![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capn_n_pyeOnce upon a time, Stinky decided that we should totally go to Sulawesi. D’admiral and Chuckles thought that sounded like a pretty good idea, so before you could say “Remember we used to do this all the time before COVID” we were off to Indonesia in the Term One holidays.
Moose led the way to international departures…
… and Chuckles took care to point out that this door had been open the entire time we had lunch - way to go, airport restaurant…
(it says "Please keep the door close at all times)
Eid had finished a couple of days previously, and everyone was heading back to work, the plane was 99% Indonesians, and us lol.
This really cut down the admin line on arrival, which was good, since their response to everyone being on holiday for Eid and Nyepi was to shut down the website, meaning we hadn’t been able to pre-purchase our visas on arrival.
Uncharacteristically, there was no driver anxiously awaiting our arrival in Jakarta - well, apparently there was, but he was nowhere near where we were. We patiently waited at the pickup zone, occasionally doing a roving lap to make sure old mate wasn't waiting behind a different pole and to trying and decide if we should pretend to be "Roland" and just pinch that guy's ride. Apart from being the only bule there, Stinky noticed that the only other people with red on top like Pye were people wearing red hijabs, hee hee hoo hoo.
South Sulawesi (or Sulsel – short for Sulawesi Selatan) is somewhat annoying to get to if you are precious enough to not want to fly with shonky domestic airlines with a reputation for landing at the wrong airports, or not sticking the landing. If we had to go via Jakarta anyway, we thought we might as well show D’admiral and Chuckles around a couple of the old colonial sites. But first, can anyone explain the thinking behind this hotel bathroom design?
Architect, tapping the plans impatiently: “I thought I told you I want to make eye contact with people when I shit or when I’m scrubbing my balls – get back to the drawing board!!”
The best way to see Jakarta is briefly, let’s get out there!
Sunda Kelapa Harbour combines our favourite things of boats and taking cool photos. Pye had been there with students before, but those visits had consisted of the bus dropping everyone off at one end of the docks to wander around for five minutes and wonder why they should be interested in a bunch of stupid boats. Turns out all this time there’s been cool watch towers and museums we could have been looking at!
There’s a harbour master’s tower! You can climb up it and pretend to be a Dutch East India Company (VOC henceforth) official plotting how best to exploit this new land!
There’s a Chinese inscription that marks the Batavian meridian they needed to calculate position around this end of the world!
There’s a security guy who’s bored and likes taking photos, too!
Next door in the ye old Dutch warehouses is a collection of artifacts and as much information as you could ever want about Indonesian maritime history!
Moose fricken loved it, and immediately got to work rubbing his bum on anything and everything, including every model boat he could find.
Imagine our joy when the model boat gallery gave way to a collection of real life boots (sic)!
Stinky thought she was being all subtle about her disrespectful photography game, until our driver/guide Daniel shouted, “WHERE IS YOUR BABY?” and got Moose onto the biggest boat he could find – the Papuan boot!
We could have spent all day there, but there was more to see. Having viewed it from the tower, we took a quick spin around the busy and bustling still functional ye olde Sunda Kelapa port…
… then made time for morning tea in olde Fatahillah Square (which, thanks to the maritime museum, we now know is named after a 16th century Sultan who conquered the area back in the day).
Chuckles got bule-hunted by her new best friend before she could even notice the colonial splendour of the square built to resemble Europe (without any consideration for what building a stone square in the tropics means in terms of it being pleasant to be in).
Here we see D’admiral beside the restored 18th century water fountain, in front of the Gouvernurs Kantoor:
This was the governor’s office, and it’s called ‘kantoor’ because it was full of cunts – we hope this is helpful information.
Across the square is the Café Batavia, a monument to gross colonial splendour. It’s like being on a movie set, but more importantly for our purposes, it was cool and served coffee and beer. It also affords an excellent view of other tourists enjoying the square in its intended way – hiring a bicycle and safety sun hat, and riding around in circles!
There are lots of museums around the square, but since it was a Monday, they were all closed, so we didn’t have to feel bad about not having time to go into any of them. But anyway, who needs museums when you’ve got Café Batavia’s toilets??
We could have admired their weirdly eclectic collection of photos for hours! We need to measure up at least one of the frames so we can prepare a photo of us (or Moose) to carefully add to the wall next time we’re there.
