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The small plane was less than half full, so we didn't take too long getting through passport control, even though we were last in the queue. But we had to change some money and somehow, despite only having hand luggage, we ended up being the last passengers to leave of the airport. Of course this meant we got mobbed by all the taxi drivers and hotel touts who were still waiting there, as we were their last prospects for the day! In fact their last prospects till Saturday at that airport, which was when the next flight from Darwin would arrive.
The taxi drivers wanted 7500 rupiah to take us into town, which seemed like a lot at the time, although later, when i was more used to the money, i realized it wasn't as much as i'd thought. Anyway, due to being a bit overwhelmed by the mob, who i actually spent a while talking to, laughing and joking with them, we decided to walk out of the airport.
A very persistent man called Martin was the only one of them that followed us and we took a short cut from the airport carpark, along a muddy path through a paddock to the road. A couple of kilometres down the road, at the first junction, we caught a bemo, the local public transport, a bit like a minibus, which cost 1000rp each - way over the odds, but still less than a dollar.
Martin was still with us when we got off the bemo. He wanted to take us to a homestay, presumably to get some commission, but we really wanted to find somewhere on our own. We took him on a long walk round the town, but somehow we ended up in the homestay he wanted to take us to anyway, for lack of anywhere else to go. It was a bit strange, as he didn't seem to have any connection with the place and didn't even seem to know exactly how to get there! Anyway we were buggered and disorientated and took a room there for 4000rp each per night. Martin still hung around and i gave him 5000rp which made him happy and he went away.
He'd offered to let us stay at his place out near the airport, but it was a bit too far from town, and anyway, seemed a bit too difficult to accept and offer like that, at that time and under those circumstances.
By this time, Nicki, who's never been out of southeastern Australia before was fully culture-shocked and totally spun out.
The light in the room didn't work, as the wires had been ripped out of the bulb holder and Robbo, a boy who lived there, came in with a screwdriver and tried to take the socket off the ceiling. He was trying to turn the screw the wrong way and i had visions of him electrocuting himself as he obviously didn't know what he was doing (one of my trades is electrician). So i asked for candles instead.
However, he came back with a bulb holder on the end of some cable and was trying to hook that up. I eventually did it for him and we had a new light fitting, with no switch - you had to unscrew the bulb to turn it off.
Then granny wandered over and stood outside the door to have a look at the strange foreigners. She stood there studying us for quite a while, in what was a friendly and relaxed manner really. But when you're not used to people who just stand and look at you like that, i can be a bit disturbing. I could feel Nicki thinking "i wish they'd all just go away, i can't handle it!"
In Kupang, all the roads seem to change name every kilometre or two - as if there were more fascist generals, whose arses the administrators needed to lick, than there were roads. But the homestay was somewhere around where Jalan Urip Sumoharjo becomes Jalan Ahmad Yani. It was up a very rough, rocky path and consisted of a collection of sheds around a courtyard with a well in the middle. The well was fairly full of clear water. But it looked like it went quite deep - and it would be a lot further down to the water in the dry season.
Our room was one of two ground floor rooms in a small two-storey block which backed onto the well. The kamar mandi, or bathroom, was up a couple of crumbling steps just off the courtyard and had half the tin roof missing, which didn't matter much as the toilet bit was covered. What a pleasant change it was to be in a country with civilized toilets! Squat toilets and water to wash your arse evrywhere. Shame Australia's not like that!
On the way to the mandi there was usually a fire buurning under a tin roof, with a couple of kittens lying by it.
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I felt quite a considerable "culture shock" when we walked around Kupang that afternoon - more than i would have expected, more than i could ever remember feeling anywhere else, except for Tangier. I realised later that a lot of it was probably caused by picking up on the way Nicki was feeling.
The contrast between the blank and meaningless, post-cyclone-Tracy architecture of Darwin and the crumbling, post-dutch colonial architecture of Kupang was probably more disorienting because it was only an hour and a half's flight apart. I'm used to having a much longer transit time to get adjusted, going from a rich to a poor country. And Kupang is probably the most neglected city i've been to. It's really obvious that Timor's at the arse end of the javanese empire.
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That night, i was really buggered, but i didn't sleep very well, the same as the night before. However, that's what it's usually like for me at new moon. The next morning i woke up feeling a bit less disturbed. The homestay looked less weird that morning. I think i'd sort of jumped that cultural barrier in my sleep.
It's a weird thing, culture shock. I'd never been so conscious of it before as i was that first period in Kupang, although i'd certainly experienced it plenty of times. Even though i know it and recognize it, i've got no idea what it really is and why it affects me. I'm certain it's not something visual. I'm quite accustomed to finding myself in different surroundings and weird places. It's either an unconscious freak-out at arriving in such a drastically different place, which i doubt, or it's some kind of psychic confusion caused by suddenly being surrounded by people thinking in such a drastically different way to the people you're accustomed to being around. Something like a psychic "seasickness", where you're eyes are telling you one thing (that it's not really very different) and your intuitive senses are telling you another (that it really is very different). I suspect if i could shut off my consciousness of what others around me are thinking and feeling, it would go away. I'll have to check that theory out sometime...
Nicki was still a bit spaced out, but she was feeling a bit less weird too. We went out and found a restaurant for breakfast. It was about ten o'clock, but we had a beer first. We ordered nasi goreng (fried rice), "tanpa telur, tanpa daging" (without egg, without meat) and gado-gado (an indonesian salad). The rice came, but the gado-gado never did. Oh well... We had another beer instead.
