Greased pole

More on the witchcraft market soon, but first ...

August 17th is Indonesia's Independence Day. I love the way it's celebrated; basically everybody gets together in their neighborhood and plays games. There are cart-pulling races and balloon-between-the-knees races and lots of other contests, for adults and kids alike. But the highlight is always the greased pole.

The greased pole is sanded until it's pretty smooth, and then covered in used motor oil. You climb in teams of four or five. The idea is to stand on each other's shoulders until you get one guy high enough that he can just loop a towel around the pole and shimmy the rest of the way up to the prizes at the top.


The Ancol amusement park set up a hundred greased poles. Our friend John recruited Chad and our friends Michael and Howie to try and conquer one of them.


I kinda figured our guys would make one climb, fail to get to the top (as most teams do) and call it a day. But in fact, they kept at it. They made several attempts over the course of an hour, taking turns with an Indonesian team led by a friend. They got pretty close to making it.


In the process, they figured out all sorts of ways to climb each other.


And they made some pretty terrible faces.


In the end, they didn't make it. After Chad and Howie were worn out, Michael and John got together with some of the Indonesian climbers and kept trying. When everyone was a mess of sweat, oil, dirt, bruises and scrapes, a lone Indonesian with a towel soloed the climb with impressive panache and claimed the prizes.


It was a grueling kind of fun, but I think everybody had a good time.

Gem market

Next to the Jatinegara train station in East Jakarta is a famous gemstone market. It's one of those classic, sprawling places with row after row of stalls, and it was packed with customers on the Saturday when we went.


You can buy smooth, polished stones, and all kinds of rings and necklaces.

You can also watch the artisans cut and polish the stones and make the jewelry, often using these crazy contraptions that look like they were built from bicycle wheels and lawn-mower engines. This guy was using a little flamethrower operated by a foot pump.

We didn't really go to Jatinegara for the bling, though. We were after something even more exciting. In addition to gems, this market does a substantial trade in mystical and magical objects. More on that in the next exciting installment of Kopi Susu 2!

Caught wet!

What do you mean, wallet and cell phone? I don't know anything about a wallet and cell phone!

In Indonesia, you're not caught red-handed, you're ditangkap basah: caught wet. Thus it is with me and the blog: as you may have noticed, I haven't posted in a while, heh.

I really like my new job with an English-language newspaper that's set to launch in Indonesia soon. But it seems to suck all the brains out of my head, so I have nothing left to blog with when I get home. As I get settled in, though, I hope to get back into the blogging routine. There is much to write about, including the witchcraft market, a ladyboy show in Thailand, spicy coconut duck-egg pancakes, and of course, THE CAT.

More soon!

Potty talk

Our trip to East Java and Bali was not only full of cultural, ecological and culinary marvels; it also offered numerous excellent bathroom signs, which you may remember are a particular interest of mine.


This one was on the Surabaya-Probolinggo bus (Dangdut Bus 1). It says "Sorry! Only for pee." No doubt this was because the toilet was perched over a hole in the bus floor and the bus company felt there were limits to how much it could foul the roadways of East Java.


I really like this one. It was painted on the wall of the train station across from the Margo Utomo plantation in Kalibaru, and it says "No Peeing Here Except Dogs." That's rather sly, because in Indonesia calling someone a dog is an extremely grave insult.

This last one is a pricing chart from a bathroom at a Hindu temple complex in Bali. In Indonesian, pee is "little water" (air kecil) and poop is "big water" (air besar). Apparently they couldn't find an appropriate term for solid waste in English, so they decorously left that part blank.

The Story of Cancer Snail

Cancer Snail is made of sulfur. We bought him for 50 cents from one of the miners at Ijen, who assured us he was a snail even though he has no shell or other snail-like features. We immediately named him Cancer Snail because of the tumor-like lumps that cover his body.

Riding in a van in East Java

Cancer Snail cannot walk or even stand on his own. Still, he is an inspiration to millions. He has traveled the length of Java and Bali, and faces each day with the same cheery yellow countenance. Schoolchildren flock from miles around to see him (well, not exactly, but we think they will someday). I believe we can all learn from the example of Cancer Snail.

The sulfur miners of Ijen

The reason people stay at Margo Utomo, besides the enormous bat and the nutmeg, is that it makes a good staging area for a hike to the Ijen Plateau. And Ijen is one of the most amazing places I've ever seen.

Photo: Jason Gold

The path up is quite pleasant, with pretty views of the surrounding mountains. But once you get above treeline, you're suddenly standing on the surface of the moon. It's all exposed, striated rock surrounding a smoking crater and an unnaturally bright-aqua lake.


The crater spews clouds of yellow sulfur gas. Sulfur collects all around the crater mouth, and local people chip out chunks of it and carry it 5 miles down the mountain to sell. The baskets full of sulfur often weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg). The miners typically finish two trips per day, for which they get paid around $7.

Chad and I went into the crater to do some interviews. Here, as opposed to Mt. Bromo, we got very lucky with the wind direction. When we arrived it was blowing the sulfur right up the trail, but as we began to descend into the crater it shifted to the side.

Still, the mine was like some medieval portrait of hell. It was hot; the men did backbreaking labor, using long, metal-tipped poles to dislodge chunks of sulfur; every time the wind shifted and blew a cloud of gas over them, they were seized with spasms of coughing.

Each man generally works two weeks on and two weeks off; you can't do this job full-time because your knees and lungs can't handle it. As it is, the miners have multiple health problems and tend to die younger than their counterparts with easier jobs.

Ask them why they do it, and you get a simple answer: for their kids. School costs money here, and any responsible parent is focused on getting his or her children educated. $7 clearly isn't much, but it's way more than you can make farming.



This guy has a grown son in the Navy. He was proud, and justifiably so, but he was still laboring away because he has more children to raise.

The New York Times has a pretty cool slideshow of Ijen here.

Where spices come from

The Margo Utomo plantation has an excellent tour, during which they teach you about the origins of all sorts of spices. Cinnamon, for example, is a tree bark -- our guide peeled some right off the tree.


Nutmeg is particularly surprising. It's actually a fruit -- a tart, nutmeggy fruit. Inside is a seed covered by a beautiful, lacy red husk. The husk is ground to make mace; the seed itself is what becomes nutmeg powder.


While we were admiring the nutmeg, the palm sap collecter came around and started climbing a nearby palm tree. There are notches cut on either side of the trunk for footholds.


To make palm sugar, you collect the sap from the palm buds. Then you boil it down into a sort of sweet brown hockey puck. Palm sugar has a nice, rich caramel-y flavor that's key to certain Indonesian sweets.


The tree-climber's daughter helped him pour the sap into the waiting jugs.

She liked it when the last of the sap gurgled down through the funnel.