#id-6

vAs this title suggests, the cross-province buses run on a major road outside my village at a schedule unknown to any except the driver, which means I typically build in a max thirty minute wait time for any traveling I undertake. The buses are often crowded (sometimes three to a bench seat with a line of people packed standing the length of the aisle), hot, and a complete olfactory assault- the perfect storm of many people sandwiched into a hot bus while men smoke and ash into the aisles, food vendors weave their way down the aisle hawking fried tofu and milk in plastic bags, and outside pungent scents of either burning trash or malodorous, stagnant canals blow through the windows.

The buses are no great testament to safety and security, either.  They hurtle—and when I say hurtle, I want you to imagine the fastest you have ever moved inside a vehicle, roller coaster, space ship blasting into the atmosphere; now remove your seat belt—down the roads, dodging and passing motorcycles, bicycles, becaks (pedicabs), other buses, cars, trucks laden down with every imaginable haul-able object, often going head to head with oncoming traffic. I have been on buses that decided that the car in front of them was passing too slowly, and therefore the driver goes for a simultaneous double pass. I tend to either fixedly ignore these moments, staring out a side window and thinking happy thoughts about 7-11 fountain cokes and puppies, or consumed in rigid certainty that this is probably it, and I never got around to going to Burning Man because I thought I’d have more time.

Safety concerns sometimes extend inside of the bus. I have yet to experience any theft or threats, but other volunteers have been pickpocketed in various degrees of subtlety. And during PST, we heard a litany of bus danger stories, including vendors selling drugged food and drinks and then robbing their passed out victims, so that now I think every bus vendor is a murderous sociopath behind a basket of peanuts. While less of a security problem and more of a puzzling slice of Indonesian life, it is typical for buses to pick up buskers at stops who plant themselves in the middle of the bus to sing, play ukuleles or guitars, or in some other way “entertain,” and then proceed to go up and down the aisle with an extended hat or bag for passengers to drop a few coins in. I still can’t figure this out—are the bus drivers getting a kick back from said roving minstrels? How much money can they be making doing this all day—jumping up on buses for a song, collecting maybe a thousand rupiah, jumping down and doing it all over again. And don’t forget the travelling salesmen hawking vegetable peelers, belts, and face masks… its like having QVC live on the bus, only Joan Rivers is a sweaty fifty year old man with a cigarette hanging from his lip. These vendors have a habit of trailing down the aisle and dumping their wares in your lap, and then picking it back up on the second go, so you can get a good look at the holographic poster of two tigers at a moonlit lake.

I wrote the above paragraphs mid-Idul Fitri vacation. Days afterwards, I had probably the most horrendous bus experiences to date, where a two-three hour trip wound up taking a ponderous, sweaty, nauseating five and a half hours. The trip sent me into a state of frantic anxiety that I mostly recovered from in the form of wandering loops around an air conditioned, Western style grocery store while talking the ear off one of my friends, who possibly deserves sainthood for listening to a personal record of fastest, longest babbling by an admitted motor mouth. For perspective, the next day I was on a bus where my seatmate threw up on herself, and I still consider that to be a better bus ride than the five hour trip of misery.

All this being said, I stand by my man. My man being the bus system. Really? you’re probably asking right now, squinting at the computer screen in skepticism. What can really redeem this lost soul of transportation? I’m going to sound like a slightly codependent girlfriend if I insist that it has really great qualities, they’re just hard to see behind all the problems and its not that bad, you learn to love it. In this case, you pretty much have to learn to love it or never go anywhere ever again, and hope you have kindly friends that will hoof it to see you. I’m going to argue this is less codependent and more optimistic.

So, the best part of the bus is that it gets me to where I need to go (a place of Nutella business, or a friend’s house) in a usually quick manner, if you can sharpen up and figure out the most direct routes (depending which bus terminal I head towards, it can add or save an hour), where to stop so that you don’t wind up taking a thirty minute loop around the city just to get back to where you started (has happened, twice), and you don’t travel during a major holiday that makes BWI Thanksgiving check in counters look like a line dance (I’ve made a huge mistake).

