Adoring Adonara

The little visited island of Adonara in Nusa Tenggara

Originally Published in Bali and Beyond Magazine November 2010

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/

Larantuka, a town of white churches at the eastern tip of Flores, is the end of the road. This is the point where bus travel finally gives way to boat trips. But though this Catholic stronghold is the terminus of the Trans-Flores Highway, for anyone with a taste for adventure it is just the start of the real journey.
From the dockside, with its baskets and bundles and white wooden ferries, a view of a mirror-smooth private sea opens, and offshore lie the first landfalls of the Solor and Alor Archipelagos, the string of small islands that form the furthest extremity of East Nusa Tenggara province. To the south stands the long ridge of Solor, a small island with a big history; beyond it is rugged, mountainous Lembata, famed for its traditional whaling village at Lamalera on the south coast. Further afield, beyond the horizon, lie volcanic Pantar and the pristine coral reefs and dark, myth-filled hills of Alor. But before all that, rising in steep green hillsides just across the Flores Strait, is Adonara, the most easily reached of this tantalizing chain of islands, but perhaps the least visited.

Small, sun-bleached passenger boats will carry you from Larantuka across clear turquoise water to Waiwerang, the capital of Adonara. It is a tiny township of rusting tin roofs and sagging palm trees, and once the ferry departs an air of tropical torpor descends. Adonara is close enough to Larantuka to visit on a day trip, but there are a couple of simple guesthouses here if you want to spend the night.
Waiwerang’s name means “Water from the Land” in the local language, and it is named after a hot spring that bubbles out of the ground not for from the jetty. This geothermally heated water shows that fiery forces are at work beneath Adonara’s green hills, and a glance east along Waiwerang’s sleepy main street reveals the volcanic apex of the region – Ile Boleng, the 1659 meter mountain that looms over the island.

Despite its remote location, Adonara was close to the epicenter of some of the earliest European involvement in Indonesia. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed through this way in 1522, and according to local tradition the first Portuguese missionaries arrived even earlier – in 2010 the Catholic community focused on Larantuka celebrated its 500th anniversary. In 1561 the Portuguese arrived in force and built a fort on Solor, and another on the north coast of Adonara. From this unlikely outpost they controlled the traffic in fragrant sandalwood from nearby Timor, and spices from Maluku further north. It was only when the Portuguese lost ground to the Dutch in the 17th Century that Solor and Adonara became a lost tropical backwater once more. Today the only echoes of this Portuguese past are in the strong Catholicism of these islands, and in the devotion shown to an ancient Portuguese idol of the Virgin Mary, known here as Tuan Ma.

Beyond Waiwerang Adonara is a place of steeply folded hills and thick palm forests. Despite the greenery this is a dry island by Indonesian standards. Maize, rather than rice, is the main crop here. Great piles of yellow corncobs are heaped outside red-roofed village houses, and the local staple food is jagung titi, a sort of squashed popcorn!
The potholed road east of Waiwerang leads through villages and cornfields with the soaring slopes of Ile Boleng looming to the left. To the right lie a string of pristine white beaches. Head down a bumpy red track to Pantai Ena Burak on a weekday and you’ll likely have the strip of blinding white sand, backed by palms and black basalt outcrops and fronted by a skyline view of the hills of Solor and Lembata, all to yourself. Small white boats chug against the current offshore and the bright blue water surges onto the shore.

Today the people of Adonara are a mixture of Catholics and Muslims. The two communities live side by side, and there are often interfaith marriages, for they share the same adat traditions, the customs and belief systems that predate the arrival of foreign religions on Adonara. Bride price here is still paid with heirloom elephant tusks, imported from mainland Asia centuries ago. The most valuable of the tusks can be worth as much as Rp50 million, and a marriage between aristocratic families can require a payment of ten such pieces!
Traditions are at their strongest in the hills of Adonara. Though the island is peaceful now, local men still carry long spears when they go into the forest, an echo of times when rival clans were often in conflict. In the villages of the Koli area, high amongst green, palm-clad ridges, with a view of Ile Boleng’s smooth cone rising to the east, there are traditional ceremonial buildings.
In Lama Nepa hamlet the roof of the Koke-Bale, the thatched building traditionally used for planning battles in times of clan warfare, is decorated with a carving of the dragon which was slain by the village’s founding fathers according to legend. In another building nearby one family has the hereditary duty of minding a sacred sword, said to have belonged to the dragon-slayer. Sacred power and ancestral spirits are said to linger around this rusty heirloom; an offering of food and tuak, palm wine, are placed before it each evening.
Tuak, made from fermented coconut water or lontar juice and quaffed from a hollowed out coconut shell, is the beverage of choice in these villages, but before drinking, anyone whose parents have already died will deliberately spill a drop of the sweet liquor onto the ground – an offering to the ancestors.

