Empire of the East (10 page)

The town’s principal mosque was a hundred yards along the road and at six thirty the loudspeakers fixed to the base of its colossal aluminium dome called the faithful to prayer in a voice which extinguished all the other sounds of the town. This was followed by Koranic readings which might have lasted a half-hour. That at an end, all the television sets in Tapaktuan went into action, with the daily instalment of
Puff the Magic Dragon.

We found Andy down in the square, where in the absence of newspapers people went to pick up and sift through the latest rumours. One glance at his face and the sag of his moustache was enough to realize that the news was bad. ‘Road closed,’ he said.

‘You’re joking.’

But Andy’s jokes were of a different sort. ‘Many trucks in crash,’ he said. ‘Steel girders all over the place. For three days no can go to Berastagi. What can do?’

‘We wait,’ I said. ‘Put up with it and wait. When they clean the mess up we go. Where did this happen?’

‘Kalakepen,’ he said. ‘Big smash up. Trucks are in river.’

‘Cheer up,’ Gawaine said. ‘We can always turn round and go back.’

Considering that possibility, Andy’s deep tan seemed to have lightened. A group of women were ready with disturbing details of what had happened. ‘They say we must stay here many days,’ Andy said.

‘How do they know? I’ll go and talk to the police.’

We drove down to the road-block outside the town, where a policeman who looked in his teens lounged and spat. Andy spoke to him. ‘Bridge over Simpang-kiri River at Kalakepen gone, he says.’ ‘Is that in Aceh?’ I asked. If it were, this might have accounted for whatever had happened, I thought. The policeman said it was.

We decided to discuss the setback over a beer in The Select’s curtained room. Looking around for Andy he seemed to have slipped away. Gawaine and Robin went in search of him, and there was something about their manner on returning that made me guess what was coming.

‘Andy’s on his way,’ Gawaine said.

‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

‘He’s pulling out. Off to Medan.’

‘With the road closed?’

‘Don’t ask me what’s happened. They’re letting a bus through, so it’s all rubbish about the bridge being down.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘At the bus station.’

We drove round to the bus station where Andy was waiting for me, and doing his best to raise a smile. ‘What’s it all about?’ I asked.

‘Last night I telephone my wife. She worries for me.’

‘I know she does,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your problem. If the bus is going now, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. We’ll be out of Aceh in a couple of hours and your troubles will be over. All you have to worry about is the rain, and the forecast is OK.’

‘They say they no let your car go.’

‘Come and ask him with me.’

The policeman had been changed. This was an older man with an expression of professional severity.

Andy asked him in the ingratiating manner it is safer to employ with the Indonesian police if we could safely go to Berastagi. Using one of the five forms of the negative which complicate the Indonesian language, he replied, ‘Belun’, meaning ‘not yet’.

We thanked him and backed away. ‘Well, that clearly means tomorrow, doesn’t it?’ I said to Andy.

‘Can mean tomorrow, or maybe one month. Can mean anything you want.’

‘So you’re absolutely set on going?’

‘My wife worry and I must go to her.’

We walked with him to the bus where two other hopeful travellers had already taken their seats and the driver was at the wheel. Our leave-taking was an affectionate one, and we were sorry to see him go. He had been dogged by fear almost from the first moment of our meeting, but on the whole had managed to keep it in the background, and had made himself useful and pleasant in every way he could. In his unobtrusive way he had managed to impart information about the way his people looked at human relationships that I suspected many foreigners who lived or worked in the country may not wholly have understood.

Always descend from car, smile, and ask for excuse before requiring directions of road.

Say always taxi man, ‘Where you learn drive so well?’

Not to drink lady’s health in glass from bucket of soap powder.

For waiter you must be saying, ‘Food delicious.’ If not delicious saying, ‘Sorry for cook too busy today.’

In crowd with ladies best keep arms folded.

With us he had never had the opportunity to prove his worth as a guide except through the labyrinths of oriental protocol, where he would have been hard to beat.

There was an afternoon to be used up. We had plans for the exploration of what sounded like untouched rainforest that actually came tumbling over the mountainside down to, and within sight of, the town. On further consideration it was decided to devote a full day to this the next day, planning instead to spend an hour or two in the old fishing village, so far overlooked.

