Solo Bike Trip

Our bike adventure in the outskirts of Solo was incredible. It started with our fantastic guide, Ajip, taking us through the somewhat flooded streets of the city. After torrential rain the night before, there was about 2 feet of water on some streets, which we biked through along with the rest of the Saturday morning traffic. People were rather non-shalant about the American-emergency-level flooding, although a somewhat toothless gentleman did take it upon himself to wade waist deep and haphazardly direct traffic. Although they usually cross the river on a bamboo raft with the bikes, we had to take the bridge out of town because the river was dangerously high. We first stopped at a tofu making house, where soybeans were heated and pressed and heated and made into tofu in old window frames.

Next we went to the gamelan making house, which was absolutely amazing. A team of 8 guys takes a sheet of bronze about the size of your arms spread all the way apart (in the "the fish was this big" way) and turn it into a musical instrument by doing the following: the plate is set on a pile of burning coals (which is kept burning with a leaf blower in an adjacent hole feeding it fresh oxygen) and heated to glowing red, with one guy handling the super hot plate. Another guy then grabs the giant smoldering plate and hauls it over to a makeshift platform of fresh mud, where 4 guys with 20+ pound metal hammers are waiting to pound the edges out in a terrifying 1-2-3-4 swinging movement. Yet another guy continually turns the plate while the hammering guys hammer away for about a minute, until the plate cools too much and it is yet again thrown into the pile of charcoal. Process repeats until the bronze plate has become the right shape for the gamelan - it takes about a day for each gong to be completed. All of these guys are barefoot and most also have a cigarette dangling from their mouths the whole time. This unbelievable process happens in a very hot, very sooty room with a charcoal floor.

The gamelan is then given to another guy who is the tuner - he hammers out the inside of the instrument until it reaches the perfect pitch, which he recognizes by ear, even though his job is incredibly loud and must damage his hearing. Yet another guy then polishes the top of the gong until its beautiful and shiny and ready to sell. A full gamelan orchestra requires 98 gamelans, each of which is made in this traditional way. Craziness. All of the guys that worked at this production house were from the same family, a family that had been making gamelans this way for generations.

We then biked along through the rice fields to a place where they make arak (cane liquor), tempe, and rice crackers. Along the way, innumerable children chased us and shouted "Hello!", giggling with each other when we said hello back. We stopped for lunch at a little roadside restaurant where Ajip explained some of the more intricate Javanese dishes and Kate had the best strawberry juice in the world. We finished our trip at a batik workshop and saw all of the traditional ways to make batik (bark for dye, hand painted wax) and the ridiculously intricate patterns they create. Fantastically educational day in Solo!

Later that night, we went to the recommended "dance performance" at a nearby theater. The javanese, like the balinese, are all about their traditional arts, especially dance and shadow puppets. It being Saturday night, the place was packed with local teens talking and texting on their cell phones. The performance was largely unintelligible and once of the strangest demonstrations of dance imaginable - overweight men in weird masks pointing and stomping their feet to intermittent musical accompaniment. Cultural, certainly, and still worth the 30 cents apiece, but we hope the Yogyakarta performances with me a little more...magestic. We left the next morning for the hour train ride to Yogyakarta.