More folklore surrounds that mighty, dominating volcano peak that towers over Adonara. Each year, at the start of the wet season, elders from the villages on the lower slopes head up to the summit of Ile Boleng where they toss chickens into the deep crater as offerings. The volcano, locals say, must be fed like this each year to ensure that it remains good tempered. Perhaps its hunger was not satisfied in 1982 – the last year that it erupted, spilling smoke and ash high into the tropical sky.
Today the mountain is dormant, and the climb to the summit is one of the most rewarding hikes in Nusa Tenggara. From the cool, green village of Lamalota a black trail leads through dense forest, past small gardens in quiet clearings, tangles of thorny creepers and wild avocado and guava trees. Villagers grow vanilla in the undergrowth and the branches are full of green parakeets and other birdlife more reminiscent of Australia than of Bali and Java. Taboos surround the flanks of Ile Boleng – no salt or fish may be carried to the summit, and on the slopes even discussion of maritime matters, boats or whales for example, is forbidden.
Beyond the forest the trail leads over steep, stony slopes before finally reaching the crater lip. Circuit this great gaping chasm of fractured red rock to the very summit and you’ll find a swelling view of a wild island world. Far below all of Adonara, from Ena Burak’s white shore, to the green, village-speckled interior, opens. To the south Solor rides like a ship at anchor, and to the east Lembata broods, with Ile Boleng’s twin, the steep cone of Ile Api, rising over the shore. And beyond to the west lie the mountains of Flores. The view makes the climb more than worthwhile, and that panorama of isolated islands is a tantalizing widow on other potential adventures in this beautiful, little-known corner of Indonesia.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Hidden Timor Village Shares its Secrets with Tourists

The traditional West Timor Village of Boti

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 02/11/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/hidden-timor-village-shares-its-secrets-with-tourists/404542

The minibus was full of the sour scent of betel nut. I was crammed into the front passenger seat between the driver and two old men with thin, wiry limbs. All of them were wearing heavy, knee-length sarongs of local ikat cloth, and their voices were blunted by the wads of scarlet betel they were chewing.
Outside the forest was cool and damp and green and the road was full of red puddles. We were bouncing along a mountain road southeast of the little West Timor town of Soe; my fellow passengers were talking about the Raja, the King. The new raja was keeping the adat – the traditions – very strong, they said. He couldn’t speak any Indonesian. He had actually been second in line to the throne, but his older brother had moved out of the kingdom and had “entered Christianity” and so lost his right to rule.
It was a simple enquiry from the driver about my destination that had kicked off this tantalizing conversation; the “king” in question was the hereditary headman of Boti, the remote village towards which I was heading. On a high promontory above a sweeping panorama of mist-chased hills the driver paused and pointed. Far below a clutch of pale roofs showed between the trees.
“There it is,” he said; “Boti!”

***

Boti, about 50 kilometers from Soe, is West Timor’s most famous traditional village, known for its unique “independence”. Under a succession of self-styled rajas the hilltop community there has kept the outside world at bay, rejecting first Dutch colonialists and Protestant missionaries, and then the Indonesian state with its education, language and infrastructure.
But the previous Raja, father of the present incumbent, demonstrated that he was not simply some hostile isolationist. Indonesian government services and prescribed religions might have been rejected, but there was one outside influence that Boti had allowed in, on its own terms: a little low key tourism. The place was, I had heard, not only a bastion of traditional Timorese culture, but also a model for responsible cultural tourism.

