Sumatra's Forgotten Lake

 

Exploring Danau Ranau in the mountains of Southern Sumatra

 

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 17/06/12

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/danau-ranau-sumatras-forgotten-lake/524571

Soft sunlight cuts through the forest, and the road winds around another steep hillside.  It is three hours since the minibus left the scruffy town of Baturaja, straddling the Trans-Sumatra Highway, and I am nearing my destination.  Houses appear between the trees – sturdy, shuttered buildings of weathered timber, rising above the ground on stilts – and then, as the road begins to roll downhill, the lake appears – a sheet of smooth steel-grey water ringed by a rampart of green ridges in the very heart of the Bukit Barisan range.  Welcome to Danau Ranau, Sumatra’s forgotten mountain lake.

***
            Danau Ranau lies some 340km from Palembang.  It is a crooked 16km-long lozenge of water, straddling the Lampung-South Sumatra border and surrounded by lush upland landscapes.  But while Sumatra’s other mountain lakes – Toba in the north and Maninjau in the west – have long earned a place on travelers’ itineraries, Ranau lies far from beaten track.  I have braved the rattling bus ride to see what the place has to offer.
            I get down from the bus in the sleepy little lakeside township of Banding Agung and I am soon comfortably installed on the terrace of a little guesthouse, sipping sweet black coffee and chatting with the owner, a retired policeman called Armando.
            The view of the lake is magnificent.  From the bottom of Armando’s stony garden the unruffled water rolls away under a pearly evening sky.  Tiny fishing canoes creep across the surface, dark figures silhouetted in the sterns.  On the far shore the hillsides drop steeply down to the water, and the smooth cone of Gunung Seminung, Ranau’s 1881-metre guardian peak, rises towards the high clouds.  Like Sumatra’s other mountain lakes, Ranau is the flooded crater of a huge volcano.  But according to local legend, Armando tells me, it was formed when a huge tree toppled over and water gathered in the hollow left by the roots.
            The panorama is certainly worthy of a long journey, but Armando tells me that tourists are a rarity.  He blames the provincial government for Ranau’s low profile:  “They haven’t built any tourism objects here,” he says.  But it seems to me that isolation rather than a lack of concrete facilities and car parks has kept these waters undisturbed.  As darkness falls and the blank sky gives way to a thin speckling of stars I am rather glad that I have the place to myself.

***

In the watery sunlight of the morning I set out along a forest trail to explore the countryside west of Banding Agung.  Men on ramshackle motorbikes come slithering past with shotguns over their shoulders.  They are heading for the coffee and cacao plantations that stud the hillsides – agriculture is the mainstay here – and the guns are to ward off visitors from the deep forest: Armando has told me that a few tigers still haunt the more remote shores of Ranau, turning up from time to time in the plantations.

I pass beneath shady stands of bamboo, and through neat little stilt-house hamlets, where barefoot children play football on muddy fields.  The lake drops in and out of view, glimpses of grey water showing between high green headlands.

One of the gaggles of football-playing kids abandon their game and appoint themselves my impromptu guides, leading me up a boulder-studded slope to a waterfall.  Cool water plunges over the mossy black rocks into dark pools, and the hillside is knotted with creepers.  It starts to rain, and the children lead me back down the slope to take shelter in the house of a local farmer called Udin.  He is originally from Java, he tells me, but he has been here for 30 years and now speaks the local Ogan language better than his Javanese mother tongue.

It is almost dark when I get back to Banding Agung, and Armando tells me he was about to send out a search party: he was worried that I had been eaten by a tiger.

***

The next day I borrow a motorbike from Armando’s son, Ateng, and set out to explore the more distant corners of the lake.  A breeze is blowing today, rumpling the surface and slapping small wavelets onto the little beaches that edge the lake.

In the hamlet of Pusri I find a hotel, apparently built during a bout of ambitious speculation over Ranau’s tourism potential.  There are impressive bungalows built on stilts over the water’s edge, but when I rouse a member of staff to show me around I find the paint peeling and the timber cracked.  Guests are a rarity, he tells me.

I ride onwards, crossing the border between South Sumatra and Lampung provinces and stopping for lunch in the scrappy little town of Kota Batu at the easternmost inlet of the lake.  My meal is a plate of grilled mujair, a large, carp-like fish with a mesh of grey-gold scales that thrives in Ranau’s clear waters.

