An Empire of the East E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Norman Lewis was eighty-three years old when he embarked on a series of three arduous journeys into the most contentious corners of Indonesia: western Sumatra, East Timor and Irian Jaya. Presenting himself as the picture of innocence, he reports only what he observes, using his well honed tools of irony and humour to deliver a devastating assessment of the brutality of the central government in these outlying corners of its empire. Lewis observes the decimation of tropical rainforests in Sumatra and unearths the all-but-forgotten massacre of communists in 1965, and describes his visit to the gargantuan Freeport Copper mine in Irian Jaya- a foretaste of the film Avatar, in which this time the bad guys triumph. He reveals his passion for justice and his delight in every form of human society whilst gently challenging our complacency and lazy indifference.

Leseprobe

AN EMPIRE OF THE EAST

Travels in Indonesia

NORMAN LEWIS

Contents

Title PageMapPrefaceSumatraEast TimorIrian JayaSelect BibliographyAbout the AuthorCopyright

Map

Preface

INDONESIA IS SPREAD in a vast archipelago across three thousand miles of the southern seas. Its population, creeping towards two hundred million, is uniquely diverse in its composition of three hundred ethnic groups speaking some two hundred and fifty languages; each inhabited island possessing a different history and culture from the next. Eisenhower first conferred imperial status upon this island agglomeration when speaking of what he called ‘the rich empire of Indonesia’. He demanded that nothing should be allowed to interfere with its unification process, for ‘a strong Indonesia would provide the essential barrier to the spread of communism in the East’. Whether they liked it or not, the components of what had been until 1949 the Dutch East Indies were to be surrendered to Javanese rule. West Papua, promised self-determination, became Irian Jaya under the Indonesia flag. As late as 1975 the United States and Australia joined forces in the manoeuvres following which East Timor, a Portuguese colony, was invaded and occupied.

Both these takeovers have encountered local resistance protracted over many years, while an unending struggle conducted by the central power against the separatists in Aceh (Sumatra) has added to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in insurgencies. While the absorption of West Papua into the empire was accepted by the world as a fait accompli, the United Nations has protested on numerous occasions against the illegal occupation of East Timor. In February 1983 a UN Commission on Human Rights expressed ‘deep concern over continuing human rights violations in the territory of East Timor’ and in the same month Amnesty International found that extra-judicial executions and disappearances have become a central part of the Indonesian government’s repertoire. The capture of the rebel leader Xanana Gusmao led in 1993 to his trial and sentence to life imprisonment. With that the Indonesian government declared that the eighteen-year resistance was at an end. Yet almost simultaneously British Aerospace announced a deal signed secretly for the supply of twenty-four Hawk combat jets to Indonesia – aircraft described in promotional literature as well suited to ground attack. The Independent’s headline on June 11th 1993 concluded that these ‘may be used on Timor rebels’.

Little of these unhappy events is likely to impinge in any way upon the experiences of the average Western visitor to the country. Indonesia aims to present itself above all as a democracy of the kind we understand, and at five-yearly intervals the nation goes into a paroxysm of excitement over elections which infallibly return Golkar, the President’s party, to power. Innovations in the electoral process have included Golkar’s advance notice of the overall majority it expects to get, which is always correct, and its choice of the leaders of the parties – destined to a crushing defeat – which will oppose it. Sometimes enthusiasm for President Suharto’s cause is carried to extreme lengths. Thus, in the 1987 election, called by the President the country’s ‘festival of democracy’, the island of Kalimantan is reported as having scored a possible world’s record turnout of 508% of the registered voters. ‘Once again,’ Suharto is said to have commented, ‘the nation has applauded the success of our policies.’

Despite the cultural attractions of Java and its bustling modern cities at the heart of the Empire, many Western travellers will wander away in search of the graciousness of the East Indies of old. This in its gentle decline is most likely to be found in the outer islands where sheer distance has preserved it from our times. There are few places anywhere with reserves of human warmth and generosity to equal those of these island people of slender means and little ambition, although too often labelled by the government suka terasing (isolated and backward).

In all probability Indonesia can still offer the greatest variety of primitive scenes and entertainments of any country on earth. Upon these the State casts a cold entrepreneurial eye. The real test of acceptability is whether or not these light-hearted affairs can be detached from the life of the people and converted to marketable folklore for the benefit of the nascent tourist business. Tourism is seen as a major industry of the future but there is a lack of realism about the forms it is likely to assume. A few hundred square miles of the incomparable rainforest of Sumatra used to house more rare animals than all the zoos put together, and was surely the most precious of national assets. But the trees among which the animals hide are going even faster than those of Brazil, and soon there will be no trees and no animals.

‘So what comes next?’ I asked a man who had just turned a half-million acres of a forest in Aceh into cement sacks.

‘Personally I’ve nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘The big money’s in tourism these days. From now on it’s golf courses. This is going to be the paradise of Japanese golfers.’

But can there really be enough golfers in Japan – or even the whole world – to fill this terrible gap?

Sumatra

One

IN EARLY 1991 I embarked on a series of journeys in Indonesia. The choice offered by an archipelago of thirteen thousand-odd islands is overwhelming, and a traveller setting out in youth, with the intention of leaving none unvisited, would find himself trapped in the bailiwick of old age before completing such an odyssey. Change in Indonesia is rapid and sometimes depressing. Today’s luxuriant forest is tomorrow’s bare hillside, and today’s mountain tomorrow’s copper mine. I was at pains to avoid areas that had succumbed to tourist influences, for mass tourism is the great destroyer of customs and cultures, and the purveyor of uniformity. There are astonishing resemblances between Spain’s Costa del Sol and Thailand’s Phuket.

