Malang

It was finally the end of the “group experience”. Our last (short) bus trip and we were in Malang. Within 30 minutes, we found a hotel room (90,000 rupees for their top of the line suite…about $10 at the Splendid Inn), a car for tomorrow, and we were onto the “Kuda Lumping”.

Every Sunday, they have “horse trance dances” where young men dance with plaited cane horses until they go into a trance and –supposedly- do things like eating glass. Except for the “medicine man” who seems to be a part of the trance process, it was really just a hokey dance for the local Indonesian families.

A wander through the maze of the bird market…there was every variety of bird, mostly prized for their song, but they also had owls and parrots, etc. Watching the bird food vendors pick the crickets out of a cage with their bare hands was quite interesting. Then, it was on to McDonalds. This time we were on a quest to determine if all chicken in Indonesia is “road chicken” or if the western restaurants actually serve chicken with meat on the bones. Success at McD’s- the chicken was excellent- in fact, better than the Big Mac.

After lunch, we stopped at Tako Oen, an old colonial restaurant serving mostly bakery stuff and ice cream.

As we were watching the street scene, the streets filled with trucks packed with young Indonesian men waving banners and flags and blaring loud speakers, hoards of motorcyclists carrying flags and a parade like we’d never seen before. First came the PDI, the red flags with the bull head representing Mega Wati (Sukarno’s daughter). They were followed by the PPT and the PAN parties, each wearing their colors (green and blue respectively). The entire afternoon was filled with these parading youths driving through the streets of the city singing, yelling and chanting for their political parties. We unfortunately missed “the” picture of the day—a guy riding down the street on his motorcycle with his feet first, his head resting on the license plate.

The Political Rally

We escaped the insanity by popping into the local Chinese temple (Eng An Klong), a “Tri-Dharma” (covering Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism).

Back on the streets, we watched more parading. In a show of solidarity with MegaWati, John bought a Pro Mega Wati red headband and proudly flashed it for the parading MegaWati trucks and bikes. The crowd went wild. We “grazed” through Malang- another Chicken taste test at KFC (not even close to McDonald’s) and a taste of the local specialty, “Martabak Agong”—egg surprise, a thin crepe filled with egg and onion and green pepper fried.

On the way back to our hotel area, we stopped at the sound of the “clocker”, the local food cart clocking sound. Each street vendor has a different sound made with various bells and wooden instruments. We’d been locked on to this particular “clocking” sound since we were in Vietnam and decided to see if we could acquire our own “clocker”. We finally got the concept across to the local vendor and when we got to a price of 20,000 rupees (about $2.00), the guy ripped his “kentongan” (Pronounced kungdongen)) off of his cart (it was nailed on to the cart) and cut the nails out and proudly handed it to us. As the new owners of a kentongan, John amused all the locals on our walk back as he played his new toy.

Our kentongan

(Basically, it’s a hollowed out piece of wood with a striker that makes the most wonderful noise).

We found a quiet little restaurant and sat back to watch the street scene… a quiet evening with tomato soup and white wine. Back at the hotel, we came upon a huge group and a band taking up the entire hotel lobby. With full volume kareoke going on, we decided that there was no sense in trying to sleep, so we headed to the outer rooms to watch the show. We found a Dutch guy with his cocoa beauty girlfriend and a group of locals who invited us to join them …and we got the story on the evening. Evidently, people in the town put money into a kitty every month and at the end of the month, they have a huge party with a band and food. At the end of the evening, someone gets the money (a lottery of sorts). What a scene - bad American songs being sung by a three piece band with Muslims sitting on the side of the room clapping. The drinking crowd was sitting with us—proof that Muslims do drink! In the course of a few hours, we got into discussions of politics, Indonesian history, current affairs and business opportunities. What a strange and wonderful day!