Shop Till You Drop

Consumerism continues to annex modern life

The amount of time that I find myself spending in the city’s retail palaces has tailed off enormously in recent years, as I'm of the opinion that, in the words of the old joke, once you've seen one shopping plaza, you've seen a mall. New shopping plazas continue to mushroom all over Jakarta however and most recently I was passing the enormous new Kota Kasablanka mall and popped in, lured by the promise of a branch of Ace Hardware. Yet another mall to burn time in. The interior was absolutely huge, more like an air terminal than a shopping mall. Most unsettlingly though, I stumbled across a branch of Top Man/Top Shop, and as a Brit I find it slightly disconcerting to see shops such as these and Debenhams, rather proletarian UK stores to be frank, being scrubbed up and repackaged for the Indonesian petty bourgeoisie.

Hanging out at shopping malls is a favourite activity in Jakarta, although this seems like something of a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. If there's nothing but malls in the city then, unsurprisingly, people will go to malls. In this respect, Indonesia once again exemplifies all of the worst elements of late capitalism, its capital city being woefully bereft of parks, libraries, theatres or public sports facilities and instead being crammed with temples of vapid materialism, circuses and bread for the iPhone generation that denote something of a land-use imbalance in town. Bright, shining sterile fantasy worlds unencumbered by the diesel fumes, guys with guitars, potholes and dried-on-chilli-sauce stains that prevail outside. An odourless nirvana of boutiques, food courts, computer motherboards and security guards in ill-fitting uniforms ready to pounce if they see a single bead of perspiration breaking out on your forehead.

Yes, Jakartans love their shopping malls and those escalators and food courts have seemingly won the battle for the twenty-first century Indonesian soul. Behind all of the Grand Guignol, 120dB fun fashion shows in the plaza lobbies though, the city’s malls are clearly papering over the cracks of a serious infrastructure deficit.

A thousand years hence perhaps, future archaeologist and anthropologists will unearth Jakarta's great plazas along with petrified Starbucks beakers and mobile-phone casings and pontificate on what strange religion their ancestors practised in these places. And indeed, more than just temples of consumption, malls such as Cilandak Town Square promote a new kind of lifestyle hedonism completely divorced from the utilitarian weekly supermarket shop. Just hanging out in these places is where it’s at.

The result of this new plaza-centric social paradigm also seems to be affecting the general population’s holiday time. Modern life negatively impacting people's explorations of the countryside around them can be seen in a number of developed countries as well. This is particularly distressing, given that the potentially species threatening problems that humanity faces over the next half century or so are rooted primarily in the natural systems that support us. Any increasing alienation from these systems, specifically people spending their existences trudging around shopping plazas or sitting isolated in their bedrooms behind computer terminals, is not really going to catalyse any quest for solutions.

In this context, plaza life seems to impact Jakartans awareness of the beautiful West Java countryside that lies outside their stinking city, and it achieves this in two main ways. Firstly, the number of people heading out of town to relatively local beaches such as Carita and Pelabuhan Ratu is pretty small these days. Now admittedly the road to Pelabuhan Ratu can get a little jammed, however Carita is relatively straightforward to reach, with a good two thirds of the journey lying along a speedy toll road. During a recent trip to Carita I came across a number of pretty rundown hotels, including one fantastic abandoned effort which was presumably quite extravagant in its day.

It seems that the number of Jakartans heading out of town in order to explore their local landscapes has tailed off over the last decade, as people spend an increasing amount of time in those retail pleasure palaces, tapping away on their laptops. Admittedly, the advent of cheap flights to Bali is also no doubt playing a part in this phenomenon; however the average Bali holiday increasingly seems to feature plenty of, yes you guessed it, shopping, in familiar urbanised environments recreated in a non-urban setting.

And this brings us on to the second phenomenon impacting local city slickers’ awareness of the countryside, namely resorts and hotels increasingly resembling the classic plaza environment. I recently had the pleasure of staying in one of the huge holiday-villa complexes up in Puncak. It was called Kota Bunga (Flower City) and upon arriving I took a stroll in order to familiarise myself with the Flower City experience first hand, in all of its prefabricated, garish hideousness.

The complex covered a huge area and was arranged into neat suburban cul-de-sacs that seemingly contained the exact replicas of the Jakarta pied-à-terres lived in by the families who come to stay here. The main difference were the vibrant hues of the houses' exteriors and the postmodern mishmash of cutesy architectural designs that proliferated like a Walt Disney acid trip. The families themselves seemed to contain two Nintendo-brained children cramming ice cream and noodles into their wide-bore gullets, and all were born by the regulation people carrier, or perhaps a big Mercedes for the richer clans.

