Toen ik erachter kwam dat ik was vergeten hoe ik moest denken, kon ik me op niks anders meer concentreren dan te proberen het me te herinneren.

En ik at een heel veelvoud van driekoekjes.

♪ anai leu ita - welcome to mentawai! ♪

After a beautiful two weeks of island hopping, jungle trekking and cave sleeping I am back in Yogya. I was picked up from the airport, I extended my visa, I rented a motorbike, I decorated my new room with an explosion of colours, and then I sat on my balcony full of ants and plants. My gecko made a sound and I looked up: it was peacefully hunting a bugging insect. The sun was setting while Indonesian television filled my head with my newest language. Planes flew over, heading to destinations where I don't even have to think about, because I am at home.

The thought of living in Yogya for another three months isn't bothering me at all. The rainy season has now definitely started and I feel fresh. The falling drops of water make a comforting sound, the sight of a threatening sky is always marvelous and everything is covered in ultimate freshness after yet another tropical shower. For many people it will just continue to be a necessary inconvenience, but I realised that I still love the rain. Someone asked me to teach him how to do that, but it cannot be taught. The rain just soothes my senses.

Waiting on the wobbly water for the ferry to take off

I was happy however, that during our visit to Siberut Island the skies were blue and the trees were green. From blue to green and back, and all the colours in between, that is Mentawai.

It started on a ferry in Padang. Together with Pak Rachmadi we had to wait for a storm to pass in order to safely make the 10-hour journey to the island. When the high waves calmed down and finally disappeared, we took off and this is what that looked like (click on the link and check 9:35) Carlijn and Marieke on Indonesian television!

The next day we were welcomed in Muara, the main town on Siberut and a good starting point for both jungle trekking and boat trips to bounty beaches. Pak Vincent, whom we met via Pak Rachmadi, was going to be our local guide for a week. He made it possible for us to stay away from tourist packages when he opened the doors of his humble house in Muara. We met his family and took on their daily rhythm, which mainly consists of hanging around in the uma, the communal space to gather and relax. He also brought us to the in-lands of the island by speed boat, where we visited a jungle school. The waterways that took us there connect the sea to the in-lands, and we were surrounded by beautiful mangroves. Traveling for hours and hours to reach the most remote destinations is a common activity on Siberut. Sometimes, when the engine refuses to take you any further, the only option is to wait and relax. Santai aja (just relaxing) is often the answer to the question Apa kabar (how are you), and it sounds much easier than it actually is ...

Our house in Muara, Siberut

Andi and Ditto from TransTV were filming our trip

Sekolah hutan, jungle school in the village Magosi

Pak Vincent is preparing cocoa to dry in the sun so that it can be sold later

Local kids looking at a pom-pom (traditional boat) that just arrived 

The road to the next village ...

... where we played volley

The mangroves of Siberut are just so mysteriously stunning ...

Getting ready for the jungle shower ...

Thursday 8 December, scribble. "Is it still morning? There is no signal here, no time, nothing to do, a dead chicken, nothing soft. We have been sleeping on the floor for a week now. Hard, everything sakit. In the middle of the jungle, far away from everything, we are on Siberut. Siberut is derived from Sabirut, which means 'many mice' in the local language. I haven't seen a single mouse yet, just an enormous and friendly beetle, yesterday. 'We play with it', said the boy who was holding the giant bug. It tickled on my arms."

Later that day. "Our friend Pak Rachmadi is always talking, banyak cerita. Everyone is listening to stories without a clue. Same old jokes are repeated and everybody laughs. I'm learning some Bahasa Mentawai, asit magele means sweet pineapple. We ate the most delicious asit magele in a village named Gotab. People are smoking kretek cigarettes and everything is going extremely slow. We'll go fishing on the way back to Muara, later today."

We then took it to the land where we ate it

We caught one!

On our last day Pak Vincent took us up the hill to show us his disaster preparation project. Mentawai is a disaster-prone group of islands, and although Siberut never experienced a tsunami like on the southern islands Sipora and Pagai, the threat is always there. Some years ago Siberut suffered from a rather severe earthquake -6.9 on the Richter scale- and people still clearly remember that day. Experience is the best teacher, and many islanders learned an important lesson: to be prepared for natural disaster in an area like this. Recently, the Indonesian government constructed a jalur evakuasi (evacuation route) so that the villagers can immediately run up the hill in case of an earthquake. Temporary shelter is not provided, so Pak Vincent showed us the house that he built there on his own initiative. 

