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

Walking on Fire

"Gunung Bagging" - climbing Indonesia's volcanoes

Originally Published in Trek and Mountain Magazine, June 2011

http://www.trekandmountain.com/ 

I huddle in the darkness, tucking my hands under my arms and shrinking down inside my jacket. Through the gloom I can see Maman squatting over the stove to boil water for coffee while Cokie sits shivering nearby. I flick the switch of my flashlight and scan the surrounding vegetation. It is three hours since we left the tea gardens, and somewhere along the rough, muddy, and agonisingly steep trail, we have passed beyond the tropics. There are no more broad-leafed banana plants or jungle creepers; we are now amongst gnarled, crooked trees draped with the wispy, blue-grey lichen known in Indonesia as jengot angin – “the beard of the wind”. It is an hour before dawn, and from a village mosque somewhere far, far below, the first prayer call rises, very faint, but unmistakable through the clear, cold air.

Ahead the trail continues, onwards and upwards towards the bare, 3173-metre summit of Gunung Dempo, Sumatra’s third highest peak, a mighty volcanic eminence towering over the Pamesah Highlands.

With the coffee finished we scramble to our feet, stamping and slapping our sides to get the blood moving again. I ask Maman, a local mountain fanatic who has climbed Dempo fifteen times, how much further we have to go. Two hours, he says – and the air is getting thinner with every step…

***

Indonesia is a land of volcanoes. A great, 4000-mile arc of shattered green land stretching across the equator, it owes its very existence to tectonic violence. It is part of “the Ring of Fire”, where the Pacific and Indian Ocean plates are forced beneath the thick crust of the Eurasian continental plate. The western and southern flank of the archipelago is one long line of fiery mountains – known as gunung in Indonesian. There are 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, more than in any other nation, and many more extinct and dormant peaks. The tallest – Kerinci in West Sumatra – stands 3805 metres above sea level.

But despite this plethora of peaks, most visitors come to Indonesia for beaches, coral reefs and culture. For those who do pack a pair of boots, however, this is probably the place where you can tick off more serious summits in a short space of time than anywhere else on earth. And with the recent categorisation of mountains with a prominence of at least 1000 metres into “Ribus” (from the Indonesian word for “thousand” – ribu), on criteria similar to those used internationally for Ultras, and in the UK for Corbetts and Grahams, there is now a target list for would-be trekkers. It runs to 222 summits – it’s time to start “gunung bagging”…

***

Volcanoes are not like other mountains. That might seem an obvious statement, given that nothing in the Scottish highlands has a steaming bowl of sulphurous smoke at its summit, but there’s more to it than that. Volcanoes are formed, not by a slow crumpling of the earth’s surface, but by a single upwelling of molten rock. Because of this they often stand alone, towering in a steep cone above low-lying flatlands to a height of several thousand metres. For this reason an attempt on an Indonesian volcano is usually a short, sharp shock. There is little chance for acclimatisation, and in the tropics temperatures drop dramatically as you rise. You can start the day sweating at sea level, and then finish off shivering in the sunset at close to 3000 metres. This makes the effects of altitude particularly pronounced (though the chance for swift descents means that AMS is not a major risk on even Indonesia’s highest volcanoes).

Most of Indonesia’s volcanoes are “trekking peaks”, demanding no technical skill or specialist equipment to scale. But have no doubt, it’s a tough business. Lower slopes are almost always cloaked with thick, steamy forest where mud, leeches, and dehydration are the main concerns. As you rise, however, temperatures drop to teeter on the brink of freezing point, and final ascents are often over soul-sapping scree. But the fact that an Indonesian peak high enough to be worthy of a ten-day trek elsewhere in the world can be the object of a weekend outing, or just one chapter of a multi-mountain trip, makes “gunung bagging” an addictive pastime, and the experience of standing at dawn on the brink of a gaping crater, high over a sea of pale, creamy cloud, is always something to relish.

***

There are well-trodden trails to the tops of Indonesia’s best-known peaks. You can summit many independently, and local guides are usually easy to find. The highest concentration of accessible mountains is in Java, the England-sized loadstone of the archipelago. Gunung Pangrango, 3019 metres tall and just 50 kilometres short of the seething capital, Jakarta, is one of the most popular for weekenders. In neighbouring Bali, meanwhile, the mighty 3142-metre Gunung Agung is easily accessible too.