Insulting stereotypes aside however, it was clear that any local expression of West Javanese culture had been tastefully airbrushed out of this theme park in search of the theme. Admittedly there was an area in the complex called Kampung Budaya (Cultural Village), although its cultural reach didn't seem to extend beyond an overpriced branch of KFC and a swimming pool full urinating kids. There was also a postmodern apocalypse of ersatz Greek friezes, old English lamp standards and mock European architecture, all clashing in the same tasteless hyperreal style of your local shopping mall, all elements stripped of their original meanings and transplanted into the toy-town fantasy. Pride of place went to a scale mockup of Mount Rushmore that loomed perplexingly 30m high over the complex lake. The chiselled faces of the four US presidents surveyed the scene before them sternly as if about to pass judgement.

Well, not my scene really, and those Jakarta malls should be housing way more hiking-boot shops in my opinion. I need a holiday.

Absolute Zeroes

The Indonesian currency is about to go on a crash diet

 If you live in Indonesia, then I'm sure you've had the following experience. You delve confidently into your wallet, snap out a nice, crisp note, and for a split second you're not sure whether you're clutching Rp. 10,000 or Rp. 100,000 in your perspiring mitt. Part of the reason for your discombobulation derives from the fact that Bank Indonesia, in its infinite wisdom, elected to print both notes in a similar shade of red ink. The colour issue is undoubtedly compounded though by the number of zeroes that one has to get into the old optical crosshairs when dealing with Indonesian currency.

Well, annoyances such as this could soon become a thing of the past, as plans for a rupiah redenomination are slowly gathering momentum in the country's corridors of power. Redenomination (and, crucially, not revaluation) of a currency involves changing the numbers printed on notes and coins, but not their value, in order to simplify things. In terms of the Indonesian rupiah, such a process would naturally involve the lopping off of a few zeroes. Now admittedly this raises the danger that in the country’s kampungs and boondocks, a potentially explosive perception may emerge that by substituting a Rp. 10,000 note for a Rp. 10 note, one has lost Rp. 990. This is apparently why the planned redenomination changeover will take a full six years to “socialise” and implement. In comparison, it took Europe's economies under a year to ditch their local currencies in favour of the then-proud euro. As ever though, the pace of change in the good old Republic of I remains glacial. Seeing as the redenomination of the rupiah will affect legal contracts between banks, their clients and overseas institutions though, with all of the accompanying IT headaches that go along with this process, maybe it’s as well to take things slowly.

The tentative plan is to multiply the nominal value of the rupiah by a factor of 1000, thereby dropping three zeroes from those bothersome bills. In South-East Asia, only the Vietnamese dong currently has a higher dollar exchange rate than the Indonesian rupiah does, and it is hoped that the move to redenominate the national currency will give the rupiah a bit of an image boost in the eyes of a world that looks somewhat suspiciously on currencies that sport so many digits. Endless zeroes tend to evoke images of hyperinflation and people pushing bundles of notes around in trolleys in Weimar Germany during the 1920s. More recently, in Robert Mugabe's economically imploding Zimbabwe, the monthly inflation rate reached an eye-watering 6.5 sextillion percent at one point. Obviously Indonesia isn't going through such a meltdown, however many of the fiscal inflows into the country through capital markets are so often short term only, as there is a perception that the rupiah is "cheap".

Indonesia is currently basking in the warmth of economic good times though (well, some of its citizens are) and inflation is well under control, which should help the process to run smoothly, ensuring that the redenomination failures of countries such as Russia and Brazil, whose economies were in pretty parlous conditions when they attempted to renumber their currencies, are avoided. A strong legal framework will be necessary though and the Indonesian Parliament, a body not particularly celebrated for its speedy deliberations of bills of national importance, will hopefully get around to the great redenomination debate this year.

We are all instant millionaires in this country of course and this status could be about to be confined to the dustbin of history, however there will be positives to enjoy in the redenomination of that old rascal the rupiah. Salaries are paid in millions here and government budgets clock in at millions and even trillions of rupiah. Lopping a few zeroes off the currency will ease accountancy headaches and, as an added bonus, the public should be able to gain a better mental picture of how much cash various politicians and regional leaders are pilfering from public coffers, as the endless parade of corruption cases continues its sorry march through the nation's courts.

