Java Heaven and Hell

by John Keeble

I glimpsed heaven and, in the pre-dawn blackness, got a whiff of hell in this earthly paradise living on borrowed time in the Ring of Fire.

Here, on a plateau in central Java, I was finding what I had travelled so far to see: the birthplace, maybe, of the great religious-political civilisations of South East Asia – this was the site of the oldest known Hindu temple on the island. And, as a bonus, I was getting the chance to live in an area where the ground opens up every now and again in explosions of volcanic steam and gasses and the sulphur lingers in the air as a constant reminder of the violence below.

Yeah, but this great quest was just an excuse, wasn’t it? All you really wanted was to tramp through somewhere exotic, take lots of photographs that you don’t really need, and have the excitement of getting up close and personal with some volcanic stuff?
“That’s a bit harsh. I know we’ve both read the same psychology book* but I wouldn’t interpret my travel experience quite like that.”

This was Dieng, an area in the middle of the island. It is richly fertile with three major crops of potatoes, cabbages and carrots a year grown on the terraces reaching towards the sky. It was richly fertile, in another way, in the 7th century when the first of maybe 400 temples was built there: Hindu creations reaching towards the gods like today’s money-making terraces.
If that pleased the gods at first, it did not last. Their pleasure turned to anger; the ground shook, the temples were destroyed and the people took their faith to safer places - the plains around Mount Marapi, today one of the most active volcanoes in the world, where Java’s temple-building civilisations grew in the then Buddhist Borobudur and Hindu Prambanan. And from there they exported the lessons of power underpinned by religious inevitability to Angkor in Cambodia.

On the Dieng plateau, the religious community declined, the agrarian pursuits continued over the centuries, the ground shook and flooded at times and the people used the temple stones for their own domestic needs. The Hindu gods were all but forgotten as Allah became the power in the land.

Good stuff, but admit it, the psychology book was right: you were just there for the action and the excitement. The travel was the end in itself – the rest is just window dressing for anyone taken in by it. Right?

“Well, maybe. But I can’t help wondering how many other Travel SIG members are just like that too.”

If my camera twitched at the thought of all that interest, it was nothing compared with the great photographic/archaeological expedition by the Dutch artist and photographer Isidore Van Kinsbergen, who lived on the island. He was given an official commission and set off for what turned out to be a four-year project in the middle of the 19th century.

He drained the land at Dieng and uncovered the temples… so he could photograph them. Today you can see these five Shiva temples, along with a few others including one dated at its site as 7th century (although most of the 400 temples were built in the 8th and 9th centuries).
Van Kinsbergen got there first, by only a century and a half, but I wanted to do much the same route as his expedition, though with a little more speed both in transport and in photography. His intention was to present Javanese art; and mine was to look for visual links with Angkor where the Khmer empire elaborately sustained a million people when London was a primitive sprawl. Dieng was the first stage. The other two were the tourism honeypots of Borobudur, the massive Buddhist temple, and Prambanan, an area of Hindu temples dating back to the 8th century.

So what’s your take on the book. How does it link with Travel SIG?

“It takes a close and educated look at the four temperaments that psychology and social thinkers have written about since Hippocrates. And a careful reading of it rather sorts out the travellers from the arrivers, the stayers from the goers (in the ‘going’ sense, not the way we used it in the 60s …)”

Lonely Planet thinks Dieng is the ‘remote’ Abode of The Gods, as its name may mean, but it took only a day to get there with lucky connections – an easy airport taxi ride from Yogyakarta airport to the right bus terminal; and then four buses, one tiny and crammed with 12 Moslem women, three girls, one wide-eyed boy, my bags and, taking more space than any other two there, me. The long climb up to Dieng plateau, more than 2,000 metres above sea level, in the next bus was not a joy – I had arrived at the bus’s jump-off point, Wonosobo, as everyone in the universe wanted to get home and had chosen the same bus. But arriving in the quiet, friendly Dieng village certainly was a pleasure.

Good connections? You planned the journey well, then?

“Ah, not exactly. I did look at the map in the airport just before flying to Yogyakarta but it was 5am and I hadn’t got my glasses to hand. Anyway, I told the taxi desk at Yogya airport I was going to Dieng, a bit past Borobudur, and could they take me to the right bus station. It was easy.”

