3350 These are the Semarang, Java welcome dancers.
3365 Our escort and ourselves are on the wrong side of the road and traffic’s coming fast.
3369 In the small towns the job gets more complicated.
3397 This picture, taken from the train, shows a rice growing village. All the tall sticks in the water in the distance are supporting fish pens
3414 Rice paddies with the volcanic mountains in the distance. The craggy peak of the one on the right was formed when the mountain blew its top Mount Saint Helen’s style just a few years ago.
Oct 29 - Semarang, Java, Indonesia. We have never been to the island of Java before so this will be a new experience. The Javanese are a distinct people group with their own culture and traditions. To be honest, some of the distinctions are very unclear to me but they’re there and it’s up to me to learn to see them.
Java is divided into three separate regions, East, West and Central. The port of Semarang is on the north coast of the island, just about dead center. It’s a bustling city of about a million and a half. Its streets are even more clogged than Shanghai or any other place we’ve been mainly because the infrastructure has not kept up with development. If Shanghai had these roads it would be a giant parking lot.
Today we are heading to one of the triumvirate of sites in Southeast Asia that make other sights seem a little insignificant. Along with Angor Wat in Cambodia and Bagan in Myanmar, Borobudur is so spectacular that you experience it as much as you see it. This huge Buddhist structure has survived volcanic eruptions, terrorist’s bombs and earthquakes to become the penultimate destination for Buddhists in the Indonesia and can have over 90,000 visitors on holidays. There are three Buddhist monasteries in the area and they are open to visitors and invite anyone to join in their services.
Borobudur was built in a 100-year period starting in 750 AD. Very little is known about its construction but the workforce must have been huge. 60,000 cubic meters of stone had to be cut, transported and carved to build it. Over 2,200,000 cubic feet of rock, much of it ornately carved, had to be fit together to build this colossal structure. As Buddhism declined and East Java and Islam became prevalent the site was abandoned not long after it was finished and remained mostly forgotten and buried under layers of volcanic ashes until 1815 when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles as governor of Java had the site cleared and the glory of the site was rediscovered.
Essentially it’s a stupa (A stupa is a memorial to Buddha that often contains a small chamber with a relic of the Buddha inside. As I mentioned before it usually looks like a bell and is topped with a spire or sometimes an umbrella.) atop a massive memorial to Buddha made up of over 2,000,000 individually cut pieces of volcanic stone. Most of the pieces are just over a square foot in size. The builders constructed it over the top of a hill so that the volume of stone needed to make it tall was reduced dramatically. Monumental, pun definitely intended, efforts were needed to restore it as the hill had become water logged in the years prior to its discovery and it was sinking fairly rapidly. A series of PVC pipes were installed under the structure to allow the hill to drain away the excess water and that effort has been successful. Physical reconstruction of the stone has gone one for years and continues today.
Originally it was 138 feet tall but the spire at the top of the stupa was continually hit by lightning and they got tired of replacing the stone so they put up a lightning rod and left the tip of the spire off. Consequently it’s only 118 feet tall today. It covers an area of 141,650,000 square feet. That’s over three and a half acres. It’s estimated that the whole thing weights about three and a half million tons.
The overall shape is a square with slightly rounded sides. It has five levels including the top, each one a little smaller than the one below it, making a stack of ever smaller layers. You can walk all the way around the four lower levels. The walls on both sides of these balconies are ornately carved with scenes in and of the Buddhist tradition.
But let’s start the beginning. As our ship docked there were some dancers performing a traditional Javanese welcome dance. Their costumes did not appear to be in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition but more like the traditional costumes of the native cultures of the Amazon rain forest or even Native American cultures.
Historical Note: You may or may not be familiar with my distain for calling some of the residents of North America Native Americans. They are no more native than my German ancestors that came over in the late 1600s. The simple fact is that they migrated here and displaced whoever they found just like the Europeans did. I was once told by a Taiwanese student attending UCI that the Pilgrims were just greedy entrepreneurs that came to the New World for the expressed purpose of subjugating the indigenous peoples and exploiting the land’s natural resources. Is it any wonder I grow extremely weary of wrong-headed attempts to rewrite history in the name of political correctness. What agenda driven, or worse sincerely misinformed, lecturer at one of our state universities put that idea in that poor kid’s head? And even worse, was paid handsomely by the taxpayers of California to do it.
