Going everywhere in a neverending journey.
I haven’t captivated/delighted/enchanted/thrilled/terrified you with jumping spider photos recently! We haven’t seen many since New Zealand, but Borobudur turned out to have several. They were going about their business, but I managed to enlist a few for photoshoots.
And remember, spiders are friends, not foot-stomping material. They’ll thank you by eating all of those flies and mosquitos that *bug* you so much. (HAHAHA…I regret nothing.)
There’s not much I can say about Borobudur that hasn’t already been said or written, so I’ll keep it short: Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Constructed in the 9th century, the temple’s nine stories represent the three realms of Buddhist cosmology (world of desires, world of forms, and formless world) and tell the tales off Buddhism through more than a thousand reliefs carved into its stones. In walking its corridors, the temple becomes storyteller to all pilgrims and visitors, narrating the teachings of Buddha and his enlightenment.
There’s not much I can show you through our photographs that hasn’t already been seen. Borobudur is one of those picture-perfect places, with each snapshot of the place becoming art in itself and tons of visitors have that awe-inspiring, Instagram-exploding photos of Borobudur at sunrise. We don’t have sunrise photos. But how about this: ever seen an ancient Buddha get a bath?
P.S.: If you visit, here’s a money-saving tip! You can buy a ticket for both Borobudur and Prambanan at the ticketing office that saves you several dollars. The only catch is you’ll have to visit Prambanan the next day, but it’s only a taxi/bus ride away.
We’re bound by train to Yogyakarta, the “cultural capital” in southern Java that’s affectionately referred to as “Jogja”. Though a flight is only an hour compared to the train’s nine-hour trip, it’s nine hours well-spent admiring Java’s scenery.
This is the most densely-populated island in Indonesia, and villages, fields, and rice paddies speed by every second. Each moment is a snapshot of Java beyond the cities, where most people farm and know no other way of life. As we speed by, I imagine all of the knowledge they must have about farming and the seasons of Java—how to start rice shoots growing, when to plant them in the flooded paddies, when to harvest the rice plants, when to let a paddy lie fallow. I try to imagine what it must be like to push the rice seedling into the muddy water, feet sunk into the same mud that will nourish this rice plant as the sun beats down on my back. It’s hard work and I’m lucky I don’t have to do it, but I want to know how it feels.
As people increasingly flock to Indonesia’s cities (a worldwide trend), the passage of this agricultural knowledge halts. Maybe one day it will disappear entirely, forgotten or as good as forgotten, left only in written texts. But hopefully someone here will see value in this knowledge and keep it alive.
Jakarta is a sprawling megacity, with 10 million people crammed into an area smaller than New York City. The people here come from a kaleidoscope of cultures and faiths; dozens of Indonesian ethnic groups rub elbows and the majority Muslim community lives alongside communities of Buddhists, Christians, Catholics, and Hindus. It’s business as usual for the thousand year-old seaport, which has seen waves of nearly all the world’s religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity) carried on the tides of trade routes.
Indonesia’s wealth has increased in the past decade, but with it has come rising income inequality that is etched into Jakarta’s cityscape. We’re staying in Glodok, an industrial area near the seaport characterized by corrugated aluminum roofing, wooden market stalls, and open sewers in the streets. But take a bus thirty minutes south and you’ll find yourself in Central Jakarta neighborhoods like Menteng, surrounded by walled mansions and multi-story malls with marble floors pushing the latest luxury brands, where doors are opened for you by bellhops who speak perfectly unaccented English. The economic disparity in the city is jarring—residents of Glodok and Menteng may share a city, but they live in different worlds.
In spite of the wealth gap, nearly everyone we meet in Jakarta is happy to see us. Any smile from us is immediately returned by a passing person. On the bus and around town, people who speak English ask us about our travels and translate our responses for excited relatives. Gaggles of schoolchildren approach you at tourist attractions, tasked by their teachers to interview tourists as English homework, and in nervous giggles ask about your favorite Indonesian food. I’ve never felt more welcome in a country where I don’t speak the language. It’s as if the entire country is excitedly curious about you, reaching out to embrace you in every act.
Just south of the Queensland-New South Wales border, Dorrigo National Park is a green rainforest refuge, one part of World Heritage Site known as the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. The patches of rainforest here are all that remain of the thick rainforest that once blanketed Australia millions of years ago. Thick mists and rain nourish the forest, and the water flowing from the soil collects into streams that tumble from rocky cliffs. And uncleared by humans, these forests remain a refuge to thousands of species: microbes, plants, fungi, and animals. Just a brief stroll through the forest reveals a kaleidoscope of wildlife, carrying on just as it did when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
We visited Dorrigo National Park on a rainy day, raingear ready and cameras poised to capture what we saw. Sometimes we were surprised. Sometimes we weren’t fast enough. But here’s a sample of what we found in the 7 km loop from the Dorrigo Rainforest Center:
Somewhere along the vast Australian coastline, a giant is creeping. Grain by grain, the giant oozes further inland, engulfing trees and burying forests. Its particles whip free, tumbling through the air and over the precipice until they come to rest at the giant’s pseudopod. And we as we walk along the giant’s back, feet sinking into its visceral mass, we brace ourselves against the air that shapes this strange dreamscape with erosion. One day, the giant will engulf a city. But for now, it is content to nibble upon the land and the occasional contents of a human pocket, buried and preserved in the endless sand.
