Green Maps in Yogya

As a major tourist destination, Yogya receives a hefty amount of visitors both domestic and international each year. I decide to stop at the tourist information booth in the center of town, to see what type of information they offer to visitors. The lady behind the front counter gave me a large map of the area. On the backside over 30 different destinations in and around Yogya were highlighted, including some lesser known places like villages, a snake fruit agricultural tour, and an education forest. I also found a mini newspaper called the JogjaPages that include articles related to traveling, and more alternative opportunities for touring the surrounding areas like at a pottery village, a copper goods village, village home stay opportunities, and a bamboo handicrafts village. This type of tourism management seems positive as its trying to emphasize the local potential of other interesting, but less visited places.

That evening on a rather stormy night I met with members of the Yogya Green Map club at a little restaurant on the main street of town. I was greeted by Joyo, a young lanky guy in glasses, who is the coordinator of the Indonesian hub of Green Map. Also at the table were Thomas and Inu, other “green mappers.” I hadn’t heard of this group previously, but it is actually a worldwide organization started in New York in 1995, with the head of the Asian hub being in Taiwan. Using Google Earth communities are able to map interesting places in their area, and then make interactive and print maps for distribution. As Joyo explains, the Green Map club provides workshops to those interested in making maps and teaches the universal codes used by all green map members, but it is the community that creates and develops each map.

While Jakarta had the first green map club in Indonesia, the group in Yogya is now the most active. It’s primarily students that create these maps, as they are often very comfortable using computers and are usually more eager to help with volunteer projects. And as Joyo puts it, “the number of socially conscious university students around Yogya has really been a benefit to keeping our group active and focused.” Thomas, Inu, and Joyo told me they first discovered the club about 4 or 5 years ago when they were also university students.

As Joyo goes on to explain, one of the primary benefits of doing the mapping projects is that through the act of making the maps it gets others, especially young people, interested and aware of the assets of their community. By getting the community involved and educated about the interesting features of their area, the group hopes to encourage residents to be more apt to manage and preserve these unique features. “One of the most important steps of the map making” Joyo continued, “is the review process, which acts like a forum where participants can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of various points of interest.” They feel that by discussing weaknesses and strengths of different areas, this will encourage interest in more local community planning.

The next workshop the group is holding is taking place the following Sunday and the Green Map group will be helping to educate the community at Borobudur how to map their area. This will be a special “youth map” created by junior high students, with the purpose of encouraging visitors to extend their stay and visit other places in the local area surrounding the Borobudur World Heritage Site. Currently, most visitors are bused into the temple and then depart, without ever visiting the town or other interesting places and smaller temples around the area. However, as the group explains to me, there are hotels in the area, and inexpensive horse drawn carriages can be hired to visit the lesser known points of interest, thus providing an alternative experience to the routine mass tourism of the area.

In one sentence Joyo was able to sum up the goal of their group, “To empower local people to see their local resources honestly, and to encourage community involvement in planning and managing these assets.” I thanked the group for all the information, and as I left I couldn't help feeling very optimistic to see the passion they have for this work. Green maps really do seem like an innovative idea that can benefit local communities, as well as guests to their area.

Green Maps really is a global endeavor, so to find out more visit: http://www.greenmap.org/

My First day in Yogyakarta

I arrived early in the town of Yogyakarta, pronounced “Jogjakarta,” by night train from Tasikmalya. Somewhere during the evening the train crossed the imaginary line from West Java into Central Java. While West Java is dominated by Islamic Sundanese, Central Java is primarily Islamic ethnic Javanese. The whole region is known as the cultural home of the island, with Yogya in particular as the “soul.” It is here that many travelers go to learn more about local traditions and customs, to take language courses, and to appreciate the arts of the island. It is also a place where locals have become very accustomed to seeing and interacting with both domestic and international tourists. Many visitors fly in, visit Yogya, maybe Mt. Bromo, and then whisk off to Bali.