We had no time at all to tire of Jakarta’s charms, because once we could pry Chuckles and Stinky out of the dunny, we were off back to the airport to press onwards, to Makassar.
We were the only bule on the flight again, but at least this time our driver was there when we arrived! It was late enough that there we had just enough fuel left in the tank for dinner and a drink in the rooftop bar
Anyway, the party don’t start till Moose walks in (and sometimes not even then)…
When you arrive in a city at night it’s always fun to have to wait until morning to find out if your hotel looks out onto an alley or a brick wall. This time it was neither!
Here is actual footage of Stinky when Pye opened the curtains and told her to look out the window:
Our Sulsel guide, Kornelius and driver Salam, met us nice and early for the first proper day of our adventure. We deferred the delights of Makassar proper and headed out of town to the village of Rammang-Rammang with its provocative and intriguing limestone karst mountains, caves and rainforest. We were loaded into lil boats to meander down the river that was almost like a film-set – this part of the journey is possibly an acclimatisation technique, so the tourist’s soft and unprepared brain has time to come to terms with the sheer absurd wonderfulness of the Scenery.
Although Kornelius had grossly overestimated our interest in nipa palms and the various products thereof, it would be a cynical person indeed who would fail to be impressed by the environment. And then we got to Kampung Berua!
Fishponds and rice fields reflect the mountains and trees in a most aesthetically pleasing manner - and there was our first putri malu for the trip!
Both were equally exciting!
We wouldn’t be in Indonesia if an enterprising local hadn’t set up a photo stop that you could pay to pose in:
Of course, Moose insisted on a picture too, which confused the locals who really, really wanted to give us change for our $AU2 contribution, and couldn’t seem to realise that if Moose didn’t get recognised as a real person with a 50c contribution, we were all in trouble.
There’s a wonderfully convenient boardwalk that takes you on a circuit around the kampung, and even if it’s full of holes and is sometimes on an interesting angle, it’s much more agreeable than negotiating a muddy path. And we got to watch people doing a job we are not tough enough to do on a daily basis!
Almost at the end of the circuit is the kingkong monkey stone. Stinky’s not embarrassed to admit that she kept reading ‘kingkong’ with her Indonesian brain on, and thought it was dialect/a type of monkey. Nope. It’s the King Kong Stone. In Stinky’s defence, King Kong is not a monkey, he’s an ape, hurrumph.
Anyway, how can a rock look like a gorilla? Like this!
We held up a bunch of domestic tourists from taking their own pictures to see if D’admiral could make a grumpier face… it’s a draw!
That brought us back to the river, and a welcome chance to cool down. Chuckles helped Moose feel important…
… and D’admiral ripped open his shirt to air out the real estate!
Stinky was so inspired she did the same thing! (or did she…..?)
Back on dry-ish land the next stop was Taman Batu – the Stone Garden. Yuck, we hate cool sticky-up stones in interesting configurations!!
What do you mean there are holes in the rocks to put Moose in and to peek through, yucccck!!
There was a group of young women from a local university there who were taking advantage of the Instagram-able nature of the landscape. This was when we began to realise that Bule Hunting in Sulsel is next level - one of them came sprinting across the grass to get to us first (indeed, she turned to her friends and shouted, “I WIN!”). There were some selfies, then the shouting continued – “GRANDMA! WITH ME!” “GRANDFATHER, MY TURN!” “EVERYONE ALL TOGETHER!” As the interaction drew to its natural conclusion, there was even squealing and shouts of “I LOVE YOU!” These fabulous young women are living their truth and we are here for it!
It is, however, possible that they were not as interested as we were in seeing the ancient cave art just around the corner. These handprints have been dated to be at least 39,900 years old…
… and the babirusa next to it as at least 35,400 years old.
Kornelius was brave and nimble enough to get us photos on a better angle than we could stretch to without having to wonder if we’d remember our travel insurance details…
… and as if that wasn’t enough, just down the track there was even more Paleolithic art in another cave, with even more piggy and hand art action!
