The Peace Correspondent (36 page)

IT is really better that the train from Jakarta to Bandung takes longer now than it did when the Dutch completed the line in 1886. Then, the train shipped tea from the colonials' mountain plantations to the port. Today, the leisurely pace gives passengers more time to relax and enjoy the scenery on the way to the city where Dutch colonials once went to escape the Indonesian capital's heat and humidity.

In a few pleasant hours, the comfortable, punctual Argogedes train climbs from the steamy coast of Jakarta to the cool mountain retreat 180 kilometers southeast.

So, at 9am on a typical tropical morning, an attractive hostess in airline-style blue uniform greets me on the platform of Gambir Station in central Jakarta. As I settle into my coach seat, the train moves through leafy suburbs, of red tile roofs and green jungle foliage, minarets and domes, and satellite dishes.

The agricultural scene beyond the city, with broad brown rivers, chickens in farmyards, planters in woven cone hats working the rice paddies and children riding large, lethargic water buffalo, is remarkably like that depicted in popular Balinese paintings.

Bandung, the provincial capital of West Java and Indonesia's third largest city, is set on a plateau in the Parahayangan Mountains The City of Flowers' pleasant climate and lush surroundings have provided an escape from the lowlands heat since the mid-19th century, when it was the center of a prosperous plantation area.

About an hour out, the train starts its climb into the scenic green hills of Java, crossing bridges over deep canyons, far above women washing clothes in the rivers. By good fortune, I've been assigned a right-hand window seat going up, with the best views of the valley. I'll remember to pick a left-hand one going down. Higher in the mountains, we pass spectacular rice terraces, like a Hanging Gardens of Bandung.

Bandung may not have the faraway-places-with-strange-sounding-names romantic allure of, say, Malacca or Makassar, Bali or Mandalay, but I first heard of it decades ago, and the name stuck in my impressionable mind. Growing up on the Canadian Prairies in the early ages of black-and-white television, I watched the news about the Bandung Conference of April 18-25, 1955, and the place seemed wonderfully exotic and important.

For a few day that year, the city was the center of world media attention as leaders of 29 African and Asian countries gathered to help determine the future of their newly independent nations and form a new, supposedly nonaligned bloc. Indonesian president Sukarno welcomed such prominent personalities as Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast (later Ghana), president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, Chou En Lai, premier of China and Ho Chi Minh, prime minister of Vietnam. It was a gathering of the world-shapers of the day, plus lesser-known lights from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Japan, the Philippines and others.

But this quiet city on a plateau 768 meters above sea level has been a tourist destination for a century, since the time when Indonesia was known as the Dutch East Indies. Dutch colonials rode these very tracks, where this morning rock videos are showing on a TV screen at the end of the car -- fortunately with the volume turned down low. In the colonial days, Bandung was Indonesia's version of the British Indian hill stations such as Ootacamund and Simla. Planters came down from the highlands and administrators and merchants up from the coast to frolic in this lively resort town, with its cafe society and luxury shopping.

Now, as the train rattles up the mountain, the stewardess hands out snacks and cups of water and sells Indonesian style rice and noodle meals. Today, Bandung's attractions are the Sundanese culture (puppet plays, dance performances and angklung music played with bamboo instruments), the surrounding mountains and volcanoes, and its fine heritage buildings.

When I reach Bandung station, I feel I have stepped back half a century, with a vague sense of looking at an old black-and-white movie. The town is a repository of well-preserved colonial buildings, with many fine old residences along tree-lined streets. But when the taxi turns onto the central Asia Afrika street I'm bemused to behold a building resembling a great ocean liner complete with smokestack, railings, decks and porthole windows beached on the plateau; the Savoy Homann hotel.

After checking into my sizable room with a huge balcony, like an outside promenade deck suite on an ocean liner, I look up the hotel's public relations director. The tall, enthusiastic American woman is also executive secretary of the Bandung Society for Heritage Conservation and the local expert on Art Deco architecture.

