Java: a captivating cauldron

In the steamy tropical night when the cry of cicadas was strongest and fruit bats swooped low on the horizon, I squeezed past coy couples and noisy families and eased myself down onto the hard stone bench.
Moments later a rhythmic drum beat brought silence to the audience and the darkness of the stage was pierced by a spotlight. And there, clutching his bow and arrow, stood Rama, Hinduism's embodiment of the perfect man. Under a clash of symbols and a flash of red and blue lighting, Rama, in an attempt to rescue his beautiful wife Sita from the clutches of the evil Ravana, strode into battle in a theatrical retelling of the Hindu Epic the Ramayana. Rising up behind the stage, and lit by spotlights and glittering under a star-soaked Indonesian sky, stood the 1,000-year-old Hindu temples of Prambanan.
This wasn't my first visit to Indonesia. On previous visits I've been pampered in Balinese resorts, seen lizards the size of dragons on Komodo Island and tracked orang-utan's through Sumatran forests. But Java, the heart of the nation, was an isle I had only ever skipped through with haste. Why? I guess I wanted an easy time and like so many before me I'd been put off by thoughts of numerous mega-cities with their mega levels of pollution and congestion.
However, with more than half of Indonesia's 240 million inhabitants, Java is the undisputed political, economic and commercial powerhouse of the archipelago and so it was only right that I dedicate this Indonesian journey to exploring Java in depth. From its glittering fields of rice to its equally glittering shopping malls, Java, with its backbone of belching volcanoes, is an island of extraordinary beauty and great diversity.
My Javanese explorations had begun, as they do for many, in the traffic jams of Jakarta, the capital. An ever-growing city of some 10 million, this seemingly endless sprawl of relentless concrete is a megalopolis of daunting proportions and most visitors try to escape its clutches as fast as they can. At first I thought I'd be like all the others and jump on the first plane, bus or train out of town, but I forced myself to slow down and, bit by bit, I found that the longer I stayed the more enjoyment I reaped from the city. I learnt to avoid travelling across town during rush hour, I discovered some of the best restaurants in the country and I poked about the Chinese markets with their stalls selling live eels and frogs, incense and traditional medicines. But what really made me enchanted by Jakarta was the Sunday afternoon I spent with hundreds of local families laughing at street performers and acrobats in the cobbled old town square of Kota and visiting the surrounding galleries and museums.
Every day new arrivals from the farthest reaches of this sprawling archipelago pour into Jakarta searching for its promise of wealth and opportunity. You can almost feel money being made and social boundaries breaking down. The social cohesion of village life is eroded away in Jakarta and what was once unacceptable becomes normal. Jakarta has certainly not left its past behind, but it's clearly looking towards a future where priorities will be very different to the traditions that still rule in towns and villages across the isle and the archipelago. It was while admiring the treasures displayed in the magnificent National Museum that I first learnt about the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta. The various museum displays made clear it was a city with one eye keenly on the future but the other staring firmly at the lifestyle of its past.
It took next to no time for me to decide that Yogyakarta, the cultural epicentre of Java, was possibly one of the most artistically rich cities I had ever visited. At the city's heart is the Kraton, the Royal Palace complex of the Sultans who were once regarded as divine rulers. Even today the Sultan still retains immense political and spiritual power and within the Kraton walls the ancient traditions of Javanese court life - its art, its dance, its poetry, its music and its rituals are kept alive and relevant. Courtly ceremony here is conducted with finesse. On days of great importance chariots are decked in royal robes and horses and smartly turned out guards lead the Sultan out to meet his people. On other days, though, the people come to the palace and are entertained by dancers and musicians, storytellers and shadow puppets. Even beyond the confines of the Kraton though, Javanese culture old and new thrives. In the south of the town a market sells ravens, owls and other creatures to be used in traditional medicines but, in a nod to future directions, come night young punks with hair dyed green leap about to the thumping drums and screaming guitars of an Indonesian punk-rock concert.
Wayang kulit, or a leather puppet shadow play, is more than mere children's entertainment. A show can last all night and involve hundreds of shadow puppets and an entire orchestra, but more to the point, the tales recounted in these performances, classic stories of good versus evil, are filled with the gods of Java's Hindu past. Yogyakarta is a centre of wayang kulit and naturally enough I found myself spending many an evening watching Ganesh, Kali and others flit across a backlit, white-cloth screen. But it was the Ramayana Ballet, a flamboyant spectacle involving up to 200 performers, ear splitting fireworks and daring fire walks that most had me enchanted.
Java isn't all about high culture and dainty art though. This is an island that can be as ferocious as it is refined. To the north, and towering over Yogyakarta, is Mount Merapi, which at 2,930m is the most active volcano in a country bristling with angry mountains of fire. Merapi has erupted numerous times over the centuries and its fury has buried towns, villages and people under avalanches of ash, rock and lava over and over again. For the citizens of Yogyakarta its presence is so demanding that every year, to appease it, the Sultan of Yogyakarta is compelled to dedicate offerings to the spirits of the volcano. Merapi might be the most active of Indonesia's volcanoes, but for me it was two of Java's other volcanoes that had me enthralled. Mount Bromo, east of Yogyakarta, is a place of pilgrimage for Hindu's and a place of beautiful awe for all others and braving the pre-dawn cold to watch the first beams of the crimson morning sun light up the sandy crater floor in which Bromo sits is one of the finest ways to start a day I can imagine.
And it was further east still, at the point where Java falls into the waters separating it from Bali, where I truly felt the innards of the planet being spat out around me. Ijen is a moody volcanic crater on a high, mist-shrouded plateau. At its centre is a deadly lake of acid around which swirl clouds of noxious sulphurous fumes. It's hard to imagine a place more unsuitable for humanity but a special breed of man makes his living in the very belly of this beast.
In the dark hours long before dawn I walked to the crest of the crater and then, putting on a gas mask and goggles for protection, I followed a narrow, rocky trail into the guts of the volcano where I came upon dripping molten sulphur and bright, blue flames of fire (the burning sulphur causes the blue flames) and a group of unimaginably tough miners whose only protection from the toxic gases is often nothing but a handkerchief tied around the mouth and nose.
These hard men make their living in this most extreme of environments by digging the valuable yellow sulphur straight out of the flames of the volcanic vents and then, carrying up to 80 kilograms of sulphur at a time, they walk down the mountain to a processing plant where the sulphur is converted for use in fertilisers, cosmetics and medicines. Java could be cultured and civilised but after spending a day with these miners it was impossible to deny that it could also be a brutal and cruel island.
Sitting on the hard bench I was transfixed for hours as Rama and his fellow godly actors and dancers spiralled and twirled under a rainbow of spotlights. With their dance they carried us far away from the Java of today, across an Indian Ocean ripe in spice, to an India of thousands of years ago, when Rama and Sita lived and loved together. It was a story as old as Asia. A story of good and bad. A story of hardships and of art, of toil and of dance, of apocalyptic disaster and courtly elegance. And, as the final explosion of fireworks died away, the drums fell silent again and the dancers wiped away their make-up I looked up to see the nearby floodlit spires of the Prambanan temples and beyond, just visible in the darkened night sky, the clear outline of Merapi, the brooding mountain of fire.
weekend@thenational.ae
Follow us @TravelNational
Follow us on Facebook for discussions, entertainment, reviews, wellness and news.