Rock Bottom

It all started with an outrageously manipulative Dutch boy in Borneo. In less than three weeks, respiratory infections, delayed flights, miscommunications, forest fires, objectification, swasticas, loneliness, shit air quality, personal space, twisted accusations and the monsoon got involved.

At 12:15 AM on Sunday, September 17^th, following such a plethora of factors coming from so many directions I couldn’t keep track if I tried, I hit rock bottom for the first time in over two years. Hard. The last straw involved my exhausted self, riding a wave of triumph after a long, successful afternoon mission in the city, catching the ferry home from Central at the right time from the right pier, waking after midnight to arrive on the wrong island with a pointed lack of onward transport until morning.

The tattoo on my right arm reads: “In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” Moments like this are exactly why that text wraps my arm. Sometimes the entire situation just feels utterly futile.

I passed the night protecting my gear from my new friendly pet rat, getting cozy with cockroaches and mosquitoes as I snoozed on the world’s classiest metal park bench under a blessedly unrainy sky. My newly reunited slackline pillowed my head until the temperature dropped just enough that sleep ceased to be an option in my sweaty, sticky t-shirt, board shorts and utter lack of insulation. Safe to say, climbing the next day on my first opportunity in five months was cancelled.

I caught the morning interisland ferry from Peng Chau back to Mui Wo, walked my ass home, slept until the afternoon and ate some hippy chia seeds in almond milk.

Then I discovered my sunglasses were missing.

Occasionally I just have to pick my head up, remember how goddam lucky I am and punch forward into the sludge. Somehow, it always gets better.

Nowhere To Go But Up

Hong Kong is downright crazy: one of the most insane juxtapositions I’ve ever experienced.

The region, encompassing a mountainous maze of islands and a bit of the southern mainland coast connected to China itself, actually contains quite a large percentage of protected natural land where humid, jungled granite peaks rise above twisting roads. In designated urban areas, where there’s literally no more space to expand laterally, buildings already crammed close simply rise higher and higher and higher…and because high rises stand on ridges and in valleys and extraordinarily undulating terrain, they tower overhead in a chaotic, compact, endless twisting illuminated glass maze. As the city’s arms reach outward, shining glass turns to dense concrete lattices patterned to the multi-thousand by metal window bars.

I’ve arrived in a place with an utterly baffling network of color-coded taxis, ferries, trains, double-decker busses and trams and bridges and tunnels and webs of elevated pedestrian walkways that belong in some futuristic sci-fi.

I’ve arrived in a place with the most expensive education in the world, where kindergarten entrance exams often determine the course of a child’s schooling through university: where they study, what languages they speak, and the opportunities available to them.

I’ve arrived in a place where motivation is driven by objective success and family honor; where an entire culture centers on quantitative success rather than happiness.

I’ve arrived in a place where the government measures and forecasts air quality by the hour, where the recommendation to stay inside proves unsurprising.

I’ve arrived in a place where rainstorms arrive in intensities forecasted by color, reaching extremes at which the government mandates all public transport be shut down.

I also happen to have arrived to typhoon season. It is stupid hot. And stupid humid. You literally never feel clean; it’s that heavy, smothering heat that hangs in the air before a thunderstorm, but the thunderstorms and rain almost never come, so you walk around  soaked in humidity and sweat in 95 degree heat. (When you’re on the outer islands, feel free to add hoards of vicious mosquitoes to the mix.)

__________

I live in Mui Wo, a rather small village on the rather large island of Lantau. My flat nestles in a small cluster of buildings 20 minutes’ walk from the piers, past a lattice of concrete walkways crossing a broad, flat wetland filled with violet and white blossoms, and murky canals where the water buffalo wallow in bliss.

Happy feral cows and buffalo wander the streets, leaving monster brown bombs for the unsuspecting Chaco-wearing foreigner. Although roads connect towns across the island, villages are built on an infrastructure of bicycle paths.

There are bicycles everywhere. Chirping bells provide the village’s soundtrack. Racks of rusty fixies fill by the thousand at the ferry pier.

More often than not I look out my window in the morning to hills rising above my flat in a murky, dusty brown haze. The kind I tend to associate with nearby forest fires too close for comfort, but more muddy, and without the fires.

There’s a starbucks. There are two proper supermarkets. There’s a baller bakery. There are 7-11s everywhere. Never has the option to spend a couple dollars more to eat western food I appreciate and stay sane been so welcome.

