On our farewell tour of Indonesia, we aimed to reach the Togean Islands, a paradise off the coast of Sulawesi. But before we got there, a series of obstacles awaited. Not in the least the local traffic.
“Blarghhhh.”
We sat in the cargo bed of a pickup truck in Sulawesi, on our way to the Togean Islands. The noodles Anete had consumed with relish the night before disappeared into a plastic bag of Indomaret. I looked paler than Steve Buscemi after several hours of soaking in a bath filled with bleach. My stomach explored the space between my ribs.
A day earlier, guide Nicolas had told us about the peculiar rituals of the Toraja people. Each August, for instance, they take the deceased out of their coffins. They wash and polish them and dress them in nice clothes. Then they parade them around their villages. Yesterday, we had frowned at this. But now we feared being mistaken for mummies ourselves. We’d better watch out that they don’t throw us back into the pit. Maybe that second bottle of palm wine hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
Our drivers were enjoying themselves. They drove like lunatics on the narrow, winding mountain roads, laughed like hyenas and lit one cigarette after another. Put a local in a car in Sulawesi and he imagines himself a racing pilot, combining a lead foot with the steering skills of Stevie Wonder. We braced ourselves every time our driver took a turn in the oncoming lane, like a mobile variation on Russian roulette. After two hours of shaking and trembling – literally and figuratively – the gentlemen dropped us off in Paloppo.
Balls off
We didn’t have much time to recover from the rollercoaster – we wanted to get to Tentena that same day. While I tried to convince a driver to take us, a local pint-sized rascal struck up a conversation with Anete. She didn’t like it. “That little brat won’t stop making remarks about my boobs”, she said. My inner Usain Bolt awoke. I dashed towards him, intending to use a few well-aimed pedagogical touches to rid him of some baby teeth. Alas: seeing my seven-mile boots, he jumped on his motorbike and rushed off. I saw the futility of my attempt and chugged back. Meanwhile, the whole village had crowded around Anete. There were more motorbikes than during the Harley Davidson Days.
“That bastard! I’ll chop off his head!”
“His balls! Give me five minutes, I’m going home to sharpen my machete.”
I swallowed hard. That was the end of me. After our detour through the Christian lands of Toraja, we had ended up in Muslim territory again. I had probably affronted one of their sons with my manoeuvre. I signalled to Anete. “Come on, let’s get going before I end up in their soto ayam.”
“Relax, mas. These people only want to help us.”
***
And indeed, the wrath of the village was directed at the little devil. I got to keep my family jewels.
“What did his motorbike look like?” growled one of the bystanders. “Do you remember the registration number? He can’t be far. Let’s organise a manhunt.”
When things cooled off, and pitchforks and machetes were safely stowed away again, only a small chubby lady remained behind, the only villager who spoke English. She introduced herself as Maya. “Chances are that guy was on drugs. It’s a huge problem amongst young people”, she told us. “Do you want to come for a coffee? I’ll introduce you to all my ex-junkies.”
Resist temptation, smoke a cigarette
“They start young, often not much older than eight or nine. Ecstasy pills can be bought for as little as 1,000 rupiah (0,06 euro). They add those to a bottle of wine. Well, what they call wine, it’s more like a chemical mix. See that guy over there?” Maya pointed to a 16-year-old boy with a bare torso, working on an old Vespa. “He recently drank half a litre of mosquito repellent. Fortunately, he’s on the mend.”
Why were drugs precisely here a problem, in this Allah-forsaken hole? “Religion”, Maya mused. “All those rules confuse these guys.” It has to be said that Maya would’ve probably blamed high market prices on Islam, too. She presented herself as a true crusader against religion.
“We help them by letting them tinker with Vespa’s”, she said. “At least they can be useful.” I asked how she got them to stay off the drugs. Maya pointed at her sister, Heema. “She’s a shaman. She taught herself to heal when she was five. It’s a gift of nature. To cure our junkies, we only use plants and herbs.”
