Living on the edge in Sydney

Or in this case, about 100km west of Sydney, at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.

Sydney was a bit on edge this week, after the events in Martin Place, but I'm still reliving my edge-of-the-world experiences at Lincoln Rock with my Thursday walking group the other day, and plotting the next one.

Funny, I actually don't feel that I take risks on clifftops or elsewhere, but we do look closer to the edge than it seemed at the time! But we stay calm, focussed, and stoic. And it generally works out fine.

Picture courtesy Saf Barbour

Once were islands

Bennelong Point used to be Bennelong Island, in the days when Sydney Harbour had 14 islands, or 13 or 12 or whatever the correct number is. Today it's got eight, and most of the rest have been joined to the mainland.

I went on a tour of the other islands that used to be. They are Garden Island, Berry Island, Darling Island, and Glebe Island.

And here are the pics:




Garden







Berry










Darling

Glebe

Ninth Island

A trivia quiz question that crops up now and again is: "How many islands are there in Sydney Harbour?" Then:  "Name them".

I distinctly remember being at one such quiz where the answer for the number was given as nine. The names were, in west to east order, given as: Rodd, Spectacle, Snapper, Cockatoo, Goat, Fort Denison, Garden, Clark, and Shark.

There's a problem or two here. Garden Island is no longer an island. It was joined to the mainland during World War 2. And if you're going to count other islands that are no longer islands, then you've got Berry Island too, Darling and Glebe Islands, and there's Bennelong Point of course, which became the site of a tram depot and later an opera house of some renown. And it seems that Spectacle Island used to be two islands, but got joined into one. Plus near Middle Head, there's Sow and Pigs Reef, which becomes an island during low tide.

Ninth Island, by the way, is the name of a rather good brand of wines from Northern Tasmania. I particularly recommend the pinot noir. I'd had an idea the name may have been somehow linked to my nine (or eight, or 12, or 13, or 14 or whatever) islands in Sydney Harbour. But no, it's

named after Ninth Island, in the Waterhouse Group in Bass Strait, not far from the vineyard.

So here's my Sydney Harbour Island quiz: name the seven that are pictured in this post, in the order that they're pictured.


A useful little guide to the islands, and how to get to them, is put out by the Australian Society for History and Technology. See here: http://ashet.org.au/images/All-islands.pdf

Life's a beach

And if you live in Sydney's Northern Beaches area, you've got lots of beaches to choose from. There are 22 in fact in the stretch Palm Beach to Manly. I know because I counted them as I walked the 33km walk recently.

Here's the list:  Palm, Whale, Avalon, Bilgola, Newport, Bungan, Basin (aka Bongin Bongin Bay), Mona Vale, Warriewood, Turimetta, North Narabeen, Narabeen, Collaroy, Fishermans, Long Reef, Dee Why, North Curl Curl, Curl Curl, Freshwater, Queenscliff, North Steyne, Manly.

Carry on up the Colo

You'd have to be utterly mad to do a strenuous bushwalk on a day when it's 45.3°C, as it was recorded to be in nearby Richmond the other day. 

Well that's exactly what a small group of us did: bush bashing, boulder hopping, descending 500m down to the Colo River and back up 500m, the lot! The majority had cancelled out in deference to the weather forecast, and the remaining four of us were all hoping the others would cancel too, but they didn't. So it had to be done!




We were very careful to drink vast amounts of water, we took all day over it, and had several cooling swims, in Tootie Creek and the Colo River below.

The Colo is quite a river. It snakes its way around the half million hectare Wollemi National Park and drains a huge area. It provides lots of opportunities for somewhat challenging bushwalking adventures, confusing navigational episodes, benightings, exhaustings, and even the odd uplifting getaway camping weekend. 

Our trip was otherwise a relatively routine one. Driving in from Mountain Lagoon we started on the T3 track, then branched off to the left and down to Tootie Creek through fairly open bush (thanks to the big fires last year). Then down the creek to the Colo, and up the T3 track back to the car. And wasn't it nice to make it back!

Getting around (trains and boats and planes, plus bikes, becaks and buses!)

Plenty of transport options in Central Java. There are comfortable and regular train services.










 There are punts to cross the rivers on when you're cycling in the countryside.