***

I bade goodbye to my betel-chewing companions at a roadside market, and a youth with a motorbike took me several kilometers further along a rough track. A stony river bed was as far as he could go, so I shouldered my pack and continued on foot. The sky above was pale and bleached, and beyond the hissing of the river there was a tapestry of birdsong.
It was an uphill walk to the village. Pigs and chickens foraged in the undergrowth, and here and there a neat little house with shuttered windows stood in a clearing of packed earth. A clutch of wide-eyed schoolchildren led to the threshold of a beautiful half-wild garden. Tall palms towered overhead; between them stony flowerbeds were stepped down the hillside between crooked pomegranate trees.
At the end of the path stood what passes for a palace in Boti – a little wooden cottage with a wide veranda. Outside the dark doorway a gaggle of village women were chatting and chewing betel nut. They reacted as if they had been expecting me. In a few moments I was sipping sweet coffee, and the women – Mama Tua, the Queen of Boti, foremost amongst them – had resumed their conversation. Their heavy beads and bangles clicked together as they spoke.

Guidebooks and tourist brochures make much of the idea that Boti is completely cut off from the rest of Indonesia, but this is not entirely true. Many villagers – including Mama Tua – do speak some Indonesian, and the new generation of Botinese children are enjoying an Indonesian education in the government school on the edge of the village. Other hints of Indonesia seep in too – though sometimes a little late. In the gloomy front room of the Raja’s house, amongst the doilies and old armchairs, hangs a formal portrait of President Suharto, of the kind displayed in homes and offices everywhere a decade and a half ago.
The royal house stands in the inner sanctum of Boti, ringed by a fence of brushwood. Two families live here, Mama Tua later told me, her jewelry clicking. In total 70 households come under the direct rule of the Raja, and “315 souls” still adhere to Boti’s original ancestor-venerating Halaika religion.
According to legend the first people of Boti descended from a nearby mountain called Lunu. Legend also states that the royal bloodline is mixed with that of the birds, and as distant cousins small birds are offered protection in the village. This was the explanation for the excess of birdsong I had noted on the walk in.
“When they are being hunted in other villages the birds fly here to be safe,” said a young man of the royal family named Pah.

As the light thinned into the evening I wandered through the village. It was studded with traditional Timorese buildings, the beehive huts known as ume kbubu, which simply means “round house”, and the conical meeting places known as lopo.
It is unsurprising that a place as beautiful and peaceful as this draws interested visitors, and the guestbook showed that there had been around 200 separate tourist arrivals in the past year – a trickle, but a steady one.
The cornerstone of the little tourist economy here is the hand-woven ikat cloth made by village women. Ikat is everywhere in Boti, as blankets, scarves and sarongs. In other villages in the region the arrival of a tourist often launches the hard sell, but in Boti the community shop – a low, thatched building – is simply left discreetly unlocked, and visitors are free to wander in at will and pick up a few pieces at a fixed price.
To accommodate these travelers there is a simple village guesthouse, and after a meal eaten by lamplight under that portrait of Suharto, that’s where I slept. There was no electricity here, and the night was thick and velvety as I settled down under an ikat blanket to a chorus of insect noise and falling rain.

***

In the cool, clean light of the morning, I met the Raja, Nama Benu, known as Bapa Tua. He was a lean, upright man in his forties, with long, frizzy hair bound back in a loose ponytail (all married Boti men must wear their hair uncut). He welcomed me, and then left Pah to translate any questions. I was not entirely convinced that this total royal lack of Indonesian was genuine – most of the other Botinese of Bapa Tua’s generation speak it quite well – but it was a powerful statement of Boti’s determined independence.
It is striking that that independence is coupled to a remarkably confident approach to tourism. The rough roads keep visitor numbers low, but those that do arrive are handled with an understated calmness that the slick professionals of bustling resorts would do well to learn from. Payment for food and accommodation is left at guests’ discretion, as is the choice to buy a piece of ikat – though few go away without at least a small sampler in their backpacks.

