Thursday February 8th 2018
Despite setting a very early alarm I was woken by the
sholat or call to prayer from the mosques across the city. This is something else that the Indonesia neophyte has to contend with, and we'll hear more about that later. I hoisted my backpack and headed down to the boat, stopping to admire the fishing fleet in the early morning light on the way. I boarded the boat without issue and headed up top to admire the view as we chugged out of the natural harbour and headed for open waters.
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It is said that the song of the female Kloss's gibbon is the most beautiful of all gibbons. For some time I had harboured the desire to go and hear the call in the wild. The only problem is that Kloss's gibbons are really only found in one place in the world: the Mentawai Islands. The Mentawai Islands are, if you haven't guessed yet, to be found off the coast of Sumatera, and the city of Padang is really the only gateway to get there. They are too small to have an airport, but thanks to apparently sensational waves there is a small tourism industry to serve the many surfers who flock there each year. There is an even smaller ethnotourism sector offering the chance to visit and live among the tribes people who still dwell in the forest. As for nature watching, well, I couldn't find a single trip report or account of anyone going there to look for the reasonably extensive list of endemics.
My plan was therefore to arrange for one of the locals who usually organise the trips to live with some of the Mentawai tribe to be my guide and at least point me in the direction of some good nature spots. From the IUCN page all I could get was which islands which primates were found on, and concerningly the entries were full of comments about declining populations or inadequate data. I decided to start on the main island, Siberut, which would theoretically give me the gibbons and also possibly the greater treasure, the Pig-tailed langur, the only member of its genus and another Mentawai endemic. The other endemic primates are a macaque species and a langur species, which have both been recently split in two, making the Mentawai and Siberut macaques, and Mentawai and Siberut langurs. If I could see one of each I'd be a happy man.
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The trip to the Mentawai Islands takes about three and a half hours on the fast ferry. I had planned to spend this time alternatively admiring the view and studying my Indonesian phrase book, but one of my fellow passengers had other ideas. Wherever I found myself on the boat he would appear about ten minutes later, making polite conversation. Now one thing that western travellers will very quickly realise when they arrive in Asia is that ideas about personal space and body contact are very different here and if you don't adapt to that then you will have a pretty tricky time of it. I therefore paid no attention to the fact that this middle-aged man was stroking my arm while he showed me pictures of his family; until that is he asked me if I was comfortable with the arm-stroking! I suddenly found I was less comfortable than I had previously thought!
When we arrived I simply made my apologies and declined his offer to help me find a hotel. Some opportunities are perhaps better left untaken. My first task was to find a guide. In my research one name had come up several times: Sahrul. Not only was he recommended by those who had used him, but he actually featured in one memorable account as the man who had rescued a hapless couple after their own guide did a runner halfway through the trip. Because the port town of Maillepet was relatively small (I had read), I thought there was a decent chance that someone might know him. So as I disembarked I asked in my broken Bahasa (Indonesian) if this place had a Sahrul.
'Oh yes, he's just over there!'
Sometimes you don't have to be good, you just have to be lucky. Before I knew what was happening me and another foreigner were whisked onto motorbikes and went bombing off through the town and out to an adjoining village, where we arrived at a very nice longhouse. Tea was served and my attempts to start negotiations and explain my purpose were rebuffed, so instead we enjoyed the late morning heat and companionable silence for a bit. The other tourist turned out to not to be a tourist at all; he was a Belgian topologist named Yanel who was on the island for a month doing research, who had had to go back to the mainland to get more cash. As you can imagine my curiosity was piqued; why on Earth would he have to come all the way to this far-flung corner of the globe to study the mathematics of shapes? What arcane knowledge was sequestered here?
Five painful and confusing minutes later I decided that
Lionel the
anthropologist might have the strongest French accent this side of the equator.
Unnecessarily hot beverages having been consumed, we got down to business. I explained to Sahrul that I wanted to see
Bilou, which is the Mentawai word for gibbon, and hopefully
Simakobu,
Bokkoi and
Joja as well (pig-tailed langur, Siberut macaque and Siberut langur respectively). Sahrul, whose English was luckily really excellent, said he usually offered a five day trip into the interior of the island; he was certain I would see at least bilou and possibly the others if we got a bit lucky. Well that was good enough for me. I managed to beat him down to a price I could afford by pointing out that I only had Rp4.5M and I would need the point five to get back to Padang. So Rp4,000,000 all inclusive it was! All that remained was to establish that when I said my name was Josh I emphatically did not mean as in 'Joshje Bush' and we were all set to head off.
