The Jungle’s Bounty

(from Friday)

The Kalimantan jungle seems to be one of Indonesia’s last frontiers. In the eyes of many, it’s underpopulated, bursting at the seams with resources, and a ripe place to help address some of the country’s other shortcomings. And to a certain extent, they might be right. I’ve been struck by the common Dayak practice of not picking fruit from the tree but instead cutting off huge branches, letting ripe and unripe jack fruit, rambutan, and other lychee-like treats fall to the ground. It’s quick, it’s easy, and even if some goes to waste, there’s plenty more where that came from. The government has taken a similar stance, resettling people from other islands in Kalimantan, and opening up huge tracts of land for energy exploration, logging, and the planting of non-rainforest plants. The impact seems striking and will only continue to transform the Borneo landscape and one of the last remaining jungles of its kind. Logging has not only stripped the land of its hardwood trees, but of habitats for many endangered species, including orangutans. I’ll share more stories about the orangutans in my slide show, but trust me that the consequences of logging for our primate cousins—as well as other animals—have been dismal. Logging has also scarred the Kalimantan landscape with roads leading deep into the forest, and thus opening up more access for migrants to the area. Oil and coal exploration has also followed, with vast tracts of forest being peeled away to access the resources lying just below them. But while the pictures of these are horrific, at least they offer the potential for future forest development, and there seems to be an 80% success rate in returning these areas to some sort of sustainable rainforest. Not the case with oil palm. This most insidious import is the sexy choice du jour for settlers and others looking to make a quick buck. Pull out your hardwood trees (lumber companies like this) and clear your land. Plant free or low-cost oil palm trees, which require almost no maintenance, and wait for three years for them to come to maturity. Then pick the bounty and see it turn into a salary of $5000-10,000 a year if all goes well. The problem is threefold: 1) the oil palms are quite inhospitable to other flora and not the proper home to local fauna, 2) the oil palm seeds must be in a processing plant no more than 8 hours after they are picked, meaning that it can’t be done by anyone but large corporations, and growers are thus entirely dependent upon said corporations for their new livelihood, and 3) if growers decide down the road to no longer grow oil palm, they must dig out a 4 meter by 4 meter by 4 meter hole for each palm in order to fully remove the root structure. And local environmental workers feel that prices will only fall as the government opens up four times the amount of forest for oil palm trees, and growers are forced to sell their goods to the multinational corporations at the prices that they set.

Charming and Cute

(from Thursday)

Until today, I’d not seen anything/anyplace in Indonesia that was charming and cute. Indonesia is that middle school girl in the midst of puberty, a bit too grown up in some ways, not quite grown up enough in others. She perhaps was really cute earlier in life. She’ll perhaps be really charming again, but for the moment, she’s just a bit awkward to look at. I’d experienced that sentiment again and again in my first week here. Very friendly people, not much to look at that has any sustainable beauty, of course based on a very limited sample size.

Today, nearing the end of my week of work with CIFOR (www.cifor.org, I believe), we’ve come to a Dayak village in East Kalimantan, and it’s quite lovely. Not “lovely” in that it’s traditional and quaint, but in that it seems to be comfortable in its own skin. The first village we stayed in was not charming or cute. The folks there in Gunung Lumut did seem at ease with who they were, but perhaps problematically so. They suffered more from their abundance. They’ve got so much fruit and other natural resources that they don’t really have to work very hard, and in fact they don’t pick fruit as much as they just cut off giant branches with fruit exploding from it. They have so much wood lying about that they don’t have to be more efficient with their fuel usage (and thus cook on open fires). They generate enough surplus income that they can have a village store and the low-quality foods that go along with it. And they have enough free time and money that cigarettes are the number one expense for just about every household, with most men, and some women, smoking 2 + packs a day. They smoke when they relax (and they do a lot of this), they smoke when they work (not so much of this, and good for them), and they smoke when they take care of their young. Basically, they smoke all the time, and the only physical problems that I saw in the community were some dental health issues and some hacking coughs that sounded like asthma in young people and far worse in some of the adults. The community leader, also a shaman, told us that there are many local herbal cures for such things like cancer, but also admitted that there are some modern diseases coming along that he can do nothing about. This community had been moved and rebuilt by a logging company, and that might explain some of the uninteresting architecture and odd location, more than a kilometer away from the nearest river. In any case, it had none of the good lucks of the Amigos community that I found myself in 25 years ago in the Venezuelan Amazon, one that was also about a hundred people, but was near the edge of the river, and built up almost entirely from local resources.

