That's neat, that's neat, that's neat, that's neat, I really love your tiger feet.

Last weekend I was ready for a couple of days out of town. A few weeks in the big smoke can really take their toll on the psychic defenses, not to mention making the old liver squeak like a rat stuck in a trap, and so I took up an offer to head out once more to the tropical paradise of Jakarta's Pulau Seribu (Thousand Islands).

I usually like to take my chances on the Rp.15,000 public boat from Muara Angke, however this time I was afforded the privilege of sharing a super fast yacht/speed boat out to Pulau Macan (Tiger Island) from the very posh Ancol Marina, as part of an all-inclusive and very reasonably priced weekend deal.

If you're an island novice or otherwise disinclined to slum it with the Kretek chomping Bapaks on the public boat, then I'd highly recommend the Macan trip, which is proving tremendously popular with expatriates (have a look here).

The fast boat takes a mere hour and a half to steam through the mud, silt and 100 million toilet flushings that coat Jakarta Bay and on into the crystal blue waters of the islands, considerably faster than the chugging public hulk. This speed can come at a price however. If the sea is in any way choppy or rough then the boat bangs and smacks over the waves like an ojeg speeding across the lunar surface, pummeling your backside into tenderloin in the process.

Foolishly, I had necked a few cans of Bintang prior to weighing anchor (a medicinal early morning pick me up you understand). After about an hour, I made a beeline for the head (as I believe the smallest room is called in nautical parlance). Alas I got inside just as we hit a rough spot of water with predictably hilarious consequences. I reemerged from the little sailor's room with a sprained knee and damp trousers and sat down in a huff. I should stress here though that I was the only one of 14 passengers who manage to both injure and wet himself simultaneously on the way to Macan, so perhaps I only have myself to blame.

After landing at the Macan jetty I felt a touch peculiar (so what's new, I hear you cry) and went for a bit of a lie down on a sun bed. After a rousing from my siesta I found Macan to be just as picturesque and lovely as the other islands in the chain that I've visited. The tiny atoll was covered in trees and fringed with coral and an eco-friendly resort boasting solar power, recycled rainwater and a coral rehabilitation programme has been set up there. Some top snorkelling is available, or alternatively you can sit on your fat arse all weekend drinking gin and tonic whilst your Jakarta stress meter drops out of the red zone.

I thought that I'd go for a swim before hitting the sauce though and paddled over to the nearest neighbouring island, around 200 meters away. After wading through the shallows and trying not to spear my feet on any of the sea anemones that liberally dotted the coastline, I flopped onto the sand like a beached whale, the only person on the tiny island. I think I was the only person there at any rate. It took me a mere five minutes to circumnavigate the tree-covered sandbar and I didn't come across any warungs or ojeg drivers crouching amid the tropical foliage.

Birds were squawking in the trees however and mud skippers hopped across the sand hunting fish as the sun beat down, burning my back to a crisp and ensuring that showering would be painful for the next week. It was easier to imagine that I was 5000, rather than 50 kilometers or so away from a filthy sprawling metropolis.

Perhaps, when global warming causes Jakarta to be swamped, then the city itself will become an extension of the Thousand Islands. People will be able to kayak or swim between higher bits of terra firma or between partially submerged skyscrapers, as fish and coral colonize the swamped roads, traffic islands and abandoned cars and bajajs of the ex-capital. If you don't want to purchase an apartment too many floors up because of the earthquake threat then think again, you could be sitting on an eco-tourism goldmine.

After some drinks, a soothing massage, more drinks and a blissful night’s sleep undisturbed by revving motorcycle engines and calls to prayer, it was time to re-board the turbo powered speed cruiser for the 90 minute blast back to the effluent filled beauty of Jakarta Bay and the joys of Bluebird taxis. Thankfully, this time, the seas were calm and thus there was no repeat of my uncomfortably damp first leg of the journey. There was only a moraine of plastic bags to traverse about half an hour from Jakarta that seemed to demarcate the boundary between the blue waters of the further islands and the mulligatawny soup that bathes the capital's coast. Drown it all I say, wash the city into the sea, let's start again and do it properly this time.