Hopefully, the redenomination of the rupiah won't lead to any major riots and the plan is to implement a transition period which will see both old and new denominations in circulation simultaneously, although presumably this could lead to some short-term confusion. Maybe in the longer term though, a new era in economic and political reform will be ushered in by this measure. At the very least, redenomination should improve the currency’s purchasing power in world markets and strengthen the rupiah in the foreign-exchange market.

Numbers rule our lives though, and there are no bigger integers that we have to deal with than those pertaining to large amounts of money. Indonesia scores particularly highly here and, alas, humans are psychologically ill-equipped to deal with large numbers, or so the scientists and psychologists tell us.

People can rationalise numbers such as three or 50 through the use of visual mental models. We've all seen three glasses of beer side by side, or 50 peanuts in a bowl, for example. When we get into the thousands, millions and billions however, we flounder, and the higher we count, the harder it becomes to conceptualise numbers.

Visualising the planet's seven billion humans, or, more pertinently to this feature, the US national debt of USD 16 trillion stacked up in USD 100 bills, is simply not doable by the human mind, which perhaps helps you if you're trying to rip off the public budget by billions of rupiah. The brain crashes like a creaking operating system when one tries to get one's head around the large figures on the front pages of the papers, and the reader thus ends up turning to the sports section for a little light relief.

More positively though, an appreciation of the vertiginous heights of numerical value may instill just a little humility in humankind and its self-important concerns. There are around 400 billion stars in our galaxy and around 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Rather puts my broken toilet in perspective.

Consider this though. We have come up with names for some stupendously large numbers. A googol is one such inconceivably huge quantity, and is defined as ten to the power of 100, i.e. a one with 100 zeroes after it. And if you think that that's a lot of glasses of beer to get through, then consider a googolplex. A googolplex is ten to the power of a googol, i.e., a one followed by 10 to the power of 100 zeroes. In fact, you'd need to get your hands on a piece of paper larger than the entire universe just to write out this colossal number in full. Food for thought the next time you find yourself pulling your hair out in front of an ATM screen. Just as an aside, Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their famous search engine after these lofty numbers, and indeed the company's headquarters is affectionately known as the Google Plex.

The Booze Headlines

Indonesia has an increasingly ambivalent relationship with the demon drink

Alcoholic beverages have been a part of human culture for an awfully long time, and its even now been shown that natural selection has actually equipped most humans with an alcohol processing gene during the very recent evolution of our species. A thought-provoking discovery for sure and I certainly hope that one too many gin and tonics won’t see me picking up a posthumous Darwin Award. Scourge of society or valuable social lubricant, Indonesia, as a nominally Islamic and yet ostensibly pluralistic and secular nation, has a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the consumption of alcohol.

Most recently, the New Order-era, Islamic-leaning United Development Party (PPP) proposed a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol, which would effectively turn the country into a Saudi-esque dry zone and no doubt see Bintang and Anker turning to isotonic drinks in order to survive. Booze in Indonesia is already heavily regulated and taxed in fact, the result being that this time-honoured social lubricant is considerably more expensive here than it is in neighbouring countries. A total ban would be something else altogether though and prison sentences of ten years have been proposed for diehard splash heads who manage to brew up an illegal still of optic-nerve tingling moonshine in their bak mandi.

Clearly religious compulsion is the fundamental motive behind the PPP bill, although Arwani Thomafi, the PPP secretary down at the House of Representatives, has also claimed that the consumption of alcohol offered no significant contribution to the state budget. Anyone who’s staggered their way along Jl. Kemang Raya on a Friday night or Bali’s Jl. Legian on pretty much any night of the week may wish to take issue with this rather credulity stretching claim. And indeed the government’s steep-to-perpendicular 150 per cent excise tax on imported booze has this year managed to generate around Rp. 1.5 trillion in import duties from the port of Tanjung Priok alone. In any event, the fact that a much-loved activity doesn’t generate much profit for the government is a rather draconian argument for depriving people of said pastime. I mean, premarital sex between consenting adults also adds little to state coffers and nobody’s proposing…erm…no scratch that actually.

Let’s be realistic here though. This bill hasn’t got a highball’s chance in hell of being passed, even if bibulous bule tourists were to be exempt from such anti-vino legislation. Indeed, over the past few years, a real drinking culture has developed in Jakarta as the economy has boomed and a whole new generation of post-New Order kids are assimilated into an ever more globalised culture of aspirational hedonism saturated in Tweets, techno and Tia Maria. From high-end wine bars, to cheap boozers flogging lethal cocktails that are seemingly two parts Red Bull to one part low-grade hooch with a splash of Pertamax Plus thrown in for good measure, to 24-hour minimarts filled with fridges of beer and sporting their own alfresco seating areas, the capital has gone Friday-night, binge-drinking crazy. Evenings of acoustic guitar sing-alongs and a few refreshing Teh Botols now seem to be from a more innocent age as Batavia’s boulevards become increasingly sophisticated.

