I remember reading an illustrated book on the eruption of Krakatoa as a kid and being intrigued by a green island full of volcanoes, rice and strangely-clad people. I searched for Java on my globe (my favorite childhood toy) and was pleased to find it almost directly opposite my home in snowy, volcano-free Wisconsin. I'd put my finger over the bumpy little squiggle (it was a relief globe) full of cities with bizarre names, wondering how many people lived underneath. For Andrew at age eight, Java represented all that was exotic and unknown. I felt oddly connected to the place then, and I still do.
Waking up on my picnic table bed this morning however, I hardly felt I was in one of the most populated places on earth. Lizards howled, birds screamed, monkeys crashed and deer barked. And the nearest village was fifteen painful kilometers down a miserable excuse for a road. After packing our stuff I took a sunrise walk through the muddy forest and saw a surprising amount of wildlife: an orange cat-looking beast, a wild piglike substance with a long snout, and yes, barking deer. As satisfying as these sightings were, they still didn't seem worth taking such a painful detour; the mere thought of riding fifteen hellish kilometers to a cup of coffee made me groan aloud.
Fred said the road didn't seem as long going out as it had coming in. It was full of students from Yogya --most of the girls wearing ultra-Islamic jelbebs over their heads---out for a stroll. They were staying at the other \"accommodation\" a few kilometers inland from us and kept to the road in order not to sink into the mud. I heard more than one whisper \"*gila*\" (crazy) as we bounced slowly by, and I could hardly disagree with them. When we reached the little village of Wonorejo an hour and a half later, we were both covered in sweat and grime.
It felt oppressively hot, and the clock on the wall of the nasty little café in which we took breakfast showed that it wasn't even eight a.m. \"Are you going to Bali?\" everyone asked us (often abbreviated simply to \"Bali?\" accompanied by a look of astonishment). No one could fathom what two white boys would be doing in the backwoods of East Java. It promised to be a long day. From Wonorejo the road climbed high into a lush forest of teak, appreciably cooler and uninhabited but for the occasional park ranger or woodcutter. We paused at what appeared to be the top of the ridge, volcanoes clearly visible on either side of us, and one such woodcutter --a wild-looking guy dressed in raggedly clothes---stopped his rusty old bike to gawk at us, remaining silent unless responding to our questions.
In just barely comprehensible Indonesian, he told us that he lived in a village down the hill and that a headache was driving him home early. On the way down we stopped a couple of times and he'd stop too, observing us as if we were exotic birds. Back in the lowlands the traffic picked up considerably. Apart from the occasional bus or truck screaming by, most of it was pedal- or animal-powered. Horse carts called *andong* (grander than Lombok's *cidomo*) awaited passengers at every intersection; *becaks* transported people, animals and goods; crop-laden oxcarts known as \"Nippon chariots\" (due to their prevalence during the Japanese occupation) ambled slowly by.
As cyclists, however, we belonged to the vehicular majority. Like us, most bikers were loaded down, often with ridiculously cumbersome burdens which made us feel streamlined in comparison. Asembagus was our first Javanese town. The masses of people, animals and vehicles, combined with the oppressive heat made it a rather overwhelming experience for both of us. From here we turned off the main road to the port of Jangkar, where ferries supposedly leave for Madura every day. We had been hearing vastly varying versions of this ferry's schedule since arriving on Java, so it came as no surprise that the boat wasn't running today (either due to the Hindu holiday called Ngepi or the fact that it was Sunday, depending upon whom you talked to).
Would there be a ferry tomorrow? \"Yes\", \"No\" and \"Maybe\" came the responses, and when I asked what time it would leave I got answers anywhere from six a.m. to four p.m. Indonesia is a place where the notion of linear time is still in its infancy, where the locals take pride in the concept of \"*jam karet*\", or \"rubber time\", which dictates that events occur when they are meant to. Not thrilled by the prospect of hanging around a sorry harbor for a day or more (with the nearest accommodation thirty kilometers off), I proposed to Fred that we ride to the next town and investigate bussing it to Surabaya, where more reliable transportation to Madura could be found.
The road to Situbondo was busy and hot, but trees lining it provided shade and we had a stiff tailwind the whole way. Once in town we stopped at the first restaurant we saw and had a delicious meal of king prawns, washed down with numerous bottles of ice cold water. At the nearby bus terminal, we attracted the usual crowd, but within minutes we had worked out a deal for getting us and our bikes all the way to Surabaya, some 200 kilometers away. It cost three dollars total, a buck for us and two bucks for the bikes, which were very conscientiously placed behind the bus's rear seats by a trio of uniformed employees.
While the trip presented a fair share of cultural insights, Fred and I hope that it constitutes our last experience on a trans-Java bus. As soon as the bus left the terminal the windows went up; the locals apparently find the cooling breezes chilly and prefer to remain sweltering. And even though our bus was designated \"ekspres\" it stopped --or at least paused---every few hundred meters for people to leap on or off through the rear door, next to which we were seated. At the scheduled stops in large towns and cities (of which there are many in Java), merchants and buskers would invade the vehicle, often staying on until the outskirts of town, where the bus would slow --but never stop---for them to leap off.
Seated in the middle of the row, Fred was spared the terror of witnessing the recklessness of the driver, who casually ran anything smaller than us off the road, including oncoming traffic. In spite of the frenzied activity, there prevailed a sense of *gotong royong*, a Javanese concept meaning \"mutual respect and support.\" The passengers, the staff, even the little urchins selling peanuts --everyone was almost painfully polite to one another amid the madness. In my grimy, smelly cycling clothes, I felt unspeakably *kasar*, or course, in comparison. Most of our fellow passengers merely looked at us curiously before politely averting their gaze, though a few worked up the courage to practice their English on us.
One young peasant seated in front of us attempted a vocalization of his appreciation for our bikes, which came out as \"Speedle? Good?\" At one point of the ride we passed a power plant more gargantuan than I'd ever imagined possible, and picked up what seemed like half the employees to cart them to their nearby village. Squished up against the window to regard a smeary sulfur-colored sunset, I could think only of the bath I'd be enjoying in Surabaya, still three hours off. It was nighttime when we finally arrived at our destination, and both Fred and I felt more spent than if we had pedaled the whole way.
With the assistance of the amazingly servile bus staff, we assembled our bikes and found transportation into town in a funny little vehicle called an \"angguna\", an odd hybrid of pickup truck and minivan. Like Jakarta, Surabaya is a huge, huge town with one main street running through it north to south. For a long time we were part of this immense river of humanity leading to the center of town. The hotel we had picked turned out to be totally acceptable, with decent rooms and great staff, and a screaming deal at less than ten bucks a night including breakfast *and* dinner, which we fell upon like a couple of vultures.