Lake of Fire

Last weekend, I revved up the old banger and drove down to one of the few Jakarta tourist spots to have so far eluded my attentions. Around four or five kilometers southeast of Ragunan Zoo in South Jakarta, on the way to Depok, lies Setu Babakan, one of the city's more sizeable lakes. Around the lake's perimeter you'll find a Betawi Cultural Village which is devoted to preserving the ethnic and cultural heritage of Jakarta's indigenous people.

There are apparently around 2.5 million Betawi people in the capital which is, I guess, around a quarter of Jakarta's total population. The Betawi have a culture and a language, not to mention music, traditions and food, that are all distinct from Java's Sundanese and Javanese populations. They are also known for their rough and ready manner, their openness to strangers and even for their short temperedness, all character traits that are anathema to the supposedly refined Javanese.

Anyway, I headed down a bumpy track to the side of the lake and took a stroll down Setu Babakan's bucolic (and only slightly bubonic) boulevards. The lake is ringed with cheap and cheerful chairs, tables and 'warungs', at which courting couples can whisper sweet nothings in each other's ears whilst taking in the pleasant views of the lake and scoffing down a few bowls of ‘baso’ meatballs. There were plenty of amorous young blades present on my visit in fact, all enjoying the relative pollution free calm.

There were also a few groups of Betawi gentlemen enjoying some rather dubious looking homemade concoctions and shambling about arhythmically to a cassette of traditional Dangdhut music. One of them tipped a bottle of Red Bull into a mineral water bottle of fearsome looking brown liquid and offered me a swig. Fearing for the health of my optic nerves, I declined his kind offer of a Pertamina Pina Colada and continued on with my stroll.

If the Sharia religious police ever manage to expand their sphere of influence down through Sumatra and on into Jakarta, then they will surely have a field day cracking the skulls of the young couples and half cut ‘bapaks’ down at the Betawi Cultural Village. Let us hope that such a vision never come to pass.

Also stationed around the lake were various fishermen trying to hook a few bites and carp and tilapia are supposedly there for the taking. Mind you, I saw precisely nothing swimming through the rather brackish waters and perhaps this isn't surprising given that the lake is fed directly from the somewhat less than pristine Ciliwung River.

Also, next to the lake I came across a hawker selling posters of a chap called Benyamin Sueib, who was apparently a famous native Betawi actor. "Mr. Ben -- 1939 -- 1995" was the legend under one such poster. Yet another Indonesian gentleman fails to make 60. Ho hum. Perhaps those homemade, lakeside cocktails were a contributing factor to Mr. Ben's demise. The other famous ethnic Betawi gentleman is, of course, Jakarta's current governor and moustache enthusiast, Mr. Fauzi Bowo. I wonder if he ever brought a lady friend down to Setu Babakan during his formative years?

Next to the lake, sits the Betawi Cultural Village and this is well worth a look around. Regular musical and theatrical performances are held here and, on Thursday nights, Silat demonstrations can also be watched. Silat is Indonesia's indigenous martial art so I'd recommend standing well back if you do go along.

Strolling back lakeside, it was time to head out on the high seas in a pedal powered, fiberglass sea lion with a ball balanced on the end of its nose. Not quite hang gliding at the Bogor Lido for sure but extreme sport enough for a Sunday afternoon, after a Saturday night weighing Anker in Bintang Bay. A 20 minute, self powered cruise will set you back a mere Rp.5000 per person.

Back on dry land, I rounded off a fine Betawi afternoon with a tub of my favorite durian ice-cream, purchased from one of the lakeside stalls. It hadn't quite been a holographic, high-tech ride through Disneyland but Setu Babakan at least has the ring of cultural authenticity to it. Even the hello misters and suggestive innuendo were bang on target.

Perhaps though, with a little investment, the place could be turned into a modern Betawi theme park. They could put in a loop the loop roller coaster with a Bluebird taxi going round it, or a Ferris wheel with Bajajs for gondolas. They could even set up a gridlocked dodgems ride on which one only gets to move five centimeters during a single five minute session. Drivers would also get to have real, authentic Betawi road rage punch-ups with other dodgems drivers who bump into them.

Eventually, it was time to head home and I left the courting threesomes (boy, girl, scooter) of Setu Babakan to enjoy the dusk in peace. If you've already done Ancol, Taman Mini, Taman Safari and the zoo, then this relaxing little spot could be just the ticket. Just don't drink any strange liquids if offered.

