Ende to Moni
March 10th
After being too ill to go to Moni the previous day, we got up fairly early and, although neither of us felt much better, we decided we'd better go anyway, or we'd end up spending the whole time in Ende. So we caught a bemo to the bus station and sat on the Moni bus for an hour and a half waiting for it to leave.
It was a long fifty kilometres, but not entirely unbearable. Unfortunately, we got the back seat, right behind the rear door, and ended up with heaps of stuff and people crammed in around us. However, it was a pleasant ride up a winding, very rough road through the hills - the same road the bus had crashed on a few days before. The country we passed through was very green and beautiful and the land was obviously fertile volcanic soil. There was a lot of coffee growing near the road on the way up.
Moni was a small, relatively natural village, overlooking an almost flat area, somewhere in the region of a hundred acres, surrounded by hills. It was definitely a tourist place, but very low-key. There were a few losmens (guest houses) and a couple of restaurants, a few people selling ikat, which is the locally woven patterned cloth, and that was about it. Tourists had only been going there for five years, so i guessed there was still plenty of time for it to be ruined, which i thought it probably would be eventually.
We were lucky to be there in the wet season, as apparently the price of rooms doubled in the dry - due to the govenment putting up taxes at that time of year!
I was amused to hear that the church in Moni had been destroyed by an earthquake a couple of years before. So there is a god, after all, i thought!
We were staying at the losmen "Friendly", which was a pretty nice place, with a well-kept garden at the front, surrounded on three sides by a covered veranda with rooms off it and beautiful, green views from the front and the back. It was run by a woman called Genevieve.
It was quite cold up there in the hills, much colder than the coast. At night it got chilly enough that i had to wear three layers of clothes. And blankets were a definite necessity at night.
The four british men and the swiss woman from the ferry were all staying there too. But they were off back to Ende the next day. Three of the Australians were also staying in Moni, in a different place - the fourth one, Steve, had the same thing as me and Nicki and was still in Ende, too sick to travel.
The "Anker Mi" bar, just up the road, had been drunk dry of arak, a distilled rice wine, the previous night and the poms were on a mission to find some more. They eventually succeeded in finding some pretty dodgy stuff for two hundred rupiah a bottle, which was fairly cheap, but it tasted like low grade kerosene! Despite being sick, i managed to force myself to drink some.
A whole heap of us went up the the Anker Mi that evening, carrying bottles of arak. It turned into quite a demented night, with four more bottles of arak being bought later. I left at about half ten, but i was woken up later by the drunken yobbos coming back to the losmen. They were up till four o'clock in the morning being really noisy and singing their "Bintang" song (Bintang's a brand of beer):
Bintang bintang bintang oh,
Bintang oh,
Bintang oh.
Bintang bintang bintang oh,
Bintang bintang oh!
(It's sung to the tune of the song "The Music Man" - the bit that goes "pia pia piano...." etc!)
The next morning, the women who ran the place were extremely pissed off with them all - and especially Carlo, who went to sleep on the verandah naked! British tourists on the piss abroad, eh? The whole world lives in fear!
- - -
I was sitting on the back veranda one morning, outside the door of our room, watching three little black pigs eating the grass and digging up the ground with their shovel-like noses, looking for food. The biggest one of the three, for no particular reason, started having a go at the middle one, which backed off a bit. Then, not long after, the middle one started taking it out on the smallest one. I felt sorry for the little one, as the poor thing didn't have anyone to bash in its turn!
They didn't seem to like giving you boiled water to drink in the losmen "Friendly", unlike the other places we'd stayed so far. I guess they wanted us to pay for bottled water. I'm not really keen on buying the stuff though - partly because of all that plastic - so fortunately i managed to fill up four bottles with rainwater from the roof while it was raining that morning.
I went for a short walk up the road, to have a look around and see what goes on in Moni. The scenery was interesting, with a lot of rice sawahs (fields) around, as well of lots of corn, fruit trees and a few coconut palms. The fruit was mainly citrus, with a lot of pomelos ripe on the trees. There were guavas, which were still green and fairly small. Also mangoes, bananas, papayas, avacadoes and other tropical fruit trees that i recognised but couldn't quite identify.
When i got back, there were two very little pigs eating where the three bigger ones had been before. These ones weren't much more than a foot long from nose to tail.
The countryside around there made me think of northern New South Wales around Mullumbimby, Main Arm, Terania Creek, Nimbin. It seemed strange really, as that area's south of the tropics, but it seemed more like that than tropical north Queensland.
I was beginning to get sick of tourists. Just listening to the way some of them speak was pissing me off. There was a real master-race mentality, and it was probably mainly unconscious. There's also this obsessive-compulsive disorder they all seem to have. It's called "seeing sights". Like they've got a list of all the "sights" in the world and their job is to tick them all off before they die... There's no kind of desire to understand what they're seeing in anything more than a totally superfluous way, or to see anything other than "sights". There seems to be very little interest in the local culture - except, of course, for the consumable parts of that culture.
It's only a few stages removed from the package tour syndrome i've noticed in Kuranda, in north Queensland, so often - where they hardly even really know where they are.
The first thing we got asked by the losmen people after we'd checked in was if we wanted a ticket to go up to Mount Kelimutu the next morning. All the tourists would go there at four o'clock on the morning after they arrived, to watch the sun rise. Then they might hang around one more night and leave! It was bizarre. They were really surprised when we said no, we didn't want to go to Kelimutu the following morning. It was just unheard of not to...
I had no intention whatsoever of going compulsively up to Kelimutu. If i ever went there, it would be after spending a lot more than just a few hours in the area - which wouldn't be on that visit. And i certainly wouldn't be going up with a busload of people. I'd probably be walking.
A dutch tourist had disappeared up there ten days before. He was almost certainly dead. Maybe that's the sort of price that gets paid now and then for blindly wandering around so-called "sights" i thought. Maybe he'd been an unwitting sacrifice to the spirits who guard the place, allowing hundreds of other tourists to get away with their thoughtless blundering into an obviously powerful area.