All of this hardcore drinking has alas had some sadly all-too-predictable consequences. To take but a handful of recent examples, teenage model Olivia Dewi recently died after a drunken car crash, 17-year-old Raafi Aga Winasya Benjamin was stabbed to death in a drunken brawl while partying and, most notoriously of all, Afriani Susanti was sentenced to 15 years behind bars after mowing down nine pedestrians with her car, the result of a night of hard partying. Clearly road safety needs to be looked at in a country unused to such a high degree of Dionysian dipsomania, and as Sigmund Freud noted vis-à-viz violence, the conscience is soluble in alcohol.

Most of these Jakarta booze hounds are no doubt having the times of their lives, although those life-threatening, Saturday-morning hangovers are possibly providing a whole new world of Panadol- and vomit-punctuated adventure that may be giving many new drinkers pause for thought. Short of deliberately imposing a Draconian total booze ban though and opting out of the trappings of boom-time economic good times that Indonesia alone in the world seems to be enjoying at the moment, it’s hard to know what despairing parents (who themselves can probably be found down at the city’s chic wine bars) can do. Autre temps autre moeurs.

In stark contrast to Jakarta’s hedonistic, pilsner-fuelled zeitgeist however, a more ascetic climate of abstinence has descended upon other parts of the Indonesian Archipelago. An alcohol ban is most definitely not on the cards if imposed by central government, however Sharia-law-type rules and regulations seem to be entering people’s lives via the back door in this era of regional autonomy, even in Jakarta’s surrounding neighbour of West Java.

Local bylaws in places such as Tangerang, Indramayu and Tasikmalaya have seen shelves cleared of falling-down water in recent years, drawing criticism from some quarters that such regulations are both unconstitutional and violate regional-autonomy laws. An amazing 9000 new regional bylaws were issued across Indonesia between 2000 and 2011, many relating to alcohol, however opportunistic ministers seem unwilling to revoke any of them. So while Jakarta is becoming increasingly one eyed, large swathes of the rest of the country are now unable to blow the froth off a few foaming glasses of Bintang. It’s beginning to look like there’s one law for the rich elite in Jakarta and another for kampungan-poor provincial types. What a surprise to find that it should ultimately boil down to this.

So what are we to make of all this? Well people need to unwind for sure, but as our ritual of social integration of choice, putting one’s forebrain to sleep with ethyl-alcohol while sitting in a dull, smoky pub perhaps isn’t that impressive when compared with the extravagant exploits of human societies throughout history. Moreover, when the great Prophet (peace be upon him) decreed that drinking was to be off limits, it was a decision originally made, like so much inherited and inflexible religious morality, with regard to quite utilitarian concerns and an appraisal of the negative effects of alcohol upon society as a whole.

And the positives? Well one of the great things about the inhabitants of this country is that they really don’t seem to need fermented grain in order to lower social barriers, crack the shells of formality and have a good time in the company of complete strangers. However, should someone require a little libation in order to liberate their stiff-arsed egos from the stultifying shackles of everyday inhibition, then surely adults can make such decisions for themselves?

Top of the Pops

First there was J-pop, then came K-pop, and now I-pop stands poised to win over the world's teenyboppers. The attention of the whole world has been focused on Asian pop music of late in the wake of the "Gangnam Style" ear worm, a Korean pop-cultural phenomenon that has conquered the entire planet, notching up a record 861 million YouTube hits in the process. Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has described the unprecedented global smash as a, "force for world peace,” which I think might be gilding the lily just slightly.

PSY's Solar System conquering hit, which parodies the lavish lifestyles of Seoul's Gangnam district, will probably prove to be a one-hit wonder, however Asian pop music itself has a long and illustrious past behind it, and now I-pop (Indonesian pop) is bidding to join J-pop (Japanese pop) and K-pop (Korean pop) on heavy radio rotation around the world.

Now, it should be stressed at the outset that if you're not a teenage female of the species then you may well rather, like myself, prefer to saw your own legs off with the sharp edge of a copy of Gadis magazine to actually listening to most of this stuff, however there is no doubt that the star of Asian pop is rising at the moment and that the music represents a social phenomenon most definitely worth remarking on.

