FunkyGibbon
Well-Known Member
Saturday 10th February
Having slept surprisingly well on the bamboo mat in the oma I was nonetheless awake before dawn, excited to hear my first bilou. If I was lucky I might even glimpse one in the distance!
I stood outside the porch, the rough boards scraping against my skin, and soaked in the early morning atmosphere. As the sun slowly rose I heard various birds, but no bilou. I strained my ears slightly, hoping to pick out some distant whooping, but there was nothing to be heard. Patience is a virtue when nature watching, but with the time pressure of 'They only sing at dawn' looming over me this was tough. Finally I was forced to bring to mind the other great lesson of looking for animals in the wild: 'Most of the time you will fail'. For some reason nature has often deemed remedial lessons in this area to be of great importance in my studies.....
Eventually Sulei emerged.
'Morning Josh, did you hear them?'
'Nope'
'Ah, I thought you wouldn't'
I invite the keen thread follower to cast their eye back to previous posts to see how consistent Sulei has been on this point. Needless to say, this moment had the feeling of a real inflection point in the trip. If I couldn't even hear them in the surrounding forest on a quiet and still morning what were the chances that I'd actually find and see one? I put this to Sulei and he promised that if we didn't find any today we would get up even earlier tomorrow morning and walk until we were far enough away from human habitation to have a much better shot at them. I was unconvinced but there wasn't really anything I could do.
Despite the whole project having been cast into doubt by the events of the morning, I was feeling rather sanguine. After all, I was in the middle of the forest on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, living with people who had a surprisingly take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the benefits of agriculture over hunting and gathering. I really wasn't going to complain. Spirits were raised higher by breakfast; if we hadn't been there it would just have been more sagu but in order to appease my western palate Ogei worked up some pancakes with fruits and chocolate sauce (the banana pancake trail really does have its tendrils everywhere). At this point I produced what turned out to be a bit of a trump card: some Oats So Simple sachets in various flavours. These were a bit like manna from heaven and my five day supply quickly evaporated. Everyone agreed them to be mananam.
(Of all the words I learned that week this has stuck with me the most. There's just something about the way you can throw yourself into it: 'MMMMMMmananam!, to indicate gusto and appreciation. The other option is the evergreen makan bagus, literally 'eat good' in bahasa)
Whilst Sulei devised a plan to rustle up some bilou, Amatoplei took me into the jungle for loincloth making. Although it was never explicitly mentioned, this must have been a part of the ethnotourism experience. I'm not not going to dwell on the ethics of it here, but I think people should before they avail themselves of this kind of thing. I was lucky in that it turned out that Sahrul's business relies on family connections, and so the potential for exploitation is lowered, but this was essentially luck; it would have been very hard for me to make that determination when getting off the ferry in Maillepet. Often in indigenous areas it can be quite hard to support local people, I am thinking in particular of China where hotels are typically Han-owned even in 'Autonomous' minority areas.
Anyway, Amatoplei and I went wondering through his personal patch of jungle until he found a sapling of the right size and species. He then felled this and we dragged it to a pebble beach by the stream. With a combination of knocking and cutting he removed a strip of bark that went the entire length of the tree. This was then further split into its inner and outer layers, and it was the tough but pliable inner part that we were after. Back at the oma this was 'tenderised' with a mallet which caused it to soften and display a sort of 'cross-hatched' fibrous texture. A really marvellous material. Whilst this was happening it began to pour with rain and so we were confined to the oma for most of the middle hours of the day. When it rains here it really rains.
As we sat and watched the river rise and the ground somehow become even boggier I took the chance to ask Amatoplei a few questions. He told me that he doesn't know hold old he is, just that he has 8 children and that this is his third house in the same spot (because it's so wet, even the hard rainforest wood rots eventually. This probably, according to the group, puts him somewhere around the age of fifty. I also discovered something rather wonderful about Mentawai names. You might have already spotted the similarity between his name and his wife Baitoplei's. It turns out that Toplei is the name of their firstborn, a daughter who is now married elsewhere. When Mentawai have their first child they change their names to 'Father of...' and 'Mother of...', and without being patronising I just think that's quite sweet.
Thanks to the rain, and I believe the family's social status due to Amatoplei being a shaman, as the morning drew on we gathered more and more visitors sheltering in the porch. We sat and smoked and chatted in Mentawai (I only did the first of these things). To pass the time I got them to translate some of the simple bahasa words I knew into Mentawai, and I also showed the kids my bird and mammal books. These soon attracted the attention of the entire gathering, who are obviously intensely knowledgeable about local wildlife. Sadly this didn't produce any useful intelligence about primate locating. Eventually I busied myself with IDing the various skulls tucked away in the rafters of the oma.