Local characters include the woman who wipes her monster slobbering bulldog’s butt with a tissue every time he poops, the man who rides his bicycle in circles through town wearing a crimson, head-to-toe Power Ranger uniform as he blasts the theme song forward (GoPro attached to his handlebars), and the old dude who walks his pet giant tortoises by the waterfront.

Depending on the ferry, I’m thirty minutes’ or an hour’s commute from the Center’s urban chaos.

Anything is available in Hong Kong, they tell me. You just have to know where to go.

The problem being, in order to find anything at all in this city you have to know exactly where it is. As in, the name of which slip of a shop has what you’re after, in which twisted maze of a floor in which building, which most likely doesn’t look like it contains a twenty-floor mall in the first place. Also, where on some hectic side alley the tiny slip of an entrance to the building’s elevators is located. If you’re really lucky, Google Maps won’t have changed the place’s name in the last week.

It’s all a sort of semi-controlled chaos that somehow seems to sort of work out, although more often than not I’ve probably passed within a half block of what I needed, searching for hours, before simply giving up. (Every so very occasionally, I board the ferry back to Mui Wo clutching some random trophy in blissful triumph.) Seriously, how anyone found their way around here before the internet is utterly beyond me.

Adding to the slight frustration: when people don’t understand what I’m looking for, they simply tell me they don’t have it.

Exhibition A:

Gavi walks into an electronics shop. Gavi spies laptops, cameras, watches, phones, portable speakers and TVs. Gavi asks an employee whether the store carries portable hard drives. The employee tells her, in the nicest possible way, to go elsewhere. Gavi takes another quick walk around the counters and spies no fewer than 15 models of portable hard drive.

End Exhibition A.

Somehow, I still manage to accomplish a fair amount in my first two weeks in Hong Kong. I get my ass to a hospital– finally!!– and come away with some really good drugs to properly kick the (now properly diagnosed) respiratory tract infection I’ve apparently been packing since I left Penang. I replace my climbing helmet (the old, manky, tiger-striped one, with me since my first week on rock in 2012, stayed behind in Oz). I reunite with my climbing shoes and slackline. And, I find my way to a post across from Central’s light-bedecked high rises from which I watch a super chintzy laser show after the sun goes down, in front of which a totally real pirate ship with bright backlit red sails cruises the channel.

Welcome to the Far East.

Land Below the Wind

Visiting Borneo realizes a dream for me. At the same time, I feel like Borneo steals the tiniest little piece of my soul. That idyllic utopian vision of the island I’ve grown up with– that wild, free, untouched jungle wilderness– is destroyed this week.

My flight into Sandakan skirts Mt. Kinabalu’s rugged, gray mass, rising from green spurs below us to disappear into low cloud hovering just below the summit. Rivers wind below us in a dizzying psychedelic, monochromatic array as they near the ocean, carving deltas into a perfect, round-edged jigsaw puzzle.

And then we descend over palm plantations. We drive through hours upon hours of palm plantations. I know I won’t see Borneo’s true virgin jungle– even after a year in the Holy Disneyland of wages, the Danum Valley would have broken my bank account– but even so, it’s disheartening.

That being said, within thirty minutes on the muddy, hot and humid Kinabatangan river, we’ve found no fewer than three orangutans high in the trees and a troupe of proboscis monkeys… minding their own business, as usual.

The river snakes 560 kilometers from its headwater in Kalimantan to the Borneo’s eastern coast, emptying into the ocean through a dizzying delta of tidal islands and tributaries nestled together like a jigsaw puzzle assembled in utopia.

A pair of orangutans is apparently a rare sighting: since they’re solitary creatures, the only time the primates really come together in the wild is when making or raising babies is involved. Their movements prove shockingly fast and nimble for such large animals, making their way through the canopy as they feed on leaves high above our heads.

The proboscis monkeys emerge near dusk. Harem groups, comprised of one big, bulbous-nosed male and many smaller, witch-nosed females, swarm trees over the river to feed. “They do not eat sweet fruit," our guide tells us. "Only the sour leaves. They have two stomachs, and they make the glucose from the sucrose. If they eat the glucose, the fruit ferments in their belly and BOOM! HiroshimaNagasaki!”

