Empire of the East (12 page)

‘How do we get these going?’ Gawaine asked.

I told them to kick with their heels, and they moved off in an unhurried fashion up the path. Despite having been waved away the guide went trudging in the rear. The boys found the pace too slow and urged the horses on with cries of encouragement and more jabbing with their heels. They turned the corner of the path into the trees, and with that the voices died away almost immediately, and silence fell.

A long time seemed to pass. The porter and the groom had followed the guide in the direction of the forest. The Indonesian rock, previously bland, had been replaced with the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’, and I went up to the hotel, got them to switch off, declined a cocktail, and came back. I was just in time to see Gawaine and Robin on foot, on the path coming down from the forest. They were both red in the face, somewhat dishevelled, and talking excitedly. There were signs of blood on them.

‘What happened?’

‘They threw us.’

‘How far did you get?’

‘No distance. Mine only wanted to go sideways, and when I tried to straighten him up he threw me over his head. Robin landed up in a clump of bamboo.’

‘So where are the horses?’

‘The groom caught them and took them away. We chased them all over the place. They play a game with you. They wait for you to come up, then they take off again.’

‘Who won this time?’

‘Robin. He stayed on longer than I did.’

B
ERASTAGI WAS JUST DOWN
the road, and as we drove in it came as a surprise to see travellers in plenty, instantly identifiable by their money belts suspended like marsupial pouches over the lower area of their stomachs. On the whole the travellers were unconcerned with politics, and the ugly sounds reaching Bukit Kubu from just over the border in Aceh were inaudible in the self-absorbed tourist world of Berastagi itself. Berastagi, in the Karo Highlands, could have been anywhere. Here was a main street, with travel agency, bank, Modesty Souvenir Shop, Superfast Filling Station, three Chinese restaurants with nightly karaoke, and a tiny hole of a place in a back street with dog stew bubbling in a cauldron. It was ritual food for the Karos, normally consumed by them only on great occasions, although here it attracted the attention of the occasional foreigner prepared to go to almost any length in search of exotic experience.

There was a joint letter from Claudia and Rod awaiting me, which I was lucky to collect because it had taken only half the normal time to arrive. It was from Siberut, which had been the final and supreme goal of Claudia’s journeyings. This island not quite the size of Bali, off the west coast of Sumatra, was outstanding at many levels of interest, so much so that in 1981 the whole island was declared a ‘Man and the Biosphere Reserve’. Despite such international interest and the Presidential Decree of 1992 declaring that its future would be safeguarded, Siberut had suffered outrageous exploitation. Intensive logging continues even at night; its indigenous people have been forbidden to practise their religion, and deprived of their means of existence by compulsory relocation to coastal areas which cannot provide a livelihood. Relief organizations are harassed by the police, and although Claudia and her friend were able to visit parts of the island normally out of bounds, they did so with extreme difficulty and probably at some risk.

The people here on the coast who have lost their plantations inland have to get their food from the Menang traders — either
beras
(low grade rice),
supermie
(instant noodles) or tins of sardines at vastly inflated prices. The money for this is any
gaheru
they may have saved, or
copra.
Gaheru is a fungus causing a fragrant resin to grow in the heart of a local tree (now rare). The traders buy this at a very low price. It finally ends up in the Middle East as frankincense at thousands of pounds a kilo, and the islanders are persuaded to spend the money on cigarettes, radios, electric torches, T-shirts, etc. The plan is to hook them on ‘modern’ things, but where will they turn when their savings are gone?

The trip inland to Pokukul was our first experience of trekking in Siberut, which is an island made totally of mud. To make the walking easier on very muddy climbs, descents or crossing ravines or rivers, there are notched logs along the path. These might be very useful for the Mentawaians with their splayed-out, huge, flat feet, but for whities it’s a complete nightmare. The health situation is appalling. There is cholera in the region every year, the worst period being in 1975. The spread is probably increased by their method of mourning which is to stroke and kiss the dead one.

