On Christmas eve eve I wrote home about the potential of my sleeping on a beach for the holidays. No such luck, $8 accommodation was easily and sweatily located the morning before Santa's flight on Gili Trawangan, just off the coast of Lombak in eastern Indonesia. Small enough to ban motorized vehicles in favour of horse-drawn buggies, this island was our little sanctuary for the Christmas holidays and the starting point for us to earn our international scuba licenses. More resort style than anywhere I've been yet, we splurged on delicious holiday dinners and then returned to the back alley local restaurants, plastic plates and curbside seating, where we felt more at home.
It was on one of these bum in the dirt evenings that we witnessed the great and inspiring generator moving project. It began when several island residents came into view just past the 'pier' (read: spot on the beach apparently chosen as boat landing destination #1). They were dragging a massive box, obviously heavy, and totally lacking mechanical help. Soon dozens of people sprang out of their shops, restaurants and homes to help. Ideas were shared, leaders emerged, strategies were perfected and cheers erupted at each sign of progress. The incredibly large box moved slowly along the beach road, sliding upon procured rollers that had to be lifted and replaced every few feet. When we'd stared in awe and laughed along with the merrymakers' successes for a while, we found an English speaker who could explain the enterprise. Inside the box was a generator, bought by a foreign restaurant owner and delivered tonight so that his establishment could avoid the temporary power failures that everyone had been experiencing lately on the island. In the experience there was evidence, for me, of the sharp contrast between visiting an island and living there; between the facade of the resort and impersonal, Western-style service on one side of the road, and the community spirit that is necessary to fight the dire realities on the other.
After visiting the fishes and turtles and eels and snakes 18 meters down for a few days, our life continued on Bali, where we chose to avoid boisterous Kuta in favour of artistic Ubud. For four days we photographed the temples and alleys, browsed the galleries, biked the hills and fed the monkeys in their forest sanctuary. We made some great friends and New Years Eve saw us, two wonderful Canadian girls, and our hotel owners in a stone gazebo, eating whole chickens (which unfortunately, and against my own food consumption rules, I had previously met) dipped with greasy fingers into banana leaves filled with homemade red pepper paste, and listening to the club beats turned up to drown out the rain. At midnight reggae drums filled the restaurant down the street and we welcomed 2009 with open minds.
And from these comparatively tiny islands I flew here, to Australia, where I am currently sharing the island of a bedroom within a rather large house with my two friends Stacy and Mel, in beautiful, cultural, artistic Melbourne.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sumatra cont'd
The thing about Sumatra is: there just aren't any other tourists. Lake Toba was done up like Thailand - bars and restaurants galore, beautifully decked out, themed for Christmas, the works. But walking the road by moonlight, there are maybe one or two guests, plus a few workers in each. However, despite the stiff competition between locals, I felt neither pushed into committment nor forced to listen to the demeaning of other business owners. It's just a little more rugged here, a little less traversed, and takes a little more creativity to navigate and survive. Mission accepted.
Next stop along the pot holed road was Bukit Lawang. A small village built up beside a rushing river on the edge of Gunung Leuser National Park, it flooded in 2003 (illegal logging??) and is only just now recovering. We are greeted by a fatal current under an immense, wobbly cable bridge, and the faster you walked, the less the rain hit you. My backpack nearly toppled me down the steep exit stairs and that was just the beginning: for the next two days we pushed ourselves up and down steep jungle hills, in and out of river currents, and through thick bush to watch orangutans in their natural habitat. More than 200 orangutans have been rescued and released here since 1973 and are what BL calls semi-wild - we know they are going to be there, we just don't know exactly where, explains our hilarious guide, Thomas. We saw a mother orangutan with her baby, some Thomas Leaf monkeys, and several macaque monkeys. We even got to run away from Mina, the notoriously mean and hungry one, led away by food from guides. Thomas also told us great bedtime stories about the 'jungleman's trip to London' - for anyone who thinks it's strange to pee in the woods, I can't even imagine seeing a toilet for the first time in your life: he stood on it, as Asians do with squatters. I was in stitches.