For me the places holding the greatest interest were those that had withstood the standardising processes of the Indonesian government, thus retaining an individualism that it was hard to believe could survive. Among those were Aceh in North Sumatra with a culture and history entirely separate from the Javanese one the government seeks to impose. East Timor was a former Portuguese colony which, having resisted an Indonesian takeover, had become the scene of this century’s most ferocious small war. In Irian Jaya Stone Age Papuans continued to resist absorption into the national amalgam. Fresh news awaited the visitor to all of these destinations, but apart from their special interest, urgency was the spur.

That Aceh should have been chosen for the first of these peregrinations was largely fortuitous. My son Gawaine and his friend Robin – both refugees from the stresses of life in the City – were taking a six-month therapeutic break in South-east Asia, and now they suggested we join forces. At this time almost all the islands of Indonesia were plunged into the season of rains. Only North Sumatra, projecting well across the Equator, offered a climatic exception. Travel elsewhere in the archipelago could be difficult indeed, but Aceh was dry – offering the benefits of uncomplicated journeyings if, and when, compelled to leave the beaten track. Enthusiasm for the project was general. We would refresh ourselves with new simplicities, relax among village people, drink boiled water, eat rice flavoured with chillies, and travel among basketed chickens and parcelled-up piglets by village bus. And so we flew to Medan, capital of North Sumatra, where the practicalities were to be tackled.

A minimum of prosaic information would be required: we needed to supply ourselves with local maps, find out where buses went, decide on routes, enquire as to the availability of accommodation at the end of the journey, collect whatever schedules and timetables might exist. With this object in view, our first visit was to the office of NATRABU, the government tourist board, where we were questioned by a series of smart girls, recalling the air hostesses whose melting sympathy and charm so frequently advertised a short while back on British television quite certainly contributed to the success of the national airline.

We explained that we hoped to travel by bus from Medan to Banda Aceh on the island’s northernmost tip, returning after various sidetrips by the west coast. This part of the journey we expected to be by far the most interesting, for the road – much of it in poor condition – passed through what sounded like the least-visited part of the island, where the coastal villagers lost their animals to tigers coming down by night from the mountains. In the rainy season stretches of this route were impassable for weeks on end, and an oldish guidebook spoke of cars and buses having to be rafted across three of the rivers. Some difficulties had arisen here, we read, through problems of transmigration and the understandable resentment of Sumatrans to see newcomers, whom they considered as foreigners settled on their land. Finally there were the reports of an insurrection in Aceh province by separatists, although little news of this was permitted to appear in the Indonesian press.

The three beautiful secretaries at NATRABU considered our project, expressing at first limited enthusiasm and encouragement and then the invasion by doubt, with the wonderfully subtle expressions and delicate finger gestures suggesting the genesis of a Balinese dance. Part of Indonesian protocol on such occasions prohibits the bringing of bad tidings – in this case conveyed in the use of the word impossible, either in Indonesian or English translation. ‘Sometimes difficulties are arising,’ said the spokeswoman, holding the telephone through which unsatisfactory news had been received as though she had just gathered a lotus. ‘Maybe there are buses to Langsa,’ she said. Langsa was seventy miles away up the easy east-coast road.

‘And after that?’

‘We are waiting for answers to our questions. Soon we shall know. You see, perhaps today is bus, but tomorrow no. Maybe you are in Langsa and they say you this bus must go back. What will you do?’ In spite or because of the possible predicament, all three girls burst into laughter, trilling their merriment in a most musical fashion.

The office was the personification of the orient of our day, glutted with electronic equipment among shining spaces. All the aparatus in sight seemed to have been designed to disguise its actual function. A TV set succeeded in looking like a jousting helmet, and a shutter like the door of Ali Baba’s cavern dropped over the computer in its wall niche when not in use. Of the past nothing remained but a small girl who kneeled to polish foot by foot the already gleaming floor.

The spokeswoman detached herself from her friends and glided back to where she had placed us under an air-conditioning vent which blew breeze over us with the sound of distant prayer. ‘We could hire a car for you,’ she said.

We shook our heads. ‘Not a car,’ I said.

‘What will you do, then? Walk?’ She went through a mime of an exhausted pedestrian dragging himself down the road under the sun. All the girls laughed happily again, and we did our best to show amusement too. Groaning, I dragged my hand across a sweat-soaked brow, and the effort to enter into the spirit of the joke delighted them. Amazingly, the highly developed Indonesian sense of humour is of the slapstick kind, running to false noses and Chaplinesque moustaches. ‘They like to look on the funny side of things,’ said a booklet on how to make friends and influence people in Indonesia. The author instanced the case of a friend who had scored a social success at a party by taking out his false teeth and holding them in his hands to snap convivially at fellow guests.

By now we had the girls on our side, but with all the goodwill in the world, they couldn’t make the buses run. It was clear that it was a car or nothing. ‘We are making special deal for you,’ the spokeswoman said, ‘but’ – she hesitated, and her smile increased in brilliance – ‘it is necessary to take a guide.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you cannot find your way. Some new roads are not on map. The car is no problem. For the guide I do not know. Maybe we find one, maybe we don’t. I can telephone.’

She went away to phone and came back shaking her head. ‘I try them all. They don’t want,’ she said.

‘Did they say why?’

‘They tell me distance is very far. They do not want to leave their family. I think their wives are saying them don’t go.’

‘So what can we do?’

‘Well, now I try another company. These guides have no work to do. Maybe one will come.’

