First posted in August, 2009, but hav­ing come across it again, I’ve re-worked out why I moved to Bangkok. You for­get these things. This sort of mind-wrench used to hap­pen all the time. I loved large parts of Indone­sia — and still do — but the daily frus­tra­tions really grind at you.

Sit­ting in a cafe on Sat­ur­day and the cell­phone goes:

Hello

Hallo, Bapak Simon, ada paket (there is, or I have, a packet) (in a worked up way)

I reply:

Apa? Siapa ini? (what, who is this?)

He replies:

Ada paket (louder)

I reply:

Ada paket? Untuk saya? Dari? (what packet? For me? From?)

He replies:

Ada paket, ada paket, ada paket, ada paket (get­ting increas­ingly louder until he screams it)

He then hangs up.

I call the num­ber back.

I say who it is — in Indone­sian — he hangs up. I do this again. He hangs up.

The next day the phone goes again and a voice speaks — in Bali­nese I think, not Indone­sian (or maybe some sort of street mix) — very very quickly.

Pelan pelan says I (slowly.….)

Ada paket, ada paket, ada paket, ada paket he screams, increas­ingly agi­tated, then hangs up

The next morn­ing my phone goes again. It’s a nice woman from Tiki, the courier company.

Mis­ter Simon, we have a packet for you but the dri­ver could not find you.

Ahhh, the dri­ver. Clearly they don’t impart com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills or phone eti­quette at Tiki Central.

Please come to our office in Den­pasar, it is in Jalan Kapten Rebub. You must bring ID. You can not have it with­out ID. It is a hardy.

A hardy?

So, later, I check their web­site and, yes, it is listed as being in Jalan Kapten Rebub — num­ber one in fact. Easy. I look at the map: no such street. I look on google maps: no such street. I do a search on google and yep, here is a busi­ness marked as being on this street but at num­ber 5, and, yep you can clearly see it on the map, so I print out the map and head off.

The busi­ness in ques­tion is Den­pasar Tourism. Jalan Kapten Rebub, num­ber 5 — although on Google maps the street is with­out name.

Three hours later, hav­ing gone around in increas­ingly con­vo­luted cir­cles — in a one way sys­tem that after all these years of nav­i­gat­ing it, still beg­gars dis­be­lief & the appli­ca­tion of logic — and hav­ing tried to ring their office — no answer — I find Tiki, in a com­pletely dif­fer­ently named street. I find it by exclud­ing all other streets in the square kilo­me­tre one by one.

It’s the last street left unexplored.

I park, and wan­der in, to ask for Ibu Henny. Cus­tomer ser­vice, says the man in the rather grimy smoke filled (with plen­ti­ful no smok­ing signs) front office, and points towards a bunch of tan­gled bam­boo scaffolding.

Apa?

You must climb over it mis­ter. We are build­ing a new cus­tomer ser­vice office.

No — surely there is another way? Oh yes, go out­side and use the new door down the side. I do this — and dis­cover a one metre high hole smashed in the brick wall which I need to crawl through (easy if you are a small­ish Indone­sian, not so user friendly if you hap­pen to be a six foot one aging expat).

So, I crawl through to find Ibu Henny. This is not Jalan Kapten Rebub I say. Yes I know, it was long time before, says the young lady, hand­ing me my paket (a new hard drive I’d ordered a week ear­lier — the ‘hardy’).

After I’d crawled back out I realised that she for­got to ask for my ID.

The big Amer­i­can guy with a back­pack at the South­ern Bus Ter­mi­nal asked me if I was lost.

We can’t have tourists get­ting lost

I’m not a tourist I responded curtly.

What non­sense. Of course I’m still a tourist.

I could spend the rest of my life here and would still be a bloody tourist. And happily.

After almost six years in Indone­sia I was still a tourist there. I could speak the lan­guage of sorts, I had a bet­ter under­stand­ing of parts of the col­laps­ing road­ing sys­tem and the local geog­ra­phy than many local born Indone­sians in many of the regions I spent time in.

But I was still a tourist to the Indone­sians. I was still a tourist men­tally. Every bule I’ve ever met in Indone­sia is a tourist, and most espe­cially the ones who like to think they are not..the sad ones in Bali who adopt local dress and local names and wan­der around in some never never land. Eat, Pray, Dream on…

I’m not sure how one stops being a tourist — or if one ever can. My child, if born in Indone­sia, might have bet­ter claim, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the Dutch, many of whom came from fam­i­lies who had been there 300 years, were given two weeks to leave in 1949.

