indonesia
2009
in august, i had a chance to take a quick (and rather precipitous and unplanned) trip to indonesia. i wanted to make a long-overdue visit to see old friends. but part of the trip was also so that i could start to get to know some new parts of indonesia i’ve never travelled to before. so i spent about a week in kupang, on the island of timor, which is farther east in the archipelago than i had previously visited.
kupang is the capital and largest city of its province, but it’s much smaller than surabaya. it is also fairly spread out; and ‘old town’ area still bustles down by the ocean, but other centers of activity are scattered around the ravines leading up into the dry hills. there’s a fairly small shopping mall up one route; a sprawling bureaucratic complex housing government offices from the municipal through the province level is built in another area.
kupang is stretched thin in other ways, too. street vendors are predominantly emigrants from java, to the point where finding places serving local food isn’t easy. several residents complained to me that refugees from east timor were just living off of stipends. others i talked to recounted how the seashore used to provide expansive soccer fields of clean sand; now it’s narrow, rocky and covered in trash and jetsam. sand was carted off for use in construction, triggering erosion down to old coral beds, and necessitating a massive project to build concrete breaks.
that exposed coral was also metaphorically invoked several times, as local folks explained to me a stereotype of local character—”kupang karang,” “people from kupang are hard as stone (coral).” indeed, by comparison to conversational norms on java, they were frequently spectacularly, and often refreshingly, blunt. i look forward to spending more time there.
bemos are the microbusses which ply the streets of many indonesian cities. they are privately operated, so rather than service being distributed like metro busses, many vehicles compete for the same route’s passengers. the up-side is that you don’t need to find a bus stop, and you don’t (usually) have to wait long for a ride to come along; the down-side is that the busses are tiny and, at least in kupang, often outfitted with eardrum-splitting pop music systems. conductors called konjak hang out of the side door, shouting out the route and waving in potential passengers; they are also responsible for collecting fares. drivers have to peer out from behind decorative and mostly opaque stickers covering most of their windshields. passengers cram onto benches lining the length of van. [click here for gallery]
some of my favorite shots from surabaya, kupang, yogyakarta, and denpasar. [click here for gallery]
and on the fence. and the sidewalk. and wherever else people write things. compared with what was going on the last time i visited indonesia, there’s a downright graffiti renaissance underway. [click here for gallery]
last, some photo of mostly inanimate subjects which i just think are kind of nice. [click here for gallery]
