Cover Story

Hot off the press! Gangs of Indonesia's original gang photograph takes the front cover of the new issue of Jakarta Expat.

Labouring in the centre of the image is a man collecting waste cardboard in the Bendungan Hilir neighbourhood in central Jakarta. It's an inner city gang...the scene of much morning activity...

Hearing a whoop, doors open and a chorus of women in baggy dresses bustle from their homes into the lane. It's a narrow leafy lane with drainage ditches, black and stagnant, on either side. Simple planks cross the open drains; some are bridges to the houses beyond, others hold plants and flowers growing in old paint cans. It's early: the bite of the sun has yet to come.

The whoop is the call of a vegetable vendor, pushing his wares in a wheeled cart. He kicks down the stand of the wooden cart and the women prod the market vegetables. One eye on the produce and an ear for the daily gossip.

This mobile market is a fresh salad of bean sprouts, leafy greens, tomatoes, peppercorns, oncom (fermented soy beans), prawn crackers, boxed coconut milk, and dried noodles. Draping the side of the cart like shiny grey fish scales are layers and layers of transparent plastic bags.

A young mother spoons puree into the pout of her eight-month-old daughter. She sighs. "It's difficult to make her eat." The baby's bare thighs are splattered with sauce. Then a dappled cat trots past. "Puss," coos the mother. "Meow. Where's he going?" But the baby remains tight-lipped and the gruel trickles down her chin.

"Have you got chicken liver?" a woman asks. The vegetable vendor opens a door within the body of the cart. In the gloom a single yellow chicken foot claws upwards from a hillock of bagged entrails. "I've got chicken, beef, and prawns," he lists. The women berate him for his prices and the haggling begins.

Tackle Shack

Mohammad Ariefin knots weighted grey beads into a nylon fishing net in the gloom of his wooden house. One foot, long infected, is caked in a sulphurous crust. "Come in! Don't be shy," he chirps, one eyelid drooping. "It's shoddy in here, but do sit down."

Ariefin, 85 years old, runs a fishing tackle shop on Jl. Layur in Semarang's decrepit old town. Today the lane is flooded rat-brown. "It always floods after rainfall," sighs Ariefin's wife Derma. "The drains are blocked with garbage and corruption."

Behind the dirty laundry of an old advertising banner, the shop porch is busy with reels and rods, beads and buoys, hooks and hats. And a stall offering iced coconut juice. Woven bamboo caskets hang from thin blue rope by the old blue door.

"They're called kepis," says Ariefin. "Fish cages." The cages have tapered necks and removable stoppers.

"It's not nice, but come inside," repeats Ariefin. "I already said don't be shy."

"You're very kind."
"In essence, all people are the same," he replies. He is wearing an election t-shirt bearing the slogan Not promises but proof.

Inside, amid the shadows, wispy white nets trail greasily from the ceiling like jilted veils.
"Do you like fishing?"
"Me?" Ariefin exclaims, sucking on a clove cigarette. "Not at all."

Steaming in a bucket of dye are black nets. "For birds. I do like catching birds. Good for racing and singing competitions."

"His foot is sick," says Derma, as Ariefin leaves the room. "He got a splinter in it from that cupboard there. We got some expensive medicine (Rp 50,000) from the doctor, but now the medicine's gone and the infection hasn't."

Ariefin's bare foot is the texture and colour of yellow powder paint muddied with supermarket sambal (chili sauce).

He returns with an earthenware tile. Against grubby cream is a Delft-blue windmill scene. "Win meal," Ariefin and Derma giggle. "A Dutch person gave this to us two years ago." Four days later I see similar tiles decorating the interior of the sultan's palace in Cirebon.

At the top of the road is a metal stall selling recycled cups of rosy grit. Fishermen wearing motorcycle helmets and quivers of rods crowd the seller who tips a cup onto the counter. Pink worms squirm. A pot of 12 worms costs Rp 2,000 ($0.20).

"Do you have worms in England?" the seller asks.
"Of course not!" one fisherman scoffs.
"Yes, actually," I correct.
The fishermen laugh loudly. "Yes! Yes!" they chorus. "Of course there are worms in England! Many worms in England!"

Jakarta Expat: 80

Gangs of Indonesia's pocong boy takes the front cover of the biweekly Jakarta Expat magazine.

This boy, bound in a burial shroud and slung into a black tent, magically disappeared during a whip-cracking, fire-breathing performance in Suropati Park, Menteng, Jakarta. When the black tent collapsed under a bullwhip blow, the interred boy had vanished...

Thanks Jakarta Expat!

Punching Pufferfish

"Watch this," says a fisherman, bouncing the belly of a brown fish against the bottom of his boat.
"Ikan bola!"
"Ikan buntal!"
"Pufferfish!"

We are eight women in a narrow wooden sampan paddling up a tributary of the River Kapuas in West Kalimantan. "Careful," cautions the passing fisherman. "It's not poisonous to touch, but it will bite."

As a defensive manoeuvre, the pufferfish has engorged on air and is now as round and taut as an orb. It has a rough, white underbelly mottled with tawny rivulets and more intense citrine and brown colouring around its head. Its eyes are creased, its mouth wet and puckered. It looks like a Year of the Pig souvenir.