With the first Borneo community a bit of a disappointment (from a charm standpoint), and a few others that we passed through also lacking promise, I was hoping that this last one would be more photogenic. Upon our arrival in the community house, we looked out from the back porch to see kids vaulting themselves into the picturesque river below. We saw boats passing by, laundry being scrubbed, and a fellow strumming a guitar in a nearby open-air hut. I ran out to spend the last two hours of the afternoon talking to people, seeing the lovely architecture, and photographing some of the daily life. With six more hours of photography tomorrow morning, I’m very hopeful that this will be the first set of exciting images of the trip. If nothing else, it’s quite cute and charming, and I’m sure I’ll sleep well in anticipation of what lay ahead.

Translation Frustration

(from Wednesday)

I wrote earlier about how my photography is really only a means to an end, and that end is hearing people’s stories, learning about the world around me. It’s for that reason that this week has been filled with great frustration. I’ve been in this new country for less than a week. I’m excited to learn all that I can. And I feel stymied by my assistant’s lack of translation services. A few days ago, I sat down with him to share my concerns. He’s a very nice guy, and said that he’d be happy to put more energy into translating, but I think that he’s just not cut out for it. Not because he doesn’t have the English skills—he absolutely does—but because he seems sometimes so self-absorbed that he can’t take his own love for conversation out of the equation. I’ll ask a very simple question to someone I’m photographing, like “how long have you lived in this community”, and then I’ll wait a full five minutes to get a three word answer from him as they seemingly talk about everything but what I’ve asked. I’ve told him that I need translation every 15-30 seconds, and that if he’s going to add a question, he should translate that for me so that I know what he’s asking, yet it just doesn’t seem to be getting through, as I often have to interrupt him to say “translation please!” Car rides and meals have been especially isolating as I’ll be seated with 2-3 other people and not more than a few words will be shared with me, even though I’ve posed some questions to the others with me. Tedi will give me a quick answer and then ask a follow up question in Bahasa Indonesia, leave me in the dust, and this can go on literally for hours. English is quite a rarity here, so I’m really dependent on him for this entire week, and I feel like I’m missing out on so much interesting learning. On one or two occasions, someone else has translated a few conversations and my experience has just been so much richer, even if their English was not nearly as good as Tedi’s. On some levels, the saving grace of the week so far has been that I’ve gotten sick with the flu and have slept through several meals and for much of the long car rides. Otherwise, I really might have bitten his head off—and I still might—for feeling so cheated. I’m not sure if I hope that he’ll never have to feel what I’ve felt with him this week, or if I absolutely want him to feel what I’ve felt so that he knows to never repeat such treatment.

When I Grow Up

(from Sunday)

I’m a working photographer this week. And I’ll be one for the next couple of weeks, and perhaps for the remainder of my six week trip here in Indonesia. It’s exciting to get paid for doing something one loves, and I’m quite stunned that I may make more money while traveling in a far off place than I do at home. But I also realize that the photography is only a very small part of why I like photography, and is not enough unto itself. Sure, I love seeing a great photograph, and I love even more making a great photograph. But photography is really only a tool for me to learn about my environment and hear cool stories, and without the stories, photography kind of feels empty. Today took me around a small Dayak village on the island of Borneo, one where people were friendly and happy to be photographed, but I don’t feel like I learned anything new. I think that this has a lot to do with the language barrier and not having a true translator, but it made me wonder about what kind of work I could have that would be sure to be chock-full of stories all the time. Something where I would meet interesting people who weren’t too interesting that they became just weird. Something that’s consistently providing new challenges but which I feel like I’m doing well. And, of course, something where I’m my own boss. Trivia master? Restaurateur? General Manager of a professional baseball team? Stand-up comedian? Can I do better than what I’m doing now? These are the questions of a mid-life crisis traveler navigating not only new cultures but also the uncertainty of my present and future.

Jakarta

(from Saturday)

For some reason, before my arrival, I was really nervous about coming to Jakarta. I’m seldom nervous about arriving someplace new, even if I’ve not done too much research about it. Maybe it was that I didn’t speak the language. Maybe it was that it was a city of 20 million people. Or maybe it was just that I had a bad feeling that something untoward might happen. But so far, everything has gone quite smoothly. While it’s a sprawling city with occasionally horrible traffic (I spent just under two hours in a cab yesterday to go maybe 15 kilometers), it doesn’t feel oppressive, and just about everyone who I’ve met has been friendly without being overly friendly. Indonesians are friendly with their eyes, and they—or at least the ones in Jakarta—pass the stranger smile test, where they nod or smile back when I smile or say “hello”.