My own stay in Boti was only a short one, and after breakfast I thanked the Raja and made my way back out of his little realm towards modern Indonesia. Pah saw me to the gateway. As we walked he told me that many people in Boti’s outer orbit, the hamlets of the lower hillside, had become Protestants and abandoned the older traditions.
“But not us,” he said; “we follow only what came from before, what has descended.” As I took one last look at this strange, dreamy place, deep in the hills, I felt that between their confident cooption of tourism and the rule of Bapa Tua, they would continue to do so for a long time.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

History on Sabu Island

Captain Cook and the remote island of Sabu, Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/06/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/travel/history-and-lethargy-on-sabu-island/378141

The island lies to starboard in the grey light of the dawn – a streak of pale sand and a dense wall of lontar palms. I watch from the upper deck of the ferry as a concrete jetty materializes from the shoreline, marking the location of Seba, capital of the tiny island of Sabu, one of the most isolated of all Indonesia’s scattered landfalls.
Two hundred and forty years ago another vessel approached this same shore. It was not a rusting ASDP ferry, but an English sailing ship under the command of the celebrated Captain Cook, returning from his first successful exploration of the Pacific. Cook had stumbled upon Sabu, a dot in the ocean halfway between Timor and Sumba, by chance, for at that time he noted, it was “so little known that I never saw a map or chart in which it is clearly or accurately laid down”. Still, he was glad to have found it, for he was short of supplies. The island was, he wrote, “a most pleasing prospect from the sea”. After 15 hours on a ferry, it still is.

The arrival of the ferry from Kupang marks the busiest day of the week in Seba. But by the time I have settled down in one of the little township’s simple home-stays a damp, tropical torpor has returned. Electricity is only available here during the hours of darkness, and even motorbikes are few and far between. Children play amongst the puddles as a thin rain begins to fall.
There is, however, a certain buzz around Seba these days. For years Sabu, with a population of around 60,000, was an appendage of the Kupang Regency, administered from the East Nusa Tenggara capital, 250 kilometers to the east. But last year it became a regency in its own right.
Sitting drinking coffee outside his house on Seba’s muddy main street as the rain continues to fall, local Arman al Gadri tells me that the upgrade to regency status has been welcomed in Sabu, raising hopes of increased development. The biggest problem that the island faces, he says, is transport. One or two ferries a week connect the island to Kupang, but it’s an exposed crossing, and in the wet season the island can be cut off for weeks. Air links are even more tenuous: the tiny Merpati plane that serves Sabu sometimes only makes it to the island a couple of times a month.

There were no ferries at all when Captain Cook arrived in 1770, but treaties had already been signed between the Dutch and the rulers of Sabu’s five principalities, and Seba was home to an official resident, Johan Lange. Marooned at his lonely outpost Lange was the archetypal corrupt colonialist, and he issued threats until Cook and his men paid the locals in cash for their supplies – cash that Cook was convinced was destined for Lange’s own coffers.
The Dutch had become involved with Sabu in the previous century. In 1674 nervous islanders had massacred the shipwrecked crew of a Dutch vessel, and in seeking revenge Dutch forces formed an alliance with the king of Seba and set out on punitive raids of the neighboring principalities.

The next day I visit the spot where Sabunese defensive architecture defeated those early Dutch attackers. Some twenty kilometers east of Seba, the hilltop village of Hurati is abandoned now, a place of crooked trees and crumbling foundations. But the sturdy surrounding wall that the Dutch failed to penetrate still stands. They were forced to accept a nominal payment instead of total conquest as recompense.
Though the arrival of the Dutch is usually seen as the first European contact with Sabu, Captain Cook noted in 1770 that “many of the people can speake Portuguese, but hardly any one Dutch”, and as the Portuguese had been present on neighboring Flores long before the Dutch arrived on the scene, it seems likely that it was they who made the first landfall here.