***
Anete mentioned she had a toothache. Heema tipped some table salt into a glass of water, clamped it between her palms and looked at it as she read the future. Then she made a few wrist movements above the glass and slid it towards Anete. My bullshit meter was going into overdrive. But as we were guests, I bit my tongue.
Meanwhile, Maya invited us to sit around the table. “I may be against religion, but I still consider myself a Buddhist”, Maya preached. “Young people today only think about smartphones and gaming. And stuffing themselves with sugars and fats. These are cravings we must suppress.” Her Guru lit her 200th cigarette of the evening. Because, yes, the uncrowned queen of suppressed cravings would easily beat any moustachioed Turkish truck driver in a cigarette-smoking competition.
“Having said that, enjoy the meal!” Maya lifted the lid of the cooking pot. I rubbed my hands together, all this gabbling had made me hungry. But then the pot revealed its secrets. Dry noodles! Served on a bed of nothing!
Enough! For all that diligent do-gooding: kudos. With the necessary Valium pills, I could just about tolerate all the preaching and esoteric rambling. But to eat so poorly? And this on the eve of Idul Fitri, the end of Ramadan and pretty much Christmas Eve for Muslims – who are eating themselves an indigestion at this very moment? We’re out of here! On to Tentena!
Batman in the pan
Sulawesi is wild and underdeveloped — especially compared to Java, where we lived for almost a year. Java is the most densely populated area in the world, 140 million people on an island the size of Greece. We couldn’t take five steps without tripping over the guy lines of a food shack. The Javanese drank tea in industrial amounts, usually served with large, hammer-chopped chunks of ice and quantities of sugar that would give any dietician a heart attack. In Sulawesi, on the other hand, you needed to be Sherlock Holmes to find a chilled drink, let alone a decent meal.
Which was unfortunate as we hadn’t eaten since Maya’s Auschwitz menu.
“Batman!” The warung owner flapped his arms. I had just pointed at a yellow curry with bamboo shoots. In this restaurant in Tentena, Bibles and Jesus statues adorned shelves, bats figured on the menu. I pointed at another dish. “Woof, woof!” barked the man. When the next bowl contained goldfish, we ordered a portion of dry rice. Who would’ve thought that the chefs in Tentena would make our Maya look like Jamie Oliver?
***
The locals might throw a bat or a dog’s leg on the grill every once in a while, but otherwise, Tentena looked like a lovely, sleepy village. Cute, whitewashed fences, charming churches whose bells reverberated every morning, a lovely deep-blue river flowing into a lake: postcards have been printed for less. Appearances are deceptive. For the previous twenty years, heads had been rolling over the streets with the regularity of said church bells. Mostly heads with headscarves or with a cross dangling from a chain around their necks.
Muslims and Christians had lived side by side for years, the mosque next to the church without any problems. Until the central government started encouraging Muslims from Java to settle in Sulawesi. Those waves of immigration upset the balance. The straw broke the camel’s back when drunk youngsters from both religions clashed in 1998. The situation got out of hand, and hundreds of people died.
In the following years, peace never truly returned in the region. It didn’t help that paramilitary organisations got involved. They battled each other, sometimes with traditional spears, bows and arrows, catapults and homemade bombs and guns. The dominoes of violence kept falling, unstoppably. Churches were set on fire, Muslim boarding schools invaded, students’ heads bashed in. Christians killed Muslims and threw their mutilated bodies in the river, Muslims retaliated by brutally beheading teenage girls on their way to school. And so on.
Eventually, the government intervened, manu militari. But that peace remained shaky was proven by the events of a year earlier. When a simple farmer, on the way to his fields, witnessed a shootout between police and Muslim extremists, the latter finished him off in front of his family.