Even in an uninteresting town like Tapaktuan that happens, at least, to be on the coast, it is always pleasant to spend time in the port area, to enjoy the shape and colour of the boats, and the animation of the maritime scene. Tapaktuan possessed no port, but miraculously the old fishing, village, unchanged probably for a thousand years, had so far not only been spared but ignored. It was at the end of a few hundred yards of beach, full of shallow lagoons and savagely coloured rocks, standing on great slabs of sandstone which descended like stepping stones to the water. The fishermen had built their houses of dark ferruginous wood, under deep blond thatches, and they were in the shade of wide-spreading firs through which the breeze never ceased to stir. A great assortment of feluccas and catamarans had been lined up in short order on the beach, and around them were heaped up the nets, fishing pots, windlasses, anchors and the rest of the cheerful paraphernalia of the sea. So far the fishermen remained in possession of the most desirable site for many miles, but it was impossible that this should long continue to be the case, and slowly the town was moving its frontier of white cubes and high, glass-topped walls towards this maritime Arcadia.

In the meanwhile the fishermen’s village remained solidly rooted in the past, and I was interested by the survival here of a prehistoric pre-culinary process which I had previously believed to be confined to Burma, and in particular Mergui, famous for its ‘Bombay Duck’, which is considered the best in the East. In Mergui the whole of the town’s extensive seafront is closely covered, in season, with small fish which are split, salted and laid out to dry. Their exposure is not only to the sun, but to numerous dogs which pass up and down their rows, marking their territory in the usual way. In Tapaktuan the limestone shelves replaced the Mergui seafront, but the process was identical. In The Select they did not call it Bombay Duck, but it was much in demand, and there were cries of
enak
(delicious) from diners who had ordered it. No one within earshot remarked that the cook had been busy.

The next morning, conveniently alerted by the mosque, we were up at dawn, then down to the road-block, where after a glance at our passports the policeman waved us through. ‘Road bad,’ he said. ‘You go, OK, but if trouble no one come for you.’

We expected it to be bad, but not that it would be the worst any of us could remember ever travelling over. Someone had told us that they were repairing and widening it at the rate of thirty kilometres a year, but every year the problems got worse. People who popped down to their holiday villas once in a while could never be sure how long their weekends might last.

The first few miles out of Tapaktuan inspired us with false confidence. It wasn’t so bad after all. We were skirting the foothills where the cataclysmic rain to come would drain quickly down to a wide marshy plain, with the sea in the distance, so there were no dubious bridges to negotiate and no wide holes in the road surface to be filled in. The mountain slopes above the road had been logged, and with the loss of the sponge effect of the root-system there could be sudden floods where the road dropped to marsh level. We should be well away by then. At least the road surface was better than it had been before Tapaktuan. We suspected that the trouble had been no more than a few girders gone out of control, and felt hopeful that this had been cleared up.

Although still in Aceh we were coming to the end of it, and the feeling was of the slackening of tension and an end of a war-time atmosphere. Fifty miles back much of the countryside was deserted, and we drove all day hardly passing a car. Here, so far as we could see, things were back to normal. There was some traffic and many more people about, some of whom actually waved.

The traditional villages we were passing through were exceptionally picturesque in a slatternly fashion. They seemed in microcosm to illustrate an Asian pattern where fertile soil stimulates uncontrollable population growth. They were built in and along the small, swift-flowing mountain streams, which were chocolate in colour from the silt in suspension, and which over the years and centuries had enriched the peasants’ fields. Possibly from custom, no paint was used on any of these places. Buildings were of raw wood under layered roofs of palm thatch or, where the owner could afford it, corrugated iron. People packed the road and streamed like ants in and out of their doors. Domestic gear of all kinds was piled up outside houses into which nothing more could be crammed and there was a sensational amount of litter. Here was the problem at its source, for which a solution had been sought in transmigration, but when the authorities decided to move out surplus humanity from such villages as this it could only be a matter of years before an inborn urge to increase and multiply put things back to square one.