This time she was joyously successful, with a gain of face as the bringer of good news. ‘This is very good man, but very poor. When there are tourists he is water-skiing instructor, but now no tourists and he must take work. He will come. This man’s name Mr Andy.’

‘Mr who?’

‘Real name you will not be able to speak, so he has taken short name. Many people are doing this, because short names are more suitable for us.’

We called back an hour later to meet Mr Andy, a small, neat man in a carefully pressed denim suit with meticulous repairs over the trouser knees where wear and tear had gone too far. He had a kind and sensitive face embellished with an army-style moustache, which in view of the extreme passivity of his expression seemed out of character. His glittering eyes were devoid of malice, and the impression he gave was of a responsible citizen occupied with a struggle to maintain the decency of his poverty. He could have been in his late thirties and for some reason the name he had chosen for himself could not have been more inappropriate.

The girls had retired to the rear of the office and from a diffused image of them through a glass screen appeared to be involved in the gentle gymnastics of what I supposed to be a Sumatran dance. ‘You are wishing to go for water-skiing to Lake Toba?’ Mr Andy asked. ‘On this lake I am chief instructor Albatross Club.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re going north to Aceh.’

‘Ah, Aceh, you say?’ His moustache flickered. ‘In Aceh only Lake Tawar is good. You may enquire if Hotel Takingeun have boat for hire.’

‘We don’t want to go water-skiing.’

He smiled moving only the corner of his lips, as we were to learn he always did, as a matter of politeness, to conceal emotion of any kind. In this case he was resigning himself to a disappointing situation. ‘What is purpose of your visit?’ he asked.

‘To look at the place. We wouldn’t expect problems in driving from Medan to Banda Aceh, but we’re told the west-coast road is bad and we need a guide. The people here tell us you’re just the man.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. How long will we be away?’

‘At this stage I don’t know. Are you sure you want to take this on?’

A change had come over him. He straightened himself, and there was a briskness in his manner I had not seen before. For a moment he reminded me of a man I had known who had suddenly come to terms with the fact that he was about to go to prison, and I knew I was witnessing a case of resignation.

‘I can take it on,’ he said.

‘And we can start tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow. What time shall I come?’

‘Well, let’s make it early. Say seven.’

Parting company with Mr Andy, we walked over to the main post office and picked up letters at the poste restante. One from London contained a Financial Times cutting which reported that the Indonesian government had sent in five battalions to crush a rebellion in Aceh. The newspaper spoke of the worst violence in years. If this were the case it seemed extraordinary that I should be allowed simply to pick up a hire car and drive it into an area of some sensitivity.

By coincidence a front-page editorial in the English language Indonesian Times caught my eye on a news-stand. It was headed – as might have been expected – Incorrect reports on security in Aceh, and the gist of what followed was that any such reports were the baseless inventions of the foreign media, produced with the intention of harming Indonesia’s image. No more convincing evidence of trouble could have been offered than that from Jakarta’s point of view the situation in Aceh was serious enough to have jolted the Indonesian press out of its normal silence in all such matters. This very long and puffed-out article provided absolutely no information on the subject of current happenings. There was nothing to bite on. The Indonesian people, who have lived for some thrity years in a news blackout, shy away like deer from any discussion into which politics enters. No one we spoke to in Medan admitted to any idea of what was going on in the north.

There was also a letter from my daughter Claudia – a medical student who would be working and travelling for a year in Indonesia – dealing with her adventures on the island of Sumba. Her letters were an ideal complement to my own experiences in these islands, and it was hoped that we would be able to meet and travel together to East Timor, at some point during these travels.

Claudia and her friend Rod, also a medical student, had been engaged in a project with homeless street children in Java, and at the termination of this were visiting a number of islands where their principal concern was the predicament of the original inhabitants. In many cases these were threatened by the loss of their land, and under pressure to abandon traditional religions, dress, housing and means of subsistence, thereby becoming available as the labour force of logging, mining and plantation industries that were moving in. In Sumba the enemy was mass tourism, and as this letter shows the processes of deculturation involved were much advanced.

Well, we finally made it to the Pasola, and stayed in a house where a funeral was going on. The people were no longer Merapu but converted to Christianity and we heard some had been forcibly baptised. The only difference this appears to have made is they don’t keep priceless ikats (traditional dyed fabrics) symbolising the Merapu religion in the rafters any more and they don’t kill a horse to carry you off to heaven. In the one we saw they were not even allowed to inject the corpse to preserve it – so when they showed us grandma wrapped up in an ikat in the sitting position, she had a lot of bubbling red exudate coming out of her nose and mouth. They said tomorrow she’d be black and smelly, so they’d keep her covered up. We gave a donation to help her on her way, and so she’d protect us and give us a long and prosperous life. We also brought gifts of sugar, and were given local betel which we bravely tried but didn’t enjoy too much, but caused a lot of merriment as we inexpertly spat it out. Three pigs were swiftly killed by a knife in the chest, then we got to eat pig fat served with blood soup – Mum enak! Yesterday the second day of the funeral saw the end of a cow and a buffalo, then off to the ancient grave with a massively heavy stone top. There were cries of ‘Wooohhh’ as they levered it up, then pushed her in. The Pasola was wonderful – far, far more exciting than expected. Full details in my next.