But, impor­tantly, the most Dutch never went from being fairly unpleas­ant colo­nial mas­ters to equals with the indige­nous peo­ples they exploited — or wanted to.

Three hun­dred years of exploita­tion, sup­pres­sion, oppres­sion, mas­sacre and worse does leave scars. I’m not sure Indone­sia will ever get over Holland’s rule.

Try men­tion­ing the Opium Wars in China and watch the reac­tion. The next gen­er­a­tion, and the gen­er­a­tions there­after, of Viet­namese are the ones who will raise the spec­tre of Hue and other bat­tles again. Asia rarely forgets.

I know West­ern­ers that carry Indone­sia pass­ports, born else­where — they are still tourists. ¹

Thai­land, never hav­ing had an extended period of West­ern exploita­tion, is slightly more ambiva­lent about for­eign­ers than its big­ger, more con­fused, south­ern neighbour.

But I’m still a tourist.

And yes­ter­day I was a tourist in effect. We were going to Ratchaburi.

I’ve resisted Ratch­aburi. Mostly because of the end­less offers to take me to the Float­ing Mar­kets, the main one of which is in that west­ern town, not far from Myan­mar (the town is about 1% Karen tribes-people) from the numer­ous dodgy taxi dri­vers tout­ing if I have the very rare mis­for­tune to find myself around Nana or the lower end of Sukhumvit ²(yes, within the bound­aries of BKK’s own tourist hell. I’m not/am a tourist).

How­ever this was work and, yes, thanks for offer­ing to help, but I do know my way around the fast, silly-cheap, mod­ern and con­ve­nient Thai bus inter­city sys­tem. It was about $2 each way, for a two hour trip and the price included a bot­tle of min­eral water.

Chur.

After pass­ing what seemed like a dozen or more Tesco/Lotus-hemmed mega malls, we crossed the bridge into the main Ratch­aburi drag and were tossed out at the cen­tral bus stop. Nobody tried to sell us any­thing. Nobody paid any atten­tion to us, we were just two farang arriv­ing on a bus.

On first impres­sions I liked the town. It was small, clean and tidy with the fast flow­ing Mae Klong River, brown and muddy, flow­ing through at some speed, drag­ging and deposit­ing green­ery on the banks and bridge pylons.

There was a float­ing beer gar­den but the walk­way had col­lapsed it. I hoped no-one was drink­ing on the thing or, worse, try­ing to stag­ger off, when the walk­way fell in. The Mae Klong River was not the sort of river I’d want to be in, sober or leg­less. And in Thai­land peo­ple do get legless.

Mostly I liked it because a day trip any­where is always an adven­ture. And a day trip any­where in Asia is an even big­ger adventure.

As much as I love the coun­try I was bought up, it’s pre­dictable. One of the joys of New Zealand is turn­ing a cor­ner and know­ing exactly what is around it. One of the joys of Asia is turn­ing a cor­ner and never know­ing what is around it. Even if you’ve turned that cor­ner a hun­dred times.

I’m ram­bling.

We had a map. The fac­tory in this lit­tle ceram­ics town ³ had given us a map. It was sim­ple. It showed the river, the rail­way, the cen­tral police sta­tion and the mall. How­ever maps are like cor­ners in Asia. You never quite know what you should expect from them. It looked like a few metres — a hun­dred at most. I showed a Tuk Tuk cab at the bus stop. He laughed and said jed sip baht. I drove him down to ha sip baht but still felt that while B50 was an improve­ment over B70, it was still far too much for a short drag up the main street.

What the hell.

We got in.

I’ve always won­dered why these almost excu­sively tourist traps, which is what tuk-tuks effec­tively are, are so bloody hard to get into if you hap­pen to stand over five feet tall. I twisted and pulled about 80% of my body in before the thing did a u-turn into oncom­ing traf­fic with my leg still hang­ing out, swing­ing per­ilously near to Honda vans we seemed close to nudg­ing. As we tipped around a cor­ner into a long-ish straight road of hard­ware and Plasma TV stores, bal­loon sell­ers and half-a-dozen mas­sive stuffed toy empo­ri­ums, I man­aged to get it fully in.

We are going exactly the wrong way I thought, map focused in mind. I thought I’d shut up. A one way sys­tem per­haps — like London’s — or Denpasar’s — where the best way to get to the desired point B is to go in exactly the oppo­site direction.