To get to our halfway point, a village called Madobak where we would sleep that night, was a two hour motorbike journey. So, I put my heavy bag on my back, climbed into the pillion seat and off we went. The road started off as a well tarmacked affair; the Indonesian government is investing a fair amount into infrastructure on the islands which, for better or worse, has attracted a lot of
Immigrasi workers. In fact we soon reached the end of the tarmac where a road crew was at work with a gravel track stretching beyond them. At this point the heavens opened in a fairly dramatic fashion and it became obvious that however I or my raincoat felt about the situation I was shortly to become very, very wet. Sadly this meant I have no pictures of what was quite an interesting journey. As the miles went by gravel turned to mud and mud turned to mire. Just as I thought the road couldn't get any worse we took a right-hand turn into an improbably small gap in the jungle.
Initially we made good time as even though the track was narrow it still had a concrete base and my driver happily threw himself into the corners with fear of what might be around the bend. The rain had stopped as well which was a real blessing. After a few more miles though the concrete ended and because the ground itself was so muddy the path now consisted of a series of planks or boards. Needless to say this was not preferred terrain for the moped. As the old saying goes: when the going gets tough, the tough get off and walk. Me and Lionel thus spent most of the rest of the journey either jogging in front or behind of the bikes depending on conditions under tire. After a lot more than three hours we finally arrived into the village, where we headed straight to Sahrul's house. As it turned out the previous place belonged to a brother-in-law. Very much a family business.
The village was slightly sprawling; houses spread out down the roads rather than simply existing in one cluster. I think this is at least partly because it was built by the government and it is much easier to build houses on the sides of a road you have already cleared through the forest rather than making further clearings. Despite being quite small the village has several shops, a mosque and sizeable school, the latter being one that attracts boarding students from the surrounding region.
We had more tea at Sahrul's house, and then my driver, whose name, it turned out, was Sulai, invited me to dinner at his home which was next door.
Almost all the people who live in the village are indigenous Mentawai. Their parents were born and raised in the forest, but a while back the government built all these villages and mandated that the tribes people move into them. One of the justifications for this was that they would have access to electricity, so we ate our dinner under the harsh light of a naked bulb with a generator humming somewhere in the village. Despite having left the forest the Mentawai for the most part still pursue a largely non-agricultural lifestyle. The staple diet, which forms the backbone of every meal and presumably accounts for most of the calories consumed, is
Sagu (you may or may not know sagu as sago, usually a desert item in the West). Sagu is actually essentially highly processed wood pulp, from the sagu palm tree. In the village it is cooked inside bamboo, which is then broken open with machetes at the table. It comes out as something that looks a bit like a long stale bread crust. I had read that sagu was basically inedible but in fact it went down quite nicely with a bit of chilli sauce. Protein came in the form of pork, tree snails (garnished with salt) and 'sagu worm' which was basically a large roasted maggot. All good fun, but it was a bit of a relief to see bananas as desert!
Halfway through the meal a teenage boy and girl arrived and joined us for food. I found it quite hard to pin down a lot of the familial relationships I witnessed on my journey; partly this was due to extended family ties being a lot stronger I think and partly probably due to more people showing up at mealtimes because I was a bit of a curiosity. In any case I think these guys were cousins or something along those lines, either of Sulai or his wife. The girl was wearing a
jilbab, the Muslim headscarf when she arrived, but this was only because she had just come from prayer. One of the darker things I learned on my journey is that when indigenous people in Indonesia get ID cards and thus citizenship; they HAVE to choose a recognised religion on the card. There are only five: Buddhism, Catholicism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. This means that none of the many thousands of other belief systems are recognised, including of course the local Mentawai religion which is, anthropologically speaking, animist. This would be bad enough but the government extends its control in this area to requiring children at least to actively follow their official religion, by attending church or the mosque or whatever. A soft and insidious form of cultural genocide is therefore being perpetrated all across the Malayan archipelago wherever this pattern is repeated.
When I was on Flores I visited a village where people attend church on a Sunday and still sacrifice a bull at the family totem pole when a daughter gets married; the meeting of old and new doesn't always have to be a zero-sum game. However, what I find most painful about this 'enforced religion' policy is that it is so
thoughtless; I can almost forgive those proselytisers who go out to convert because they firmly believe in the 'one true path', but to simply force people to abandon their own beliefs for the sake of bureaucracy...... well, it's heart-breaking.
There are more anecdotes from my arrival in Madobak, but they will have to wait for another less narratively busy part of the thread. Suffice to say I really couldn't wait to continue my journey in the morning. There would be another relatively early start as we would be trekking into the forest to stay with those who still choose the traditional way of living. Obviously we had seen very little wildlife so far, but that should all be set to change....