His shelter is just as equipped as his ordinary house

Yet, much more progress can be made in the implementation of DRR (disaster risk reduction) as a significant element in local development, something that Pak Rachmadi is working on through the organisation YCM. Above all, he advocates for the protection of indigenous right of the Mentawai people. Together with Siberut communities, Pak Rachmadi works on capacity-building and local participation in development projects on the island, while trying to keep the traditional culture alive. For successful implementation of their projects, volunteers such as Pak Vincent are much needed. I have experienced the two as a great team, two people who know how to santai aja but who always end up where they are supposed to be.

Pak Vincent on the hill near his shelter

Pak Rachmadi in the sekolah hutan

It was a real blessing to get to know Pak Rachmadi and Pak Vincent, they added so much fun and knowledge to my Mentawai trip. Surak sabeu kepada Anda berdua!

Tentu kamu juga sayangku! Pengalaman yang luar biasa, surak sabeu!

merapi and me

My first sight of Merapi - it was a grey and green day

Gunung Merapi, Indonesian for Mountain of Fire, is one of the most important symbols in Yogyakarta (or Yogya). The volcano is located on the border between the provinces Central Java and Yogyakarta, 25 km from the city of Yogya. When the clouds are willing to cooperate, I can see it from my place! Merapi is the reason why the fields are green and fertile, and it is of great spiritual importance to the people who are living on its flanks. Also, the sunset gets just a tiny little bit more exciting when this miraculous fire mountain is involved. Breathtaking, really!

The '10 eruption was much bigger than the ones before

But there is a price to be paid. Late October 2010, after four years of sleep, Merapi starts to yawn. On the fifth of November the volcano wakes up and shows its devastating power once again with the strongest eruption since 1882. Hot lava, sand and ash cover the region around Merapi. Fields where vegetables were grown to provide the landowners an income, bridges to connect remote villages to the main roads, houses, livestock, nothing stands a chance against Merapi. The lava streams reach up to 18 km from the top and even in the city it is hard to breathe because of the ash. Even today, more than a year after the eruption, Merapi is still a common topic. Especially with the start of the rainy season: the loose volcanic sand which is still on top of the mountain will mix with the rain and create streams of cold lava. Many bridges have already broken down as a result of these powerful streams, and January and February will surely bring a lot more trouble.

Javanese dancers at the Merapi Museum

Still, people consider Merapi as their friend, I have heard some people literally say. There is an obvious danger of living on the flanks of a volcano. Having to evacuate your family as a result of an eruption is a terrible experience. It takes time to rebuild and to recover. Yet, there is a special connection between the mountain and the people, their history and their future, their community spirit and strength, and their willingness to stay. Hopefully these sentences will make more sense to me in a couple of months, when I’ll be writing my thesis on the social impact of the eruption.

Learning a culture starts by learning the language, and Indonesian is not quite as easy as I imagined. Sometimes I just wish I was fluent without having to put in all this effort. Now thát is not going to happen, but I díd finish my language course last week! On the certificate it says Fluent, Natural Communicator of General Indonesian. Although it is not really true, it motivates me and I am learning new words every day. Having Indonesian friends helps a lot, and if it weren’t for my Dutch roomie Carlijn, I wouldn’t have already met so many nice people here in Yogyakarta. Carlijn and me are doing the same master’s program, NOHA International Humanitarian Action. Carlijn and five other NOHAs have been living in Yogya while I was in Melbourne. Four of them have moved to different parts of Indonesia for their internships, and I am going to meet them all in Sumatra next month! Six NOHAs will be reunited surrounded by orangutans in Bukit Lawang. Oh yeah (:

Carlijn and me are happily having a Bintang beer

Alright, a little bit more about this exciting upcoming trip then. On Wednesday, I’ll be taking the plane to Padang, a fishing town on the southern border of Sumatra. From there, Carlijn and me will take a boat to one of the remote Mentawai Islands where we will spend one week. Last year, at the same time as the eruption of Merapi, a tsunami took place near Mentawai, wiping away big parts of the islands while killing a number of its inhabitants. Many might not have heard of it, as natural hazards are very common in Indonesia. The country is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is therefore vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding and volcanic eruptions. This does not take away the fact that every disaster, as small as it can be, has an impact on the affected population. Local organisations, sometimes in cooperation with (inter)national NGOs, work hard to prepare those communities for possible threats, provide relief in emergency situations, and recover and rehabilitate when the worst shock is over. Together with one of those local NGOs, Carlijn and me will visit the Siberut Island, where we will be learning about their disaster management and hopefully experience the local culture. That is why we like to call our week on this tropical island a ‘learning experience’. We will also do some empirical research on the credibility of the beach pictures that Google provides.