Unfortunately one of the guests had arrived to fetch Amatoplei; he was needed for some kind of emergency exorcism and had to leave after lunch. I was sad to see him go, but at least he stayed for lunch, which was a large green pigeon, Treron capelli, that had been shot in the morning, one of the only birds I saw around the oma. I learned many things on this trip, but one of the more surprising was to have a degree of scepticism for the story that we like to tell that indigenous peoples are the custodians of the landscapes they live. That they are key stakeholders can't be denied, but the idea that there is some kind of inherent respect for balance and harmony in nature that will prevent over-hunting does not survive contact with reality. Or perhaps better to say it doesn't survive contact with modern weapons.
In the afternoon Sulei announced that we would be trekking to a known joja (langur) roost to see them come back at dusk. He didn't know if we would see any bilou, but there was always a chance. Ogei and the two older boys, Sabei and Matai would be coming with us. Smelling something of a rat, I had a quiet chat with Sulei. Would we be shooting these joja this evening? “Oh yes, but don't worry, you can look at them first, then we will shoot them”. Ah. As you can imagine, this put me in a very difficult position. I was staying in their home, but they were undertaking this trip specifically because I wanted to see primates, and I wasn't really sure I could have the deaths of endangered langurs on my conscience. Eventually I decided it simply wasn't possible, and told Sulei that if that was to be the case I would just have to respectfully cancel the trip. To his credit, Sulei was very understanding, and we entered a period of negotiations. Sulei floated the idea of not shooting the specific langurs in their roost, but I still had visions of bilou plummeting to the forest floor in front of me. In the end we agreed that no primates would be shot today, but that birds would be fair game. Have you spotted the key mistake I made here?
We set out at 3.00 pm, with the rapid equatorial dusk being around five thirty. This was my first time off Mentawai paths and onto Mentawai trails. The key difference here is that the trails are mostly just stream beds, and we were sharing them with the streams. My boots, which had finally dried out after yesterday's walk, were instantly soaked, along with my trousers. Active stream beds are both rocky and wet, and wet rocks are slippery. I like to walk with my phone camera to hand for photographing insects or just general scenery (my zoom camera is in a pocket so that I can fumble madly for it if I see something in the distance), and so I was constantly choosing between smashing my screen or an elbow. Our route soon led uphill, and that meant one thing: waterfalls. Sabei knows the forest best, and so our only option was to follow him, but his routes, which I am genuinely sure were in good faith his best estimation of what was safest for me, often led through the most torrential parts of the falls (which were not really that big). I flatter myself to be both a decent rock-climber and relatively strong and fit, but I was really struggling here.
Occasionally the trail would cut across 'dry' land a little way, or the jungle would simply encroach onto the streambed, and this presented additional challenges. The first and most obvious were the vines that are thick with thorns. If you are imagining brambles, don't. These are nothing like them. The density of spikes has to be seen to be believed. Next is something that Sulei just referred to as the 'fireleaf'. It was made very clear to me that I didn't want to touch this plant. Sometimes one of the lads would slash at various stems or branches that poked out into our path and sometimes hordes of ants would come gushing out, presumably to engulf me if I got too close. As a general rule, if a branch looked at all necessary as a handhold in my quest to avoid a short, sharp drop Sulei would say 'Don't touch this'. And so we made our way uphill. The low point of my interaction with the flora of Siberut came when I sat down to rest on a tree trunk that had fallen across a small waterfall and the entire thing just snapped off despite being thicker than me.
As we made our way through the undergrowth, either stealthily or surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and profanity, we would periodically stop when one of the boys spotted a bird, just as we had the day before with Ogei. I never saw any of these birds, but I did finally realise my big mistake: if we fired off a gun every twenty minutes on our walk how much nature could we really expect to stay in the area. Well, so it turned out to be. We didn't see any joja at the so-called roost, although we did spot an Asian pied hornbill from the top of a ridge. This turned out to be both the literal and metaphorical high point of the walk, as with night setting in we headed back, thankfully on a different route that took us away from the waterfalls. When we reached a flat stretch I was finally allowed to take the lead. I promptly walked straight into the end of a eye socket-sized branch that punched the lens right out of my glasses. Miraculously there was no further damage to either them or me, and once the lens was retrieved we made our way back to the oma without further incident.
