Notes from Indonesia 🇮🇩

Morning prayers, clove cigarettes, improvised transportation and more!

Greetings from Pemuteran, Bali, Indonesia. We’ve been on the road for two weeks now, mostly on Java, and are just starting to explore Bali (the titular “Love” in Eat Pray Love). We’re making our way, finding a sustainable pace, and adjusting to little conveniences — the food is consistently flavorful, cheap and easily pescatarian for Alli — and inconveniences — 4:30am prayers blasted by the mosque next door. 

I’m on the lookout for the little details, like glass bottles filled with green gasoline on little roadside stands and beaded head straps that hold masks in place over headscarves. I don’t really have a big essay for you, but lots of thoughts, and so I thought I’d make this newsletter a jumble of notes and observations. For more of a play-by-play of where we’re going and what we’re up to, you may want to follow me and Alli (especially Alli) on Instagram.

Colorful village

In Malang, in East Java, a poor neighborhood called Jodipan painted every building in vibrant colors a few years ago to attract tourists like Alli and I. Reader: it worked. We forked over about 30 cents worth of Indonesia Rupiah, and walked around taking pictures. It does, in fact, look cool. Seeing a winning strategy in action, the village on the other side of the bridge went ahead and adopted an all blue scheme — who doesn’t like blue?

As a full time tourist, I see signs of Instagram everywhere. While photography has been a big part of travel for a century, this one platform, owned by one of the largest corporations on the planet, has clearly reshaped why some people go where they go, and how others earn their livelihoods. Who knows how that might change as Instagram pivots to short form video in pursuit of TikTok’s runaway growth.

I really dislike noticing myself, in the moment, planning the photos I will post to Instagram. I’m often caught between feeling like I should be taking photos of a beautiful or interesting place and actually wanting to experience the thing in front of me. Photography is awesome. But finding the right balance of posting and sharing is a work in progress.

Batteries everywhere all at once

I’m more aware than ever of the various things I need to charge, how long charging takes, what cables are required, and where I’m going to be able to plug in. The batteries are multitudinous. An incomplete list:

• cell phone

• iPad

• Apple pencil

• portable keyboard

• portable mouse

• Kobo¹

• earbud case

• left earbud

• right earbud

• digital camera

• extra camera battery

• portable battery charger

• electric trimmer/razor

• watch (the battery has been promised to last 10 years)

• body: sleep, food, water, grooming, etc.

Trash Vespas

In the land of the scooter, the Vespa is king. Our Malang homestay host and waterfall guide, an extremely kind and generous cruise ship chef, told us about how the Italian motorscooters have a special status here. Some save up and buy a new model, while others fix up classic, vintage scooters. 

However, he said, there is a third category. As we drove, a young man drove a scooter chasis rigged up into a truck-like shape of maybe a dozen tires, with a few other guys riding on the impromptu flatbed. This improvised, borderline road-safe contraption typifies the third category, which my host called “trash Vespas.” He said that any driver of any sort of Vespa can traverse Indonesia and rely on the hospitality of others in the Vespa community.

In my opinion, these vehicles are sick as hell and I would like to see more of them. They exemplify the “anything goes” driving culture here, where lanes and traffic lights are often a suggestion.

“Obesity of experience”

Some newsletter writers I respect and enjoy reading have shared this article recently, from a German English-language broadcaster. It’s about whether tourism makes sense anymore considering its impact on the climate. In some ways, the interview is about what I talked about above, how social media drives FOMO and is less about experience and personal growth, or whatever travel is supposed to be about. UK professor Richard Sharpley goes on to say:

When you can travel all the time, in my view at least, it loses the excitement. It loses its meaning. I've used the term "obesity of experience," and I think, particularly in Europe and elsewhere, we are becoming obese on experiences. I think people will eventually begin to realize that to enjoy tourism, let's do a bit less and really savor it when we do travel.

Well, as you might imagine, my gut instinct is to react to this like a person with children who is lectured about the environmental impact of raising a family: “WHATEVER DUDE! YOU can do that if that’s how YOU want to live.” But obviously it strikes a cord because there’s some truth to it, and we’ve decided to travel for a whole year.

My main critique is the lack of differentiation between modes of travel and living. Surely slow travel has a different carbon footprint than flying back and forth across the ocean to take a cruise, right? And there’s more to life than how you vacation. If I travel more, but live in an efficient city without a car, shouldn’t that matter? I’m not suggesting we all count up the climate points of everything we do like on The Good Place, but at the same time, I think it’s reductive to lump all kinds of “travel” in together.

Keep Driving

If you think Harry Styles’ recent album is a big hit at home, I’m pleased to tell you that it has already become dominant in faraway locales as well. Older pop music proliferates, but I’ve also heard “As It Was” on a mountain top while waiting for the sunrise and overlooking the crater of a volcano. It is nearly as ubiquitous as Belgians seem to be, or drones.

Djarum Black

I’ve never been a regular smoker, but I did occasionally smoke clove cigarettes in high school and college. (Yeah, I was really cool.) I guess I liked their pseudo-literary/intellectual rep. They tasted great to me, especially in the cold, and became a wintertime treat. Home from college on break, I would buy a pack of Djarum Black and a BIC lighter and smoke them outside the diner, shivering in my gray wool Swiss military jacket.

And then, of course, I grew up. Clove cigarettes were banned in the US in 2009, along with other flavored cigarettes besides menthols. At no point did I wonder where cloves themselves come from. It turns out, they’re from the Maluku islands, formerly the “spice islands,” in the east of the Indonesian archipelago. Elizabeth Pisani writes in her excellent book Indonesia, Etc.:

In the seventeeth century as now, many families in northern Maluku would spend harvest season knocking clusters of pink buds off their clove trees. Children spread the buds on flat, round trays woven out of palm leaves, and adults hiked them up onto the nipa-palm roof of the cottage to dry. After a few days being toasted by the sun and caressed by the breeze, the buds shrivel and blacken into the round-topped nails we toss into mulled wine. If you are sailing downwind from one of the smaller islands of Maluku in the July clove-drying season, you can sometimes smell Christmas before you can even see land.

So far, I haven’t been tempted to nostalgically smoke cloves.

Travel recs

One of the best parts of being a backpacker is getting recommendations from strangers. You meet someone who’s just come from where you’re going, and you find out what they liked. We literally are staying in a hotel recommended to us by three Australian girls we met last week. And now I’m seeking your recommendations:

Specifically, I’m working on a playlist of travel songs. They can be about a specific mode of conveyance, or simply be about getting somewhere, but I’m looking for good songs about being on the move. Here is the nascent playlist, and I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Also, if you have iPad games (especially ones that don’t require the internet) that you love, please tell me. Something less complicated than a 100-hour RPG is ideal.

Fortifying my stomach for the long haul,

–Josh

P.S.: I have a new piece about Indonesia internet freedom in the most recent New_ Public newsletter.

1. Everyone is shocked when you have an e-reader that’s not a Kindle, but it’s great, and I would recommend one, especially if you borrow a lot of ebooks from the library