Empire of the East (7 page)

From Lhoknga on, the road fell into sudden decline. It had been built to serve a scattering of villages populated by small farmers whose problem even in recent years was to protect their flocks from nightly incursions of tigers from the forested mountains. Latterly the traffic using the road had broken it up. Potholes were many and deep, and resurfacing perfunctory. Nevertheless, from the point of view of a beautiful drive, nothing equalled it on our Indonesian journey. This was how the depths of the Amazon forest had been before the building of the desert-maker highways. The road twisted through the steep-sided foothills at the edge of the coastal plain. No one had touched these trees because they could not get at them — growing as they did on precipitous slopes and in narrow ravines. There were not even any villages nearby from which the villagers could stream out daily to cut their firewood. This, then, was the showcase of a magnificent forest, of which so little remained, presenting its immensely tall trees with their pale, slender trunks, no two appearing to be the same. Orchids of many colours were suspended, as if in florists’ baskets, from their branches — and sometimes, where decaying vegetable matter had made a substantial lodgement, a version of the arum lily unfolded its maculate and slightly sinister bloom. These trees were enswathed in extremely tall ferns, some reaching twenty feet high. We stopped and climbed down to the nearest tree to look at them. Small, bright, fussy birds — babblers, barbets, minivers, sun birds and bush robins — fidgeted among the leaves, popping into sight and back out again. We were at the very edge of a plain covered in brilliant grass with mountain streams threading through small lakes to the sea. Further on we came to an abandoned coconut plantation. A gale had smashed the tops off most of the palms but nobody lived here any longer to pick up the nuts that lay scattered by the hundred on the ground.

Stretches of the road had suffered near-demolition through the passage of large and extremely heavy vehicles, and wheels had left deep gouges where temporary surface repairs had been carried out. We shortly trundled over the first of numerous recently built iron bridges. None of these improvements was likely to have been planned for the benefit of local buses, and it was to be supposed that the road would be made negotiable in all weathers by log-transporters coming up from the South, which so far had been unable to reach Banda Aceh by this route.

Driving all day at hardly more than a walking speed, we had covered an extremely low mileage by the late afternoon. Sundown was to be expected shortly after six, and being unenthusiastic at the prospect of having to pick our way after nightfall among the many hazards likely to await us ahead, we decided to look for somewhere to stay the night in Calang, the only village the map showed in this area.

Once again, as had happened from time to time in the past, I felt a sensation of having come to the end of the world. The village was down by the water meadows; a row of what might at first sight have been deserted shacks. There was no one to be seen. And then doors opened and people stood in their doorways, all smiling in a sleepy fashion as if just awakened from happy dreams. They fitted into their surroundings in an exemplary way, and my feeling was that they and their ancestors had been where they were for a very long time. We were directed to what passed as a losmen, which had two partitioned cubicles in its only room. Like the rest of the villagers, the man and woman who owned it were small. They had a son with a big head, and the village’s fixed smile.

I found it hard to see what these people lived by, as there was no evident source of livelihood. Perhaps they fished, but there was no fishing gear in sight. There were a lot of intelligent-looking dogs about, who by our observation lived on each other’s excrement. At the losmen they asked us if we wanted to eat and showed us the saturnine left-overs of a bat-stew, which Andy accepted. The rest of us decided to stick with the cake.

We went for a walk before sunset. Terns by the hundred were drifting over like flakes of white ash, on their way to roost on the cliffs. A clump of trees attracted us by their smell of camphor and, spotting flying foxes among the top branches, we wondered if this was the larder that had supplied Andy’s stew. When we got back he was still at work endlessly polishing the car. We went in, listened to the BBC’s World Service, and Gawaine and Robin settled under their power lamp for an hour or two of a continuing chess match before going to bed. All day we had rattled and bumped over clattering bridges, through the sticky vestiges of swamps, round chasms caused by road subsidences, and through ruts, a foot or more deep, left by the many vanished transporters. Now the void of night confronted us and demanded to be filled, and the chess pieces came out, to be assembled on the board in their previous positions. My companions seemed unable to exist without contest, and chess was called into service to offer its equivalent of the problems and hazards the road had supplied with such prodigality.

