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Indonesia’s Hybrid Theme Parks

18 June, 2013 Travel & Tourism No comments
Written by Lauren Gumbs
TUESDAY, 18 JUNE 2013

The emergence of the growing Asian middle classes has seen an increase in theme parks. Indonesia is no exception. New lifestyles marked by patterns of consumption have made the proliferating amusement venues profitable and attractive as recreation goals with attendance hitting 108.7 million people in 2012.

Indonesia’s theme parks tend to be hybrids, combinations of themes and attractions. These can be bewildering mixtures of animal enclosures and educational exhibits with a sudden rollercoaster or water slides appearing. Some even have hotels attached like the big Western models.

These hybrid parks are common in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The Singapore Zoo for example, includes a Kidsworld amusement park within the zoo.

These impressive modern parks have endless variety; Park Jatim 1 in Batu East Java, is a museum/ zoo/ theme park/ amusement park. Park Jatim 2, also in Batu, is an educational museum/ waterpark/ theme park. Another Batu offering, the Eco Park, is a museum/ bird zoo/ amusement park. Even the famous Taman Safari near to Surabaya combines attractions as a zoo safari/ theme park/ amusement park.

Many of the designs seen in Indonesia are partly modelled on European or western styles, which are not immune to expressions of ideology within both the architecture and exhibits, particularly in museum or educational components.

In the Indonesian context, the architecture often funnels visitors along an inescapable circuit, with usually an educational element that transfers dominant ideologies to shared public spaces.

Jawa Timur Park 1 in Batu East Java includes a science centre with pictures of the most groundbreaking scientists lining the walls. All the scientists between the years 781- 1288 are Muslim, with several more included in the lead-up to the 20th century.

Apart from framing science’s earliest and ongoing achievements profoundly within the domain of Islam, and obscuring the problem that science conflicts with religion in fundamental areas like evolution, the act of recognizing historical figures outside of a western sphere of consciousness and narrating the triumphs of an exemplary Islamic past is not unsurprising . Their merits, however, are.

Abu Uthman ibn Bahr al Kinami al Fuqaimi in CE781-869 was “The first Muslim scientist who coined the theory of evolution, the foundation stone of the science of zoology, and the biologist first to note changes in bird life through migration”.

It is hard not to see a rivalry between western and eastern thought being ingrained in visiting children and students with the following scientific and historical fact that another Muslim scientist in the 13th century- 1213-1288- was the first to discover the human circulatory system “far before Harvey in 1628″.

In the cultural area, where the diversity of Indonesia is represented through still life displays defined vis-a-vis regional identities, Indonesian ethnic groups with dazzling traditional costumes and impressive artefacts stand in contrast to Papuans who are nearly naked and squatting by primitive huts and fires.

Indonesian theme parks predominantly cater to domestic visitors and tourists, and just as the west represents its multiculturalism and other political ideologies, Indonesian parks are also predisposed to transfer dominant cultural and political subjectivities via educational exhibits and attractions.

School curricula and textbooks can be heavy on ideology such as nationalism or dominant religious views, similarly impressed upon educational areas of theme parks where typically Indonesian subjectivities come through.

Bizarrely, the Eco Park in Batu, which across other eco-themed exhibits cultivates respect for life and interest in the protection of the environment, has a jungle safari adventure that consists of riding a jeep through a jungle with pop-up animal and hunter statues. Laser guns are connected to targets on the pop-ups and points are awarded for killing the hunters, who cry out and fall down dead.

Considering that shooting animals, even fake ones, is off limits by eco-park standards, the excitement of hunting is replicated justifiably: by hunting the hunters. However, the pronouncement that illegal poaching is punishable by death is as disturbing as is the encouragement to participate.

Such exaggerated, hyper-real situations reflect and distort real life, yet the idea can be applied to the broader idea of law and justice in society; that violence is legitimate if employed in the service of a principled idea and carried out by those vested with the power to wield it.

The recruitment of violence in the service of fun is presumably preparation for the ideologies behind a punitive penal system. The four and five year olds present accepted it simply and enthusiastically: “We can kill the baddies that kill the animals?”

Perhaps the most prominently ideological theme park is “Taman Mini Indonesia Indah” in Jakarta. Taman Mini is symbolic of nation-building during the time of Suharto.

It idealizes Pancasila and ‘unity in diversity’ by displaying replicas of all 27 provinces in Indonesia (26 now without Timor Leste).

However, it is only a rural narrative told here, one that captures the vision of a regionally diverse sovereign nation. Chinese culture is absent, as are depictions of urban dwellers like the 10 million living in Jakarta in the 1970s at a time of rapidly rising urbanization.

Taman Mini was not without initial controversy. At a cost of US$26 million in 1971 the project triggered small student demonstrations. Three hundred residents claimed they were forced to move and to sell their land at half the market value.

Michael Hitchcock, director of the International institute for culture, tourism and development at London Metropolitan University, described Taman Mini as contributing to the “folklorization” of Indonesian culture, a key aspect of nation building projects to unify and codify “Indonesia”.

The symbolic import of Taman Mini was not lost on Indonesians.

“With hindsight it would appear significant that the first major open protest against New Order rule should concern a cultural village theme park”.

Hitchcock said New Order propaganda involved an articulate rhetoric of culture in which appeals were made to traditional values and customary behavior. Indeed, the vision of rural life and ethnic diversity is romantically expressed with neat and tidy traditional dwellings and elaborate traditional costumes. Moreover ethnic identities are construed as regional identities—kebudayaan daerah - keeping the specter of the nation close at hand by containing differences within a territorial scope.