Having slept surprisingly well on the bamboo mat in the oma I was nonetheless awake before dawn, excited to hear my first bilou. If I was lucky I might even glimpse one in the distance!
I stood outside the porch, the rough boards scraping against my skin, and soaked in the early morning atmosphere. As the sun slowly rose I heard various birds, but no bilou. I strained my ears slightly, hoping to pick out some distant whooping, but there was nothing to be heard. Patience is a virtue when nature watching, but with the time pressure of 'They only sing at dawn' looming over me this was tough. Finally I was forced to bring to mind the other great lesson of looking for animals in the wild: 'Most of the time you will fail'. For some reason nature has often deemed remedial lessons in this area to be of great importance in my studies.....
Eventually Sulei emerged.
'Morning Josh, did you hear them?'
'Nope'
'Ah, I thought you wouldn't'
I invite the keen thread follower to cast their eye back to previous posts to see how consistent Sulei has been on this point. Needless to say, this moment had the feeling of a real inflection point in the trip. If I couldn't even hear them in the surrounding forest on a quiet and still morning what were the chances that I'd actually find and see one? I put this to Sulei and he promised that if we didn't find any today we would get up even earlier tomorrow morning and walk until we were far enough away from human habitation to have a much better shot at them. I was unconvinced but there wasn't really anything I could do.
Despite the whole project having been cast into doubt by the events of the morning, I was feeling rather sanguine. After all, I was in the middle of the forest on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, living with people who had a surprisingly take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the benefits of agriculture over hunting and gathering. I really wasn't going to complain. Spirits were raised higher by breakfast; if we hadn't been there it would just have been more sagu but in order to appease my western palate Ogei worked up some pancakes with fruits and chocolate sauce (the banana pancake trail really does have its tendrils everywhere). At this point I produced what turned out to be a bit of a trump card: some Oats So Simple sachets in various flavours. These were a bit like manna from heaven and my five day supply quickly evaporated. Everyone agreed them to be mananam.
(Of all the words I learned that week this has stuck with me the most. There's just something about the way you can throw yourself into it: 'MMMMMMmananam!, to indicate gusto and appreciation. The other option is the evergreen makan bagus, literally 'eat good' in bahasa)
Whilst Sulei devised a plan to rustle up some bilou, Amatoplei took me into the jungle for loincloth making. Although it was never explicitly mentioned, this must have been a part of the ethnotourism experience. I'm not not going to dwell on the ethics of it here, but I think people should before they avail themselves of this kind of thing. I was lucky in that it turned out that Sahrul's business relies on family connections, and so the potential for exploitation is lowered, but this was essentially luck; it would have been very hard for me to make that determination when getting off the ferry in Maillepet. Often in indigenous areas it can be quite hard to support local people, I am thinking in particular of China where hotels are typically Han-owned even in 'Autonomous' minority areas.
Anyway, Amatoplei and I went wondering through his personal patch of jungle until he found a sapling of the right size and species. He then felled this and we dragged it to a pebble beach by the stream. With a combination of knocking and cutting he removed a strip of bark that went the entire length of the tree. This was then further split into its inner and outer layers, and it was the tough but pliable inner part that we were after. Back at the oma this was 'tenderised' with a mallet which caused it to soften and display a sort of 'cross-hatched' fibrous texture. A really marvellous material. Whilst this was happening it began to pour with rain and so we were confined to the oma for most of the middle hours of the day. When it rains here it really rains.
As we sat and watched the river rise and the ground somehow become even boggier I took the chance to ask Amatoplei a few questions. He told me that he doesn't know hold old he is, just that he has 8 children and that this is his third house in the same spot (because it's so wet, even the hard rainforest wood rots eventually. This probably, according to the group, puts him somewhere around the age of fifty. I also discovered something rather wonderful about Mentawai names. You might have already spotted the similarity between his name and his wife Baitoplei's. It turns out that Toplei is the name of their firstborn, a daughter who is now married elsewhere. When Mentawai have their first child they change their names to 'Father of...' and 'Mother of...', and without being patronising I just think that's quite sweet.
Thanks to the rain, and I believe the family's social status due to Amatoplei being a shaman, as the morning drew on we gathered more and more visitors sheltering in the porch. We sat and smoked and chatted in Mentawai (I only did the first of these things). To pass the time I got them to translate some of the simple bahasa words I knew into Mentawai, and I also showed the kids my bird and mammal books. These soon attracted the attention of the entire gathering, who are obviously intensely knowledgeable about local wildlife. Sadly this didn't produce any useful intelligence about primate locating. Eventually I busied myself with IDing the various skulls tucked away in the rafters of the oma.