I’m not exactly sure how accurate the explanation is, but safe to say we only spy proboscis monkeys eating leaves. The monster males, who spend the majority of their time lounging amongst high branches, occasionally take a moment to chase down a favorite female and engage in copious monkey business.

In other news, on our second morning we find a little baby crocodile sunning itself on a muddy bank. Hornbills and storm storks frequent the sky and big, wild pigs with protruding noses, faces framed by long, bristly whiskers, blend into the vines just off the river. At one point, our guide nudges our boat under an overhanging branch on which a black and yellow-striped cat-eyed snake coils. Occasionally we spot small groups of silvery langurs high above, tiny orange babies clutched tight to mothers’ chests. Our second morning, a sea eagle skims our heads as it cruises low over the river.

Our guide explains how we’re amongst secondary jungle right now, somewhere between 50 and 80 years old. He shows us places where the Malaysian government has used helicopters to spread seeds of native plants, encouraging regrowth of jungle to protect and provide habitat for local species. He points out ropes strung between monster trees over tributaries, providing passage over the water for orangutans (taken advantage of by other species as well). He talks about how even through other areas of Borneo have virgin jungle, hunting has all but decimated local wildlife: for a villager, catching a single native songbird to be sold in the city nets half a year’s salary. 

On a short morning trek to a nearby oxbow lake, our guide points out vines that grow to a kilometer in length, serving as water sources when cut open for people unable to drink from the river’s muddied expanse. He cuts off the outer layer of a globular green fruit known as an elephant apple, exposing a shampoo-like substance within. And he points out fig trees: orangutans’ favorite, he tells us.

Night brings other life: civets, large Bornean-style mongoose probably most-well known as the tree cats that poop out the world’s most expensive coffee beans, forage for fruit amongst the trees surrounding our river lodge. Whip scorpions cling to tree trunks’ undulating indentations and palm-sized, translucent tree frogs wrap slender toes around slim, leafy stalks. Fluorescent Rufus-backed kingfishers, blind by night, sleep in pairs on small branches just above head height.

I spend a single day in the village of Sepilok after returning from the river, exploring some surprisingly impressive wildlife conservation centers. Opposed to the “rehabilitation centers” I encountered in Thailand, more geared toward allowing thousands of tourists with even more cameras to get as close as possible mostly without touching to penned-in wildlife, Sabah’s local orangutan and sun bear centers focus rather on minimizing human-animal exposure while still providing some education to the public. The centers themselves are located several minutes’ walk into the jungle off the access road. Public access is limited to four hours each day. Bags are locked up (food and water attract the monkeys), hands sanitized before entry, and viewing platforms, for the most part, separate humans from the animals by rooms with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Staff who come into contact with the animals wear gloves and face masks. Orangutan feeding and play areas have no fences, leaving the apes free to come and go from the jungle as they wish– even the young ones.

We wander the orangutan sanctuary through the morning, watching drama unfold in the “kindergarten playground” as younger apes socialize, munch on fruit, and gain agility through a jungle gym of platforms interconnected by ropes, tires, and other random bits and pieces. They steal fruit from each other. They play tug-of-war with their bodies. (There may be just a teeny bit of shameless biting involved.) One particularly hapless ape falls off a rope and proceeds to throw the tantrum of the century, mashing its banana through the dirt, spinning in circles on its back, digging holes and hurling balls of dirt back to the earth and summersaulting across the ground to steal more fruit.

On a feeding platform further into the jungle, a ranger stands watch while orangutans help themselves to a basket brimming with bananas and watermelon slices. Hoardes of aggressive short-tailed macaques take advantage of the free food, racing in to reach up from beneath the platform, snatching fruit before the ranger chases them off. Also, a single black super-ninja squirrel helps itself to scraps while a mother orangutan immerses her head into the basket. Her baby releases her chest to grab its own small bunch of fruit, which it proceeds to cram into its mouth as it hangs by its feet from an overhead rope.

The Sun Bear Conservation Center greets us with the smallest of the world’s bears digging for grubs amongst downed logs. Also: a silver-tailed racer (read: giant, theoretically harmless, bright yellow and black tree snake) making its happy way though the branches above our heads. Also: an orangutan who swings through, climbs down onto the walkway and chases a group of tourists down the stairs. Also: several sun bears snooze the afternoon away amongst the trees. One rouses itself to root through the top of a snag before beginning its long climb downward. Shortly thereafter the predator demonstrates what happens when kinetic energy combines with lazy sun bears, rapidly transforming into the world’s cutest drop bear.