Brisbane is our first stop in Australia and little has changed in the years since I last visited. The city is still in eternal summer, just as I left it in August of 2010. It’s still a maze of suburbs, interspersed with parks and wide streets not built for pedestrian navigation. Cars speed through the metropolis while an underdeveloped bus network serves the rest of the population (and us). There are somethings I don’t remember from my last stay: new skyscrapers have appeared in the downtown area, and there’s a pedestrian/bike only path along the river. But if there were ever a sister city to my Los Angeles, it would be Brisbane.
Then there are the things that are wildly different here in Brisbane: the flora and fauna. While there are plenty of European imports, like bobbling pigeons and frilly French marigolds, native Australian wildlife has taken to the city. Black-headed ibises strut through grassy parks where you’d normally see crows, and at night giant fruit bats and bush possums forage in park trees. It’s wild and jarring, a reminder that we’re on a continent on the other side of the world.
With its swooping green hills, sandy beaches, and snow-capped peaks, New Zealand is effortlessly beautiful. And while anyone with a camera or phone can capture the country’s wild perfection, though photos don’t do the land justice. For you, who hopes to visit, who has visited, or who lives there now, we present our fifteen most breathtaking landscape photos from our two weeks on the North Island. And it’s just a small slice of New Zealand’s beauty:
Though we’ve left Kerosene Creek, we’re still in the island’s hotspot as we drive south along the 5 Highway, and the peridot-green forests beside the road are thick with rising geothermal steam. Everything is damp this morning. We’re damp and smell like sulfur after taking a morning bath in Kerosene Creek. Our towels and clothes are damp from the steam of the creek and morning mist. The car is damp from morning mist and intermittent rain. It looks like it’s going to be gray all day.
Stoytcho is driving, so I’m the first to notice the imposing shadow of the cooling tower along the horizon. My first thought is to associate the tower with nuclear power and ask myself “What’s a nuclear power station doing out here?” Stoytcho hands me the phone and through some Google work, we find out that it’s not a nuclear power station but a geothermal one, harnessing the boiling energy of the hotspot. It also appears to have a gift shop.
“Wait, what?” Stoytcho says.
“Yeah, it says it has a gift shop,” I repeat.
“So we can go visit it?”
“I have no idea. We can try.”
We turn off the highway into the road leading up to the station, a gravel stretch flanked by fields of swaying grass. At the entrance, we look for some kind of sign directing us to a gift shop, but only find visitor parking. We park and get out of the car to look around, but the entire area is fenced off with chain-link and barbed wire. It doesn’t look like there’s a gift shop anywhere, so we walk to the front gate to find an intercom and this sign:
“TOURS: PRESS BUTTON FOR ENTRY. TOURS FOR CLASSES OR GROUPS ONLY. NO PRIVATE TOURS.”
Well darn, it looks like we won’t be getting a tour or a chance to visit the station’s gift shop, so no geothermal-themed keychains for anyone back home. Then we notice an asphalt path off to the left titled “VISITOR WALK”. Hey, we’re visitors and we’re here. Might as well do that.
The asphalt path leads out to an observation area overlooking the station’s external pipes, where steam rises from everything. The pipes carry hot steam and boiling water from the hotspot below into the station, where (I would guess) the water/steam is used to heat a closed loop of pure water (so they don’t have to worry about impurities in the geothermal water), turning that into steam which is used to turn turbines and generate electricity. The cooling tower above is there to cool that water down again, condensing it for reuse in the system.
There’s not much else to explore beyond the visitor path, and in half an hour we’re back on the main highway. As we drive past the cooling tower, we stop for a photo of this giant, resting in the fields beneath a low sky. Its form dominates the landscape, a testament to our power in harnessing the energy of the Earth.
After our loop in the Northland Peninsula, we’re back in Auckland to see the city’s annual lantern festival. What began nearly twenty years ago as a small celebration with lanterns borrowed from cities in China is now a festival with hundreds of handmade lanterns and hundreds-of-thousands of attendees a year. And though the Lantern Festival is a celebration of Chinese cultural heritage (it’s part of our celebrations for the Lunar New Year), people of all races and ethnicities have turned out for the event. Here are our best shots from the festival:
That’s all from us for now, but tomorrow we head out from Auckland again, this time southward to see the rest of the North Island.
Neverending Everywhere 