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Month: July 2024

The fast train leg from Laos to western China

Jul 31, 2024 | agriculture, bicycles, books we are reading, food culture, government, politics, public transport, state-corporate nexus, street food | 57 comments

 

We left Nong Khai in Thailand in a Grab car from The White Inn,

approached a sign reminding us where we’ve been, and directing us to where we are going,

departed the country through a relaxed Thai immigration, bought three tickets bound for Laos,

travelled in a van

across the Thai-Laos friendship bridge above the Mekong River,

were directed through Laos immigration,

exchanged some money, got on another bus to Vientiane, the capital, where we booked another Grab

to the Vientiane railway station, 20kms out of town. Phew; big morning so far!

At the station some locals kindly helped us navigate the rail system and the language,

and we stood in queue to buy tickets for the Laos-China Railway.

We tried to find something edible near the station while we waited a few hours to board, but we didn’t have much luck.

When we were allowed through into the station, we proceeded into a neofascist security zone, which we hadn’t experienced since leaving Australia.

After going through the scanners, we had our knives taken from us. We were really shocked and protested and asked, “How are we going to cut up fruit while we travel?” After much indignation at having our knives confiscated we were told we could pay to have an officer take them to our destination at Luang Prabang station. We agreed. It cost us AU$20, although we didn’t think we’d see them again.

Laos the nation and Laos the Laos-China Railway are two distinct countries. The former is chilled out and beautiful and wild, the latter authoritarian, stern and uptight. We have travelled through several countries with our knives, Patrick generally keeps both his knives on his belt while passing through immigration. In fact he did this here too and remarkably they didn’t pick them up in the body search, just Meg’s and Woody’s knives in the luggage scan. Was this a taste of what is to come in China? Woody was especially upset. For we adults it was like going back to school and having to endure nanny-state rules, a context that Woody hasn’t ever experienced.


His Leatherman was a gift from Steve, a kind Warrnambool man, who we met on our last big bicycle tour in 2021, and his Opinel knife and pouch were a gift from his Aunty Hen. After several hours of traveling through the beautiful Laos valleys,

where we saw many examples of subsistence farming.

it was time to get off at Luang Prabang. The armed police officer who had our knives alighted with us.

His briefcase contained some of our most useful tools on this journey, and in life generally. We were overjoyed to have them back,

but we had a problem. We knew we were going to come up against this situation again, especially in China. That night we booked a sweet little room with surprisingly cute folded swan towels, in the old capital. It was the cheapest room in the little city. Someone’s been to international hotel school in the 1980s, eh?

After arriving quite late in the day, we dropped our bags and set out to explore the town,

and to find some grub. We found a lively and packed night market, forgot to take photos, ate a delicious dinner of stir-fried veggies and rice, and came back to our swan-toweled room with mangoes for breakfast. In the morning we used our knives for the last time to cut them up.

Cutting up mangoes has been a morning ritual for weeks now, as mangoes are so cheap in Asia, and local, and in-season. We were now coming face to face with state-paternalism. We knew this was the influence of China, who paid for and jointly run the railway line we were now dependent on for our trajectory north. We headed out again after breakfast to see a little more of Laotian culture and living,

and to find the local post office to send our knives home.

We had to make such a carry-on yesterday to be able to pay get them back, and we knew things were only going to get worse the further north we headed. People around us yesterday had to hand over their work hammers, deodorant sprays, scissors and small useful knives such as ours. Hopefully we will see these prized tools again back in Australia.

After we sent off our package, we went looking for a bookshop to stock up on reading material. We walked for a while through beautiful streets,

stopped into a cafe run by this German woman and her dog,

discovered an incredible wasp’s nest above us on the footpath,

beheld more miraculous examples of bamboo scaffolding,

spent a moment reflecting on the magic of remnant ritual offerings,

before collecting our bags from our room, checking out and hopping into a van with just two seats left, heading for the station. We three squeezed in,

travelled for twenty or so minutes with a cohort of fellow travelers, and once again went through the intense process of getting clearance to enter the station. Passports, facial-scanning, security gates, body scanning, luggage scanning. Patrick had decided to keep his knife in his luggage to see whether it would go undetected. It didn’t, and the authorities refused to offer us the same knife escort service, so he gave it away to some Celtic travellers (sitting beside Woody in the pic above) rather than leaving it at the station. Now completely knifeless, we lined up to board the Laos-China Railway for our next leg.

Once again, the train attendants were officious.

The land from the train was beautiful and uncontrolled. There was longing in us for such uncivil life, and we contemplated the easiness of Thailand, sans the pollution, and the autonomy we have back home, as we don’t live in a city. As we travelled, Meg and Woody listened to an audiobook about Don Bradman, while Patrick read The Forest People: The story of Laos’s unknown tribe.

This account of Mlabri (or Mrabri) people is again another example of just how uninformed Yuval Noah Harari is when he describes human history as being a singular path of narrow self-interest. His ridiculous propaganda, we later found, is also available in Chinese.

Like countless examples of indigenous lifeways, sharing food and other resources among the Mlabri is the rule, not the exception. Every wild forested area we passed held the possibility that Mlabri are still living outside the luggage-scanning, finger-printing, facial-recognising insanity of the global machine conglomerate.

When Meg lived in Laos 25 years ago, teaching English, there were no sealed roads. While the roads now are still rudimentary, Meg was surprised to see so many sealed ones from the train. We also saw many beautiful patterns of cultivation, demonstrating other earth-harmonious lifeways are possible besides nomadic forest dwelling.

We wished we could have spent more time in Laos, but this journey to India is taking much longer than we expected, and we still have a long way to go. In the afternoon we arrived in Boten station in the north of the country, where we came across this musician playing a Lusheng wind instrument.

Later we found out that Dong people, a minority group from southeastern China, traditionally play this instrument. We waited at Boten station for a few hours for another train to take us into China.

As you might imagine, things were fairly serious going through immigration into China, which occurred after just 12 minutes of being on the train. Everyone got off. We had our temperature and faces scanned, our fingers and thumbs printed, and our passports checked and scanned, and notes were written down. It was quite a procedure. We held both apprehension and excitement for entering China.

Once back on the train we had our tickets checked and passports read again.

As we travelled, we passed millions of hectares of cultivation, everything highly organised.

We couldn’t quite believe we were in China when we alighted the train at Xishuangbanna.

We didn’t think our travels were going to take us this far north, into this epic country.

But we had significant challenges ahead. We had no money we could access, and we’d booked a hotel that required a 15-minute car ride. We didn’t have a local sim card, or a way to install an e-sim, therefore we had no use of the internet. We knew most things in China require an ID banking app, and our remnant Laos Kip had no agency this far inside the country. Outside the station we were approached by a fella who could speak a little English. We showed him the name of our hotel as he shunted us towards a driver. We conveyed to him we had no money, and he said, “Driver, ATM.” We understood. They had a brief conversation and we were led away by a sweet man who drove us to several ATMs until one relented and gave up some yuan. We all cheered and got back into the car.

Then we continued on to find our hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but some sort of shonky sublet business. The driver couldn’t find it because there was no hotel, there was just a picture of a hotel on the internet. Eventually he found some locals who directed him to a back door operation where we got a key card for this little apartment room.

We were grateful. We handed over our passports for about the seventh time that day. Nothing is underground here, not even shonky sublet businesses. Everything is recorded and scanned and documented. Several moments later we were also grateful for the family-run restaurant across the street who accepted us for a meal after 9pm. We sat down and we were brought tea and dry roasted soybeans.

They asked us to take selfies with them. We were quite the novelty in this city. We were going to find out that in southwestern China our ethnicity was quite exceptional. People kept staring at us. Long stares that were met with our smiles. Our meals arrived,

which we had ordered by pointing and hoping for the best as there was zero English in the restaurant and we had no internet for our translation app to work. We were so grateful for this first delicious Chinese meal and also grateful this business took cash, as across the country they are phasing it out. We noted (pardon the pun) that all the notes of money included a picture of Mao on one side.

It didn’t seem very communist to have just the one character on every note, especially a character that had caused so much suffering in the twentieth century. We wandered around the city after dinner. It was Friday night and everywhere we turned young women were being styled and groomed in some sort of costume that looked part wedding dress, part traditional costume.

There were dozens of businesses working on hundreds of young women. The street life was vibrant and had a carnival feel about it. We went looking for a sim card and were told we had to go the the business park in the morning at 9am and apply for one. So we woke early, took some bananas for breakfast as we could peel them without our beloved knives, made a cup of tea and sat outside on the balcony taking in the new day,

until quite suddenly we were forced inside with a toxic smell permeating our olfactories. We packed up and left the building gagging, alongside others who also ran outside. It smelt like turps mixed with something stronger. We handed in our key and were helped by a kind local woman to hail a driver.