Dead cockroach
The goal of our trip, the Togean Islands, got closer and closer, paradisical islands with no mobile connection or internet. The perfect place to escape the hustle and bustle of Java. To reach our eldorado, we needed to take a ferry. As it only sailed in the morning, we were condemned to spend the night in Ampana, a grim port town where ugliness blew in our faces like a Jeff Koons artwork.
Lonely Planet recommended staying in Hotel Oasis and we followed that advice. All the more so because upon checking out another hostel, we found a cockroach corpse on the floor. I could handle quite a bit of filth while travelling – to save a few euros of drinking money – but with a lady in my company, I couldn’t do that.
So be it, Oasis would have to do. The name sounded promising and, according to Lonely Planet, this hotel offered clean rooms and good service, “but don’t expect to sleep before the karaoke bar in the adjacent premises closes at 11 pm.” We are no killjoys, if it keeps the local youth off the streets, we could live with that.
At a quarter to 11, we brushed our teeth and put on our nighties. For a moment, I had forgotten that we were in Indonesia – where ‘rubber time’ applied. The Indonesian word for ‘tomorrow’ could mean any moment in the future, from tomorrow to a few years from now. At three in the morning, we were still vibrating to bad dangdut. When an hour later, it finally got quiet at the neighbour’s, it was time for the morning prayer at the mosque down the road. I appeared at the breakfast table with eyes betraying ten days without sleep.
***
We received the next piece of bad news on a sober stomach: the ferry would exceptionally not leave from the terminal within walking distance, but from the port 15 kilometres away. (In hindsight, this might’ve been a scam.) And so we had to take an angkot first. No, not the abbreviation of Anxious Nausea Generator, Knees Overlapping Tightly, but the type of minivan that the kindergarten uses for its yearly trip, the kind that even Tom Cruise doesn’t fit in very easily.
The adventure started with crawling in – and you can take that literally. We squeezed ourselves between a man with a body odour the UN would label a biological weapon of war, and a crooked old lady coming back from the early market. Judging from the live chicken, the bag of rice and the large plastic bags bursting with fish and wilted vegetables, she possibly assumed war was imminent in the next 24 hours and took precautions.
There were six people in the minibus, but we were under no illusions: that number was bound to be multiplied. The rule of thumb seemed to be that as long as everyone was still breathing normally, at least one more small Indonesian could be added. We were lucky to have a handkerchief-sized spot to ourselves. Pinned between shopping bags, the bus shook us harder than a theme park ride. Was that the fish that started leaking on our shoes? Did that stinky guy manage to fall asleep, saliva dripping from his mouth?
***
Three schoolgirls next to the road signalled that they wanted to join the van. If they fit, I thought, then Mark Zuckerberg qualified as a sex god. But as everyone was still breathing more or less normally, wooden benches suddenly appeared from under the seats, plastic bags were pushed onto our laps and the miracle happened. Indonesia reinvents the concept clown car.
The question, however, remained: were those Togean Islands worth all this suffering?
Dynamite fishing
Finally, paradise! Hammock, here I come!
“Nou, Mark! Lekker weertje, toch?” (Dutch – the kind from the Netherlands – for: “Well, Mark! Nice weather, right?”)
“Zeg dat wel, Sonja! En die Bintang smaakt heerlijk. Prima pilsje!” (“Say that again, Sonja! And that Bintang tastes great. Great lager!”)
I should’ve stayed at home.
This is what would have happened if everything had continued in the same line of expectations. Instead, something else happened. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Togean forms a mini archipelago of 56 islands within the giant archipelago called Indonesia. There are 37 villages, some of them found by Bajau people, semi-nomadic sea gypsies that spend large parts of their lives on the sea, in small, wooden boats.
Unlike the bulk of Indonesians, Bajau people feel – well, yes – like fish in the water. According to legend, however, they used to live in a kingdom on the land. The king had a daughter, at least until a fateful storm dragged her into the sea. The distraught monarch ordered his people to track down the apple of his eye. The Bajau searched and searched, turned over every sea drop three times, but to no avail. Terrified of the king’s fury, they decided not to return to land and to continue their lives as sea nomads.