The following day I head for the hills on a borrowed motorbike. Cook declared that most of the Sabunese were “heathens and others of no religion at all”. Today, with the exception of a handful of Muslim Sabunese-Arab families in Seba, the majority are nominal Protestants, but old traditions are strong.
In the hilltop kampung of Namata, south of Seba, the original ancestor-worshipping Jingi Tiu religion still lingers. When I arrive most of the villagers are out at work in the surrounding fields, but a woman named Hi’a tells me that during Jingi Tiu ceremonies people from around the island, dressed in traditional ikat cloth, descend on Namata.
The houses have long thatched roofs. According to legend the first settlers came originally from India – and the Sabunese do indeed often look decidedly Indian. When they came ashore they turned their boats upside down for shelter, and traditional Sabu houses still symbolize these makeshift dwellings. On the outskirts of the village a picture of a European sailing ship is carved into a slab of grainy yellow sandstone, another echo of those early European contacts.
From Namata I follow a rough road south into rolling hills grazed by sheep and horses. Sabu is a dry island – “indifferently water'd in the dry season” according to Cook – where maize is the staple crop and drought is a real risk.
On the stony southern coastline I reach the village of Ege. There is a foreign connection here too, for locals say that Ege means “English” in the Sabunese language. At some uncertain time in the past, they say, a British ship ran aground near here, and the sailors received a rather warmer welcome than the unfortunate Dutch of 1674. They were housed by the locals while they repaired their ship and remembered fondly when they went on their way.
There are echoes of a more recent and less happy historical episode at Ege too. The old village – surrounded like Hurati by a formidable wall of black basalt – is abandoned now. Two local men, Daud and Lido, take me there. The place was used as a fort by the Japanese occupiers during World War II.
“We know from our grandparents that the Japanese time was the hardest time of all,” says Lido, pointing out the loopholes for rifles that the soldiers knocked through the walls; “people had to work for them from six in the morning until six in the evening without food, and if people did something wrong they would tie them up and leave them in the sun. But then the British came back and chased them away!”

Over the next two days I travel the back roads of Sabu, finding warm welcomes and fine white beaches where seawater is left in upturned clamshells to evaporate and make salt. Bumpy tracks lead to hilltops offering swelling views to rocky shores, to the off-lying hulk of Raijua Island, and to the empty horizon beyond.
Captain Cook noted that the people of Sabu were addicted to betel nut – and they still are; smiles here have an extra dash of red color. The other lifeblood of Sabu is the lontar palm, which provides sweet sap for making sugar and palm wine, described by Captain Cook as “a very sweet agreeable Cooling liquor”. On other islands people hack steps into the trunks to get at the harvest, but in Sabu there is such respect for this “tree of life” that locals wish to do it no injury and bind smooth pebbles to the trunk with twists of dried leaf for footholds instead.

Captain Cook sailed from Sabu on 21 September 1770, bearing west past the tiny, uninhabited islet of Dana, said to be home of ancestral souls in the Jingi Tiu tradition, and heading for Java. As the island fell behind, Cook called his men together and swore them to secrecy about the place they had just visited for fear of arousing Dutch jealously in Batavia. As I make my own departure on the returning Kupang-bound ferry, watching the white beaches and lontar-clad hills fade to a dot on the empty horizon, it seems like the secret is still well kept.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

In Pursuit of the Dragons of Alor

Traditional belief, myths and legends in Alor, Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 06/05/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/in-pursuit-of-the-dragons-of-alor/373491

In the fishing village of Lanleki on the island of Alor I met an old man who had seen a dragon. His name was Achmad; he wore a white Haji’s skullcap and he told his tale simply, sitting in the narrow front room of his little house. Outside the hot wind rustled in the palm trees and the children of Lanleki jostled in the doorway, more interested in the foreign visitor than in hearing Haji Achmad’s familiar story.
He had seen the dragon forty years ago, he said, long before he made the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. He had been walking along the narrow path that leads to Lanleki when the dragon emerged from the sea and chased him through the trees. It had horns like a buffalo and seven flickering tongues…

Alor is a place of pale beaches and dark, myth-filled hills. The most easterly landfall in the stuttering island chain of Nusa Tenggara, like many parts of Indonesia it has gone through incredible changes in the last century. In 1938 the American anthropologist Cora Du Bois visited and recorded an island where people knew little of money and spoke no Indonesian. Though there was a long-established halo of Islam around the coast, in the hills Protestant missionaries had met little success and most people worshiped only the spirits of the countryside. Dutch colonialists had supposedly pacified the island at the turn of the 20th Century, but clan warfare and even headhunting were still very much current concepts.
Seventy years later roads have snaked into the hills, whitewashed churches have sprouted in remote villages and most of the population has become nominally Christian. The island capital, Kalabahi, has filled with buzzing motorbikes; there are daily flights from Kupang and even a nascent tourist industry. But as I was to find out, Alor is still a place where old beliefs and customary adat traditions hold strong, and where there is no distinction between history and myth. This is an island that could still be marked on the map with the words “here be dragons”...