Next day we journeyed on roughly as before: mountains to the left, palm-fringed lagoons to the right, the incredible sight of orchids growing among rocks, a hopelessly broken road, so many bridges we had ceased to count them.

This was the part of the journey Gawaine and Robin had looked forward to, and revelled in. Two years previously they had paid $800 for a decayed Ford Maverick in a junk-yard in San Francisco, patched it together, and taken three months to drive to South America. Was this the worst road they had ever driven over? Probably not, they thought. Bits of Venezuela might have been worse. They had divided up the driving into fifty-kilometre stretches, assiduously checking on times and distances, while on the alert for rotted timbers in old bridges, concealed patches of swamp, and landslides that had always occurred just around a blind bend. Each in turn ploughed competitively ahead, by necessity largely oblivious to the drama of the landscape traversed. The bridges concealed the worst hazards. Few spanned flowing rivers, and all that did were safe. The bad risks arose from the new bridging programme which did its best to cope with flooded streams. Sections of these less important bridges had sometimes been dumped in a hurry off the transporters and left lying around, calling for a top-speed diversion from a road surface of fragmented boulders into a hollow with puddles among the grass, then a charge up the other bank. For these performances I awarded or deducted marks.

Untouched by such emergencies, Andy reclined in the back working with a cloth and cleaning fluid on the small, stubborn stains here and there on his denims. There had still been no occasion to use his services as a guide, for, shattered as the road was, there were no turnings, no possibility of losing the way. One either went ahead or turned back. A slight note of urgency had been added to this enterprise when Andy, who seemed well informed on the subject of weather, mentioned in the most casual way that there were differences in the climate of North Aceh and the South, which we should shortly be entering. In South Aceh the rains arrived earlier, and were now expected any day. Should we be caught in them he recommended us to take no chances, in view of the condition of this road, but to turn round and make for the dry North just as fast as we could.

It was hard to say what produced the antipathy we all felt for Meulaboh. It had lost all those things that hold a good village together, but had never quite turned itself into a town. Youths with nothing to do were kicking their heels and staring angrily into space on the street corners. Cars coming from the South that had made it as far as this, and would go no further, were driving round revving their engines to attract attention and stirring up the dust. Part of our feelings might have been due to anticlimax after two days spent in settings of exceptional charm. Weh, too, had spoiled us with its calm Buddhistic smile and its withdrawal from the hurly-burly of Acehnese politics and religion. The boys lining the main street watched us silently with empty faces. The car was coated with red dust, and as soon as we left it they moved in after studying the number plate, and began to write in the grime with their fingers. Andy avoided telling us what they had written, but his mood had immediately slumped. There was a feeling that we were in a war zone.

Only one losmen was open and although larger than the one at Calang, it was more wretched. Music and mosquitoes poured through the wide interstices in the losmen’s boarding, and lizards sprinted backwards and forwards across the soap powder advertisements providing its decoration. Nevertheless we did our best to ingratiate ourselves with the owner in the hope of an escape from rice on this occasion. But this was not to be. The losmen’s food was kept in a showcase screened by tattered curtains. We were taken to this by a boy with sore eyes who whisked the curtain aside to display a sad array of the kind to which we were becoming familiar. He picked up a succession of grey collops, turned them over one after another in his hand, and let them drop back, accepting rejections as a matter of course, and shaking his head in a despondent yet sympathetic manner.

The alternative was stale cake identical to the kind we had just finished, and served with a kind of pickle. This had just arrived when we noticed that an excited crowd had formed at the street door. It proved to be awaiting the losmen’s evening television show — clearly the daily event that made life in Meulaboh just tolerable. Quite soon a crowd of perhaps one hundred had gathered, of which less than a half could be crammed into a small, dim area dominated by the twenty-four-inch screen. The shutters closing the room off from the street were pulled back so that viewers who had come late and were left outside would at least catch a glimpse of the picture. This was almost a religious moment, as shown by the respectful silence, and the rapt, devotional expression on all faces. Someone switched on and there was an uproar of distorted music, the screen began to flicker with jumbled shapes and colours, then to our amazement we found ourselves watching an English cup-tie football match.

