Jason Devitt

Even Uluru, the Rock formerly known as Ayer’s, is diminished by mass tourism. There are crowds of chattering tourists at the designated scenic photo spots, who just flew in for the day from Sydney or Tokyo, and ask each other loudly what all the fuss is about.

For it is, undeniably, just a big old rock.

To appreciate Uluru’s splendid isolation, you need to take your time getting there. After a few thousand kilometers of nothing, the largest rock in the world can’t help making an impression. Context is everything.

There is also an easy way to escape the crowd, and that is to walk around the rock. Perfectly flat but ten kilometers long, the hike is too much for most visitors, and for part of it we seemed to have Uluru to ourselves. If you take your time, there really is something magical about the size and the solitude and the endless patterns in the surface of the rock, patterns that appear and disappear and change color with the light.

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Uluru was handed back to its traditional owners in 1985, and the visitors’ center has a good overview of the local Aboriginal culture and the traditions that surround the rock. But there is no explanation of the geology. In a 36-page guide to Uluru, one half of one page contains a brief account of current thinking, along with a reminder that this is just the ‘western’ account of Uluru.

As Uluru is unique, the geology is fascinating: it involves a collision between India and Australia, an ancient inland sea, and a hell of a lot of erosion. Our tour guide made an excellent attempt to explain all this by drawing a map of Australia in the dirt, scooping up soil to illustrate mountain formation and pouring a bottle of water over his model to suggest the inland sea.

Unfortunately, we had two people in our group whose Christian faith led them to question conventional geology, and who were armed with stock lines like "that’s a theory, not a fact, right?" Our guide lacked the scientific training to deal with questions like these, and many people were left confused.

You can make the case that Uluru is one of the few places where indigenous people can tell their stories to the exclusion of all others - including Genesis. But most people have a very limited understanding of science, and I believe that’s a much bigger problem for all of us - because it leads to poor decisions by individuals and by governments on issues like education, healthcare, and the environment, as well as economic planning. The traditional owners of Uluru are squandering an opportunity to educate millions of people. I guess that is their right.

For six days we zig-zagged north from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It’s about 1,500 kilometers, but our scenic route took us over 3,000. Amid all the nothingness there’s quite a lot to see - the Flinders and McDonnell mountain ranges, the underground town of Coober Pedy, King’s Canyon, Kata Tjuta, and Uluru. But there is an awful lot of nothing.

Although there are landscapes like this in America, there is nowhere so vast and so thinly populated. Every 100 km or so we’d encounter a roadhouse, basically a service station with a bar attached, some of which boasted communities of up to 30 - yes 30 - people living around them. They have all merged into one in my mind.

In the store, three elderly ladies are run off their feet trying to serve five customers. "It’s like Grand Central Station in here," says one. It isn’t. Stuck for something to read, I browse the magazine rack. My choices are Just Trucks, Truckin’ Life, Big Rigs (which is not a porn magazine but ought to be), and Barely Legal (which is not a magazine about unroadworthy trucks but ought to be). A self-published book by a local preacher explains Australia’s contribution to the founding of Israel, which will assure her children their place in heaven. Inside Spuds - the restaurant cum bar - the truckers dine alone. They are potato-shaped men: round, tapered at one end, white where their skin is peeling, wearing shapeless t-shirts and tight shorts, cut to the groin. A notice says that five of the eleven local residents are barred from the pub for three months. Out back there is a giant wooden echidna. And everywhere there are flies, flies that have all mislaid something valuable inside your left nostril and need to find it, urgently.

Australia and the U.S. have a lot in common. Britain used to transport convicts to America until the Revolution, and only then switched to Australia. Australia is roughly the same size as the lower 48. Both countries were colonized by mainly English-speaking people, starting with the east coast. But today there are fifteen times more people living in the U.S. than Australia.

In both countries, the 19th century was a period of westward exploration and expansion. Pioneers in both countries dreamed of finding an inland sea, navigable rivers, and fertile land. Those who travelled west of the Mississippi found a land of incredible bounty. Those who travelled west of New South Wales found an awful lot of this.

The iconic explorers of the American west are Lewis and Clarke: travel overland to the Pacific and back, map the American West, describe 300 new species of plants and animals.

The iconic explorers of the Australian outback are Burke and Wills: march north from Melbourne with too much equipment, abandon it as you go, leave most of your team camped in the middle of nowhere and strike out alone with no real plan, fail to reach the sea, bungle all attempts to communicate with the rest of the team, run out of food and water, and die, miserably, in the desert.