Beyond the town I skirt the flanks of Gunung Seminung and head out along the southern shore.  The afternoon has brought bright sunlight and the lake is blue under a clear sky.  Eventually the road begins to give way to a rutted track, so I turn back.  But before I return to Kota Batu I take a detour, intrigued by a glossy signboard pointing along a narrow side-road.  It leads to an unexpectedly lavish development – Hotel Seminung Lumbok.  The place seems to be deserted.  A few brown cows are grazing in the children’s play area, and a troop of black monkeys eye me suspiciously from the trees.

Eventually I rouse the only member of staff on duty, a young man called Jamie.  He tells me that the hotel is owned by the West Lampung regency government.  It was opened in 2007.  I ask if there are many guests.

He shakes his head: “The hotel is owned by the government, so the only guests are government people.  There are no tourists because there’s no promotion.”

***

Back at Kota Batu I park my bike and take a local ferry across the bay to a hot spring that Armando told me about.  The springs stand at the very foot of Gunung Seminung, and as we draw in to the landing stage I catch a smell of sulfur rising from the turquoise-tinted surface of the lake. 

A pool has been walled off around the springs, where clear water bubbles from the fractured rocks.  It is deliciously hot.  I share the waters with a local woman and her son, who have stopped off for a bath on the way home from the chili fields up on the slopes of the mountain.  It’s a three hour walk to reach the summit, she tells me.

I can just make out the rusting roofs of Banding Agung on the far shore, and closer at hand the little islet of Pulau Marisa.  According to local legend the island was the upshot of the efforts of a pair of rival suitors for a mythical local princess, Putri Aisah.  To win the lady’s hand the two heroes were challenged to build a bridge from the hot springs across the lake to Banding Agung.  They were convinced they could do it, but rather like those who would install upscale hotels on the lake’s shores, they were suffering from a surfeit of ambition.  Little Pulau Marisa was all they managed to build.  Thanks to their failure I have to go the long way back to the guesthouse. 

Tomorrow I will be heading back to civilization, but the bus ride will be worthwhile, for Ranau has proved a fine and tranquil spot.  Had it lain closer to a major city it could have been as famous as Lake Toba.  But for now it is a well-kept secret, locked in the green heart of southern Sumatra.

© Tim Hannigan 2012

A Pilgrim on the Holy Slopes of Gunung Penanggungan

Climbing Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/10/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/travel/a-pilgrim-on-the-holy-slopes-of-gunung-penanggungan/333875

The forest was silent in the gray pre-dawn light and the stone slabs at the edge of the bathing tank were slippery underfoot. Someone had been here ahead of me, for there was already a scent of incense in the air, and a fistful of pink petals in the green niche beside the waterspout, but for now I was alone. I undressed and dropped into the icy, chest-deep water. This was the sacred bathing place at the Jolotundo temple on the forested western slopes of Gunung Penanggungan. Suppressing a shiver I did what countless pilgrims before me had done and bowed my head under the stream of cold, clear water pouring from mouth of an algae-covered gargoyle, then clambered out, dressed and set out uphill towards the summit.