And I have (yet) to experience any problems with getting lost, being overcharged, or other bad things happen to me, and this is a credit to the bus guys. On every Indonesian bus, there are three employees—the driver, the front door guy, and the end door guy. These door guys (official job title) are in charge of leaning out the open doorways of the speeding buses, hollering at people on the sidewalks, taking bus fare, herding people to seats or aisle space, finding space for oversized bags, and making sure that lone bule (foreigner) gets off at the right stop. The door guys are always friendly, and at this point the Trenggalek-Kertosono-Surabaya Pelita Indah team know and remember me. The same goes for the food vendors I occasionally wait for the bus with. They will always give me travel advice and tips, and make sure that the bus guys know where I want to go.

I also have to give it up for my frequent seatmates, the ibus. You sit with these ladies and they will make sure your trip is golden. The older they get, the bossier and more demanding of the bus guys they will be, and the more protective they will get of said lone bule. If I have one tip for solo travelling in Indonesia, its go where  the old ladies are, smile at them, tolerate their pokes and slaps, and know you’re being looked after. On my recent bus trip with a side of vomit, I originally sat with an older ibu who spoke very clear Bahasa Indonesia and had a vested interest in everything about me. I in turn had a giant oversized backpack full of boxes of oleh-oleh, in this case apple juice cups , that I couldn’t hold in my lap. She planted the bag in the aisle and held onto it for me the entire trip, eyeing anyone who walked past it like a hawk. When she finally got off the bus, I wanted to hug her. She instructed a teen girl who took her seat to hold onto my backpack in the aisle and make sure nothing happened to it. Later, this girl would wind up vomiting on herself, but she didn’t throw up into the aisle onto my bag. That was seriously the most Javanese thing I have ever witnessed. So polite.

Maybe the best part of the bus is getting off it. Stumbling from its rusty iron steps back into my desa is not unlike emerging from a club at two in the morning—the air feels a thousand times fresher (no small task in Indonesia), I’m a little disoriented, and I feel like I’m covered in the sweat of a thousand other people. And I’d kill for a trip to Sheetz.

The first few weeks at permanent site called for a lot of adjustment. Adjusting to a new family, a new town, a school community, weather, language differences, expectations, even readjusting to food all over again. It also means adjusting to a wildly different schedule, with buckets of downtime instead of the break neck speed of training.

At home in the states, tis well known by my family that it takes me a few days to unwind when I go from structured to unstructured. The first day or two at Ocean City every summer sees me being a little frantic, and dare I say guilty, about relaxing. Battling my adorable Type A neuroses about accomplishment and wasting time is hard enough on vacation, and difficult to say the least now that I have a position which calls for a lot of just…hanging out. There were a variety of events at my school the first week at site, which called for me to be awake early, appropriately dressed, and feeling kind of Peace Corps-y, even if a lot of it involved high schoolers taking pictures of me while I sweated profusely (cantik! they insisted), and assuring the teachers that yes, I like spicy food and no, I don’t want to get married in the next two years. I even went to an amusement park with one of the tenth grade classes, which did not feel Peace Corps-y, but at least was a school activity where I was involved (mostly by taking pictures with ever y student).

The second week at permanent site, school was closed for the break between semesters. And that’s when I was presented with the most free time I’ve had in what feels like years. I didn’t have anything to do—my school wouldn’t even make my schedule for teaching until the semester started, so I couldn’t really start to plan ahead for the school year.  I didn’t have a bike yet, so my exploring was limited. I didn’t need to go shopping for anything, and all my clothes were washed. There was little demanded of me, and I immediately felt guilty for having so much free time that I was notefficiently maximizing.

I’m a Peace Corps volunteer, I’d think, looking around at my host family as we communally napped all afternoon on the porch. Why aren’t I coaxing illiterate street urchins into fluent English conversations right now? WHAT AM I ACCOMPLISHING FOR PEACE I AM MOSTLY EATING AND PLAYING BADMINTON WITH MY TWELVE YEAR OLD COUSIN AND LISTENING TO KPOP. I started to feel bad about my service while it had barely started.

