CHAPTER 1
INDONESIA TODAY
A social media-mad nation where old ideas of status and respect still run deep, where easygoing welcomes offset fierce national pride, and where everyone from Sabang to Merauke speaks a single language—which might not be quite as easy to learn as you’ve been told, and which has a youth-speak version that’ll make your head spin. Indonesia today is a frenetic, and at times contradictory, place with an energy all of its own.
INDONESIA IN A SNAPSHOT
It’s a very long way from one end of Indonesia to the other—3,274 miles (5,269 kilometers), in fact. The space between those far-flung points is filled with a magnificent chaos of islands—approximately 17,508 of them, but who’s counting? Seriously, who actually is counting? Previous estimates of Indonesia’s island tally have ranged from a mere 13,667 all the way up to 18,307. What matters more than any precise number of islands is the staggering diversity of human experience that’s going on, right now, within this vast archipelago. Indonesia is home to something like 255,462,000 people, but once again, who’s counting? (Actually it’s Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics in this case). Scattered across that 3,274-mile, 17,508-island space, they range from Internet entrepreneurs to subsistence farmers, from classical musicians to supermodels, and from LBGT activists to religious evangelists, all living out myriad lives to a soundtrack that spans the gamut from dangdut to death metal.
Indonesia’s national flag, Sang Merah-Putih (“The Red and White”), is a potent emblem, closely associated with the country’s bloody struggle for independence from the Netherlands in the 1940s.
FROM SABANG TO MERAUKE
Start at the top: drifting off the northernmost tip of Sumatra you’ll find a ragged little scrap of land by the name of Pulau Weh. Its main town, Sabang, is one of the proverbial poles of the nation. When Indonesians want to invoke the entirety of their supersize homeland they say “from Sabang to Merauke” (Merauke is a small eastern city close to the border with Papua New Guinea). It’s a bit like when Brits say “from Land’s End to John O’Groats”—except that there’s no way in the world you could cycle from Sabang to Merauke in 48 hours…
Lively hip-hop street culture in the Javanese city of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest.
Pulau Weh is the perfect image of a tropical island, and right at this very moment, in one of the guesthouses back from the beach in the village of Iboih, there’s bound to be a gang of hip twenty-somethings from a big Indonesian city, chilling out after their latest dive excursion, and doing their best not to think about heading back to school or the office next week. And see the one with the laptop? She’s working on a post about this trip for her travel blog.
Modern urban Indonesia is a gritty counterpoint to guidebook images of timeless rural traditions.
Swing up, out, and southeast down the length of Sumatra with its cities shining like bright constellations in a great green emptiness. In Medan there’s a mob of teens queuing for the cinema in the glitzy Sun Plaza shopping mall, and down across the equator in Palembang there’s a couple on a first date in a floating restaurant on the banks of the River Musi. Head on southwards, across the Sunda Strait to Java, and before long you’ll see a smoky smudge up ahead, with a forest of slender skyscrapers rising into clearer air. It’s Jakarta, a massive maelstrom of energy raging above a sludgy tide of traffic. The richest and the poorest, the most radical and the most conservative, and people from every corner of the country and many corners of the globe—they’re all here, and most of them are stuck in that traffic. In a TV studio in the west of the city, a short way off the Jakarta-Tangerang toll road, there’s a glamorous celebrity waiting in the green room of a daytime chat show, and back in the center of town, on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise office block, an intern in an advertising agency is sucking at a cup of take-out coffee and sneaking a look at a blogpost about Pulau Weh he just saw linked on Facebook…
HEADING EAST
Up over the mountains to Bandung, where, in a garage in a northern suburb, there are four skinny kids with electric guitars who, though they don’t know it yet, are going to win an MTV Asia award in 18 months’ time. Onwards, eastwards, weaving in and out of the looming volcanoes that run the length of Java, the sprawl of red-tiled roofs that makes up Yogyakarta appears below. The heart of the city is an old royal palace, still home to a reigning sultan and still governed by ancient protocol. But a little way north, on a busy street near the Gajah Mada University campus, a gang of students are planning an anti-corruption demonstration over bowls of noodle soup—although one of them is a bit distracted by something about Pulau Weh that he’s reading on his iPhone…
Another world: in the hugger-mugger mayhem of the big cities, it’s easy to forget that much of Indonesia still does look just like those glossy guidebook images—a world of forests, mountains and rice terraces, like these in East Java.
In Surabaya the members of a vintage motorcycle club are planning a weekend road trip to the mountains, and in Banyuwangi a group of absurdly talented buskers are singing their hearts out for coins on a Bali-bound bus. Across the next narrow stretch of water, in Bali itself, a trio of thirty-something professional women from the capital are on a shopping spree in Seminyak, while a few streets away a local family with a property portfolio worth millions of dollars are getting dressed up for a major Hindu ceremony. On Lombok student mountaineers are posing for selfies, 12,224 feet (3,726 meters) up on the summit of Gunung Rinjani. Back down at sea level, and one island further east, a ten-year-old village boy with a hand-me-down surfboard left behind by a traveling Australian is paddling out for his daily after-school session in the waves, completely unaware that in a decade’s time he’ll be competing on the World Surf League Men’s Tour.
Indonesia sprawls away to the north and the east, with a hundred passenger jets streaking contrails in all directions. In the middle of Kalimantan there’s a trucker with a load of timber, cramming Iwan Fals into the cassette deck and settling in for the long-haul, and in Makassar a middle-aged woman with a small empire of takeaway food stalls is heading for the Trans Studio Mall with the grandkids. In Ambon some young entrepreneurs are frantically plugging their new alternative clothing distro store on social media, and in a village of thatched houses in the green hills of Flores a ten-year-old in a red-and-white school uniform is trying to download an Agnes Monica song on a weak Internet connection.
And still further east, in the terminal of Merauke’s modest airport, an environmental scientist on his way home to Jakarta after a site visit, is hunched over his iPad scrolling through a pithy description of a far-off island on a travel blog. He reaches for his phone and thumbs a message to his girlfriend—“Next trip, we’re going to Pulau Weh…”
There’s a theory—a serious one—that Jakarta’s addiction