Next morning it was clear that Andy’s morale had collapsed. He had kept close to our sides the night before during a barren exploration of the town. He had even waited unhappily just inside the door of a shack calling itself a night club and serving only a repellent pseudo-beer, tolerated by the religious authorities on the grounds of containing less than one degree of alcohol.

He had spent the night locked in the car under a blanket in the space between the front and rear seats, and now showed signs of terror, due, we could only suppose, to real or fancied hostility shown him in the village. He was even more concerned than us at the possibility of being trapped by the rains, and the woman who ran the losmen fetched her English-speaking brother to advise us on this matter. ‘We are praying for them,’ he said. ‘Soon they must come.’

We left this place with relief, turning shortly away from the sea, and making for the mountains, but first we visited the important transmigration settlement at Lame, of which we had already heard contradictory, although largely unfavourable, reports. There should have been some way of softening the shock of this place, a transitional period from the constant visual excitements of the west road to the infernal vistas of this settlement into which the traveller is projected without warning. Dismissal from Arcadia occupied no more than seconds. We turned a bend and there was Lame amid its theatrical devastation. This had been the rainforest in all its glory, and now it was a prairie of ashes, spiked all over with the blackened stumps of trees that had been burned or felled, in theory to provide land for the migrants. We had plunged suddenly into what must have been one of the early zones of settlement, illustrating all the errors of the first waves of transmigration, repeated throughout the outer islands of Indonesia.

Possibly the forest would have been cut down here in any case, but there was no doubt of the intention to settle landless peasants from Java and Bali, because there were small wooden houses all over the place, although none we could see from the road was occupied. This part of Lame had overprinted the ghost image of an outer suburb — the sweep of curving avenues, crescents, a central square, a shopping arcade — on a desert of tree stumps and charred wood. The buildings were all tiny cabins of identical shape, each with its minuscule front garden enclosed in raw breeze blocks. No garden was cultivated. In some cases huge tree stumps with abstract designs of fungus painted over the charred wood occupied half the garden space, sharing the rest with weeds pushing up through the cracked earth to unfold leathery leaves. This area of forest had not been ‘clear-cut’ and the loggers had taken only saleable timber, but for some inscrutable reason they had smashed the trees they had left, leaving a background to this ghost town suggesting a forest of ships’ masts devastated by a terrible storm.

Settlers from over-populated Java had poured in here and into similar sites all over Indonesia in the greatest mass-movement of people in history. By the original scheme each transmigration family received a house standing in 0.25 hectares of land, along with two additional hectares of cleared land ready for cultivation. They were to receive aids of food, seed for planting and agricultural implements. Many promises were not kept and transmigrants by the thousand were dumped down on sites without infrastructural development, or even where no houses had been built. As in the case of Lame, the transmigrants were left with cinders, and ash, and forest soil damaged through loss of moisture and exposure to the sun, on which nothing would grow. From where we stood on the highest point of the development, no crops had been planted anywhere in sight, nor was a single human being to be seen. It was a repetition of what happened to such experiments tried previously in Brazil.

There were several miles of this Brazilian look-alike before the road suddenly splayed out, took on a more solid surface, and we shortly drove into a species of circus, enclosed by a number of recent buildings, some flanked by piles of constructional materials and clearly incomplete. A service station had no petrol for sale, and there were no mechanics about to deal with semi-degutted lorries in for repair. The population of a large village appeared to have been emptied into the small centre of what it was hoped would become a metropolis. A hundred yards or so away, the rows of the familiar standard cabins started, eighteen foot by twelve foot with partitions. The aroma of baffled expectations and stagnation hung heavy on the air.