As i wrote the above paragraph, it occured to me that the reaction of wanting alcohol first thing that morning kind of confirms my idea that culture shock is a "psychic seasickness". I've been well aware for a long time now that the primary use of alcohol is to isolate you psychically from the people around you, to block out that constant awareness of how all the people that are nearby are feeling. That's why you find that pretty well all alcoholics - and, for that matter, heroin addicts - are the most sensitive people. Unfortunately our culture has no way of helping them to live with their sensitivity and the easy way to deal with it is to block it out with alcohol.
After breakfast, we walked to the market, which is near the beach, on the way out of town towards the airport. It's a fairly typical market, i suppose. A lot of vegetables, not much fruit, a bit of meat, tofu, tempeh, cigarettes, clothes. It's pretty scummy and it reminded me of Ridley Road market in Dalston, London, for some reason. We walked around the market to cries of "hallo mister", "hallo missus", which is a universal greeting for foreigners in Kupang, and appreciative comments about my tattoos.
Nicki started spinning out a bit at the market, but we wandered around for a while and bought three avocadoes and some tempeh. The avocadoes were really disappointing, watery, tastless and not really ripe -just bruised, so they felt like they were. They were totally inedible really. But the tempeh was nice. It was wrapped in palm leaf and chopped off at a sharp angle at each end. It was different to what you normally get in Australia - more like the sort some friends of mine in northern New South Wales make - with thick growths of oligosporous rhizoporous (or whatever it is) and not such thickly packed beans. It needs to be fried really, but it wasn't too bad raw.
*-*-*
The next ferry to Ende, in the centre of Flores, where we wanted to go next, was due to leave on Monday from the port of Bolok about seventeen kilometres east of Kupang. We decided we couldn't handle hanging around in Kupang for the next three days, so we'd go to Bolok and stay there. I pictured a small ferry port town, like most other ferry ports i've ever been in. Not very exciting, but a bit more interesting in a port sort of way.
We caught a bemo from the bus terminal in the middle of the morning and were the only remaining passengers by the time we got to Bolok. I had that usual feeling of mild anxiety that seems to go with taking public transport to somewhere i've never been before. Is this it? Will they tell me when we get there? Have we gone past it? etc...
At Bolok, the bemo stopped at a t-junction and we got out. We were pretty much in the middle of the countryside. It was very green and there were quite a few trees around, but apart from that, there wasn't very much there. A small shop, just back along the road, a house or two and a hand-full of kids wandering down the side road. That was obviously the way to the port, so that was where we went.
The ferry terminal was near enough deserted. Although there was a ship at the end of the pier, it obviously wasn't going anywhere today. And apart from the terminal, there was a row of hut-like kiosks along the scummy looking beach, but nothing else. Hmmmm.... maybe this wasn't the ideal place to hang around for three days in the wet season.
We sat on the steps of the ticket office and provided something different to look at for a few locals. Then it started raining and we were soon part of a large crowd of mainly boys and men, all sheltering under the eaves of the ferry office. Naturally, they all entertained themselves by looking at us. I guess we must have been pretty amazing, as we kept the attention of most of them for the whole time it rained. At one point, they all moved in to have a closer look when i got a piece of paper out of my bag.
They were friendly and pleasant, but none of them spoke english and our Indonesian was way too rough to attempt any form of conversation. However, they didn't seem to mind, they were just happy to have something a bit unusual to look at for a while.
When it stopped raining, we jumped in a bemo that came down the hill and went back to Kupang.
*-*-*
The Karang Mas restaurant is on the main shopping street in Kupang, Jalan Siliwangi, not far from the bemo terminal in the main square. It's built on rocks on the beach and the tide comes up around three sides of it. Like everything else in Kupang, it's crumbling - tropical style. The roof leaks, the walls are discoloured from damp, the decor looks like it was done in the sixties and the round formica tables are really ricketty. But it's comfortable. It's a great place to sit and have a beer or a meal and look out over the ocean. There's plenty of air and the crashing of the waves on the rocks below has a calming effect on your soul.
From the windows on one side you can look out over the town beach. It's not very long and it's permanently covered in rubbish washed up from the ocean. Really covered, i mean - so much so that it looks like a garbage dump. Somehow it reminded me of Sydney's Bondi Beach!
When we got back to town from Bolok, we went into the Karang Mas for some food and a drop of beer. In there, we met a canadian woman and man who were involved in some indonesian-canadian cultural exchange. They were sort of team leaders and they were sitting there working out their accounts.
We asked them if they knew anywhere good to stay, as we didn't want to go back to the last place, and they pointed us towards the Sea Breeze Homestay, which is only a couple of hundred yards away from the Karang Mas, at the end of the garbage dump beach.
The Sea Breeze is another crumbling old Kupang building, with a leaking roof and the rusty reinforcing steel visible in the concrete it's built from. It's on the bank of the river, right where it joins the sea and the back wall of the building is acutally continuous with the river embankment. The toilets just go directly through this wall into the river. We had a room upstairs, with walls like cardboard, so you could lie in bed and listen to the person breathing in bed next to you - on the other side of the wall. However, it was a really nice place and we felt much more comfortable there than the last one. Gama and Abdul who run the place were really cool. They had two kids, a five year old boy who's a little monster and a three year old girl who's not.
Being vegan in Kupang was virtually impossible, unless you wanted to just live on boiled rice or you could cook your own food. We decided we'd get a billy and a spirit burner and do our own cooking. The market had a small, but reasonable range of fresh stuff, including tofu and tempeh. And if we cooked it ourselves it would be quite easy. As it was, by the time we left Kupang, because it had taken all that time to work out that hardly anything was actually vegan, we were beginning to get a bit sick.