I first heard about dragons in Probul, a village in the hills behind Lanleki. An old man there had told me that in the days before Christianity there had been many dragons – he called them naga. Mostly they were invisible, but they were dangerous if not appeased. Then there was Haji Achmad’s story, in which the dragon was unmistakably a real thing. If I wanted to learn more about dragons, Haji Achmad told me, I should go to the village of Alor Kecil, on the other side of Kalabahi Bay.

Alor is smaller than Bali, and with a population of just 168,000, but it is perhaps the most linguistically diverse place in Indonesia. As many as 17 separate, mutually incomprehensible languages are spoken here, and distinct dialects are numbered in the hundreds.
There is a similar diversity of culture, with the creation myths of one village often meaning nothing to the people of the next. But there are certain threads that run throughout the island. The moko is a bronze, hourglass-shaped kettledrum, thought to have originated in the ancient Dongson civilization of northern Vietnam. Just how the moko reached Alor, where the “lost wax technique” used to decorate the drums was never known, is a mystery – locals claim that they sprung fully-formed from the ground – but they are a key motif of the island. When the Cora Du Bois visited they were the main form of currency and even today they are used to pay wedding dowries.
Another common connection is the misbah, a round altar of rough stones at the heart of each village. This is still the focus of the lego-lego, the Alorese circle dance performed at weddings and other celebrations, and in the not-too-distant past it was the place where heads taken in warfare were placed. And now it seemed that I had stumbled on another connecting thread – the dragon.

Alor Kecil lies at the western tip of the rugged peninsula that bulges to the north of Kalabahi Bay. Offshore rides the little islet of Pulau Kepa, location of Alor’s first dive resort; in mid-channel rises the volcanic cone of Pura Island, while beyond it is the dark coastline of Pantar.
Like Lanleki, Alor Kecil was a Muslim village with modern concrete houses and tin-roofed mosques in the shade of huge banyan trees. But here too there was a misbah, with a few buffalo skulls resting on its weathered stones in lieu of human heads. There were rumah adat – the lineage houses of each of Alor Kecil’s five clans – and as I picked my way through the village I spotted dragons everywhere. There were dragons carved into doorframes; dragons woven into pieces of local ikat cloth, and statues of dragons outside the modern community hall.
Sitting outside the lineage house of the Suku Bao Raja, Alor Kecil’s royal clan, I met a young man named Jason. I asked him about the dragons. The dragon, he said, was the protector of the village. It had come originally from the ground in the hills to the north, but today it lived in the sea. I repeated Haji Achmad’s story and Jason was unsurprised.
“People do see the dragon, but not often. It’s usually outsiders who see it, not locals,” he said.
The dragon was not the only mythical presence around Alor Kecil; there were also Sea People. In ancient times, the story goes, the Sea People were regular visitors to their brethren on the shore, and though these days they stay beneath the surface, one of Alor Kecil’s tribes, the Mang Lolong, still claim to maintain a connection with them. A popular rumor has it that a few years ago a foreign tourist, diving near Pulau Kepa spotted an underwater village full of mermen dancing the lego-lego in the blue depths beyond the edge of the reef.
Jason said that all of the people of Alor Kecil and the surrounding settlements are descended from a man who rose from the earth in a place called Bampalola in the hills above the coast. Following his directions I traveled up a steep track that wound between the ridges.
Bampalola itself was a modern village with a school and a mosque, but a kilometer downhill through the maize fields, on a high promontory at the end of a razor-sharp ridge, stood the old village, Lakatuli. Many villages in Alor shifted from defensive hilltops to more convenient locations once the age of clan warfare was over; no one lived in Lakatuil now, but the place was still used for adat ceremonies. Tall thatched roofs rose above bamboo-floored platforms. Elaborate carvings on beams and banisters were picked out in white and ochre, and there were dragons chiseled into the woodwork.
Looking at them I was reminded of a grainy black-and-white photo in the anthropologist Cora Du Bois’ 1944 book, The People of Alor. It was a picture of an Ulenai, the carving used in that era to represent the village guardian spirit. Though the Ulenai lacked the stylistic touches clearly borrowed from Chinese art that I had seen on the carvings in Alor Kecil and Bampalola, it was very obviously a dragon.
Du Bois had written of ancestor myths and guardian spirits that “this whole concept will undoubtedly become the center of revivalistic cults when Alorese culture crumbles as it inevitably will under the impact of foreign colonization”. But it seemed to me that nothing had crumbled, let alone been revived. The idea of the dragon as a powerful protector, and a real entity, had probably never faded from the scene in the villages here.

