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 on her father’s whaling ship back in the 19th Century and at her 101st birthday in a Falmouth Heights nursing home, the ancient Yankee lady had related tales of the black-toothed betel-nut chewers of Siam and tiger hunts on Java. I saw myself there in Asia. A far distant land from New England.
The only two other family members of the previous generation had visited the Orient. My Uncle Dave had served on a US Navy 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, especially Bali, home of the Legong dancer’s statue.
My chance to scratch this itch came in 1990.
After a successful holiday stint selling jewelry, I sold a 10-carat diamond for a good profit. Business died after the New Year and I decided to temporarily resign my sales position 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 to purchase an around-the world ticket and cover my expenses for about six months throughout the Orient.
"How long are you going?" Manny paid out my money in hundreds. 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." Late-May.
"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. No guarantee on a job."
"None expected."
Manny was twenty years older than me and hadn’t taken a vacation in years other than to drive each winter to Florida, the true Holy Land. Manny returned to sorting diamonds on his desk. The Brownsville native loved his work. He was happy on 47th Street."Sie gesund and good travels."
A day later I purchased a world ticket from John at PanExpress Travel for $1400. NYC-LA-Biak-Bali-Java-Singapore_Bangkok-Kathmandu-Paris-London-NYC. I also obtained THE ROUGH GUIDE to Indonesia and researched a two-thousand-mile voyage through the archipelago from Biak in Irian Jaya to Sumatra in the west. I mentioned stopping at the first Indonesian destination and John said, “No one has ever stopped in Biak.”
“Then I will be the first.”
He handed over a sheaf of airline tickets and wished me 'good luck'.
My Uncle Dave had served as a Navy sailor in the Pacific War.
“I’ve been to Biak. Not really. I was on a destroyer off-shore. We blasted the hell out of everything. I never stepped foot on it. “He handed me #20. “Have a few beers on me.”
I caught the Amtrak train south from North Station to the city. The first leg of my journey. From here on, my travels headed west and I was happy knowing that two days later Indonesia’s national carrier, Garuda, was flying to LAX and I was scheduled to be on that 747.
I sublet my apartment to a friend. It was winter in New York. Not where I was going. I packed the day before my departure. Summer clothing, an Olympus XA2 camera, a small Brother typewriter, and a Sony World Band radio. The day of my flight, I left my apartment three hours early and the 747 lifted from JFK on time. California-bound. Ever west. 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 wasn’t the only 'Mistah' or white man on the island. Larry Smith, a famed diver, was 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 bearded Texan on the veranda of the old Dutch hotel overlooking Cendrawasih Bay. We free-dive off the coral cliffs. I had good lungs. Larry had better. He was a pro.
Happier, until I arrived in Bali. A paradise and I lived in Ubud, a cultural center away from the Aussie surfing beaches. I stayed in a small bungalow down Monkey Forest Road from the Legong dance temple. The adolescent students shared identical facial features with the mahogany statue, that I had received from my Aunt Marion. I ate at the Ubu Cafe, swam in a nearby hotel pool, drove a 115cc Motorcycle across the island, and read books at night under mosquito netting. The BBC on my World radio was my ear to the world. Mostly I loved hearing the mosquitoes buzzing and me beyond reach of their stingers. I was more than happier. Happiest in the far away with the gong of the Legong gamelan band wafting from the temple over the rice paddies after sunset. It got dark fast in the tropics. Very dark.
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 my years as an altar boy. Knowledge of the Latin Mass was of no use in Indonesia. Over 90% Muslim.
After crossing the straits between Bali and Java by ferry, I rode a train to climb Mt. Bromo. The people on its slopes looked Tibetan and the night air chilly. At dawn a tour group climbed to the volcano's rim of the volcano with a view of the Indian Ocean. Another train to Yogyakarta and a motorcycle exploration of Borobudur’s massive Buddhist and the Dieng Plateau's Hindu ruins. Not really stopping anywhere. I had places to see. A train to Jakarta and a plane to Padang, where I stayed in a cheap hotel on the Indian Ocean. Sweltering hot. Mountains behind the town. I planned on leaving in the morning. My destination: Lake Toba in the highlands. 1500 meters high, promising a cooler climate than the equatorial Padang.