And then you looked at the book and worked it all out?

“Oh, yes, of course. A little list. But the routes had all changed and it wasn’t any good anyway so I just went with the flow; seemed to be a good idea at the time.”

Dieng plateau is the caldera of a collapsed volcano, at one time marshy but now it is threaded with plastic arteries, crossing fields and roads, to carry water to the crops. Its villages include the highest in Java and some people measure that village’s wealth by claiming it sends more of its residents to Mecca than any other Indonesian village.

The plateau is still an active volcanic area with craters all over it, some filled with waters that sparkle blues, greens and yellows when the light catches the impurities bubbling up, some boiling and emitting steam all the time, two that had exploded in the past few months… a blast of rocks, boiling water and steam at one; and an explosion destroying everything around and throwing up a huge gout of mud at the other.

Locals are not averse to showing the volcanic sights to tourists, mostly Indonesians when I was there, but they do not treat the earth with complacency. Too many people have paid the price, even recently, like the man walking to a boiling water crater who stepped off the main way, fell through the crust and got his legs cooked; and the four agricultural workers who got showered with hot mud in the explosion just 10 days before I was there… and the horrifying death, suicide apparently, at the latest steam and boiling water crater that exploded early in 2009.

So the book says … what?

“It names the four temperaments after four Greek gods. It seems that I’m a Dionysian temperament: action for the sake of it, nothing too much trouble or hardship because it’s all compulsive play, no need to have an outcome or product: it’s travelling not just for the sake of travelling but because I can’t help it.”

On the plateau, as the earth threatens so it blesses: 46 wells, some nearly 3km deep, tap and control steam that drives the electricity generators; and the volcanic earth, the product of millennia, is making many of the locals rich, in Indonesian terms, from endless crops. Of course, the endless use of pesticides is also probably killing them but no one seems to worry about that slight drawback.

I explored this earthly paradise of plenty on the back of a motorcycle ridden by young Dwe (‘Doowee’), who worked at the Bu Djono losmen – my vote for the friendliest guesthouse of the year – who quickly understood that between places to stop I liked to ride, paparazzi-style, with my hands free and my camera machine-gunning the locals.

Eventually, after our 4am start, our ride through the pre-dawn countryside and a hike up the local mountain to see the sunrise (no, not obligatory, not really… but…) we got to the temples.
The visual similarities to Angkor, and to Bagan in Burma, seemed striking, almost those temples in miniature as I began snapping away with the intention of making comparisons when I got back to my hard-disk base in Thailand. I expected to find some more echoes at Prambanan and Borobudur, though exact linkages abroad were looking less likely and the obviousness of Indian influence – there and in Angkor - was shadowing what I was doing.
Maybe someone has already earned a doctorate uncovering the links. Maybe I’ll track them down. The fascination is not just with the temples: it is the very idea of so effectively using the religious power to drive the social power of the rulers. With the temples today, we are looking at the physical foundations of a civilisation’s power – at one time unshakeable, but something happened in Java and the whole edifice crumbled; and in Cambodia the foundations were first shaken by the Chams capturing Angkor Wat and, a couple of centuries later, a decline slumped into abandonment.

So now you think all SIG members are puppets of given temperaments?

“I’ll get to that. Let’s have a look first at what the book’s authors – when they weren’t writing they were training therapists and diagnosticians in dysfunctional behaviour at California State University – have to say about the Dionysians and see if it resonates with any other SIG members.”

Not far from the five Dieng structures, in an immaculate museum, temple artefacts and building materials lined walls covered with drawings and photographs illustrating the plateau’s incredible past. Among the Shiva exhibits, there was a unique Nandi bull with the body of a man.

Back at the Bu Djono, over hot ginger tea, history was also at the forefront. A different time period: World War Two. The other guest there was Sofia, who had the mind and heart of a 25-year-old but who had turned 70 earlier in the year. She was back in Java for a visit after an adult life spent mostly in her native Holland. She had been captured with her parents by the Japanese and had spent time, as a very young girl, in a Java prison camp before being sent with her parents to Thailand and ending up helping the sick and injured on the Burma Railway. Isn’t it amazing who you meet when you are travelling?