We were very impressed, although Moose was much more captivated by the Sulawesi version of macaques picking each other’s bums
As if that wasn’t enough for one day, we then headed back to town to see what Makassar-proper had to offer. The Phinisi Harbour was very chill compared with Sunda Kelapa, but more interesting, on account of how we could actually watch the precarious loading methods of ships bound for faraway exotic places like Labuan Bajo, in Flores.
Moose found a truck he thinks belongs to him – it says ‘Boss Kecil’, which means ‘Little Boss’. We told him he could keep it if he could use the steering wheel and pedals at the same time, but he hasn’t got back to us about his decision yet.
Now, the only thing we hate more than really old things and caves is ye olde fortifications, so just imagine how upset we must have been to have a look around Fort Rotterdam.
At the centre of the fort is a church building (with the cannon pointing the wrong way, wethinks)…
… and there’s a very detailed museum of South Sulawesi history to be explored. This part would have been more appreciated if we weren’t racing against sunset, and if old mate Kornelius could: A) Walk and talk at the same time; and B) Recognise that he possibly didn’t need to explain each exhibit to us individually. In a fit of PTSD we were tempted to name him KorneliMEUS in honour of the 2009’s Flores guide, Meus. They must be trained to be like this, but since Indonesians wouldn’t pay attention for more than two seconds, maybe it’s all on us for thinking we have to attentive listen…?
Perhaps we were impatient with the museum because of an intrinsic character fault within us. You see, the problem with showing us a fortification is that if there are walls, we’re going to want to walk on them – even if there’s not actually any gun emplacements (or indeed anything, really) left to see from them, we’re going to need to prove that for ourselves, and nothing else will interest us until we’ve been on the walls. Walls!
Walls!
While on the walls, Kornelius pointed something actually interesting out! Here is a picture of the hotel we were staying in – another thing we really like is taking pictures of the boring place from the view that you can see from the boring place (yes, we are fun at parties).
Having successfully crawled around the best aspects of the fort, we found the door…
… waved goodbye to the gilded youths festooning the walls who’d been pretending that they weren’t taking pictures of us…
… then raced back to the Aston Makassar to see if we could make it to the top floor in time for sunset. Spoilers: we did! The lift didn’t go all the way up, but there were some stairs and unlocked doors, so if they didn’t want us in this sort-of-abandoned-ballroom kind of space, maybe they should have locked the doors better…
Anyhoo, now we knew what we were looking for, we could spot the fort!
… and out the other side, the mosque was still where we found it when we woke up!
This prettily provocative mosque was our first goal the next morning. Masjid Kubah 99 (99 Domes Mosque) arguably has too many domes or one dome too few. Who are we to judge?
Here is a picture of the hotel from the view we could see from the hotel:
We’d only ever taken photos of the view from inside the hotel, so to even things out, here is the hotel from inside the view.
We were allowed (nay, encouraged?) to wander in without having to borrow a headscarf, which frankly felt very wrong, but no one minded??
While inside, we discovered that Pye has a red hat…
AND a mushroom on her head…
… and that D’admiral was dressed to match the wallpaper!
It is very striking and everything looks amazing – from a distance. But considering that the building is under ten years old, the cracked plaster, rising damp and missing cladding makes it a bit sad up close.
The mosque is built on reclaimed land, and if you’re wondering if all the appropriate geophysical diligence was done prior to building, a glimpse at the basement near the ladies’ toilets would tell you ‘no’.
The other thing we were excited to visit in Makassar was the self-declared Centre Point of Indonesia (CPI). They are taking some geographic liberties with the 'centre point', but we'll give it to them, because it would be too hard to wade to the actual point.
For a really long time we didn’t realise that all the reclaimed land was part of a Dubai-style project in the shape of a Garuda and it hadn’t occurred to us that it would be difficult to stand at the CPI, but there it was, in the middle of a roundabout. Kornelius assured us we could visit it nonetheless, so after a quick selfie with a bunch of people who’d ridden their bikes to Makassar from Bira (about 200km away), we scampered across the road.
Here, Moose fulfilled a days-long dream - we held up a map of Indonesia, then pinched it at the ‘central point’… it’s like we were picking up the nation!
Moose was so excited he wiggled enough to fall out of Stinky’s hands to lie on the ground giggling.
That’s what he was doing when a traffic cop came and told us to piss off because we were stomping on the peanuts. Upon hearing this, Moose was delighted to have immediately gratified a seconds-long dream of stomping on peanut plants on a roundabout at the centre point of Indonesia. We had to get out of town, and quickly, too!