***

Gunung Penanggungan stands sentinel on the northern fringes of East Java’s volcanic hinterland; on a clear day you can see its smooth purple cone from the shopping malls of Surabaya. This 1653-meter mountain was long considered one of Java’s most sacred peaks. According to legend, when Hinduism arrived in Indonesia Mount Meru, the home of the gods, was shifted from the Himalayas to Java. Unsurprisingly the mountain suffered some damage during transit. The base broke away to form Gunung Semeru, Java’s highest peak, while the top fell 60 kilometers to the northwest to become Penanggungan.
My journey – by motorbike – had begun the previous day at another sacred bathing place, Candi Belahan, on Penanggungan’s eastern slopes. This temple dates from the late 11th Century, and is said to be the memorial of the great King Airlangga of the Sanjaya Dynasty. To find it I had branched off the howling Surabaya-Malang highway, and within minutes was deep in the Javanese countryside. The temple’s rather racy local name is Candi Tetek, the “Breasts Temple”, and the reason is obvious: the water that feeds the shallow pool here emerges in two ceaseless streams from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. When I arrived a pair of truck drivers were unashamedly soaping themselves under this ancient power-shower.
“Come on mister!” they called to me; “take a bath, the water’s good here!” To their disappointment I only dipped my toes in the pool before heading on along rising roads through the little hill resorts of Tretes and Trawas. To the south the towering slopes of the Arjuno-Welirang volcano massif swept away into dark cloud; to the north Penanggungan itself stood stark above the concertinaed rice terraces.
At the end of a steep, potholed track through the trees I came to Candi Jolotundo. This temple is the oldest and most sacred on the mountain, and also the best starting point for the climb to the summit. Built in 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions suggest that it was the royal bathing place of Airlangga’s father, Udayana, king of the old unified Balinese kingdom that once held sway over east Java.
I could smell the incense and hear the sound of running water even before I saw the temple. It was set into a steep, forested hillside behind a pool full of huge, slow-moving fish. In a deep, walled-in tank three men were bathing, but they were not merely washing themselves like the truck drivers I had seen earlier. They stood upright, heads bowed and palms pressed together in prayer. Incense sticks fumed in the damp recesses of the façade and an offering of petals floated in the water. On the temple’s central platform a young man in a white tee shirt was meditating, eyes closed, the afternoon sunlight slanting through the forest behind him.
One of the bathers emerged shivering from the tank.
“Is it cold?” I asked
“It’s not too bad if you jump straight in,” he replied. His name was Rozi. He lived in Surabaya and often came to the temple with his friends. “The water is good,” he said, “and it’s a good place to meditate. You can be close to god here.”
Another man, Aji, sitting in the shade of a pavilion nearby said that he drove up here from his home in Sidoarjo almost every day. He had a problem with his shoulder, “But after bathing here, it doesn’t hurt,” he said. Both Aji and Rozi were Muslims.
“This used to be a Hindu place,” said Aji, “but now it’s universal.” Nonetheless, the incense and the petals were still a strong echo of Hinduism.
“You should take a bath,” said Aji; “it will make you strong!”

I would need my strength to climb the mountain the next day, so I decided to take his advice. I spent the night a kilometer downhill from the temple at PPLH, an environmental educational center which also has eight neat little bungalows for visitors, and then, after that strengthening early morning dip at the temple, I headed for the summit.
The trail led through cool forest, then across a stretch of terraces studded with pale green banana plants. Ahead, the bald yellow summit of the mountain rose; to the left was the rocky outcrop of Bekel, one of Penanggungan’s four smaller outlying peaks.
Beyond the patch of farmland the trail rose into dense undergrowth. I was dripping with sweat by the time I came to the first temple. This was nothing more than a pair of small masonry stumps, but further on I came to another temple, this one a series of five basalt platforms rising to a crooked altar. Still higher up, on the saddle of land between Bekel and the main mountain, I found another three ancient places of worship. Struggling through the undergrowth I felt a little like Indiana Jones, but all of these places were well cared for. The surrounding vegetation had been cleared, and petals and ash showed that someone was still worshipping here.
There are at least 81 temples scattered around these slopes. Most date not from the time of Udayana and Airlangga but from the later Majapahit Kingdom. After the collapse of Majapahit the mountain was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak and the temples fell into disuse. They were “discovered” by European archeologists in the 1930s, though local villagers had always known about many of them.
Beyond the last temple – Candi Sinta – the scrub fell back. The trail here was a steep, ragged thread of yellow soil across slopes blackened by a recent wildfire. I had been hiking for almost two hours now and the sun was high overhead. Glancing back I could see the forests and fields of the lower slopes fading into a sea of yellow haze. A hot wind was whipping the dust into the sky and high above a dark-winged eagle turned on a thermal.
The slope grew steeper and steeper, and the ground rougher and rougher, but finally, sweating and gasping, I made it to the summit with its sunken crater. The mountain was adrift in the haze, but as I sat catching my breath the faint, dreamy sound of a traditional gamelan orchestra drifted up from what must have been a village wedding somewhere in the trees below.
The summit was a bleak and windy place of dry yellow grass, marked with the empty cigarette packets and burnt-out campfires of other hikers, but sitting there, listening to the distant gamelan and thinking of the cool water pouring into the pool at the Jolotundo temple – where I would certainly be taking another bath after my descent – the ancient idea that this was the home of the gods didn’t seem quite so farfetched.

© Tim Hannigan 2009

Ampel: The Holy Heart of Surabaya

The Arab Quarter of Surabaya

Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, December 2008

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/12/12/ampel-the-holy-heart-surabaya.html

The light falls in dusty sheets and the alleyway smells of perfume and rosewater. Narrow tables are piled with bundles of cloth and bags of pistachios. There are stacks of Arabic books; colored prayer beads hang from racks above doorways, and ranged along counters are glass jars full of sticky, amber-black dates from the palm groves of Tunisia and Iraq. The traders, sipping tea or frowning over account books, are Arabs; tall men with the bruise of devout prayer on their foreheads. But this is not Marrakech or Damascus; this is Ampel, the very heart of the Javanese city of Surabaya.

