The Sultan and the magical egg

The pre-hike briefing was at 2:30 a.m. We would not go all the way to the cone of the volcano, since it's still active. Instead we'd stop at a couple of different viewing points to see the lava and smoke from a relatively safe distance. Christian gave us our emergency instructions, which boiled down to: "If somebody says run, run!"

Marching orders

Then he told us his brother-in-law would be leading the hike. That was disappointing, because Christian is a great storyteller. On the plus side, he said Ilu, the dog, would be coming with us. Ilu is a funny-looking mutt with stumpy legs and an extravagant plume of tail. He has a piece of skin stuck haphazardly on his head, the memento of a long-ago fight. "A nice dog, but quite smelly," Christian said in his precise way.

Ilu: A nice dog, but quite smelly

Isa, the brother-in law, showed up, and we headed out through the dark town to the woods. We hiked for about an hour up an easy trail to a viewpoint. There we stood looking across a canyon at the peak of Merapi, barely visible in the dark. Nothing happened for a while. Then we saw a finger of red tracing down from the cone. Lava! Then another red thread, and another. The sun began to rise, and the peak became visible. The call to prayer sounded, along with the bellow of the loudest cow I have ever heard. And while all this was happening, Isa told us a story.

A long time ago, he said, the first sultan of Yogyakarta came into power. Since he was the first, he wasn't quite sure how to rule the kingdom. The kingdom was very small. He wanted to make its people more numerous. He wanted them to be safe and prosperous. He decided to medidate in pursuit of wisdom. After a few days, the Queen of the South Sea, who rules the water along Yogya's coast, came to him in a vision.

The Queen of the South Sea

"Hey Sultan!" said the Queen. "I notice you've been sitting around for quite a while."

"I'm meditating on how to make my kingdom grow," said the Sultan.

"Well that's all well and good," the queen barked, "but leaders have to act. So get up and get moving! Since you seem to need a little help, here's what we'll do. If you marry me, I'll align my kingdom with yours, and I will enhance your power."

That sounded good to the Sultan, so he agreed. He married the Queen, and she tutored him in the ways of love -- and power.

One day the Queen gave her husband an egg. This was not the egg of a chicken or a duck, but a mystical egg, the egg of the Earth itself. "There is only one egg like this in the whole world," the Queen said. "If you eat it, you will never be hungry."

A magical egg

The sultan accepted the egg. He had his royal chef cook it up for breakfast. But as he pondered the Queen's words, he began to worry.

"What sort of person never gets hungry?" he reasoned. "A dead one, that's who!" He began to wonder if the Queen was plotting against him.

So he called to his gardener. "Hey gardener. Come eat this!"

The gardener dutifully ate the egg. Then he began to grow. He grew taller, taller, taller! "What will I do?" the gardener cried. "I can't go home! I'm too big for my house!"

The sultan thought quickly. "There's a wild mountain near here," he said to the gardener. "You shall be the king of that mountain, and use your newfound power to protect all of Yogyakarta."

So it was, and so it has been to this day. As each sultan of Yogyakarta passes away, he leaves an heir by his earthly wife. Each new sultan enters into a mystical union with the Queen of the South Seas. And the king of Merapi (for that was the name of the wild mountain) rules with the sultan and the Queen to protect Yogyakarta and its surroundings.

The tenth, and current, Sultan of Yogyakarta,
Hamengkubuwono X

And that is why, to this day, the sultan and the people of Yogyakarta make regular offerings to the sea Queen and the mountain King to maintain peace and prosperity.

When the story ended, the sun had risen, and Isa had proved himself no slouch as a storyteller. Ilu, who had fallen asleep (he's probably heard the story a hundred times) gave himself a shake, and we set off for a closer look at the peak.

(This is one of many legends about Yogya, Merapi and the Queen of the South Sea, and I make no claim to it being the authoritative version. It's a good story, though, eh?)

Junk food of the week: Silver Queen

I was surprised when my friend Michele told me she'd spotted Indonesia's own Silver Queen chocolate on a list of Sauveur Magazine's Top 100. Top 100 what? I'm not sure. I like Silver Queen -- I've rarely met a chocolate bar I don't like, really, other than the really cheap, waxy, grainy ones -- but I never figured it was Top 100 Something or Other quality.