We were taken to the wrong place by the driver. You just can’t go into any phone place and get a sim card here; we discovered you have to go to the right phone place, and apply for one. We hailed another car, and he took us across the city to the right phone place, even though the previous places were all the same company, the government-run China Mobile. We were noticing most of the traffic consisted of new electric vehicles and we saw only a remnant of an older kind of mobility, although it too was electric. We also noticed how well organised everything is, including the streets and the roadside gardens.

It took about an hour to apply for and receive a sim card, by which point we’d missed the train we’d hoped to catch. Before we headed to the station for a later train we walked around looking for food. We came across many police cars, cameras and prohibition signs, such as this one, prohibiting long distance riding.

Our bicycle touring sensibilities were shocked. Over the past decade, we have spent nearly two years on the road riding long distances.

Since arriving in China we are finding the authoritarianism a frightening sign of what is to come in Australia, if people don’t pay attention to the incremental rise of surveillance, digital ID metrics, biometrics, censorship, and everything else Australian federal and state governments are doing to screw up our freedoms (such as steer us into another bogus pandemic, this time bird flu). While China has learnt predator capitalism from the west to grow its economy and incentivise ‘progress’, the west (particularly the Anglophone Five-Eyes countries) appears to be learning from China how to control populations and eradicate dissent. This is how the global machine conglomerate works. Any self-respecting anarchist does not want to live in a police state that has a prohibition against long-distance bicycle or motor bike riding. Patrick has also been reading Howard Zinn’s, The People Speak,

which details the horrendous struggles working men, women, indigenous, black and minority Americans have had over the centuries, since the Spanish first arrived. Be it industrial fascists, industrial communists, or a more contemporary, insidious merger of the two into an industrial state-corporate nexus, we people will need to fight against the next wave of totalitarianism. Being in China is making us realise just what is at stake, and reading Zinn reminds us that freedom doesn’t just happen, it has to be worked for and reworked for. One of the books Meg picked up in Laos is Elie Wiesel’s Night, another timely reminder of what happens when a country gives in to authoritarianism.

And it’s not just the Five Eyes countries. The way in which the German and Israeli governments are currently conducting themselves today, they would do well to turn back to books like these.

For lunch we found a restaurant and once again navigated the menu without a clue for the language.

We thought we’d conveyed, “Chinese vegetables and rice for three” quite well, and we received a beautiful leek and pork dish and some rice. OK, fair enough. We were grateful. Then another dish arrived. Egg and tomato – delicious, but too much. And then another, Chinese vegetables, and then another, which we couldn’t recognise. We protested, but the staff had no idea what we were saying.

It was all bloody delicious although enough for six people. After we had eaten all we could, we cleared out our ‘tea chest’ container and piled in the leftovers, which we had on the train, later in the day.

We travelled north, having no idea how we were going to get to India from China, but just pushing forward in the general direction, avoiding Myanmar. We’ve heard of the rapid industrialisation of China over the past three decades, and now we were experiencing it. The scale of development here is mind blowing. So far we have seen high intensity cities and agricultural zones, with only little glimpses of wilder spaces when the fast trains have come up from the extensive tunnels, briefly for air.

We got off the train in Kunming,

went through a series of security checks and scans to leave the station,

and popped out into a city of 8 million people.

As we travel north it is gradually getting cooler. Meg managed to set up a Chinese pay app and so we could order DiDi cars by copying in the addresses of where we are and where we need to go. While we waited for one to collect us, we bought some fruit from a lovely lady at a street stall outside the station. In this photo, Meg is saying no to a plastic bag, something we find ourselves saying many times a day.

We became aware of an intense police presence outside the station. The lady with the fruit stall and other stall holders were moved on by police screaming orders at them through a megaphone. Guards in mobile towers patrolled the station with machine guns,

and everywhere we turned there were CCTV cameras watching and recording. We travelled through the extremely lit CBD of Kunming,

across the city to the cheapest accommodation we could find online. It was hot inside.

We remembered the images of Chinese people during Covid, screaming from the balconies of their apartments to be let out, and we sensed what these inhumane lockdowns must have been like for people here. We were grateful we could come and go as we pleased, although having arrived and walked up 14 flights of stairs we weren’t going anywhere, we were well past ready for bed. We’d eaten the lunch leftovers in the late afternoon, and we still had some steamed sweet potato we’d bought earlier in the day. So we ate those, put on a load of washing,

took a shower, and went to bed in a sauna of an apartment with wet towels covering us. It was coolish outside, but these apartment buildings are heat banks. The motorway the apartment towers were built beside finally quietened late in the night, and we awoke to rain, coolness in the streets, and a Chinese tea set.

Just near to the apartment we found a friendly little restaurant. We ordered just two bowls this time,

and shared them between us as we are learning the portions here are often very generous. This delicious noodle soup breakfast cost just AU$4, and we were invited to keep refilling our bowls at no extra expense. It was at this meal we quite suddenly fell in love with China. Despite the unpleasant surveillance state and the attempt of Maoists in the twentieth century to eradicate the past, China still holds its deep cultural roots dear. Its soul is still intact, as are the souls of many of the people we are meeting.

Every meal we’ve eaten in this country has been outstanding. This lovely fella approached us after breakfast and asked whether we needed anything.

Steve has been learning English for several years and we shared some lovely moments together outside the restaurant. Our endorphins were tripping after our warm, albeit brief exchange. We DiDi’d back across the city to Kunming Station, noticing the old and new of China intersecting in many places.

Mobile phone towers proliferated the motorways,

and millions of rusting solar hot water systems sat upon apartment rooftops alongside their associated stainless steel header tanks.

We bought some more fruit at the station and went through several thresholds again to check in,

having to line up and scan our passports (the locals had their Digital Identity cards scanned) twice in the space of seven minutes. We witnessed one man being sent back because of a problem with his ID card. He was distraught.

The volume and scale of everything in China is incredible. The train we booked to Xichang was 16 carriages long. We were in carriage 15, which took about a half kilometre fast walk down the platform to board on time. Many had to work hard to get to carriage 16 before the train left.

Once again we settled in with our various books, audiobooks and writing projects, and travelled under ground for much of the trip. Each time the train resurfaced we were met with intense cultivation,

even on the drier, rocky hilltops perennial tree crops were growing.

These fast trains travel at around 165km/hr. We arrived at Xichang Station in the afternoon,

and DiDi’d into town.

We were dropped off in this leafy street,

where we had booked this comfortable room, the cheapest we could find in the city at AU$60 a night.

We dropped our bags and went exploring, finding we were in a neighbourhood full of sleepy fruit merchants.

Woody was thrilled. Many people work hard in China, and they take sleep whenever they can get it.

The family run hotel we were staying in was again a friendly place, and in the evening the team helped us to navigate our way to get to the opening of the Torch Festival, which was occurring in the city.

The Torch Festival is an annual traditional festival of the Yi minority. Fire is the symbol of the Yi people’s pursuit of light, and is believed to have the ability to drive away insects and pests, and protect the growth of crops.

Whatever went on there, we’d missed it by the time we arrived, but nonetheless soaked up the afterglow.

There was such a buzz about the place,

and many people asked us to take pictures with them. We obliged and had a lot of fun taking pictures with strangers. We woke the next day to this rather prosaic but nonetheless interesting view from our room window.

By mid morning we farewelled our happy hosts,

walked back to the street stall holders to stock up on fruit that didn’t require a knife,

admired the chickens and the wonderful characters selling produce on the street,

and spoke English with the brothers (the one-child policy ended in 2016),

while we waited for our fast ride,

with a Didi driver wanting to be a F1 driver, back to Xichang Station.

Agricultural crops are grown right up to and throughout the cities, and even right up to the train tracks at Xichang Station. We are continually amazed by the intensity of production.

There is something very special about this country – the people, the food, the buzz on the streets. And one of the things that enamours us most is the clean air. While we’re not green tech enthusiasts and we know e-cars are just another industrial revolution that will continue to mine, deplete and poison the world, the lack of motor exhaust pollution makes being in this heavily populated country an absolute pleasure.

After another four hours on a fast train we arrived at the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, the gateway to Tibet.

Our first hotel in this city, again the cheapest we could find at AU$60 a night, was the filthiest we’ve stayed in for our entire trip. It was situated beside a large teaching hospital,

and in the morning we woke to a street-wide blackout that went on until after we’d left for some damn-delicious dumplings for breakfast.

