So you’re with a few of your friends riding your tallbikes around Indonesia. You’ve just invaded the Venice Bienniale on a flotilla of beautifully intricate handcrafted junk-assemblage-art-music-boats, and this is a well-deserved break: overpaying the airline to get a few tallbikes to Indonesia, fighting Jakarta traffic and smog, skirting giant rats, perusing street vendors selling water snakes in plastic bags, sneaking extra folks into cheapo hotel rooms, and generally having a good old time.
Sound like a crazy dream? Dream on: Photographer Tod Seelie is there.
My favorite part? Yogaya.
We finally get to Yogya, and feel like we’re home:
- Getting in to Yogya late at night and meeting up with friend-of-a-friend Maya, who lives at the Performance Klub house. She welcomes us and promptly sets us up to stay at her place, which is really nice (open courtyard/garden thing, guest room).
- We meet her cat, who first bites you and then sucks on the spot he bit. We can’t remember the cat’s name so it’s promptly branded “Viper Suckle.”
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- We go to the tourist-shopping street later to look for a hat for Greg. As soon as we get off our bikes a posse of punk kids on crazy tall bikes ride past. We yell at them, but they just smile, wave and keep going. Later we head out on our bikes and pass the same group of kids hanging out at the end of the street. We stop and tell them how we had heard of them and came to Yogya to meet them. They had heard we were coming, but didn’t know when. We rounded up a posse and went for a long nighttime ride around town.
- The next day, Atom (one of the local bike gurus) helps Chloe make her mountain bike into an Indonesian-stye tall bike.
See all the images and follow the adventure on Tod’s amazing blog Suckapants, or just enjoy his gorgeous photography at his website or on Flickr.
(Photos posted with Tod’s permission. Thanks Tod!)
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beautiful stuff. great find. those pictures all conjure up dreamy stories of other worlds. that last one is like something out of a terry gilliam film.
Nice picture and story
Tallbike have been around 25 years ago in Indonesia. Appear in the capital city of Jakarta, high bike reaches 2 to 3 meters or more. Tall bike community disappeared after the Jakarta city filled with vehicles.
Goesbike.com.
It’s an adventure riding tall bikes here in the states. I can’t imagine what it takes to do it as your overseas journey.
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