Yesterday I left Cousin Johnny in Honolulu. No more drinking at the Hotel Street bars. No more Femme Nu Go Go. So far New York to Los Angeles to Hawaii. Last week I picked up my Garuda tickets at Pan Express' LA downtown office. LA-Honolulu-Biak-overland to Jakarta and then Sumatra-Singapore-train to Bangkok, where I'm meant to pick up my onward tickets to Nepal, Paris, and London. Two legs of my trip around the world completed. More to come. No more Hawaii. LA with volcanoes, but only one freeway. I stayed with Cousin Johnny in his college dorm and his roommate, who was obsessed with Jamie Lee Curtis. Who isn't?
Cousin Johnny drove me to the airport. "What's in Biak?"
"I don't know. My travel agent had said that no one going to Bali ever got off there. My Uncle Dave had served on a destroyer during the Battle of Biak. He never went ashore. His ship kept the island under bombardment for a week." "Japs didn't want to give up."
His father Carmine back in the East Village was a WWII buff.
That evening Cousin Johnny said goodbye at the Honolulu airport and I boarded the Garuda flight across the Pacific. I had never been this far from the East Coast. Not Paris. Not the Yucatan. Hawaii 4700 miles from New York. The Garuda flight took off on time. Every miles farther from the known world.
The 747 landed on the long runway, low on fuel after a long trans-Pacific flight. Beyond the tarmac jungle and a small terminal. Biak, an island off the coast of Irian Jaya. 9100 miles from New York. It had been deep winter back there. LA and Hawaii had been warm. The tropical heat hit the passengers, as we descended the air stairs. Easily 90, as was to be expected sixty miles south of the equator. Once more on Earth. Hundreds of Bali-bound tourists stretched their legs, as black as night Melanesian musicians, naked except for a gourd over their penises strummed BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON on their guitars.
Their ancestors had obviously migrated from Africa sometime before the last Ice Age, when the shrinkage of the oceans created land bridges to connect these future islands to what is now Asia. A fat Christian missionary ignored the musicians to be greet tribal bible thumpers. The tourists went into the air-conditioned gift shop. The man of God traversed the tarmac to a single-engine prop plane. Biak was the epitome of remote, however the Christian was bound for a destination unknown to everyone other than the airport's traffic controllers, the pilot, him and his God. Once he was aboard the plane sped down the runway and took to the sky. Time from leaving the 747 to lift-off about ten minutes.
When I purchased the ticket from Pan Express I asked John, the owner, "What is Biak?"
He said, "It was where the plane has to stop there to refuel. In Irian Jaya. The Indonesian part of Papua New Guinea."
A land of naked headhunters. In 1961 the Asmats on the south shore of the island had eaten Michael C. Rockefeller. A rich man's son. The Metropolitan Museum had a wing of Melanesian wooden sculpture dedicated to him. I always went there. No one else did. Just like here. Biak. I passed through immigration to have my passport stamped for an Indonesia by a Javanese official. Good for three months. Biak and many islands through the vast archipelago were in the process of transmigrasi or shipping Javanese by the thousands to populate distant islands to deal with extreme overcrowding on Java.
Exiting the terminal into the midday sun I put on my sunglasses. Javanese motorcycle taxi drivers sought my traffic. I surveyed the street. Palm trees wavered in the air. Pick-up trucks and motor scooters cruised Jalan Mohammad Yamin.
Across the street bordering the bay was an old Dutch hotel. ROUGH GUIDE suggested staying there and I hefted my bag over my shoulder. I was sweating bullets by the time I reached the check-in counter. A room per night was $10. I paid for five nights and asked for a cold beer to be brought to my room.
A double bed and a overhead fan. Clean, but the tropics had been hard on the walls. Still the sheets were crisp clean and a cold beer arrived shortly. After tipping the waiter 2000 rupiah I changed into shorts and walked out to the deck. Cold beer in hand. I sat at the table and unfolded the Nelles map. Beyond the lawn Yappen Island floated on a slate blue sea. Clouds rolled in from the west. The promise of rain on the wind. This island lay beyond the Orient. I sipped the beer. Biak, Indonesia. So far away from everything. Why had I never come here before? Why had I gone to Paris? I took a long pull for the Bintang beer. No answers. They didn't matter now. I was here now. A light breeze wafted from the shore. The air smelled of jasmine. Night was coming my way. I turned on my Sony Radio to the BBC. It was my only contact with the Western World and I fell asleep happy to be someplace far beyond the reach of the West.
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