Meg did some more research and found us another hotel room. It is the fanciest we’ve stayed in on our trip so far, but for the same price as the previous night. We’ve been spoilt outside Australia, being able to get goodly rooms for between $15-$40 a night throughout southeast Asia. We know back in Australia the same rooms would all be over $120, which is why we travelled the Australian leg with a tent and sleeping bags.

While few people speak English in China, every second person wears a t-shirt with English words written on them, or printed on walls are philosophical phrases or advice in English, sometimes making sense, but often lost in translation.

We’ve also noticed the absence of street dogs in these modern cities, which is very different by comparison with the rest of Asia, though people’s pet dogs do hang out on the street, occasionally.

We did, however, in the last days of our time in China when we stayed in a more remote village, come across street dogs, this one suffering terribly from mange.

We love the bike culture in the cities. People don’t as much own them but hire them, and it is interesting that even though the state is obviously very controlling here in certain ways, it is not stupidly paternalistic like Australia when it comes to things like helmet wearing. Personal accountability and personal choice, when it comes to safety, is obviously left for grown adults to decide. We’re impressed by this.

In Chengdu, Woody hired a bike and for the two kilometres or so he rode it, cost a mere AU 20 cents. We’re also impressed by this.

While we have found the excessive camera surveillance here disconcerting,

we have also found people largely ignore the militaristic over-shadowing of their lives. People break rules here, for example they smoke in non-smoking areas. While we personally don’t like having to smoke passively, we do like the spirit of the rule breaking.

Meg hasn’t been able to work at all in China as they ban Zuckerberg and Google products. They also ban Substack. We can understand the Chinese government banning the US spy corporations Facebook and Google, as these bastard companies are censorship dogs that collude with the US government, eroding democratic diversity and political dissident reach, and censored thousands of vaccine injured people trying to tell their stories. So, we’re glad these companies are being punished by China. But Substack? Really? This important independent publishing platform is where all the independent academics, artists, thinkers and journalists who still have their integrity in tact gather their writings, and it enables readers to transition away from the court journalism of legacy media and the predators at Facebook and Google.

A former student of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Sunshine Yang, who we recorded a podcast with earlier in the year, told us back then, “People do whatever they like in China, they just don’t criticise the government.” We’re publishing this post before we have left the country. We hope the feedback here is taken in the right spirit.

Examples of beautiful acts of anarchy amongst all the 2030 smart city correctness being grown here in China, are the many marvellous gleaners that, like the street stall folk, bring a poetic to otherwise homogenised and boring modern streets.

The regular traffic too has a beauty in its anarchy and wildness of flow. Cyclists and scooters dart every which way and even against the traffic, bringing a feralty to the streets. Jay-walking too! We’re glad we’re not driving in Chinese cities, being a pedestrian is a wild ride enough. While there are obvious strictures on peoples’ lives here, in all the cities we have visited we haven’t seen anyone homeless, drug or alcohol affected, and people are able to raise money in novel, autonomous ways in public. This family (below) is attempting to raise money for an expensive treatment for their sick child. We don’t know enough about the healthcare system here to adequately comment, but obviously not everything is covered by a universal healthcare system, which you’d think by being in a communist country would exist. Cuba is an excellent example of medicine-for-the-people, but perhaps China has followed the toxic US model of medicine-for-Pharma-profits. We don’t know. The reason we know a little of these people’s sad story is we downloaded an app that converts photographs of Chinese text into English.

Sunshine, from afar (she is travelling in West Africa currently), and a group of lovely Tibetan women we met on the street,

all gave us goodly information about how we might travel to Tibet and enter India from there. We have read that foreigners need to apply for a special visa, which takes about 20 days and we need to go with a registered tour company. The problem we are having is we only have a two week visa for China, and we also don’t want to return to Chengdu after Tibet. The stipulation is we must be accompanied the whole time by the tour guide company. But we need to travel on from Tibet to India. While we are enjoying Chengdu city, and admiring the traces of ecological culture within this now very high-tech country,

and laughing at the hubris of the greenwash,

and playing music together,

and eating consistently wonderful meals on the streets,

and coming face to face with some confronting things –

this little one, with a AU$2000 price tag, was scratching on the glass, desperately trying to get out, if only they were able to play together –

we are at the same time cobbling together plans for the next leg of our journey.

Sunshine found for us the name of a Tibet tour guide called Harry. She has been going out of her way to help us. She told us Harry could get a visa in five working days. We contacted him, excitedly, and shared our travel wishes and our time frame, and he got back to us confirming he indeed could get us visas to travel on the world’s highest altitude and highly affordable railway for 35 hours to Lhasa in Tibet, and from there he would escort us to the Nepalese border. Yay! We were so excited when we heard the news. The train ticket was only around $100 each for all that way. The Ghan railway in Australia, by comparison, is thousands of dollars. Half an hour later, however, Harry contacted us saying that the most significant festival in the year is taking place now in Lhasa, called the Shoton (or yoghurt banquet) Festival, and there is no way the officials will be able to supply a visa in such a short time. Oh no! We are so disappointed. How are we going to get to India from here?

We have come so close to getting through to India overland or by boat, sans a short flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste. All the other borders where India meets Chinese territory are not open, and they are contested, heavily militarised zones. The two countries have longstanding disputes with each other, although relations may be warming as they are both in the original BRICS currency challenge to the dominance of the US dollar and western financial institutions.

We are looking into flying from Chengdu to Kathmandu, but the flooding and land slides covering roads to the south of Kathmandu towards the Indian border is making that option look dubious, too. So we are spending a few more days in China, in a village outside Chengdu, called Lujing, which is a little wilder,

where the locals brew booze from their rice,

and dry their own corn,

and enjoy their street life,

while we gather our thoughts, do more research, and see how else we might get to India. We are so close, yet still so far away.

Thank you for following our journeys, Dear Reader. When we leave China in the next few days we will be two months into our four month journey. We have travelled such a long way from our beloved home and community in Djaara Mother Country, thank you for coming along with us. Signing off for now, hoping you are well, eating nourishing food and breathing clean air, whatever part of the world you call home.

All the little and big offerings of Thailand

Jul 25, 2024 | appropriate technology, bicycles, biodiversity, ceremony & ritual, climate change, dogs, economics, food culture, Industry science, medicinal plants, pollution, street food, subsistence economy, travel | 31 comments

 

We’ve been pollution-sick again, which has been inhibiting our enjoyment of this rich and colourful country.

Patrick and Woody have had it worse than Meg, but each of us have have struggled in our own way. Blackwood is also experiencing homesickness: “I miss our food, I miss my ball on a string, and I miss my friends at Forest & Free.”

When booking transport over the past 12 days in Thailand, we have found it best to stick with people on the ground and avoid the national railway or bus websites. While digital, cross-language communications might improve over time, it currently doesn’t match pointing, grunting, nodding, shaking, laughing or any combination of body gesturing to get on the right train, ending with a khawp khun kha/p!

What we’ve also found difficult about being in this beautiful country, apart from our own participation in what we dislike most about global tourism, is the homogenisation process that is creeping in everywhere there is development. An example of this is the Safety First signage that proliferates through the country.

We think the ‘Safety third’ ethos of the early Burning Man festivals is wiser. Without a little daily danger or risk, our bodies switch off, they lose an alertness, which we think pre-disposes people to becoming accident-prone and even compliant. We’d prefer to live in a world where sharp metal lugs stick out below bus seats,

and rusty metal blades come out of the footpaths,

and a billion or so unleashed dogs inherit the streets by day and night, than live under the cult of safetyism. We’ve loved beholding the autonomous culturing of dogs in Thailand. No one fears them here. When we think of life back home, walking with Zero around Lake Daylesford, there is always one, if not five people who recoil with horror that our little scruffy is off a lead. Oh, Zero! you would love it here!

How western imperialism appears to work as a global-machine-conglomerate is to covet all the major issues of ‘the global village’ into a set of preordained arguments. These arguments are never framed by independent, bioregional, democratic, or indigenous thought – although there’s a fair bit of theatre in places like the UN and in universities that purport heterodox or alternative voices are heard – instead, they are created to serve large global markets, which always have a homogenising effect. That’s why this Thai motorway looks like it could be in South Melbourne, sans the signage.

Because the human world is now so advanced in preordained, market thinking, solving problems is difficult. Climate change has been a theory in the orbit of scientists since the 1930s and yet the machinations that reportedly drive climate change have only steadily worsened over 85 years. To make things worse there’s now a very large industry that’s grown out of ‘Climate’, a kind of Jevon’s Effect industry, making those who are financially welded to it hard to trust. Big money has a way with decision making that the empire is perennially blind to. This is why it is so hard to trust the expert class.