I’m developing a belief that the friendliest people—outside of perhaps Mormons in Salt Lake City and anyone from Minnesota—are Moslems in Moslem countries. If I look back upon all my travels, it just seems that I’ve been consistently so much better received in places such as Kurdish Iraq, Turkey, Tanzania, Northern Mozambique, and now in the grand-daddy of them all, Indonesia (the only place that didn’t work out so well for me was Morocco, but I’m hoping to give it a second chance later this year as I was sick as a dog the first time around).

In light of this, it’s a small wonder to me that I know so little about Islam, and rather exotify it regularly. I try to fit it into tidy boxes so that I can easily make it work in my mind. Seems like I’ve met enough Moslems in my life that I shouldn’t try to oversimplify them. But I do. Last night, I went to photograph a Jakarta independent radio station where they had an outdoor Valentine’s Day concert with a handful of live performers. I expected the concert to be melodic and quite staid, being the most populous Moslem country, after all, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Hip performers rapped, crooned, covered Elvis and Brittney (the latter thankfully as a joke), and all the while, twenty somethings in the audience screamed with glee and swooned, regardless of whether they were wearing fitted t-shirts or head scarves. Not quite what I expected and most delightfully so.

I Love Talking to People

(from Thursday)

I'm just now back from a jaunt around Dubai. Well, not much of a jaunt because I didn't really know about any place to go see except for the tallest building on earth (less impressive at night). Others suggested the malls, but that had less appeal to me for obvious reasons. So I had some decent food in a hookah cafe, watched a bit of soccer on TV and strolled back and forth to the metro station. On my return back to the airport, I struck up a conversation with two women who worked at the metro station—both coming to Dubai from far away for work. Not sure how we got started, but it reminds me that I just love talking to people. And they were delightful. We talked about work here, life at home, love, freedom, travel, the like.

Dubai was fascinating that way: far more South Asians and East Asians than Arabs. I guess that gives it the feel of a very international city, but it’s clearly stratified in the jobs that people are doing. The women with whom I spoke were from Malaysia and Kenya, and told me that they came for the experience and the money, respectively. And they were making close to 10k a year with almost all of their expenses covered, and this was tax-free. That’s better money than I make, and they work that they were doing at the metro didn’t seem particularly taxing. Ninie told me that could make more in Malaysia but that it was a good life experience. Julie said that this was far more than she could make in Kenya but didn’t like the lack of freedom to be herself in Dubai. She flies back to Kenya 2-3 times a year to have enough sex and alcohol to last her another six months in Dubai.

Flying Again

For those of you who read my blog last year when I traveled to East Africa, you may know that I experience much more luxury on my international flights than at just about any other point in my life. It’s one of the few times that I just sit and relax and enjoy most everything that comes my way. That’s why it should be no surprise that when given the following choices, I chose B.

A) $950 ticket on China Air, 18 hours of travel time going there, 20 hours coming back.

B) $850 ticket on Emirates going the wrong way around the globe, via Dubai, 33 hours going, 28 hours coming back.

I must say that I was a bit concerned about how I’d face a sixteen hour flight from San Francisco to Dubai. Now I’m concerned that I won’t have enough time for all the things that I’d like to do. I’d like to sleep—and have three seats for doing so—eat and then eat some more, maybe have some free drinks, and watch a whole host of movies and TV shows that I’ve wanted to see. This airline is really luxurious. You should see the seats up front: even in business class, the travelers have little pods that they can retreat into, basically making their seat into a bed (for those who don’t have three seats). First class must be even better, but that’s off limits for us little guys. But even for us, the going is quite good, and I’m not doing any complaining. The steam towels that they brought were flavored, maybe with kaffir lime leaves, the menu looks quite nice, and they just brought me a lovely little goodie bag with, among other things, the cutest toothbrush-toothpaste thingy in it. Now I might have been a little less excited if the flight were full and I were locked in for sixteen hours, or if the horribly smelly man sitting kitty corner from me were sitting a bit closer, or if they had forgotten my special meal. But for the moment, life is really good. I think I’ll try to catch up on a bit of sleep now…

Djibouti or Bust (the international version) Is Back!

Djibouti or Bust, the travel blog, is back. I’m keeping the same blog name since not only is it fun to say, but also because I’ve not made it to Djibouti, and I don’t see myself as a bust quite yet. As you may know, I’m about to spend six weeks in Indonesia and environs, and if I’m able to collect half as many interesting stories as I did last year in East Africa, I’ll be a very lucky man. Once again, I’ll be working with several international nonprofit organizations, which I expect will take me to some off-the-beaten-track places and through which I’ll meet some fascinating people. Not sure how many photos I’ll include this year, as these are quite frankly a pain in the ass to upload while traveling, but you’re all invited to the slide show in the spring/early summer to see all of these. In the meantime, enjoy the stories and please, please post comments on the blog. Those make writing especially fun for me.