Padang people were mostly Minangkabau, the matriarchal ethnic majority of West Sumatra. Women ruled the houses. A contradiction to Islam and Western ways, due to more ancient traditions or Adat, according to Rough Guide. As it was Ramadan, I took care not to eat during the day to avoid offending fasting Muslims. Hungry people anger fast in the tropical heat and ‘running amok’ is an old Malay term for going crazy. I played it safe. No beer either. Not until after sunset.
I woke and swam in the Indian Ocean at dawn. The water was warm. The waves treacherous. There were no lifeguards. I stayed close to shore, the only one in the sea. After toweling dry, I walked back to the hotel. The only 'mistah' in sight. No one paid my presence any mind. It was Ramadan. Time for prayer and hunger. NO beer too. It was good to be sober. At least in the day.
No Sunday morning church bells sounded in this heavily Muslim town. I checked out of the hotel and walked to the bus station located in a bustling market. A bus bound for the Batak Highlands was scheduled to leave in thirty minutes. Some 600 kilometers to the north. The ticket cost less than $5. The bus left an hour late. More or less on time.
I woke before dawn and ate a traditional ‘sahur’ morning meal of nasi goreng. Spicy fried rice with chicken. Very sweet tea. Dawn brought light to Padang. I heard the ocean and headed to the beach and swam in the Indian Ocean at dawn. The water was warm. The waves treacherous. Children waded in the eddies. Parents kept an eye on their young. I stayed close to shore. There were no lifeguards, and I was the only one in the sea. The only 'mistah' too. For the most part, everyone ignored my presence. I had grown accustomed to being alone.
No Sunday church bells sounded in this heavily Muslim town. I checked out of the hotel and walked to the bus station located across from a bustling market filled with women shopping for the evening break fast or Iftar. No one was eating or drinking. A bus bound for the Batak Highlands was scheduled to leave in thirty minutes. I bought fruits and water and packed them in my bag. Some 600 kilometers to the north. The ticket cost less than $5. The bus left an hour late. More or less on time.
I studied the chattering passengers. Their smiling faces were ethnically different from the lowlanders. The Rough Guide described them as Austronesian like the tribesmen in Biak. As soon as they were twenty minutes out of Padang, they opened their bags to eat all kinds of fruit; snake fruit and mangosteen. Thankfully no durian. Hotels in Bali had signs - NO DURIAN for a good reason. A fruit with a well-known putrid stench. Eating during the day signified that the Batak were not Muslims, the passengers sang a song, which I immediately recognized as BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON.
I had first heard the church tune in Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 THE HARDER THEY COME on a snowy afternoon at the Orson Welles Theater near Harvard. It ha been my first taste of the tropics. I loved the Melodians’ reggae version and I joined the impromptu choir. The closest passengers stared at me with surprize. No 'mistah' ever sang this. At the end of the song, an old man rose from his seat and shook my hand. A faint embrace.
“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.
Indonesia’s largest lake had been created by a cataclysmic volcano eruption over 60,00 years ago. Not another one since. As a youth, I had seen photos of the lake in an old National Geographic. Hundreds of the magazines were stacked in my grandmother’s attic in Maine and they always set my juvenile heart afire with wanderlusts. I pulled out the Nelle’s map and John’s index finger stabbed the center. His little finger's nail was very long, signifying that he was not a manual laborer. Indonesians also considered the long pinky nail good luck for wealth.
“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 watched everything about the passing scenery. All the New World. “I like standing.”
“No, you big mistah. You my friend. Sit. Duduk.” The word was 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 bus' climb into the mountains, John proudly recounted the traditional fierceness of Batak warriors.