Unfortunately one of the guests had arrived to fetch Amatoplei; he was needed for some kind of emergency exorcism and had to leave after lunch. I was sad to see him go, but at least he stayed for lunch, which was a large green pigeon, Treron capelli, that had been shot in the morning, one of the only birds I saw around the oma. I learned many things on this trip, but one of the more surprising was to have a degree of scepticism for the story that we like to tell that indigenous peoples are the custodians of the landscapes they live. That they are key stakeholders can't be denied, but the idea that there is some kind of inherent respect for balance and harmony in nature that will prevent over-hunting does not survive contact with reality. Or perhaps better to say it doesn't survive contact with modern weapons.
In the afternoon Sulei announced that we would be trekking to a known joja (langur) roost to see them come back at dusk. He didn't know if we would see any bilou, but there was always a chance. Ogei and the two older boys, Sabei and Matai would be coming with us. Smelling something of a rat, I had a quiet chat with Sulei. Would we be shooting these joja this evening? “Oh yes, but don't worry, you can look at them first, then we will shoot them”. Ah. As you can imagine, this put me in a very difficult position. I was staying in their home, but they were undertaking this trip specifically because I wanted to see primates, and I wasn't really sure I could have the deaths of endangered langurs on my conscience. Eventually I decided it simply wasn't possible, and told Sulei that if that was to be the case I would just have to respectfully cancel the trip. To his credit, Sulei was very understanding, and we entered a period of negotiations. Sulei floated the idea of not shooting the specific langurs in their roost, but I still had visions of bilou plummeting to the forest floor in front of me. In the end we agreed that no primates would be shot today, but that birds would be fair game. Have you spotted the key mistake I made here?
We set out at 3.00 pm, with the rapid equatorial dusk being around five thirty. This was my first time off Mentawai paths and onto Mentawai trails. The key difference here is that the trails are mostly just stream beds, and we were sharing them with the streams. My boots, which had finally dried out after yesterday's walk, were instantly soaked, along with my trousers. Active stream beds are both rocky and wet, and wet rocks are slippery. I like to walk with my phone camera to hand for photographing insects or just general scenery (my zoom camera is in a pocket so that I can fumble madly for it if I see something in the distance), and so I was constantly choosing between smashing my screen or an elbow. Our route soon led uphill, and that meant one thing: waterfalls. Sabei knows the forest best, and so our only option was to follow him, but his routes, which I am genuinely sure were in good faith his best estimation of what was safest for me, often led through the most torrential parts of the falls (which were not really that big). I flatter myself to be both a decent rock-climber and relatively strong and fit, but I was really struggling here.
Occasionally the trail would cut across 'dry' land a little way, or the jungle would simply encroach onto the streambed, and this presented additional challenges. The first and most obvious were the vines that are thick with thorns. If you are imagining brambles, don't. These are nothing like them. The density of spikes has to be seen to be believed. Next is something that Sulei just referred to as the 'fireleaf'. It was made very clear to me that I didn't want to touch this plant. Sometimes one of the lads would slash at various stems or branches that poked out into our path and sometimes hordes of ants would come gushing out, presumably to engulf me if I got too close. As a general rule, if a branch looked at all necessary as a handhold in my quest to avoid a short, sharp drop Sulei would say 'Don't touch this'. And so we made our way uphill. The low point of my interaction with the flora of Siberut came when I sat down to rest on a tree trunk that had fallen across a small waterfall and the entire thing just snapped off despite being thicker than me.
As we made our way through the undergrowth, either stealthily or surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes and profanity, we would periodically stop when one of the boys spotted a bird, just as we had the day before with Ogei. I never saw any of these birds, but I did finally realise my big mistake: if we fired off a gun every twenty minutes on our walk how much nature could we really expect to stay in the area. Well, so it turned out to be. We didn't see any joja at the so-called roost, although we did spot an Asian pied hornbill from the top of a ridge. This turned out to be both the literal and metaphorical high point of the walk, as with night setting in we headed back, thankfully on a different route that took us away from the waterfalls. When we reached a flat stretch I was finally allowed to take the lead. I promptly walked straight into the end of a eye socket-sized branch that punched the lens right out of my glasses. Miraculously there was no further damage to either them or me, and once the lens was retrieved we made our way back to the oma without further incident.
