Living in Jakarta can be overwhelming at times. Exotic bars, glamorous malls, fancy cars and world-class restaurants, all surrounded by horrendous traffic and abject poverty. A 2-hour drive away, Taman Safari offers a great chance to escape from the craziness of Jakarta and enter a strange man-made animal world. Taman translates to park in Bahasa Indonesia (the National language).
Welcome to Safari Park
As the name suggests, Taman Safari begins with a safari. However, this is no ordinary safari. Strangely enough, it starts off with the purchase of a few kilos of carrots and bananas. An elephant induced traffic jam leaves you with no doubt as to what the carrots and bananas are meant for. All the animals have connected the dots between tourists and food.
Progress is slow. Fortunately, the fascination of having a zebra’s mouth pressed against a car window or an elephant snout in your face never gets too old.
Once you’re done with the vegetarian section, all windows are required to be tightly shut. The residents of the next section would choose you over the carrots. Lions, tigers, bears and rhinos either glance suspiciously at the passing cars or ignore them completely. That probably depends on whether lunch has been served or not. The lush green landscape does well to disguise the fact that this is just a zoo with a drive through cage.
Zoo
You would assume that boring half-asleep animals in cages would never be able to match up to a carrot safari. But then comes the central exhibit – a liger (cross between a male lion and a tigress). Ligers grow larger than tigers and lions and exist only in captivity since the territories of lions and tigers do not overlap. And all of a sudden, the zoo’s interesting again. Next comes the petting park where all tourists go wild since they can now pose for a picture with either a tiger or lion cub. The cubs are trained to smile for the camera with a stick. I believe that this practice is extremely cruel since the primal instinct of these hunting animals is to either attack or run away from humans.
Bird Park
A wooden walkway through a large football stadium sized cage allows you to get pretty close to a wide range of birds in all shapes and sizes. Exotic parrots, one legged cranes and weird orange beaked birds are all on display along with a bat cave. Unfortunately the thrills of the zoo and safari ensure that the bird park experience can never match up.
Entertainment
And if all THAT wasn’t enough to make an interesting day, Taman Safari has various shows on offer as well – elephants that paint and dolphins that walk on water. They’ve even gone one step further to cater for the non-animal lovers with a Wild West show and a motorcycle globe of death (that’s not as morbid as it promises to be).
If you catch yourself in Jakarta with some time to spare, Taman Safari’s sure to entertain, amuse and bewilder any seasoned traveler. Besides that, squeeze all this stuff into a day and you’ll need a week to recover. Phew.
While the two others on the Bali trip (they called themselves the Dynamic Duo) were getting their basic dive certification, Brit and I decided to cheat our way to a PADI advanced certification. After copying each other’s wrong answers for our ‘theory’ component we now only had five fancy dives in two days between us and a new card to certify us as advanced divers and clinically mad.
Underwater PhotographyThis first speciality dive was an easy one. Since we did not know anything about photography, cameras and optics (and neither did our instructor), this was just a dive where they let you handle a camera with one hand while you go about diving as usual. We decided to do what we do best with cameras – silly poses! Brit even pretended to take a dump in a vase coral. |
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Underwater Navigation
This was an altogether more boring dive but probably very important. Despite traversing a perfect square on a sandy patch (under water mind you) with just a compass, we still can’t navigate to save our lives literally. Oh and apparently there was a black-tipped shark in the waters while we were busy navigating. The thought of having to return to the same waters in the night later was a bit worrying.
The other highlight of this dive was the most complex conversation I’ve had under-water.
Me – Water cold here. But warm here.
Brit – Like in that episode of Planet Earth.
Me – Thermokline!
Brit – Yea .. there is a lot of marine life in thermoklines. Watch out.
Me – High five!
Just remember that this was all done through sign language coz you can’t talk under-water!
Night Dive
This was truly an unforgettable experience. I’ve never been more focused on a dive before. It was one of those things that make you go “Why am I doing this again?” We saw some interesting organisms but the real thrill came when instructor asked us to switch off our torches – I pretended to not understand. Then he did it himself. The dark swallowed us.
In this modern day, we don’t experience genuine total darkness. This was a different level. 20m underwater, the cool night sea engulfed us in a silent suffocating envelope of black interrupted only by the chortle of our bubbling breath. Then the lights came back on! The two of us were constantly checking our backs to see if that dastardly shark was anywhere. Good dive to end the day!