Medicine Show

Last week, I was in a branch of a local, well-known chemist chain (or drugstore, as they are known to people who also use words like fender, faucet and filibuster). I was ostensibly there to stock up on my usual supplies of razor blades, corn plasters and sanitary napkins. The store in question featured a typical combination of small size and overstaffing that always sees several shop girls descending on me to ask me what I'm looking for just as I'm trying to decide whether to get a box of Ribbed or Exciter.

After selecting my party hats of choice, I looked up and noticed that, not atypically, one entire wall of the shop was filled with non-prescription pills, all claiming to do this, that and the other and to treat conditions that most of us presumably never knew that we were suffering from in the first place. As George Orwell once said, the true genius is to sell you the solution AND the problem.

Many of you may be one of a new breed of pill poppers, swayed by the claims made by this new multi-million dollar industry and persuaded that a good diet and a bit of exercise are no longer enough to maintain decent health. No, you have to pop pills and vitamins until you rattle like a half empty jar of peanuts when you walk down the street.

Fish oil, antioxidants, detox treatments, you name it, capitalism has to expand in order to survive these mountebanks of multivitamins, these pseudoscientific sellers of snake oil, have now sown seeds of paranoia in perfectly healthy people. Nobody ever became a multimillionaire by advising people to eat more fruit and vegetables and so, in our money obsessed world, decent, rigorous medical science has been debased by this confidence trick. Perhaps it all started in World War II when the British Royal Air Force put about the myth that carrots contained chemicals that enabled its pilots to see the German planes in the dark in order to disguise the fact that they had invented radar. Who knows?

Most of the world's drugs were in fact discovered and synthesized between around 1930 and 1980. Wave after wave of genuine miracles came along. However, after this low hanging fruit had been picked, things became much harder for the pharmaceutical industry and so new conditions and pathologies had to be invented that could be nixed with pre-existing drugs or quack remedies. Whoever heard of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) or Night Eating Syndrome before about ten years ago?

Looking around the shop’s well-stocked shelves, I could see how lucrative the non-prescription pill game is, as most jars cost between Rp.150,000 and Rp.500,000. I picked up a few and had a good look at them. One of them was called 'Nutrimax Renew Life' and was priced at Rp.261,000 per jar of 60. Perhaps the stuff would be cheap at ten times the price however seeing as it claimed to offer weight loss, increased energy and libido, a more youthful appearance, lower blood pressure, more restful sleep, improved emotional mood, increased lean muscle mass and enhanced memory and vision. All in one tablet! A two-month course of these and you'd probably live forever.

The most prevalent kind of tablets in the shop though, and the latest pill popping craze, were called things like 'Brain Power' and 'Nutri Brain'. The fish oil and Omega 3 industry has tapped into our deepest fears in this ultra competitive world and fish oil tablets are currently selling by the bucket load as parents foist the things on their poor kids, hoping for improved exam results.

So what of the evidence though? What have proper, academically rigorous, double-blind medical trials involving placebo groups shown about all this stuff? Fish oil for increased IQ? No evidence. Antioxidant pills for protection against cancer? No evidence. Surely vitamin C to prevent colds? No evidence…at all.

We are seduced by the power of the pill however and prefer to avoid inconvenient truths regarding complex social problems and the real causes of poor health. We don't want to hear about the social inequalities, the employment uncertainties, the disintegrating communities and environments, the junk diets and pollution that all affect public health. Instead, the charms of curative quackery in capsule form dovetail nicely with the now naturalized, right-wing notion of individuality that has won the ideological battle over the last 30 years. "It's their fault if they're not eating their fish oil capsules and thus their children are failing at school."

Alas, Indonesia, with its traditional culture of placebo medicines and credulous underclass, doesn’t really stand much of a chance of resisting these fads that have now taken the West by storm. I however cocked a snook at the fair maidens and their cornucopia of pills and headed to the cash register with only a box of Pleasuremax™ in my trembling hand. I then scuttled off to enjoy the oldest cure of them all, namely putting my forebrain to sleep with ethyl-alcohol. Stay in the pink everyone there will be more ratty banter next week.

How Deep Is Your Love?