Batik is everywhere in Yogya, and everyone seems to produce and sell it. For those of you who are curious, or not, to make Batik one applies wax to either cloth or silk and then dyes the areas around it. At some point or other most visitors end up giving in and visiting one of the many Batik stores. It’s very time consuming to make Batik, but much simpler to make fake prints on cloth and sell those as “real” to unsuspecting tourists. Another trick is telling people that the shop is part of a government owned school selling prints without commission, and that by buying these reasonably priced art products you are supporting the students. This is still part of the tourism industry in Yoyga, so I decided to check out one of these places. I chose one of the fake art school ones, and the curator there gave me a brief demonstration on how to make Batik and then let me look around at the beautiful examples in the store room. I really haven’t a clue if it is “authentic” or just printed, but many of the images on the cloth were still interesting to see. He then tried to tell me how it is usually only other shop owners or traders that visit the school (because of their great prices), not tourists – yet when I was leaving another foreigner was arriving, probably to hear the same pitch ;)

The city of Yogya is considered a special region and is still ruled by a Sultan. In the middle of the city is the walled Kraton, home of the sultan, and a major visitor attraction. Outside of the locked front gates is a man telling all visitors the Kraton is closed until noon and that he can direct you to a Batik store. If one side step him, it’s easy to find a real entrance with ticket booth to the right side. This is another scam. There is nothing except a big empty entrance hall with a couple of chickens in cages around the side. The REAL entrance is further away on the Northwest side, to find it requires some aimless wandering and having people giving you the wrong directions. When I finally did find the entrance at 1:45pm, they were closing (as the guidebook can actually backup the Kraton is only open from 8a to 2p). Sadly, this is the first time during the 12 days I’ve been in Indonesia where so many people have been dishonest about directions.

While the Kraton palace was closed, I was able to enter the greater Kraton compound, which still serves as home to more than 25,000 people, and includes mosques, shops, a bird market, and "the Water Castle". The water castle, constructed by a Portuguese architect in the mid 1700s was a palace where the Sultan could spend time bathing and getting to know the lovely girls of his harem. However, it was completely destroyed during an earthquake in the mid 1800s. In 1970s some basic restoration efforts began on 5 structures and the place began attracting tourists. In 2003, a serious restoration effort began with donations of the Portuguese government and the World Monument Fund, which had placed the water castle on its 100 most endangered architectural sites list. In 2005 re-construction was finished, but in 2006 it was again damaged by an earthquake, yet not so severely as to be unfixable. I ended up getting a guide to take me around, who did a fine tour, but then ended it at another Batik shop – oy.

In one sense it’s very easy to understand people of the community wanting to make a profit from visitors who make the city congested, and who have enough extra money to spend taking a holiday. This is a very fair point, but I guess one of the negative social aspects that I’ve been noticing in this tourist town is the tendency of some people to juggle the truth, in order to make their profit. While so many people are still friendly and display the typical Indonesian charm, tourism does seem to test the ethics of some. Even at the guest house where I’m staying, the owner’s son was advising not to go to my next destination, Solo, because of a current violent spell. I asked others about this and checked online – nonsense.

The essence of articles I’ve read for my tourism class have also discussed how it’s much easier to regulate tangible resources related to economics and the environment, but social effects … that’s a different matter. So yes, Yogya is economically benefiting from tourism, but what about the negative (and positive) social impacts that can’t fit so easily onto a balance sheet? How can they be measured, tracked, and improved upon? Anyway, just thinking out loud ...


On a lighter note, here are some unique things I’ve noticed so far during my trip in Indonesia:

• I expected people to call out to me, “madame, come this way,” like in India, but no I keep getting “Hey Mister, over here!”
  
• People love discussing the US primary, and are usually filling me in on who is winning each state. There are also different views on who should win. As one man put it, “Obama – he’s a Jakarta boy” (since he went to school in Indonesia during his youth.) Another guy felt differently, “Hillary – I love the ladies.”
  
• Coming across an “Idol-esk” dance competition where pairs of youths dressed in funky outfits danced to rap songs, after which 3 serious looking judges in the front critiqued them.
  
• Watching foreign amateur photographers taking forever to shoot close up pictures of water lilies or trying to dramatically capture the image of a temple in a nearby puddle. Hehe, it’s quite silly to watch this.
  
• Listening to a minibus bus driver sing along with Nirvana on the stereo, much to the incomprehension of his traditionally dressed passengers
  
• Watching people, even Muslims, turn up the television volume when they hear the call to prayer.
  
• Oh, and coming across an English sign for a "Biker’s Brotherhood" in Bandung, Indonesia