Next morning Mr Andy was waiting for us at the reception exactly on time. If possible he seemed to be even smaller and neater than on the previous day, and there was evidence of some further needlework on the doubtful areas in his denims. He was clutching a small wallet containing, it was to be supposed, the essentials of travel, and his moustaches were lifted slightly by his unrevealing smile as we came into sight. The car, delivered to the forecourt, was a seemingly new Toyota of robust appearance, with enormous tyres, a high ground clearance, and bearing a self-satisfied maker’s claim about the construction of its body. The agreement was that the two boys would take turns to drive. Gawaine got in behind the wheel, I settled myself beside him, and Robin and Andy climbed up into the back. We drove to a filling station to top up with petrol and the man at the pumps asked Andy where we were bound for, and when Andy told him he laughed and drew his hands across his throat. Taking this to be a joke we paid little attention, but the menace it concealed revealed itself and grew until in the end it cast a shadow over the journey.

The road northwards from Medan to Banda Aceh, capital of the province, keeps close to the sea, and a wide coastal plain, now virtually cleared apart from recent plantations of rubber and coconut palms, is described in one of the guidebooks as boring. This was far from being the case, for much of it is flanked by rice paddies, and there are few livelier and more varied scenes of farming activity then those concentrated in these sparkling wetlands, and nowhere softer colours and more indulgent light. Rice farmers everywhere enjoy and pride themselves upon their orderly existence, and orderliness is inseparable from the efficient production of their crop. The water in which they work can only be kept under control by exact practice and comformity with natural laws, and this enforces tidiness. One never sees a rice field with a ragged boundary, and paddies are firmly geometrical and fitted into their surroundings in a lively mosaic of shapes that increases rather than detracts from the charm of the landscape. Monotony is avoided by variation from field to field in the growth of the rice seedlings: some barely pricking through the water’s surface while others already display the viridian brilliance of full growth. The trimness of the paddies is accentuated by that of the little thatched shelters where tools are kept, and from which the farmers operate the devices they hope will scare away the birds. These are waders of the most elegant kind: delicately stepping storks, herons and egrets. The familiar coolie hats of the East are normally worn by the rice farmers here in Aceh, although as we drove north more and more wore black witches’ hats, miraculously kept in place as they bent over their work, which added a stylish and dramatic note to the scene.

We spent a morning dawdling through this pleasant landscape. Until 1870 the great eastern plain of Sumatra had been covered with the densest of jungles, but with the discovery that the Deli tobacco grown in tiny clearings was probably the finest in the world, plantations on the old American model were introduced. By the end of the century the number of persons contracted to work on these equalled half the population of Holland, and for all the legalistic quibbles they were hardly distinguishable from slaves. It was the Eastern equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps rather worse. Van Stockum’s invaluable Traveller’s Handbook to the Dutch West Indies (1920), regards the plantations with benign interest. ‘These industries brought much prosperity to the district, and they necessitated the importation of Chinese and Javanese labourers who work under contract and are very well looked after, owing to the combined efforts of the employers and the government. The labour legislature and the welfare work are highly developed in this plantation district.’

Such self-deluding pictures of a tropical near-Arcadia were damaged by the disclosures of a young Hungarian planter, Ladislao Szekely, whose book Tropic Fever was to arouse a frenzy of protest in Dutch colonial circles. Szekely, puffing on an English opium-filled cigarette, was present at the arrival of a new coolie transport. The coolies, including women and children, had been tricked by the recruiting officers of the Coolie Importing Company into accepting a silver coin and putting a fingerprint on a contract form. The victims were then seized and led away. ‘On the boat the sailors had beaten the coolies and taken away their young wives. Coolies who had worked well for the company were waiting at Deli to take their pick of the women left over.’

The first part of the book is a catalogue of horrors. Families are torn from the jungles and split up, the women being not only separated from their menfolk but from their children. All names are changed, cancelling previous identities. There are scenes of unending violence. On Szekely’s first day in the jungle a suspected thief is taken in a tiger trap, and the corpse of a coolie who had died in the night is flung as a matter of course through the nearest barrack-room window. Batak tribesmen with a notable propensity for cannibalism are hired to track down would-be escapers. Persuaded by a superior, Szekely buys a coolie’s wife for ten guilders – although up to this point he appears as full of shame.

Then suddenly all this record of atrocity is put out of mind. The mood changes so dramatically that a suspicion dawns that perhaps the author has suffered a kind of breakdown causing him to throw in the towel and call for someone holding opposite opinions to finish the book. So far we have been reading an account of a Sumatra version of the outrages of Putamayo, but now the view is through different eyes. Szekely, at twenty-six, has become a Tuan Besar (big man), sanctioned by the Board of Directors to clear more and more forest for plantations, and living in a kind of forest suburbia. ‘In front of my house was a large garden with carefully tended flower beds … four gardeners worked the grass mower from morning to night.’ There are tennis courts and golf courses for the Europeans and football for the natives. ‘I gazed upon the gentle, friendly landscape. Only six years had passed since our first axe-blow brought about a new life here.’ In the next two weeks five hundred coolies would be arriving. He finishes on a note of quiet satisfaction.

We lingered happily in a pleasant environment of work in these days easily performed; of buffaloes ploughing through shining mud with women following to tuck in the seedling rice plants. Farmers with time on their hands fished a little, with unimpressive results. There was always a child in sight flying a home-made kite.

Eventually the matter of food came up. Andy knew this area and recommended a restaurant at Langsa. ‘Here food very clean,’ he said. ‘You will enjoy.’

The restaurant turned out to be what at first appeared as a substantial double-fronted shop, an impression heightened by a modest display in both windows of cooked foods of various kinds, all these exhibits appearing more as crudely made plastic imitations than the real thing.