Over a lime juice in the bright, outdoor Garden Cafe, I get a quick lesson in the style that prevailed between the two world wars, and the merits of Bandung. “Bandung has been a tourist destination for 100 years, long before Bali which is a creation of air travel,” she explains. “This was a resort town, a playground of the rich living someplace else. It was a party town, with lots of cafes and cafe society.”

And the wealthy Dutch colonials (who at one time planned to move the capital to Bandung), built it in a kind of tropical Art Deco style, with its geometrical shapes and stylized, curvilinear lines. So many of the buildings have been preserved that Bandung shares the curious distinction of being one of the world's three leading sites of tropical Art Deco architecture, along with Miami Beach, Florida, and Napier, New Zealand.

The finest example of the genre is this classic curiosity, with
its curved lines, portholes, railings along the balconies like on a ship's deck, even an elevator shaft shaped like a ship's funnel. A mural in the Savoy's lobby depicts a steam train racing across Java -- machinery being a popular Art Deco motif -- with local images including a maiden holding staves of rice, and a reclining water buffalo -- certainly not symbols seen in a Miami Beach hotel. Cast chrome clouds float across the walls of the Sidewalk Cafe, like a ship's dining room with leaded glass, neon lamps, white lacquer chairs and chrome bar stools.

The first hotel on this spot, a bamboo house on stilts, dated back to 1871. Even before the Batavia-Bandung Railway started, the first brick building was built in 1880.in the Greek Revival style and opened as the Hotel Homann. Guests in the early part of the century included Thai King Chulalongkorn in 1901 and Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in 1927.

In 1936, Dutch architect A. F. Aalbers designed this architectural oddity in the super-modern streamline deco style popular in those optimistic days, emulating the grand steamships that brought the Dutch to Indonesia. The hotel opened in 1939 under the new name Savoy. During the Pacific War, from 1942 to 1945, it was the Japanese officers' quarters, then it was the Red Cross headquarters briefly before once more becoming a hotel in 1946.

The current owner, a member of the Bandung Heritage Society, has restored it over the past few years. “We undecorated the place,” says the enthusiastic local expert. “We removed the low ceilings and took down the dark wainscotting and painted it white.” Renovators also removed the old, frayed carpets to reveal marble floors, and pulled out teak ceilings and wainscotting to reveal Art Deco plaster work.

Lecture completed, my mentor hands me a book on walking tours of Bandung and sends me off to explore this living museum of Art Deco. An afternoon walk along Asia Afrika and Braga streets is a stroll down a Memory Lane of architecture. Just a block from the Savoy, Gedung Merdeka (literally Freedom Building), the venue of the Bandung Conference, was originally the
Concordia, a Dutch social club. It now houses the Museum Asia Afrika, commemorating the historic event. On another note, the nearby Rumah Mata Hari restaurant recalls the legendary WWI Indonesian spy.

The walk takes me along Jalan Braga, once the center for European cafe society and luxury goods shops. The East Indies' first Mercedes-Benz outlet operated on this street and, in the 1930s, when Bandung was “The Parijs van Java” (Paris of Java), Braga was known as “The Fifth Avenue of Indonesia,” in a mixed geographical metaphor. Now, Bandung is more famous for its jeans street. Most noteworthy buildings, many with the original stained-glass windows, include the aptly named Majestic movie house, Center Point and the Landmark building, all designed by prolific Dutch architect C.P.W. Schoemaker, who studied under American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

But Bandung is not just a city of broad, tree-lined streets and fine period architecture. Like the Dutch before them, Southeast Asians now come here for the fresh mountain air and the cool climate. Up on the volcanoes as night descends, it is long-sleeved shirt and jacket weather, dropping to as low as 5 degrees Centigrade, which feels positively frosty after the tropical heat of the plains below.