By contrast Monks here live with little and ask for their food, which encourages acts of generosity in the culture. They are trusted and loved.

When we crossed the border into Thailand in this weird little space shuttle of a van,

we came to realise that our fellow passengers were Malay dopenauts who’d come to the only country marijuana is legalised in southeast Asia. When they alighted, we too got out of the van and stepped into light rain falling in the little city of Hat Yai.

We changed currencies,

and found a family-run establishment to buy lunch.

Across the road from where we were to stay that night was a friendly little family-run garage.

By day they service motors. By night they serve beer and pork, and punters cook a ‘set’ or two on little drop-in table BBQs.

As we’ve travelled we’ve tuned our eyes to seek out local tree crop fruits that come with their own thick-skinned packaging,

and have sought out local snacks such as grilled banana,

which are sold wrapped in banana leaves.

And, as everywhere, we like to buy direct from growers’ markets.

In Thailand we delighted not just in the dogs that are left to dance on their own accord, but the plants too;

and in the technologies that quieten the streets and produce no exhaust;

and in the vegetables cultivated locally and sold proudly by growers;

and in the overhead lanterns that mark such a street a night market;

and in all the little,

and big places of ritual, offering and worship;

and in all the kind gestures we’ve witnessed, such as this lady bus conductor eyeing an elderly man who had no hope of reaching the bus stop in time, request to the driver to stop, then urge him to back up, before helping the oldtimer up the steps and into a seat.

The driver was not in the least bit annoyed by this delay in his proceedings.

It took us a few goes to leave Hat Yai. We’d booked our tickets online, and so we thought this was our train,

but it was two days early according to the computations of our tickets. We managed to get on one later that night,

which took us to Surat Thani. We arrived just after midnight in a bit of a blur,

and were thankful for another kind lady, who waited up and let us into our tiny room.

While in Surat Thani we did some day tripping,

We took a local bus, then a truck,

to a market, where we ate Shrimp Pad Thai,

which came in this beautiful little leaf bowl,

and bought bananas with sticky rice.

Later in the day we went in search of a nearby agricultural cooperative, only to find the gates shut and no one around.

We reacquainted ourselves with an interesting weed on the walk there. Mimosa pudica, which we were first shown back in Timor Leste by Sebas, who called it, Shy Maria, is a herb that responds dramatically to being touched, going from upright to prostrate at the slightest feel.

Mimosa pudica is not the broad cut-leaf creeping plant that dominates around Meg’s feet in the photo above, but the small little fern-like leaf plant she is gently caressing. You might have to zoom in to see. We found this paper on the benefits of this sensitive medicinal plant, which states, “[i]t majorly possesses antibacterial, antivenom, antifertility, anticonvulsant, antidepressant, aphrodisiac, and various other pharmacological activities. The herb has been used traditionally for ages, in the treatment of urogenital disorders, piles, dysentery, sinus, and also applied on wounds.”

Plants offer us the possibility of rewiring our nervous systems,

and appropriate technologies offer the possibility of maintaining or recovering our health,

and humourous exchanges offer up the possibility of living with lightness.

Prachuap Khiri Khan is a town by the sea. We stopped there for a night, walked from the station via the food market,

dropped our bags, where we took this photo,

and walked down to the ocean.

Subsistence and local market fishing at the scale of these little boats will never dismantle biodiversity in the world’s oceans.

Only ‘feeding the world’ via the global-machine-conglomerate will do that, as Patrick’s teenage love, Karina, unpacked in her film Blue.

The next day we were back on the rails. An old rattler, hot, noisy and fumesy. We all started off well,

looking out to the rice fields and lyrical wirings,

but as the day continued, and it got hotter, and the dirty squalls coming into the carriage refused to bring comfort, we all started to fade.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Bangkok,

a city of 17 million people, we were fairly wasted.

Although, Meg still had a little spirit, and so we awarded her this watermelon for being the most resilient member of the band.

We’d booked online a little cheap room near the station,

but didn’t know it was right in the middle of a western tourist zone. You know: beer, pizza, cocktails, dope, all night revelling, maybe a dash of Pad Thai and Houellebecqian sleaze. The only picture we took here doesn’t really capture it, rather we were once again collecting photos of vines growing over powerlines.

Woody and Patrick pretty much slept for two days and nights. It was a low key anniversary of Patrick and Meg’s, and Zero’s 14th birthday. Happy birthday little fella! We miss you Zero. Thanks for loving him in your home Black Cockatoo!

The pollution in Bangkok was next level, and after we’d slept through it for a few days, we hightailed it out on another hot, old rattler.

This six hour ride was gruelling, especially for Patrick. It is the combination of heat and pollution that is so harsh for this fella who has spent most of his life in cool mountain fields and forests. Patrick hadn’t had asthma since he was in Hong Kong, 27 years earlier. In Bangkok and on this train he struggled to breathe,

and if he didn’t go to bed when we arrived at our hotel in Nakhon Ratchasima and do 4 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, he would have required a hospital ventilator. The breathing method opened up his air passages, which brought a few hours of peace and rest, before he started burning up. He then spent the next two nights and days in and out of fever. He fasted, drank water, dried his sheets over the oven-like balcony rail outside our room, and collapsed back into bed.

When we all surfaced from this time, which included having to change hotels for another night of convalescing, we walked straight out into a street festival the locals had put on to raise money for the monks.

In leaving Nakhon Ratchasima, we thought we’d mix up the transportation a little,

and jumped on a bus,

to Khon Kaen.

We loved the stick food on offer here, though trying to buy food naked has been a challenge in Thailand. Shopkeepers seem to need to close the deal by wrapping your purchase in plastic. It takes a watchfulness to arrest this urge.

The following day we headed to the Khon Kaen train station,

where we were met by this little remnant life force.

We waited to catch the last train we were going to board in Thailand,

and that afternoon travelled to Nong Khai on the border with Laos. Feeling better than we have for days, we had dinner with the locals who have a penchant for green chairs,

and red shrines.

To get into Laos the visa process is a little complicated. So we have had some days here to wait, and to look across the river to the path we have chosen to get to India. Myanmar is too dangerous to cross at this time, and there is no longer a ferry or boat option across the Bay of Bengal. Hence why we’re here, in the north of Thailand.

We’ve been on the road seven weeks now and we’ve just hit another sweet spot here in Nong Khai.

Wherever you are in the world, Dear Reader, we hope you too are experiencing a sweet spot in your life. Sending much love to you from us here, and thanks so much for following along on our journey.

The low life and rich cuisine of Malaysia, in a yellow t-shirt

Jul 13, 2024 | adventure, agriculture, alcohol, ceremony & ritual, children's learning, colonialism, Covid-19, culture, food culture, health, Industrial culture, lifemaking, politics, protest, raising boys, social warming, storytelling, street food, travel | 36 comments

 

At Batam, we left Indonesia.

We realised, too late, we could have caught a ferry directly to Malaysia. Instead we had booked ourselves to travel to three countries in one day.

We love travelling by sea. Give us a jetty, port or ferry terminal any day, before an airport.

Leaving Indonesia was as relaxed as arriving into the country, way back in West Timor. By 8am we were on our way to Singapore,

and by about 8.30am we finally finished off our crumbly stores of homemade roo and rabbit jerky.

By mid morning we were arriving in the old British colonial port of Singapore,

where we experienced a rather more uptight immigration system. Still, those who were supposed to be assessing our x-rayed luggage and bodies were instead scrolling on their screens or watching a movie on their phone, just like in Indonesia. We were to find the same laissez-faire attitude in Malaysia, later in the day.

We had hoped to connect with some permies in Singapore but the timing wasn’t to be, so we hightailed it from the south to the north of this micro-country, which we found to be fastidiously neat.

From the north of Singapore (about 30 minutes by car) we boarded a five minute train that took us to the Malaysian border.

We crossed the Strait of Johor,

into Malaysia, and were thrilled to find these homemade baked goods at the station.

In the third country for the day we boarded another train to go north, with our lunch of tea eggs and beef cake.

With the bureaucracy of borders behind us and our bellies full and nourished, we settled in for a gentle journey for the afternoon,

beholding what nation states do to their respective Mother Countries in order to participate in the global-pool-of-money-tragedy-of-the-commons routine.

In Malaysia, rubber and tin industries are in decline, but palm oil is in expansion. While habitat loss and species extinction are stories well associated with palm oil farming, in more recent years metastasis cancers have been linked to palmitic acid in those who consume it. This is potentially serious because palm oil is now found in close to 50% of the packaged products found in supermarkets. Think Nutella, for example, which is more than 50% palm oil and refined sugar.

