Indonesia In A Day

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DAY 491: “You should see the outside,” Henricus said to me in the living room, which had been converted to a guest room with the simple folding out of the futon.

“Yeah, I know,” I said without looking away from the television screen.  I was fully enthralled playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on his PlayStation 2 since the night before.  Between that and Metal Gear Solid 3 (which I had been itching to play since Tokyo Game Show 2004), I was fully entertained just being in the apartment.  However, it made sense to take advantage of the fact that Henricus had no work to do that day in his life as a freelance designer.  And so, I turned off the PS2, took a shower, and got ready to see Indonesia.

INDONESIA, WITH OVER 17,000 ISLANDS, is of course way too big to cover in the time I had allotted:  just four days.  My intention to journey to Indonesia for such a stupid amount of time wasn’t a tourist one; on my immigration form for Purpose Of Stay, I checked not “Tourist/Holiday” but “Visit Friends/Relatives,” for I just planned on seeing Henricus for a few days since I was in the region, and to see the few sights he’d care to take me to in the greater metropolitan Jakarta area. 

However, Henricus told me that I could actually see “all of Indonesia in a day,” at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an Indonesia-inspired theme park which brought all of the country’s many diverse cultures in one place, separated into different “lands” like at Disney World.  (Similar parks have also been created in Thailand and the Philippines.)

“[Linda’s] excited,” Henricus told me as we drove down the highway towards “mini Indonesia.” Both he and his wife had been to the park before, but not in over twenty years; “mini Indonesia” was a popular destination for grammar school field trips.  We arrived after about a forty-minute ride through metro Jakarta, only to find out it wouldn’t be as exciting as they remembered.

“It’s closed on Mondays,” Henricus informed me after the entry gate guard told him first.  “[He says] we can see it, but just the outside.”

“Okay.”

It wasn’t completely closed though; mostly everything was open, just the interiors of the mock edifices wouldn’t be accessible, nor would there be any people wandering around in traditional garb for tourists to take photos with. 

“It’s Disneyland,” said Henricus said as we rode on the cable car skyway over the different areas of the park.  That statement was sort of true; in the center of the different lands was a big non-Indonesian, European-style fairy-tale castle that served as the front entrance for a pool.

We toured each “land” via ground transport (Henricus’ car) and in just about an hour, we covered a lot of Indonesian ground (since each land was separated often times by merely a thin fence):  the stone statues and temples of Bali; arch-shaped houses of West Nusa Tenggara; the brightly-painted houses (picture above) and tombs of south Sulawesi; the red-roofs of southeast Sulawesi; the statues and houses of Java’s Yogyakarta; and the totem poles, primitive straw huts, and fake fishermen of Papua.  Keeping with the “mini” theme, there was even a miniature scale model of the famous behemoth temple, the Barabudur. 

Rounding out the rushed “Indonesia in a day” experience was a sampling of what Let’s Go called the national dish, nasi goreng which every Indonesian I met laughed at—What’s so nationalistic about their commonplace fried rice dish? Kerupak, prawn crackers were another local fave.

INDONESIA BOASTS MANY CUISINES AND CULTURES, but it is also a place of natural wonder untainted by man.  Indonesia has a variety of indigenous flora and fauna, including monkeys, deer, and many species of birds that we saw in an aviary—peacocks, cucaks, and others.  A guy working the grounds there spared some time to show us a particularly big horned-billed bird that freaked out Linda, and perched it on Henricus’ arm so that I could take a photo.  Now if I could just get this auto-focus to lock on...

“Hurry!” he cried.  The bird was digging its claws into his skin. 

From birds we saw bats, not at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, but at the Bogor Botanical Gardens about 90 minutes away on the other side of Jakarta.  The bats were a part of a bigger rainforest ecosystem in the complex of many plants and trees, both big and small, including the “stinky flower” (as Henricus and Linda called it), also known as the Carcass Flower, named after the fact that reeked like a dead body every three years when it bloomed. 

“OFF ROAD!  IT’S LIKE WE’RE IN THE JUNGLE,” said Henricus as Linda took to the steering wheel and zipped across the park, passed small roaring rivers.  Without the skyscrapers of Jakarta in sight, you could squint and pretend you were in some remote jungle in Borneo or something, which was the best thing that one trying to see “Indonesia in a day’ could do.  Our afternoon jungle experience was made complete with a swing on a woody vine like Tarzan; and our day-long pan-Indonesian excursion was made complete with afternoon tea at the botanical gardens cafe (not too far from the Bogor Mansion).

“This is refreshing for us,” Henricus said, sitting down for tea.  “We’d just be inside all day [if you didn’t come over].  And the gallery is so small.”

THE GALLERY HE WAS REFERRING TO was Artnivora, an art gallery he had just opened in the Kemang district in central Jakarta, a district once swarming with foreign ex-pats until they cleared out after the economic crisis of 1998.  After our day of seeing what the tourist traps the suburbs had to offer, we drove back into the hustle, bustle, and traffic of the city to visit the gallery. 

Created more as a hobby than a profit-making business, Henricus and Linda had spent two months building up an easily-rented space into the Artnivora gallery and opened its doors on the fifth of January 2005.  Curator Henricus’ first show was ”Anton Huang On Paper,” a collection of works by the Indonesian-born international painter Anton Huang—known locally as “Anton Kustia Widjaja”—which Henricus’ father had acquired over the years without a real place to put them all. 

Henricus was quite into the arts scene in Jakarta and wanted to do what he could to push it to another level—any level for that matter.  It was evident that the city was more concerned with commercial shopping malls than the arts, and Henricus wanted to change all that.  “Have you talked with the Ministry of Arts at all?” I asked him.

“There is no Ministry of Arts,” he replied.  “It’s going to be me.”

Henricus’ freelance design duties would always come first though, for they paid the bills and supported his wife—and his guests from the States for that matter, since he insisted on graciously paying for everything for me.  The dinner tab was ultimately picked up by him when we went out for fried fish at a restaurant where Henricus had a short meeting that night with a business client. 

Henricus got work to do out of that meeting, but in the meantime, his dreams of being “Minister of the Arts” would continue—and he had the creative genius and perseverance to make it happen.  I knew that he would achieve his goal sooner than later.  I mean, if you can see all of Indonesia in a day, there’s no telling how fast things could develop.

(Anyone interested in going partner with Henricus to globalize the ”Artnivora” brand should contact me or him.  It is the perfect opportunity for aspiring art history students or contemporary art lovers yearning to get into the gallery scene.)

SAVE THE DATE; DAY 503 IS COMING.  MARCH 5, 2005, NYC.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE TRAILER. 
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This blog entry about the events of Monday, February 21, 2005 was originally posted on February 25, 2005 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

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