So, in search of cool, I hire a car and driver and set out on the most popular excursion from Bandung - to Tangkuban Parahu - which claims to be the world's only drive-in volcano. The road north winds through scenic tea estates and forests up to the volcano, 1,830 meters above sea level. There is a northern woods feel as we climb higher, with the sun slanting through trunks of towering pines like through a half-opened, vertical venetian blind. The forest is empty, except for a few hammock sellers swinging lazily in their merchandise stretched between trees by the roadside, only stirring when a car stops.

I smell the volcano before I see it, when the acrid aroma of a damp match trying to splutter into flames suddenly cuts through the sweet scent of pines. The parking lot is already crowded with
tour buses and private cars, and pretty purveyors of bric-a-brac aggressively hounding newly arrived visitors with displays of tourist trash -- furry bags and Davy Crockett-style coonskin hats with the animal tail hanging down the back, bamboo musical instruments, polished stone eggs and black hematite jewelry.

Batting away the junk dealers like pesky flies, I head to the crater pit. From here, I can see ant-like hikers following a path around the rim of the still-active Ratu Crater, with smoke billowing up from the pit below. This is a great walking area, with paths crisscrossing through the forests and leading all the way back down to Bandung. With limited time, I can only hike to the bottom of partly active Kawah Domas (Domas Crater). There is a nominal charge to go down to the crater, plus another for a guide, which is optional. The rate is low, it contributes to the local economy and it provides some company on the way down, so I pay at the office and head down the trail.

Ole has been a guide for 20 years and, despite his advanced age, he scampers down the path to the pit far more agilely than I. The experience reminds me of climbing Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Southeast Asia's highest peak, many years ago with a local guide who didn't speak a word of English. Although several decades my senior, he scurried up the mountain much faster than I could -- and stopped for smoke breaks whenever I fell too far behind.

The well-marked path, with steps carved into the dirt much of the way, goes down, down, down, 1.5 kilometers to the belly of the beast. Along the way, vendors in bamboo shelters sell refreshments, walking sticks and bundles of short twigs used to make tea to cure rheumatism, although it seems unlikely that rheumatics would be climbing down here. Packets of green powdered sulfur from the volcano are good for the skin, Ole informs me. “Mix it with hot oil and spread it on.” I decline the suggestion, fearing ending up smelling like a rotten egg after the treatment.

According to Ole, it is best to come at about 7am before the
animals are frightened away, and while black monkeys scamper in the forest. In decades of guiding here, he has seen small black and yellow tigers about 10 times, most recently about six months ago. The wild cats are smaller than Sumatran tigers and not dangerous, he says.

The bottom of the spluttering volcano is like a medieval churchman's vision of hell, as sulfurous pools of evil liquid rumble and hiss, burble and eruct, belching out great clouds of reeking steam. One large pool burbles like a Jacuzzi on overdrive, another spits a spout of sizzling water high into the sky. Ole says it reaches up to three meters high during the rainy season.

At a small refreshment stand, while we wait to buy some soft drinks, Rohana, the stall-keeper, sells 38 chicken eggs to a six-pack of Koreans. It makes his day.

“Asians buy my eggs, especially people from Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong,” the egg man says. “Westerners usually don't.”

Taking the eggs over to the fumarole, the Koreans put them in brightly colored baskets on a stick and lower them into the bubbling 120-degree pool. After 10 to 12 minutes, they remove the eggs, now hard boiled.

“Delicious, no sulfur taste,” the Koreans claim, as they munch through the entire three dozen plus two. Although the crater resembles a mythological inferno, visitors are laughing, romping around, posing before the geysers for group photos and munching on their naturally boiled eggs.

It is a short walk from here back to the main road, and the ride back to the Bandung railway station. Just hours from that Happy Hades, I am on the train once more, winding down the mountain in the soft tropical twilight, snaking around the lush hills, over rushing rivers and deep gorges, heading back to hectic Jakarta.