My great-grandaunt Bert circumnavigated the world on her father’s whaling ship in 1868-1869. In 1960 National Geographic published a story about her childhood travels and at her 101st birthday the old Yankee lady related tales of the black-toothed betel-nut chewers of Siam and tiger hunts on Java.
The only two other family members of the previous generation had visited the Orient. My Uncle Dave had served on a destroyer during the Battle of Biak in World War II and my grand-aunt Marion traveled through Indonesia in the 1950s. She brought back a statue of a bare-breasted Legong dancer from Bali. Their travels to faraway places sparked my imagination and throughout my youth I dreamed of traveling to Indonesia.
My chance to scratch this itch came in 1990.
That December after a successful holiday stint selling jewelry I sold a 10-carat diamond for a good profit and sought to temporarily quit my job at the diamond exchange. Manny, my boss, asked my plans.
"I’m going to travel to Indonesia and write a novel." My commissions on holiday sales and savings from working every day of the Christmas season added up to enough an around-the world ticket and cover my expenses for about six months throughout the Orient.
"You should invest your money in some diamonds. That's how you make more money."
"I want to see the other half of the world."
"Suit yourself, but don't expect a job when you get back." Manny was twenty years older than me and hadn't taken on a vacation in years.
"I won't."
I bought an aroun the world ticket from Panexpress for $1400. MYC-LA-Biak-Bali-Java-Singapore_Bangkok-Kathmandu-Paris-London-NYC. I also purchased THE ROUGH GUIDE to Indonesia and researched the various islands of the populous archipelago to plan a two-thousand mile trip from Biak in Irian Jaya to Sumatra in the west.
My family up-country farewell party in Boston was a blur of good luck wishes and the day before my departure I rode the subway up to 47th Street to say my good-byes and receives my commission.
"How long are you going?" Manny paid out my money in hundreds and the stack had a good feel to it. I wasn’t rich, just free.
"Six months. I'll be back in time for the wedding season."
“Six months? Sei gesund.” Manny returned to sorting diamonds. The Brownsville native loved his work. He was happy on 47th Street. I was happy two days later catching a flight from JFK to LA on Garuda Air, Indonesia’s national carrier.
After a week in LA I boarded a Garuda 747 to cross the vast Pacific. THe airliner landed at the small fishing port of Biak in Irian Jaya. Bali-bound tourists bought cannibal souvenirs from the small gift shop. Two missionaries were greeted by their Melanesian flock and boarded Cessnas to their churches. The 747 lifted off the tarmac.
I was the only Mistah or white man on the island, at least until I met Larry Smith, a fameed diver opening up a dive shop here. His boat's engine was kaput, but his Zodiac was good for free-diving off the cliff like reefs. And I couldn’t be happier, drinking a Bintang beer with the Texan on the veranda of the old Dutch hotel overlooking Cendrawasih Bay.
For the next three months I traversed Indonesian archipelago on boats, ferries, trains, and buses. Indonesia possesses hundreds of languages and cultures. Each journey brought me to a new land. The kids shouted 'allo mistah' and Bahasa Indonesian became my fourth language. My first second language had been Latin thanks to being an altar boy. It was of no use in the Orient.
After crossing Java by train in early April, I flew out of Jakarta to Padang and stayed the night in a cheap hotel on the Indian Ocean. After swimming in the ocean at dawn I showered and caught the Sumatran coastal market town on a bus bound for the Batak Highlands. Some 600 kilometers to the north. The seats and aisles were crammed with Sunday shoppers and I stood at the open back door smoking a kretek cigarette. Sweating profusely from the coastal humidity. The clove and tobacco smoke mixed well with the diesel fumes from the bus' laboring engine.
I studied the chattering passengers.Their smiling faces were ethnically different from the dour lowlanders and halfway up the mountain they sang a song, which I immediately recognized as BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON.
I had first hear the church tune in Jimmy Cliff’s THE HARDER THEY COME. I loved the Melodians’ reggae version and I joined the impromptu choir. The closest passengers stared at me with amusement. At the end of the song an old man rose from his seat and shook my hand.
“Chretian?” He had several front teeth. They looked sharp.
“Christian,” I replied without hesitation. My atheism was a secret better kept from the devout.
“Saya nama John.” His English was a step above the usual ‘hello mistah’ from most rural Indonesians. “Where you go?”