Moose led the way to international departures…
… and Chuckles took care to point out that this door had been open the entire time we had lunch - way to go, airport restaurant…
(it says "Please keep the door close at all times)
Eid had finished a couple of days previously, and everyone was heading back to work, the plane was 99% Indonesians, and us lol.
This really cut down the admin line on arrival, which was good, since their response to everyone being on holiday for Eid and Nyepi was to shut down the website, meaning we hadn’t been able to pre-purchase our visas on arrival.
Uncharacteristically, there was no driver anxiously awaiting our arrival in Jakarta - well, apparently there was, but he was nowhere near where we were. We patiently waited at the pickup zone, occasionally doing a roving lap to make sure old mate wasn't waiting behind a different pole and to trying and decide if we should pretend to be "Roland" and just pinch that guy's ride. Apart from being the only bule there, Stinky noticed that the only other people with red on top like Pye were people wearing red hijabs, hee hee hoo hoo.
South Sulawesi (or Sulsel – short for Sulawesi Selatan) is somewhat annoying to get to if you are precious enough to not want to fly with shonky domestic airlines with a reputation for landing at the wrong airports, or not sticking the landing. If we had to go via Jakarta anyway, we thought we might as well show D’admiral and Chuckles around a couple of the old colonial sites. But first, can anyone explain the thinking behind this hotel bathroom design?
Architect, tapping the plans impatiently: “I thought I told you I want to make eye contact with people when I shit or when I’m scrubbing my balls – get back to the drawing board!!”
The best way to see Jakarta is briefly, let’s get out there!
Sunda Kelapa Harbour combines our favourite things of boats and taking cool photos. Pye had been there with students before, but those visits had consisted of the bus dropping everyone off at one end of the docks to wander around for five minutes and wonder why they should be interested in a bunch of stupid boats. Turns out all this time there’s been cool watch towers and museums we could have been looking at!
There’s a harbour master’s tower! You can climb up it and pretend to be a Dutch East India Company (VOC henceforth) official plotting how best to exploit this new land!
There’s a Chinese inscription that marks the Batavian meridian they needed to calculate position around this end of the world!
There’s a security guy who’s bored and likes taking photos, too!
Next door in the ye old Dutch warehouses is a collection of artifacts and as much information as you could ever want about Indonesian maritime history!
Moose fricken loved it, and immediately got to work rubbing his bum on anything and everything, including every model boat he could find.
Imagine our joy when the model boat gallery gave way to a collection of real life boots (sic)!
Stinky thought she was being all subtle about her disrespectful photography game, until our driver/guide Daniel shouted, “WHERE IS YOUR BABY?” and got Moose onto the biggest boat he could find – the Papuan boot!
We could have spent all day there, but there was more to see. Having viewed it from the tower, we took a quick spin around the busy and bustling still functional ye olde Sunda Kelapa port…
… then made time for morning tea in olde Fatahillah Square (which, thanks to the maritime museum, we now know is named after a 16th century Sultan who conquered the area back in the day).
Chuckles got bule-hunted by her new best friend before she could even notice the colonial splendour of the square built to resemble Europe (without any consideration for what building a stone square in the tropics means in terms of it being pleasant to be in).
Here we see D’admiral beside the restored 18th century water fountain, in front of the Gouvernurs Kantoor:
This was the governor’s office, and it’s called ‘kantoor’ because it was full of cunts – we hope this is helpful information.
Across the square is the Café Batavia, a monument to gross colonial splendour. It’s like being on a movie set, but more importantly for our purposes, it was cool and served coffee and beer. It also affords an excellent view of other tourists enjoying the square in its intended way – hiring a bicycle and safety sun hat, and riding around in circles!
There are lots of museums around the square, but since it was a Monday, they were all closed, so we didn’t have to feel bad about not having time to go into any of them. But anyway, who needs museums when you’ve got Café Batavia’s toilets??
We could have admired their weirdly eclectic collection of photos for hours! We need to measure up at least one of the frames so we can prepare a photo of us (or Moose) to carefully add to the wall next time we’re there.