Remember when I said that PCVs tend to suffer from comparison anxiety/envy with their fellow volunteers? I understand that a little more, being at permanent site. You’re in a new environment with an unknown structure and your meter for what constitutes a job well done is unformed, so you look to your friends to measure your progress. But in this case, I wasn’t really measuring against my friends. I was measuring against the Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer.

The Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer is a mid to late twenties racially ambiguous woman with dark hair (also the most desired actress stats for TV commercials, in all seriousness. A little Women in the Media knowledge for your day). She wears durable, camping-esque, modestly priced clothes- lots of crew neck tee shirts and cargo shorts and visors and practical shoes (she would not spend $100 on a pair of yoga pants like the author of this blog. or 200.000 Rupiah on neon crocs with her settling in allowance). She probably has these beautiful handmade woven bracelets that a shrunken old woman gave to her on the side of a mountain, that are blessed or charmed or something mystical. She has a beatific smiling face, kind of like a young Mother Theresa or portrait of the Virgin Mary. She is most likely surrounded by children as she does something physical, such as building a clinic out of recycled plastic drinking bottles for women’s pre-natal care. Or harvesting corn. She definitely lives somewhere very remote, and definitely does not have internet access in her house or her village. She is fluent in her host country language and probably several regional dialects. She never needs alone time to decompress and she’s always serving her community. And she’s a complete figment of my imagination.

As I dealt with a bevy of free time and minimal demands of service, I’d bemoan that as I sat on the couch watching Putih Abu-Abu (the Gossip Girl of Indonesia, without any of the debauchery) with my cousins, Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer was out in a field somewhere, planting seedlings with a micro-loan company that supports grassroots educational efforts. Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer would already know her entire extended family’s names, I’d think bitterly as I met yet another distant relative and her brood. Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer doesn’t get stressed out and have to take a nap, I’d guiltily chide myself as I went for an afternoon break to chill out in my room. I kept measuring myself against Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer and feeling more and more overwhelmed about what a lack of impact I was already not having in my community.

Like all great insights, mine came in theshower mandi. I was thinking about how the Perfect Peace Corps Volunteer wouldn’t have any troubles going on radical explorations of her site alone ( I don’t really like to go anywhere alone- notorious for picking up Melissa from her house so we could drive the ten minutes to the mall together instead of just meeting there), when I realized that there is no perfect volunteer. Not my slightly crazy personification of perfection, or any other kind. There was no volunteer before or after me with a perfect service record. So I should stop worrying what the perfect volunteer would do in a given situation, and just be my own self as a volunteer, which is a typically cheerful young woman and an enthusiastically brave eater. I acknowledged to myself that I had taught my first informal English lesson to my neighborhood children, and I had ground whole peanuts into spicy peanut sauce by hand. I loved my host family and my teachers, and we communicated through a variety of languages and gestures every day. I was accomplishing things, I was engaging. I wasn’t a solitary cave beast.

There was a nominal theme to this blog, wasn’t there? Charting the adventures of an admitted semi-hoarder with a purse compulsion (I hope my mom is taking my Michael Kors out for plenty of sunshine (not too much though, I don’t want it to fade)), as she navigates an 80 pound luggage limit and two years of bucket washing. I’ve been here for nearly two months, and I’ve worn clothes every single day of it- shockingly, in this equatorial sunshine and abusive capacity for heatstroke. I have assuredly worn everything I own at least once, and at this point,

 Lululemon is My Wardrobe Overlord. All Hail Lululemon.