Which is not to say that there’s no life here. There’s spinifex and salt bush and gum trees. There are more species of reptile than anywhere else on earth, and dozens of birds. There are marsupial versions of mice, rats, and rabbits, and even more of their placental cousins. We saw wild emus and kangaroos, feral camels and horses, and domestic sheep. But before the Europeans arrived, the indigenous life supported an indigenous human population of only half a million, and the best technology that Europeans could bring from elsewhere has raised that to just twenty million.

Geography is (manifest) destiny.

At the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, there is a large collection of Australian landscape paintings. An environmental group has produced a pamphlet that uses these paintings to show how drastically European settlers have altered the landscape in 200 years, by clearing forests and introducing many new species of plants and animals. That’s very interesting, but incidentally the pamphlet also shows how people’s appreciation of the Australian landscape has changed over the same period. The first artists painted fields and gardens full of European trees and flowers, planted by homesick settlers. The bush and the gum trees show up indistinctly in the background. Later they started painting the native plants, but made the eucalypts look more graceful, like good European trees. Finally, in the middle of the last century, artists began to celebrate the great emptiness for its own sake, and so did everyone else.

The sublime is the eye of the beholder.

We have gone without TV, newspapers, or Internet access for several days, so we only learned about the earthquake in Yogyakarta today. We were there at the beginning of April, and the city was clearly suffering from the downturn in tourism. Our guide at Prambanan hoped that things would improve soon. Instead, things couldn’t have gotten any worse. More than 5,000 dead, Prambanan and the royal palace heavily damaged, and Merapi is still rumbling. Please help if you can: Oxfam is one of many agencies providing emergency relief.

A winery in the Yarra Valley, just outside Melbourne, on the sunniest day we spent in Victoria.

Melbourne is a graceful Victorian city with a temperate climate. That is to say, it felt like we were spending a cold, wet week in London. Great food, wine, and beer, friendly people who call you mate all the time, shopping, theatre (their International Comedy Festival was on), fine architecture, a veteran’s parade (it was ANZAC day), the Queen’s head on all the coins, dull skies, chills, and a little drizzle. If it weren’t so spread out - Melbourne, like most American cities, grew up in the age of motorized transport - I’d have sworn we were in London.

We started our Aussie trip in Melbourne at random; it was the first flight available when we decided to leave Indonesia. We loved the Aquarium, and Federation Square, and the Aboriginal art at the Ian Potter Centre, and strolling up and down Brunswick Street. But after five months in South-East Asia Melbourne was such a first-world oasis that I soon wanted to get out. It felt as if we’d come home early. Summer did not miss the mosquitoes, squat toilets, and bird flu as much as I did, but she was 10°C/18°F colder than she had been in Indonesia, and that’s well below her recommended operating temperature.

We decided not to travel up the densely populated east coast. That seemed too much like an American road trip. Instead we wanted to head west into the outback, to see a landscape that is unique to Australia. So we booked an ‘adventure tour’, a coach trip that promised a meandering ten-day journey to the centre of the continent, with lots of stops along the way for hiking and sightseeing. I thought that it would be more of an adventure to drive ourselves but Summer objected on a technicality: she did not want to die in the desert.

Two pieces of advice if you are ever go to Melbourne (which you should). One, go in summer - theirs, not ours. And two, as we discovered while waiting for our bus out of town, if you need a transvestite hooker, go to Carlisle street in the suburb of St. Kilda’s. But go early, they quit at 7 a.m.

The first thing that we noticed when we travelled from South-East Asia to Australia was a quite remarkable drop in the number of Asian people.

Everywhere you see European faces, English street names and pubs and meat pies, Greek restaurants, and Italian cafes. 30% of Australians claim Irish ancestry. John Howard visited Dublin this week and said "coming [to Ireland] is part of the journey of being an Australian Prime Minister."

It only takes a few days to sail from Indonesia to Australia. Intrepid researchers have shown that the first Australians could have drifted there from Timor on bamboo rafts. Aboriginal Australians had been trading with people from Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for a thousand years before Europeans stumbled across the great southern continent. Some Aboriginal people may have been living in Indonesia in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived.

But today there are no passenger ships that sail from Indonesia to Australia. There aren’t any cheap flights either. Terrorism is one factor, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon and not confined to Indonesia.

Here’s another way of looking at it. About 8 million people migrated from Mexico to the U.S. between 1990 and 2002, just counting the ones who filled in a census form. In the last ten years, only thirty thousand people have migrated from Indonesia to Australia. Allowing for the big difference in total population, that’s still twenty Mexicans entering the U.S. for every Indonesian who entered Australia.