We went in and found ourselves in the Victorian surroundings of what could have been a family restaurant in the back street of an English country town. The walls bore massive, fly-spotted mirrors in heavy frames carved from dark, expensive-looking wood, and the dining area contained nine circular tables with marble tops, each of them some seven feet across. Having seated us at one of these, two waiters went off together to a cupboard under the back of one of the windows, opened it, and came back carrying between them a tray holding twenty-five dishes of food which they proceeded to arrange on our table. We prodded with our forks at the items on offer, identifying what might have been lamb or goat, the unmistakable limbs of chickens wrapped in yellow, parchment skin, a short black length of rubber imitation of bowel, segments of fish, and octopus tentacles. It was all cold, rock-hard, and caked with what had once been a reddish sauce, recalling an unimaginative museum exhibit illustrating, perhaps, articles of food recovered from a Celtic settlement. Within minutes of our arrival four customers sitting at the nearest of the enormous tables got up and prepared to leave. They too had been confronted with twenty-five plates and their disturbing contents, and we had been in time to watch their fumblings in search of last-minute titbits before their departure. The waiter picked among them, and added several obviously popular dishes to those we already stared down at disconsolately. ‘Were all these things cooked some days ago?’ I asked Andy.

‘Oh, yes. Cooked once, twice a week. Very long time cooking. This way is keeping fresh.’

As it was quite impossible to bite into these victuals there was no opportunity, even had we desired to do so, to test their flavour, and in studying them, appetite had leaked away. Since no more food might be forthcoming for some hours, if at all that day, it seemed reasonable to stoke up with rice. A bowl of this was brought, but large mosquitoes, evidently attracted in a dry place to moisture when food was newly prepared, stuck like festive embellishments about its surface where they had weakened, then expired. Even Andy was not tempted by this offering. ‘Rice is eating for farmers,’ he explained. ‘Make you no can do shit.’ Otherwise he ate heartily and with evident relish, tearing at the dry and often withered segments of meat, the corrugations of skin and shattered bones, with small but powerful jaws. Experience might have taught him that this was the last such feast he would enjoy on the journey.

We were entering an area which appeared to be increasingly Muslim fundamentalist the further we travelled. Every village was dominated by its mosque, its size and architectural pretensions clearly reflecting the prosperity or otherwise of the local rice farmers. Some of the mosques were showy, domed pavilions; others, where crops may have been normally poor, were no more than a dome added by way of an afterthought to a normal house. The domes were of all sizes and shapes: inflated Moghul with accompanying towers, Slavic onion, Hollywood fantasy, Tartar. Some, in the case of the richer villagers, were very vulgar. Religious outcry broadcast by loudspeakers was a feature of this region, and it would have seemed that the normal call to prayer was liable to extension by a lengthy discourse in Arabic, or possibly a reading from the Koran.

These villages were spotless and rather austere. Each one had its school, and we passed several of them shortly after midday when studies came to an end. Pupils streamed from them by the hundred and our attention was drawn particularly to the girls in their fundamentalist uniforms, rubicund faces enveloped in spotless white wimples, with medieval-looking capes, and grey skirts reaching to within inches of the ground. A few among these, perhaps prefects, wore dark blue skirts instead of grey. All were stunningly immaculate, and it was amazing to see that, despite these constraining outfits, the girls clambered into the back of the minicabs waiting to collect them with great agility. It was an illustration of the versatility of human beings, who can so easily adapt themselves to the trappings designed for another environment and another age. Further on, in reflection perhaps of less stringent fundamentalist views, schoolgirls in the longest of long skirts had taken to bicycles. In another area, clearly even more relaxed, the skirts still as long as ever, were pink, and in a few cases the daughters of the rich had been allowed to pretend ignorance of orthodox prohibition of luxurious display by fringing the edge of their wimples on the forehead with trinkets of gold.

The road north from Langsa was full of surprise and colour. We passed over a terracotta river and round the verge of a swamp in which the mangroves brandished their black, surrealistic shapes. From this swamp a seepage spread inky plumes among neighbouring paddies. At this time of day heatwaves disguised the ingredients of this picture. In the halation it was hard to distinguish the white shapes of the peasants, knee deep in the paddies, from those of the cranes fishing a few yards away.

Evening stole up on us. We pressed on, besieged by hunger, to Lhokseumawe, a coastal settlement overshadowed by a vast oil refinery with the traffic under the severe discipline of police-manned roadblocks, and a one-way system that took the driver for a glum tour of the town before releasing him again into the main coastal road. One of the locals directed us to a Chinese restaurant where we settled to a succession of ingenious and imaginative dishes, only distracted by karaoke singing – a current fad in Indonesia which is not easy to avoid.

Andy had gone off to eat in an Indonesian place. When we picked him up later, as arranged, he took us to the Lido Graha Hotel, where he knew someone in the management who would give us a room. There was something about this vast barracks of a place that matched the architecture of the refinery and the industrial mood of the town. We were the only guests, so they had turned all the lights off to save money, and we had to feel our way along the passages leading to the rooms.

Apart from the reception the only place where there was a light was the bar. Here we were joined by Santana Mehta, an Indian from Bangalore who was in Lhokseumawe as part of a course he was doing on hotel management. He had aquiline features with fine, melancholic eyes, wore a blazer with a foulard scarf tied round his neck, and had spent a year in Sunderland that had left him overbrimming with nostalgic memories. ‘I had a whale of a time,’ he said. ‘Darts every Saturday night in the Marquis of Granby and Sunday fooling around in boats with the girls on the River Wear.’

‘Indonesia is OK,’ Mehta agreed, ‘but they don’t do things the way we do them in England.’ In England Mehta had been popular, one of the boys. Here he seemed to be held at arm’s length – handicapped, he readily agreed, by the fact that although he understood the language he could not twist his tongue round the long, unfamiliar words well enough to speak it. In this wry fashion he found his isolation funny. Not even the manager’s dog accepted him, he said. ‘I am so kind to that dog. Much as I try my persuasion that we should go for a walk, he will not associate with me. I am suspecting that it is my smell that he does not like.’