Wreck Dive
The next day’s programme was promising and therefore inevitably disappointing. The USAT Liberty was a world-famous wreck dive site which looked churlish and average that day. We did hit 30 m depth but a downward sea-current challenged me a great deal. I eventually made it back but in an ungainly fashion and really off-course.
Deep Dive
Our deep dive off the side of a cliff under water turned out to be a lot less dramatic than I hoped. It was a deep fall alright but when you are suspended 30 m under water, being on the side of a sheer cliff isn’t that spectacular. It would have been even less memorable had it not been for me almost starting my dive without my cylinder open. A few metres into the water lugging a heavy ass cylinder and weight-belt, I realized I had no way of inflating my suit to stay afloat. Furiously back-pedalled to shore and rectified the situation. At the end, we were certified and so were the Dynamic Duo.
21 dives into my amateur diving career and I still treat the underwater with a healthy dose of skepticism and fear. I wear gloves lest I touch something evil and obsess about my gear. I constantly check my air gauge and breathe heavy to convince myself I am not drowning. All that fussing and my high metabolism combine to rob me off at least 10 minutes of dive time – I use up the air too fast!
Interesting fact: an empty aluminium cylinder (since it is supposed to contain life-saving air, empty is not good!) is very buoyant and causes you to surface uncontrollably.
Diving is not for everyone – and probably not for me. I can say with great confidence that I am not a natural but I have persisted and progressed. I can see myself slowly accumulating dives over the coming years till the proverbial shark or decompression illness ends my run. With me, it might even be a rogue unopened cylinder valve!
A walk down Bali’s Kuta beach and I’m faced with an onslaught of double-digit IQs. The prejudice might have arisen out of flat foreheads and wide-open mouths being evolution’s signals for dumb. Or it might be the bigotry born of jealousy of all those ripped bodies and tanned skin.
Surfing is the ultimate victory of the jocks over the geeks. If you intellectualise the why of surfing, and the learning of the art, you have already lost it for you are not cool enough. As a geek, the rational thing to do is to pretend to be a surfer …. And that’s exactly what we set ought to do.
There is something about taming the waves on a ridiculously large board that screams cool! Even a real surfer’s wipe-out looks rehearsed. It requires an improbable mix of those skills and attitudes that are not at all natural for a middle-class Indian kid.
Childhood Trauma
My father’s refusal to let a wet sandy Vikram back into the car after a trip to the beach took the fun out of entering the water and made it an act requiring great contemplation. Let us say I’ve overcome that by now. But swimming in a surf beach is not just swimming – no goggles, ridiculously salty water, unexpected slaps of waves all make you want to rush back to knee-deep waters near the beach. High fitness levels, upper-body strength, a devil-may-care attitude to scratches and bruises are not inbuilt qualities in folks like me. Most importantly, the grace, balance and co-ordination needed for surfing can only be found naturally in kids who grow up doing stunts like walk on thin ledges, skate-board and jump off walls. Kids who did their home-work on time and attended violin classes are much slower in getting the hang of surfing.
Nevertheless I wanted to learn the basics and so I signed up for a class.
Surfing 101
My previous attempt at figuring it out on my own in Surfers’ Paradise was a flop, so this was going to be a class with an instructor – the world I used to thrive in!
Additional adversities to my surfing dream included an unhealed motorcycle injury on my knee (Oh yes! You need your knee for surfing). My bandana disappeared in the waves really early and left my long hair to join salty water in annoying my eyes. But remarkably I was standing up on the board in no time! Had I already figured this one out?
The “Instructor” (a local teenager) thinks I am ready for step 2 – paddle yourself to get the start as the wave hits you on your backside. Wipe-out de un! Try again with a bit of preparation. De deux! While I was going through hell, Brit (who’d been struggling until then) went past me in a perfect illustration of how to surf! He decided to step up by entering deeper waters – and quickly regretted the decision after being dragged under water for almost a lifetime.
In a while, we were tired, defeated and famished and sounded the retreat.
Encore
The next day we went surfing, I’d developed the illusion that all I needed was a board and time in the water. What followed was a frustrating couple of hours in the ‘wrong’ part of the beach. Surfs were rare and when they came, they took you down really fast. We hardly made a stand! I actually felt like I was unlearning what I’d figured out the last time, and the pro-surfers were making the feeling worse by zipping in and out around us. We made our excuses and left.
Conquering the waves will have to wait another day. And until then, we have these lucky pictures to get our entry to the cool kids club.