Frankly, is this a surprise? I was already wearing yoga clothing to every possible social situation in America. It was only a matter of time until I returned to my Luon-clad ways. Yoga pants, and Lululemon in particular, is the superior choice in every situation, for several reasons. The first, I would argue, is combatting swampy butt. Take into consideration what my first six weeks entailed- walking fifteen minutes uphill (and when I say uphill, I mean a near vertical ascent) in the already blazing Indonesian sun, sometimes accompanied by a forty minute ride in an angkot (a form of public transportation that would never be legalized in the states) with fifteen other people, a sack of vegetables or two, and some fish “fresh” from market. Dress pants hold all of that close to your butt, in a sweaty embrace. Luon, in its sports fabricky nature, is meant to dry quickly and keep your butt breezey.  Also, yoga pants don’t wrinkle, are mostly stain resistant, and retain their shape even after bucket washing, wringing them by hand, and line drying.  And duh, they’re comfortable and allow for frequent floor seating, which occurs often in Indonesia.

Lululemon doesn’t just masquerade as dress pants. Capri leggings work great as modest bottoms when you go to a swimming pool and don’t want to offend delicate conservative sensibilities. They’re comfortable and non-saggy/riding up/general discomfort when you’re hiking half a mountain. You can sleep in them when you’re nervous about sleeping in shorts, because you have a fear that the rats in your ceiling will fall through on nights when I’ts raining, land on your bed, and your subsequent screams will alert your Ibu and she’ll bust into your room, to see you covered in rats and wearing shorts, and then be offended by your immodesty. Not that I worry about that. And you can wear them at night when you hang out with your family in the chilly Batu night air, which leads me to-

Am I Acclimating, or am I in Denial? Someone send me my other Gamma Chi hoodie.

I wear a sweatshirt every night. What is this, Western PA? I’m in Indonesia, how can I want a sweatshirt every night? I guess the weather equivalent is like being at the beach in late summer, and how sometimes it gets cooler so you wear a sweatshirt over your bathing suit for the walk home?

Don’t get me wrong, sweatshirts are solely a nighttime clothing necessity. I regularly see people riding around Batu in sweaters and sweatshirts at noon- I am not one of those freaks. Every time an Indonesian complains of being “dingin” (cold) in the middle of the day, while I’m actively sweating (but without swamp butt, thanks Lulu!), I have to fight my very un Peace Corps like desire to dump them in a Lake Erie Effect snow bank.

But if I walk to a friend’s house at night, you better believe I’m wearing my Gamma Chi hoodie. Sometimes I even sleep in my sweatshirt. And sweatpants. I feel like a freak of nature. Granted, the Batu area where I live is up in the mountains, and there is very little chance that I will ever feel chilly again once I go to my permanent site. So maybe I should cherish every shiver?

These Shoes Were Not Made for Walking.

About that super-walk I had every morning for the past six weeks? It’s destroyed my dress shoes. Maybe when they set our “professional dress” code for class time, they forgot that we can’t drive motorcycles like all Indonesians do for any distance that isn’t up the street, and they didn’t consider what toll that walk would take on  our clothes? Mungkin. Either way, I’m just glad my dress shoes haven’t worn holes through the soles. Not to mention they’ve gotten scuffed, stained, stretched out, and all manner of not so dressy anymore. This wear and tear led to a slow, quiet rebellion amongst my cluster mates- first we wore dress shoes; then we brought them with us and walked to class in sandals; until finally we “forgot” our dress shoes and just wore sandals all day. Slightly related, investing in more expensive but durable sandals (Rainbows and Birkenstocks) was a good choice. They’re more comfortable for walks than my dress shoes, and they hold up well in multi terrain adventuring.

How-to Camouflage a Tee Shirt at a Business Casual Dress Code Event

Anything can be dressed up if you have enough accessories, right? Giant plastic necklaces take standard Am Appy v-necks into a Hub Day event  outfit. Long sleeve tees are elevated with a couple cloisonne bangles. One Hub Day a staff member told me I looked really nice, and I was wearing a tee shirt and yoga pants. 

Really, really, I don’t have enough purses.

I’m not sure if my ibu enjoys doing things for me out of sense of motherly hospitality, or if she’s convinced I’m completely incapable of caring for myself. Either way, I fight a battle every day to boil my own water for coffee and to carry my dirty dishes to the sink.