When we arrived in Gemas that night, we were asked by an Indian-Malay tradesman staying in the same hotel why would we come to such a town.

“We like non-touristy places,” was Patrick’s reply. “We want to see how people live in towns that are not famous.”

Even though we were treated like tourists and overcharged when we stopped at a local food hall for dinner,

the meals we bought were delicious and highly affordable for we radical frugalists who live in a rich country, and whose nation’s wealth is also dependent on destroying the landbase. We are not shy in ‘fessing up to the fact that our travelling is predicated on the privilege of a currency made strong by mining, thus earth-wrecking. Thus too, the local fruit here was highly affordable, a little of which we bought for breakfast and lunch the next day.

We’re getting used to living on golden mangoes, and sleeping in cheap hotel beds.

We woke to rain and fog,

walked through the streets,

startled the local pigeons,

and arrived back at the station.

Seeking out small towns and avoiding big cities is our aim in Malaysia, in the bid to avoid taking in too much pollution. However, we are finding that Malaysia has much cleaner environments and air than Indonesia. We have loved the absence of drugs and alcohol in the two countries. It makes us reflect just how much pain comes with addiction to these things.

From sweet Gemas we boarded a train,

and relaxed into a rainy morning of travel and air conditioning. While Patrick has recovered from his malaise in Batam, Meg was feeling a tad under the weather.

By midday our train had arrived at the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where we stood in line to book a bus to go yet further north.

No one gave Woody the memo about his politically indecent attire. At the time we were clueless that if you wear yellow clothes in Malaysia you could risk a fine of AUS$1600. In 2016, protestors wearing yellow clothing walked the streets of Kuala Lumpur calling for the resignation of then-Prime Minister Najib. Several years on, yellow clothes are still considered a symbol of protest and a threat to national security. We were completely oblivious to this next chapter of people control.

Across the world governments are incrementally stepping up efforts to censor, coerce and forbid people from exerting their basic human rights. A slow, year-by-year approach using mass propaganda tactics has seen human rights steadily dissolve across the world.

In 1951, Hannah Arendt, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Does this sound like the past four years to you? Does this sound like watching, for example, ABC TV’s emergency porn propaganda during the Covid years?

Thankfully no one locked Woody away or fined him for wearing a yellow t-shirt. Coming from a family of protesters, the irony of being political disruptors even without knowing it wasn’t lost on us.

The bus we booked turned out to be filled with electric massage seats. Only none of them worked. This large coach headed off about an hour after the advertised time,

and on the way out of KL, we met glimpses of the city displaying modernist vertical gardens,

and archaic colourful temples.

The measure of a city’s soul does not concern the most elegant architecture, the most dazzling spectacles, or the most novel cafés and restaurants, but rather how the poorest members are living.

Our ‘first class massage coach’ embodied only the pretence of wealth. It was in fact the cheapest bus ticket money could buy, and it stopped several times over the course of the afternoon, to drop off passengers at unglamorous petrol stations,

taking us past thousands more hectares of palm oil monocultures,

and grand old hills and mountains,

many of which are being reduced to lime,

and cement products.

On the road we read about the 5 million year-old limestone hill being destroyed by a Malaysian cement company, and reflected on all the small projects back home where we’ve used cement, as well as all the many times we have found alternatives.

While the massage chairs were broken in the bus, and were generally fairly uncomfortable, at least one provided the right nest for rest for Magpie.

And while the rail systems in both Indonesia and Malaysia are reliable and enjoyable to travel on, we’ve found that if you are travelling by bus, always expect the unexpected. The driver dropped us off in Pekan Simpang, and not where our ticket stated.

We protested (must have been Woody’s reactionary yellow t-shirt that got us going), saying we booked a ticket to Taiping, the next town. The driver shrugged and rudely said, “You get a car.” Which is how we arrived here, at the Knight Alley Hotel in Taiping.

Woody and Patrick tucked Meg into bed and went exploring.

Taiping is known as the rainy town, but it was warm and dry, and the buildings fascinating.

There’s significant juxtaposition between wealth and poverty, arrogance and humility, imposition and makeshift spirit here.

Wherever the locals gather for meals is a sure bet there’s goodly food on offer. “I’ll take your picture, dad,” said Woody.

Woody and Patrick dined in one of the food halls in the main centre. It was bloody hot.

Chilli pan mee for Patrick, a glutton for punishment, and a fermented chicken bun for the boy.

We love the food here, and the endless trip hazards in the streets that keep us alert and watchful,

After our meals we tripped into a fruit store to buy some dinner for Meg. The fruit bat got to work, hand selecting golden mangoes for his mum.

On the way back to the hotel we found this beautiful little offering.

We were later told that the offering was most likely made to the spirit of a tree that once stood on this street corner. The beauty of this gesture reminded us of our own European animist tradition – to touch or knock on wood, to wake up the gods or spirits living there, to bring forth luck or safe passage. Traces of this tradition remain in us today, carried by grandmothers and uncles, and poets like Blake and Wordsworth, who once penned, “One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can.”

Approximately 63% of the population of Malaysia practices Islam, 18% Buddhism, 8% Christianity, 6% Hinduism and 5% are other groups, which include animists, Confucianists, Taoists and Sikhs. To our minds, any spiritual practice that makes offerings to the spirits in trees that have been cut down, has our attention. Can we imagine if this was a major religious expression throughout the world? Oh, how our economic, political and cultural forms would radically change.

We left this lovely little non-tourist town, without experiencing the Taiping rain,

and were pleased we could travel the next leg by train.

It was a short trip, which included the practice of patience,

before we arrived in Butterworth, an industrial service town that powers Penang Island from the mainland.

We booked another $30 room high up in the clouds. We estimate we are spending around AUS $50 a day on this trip.

and while Meg did some office work to both fill back up the coffers and because she loves her meaningful work managing the Holmgren Design comms,

Patrick and Woody pursued their bourgeois lifestyle, and took a swim.

Woody is getting right into the spirit of this trip. When we first arrived in Dili he experienced significant culture shock. Now, several weeks on he is thriving.

In the late afternoon, we took a ferry across to Penang Island,

Woody practiced his photography,

Patrick too,

while Meg hung out with the bikies.

It was a short ride, and as none of us had eaten lunch, we stopped into this cosy shed for a snack.

The proprietor didn’t seemed that fazed by our late arrival.

While in Malaysia we’ve been dwelling on the phenomenon of the human blindspot. What have we been ignoring or are unable to see while we travel? The evidence now of scientific fraudulence and iatrogenocide in the Covid era is all around for anyone willing to investigate it. DNA contamination in the original mRNA shots is becoming a growing concern for scientists brave enough to study it, for example. We see it, hear and speak it. But it feels like the majority still prefer to actively unsee the lies, or defend them. Rather than sit in the sadness and horror of such masking (for what this means to human health and indeed civil rights), we’ve found it more important to ask, what are we averting our eyes from? What are we refusing to speak? What are we blocking our ears to?

It is the little things, the fledglings, the minutiae that inform this journey.

After we had a little moment with this chick, she hopped down from her perch and proceeded onto the road. We turned to see a man race over to her rescue, gather her up and return her to a safe place. After we’d photographed and admired the little bird, we’d turned away from her despite the obvious absence of a parent bird. The kindness of the rescuing man caused us to reflect on why we hadn’t done the same. In hindsight, it probably got down to touch. We were afraid of touching the chick, even us, confirmed terrain theorists. This event made us more aware of the greater caution we have to microbiology while travelling. While we are mostly eating street food and using tap water to clean our teeth, in the bid to train our microbiomes to co-evolve with our adventuring, we are at the same time applying the precautionary principle.

While in George Town on Penang Island, we met Tamanna and Adam, who are locals. Patrick and Meg teach on David Holmgren and Beck Lowe’s permaculture courses, both in-residence and online. Tamanna and Adam have booked in to the online PDC and Meg, in recent weeks, established a goodly email rapport with Tammana about the course. One thing led to another, which in turn led to us sharing an evening together. Adam led us to a lively street of food.

Where we were thrilled for his local knowledge.

He ordered many little tasting plates,

and the flavours were divine.

“Dinner is on us,” said Adam. We agreed with the condition we repay the generosity back in Australia. During this meal, Patrick was escorted to another realm,

into a nirvana of flavours and pleasure sticks.

We had such a special night with these two, reminding us how more enriching it is to be with locals of a place, who equally love simple and rich food culture.

The next day we headed north again,

catching a commuter train to the border,

where we had a few hours to reflect on our brief sojourn through the heart of Malaysia,

and where we beheld the switch from palm oil to rice agricultures,

and caught up with some sleep. Could someone please tape that mouth shut!