Similarly, differences between ethnic groups today are emphasised culturally rather than politically, obscuring assertions of economic and political claims under the constructivism of nationalism.

Theme parks are not always benign educational playgrounds, but also vehicles for dominant interpretations, even inventions, of history and tradition, and the transference of dominant ideologies into public spheres of learning and recreation.

Once entrapped within the entrance gates, visitors are often herded forward with no early escape or shortcut to preferred rides or attractions. Like a conveyor belt in a factory, visitors’ routes are organized; they are guided through exhibits and rides, exposed to norm-engendering educational forces that stamp, shape, and affirm.

Exhausted visitors are ejected at the exit, reeling from activity overload, Disneyesque verisimilitude and the unconscious realization that reality is slightly inferior to reproduction which seems to carry the greater truth value. Indonesian hybrid theme parks are an absorbing mash up of fantasy.

http://asiasentinel.com

Indonesia for Road Warriors

17 June, 2013 Travel & Tourism No comments

With a one-trillion-dollar economy growing at 6% a year, Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest market, and is becoming increasingly attractive to road warriors.

The nation’s overseas and domestic business travel market is in good health due to rising investment and a growing middle class. Business events and commercial interest are spilling out of the capital, Jakarta, and into other major Indonesian cities, with Batam, Bintan, Medan and the island of Bali drawing many executives. And following a regulation mandating that oil, gas and natural resources companies invest in the local area, the expanding energy and pharmaceutical sectors are funding business travel and business events throughout country.


“An oil company operating rigs or vessels in one area needs to book all its travel from local suppliers and not use agents based outside the country,” said Adam Knights, group sales director at ATPi, a travel management company.
In addition, the country will host various Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conferences this year, such as the CEO Summit, the Trade Finance and Treasury Reform meetings.
Indonesia’s economy is predicted to be larger than Germany’s in terms of projected GDP by 2050, according to consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. An additional 100,000 guest rooms will need to be built in the next decade just to cope with demand, translating to an estimated 700 to 800 hotels.
The government forecasts that the number of air passengers, both business and leisure, will increase by 12% this year, after growing by 15% to 72 million passengers in 2012. Flying is one of the easiest ways to get around this archipelago nation of more than 17,000 islands, where rail, ferries and roads are still fairly undeveloped.
If Soekarna-Hatta, Indonesia’s main airport in Jakarta, is anything to gauge by, the country is already overwhelmed by air traffic. The airport handles roughly 150,000 passengers a day – more than double its capacity – and is planning a $2 billion expansion to triple its capacity. The much smaller Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in the east of the city will open to commercial flights in September to help ease the strain.
This is just one of more than 20 projects aimed at building and upgrading Indonesian existing airports, many of which will be located in the east of the country, including East Nusa Tenggara and Papua, according to airline operator Angkasa Pura. This under-developed region has less infrastructure and tourism-focused facilities than the islands of Java and Sumatra to the west.
Singapore Airlines is boosting links to the country by launching a daily flight to Surabaya, the country’s second largest city, on 26 July. In addition, the airline is launching its ninth daily service to Jakarta and its fourth daily service to Denpasar, Bali, on the same day. Tiger Airlines is ramping up its services out of Singapore, launching flights to the cities of Yogyakarta starting in July and Bandung in August.

http://www.bbc.com/travel

The origin of all dragon myths

10 June, 2013 Nature, Travel & Tourism No comments

By Eko Armunanto

Richard Dawkins from The Richard Dawkins Foundation says “It has been suggested that the Komodo dragon is well named as the real-life origin of all our dragon myths, and it is certainly plausible that Chinese sailors would have brought back awestruck tales of them.” They don’t breathe fire but their mouths are so riddled with festering bacteria that one bite is fatal. Their preferred method of hunting is to deliver that fatal bite, then follow the prey around until it dies from the resulting bacterial infection, then eat it.

“They are confined to a handful of Indonesian islands, including Komodo itself and also Flores, home of the recently extinct Homo floresiensis on which they, and an even larger species of giant lizard, now extinct, perhaps preyed (if, that is, H.floresiensis was a real species of miniature human at all),” says Dawkins.

Komodo hunts live prey and are capable of ambushing creatures much larger than themselves. They have a thickly muscled tail and a strong bite. Even a slight graze can be lethal and cause severe infection because of the septic bacteria that live in their saliva. Western scientists verified their existence around 1910, but stories of these fearsome beasts circulated long before that.

Komodo Dragons are capable of ambushing creatures much larger than themselves (Free Wallpaper)

Komodo dragons were termed “Prehistoric Monster” back in 1926 after a much publicized expedition to Komodo island of Indonesia, led by William Douglas Burden, resulted in the capture of two live specimens; this expedition inspired one of the most famous movies of all times, King Kong (1933). The movie’s director even wanted to have Komodo dragons in the movie. But this was ultimately not possible and he replaced them with animation. In New York, the giant lizards met a captivated audience.

National Geographic says Komodo dragons have thrived in the harsh climate of Indonesia for millions of years, although amazingly their existence was unknown to humans until about 100 years ago. Animals that escape the jaws of a Komodo will only feel lucky briefly. Dragon saliva teems with over 50 strains of bacteria, and within 24 hours, the stricken creature usually dies of blood poisoning. Dragons calmly follow an escapee for miles as the bacteria takes effect, using their keen sense of smell to hone in on the corpse. A dragon can eat a whopping 80 percent of its body weight in a single feeding.