J-pop was the first Asian popular music to be truly in and of itself, and entered the musical mainstream during the 1990s, although its history dates back to the 1970s and Japanese synth-pop bands such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Southern All Stars. Currently, one of the biggest (in every sense of the word) J-pop groups is AKB 48, who are one of the highest earning musical acts in the world with record sales in 2011 reaching a whopping US$200 million in Japan alone (although the group’s share of this had to be split among its Guinness World Record-breaking 91 members!).

The huge group is divided into three subgroups, Team A, Team K and Team B and also includes a number of aspiring members known as kenkyusei (trainees). It's perhaps not coincidental that this hit-making behemoth of a group appears to structure itself like some bobby-socks wearing multinational corporation, and as the band's profits reach for the stratosphere, no doubt the accountants are rubbing their hands together gleefully.

And so over to I-pop, Indonesia's answer to the super-slick, Samsung and Sony powered smashes of the Far East. I-pop's profile is also on the rise at the moment and even Indonesia's Tourism Minister, Mari Elka Pangestu, is currently urging the country's pop musicians to try and emulate the success of their Japanese and Korean brethren. Indeed, Indonesia's Tourism Ministry recently sent a party of pop musicians over to South Korea to study the K-pop phenomenon.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps, however it has to be said that Indonesia's music industry now dominates its own domestic market at least, despite being blighted by copyright piracy, and in 2010, Indonesia's creative economy contributed some Rp. 468 trillion (US$ 48.6 billion) to the economy, growing by 6 per cent in the process and absorbing some 7.9 per cent of the country's workforce.

I-pop (or Indo pop) acts range from long-time stalwarts such as Peterpan (now Noah), Sheila on 7 and d'Masiv, to new teeny-bop sensations such as Cherry Belle and Princess (both girl bands) and ZooM and HITZ (boy bands, if you can tell the difference). And, naturally, social media such as Facebook feature plenty of I-pop (as well as anti-I-pop!) groups.

J-pop and K-pop influences abound in the protean world of I-pop, it has to be said. Local bands such as J Rocks, Geisha, and Daisha, as their names suggest, remain in a thrall to their more illustrious, hair-gel abusing peers across the oceans of the Orient, and Indonesia even has its own answer to AKB 48: JKT 48.

This sister group was formed just over a year ago and, according to producer Yasushi Akimoto, can become, "A bridge between Indonesia and Japan." Dewy-eyed, feel-good, Oprah-esque platitudes aside though, a primary motivation behind many of these new Indonesian pop stars is surely the economic exploitation of teenagers for fun and profit. JKT 48, for example, have already notched up advertisements for Pocari Sweat, Sharp, Rakuten, Laurier, Yamaha, Biore and Pocky, as both the group's star and stock rise simultaneously.

I-pop is not completely derivative of its more established Japanese and Korean cousins however, and local flavours, sentiments and styles are increasingly featuring in the music as it develops its own national identity. I-pop is also extending its reach beyond Indonesia's borders to Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, primarily due to common elements of language and culture of course, however they really seem to love the stuff over there. Indeed, Indonesian pop music has made such a splash over in Malaysia that back in 2008, the Malaysian music industry demanded restrictions on Indonesian pop songs broadcast by Malaysian radio stations.

As in demand as I-pop has become in Malaysia however, there is as yet little sign of the obsessive, compulsive behaviour of a certain section of K-pop fans being replicated over here. Specifically we’re here talking about fans who engage in stalking and invasions of artists’ privacy, and indeed there are even taxi services in Korea that cater specifically to fans looking to follow their idols around town. Obsessive K-pop fans have also actually been known to install GPS trackers under their heroes' cars in rather ingeniously James Bond-style acts of obsessive hero worship. Speaking personally though, I'd perhaps be more inclined to engage in anti-fan forms of stalking, such as that perpetrated by the strange woman who gave Yunho, a member of K-pop band TVXQ, a drink laced with superglue before turning herself in to the police.

So is I-pop poised to pounce and conquer Asia, and indeed the world beyond? Well, so long as the hair gel keeps oozing and the money keeps flowing, then I’ve every confidence in the genre storming the post-modern ramparts of cultural banality before next Christmas. Stay sexy pop pickers.

Car Jamming

Last weekend afforded me the opportunity to undertake another of my Indonesian politician style comparative study tours. AirAsia once again supplied me with a great value flight and some simply appalling in-flight coffee, as I hopped over the briny to Kuala Lumpur in order to take in this year's Malaysian Grand Prix. My trip to last year’s Singapore Grand Prix gave me a chance to compare the island state's sweeping boulevards and cyber-conformist hygiene with Jakarta’s pungently aromatic demographic implosion, and I was hoping that KL would offer up some similarly enlightening contrasts.