Ampel, sometimes known as the Arab Quarter, lies north of throbbing tangle of highways and shopping malls at the modern centre of the East Java capital. It is surrounded by the old parts of what was once the principal city of the Dutch East Indies: Chinatown, the Pabean Market, and the Kalimas harbor. But it is Ampel, or rather the mosque of the same name, that is the oldest place of all. The first record of a settlement named Surabaya comes from the mid-14th Century, and the Ampel Mosque, dating from 1421, is the oldest identifiable point in the city, the hub from which a metropolis has grown.
The mosque was built by Sunan Ampel, one of the Wali Songo, the nine, semi-mythical holy men who spread Islam in Java. According to the standard history, Sunan Ampel came from the Champa kingdom of southern Vietnam. His father was a wandering Arab Sayyid, and his aunt was a Cham princess who married the Hindu king Brawijaya of the Javanese Majapahit Empire. Following his aunt to Java, Sunan Ampel was given land on the banks of the Kalimas River where he built a mosque and set about converting the locals. His descendents eventually helped to topple Majapahit.
An alternative theory suggests that Sunan Ampel was a Chinese Muslim, but this is a controversial claim. And it is best not mentioned in the alleyways of the quarter that takes the Sunan’s name; here sometimes even his Champa connection is excised, making him a pure Yemeni Arab.

Close to the port, Ampel became a ghetto for later foreign Muslims who arrived in Surabaya. The earliest Dutch maps of the city record it as a Malay, rather than Javanese, area. But there were not only Malays in the teeming alleyways around the mosque. Acehnese and Ambonese settled here, as did Bugis and Bajo from Sulawesi. More exotic immigrants came from further a field – Indians, Persians and Chinese Hui Muslims. But the people who truly made the area their own were the Arabs.

There have been Arab trading communities in the ports of Southeast Asia for centuries. Today the names of the shops that line Jalan Sasak, the anteroom of Ampel, hint at a past of spice, sandalwood and cargoes bound for Aden: Mesir, al Hudah, Ma’ruf, Abu Yaman.
An elderly Arab named U’ess who owns a shop selling sarongs on Jalan Sasak says that his grandfather arrived in Surabaya in the early years of the 20th Century.
“They came for business. They sold cloth and sugar,” he says, explaining that most of Surabaya’s Arabs trace their ancestry to Yemen, a poor place from which there was good reason to emigrate. U’ess is also quite certain that Sunan Ampel was a Yemeni.
Two doors down another Arab named Usman says his family have been in Indonesia for many centuries; his own parents came to Surabaya not directly from Yemen, but from the old spice-trading Arab community in Ambon.
“Ampel is not only for Arabs,” says Usman; “it’s mixed. There are Malays and Bugis. Most of the people here are immigrants, but it is the Arabs who are famous.”

And the Arab shopkeepers of Ampel trade on their fame. The whole area functions as a religious emporium, the place to go for anything remotely Islamic from a carved Pakistani Qu'ran stand to a bag of Tunisian dates to break the Ramadan fast.
The centre of this commerce is the narrow alley known as Jalan Ampel Suci, a classic Middle Eastern-style souq or covered bazaar. Roofed in against dry season heat and wet season rain, and lined with hole-in-the-wall shops selling all manner of exotic goods, it could be a back alley of Cairo.

Surabaya’s Arabs may have kept the exotic atmosphere of their neighborhood, but most use Indonesian as their daily language. A teenage shopkeeper on Jalan Ampel Suci named Abu Bakar claims that Arabic is his first language. But a jab in the ribs from his assistant, a Javanese girl called Fitria, prompts a sheepish grin.
“I do know Arabic,” he insists, “but not one hundred percent yet. All Arabs must learn Arabic, but it’s very difficult…”
Abu Bakar and Fitria argue for a minute about the origins of Sunan Ampel, but eventually repeat the official line: he was half-Arab, half-Cham.

