Moni to Ende
March 13th
On Monday we left the losmen fairly early to go back down to Ende. They tried to tell us there wasn't a bus till ten or eleven, but i didn't believe them. There's buses up and down that road all the time. How many of them are going to Ende, or course, is another matter all together...
As it was, we only had to wait for ten minutes by the side of the road, before a passenger truck came along, going to Ende. I don't know what they called this form of transport, but they were full-size trucks with benches going from side to side all down the back. They had roofs which got piled up with cargo and luggage and there was space for more cargo under the seats and right at the very back, where the tailboard was tied permanently at forty five degrees. The non-human freight consisted mainly of produce in sacks. Flour, grain, corn cobs, chokoes, potatoes, bundles of wood and undoubtedly everything else that grows up that way. We were sitting right at the back, looking backwards, and a lot of this stuff was under our feet, up against the tailboard. It was being put on and taken off all along the way.
We stopped at a weird little roadside market on the way. It was a strange place, with stalls along both sides of the road, but no sign of anything else there at all. We bought a couple of corn cobs, that were boiled and sold in their skin.
The ride back down on the truck was much more pleasant than the trip up in the bus. There was a lot more air and we could see a lot more too. And most of the time there was more space.
Around Moni seemed to be a great area for growing things - totally different from most of Australia. The soil was really black, obviously very fertile, presumably volcanic in origin. The extreme good health and dark green leaves of the citrus trees, even when they'd got grass around their roots, showed there was no shortage of nitrogen in the soil. I'd rarely seen such healthy, abundantly producing gardens or farms, and certainly never in Australia. The closest anything had come in Australia was some permaculture-style places i'd spent a bit of time in.
However, i couldn't help but wonder if they used chemicals or not. There doesn't seem to be many parts of the world that haven't been ruined by the greedy, hard-selling, chemical companies. It didn't look like they did, as everything was too healthy, but you could never tell. I also wondered if those other greedy people in the international seed industry had conned them into using hybrid seeds yet or not. I hoped not. Hybrids may mean slightly better yields in the short term, but that doesn't nearly compensate for the fact that you have to pay the companies for your seeds forever after, as you can't grow it yourself any more. Also, hybrids have much much more problems with pests, so they can't be succesfully grown without vast quantities of pesticides. And they are totally dependent on large quantities of artificial fetilizers too. The seed companies and the chemical companies are laughing all the way to the . As far as i knew, there was virtually nowhere in the world that hadn't been adversely affected by the multinational agribusiness.
Anyway, that's enough of the sermon!
- - -
Back at losmen Ikhlas, we got our old room back - which was a bit boring! Nigel and Jaffa, two of the aussies, arrived back there from Moni a couple of hours after we did. (Are they following us???) Steve had left there that morning apparently, for Labuhanbajo and then presumably Komodo. They reckoned they would follow on.
Ikhlas was good. There were maps on the walls all over the place. Maps of Indonesia and Nusa Tenggara (this group of islands) mainly, but also one map of the closest bits of Asia, one of Europe and one of the world.
I began to look at the map of Europe, which has a sliver of north Africa at the bottom of it. I'd never realized the Mediterranean was so narrow. Italy and Greece are really close to Africa. I was thinking about how i was going to get from India to Europe in a few months time. I really wanted to enter Europe through Spain. But then again it could be Italy, Greece or Turkey.
Looking at the map of the world, it was a long way from Bombay to Djibouti, which was one possible route - then through the Suez canal maybe. Another possibility was around the coast of India and Pakistan then to Saudi Arabia and possibly through Jordan. But i didn't know if it was possible to travel that route. Or maybe through Iran and Turkey, that was definitely possible, but i didn't think i fancied it much. Or what about Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Russia? Hmmmm... I didn't know about that one, i was thinking eastern Europe was good place to avoid those days! Generally, i thought, i fancied the more southern routes. Who wanted to get into the cold subcontinent of Europe any quicker than necessary?
I also began to wonder what i was going to do with my life from that point on. I really couldn't face living in Europe. It seemed so dull and overpopulated. I didn't think i could live in Australia any more either. The culture was as dead as Europe's, but at least it had the advantage of only having twenty million people in a space the size of Europe. Still, it was a beautiful country, even though colonization had done a pretty efficient job of trashing the place over the previous two hundred years. But nine years of surviving what i saw then as the mindnumbing cultural uniformity and the colonial outlook had been really all i could take.