All these mountains have clear trails, kept well-trodden by gangs of student hikers, and visiting trekkers from overseas. Most can be tackled in a single hit from the trailhead. True summits are usually simply the highest point of a crater rim, a gravelly patch above a great stony hollow, often holding a cobalt-blue lake or a steaming sulphur vent.

If smoke and sulphur add a certain frisson to the summit experience, they add a similar tension to daily life in Indonesian too. Volcano slopes – with their rich soils and wet microclimates – are the most fertile places in the archipelago, and red-roofed villages huddle high on the slopes. The risk of eruption is the pay-off for the fertile fields (Java’s Gunung Merapi erupted violently in 2010, killing several hundred people). The dominating character of the peaks has given them a place in Indonesia’s belief systems too. Local traditions often see the craters as the receptacles of the souls of village ancestors, and many peaks have taboos and traditions of animal sacrifice to appease the spirits.

As well as the wealth of one-day wonders there are mountains that demand a more sustained assault. Gunung Rinjani, towering over Bali’s eastern neighbour, Lombok, is Indonesia’s second highest volcanic mountain – at 3726 metres – and one of its very finest trekking peaks. Most people tackle the mountain over three or four days, summiting in the early hours of the morning on the second day before traversing the huge caldera and descending into the jungle. Another headline star in the ranks of Indonesia’s fire mountains is Semeru, Java’s highest peak, accessed by a three-day route across the wild Bromo-Tengger Massif.

But all of these mountains are just for starters. There are hundreds more – Inerie, Ile Boleng, and Tambora out amongst the islands of Nusa Tenggara, forgotten Javanese giants like Argopuro, and little-known peaks in Sulawesi and Maluku. And then there’s the 1200-mile, volcano-studded stretch of Sumatra, home to Kerinci, Marapi, Leuser and the mighty Gunung Dempo…

***

Two days have passed since I arrived in the little upland town of Pagaralam with my eye on Gunung Dempo. The mountain, rising sheer from the forests and plantations, swimming in and out of cloud, and casting a long shadow across the rice fields, is a tantalising prospect. But despite its huge height this is not one of Indonesia’s well known peaks, for it stands far from any of the major tourist trails, and seven hours by road from the regional capital, Palembang.

I had struggled to find information about routes to the summit before I arrived, but then, in a typically Indonesian piece of good luck, I ran into Maman. A serious 27-year-old trekker with an enviable string of Ribus under his belt, he grew up in the shadow of Gunung Dempo, and cut his teeth on its high slopes. He told me the he was planning to make yet another ascent the following day with a friend from Palembang, Cokie, and invited me to tag along. We made our way by motorbike to a ramshackle climbers’ hut, 1000 metres above sea level on the fringes of the huge state-owned tea estate that skirts Dempo, spent the evening drinking endless cups of coffee, and then two hours after midnight – following traditional Indonesian practice of aiming to summit at dawn – we set out along one of the toughest forest trails I’d ever seen.

And so now here I am, struggling up through the thinning trees, lungs burning and thighs throbbing, reaching for withered branches to support myself, as thin, pearly daylight begins to leach out over a vast, inverted cloudscape. The last of the forest gives way to stunted scrub, and knuckles of grainy rock replace the tangled roots of the lower trail. We’re just short of Dempo’s false summit, Maman says, so we stop to watch a steely sun slip into a pale sky cut with skeins of charcoal cloud. Dempo stands just three degrees south of the equator, but at 3000 metres in a sharp breeze it is shockingly cold, and with sunrise over we press on, crossing the false summit – an unprepossessing hillock cloaked in tangled bushes – then dropping to a small plateau before making the final slog up a stony slope to the crater rim.

The altitude is sapping all of our strength now, and we move silently, finding our own pace, searching out meandering paths over the rocks with short footfalls. And then, with a few final, staggering steps, I’m on the crater rim. A deep bowl of broken rock the colour of builders’ rubble opens below me with a blue-grey pool in its belly. The bitter wind is driving in from the northwest; shreds of cloud rush across the crater, and, with the rising sun at my back, for a moment a “glory” – my own swollen shadow ringed with a rainbow halo – shows on the far ridge.

Leaving Maman and Cokie huddling on the edge of the overhang I pick my way to the highest point of the rim, and look out on the surrounding panorama. Away to the west I can see the distant blue line of the Indian Ocean coast, backed by descending green ridges. In the east Pagaralam and the tea gardens are hidden beneath a sheet of cloud.