Last weekend, I went zooming around the ring road all the way up to Kemayoran Expo in order to take in the Jakarta Mega Wedding Festival 2010. I should just say at this point that I'm not planning a wedding myself, be it mega or otherwise, in the near future. I'm clearly not very commited when it comes to the fairer sex and it's going to take a very special lady to keep me smiling (or a whole bunch of average ones... I mean either way it's all good).

I did however spy a number of Western gentlemen mingling in amongst the mainly ethnic Chinese attendees. They were being tugged reluctantly around the stalls and stands by their eager local fiancés.

So, what was on offer for young lovebirds to feast on down at the Jakarta Mega Wedding Festival 2010? Everything that any loving couple could possibly want from their big day out in fact: fancy rings to show off to those bitches at work, cakes the size of wardrobes, dresses for fatties, elaborate wedding tuxedos that'll make any groom look like a gay maitre d’, hideously expensive photographers who’ll airbrush your memories of that big day to a Hollywood level of blandness. Yes, there were literally a million and one ways of blowing a sizeable chunk of cash that would otherwise be better spent on a prefabricated starter home outside Bekasi that will look like a Roman ruin within five years.

Alas, the festival has now finished, so if you're planning to get hitched in the near future, then you've missed all the best deals on an aspirational wedding that will create a satisfactory illusion of wealth and grandeur for your friends to try and top.

Weddings don't come cheap though, even in Indonesia. I checked out prices for the various elements of the classic wedding and it certainly all adds up. A photographer will cost you a minimum of Rp.3,500,000 for indoors and Rp.6,000,000 for outdoors (no, I don't understand the difference either). Surely you could get a friend to take a few snaps for you in these days of powerful digital cameras? Ha, I’m such a cheapskate. We’d better take a figure of Rp.6,000,000 then.

Next up is the catering. If you wish to invite a large crowd of wedding goers, say 500 people, then the cheapest deal I could find was Rp.38,000,000 all in. Actually, I had great fun at the catering stalls as they all featured example wedding buffets for potential clients to test.
"Did the black pepper beef perform for you, Sir?"
"Not bad my good man, I think I'll try the caterers two stalls down though, just to make a comparison".
Several hours later, I was getting stuck into the antacids. The things I do for this column.

Next up comes a cake. You can save a bit of money here by renting a pretend cake several feet high for only Rp.1,000,000 and then giving your guests pieces from a more modest offering that has just been cut up behind the scenes. Honesty, that's what launching a successful marriage is all about.

Next comes a hall or hotel function room to hold the reception in. This will set you back about another Rp.20,000,000 minimum. Then there are the rings. We'd better add about Rp.30,000,000 there. Then there are the invites and the little gifts that are always given to wedding guests on the door in Indonesia. Whole selections of gift ideas were on display and ranged from clichéd and boring fans to photo frames to rather more interesting beer bottle openers.

A wedding that I attended once actually gave away shot glasses, my personal best door gift winner. Moreover, when ex-strongman Suharto's grandson got married a couple of years back, all of the guests were given a rose made from five Rp.10,000 notes with two Rp.20,000 notes for the leaves, pretty much summing up that particular family's weltanschauung. In any case, we'd better add about Rp.12,000,000 for the invites and gifts. So that leaves us with a grand total of Rp.107,000,000. This is around US$10,000, roughly half the cost of the average American wedding, although I've probably forgotten lots of other stuff. I am a man after all.

I said that the wedding Festival reflected the classic western Christianized wedding and seemed to be catering for a mainly ethnic Chinese clientele, however I find Indonesian weddings, be they Muslim or Christian, to be much of a muchness. Many that I've attended haven't been a whole heap of fun to be frank. There is usually no drinking or dancing, as we have in the West, and certainly nothing like those week-long affairs that they have in India. The bride and groom themselves have to do a whole lot of standing around looking like androgynous mannequins and generally avoiding any spontaneous displays of enjoyment.

No, no, I can't face it. It's elopement to Vegas for me if I ever get hitched to an Indonesian lass. When I tie the knot I want a quick 10 minute ceremony presided over by a dead-on-the-toilet, cheeseburger era Elvis followed by a 24-hour Jack Daniel's bender. Now that's what I call a day to remember.

Back next week chaps.