From Bampalola I returned to the coast and the hamlet of Alu Kai, just east of Alor Kecil. In the front room of a clan house with a carved dragon in the corner two of the village elders, Pak Amir, and Pak Mo, told me more about dragons and sea people – they called all this “history” rather than “legend” and made no distinction between the wilder tales and the stories of the arrival of Islam in Alor from Ambon and Makassar.
The dragon first appeared from the earth in Bampalola many centuries ago, before the birth of mankind, they said. The first man rose in the same place later and his descendents traveled downhill to the shore where the founder of Alu Kai hamlet, Jai Manu, married a princess of the mysterious Sea People named Eko Sari. Pak Amir and Pak Mo themselves, it seemed, were half-merman!
While they talked children gathered in the doorway, just as they had done in Lanleki. Pak Amir smiled.
“It’s important for old men to talk; if the old men just keep silent then how will the children know their own history?” he said.

There was one more place to visit in my pursuit of the dragon myths of Alor. At the tip of the stony headland beyond Alor Kecil, Pak Amir had said, was a shrine dedicated to the dragon. Chickens and goats were routinely tossed into the sea there as offerings, he said.
Leaving the road and the houses behind I picked my way through stony fields and thorny scrub. It was late afternoon now and a dense, humid heat had risen. Insects buzzed in the undergrowth and I could hear the sea, hissing onto the rocks nearby. I lost my way in the web of pathways until I met a tall, barefoot man named Haider who led me to the shrine.
It was a small structure, a low tin roof sheltering two shelves painted with long, black dragons, and on the top level a heavier, cruder dragon carving. The ground around the shrine was scattered with old coconut husks. A bunch of dried goats’ ears hung on a rusty nail. It felt like a place of dark magic.
People often came here to make offerings to the dragon, Haider said, not only local villagers but also big men, police chiefs and politicians from Kalabahi looking for the protection of the mysterious beast.
The spot where the dragon was fed lay beyond the shrine, a ledge of scaly, reptilian black rock over deep blue water. The dried carcass of a chicken hung from a branch. It was a strange, faintly unsettling place, and as the afternoon sun slanted away over the hills of Pantar I peered down into the water, half-expecting to see a horned, seven-tongued serpent rise from the depths. In the 21st Century the myths and legends of Alor are, it seems, still powerful enough to impress a skeptic…

© Tim Hannigan 2010

In the Shadow of Ile Boleng

The remote island of Adonara in Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/04/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/in-the-shadow-of-ile-boleng/371749

The old man leading me along the forest trail carried a long spear over his shoulder. He moved quickly, pausing from time to time to cut aside a dangling creeper, pick wild guavas or shinny up a palm tree to cut fresh coconuts.

Distant voices echoed through the trees as smallholders carried out conversations over kilometers of forest. The old man joined in, shouting in a tone pitched to carry through the creepers, “It’s Wilhem; I’m going to the mountain.”

Pak Wilhem was indeed leading me to the mountain, Ile Boleng, the 1,659-meter peak that looms over the dense palm forests of Adonara, a small, remote island in East Nusa Tenggara.

My first view of the island had come three days earlier as I stood on the deck of a small ferry, chugging away from Larantuka, a town of white churches at the eastern tip of Flores. To the south, across a strait of bright blue water, lay the long ridge of Solor. Closer at hand Adonara rose steeply from the shore. As the ferry rounded the island’s southwest corner, Ile Boleng came into view, a perfect volcanic cone rising into thin white clouds.

Adonara is the first island in the Solor group, a chain of isolated landfalls between Flores and Alor. Few people visit, but it is a beautiful place with white beaches, a forested interior and villages where people live according to old traditions.

After spending the night in a simple guesthouse in Waiwerang, a sleepy fishing village that passes for the main town of Adonara, I headed east along the coast. It was harvest time, and freshly cut maize, the staple crop here, was heaped in the roadside villages.

The picture-perfect Ena Burak Beach lay at the end of a rough red track, a strip of blinding white sand, flanked by warty outcrops of black basalt. The sea was a shifting sheet of cobalt, and across the water the hills of Lembata rose under an empty sky.