Another Ribu bagged, I think happily to myself. But beyond this crater I can see a long rank of other unnamed summits, and in the opposite direction the dark bulk of Gunung Patah – a wildly remote jungle peak that Maman pioneered just last year – shows above the cloud. There are plenty more still waiting to be climbed…

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Reaching Sumatra's Mountain Paradise

Pagaralam and Gunung Dempo, South Sumatra

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 31/05/11

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/reaching-sumatras-mountain-paradise/444298

 

Thin daylight is seeping out over Sumatra. I am just three degrees south of the equator, but high on the slopes of Gunung Dempo, it is bitterly cold. A sharp breeze is cutting through a sky streaked with cloud. Far below Pagaralam and the rest of the Pasemah Highlands are buried beneath a blanket of creamy haze, while away to the south the dark hulk of Gunung Patah looms from tiger-haunted forest.

It is almost four hours since we started our climb, struggling upwards through a tangle of roots and creepers, but now we have broken free of the tropical forest. Stunted bushes, strung about with the gray-green lichen known as jengot angin, “the beard of the wind”, dot these stony upper slopes, and we pause for a moment to watch a cold sun slip swiftly up over a vast inverted cloudscape.

My two companions – a local mountaineer called Maman, and a student hiker from Palembang called Cokie – shiver and thrust their hands deep into their pockets as we take in the view. Then we turn our backs to the panorama and pick our way onwards, upwards in the thinning air. Somewhere ahead, still out of view is the summit of Sumatra’s third highest mountain.

***

My first view of Gunung Dempo had come two days earlier, from the more benign environment of the ripening rice fields on the edge of the sleepy little upland town of Pagaralam. Rising 3173 meters from a fringe of forest, it was a tantalizing prospect. But before tackling the summit I wanted to explore the region that surrounded the peak – the Pasemah Highlands, a beautiful, but little visited corner of South Sumatra.

Seven hours west of the steamy provincial capital Palembang, the Highlands are surrounded by the mountains of the southern Bukit Barisan range, far from tourist trails and beaten tracks. Pagaralam, the only real town in the area, lies some 600 meters above sea level. There are tea gardens and strawberry farms. If this place was in Java it would swarm with city folk every weekend; as it is, I seemed to have it almost to myself.

In the 19th century the clans of the Highlands had a ferocious reputation for hostility to outsiders, but things seem to have changed, for the villagers around Tanjung Aru, a hamlet of wooden houses on the outskirts of Pagaralam, were very friendly, and they pointed me in the direction of the region’s most famous and enigmatic attraction.

Carved megaliths dot the rice fields all over these South Sumatran uplands, hulks of rough basalt chiseled into the shapes of men, elephants, bulls and tigers. I found one of these carvings a little way outside Tanjung Aru. At first it seemed like a chaos of loops and ridges, weathered by centuries of monsoon rains. But as I stood back it resolved itself into the form of a man, locked in the coils of a huge serpent. No one knows who carved these strange statues, or for what purpose. The oldest are thought to date back some three thousand years.

The more recent buildings of the Pasemah Highlands are remarkable too. The next day, in the village of Pelang Kenida, south of Pagaralam, I saw some of the finest examples of traditional local architecture. The houses here were built of lengths of rough-cut timber, raised above the ground on stilts – a precaution from the days when wild tigers sometimes strayed into the settlements from the forest. The gables were topped with a V-shaped motif representing a set of buffalo horns, and the walls and buttresses were marked by long strips of floral patterning, and mandala-like whorls. Once all the houses in the region were decorated this way, the villagers told me, but today the old skills have been forgotten. The surviving carved houses are already half-a-century old, and when they succumb to rot and termites these traditions will be lost forever.

The art of woodworking for village houses might have been lost, but another craft is still in full swing on a narrow side-street in the Pagaralam market. In a string of little workshops artisans make the emblematic local dagger, the kuduk. Back in more bloodthirsty times these were used in warfare; today they are still an essential possession for a man of the Pasemah Highlands. In a dark, smoky space at the back of one of the workshops two men were hammering a glowing blade, fresh from the forge, into shape. Pausing from their work they told me that they can make about 15 of these knives in a day’s work.

***

Once I had toured the gentle countryside around Pagaralam, it was time to tackle that looming, unavoidable peak – Gunung Dempo. I had been lucky enough to cross paths with Maman, a local mountaineering fanatic. He told me that he had climbed volcanoes all over Indonesia, but Dempo was still his favorite. He was heading for the summit yet again with a student friend from Palembang, and he invited me to tag along.