***
This loyalty to the sea goes a long way. When a Bajau couple gets married, the family pushes them out to sea on a canoe. They have to find their own place. Fathers dive with their year-old children to get them used to the water as quickly as possible. To get better at diving, some Bajau deliberately destroy their eardrums. Many older Bajau therefore are hard of hearing. At its peak, their sailing area extended far beyond East Timor. They searched for sea cucumbers, pearls and shark fins. Occasionally, the Bajau also put a black patch on their right eye and boarded a merchant boat. But they always lived mainly from fishing.
Gradually, they started losing out to better-equipped fishermen from the mainland. Their sailing area shrunk. In a desperate attempt to salvage their livelihood, they turned to ‘dynamite fishing’ – the name says it all. An ecological disaster, but you could hardly blame the Bajau people for wanting to feed their families. When the government clamped down on dynamite fishing, many Bajau people gave up their lifestyle.
Now they shack up in shabby stilt houses on the coasts of the islands. Some families have changed trade, opened resorts and now fish for tourists. Quoting Lonely Planet about Pondok Lestari: “Stay with a charming Bajau family that takes its guests on daily free snorkelling trips and fishing excursions on which you can catch your dinner.” Ready for the canoe, Anete? She nods.
Saved by an angel
On the quay of Wakai – the only town in the Togean Islands worthy of that name – we met the owner of Pondok Lestari by chance.
“Sir, can we stay at your house?”
The man brought a hand to his ear. “Floor mouse? No, we usually eat fish.”
After we raised our voices to Gordon Ramsay levels, he finally understood our search for a place to sleep.
“Gosh”, he said. “We’re already hosting 35 people in ten bungalows at the moment. And tomorrow, another ten will arrive. Maybe we can put a mattress in the restaurant.” In just a few words, our deserted island dream shattered to pieces. The man must’ve noticed our disappointment. “Try at Sunset Beach, you might be more lucky there.”
***
With less courage than despair, we engaged a local fisherman to take us to Sunset Beach. Upon arrival, a blonde angel came running out to meet us in the sea. Her smile was so big that you’d need a wide-angle lens to photograph her. Irina took over the resort only a month before and was still waiting for an influx of Robinsons. Hallelujah!
We plonked ourselves down on the picture-perfect beach and no longer thought about the hurdles to get here. All of a sudden, life was dead easy. To flush the toilet, we ran to the sea to fill a bucket of water. Occasionally, we had to chase away a spider with the diameter of a large tennis ball. We made coffee and tea with water from a freshwater stream nearby.
Shopping was possible in Bajau village-on-stilts Tobil. It was within walking distance distance, but only at low tide. At high tide, we’d have to swim back with our grocery bags. Tobil permanently smelled like Christmas, thanks to the cloves drying in the sun. It takes quite a lot of that stuff to supply an entire nation with kreteks, the crackling clove cigarettes that every male Indonesian from 8 to 88 is addicted to.
***
In the morning, afternoon and evening, we joined Irina at her table. An all-in for 11 euros per person, what a deal! The rare times we managed to hoist ourselves out of our hammocks, we made snorkelling excursions. We swam with non-toxic jellyfish in a lake and discovered a magical underwater world in the sea. The coral of Togean seemed to have recovered from all that dynamite fishing. What a life!
But alas, all good things come to an end. After six days on the Togean Islands, we ran out of cash. And there was no ATM around. Just when we were about to throw our backpacks into a fishing boat and return to reality, Irina stopped us. She spoke the golden words: “Soon, I’ll have to go back to Moscow to take care of business. I am still looking for someone to take over things here temporarily. How about becoming managers of the Sunset Beach?”
Chief, we are sorry, but we will stay away a little longer.
This story first appeared in Dutch in P-magazine in the summer of 2015.