Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (53 page)

The Javanese will be unfailingly polite, I was told by blunter tribes, it’s always
inggih, inggih, inggih
, yes, yes, yes, but watch out because before you know it they’ll have stabbed you with a
kris
dagger they had behind their back. They’re not as open as us, not as friendly, said people from most other parts of Indonesia (even the unfriendly parts). It’s because of the hierarchy thing.

I had arrived in Java at Semarang, which sits more or less dead centre along the north coast of the island. It was four in the morning when my Pelni boat from Kalimantan steamed in. We lined up on the dock next to three much larger Pelni ships, two of which had also just arrived. It was pandemonium. There was the usual stampede of porters up the narrow gangplank just as passengers shoved and jostled their way down. This time, though, there was an added bottleneck caused by people bending over and taking off their shoes, rolling up their trousers, tucking their skirts up above the knees without losing their dignity too completely, hiking luggage up to shoulder height. Because every single gangplank stretched down on to a dock transformed into a small lake. Every passenger had to wade knee-deep through about ten metres of water to get to dry land. I asked one of the boat stewards what was going on. ‘It’s high tide, Bu,’ he said. Twice in any given twenty-four-hour period, the docks of one of Java’s biggest ports are under water. At least one of the notions that other Indonesians have about Java – ‘Those Javanese get all the infrastructure’ – lay puddled at my feet.

Semarang was once the largest port in the Netherlands East Indies, the place from which all the sugar, tea and coffee of the rich lands of Central Java began their trip to the kitchen cupboards of northern Europe. Now, it is one of the biggest industrial centres in Indonesia; its hinterlands bottle Coke and Pepsi, they make dolls and pharmaceuticals, furniture and clothing. Its port has been overtaken by Jakarta and Surabaya, but it is still the third largest in Java, an important hub for cargo as well as passengers. And yet it wasn’t just the dock that was in need of repair.

Just after dawn I took a motorbike taxi into town. We ploughed through the muddy water that swirled about in potholes of indeterminate depth. In front of us, a high-school student on a bicycle hit a submerged rock, tottered and fell. When he picked himself up he looked like one of those blocks of vanilla ice-cream that has been dipped in a chocolate coating on one side, half white, half brown. A tear cleared a path through the mud on his left cheek.

Semarang is sinking, and the old colonial quarter, perhaps the loveliest in Indonesia, is sinking fastest of all – at the rate of twelve centimetres a year, according to Megaputri Megaradjasa, aka Ibu Jenny. I’d seen Jenny’s name in the newspaper I was reading on the boat; she was organizing a festival to celebrate the heritage of Old Semarang, complete with a classic car parade and traditional games and foods. I’d missed the festival by a day, but I went for a wander around the Old City anyway. It was both glorious and sad. The most iconic building, the Gereja Blenduk or Church of the Dome, dates from 1753. It has been beautifully restored; at night it glows like a piece of amber, preserving the dreams of colonists past. The church, with its copper dome and colourful stained glass windows, stands proud between two clock towers which proclaim, morning, noon and night but in perfect unison, that it is nine o’clock.

Most of the buildings in the Old City were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the grand enterprises of the day – trading companies, plantations, banks, though there were government offices too. A few of them have been given facelifts. But these rejuvenated belles are pressed shoulder to shoulder with others that have been left to their tropical fate. A shutter flaps loose from an elegant, arched window in the facade of a building that stands as though intact. Through the window, we glimpse the gaping hole where the roof once was. Next door, a wrought-iron staircase spirals up into nothingness, its upper reaches gnawed away by rust. Grasses cascade out of broken drainpipes, trees burst out of cracks high in the walls of once splendid palaces of commerce, obscuring the ubiquitous signs: FOR SALE/RENT.

Around the decaying grandeur, life goes on. People have built tiny houses out of salvaged wood and broken tiles; they lean Gaudiesque against the crumbling wall of some long-forgotten government department. A small child stands patiently in a plastic bucket in the middle of the cobbled street while his father bathes him. Under a beautiful wrought-iron balustrade, a team of men unpack their pop-up restaurant, serving rich chicken soup to a stream of Chinese businessmen in SUVs; the street stall has its own director of parking.