____

A day and a half later, Mt. Kinabalu greets us with low cloud and relentless rain.

We wander the national park’s botanic garden through a soft foggy haze, exploring a creation blended so seamlessly into the montane jungle I wouldn’t know the difference save for the garden’s boundary fence and name placards. Orchids greet us from every corner. Clusters of hot pink blossoms hang from high shrubs. Ferns uncoil over our heads. Purple and blue berries burst near our knees. And pitcher plants abound. While some of the near-mythical carnivorous organisms hang in light green pairs from delicate vines above our heads, others rise in deep mottled red and green from the soil.

Late in the afternoon, our taxi driver turns down the end of a bumpy pitted road to a palm plantation. A local lady leads us along a decrepit muddy brick path in her back garden to a small tarp strung sheltering a small patch of leaf litter. There from the ground rises a rafflesia flower, five days old, deep red petals curled in under its perfectly round bowl of a body. For all they’re the world’s biggest flower (also supposedly stinkiest, as they attract insects that feed on carrion), the rafflesia are notoriously hard to find: they bloom only six days at a time, with almost no warning.

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Mt. Kinabalu shows a marked shortage of mountain guides the day we climb due to the combined effects of Independence Day (the villages may have gotten a wee bit drunk last night) and an unholy amount of rainfall this year: landslides this morning wiped out at least two guides’ houses.

I feel utterly run down as we start up the trail, courtesy of what appears to be a sinus infection I’ve now been attempting to kick for close to two weeks. Also, the last time I tried to climb a mountain, the altitude ate me alive. This time, armed with all the good stuff, I’m still slow.

My guide, Aling, proves a gem. “You are not so slow,” he tells me. “You have a good pace. All my Chinese customers are slower.”

Oh, good.

As we walk, Aling tells me about the ramifications of the 2015 earthquake. 20 dead, 30 injured, three guest houses collapsed, and good luck getting a technical climbing permit these days. He explains the year-long process of becoming a climbing guide. Somewhere along the way, he discovers my interest in ecology. Aling spends the next half hour detailing the park’s endemic pitcher plants and orchids, and promises to show me “the biggest” when we descend tomorrow.

Aling cares so deeply for the park, which is kept absolutely immaculate. He explains where we can pee and poop (in the toilets. Only the toilets.), where we can dispose of trash (in the bins), and calls a group of wandering climbers back to the trail (more than one meter off track and rescue isn’t your mountain guide’s problem!). He tells us how every piece of sewage and trash is piped or carried off the mountain; how every piece of food and equipment is carried in by porters: Mt. Kinabalu's weather is too tempermental to utilize helicopters.

The track climbs steadily through changing vegetation zones: we pass from dense, shaded jungle filled with vines and broad leaves to shrubby, damp, whispy montane forest, where a brilliant red and chartreuse pitcher plant greets us from slender tendrils. Nepenthes villosa is endemic to Kinabalu, Aling tells me, and grows only above elevations of 2,800 meters.

Kinabalu’s tall upper reaches tower over our rest house, situated just below the timberline at 3,300 meters. Bright white blocks shine from the mountain’s sheer slopes where a block the size of a high rise dislodged from the base of a tall spire in the 2015 earthquake, shattering into house-sized pieces as it tumbled downward toward the rest houses.

Thunderheads and a dark, persistent rain arrive in the evening: as the mountain’s upper reaches consist entirely of granite slab, too much water results in track closure to the summit.

The weather moves on during the night, and we wake at 1:30 am the sky is clear. We climb. We climb and climb and climb some more through oxygen-starved air. We climb under clear skies, and I feel granite under my hands again. At some point Cassiopeia appears ahead of me, and I follow the half-forgotten constellation upward. In a strange way, it feels like coming home.

I summit just before dawn breaks on my last full day of vacation, in time to watch the sun rise over the mountain’s craggy spires and low valleys to the east. Kinabalu’s shadow descends over Kota Kinabalu as the city’s lights disappear to the west.

As I take a moment to rest, lungs half-starved of air, I feel the sweet, glorious taste of redemption: a month ago, Rinjani sent me packing after a night of violent altitude sickness at 8,500 ft. Today, even in my slightly decrepit state, I’ve proven to myself I can still do this shit.

Thank god for antibiotics and Diamox.

