transavante

Saturday, July 01, 2006

July is here

Well, here I am homeless! I said this to my daughter last night just hours after leaving my house for the last time and she looked at me while considering what I had said and replied, ‘well, not too many homeless people have a shipping container full of possessions?’ No, quiet right. I think I have a bit of time between now and the park bench, a few newspapers to keep me warm and a bottle of cheap wine to see me through the night.
Today is July 1 and thankfully June is now out of the way. I realise now that winter is the worst time to be breaking routines or taking on new challenges. Winter is a time for simple survival and self preservation up against the elements. At this time of the year people generally just bunker down with life and ignore failing relationships, bad jobs, bad housing, and all kinds dissatisfactions till the spring. It is then they spring clean there house, their loves, their live. When I was share housing trying to find someone in winter was always difficult. It seemed the only people looking for a share house at that time of year were the desperate and unstable as anyone with any sense of forward planning was already well ensconced in some form of habitation.
So, although I am sure I wasn’t the only person moving house at this time of year it felt like it. I was the bear moving about when I should have been in my cave. Well, at least I am sure I would have been far happier sitting by the fire eating warm soup and reading a good book with my bed socks on than getting up at the crack of dawn at below zero temperatures to pack boxes.
Anyway, that period, like most of my possessions now, is now packed and boxed, taped and sealed. Done. Today is a rest day. It is my last day in the mountains for some time and I am using it for precisely that, rest. Packing and moving is fairly taxing. It is bad enough if you are moving from one house to the next but if you are packing you life into storage while you travel overseas it becomes far more complicated. Apart from the not inconsiderable physical demands of packing, lifting and lugging your mind tends to be in a juggling act of dealing with the past present and future, the what ifs, the when’s and how’s. It is kinda like you’re expected someone to come and tap you on the shoulder at the very last minute and tell you you goofed up big time and forgot to consider something fundamental and
‘sorry, you can’t go anywhere because you forgot………..’
So, it is with some relief that that process is now over and my life for a short period will be confined to a small backpack of possessions and life will be full of small rather inconsequential considerations and decisions. I love travelling for precisely this reason. There is something rather refreshing about existing with only a few possessions, with literally only what you can carry on your back. Similarly, your fellow travellers are often more naked and exposed having to leave much of their identity behind, no social networks, no status symbols. This can be very confronting for some and I have seen quiet a few freak out at being so exposed and alone in the company of strangers yet for others it is refreshing and liberating and a chance to be who ever you want to be.
I think most understand there is a distinct difference between a traveller and a tourist yet sometimes the distinction tends to blur a little. I first started travelling about twenty five years ago not long after Lonely Planet first started printing there now universal guide books. Back then you could have put every Lonely Planet book into your backpack as the company was really in its infancy. Now you would probably need a ute or small truck for such a task. I remember walking down Jalan Jaksa in Jakarta in 1982 with a copy of ‘South East Asia on a Shoestring’ and looking for one of the two hostels listed there. I finally found and entrance with nothing more than a small sign written on A4 paper with an arrow pointing up a long set of stairs. That was it. That was Jalan Jaksa in 1982. I went back about twenty years later and it wasn’t the same place at all. Jalan Jaksa was a backpacker strip from one end to the other. There was no longer little road side stalls or cheap restaurants were you could pick up a cheap bowl of nasi goreng, nasi ikan, nasi ayam or the like. There were no young boys pushing carts selling shave ice. It was backpacker central and all rather corny. Restaurants made of thatched bamboo were popular. I suppose these would look fairly net on the beach on some pacific island but in the back streets of Jakarta they seemed a little out of place to me. Call me pedantic if you like. The travesty didn’t just stop there. Down on Jalan Jaksa try some of these Indonesian favourites, hot banana pancakes with maple syrup, vegemite on toast, pizza slices and be entertained to the music of Men at Work, Midnight Oil and other Oz rock bands.
