Psychogeography for beginners

Psychogeography for beginners -

 

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Borneo is a great place to visit, but there hiking Jakarta is perhaps not the best way of putting things.

mysterious heart of darkness Borneo is the subject of the action-packed Indonesia Expat this week and I my weakest synapses have been scouring for stories about the dense jungles and faster d white water of the tropical zero field. It has been a while since I slept with either an orangutan or a Dayak woman with long earlobes three feet (they give something to hang) and I'm not Joseph Conrad, it seems. Admittedly, I recently visited the lovely city of Kota Kinabalu on the Malaysian part of the island, but a piece comparing and contrasting the clean, dynamic and organized KK with its urban-Indonesian counterparts dying would surely only be used to support the RI faithful readers expatriates.

So instead, I thought it relevant to tell the occasion on which a colleague of the same brain damaged and I took upon ourselves to walk to the city of Palangkaraya Kalimantan , all the way from the National monument in Jakarta.

Now you can go straight to the top of the class and accept the value of a million rupiah good Anker (not redeemable at your local minimart) if you correctly guessed this epic trek presents no significant problem, ie, the stretch of 300-odd kilometer of the ocean that lies between Java and the sunny coast of Borneo.

Certainly, I was accused of a messianic storey complex on the water front with a companion, but I really should clarify at this point and explain that my friend, Dan and I actually flew across the Java sea in a large jet aircraft and that the underlying conceit of our hike / theft was a concept known as "psycho-geography."

Psychogeography was first developed by French theorist Guy Debord called in the 1950s as "Study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on emotions and behavior of individuals. " An alternative definition is "A complete set toy box of fun inventive strategies for exploring cities. Just about anything that takes pedestrians their predictable paths and jolts in a new awareness of the urban landscape."

More recently, Will Self, a British novelist and spinner darkly comic and surreal urban son, revived the idea of ​​Psychogeography (check his rap Authors @   about YouTube for a detailed discussion) . Auto Notes how modern, urban life isolates us on the small islands of life around the home, office, pub, etc. Consequently, any visceral feeling we can have for urban geography around us is very limited, that travel between cities these islands is largely passively facilitated by motorized vehicles that are barely a century old. So little sense of geography, terrain or scale is printed in our modern minds like mind maps, and the process has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years have now been reduced to nothing.

Auto therefore resolved to march from his home in London to New York. Specifically, he left his home at Heathrow Airport in London, flew to New York and continued to rise from JFK airport to a hotel downtown. Strenuous physical effects of walking, coupled with the closed the passive downtime spent on the brain apparently deceived his plane into believing he had crossed one continuous mass.

Still with me? Well, always a sucker for an essentially ridiculous idea that was dressed in a patina of intellectual theorizing, my colleague and I left Dan Monas at 2am one night and just began a long hike to the Soekarno-Hatta Airport a noon flight Palangkaraya. We chose not to run along the toll road and instead followed the main town in Jalan Daan Mogot artery for a good 20 km before hanging a sharp right turn and painfully few clicks to end the airport.

The early stages of the chore was a night urban hiking haunting fueled by large boxes of Anker (the importance of decent hydration on long hikes can not be overestimated). The dawn was soon upon us, however, and we were able to take the full measure of our post-apocalyptic environment. Ammonia floated through the channel and into our eyes and piles of garbage carcinogenically smoked while sporting underclass children interesting skin conditions played away in the ruins of West Jakarta. It is the city that never sleeps people, which is why it looks so bloody awful the next morning.

The sun always rose higher in the sky, the juggernauts pounded relentlessly asphalt and fatigue began to take its toll on our members as we approached a terminal. Concrete and slums packet noodles eventually gave way to the beginning of the toll road to the airport we have come from the south, along the relatively green area of ​​Lake airport and trees that I usually only see through a taxi window.

The final, painful hours of hiking through the roasting sun now we finally transported to the terminal building. According to Charles Babbage, GPS device steam Dan, we had 26km market and felt a real sense of accomplishment to have mental instability scale heights that few manage to achieve. Certainly inbound social media comments were unforgivingly rigorous in their overall assessments of the project.

After a short flight, we again our hike on the lush island of Borneo. The final 3 km walk in the city through the bucolic countryside surrounding tropical Palangkaraya airport was a relative breeze after expiatory wastelands of West Batavia. Any sane person would have started hiking from here instead. It was definitely a memorable trip, although I 'fess here and show that the day after the return leg was not undertaken on foot. So is someone else to take the challenge? Supping cocktails on a Bali beach is so 2014.

 

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