Then we start the long, slow, painful descent downward.

About a third of the way through our descent from the rest houses, Ailing motions for us to set down our backpacks. We follow him down a small side trail to where a deep red pitcher rests on the ground, rising from trailing tendrils in a bowl the size of my lower leg. “This is a hybrid,” he tells us, between N. Rajah, the largest pitcher plant in the world, and N. Villosa, which we found yesterday higher up the mountain. It, too, is found only around Mt. Kinabalu.

Some hour or so after we leave the pitcher plants behind, a low, deep rumble reverberates around the mountain. When I look up I notice trees and ferns shaking.

“Landslide?” I ask.

Aling shakes his head. “Earthquake.”

By the time we arrive to the gate in the early afternoon, I’m absolutely shattered.

We drive back to Kota Kinabalu, where I fall into bed and sleep for 12 hours straight. Then I pull myself together, down more coffee than is probably rightfully healthy, mail a few postcards (not exactly an easy task on a holiday weekend), find my way to my last Southeast Asian airport and switch my brain from “Vacation” to “Work.”

Chapter close.

City of the Future

Singapore: land of gardens in the sky, old shophouses made new and outrageously expensive cars. Land where sliding glass doors open onto subway trains from immaculate platforms where people legitimately respect queueing lines painted on the floor. Land where public signage includes four languages: English, Chinese, Arabic and Bahasa. Not only is this probably one of the most eclectic mixes I’ve ever encountered, every single language has a different structure.

Good luck learning all of them.

For an entire week, I don’t notice a single piece of litter on the ground.

Double-decker, electric busses cruise the streets alongside an inordinate number of Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs. Seriously, there’s a fire-engine red Ferrari chilling on the street a block down from where I’m staying. People call dibs on entire tables tables in swarming wet markets by leaving a pack of tissues on the seats, and when they return from collecting food, there’s still a clear table waiting for them.

Heat and humidity envelop the city, accompanied by thunderheads which occasionally drop rapid, deafening, torrential storms. “Not rainy season,” Tatik, one of the housekeepers where I'm staying, tells me. “Just always raining.”

I spend my first day fighting off a rude and rapid head cold from the quiet paradise of a family friend’s house, where clusters of bamboo bend over a slender pool and monster koi cruise a shaded pond.

I spend my second day chasing down things and stuff available to me for the first time in three months, because even in the outback, clothing choice is limited. The process takes probably twice as long as it should given that, even though companies in Singapore carry western sizes, the largest shirt on the racks still happens to be a size small.

Yep, definitely still in Asia.

A quick and intimidating afternoon wander into the city’s glitziest shopping mall turns up pretty much every luxury brand in the history of ever: shops guarded by suited men wearing earpieces who would never, ever even let me through the door. Rolex. Gucci. Dolce and Gabana. Chanel. Valentino. A bunch of other crazy-ass shit I never heard of that would charge me half a year’s salary for a pair of socks. Places that rent an entire store and hang like five items on the rack just because that’s the way they want it to look.

… and for some unearthly reason, the entire building happens to be guarded by a giant watercolor techno pug on acid.

I poke around Little India the next morning, finding my way by accident into the infamous Mustafa: a mall that pretty much seems to consist of the amazon warehouse all in one, with people swarming everywhere and no organization whatsoever. I literally get lost in aisles of almonds and cashews. And salsa. Somewhere along the way, I find iron land. I’m pretty sure there’s a floor dedicated to shampoo. Potentially shared with binoculars. Somewhere else, I wander into Land of Luggage. It’s like the entire world has been squeezed into a single block of wizard space (Inner geeks, unite!).

Once I manage to escape Mustafa my afternoon wander takes me through an odd cultural mashup where old lanes filled with three-story shophouses have been converted to middle-eastern shops selling fabric and lanterns and Persian rugs. Eventually I continue past an epic streetside shwarma stall and arrive to Haji lane. The narrow trendy street, complete with exorbitant prices, bursts with historic shophouses have been repainted in massive murals, repurposed and restored into hair salons, boutique cantinas, juice bars and modern vintage shops. The place is pretty much a cross between the 23^rd Avenue of old and Hawthorne Boulevard, built in centuries-old buildings and centered on a mosque.