We had no time at all to tire of Jakarta’s charms, because once we could pry Chuckles and Stinky out of the dunny, we were off back to the airport to press onwards, to Makassar.
We were the only bule on the flight again, but at least this time our driver was there when we arrived! It was late enough that there we had just enough fuel left in the tank for dinner and a drink in the rooftop bar
Anyway, the party don’t start till Moose walks in (and sometimes not even then)…
When you arrive in a city at night it’s always fun to have to wait until morning to find out if your hotel looks out onto an alley or a brick wall. This time it was neither!
Here is actual footage of Stinky when Pye opened the curtains and told her to look out the window:
Our Sulsel guide, Kornelius and driver Salam, met us nice and early for the first proper day of our adventure. We deferred the delights of Makassar proper and headed out of town to the village of Rammang-Rammang with its provocative and intriguing limestone karst mountains, caves and rainforest. We were loaded into lil boats to meander down the river that was almost like a film-set – this part of the journey is possibly an acclimatisation technique, so the tourist’s soft and unprepared brain has time to come to terms with the sheer absurd wonderfulness of the Scenery.
Although Kornelius had grossly overestimated our interest in nipa palms and the various products thereof, it would be a cynical person indeed who would fail to be impressed by the environment. And then we got to Kampung Berua!
Fishponds and rice fields reflect the mountains and trees in a most aesthetically pleasing manner - and there was our first putri malu for the trip!
Both were equally exciting!
We wouldn’t be in Indonesia if an enterprising local hadn’t set up a photo stop that you could pay to pose in:
Of course, Moose insisted on a picture too, which confused the locals who really, really wanted to give us change for our $AU2 contribution, and couldn’t seem to realise that if Moose didn’t get recognised as a real person with a 50c contribution, we were all in trouble.
There’s a wonderfully convenient boardwalk that takes you on a circuit around the kampung, and even if it’s full of holes and is sometimes on an interesting angle, it’s much more agreeable than negotiating a muddy path. And we got to watch people doing a job we are not tough enough to do on a daily basis!
Almost at the end of the circuit is the kingkong monkey stone. Stinky’s not embarrassed to admit that she kept reading ‘kingkong’ with her Indonesian brain on, and thought it was dialect/a type of monkey. Nope. It’s the King Kong Stone. In Stinky’s defence, King Kong is not a monkey, he’s an ape, hurrumph.
Anyway, how can a rock look like a gorilla? Like this!
We held up a bunch of domestic tourists from taking their own pictures to see if D’admiral could make a grumpier face… it’s a draw!
That brought us back to the river, and a welcome chance to cool down. Chuckles helped Moose feel important…
… and D’admiral ripped open his shirt to air out the real estate!
Stinky was so inspired she did the same thing! (or did she…..?)
Back on dry-ish land the next stop was Taman Batu – the Stone Garden. Yuck, we hate cool sticky-up stones in interesting configurations!!
What do you mean there are holes in the rocks to put Moose in and to peek through, yucccck!!
There was a group of young women from a local university there who were taking advantage of the Instagram-able nature of the landscape. This was when we began to realise that Bule Hunting in Sulsel is next level - one of them came sprinting across the grass to get to us first (indeed, she turned to her friends and shouted, “I WIN!”). There were some selfies, then the shouting continued – “GRANDMA! WITH ME!” “GRANDFATHER, MY TURN!” “EVERYONE ALL TOGETHER!” As the interaction drew to its natural conclusion, there was even squealing and shouts of “I LOVE YOU!” These fabulous young women are living their truth and we are here for it!
It is, however, possible that they were not as interested as we were in seeing the ancient cave art just around the corner. These handprints have been dated to be at least 39,900 years old…
… and the babirusa next to it as at least 35,400 years old.
Kornelius was brave and nimble enough to get us photos on a better angle than we could stretch to without having to wonder if we’d remember our travel insurance details…
… and as if that wasn’t enough, just down the track there was even more Paleolithic art in another cave, with even more piggy and hand art action!
We were very impressed, although Moose was much more captivated by the Sulawesi version of macaques picking each other’s bums
As if that wasn’t enough for one day, we then headed back to town to see what Makassar-proper had to offer. The Phinisi Harbour was very chill compared with Sunda Kelapa, but more interesting, on account of how we could actually watch the precarious loading methods of ships bound for faraway exotic places like Labuan Bajo, in Flores.