You Will Pass Water

So we're all another year, if not a whole decade, closer to shuffling off this mortal coil. This fact was vividly brought home to me by the expanding waistlines and receding hairlines of the old friends that I hooked up with on my recent Christmas sojourn back to mother Britannia (and that was just the women).

So what does this year have in store for us then ay? I’m already having visions of my 2010 as a green snake of empty Bintang bottles stretching out in front of me towards the horizon. Not necessarily a prediction that took prodigious mental powers of deduction on my part to make but at least it has the ring of truth to it.

Other commentators have also been keen to stick their tuppences into the annual year-end free for all. A feature in last week's Globe gathered together psychics, tarot card readers and inveterate chancers of every stripe to offer up their soothsaying hokum to the credulous idiots who believe in horoscopy, tea leaf reading and that sort of thing (and there are surely many such individuals in this country).

Most of these charlatans rather hedged their bets however. This is probably due to the fact that their mystic ether surfings were being printed in a widely read newspaper. We were therefore confronted with earth shattering, gob smacking predictions such as Indonesia being subject to more natural disasters and political turmoil over the coming 12 months. A child of five could have foreseen all of that on an Etch-a-Sketch. Alas, we never seem to get a follow-up article 12 months later in order to compare the quasi mystical babble of the fortune tellers with a year's worth of hindsight do we? It's a shame that.

I don't claim to be able to bring the contours of 2010 into focus via some clairvoyant information superhighway, however there are a number of things that I believe I'm on pretty safe ground in saying definitely won't be happening during the coming year. Let's have a quick look into my crystal balls (for I have two, dear reader).

1. Avid songwriter and part-time recording artist SBY will release his sophomore effort to rapturous critical acclaim. The album will be a sprawling three CD box set of acid fried psychedelia, overlapping tribal polyrhythms and industrial samples. A bonus disc of updated, dubbed out Jimi Hendrix covers will win the Prez a support slot with Slank. Fundamentalist calls to impeach the President for his forays into the devil's music go unheeded and a Summer of Love breaks out across Java as Indonesians tune on, turn out and drop in.

2. Barack Obama finally visits Indonesia, only to meet his death somewhere in the Archipelago. Rather than an assassin's bullet however, it's a rogue bowl of soto ayam that does for our Barry. CIA watching conspiracy theorists prefer to see the death in the shadow of the Castro exploding cigar plot. Several nations mourn.

3. A crackpot inventor in Java, working round the clock in his garden shed, discovers and develops yellow energy, a process by which energy can be liberated from urine. Amazingly, scientists at Caltech verify that he's not taking the piss and our man wins the Nobel Prize for physics. Meanwhile, the country's lavatory attendants are catapulted from poverty into riches beyond the dreams of KPK suspects. Sales of Bintang rise by 7000%.

4. Investment comes to newly rebuilt Aceh in the form of US franchise Hooters, who open a chain of bars across the province, creating jobs and opportunities for many.

5. TVRI screens a 12 part series on evolution and the history of life on earth to record viewing figures. A DVD of the series is subsequently released and makes it onto the national school curriculum. Prominent Islamic clerics declare themselves proud to share their genes with orangutans and don green robes in order to hug trees. Chainsaws are declared ‘haram’.

6. Tommy Suharto opens a series of inner-city orphanages across the Archipelago. "It's time to give a little back," says Tommy, who sells his fleet of fast cars and takes to an ascetic life of meditation, abstinence, sackcloth and ashes.

7. Jakarta's ageing fleet of orange Metro Minis is replaced with shiny new Smart Buses complete with an electronic travel card ticketing system. People abandon their cars in droves.

8. Conditions are finally deemed right for the long delayed invasion of the Malaysian peninsula by the Bendera group.  Amphibious landing craft (well, rubber dinghies) are employed and a brave landing party of 20 splits into two brave fronts of ten, who then launch a daring pincer movement assault on Kuala Lumpur. An Indonesian flag can be seen fluttering atop the Petronas Twin Towers by late September.  Malaysia surrenders to its new Indonesian masters the following week.

Okay, so that's what’s probably not going to happen. I'll see you in December for a recap. In the meantime, have a super New Year one and all and remember to get plenty of sleep and to eat your greens. Let’s see if we can’t raise a smile in time for 2011.