There were transmigrants here, too, living in a kind of ribbon development along a lengthy stretch of the road, in conditions that might have discouraged the production of too many children. Settlements were bare, stark, hot, and above all regimented. The established villages had long since taken possession of those choice situations where there was water in plenty, fertile soil, and the shade of ancient, carefully conserved trees. The transmigrants, in their cleared area, had no shade; sometimes they may have had piped water, but we had heard of many condemned to a daily trek to the nearest river. Above all it was hard not to believe that they suffered from boredom in such surroundings. The vastness of the undertaking in which they were the pawns, coupled with the planners’ lack of vision, had constructed vistas of unimaginable monotony, of endless austere little grey cabins set up in straight lines with nothing to refresh the eye. The planning authorities may have equated standardization with progress, efficiency and manageable subservience, but the onlooker, and probably the homesick migrant, longs for the generous muddle of the average village. A passion for tidiness on the transmigration site itself is sometimes bolstered by notices urging the occupants to keep streets and houses clear of litter. Yet this concern for the immediate environment goes with indifference to the hellish wasteland in which the project is so often located.

Somewhere along this stretch we found ourselves crashing and bucketing over what we assumed to be the bad road of which we had been warned. For a moment we were mystified at shocks that suggested a major earthquake was taking place under us. The explanation was that the road was cratered with deep potholes camouflaged with a filling of dust. For the boys this was no more than another opportunity for testing driving skills, and spells behind the wheel were rationed and timed. Apart from the driver the problem was to avoid cracking heads on the roof, and this could only be done by hanging on to the bases of the seats.

This was the area of the Simpang-kiri River, and a wide and glowing plain, edged with a glittering tinsel of sea. It was here that the bridge was rumoured to be down. This was not so. In fact the road followed the river for some way and crossed and recrossed it over new steel bridges. The work on these had not been finished in all cases, involving some detours with the chance of getting stuck in the mud. For my part the slow going and delays added greatly to the interest of the journey, and many of the rare and spectacular birds I saw were familiar only from ornithological books. Mostly these were waders: stolidly contemplative painted storks — one in every pool — cranes mincing along the edge of streams, a white ibis, a purple moorhen, a scarlet minivet, a yellow oriole, a blue roller, and that great speciality of Indonesia, a green pigeon almost as large as a goose, pecking at seeds at the edge of the water. Two hundred yards away a fishing eagle planed down to rip ineffectively with its talons at the surface of a pond, then settled for a moment in an heraldic pose before launching itself on the air and flapping away. We wound down the windows and listened to the melancholic outcry of all the small birds of the marsh. There were the sounds of the mudflats of estuarial England, and half the small ducking, dodging, scampering water-birds in sight we shared with Sumatra.

Turning inland soon after this we realized that the moment of truth had arrived for suddenly we were driving over a switchback with exceedingly deep troughs holding sand and dust in their bottoms. This called for full throttle in bottom gear up the slopes, with the Toyota’s rear swinging like a pendulum as the wheels lost their grip, spun, took hold again, and we finally slithered, churning sand, foot by foot, over the top. This must have been the area where the steel girders had come adrift and it was hard to imagine how they could have been retrieved, for we passed two transporters that had dug themselves into the troughs, and another that, having slewed sideways while breasting an incline, had ploughed off the road. The ticklish problem now arose of lightening the loads. As a gesture of international friendship we stopped and offered to do whatever we could to help the drivers in their predicament. In reality the Toyota lacked the power to be of any use at all, but the drivers showed themselves delighted at our concern. They were the most courteous and genial men we had met on the journey.

Our target for that day was Berastagi, and the vote was unanimous that we should stay on the outskirts in the Bukit Kubu Hotel. This had possibly been the hardest day’s driving that any of us had done in our lives, and between us we were suffering from a list of minor ailments: abrasions and bruises inflicted by the road, infected mosquito bites, queasiness of the stomach, a touch of asthma, and general fatigue. The hotel had been described in the guide-book in terms that suggested it was a good place in which to rest up for a couple of days. Too often in the past fortnight in the matter of food we had had to fall back on
nasi goreng, mie goreng,
or stale cake. The restaurant at Bukit Kubu was praised, and the feeling was that in a hotel of this category enclosed in its own substantial grounds we would also enjoy the luxury of silence after so many nights of the babel of Indonesian small towns. The
Indonesian Handbook
said: ‘You’ll feel like a Dutch colonialist in the gracious Bukit Kubu … this is one of the most faithfully preserved colonial-style hotels in Indonesia with complete and original Dutch furnishings, and a fire at night in the lounge … one can hire horses and hope they don’t throw you off.’