Sumatra’s monotheism worried him. He had little patience for a religion that ordered people to get out of bed at dawn to pray and do gymnastics on the floor. ‘In Bangalore we are paying our respects to so many gods. If there is a party at a temple we are going to that temple.’ He found it easier to get along with the British class society which in some way resembled the situation back home, rather than Islamic democracy which he did not understand. Puritanism shocked him. ‘Take my advice not to invite ladies to your room in this hotel. Now the police are saying that they are prostitutes and they will shave their heads. You are foreigners, but otherwise they may punish you for adultery.’

Happily enough, Andy, whose faith at least kept him out of bars, was not present at this conversation. He had put a gloomy interpretation on the presence of roadblocks in the town, and now Mehta brought up the matter of rumoured insurrection. The army was in action, he said, in the mountains nearby. He knew no more than that, but had seen military helicopters over the town earlier that day.

A large swimming pool had been built in a pseudo-garden setting on the hotel’s roof, and having learned of this we had arranged to take an early dip before leaving next morning. Arriving on the scene we found that despite possibly weeks of non-use the pool had been looked after to the extent that it was not only splendidly clear, but exuded a reassuring whiff of chlorine. But, possibly on the day of our arrival, it had been showered from the sky by many thousands of small black beetles, and these had formed an unbroken encrustation on the water, several inches in width, all around the rim. In addition there were islands of beetles floating here and there on the surface.

Under pressure of surplus energy, the young enjoy complexity in their sports. The hotel supplied a beach ball which Gawaine and Robin, standing at opposite ends of the pool, hurled across the water at each other, the game consisting of leaping into the air to kick the ball as far as possible before plunging into the pool. This exercise was pleasurably complicated by the need to avoid the rafts of beetles.

Athletic excess encouraged their attack on the hotel’s set breakfast. This included spiced porridge, chopped octopus, cold chicken pieces in curry, giant strawberries and an assortment of cakes. Mehta came in, wearing the most crisply laundered shirt I had seen since Delhi, hailed us genially, seated himself at the next table and swivelled in his chair. He bent across to inspect our breakfast with a hint of the misgivings of an aviary eagle over some dubious titbit thrown into its cage. ‘What is this food they are bringing us?’

‘It calls itself an Indian-style breakfast,’ I told him.

‘This is not Indian,’ Mehta said. ‘It is pure imitation. They have caught me with this before. All spices and very deleterious for stomach juices. In your country I am eating one kipper for breakfast every day. It is enough. Someone must ask these people to desist from their imitations of Indian food.’ He paused to look up at a weasel-faced man with eye-shades and a heavy gold bracelet hanging from his wrist who had just slid through the door. After a glance in our direction he withdrew. Mehta had lowered his voice. ‘Guess profession,’ he said.

‘Police spy, would you say?’

‘Spot on,’ Mehta replied. ‘He is checking to see no ladies are under table. He is living in hopes one day will be taking lady for hair to be shaven. The town is full of these silly men. So what is your immediate programme? Will you be leaving us?’

‘We’re going north,’ I said. ‘Probably get as far as Banda Aceh, and call it a day.’

Mehta lowered his voice, pulling with a finger at the corner of an eye in a cautious but unfamiliar gesture. ‘May I give you piece of advice? Take it easy.’

‘Any trouble expected, then?’

‘I am recipient of many rumours,’ Mehta said. ‘Now there is one that hostages have been taken. Seven oilmen working with their explorations on road you will be following.’

‘We’re tourists, not oilmen. Nobody will bother with us.’

‘Well, let us hope that is so,’ Mehta said, ‘and that you will arrive safely at your destination.’

‘Do you suggest checking with the police?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, dear boy. That is one thing you must learn not to do. Keep profile low. In Indonesia that is golden rule.’

Two

WEST OF LHOKSEUMAWE, in the direction of Banda Aceh, a change of climate suddenly drained the colour from the landscape. The paddies were empty, awaiting the rains. Behind the bare, iron scrollwork of the mangroves the sea had whitened over the sand, and here the fishermen, just offshore, used rakish black feluccas with black sails. For these people, said Andy with good-natured contempt, black was lucky. They prayed in the mosque but were not in reality true Muslims for they put out offerings to spirits and sea-monsters on their beached boats, and at the entrance to their huts. From this point on, westwards and northwards, the people were a strange lot. ‘They eat things we do not eat,’ he said, ‘for example the heads and feet of chickens. Also some parts of the body they are leaving unwashed.’

At Bireuën, a few miles further on, we took the road going south leading to Lake Tawar and the not wholly explored Gayo range of mountains. Lake Tawar itself was the great inducement, for the guidebook said of it that, despite its spectacular scenery, it had remained undiscovered by tourism and could expect to receive only 100 visitors annually. All at once we were in another world. We had driven 200 miles through paddyfields along the shore, through many pleasant villages with kite-flying boys, Muslim girls on bicycles, old men with their long religious beards, rice farmers with children’s butterfly nets splashing after tiny fish, and overbearing policemen on Japanese motorcycles – people in fact busying themselves in every corner of the landscape. Now we had passed the last little girl dragging her buffalo, and easily avoiding the occasional horn-thrusts in her direction, and the people had gone. The green and silent world of the jungle was closing in.

