Political Bombshell: A Sultan on the ballot

How exactly do you run against a demigod?

Now there's a question I bet political hacks like James Carville and Pat Buchanan have never had to answer. But if they were across the Pacific, they might have to. That's because the Sultan of Yogyakarta (aka Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X - try fitting that on a ballot) has announced that's he'll be running for Indonesian president, against the usual suspects like Megawati and Yudhoyono.

If crowds are any indication, he could stir up the race: 200,000 turned out to see him speak. Maybe not that surprising a turnout, since he's supposedly semi-divine. In terms of experience, he's not exactly Sarah Palin: He's governor of Yogyakarta, is extremely popular throughout Java, and in 1998 called for national unity while the country was undergoing a crisis that strained it at the seams. Plus his lineage is stellar: His dad served as VP under Suharto, and going further back, royal ancestors rebelled against the Dutch colonialists.

I have no idea how a demigod would deal with the gritty realities of everyday politics. Or if all Indonesians would have to crouch in his presence, like his palace staff does. But when it comes to shaking up the '09 race, you couldn't have a more interesting contestant.

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For sale: Obama's old house!

Here's a real-estate listing you don't see every day: The former home of the next (hopefully) leader of the free world.

It's Barack Obama's former house in Jakarta, where he lived with his mom and her second husband for a couple of years while growing up. The current owner, 78-year-old Tata Aboe Bakar, doesn't really want to move out ... but everyone has a price, and if someone is flashing millions of dollars in his face, he drops hints that he's willing to negotiate.

In fact a local bar owner, Bartele Santema, already has big plans for the place - even though he doesn't even own it yet. He envisions a Dutch-style coffee house with Barack memorabilia all over the walls (a kind of political Hard Rock Cafe?), and a house coffee blend mixing Indonesian and Kenyan beans. Cute.

The aging owner, for his part, vaguely remembers mini-Barack, but only as a kid who didn't like having his hair ruffled by adults, and who once lost his favorite poodle. He should thank God for his little former tenant, though, because if current polls hold, his real-estate capital gains are about to go through the roof.

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Lonely Planet reviews the islands

Very excited to get this year's Lonely Planet guide to Indonesia, not least because of the memories it brings back. When I was traipsing through the islands back in the day, it was Lonely Planet that served as my informal tutor. I don't know where that dog-eared edition ever went, but God bless it.

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I've always found Lonely Planet more appropriate to my situation than a Fodor's or a Frommer's, which are fine in their own right, but skew more towards the five-star-hotel traveller than the backpacker who prefers to flop in guesthouses with mandis. (For those of you who don't know what mandis, are, well, you're in for a treat ...)

There's an inherent flaw in every travel guidebook, of course. It's like that law of physics that says that once you observe a phenomenon, the phenomenon itself changes, simply thanks to the fact you're looking at it. So it is with guidebook mentions; when a terrific losman gets featured, there's a risk of it getting overrun and ruined. Such is the dilemma of travel writing.

Neverthless, can't wait to dig in to see what Lonely Planet's 11 authors have compiled for this edition, fanning across the archipelago to discover the best of the best. I'll follow up with a fuller review later, but in the meantime you can check out Lonely Planet's Indonesia section here.

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Life Changing Travel: The i-to-i story

When it comes to travel, there are different schools of thought. One is the idea of getting away from it all, and detoxifying from daily life with a mai-tai and a beach chair. Not that there's anything wrong with that; in fact I'm very much in favor.

But there's another school of thought, that the meaning of travel is not to get away from life, but to throw yourself into it with both feet. That's the philosophy behind i-to-i.com, a British organization that feeds travellers into worthy projects around the globe. Sicne 1994 they've dispatched 20,000 volunteers and taught another 50,000 to be English-as-a-second-language teachers.

Here's information on their Indonesian branch, which currently includes options like working with orphans and disabled people, or teaching English while surfing on the side, both of which take place in Bali. It requires some effort on your part - and a fee, too, which helps fund the projects - but you'll be left with more powerful memories than if you spent your whole vacation drunk in a bar in Kuta.


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Market bloodbath: When will it end?

Just when you think world stock markets can't go any lower ...

Another Monday, another stock-market massacre. This time the Jakarta Index was down 6.3% - and that was relatively strong showing for Asia, since Thailand's index lost 10% and the Philippines more than 12%. Hard to know who's dragging down who, but in the U.S., it's looking like hedge-fund redemptions are one catalyst for this ongoing slide. Investors want their money out, which requires hedge funds to raise capital, which requires them to get rid of stocks at rock-bottom prices whether they like it or not.

As such, the markets have become untethered from the fundamentals, and are simply another victim of the global deleveraging process, in which cash is king. For those with strong stomachs, the good news is that legendary market bears like Jeremy Grantham, of Boston money manager GMO, are sounding like kids in a candy store. Global equities are the cheapest they've been in 20 years, he calculates. But as for emerging markets? In the short term they could fall another 20%, as the bear continues to rampage.

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Australia ups Indonesian threat level

Australia doesn't have America's silly color-coded terror system, which assigns threat levels based on shades from yellow to orange to red to a really nice chartreuse (sorry, I made that last one up).

But it does have a system, which has just been raised to the equivalent of Defcon 4, one spot removed from the top (which is reserved for standout basket cases like Iraq and Afghanistan). The reason: The imminent execution of the Bali bombers, which many fear will invite retaliation from the likes of Jemaah Islamiyah.

If you've been following the saga, the Indonesian government response has been almost comic, delaying the sentence countless times already ... presumably in fear of just such an outcome. You can tell they just wish the situation would go away, and I don't blame them, since they're between a rock and a hard place. Carry out the law of the land and risk revenge, or commute the sentence and give terrorists fresh hopes about the lack of government backbone.

Meanwhile would-be tourists (and the poor 'Visit Indonesia' bureaucrats) don't know what to think, since the U.S. itself recently eased its travel warnings about Indonesia in recognition of beefed-up security. Mixed messages, all. But then, no one ever said our post-9/11, terror-paralyzed world would be an uncomplicated affair.

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