Kupang's such a poor island that the range of food available is very limited and i guess they chuck everything in. They'd certainly have no concept of veganism and very little idea of vegetarianism, if any. But that, of course, is nothing unusual anywhere in the world! But because our grasp of indonesian was worse than basic at that point, we had very little hope of getting food that was really vegan.
*-*-*
Abdul told us that yesterday's ferry to east Flores had gone round in circles three times and then returned to Bolok because it was too rough to make the crossing. Shit! Just what we needed! Of course this didn't mean our ferry wouldn't be going that day, but the chances of us getting out of Timor did seem a bit lower...
Anyway, we got our stuff together, bought a bit of food and three bottles of water and caught a very crowded and mechanically dodgy bemo to Bolok.
The place was a bit more lively that day! I had to endure the usual shoving match for tickets before we walked down the concrete pier to where two ferries were tied up. They were old rustbuckets that looked like they'd already sunk a couple of times, but pretty much what i would have expected. The second one was the one that didn't get to Flores the day before - and it didn't look like it was planning to go that day either.
On the bottom deck of the ferry there was a drive-on cargo area, being loaded up with stacks of this and that in an apparently haphazard way. It obviously wasn't so haphazard though, or we wouldn't have had a chance of getting anywhere. The passenger area was up some iron stairs to the top deck.
Second class had rows of those uncomfortable orange plastic chairs you find in airports and railway stations. I managed to sleep sitting on seats like that once, during a fifteen hour stint in Bangkok's Don Muang airport on the way from London to Sydney once, but i doubt i could manage it again! It wasn't really full when we got on board, but then it was only one o'clock and we weren't due to leave till two. A lot of people had captured themselves a stretch of deck space and spread out sleeping mats. The deck was covered, with open sides and green plastic tarpaulins which rolled down to keep the weather out if necessary. All in all, it could have been better, it could have been worse, but i wasn't banking on getting much sleep that night. With luck though, we should have arrived at Ende the next morning.
The scene at the dock was of one of a lot of activity. On the cargo deck, yellow-shirted dockers were unloading packages from a truck parked on board. Most of the central part of the cargo deck was taken up with five foot high stacks of large, mainly white-wrapped packages. Every stack was covered with people, lying, sitting, sleeping, talking and eating. A few were lying, sitting and standing on the deck itself. Half a dozen youngish men were fishing off the stern and catching the small silver fish, which were swimming around the boat in massive shoals.
The seating deck gradually began to fill up and it started to feel like it must be about time to leave. But the hawkers were still walking around, selling food and drinks from wooden trays, so it was obvious we weren't going to leave for a while.
The ferry eventually left at twenty past seven. At first it was fairly comfortable, but after a while the nightmare began... I could tell straight away that the boat definitely wasn't designed for rough weather. It was the same type as the one that turned back the day before - but this one wasn't turning back. Having a front cargo door (as well as a back one, for some weird reason), it wasn't very well suited to punching through the waves and it had to go up one side of every wave and down the other side. Also, due to it's obviously high centre of gravity, it had no chance of surviving any reasonable sized waves from anything other than straight ahead. There was a swell of about three metres at the most and taken from head on, the waves made the boat pitch hideously. But even at ten or fifteen degrees off head-on, it rolled in a really scary way. I'd spent quite a lot of time on a fair few different boats, ever since i was born, but i'd never been as scared as i was that night. I could feel straight away that it was hideously unstable and not suitable for any conditions other than almost dead-calm. It reminded me a lot of the car ferries that cross the Thames at Woolwich...
Anyway, at least partly because of the design of the boat, it could make very little headway. It ended up taking twenty four hours on what should have been a fourteen hour trip. It was making maybe four knots through the water, but up against the wind and waves this often resulted in almost no headway at all, relative to the land. From the time Flores came in sight to when we were actually docked seemed to take forever - like maybe ten hours. And most of this time we didn't seem to be moving at all!
The highlight of the voyage came in the middle of the night. There were tarps which rolled down for closing in the sides of the economy seating area to keep the weather out. Of course, these were generally flapping around noisily in the wind. Everyone woke up to a massive sheet of rain flying horizontally in from the port side. I grabbed my bedding and dashed for cover and then went to help a couple of other people tie down the tarps. This was a massive struggle - wrestling with a tarp in a strong wind is always difficult. And with the rain pouring in we got good and soaked! After that, the deck was too wet to lie down on again.
When we finally arrived at Ende, it was a bit of a laugh too! We went down to the cargo deck where the door was, everyone seemed to have gone mad. A lot of people were running around shouting and everybody else was clustered in the middle of both sides, where they were struggling to be first into one of the half dozen small boats hanging on there.
Several people tried to get us to go with them to the shore for a thousand rupiah or something. But, not too sure what was going on, we just hung around and watched for a while.
It became obvious we were going to have to get a sampan (as they call the small boats) if we wanted to go ashore. They scull them, with one paddle out the back, just like we do around the Thames estuary! I was surprised to see that, as i'd never seen it done anywhere else.
On the beach, which was only a few minutes away, it was more of the same chaotic madness. It was very dark and there were heaps of people lined up along the water line, some waiting to get onto the ferry, some coming off and others trying to get something out of either set of passengers. We eventually picked a route through the shadowy crow and found our way off the beach to where the bemo drivers were hassling people. We got in one of the waiting bemos and got seriously ripped off for a short trip to Ikhlas homestay, which had been recommended to us by Martin, the man who accompanied us from Kupang airport. In the bemo with us there were a couple of pommie geezers and a swiss woman who we'd met on the boat.
*-*-*
At first sight, Ikhlas was a bit horrible. I don't really know why, maybe it was because it was all clean and white and brightly-lit and full of Europeans. But after a while i got used to it and it was actually quite a nice place really. They did pretty good vegetarian food, although it was a bit bland and uninspired - but that wasn't a worry after a week of rice! And their chips were great!