A Canadian chocolate bar named Big Turk also made the list. I find it sad that Silver Queen and Big Turk are separated by so many thousands of miles. I have a feeling they'd be perfect for each other.

Unintentional offering

The first thing we noticed at Parangtritis beach was the SUV in the water. It was hard to miss. It was stuck in the sand and the rising tide was rocking it a little harder with each incoming wave.


Someone had made a poorly-planned effort to go offroading. But that wasn't the real reason they'd gotten stuck. Everybody knew the real reason: the truck was green, or at least greeny-blue, and green is the favorite color of the Queen of the South Sea. People always warn you not to swim at Parangtritis in a green bathing suit, or the Queen will grab you in her strong watery embrace and you'll never be seen in this world again.

Furthermore, a Protestant minister on the beach informed us, this particular Monday was a very spiritual day on the Javanese calendar, so our offroader was really asking for trouble.


People hung around watching. The minister said later, when the tide started going down, they'd get a bunch of guys together to push the truck out. We didn't want to wait, so we strolled off down the beach.

We had dashed out to Parangtritis after school that afternoon, just for a little getaway. We were glad we did. There weren't many people. It was quiet. The air smelled like ocean and the sand felt like ocean. It's crazy how rarely we see the ocean, given that we live in an archipelago.

We had a good walk and then bought an ear of roasted corn spiced with sugar and chili. It was so good we bought another. We watched the sun set.

Later we got some fish at a little strip of restaurants back near the parking lot. Everything had that offseason feeling. The restaurants were all lit up, but they were empty. Our taxi was the only car in the parking lot.


On the way back the driver told us he'd watched them get the truck out of the sea. The guys had waited for each incoming wave and then pushed, letting the ocean help them. As we sped home in the dark, often straddling the white line in the middle of the road, we passed the green truck being towed to the repair shop, still dripping. Maybe the Queen of the South Sea decided she didn't like SUVs.

The List

Before we left Bloomington, I made a list of things I thought I might miss. Now that we've been here a while, and a new year is beginning, I figure it's time to see how strong my powers of prediction were. I will award hankies on a scale of one to ten to represent how fervently I wail for each item.

I was going to make a little hanky icon out of the image above, called Sketch of Queen Victoria's Handkerchief, which I found on the British Library website, but A: you lose the impact if you shrink it down to icon size and B: Blogger was being a big pain about it.

So here's my list from March, and my ratings of how much I actually miss each one. Friends and family are off it, of course, because you are in a totally different category of missing.

1. Drinking out of the faucet: 3 hankies. While I love sticking my head under the faucet, I can live without it. What I do really miss is potable tap water. We have to keep resupplying ourselves with big bottles of drinking water for the dispenser, and it always runs out at a bad time.

2. Eavesdropping: 2 hankies. Comprehension is still a challenge, but I can make out enough Indonesian to keep me interested.

3. Blue cheese pizza from Rockits in Bloomington: 7 hankies. We can get pizza here, but it tends to be all boutique-y, with stuff like sesame seeds, cilantro and worst of all, tuna on it. I long for a good working-class blue cheese pizza.

Local pizza chain, Papa Ron's.

4. Snow: 10 hankies. Ouch.

5. Oatmeal: 0 hankies. I still eat oatmeal every morning. The quick-cooking kind is readily available, and there's no need to cook it. Who wants a hot breakfast when it's 90 degrees out? Just pour on some milk and you're set.

6. Being able to buy something in a drugstore without a lot of pointing, pantomiming, and mispronouncing things out of the phrasebook: 1 hanky. It's pretty rare for us to have major difficulties in a store these days.

7. The Monroe County Public Library: 3 hankies. Indonesian teen novels are still keeping me pretty well entertained.

So there you have it! As I said in my original post, you may know what you love, but you don't know what you're going to miss. Sometime I'll draw up a list of what we DO miss, and I can tell you what's going to be at the top: a fast internet connection!!!