"They're delicious," says one of the women in our sampan. "The meat is here, in the dark part behind the head." She inserts a thin stick into the fish's mouth. The fish snaps straight through it. She sets the pufferfish on my rucksack and we motor on. Hornbills fly overhead. A stork-billed kingfisher surveys the river from the shadows. Dawn's spectral colours ripen.

With a spit bubble and sudden hiss, the pufferfish deflates a little. Then again: hiss, bubble. The fish deflates to sloppy jelly.

"Will you eat it?"
"I'll release it later," says the woman. She's protected against the Indonesian sun inside a red lumberjack shirt. She pokes the fish's squishiness, then drops it overboard. It floats like a buoy.

Also in the sampan, neat in pink, is Ibu Kades, wife of a Village Chief. She leans over the low hull and recaptures the fish. She smacks it against the boat: thwack, thwack, thwack. The fish inflates fully again. Ibu Kades stands. She tosses the fish high into the morning and with an almighty fist, volleyball serves the pufferfish across the water.

The pufferfish finally sinks below the surface and the women fall asleep.

Into Wild Country

"Trail-blazing," says ace reporter Catriona Richards in today's The Jakarta Globe (read here).

A quietly beaming post today. I like this definition of trailblazing from the New Oxford American Dictionary: "...new track through wild country."

Jakarta: 25 Excursions in and around the Indonesian Capital 
Written by Andrew Whitmarsh, photographs by Melanie Wood 
Published by Tuttle Publishing
224 pages

Jakarta 25 Excursions

People say you can't walk in Jakarta.

Published by Tuttle, Andrew Whitmarsh's Jakarta 25 Excursions in and around the Indonesian Capital is now in the shops.

Andrew's enthusiasm grabs you by the sandal straps and leads you through Jakarta's inner-city villages; through decay and beauty. There are market walks, history walks, park walks, family walks, village walks, and Gangs of Indonesia photos inside.

"Many residents never walk anywhere in Jakarta for pleasure," Andrew writes. "This is not necessarily for lack of want, but for lack of helpful information compounded by plenty of misinformation and a fear of getting lost."

Jakarta 25 Excursions includes some city secrets: Jakarta's horse racing circuit, for example, with its whip-slim, silked jockeys and rustle of discreet bets.

Unlike the thoroughbreds, Andrew doesn't rein in his similes: "Keep hydrated in the tropics. You may not realise it, but your body will become as dehydrated as a shrimp cracker. Don't wait until you are thirsty. Start drinking."

The book is for residents as well as tourists. There are sections on clubs, sports, culture, history, etiquette, language, and city transport routes, as well as the city's attractions.

Author Andrew Whitmarsh and Photographer Melanie Wood

Betel in Boti

It is dusk now. Hibiscus heads hang red. The king sits serenely stoned on the veranda of his wooden house. Villagers whisper and spit. Inside the house we chew psychoactive areca nuts with the king's barefooted niece.

Her name is Sau Sae. She wears hand-woven cloth, silver bangles, and an eye-shaped golden ring. She has ballerina hair. Sau Sae is 36 and unmarried. "The king will decide when I am ready to marry," she says, biting hard into an egg-sized areca nut.

The skin of the areca is green with a ripening autumn blush. The stone inside is white with orange veins. Sau Sae stores a piece of the seed between her teeth and gums. She's been chewing betel since she was five years old.

On the low table is a bundle of mossy green asparagus-shaped betel peppers and a bowl of quicklime. Sau Sae snaps a piece of pepper, frosts it with lime, and pops it in her mouth. "Too much lime turns your mouth red," she says, spitting into a dish. "Like yours," she observes.

The betel quid is lime-rind raw. The effect is swift: a giddy glee. I spit red and chew and chew, smothering mellow giggles on the king's settee.

"People are proud of their red mouths," says twenty-something Yabes, ambling through Soe market in central West Timor. Market tables display tidy pyramids of green areca nuts (pinang), betel leaves (sirih), and bagged lime (kapor). Deep tubs bear thousands of dried areca seeds. They look like old wooden buttons.

"It is part of their culture and they believe it makes their teeth strong," continues Yabes.
"Do you believe that?"
"Well, I don't know. I asked some old men and old women and some said yes and some said no."

University-graduate Yabes chews betel when visiting his family. "I first tried it when I was elementary school age."
"Can you chew betel at school?"
"No. You have to have clean teeth at school or the teacher will fight you."

A betel kit from a roadside stall in Soe costs under a dollar.
Seven ripe areca drupes: Rp 5,000
A handful of dried areca seeds: Rp 2,000
A bundle of betel peppers: Rp 5,000
A knotted bag of slaked lime: Rp 2,000

New Home

Today Gangs of Indonesia gets its own home: www.gangs-of-indonesia.com

The pocong masthead image marked the second year of Gangs. A pocong is a type of ghost and the story of this boy's disappearance is here.

The former Gangs banner was this girl playing tag in south Lombok, the daughter of a seaweed farmer.

While the original 2010 banner was simply a gang in Indonesia...

It's a leafy gang in Benhil, a neighbourhood home to many of the people in Gangs of Indonesia, including tattooed Tyas, blue-eyed Titin, and the butterfly kids Dina and Caska.