On the ferry trip i'd started to feel ill and now i was feeling really sick. I had half a bottle of beer and felt so bad i had to go to bed.
The next morning i wasn't feeling quite so bad, but i was still definitely sick. I was aching all over, coughing, my glands were swollen and i felt totally spaced out and tired.
Later on we walked into town, which was about one and a half kilometres away. There was nothing there really and mostly everything was closed as it was afternoon. But it was immediately obvious that Flores was a much less poor island than Timor. There was more variety of food for sale, a lot of the houses had nice, well-kept gardens and there were more private cars.
We had a look at Ende beach, which is an unexciting strip of black volcanic sand next to a harbour. And that was it for town! It was very small and there wasn't much going on.
There were a lot of people staying at Ikhlas who had been on the ferry with us, three english men, one welsh man, a swiss woman, an american man and four australian men. They'd all come from Darwin to Kupang and most of them were following a roughly similar route to the one we were taking. This Australia/Asia overland route seemed to be catching on in a big way then. It wasn't long since Indonesian immigration regulations had made it impossible, by only allowing you to leave from the same port you arrived at. That had been changed a couple of years or so and now you could travel in one end of Indonesia and out the other. No doubt we'd be meeting some of these people here and there over the next couple of months.
We decided not to keep on with the local ferries - partly after the one that had brought us to Ende, but mainly because it was taking too long and we just wanted to be getting on our way to India. To get the ferry to Sumbawa, the next island west meant a very long three hundred and fifty kilometre bus trip, over bad roads in the wet season, to Labuhanbajo. And someone said it taook twenty four hours to get from there to Sumbawa anyway! These ferries only ran three times a week too. Then after that, we'd have to get to Lombok, then Bali, then Java, then Sumatra - before we could even get out of Indonesia.
We decided to wait a week instead, and catch the Pelni ship "Kelimutu" which would take us all the way to Surabaya in the east of Java in about three days. It cost 118,000 rupiah, which seemed pretty cheap. And they were reputed to be good boats too. From Surabaya, we should have been able to catch a fast train to Jakarta and then another short trip to the ferry port and Sumatra. Apparently you could get a ferry from Pakanbaru, in the middle of Sumatra, which would take you to Indonesia's closest island to Singapore. From there, it was just a short hop to that big island city, one of the world's main crossroads.
The Kelimutu was due to leave Ende in a week, on Wednesday, March the 15th, on the full moon - which seemed to be a good time to go to sea for a few nights.
*-*-*
When we were waiting for the ferry to leave Kupang, a hawker sold me a copy of the Kupang Pos, the local daily paper, which had a story in it about a bus crash in Flores, where an irish tourist died. At Ikhlas, we met a german woman who had survived that crash, with only bruises, cuts and probably a bit of concussion. She said the bus rolled five times, down a two hundred metre drop. She didn't remember how she got out, but she managed to make it back up to the road with only one shoe on.
She was off to Lombok the next day. On the same plane, they were sending the body of the dead man to Jakarta on his way back to Ireland. She seemed quite inspired, in a way, by the experience. I think coming that close to death and surviving had made her see life a bit differently.
The following day, we'd planned to go to Moni, which is a village up in the hills about fity kilometres from Ende, near mount Kelimutu. But after walking into town to go to the bank and the Pelni office, we were both so fucked that there was no way we were going anywhere. Nicki was ill too then. I could hardly move and had to spend the whole day lying down.
*-*-*
It was a pretty long fifty kilometres, but not entirely unbearable. Unfortunately, we got the back seat, right behind the rear door, and ended up with heaps of stuff and people crammed in around us. However, it was a pleasant ride up a winding, very rough road through the hills - the same road the bus had crashed on a few days before. The country we passed through was very green and beautiful and the land was obviously fertile volcanic soil. There was a lot of coffee growing near the road on the way up.
Moni was a small, relatively natural village, overlooking an almost flat area, somewhere in the region of a hundred acres, surrounded by hills. It was definitely a tourist place, but very low-key. There were a few losmens (guest houses) and a couple of restaurants, a few people selling ikat, which is the locally woven patterned cloth, and that was about it. Tourists had only been going there for five years, so i guessed there was still plenty of time for it to be ruined, which it undoubtedly would be.
We were lucky to be there in the wet season, as apparently the price of rooms doubled in the dry - due to the govenment putting up taxes at that time of year!
I was pleased to hear that the church in Moni had been destroyed by an earthquake a couple of years before. There is a god, after all!
We were staying at the losmen "Friendly", which is a pretty nice place, with a well-kept garden at the front, surrounded on three sides by a covered veranda with rooms off it and beautiful, green views from the front and the back. It was run by a woman called Genevieve.
It was quite cold up there in the hills, much colder than the coast. At night it got chilly enough that i had to wear three layers of clothes. And blankets were a definite necessity at night.
The four british men and the swiss woman from the ferry were all staying there too. But they were off back to Ende the next day. Three of the Australians were also staying in Moni, in a different place - the fourth one, Steve, had the same thing as me and Nicki and was still in Ende, too sick to travel.
The "Anker Mi" bar, just up the road, was drunk dry of arak, a distilled rice wine, the previous night and the poms were on a mission to find some more. They eventually succeeded in finding some pretty dodgy stuff for two hundred rupiah a bottle, which was pretty cheap, but it tasted like low grade kerosene! Despite being sick, i managed to force myself to drink some.