Sometimes I perversely enjoy the swaddling attention. It’s been a long time since someone made me a packed lunch. And the food my ibu cooks has been nothing but enak sekali (very delicious), while the kitchen remains a vague mystery of propane tanks and baskets of garlic on the floor.

The one thing I think I should be capable of doing, at least, is washing my clothes. I’ve washed plenty of delicate clothes by hand over the years, so I doubt I am that unskilled. In Indonesia, clothes are typically washed by hand in buckets in the bathroom- unless you pay for laundry service, or have a washing machine, like one of my cluster mates (she lives with the head of our village). The first day I washed clothes, my ibu showed me the various buckets to use, and the laundry detergent, and I got to work. After washing and rinsing, I wandered outside towards the clothes line. It was the morning, and she insisted I sit down for breakfast and she would hang them later. She took the basket from me, and proceeded directly back into the bathroom and rewashed my clothes. The same thing happened the next few times I attempted to do laundry. After two weeks of my clothes getting a double washing, she told me that my clothes weren’t clean enough, and that I should just give my laundry to her and she would wash them.

I’m just saying, I don’t think washing clothes by hand is rocket science. I even tried to spy on her while she was washing my clothes (my typical way to learn where things were before I had a lot of language experience), and from what I can tell, she’s mostly vigorously pouring lots of water everywhere. I don’t understand how she can tell my clothes aren’t clean enough if they are stain free and smell like detergent, and are well-rinsed.

So for a few weeks I gave her all my laundry, even though I was racked with guest-guilt. She washes laundry every Sunday and it looked like SO MUCH clothes next to hers and my sister’s. Not to mention after they are washed and dried, she irons everything. Including my leggings. There is nothing better than hot and freshly pressed yoga leggings.

But I draw the line at giving her dirty underwear. No one should have to go there but me, and a washing machine if available. But paradoxically I didn’t want her to know I wanted to wash them myself, because we already have tug of wars over my dirty plates. The last thing I want is a dual language argument for my underwear. Finally one morning I realized I was getting low in the clean underwear department, and embarked on a Mission:Impossible style smuggle of all my underwear into the bathroom, wear I could wash them in peace. And then I smuggled them back to my bedroom, and proceeded to hang them everywhere so they could dry without the judgment of my ibu.

Sometimes I forget what a hot shower feels like, and what aid toilet paper brings to the bathroom. Is that a good sign of my cultural integration, or just a testament to how small my short term memory is?

The mandi seems like a formidable adversary, but it's your friend- sometimes your best friend. It provides you with what might be the only time in your house when you are guaranteed complete privacy. It's a chance to decompress, ponder upcoming lesson plans, and identify various insect and reptile species that live around you. It is completely possible to emerge from the mandi feeling just as clean  as you would from a hot shower at a fancy hotel. Not that I dream about luxury showers I have taken in the past. No way. I love my mandi.

Your mandi supplies should include: (1) towel (can be smaller than usual, you won't be able to wrap up and walk back to your room in it), (1) hair tie (if its your every-other-day hair washing routine, (1) toiletry bag, containing all your bathing needs but especially including (1) loofah, (1) shampoo (I use a Lush shampoo bar and I can't recommend that highly enough, in fact, I might need someone to mail me a few from the states), (1) body wash, and, most importantly (1) TRAVEL SOAP CONTAINER- I didn't bring one with me, and my toiletry bag was a slimy mess for two weeks. My soap immediately started to fall apart. I bought a mini tupperware box that holds both my body soap and my shampoo bar. 

Really, keep it simple in that toiletry kit. When I went into the mandi for the first time, I had so many extra lotions, skin care products, tweezers, etc. Your mandi toiletry kit should contain the basics- the things you keep on the rim of your shower. Do all your other grooming back in your room.

Never, ever, if you can in any way prevent it, wear skinny jeans into the mandi and expect to put them back on after bathing. I have a pair of big baggy sweatpants that I wear expressly for the journey to and from the mandi. Indonesia's country motto should be "Indonesia: Perpetually A Little Damp." You will never be totally dry when you put your clothes back on. If anything, your feet will still be wet from standing on the wet tiled floor (expect and embrace that the floor is constantly wet, and that means its clean!)