The souq runs north for 200 dark, perfumed meters before opening into the sunlight of the mosque courtyard. The Ampel Mosque is no longer the largest in Surabaya, but it is the most sacred. The old teak-wood core is hidden beneath later extensions; shining expanses of marble floor open at the head of white steps beneath tall, lighthouse-like minarets, and between prayers, people snooze in the cool interior where fugitive breezes cut the tropical heat.
But the real focus of this place is not the mosque but the cemetery that lies in its shadow. Here, beneath hibiscus and frangipani trees, a world away from Arab traders and formal prayers, is the grave of Sunan Ampel himself. There is a murmur of voices here, quieter but more insistent than the shrill wailing from the loudspeakers on the minarets. Sitting cross-legged amongst the tombstones are dozens of people, each making their own private prayer to the Sunan, or to the members of his family enshrined nearby. And these people are almost all Javanese pilgrims. The Wali Songo are hugely important for traditional Javanese Muslims, and people travel long distances to visit their tombs, places where the currents of older powers meet with those of Islam.
This graveyard is the sacred heart of Surabaya. It is also strangely paradoxical: the tomb of a Cham-Arab, or possibly a Chinese Muslim, the oldest point of the city, surrounded by a neighborhood of Yemeni Arabs, and yet a place that is uniquely Javanese.

A small man with a thin moustache and a green sarong is leaning against the wall at the back of the graveyard. He is in his early forties and he comes from Cirebon in West Java. His name is Wayudi. He has traveled here as part of an organized tour, stopping in Demak and Kudus along the way, visiting the sacred graves of the Wali Songo.
“The Wali Songo are special for everyone in Java,” he says. “They were the first Muslims.” For Wayudi the mosque, the souq and the Arabs are not important; it is the tomb that matters: “If you pray at the graves it can make you happy and successful. All Javanese people know this.”
And Wayudi is quite sure that Sunan Ampel was neither Chinese, Cham or Arab. “He was Javanese,” he says.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Salt of the Earth

The Nyadar Ceremony in Eastern Madura


Originally published in Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, October 2008


http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/26/salt-the-earth.html


The village of Pinggir Papas is deserted. It is a stark place, near Sumenep in the far east of Madura, surrounded by a patchwork of glittering white salt pans, a barren and strangely wintry landscape, despite the fiery breeze.
Almost every adult in the village works in salt manufacture, a major industry here for centuries. On a normal day there would be dozens of figures at work out on the pans, raking over the drying crystals, shrouded against the blazing sun. But on this Friday afternoon in August there is no one, and in the village itself flimsy wooden doors are bolted and windows shuttered. The people of Pinggir Papas have important matters to attend to elsewhere.

The Nyadar ritual of Pinggir Papas is held three times each year between July and October, with dates specified according to the stages of the moon. The biggest ceremony comes in mid-August. The ritual is connected by legends to the coming of Islam, the founding of the salt industry and a history of warfare. It is at the heart of the salt makers’ identity.

The afternoon sun is dropping away to the west and the light is taking a copper-colored glow. The villagers are gathered on the banks of a muddy river that runs through the mangroves west of Pinggir Papas, the men dressed in sarongs and black pecis, the women carrying cloth-wrapped baskets. They are waiting for the fishing boats that will ferry them to the far shore, for Nyadar, though it is celebrated only by the people of Pinggir Papas, is held in the neighboring community of Kebun Dadap where the ancestors of the salt-makers are buried.
The ancestral tombs stand in a neat courtyard above the river. Kebun Dadap lies beyond the salty wastes of Pinggir Papas and here frangipani trees with sugar-white flowers break the fading sunlight. Red-tiled roofs and neatly painted white and green walls shelter the resting places of revered forebears. Most important of these is a man named Angga Suto.
Angga Suto – a local leader at some unspecified time in the early Second Millennium – is credited with both introducing Islam to Pinggir Papas, and inventing salt production. The story tells that he discovered the process after noticing that the seawater that filled his footprints in the clinging mud around the village evaporated to leave a crust of salt crystals. A commemoration of this man, and a thanksgiving for the salty prosperity of Pinggir Papas, is the focus of the Nyadar ritual.

