Heyward Mark Bowden Tim - Crazy Little Heaven: Travels in Indonesia, a Journey Through Life

crazy little heaven

an indonesian journey

crazy little heaven

an indonesian journey

MARK HEYWARD

Foreword by Tim Bowden

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

www.transitlounge.com.au

Copyright Mark Heyward 2013

All rights reserved

First Published 2013

Transit Lounge Publishing

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Cover and book design: Luke Harris/Chameleon Design

Printed on woodfree paper in Indonesia through Red Planet Print Management

A cataloguing entry for this title is available from the

National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

ISBN: 978-1-921924-59-0 (e-book)

For my father

who, with my mother,

raised me for a life worth living

We are all gods, in this crazy little heaven

CONTENTS

DAY ONE: SAMARINDA TO MELAK

T hey say that if a man drinks alone he is an alcoholic. But what if he drinks with the sunset, with the lonely forest or the moonlit ocean? What if he drinks with the angels, with the prophets or with God? What then?

Lying back, I rest my head and let life take its own course for a while. Our journey is underway. The constant throb of a large diesel motor pervades the riverboat, punctuated by the chatter of day-old chickens in cardboard boxes and the tinsel beat of Indonesian dangdut music played, perhaps, to keep the young man who steers us upstream from falling asleep.

Day one of the expedition began inauspiciously. Woken by a predawn chorus of giant cicadas, in a sleepy muddle I thought I was listening to an alarm sounding in the adjacent room. Stumbling around in the dark collecting scattered clothes, it was some time before I realised that I was up an hour earlier than necessary. When the team surfaced and we collected our wits over coffee in the early light on Fergies front porch, it was not a pretty sight. Fergie, a rusty-haired larrikin from Australia, was one of a handful of expatriates living in Samarinda. On the night before our departure he had insisted on a traditional send-off, which turned out to be an after-hours tour of Samarinda. This followed a lengthy trip south along jungle tracks and rough roads from Sangatta the previous day.

Fronting up for the flight from Sangatta that afternoon, the pilot had informed us that weight restrictions meant we could not board with our luggage. The protracted debate that followed was characterised by the silence and foot shuffling of would-be passengers waiting for a solution to be provided by God, Allah or some other agency. Eventually, when the standard Indonesian solution of ejecting the passenger of lowest status was rejected by the more egalitarian Australian contingent, the deadlock was broken and I found myself travelling the five hours south with Tim in a typically dilapidated Kijang car. The other two members of our party took the half-hour flight, promising to purchase final supplies from the markets of Samarinda.

In any event, as I looked around at the characters who were to share my life for three weeks in the inlands of Kalimantan, I wondered anew at the tricks and surprises that fate can spring.

Vonie Anto, the only Indonesian member of our group, was in the best shape that morning, having slept soundly and woken with a clear head. Vonie was a fit thirty-year-old from Yogyakarta in Java with a serious disposition that I hoped to crack on the trip.

Tim Harrington, also in his early thirties, was a fellow Tasmanian. Tim approached every aspect of his life with a fierce intensity; work, travel, sport and, on occasions, drinking. His was the kind of old-style mateship that may have become unfashionable but is probably still at the heart of the Australian character.

The fourth member of our unlikely team was Ray Rutherford. Ray was a mad old Irish-Australian with weathered features and a taste for adventure who put his hand up to join us in the week before we left. In the early morning light his eyes still managed their characteristic Irish twinkle and a promise of mischief and roguery that I knew would enliven our trip.

I first came to Indonesia in 1992 to join a group of Tasmanian teachers in the coastal jungles of East Kalimantan. I expected an adventure but did not know the extent to which Indonesia would change my life. Tanjung Bara International School was established by the Tasmanian Education Department for Kaltim Prima Coal to serve the children of expatriate miners. It was an anomaly, the result of a chance meeting on a plane between a mining executive and an entrepreneurial government official; a primary school staffed with Tasmanian teachers, stocked with Tasmanian education supplies, teaching a modified Tasmanian curriculum in a remote jungle community in Indonesian Borneo. Imagine a small school on Tasmanias isolated west coast, heated up, humidified and transplanted halfway across the globe with all the resources of an international mining company to support it. It was a great little school and life in Sangatta was a blast.

Access was via a twenty seat Casa from the nearest commercial airport, an hours flight away in Balikpapan. Every day brought new experiences. Wild orangutans nested in the trees and from time to time raided gardens to taste the fruit and young palms, on rare occasions disturbing classes as they romped through the playground. Sunrise was frequently accompanied by a chorus of hooting gibbons. Hornbills flew overhead, their great wings thumping the moist air. I saw a sunbird the size of a fingernail and wood-eating bees the size of a thumb. A two-metre monitor lizard scampered through the school yard and huge saltwater crocodiles lurked in the mangroves. The evening sky sometimes crowded with fruit bats leaving their island roosts and on one occasion we surprised a pod of giant whale sharks cruising the tideline offshore.

A short distance up the coast, off the island of Miang Besar, I first encountered Indonesias indescribably beautiful marine life. Iridescent blue fish zipped this way and that, a warm and frothy ocean playing gently over the islands coral garden. The water sparkled, clearer than air. Little clown fish flitted about between rubbery green fingers of anemone waving back and forth in the swell. Giant clams opened their purple mouths in the deep, eels peered from holes in marine walls, reef sharks dozed beneath fan corals and the occasional turtle flapped lazily past. I thought I was in some kind of heaven.

Back on the shaky wooden jetty leading to the islands village, I met a man with eleven fingers and learned that the islands produce consisted of fish, coconuts, bananas and oil. The villagers of Miang Besar had their own oil well, and the oil that it produced was put to use, unrefined, to fuel their boats. Great plumes of dense black smoke were visible from miles away as the villagers chugged up and down the coast in their wooden vessels; thud-thud-thud-thud.

Sangatta, an isolated mining town fifty kilometres north of the equator, sat on the mangrove fringed east coast of Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. From my deck I could catch the afternoon sea breezes and watch bulky coal ships come and go. The small town looked out to the balmy waters of the Makassar Straits that stretched to Sulawesi in the east. And pressing in behind us, vast, steamy tropical rainforests stretched away to the west.

These wild and largely unexplored forests were home to the orangutan, clouded leopard, sun bear, reticulated python, gibbon and nomadic Punan Dayak groups. For the most part there were no roads and the only practical means of travel inland was by boat along the huge river systems that for centuries have provided the only link between the upriver Dayak tribes and the Chinese and Malay peoples of the coast.