When we reached the Sakkudei and gave them some coloured wool, they put skeins and skeins round their waists, wore it as armbands and in their hair. Some of the men wear their hair down to their bottoms, but that’s an imprisonable offence if they’re caught. The old religion of the Sakkudei people is fascinating, and a very little persists today in the more remote areas, which is where we’ve come. Basically animism (that everything from trees, rocks, rivers to the weather are imbued with their own spirits) and worship of the ancestral spirits result in a cultural adaptation of the people to the life of the rainforest in an almost perfect harmony, preventing overexploitation of local resources. Hunting is an important social occasion for the men, the prey usually being monkeys and deer. A complex act of rituals must be performed prior to the event. A ceremony is performed where the
dukun
(shaman) conjures up the spirit of the monkey and apologises to it for its imminent death, pointing out that the clan is obliged to eat, and also trying to persuade the monkey spirit that coming to live in the
uma
(big clan house) is a great idea and it is a really nice place.

Felling of forest trees, too, is strongly tabooed, as trees are believed to be homes for spirits of the deceased, as well as having spirits of their own. Thus when a tree needs to be felled to make a
sampan
or maybe a village clearing, a ceremony must first be performed to apologise to the resident spirits.

The Italian Catholic pastors here have a very liberal attitude towards Sakkudei traditional culture. We trekked a day through the mud to Liman to attend a ceremony in the newly erected church. Everyone stood outside with palms to listen to the pastor then filed into the church. Then the
dukuns
took over, slaughtering a few pigs and wringing the necks of the chickens. The two oldest
dukuns
were gorgeous long-haired old men, one of them with the most captivating smile. We’d met him on the trek and he said we could stay in his house, where his little adopted daughter used my feet as a pillow. He had been wearing a splendid bark loincloth the first time we met, but for the church festival the kids made the
dukuns
change into shorts, and in two cases dirty Adidas towels. The dancing was the most amazing I’ve ever seen anywhere. In addition to the professionals, all the most important figures, e.g., school teacher,
kepala desa,
pastor, etc., were expected to do their bit with a song or a dance number. At the last minute we found that we had to perform something typically British too. After a good deal of blank-minded panic, I came up with Morris dancing. For this we decorated ourselves with leaves, borrowed horse bells from some children, and made a bamboo stick each. We made real fools of ourselves prancing about on stage — but people seemed to get quite into it.

I wonder if any of the tribal life we’ve experienced in the outer islands still exists in East Timor, after all they’ve gone through. From all one hears I very much doubt it. Anyway we shall soon see for ourselves and I’m living in hopes. It won’t be long now. See you in Jakarta.

Clear of Berastagi the pulse of life in North Sumatra quickens. The village streets fill up, smiles return; the mixture is one of bustle, yet extraordinary tranquillity. There are animals everywhere — cats, dogs, chickens, goats — indifferent to the congested traffic in a narrow road, and it comes almost as a revelation to see a lorry driver pull up, climb down from his perch and gently shoo a hen and her chicks from his path before grinding into action once again. Whence comes this tenderness for animals? These lorry drivers and villagers were in the main Karos, many of them only converted to Christianity or Islam at the time of the emergency in 1965, when to be an ‘atheist’ in many areas was to run the risk of inclusion in the general slaughter.

Nevertheless, many who had survived through prudent conversion remained animist under the skin. Remembering the Indian animists of the Amazon, too, and their villages full of tame parrots and of small jungle animals that wandered about and through their houses fearlessly, it seemed to me that the difference lay in the tribals’ acceptance of the animal’s soul, rejected by monotheist belief. The Karos, too, were great pet people, and in most villages there were tarsiers on offer, perched on a pole — often with a baby in arms — watching the world through their wide, deep eyes, mirroring all the human emotions. Passers-by stopped to admire them and pop slivers of cheese into their mouths. Despite solidarity with the animals, the villagers were carnivorous, and there were always stalls with plentiful bats for sale. They hung head-down in rows, absolutely inert apart from sensitive claws, constantly in languid movement, like the fingers of a tired pianist over the keys of a piano. I would have imagined that the Sakkudei of Siberut, too, ate bats, and assumed that if so these would have been included in the ritual apologies made to animals that went into the pot.