Kebun Dadap, a village of simple white bungalows, is crowded. Nyadar is the most important time of year for the people of Pinggir Papas, and even those who have joined the huge Madurese diaspora return home for the celebration.
On a shaded pavilion outside the tomb compound, women are working to blend packages of leaves and petals – offerings for the ancestors – into one sacred mass. Each family has brought their own package, but it is handed over and added to the communal pile.
As evening approaches the crowd gathers before the gateway to the tombs. A dozen old men and women – direct descendents of the people buried here – hurry inside the compound to undertake secretive preparatory prayers. Overhead the sky is clear and pale and a full moon floats between the stands of bamboo.
A kyai – a village religious leader – conducts the waiting crowd through a chant of simple Arabic – la il aha il Allah – more and more urgently and insistently until the elders reemerge. Then the most dramatic element of Nyadar erupts: a hell-for-leather rush to enter the complex. All the usual conventions of deference collapse as men, women, young and old struggle to run through the narrow gateway and across the outer courtyard in search of a prime position within the inner sanctum. People push and shove, stumbling over gravestones and dragging others down with them. It looks more like a rugby scrum than a religious ceremony.
Once everyone is inside, a low hum of prayer begins to rise from the crowd. Offerings of petals and leaves are placed before the headstones, the tombs are doused with holy water from old brass pitchers, and villagers dab their ears and foreheads with rice-water – a strange echo of Hindu practice.
As darkness falls people filter back out and into the village and a bustling night market gets underway, the alleyways a mass of hissing paraffin lamps and glowing faces. But the people of Pinggir Papas do not return home. Instead they seek shelter in the houses of the Kebun Dadap locals – who play no other part in the Nyadar ceremonies – and begin to prepare for the second stage of the ritual.

***

The hint of Hindu practice in the Nyadar ritual may be more than a coincidence. Locals in Sumenep say that the people of Pinggir Papas speak an unusual dialect that “sounds like Balinese”.
According to legend, in the 1560s a Balinese army attacked Sumenep. A fleet of warships landed and Balinese soldiers torched fishing villages and advanced on the capital. But the Madurese defenders were victorious; the Balinese ships and camps were destroyed. Many of the invaders killed themselves rather than face defeat, but one small band fled from the battlefield to Pinggir Papas where they were given refuge on condition that they converted to Islam.

***

Saturday; the morning after the night before. The stalls of the night market have been cleared away; the alleyways of Kebun Dadap are silent and the villagers have returned to the area around the tombs. The ground is covered with upturned red and black baskets. During the night the Pinggir Papas people cooked a ceremonial meal of rice, chicken and eggs. This food, an offering to God and the ancestors, has been heaped on the platters known as panjeng that are the most important heirlooms of each Pinggir Pappas family. The red and black baskets have been placed over this food and the final stage of Nyadar is about to begin.
A group of elders in Balinese-style head-cloths enter the tomb compound to pray while the other villagers wait in the rising heat. Four ancient men are moving through the crowd. They are dressed in harlequin waistcoats dappled with rag-bag patches of color. On their heads are twists of gold and black batik. The hereditary duty of these men, called Pangolo, is to count the rice offerings.
As the elders return from the tombs everyone takes their place on the open ground under the trees, sitting cross-legged amongst the rice baskets, hands cupped in prayer. At the centre of the crowd the Kyai leads the ceremony, his head bowed. Clasped to his chest is a bulky object wrapped in tattered red cloth. It is said to be the sacred weapon of Angga Suto himself. The Kyai mutters a string of prayers and mantras. Fragments of different holy languages drift through the air: Arabic, Sanskrit and old Javanese.
When these prayers are finished the plates of rice – now imparted with the blessings of Nyadar – are uncovered and a chaos of chatter erupts as people hurriedly scoff a few symbolic mouthfuls. Then, with almost the same urgency that they rushed the tombs the night before, the rice is covered, wrapped and lifted onto heads and shoulders. The villagers dash to the river bank, eager to return to Pinggir Papas where the rice will be dried in the hot sun and a little added to the cooking pot each day throughout the coming year to ensure success and prosperity. Within half an hour Kebun Dadap is deserted, only a few scraps of leaves and paper to mark where the ritual took place.

For the people of Pinggir Papas the Nyadar ceremony is a celebration of their unusual heritage. Like so much in Indonesian religious practice, currents of older traditions run through it. For the locals however, Nyadar is very much part of Islam and the fact that their Hindu ancestors became Muslims as a condition of their asylum is an important point. But they are proud of their Balinese connection.

