Ones in India perhaps?

I'm in Ind-ones-ia.

I like crosswords and stamps and books by dead russians.

In fact Indonesia does have distinct shades of India about it and I had a lot to write, but I'm afraid I've just gone and got bogged down in more scribblings. Read these as if I am mumbling them through my beard.

***

The call to prayer of the mosques still gives me the shivers, tugging at hidden strings in the music of a foreign language. Glancing into the mosques, seeing the rows of men, heads bowed. It makes me wish I belonged a little. In one town I sit on my balcony and listen to the different mosques loudspeakers drowning each other out, competing for worshippers. Some swallows on a balcony nearby chirp and cheep away, oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion, like kids in church. It is five in the morning and the sun struggles to rise over the volcano which dominates the skyline, its crown lost in cloud.

We get a bus out in to the countryside to go jungle trekking and see the orangutang. Numerous random stops, including one spent singing Maroon 5 with just another local guitar hero. Toni has her head out the window for most of the 4 hour journey taking in the sights while I, being a veteran of one Indian campaign no less, affect nonchalance and try to sleep.

We drive past a school. The kids are standing in ranks in the school yard, the girls like miniature nuns, the boys like sailor cadets maybe. The teachers stand at the front in military green, their shoulders and chests adorned with merit ribbons, like a visiting delegation of war veterans. Every couple of hundred metres is a mosque with a dome crudely hammered out of corrugated iron, streaked in rust, no fancy marble glazing here. Yet every house seems to have a satellite dish the size of a small car. There are rows of tiny minibuses, garishly coloured, brightly decrepit, going nowhere.

***

We decide to do a guided trek to see the orangutan, the jungle people. Our guide makes monkey calls and disappears occasionally in earnest searchings. We half expect him to come back in a monkey suit.

He is a little obsessed with the idea of a banana representing a penis. He tells us about the betel nut, is good for a young man's banana, he says and he gives me a worryingly knowing wink. Later he says I shouldn't give my banana to the orangutan, oh I don't have one, I say, yes you do, he says and laughs and I am a little afraid of what the locals do with their bananas and the orangutans.

He jokes about one of them being his wife. Brave brave man.

Then we actually get to meet them. A mother and a baby, the baby clambering and hanging from its mothers coat as if by velcro. They come and sit with us awhile. I have heard of people who meet these creatures and cry, and it makes some sense. The mothers face is wise, bored, patient, resigned. They make you if not tearful, at least reflective.

I reflected that it is funny that those who decry the concept of evolution are offended by the notion that we might be descended from apes. I think it is us who are the embarassing relations, in our gluttony and our haste and our short sightedness. And me making it all a little worse with my many tonnes of air-fuel carbon emissions.

Our guide carries a machete which I hope he will attack the vegetation with as we battle our way into the untouched wilderness. But the trail is distinct and well worn, and he uses his knife only to slice and dice some pineapple. Which he has brought in his bag. He continues his monkey calls and sometimes it seems to work only as an echolocation system for the other guides and their parties who we occasionally meet. It starts to feel like we are 20 groups painstakingly criss-crossing and avoiding each other in an area the size of a football pitch. And it is all good.

We are in a little wooden restaurant shack on the rivers edge in the darkness. The electricity has gone again so the mood is candlelit. There are cats somewhere nearby making that unnerving crying infant sound, their pitch rising and falling like wind through bottle tops. They know the weather is about to break. Thunder passed up the valley earlier in the day but it was lost without its rain and lightning. Now the narrow valley is lit sporadically, as if by a broken strobe. Above us the gods beat their drums and the heavens open on our corrugated roof. We are lost in noise.

You can drown in the jungle noises, your senses numbed by it, and sit idle for hours, stoned on it.

The Tsunami Tourist

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them. I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they do show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their eyes ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the slowest places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation takes another knock.

On the Road...

Dear Diary,

I told the guys I'd be writing to you about them and they insisted I disguise their names which I have duly done.

J.ames has given me a wetsuit with holes in it that give views which only one's doctor and one's darling should be subjected to. The lads qualify as neither so I wear togs underneath. I am still worried the lads will start calling me SeaGimp.

J.ames insists on talking to me while I am sitting on the toilet, even though he knows how uncomfortable this makes me. We might have to have a family meeting about it. P.aul says he is Canadian but does not have any Canadian flags sewn on to his bag. This makes me suspicious, I will see if he likes Celine Dion.

J.ames has R. Kelly on his iPod. This threw the future of the road trip into doubt but I quietly checked with the local authorities and they said they were aware of the situation and to continue as normal. I soldier on but have taken to sleeping with an open penknife.

J.ames wets his wetsuit when its dry. We will be walking down to the sea to surf and he will get a slightly distracted look and then smile slightly and we know he has just got a headstart on getting his wetsuit wet. It's wrong I tells him but he only laughs slightly hysterically.

My eyebrows, no doubt bolstered by the sun, wind, fresh air and water, are growing at a prodigious rate. I am worried that soon my eyelids will become obsolete. The lads will call me Curtains.

I have got that strange man pride of wearing the same boxers for 5 days. I also went unshowered for 7.

There is a condom kept in the tent in case anyone "gets lucky". We fight over who will get to use it, bald men fighting over a comb.

****

I went to the hills on my own after the lads went back to work, lived out of J;ames car, walked the peaks, swam in streams every day and watched solo sunsets with a bottle of red wine and a book. I camped in a valley ringed by slag heap giants, the barren peaks huddled together in a line, their shoulders rubbing like a barbershop quartet. On one of my walks I got lost on one of these shoulders. I battled my way through irreversable shrub forests and barbed wired plantations and then ran out of water in the midday sun effectively passing out when i got back to the car. Inevitably one of the highlights of my time here.

****

In a way my sense of direction has just failed me again only on a grander scale and I have caught a flight back up to Malaysia instead of to South America. Eleven hours in the wrong direction perhaps but then every direction is homeward bound on this side of the world.




Thats right, yours truly. Rad.