Then, before the day had begun to buzz, we were off the train,

and into a local initiative that takes people across the border in vans.

We lined up,

and were transported to the Thai border centre, where we went through immigration and customs without bother or money.

From there, we boarded a space ship to transport us to the next leg of our adventure…

 

 

Crossing the equator – the Jakarta to Batam moment

Jul 9, 2024 | adventure, children's learning, colonisation, community gardens, energy descent, human rights, Hypertechnocivility, politics, post-industrial thought, state violence, story, street food, toxins & pollutants, travel, Unschool | 55 comments

While the electrical experience in Jakarta was fascinating and relatively complex,

the hybrid smog from motor exhaust and cigarettes was heavy going.

We were very much part of the traffic; part of the problem; part of the toxicity. Since arriving in Dili and travelling west by land and sea to Jakarta, we’ve found that hitch hiking is impossible. There are taxi drivers on every street eager to pick up as soon as there’s the smallest intimation that a lift is required. It took about two hours in a cab from the railway station to drive about 20kms, grinding through one continuous traffic jam to where we’d booked a room for a few nights in an apartment building called the Casablanca East Tower.

A $30 a night room with this view.

Since we left Vincent in Surabaya, he being the final thread of relationship woven for us by Yanti way back in Dili, we are socially anchorless in Jakarta. We went in search of connection.

We explored back streets,

and street food warungs,

and were thankful for the delicious gastronomic arts of this city.

We loved the simplicity,

and flavours, and it was here Patrick fell in love with gado gado – an Indonesian salad served with a peanut sauce dressing.

We beheld richness in the poorer suburbs,

and a green emptiness in the bourgeoise ones.

Afternoon storms became a pattern while we were in Jakarta, and we got caught out in one.

Coming across a truck selling sweet potato, our cold climate farming bodies dreamt up crop trials for this coming summer. If tuber vegetables can replace cereals at home, we are another step closer to unshackling from monocultures. While this may sound eco-ideological, it was actually our love of sweet potato for breakfast at Ego and Yanti’s where this desire grew.

We came across a man repairing shoes on the street. Patrick handed his over, and we walked on for a while,

exploring streets inhabited by the transported abundance of Java’s rural productivity,

and stopping here and there to savour the goodly fare.

Between deluges the cobbler had glued, re-stiched and polished Patrick’s shoes. His handiwork cost a mere $3.50.

We were happy to spend a few nights in Jakarta getting high,

and getting down low,

and discovering communities growing food together,

such as Green Farm.

We were happiest in this city either playing music as a family, trying new foods or exploring productive gardens.

However, try as we did with the locals,

we really just consumed food, returned it to leaky, decrepit plumbing systems, and absorbed volumes of pollution. We also got fairly pissed off, at one point.

We booked a boat to the island of Batam, just south of Singapore, and had to stay another night in Jakarta before it set off late the following night. So we took another room in an apartment building. At 9am, dressed and ready to explore the neighbourhood, we caught a lift to the ground floor, only to find we couldn’t get out. We went back up the elevator to a number of floors to try to get help and understand what was going on. One man we met told us people are locked in the building until 10am. WTF! Incredulous, we descended to the basement, budged open a door, and after stumbling around in the dark entered an apocalyptic passageway,

which led to an underground carpark that had no lighting. After a little orientation we came across a bolt of natural sunlight descending into this creepy underworld, indicating a road out. As we entered daylight and approached the security guards lingering at the laneway behind the building – thinking they were going to chastise us for leaving before 10am – Patrick started penning this message on the translation app:

It read: “You cannot incarcerate people in a building against their will, it is an abuse of human rights.” But the guards looked unfazed as we drew up next to them, so we walked on, away from that strange moment into the mayhem of street life, where we practiced the art of crossing busy roads,

by doing what the locals do – walk out in front of the traffic, gesturing to motorists to slow down or stop. We crossed many roads during the morning looking for an op-shop to buy Woody a t-shirt. He’s a fast growing boy, especially in the tropics.

The roads are anarchical here; they hold their own flow and logic,

and while there are few footpaths and everyone seems to drive anywhere they can, including against the traffic, it is not entirely impossible to be a pedestrian.

On our last afternoon in Indonesia’s capital we reflected on the city and its future in an energy descent reality.

There’s a makeshift spirit here and an absence of safetyism that will likely aid residents, and while the examples of retrosuburban farming we saw in the wealthier parts of Jakarta may well keep producer knowledges alive, the infrastructure collapse that is already advanced in this metropolis, could undermine any such resilience.

In our final hours in Jakarta we played music, and slept and swam,

before joining the traffic, again, to the port, to board this boat, the KM Kelud.

We’d wanted economy tickets for both the affordability and sociability but they’d sold out, so we paid for lodgings in bunk rooms.

$70 per bunk for a 40 hour voyage, and all meals included.

We found we were again the only caucasian travellers on the boat sans one young couple, perhaps Dutch, who had no thirst to converse and held a permanent look of worry in their faces. Without any phone signal, our translation app was rendered useless so we defaulted to body language with fellow passengers, were invited many times to make selfie, and practiced what little Indonesian we’ve gathered.

After several weeks of travelling west, we are now heading north again.

On the way to the port the taxi driver warned us about our belongings both at the port and on the boat. We have heeded such advice along the way, and used the lockers provided on the boat, however, neither in Jakarta nor on this boat have we felt unsafe.

We spent July 6 at sea on Indonesian waters, crossing the equator. July 6 is an important day for both Indonesians and West Papuans, as it marks the anniversary of the Biak massacre of possibly hundreds of West Papuans by the Indonesian army, 26 years ago (as Alison Bevege reports). A US mining giant, Freeport, and the Indonesian government make considerable wealth from their joint colonial project in West Papua.

There is no getting away from it, colonisation is insidious. It is in this boat. It is in the food on this boat. It is the fuel powering this boat. Industrial civilisation is nothing more than extravagant displays of colonialism rebranded as global development. While the machine of Empire sets out to conquer and destroy, perhaps all we have as a meaningful antidote is connection, even at 3am when this photo was taken. (From left Jernih, Meg, Shanty and Wenti).

Around 2.30am as we approached Batam our fellow bunk bedders’ phones came to life. It had been an enjoyable 36 hours without signal, but all that changed in the early hours. Phone addiction is next level in Indonesia. It was a media frenzy and we just went along for the ride.

The blurriness of us compared to Jernih and her husband speaks not only of device foreshortening but also of how tired our lil family felt in this moment.

Both nights on the boat our sleep was disturbed with multiple comings and goings of people, as well as their pre-downloaded media, which was played at full volume throughout the night.

We had perhaps vague, even romantic notions of an island oasis before arriving in Batam,

only to find a fully industrial port city,

where the empire had long since come, and dumped its shit.

There were remnants of ecological culture on the street. The indigenous mob here has been reduced to just 5 remaining Orang Darat people.

A culture replaced by a civilisation that has little regard for life.

These practical baskets made us laugh thinking about the local council back home, neatly ticking their sustainability boxes, rolling out ever more coloured plastic bins to the streets to organise (and hide) the various wastes of we residents.

Once again, the pollution was overwhelming in this city, whether it be cigarette smoke, burning plastic waste,

or motor fumes, which sat as an unpleasant smog above this produce market.

Motor bikes and scooters bellowed fumes across all the lovely food tables. The antioxidant medicine of chilli almost negated by the immune wrecking smog.

We bought salak, banana and longans,

and we booked another $30 room for two nights. Patrick slept for two days as he is struggling most with the pollution, while Meg went on little exploratory journeys into the city with Woody, and researched the next leg.

A big part of this trip is to put ourselves in situations where we are out of our comfort zones, to have our Magpie and Blue Wren feathers ruffled, and our Blackwood branches shaken. We are here to learn, to be jimmied open. There are things we keep learning over and over about ourselves. That we are creatures of place, creatures of a sacred Mother Country. This trip is not open ended, and although we are travelling slowly in industrial terms, we are moving quite swiftly towards India. Where we can, we are trying to stay put in one place so we have time and spaciousness to explore where we are, from the inside out. We love markets, hot food warungs, and produce stores, and understanding how other people do food.

The lesson we keep learning over and over is that we are not city people. The hustle and bustle overwhelms us and again and again we gravitate to the backstreets. The side alleys, the quieter moments. Gardens and green spaces, where our lungs and souls can breathe. We are grateful to the cities for enabling our transit, but we don’t understand what they are for and why people choose to live in such places. But that’s of course a long civilisational story, which is different for each of us.

So, here we are. Open and willing to learn, feeling the estrangement while trying to see the beauty of every moment.