Semarang was more beautiful that I had imagined it would be, and more neglected. I tracked down Ibu Jenny in Toko Oen, a coffee shop started by her family in 1936. She said she was pleased by the success of the festival, which she had arranged in part as an excuse to bring in people with expertise in heritage and preservation. She had not really known what to expect: ‘There’s a general feeling that we Indonesians are not so interested in history or heritage, especially colonial heritage,’ she said. But all the events were packed.

The goal of Jenny’s Oen Foundation is to get Semarang declared a World Heritage Site by 2020. When I arrived, she was chatting with a Dutch professor of conservation who had spoken at the conference. He was huge on every axis, with satisfactorily Mad Professor hair and the look of a man who appreciates a tankard of beer or two. He was also charming, erudite and informative.

When the VOC started building Semarang in 1678, the city was protected from flooding by a system of canals that still exists, but is no longer up to the job. The real trouble is much more recent, the professor said. To slake the thirst of a booming population and of all the factories that squat on the outskirts of town, Semarang has been pumping fresh water out from under itself. The sea was getting sucked in to fill the void, rising gently around the ankles of Semarang’s residents, beginning in the Old City, which is closest to the shore. That sapped people’s willingness to invest in restoring the old buildings. ‘Good restoration is a huge investment,’ said Jenny. ‘It’s hard to ask companies who own the buildings to put in all that money if their employees will have to swim to work.’

Who does own the buildings? I asked. Both Jenny and the professor rolled their eyes. Land ownership is always a complicated business in Indonesia, especially if it involves property that was Dutch-owned at independence. Many businesses just scarpered, some changed their names, others were nationalized but without any agreed transfer of assets. On paper, many of these buildings belong to companies that have gone bankrupt or have been subsumed by giant conglomerates such as Unilever. Even if they could be sure of keeping the floors dry, most firms would be loath to invest in restoring these buildings if there were any chance that ownership could be disputed.

How supportive was the local government of Jenny’s conservation efforts? I asked. More rolling of eyes. The Mayor of Semarang was in jail in Jakarta; he had been convicted of corruption a couple of months earlier. ‘With this government, there’s only one priority,’ said Jenny, miming putting money into her shirt pocket, ‘and it is not preservation of the colonial city.’

The professor explained the only viable solution: they would have to build a ‘polder’, a sort of giant dyke, around the Old City and pump water constantly out of it. I thought of the stinking canals designed to protect Jakarta from flooding. Every year, tonnes of garbage pile up in the canal; every year, when the rains come, the garbage drifts down and blocks the floodgates, rendering them more or less useless. Every year, the city floods. Any flood-protection system in Semarang would have to be pretty low-maintenance, and be able to tolerate high volumes of trash. ‘It’s fine, the technology can incorporate waste management,’ said the Dutchman. ‘It’s fine, we can hire people to pick out the garbage before it clogs the drainage system,’ said the Indonesian. In retrospect, Jenny’s response seemed to be the more realistic of the two. Though infrastructure was certainly a great deal better in Java than it was anywhere else in Indonesia, it was still far below par. And it doesn’t seem that Java’s pool of cheap labour will run dry any time soon.

A friend in Jakarta put me in touch with her cousin Evi in Semarang. The family owns a chain of fast-food stores specializing in Es Teler, a drink/dessert/meal that dumps avocado, jackfruit, coconut juice and a variety of gelatinous, wormy and blobby things onto a mountain of shaved ice to form a curiously intoxicating sugar-bomb. Evi was going shopping for a couple of tonnes of avocados and a stock of palm sugar and wondered if I’d like to come along.