“Danau Tobah.” I took out my Nelles map.
The largest lake in Indonesia was set within a gigantic volcano. I had seen its photos in National Geographic. My grandmother in Maine had the entire collection in the attic and those magazines set my heart to distant lands. His index finger stabbed the map.
“Tobah my home. You stay at my guest house. Very cheap. Very good.” John motioned for the young man next to him to get out of his seat.
“No.” I waved off the offer. “I like standing.”
“No, you big mistah. You my friend. Sit. Duduk.” The word sounded more like an order and I sat in the young man’s place. Accepting an offer is always better than refusing one in the strange land.
On the climb through the mountains John proudly recounted the traditional fierceness of Batak warriors. saying, "Many of our people serve in the top ranks of the Indonesian military. I fought for British against Communists in Malaysia. Where I learn speak your language. Good money."
The Irish and Scots had assisted the English in the conquest of the world. John's tribe had done the same for Java for the Dutch and Malaysia for the British.
"My family live Lake Toba. Since before time.”
“It says in my book that the Batak people came to Sumatra 2500 years ago.” The Rough Guide delved deeply into history.
“2500 years before time.”
“This book states that 50,000 years ago Lake Toba blew up and nearly killed off everyone on Earth at the time. Some scientists think the population of the world was reduced to 10,000 and they lived someplace in Central Asia.”
“That book say many things, but Batak people believe world came from Sideak Parujar."
"Sideak Parujar."
"Yes, goddess leave husband, a lizard-god.”
John related the Batak tale of creation in a combination of Bahasa Indonesian, English and a little Batak to the passengers. I caught about 5%. Thankfully he was a skilled mime. The rest of the bus listened intently to every word and the children shuddered, as John stabbed downward with his hand.
“Sideak Parudjar thrust sword into Naga Padoha. He not die. God never die and every time he move earth shake.”
His captive audience applauded his story and John lit a kretek cigarette.
I liked the smell of burning cloves.
“As Christian we not believe in other gods, but the old stories too good to give up. Maybe tonight you tell story.”
Nearing dusk the bus descended from the volcano’s rim to the floor caldera of Lake Toba and we boarded a ferry to the island on the opposite shore. The temperature was much cooler as expected from anywhere 2900 meters above sea level.
John’s Batak Villa was simple and cheap. The food adequate. My room ’s deck had a lake view facing the high rim of the ancient volcano. The other guests were European backpackers. German, French, and of course Australians eager to leave their subcontinent. Few Americans traveled this far from the States. That night at the lakeside terrace I narrated the story of the Evans Mountain ghost. His family gathered around our table, as I introduced the Batak clan to a haunted house in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The Evan's Mountain House.
John struggled to translate my tale. The two of us acted out the ghosts and the little children shivered with the old man's version. At the end the children clapped their hands and John said, “Good story. Everyone like. They think Mistahs not have ghosts. Only have one god. Good story. Now go sleep.”
I spent the next few days sightseeing around Samosir Island on a small 115cc motorcycle. Even driving off the island to Hadabuan Naisogop Waterfalls to the west. The water was icy cold. I ate a nasi goring, In the waterfront town of Pangururan. I was so far away from the Western World, but at night I listened to the BBC on my Sony World Band radio. Ever so far from London.
The lake was too reedy for swimming. Like an ancient water ogre was trying to seize your ankles. While it wasn’t the rainy season, the equatorial sun flayed the skin off my shoulder. John’s wife salved my burnt flesh with a healing clove oil.
Every evening I ate with John’s family. They asked questions about my family. I lied about a dead wife and showed photos of my nieces and nephews, claiming that they were mine. A man my age without a wife or children was considered strange by the Bataks and all Indonesians. They had big families and the children strangely cried all the time unlike any other small ones in Indonesia.
“They think they big. Not understand they small,” explained John.
The day before my departure to Medan John invited me to a pig roast in a mountain village. We arrived at a compound of wooden houses before sunset. The thatched roofs were curved like the horns of bulls.
Dogs crept closer to steal the offal. John beat them off with a club.
"Angin no good."
"They like people."
"Because people give dog food. I no trust dog, but everything have tondi, man, pig, dog.”
“Tindi.” I figured tindi meant soul.