KL has been described to me as being midway between Jakarta and Singapore, although the fact that both Malaysia and Singapore host Grands Prix, whilst Jakarta doesn't, perhaps tells you all that you need to know about the three cities' relative urban credentials. Indonesia's largest sporting event is the Commonwealth Masters Tennis tournament, which is held in Bali every year. This does indeed attract a few big names but it certainly isn't a big international event, although certain rogue tax officials have been so keen to attend in the past that they've been known to spring themselves from jail and don ludicrous Beatles wigs as a disguise.

In any case, down at the AirAsia terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, everything was a Formula 1 frenzy, presumably because AirAsia supremo and Malaysian mogul extraordinaire, Tony Fernandes, now owns his very own Formula 1 team (in fact, he's revived the iconic Lotus brand). An expensive hobby perhaps, but presumably Mr F. isn't short of a few ringgit.

Kuala Lumpur's airport is roughly twice as far from the centre of town as Jakarta's Sukarno-Hatta is, however it lies a mere ten minute bus ride away from the Sepang Circuit. And so I soon found myself sitting on a lush, green hillside, necking Tiger beer and watching all of the Saturday qualifying action. Sepang is a great place in fact and affords spectators some simply superb views of all those high-speed dogfights.

After qualification was over, I had a stroll around the overpriced merchandise stalls (although there was a 50% discount on Michael Schumacher T-shirts -ha ha and furthermore, ha). I then headed into KL Central to hook up with a couple of my F1 loving chums who had also made the hop over from the Big Durian for the race, and we all headed out for a little Saturday night fever.

The centre of KL is perhaps closer in essence to Singapore than it is to Jakarta, and a few things stand out immediately to any visiting long-term Batavia warriors. Firstly, the traffic doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as the purgatorial gridlock that we all know and love. The lack of motorcycles in particular makes for a pleasant change. The second thing that struck me as we walked around KL is perhaps not entirely unrelated to the first. While Jakarta engages in endless debates about the city's actual and fantasized Gordian transportation knot of cars, busways, monorails, new flyovers and even bicycle lanes, the most fundamental mode of human transportation, namely Shanks's pony (or getting up of one's rear end and walking), has been sadly neglected.

"Normal" developed urban environments usually feature those amazing technological innovations known as pavements and, as a knock-on effect, there are bustling streets filled with shops and the like. Jakarta's fancy shops are all safely buried within the closeted, safe, technocratic womb of the shopping mall, whilst outside a post-apocalyptic urban assault course of crumbling concrete, 30-year-old buses, raw sewage and underclass serfs serves to deter any integrated urban renaissance (although a few brave venues have now opted to try a more alfresco approach to city life).

Coincidentally enough, I have just read that 500 trillion rupiah has been earmarked by the government for infrastructure development across the country. I reckon though that by the time a multitude of greedy politicos has dipped its avaricious mitts into the honeypot, there’ll be just about enough dough remaining for a couple of keep left signs.

Meanwhile, back in KL, Sunday came around and we all headed back to Sepang for a highly enjoyable race that actually featured a fair amount of overtaking. Wonders will never cease. The next day, it was time to the inevitable lemming like tourist traipse around Kuala Lumpur Tower and the Petronas Twin Towers. As iconic as the Twin Towers have now become, they are basically just two large slabs of steel and concrete. Whatever happened to architectural creativity in our modern world? The entire thrust of modern architectural hubris seems to be to raise your non-idea of a building 15 storeys higher than the neighbouring country's non-idea of a building.

Personally, I'd like to see Indonesia's putative and scandalously extravagant new parliamentary office building being constructed as a Gothic pastiche and filled with pointed arches and flying buttresses. Such a design would more fittingly reflect the mediaeval, Machiavellian mindset of those who will be ensconced inside it, enjoying a grease-down and a shiatsu whilst they scan the year's budget allocations to see what can be craftily diverted into their Citibank accounts. Gothic Jakarta, now that really would be infrastructure to be proud of.

Go Wild in the Country

Last weekend, it was time for your intrepid hero to make another foray into Indonesia's bucolic boondocks with my obsessive-compulsive mountain climbing chum, Mr. Dan, and a few other curious takers fooled into parting with their hard earned cash by the slick graphics of Mr. Dan's Gunung Bagging website.