The trailhead lay high above Pagaralam, on the edge of a vast tea estate. This estate was first established in the colonial era. The descendants of these Javanese transmigrants, shipped in by the Dutch to work on the plantation, still live in neat white villages amongst the tea bushes.

We spent the evening drinking coffee in a ramshackle mountaineers’ hut on the edge of the forest. As darkness fell and a pale moon rose over the highlands, Maman explained that for local people a sacred aura still surrounds the high slopes of Gunung Dempo. Like so many mountains in Indonesia it was traditionally viewed as the receptacle for the souls of departed ancestors, ruled over by a deity called Puyung Raja Nyawe. The Pasemah Highlands have long since converted to Islam, but a belief in evil spirit tigers still lingers. These beings, known as masumai, are said still to haunt the forests around the mountain; they can shape-shift, transforming themselves into beautiful women to lead travellers astray.

Unsurprisingly, Maman said, many locals are reluctant to climb the peak!

Watching out for shape-shifting ghost tigers we set out after midnight, following an agonizingly steep uphill trail into the jungle...

***

We have passed beyond the tropics now, and it is stunningly cold, even with the first light of dawn at our backs. As we cross the first, false summit – a low hillock in a dense thicket – and scramble down a steep slope beyond towards a stony plateau, studded with little cairns and clumps of wind-burnt bushes, I struggle to catch my breath in the thin air. Villagers sometimes make pilgrimages here to sacrifice goats and chickens to the mountain spirits, Maman says.

The summit is almost in reach now, but altitude and exhaustion are taking their toll, and the final ascent over stony slopes is painfully slow. And then, at last, we reach the crater rim, and a great bowl of broken rock with a pool of slate-gray water at its base opens below. Shreds of dark cloud streak past, and dust devils pirouette across the scree.

Away to the west, beyond a mesh of interlocking green ridges, I can make out the pale line of the Indian Ocean coast. North and south the long line of the Bukit Barisan Range runs on, and to the east the dense covering of cloud, blanketing Pagaralam and the tea gardens, is turning a coppery gold beneath the rising sun. It is a magnificent panorama, and as I stand there I am sure that the cold, the aching legs and the risk of marauding spirit tigers were all worthwhile. 

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Ghosts of Brittania

Searching for traces of the British Empire in Bengkulu, Sumatra

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/03/11

http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/archive/ghosts-of-britannia/

The little hilltop is thick with vegetation. To the east the dark hills of the Sumatran hinterland rise under banks of pearly cloud; to the west the wind-chased expanse of the Indian Ocean rolls away towards an empty horizon.

I scramble through the undergrowth, searching for some trace of the building that once stood on this riverside hillock on the outskirts of Bengkulu. There are fragments of brick and concrete, and here and there a chunk of rough-hewn limestone. Mosquitoes needle at my ankles and I beat a retreat to the bright sunlight.

A bulky middle-aged woman waddles across from a nearby house to ask what I’m looking for. Her name is Eni, and she tells me that the remnants of something do indeed stand on this overgrown hill in the Pasar Bengkulu district.

“Something from the Japanese era, or maybe from the Dutch era,” she says. The fragments of brick and concrete suggest that she might be right on both counts, but long before those foreign occupiers another nation flew its flag over the river here. This spot was the site of Fort York, the first British outpost in Bengkulu.

Bengkulu, occupying a little knuckle of land and presiding over a 400-kilometre sliver of coastal territory is modern Sumatra’s sleepiest provincial capital, but for 140 years was an anomalous pocket of British territory. Two centuries later I am here to hunt down the traces of this forgotten episode in Indonesian history.

***

The first servants of Britain’s East India Company reached Bengkulu in 1685 after being kicked out of Java by the ascendant Dutch. They hoped that the place would prove to be a honeypot – an essential stopover for China-bound shipping and a fertile garden for lucrative pepper crops. Instead Bengkulu turned out to be an unremitting economic black hole, losing the Company £100,000 a year. It was the original Southeast Asian hardship posting.

The Sumatran climate proved catastrophic to foreign constitutions, and Fort York, the outpost that once stood on that little hillock, had a particularly insalubrious location.

“Some unusual malignity infests our air and strikes at all,” wrote the governor Joseph Collet in 1713. In search of a better climate Collet abandoned Fort York and had a new garrison built, a couple of kilometers further south. After bidding goodbye to Eni, that’s where I head, following a coastal road beneath ranks of tilted casuarina trees.