Their costumes had feathered headdresses and an ornate, fringed collar that was worn over the head and covered the chest and abdomen (the dancers wore a dark t-shirt under this collar but most likely the original was worn directly over the skin. A wide fringed belt attached to a breechcloth like garment made from strips of black, red and yellow material about 1.5 inches wide extended from the belt to just above their knees and was open on the sides. Again they were wearing black shorts under this garment, once more, not likely included in the original outfit. They had wide leather coverings on their shins that had rows of bells attached as well as a 4 inch yellow fringe just below the first row of bells. Of course, they wore tennis shoes, also not likely part of the original outfit. I hope the humor is coming across in all this. I’d hate to think someone holds the idea that I think it was possible that t-shirts and tennis shoes were worn by the ancient people groups of Java. They danced in two lines with a dancer in a tiger/jaguar costume dancing in the center, accompanied by an assortment of percussion instruments, mostly drums of one size or another. It was a nice greeting.
I’ve mentioned that the traffic here was bad; it’s not bad it’s impossible. We have to cross the island about half way to the south to get to Borobudur. In order to get us there and back in the time the ship has allotted we will have to have a police escort. Shades of Dakar, Senegal. As we left the port it was easy to see how useful the police escort was going to be. He drove ahead, lights flashing, siren screeching with occasional taps on that very deep horn like fire trucks have in the US.
It was helpful on the highways but soon we were on two lane roads and going through small towns. When traffic was stopped at a red light things were simple. The police car and our bus just drove on the wrong side of the street until we got to the intersection and then switched back to the correct side without stopping. When we were in the town with traffic stopped in both directions things got really interesting. Somehow, as the Red Sea parted before Moses and the Israelites, the traffic parted in front of the police car and we kept moving, albeit sometimes fairly slowly. I’d estimate that we spent more than half of the trip straddling the center line of the street and about 20% driving fully on the wrong side of the road.
Some of the female, more seasoned, citizens seemed about to have the vapors and based on how I see them drive in and around Leisure World I understand why. They won’t pull out from a stop sign if there’s another car on the road in the same county. I have to admit that some of the misses were not by a large margin, but it was in no way actually scary.
It took about an hour to reach the train station where we boarded some very old coaches pulled by an old fashioned, steam driven, coal burning locomotive. The cars had no glass in the windows and that was just fine as it’s very warm and humid. We are now about 2 degrees below the equator. Soon the whistle sounded and the train chugged off pulling the two coach cars down the rusted rails. This section of track is not used any more except for tourist rides. The proceeds fund the train museum at the station where we will arrive.
Soon we were in open country passing through miles and miles of rice paddies. People were out working in them, some standing on the ground some working from small boats. There are scarecrows and flags of all colors waving in the fields to keep the birds away. In fields where they are growing sweet rice, that wonderful, sweet, sticky stuff that they use for deserts, they have densely packed flags, bandanas, scarecrows and long ropes with ribbons hung from them because the birds really love the sweet rice.
As we passed through small villages kids in uniform on their way to or from school waved at us and laughed. Plenty of adults waved and smiled too. Apparently the Indonesian crew members on the HAL ships come by their cheery warm attitude naturally. Many times we were looking down into what essentially served as the back yard of their homes. Whole families, sitting on their back porches waved and smiled at us. It was great!
When we arrived at Meglang Station the end of the train ride, there were two young girls in Javanese traditional clothing that performed a welcome dance for us. We had one of our fellow travelers take out picture with them. All around the back of the station there are locomotive displays. Some are so nicely maintained they look like they could be put into service without delay.
When we returned to our bus, out guide had gotten us some traditional Javanese candy. It’s wedge shaped and about one inch wide and high with a one-half inch base, tapering to a line at the top. I’m game to try this sort of thing and I was surprised to find that it tasted like the old Bit-O-Honey candy but less sweet. A nice treat.
Back on the bus with our police escort we mainly drove on two lane roads that were clogged with traffic as we went through villages. We passed two trucks about the size of a military 2.5 ton truck that were piled high with rolled, very colorful mattresses.
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