"Many of our men 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 in Java for the Dutch and in Malaysia for the British. Merecenaries.
"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.”
“Book say many things. Batak people believe world come 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. The driver turned off the music. I understood about 5% of the story. Thankfully, John was a skilled mime. The rest of the bus listened intently to every word. No one said a word. 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. He gave me one as well and lit it. I inhaled and coughed on the sweet, harsh smoke.
“As Christian Batak people not believe in other gods. Old stories too good to give up. Maybe tonight you tell story.”
Nearing dusk, the bus descended from the volcano’s rim to Parapat at the edge of Lake Toba. A two-deck ferry waited on the dock and we boarded a ferry to cruise twenty minutes to Samosir island on the opposite shore. Mostly Batak passengers. Three westerners. A French couple and me. I had met few Americans on this trip. This was the other side of the world. The temperature was much cooler as expected from anywhere 2900 meters above sea level, as the temperature had been atop Mt. Bromo. I was again glad to have my leather jacket.
John’s Batak Villa was simple and cheap. The food adequate. My deck offered a view across the lake to the high rim of the ancient volcano. The other guests were European backpackers. German, French, and of course Australians eager to leave the Antipodes or distant subcontinent. Few Americans traveled this far from the States. That night at the lakeside terrace I narrated the story of the Evans Mountain ghost to John’s family gathered around our table, thus I introduced the Batak clan to a haunted house in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The Evan's Mountain House. I also used mime.
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 Honda 115cc motorcycle. Even driving off the island to Hadabuan Naisogop Waterfalls to the west. The river was icy cold. In the waterfront town of Pangururan, I ate a nasi goring. 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 snake or Ular Ndaung according to local legends was trying to seize your ankles. I spent my time motorcycling around the island. It wasn’t the rainy season, and the equatorial sun flayed the skin off my shoulder. John’s wife salved my burnt flesh with a soothing clove oil.
Every evening I ate with John’s family. They asked questions about my family. I lied about a dead wife. They all said sorry. I showed photos of my nieces and nephews, claiming that they were mine. A man my age without a wife or children was considered strange and unlucky 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 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 night 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. Bulls were a sign of wealth throughout Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia.
Once the pig was cooked, the long curved kris sliced off thick slabs of pork. We ate with my right hand, since the left hand was for wiping the ass. John called his right hand ‘Adam’s Spoon’. We drank Bintang beer and gnawed pig. The bones went to the dogs.
Dogs crept closer to steal the meat. Dogs crept closer to steal meat. John warded off the hungriest cur with a club.
"Angin no good."
"They like people."
"Because people give dog food. I no trust dog, but everything living have tindi, man, pig, dog, tree”
“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.
A young man broke out a hasapsi, a traditional two-stringed lute, to play a lyrical song. More plastic sacks of arak were passed round the fire. 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 babi sekali.” I had never tasted better pig.
The older men toasted my compliment, shaking hunks of greasy 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 people 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 the 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. Silent shadows filled the night beyond the flames. 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 and I 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. In the end we snacked on the crispy ears. The fire died out and John walked me to the hotel. Tomorrow I was off to Medan. A big city on the Malacca Straits and then Singapore. No one ate man in that modern city.
At the door to my room he said, “I tell story to many Mistahs. It is joke. No Batak eat man in hundred 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. I also think the only reason we survived the tigers was that we smell bad and taste worse."
John lifted his head to the stars and laughed aloud. He clapped me on the shoulder and size up my bicep.
“You not good food. Too tough.”
“Same you.” “Same you. We are both pria tua.” I was thirty-eight and John had to be in his forties. Both old men.
His wife shouted for 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.”
“Sekali bagus.” Good eating, because a young pig was always tastier than an old pig even with babi besa.
“Sama sama. I not here in 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 anyone with a taste for pig knows that is the truth, especially since I had money in my pocket and the rest of the world ahead of me.
And everyone who has a taste for pig knows that is the truth.
1 comment:
A terrific tale.
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