But where else could i live? On the move, obviously, i couldn't have changed that even if i'd wanted to. And how was i going to survive without the ease of finding work - or getting the dole - It was just too easy. It had got boring.
Trading's the way most people seem to go - clothes, stones, jewellery, fabrics, gold, drugs. But i didn't feel that was really my style. I certainly couldn't see myself buying stuff cheap in Asia and then going and selling it for rip-off prices in some shitty tourist market in Britain or Australia. And as for drugs - no thanks! I valued my freedom far to much to risk all of it to pay for a little bit of extra freedom.
I'm not averse to a bit of hard work here and there, but there's not much future in that as a way of surviving - specially when there's so many millions who are willing to work like dogs for almost nothing. Writing was a possibility too - but i didn't have any contacts in the publishing game. So the chances of getting anything published were very slim. Anyway, even though i can live on very little, writing wasn't particularly likely to bring in enough to survive on - unless i was lucky, that was. I'd heard teaching Spanish in southern Mexico was a good bet.
Who could say?
- - -
I spent a while sitting on the porch at Ikhlas, watching the traffic go by. What i found particularly interesting was the bemos. They were all well painted in bright colours, with individual designs and each one had its own name painted on the side as part of the design. Here's some of the names:
Bunga Desa
Liberty
Widuri
La Vita
Elthan Jon
Sindy Loper
Mega Hits
Kasih Sayang
Tulus Karya
Amar Maruf
Fortuna
Agung Free
Karya Baru
Mekar Sari
Metallica
Ronald
Dimension
and so on...
Bemos had a culture of their own. There was always a crew of three young men and almost always loud music blasting out from a good car stereo. It must have been one of the most exciting and cool jobs available to anyone on those islands. Just cruising around all day and listening to loud music!
- - -
By Monday, the slow pace of our journey up to that point was beginning to get on my nerves. So far, we'd covered two hundred and fifty kilometres since we'd arrived in Indonesia. When we left there on Wednesday, that would mean we'd done two hundred and fifty kilometres in two weeks! It was nothing like enough. I'd been hoping to be in Singapore by that time, applying for our visas for India, which we'd stupidly forgotten to get in Sydney. It was probably going to take a couple of weeks to get them in Singapore.
Waiting, waiting, waiting. Sometimes life seemed like one long railway station!
- - -
There were two ports in Ende and on Tuesday morning i went out for a walk to the nearest one. This was the one we'd come into. It was about twenty minutes walk away from Ikhlas. The road going there was closed off at the junction and when i went down there i found out why. A big chunk of it had been dug up and one end of the airport runway extended into where the road used to be.
There wasn't much happening in the port that morning. There was a prahu, a sailing cargo ship, tied up alongside the pier. It was about seventy foot long, made of timber, with one mast and a sort of short bowsprit. Its rig looked similar to our sailing barges in Essex, except it had a standing gaff halfway up the mast, following the line of the top of the sail. It looked like there could be a topsail, but there was no sign of one there.
It was about half as wide as a sailing barge - that is, maybe twenty foot. And there was a two-storey deck house at the back for the crew - the hold, of course, being for the cargo. The deck was level roughly midships, but towards the bow it began to curve upwards quite quickly, ending up probably steeper than forty five degrees. At the stern it curved up slightly too.
There were two rudders, one on each side. They were long, straight and flat, like two giant timber spatulas. They stuck out backwards at something less than forty five degrees.
The combination of the gaff rig and the way they scull their sampans, like we do in Essex, created a strange feeling. Almost like reminding me of home, but so totally different that the similarities were almost completely lost. Like i felt like i should have felt something, but i didn't...
- - -
I got a small bottle of arak from one of the markets. It was 1000 rupiah for 300ml. It tasted like rice wine with methylated spirits in it, and i gradually came to the conclusion that was what it was - not real arak at all.
We drunk that in the evening, sitting with Nigel and Jaffa, who were finishing off their last bottle of bourbon. They'd been drinking in a bar in town all day and were fairly pissed. They'd changed their plans and were now coming on the Kelimutu too, as far as Lombok.
They were heading for Gili Air, a little island of the north west coast of Lombok. They'd heard "there's an aussie sheila running a bar there and she sells green cans!" (in other words, VB, a popular australian beer) The aussie boys are on a great mission - to find the last carton of aussie beer in the world! I'd better not tell them you can get VB in London, i thought, they'd be off there like a shot!