Mr. Dan, in the flesh, has been known to exude the authority of a seasoned and knowledgeable hiker. On one occasion however, whilst leading a small group of keen and crisply booted, fresh-faced walkers on an early start through the Highlands of Bandung, Mr. Dan had felt a little worse for wear after a taxing night scaling Gunung Bintang and had ended up projectile chundering onto the road in front of his hiking disciples just before the off. This may have taken some of the lustre off the good Mr. Dan’s professional standing in the fiercely competitive world of amateur hiking, however it will take more than a mound of early-morning ale spew to put me off, and I soon found myself taking in the fresh air and outboard motor petrol fumes with Mr. Dan and the gang as our speedboat skimmed its way from Carita Beach on Java's west coast to the island of Panaintan, which sits next to the Ujung Kulon national park on Java southwestern tip.

I do like to indulge in the occasional return to nature in order to remind myself of my own mortality. Such near terminally exhausting trips are always memorable and interesting, although 'fun' perhaps wouldn't be the right adjective to use. Alas though, I can't accompany that irrepressible bounder of adventure Mr. Dan quite as often as I’d like to, as sitting on my fat arse watching DVDs and eating chocolate makes a lot of pressing demands on my time you understand.

Panaitan is the largest island in the Sunda Strait and is uninhabited by humans, save for a skeleton staff of caretakers. There's plenty of native fauna to be seen here however, including populations of deer, monkeys, pythons, monitor lizards, eagles, crabs, colourful fish, buffalo and even, apparently, crocodiles. I was slightly uneasy about the latter species to tell the truth. Animals are fascinating of course but I'm not an, "animal lover" as such, and rather regard those who lay claim to this title as perhaps compensating for a lack of more human bonhomie in their lives.

The prospect of being chewed up by a bloody great crocodile should always inform one’s views of the natural world, lest one end up as dead as Australian naturalist and mental case Steve Irwin. Before last weekend's trip, I had, moreover, just watched a Werner Herzog documentary called, "Grizzly Man" in which another chuckle-brained individual, one Timothy Treadwell, attempts to befriend and live with a population of bears in the wilderness of Alaska, with predictable dietary consequences for the local ursine population.

Personally, I doubted that a light spraying in Autan mosquito repellent would do much to deter a hungry croc from chowing down on my lily white legs, and I thus walked ashore at Panaitan with some trepidation. Thankfully though, while monkeys and deer could be spotted surrounding our campsite, crocodile-wise, things seemed peaceful and nature remained unbloodied in tooth and claw.

After cooking up a spot of lunch it was time for the main event. We reboarded our boat and headed up the coast for 15 minutes for an assault on Gunung Raksa, Panaitan's main peak. Only 329m tall it may be, but our ascent of Raksa proved to be pretty much the most masochistic thing I've ever attempted. Next to this, the hike up the 4,000 m high Gunung Kinabalu in Malaysia that half killed me last year was a walk in the park.

Dense jungle, steep, wet, muddy slopes and ludicrously inappropriate footwear conspired to have me looking as if I'd just crawled out of a particularly noxious swamp within a matter of minutes. Moreover, spring-loaded brambles liberally peppered with thorns gleefully grabbed at my hands and arms as I tried unsuccessfully for the 20th time not to fall over like a silent comedian on a banana skin.

We eventually reached the summit, atop which sits the oldest statue in Java. Unfortunately however, it’s a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha, which means that, in light of recent developments in Sumatra, "offended" Muslims will no doubt soon be campaigning for its removal, despite the fact that it stands in one of the most isolated spots in the whole country. Looking at the statue, I had a vision of fundamentalist types cursing as their virgin white robes turned to muddy brown and their beards got caught on brambles, while they attempted to scale Raksa in order to blow up the statue, and this immediately cheered me up.

After a brief rain shower, which only served to make the muddy slopes even more slippery, it was time for the harrowing descent. I soon found myself bringing up the rear of our party of eight as I tried to negotiate the terrain carefully without breaking my neck. Alas though, this proved less than salutary place to be, as the seven infidels in front of me had worn the "path" down to the consistency of the slippery mud chute.

After about 10 minutes of near fatal skids and tumbles, I gave up walking and opted to simply slide down the slopes on my behind, as if it were some kind of tropical luge run. This proved to be a just about workable technique, although I accelerated frighteningly out of control on a couple of occasions before slamming to a halt against tree trunks. Moreover, on the final 200m walk along the flat to our waiting boat, I tripped over a root and fell flat on my face. You really should leave Jakarta more often at the weekend folks, you don't know what you're missing.

Dancing in the Dark

Well, Earth Hour came and went last weekend with many seemingly oblivious to its very existence. There are 8760 hours in a single year and thus cutting the power for one of these hours (punches numbers triumphantly into calculator) could result in a massive 0.0114 per cent reduction in our annual electricity consumption. Possibly this won't make a huge dent in global warming and the increasing likelihood that we’ll all be sipping Icelandic Shiraz before the century is out.

