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Blueless Days On The Mahakam
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ash falling in
the city sky of dusk,
orange-pink glows behind
the jungle from the riverboat,
sunless sunrise from
the hill of durian and chocolate,
thick smog in
the green lanes of noon
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image is...
four maybes for the next Pour into The Bucket
yet i think i’ll hold onto them a little longer
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The Bucket will be a whole year old come November 29
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in other news
Samarinda, Kalimantan
a pleasant city in the hot and sticky
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where no-one walks
where there are almost no pedestrians
outside the areas with shops
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where bicycles have virtually died out
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where the rooftops are the graveyards of defunct satellite dishes
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where i just, i hope
did my visa renewal
giving me another 28 days in Indonesia
though i am waiting on an email
where there should be no problem
yet... i... don’t actually have it ... yet...
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while
just like the security people at the airport in Balikpapan
everyone in the immigration office
young, round-faced, gleaming of eye
was exceptionally friendly
though the immigration people were perturbed when i returned in shorts
which aren’t allowed
so the same helpful security guard who, yesterday
took me to the chain supermarket across the ultra-busy road
and showed me how to pay for the visa at its counter
well, today, he helpfully loaned me the sarong
they save especially for cluelessly informal foreigners in shorts
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while yesterday it took the goofy toothy young head-scarfed woman
sixty seconds to find out i am, like her, a Chelsea fan
so she could garrulously gush about how much she loves Chelsea
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and now...?
i can get the boat
sixty hours
back up the Mahakam River
as far as it will go
where, because its the end of the dry season
the river is slow
and the boat may not get all the way to Long Bagoen
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and where i am looking for a place to stay as fabulous as Homestay Aina in Pela
where i had 28 meals and looked forward to every one
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and i am reliably informed of
Penginapan Polewali in Long Bagoen
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so here i go
back up the river
through the wetlands and into the jungle
back into the proper smog
the people-live-in-it-for-months thick-thick smog
the health-threatening smog
the international controversy smog
the ridiculously thick and unchecked smog
the worst-smog-in-the-world smog
the no-one-has-a-plan smog
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a genre of music where
the chief aesthetic drive is to have nothing black
and where if they discover anything black
anything at all
a phrase a chord a beat a note
a word an air a particle a mote
they batter it with mallets
then take it out and lynch it
and then they happily play on and sing along
until one day someone finds something
anything
black in the music
when they take it out and...
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in other news
continual frustration at build-up of unaskable questions
i have no-one to put to
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in other news
my new friends Budi and Danielle
who are very much a married double-act
who are the chief thing between the pesut, the river dolphins
and extinction
well they’ve told me about Maratua Island
which i’d never heard of
and flights are only forty pounds...
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which has certainly thrown another possibility into my November
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the weaving village over the river