OK, I’m getting bored with the psycho stuff. Give me the golden highlights of the Dionysian temperament and how they touch sides with travellers. Then I want to know about the other three temperaments.

“The Dionysian temperament is all about action for its own sake and enjoyment. Risk, excitement, crisis… these are music to the ears of this type. When something gets them going, they don’t see it as work or something to be suffered before arriving at some place – they just keep going, not even enduring hardship because to them it is just part of the whole adventure to be enjoyed with the rest.”

The next day, Dwe and I stalked the locals on a wider motorbike safari through the plateau, on high roads looking down, on low roads looking up, but always seeing terrace after terrace of potatoes, sometimes cabbages, occasionally chilli bushes and, somewhere maybe, carrots.
We stopped at a hot spring, 5km from a crater where the run apparently starts, and the local villagers were stripping off for their baths, scented soap masking the sulphur in the water. “You want to photograph them?” asked Dwe, no longer surprised at anything. Er… no, not this time. “Oh, it is not polite,” he explained thoughtfully to himself. I agreed and we ambled on our way.

Dionysians sound like thoroughly irritating travelling companions.

“I think so. For about two-thirds of the people – the authors put the Dionysian population at about 38%, but they are Americans so it might be different in British Mensa. On the plus side, the Dionysian is a sharing kind. Whatever’s going, it’s for sharing. On the negative side, that includes 15-hour days, getting up at 4am and missing a meal rather than a bus.”

Next day, I did what a lot of the royal and religious community of Dieng did in the 8th century… I decamped to lower ground. The Dieng Hindus, apparently, went straight to Prambanan and started building again but my first stop was Borobudur to see one of the greatest Buddhist temple structures in the world.

The temple was magnificent, awe-inspiringly huge, beautiful in its detail… but for me, that day, there was a deadness about it, a flat feeling of being there without meaning. Like a castle in Europe, the bones of a fish whose cultural water had evaporated.

I was left pondering how Angkor could be so alive while this one was so vacant despite the excited Indonesian children and a smattering of low-season foreigners scampering for just the right camera angles.

Maybe the difference is the way that the people use the complexes. Angkor is in a living Buddhist society, out of time maybe but not out of cultural place and still alive with prayers and offerings … Borobudur is a relic of a dead civilisation that once, more than a thousand years ago, lived by Buddhist beliefs, and today it is 53,000 cubic metres of rock-solid tourist attraction in a friendly, easy-going Muslim society.

Not everyone, including local people and the million visitors it receives each year, would agree with me on this (now that’s a surprise, isn’t it?) One of the boys at my losmen lent me his Borobudur school textbook and the authors wrote in their preface: ‘Some moments in life make one feel as if there were no longer any distance between heaven and earth, and in the creative blending into the whole, the sense of life is being revealed. Such an emotion is experienced when one ascends the stairs of Borobudur, Buddhist marvel of stone, in a full tropical moonlight.’

I think maybe I will pop back next May for dawn sun, a full moon and hopefully more of a feeling of heaven and earth as one of its annual rites is celebrated.

And the other three temperaments. What are they? What do they tell SIG members about their travelling needs?

“The Epimetheans, who take 38% of the population; the Prometheans, who account for 12%; and the poor old Apollonians, who no one understands, including themselves, and who make up the balancing 12%. Apparently. According to the authors, though the figures look suspiciously balanced to me.”

The Borobudur statistics, like the architecture, are staggering: built around a natural hill, there are six square levels crowned with three round levels and a giant stupa. The base is about 120 metres square; the original height of 42m has been reduce to 31.5m after lightning strikes, volcano subsidence and rebuilding; it was made from 53,000 cubic metres of andesite (volcanic) stone in 2 million blocks, maybe 3.5 million tons; it has 72 trellised stupas containing single Buddha images, four galleries with 1,300 pictures along a total length of 2.5km; 1,212 decorative panels; and its base and hidden footing is made from 13,000 cubic metres of stone with 160 hidden reliefs.