I was actually keen to spend a bit of time in a ‘real’ city. Despite myself, I wanted to go to a nice, air-conditioned mall where I could drink a cappuccino made with fresh milk and no sugar. I wanted to go to the movies, and to spend time in a decent bookshop. I wanted to sit somewhere with free, high-speed wifi, talk to my friends on Skype, tweet, write blog posts, and do all the other things that young Indonesians do in the big cities of Java. But I couldn’t resist palm-sugar shopping.

A relative drove Evi, her husband and me out of the Old City and up into the hills. Posh spas, garden restaurants and colonnaded mansions gave way to neat middle-class suburbs. Then came a rash of more affordable estates, boxy row houses fresh from the modular plans of the developers. Beyond those were the warehouses and factories that were sucking Semarang dry and causing it to sink. After that we reached open fields, heaving with chillies and ginger, with tobacco and soybeans, with roses and eggplant. I hadn’t seen anything like this anywhere else in Indonesia. It is the reverse of the chaotic ‘shove a stick in the ground and throw a couple of corn kernels in the hole’ approach of Adonara or Halmahera. There was not a weed to be seen. Crops were planted in careful equidistant rows. The fields were patterned like a woven ikat cloth; chillies were banked neatly up and interlaced with rows of cherry tomatoes; red roses faced off against pink and white. Not an inch of soil was wasted. But there was nothing industrial about it, either. Families of farmers were tending their own fields; they each decided what to plant and when, based on market prices and the amount of effort they felt like putting in. Those that worked hardest and made most money often set up as first-line wholesalers, buying up crops from other villagers and selling them on to factories in Semarang.

Ibu Sanna was one such. We went to meet her because Evi was thinking of working with her to wholesale ginger. Impeccably coiffed and made-up, wearing a dusky spandex top threaded with silver and not sweating a drop, she walked us in the midday heat through her fields of chillies, tobacco and ginger. She had recently been buying up ginger from other farmers as well, selling it on to Sidomuncul, one of the biggest manufacturers of Javanese traditional medicines, including
Tolak Angin
, a ginger- and honey-based tonic. In the same way that English speakers ‘catch a cold’, Indonesians are ‘entered by the wind’. To avoid this
masuk angin
, they drink Tolak Angin, which literally means Refuse the Wind. I carry it around the world with me – along with Ibuprofen it forms the totality of my medicine chest – and I was curious to see where it was made. In Semarang, I had waltzed along to a Sidomuncul factory expecting to be able to blag my way past the guards and go and chat with the managers as I had everywhere else in Indonesia. I was turned firmly away, underlining the scale and professionalism of companies in Java compared with many I had stumbled into elsewhere.

The scale was a problem for Sanna too; she had contracted to deliver twenty-five tonnes of ginger a month, but wasn’t always able to scrape together that much from local farmers. She didn’t have the capital or the storage space to stockpile ginger so that she could be sure of delivering what she had promised, and in the end had given up the contract. Evi, one tier up in Indonesia’s gently graduated ziggurat of a supply chain, wanted to buy up whatever Sanna could collect; she’d ensure the rest of the stock for giant consumers like Sidomuncul from other sources and her own stockpiles.

We’d come to see Sanna not just to discuss ginger but because she said she could take us to get good quantities of
gula aren
, the crumbly brown sugar boiled down from the sap of the aren palm
arenga pinnata
, a key ingredient in a really good Es Teler sugar-bomb. Ibu Sanna changed from her cocktail-party top into an even more elegant outfit, a full-length dress in cotton jersey topped with a matching jacket that hugged tight over her bust and flowed generously over her rump. It was a classic Javanese mix; unimpeachably modest, but undeniably sexy.

While waiting for Ibu Sanna to touch up her make-up, I wandered around her neighbourhood. Inside the houses, cell phones were plugged in to charge, and TVs were thinly covered by knitted doilies. But from the outside, the scene seemed not to have changed for generations. Rice, taro root and other unidentifiable starches were spread out to dry in plaited baskets balanced on the terracotta tiles above wooden or bamboo-weave walls. A red steel wheelbarrow looked jarringly modern leaning up against one of the village houses.