A whole heap of us went up the the Anker Mi that evening, carrying bottles of arak. It turned into a pretty demented night, with four more bottles being bought later. I left at about half ten, but i was woken up later by the drunken yobbos coming back to the losmen. They were up till four o'clock in the morning being really noisy and singing their "Bintang" song (Bintang's a brand of beer):
Bintang bintang bintang oh,(it's sung to the tune of the song "the music man" - the bit that goes "pia pia piano...." etc!)
Bintang oh,
Bintang oh.
Bintang bintang bintang oh,
Bintang bintang oh!
The next morning, the women who ran the place were extremely pissed off with them all - and especially Carlo, who went to sleep on the verandah naked! British tourists on the piss abroad, eh? The whole world lives in fear!
*-*-*
I was sitting on the back veranda one morning, outside the door of our room, watching three little black pigs eating the grass and digging up the ground with their shovel-like noses, looking for food. The biggest one of the three, for no particular reason, started having a go at the middle one, which backed off a bit. Then, not long after, the middle one started taking it out on the smallest one. I felt sorry for the little one, as the poor thing didn't have anyone to bash in its turn!
They didn't seem to like giving you boiled water to drink in the losmen "Friendly", unlike the other places we'd stayed so far. I guess they wanted us to pay for bottled water to. I'm not really keen on buying the stuff though - partly because of all that plastic - and fortunately i managed to fill up four bottles with rainwater from the roof while it was raining that morning.
I went for a short walk up the road, to have a look around and see what goes on in Moni. The scenery was interesting, with a lot of rice sawahs (fields) around, as well of lots of corn, fruit trees and a few coconut palms. The fruit was mainly citrus, with a lot of pomelos ripe on the trees. There were guavas, which were still green and fairly small. Also mangoes, bananas, papayas, avacadoes and other tropical fruit trees that i recognised but couldn't quite identify.
When i got back, there were two very little pigs eating where the three bigger ones had been before. These ones weren't much more than a foot long from nose to tail.
The countryside around there made me think of northern New South Wales around Mullumbimby, Main Arm, Terania Creek, Nimbin. It seemed strange really, as that area's south of the tropics, but it seemed more like that than tropical north Queensland.
I was beginning to get sick of tourists. Just listening to the way some of them speak was pissing me off. There was a real master-race mentality, and it was probably mainly unconscious. There's also this obsessive-compulsive disorder they all seem to have. It's called "seeing sights". Like they've got a list of all the "sights" in the world and their job is to tick them all off before they die... There's no kind of desire to understand what they're seeing in anything more than a totally superfluous way, or to see anything other than "sights". There seems to be very little interest in the local culture - except, of course, for the consumable parts of that culture.
It's only a few stages removed from the package tour syndrome i've noticed in Kuranda, in north Queensland, so often - where they hardly even really know where they are.
The first thing we got asked by the losmaen people after we'd checked in was if we wanted a ticket to go up to Mount Kelimutu the next morning. All the tourists go there at four o'clock on the morning after they arrive, to watch the sun rise. Then they might hang around one more night and leave! It's bizarre. They were really surprised when we said no, we didn't want to go to Kelimutu the following morning. It was just unheard of not to...
I had no intention whatsoever of going compulsively up to Kelimutu. If i ever went there, it would be after spending a lot more than just a few hours in the area - which wouldn't be on that visit. And i certainly wouldn't be going up with a busload of people. I'd probably be walking.
A dutch tourist had disappeared up there ten days before. He was almost certainly dead. Maybe that's the sort of price that gets paid now and then for blindly wandering around so-called "sights". Maybe he was a sacrifice to the spirits who guard the place, allowing hundreds of other tourists to get away with their mindless blundering into an obviously powerful area.
*-*-*
As it was, we only had to wait for ten minutes by the side of the road, before a passenger truck came along, going to Ende. I don't know what they call this form of transport, but they're full-size trucks with benches going from side to side all down the back. They have roofs which get piled up with cargo and luggage and there's space for more cargo under the seats and right at the very back, where the tailboard is tied permanently at forty five degrees. The non-human freight consists mainly of produce in sacks. Flour, grain, corn cobs, chokoes, potatoes, bundles of wood and undoubtedly everything else that grows up that way. We were sitting right at the back, looking backwards, and a lot of this stuff was under our feet, up against the tailboard. It was being put on and taken off all along the way.
We stopped at a weird little roadside market on the way. It was a strange place, with stalls along both sides of the road, but no sign of anything else there at all. We bought a couple of corn cobs, that they boil and sell in its skin.
The ride back down on the truck was much more pleasant than the trip up in the bus. There was a lot more air and we could see a lot more too. And most of the time there was more space.
Around Moni seemed to be a great area for growing things - totally different from most of Australia. The soil was really black, obviously very fertile, presumably volcanic in origin. The extreme good health and dark green leaves of the citrus trees, even when they've got grass around their roots, shows there's no shortage of nitrogen in the soil. I've rarely seen such healthy, abundantly producing gardens or farms, and certainly never in Australia. The closest anything comes in Australia is some permaculture-style places i've spent a bit of time in.
However, i couldn't help but wonder if they used chemicals or not. There doesn't seem to be many parts of the world that haven't been fucked by the evil, hard-selling, chemical companies. It didn't look like they did, as everything was too healthy, but you never know. I also wondered if those evil greedy fuckers in the international seed industry have conned them into using hybrid shit yet or not. I hope not. Hybrids may mean slightly better yields in the short term, but that doesn't nearly compensate for the fact that you have to pay the bastards for your seeds forever after, as you can't grow it yourself any more. Also, hybrids have much much more problems with pests, so they can't be succesfully grown without vast quantities of pesticides. And they are totally dependent on large quuantities of artificial fetilizers too. The seed companies and the chemical companies are laughing all the way to the death of the planet. As far as i know, there's virtually nowhere in the world that hasn't been adversely affected by these evil turds.