Plus, of course, the headline statistic of more than 500 Buddha images (including the 72 in stupas) in styles of six mudras. It can be entered from the cardinal points but the east gate is regarded as the main entrance with the “unique harmony” of Buddhas exhibiting mixed mudras.
No one really knows how the civilisation was organised but Borobudur was built over perhaps 140 years in the 7th and 8th centuries, when the Buddhists ruled in central Java and the Hindus held sway in east Java. As I worked into it, I had to conclude that the tantalising possibility of tying them to Angkor and even Bagan looked like a lot more work than snapping a few carved stones at Dieng.

Let’s start with our Epimethean members. What do they want?
“They live to be useful, apparently, and so I expect they are well represented in the volunteering places around the globe. Epimetheus himself married Pandora, who opened her box and let all manner of ills into the world – airport taxi drivers, souvenir sellers, never-closing bars, credit card companies and holiday brochure designers. But he stood by her, a solid worldly-wise god who leads rather than follows, who is reliable rather than irresponsible.

“They are the opposite of the Dionysians: the Epimetheans favour work over play every time. They also have to belong, earning their place and keeping it by care and effort, usually in hierarchies that maintain the social order. They like titles, uniforms and organisation.

“Oh, one other thing. The Dionysians always expect everything to turn out OK … the Epimetheans definitely don’t. They think if something can go wrong, it will (and I guess they are often right). They are the Scouts who always need to be prepared. Conserving the past, helping anyone in need, making sure they never let down anyone. Taking a spare pair of underpants when travelling. Thoroughly good people, I’d say.”

For the traveller, there’s at least another day in Borobudur village. First, there are two more temples built around the same time as the great temple and linked to it in geography and use.
And then there are the local attractions for those who want more than the tourist gloss. How excited do you get about seeing how to make tofu or glass noodles? I got quite excited.
First the tofu factory. All clinically clean, sterile, gleaming steel surfaces, glowing hands washed every few minutes… if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. If was fascinating, nonetheless, and Mr Wen (Mr ‘Won’), the good-natured tofu maker, just carried on working as I danced around him to document the process. Glass noodle making was another education. Both processes were kept local and started with local produce (though the tofu maker could use American soya beans to order; they were cheaper but inferior to local beans).
Next morning the nice people at the Lotus 2 losmen – where I had the equivalent of a suite for £10 a night including breakfast – ran me up to the bus station on one of their motorbikes… and the Prambanan leg began without any real idea about how to get there.

OK, you don’t need to say that. We know you’re a Dionysean and don’t bother with finding out where you’re going. What about the other temperaments?

“The Prometheans look interesting. They like to get control over the natural world, so the authors say. Some of the sub groups of this temperament really go through it because there are so few of them – bit like having a Mensa IQ at the parish council meeting.

“These are the scientists who need to understand, predict and control Nature (though not necessarily people). They are self-critical to the point of being manic and they don’t take kindly to criticism of their ability to perform whatever tasks they have set themselves.

“So good travel planners, probably. I bet they actually like timetables, assess natural hazards, love multiple currency exchange calculations and probable count the bacterial content of the hotel breakfast. And the Prometheans apparently keep score on excellence, maintaining huge lists in their heads, so choice of hotels and restaurants should be easy. As long as you do what they tell you.

“One drawback: they don’t take other people’s word for anything. They have to work it out and prove it for themselves. So no easy guide book routes for them. And even play is work for them. It has to be done correctly for the maximum benefit. And they worry all the time that they are not doing things as well as they should… If you really want to punish Epimetheans, say the authors, compel them into idleness… like sitting on a beach for endless sunny hours…”

As it happened, the journey to Prambanan confirmed what I was already thinking. The Java bus system is run by pros and they don’t let little hiccups like lack of language interfere with getting you to your destination. The key is the private company nature of the bus operators. Everyone wants your business if they are plying the route you need. And fares are so low that western people find them hard to comprehend: more than 20 miles on two air-conditioned buses between Yogya and Prambanan for 3,000 rupiah (20p).