There are lots of airlines plying the many routes between and within the islands of the enormous Indonesian archipelago, and they don't crash nearly as often as they used to.







Within cities you often rely on the ojek (motorbike taxi). I was unsure of the best pillion passenger etiquette. Do you hold on behind the seat, in front of you, or do you hold on to the driver? So I had a good look at what others around me were doing, and the truth is, hardly anyone holds on at all!

Or you can use a becak (bicycle trishaw - some of them now motorised with a little motor). I forgot to mention real taxis too. Plenty of them around too, though I don't seem to have a picture.














The odds are though that you'll do a lot of your land travel using buses. There are lots and lots of buses, going anywhere and everywhere. Traditionally if people stand on the roadside anywhere for more than a few seconds, buses will compete to screech to a halt alongside them, anxious to lure them aboard, whether or not they want to go where the
bus goes, and regardless of how much luggage they're going to lug aboard with them. Buses tend to be relatively clean and smart on the outside, but a bit the worse for wear inside. The ride can be exhausting. They're driven by maniacs who think nothing of tailgating and roaring past trucks and other buses on blind corners, only to screech to a halt seconds later when they see another potential passenger on the side of the road. Often, impecunious wandering minstrels get on for a few minutes at a time, and play ukuleles and sing tunelessly. Most passengers meekly pay them with a small donation - This is the country's social security system at work.

This sort of bus 'service' has usually applied to both city and intercity bus systems. So I was very pleasantly surprised to come across Yogyakarta's new city bus service. Would you believe there's a well organised network of air-conditioned city buses, with route maps and timetables even? There are designated bus stops - comfortable shelters on raised platforms, each with an attendant. You pay the attendant and are let through the turnstyle, and when the bus comes along it pulls up at the right spot for easy ingress and egress. The bus conductor, whose job is just to announce the stops to the passengers and to open the doors, then welcomes you aboard, and off you go to the next stop.

A day at the beach

Swimming's banned, and people don't take off their clothes the way they do here, but they still have lots of fun.

I spent a pleasant few hours in the beach resort of Parangtritis, 27km south of Jogja, in Central Java. There's dark, volcanic sand, and there's quite a big surf. In Australia it probably wouldn't be considered a particularly dangerous beach, but in Australia most people can swim.

There are other ways of having fun at the beach though, like riding around on horse carts, being covered by cool wet sand, or lunching on excellent seafood dishes for a dollar or so.









Or you could take selfies with your extra long selfie stick.

Sacrifice

Well well, what's going on here then?

It's the day before the Idul Adha (as the Indonesians call the Muslim Day of Sacrifice) festival, and I'm walking the streets of Yogyakarta, and here are these rather reluctant looking cattle being coaxed off the back of a truck.

It's right outside a mosque, there are crowds of festive people in the grounds, and the imam's in full flow on the speaker system.

At this point I need to issue a

VIOLENT CONTENT WARNING!

If you don't want to see images of animals being ritually slaughtered, don't scroll down any further.
























I was curious to see it all though. I eat meat after all. Animals have to be killed for that. If you can't watch it, maybe you shouldn't eat it. And if they're still alive and conscious while being bled to death, halal style, is that really much more cruel than whatever goes on in an industrial scale Australian abattoir?


What struck me most of all was what a friendly, festive atmosphere there was. It was quite a community event. There were specialist slaughterers (who stroked and comforted the animals even as they worked on them). There were butchers, smallgoods specialists, labellers and documenters. There were refreshments distributors, photographers, and mosque officials. And there were lots of welcoming people, anxious to explain it all to me and make me feel at home.













I was told about the origins of the festival - it's to celebrate Abraham being tested by God when he asked him to sacrifice his only son. It was explained to me why it had to be 23 beasts that were to be sacrificed (the number of prayers made over the 5 day period, I think it was). I was posed for photos with people, and I posed some of them for photos. At morning tea time I was even given one of the prepacked morning refreshment kits provided for the volunteer workers.

Sincere thanks to them all for sharing this experience with me. A good time was had by all (except the cattle, admittedly).

Kopi Luwak - If it tastes like crap .....

As souvenirs of my Indonesian trip, I thought about bringing home a few packets of the legendary kopi luwak, or 'civet coffee', the world's rarest and most expensive coffee.