*-*-*
Anyway, back at losmen Ikhlas, we got our old room back - which was a bit boring! Nigel and Jaffa, two of the aussies, arrived back there from Moni a couple of hours after we did. (Are they following us???) Steve had left there that morning apparently, for Labuhanbajo and then presumably Komodo. They reckoned they would follow on.
Ikhlas was good. There were maps on the walls all over the place. Maps of Indonesia and Nusa Tenggara (these islands) mainly, but also one map of the closest bits of Asia, one of Europe and one of the world.
I began to look at the map of Europe, which has a sliver of north Africa at the bottom of it. I'd never realized the Mediterranean was so narrow. Italy and Greece are really close to Africa. I was thinking about how i was going to get from India to Europe in a few months time. I really wanted to enter Europe through Spain. But then again it could be Italy, Greece or Turkey.
Looking at the map of the world, it's a long way from Bombay to Djibouti, which was one possible route - then through the Suez maybe. Another possibility was around the coast of India and Pakistan then to Saudia Arabia and possibly through Jordan. But i didn't know if that was a possible route. Or maybe through Iran and Turkey, that's definitely possible, but i don't think i fancy it much. Or what about Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Russia? Hmmmm... I dunno about that one, i was thinking eastern Europe was good place to avoid those days! Generally, i thought, i fancied the more southern routes. Who wants to get into that cold hell that's Europe any quicker than necessary?
I also began to wonder what i was going to do with my life from that point on. I really couldn't face living in Europe. It's so fucking dull and overpopulated. I didn't think i could live in Australia any more either. The culture's as dead as Europe's, but at least it's got the advantage of only having twenty million of the fuckers in a space the size of Europe. Still, it's a beautiful country, even though the stupid greedy bastards have comprehensively fucked it up. But nine years of surviving the mindless, numbing cultural uniformity and the colonial outlook had been really all i could take.
But where else could i live? On the move, obviously, i couldn't have changed that even if i'd wanted to. And how the fuck was i going to survive without social security? I'd become so institutionalized by the fact of there always being money in my bank account every fortnight, that i thought i was going to be fucked surviving without it. That was another good reason to not go back to Australia - it was time to re-learn how to feed myself. Somehow the dole had become a serious rut - even though it allowed me to travel round an entire continent in freedom and relative luxury. It was just too easy. It had got boring.
Trading's the way most people seem to go - clothes, stones, jewellery, fabrics, gold, drugs. But i didn't feel that was really my style. I certainly couldn't buy stuff cheap in Asia and then go and sell it for rip-off prices in some shitty hell-hole tourist market in Britain or Australia. And as for drugs - no thanks! I value my freedom far to much to risk all of it to pay for a little bit of extra freedom.
I'm not averse to a bit of hard work here and there, but there's not much future in that as a way of surviving - specially when there's so many millions who are willing to work like dogs for almost nothing. Writing was a possibility too - but i never went to a rich kids' school with all the right wankers. So the chances of getting anything published were virtually zero. Anyway, even though i can live on very little, writing wasn't very likely to bring in enough to survive on - unless i was lucky, that is. I've heard teaching Spanish in southern Mexico's a good bet.
Who knows?
*-*-*
I spent a while sitting on the porch at Ikhlas, watching the traffic go by. What i found particularly interesting was the bemos. They were all well painted in bright colours, with individual designs and each one had its own name painted on the side as part of the design. Here's some of the names:
Bunga Desa Liberty Widuri La Vita Elthan Jon Sindy Loper Mega Hits Kasih Sayang Tulus Karya Amar Maruf Fortuna Agung Free Karya Baru Mekar Sari Metallica Ronald Dimension
and so on...
Bemos had a culture of their own. There was always a crew of three young men and almost always loud music blasting out from a good car stereo. It must have been one of the most exciting and cool jobs available to anyone on those islands. Just cruising around all day and listening to loud music!
*-*-*
By Monday, the slow pace of our journey up to that point was beginning to get on my nerves. So far, we'd covered two hundred and fifty kilometres since we'd arrived in Indonesia. When we left there on Wednesday, that would mean we'd done two hundred and fifty kilometres in two weeks! It was nothing like enough. I'd been hoping to be in Singapore by that time, applying for our visas for India, which we'd stupidly forgotten to get in Sydney. It was probably going to take a couple of weeks to get them in Singapore.
Waiting, waiting, waiting. Sometimes life seems like one long railway station!
*-*-*
There's two ports in Ende and on Tuesday morning i went out for a walk to the nearest one. This was the one we'd come into. It was about twenty minutes walk away from Ikhlas. The road going there was closed off at the junction and when i went down there i found out why. A big chunk of it had been dug up and one end of the airport runway extended into where the road used to be.
There wasn't much happening in the port that morning. There was a prahu, a sailing cargo ship, tied up alongside the pier. It was about seventy foot long, made of timber, with one mast and a sort of short bowsprit. Its rig looked similar to our sailing barges in Essex, except the gaff was fixed and started halfway up the mast, following the line of the top of the sail. It looked like there could be a topsail, but there was no sign of one there.
It was about half as wide as a sailing barge - that is, maybe twenty foot. And there was a two-storey deck house at the back for the crew - the hold, of course, being for cargo. The deck was level roughly midships, but towards the bow it began to curve upwards quite quickly, ending up probably steeper than forty five degrees. At the stern it curved up slightly too.
There were two rudders, one on each side. They were long, straight and flat, like two giant timber spatulas. They stuck out backwards at something less than forty five degrees to the perpendicular.