For the fruiting, ferrying, vomiting, gifting and train travelling love of Indonesia

Jul 3, 2024 | adventure, agriculture, children's learning, creative frugality, culture, economics, government, locavorism, parenting, praise, raising boys, story, subsistence economy, toxins & pollutants, uncapitalised food, Unschool | 49 comments

We left Amá Mar and Apá Yan’s home for the Indonesian border with a pod of family members and local villagers who were going to spend the day at the beach. On the last night in this warm and loving home, Yanti, Thaddeus and Bella came to stay. Yanti has been such a big help in the organisation of our travels since we left Dili, for which we are so appreciative. Thank you Yanti and all your family and adopted kin for making us feel so at home in Timor-Leste.

Our farewell was emotional. We’ve made so many connections over the past week or so, and we extended warm invitations to many to visit us in Australia.

Then, when all the hugs and waves and bondias (good mornings) and obrigadu/as (thank yous) and nadas (not at all) ran out, we were off in a little black pickup,

driving on roads that were in various stages of construction and deconstruction, the latter due to the common floodings in the wet season. Buildings too along our path were at various stages of their lifespan.

It was good to be travelling under a tarp with natural air conditioning because Patrick was heavy with cold symptoms for the second time this trip. Before we left we wondered whether we could find a place to rest for several days, as he was fairly run down. We are all still adjusting to the relentless heat, which is exhausting for we cold climate loving folk. Siestas, when we can take them, have been a godsend.

As it’s the dry season, everywhere cows free range on the soured stubble of the last rice harvest.

After about an hour or so in the pickup we arrived in Balibo, a town where five Australian journalists were killed in 1975 by pro-Indonesian militia.

Amá Mar came with us to check out this little museum dedicated to that grief story, which still touches our home town as one of the five, Tony Stewart, has family there. Tony was just twenty years old when he died.

The people of Timor, before European settlement, were not divided between east or west. They were, and, to a large extent still are, people of land, and therefore of ritual and ceremony, whose remnant traditional buildings still hold the traces of an earth-honouring and aesthetically astute culture.

While thankfully invading armies have stopped assaulting Timorese people, environmental pollutants brought in by colonising industries are killing the country in more insidious ways. While subsistence to local market economies remain strong, and are probably the reason why there is little obesity and type-2 diabetes here,


we have seen the many tendrils of the global greed machine at work in this beautiful country, and we hope the Timorese people will continue to fight for their independence from all forms of colonisation. Before lunch we arrived at the border,

said goodbye to our fellow travellers,

and were escorted to the start of our visa transfer process. Farewell Amá Mar and granddaughter Domin!

and farewell dear Timor-Leste!

On the other side of the line we were met by Yanti’s brother, Agus, who led us into Indonesia,

where we went through another visa process, which, as in Timor-Leste, was relaxed, and a stunning constrast to the increasingly paranoid corporatised nanny-state some call Australia. We’re happy to attest we didn’t bring to Indonesia paranoia or fear, but instead we walked through the metal detecting threshold with our knives on our hips, (after being told it was fine), dwindling stores of kangaroo and rabbit jerky, openness in our hearts, and

our trust for what comes next.

Agus took us into the town centre of Atapupu to change currency,

before backtracking us to his family home in Silawan. Seated here with us is Agus’ wife Anita (far left) and neighbourhood friends.

After school Alfan, Anita and Agus’ eldest child (13), and Woody (11) met, much to the hilarity of the younger kids.

It was a sweet moment of connection. We have come across no fellow caucasian visitors or residents in this part of the world. We met a few westerners in Dili, but have seen no others on our trip outside Australia, so far.

We are a bit of a novelty in these parts and everywhere we go what we find to be novel and interesting is often amusing for the locals. Meg and Patrick haven’t travelled overseas in the mobile phone age, and our snaps back then weren’t as instantly interactive and shareable as they are now.

In the afternoon, Agus took us for a walk around his village, where we met a man and his monkey,

and where we beheld this beautiful doe goat, who we’d love to cross with our buck, Hawthorn,

and we spoke with neighbours growing, tending and drying all manners of food, including cassava.

We returned home to this exquisite dinner made by Anita. Rice, fish, chicken, vegetables and always, always fermented chilli and lime. Sooo good!

The continual grace and generosity people offer us only grows our gratitude the deeper we go into this journey.

The myth that humans are selfish and narrow self-interested is promulgated by the ruling classes and their quasi-intellectual stooges, who are blind to other values and lifeways due to the social circles they keep. Think Noah Harari and Steven Pinker, for example. While some folk buy into the myth of the selfish gene, most don’t and their souls are very much intact as a result.

Agus lost his employment as a driver due to the Covid measures of his government. He had to sell his car, and economically things have been very hard since. One villager, Torie, who was keen to hang out and practice her English, told us “People didn’t suffer from Covid here, they suffered from the health measures.”

But rather than see themselves as victims, Agus and Anita’s home life speaks of a loving resilience inseparably connected to people and place,

a home life without running water, where they forego their own bedroom for strangers passing through.

After bean cakes and Timor-Leste coffee for breakfast, Agus loaded up his friend’s car with backpacks and people and all six of us headed off to Kupang at 7am.

The roads are on the whole smoother in Indonesia, but nonetheless the average speed we travelled was only around 40kms/hr. We were happy for this slowness. It’s not only conducive to animals, cyclists, tourists and the longevity of vehicles, but friendlier for pedestrians too.

On more internal matters, our microbiomes have been in radical transformation since we left home. Constant changes in our diets and body temperatures have rearranged our guts and not necessarily for the worse. Patrick and Meg have been eating much chilli and seeking out tuber vegetables such as sweet potato varieties, taro and cassava. There are always a bounty of bananas to collect, and we’ve all been trying to steer clear of fried foods because, as we reported in a previous post, cooking with vegetable oils longterm is a fairly reliable path to cancer. The confluence of nutritious foods and industrial contaminants mix in our bodies, and the toxins are either getting sweated out in the intense heat of the afternoons, or end up in one of these, which we’re getting more adept at using.

As we travelled we saw many examples of subsistence garden agriculture, as well as much uncultivated land, and therefore much potential for radical economies of place to grow from.

We stopped for a delicious lunch with Agus and fellow remaining passenger, Vincent, who was, like us, heading to Kupang to catch the ferry to Surabaya. We absolutely love Indonesian food.

Despite the fried parts (which would be fine if they were cooked in ghee or animal fats), such simple and delicious road food is very affordable costing just AU$14 for five hearty meals and tea. Imagine if we could get this quality of food with no plastic at a truck stop in Australia!

We drove on for another few hours passing many examples of local food and energy productions,

until we arrived at Yanti’s sister’s home. Tilde and her husband, Ady, welcomed us into their beautiful home and replenished us with dried bananas and hot tea.

From left in the above image is daughter of the house, Ningsih, mother Tilde, then to the right of Artist as Family, neighbour Ardy and father Ady. Using a translation app has been a godsend since arriving in Indonesia. For many of the people we are meeting, a foreigner is a very rare thing and an app has allowed us to speak across languages and share stories. Our hosts were informed that we are travelling with instruments and we were invited to play. After we shared a song, Ady and Tilde replied with a favourite of theirs, accompanied by their son, Lodri, on guitar. As a family who plays music together, this was super lovely to behold.

At Ady and Tilde’s home we continued to receive generous hospitality and delicious food.

We adults are particularly loving the vegetable dishes, and Woody could practically live off rice, chicken and fresh cucumber, which came out from the kitchen a moment after this photo was taken.

Woody has become quite the hit with the young women we are meeting, who shyly ask whether they can take a pic or two with him for their Instagram pages. He reluctantly and awkwardly agrees.

In just one sweet hour together our families had bonded.

Trust, grace, generosity and openness are infectious qualities, and Tilde and Ady’s home flowed with them.

We got back into Agus’ borrowed car-for-hire, and followed a banana truck further west,

until we landed at a fruit shop, where fruit bat Woody really brought out his amorous side.

The boy takes his fruit pretty seriously.

Night came in fast, as it does here, and we finally descended on the port at Kupang, where we farewelled dear Agus,

while we settled in for a four hour wait to board the ferry to Surabaya.

At 10pm, after ingesting volumes of exhaust fumes outside the ferry terminal, hundreds of we tired folk piled through two small doors eager to get onboard. It was chaotic. We’re not sure what was the culprit – something he ate, tiredness, the all day car ride, or perhaps just the petroleum and cigarette fumes none of us could escape – but Woody vomited several times on a tree at the dock as we waited to get through the next threshold. “You’re supposed to vomit on the boat, Woody,” said Patrick. We adults were fairly cooked as well, and somewhat delirious with fatigue.