By evening I find my way to the Gardens by the Bay. Twin shining oblong domes rise in lattices of glass and metal from the water’s edge. Inside the Flower Dome I find something of a cross between an art installation and an incredibly compact, diverse, vibrant botanic garden. The larger dome holds a mountain of a vertical garden, wrapped in the heavy humidity of the cloud forest. A waterfall tumbles from near the ceiling to catch Chinese tourists in white sundresses unawares. At the very, very top, above floors filled with giant crystals and tree trunks carved into wood spirits, just beneath the dome's latticed roof, a pitcher plant garden sits just above the surface of a reflecting pool.

As darkness falls I find myself in some alien synthesis of organics and future tech as I stand amongst the base of the Gardens’ supertree grove. Steel worked into tree-shaped trellises rises skyward around me, trunks blanketed in dense, wild hanging gardens as vines dangle and dance in the evening breeze. Intricate metal webs extend outward to form a canopy high overhead, flashing with fairy lights as light disappears from the city. Somehow, for such enormous structures (pretty sure there's a restaurant in one of them), the supertrees still manage to appear so incredibly delicate.

Twice in the evening music blasts within the garden as techno lights illuminate the trees, bulbs dancing amongst the canopy in front of the Marina Bay Sands’ illuminated silhouette.

On my last day in Singapore, I exit the subway to walk through a maze of trendy old shophouses set beneath glassy skyscrapers draped in greenery. I somehow manage to find a wet market in the midst of the ritz, lunching on a $3 bowl of duck noodle soup with all the extras. I wind my way through Chinatown’s odd mashup of cheap touristy trinkets and pricey chopstick shops and rows of crimson and gold lanterns draped over streets. I wander the city’s waterfront, passing a pedestrian bridge molded into a shining silver DNA matrix, and watch a man blow fifty dollars on gelato for his kids that will melt before they manage to eat half of it. I find my way to the Merlion, a towering white lion-fish spouting water into the bay in front of the CBD, where the skyline’s modern skyscrapers tower over older colonial buildings. Toward the end of the day I detour through the city center, passing the parliament building and the supreme court, which for all intents and purposes appears to be topped by the space needle.

Eventually I say goodbye to the city, and step back onto the immaculate subway, finding my way home to clear pools, fried chicken and bamboo.

Cats Dancing Through Color Wheels

Apparently stealing life jackets from airplanes is a thing for people leaving Indonesia, because before we land in Kuala Lumpur, the flight attendants specifically announce the exorbitant fee and jail time involved in being caught.

In any case. I catch up with my friend Noel for a day in KL. We hit the climbing gym and eat some REALLY freaking good chicken and rice, and somewhere along the way Noel assures me it’s the dry season.

It pours every day.

Seriously, if this is the dry season, I don't want to know what the monsoon looks like. Black clouds twine low over karst mountains in dancing wisps reminiscent of dark magic as my bus heads north toward Penang (having left Noel behind with his new soul mate in the form of a black and white kitten at the bus station).

Penang is known for food, street art, and old, old buildings and culture. Georgetown, tucked into the corner of an island off Malaysia’s northwest coast, reminds me a bit of Melacca: a time warp of a well-preserved old town in a port city. Street upon street of old Chinese shop houses pack the historic district. Spunky bakeries inhabit 100-year-old buildings next to old-style print shops. My hostel is housed in a building over a century old.

I lose myself amongst Chinatown’s narrow streets. I eat LOTS of cheap food: there’s more variety here than I would know what to do with if I stayed for a month. That being said I have absolutely no idea what I’m eating, because menus are simply transliterated in their entirety. It’s like translation and explanations don’t exist here, even though the country’s two main languages happen to be Bahasa and English.

I wander Jetties crammed with weathered wooden houses, built amongst family groups and extending into the strait between Penang and mainland Malaysia. Although they appear shabby from the front, a peek inside doors left ajar for ventilation in the heavy heat reveal slender, spacious homes.

I find street art everywhere I look. Children riding motorbikes. Simpsons and Yodas eating pizza with Obama. Cats climbing though the color wheel. Old men swallowing archways whole. Bruce lee kicking a cat across the street. A wild girl riding a sea turtle.

Chinatown’s narrow, busy streets cradle clan houses: 1,000-year-old family complexes centered around temples built of carved stone and gilded in gold, moral foundations and teachings and histories displayed in floor-to ceiling murals.

 Somewhere along the way, Chinatown gives way to Little India’s controlled chaos.

