I still haven't spoken to an anglophone, and I thought I had some sort of worthwhile material. This is my abdication of responsibility from the lengthy waffle that now follows ;)

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For a guy who has shirked `real travelling` for the sake of creature comforts for a while, I'm doing pretty good at seeing the real deal in a place. I could say this while sitting in a gold-lined jacuzzi in the penthouse of a 6-star hotel while being intermittently force-fed champagne and caviar, and no-one reading can really argue it (uness the ghost of Howard Hughes is reading) but it is true, honest guv'. You just have to trust me :>

Thing is I can happily attribute what I've seen of this country so far to the downright obvious: superficially, Indonesia is very much like India - deeply religious, highly underfunded in every area compared to our nice easy Western world, colourful, expoitative, otherwise friendly and openly curious of foreigners, and overall very easy-going once you get used to it - interlaced with the assumed East Asian influences from Thailand, Vietnam et al.
It is far less confrontational than India, less demanding on the cultural sensitivity gland, and religion is given less visible tribute and apparent heed. The deeper side of it is more or less the same, but with added natural wonders unavailable in other places, which I'll come to as I find them and that will be pretty soon I bloody well hope...

Of course there are a few differences because it is much like a melting pot of serious, pious Indian culture and more easy-going, Buddhist-if-you-insist-I-have-one ideas from the Southeast peninsular. The main difference from that so far is a very relaxed attitude towards some social taboos such as prostitution, and a certain amount of desperatation and downsizing of expectations from all other places that I must do, because this country is POOR, with a capital `F`.

I see far less infrastructure, poorer services and a weaker economy than anywhere else I've been to yet, and lower prices with more eager pursuit of them than elsewehere. Laos is the only place that rivals it for these dubious titles, but still Laos is more relaxed and well-developed, and a lot less polluted than this city at least.
This much I had guessed a long time ago, and hot-damn, I was pretty accurate. I may have guessed it before even leaving home, having never been to any of these places yet, but I did my research and wild guesswork all in advance.
You can't judge book by its cover, but you can sometimes make pretty astute judgements from the title alone :P or sometimes by reading just the first five pages.

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Real travelling, by the way, and this is according to hearsay which I don't personally believe in, means staying in the cheapest and therefore usually (apparently) the most authentic places, and that's how to really get to know the country you're in, or so they say. I on the other hand am rather partial to hotel room service and a lack of visible insect life in my sleeping area, not to mention occasional extravagances that make what I'm doing right now possible, such as WiFi internet access.
Plus it's entirely fair to say I'm getting to know one aspect of life here, while all the `real travellers` are getting to know another; I mean who says that just because there are millions of destitute poor and homeless I can't get to know the lives of the rich elite of Borneo? I'm reaching out to a minority group, for Pete's sake ;)

Anyway I only stay in nice places a day or two and there's nothing wrong with that - I am paying for it after all, and there really isn't much of interest in this particular city and I'm stuck here and this is a fantastic kind of place for the price, so screw it, I'm allowed to. Sometimes people substitute `cheap` for `real` in this sense I think, and while I may be a cheap, cheap man at heart, I know what I really like, too, and easy, friendly, non-threatening and good-smelling accomodation ranks quite high; and anyway I'm going to the jungle in a couple of days so I'll have plenty of time for `real` discomfort then ;)

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Quick Money:

£1 = 18,000ish Indonesian rupiah. 1 rupiah, 50,000 rupiah, the singular and plural are the same although with that sort of quantity you can tell no-one's seen a single unit for a good long time.
And yes, rupiah, kind of like Rupees from India but with added zeros and a bonus consonant. The similarity in the names and the currency extend down to much of the population and their habits, too.

Budget hotel per night = 100,000
Mid-range hotel pernight = 250,000ish
High-end/4 star hotel per night = 450,000ish

Can of coke = 3,800
Can of beer, small = 9,500
Big bottle of beer = 17,500

The stunning cheapness of tobacco, as in most place I've been, is really incredible though:

Pack of 20 cigarettes = 5000 - £0.28p for a pack of Marlboro Lights, for example!
Big pouch rolling tobacco and papers = 3000 - and that's a 50gram bag of 'baccy for just about 16p. Sixteen pence, for something that in England costs about £7.50! That's 1/46th of the price.