Then I really splashed out. After my 3,000 rupiah bus ride, I paid 60,000 rupiah for a horse-drawn cart to take me around the hotels until I found one I liked. Some could not care less if I took a room, one (the Lonely Planet-quoted Prambanan Imbah) refused a vegetarian breakfast and looked relieved when I left but the Botan hotel was perfect… new, its owner eager to get some business in low season and nothing too much trouble, including running me into the village in her car while someone else fixed up her bike for me to borrow for the rest of my stay.
There is a lot to see at Prambanan and, while I was there during October, not too many people trying to see it. Maybe that and the kind sun gave me an enthusiasm lacking at Borobudur.
It was there that I finally caught up with the past. I was idling in Prambanan temple museum a few days later when I met the resident historian, Mr Sugiyanto, who filled me in with the links between Dieng, Prambanan and Angkor Wat: the world’s biggest temple was a goodwill gesture by the Javanese king, according to Mr Sugiyanto.

And the Apollonians? How are you going to describe them if no one understands them?

“No problem. If I get it wrong, no one will know because even the Apollonians don’t understand themselves. It seems their goal in life is the search for themselves, the real, deep-down selves – becoming what they are without actively going about it because that would change their real intrinsic selves. Or something like that.
“This search for self can make an Apollonian wander through life, spiritually, psychologically, geographically. So maybe good, if tortured, travellers.

“The greatest fear is to be lost in the airport crowd without self identity, not for others’ sake but for the sake of self. There can be no masks, no lies, no deceptions; there must be integrity in a life where being false would be the loss of self. Their idealism leads them into ways of inspiring others, creating crusades even, and they are happy teaching, understanding and empathising with others.

“Many people journey to find themselves. But maybe each journey is another hope for the Apollonians. I just hope they don’t find themselves in some of the places I’ve pitched up in. It could be the end of hope as they know it.”

By that stage of the journey, in the way of Indonesia, I had given up any idea of sleeping after 4am and by 6am on my second day in the area I had walked a kilometre or more from the hotel to the Prambanan temple group – huge structures dedicated to Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu plus smaller shrines for their carriers. Nandi, the bull that carried Shiva, was the only one still in the shrine.
The construction of this group of temples – probably numbering around 250, almost all now gone – was undertaken in the 9th century, 50 years after Borobudur, some two centuries after the first brick of the first temple was laid at Dieng, and around the time that the Khmers started using Cham craftsmen and Hindu ideas for temples and power. The first serious reconstruction attempts were made at Prambanan as other civilisations, from the East and the West, were being swept towards the Second World War.

But for the far-off muted traffic noise, I could have imagined that I and one of the temple sweepers were the only people on the planet. It was wonderful. The sun edged round a threatening cloud and lit up the whole site. Half an hour later, the number of visitors trebled when two Indonesian men sauntered in, using their mobile phones as cameras.

Then, some time and some scores of photographs later, more men arrived. They did not seem like they wanted to obey the signs and stay out of the areas being reconstructed. Oh well, if the locals could do it… 15 very pleasant minutes later I realised they were, er, the renovation workmen but no one said anything and I wandered on my way. Later I noticed the gate had been chained.

The fact that no one threw me out chimes with the idea of Indonesians always trying to avoid confrontations – said to get out of hand very quickly if they do occur – and may have been influenced by my friendly smiles and greetings to everyone I encountered (the owner of the Lotus 2 losmen had explained earlier that the Indonesians have three tones in their verbal exchanges: a low tone for children, a slightly higher tone for equals, and a slightly higher still tone for showing respect and for addressing older people. My voice naturally falls into the tone for showing respect, which pleased him enough to cause him to explain it to me).
There is quite a lot of work going on at Prambanan temples, partly because the huge restoration job being undertaken but also because in May 2006 an earthquake caused a lot of damage.

Both Prambanan – which has four groups of temples around the area – and Borobudur have long histories of restoration efforts with Unesco World Heritage Site backing. They also share the local volcano, Marapi, and the same earthquakes. And, of course, almost all of the same visitors. If the visitors include you, just jump on your borrowed or rented bike and enjoy it!

OK, you’re back at your base with your pix and hard disk library – got the Dieng-Angkor links all worked out?

“Not yet but I definitely will work it all out. When I get time. But I’ve been really busy. And on the way back from Java I was reading the Air Asia inflight mag which was describing its new route to southern China. They have a panda conservation area there. And lots of other amazing things…"

*Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates (Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, ISBN 0-9606954-0-0)… courtesy of a travelling friend who thought I probably needed it more than she needed to lug it back to London.


First published in VISA 88 (Dec 2009)