The combination of the gaff rig and the way they scull their sampans, like we do in Essex, created a strange feeling. Almost like reminding me of home, but so totally different that the similarities were almost completely lost. Like i felt like i should have felt something, but i didn't...
*-*-*
I got a small bottle of arak from one of the markets. It was 1000 rupiah for 300ml. It tasted like rice wine with methylated spirits in it, and i gradually came to the conclusion that was what it was - not real arak at all.
We drunk that in the evening, sitting with Nigel and Jaffa, who were finishing off their last bottle of bourbon. They'd been drinking in a bar in town all day and were fairly pissed. They'd changed their plans and were now coming on the Kelimutu too, as far as Lombok.
They were heading for Gili Air, a little island of the north west coast of Lombok. They'd heard "there's an aussie sheila running a bar there and she sells green cans!" (in other words, VB, a popular australian beer) The aussie boys are on a great mission - to find the last carton of aussie beer in the world! I'd better not tell them you can get VB in London, they'll be off there like a shot!
I couldn't help wondering why they'd left Australia!
*-*-*
We'd be in Java on Saturday morning. Unless the boat sunk. With luck, we'd be in Sumatra on Sunday. And maybe even Singapore on Monday. However, i'd believe it when i saw it!
On the way to catch the boat, we had a drink in a bar near the port. At first, when i went into the toilet, i thought i was hallucinating. But no. There were fish swimming in the fucking mandi! (A mandi is a largish concrete tank you find in most bathrooms in Asia. It's used to hold clean water for washing and flushing the toilet.)
It was well after dark when the K.M. Kelimutu came into sight round the headland, lit up like a floating christmas tree on the horizon. By that time there was a massive crowd on the dock - at least a thousand people.
Like fools, when the boat tied up we managed to be in the middle of the crowd, near the gate at the end of the jetty - which was closed. They wouldn't let us onto the jetty, although a lot of people seemed to manage to get there.
Hundreds of people got off the boat, slowly flowing down the gangplank and threading their way through the crowd on the jetty. There were about three lights in the whole of the dock area and the one right over the jetty gate was going on and off every few minutes.
Eventually everyone had come off the boat and they started to let us onto the jetty. But, of course, not through the main gate, which we were getting squashed closer and closer to, but through gates at either side, which were round a corner of the fence from where we were.
We got squeezed, under incredible pressure, round the corner and - the pressure intensifying ten times at this point - through the small gateway, to pop out into the open space on the other side. We had to do our share of pushing or we would have been squashed, shoved around and possibly even trampled on, only to end up where we'd started when the mob had flowed past. I'm glad i wasn't an old person or a small child!
So we got to walk halfway along the jetty in relative comfort. And then it started again. This time the cram was for the gang plank. We managed to stay in the middle of the crowd. There were no railings and nothing to stop people falling off the edge and into the water. It was incredible that so much pressure could be maintained by a crowd that had absolutely nothing solid at any of its boundaries. Eventually you could manage to get shoved onto the bottom of the gangplank - although this was a very tricky maneuvre. Then there was nothing left but to walk up it at a fairly quick pace.
The chaos and pressure didn't ease up at the top of the gangplank, of course, but eventually we found ourselves on a rear deck with a roof over it and not all that many people. We grabbed a space there, at the top of some stairs, and that's where we stayed. A french man who'd been staying at Ikhlas was there with us at that point and we shared a drop of arak to celebrate our survival of the intense experience we'd just been through. It was a feeling almost of elation at surviving such a nightmare. Before too long we were underway and steaming mercifully away from Flores.
*-*-*
We seemed to have captured one of the most comfortable spots on the ship. The deck was timber, so it wasn't too uncomfortable to lie on. There was a roof over us if it rained and there was a decent air flow without it being a wind.
In contrast, "ekonomi" sleeping quarters were a nightmare hell. Massive dormitories, with the sleeping spaces being large communal platforms with, if you were lucky, rows of mattresses which you had to pay separately to hire. About seven sleeping places were on each side of the platform. The dorms were vaguely air-conditioned and, for me at least, were hideously stuffy and claustrophobic. I couldn't have slept down there, so i was glad we got a decent deck space. In total there were about a thousand sleeping spaces.
There were hundreds more people than the actual sleeping-space capacity of the boat, so there were people all over the decks and corridors and everywhere else. At a guess, the peak ammount of people on the boat was probably around fifteen hundred, although it was very hard to tell.
The first night, which was the full moon, was a bit strange and i didn't sleep too well. It was really cold first thing in the morning, just before light, but it wasn't totally unbearable and it didn't last very long. In the morning we arrived at Sumba, an island to the south west of Flores. Being stopped at Sumba seemed to drag on forever. I wasn't in a very good mood and i just wanted to get moving. Eventually we left.
From there to Bima, the port we were stopping at on the island of Sumbawa, north west from Sumba, was a pleasant trip, with views of land all the way. We passed the western end of Flores, the island of Komodo, where the gigantic lizard-like Komodo dragons come from, and along the east coast of Sumbawa. The section of river estuary leading to Bima was interesting too. Instead of channel marker buoys, there were red and green mini-lighthouses along the shore.
I wasn't in a very good mood for this part of the journey. The stress of being what seemed to be the only form of entertainment for the Indonesians on the boat began to get on my nerves. It really was a constant stream of people wanting to talk to you. In some ways i liked the friendliness, but it was a phenomenal strain, having to have shallow conversations with hundreds of people in one day, which were near enough exactly the same every time. I wasn't too bad till some fucking born-again muslim dickhead sat down and started crapping on to me about allah, in English that was a strain to listen to, and trying to make me say in arabic "there is no god but allah" or some similar shit. It wasn't the fact that he was a muslim that pissed me off, a christian pulling the same stunt would have received a much less polite response from me.