The Three Musketeers in 3D!

Then, on the 15^th of December I will be back in Yogya to settle down for another 3 exciting months. If I am lucky, I’ll rent a motorbike, I’ll find an internship, I’ll have dinners in rice field restaurants, I’ll sing more karaoke, I'll go to the cinema, and I’ll practice Bahasa Indonesia with anyone who wants to listen to my stories because A Fluent & Natural Communicator in Bahasa Indonesia I Will Be!

Maybe I can go up to Merapi several more times, together with local volunteer Pak Edy. He is a little man of about fifty years old, always willing to help where he can. When Carlijns friends Lorijn and Gerbrich were visiting Yogya some time ago, we all went up to some villages on Merapi where we donated several water tanks. Because the eruption covered all water sources with lava it is now difficult to access clean drinking water. Pak Edy arranged to have our names on big posters attached to the tanks. Also we brought some bags of cement so that villagers can construct shelters for their water tanks to keep the water clean during the rainy season.

Our names on the water tank

Refilling already existing water basins

Here a shelter will be built for the blue water tank in the background

Maybe I can experience some more Indonesian rituals up-close, like the slaughtering which took place for Idul Adha, after the end of Ramadan. We did not expect this at all, and the whole happening was rather straightforward and unusual, but the cause was a good one. Rich Muslim families provide cattle to the mosques, which then ritually slaughter the animals and distribute the meat to the poor. We witnessed the whole process from beginning to end but I will save you the details, also for a good cause. So maybe I wouldn’t necessarily want to see another slaughtering, but a wedding would be nice. Or New Years Eve.

And maybe I can even learn to sit still and enjoy another meditation ceremony with the medicine man. Last week, Carlijn and me had the privilege to join one of these ceremonies that took place at a graveyard in the middle of the night. With a small group of seven people we entered the sacred place of the graveyard, close to the grave of the first Sultan of Yogyakarta. We were sitting there for almost an hour, and my legs started to ache and my mind started to think many thoughts and the little kitty that walked around us started to get my full attention. In other words, it was very hard for me to concentrate and to let go attachment, ignorance and aversion, which are our biggest enemies in the journey to mindfulness. They say. But during the Javanese sentences that the medicine man spoke out when we were seated there, I heard him say my name three times… I was involved in the ceremony, my name was spoken out loud in a sacred place in Yogya, I am really here!

The holy temple of Borobudur

Together with Pak Edy and his wife

Singing the Dutch national anthem for some Indonesian wedding guests

This is how we conquer the rain Indonesian style! 

Alun Alun: whoever succeeds in walking through the trees with a blindfold is a good person ... I am not

Yogyakarta also has a Vredeburg :D Dutch influences all around

Perfectly posing cow on the flanks of Merapi

A rice field under a threatening sky, region of Seturan

Check out my future little balcony! ... This is where I'll be living when I come back from Sumatra 

You've made it through! I'd love to see your comment (:

everydayism

Somewhere between lunch and Indonesian language exercises I watched the weather paint the skies. Everydayism remains the world's greatest style.

Before the rain ...

... and after

about aboriginal dreaming and indonesian ants

My lovely Melbourne ladies, Luisa, Soumya and Alessia

Balcony birthday cake

It seems like forever ago that I was standing in my Melbourne kitchen, staring out the window to the setting sun and simply embracing life, my life. It was one of my last days in that lovely bright apartment in Malvern and I was happy. After spending a considerable time in Australia – almost two months! – I had finally come to fully enjoy the Victorian city and its little surprises. Getting lost in small hidden inner-city lanes with heaps (yeah, the Australian influence :) of eccentric cafes and people, checking out the op-shops on Chapel Street (fancy second hand charity stores), swinging to Jackson and Jackson somewhere in Brunswick Street, sleeping in the park at Federation Square after missing the last train home, dancing in the Latino bar with Luisa, discovering an amazing chocolate café with Soumya, biking downhill to Balaclava to have a latté with Alessia, or simply the sight of yet another possum. An approaching summer brought people back to the streets and the power of the sun translated into smiles upon Melbourne faces and I was no exception. Emotions are a funny thing, because this fresh happiness caused tears when I had to leave the town and my friends behind to head off to the Northern Territory and Indonesia. I turned a page, but my bike and my pink suitcase, full of stuff that I wasn’t going to need in Asia, are still waiting for my return.