Suddenly, and strangely, it was cooler, and the odours of grass and sap, of acrid blossom, of earth and weedy decay were in the nostrils. Back on the coast road the only trees had lined up in plantation rows, identical in shape, height and colour, and as repetitious as a wallpaper pattern. Here they were spread in graceful disorder over the low hills at the back of the plain. Someone had built a mosque and then abandoned it. Its tin dome was streaked with rust, and tipped to one side like a drunkard’s hat. To the delight of the boys the narrowing road had developed sharp bends, a corrugated surface and perilous potholes that offered an excuse for the display of driving skills. The roadside markets of the small coastal towns had been glutted with fish and innumerable varieties of fruit. The only village in the first ten miles on the road to Lake Tawar could offer no more than fruit bats, their wings tied with auspicious red twine, hanging upside down by the claws, their eyes subjecting the prospective buyer to a sad but penetrating gaze. They were offered very cheaply – the largest of them costing less than the equivalent of five pence – and would be turned into stews believed in Indonesia to be the most effective treatment for asthma. Even Andy believed in the value of this remedy, although he rejected as pagan superstition the popular consumption of their flesh as a remedy for defective eyesight.

It was immediately after leaving Blangrakal that we were exposed for the first time to the vivacity and exuberance of the Indonesian rainforest. We were passing under the flanks of the ten-thousand-foot peak of Mount Geureudong, of which we caught an occasional glimpse through the trees, where the entrances to the jungle were guarded by a phalanx of leaves like great interlocking shields. Placed behind them were enormous ferns which provided a defence for trees soaring possibly to one hundred and fifty feet. Tucked into niches of this rampaging vegetation were tiny villages constructed almost entirely of corrugated iron, and here and there their occupants had quietly done away with a tree or two and crammed a minute paddyfield into the space, in which men with thin, sallow tropical bodies groped incessantly in the mud. Bundles of birds with white faces and long yellow bills had been trapped in these mini-swamps and were offered at the roadside, although the villagers showed no interest in them and there was no passing traffic. The area had somehow managed to avoid official scrutiny, for clandestine logging quite clearly went on in a small way. When we stopped to examine an orchid we discovered a pile of tree trunks, their peach-coloured wood laid bare by the axe, inefficiently concealed among the ferns. This bootlegging of wood was a dangerous business for the small people who practised it, for they risked long terms of imprisonment if caught. Great multinational timber firms were clearing Indonesian forests at the rate of tens of thousands of acres a day. A hill tribesman living by the traditional slash-and-burn system, by which a fresh patch of an acre or two was cleared annually and cultivated for ten years or so before being returned to the jungle, might be sent to prison for ten years.

There were twenty or thirty miles of this impeccable forest, after which the road passed out of the steep hillside and down into an open valley where deforestation had taken place in past times, leaving a tangle of weeds, buffalo grass and secondary growth extending back to the distant mountains. Even as we passed, a woman swinging an enormous axe cut down a seedling large enough to supply a little firewood, and further on, where the forest cover had taken over, again a tree had been felled and left lying to be dragged away under cover of darkness.

Coming into Takingeun it seemed conceivable at first glance that it did in fact receive only one hundred visitors a year, for at this time of political crisis it came close to being a ghost town. Welcome, in Indonesian, said a banner stretched across the street, but there was no one about but a few children, and the losmen which had been recommended to us was closed. The view of Lake Tawar was of extreme charm. It was five or six miles across, eternally placid according to all accounts, and enclosed in a coronet of low, pointed mountains which were mantled as if in velvet of the deepest green. At regular intervals little triangular valleys opened out on the lake. These were walled in by slopes which gave out a close-cropped, burnished appearance, as did the glades revealed in openings in the trees. This supremely tropical vista reflected the harmony and spaciousness of a landscape that has escaped interference. Fishermen from invisible villages were out in flotillas of canoes. The lake is said to contain large numbers of small fish, valued not only for their flavour but for their stimulation of the sexual urge. We watched the nearest canoe in action, consisting of putting down the net, then driving the fish into it by splashing the surface of the shallow water with a paddle. The result, so far as we could see, was unpromising, yet two or three fairly minute fish were caught in an operation taking a few minutes. With five or six hours out on the lake it all added up.

The Hotel Renggali had been built upon a spit of land just above the water. In this part of the world people like to put up notices and it came as no surprise that the hotel should have displayed at its entrance a large banner worded in English: WELCOME TO ACEH THE SPIRITUAL DESTINATION OF THE EAST. The building harmonised with its grandiose surroundings in a way that such intrusions so rarely do. It was faintly reminiscent of childhood fairy tales in which castles may be emptied of their inhabitants by a spell, for there were no signs of life in the vicinity of the hotel. A longish wait followed at the reception before there were stirrings in the remote interior of the building, and a clerk who might have been reluctantly aroused from sleep came on the scene.

This hotel came close to being a magnificent shell. We were shown to splendid rooms, admired the astonishing panoply of mountains, forest and water through windows cunningly contrived to embrace half the curve of the horizon. The door closed softly behind the porter and silence fell again. Everything about the Renggali impressed: the thick pile of its carpets, the furniture of dark, richly grained wood with its metal inlay based probably on Persian models of Islamic calligraphy, the antique panels carved and painted with ethnic designs decorating the lounge, the music room in which a row of instruments, most of them unfamiliar, awaited on a podium the arrival of performers instinct told us would never appear.