Snow Joke

"Welcome to London Heathrow, the local time is 6.10am and the temperature outside is minus 5°C". If you're used to wringing the sweat out of your shirt every evening then awakenings rarely come ruder. I briefly considered nipping into the Airbus toilet to attempt a decapitation suicide by suction flushing my head off my shoulders but in the end, I steeled myself and trudged off the plane.

After a bleary eyed baggage retrieval in Heathrow's god-awful, dog-eared Terminal Four, I donned the ski jacket that last saw action on top of Bogor's Gunung Gede and headed out into freezing fog to meet my sister. The psychological and physiological effects of cold weather are no laughing matter of course. Those living at high latitudes often fall prey to what is now known as seasonal affective disorder (which, of course, is often referred to by the fantastic acronym SAD). It's basically taken thousands of years since the age of Hippocrates for medical science to get its head around the fact that people feel a bit down when temperatures plummet to penguin huddling levels.

Global warming all seemed a very long way away. They certainly scored an own goal by choosing Copenhagen as a venue in which to thrash out a putative carbon cap agreement. If the world's leaders had been ensconced in the Jakarta Convention Centre, urban heat island effect and a tropical climate conspiring to dampen their undergarments with perspiration as negotiations got underway, then we'd be looking at a 50% global reduction by next July.




Family back garden, North London, December 2009

God it was cold though. Bone crushing cold. The kind of cold that will wrench the spirit out of a man or forge it into steel. Returning from Southeast Asia's balmy climate to Britain's Arctic tundra certainly gave me pause for thought at any rate. Either you’re an evolutionist, in which case we came out of Africa, or you're a believer, in which case we were created wandering around some Middle Eastern Eden. In either case, the risks of hypothermia were minimal, on this point Darwin and Herr Ratzinger are surely as one.

At least the big freeze was lightened by Christmas however and I was soon eating non-stop and building up a good layer of whale blubber, the better for to combat the frost. A few days celebrating the birth of the Santa, or the time when Jesus comes down the chimney, or whatever it is, was just what the doctor ordered. In the news, the clash of civilizations may have been continuing apace, as people tried to either give firework displays on transatlantic jets or rugby tackle the Pope (were these too pranksters related perchance?). At home however, sprouts, wine and central heating made edicts on yoga, gender reassignment surgery and the tightness of ladies' trousers seem an awfully long way away.



After a few days of gastronomic abuse, it was time to don some thermal underwear and hit the streets. After heading into the centre of town, the first thing that I noticed upon disembarking from Tottenham Court Road tube station was how much London's ERP (electronic road pricing) scheme has reduced the amount of traffic in the centre of the capital.




Alas, the continuing social status conferred upon Jakarta's car owners will happily see them sitting in jams for hours, pumping their Blackberries like 11-year-old GameBoy addicts, rather than try any public transportation option. I reckon though that a Jakarta ERP scheme set at around Rp.50,000 per day would improve traffic flows and force people onto the busway system, where they can get groped by total strangers and fall arse over tip on the shoddily constructed aluminium walkways.

At least though, Indonesia remains uncursed by the CCTV, health and safety Nazi mentality that has emasculated the UK over the last decade. In Jakarta, one is free to down a bottle of whisky whilst driving around town, ride one's motorcycle along the pavement at full speed, bathe in faecal rivers, jump around on refuse tips and trash houses of worship, should one so desire. The developed world's ever expanding list of social pathologies is a different matter however.

Take smoking, for example. Head down to an English pub these days with a few friends and suddenly half of them are going on a little jolly trip outside in order to spark up and shiver in the snow, leaving their less interesting, non-smoking companions, such as myself, to look after their coats and bloody iPods. It's drink or smoke folks, but not both simultaneously, very dangerous that is.

Moreover, under new European Union regulations, cigarettes are no longer allowed to be called either, 'Light' or 'Mild' lest people think that they are somehow better for you. 'Smooth' or 'Refined' now the legally required nomenclature that must be employed to avoid Orwellian thought crime. If Dji Sam Soe were available over here they'd probably have to be sold under the name, Emphysema.




I guess I should make the most of my trip over here however and drink as much cider as I can before heading back to the Big Durian to thaw out. Happy New Decade readers and may you be blessed with many strong sons.