As we moved across the fairly neat town, past the big hos­pi­tal, then what looked like a uni­ver­sity but I soon worked out from the signs ⁴was one of those mas­sive evan­gel­i­cal stick-your-self-righteous-nose-in insti­tu­tions that wack-de-wacko Amer­i­can cre­ation­ists plonk all over the planet, I realised that Rat­ach­aburi has two main roads, both with rivers, rail­ways and police sta­tions (actu­ally the same river and railway).

We rat­tled and bumped along for half an hour before we found our­selves plonked on the edge of a six lane high­way just out­side the city lim­its. The show­room was down an orderly dri­ve­way. The man in the tuk-tuk pointed inwards and then quickly reversed out, leav­ing us to walk hope­fully into an expand­ing groomed but trop­i­cal expanse.

There was no-one there. The only build­ings were a pad­locked office and spot­less stand­alone loo block. We found our­selves wan­der­ing amongst sev­eral acres of highly and brightly coloured large pots and ceramic sculp­tures set in the grass, the streams and the over­grown trop­i­cal foliage. Kinda like a minia­ture ver­sion of Laos’ Plain of Jars on acid and with­out the US bombloads ⁵ and their awful heritage.

Even­tu­ally some­one found us wan­der­ing amongst the jars and invited us into a large build­ing amongst the bush. It looked like a Nis­sen hut in the jungle.

Brigid placed an order. I took photos.

If I ever need to find a new busi­ness, dial-a-tuk-tuk in Rat­ach­aburi seems like an oppor­tu­nity beg­ging. Because you can’t.

You have to reply on store­men from the fac­tory to  squeeze you into the front of their cramped Toy­ota and then gen­er­ously deliver you back the bus stop so you can wan­der off to the river and drink per­haps the most deli­cious cof­fee in the world (thick, slowly strained into con­densed milk) in a small retro-ish cafe the likes of which you only seem to find in Thai­land, com­plete with pedal-car Mini-Coopers from the 1960s (in Ital­ian Job plumage) and a huge selec­tion of Life mag­a­zines from the same era.  But, yes, the cof­fee was fab­u­lous and really bad for me. I like but don’t crave espresso any­more. I’m no longer the cof­fee snob that left Auck­land in 2005. Instead I tend to crave the var­i­ous kopis of Asia, mostly Kopi Bali. Hell, we travel with Indone­sian cof­fee. We take it to Amer­ica. We take it to New Zealand.

Still ram­bling.

But back to the ques­tion at hand. Am I a tourist?

Yes.

How­ever, I’ve become a tourist every­where. I’m a tourist in Thai­land. I’m a tourist in Indone­sia. I’m a tourist in China. I’m a tourist in New York City.

And the one thing I came away from New Zealand a few weeks back with, was that, regard­less of my birth and per­sonal her­itage, I’ve really become a tourist in New Zealand too.

I’m not sure it’s home any­more. I would not have said that a year ago but the six weeks spent in Auck­land and down-country this mid-year have let me feel­ing like an alien. A com­fort­able alien to be sure, but an alien nevertheless.

I felt no sense of attach­ment when the earth­quake struck Can­ter­bury. It was awful and I felt sym­pa­thy, but attach­ment? No. I felt some guilt about that. I felt more attach­ment to the red­shirts in Ratchapra­song. The voices on New Zealand’s TV chan­nels sound as odd as the voices on TV in Guangzhou. The accents were surreal.

I get ner­vous at the empti­ness of it all, even the much touted Auck­land traf­fic seems oddly sparse. Really sparse.

New Zealand pol­i­tics have become a mys­tery to me (although I was thor­oughly pleased when John Banks got trounced in the Auck­land may­oral race, not because I liked the other guy more — I know absolutely noth­ing about him — but because Banks is a turd).

Nope, I’m a tourist. State­less albeit with a pass­port that tells me I’m not.

And I’m not sure I mind.

The Indone­sian Reli­gious Affairs Min­is­ter proves once again that being a moron is no imped­i­ment to get­ting a cab­i­net post in that nation.…

Suryad­harma added he did not agree with Muhammadiyah’s brand­ing of smok­ing as haram, say­ing he believed Islam’s orig­i­nal stance on tobacco was makruh (frowned upon) but not haram.

“Unless it poses a direct threat to human health, such as by caus­ing heart dis­ease, then smok­ing should not be haram,” he said.

[From Min­is­ter calls anti-smoking edict ‘unwise’ | The Jakarta Post]