Moose found a truck he thinks belongs to him – it says ‘Boss Kecil’, which means ‘Little Boss’. We told him he could keep it if he could use the steering wheel and pedals at the same time, but he hasn’t got back to us about his decision yet.
Now, the only thing we hate more than really old things and caves is ye olde fortifications, so just imagine how upset we must have been to have a look around Fort Rotterdam.
At the centre of the fort is a church building (with the cannon pointing the wrong way, wethinks)…
… and there’s a very detailed museum of South Sulawesi history to be explored. This part would have been more appreciated if we weren’t racing against sunset, and if old mate Kornelius could: A) Walk and talk at the same time; and B) Recognise that he possibly didn’t need to explain each exhibit to us individually. In a fit of PTSD we were tempted to name him KorneliMEUS in honour of the 2009’s Flores guide, Meus. They must be trained to be like this, but since Indonesians wouldn’t pay attention for more than two seconds, maybe it’s all on us for thinking we have to attentive listen…?
Perhaps we were impatient with the museum because of an intrinsic character fault within us. You see, the problem with showing us a fortification is that if there are walls, we’re going to want to walk on them – even if there’s not actually any gun emplacements (or indeed anything, really) left to see from them, we’re going to need to prove that for ourselves, and nothing else will interest us until we’ve been on the walls. Walls!
Walls!
While on the walls, Kornelius pointed something actually interesting out! Here is a picture of the hotel we were staying in – another thing we really like is taking pictures of the boring place from the view that you can see from the boring place (yes, we are fun at parties).
Having successfully crawled around the best aspects of the fort, we found the door…
… waved goodbye to the gilded youths festooning the walls who’d been pretending that they weren’t taking pictures of us…
… then raced back to the Aston Makassar to see if we could make it to the top floor in time for sunset. Spoilers: we did! The lift didn’t go all the way up, but there were some stairs and unlocked doors, so if they didn’t want us in this sort-of-abandoned-ballroom kind of space, maybe they should have locked the doors better…
Anyhoo, now we knew what we were looking for, we could spot the fort!
… and out the other side, the mosque was still where we found it when we woke up!
This prettily provocative mosque was our first goal the next morning. Masjid Kubah 99 (99 Domes Mosque) arguably has too many domes or one dome too few. Who are we to judge?
Here is a picture of the hotel from the view we could see from the hotel:
We’d only ever taken photos of the view from inside the hotel, so to even things out, here is the hotel from inside the view.
We were allowed (nay, encouraged?) to wander in without having to borrow a headscarf, which frankly felt very wrong, but no one minded??
While inside, we discovered that Pye has a red hat…
AND a mushroom on her head…
… and that D’admiral was dressed to match the wallpaper!
It is very striking and everything looks amazing – from a distance. But considering that the building is under ten years old, the cracked plaster, rising damp and missing cladding makes it a bit sad up close.
The mosque is built on reclaimed land, and if you’re wondering if all the appropriate geophysical diligence was done prior to building, a glimpse at the basement near the ladies’ toilets would tell you ‘no’.
The other thing we were excited to visit in Makassar was the self-declared Centre Point of Indonesia (CPI). They are taking some geographic liberties with the 'centre point', but we'll give it to them, because it would be too hard to wade to the actual point.
For a really long time we didn’t realise that all the reclaimed land was part of a Dubai-style project in the shape of a Garuda and it hadn’t occurred to us that it would be difficult to stand at the CPI, but there it was, in the middle of a roundabout. Kornelius assured us we could visit it nonetheless, so after a quick selfie with a bunch of people who’d ridden their bikes to Makassar from Bira (about 200km away), we scampered across the road.
Here, Moose fulfilled a days-long dream - we held up a map of Indonesia, then pinched it at the ‘central point’… it’s like we were picking up the nation!
Moose was so excited he wiggled enough to fall out of Stinky’s hands to lie on the ground giggling.
That’s what he was doing when a traffic cop came and told us to piss off because we were stomping on the peanuts. Upon hearing this, Moose was delighted to have immediately gratified a seconds-long dream of stomping on peanut plants on a roundabout at the centre point of Indonesia. We had to get out of town, and quickly, too!