Which brings me to shower sandals vs. bare feet in the mandi. In orientation we were encouraged to go bare foot, so to prevent slipping on the tiled floor. At my first day with my host family, my ibu chased me around with sandals that she wanted me to wear into the mandi- I think. I have yet to go bare foot in the mandi- the wet tile sensation kind of grosses me out. 

Mandi Mini Playlist: 

Take My Breath Away by Berlin

Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

In our various training sessions, we discuss tools and methods for dealing with stress and adapting to our new situations. We receive diagrams of PCV mood swings, and make rosters of phone numbers and support networks. I've overshared, I'm sure. I'm okay with being transparent with my own experiences with stress and self care. I will always recommend deep breathing exercises, mantras, meditation malas, imagining physical manifestations of your stress, etc etc. I might have just become "the girl with stress experience." The Peace Corps sessions do give great advice, but I thought some of the most important advice- that could use a lot more discussion- came from one of my fellow PCTs quoting the show “Parks and Recreation”- that is, treat yo’ self.

I think maintaining guilt-free self care is important for a happy life, in general. I wrote a lot about it on my (sadly inactive) personal blog before Peace Corps. In a stressful, often high pressure term of Peace Corps service, self care is essential. Amongst a group of driven, frequently type A personalities, there’s a tendency to hold ourselves to high standards, push hard for success, and not want to cut ourselves breaks. Reading descriptions of Peace Corps mood swings- feelings of inadequacy in comparison with others, guilt over taking holidays or traveling, disappointment with one’s efforts in the community- was disheartening, in the sense that it saddened me that so many PCVs stress over these kinds of things.

You should always grant yourself just as much patience, grace, and kindness as you would offer to other people. I know from personal experience in the past that I tended not to give myself the same understanding I would show my friends or peers. If I tried to take it easy, I would feel guilty that I wasn’t working hard enough.  Living like that burns you out, and can damage your relationships, your work (in my case, sophomore year of college), and eventually will completely incapacitate you.

I’m not saying that I should treat Peace Corps as an extended vacation or a pleasure cruise.  I look forward to embracing the challenges my permanent site will have, to problem solving and working hard. But I also want to remember that so many aspects of my service are out of my hands, and that on top of all my work and efforts, I’m constantly adjusting to an entire new country, culture, and language. So taking a break is okay. Needing an evening of alone time to watch movies and eat some off-brand Nutella is not being weak. Taking a weekend to travel to see my friends for “bule time” isn’t extravagant. I’m not here to take on the national Indonesian curriculum, and I can’t hold myself to impossible standards of accomplishment.

Ultimately, in listening to the presentation on resiliency and stress management, I felt that a lot of the situations could be dealt with by giving yourself some credit, and a few breaks. I guess not everyone has been forced to repeat “I could always do less, I could always do worse” by a therapist in an attempt at reverse mantras for an hour (also, as an aside, attending counseling does not in any way make you damaged, as one horrible pre-invitation Peace Corps nurse tried to convince me). Who knows, maybe I’m projecting- but I don’t think so. I think that a lot of PCVs share these stressors and high self expectations, without seeing the necessity of treating themselves gently.

In closing, this is my favorite Sacral Chakra Affirmation, and I say it to myself all the time:

This past Sunday about half of our PCTs decided to hike Panderman Mountain, a nearby mountain in Batu. It was reportedly a six hour hike, in total, up and down.  I was on the fence about committing to the hike all week- we’ve been in our practicum schools while also attending Bahasa Indonesia classes in the afternoon, and there was a wedding in front of my house Saturday night that was guaranteed to rage on until two in the morning, speaker system set to full, poorly balanced, blast. (Really, what is wrong with Indonesians and their desire to BLAST poorly tuned stereo equipment at weddings, inside grocery stores, or from cars? It’s an audiophiles worst nightmare. It’s one of the few things I really resent about Indonesian culture because IT JUST DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. IT DOESN’T SOUND GOOD, INDONESIA. IT HURTS YOUR EARS).