The best thing, though is this:

DVD = 5000 Rp. So I now have Iron Man, The Bucket List, The Forbidden Kingdom and War INC. in my bag for a total of just £1.12p.
Along with 35 others as well - I've been back to the shop twice again, which pretty much proves what I'm saying below ;)

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What will cost you 4000 Rs. might just cost you 14000 Rs. next door however, regardless of the reality. This country often appears desperate for your tourist Dollar, and there is more shameless overcharging here than any peninsular Southeast Asian countries, this much is reminiscent of India as well, although still plenty of Viet/Thai/Cambodian sellers and purveyors were quick to try it on. Maybe a sign of low Western tourism in the area, but here there is less hassle for bad prices than absolutely anywhere. I haven't had anyone really pressure me with a bit of impromptu inflation, and only 5 or 10 people a day will call out to sell me something me apropros of nothing if I walk the streets.

A proper car-taxi I caught (see below, far, far below) cost me 11000 Rs. using the meter, and that was maybe 8 or 9km distance. Days later another guy charged me 25000 for a journey of less than half that in a bemo or opelet (a kind of immensely dirty and ancient minibus that is slower, noisier and cheaper than a car) in fact it was more like 2 or 3km, and that is just insane - the price for a local would be 3000. I had to take it as it was midday and I was moving hotels with all my bags, and yes, it's still only about £1.40, but the right price is really only 17pence, and if it was kept like that by everyone then a lot more tourists would come here. My basic theory on overcharging is that people would come here and spend just as much money if everyone kept their prices honest, but would spread it around evenly which is fairer to all, non?

We would come here more often, stay longer, and buy more stuff and do more things, and other people would hear about it and arrive as well, and all would be good for the tourism trade. But everywhere that people get ripped off they get disheartened. We may be far, far more fortunate than people in most of these places, but no-one likes to be cheated and that much will be spread around.

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So I've seen the inside of a few hotels, I change every two or three days and have worked up from a high-end type of budget place (160,000 Rp.) with really helpful staff, peeling and stained walls and overly expensive beer, to a midrange place with great service for the price but with bloody awful food (240,000 Rp) and now to this lovely spot on offer at 333,000 for a room with a fantastic view over the city (the view is fantastic, the city isn't much to look at).
This little charmer normally clocks in at 540,000 a night, so you can see what sort of grand opulence I'm currently swathing myself in. I suppose it must be the slow season.
I really do like the room, it feels almost classy enough: on the corner of the top floor, it has big bright windows on two sides, its own semi-private secure outer corridor and is less than 30 paces from the chief restaurant in the place, imaginatively dubbed `The Roof`.
It really is very, very nice indeed, so I'm staying here all day and se khatulistiwa (the Bahasa Indonesia for the equator) can go whistle for my attentions, yet again.

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Food is.... different in Indonesia. There are a few signature dishes that make it stand out, but mostly it is very similar to Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese I suppose. The staple is, predictably enough, rice (nasi). It comes with everything, apparently if you have an omelette and a club sandwich as I did for breakfast today, an order of rice is expected as well, as it is with a steak, with a salad, and even with fish and chips.
The sort-of standard dish is nasi goreng, literally `rice fried`, but it can sometimes mean fried rice with a fried egg placed on top, you can't ever really tell as eggs are used in the mixture so asking for `with egg` or `without egg` might or might not change your order. So I don't bother anymore.
It also involves a handful of extra things chucked in, a few chopped veggies, some chilli, beaten egg of course, and usually whatever seafood there is around.

Being a nation composed of thousands of islands, you can forgive the Indonesian obsession with seafood. It gets everywhere and goes in everything, and if you don't want little purple octopii tentacles in your noodles (mie), your chicken curry-ish-thing, your soup (sop) or your nasi, you'd better speak up fast.

I have to admit I'm not overly keen on it - I'm feeling like a little bit of an uncultured heathen about food right now, the Indian approach to food involves a pace-halting amount of butter and grease to cook everything in, too many spices that make me slightly queasy, and what I can only call a relaxed attitude towards the use of bones, gristle, feathers etc. when making anything with meat in.
Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian food often surprised me with extra bits of vegetation in any given dish which were okay sometimes, though more often sickly in a different way. Thailand I didn't see enough of to get a feel for it, although again with the seafood obsession, and I was well inland at all times.
Singapore had too many Western fast food places for me to really appreciate the local delicacies I'm afraid, what I did have a couple of small backstreet places wasn't sickly (yay!) in any way, it just didn't amount to much beyond roughage and some chilli.

Now I'm in Indonesia and the frying of everything in grease again is almost too much. The good places are good, really good, the cheap places are really quite terrible. There isn't really any defence for my shockingly bigoted approach to food you see, all I can say is that most places are of course cooking on a very limited budget.
The analogy would be having spaghetti bolognaise in a restaurant, and finding it's made with exactly one tin of chopped plum tomatoes for the sauce, a metric ton of spaghetti, half a barely-dead chicken chopped into four unequal pieces and some Tesco value cheddar on top that won't melt because there's just a bit too much plastic in it.
It is often, in a nutshell, the absolute basic minimum to qualify as food.