The hotel had its wonderfully landscaped, empty gardens arranged in terraces and lawns through close-clipped hedges and shrubberies in blossom, which attracted a cloud of butterflies as they descended to the lake. Waiting at the water’s edge was the canoe mentioned in a leaflet picked up at the reception, to conduct guests in the mood for a dip in the lake to areas where it was safe to swim. Why safe when all the lake within easy reach was so shallow? The leaflet explained. Although devout Muslims, the locals also contrived to be animists and they refused to allow visitors to risk their lives in parts of the lake under the domination of local spirits. It was after reading this leaflet that Andy told us he preferred not to sleep in a hotel bedroom that night but would lock himself in the car.

We took a walk along the lakeside to visit the nearest of the villages. These were the busiest, liveliest of places, reflecting once again a local appetite for road signs in Indonesian, subsidence, hairpin bend, falling rock, danger, proceed with caution, which they had purloined for use as a form of decoration together with advertisements of all kinds: for car batteries, soft drinks, detergents, and above all those for Rinso. The village streets were full of small, strutting Lowry figures, coming and going in all directions, with men holding cockerels clipped and ready for the combat under their arms, women hanging up washing, herds of goats directed by their owners purely by arm signals and ginger dogs. Inevitably these people grew rice, and here the paddies’ sparkling attraction was intensified by the use of hundreds of brilliantly coloured flags planted in the mud or suspended from lines to keep the birds away. Small mosques were built in each village by the villagers themselves. The domes were what really counted in these buildings and they were made from scales of metal hammered out in local forges.

Despite the Acehnese reputation for social exclusiveness and taciturnity the whole population of a village turned out when we passed through to wave and shout something that we hoped was applause.

Surprisingly another guest arrived the next day to break the spell of the hotel’s emptiness. ‘Don’t even attempt to pronounce my name,’ he said. ‘To my friends I am Anatole. Where are you from? England? Well of course one glance was sufficient. I hope you will be staying over the weekend. It is a relief to have someone to talk to. Here it is hard not to feel cut off. I am in the logging business. This is a nice place to relax and the security is good, but let us face it, it is a little dull.’

Anatole’s father had been a diplomat and he had spent several of his formative years in Paris and London. He had black, gleeful eyes, his youthful appearance betrayed only by the tufts of grey over the ears. He stood as erect as a soldier on parade, but his hands were constantly in motion. I noticed about him, as I had done before in the case of upper-class Indonesians who ate frequently and well, a faint odour of the spices employed in their food. My impression of him was that he suffered from a lifelong struggle to use up energy. There was no time when all parts of his body were at rest. He had placed himself at this moment close to a table scattered with antique bric-a-brac, and constantly shifted the position of various objects. Thoughts breaking into the stream of consciousness provoked shallow bursts of action. He broke off in mid-sentence to dash to the window, from which he returned with a frown and a shake of the head. ‘Boat still not fixed,’ he muttered. ‘As I was saying,’ he went on, ‘this is a great place to go to earth for a few days. By the way, I just saw your man down there. He was running round in a circle. Anything wrong with him?’

‘He finds that it helps with the nerves,’ I told him. ‘He picked up some talk about hostage-taking and I think it worried him.’

‘Tell him he has no value as a hostage,’ Anatole said, with a sudden explosion of laughter. ‘Anyway he’s quite safe while he stays here. You must have heard of the GAM. The so-called Aceh Liberation Front. They’re the people who are causing the trouble, but it’s quiet in this season. Could be something going on round Meuseugit. That’s past Banda, where the road gets squeezed in between the mountains and the sea. They just killed a few loggers working on one of our concessions. Here we’re well placed. Trouble is it’s coming to an end. We don’t clear-cut in this area, and unless there’s an upturn in the price of timber and we have to come back for what we’ve left, we’ll be saying goodbye.’

‘What happens next?’

‘Indah Kiat might take me on. They have a 150,000-hectare concession south of here. This is a clear-cut and replacement with a eucalyptus project. It’s very attractive but I’m sold on this place and I’d like to stay here. I’m thinking of moving into tourism.’

‘What about the GAM?’

‘They’ll have vanished by then.’ He tried to wink like a Westerner, but had to use the corner of his mouth as well as an eye. ‘From now on the only thing that matters in the East is Japan. It’s only three hours away, and given the right appeal the Japanese will come here in droves.’

‘Will you be leaving them any trees?’

‘It doesn’t matter one way or the other. There’s a lot of claptrap talked about forests. You can leave a forest a half-mile deep and no one will notice the difference. If they want animals we can even put them in at the maximum utilisation rate; in the case of deer, for example, of fifteen per hectare.’

I found myself guided to the window, embracing a prospect of two-thirds of Lake Tawar, and as he came closer I again caught the faint whiff of cinnamon and cardamoms. There were fifteen or twenty canoes in sight, several of them with their nets down and fishermen splashing in the water with their paddles. Five small mountains almost as regular in shape as pyramids came into this view. It was early morning, the light was bluish and the densely forested little mountains were veiled in ultramarine shadows, although their colouration would alter continually throughout the day, from bluish tones to a glowing russet-red according to the position of the sun. In a calm, stealthy fashion this view was changing all the time. Almost overhead a curdling of small clouds appeared, then vanished. Down in the nearest of the paddies the rice farmers were changing the position and colour of the flags. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Anatole said. ‘Sooner or later this is going to be the Acapulco of South-east Asia. Well, not quite Acapulco because it isn’t by the sea. As it is, nobody produces anything. They grow rice and they eat it. They catch fifty cents’ worth of fish a day. While gold awaits to be shovelled from the earth.’

He snapped his fingers loudly, a sound which I realised could signify frustration as well as enthusiasm, and frustration in this case was in response to the spectacle of the large speedboat by the hotel’s steps leading down to the water. ‘Nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed in five minutes,’ he said, ‘but they can’t get a mechanic to come up from Medan.’