I am not suggesting that America’s current relationship with Mexico is a model for Australia to follow (much less the EU’s relationship with Turkey and North Africa). I am just pointing out that the cultural distance between Australia and her nearest neighbors is much, much greater.

A celebrated book, The Tyranny of Distance, claims that the history of Australia has been driven by its sheer remoteness; geography is destiny, etc. etc. As if the country had only recently moved in next door, Indonesia is not mentioned until page 224. I asked a bookseller in Melbourne if he could recommend any books on Australia’s relationship with Asia. He laughed, and said nobody has written such a thing. (He was wrong, but there isn’t much. One book is simply titled The White Tribe of Asia.)

Australia - or at least its current administration - sees America as its most important partner in the world. By sending just 6,000 troops to Iraq, John Howard has minimized political risk at home while winning himself a state dinner at the White House. That’s a big deal - the Chinese President only got lunch.

But most Americans know less about Australia than they do about Europe, and that’s not much. Australians seem to realize that their most important relationships in the future will be with South-East Asia and China. But the gulf seems a lot wider than the Timor Sea.

After a week relaxing amid the rice terraces and hippies of Bali, Summer and I flew to Flores. Unlike Bali, Flores has never been a major tourist destination. I had booked the only hotel in the town of Labuan Bajo that could offer us hot water, and that hotel had eight rooms.

We’ve avoided flying on this trip as much as possible, but it would have taken four days to get to Flores by sea. And flying with the famously unreliable Merpati Airlines (unofficial slogan: "It’s Merpati and we’ll fly if we want to") was not routine jet travel.

As our little Fokker twin-prop banked and groaned and screamed over Lombok, Komodo, Rinca, and dozens of smaller islands, we had our first clear view of the Indonesian archipelago. It was one of those rare cloudless days when the land below looks exactly like it does in an atlas, bright patches of green surrounded by blue. The volcanic hills, lit from the side by the afternoon sun, looked like the little triangles that mapmakers once drew to suggest mountains.

And here be monsters. On Rinca, an hour by boat from Flores, we got to see Komodo dragons in the wild. (They are named for the island of Komodo, further to the west, but they live on Rinca too.) This one was a little over two meters long, old and sluggish. But they are typically three meters long, can run at 20 km/h, and if they bite you their viscous drool contains bacteria that will surely kill you, saving them the effort.

Here were hobbits too, once. The cave where scientists found the remains of homo floriensis is three hours’ drive from Labuan Bajo.

Indonesia probably contains many more wonders like these. Flores itself is remote and wild and unexplored, and half the size of Belgium. In West Papua earlier this year scientists reported finding a ‘lost world‘, an area of forest where it seems likely that no human had ever been before. A few previously unknown species of animals just walked up to them, out of curiosity.

The waters around Indonesia boast the greatest diversity of life on earth - a quarter of the world’s known species of fish live here. We spent several days diving off Flores with Ernest Lewandowski and his wife Kath Mitchinson, who have been running a dive shop there for almost 15 years.

Ernest is a soft-spoken Scot who spent many years as a commercial diver, repairing oil rigs in the North Sea. That meant working in freezing cold water, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, and taking two days to descend and a week to surface. For some reason he prefers living on a tropical island, studying nudibranchs, and teaching people to dive.

I am a Special Needs diver, and he did some remedial work with me. He told me that my kicks were too short and quick, when they should be long and slow.

Actually what he said was: "Lad, lad, ye’ve got to quit yer faerie dancing."

The dive sites we’d visited around Koh Tao were crowded, and the sheer number of people in the water drive the fish away. Cruising around the islands off Flores we could go a whole day without seeing another boat. Bottlenose dolphins swam alongside us, and we saw manta rays and turtles feeding at the surface. Underwater we saw crocodile and scorpion fish; humphead parrotfish; great schools of fusiliers; and in the distance, watching us watching it, a white-tipped reef shark. Candy-striped shrimp reached out to clean our nails, and Ernest’s beloved nudibranchs did whatever nudibranchs do. For me the highlight was sitting on the ocean floor, peeking around a wall of coral, and watching a meter-long puffer fish doing something that I can only describe as chewing the cud.

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At the little airport on Flores, as we prepared to leave Indonesia, Summer was puzzled by a poster asking for the public’s help in identifying the Bali bombers. She said that the photofit pictures of their faces looked distorted. I realized that they were photos of the bombers’ actual heads. They were decapitated when their backpacks blew up, and their expressions were frozen in pain. Not enough pain. The people of Bali and Flores and all of Indonesia deserve better than this.