As all caffeinaholics know, this is the stuff that's made from the predigested beans extracted from the faeces of a civet, a cat-like creature which inhabits the coffee plantations of Sumatra. It's said to be special because the animals select only the very best beans to eat, and also because of the predigestion services that they provide which allegedly enhance the flavours.

Crap, say most serious coffee connoisseurs, using a rather well chosen word, in the circumstances.

100g packets of the stuff cost about $25 in a shop in Jogja, and $60 to $80 in the Jakarta airport duty free shops. Fortunately I'd done a bit of research on the stuff. It seems that there's now a big market in fake Kopi Luwak (of course, with those prices), and when it's real, it's produced in inhumane battery farm conditions these days. To confuse matters, there's a chain of coffee shops called 'Kopi Luwak', and they sell coffees, and packets of coffee beans, with that name, but which seemed to be totally conventional coffee.

So, what a load of crap! I'm with the kchronicles.com analysis of the situation, as per this cartoon.

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak

Rebuilding Prambanan - a job for life?

And Prambanan does need a bit of rebuilding, as you can see in this shot of the Candi Sewu complex, a kilometre to the north of the 'main' Prambanan complex.

Candi Sewu was a Buddhist complex, as opposed to the main complex, which was Hindu. Both were built in the ninth century, and they have been abandoned, rediscovered, demolished by earthquakes (with the last big one in 2006), and rebuilt several times. Here's the link to the Wikipedia piece, for a much better description and history of it all than I could do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prambanan

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. On a previous trip to Indonesia nearly 30 years ago I made the effort to visit Borobudur, the other great temple complex in the Yogyakarta region. That's a Buddhist one, and quite an impressive edifice it is. I somehow wasn't as motivated that time to get out to Prambanan, even though it's actually very close and convenient to the city.

On this last trip I rectified that, and was rewarded with a very pleasant day out.

The main upstanding structures are beautiful things. But I was very struck by how big a job they still have in front of them. Candi Sewu consisted of a main central temple, plus 240 'guard temples' all around it. Very few of these guard temples are still standing. The rebuilding effort seems rather slow and half-hearted, and looks like it could keep the handful of construction crews busy for centuries, rather than decades.

Prambanan's about 17km north east of Jogja, right alongside the main Solo road, and I got there easily and comfortably on an air-conditioned  Jogja city bus.

Dioramas of Independence

I'm a bit partial to the odd history lesson, at least if it's given in a simple enough, pictorial way, and with maybe a touch of partisanship and passion. So when I turned up at the old Dutch fort in Yogyakarta, and discovered it had been turned into a museum of Indonesian independence (independence from the Dutch, that is), I thought I'd take a look.

Most of it consists of big rooms which house about 40 dioramas which tell the story.



The first diorama features the early independence hero, Prince Diponegoro. He was a member of Jogja's royal family and was a major figure in the Java War of the 1820s. He was invited to peace talks, but when he showed up he was just arrested and exiled, we're told. The Jogja royal family played a pivotal role later on in supporting the independence movement, and the city generally was a hotbed of it.

We're then led through the setting up of local cultural and educational organisations, and then independence organisations and political parties. Things changed rapidly during World War 2 though, with the Japanese occupation. There was intensive activity aimed at getting ready to take over from them as soon as they left, and two days after the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945, independence was declared, by leaders Sukarno, Hatta, and Soebardjo.

It might have been declared then, but the victorious British had other ideas. The British had been fighting not only the Japanese, but also the Indonesian nationalists (and managed to bomb and set fire to the buildings either side of one of the nationalist radio stations).

So in early 1946 those Dutchmen came marching back in to rain on the independence parade. It was nearly four more years before they saw the light and got out again, due to the pressures of armed resistance, international support for independence, and a lack of will and funds among the Dutch people themselves.

Indonesia's recent history has continued to be complicated, colourful, and painful. I was reminded of one chapter of it while walking back to my hotel that afternoon. All the flags were at half mast. I asked somebody why, and it turned out it was the annual commemoration of the events of 30 September, 1965. That was the start of a coup attempt, which was blamed on the Communist Party. This became the excuse for the right wing coup of General Suharto, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and ended democracy for quite some time.