I have missed an important story though. One of our first great nights was right at the beginning, back in the rice paddies of Bukitinggi, when, having been driven through the backroads to watch the sunset over vast valleys stretching to the horizon beneath towering volcanoes, a friendly local convinced us to accompany him back to his home. I imagine he wanted to impress us, to secure our business for a tour the next day (which he did, to lovely Lake Maninjau, where Sean excelled around 44 hairpin turns on his second day as a motorbike driver; the third day involved an hour of heavy, freezing cold rain, in t-shirts, to get home before dark - you'd have thought by now we would have learned to bring jackets) because waiting for us at his aunt's residence was a wedding. Ceremony over, the bride and groom presided over an incredible feast, laid out on the floor, in such a tiny room that the guests ate in shifts. Dishes endlessly streamed out of the kitchen in the back and the kids played outside in the warm night and watched giggling as the strangers, protests ignored, made their big bodies comfortable on the floor with the others. Dishes passed, rice and curry consumed with fingers (the fish bones stumped me a little, observing the custom of ride handed eating only), and pictures were taken with the couple of the hour. Afterwards we sat in aunty's simple living room while children of who knows how many families gathered at our feet to look at pictures of Canada and Korea on Sean's Ipod Touch. An exquiste reward, among many, for being one of a handful of tourists.
Our time in Sumatra draws to a close, as does our time together. Banda Aceh and Pulau Weh were last - a quick ferry ride brought us out of the bustling, smelly northernmost city into salt water heaven. We snorkeled, ate fried rice, showered in salt water and left the next day, not realizing until it was too late what the island had to offer. Like so many places, we I put it on the list of to return. And with Christmas nearly here and flights already booked south, back on the ferry and off to the islands we go ...
Next stop along the pot holed road was Bukit Lawang. A small village built up beside a rushing river on the edge of Gunung Leuser National Park, it flooded in 2003 (illegal logging??) and is only just now recovering. We are greeted by a fatal current under an immense, wobbly cable bridge, and the faster you walked, the less the rain hit you. My backpack nearly toppled me down the steep exit stairs and that was just the beginning: for the next two days we pushed ourselves up and down steep jungle hills, in and out of river currents, and through thick bush to watch orangutans in their natural habitat. More than 200 orangutans have been rescued and released here since 1973 and are what BL calls semi-wild - we know they are going to be there, we just don't know exactly where, explains our hilarious guide, Thomas. We saw a mother orangutan with her baby, some Thomas Leaf monkeys, and several macaque monkeys. We even got to run away from Mina, the notoriously mean and hungry one, led away by food from guides. Thomas also told us great bedtime stories about the 'jungleman's trip to London' - for anyone who thinks it's strange to pee in the woods, I can't even imagine seeing a toilet for the first time in your life: he stood on it, as Asians do with squatters. I was in stitches.
I have missed an important story though. One of our first great nights was right at the beginning, back in the rice paddies of Bukitinggi, when, having been driven through the backroads to watch the sunset over vast valleys stretching to the horizon beneath towering volcanoes, a friendly local convinced us to accompany him back to his home. I imagine he wanted to impress us, to secure our business for a tour the next day (which he did, to lovely Lake Maninjau, where Sean excelled around 44 hairpin turns on his second day as a motorbike driver; the third day involved an hour of heavy, freezing cold rain, in t-shirts, to get home before dark - you'd have thought by now we would have learned to bring jackets) because waiting for us at his aunt's residence was a wedding. Ceremony over, the bride and groom presided over an incredible feast, laid out on the floor, in such a tiny room that the guests ate in shifts. Dishes endlessly streamed out of the kitchen in the back and the kids played outside in the warm night and watched giggling as the strangers, protests ignored, made their big bodies comfortable on the floor with the others. Dishes passed, rice and curry consumed with fingers (the fish bones stumped me a little, observing the custom of ride handed eating only), and pictures were taken with the couple of the hour. Afterwards we sat in aunty's simple living room while children of who knows how many families gathered at our feet to look at pictures of Canada and Korea on Sean's Ipod Touch. An exquiste reward, among many, for being one of a handful of tourists.
Our time in Sumatra draws to a close, as does our time together. Banda Aceh and Pulau Weh were last - a quick ferry ride brought us out of the bustling, smelly northernmost city into salt water heaven. We snorkeled, ate fried rice, showered in salt water and left the next day, not realizing until it was too late what the island had to offer. Like so many places, we I put it on the list of to return. And with Christmas nearly here and flights already booked south, back on the ferry and off to the islands we go ...
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