The language though is great, and I can remember a fair bit of it which is a nice for a change. Unfortunately I haven't got so good at listing to it, and I cannot really answer any questions or ubnderstand the answers to questions I have asked. Still, all's fair because I can't ever restrain myself when someone asks me in English, and I go off on a little rambling diatribe that the poor waitress/receptionist/shopkeeper just doesn't have a chance of understanding. Reading another Stephen Hawking book at the moment and I may have actually started a sentence about theoretical physics to some poor Indonesian woman who just wanted to flog me some DVDs, I'm not sure.

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But still, not much of real significance has occured. This is because as said before I am in traveling purgatory; a region of sensory experience where I am denied any great thrills but am left at relative ease to do... nothing much at all.
I'm in Pontianak of course (let's call it Pnk from now on just to save me some effort) still and nothing is diverting enough to warant an adventure, but it is, still, very pleasant in itself considering, and I'm mostly considering the startlingly bad standard of living for most of the population here and the wild proliferation of open sewers for my own personal consideration, and once again I'm feeling humbled at my amazingly fortunate lot in life. Yet despite these pseudo-noble thoughts and the amazing conditions people can live and flourish in, still there is...how shall I put it?
Fuck-all worth doing. Yes, that's about the sum of it.

Call me picky but when I travel 12,000 miles or something like that from home, I expect a little something exotic, even if it just a different species of urban pest on the municipial garbage heaps or a new kind of irritating little native bird, but it's still brown rats and sparrows here, just about everywhere. I don't mean to be too rude or anything, but this is really just another hugely crowded and densely littered Asian city, it happens to be where geometry has a little something to say, but there's nothing much more to it other than to say "I've been there".

Yes there is that equator, but it seems no-one got around to actually painting a line in the Earth all the way around so you kind-of have to take their word for it, know what I mean? I mean I haven't actually been there yet, been too busy with all the room service menus, but still; until yesterday I would never have actually believed it, such was my cynicism and low-level, sickness-fuelled misery. Yesterday changed my mind, however.

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What is the temperature in London these days, or the South coast perhaps? About 15, maybe 20 degrees on the `C` side of the mercury? Well done to you if you get above 27 this entire summer: Yesterday here, it was 32 degrees Celsius in the shade - yes, it is rather hot here when the clouds give the game up - and this is the colder season. It gets to almost 40 here sometimes, and I'm guessing it was about hot enough to fry an egg on the bonnet of a car at some points this week, and yes, while knowing this I was the idiotic Englishman about town who went for a walk at midday in the first proper sunshine seen here this week. Well, I owed it to you dear reader, if nothing else. I wandered out half-bent on a vaguely conceived mission (had a mental map of the city from the LP - ha!!) and found my exposed forearms itching within 10 seconds of leaving the air-conditioned sanctuary of the hotel lobby. It literally beat down solar rays from a white-hot celestial fireball. Don't talk to me about getting some proper sunshine.

Now of course the Lonely Planet is there to help, but you pay for it, it's a book sold in shops for profits and everything, yet someone in the map-making department has really got the absolute completely wrong idea about customer satisfaction, and is really trying to make some of us unhappy. Yes we've heard this tune before, this time I just have specifics.
The day before the day before or thereabouts - the day before my last post in fact, hence me feeling slightly miffed, I had gone to see the only musem marked in the book, and I went in order to be in there at about the time of the daily rains, so I could get the most out of the day and all that.
I had estimated a rought time from the LP map and thought I might get a little damp if I dawdled, but rain comes at 11am at the earliest and I set off at just before 10, the distance by road route, according to the Book, was only about 3 - 4km, a very easy hour's walk.

Well you can guess what happened. I rounded the first couple of corners and passed the right landmarks much as expected, then I found a stretch of road from the wrong end of a bad dream, one of the one's where you're trying to run away from something bad (perhaps a editor from LP offering to guide you home) but never get any further to or from where you should be. It was almost as terrifying, if only for the shocking cheek of it.

I checked and rechecked; the distance from the start to the last verified cluster of landmarks was the same on paper as the distance from that cluster to the next bunch of big obvious things, but having passed them only recently on the odyssey I can testify that the real world places them at more than double, maybe more than triple that distance.

The further South I went, for that is where the museum and a couple of interesting mosques apparently hung out and tit is only happy coincidence there's another meaning in there, the worse it got. I ended up walking, by my guess, 2 kilometers down a sparse highway that on the map is only a shade over 400 metres long. I walk fast and it took me nearly 15 minutes, and it was 11:30 by then and of course the monsoon had begun for the day, so I was utterly drenched on this highway with no shelter, hardly even any trees, and none with any shelter to offer, just shanty housing and the odd dejected looking fixed warung-style (greasy snackery) places along the way, all of it clad in rusty corrugated iron and sheets of flowing water being constantly replenished by walnut-sized raindrops I didn't want.