As the crowds disappear into the morning one Pinggir Papas man named Munir is still sitting in the shade of the pavilion in the graveyard, watching them go. He says that Nyadar is a sign of respect for the village ancestors, the leluhur, the people who came from Bali.
“Nyadar is the most important thing for Pinggir Papas people. Everyone must follow it, even if they have already left the village,” he says.
But Munir is not rushing back across the river to Pinggir Papas: he has lived in Kebun Dadap for a decade.
“My wife is from Kebun Dadap,” he says with a smile. “The Kebun Dadap people don’t join Nyadar, but there’s a connection between us because we stay in their village on the night of Nyadar.”
On that long murky night more than a few pairs of shy eyes meet over rice pots and panjeng. “There are lots of marriages between Pinggir Papas and Kebun Dadap people,” says Munir, grinning.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

The Place of White Wood

Fictional short story

Originally published in The Jakarta Post, 12/10/08

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/12/short-story-the-place-white-wood.html


Three hundred years ago:

The coastline was long and pale and unmarked. A lean strip of sand faded in both directions and the branches of the trees behind it were white like bones. The schooner swung on its anchor rope in the running current beyond the turquoise of the shallows. They had ridden there through four tides; four times the flat stretch of grubby brown reef, picked over by white birds with long black legs, had opened between the boat and the hot shoreline, and four times it had been covered by bright, breeze-cut water.

The boy’s name was Salem. He was thirteen. He squatted on the warped planking of the deck where it swept towards the high white prow, squinting in the hard light, peering at the shore. The coarse ropes of the rigging slapped against the mast in the wind and the schooner smelt of tar and salt and sweat.
The other men, five of them, were sleeping through the white midday. They lay among the ropes and baskets at the rear of the deck. They were lean, sun-scarred men with thin, muscled arms and deep lines on their faces. They wore only short sarongs and white head cloths, bound loose over cropped black hair.
Salem squatted, and shaded his eyes and squinted at the long coastline. It was marked by nothing. There were no promontories or river mouths; no swelling headlands reared from the shore and there were no villages. But they were waiting for something.

His father called this blank coastline the Place of White Wood. Salem understood the name now as he looked out across the reef to the thin trees beyond the sand. They fronted a thicket of deep, dust-green, but their trunks and branches were the colour of the palest ash on the hearth in the morning. No hills or mountains rose inland and all that Salem could see of this unknown country was the empty beach and the white-boned trees.

Salem was of the Bugis people. They traded back and forth between the Islands in white boats. Salem’s father was born in Makassar and Salem was born in Bima. He had seen many ports before his tenth birthday, but he had never been this way before, had never travelled on the route his father had learnt from his grandfather: due south across empty ocean to the Place of White Wood.

The journey had been long. After Sumba the sun had beaten away to the north behind them and at night great smears of stars twisted above the schooner’s snapping rigging. Once, in the middle of the ocean, they passed a strange piece of shoal ground, all boiling white water under a wheeling chaos of seabirds. But beyond that there was nothing, and the trade wind chased them south and the men spoke less and the light was sharper every day. Salem came almost to believe that they were the last men on earth, aboard the last boat in the ocean. And then they smelt the land. It smelt of charcoal and honey.
They anchored off the edge of the shallow water and the schooner swung to the current and the rigging rattled in the breeze and the reef opened and closed and opened and closed in the tide.
“When will we go ashore?” Salem asked.
“Not yet,” said his father.

He watched the coastline and his eyes ached and flickers of darkness played at the edge of his vision. The slack of the high water at midday came and went and the flow of the tide changed and the dark blotches of the reef began to show in the shallows. And then, quite suddenly Salem saw the people.
First there was just one upright outline, black against the white of the sand at the water’s edge. Then another came slowly from the edge of the forest. Then another, and another, and two small ones, and another until there were nine of them: black silhouettes moving very slowly in the yellow heat. Salem could see no cloth and no colour; they looked like fragments of the blackest of the forest’s shadow that had broken free and drifted onto the salt-crusted shoreline.
Salem hissed through his teeth. “Look! Look! There are people!”
The men shifted and stretched among the ropes and baskets and Salem’s father hitched and retied his sarong, peering at the beach.
“We’ll go ashore now,” he said.