Much more remains of Fort Marlborough than of its predecessor. Rising in hunks of off-white masonry like slabs of mildewed wedding cake, it dominates the old part of Bengkulu. Rusting cannons, stamped with English coats of arms, lie like beached wales in the courtyard, and the ramshackle red roofs of the town sprawl away inland. The views are fine for modern tourists, but for earlier generations of foreigners with no chance of a quick escape this was a bleak and lonely place. Many drowned their sorrows in drink. Governor Collet and his 19 assistants went through a staggering 900 bottles of claret a month, prompting appalled company directors in Calcutta to declare that “It is a wonder to us that any of you live six months.”

Not all British residents of Bengkulu succumbed to drink and disease, however. William Marsden, who was here in the 1770s, wrote The History of Sumatra, the first major scholarly work in English on Indonesia. The most famous Englishman to call Bengkulu home also made the most of his time here. Thomas Stamford Raffles – famed as the founder of Singapore – was governor of Bengkulu for six years.

On arrival in 1818 Raffles declared that “This is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld”. The buildings were collapsing, and most of the officials were drunk – or dead. During his term Raffles did his best to reform Bengkulu.

A hundred meters from Fort Marlborough I find one of his civic works. It is a chunky neoclassical monument which Raffles erected to Thomas Parr, an earlier governor who was beheaded in his bedroom by disgruntled locals. From here I wander on along sleepy streets half-swamped in tropical vegetation. At many of the junctions stand concrete models of tabot, a Bengkulu icon. Once a year these tottering wood-and-paper models are paraded through the streets and toppled into the sea. The tabot ceremony falls 9 Muharram, a date usually commemorated by Shia Muslims. The celebrations in Sunni-majority Bengkulu are usually attributed to the British influence – the soldiers of the East India Company were mostly Indians, many of who were indeed Shia. But the ceremonies also show a link to earlier Hindu traditions.

Passing another British monument – to Captain Robert Hamilton who died in 1793 – I come to the great sweep of Pantai Panjang, Bengkulu’s “Long Beach”. Choppy waves are surging onto the sand and the sun is dropping west across an achingly empty ocean. I cut back northwest through the lanes to the European cemetery, the place where all too many of Bengkulu’s British residents ended up. Pale headstones stand at crooked angles and barefoot children are using the tombs as goalposts for a football match.

Hundreds of British soldiers and civilians – including Raffles’ four young children – were buried here. Today it is a strangely tranquil place. Many of the inscriptions have vanished over the years, while others were replaced with amateurish replicas during an ill-considered refurbishment in the 1990s. But there are still traces of small tragedies. One hulking vault outside the main cemetery is the resting place of a 10-day old child and of his mother, who died five years later at the age of 25. Another commemorating Captain Thomas Tapson who died in 1816 was “erected to his Memory by his much afflicted friend Nonah Jessmina”, hinting at a cross-cultural love affair.

As I wander around, scribbling notes and taking photos, the gang of children drift away from their ballgame to follow me. They come here to play football most afternoons, they tell me, but they know nothing about the tombs. No one has ever explained to them about the history of their hometown, and they do not even know the nationality of the people buried here.

Once I start to explain they quickly take an interest, and they drag me around the marked tombs demanding to know exactly who is buried where. They take a particular delight in the graves of small children, though they assure me that none of them have ever seen a ghost here.

Having done my small bit for historical awareness I head back to Fort Marlborough to watch the sunset. The British departed Bengkulu in 1824 when they organized a territorial trade-off with their Dutch rivals, swopping the town for the Malay port of Melaka. The fort remained a garrison for Dutch troops but the place was so remote and insignificant that it was chosen as a suitably far-flung exile for Sukarno during the years of anti-colonialist agitation.

As I clamber back onto the ramparts and look out towards a fiery western sky a young woman sitting with her friends on one of the parapets calls me over and we fall into conversation. Her name is Riani and she has recently returned to Bengkulu after several years in Jakarta. She comes from village 200 kilometers to the south on the old frontier of British territory. To my astonishment, she tells me that in that part of the province the local Malay dialect still contains a few English words: blanket, school, pocket and try. Almost two centuries after the Union Jack and the red standard of the East India Company flapped down the flagpole here for the last time, it seems that something still remains… 

© Tim Hannigan 2011