Ok, I know you can’t preserve things forever but it is getting much harder to find unique travelling experiences unless you go to fairly remote locales or to dangerous destinations. Yep, nothing like the prospect of being decapitated to thin the backpacker tide. I am sure there are heaps of places in the Middle East, Africa and Asia where you won’t find a banana pancake on the menu, where people have never heard of Midnight Oil and few backpackers to annoy you so long as you accept that at some point some zealot might decide it is time that your head parted company with your body!
For me this is the more disappointing change with my experience with Indonesia. The Jalan Jaksa experience happens everywhere, just look at the Esplanade in Cairns Australia as an example of questionable tourism. You simply can’t get too precious about these things I suppose. It seems in tourism that anything good, unique or precious seems to drown in its own popularity. I don’t want to sound too negative. There are many benefits to tourism also. It brings a lot of hard currency into some very struggling economies. I just think that you have to question at times the cultural exchange that ‘two minute’ tourism sets up and I am not particularly swayed by pluralist arguments. Hopefully these excesses can be contained to a few specific locations. It is obvious that some people like this kind of tourism. It is tourism delivered a little like a food hall with those visual menus where you can walk in and point, ‘one of those’ except instead of Thai noodles its, ‘I’ll have that rafting trip’, or ‘that reef trip’ or even better, ‘I’ll have that combo; reef, raft and rainforest’. Why is it that increasingly everything is delivered as a deal or combo? Anyway, consumerism is a discussion for another day. I was saying that my disappointment with my Indonesian experience is not so much the change in the nature of tourism but the change in Indonesian attitude to Australians. Back in the 80’s there was a real hospitality from the average Indonesian to Australians. We were treated almost like the unknown cousin and always curious to know about our life and costumes and I always felt a warm and sincere welcome. When backpacking conversation with the locals inevitably turns to ‘where are you from mister’ and it was always the Australians in the group that would receive the warmest welcome. For a country fairly isolated from the world, especially in the 80’s, here was a country that they knew a little about and captivated there imagination a little. I suppose when your life is often lived in desperation and dire circumstances you must live with some fascination that just over the horizon, just across the sea there is a country of, real or not, unbounded affluence.
Indonesia was the first country I travelled to and where I become much more aware of the world we live in. People often say travelling is a great way to get out and learn about other people and cultures yet it is also a great way to learn about your own culture. We are born and socialised into a culture and it is often not until we see others doing things differently or having different priorities that we examine our own ways and costumes. I remember my time in Jakarta and a growing awareness of just how privileged we are in Australia. Just one block from the central business district people were sleeping in cardboard boxes. Imagine a cardboard carton that a refrigerator comes in, lay in on its side and cut the top flap around three sides so that the swinging flap becomes the front door to your bedroom. Can you imagine that, your life and wealth being reduced to a discarded cardboard box and to wake up hungry from the night before and to have to go out scavenging for food. It is no wonder ordinary Indonesians always seemed fascinated of talk about the ‘dole’ in Australia. They seemed unable to comprehend people being paid to do nothing by the government. It was simply incomprehensible to them. I actually believe our government should fund social services and social welfare programs but my time in Indonesia did temper my understanding a little and I did come away feeling there are a lot of people on welfare whingeing who really don’t appreciate how lucky they are.
Anyway, I have been distracted yet again from the change in attitude to Australians. Of course it is the religious thing and also the events of East Timor. The first comes obviously from Australia’s involvement in the ‘coalition of the willing’ and there is plenty written, known and understood about that without my need to add to it just now. Indonesians response to East Timor is a little harder to fathom. I have always found it a little hard to accept that a nation that celebrates with such passion their freedom from colonialism at the hands of the Dutch then become the brutal colonisers of East Timor and West Papua and can’t see any contradiction.
So yeah, despite studying Indonesian language, dance and theatre and a deep affection for Indonesia and the Indonesian people and numerous trips there I can’t see myself going back there for sometime. It is unfortunate that with a population of over 200 million I fear the point zero zero zero of one percent who believe they have the blessing of their god to murder and butcher others, especially Americans and Australians. So, July is finally here.