In the shade of a thatched wooden shelter at the top of the beach I met a local man name Herodes, who was sharing a picnic with friends. They invited me to join them, and as we picked at freshly grilled fish and crunched on jagung titi, the local staple made from crushed, dry-roasted corn, Herodes told me about Adonara’s culture.

The island is home to a mix of Muslims, who hold sway on the coast, and Catholics, who dominate in the hills. For people of both faiths local adat , customary tradition, holds strong; village ancestors are still venerated, and tuak (alcohol made from fermented coconut water) is quaffed at every opportunity.

Despite their remoteness, the islands of the Solor archipelago have been in contact with the outside world for many centuries. The area became a hub of commerce in the early 16th century after the Portuguese arrived in eastern Indonesia and tapped into the trade in sandalwood from Timor and spices from Maluku. Portuguese soldiers built forts on Solor and Adonara, while Catholic missionaries set about converting the locals. The Portuguese eventually lost ground to the Dutch, but their legacy remains among the Catholic majority in these islands.

There are other traces of outside influence, too. Bride prices are still paid with heirloom elephant tusks, originally imported from mainland Asia. Adonara’s traditional music is quite unlike that of other parts of Indonesia; instead of clanging gamelan and trilling flutes there are wiry rhythms plucked on a simple guitar-like instrument and plaintive, rough-edged singing. It sounds remarkably like the music of the Middle East, hinting at the Arab traders who passed through these islands even before the Portuguese.

The next day Herodes invited me to visit his mother’s village, Koli, deep in the palm-clad hills. There were both mosques and churches in Koli. In the nearby hamlet of Lama Nepa a local man named Anthony showed me the rumah adat, simple buildings of bamboo and thatch central to the pre-Christian and pre-Muslim traditions of the area.

According to legend, the village was founded by two brothers, Patti and Bed, who were granted the land after slaying a man-eating dragon that had plagued settlements on Adonara’s north coast. The rumah adat traditionally used for planning clan warfare in Lama Nepa is still topped with a carving of a Chinese-style dragon.

In another building, the Lango Belen, an heirloom sword said to have belonged to the dragon-slaying Patti, is guarded by a family who inherited the task from their forefathers. Each evening an offering of food and tuak is placed in the right-hand corner of the home for the spirits of the ancestors.

As we rode back toward Waiwerang in the insect-filled dusk, Ile Boleng was clear of clouds, the last of the sunlight illuminating the mouth of its steep crater. I decided it was time for me to take a closer look at the mountain. So early the next morning I hitched a ride to the village of Lamalota, where I met Pak Wilhem, who was to guide me to the summit.

The forest trail led to a clearing where Wilhem kept a few goats and grew a little corn. We stopped to snack on wild avocados then pressed on uphill, Wilhem moving swiftly with his spear over his shoulder. All men take a spear with them when they go into the forest, he said, a local custom that can be traced to Adonara’s past tribal warfare.

Beyond the last stand of trees, the trail rose steeply between sharp rocks. It took an hour to reach the crater rim. There we met four men with a pack of thin yellow dogs. They were hunting feral goats, chasing them into the crater before bringing them to bay on the steep cliffs.

Wilhem and I made our circuit of the volcano’s lip, scrambling up the outcrops toward the summit.

Wilhem explained that local people believe the volcano, which last erupted in 1982, must be fed each year to ensure it stays dormant. Offerings of freshly slaughtered chickens are tossed into the fractured hollow of the crater during the early months of every wet season. The peak is also surrounded by taboos. You cannot bring fish or salt to the high slopes, and uttering words connected with the sea — “boat” and “whale,” for example — is forbidden.

We looked out from the summit over a vast panorama of pale water and dark islands. To the west the green hinterland of Adonara was dotted with white villages. Wilhem pointed out Koli, the area I had visited the previous day. To the north the Flores Sea shone yellow in the sunlight, while to the south Solor lay like a ship at anchor. Behind it I could pick out the damp hills of eastern Flores. In the opposite direction Lembata lay under a blanket of pale clouds.

There was a small white boat cutting across the channel far below — but I remembered not to point it out.

© Tim Hannigan 2010