I never made it to the museum - as well as having an improper sense of scale the map was also largely just plain wrong, because a road that was supposed to bend didn't, many roads that existed were not detailed even though there were big blank spaces on paper, and some that were detailed may as well not have been as I had no reliable idea where they were, if anywhere.
Also, either the names of all roads are periodically changed too keep everyone on their toes, or the people who make these maps up (and I mean that in both senses) are evil, evil people who should be taken outside and lined-up against the wall with a cigarette.

I was put somewhere on a highway that was clearly in the book, I mean even the Lonely Planet can't vanish a 4-lane motorway in a cloud of denial, but I had no clue where exactly on the road I was. I stumbled into one of the warung shops, realised I couldn't trust the majority of the food (or rather, my ability to keep it down) or speak the language well enough to find out what was safe, so I worked through a few slow cokes waiting out the storm, and desperately tried to remember a polite phrase to ask them to turn off the fans they had conscientiously switched on for me, as I was soaked through, and seeing a Westerner arrive in their shop out of polite friendliness they had turned two fans on for me.

And just because the map monkeys haven't a clue what they're doing, the bastards. Just to make it super-funny I was wearing the only shorts I had left thanks to The Laundry Fiasco which are fitted for swimming with those coarse mesh liners, and I got a water 'n' friction rash where one really doesn't want one, I hope I don't need to draw you a picture. My plan would have left me to walk a short distance nice and slowly in the dry. Bastards.

I found two more things confirmed my dark suspicions too: after miraculously finding a taxi - a proper car too, and even with a meter I didn't have to ask to be switched on - and driving back up the highway I noted that one of the mosques and a road junction I had memorised were a little out of place - I should have been far South of them but almost immediately turning onto the highway they appeared, and they also appeared at a suspiciously long interval from each other, so I wasn't even as far down the road as I should have been; my last turn onto a big C-shaped loop of tarmac & shant; that the museum was at the bottom of; must have in fact only put me onto the upper end of the road, at the North junction where it met the highway while it should have been the South junction. In fact, according to the fucking distance I had walked, it should have been well beyond that and off the map, but no, it was all their in scandalous black and white.
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Needing proof, I rechecked what I felt was one of the nost grossly misrepresented streets yesterday, and measured it against my stride, which is about 2 and a bit feet, so lets say two feet, and let's say 2 strides to the metre instead of the 1.7-something it should be, just to give the Lonely Planet map a bit of fighting chance.
Well it wasn't even close to a draw; at around 150 metres on the map, and almost 450 rather generous metres in real life, I submit that there are people in the back rooms of a certain publisher who will go to an especially horrific cartographical hell, and I'll personally stop in to check up on them, too.

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Yes, I know I'm going on. No-one to speak too does this to a chap. Should be better at the next place, bit more of a tourist spot, what?

Despite my fantastically generous nature, capacity for forgiveness and wonderful sense of humanity at all times, I do find sometimes that I can just ignore the horros of other people's lives, when it's all too obvious that they are in desperate, tragic situations. The good things I think is that quite often no-one has told them this, and so they are happily unaware of how unfair life really is.
I'd like to think so anyway; the way people carry on is just marvellous, terrible to see, but wonderful at how they cope with it.
The homeless and the beggars of course are the most obvious and most common cases, the few honest beggars the ones who warm the heart.

But it's easy to ignore poverty even in staggeringly poor places, in cheaper hotels you don't make anything of it because you know you're paying less, and obvious things like dirt, bugs etc. make you aware you've got lower standards of living than you generally think acceptable. More so by far in better places obviously. But when walking around a day or two ago, and seeing a couple of boys maybe 16, maybe 18 years old up to necks in a river so dirty that it is little more than liquid shit, looking for kinds of rubbish that I suppose must be of more value than the rubbish on streets, well, poverty means something else entirely.
All the sewers in the city upstream from where they were empty into it - you can't imagine being in that kind of filth, I mean you know the river's there from half a block away when there's not even any wind. I would have got a picture from the road that goes over it, but it seemed just wrong in some way, I don't know.
And then of course, at least these guys have some rubbish to look through, some kind of option...

That's enough for me, it's 3:30 in the pm (so we say `selamat sore` to greet each other ;) ) and I might actually get off my arse and out the hotel doors. Cheap place for my last night tomorrow night, gonna make the most of the shocking expense of this place while I can.