The constant gardeners

It's funny how a journey spurs me to come here and keep driving down the motorway. Always a journey within a journey. A plane ride to the other side of the world better said, I write this from Jakarta, Indonesia. Finally Covid-19 has lost its grip and hold on the world, I can get back to travelling. After my own personal black hole of the last two-and-a-half years, and a busy year at work following a grim period without, I am thankful. My feet are itchy once again and my rucksack has had the dust cleaned off it from on the top-of-the-wardrobe hibernation.

I have also been lucky enough to live in a warm country for over two decades, first Italy, then Gibraltar and now Barcelona, Spain. I say lucky, but I don't believe in good luck. I have worked hard and rode a rollercoaster to get my lifestyle and to live where I do: I have had to sacrifice and persist to get it. I am fully backing up what Seneca, the Roman Philosopher said, that 'luck is when preparation and opportunity meet'. Bad luck on the other hand, well, that is different.

In the summer, I live in holiday climes with reliable mediterranean weather and go to the beach at weekends. When I go away, I don't go on holiday - I travel. I need more than just sitting in one place, a piña colada by the pool or lazing on a beach because I can have that for five months of the year. I need to move and be stimulated, I need content and to experience the place I am backpacking in. Usually three or four days in each place, no more, sometimes only a night. I say usually, because if I like the place and can use it as a base for the surrounding area, I will stay longer. I go with the flow. Right now time is flowing with me, I am unrestricted.

This time around I have the luxury of a whole month and the long island of Java is my destination. Christmas this year will be very different, but for me they will be from now on regardless...I may as well try another spice and another recipe. I will cross the taste of it all in the coming weeks I guess.

I have travelled far and wide around this planet and South East Asia is always a pleasure. After Bali a few years ago, I wanted to see more of Indonesia, hop a few islands and drive my wanderlust. I have been in Jakarta only a few days, but I already have the gas to fuel the fingers and tell. And what is there to tell so far? 

Jakarta is a cousin of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It's chaotic, a city that never seems to sleep. And the traffic...This city is not made for walking around, it's humid and unappealing in many ways, but then there is always a fascination of the bustle for me. To be fair I am staying in the nicer part of the central city, near to the national monument, embassies and a high-rise skyline that refreshes your senses at night with its bright lights, enough to shake off the long-haul flight and rest before I commence the invention of my journey as I go.

I took this photo the other night as I walked back to the hotel on a belly full of soto nasi ayam from one of a myriad of street-side food stalls. I saw this building several hours earlier in the daylight, standing plainly white but elegantly on the corner of a street from an artery boulevard. It was only in the dark that I saw its real beauty, as if the night was a make-up artist using skill with foundation cream to turn the white in to charcoal, its vertical lines defined with mascara, to both stand out yet blend in to the blanket sky. How the long arrows of light down the length of both façades enhanced its engraved, patterned features. Yet despite my appreciation of architecture and love affair of the night, and not even the street food fest I have been on up to know, something else has stood out in this part of the city for me.

Unfortunately the pollution has a grip on this metropolis, and there is sometimes a grime to the streets even in the nicer areas, that creeps on you as you try to navigate and trudge its streets, yet when there is a garden, there is some balance restored.

As an Englishman, they say that gardening is one of our national past times, it gives us a sense of pride and purification to our own personal space. Here, even though thousands of miles and a whole world of culture, language and behaviour away, I say there is more in common than you might think. 

At any large building with a green space or a prestigious place with lawn, there are an abundance of employed gardeners, consistent and constant in their work, even if it means one holds the bag while the other calmly sweeps up leaves in an almost absent manner. Too many of them maybe, on auto pilot and certainly not labour efficient for us westerners. The bushes are pruned, the lawn is immaculate. Workers flexibly squat back on their haunches as they work with a pistol-length version of a broomstick, sweeping fallen petals and dried leaves from the flowerbeds - something we would not even go to the length of doing in Europe. As neat and angled as this building is, looking around and past the heavily beaten and uneven asphalt, it seems that it deserves a moat of green at its feet. Or is it the other way around? This building had to be elegant enough to merit being in the company of the surrounding gardens. 

I travel to far places to experience new things, taste foods and understand better cultures, yet do I need to come so far when I grew up with a garden in England? I try to explain to my Italian and Spanish friends how the British have a house and garden culture as oppose to apartment living in many European towns and cities. The Italians say 'il mondo è un paese' - the world is a village - to describe how, what we can find a long distance away in the big wide world, we can find near to home in a small village.

The grime and traffic versus the building and the garden. It is a reminder of the Cherokee Native American story of two wolves: One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. When the grandson asks the elderly brave which wolf will win the fight, he replies: "The one you feed." 

My dad constantly fed his garden every day.

Read more stuff like this here:  The bustle