This morning I made a foray across town to try to buy travellers cheques. I didn't like the idea of carrying so much cash about my person, especially after yesterday's little episode at the airport.

Anyway, it didn't work out—Ririn's contact at the bank said they didn't do it, and he didn't know who did.

I planned to do a walking tour of the centre of the city, but the heat got too much. After half an hour I was struggling, bathed in sweat, and constantly at loggerheads with the traffic. Not enjoyable at all! Spotting one of the 3 malls in the city, I made a bee-line for it, where in a cool western-style cafe I had a refreshing coffee and doughnut for breakfast.

I spent the rest of the morning touring the malls, before meeting up with Ririn. We later had difficulty finding a place to cash Euros, though we were ultimately more successful in this venture.

Indonesia and its Jittery Economy

With 17,670 islands, Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago, stretching from Southeast Asia to Australia in a 3,500-mile crescent. The fourth most populous country in the world, with 210m people, it is also one of the most culturally diverse, encompassing Javanese Muslims, Portuguese-speaking Christians, Balinese Hindus, and animist tribespeople from Borneo and New Guinea. Three hundred different ethnic groups inhabit the islands and while the official language, Bahasa Indonesia, is prevalent almost everywhere, 250 other distinct languages are also spoken.

Indonesia still hasn't picked up after the crisis. Five years since the Asian financial crisis began with the float of the Thai baht on July 2, 1997—an event that precipitated an economic and social crash across the region—the fall-out still haunts the country.

The crisis hit Indonesia the hardest, gutting the economy and leading to the downfall of former President Suharto in May 1998, events that combined to unleash a new wave of bloodletting in Indonesia's outer reaches.

There are also fears for the future, with growth in child malnutrition and worsening health care prompting the United Nations Children's Fund to warn that Indonesia faced the spectre of a "lost generation", a threat that the organization says still exists. One local organization has claimed that the number of child beggards in Jakarta has increased three-fold in the last five years.

The Indonesian currency, the rupiah, tumbled. At one stage in 1998 it nearly hit 17,000 to the US dollar from 2,500 before the crisis began—a depreciation of 85 per cent. It now trades at around 8,700 to the US dollar. Income per capita has dropped from US$ 1.200 to US$300, while prices continue to rise.

In 1998 the economy shrank 13.7 per cent, and has siince failed to hit the six-seven per cent annual growth it averaged during the previous 30 years.

The World Bank has said that the most likely scenario was, it would take Indonesia until 2005 to scale back the number of people living on less than US$2 a day to 1996 levels—a figure that would still represent half the population.

Madura and the Madurese

Our plan (well, actually, my plan, which Ririn acceded to) was to visit the nearby island of Madura, which according to what I had read is rarely visited by tourists, even from Indonesia. The island is about 160 Km long by 35 Km wide, separated from Java by a narrow channel. The Madurese have a reputation for being rough, brave, and clannish, and for having a propensity for violence. Their code of honor (known as carok), involves the use of the celurit, the characteristic knife of the islanders, usually in the back, which can lead to blood feuds (which invites comparison with Sicily). They are, of course, practically all Muslims.

Madura is also home to a unique language and culture that sets its natives apart from the people of Indonesia's other islands. And yet it is barely home to its own people. About 3 million live on the island. Of an estimated 10 million Madurese, 6 million have relocated permanently to places that offer more work. Others spend a good part of their lives on ferries back and forth to Surabaya. This makes the Madurese the most itinerant of all Indonesian ethnicities, a people banished from their home by economic circumstance.

There are many Madurese in Surabaya, where they take their place on the lowest rung of the employment ladder. They number about 800,000—a fourth of the city's population. The majority are compelled to peddle cigarettes, pimp for brothels, collect scrap metal and, with their fearsome celurits—a kind of machete—help the city's underworld run smoothly. I'd imagine they occupy the same place in Java society that the Irish did when they emigrated out of economic neccessity to England in the nineteen forties and fifties.

The Madurese have reportedly been driven out of the local gambling and prostitution businesses (now allegedly backed by Chinese-Indonesians and the Indonesian military and police). But they have their own network to help newcomers find jobs in Surabaya, whether it's selling fruit or cigarettes on the street or collecting discarded plastic bottles and bald tires. The community is centered in the northern part of the city, where many Madurese live together in tiny makeshift houses.

One touist attraction on the island are the bull races (kerapan sapi), which take place in Autumn. The races are a development of the use of bulls for ploughing.