Two younger men tended to the cooking. Pig fat sizzled onto the coals. We had finished the beer and drank arak or rice wine from plastic bags.
“Tindi live many places. The first in body. The second in birth bag from woman.”
“I was born with the placenta wrapped around my head. In the land of my grandmother the Irish think that gives the new-born the gift of sight.”
“Sight?”
I searched for the right word from a small Bahasa-English dictionary.
“Penglihatan, but with mind.”
“Ah, ESP,” John rattled off an explanation to his friends and they murmured in appreciation of my gift.
Batak people understood the shadow worlds.
"In old days every Batak men have birth bag buried special place to protect tindi.”
“Not the same as in America.” Doctors chucked the placenta out with the trash.
"America have no tindi."
"Too much tindi."
Spirituality in the West was the domain of priests, ministers, and rabbis and I almost told John and his friends this, except they believed every man was in touch with the world beyond our senses.
Once the pig was cooked, thick slabs of pork were sliced with the long curved kris. We ate with my right hand, since the left hand was for wiping the ass. John called his right hand ‘Adam’s Spoon’.
A young man broke out hasapsi, a traditional two-stringed lutes to play a lyrical song. More plastic sacks of arak were passed round the fire.
It was a fiery combination.
“You like pig.” John swayed to the music.
The other men were entering a pig flesh trance like Americans after gorging on turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
“Saya suka sekali.” I had never tasted better.
The older men toasted my compliment with hunks of sizzling meat. We smoked kretek cigarettes to the filter and I felt one with them enough to muster up the courage to ask John a question, which had been nagging me for days.
"Islam came to Banda Aceh almost seven hundred years ago. Most of Indonesia submitted to Allah, but the Batak and other mountain tribes resisted Mohammad's call. Why?"
“First we have the Batak tradition.” John licked at his lips and spoke slowly in simple Bahasa, “At one time Batak people ate men.”
“I had read that.” The Rough Guide covered every aspect of a culture without recrimination.
“We drank blood and ate heart, palms and soles of feet. They were good eating and rich with ‘tindi’ or the life-soul of eaten. In old days we ate man with his family. We suck the bones dry. The meat we eat last and we store bones in cave. If man stranger, we ate him cepat. Fast fast. You know what we call these men?”
“No.” The fire flickered low. Dogs slept at our feet. The jungle was filled by silent shadows. The horned houses were giant buffaloes. I could have been Marco Polo. The year was 1231 AD.
“Babi Bisa,” he spoke the words in a hush.
The other men woke from their stupor and muttered the words in unison, “Babi Bisa."
“Big pig?”
I recognized the words from my guidebook's extensive dictionary, but I didn’t like John's tone.
“Yes, and that why we not Muslims. Because pig taste like man. We killed them on stone.”
The elder explained our conversation to his tribesmen. They laughed and stared at me with an ancient hunger. No one in my family had ever eaten another human being andI tried to hide my shaking as I said, “I like pig too. Not because it tastes like man. I like pig, because it tastes good. Even the oink.”
I snorted several times in my best imitation of a pig.
The party chuckled in convulsion and lifted bags of warm arak. The pig was gnawed to the bone. The snarling dogs had their way with the carcass. We snacked on the crispy ears. The fire died out and John walked me to the hotel.
At the door of my room he said, “I tell story to many Mistahs. It is joke. No Batak eat man in 100 years. Many westerners run away, not you. Why?”
“Because I like pig too.” Bacon was my favorite meat.
“Why?”
“Nothing taste like it.”
“Not babi besa?”
“I don’t know, but I think not. Man is not as clean as a pig and not as smart. Dumb men can’t be good eating.”
John lifted his head to the stars and laughed aloud. He clapped me on the shoulder and fondled his muscle.
“You not good food. Too tough.”
“Same you.”
His wife shouted at him to come inside. John ignored his wife’s entreaty and walked over to the restaurant. His friends greeted him. John's right hand surveyed the flesh on a fat man. He turned and mouthed the words.
“Babi besa.”
“Makan bagus.” Good eating, because a young pig was always better than an old pig even with babi besa.
“Sama sama. I not here tomorrow morning. Selamat jalan.” John wished me a good trip.
“Selamat tingaal.” I wished him a good life. It was the best thing to do with someone who hadn’t eaten you.
And everyone who has a taste for pig knows that is the truth.
