia and work with the Indonesian government to do something?

But for all that, it’s an incredible thing to stand in the triangular courtyard of a building that once operated as an axis for much of the world’s wealth some centuries back..and there was something about the fact that it’s restoration and transformation into a polished tourist centre had yet to happen that added to that feeling. And Trenggono was the perfect guide, funny, full of trivia and gruesome detail…the VOC were not only brutal but the roots of the corruption that plagues Indonesia today can be traced back to their reign and to the Dutch era.

Inside boats from around the Archipelago, old maps & drawings, various exhibits that had no or illegibly faded signage, and a series of storyboards telling the history of the area, filled the badly lit halls (partially because many of the bulbs had blown and not been replaced), and a bunch of young kids wandered around giggling at the crazy bulé visitors.

Outside in the street, locals slept next to more old cannons, one dated 1718. We walked with Trenggono north through the streets and shops that edged the fort and I asked him if these people were original Jakarta-ites. No, he said, these were not Betawi, but mostly immigrants from the outer islands who had come to Jakarta to seek their fortune, like generations before them who had moved here then moved on.

We wandered towards the harbour itself, through narrow alleyways built on wood over the VOC era canal to the sea. Kids came out to say hello and giggle again, and every now and then we’d glimpse a bunch more sitting in a dark furniture free room watching soccer on  a small TV.

As we wound around the alley towards the open harbour, which was increasingly filled with garbage and trash, a series of bridges struck off over the canal. On one there was a hut with two guys collecting a Rp1000 toll. We asked and were told that the water supply was over there and the guys collecting the toll were the police. Nice.

Two Frenchmen passed us heading over the bridge..after something but I’m guessing it wasn’t water.

Trenggono offered us a boat trip around the harbour, but this historic waterway was so full of filth we demurred.... although kids could be seen swimming in it in the distance.

We then moved inland along the canal, past an old Dutch drawbridge, on to Fatahillah Square, the centre of old Kota..old Batavia, where the VOC Governor’s Mansion, also  from the early 1700s, is now the Jakarta Museum. The cells underneath, used by both the Dutch and the Japanese, and not tall enough to stand in, and the execution post in the centre of the square, where the VOC and their successors used to, amongst other things, use horses to pull dissidents and insurgents apart, gave us more reason to think that given recent events in the Middle East, not much has changed in several hundred years.

But the highlight of the old museum was far more contemporary. In one of the old buildings off the side of it’s courtyard Jakarta City had a Reformasi exhibition…two rooms which graphically and honestly portrayed the last ten years of Indonesian history, the ten years since the people of Indonesia, with no foreign assistance, cast off their own fairly brutal and murderous dictator. There were queues of people of all ages but particularly well representative of that large and growing very well educated post-98 grouping that is increasingly evident in Jakarta.

Trenggono’s point was that it was appropriate to have such an exhibition in a place like this as the dark years go back fairly continuously from 1998 back to the Dutch arrival and July 1998 was the first real glimmer of light, but the momentum since then has been largely unstoppable.

His point was well made.

The next day (ok we did a mall or two in between) Blake and I decided to extend our cultural excursion and visit the Suharto Museum which gathered together his gifts from around the world. Down by Taman Mini, its existence is due to the efforts of his wife who I guess thinks it sits as a tribute to the man’s greatness. However, to many of us I’d hazard that it’s more ugly than that and a statement of evidence as to those who turned an opportunistic blind eye to murder and corruption.

But, we, having checked the website (open every day) and trekked through the traffic for an hour or so discovered that it was Tutup setiap Hari Senin (closed every Monday). Oh..so we moved back north to our next destination…Monas. As Suharto’s Museum was a self constructed monument to his own greatness, so Monas was a self constructed monument to his failed predecessor, Sukarno, who promised so much but in the end delivered so little. The locals call it, in reference to his legendary bedroom antics, Sukarno’s Last Erection.

Wandering through the gates of Medan Merdeka Park, stepping over the ever-present litter that the park attendants seemed not to notice we walked, for what seemed like an hour in the glaring sun and probably was (we worked out what that little passenger train thing we ignored was for when we finally got there) until we found the entrance.

With typical illogical logic, you enter underground via a tunnel from a poorly signposted gate quite some distance away. Busloads of people, I imagine, from the provinces were flowing through to take the lift to the top of the 137 metre obelisk, to the gold, for want of a better word..knob.

We decided against that particular queue but went to go down to the Independence Museum underneath the thing. A National Park Guide approached us and offered to take us down. Warily, I asked him if there was a fee. No, he said, in very fractured English, it’s all gratis, and he led us down to the first room, a cavernous place, poorly lit, with huge murals and crests on the walls.

For the next ten minutes or so he explained the crest of Indonesia…17 feathers on the bottom to indicate 17^th of August; white for purity etc…we nodded and had our photos taken. He then reached into his pocket and tried to sell us some cheap looking pin versions of said crest for far too much. I demurred and he then asked if we wanted to be taken to the actual museum. Since we’d understood little of what he’d said to date, I decided to pass and out came his hand…for a tip please. I passed him Rp3000 and he sneered and left.

This government employed rogue, in his green Parks Dept uniform, seemed to be indicative of the gulf between this place, rooted firmly in the past, and the Reformasi exhibition looking hopefully ahead up there in old Kota. The point was made even clearer when we went down the stairs to basement level Indonesian history panoramas. They began a thousand years or so ago and continued around six walls, pausing only for a display on the monorail that Jakarta has been waiting on for most of the decade.

Apart from the, again, poorly lit dinginess of the place we found ourselves wandering around scratching our heads. The story shown here in the little windows ended in July 1998 and its half a dozen little story vignettes relating to the thirty two years prior to that bore no relation to recorded history. This was Indonesia’s own Orwellian era, when a totalitarian regime simply invented myths which were presented to the nation as facts (and indeed are still believed by many of the pre-Reformasi generations and I guess many of the Kampong folks we watched arriving here on their tour buses from some far flung part of Jawa or Sumatera). Pure fantasy invented to control and justify and it still exists, presented as historic fact, below Sukarno’s Last Erection.

The next day I scored my travel iron, found another mall or two, ate quite delicious Taiwanese Dim Sim in Senayan and got on a plane to Bali.

Technorati Tags: Jakarta