Then, about thirty minutes later the call was announced, the wide gates opened and we were rushed onboard, a collective slug of people starting to fill the hull. We knew we shouldn’t dilly, though at this moment we didn’t know why.

It turned out that our tickets, like many others, were for ‘no seats’ for a 78 hour voyage, and fellow no-seats-folk (several hundred of us) were eagerly taking up little patches of carpet to make home for the journey. This photo was taken just moments after Woody vomited into a rubbish bin. The boat was still docked in the port.

He then promptly passed out, and eventually so did his parents. This tripodded image (taken early the next morning) is effectively how we spent the night, sans Patrick’s shoes and any available floor room.

Woody woke very pale and,

gingerly, he entered the noisy, busy fray of the morning, as Patrick made tea.

But the boy had slept, and this is our best medicine on the road, as indeed it is at home. He quickly came back into himself after a breakfast of fruit and the last of our oats, before Vincent came around and offered to give Woody a tour of the boat.

while Meg and Patrick connected with those sweet souls we slept beside and near. Instead of fighting over scarce real estate, people made room and connections.

On the middle day of our three night journey, an anniversary poem flowed out of Patrick, which we shared. There is something conducive to creativity when everything is stripped back to a vast ocean,

and all one has to do is sleep, converse with fellow travellers,

try their traditional foods, such as this Shabu rice preserved with the sugar taken from the Lontar palm and wrapped in a banana leaf,

catch up with correspondence (when there is signal), or stare mindlessly at the innumerable screens playing B-grade films in languages both spoken and subtitled that we don’t understand. We are so impressed how Indonesian people can sleep anywhere, and we’re learning to do this too, sleeping under bright lights and a cacophony of chatter, laughter, hacking coughs, loud phone media and crying babies.

The plastic pileups on this voyage, and indeed since leaving Australia, have been the most depressing aspect of our journey so far. So many banana leaves and rich fermentation and preserving traditions here, though sadly people have been steered down a path of convenience by the plastic industrial complex.

To combat our participation in this tragedy of Grandmother Gaia and her oceans, we’ve kept topping up our bulk food stores as we travel and we bought as much fruit with us as we could carry onto the boat, including watermelon, bananas, papaya, longons and salak. Salak is also called snake fruit due to the scale-like skin, and also memory fruit. As Indonesian traditional (or peoples’) medicine reports, it improves memory and brain function, no doubt due to its high levels of beta-carotene, potassium and pectin, which can improve blood flow to the brain.

Over the month we’ve been away, Woody has been taking his own photos on his little camera and writing regular journal entries. He has also been a keen editor of this blog, reminding us of things we’ve left out.

This three day passage began with vomiting and trepidation, but fairly soon we were thankful for all the connections we made, and the new foods we tried because of those connections, such as this traditional homemade food from Sumba incorporating nuts and banana. Yum!

We were also grateful we bought the cheapest tickets, as we found out the more expensive ones would have put us in these sardine cans.

Give us that floor of interweaving bodies any day! We came into Surabaya on the island of Java at around lunch time on the third day, took a final journey to the upper deck with Vincent,

passed by, with wide open eyes, the mountain of anthropogenic waste amassed in just 24 hours since the last port stop, (similar, no doubt, to an afternoon spectacle at the MCG back in Australia),

and alighted the ferry into the heat and haze of the afternoon.

We booked a AU$42 room 40 minutes by car from the ferry terminal. With cyclist guilt, caught a taxi there for AU$20, which we found out was about twice the going rate. The pedal-powered and heat-intense mobility we saw from the domesticity and AC of the cab reminded us of our previous adventures. There are different challenges with this journey.

Indonesia, gratefully, is much cheaper than Timor-Leste, whose currency is in US dollars. For an Australian family who lives well below the poverty line (that is, in money terms), we are both grateful for and mindful that this frugal adventure can occasionally bring a little more comfort.

We hadn’t washed for days, our clothes were putrid, and we longed for cold water. The apartment building provided.

On the street outside our apartment, a laundry business washed, dried and folded our clothes for around AU$4, and a five minute walk brought us to a little nasi goreng warung (fried rice roadside stall), where we bought dinner for AU$6. The meal was delicious. We’ll spare you another family selfie or food porn pic. We passed out early, woke early, and as we had to get across town before 8am, hailed another cab.

Taking selfies for social media isn’t ordinarily a cultural practice for our family, but since arriving in Timor and now Indonesia, it has become an everyday thing. Sunsr (sunset), our driver, wanted to “make selfie” with us. How could we refuse such a happy fella??

Patrick regrets he didn’t get the number of Sunsr’s dentist. At the conversion rate here, we might just be able to afford an implant or two. Not for the missing front tooth – Patrick loves his well-earned pirate face – more on the sides where numerous missing teeth make it difficult to chew. In Australia, for our overseas readers, we have universal healthcare called Medicare, though something our family doesn’t use, and thus doesn’t draw public money from, because of the way we live and because we don’t trust the medical industrial complex. Dentistry, however, something we would ues, isn’t covered by Medicare, at least in real terms. Meaning low income folk can get only rudimentary dental work done if they wait a year or so, but they cannot seek out a dentist they trust or who comes recommended. For decades, a lobby of dentists has pressured the government to make sure dentistry isn’t covered by Medicare, and so proper teeth doctoring remains a luxury treatment. Pulling out teeth when a problem arises has been the only affordable treatment for us, and more recently we’ve developed practices of self-applied dental work, which we’ll share in a future post at some stage. It’s not a big thing, we are happy neopeasants who make-do to keep ourselves free from economic slavery, but we are keeping open the possibility of dental work while on this journey, so if you have any hot tips for goodly dentists in Asia, please let us know.

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Cities are not really the point of this journey. We are not the sort of tourists who seek out cities and their sights. Instead, we’re much more curious about farming practices, socio-ecological relationships, food and cultural habits, rituals and ceremony, stories and songs, and technologies that keep both bodies and Mother Country well.

At 7.15am we arrived at the railway station, found a stall that served black coffee,

and boarded a train to Jakarta.

This all-day train journey brought us into contact with the extent of small farming practices in Java. Field after field grew rice, taro, cassava, banana, cabbage, corn, sweet potato, bok choy, various alliums and a plethora of other crops we couldn’t identify from the train.

Unsurprisingly, rice is the dominant crop. Even in the dry season there is abundant water here, to flood field after field of this staple monoculture. We witnessed the use of herbicides in the rice fields, but unlike the broad-acre, boom spraying regimes of conventional agriculture back in Australia, small-scale farmers here frugally spot spray weeds by foot and with backpacks. Not ideal, especially for we neopeasants who avoid growing and eating sprayed monocultural crops back home, but a far more superior farming method in comparison to US agribusiness colonialism, so reliant on dumping endless tonnes of pesticides into the world.

As we approach Jakarta, we are reminded of the warnings about this city people have shared with us along the way. Yanti told us to keep a careful watch on Woody as child trafficking exists in this mega city of 10.5 million people. Others told us theft is big and we’ll need to be careful of our belongings. This is all curious to us because we have felt so safe on this journey so far, despite the hitch-hiking in Australia and despite being virtually the only folk of our ethnicity we’ve seen since leaving Darwin.

As we have moved west from Timor-Leste, where the dominant religion is Catholicism, to the island of Java, where the dominant religion is Islam, we have felt the social functionality formal religions bring to people’s lives. Yes, we understand the colonial threads of these newer religions, but have observed such a deep cherishing of them here. For us, we feel much more aligned to the older animist practices we have witnessed on our travels, because of the centrality of earth story rather than sky god honouring .

For society to function, for there to be peace and respect, people need a story. We have not been judged for ours, which is neither Christian nor Muslim, rather we’ve been embraced and cared for. Where our stories overlap with people, there is always humility, intrigue and gratitude. Our family’s big universal story, the story we serve so as we don’t require the use of a formal religion or unconsciously default to the cult of materialism, centres on the sacredness, abundance and teachings of Grandmother Gaia and Mother Country. So our big story goes a little like this: If we serve the communities of life that make more life possible, if we are the humus-informed participants of the materiality and physics of life source, and we honour, give to and receive from the living and dying of the worlds of the world, then so much more than ourselves can leap forward into more divine life, and our spirits and souls can dance with abundance and sing more fruit into being.

Sitting on a diesel powered train, using a rare-earthed mined laptop, and eating food we don’t know the origin story of, might seem a trillion miles from such an earth-honouring cosmology, and it truly is. However, unless we have a story that we love, a story we can cherish for its possibility, how can we move to where our souls want to lead us?