Maaf, tangent. I was waffling back and forth until I decided to call upon my 2011 mantra of last year: Say Yes to Everything. I like to use this mantra to force me to do things, when I’d rather lie in bed all Sunday and take advantage of the recently discovered electrical outlet and watch movies until I’m in an English language stupor. 2011 was a good year, and Say Yes to Everything never led me astray.  And hiking tropical island mountains is the type of thing you imagine as a Peace Corps Invitee packing for the grand adventure. That and, you know, helping people. (My other imaginings included being present for a home birth (still hopeful) and being part of a ceremonial animal slaughter (guaranteed)). Late Saturday I finally committed and was looking forward to a fun! and challenging! but ultimately rewarding! hike. Just kidding it was awful and I hated myself for agreeing to it. Until I was really glad that I did it.

The hike up was really hard. I’ve nearly blocked it out, the way mothers’ insist that they can’t remember the pain of childbirth because of the joy of having their child in their arms. In my case, the joy was the hike being over.  I don’t think I should have to defend my unenjoyment of hiking mountains, but I would just like to say that some people derive great satisfaction and accomplishment from physical challenges. I do, if that physical challenge involves Nordstrom’s Semi Annual sale, or maybe hot yoga. Or walking the entire length of North Carsons Street in Pittsburgh while wearing five inch heels in the middle of winter. Those are things I can get behind, enjoy, and feel accomplished after finishing. Hiking steep mountains brings no pleasure to me.  I can’t enjoy the views because I’m too busy having an anxiety attack that something venomous will bite me or I’ll slip and break my ankle, and I obsessively mentally size up my hiking mates wondering who could make me a temporary splint and carry me to safety. Not that safety means anything in Indonesia, where eight year olds regularly drive motorcycles.

Besides my constant worst case scenario panic, I greatly overestimated my own capabilities in the trekking up the side of a mountain department. My physical fitness was maybe on par with the thirty year old cultural facilitator who smoked five cigarettes during our ascent, and rides his motorcycle anywhere more than five minutes away. All the CFs were complete dolls, of course, as I whined my way up the side of the mountain. My CF, Ido, was completely babying me and kept trying to carry my backpack for me (he and my ibu could make a club for “Emily is Incompetent Believers”). And when we got to the checkpoint and they told me it was only half way, they prevented me from throwing myself off the side of the mountain. It was then that I decided that half a mountain was plenty of mountain for me. One of the CFs, Heru, and I hung out at the checkpoint for about an hour- I got to listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and The Decemberists while looking at some spectacular views. I’m pretty certain that I’m the only person to get to say that. Heru and I discussed one of my favorite topics, education availability and affordability in our respective countries while chilling on some rocks. Then we happened to bump into two of his friends from Malang, who hike Panderman every Sunday, and we hung out and ate some white bread slices (of course) and headed back down the mountain. The walk down was fantastic. I was only mildly panicked about falling, I could enjoy the serious lushness of my surroundings, and also, uh, so much easier. Heru and I walked back a different way and wove through a series of mountain villages, which I really enjoyed. And then, Heru insisted we should buy ice cream. He is a man after my own heart. We caught up with his friends again (they had ridden their motorcycles down to the main street) and ate Nasi Pecel (rice, stewed greens, spicy peanut sauce). Heru even shared his fried egg with me.

I’m glad I listened to myself and called it satisfied at half a mountain. I spent twenty minutes at the checkpoint battling between feeling like a slacker for not finishing (type A complex), and being real with myself that I wasn’t actually enjoying the uphill battle at all- and that’s totally fine.  Don’t have to be good at everything, don’t have to like everything.  By the time I got home, I was filthy and ready for the best mandi of my life. I got a fair share of sun “shine”, but I look much better than some of PCTs who are covered in bug bites and scratches or walking with twisted ankles.