Parepare market scenes

I love visiting places where I'm the only tourist. My overnight stay in Parepare was a great such stopover experience. It's a port city about half way up the south western leg of Sulawesi, and a good place to break a journey between Torajaland and capital city Makassar. I stayed at the well-located Lotus Hotel (pictured above right).

As ever in Indonesia, a stroll through the market is a pleasant and photogenic experience. Stallholders are universally friendly, and generally love to have their photos taken by strange foreigners like me.










This girl was putting on an act for me. She was actually fine about the photo!

And so was this one.

Wisata Selfie (Selfie Tourism)

For Indonesians a day trip to a beauty spot was always mainly about standing in front of the said waterfall, or lake, or park or whatever, and getting some photos of yourself.

In the age of the selfie, there is now 'selfie tourism', which takes place in 'selfie parks', complete with all kinds of fun props. Sometimes quite bizarre props really.

Here I was on the ridge top road above the Twin Lakes in northern Bali. You could pose on swings, on coolie bicycles, as a Garuda bird.......

Or you could fondle bats, giant lizards, or other 'enimals'.

Balinese rice field tourism

A stroll in the rice fields is one of the things a visitor to Bali has always needed to do. They can be very picturesque indeed. Ubud especially, is surrounded by scenic rice field walks, though we found that some, like the Campuhan Ridge walk, have become rather too popular for comfort. The paving over of the previous dirt path detracted a bit too, I thought.

Some of the rice field locations have reached tourism superstar status. The Jatiluwih rice terraces, for example, are considered a must-see stop on day tours between Ubud and northern Bali. They're also among the iconic destinations the Obama family visited when here last year.


And it's easy to see why.

Too much monkey business

After Sulawesi I headed back to Bali, where we set up residence for a while in Ubud. Our accommodation was just outside the notorious Monkey Forest. We'd walk through it on the way into town.

There's an awful lot of monkeys, and they're not at all friendly. Always entertaining though.

Go ahead and never quit!

In Australia you can't advertise cigarettes these days at all. And the packets are a 'drab brown' colour and have pictures of diseased organs on them.

For good reason. They kill half their users, after all.

In Indonesia it doesn't seem to work like that! And the ads are everywhere.












Even the health warning on this one looks designed to appeal to a death-defying machismo.

'Remember Surabaya'

'Remember Surabaya', this sign in Makassar said. Also 'We're not afraid of terror', and 'Our grief for the heroes'.

It's the road accidents, stupid!

I've been to Indonesia 10 or 12 times now, and spent maybe 1% of my total life there so far. Yet a majority of all the road accidents I've ever witnessed have been during my Indonesian visits. Its largely about the 100 million motorcycles that dodge and weave their way around the country's roads. By far the biggest danger for any visitor to Indonesia is the possibility of being in a road accident. Nothing else comes close.

During my recent two week trip I witnessed two road accidents, fortunately both minor. On a six-lane crowded highway in Makassar I saw a motorbike tipped over by a car, and its two riders sent sprawling across the roadway. All traffic screeched to a halt. The people dusted themselves off, and the show went on.

Then, during an otherwise safe and relaxing day tour in the Toraja region of Sulawesi, I saw another motorcyclist come to grief. The farm workers in the back of the truck above were watching, enthralled, as a young lady came hurtling down a steep hill, with her motorbike out of control, her wheels locked solid.

Over it went, with the engine roaring. A collision with the truck was avoided though, and fortunately she wasn't hurt when she came off it. Arief and John, my red-blooded driver and guide, leapt into action, ran over, switched it off, helped the poor girl pick the bike up, and twiddled and tweaked it a bit so it would start again.

She was appropriately embarrassed though when she saw I'd been photographing some of the action!

Makassar market mugshots

Plastic containers and suchlike.

A Ramadan-special dessert, I was told. I think it might be dodol (a rice flour based glutinous sweet, sweetened with coconut sugar).

A proud mum. And more plastic containers?

A dreaded chilli stall.

What's he selling? Tropical fruits I think. Maybe I've caught him by surprise.

Unhappy chooks.

Ladies' clothing. I liked the way the people blended into the scene with the mannequins.

Flying the Garuda bird again

Garuda is a legendary bird-like creature in Hindu mythology, the king of birds, in fact. He was a protector with powers to go anywhere. He's also part of  Indonesia's state insignia, and with particular importance in mainly Hindu Bali, where they're constructing the world's biggest statue in his image.

Here's a smaller version, courtesy Wikipedia, of a National Museum of India Garuda.

Back to Indonesia, and it's of course also the national airline. I'm more than happy to fly Garuda these days on my annual Indonesian explorations. They had an unfortunate bad patch for a while, with a few (unprotected) planes falling out of the sky and coming into unscheduled high speed contact with planet Earth. Along with all other Indonesian carriers they even got banned from flying to Europe. But that's all changed now. They haven't had a crash for a good while, they've been winning various international airline awards, and my experience this trip was one of efficient, friendly and comfortable service, and almost perfect on-time flying.

Indonesia's major airports too have made massive advances. They have some of the world's biggest, and most comfortable and best-organised ones these days. Vastly better places to deal with than Sydney's tired and crowded international airport.


On the subject of airline safety, there was an extraordinary incident at an Indonesian airport last week, when passengers on low-cost Indonesian airline Lion Air took it upon themselves to evacuate onto the wing of an airliner, after a disgruntled passenger claimed to have planted a bomb because there was no room in the locker for his hand baggage. Watch here: Lion Air evacuation





Another Garuda bird about to fly? Actually no. This was a tourist in Bali posing as one, I think.










My Garuda-enabled trip this year took in South Sulawesi and Bali. Watch this space for further reports.

The Japanese tunnels of Bukittinggi

The Japanese Caves, or Japanese Tunnels, in Bukittinggi are one of the city's most interesting features. They were built during Indonesia's World War 2 occupation by Japan, by local slave labour.

Bukittinggi was a major centre of Government during the Japanese occupation, as it had been during Dutch colonial times. In 1948 and 1949 it was the capital of the new Emergency Government of the Republic of Indonesia.

It's an enormous complex, with a total tunnel length of 1.4km. There are ammunition rooms, dormitories, kitchens, meeting rooms, even a torture room.













Indonesians do not have fond memories of the Japanese occupation, and I was told that very few Japanese tourists come here even today.

Schooners

Here's the old Makassar schooner harbour at Sunda Kelapa, northern Jakarta. They still use these terrific old boats for a lot of the inter-island trade throughout the country.

I got my view from the old Watchtower, which used to be for keeping an eye on all the harbour traffic. I wasn't able to stroll around the harbour for a close-up view this trip. The gates were closed and there were signs prohibiting pedestrians.











When I was here in 1984 it was a different story. I was able to stroll around the place, and on and off several of the vessels via scary narrow gangplanks. Below is one of my pictures from that trip.

Monument merriment

Indonesia's National Monument, 'Monas', in Jakarta, is dedicated to the nation's struggle for independence. So it takes itself very seriously.












Most visitors are there for a good time though. Indonesians love their day out, and they're probably world champions at selfies and group photos in front of things.



And if there's a foreign tourist around, so much the better!