I spent most of that section of the trip lying down. That was the only position you were safe from some grinning idiot trying to talk to you. I bagan to dislike Indonesians severely at this point!
(Note: the previous paragraph was written at the time it was happening, and reflects my mood at the time - not my feelings about Indonesians in general!)
From Bima, somehow, things got better. It may have been relief at finally having got well out of sight of Flores. But there didn't seem to be so many people hassling me either.
Bima was an amazing contrast with Ende, as far as dock-side behaviour went. Everyone was really organized and there didn't seem to be any pushing and shoving. They even cleared a path through themselves for the people coming off the boat to pass through un-harrassed!
It was interesting to see a couple of timber-built barges at the dock in Bima. One of them looked like a very similar shape to the Thames barges, except it had much higher sides. And presumably a deeper keel too - although possibly not much deeper.
It seemed possible that they still built timber ships like that somewhere around those islands, although somehow i didn't think it was likely. But, of course, there was plenty of timber and labour was cheap, so they were probably a much more viable proposition than steel.
It was after dark when we left Bima and the driver used floodlights mounted on the top deck, right above the wheelhouse, to pick our way back down the river.
That night i slept really well, my body getting a bit more used to the hard floor softened only by a couple of very thin cotton blankets.
*-*-*
The next morning i woke up fairly late, from a very weird dream. We were passing along the coast of Lombok and Gunung Rinjani, a big volcano on Lombok was off the port beam. From that angle, i could see it was in several sections and not one solid mountain, which i'd never realized before, as i'd only seen it from the north west.
I was feeling quite happy and enjoying the view and the feeling of familiarity with Rinjani. But my peace and pleasure were soon destroyed by the arrival of Ahmad Faisal, the preaching muslim. This morning he didn't piss me off as much as he had the previous day, probably because i was in a better mood anyway. However, i had to put up with him for at least quarter of an hour before i managed to escape and join the queue for breakfast.
Breakfast was the same as yesterday. A stainless steel tray, divided up into smaller, indented sections, with a large portion of rice, a small portion of omelette and a small ammount of red chili sauce. Unfortunately there wasn't anyone handy to eat the omelett today, so it went to waste.
Lunch was similar, except instead of the omelette and chili sauce, there was boiled vegetables and a small bit of fish. The previous day's evening meal had been fish and boiled eggplant, so that day's would presumably be the same. Fortunately we brought some peanuts, which add a little protein into the meal.
Mid-morning, we passed Gili Meno, Gili Air and Gili Trawangan, a group of three little islands off the north west corner of Lombok. It's always interesting to see places from the water that you know from the land. I'd spotted the hill on Gili Trawangan from a long way back. At that time, all that was visible of Gili Air and Gili Meno was a little bunch of tree tops apparently sticking up out of the water. Later, there were four strips of white sand, with trees behind, separated by short stretches of water. The fourth beach was Bangsal, on Lombok, where the boats go to the Gilis.
At about eleven that morning we docked at Lembar, which is south of Mataram, the capital city of Lombok - and also, i think, the capital of the province, Nusa Tenggara Barat. We went ashore in the hope of finding some fried tempeh, but didn't have any luck.
When we got back aboard, the deck where our beds were was absolutely crammed with people. We lay down to try and save a bit of space, but in the end, i just couldn't handle the claustrophobia in what had previously been a pleasant area.
I got up and had a wander around and found there was hardly anyone up the front of that same deck, where the french man (who had been at Ikhlas) and a belgian man (who'd been there too) were sleeping. So we moved there. That was obviously the end of the comfortable part of the trip!
However, our new spot turned out to be a nice change of scenery and a pleasant place to sleep too. It was also pretty quiet except when the boat was coming into port, when it was quite crowded because there was a good view straight ahead from there.
The quay at Lombok was crowded with people selling *things*, rather than just food. There were watches, t-shirts, books and all sorts of old tourist junk. We were obviously getting into heavily touristed waters then.
*-*-*
The last part of the journey from Benoa (Bali) was fairly quiet. A lot of people got off there, including a whole mob of about a hundred soldiers. I was amazed at seeing all those soldiers assemble on the quay, as i had no idea there were anything like that many on board. They must have had them locked away in the section of ekonomi that was closed. Presumably they were on their way off a tour of duty, performing acts of genocide in east Timor. They certainly got on before Flores, anyway.
Nobody at all got on board at Bali.
We slept in the front section, below the wheelhouse, where the french man and the belgian had been sleeping. They got off at Benoa. It was really good at first, as there were no lights there - presumably because they reduce visibility for navigation by shining on the front deck. But later on it got extremely windy which made sleeping very dificult.
Anyway, when we woke up, at about one in the morning, we were already docked at Banyuwangi, which turned out to be as far as the ship went. It's at the very east end of the island of Java. Java's roughly a thousand kilometres long and we needed to get to the exact other end, to cross over to Sumatra, which is the next island. Here the clocks went back two hours as we changed over to western indonesian time.
There were half a dozen or so buses on the dock, mainly going to Surabaya. We spoke to someone working in a restaurant there and he said there was a train at about eight o'clock to Jakarta and the train station was about one kilometre down the road. He reckoned we should sleep on the boat and catch it in the morning.
We had another look at the buses. I was tired and dazed and couldn't face the idea of the rest of the night on a bus. In the end, we went back aboard the Kelimutu and grabbed a couple of mattresses in one of the now fairly empty ekonomi sections. It was quite pleasant with most of the people gone and it was great to stretch out on a mattress.
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