Bollywood music blares, street side stalls sell pirated DVDs by the hundred and strands of radiant marigolds hang from wire racks. Open-air restaurants spin my into a haze as servers gesture and spout foreign sentences and eventually arrive with plates full of naan and chicken tikka for less than three dollars.

I spend a grand total of four days basking in Georgetown’s vibrant mix of deep, multilayered mix of colonial and eastern culture and color. Then I spend no less than two hours in line for a passport stamp, and leave the island behind.

Chaos and Craft, Evolving

The small city of Yogyakarta bleeds culture and life: street art adorns every alley and garage. Potted plants hang from concrete walls. Brightly colored houses line narrow, twisting alleys. Streets scream with a half-organized frenzy of cars, minibuses, hoardes of motorbikes, horse-drawn carriages, and this particular city’s version of ojeks: two-person carriages propelled by a man on a very tall, (occasionally) motorized bicycle.

Yogya is self-governed, in a way: although recognized as a “Special Region,” the sultan still seems to have something to do with ruling the city in his own right. Really still not sure how that all works out. In any case, the city is a vibrant, multilayered center of craft evolution, somehow managing to retain a strong, deep, vibrant, ancient cultural history while simultaneously developing traditional craft for modern uses.

I spend my first couple days wandering. I find my way to the Water Palace, an estate filled with stone carvings and gardens and pools where the sultan and his many wives vacationed when not conducting business. I think. I also manage to stumble across a bed in a small side chamber: prime site for boom boom once the sultan made his pick for the evening.


I lose myself in batik shops, where artists show me the process of dripping wax through tiny pipettes, laying dye, and then boiling off wax… over and over and over again. It’s somewhat like meditation, they tell me. While the craft has been used for centuries to create sarongs and other lengths of fabric, a new generation of artists has utilized the form to create wall hangings. I wander canvases for hours, immersed in cranes and dragons and abstract countryside landscapes and more modern art styles.

Some time during the week I meet a man who leads me through a maze of narrow, twisting alleys lined with potted plants and tight-packed houses, arriving at a workshop belonging to the man whose family for six generations has produced shadow puppets for the sultan.

The artist’s uncle walks me through the process of transforming cow hide into brightly painted puppets, vibrant painted details giving way to intricate, lacey patterns and shapes as light casts shadows on a screen raised behind them. He explains how each color and shape carries a different meaning, from merging elements to protection and soul, depending on which character is depicted. Although the whole family works to create puppets, each person learns only one craft: the primary artist treats and carves leather, his brother paints and his uncle carves and uses heat to shape buffalo horn into puppeteer’s sticks. Each individual’s craft will be passed from father to son, from generation to generation.

I spend a day wandering thousand-year-old temples. The Buddhist icon of Borobudur rises in above rolling jungled hills, hundreds of latticed stone stupas built around Buddhas who gaze outward over steep, multi-tiered, corridors filled with intricate, carved tapestries. The temples comprising Prambanan’s complex tower in a cluster of tall, slender spires dedicated to individual gods, lessons and histories and animals carved into almost every inch of exposed rock.

My last day in Yogya brings me to the Sultan’s palace, built of stained glass and wood and accented in gold leaf. While the building is stunning, I find myself mesmerized by shadow puppetry being performed in the main courtyard. Dozens of people execute the art to completion in complex, practiced harmony: The puppeteer sits under a single light bulb behind a broad cotton screen, framed by hundreds of puppets arranged by size on a bamboo pole. His voice weaves an alien world as he sings a mythical creation story, voicing up to 150 characters throughout the course of his tale. Through voice and puppet movement, backed by an ensemble of over 50 musicians and five female vocalists, the puppeteer evokes whimsical, forceful, fleeting and strong and cheerful emotion. One single man’s sole purpose is selecting the correct character, preparing puppets to be passed to the puppeteer at the appropriate time. Every member of the cast wears a ceremonial cap and batik sarong, a keris held tight against the back by a broad sash. Next to every set of bare feet rests a cup of tea… along with a pack of cigarettes.

The next day I leave behind one of the most beautiful countries I’ve had I’ve been graced with good fortune to experience. At the airport, some archaic counting method determines I’ve overstayed my visa by a day. When I return from the ATM, cash in hand, the immigration officer informs me the fee “If you want to leave the country” has increased by half in the last five minutes.

Thanks, guys.

And on that very businesslike note, I board my plane to Malaysia.