Some people, particularly in Australia, speak of Indonesia as the Javanese Empire. This is a loaded term, intended to convey something malevolent and bound to collapse, but it gives a sense of Java’s importance. For most of its colonial and post-colonial history, power in Indonesia has been concentrated in Java, and power in Java has been concentrated in Jakarta.

It shows. Jakarta sprawls endlessly, with no center and no apparent planning. The heat and pollution make it impossible to walk anywhere, and the traffic makes it difficult to drive. The city is spreading across the western end of Java like a fast-moving glacier, and just as glaciers pile up rock and earth at their leading edge, Jakarta piles up slums. Given its size there is remarkably little for a visitor to see. We asked friends who live there. They couldn’t suggest anything. We left.

All right, there’s one place worth seeing. In the National Museum, there is a vast collection of artifacts from Indonesia’s 200-odd ethnic groups, all neatly arranged in tall, austere, Victorian display cabinets, and with almost no labels or commentary of any kind. Bewildered, Summer and I fell in with a group of ten women who were training to be tour guides. As the only man in the group, I was the butt of all jokes about matrilineal tribes and penis gourds.

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From the comfort of our first-class train seats, we saw the slums of Jakarta roll past; the volcanic spine of Java; our first rice terraces; a dozen cozy-looking small towns; and occasionally, glimpses of life in the cheap trains - freight cars with a bench bolted to each wall and, by way of air-conditioning, no doors.

Our next stop was Bandung, where we spent a few days with Johannes, an old schoolfriend of Summer, who was an excellent host. Bandung is a very fine provincial town, much liked by the Dutch, who planned to move the capital there from Jakarta. War and independence intervened, but the Dutch left behind something that I did not expect to find in Indonesia: one of the largest concentrations of art deco buildings anywhere in the world outside Miami. If you are a fan of this style, and we are, skip Jakarta and go to Bandung.

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Yogyakarta in Central Java is the gateway town for Java’s most important ancient monuments, Pramnaban and Borobodur, and for the volcano Merapi. But it also home to a Javanese Sultan, and thirty thousand people still live within the outer walls of the Kraton or palace of the Sultan. The photo above was taken at the Water Palace. From this vantage point Sultans in former times could watch their wives frolic in the pool below, and choose one or two to, er, dally with.

Indonesia is one of the most geologically active places on earth. There are active volcanoes all along the archipelago, and Merapi is one of the largest. I took this photo from our hotel room a few weeks ago; it was the end of the rainy season and too overcast to visit Merapi or Bromo or any of the other peaks while we were there. Today Merapi is on the brink of an eruption.

Borobodur is the largest Buddhist building on earth. (Angkor Wat is a Hindu temple.) Hinduism overwhelmed Buddhism in Java before Islam even arrived, and for several hundred years Borobodur lay buried under volcanic ash following a massive eruption of Merapi.

It’s a study guide for Mahayana Buddhism; each level represents a stage in the life of the Buddha, and the progression from ignorance to nirvana to parinirvana.

But Budi, our guide, was more interested in the fact that I am Irish and Summer is American.

"Ah, Westlife is from Ireland, no?"

For the benefit of American readers, Westlife is a boy band from Ireland that has never cracked the US, but is big everywhere else in the world. Three different Indonesian people invoked their name. But only Budi serenaded us, as we slowly climbed the steps of Borobodur.

"More than words / Is all you have to do / To make it real … my daughter loves Westlife you know … "

We passed elaborately carved scenes from the life of the Buddha, and I realized for the first time just how much the Mahayana Buddhists have elaborated on his original teachings - the Theravada school that is followed in Thailand and Cambodia.

"Then you wouldn’t have to say / That you love me / Cause I’d already know … in fact I am teaching her English using the lyrics of Westlife… "

It began to rain. It was one of the last storms of the season. As the wind and rain mounted and the stone became slippery, we climbed further, watching each step.

"What would you do / If my heart was torn in two … and I love America. My dream is to move there and to marry an American angel…"

On the upper terraces, 72 bell-shaped stupas concealed life-sized statues of the Buddha meditating. At the summit, a small chamber represented parinirvana: final nothingness. The storm rose, and we saw lightning. Our clothes were soaking wet.

"More than words to show you feel / That your love for me is real … Our children would be mixed race, and all the Indonesian pop stars are mixed race you see."

Summer and I thanked Budi for his time, and left Borobodur, Yogyakarta, and Java behind us.