Sorry for the Group Email

Yogya passed quickly. We stayed in our hotel for just one night, which was a shame as it cost less than US$10 and was superb. The staff were friendly, the pool was clean and the food was superb.

Yogya is known for a few things – it offers a stunning number of shops that offer Batik artwork. Batik artwork, it seems, doesn’t just mean Indonesian arts and crafts: in Yogya it encompasses all south-east Asian and Chinese knick-knacks of all varieties. Everything from shadow puppets to sarongs to 1920’s-style American telephones were on offer.

Yogya also has what is, by most accounts, one of the most spectacular temples in the region at Borobodur. The excuse we gave ourselves at the time was that we didn’t have time to see it – which was true – but after three straight days in the forty-degree heat of Siem Reap in Cambodia looking at the Angkor Wat complex, neither of us had much of a desire to see any more.

It sounds hopelessly philistine, but after sleeping an average of four hours every night for the preceding week and travelling hundreds of horrible miles (and a few hundred good ones), we were in the mood for relaxing.

To that end, we arranged train tickets to Jakarta in the morning. This is easily done. Indonesia is full of English speakers, and we had tickets in under an hour.

We dropped our tickets at our hotel and headed out. We made an “Instant Friend”, who insisted that there was a students’ art exhibition down the road. This attempt to get tourists into a hard sell in a back alley appears to be an export from China. “Student art exhibitions” were advertised to me in Shanghai last year, and to both of us when we were in Beijing. The basic idea, it seems, is to lure tourists into a room full of artworks and, with a mixture of lies, hard-selling and wheedling, to manipulate them into buying as much as possible. We lost our new friend down a back alley as soon as we could, leaving him, I hope, crestfallen.

We were exhausted. Our travelling had caught up to us. Our backs hurt and we were tired of fighting to find tickets and food. Yogya was simpler than most, but in Asia it is, of course, impossible to disguise yourself as anything but a tourist if you look European. The badgering and hectoring continued from most angles, and soon we ducked back into our hotel.

The train to Jakarta left in the evening. Our standard operating procedure for bus and train stations was to simply wave our ticket at anyone who made eye-contact with us until we were in a seat, and sure enough, we were sat down and dozing off well before the wheels started turning. We were given little sealed cups of water and croissants (which, as it turned out, were detestable things, designed more as implements of mouth torture than anything else), and we slept.

Until quarter to five in the morning, that is.

We emerged from the train into Jakarta. It was still dark outside and, worse, it was raining torrentially – the first serious rain we’d seen since we arrived in Indonesia.

We hid in a Dunkin’ Donuts (which, while we’re on the subject, is something the Indonesians do better than the Americans) while we waited for the sun to come up. Eventually, wired on black coffee and pink frosting, we headed for the taxi rank, where we were charged an outrageous amount of money for a five minute journey to a small, ugly strip of unappealing hotels and even less tempting restaurants.

We’ve tried to check in to hotels before seven in the morning twice now, and both times were hard. In Vietnam it was hard because we’d been travelling for 24 hours on a pair of equally horrible buses, and in Jakarta it was because there were few options, most of which were shut, and it was raining hard enough to have Noah nervously sizing up nearby trees.

Eventually we dried off in an internet café while we waited for the rain to stop and the hotels to open. In due course, we finished emailing and headed to the Hotel Margot. By the standards of the trip so far, the Margot was fairly expensive, but it had air conditioning, cable TV and wireless internet.

We didn’t explore Jakarta much. Since Gilli Trewangen we’d either travelled all night, or woken up at preposterous times in the morning to look at volcanoes. We were tired and, by most accounts, Jakarta holds little for tourists.

Certainly, in the Jalan Jaksa district, where we were, there was little to entice. What shops there were were bleak American-style strip malls for ex-pats, and the restaurants were equally drab.

The smell was appalling.

Anyone who tells you that Asia is a treat for the senses is lying. Asia is a full-on assault on your senses, complete with machine guns, barbed wire and tiny (imaginary) men in hats directing complex offensives. The plus side was that any smell that was unpleasant would be replaced seconds later by the delicious aroma of spicy cooking.

In Jakarta the smells were all unpleasant. We walked for hundreds of metres and smelled nothing but open sewers. The only thing that successfully dislodged the smell was that of durian.

Durian is something I haven’t mentioned before, mainly because I spent all day, every day, hoping I wouldn’t come across any. A durian is a spiky fruit with a wooden-textured shell. It looks oddly appealing, and given its visual similarity to a pineapple I can understand why someone might break one open in hope of finding food.

But why they would actually eat any after smelling it is an unmitigated mystery. A durian is basically proof that God likes a laugh. It is so overpoweringly smelly that it’s banned in Singapore. It smells like a million rotten eggs mixed with mouldy apples, crossed with sweaty gym clothes and thrown into the world’s dirtiest, hugest washing machine. You can tell if there’s an open durian within 25 metres of you even in the middle of a busy Jakartan street, upon which there will also be an open drain and a hundred three-wheeled Bajaj taxis, puffing clouds of wet blue smoke behind them. The appeal of durian is utterly confusing, yet in Jakarta we smelled it constantly. When we didn’t we smelled mostly shit.

We wandered catatonically around for a full day and a half, our eye-lids heavy and our feet dragging.

I noted with drowsy sadness that my left boot had developed an inch-long crack along where my big toe sat. My boots have done some serious miles: I got them when I was seventeen. They’ve crossed Europe and survived two of the muddiest Glastonburys on record. They’ve also, of course, endured Russian slush and Siberian snow, the Great Wall of China, and Indo-China. It was only after Teman Negara, when they needed cleaning but didn’t get it, that they began to crack.

It’s somewhat dismaying that we didn’t give Jakarta a chance, but the part we were in was supposedly the touristy part and it was singularly irredeemable. It does, however, have an airport, and that was what we were in town for.

The Qantas 767 was only a third full as we climbed away from the Jakartan smog. Asia shrank behind us. We left behind us one silver Zippo lighter, a Parker Jotter pen, a US$2 hat and, frustratingly, a pair of trekking trousers - half my complement of full-length legwear. We covered thousands of miles overland, on buses with no doors and boats with no life-rafts or lifejackets. We rode elephants and scooters. We saw things that I thought I had no interest in seeing, and enjoyed (sometimes with a little hindsight) journeys that should have been lessons in abject misery.

I made an impromptu friend of the flight attendant who patrolled the aisle. He served airline-size bottles of wine two at a time and mixed me the strongest whiskey and water since an amorous bartender in LA handed me an overstrong concoction along with her email address. On that occasion I alarmed an apartment full of partiers by sleeping with my eyes open, which rather gave the impression that there was a corpse on the sofa.

On this occasion I simply fell into a deep, abiding slumber. Just two hours into our six-hour flight, Australia slid beneath us, and we crossed it diagonally from north-east to south-west. By the time I woke up (half drunk, it must be confessed), we were in a land of native English speakers, kangaroos, work permits and the Outback.

We hazily managed immigration and customs (who insisted on washing our shoes before we got in) and climbed uncomprehendingly on a train.

Sydney.

Dave thinks a durian might be called a jackfruit in Europe. Anyone?