Within the bounds of its thirteen thousand six hundred and seventy-seven islands Indonesia contains a greater variety of tribal peoples than any other political entity in the world. There are many hundreds of communities such as the Karos, possessing their own language, the separate culture developed over thousands of years, their own customs and their own beliefs. All are now referred to in government pronouncements as
suku suku terasing
(isolated and alien peoples) and it is the announced intention to destroy this isolation and to turn isolated and alien islanders into the equivalent of Javanese peasants or industrial workers.

The PKMT, the office created to deal with the problem of tribal peoples, has listed among its numerous objectives the imposition of ‘religion’ based upon one ‘Almighty God’, the development of tribal ability to produce works of culture and art ‘in tune with the values of Indonesian society’, and the settling of isolated communities in an area within government administration and with ‘permanent orderly sources of income’. They are therefore to be stripped of their religion, made available as a low-paid workforce wherever labour is in demand and, in the case of certain tribes having a reputation as creative artists, forced into the production of banalities for the commercial market.

The tribal peoples of Indonesia are almost without exception extremely receptive to visiting foreigners, who may even find their unvarying hospitality bordering on the excessive. Outstandingly, the Karos welcome the presence of sympathetic outsiders on the occasion of any of their numerous ceremonies. More than fifty of these are listed, the most interesting — and in a way moving — being the Washing of the bones of their ancestors. This, from the governmental viewpoint, fails on several counts. In the first place it is unacceptable because it shows regard for the ancestral spirits, thereby demonstrating animistic traits that are to be eliminated. The ceremony will have been presided over by a traditional healer, now outlawed, and in the way of all such ancient religious ceremonies, it will not have been fitted into our calendar, but remains like Easter in the West: a movable feast dependent upon the phases of the moon.

A problem now presents itself. Indonesia derives a huge and expanding revenue from tourism, the hope even being that, a few years from now, when the income at present provided by its logging industry comes to an end, tourism will have been sufficiently developed to plug the wide hole in the national resources. Tourists are attracted to Indonesia because it has remained ‘colourful’ in the way their own countries have long since ceased to be. It can provide ceremonies by the hundred like the traditional bone-washing of the Karos, performed under the compulsion of belief. These are largely what have drawn tourists to Indonesia, and these they will flock to see. In their stead the government proposes to create a lifeless folklore which visitors will instinctively avoid. Neither will tourists wish to see tribes such as the Dayaks of Borneo, whose long-houses were burned down prior to their relocation in settlements of one-family dwellings of corrugated iron and planks.

Bukit Lawang is a splendidly located village on the banks of a turbulent little oriental imitation of the Wye which has given its name to the nearby Bohorok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre. The information provided by the centre’s leaflet, stating that it is principally visited by foreigners, is wildly out of date. We arrived at the worst time, a weekend, finding ourselves at the entrance to the village in a traffic-jam of cars overflowing with exuberant locals — mostly from Medan, with the noise of car radios and cassette recorders coming from all directions — and then had difficulty in finding anywhere to park. For a moment we were tempted to call the expedition off, although second thoughts were unexpectedly rewarded, for somehow an environment of potentially grandiose solitude was able to cope with the invasion, to stifle the outcry and conceal or disperse the litter. It turned out that Bukit Lawang is also a centre of the sport of ‘tubing’. Tubers float twelve kilometres on inflated car inner-tubes in vigorous motion through the last of the Bohorok’s shallow cataracts down to the edge of the great eastern plain of Sumatra. But in the end these, too, go, returning the tubes to the many hirers, or taking them with them.

The orang-utan station was now run by the Indonesian government although it had been initiated by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, and a Germanic respect for time, which may even have been passed on to the great apes, was discernible in its publications. The visitor hoping to see the orang-utans in the morning must arrive strictly at 07.00 at the location, and if in the afternoon, he must be present at 14.30 sharp, since the time established is the time to feed (the free) animals. Leaflets put out by Indonesian guest-houses make good reading for their wildly beautiful and often evasive English, but the Germans called a spade a spade. There is nothing about the reasonable need for caution in your approach to a wild orang-utan. ‘They are capable’, the old German leaflets tell you flatly, ‘of cracking your bones.’