They paddled across the reef in a pair of small canoes, dipping the paddles into the bright water. The smell of charcoal and honey came stronger. The canoes ground onto the hot white beach and they stepped lightly over the hissing edge of the water. The black figures were standing in ragged formation on the sand, looking towards the Bugis.
“Come on,” Salem’s father said. Each sailor took one of the rough bundles from the canoes. “Go quietly,” he said, and they moved towards the black men, and came to stand before them in their own rough alignment.
“As-salaam aleikum,” Salem's father said.
The man standing before him did not reply. None of them replied.
Salem stared, shyly, nervously.
They were all naked – four men, three women, and two children, and they looked like no people Salem had ever seen. Their skin was the colour of coal dust and it did not shine in the sunlight. Their long arms hung loose at their sides; their thin legs bulged in odd places and their bodies formed heavy blocks against straight spines.
Salem’s father unwrapped the cloth bundle he carried. Inside were a pair of iron axes and a long-bladed knife for cutting cane. He held them out to the black man at the head of the group, who took them, handled them uncertainly, then passed them back to the others behind him. Salem’s father hissed and called the crewmen forward, taking each of the bundles, unwrapping them and passing what was inside to the naked stranger. There were more knives and axes, and some strips of good cloth, and blocks of rank tobacco. The black man handled each object, and passed each to his companions until all of the bundles had been unwrapped. Then without speaking or nodding or making any acknowledgement all nine turned and moved away slowly down the beach with their strange, bow-legged gait, carrying the gifts with them, axes and knives swinging loose at the end of long, thin arms.
The Bugis watched them go for a moment, blinking in the sunlight.
“We can work now,” said Salem’s father.

***

The tide was low in the evening and the whole reef was dry and flat and long. The sun had fallen away into the west over the empty ocean and the fading light had a purple tone. The wind had gone now and the sea was smooth offshore and the men were out on the reef, filling their baskets.
Salem was on the sand, cooking the fish they had caught over a fire beside the beached canoes. He had had to go a little way into the forest to collect the wood for the fire. The ground was dry underfoot and the branches were full of the calls of strange, unknown birds. The forest was open and he could have walked away into it quite easily. The trunks of the trees were white.
Salem’s father came up the beach from the edge of the reef with another basket of sea cumbers. They were strange things, neither animal nor fruit nor plant, but they fetched a good price with the Chinese traders of the Islands.
Salem’s father sat down beside him where he knelt to tend the fire. “Did you go into the forest?” he asked.
“Just a little way, not far.”
His father nodded. “Be careful in there.”
Further down the beach the black figures had appeared again, but they did not look towards the Bugis and they were moving away slowly along the coast in the other direction. The women walked along the very edge of the reef, pausing to pick at something from time to time; the two children trotted ahead of them. A pair of lean, yellow dogs came down out of the trees and loped behind them.
“What are these people called?” Salem asked, watching them go.
His father shook his head; “People of White Wood. I don’t know what they call themselves.”
They were just black shapes on the fading shore now. “They… they are people aren’t they?” Salem asked, uncertainly.
“Surely.”
“But they don’t have any villages? Any towns? Do they have kings?”
Again his father shook his head. “Nobody knows.”
The fire crackled and Salem turned the fish on the cross-branches he had rigged for cooking. There was a band of pale orange light along the horizon and the rigging of the schooner, riding offshore, was stark against the sky. Flocks of black birds were beating along the line of the coast. Salem glanced back at the forest. It was very dark now, but the trunks of the foremost trees were whiter than ever.
“What is behind the forest?” he asked.
“Nothing,” his father said, stretching out on the cooling sand. “My father told me that when our people first came here they went with the black men. They wanted to meet their king because they wanted to ask permission to work on this coast. The black men took them into the forest.”
“What happened?”
“They travelled for many, many days.”
“Did they meet the king?”
Salem’s father smiled. “There was no king. There was nothing but forest. It did not end; it went on forever. They travelled for many days, always in the forest. Sometimes they crossed shallow rivers, but the water was not good. My father said that when the black men made camp at night they did not even have blankets; they just slept on the ground with nothing to cover them.
“Eventually, when they were already far from the sea, our people realised that the black men were not taking them to their king, or to their village; they were not taking them anywhere: they just didn’t know how to tell our people to stop following them.”
The black people were just thin stick figures in the distant dusk now, still moving on down the beach away from them.
Salem nodded in the direction they were moving, “What is further on, along this coast? There must be ports or villages.”
His father reached out towards the fire – “Is that fish ready? Don’t burn it!” –then he looked on down the coastline and shook his head. “There is nothing. My father told me that this coastline goes on forever.”
The other Bugis were coming in off the reef now, lugging their loaded baskets of sea cucumbers towards the beach, following the good smell of the cooking fish.
“I don’t understand,” said Salem, watching them. “Our people are everywhere in the Islands. If this place has good fishing, and if there is no king, why don’t we build villages here?”
Salem’s father smiled and his teeth showed white in the smoky dusk. “Because,” he said, “this is not our country.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008