The waterhole in Richard's country

Wadeye sunset with Julie and Richard

Darwin welcomed me with a warm breeze and a confusing GMT+9:30. I strolled around town for a while, had a swim at the bay and then took a mini plane to Port Keats/Wadeye, the second biggest Aboriginal community in Australia. Tony the bee man, whom I met in Czech Republic four years ago, picked me up from Wadeye ‘airport’ and then introduced me to his life in this remote Aboriginal town. Tony works for the Rangers, an Australian government initiative for local development and environmental sustainability in Aboriginal communities. Through him and his local contacts I have been able to meet interesting people and see beautiful parts of ancient nature, for example this beautiful waterhole that the indigenous Richard showed us in his 'country'. There was so much to see and feel and ask and question and I was never going to understand it all, which is why I am not going to try to capture this experience in one sentence. All I can say is that spending a week up there makes me want to know much more about these people, their close connection to Earth, their language & history. Especially the dreaming makes me curious, the Aboriginal spirituality which is to be found in countless local and universal totems, such as the sun, the ku wak (crow), the ku man man (butterfly), and the carpet snake. And of course the alcohol ban in some Aboriginal areas, which made me a smuggler when I brought a bottle of rum with me on the way in.

A monkey sat on my head

A dog called Tank

I easily could have stayed a little longer, but I had a plane to catch. So after coming back to Darwin where I could stay in the house of some Kiwi musicians and their dog called Tank, I arrived to Bali. In Kuta I got a haircut and an Indonesian number (+62 821 47918034). The beach was a lovely introduction to Indonesia, but I was advised to leave this party town as soon as I could. So the next morning I was picked up early for an educational cycling tour through central Bali. Of course, I was amazed by the stunning views of evergreen rice fields and mountains, villages and villagers, and roosters in bamboo baskets… Bali and the Balinese are beautiful! The end of the tour brought me to the artistic center of the island, Ubud. Here, I was fascinated by the many different kinds and colours of ants – sometimes so tiny that you wonder how they can itch so badly, and sometimes so huge that it’s almost scary. A monkey sat on my head in the Monkey Forest and I had my first avocado-juice with chocolate sauce. Ubud is lovely and in the gardens of my home stay I saw a white bunny and some squirrels, but it wasn’t until arrival in Tirta Gangga that I had my first conversation in Indonesian! YES! Maybe I am not exactly fluent yet, and it takes me forever to form a sentence with a number in it (or any sentence for that matter) but I love it! Two nights ago I climbed Gunung Agung, Bali’s highest and most spiritually important volcano, and it made my muscles hurt. Only hours later I was feeling much better after a full body massage that I was given by the local massage man Pak Putu – price negotiated all by myself in Indonesian! Although I must still look funny getting up from a chair; my Dutch muscles are just not used to 3142 meter high volcanoes.

Tirta Gangga with Gunung Agung on the background ...

... and the next day I made it to the top of Bali

Today, on the drive from Tirta Gangga to Padang Bai, the driver didn’t stop talking to me in Indonesian. We discussed the difference between jalan-jalan (walking) and lancong-lancong (travelling), and we also practiced the pronunciation of small, smell and smile. After mastering these words, my driver told me that my smile is beautiful. Of course I know that it wasn’t very personal, and I was really NOT going jalan-jalan with him in his village, but I decided to believe him and put the words into practice (: I am quite sure that is not going to be a problem any time soon – tomorrow morning I’ll take the boat to Gili Air, where I’ll stay until leaving to Yogyakarta on Thursday. I will have the weekend to install in my new house right in the center of Yogya and to consider whether I want to rent a motor bike to get around, and on Monday I’ll start my Indonesian classes.

The sun is setting here in Indonesia, it's on its way to Europe. Embrace! ♥

it should be red, too

can't write when i'm hungry

can't write when i'm sad

can't write when the sun shines

or when it's a mess

can't write when i'm dreaming

or while making plans

just one way to solve this

nail polish and dance

Heeft hij soms een gewichtje aan zijn linkerkant? ...

... vroeg ik me af toen ik een scheefhangende Aziatische jongen passeerde. Zijn kapsel viel bijna van zijn hoofd.