Earth Hour is however, in the yoghurt-weaving, glibly eco parlance of our times, supposed to be more of a so-called "Consciousness raising" exercise. More of which later, for now though I'll just note that plenty of businesses around the city seemed to be using the event as an opportunity to promote their own agendas. "Come and enjoy Earth Hour with us by candlelight, there will be a 25 per cent discount on margaritas all night!" kind of thing. Rather cynical really, although perhaps the idea was to get the punters so drunk that they couldn't drive, thus reducing their carbon footprints to zero at a stroke.

For my part, I decided to get on my bicycle and join an Earth Hour ride from fX Plaza up Jl. Sudirman to Monas with some of the city's keen amateur cyclists. As I'm sure most of you have noticed, there's something of a cycling revolution going on around town just at the moment. Young chaps have taken to twiddling around the city on the latest must have fashion accessory, namely the so-called ‘fixie’ bicycle. These are basically track bikes without gears and, quite worryingly, often without brakes too. Hipster kids are snapping up these rather impractical aluminium steeds like hot cakes however, usually in rather effeminate shades of lilac and turquoise and the like. They then spend their evenings pedalling between Circle K and 7Eleven in search of Red Bull fuelled good times (usually at extremely slow speeds due to the aforementioned lack of stopping power).

And so my cycling brethren and I twiddled our way gently up the traffic choked Jl. Sudirman, possibly looking as incongruous as someone bouncing a pogo stick around a Formula One track. As we neared the famous Hotel Indonesia roundabout, the road became so chock solid that I was forced into my usual foolhardy tactic of wheeling my iron horse into the Busway lane and then pumping the old thighs hard enough to avoid being steamrollered into the asphalt by a pursuing TransJakarta behemoth. None of my fellow cyclists proved to be up to the Busway challenge however. The big Jessies.

Up at Monas, the lights went out, plunging the flame tipped phallus into darkness, well, semidarkness anyway. A real Earth Hour, in my view, would kill street lights, traffic lights, hospital defibrillators, respirators and dialysis machines, the lot. Let's see how committed people actually are to this premise. For my part, I gave up after half an hour and went to soak up the native charm down on nearby Jl. Jaksa at a friend's birthday drinkathon.

Earth Hour ay? I can't help feeling that this charity for the environment isn’t raising consciousness to the critical level of visceral, physical reality needed to break the capitalist-consumerist fantasies of our lives, lives that increasingly float unshackled by mere Earthly, environmental gravity, lives that are buoyed up by images on screens and the disembodying effects of surfing the net. Rather the whole environmental, Earth Hour shtick seems to have been assimilated into our materialistic culture as just another ad campaign. As the novelist Christopher Isherwood once said, the rich world has, "retired to live inside our own advertisements. Like hermits going into caves to contemplate."

Earth Hour is just another excuse to break out the bumper stickers and have a feel good Kodak moment, whilst the underlying mismatch of a capitalist system predicated on infinite expandability existing in a world of finite resources is never addressed.

Like the shark that needs to keep swimming to prevent itself from sinking to the bottom, our capital centric world has to keep growing to work properly. Thus new desires and needs have to be constantly manufactured. You can look in the wardrobe and think to yourself, “Right I’ve got eight shirts, one for everyday of the week, and one more for luck” but who does? Nobody in the developed world does this because that’s no good for the system. The system has to get you to keep buying more and more shirts in order for the whole game to work, and thus a whole mindset, an ethos of consumerism, has to be instilled in the subject. Such an ethos cannot simply be shrugged off by turning off the lights for an hour, lighting a few candles and singing a few choruses of MJ’s “Heal the World”.

Drunken musings aside, after a good old session with my friends, I found myself strolling outside of our bar of choice. "Oh bugger, I brought the bike didn't I?" I mused to myself. Now, I cycle to work every day, which is only 15 minutes from my house, but I'm certainly not used to cycling to the boozer of an evening. Moreover, earlier in the night, a friend had confessed to cycling into a metal pole in the middle of the street after a particularly discombobulating night out in Bali. "I mean, what was the pole doing there?" He implored. "Don't blame the pole," I reasoned, "it's only one short step from that to 'These are my airline seats, I'm a very important man, I'm friends with the boss of your company, I could have you fired!'" In any case, it was time to man up and wobble off home. Thankfully my bicycle has brakes, otherwise I'd have really been trouble.