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.