Hotel Kerobokan (21 page)

–
Denpost
, 2 June 2004

To Saidin, cobras weren’t just pets. When he was bored, he chopped them up and fried them. He’d cut off the head first, then slash a knife along the belly and gut it, taking out the heart and liver to eat raw and wash down with a glass of
arak
. Wasting none of his precious snake, he fried the flesh and ate it with rice and chilli sauce.

If the westerners heard I was killing and cooking some snake, they would all come and say, ‘Give me some, give me some’. They’d sit in the cell eating it, and drinking
arak.
We drank the blood like a shot. It doesn’t taste good, but has good health benefits. Lots of vitamins. Like medicine. But the fried meat is delicious. Like chicken meat.

– Saidin

If westerners weren’t keen to eat snakes, there were plenty of other exotic items on the prison menu. Inmates would catch geckos and grill them. During the rainy season, they would also catch frogs, piling them into a bucket and skinning them to fry on gas burners in their cells. Saidin also regularly ate rats that he caught and bludgeoned in his cell.

Rats are very delicious. I would grill the whole rat first and scrape it to get rid of the fur. Then I’d chop the head and legs off, cut it in the middle to open it up and then cook it again with some spices. You leave the skin on. The skin is nice, just like suckling pig, nice and crunchy. Whenever I saw a big rat in my cell, I chased it and hit it with a piece of wood, a broom stick. Anything.

– Saidin

I’ve eaten some weird stuff since I’ve been arrested. I ate bat in Kerobokan, it was very nice. I had it with vegetables. I also drank cobra blood and ate dog. First time the dog was nice, second time it was disgusting, I swear I would never eat it again. The meat was too hard. First time, maybe, it was a better race of dog. And not long ago a guy made a goat head soup, it was really nice, but very strong. Not many westerners had the guts to eat that kind of stuff.

– Ruggiero

But it wasn’t only rats, snakes and dogs that kept the prisoners’ minds occupied.

Hotel K prided itself on being a rehabilitation facility and gave prisoners the chance to run businesses. Iwan had his workshop, a killer named Tommy had opened a printing factory, Australian beauty school student Schapelle had requested permission to open a beauty salon and Bali Nine member Matthew was teaching English. Not only did these activities fill the empty hours, they helped shave time off their sentences. When drug dealer Thomas returned for his second stint, he went back to his Austrian village roots and planted a vegetable garden. He was taking a forced break from drug dealing because he had no cash to buy from suppliers. His savings were long gone. He threw himself into his garden, which ran for about fifty metres behind two blocks. Just as he had with his drug business, Thomas gave it one hundred per cent. Every morning he spent hours diligently watering his crops of lettuces, spinach, eggplant,
sawi
and cherry tomatoes.

Thomas liked being busy in his garden, where he could retreat into his own world. He sometimes walked around it, spraying insecticide with a metal can on his back and a hose draped over his shoulder, laughing out loud.

I felt like an astronaut. I was laughing to myself.

– Thomas

Always keen to do business, Thomas organised to sell his produce to a supermarket chain in Denpasar. Every morning he noticed that inmates had stolen from his garden, but he always still had plenty to sell to the supermarkets and cook for himself each day. But his vegetables weren’t making him much money. If the supermarkets ordered a box of spinach and two boxes of tomatoes, the guards would deliver it, collect the fee and take fifty per cent. Expenses like seeds, fertilisers and insecticides all came out of Thomas’s half. At the end of a month, he would be left with 25,000 rupiah ($3) for his efforts. So when the Swiss consul, who looked after Austrian citizens in Bali, offered to invest and buy lettuces for his up-market Swiss restaurant in Kuta, Thomas leaped at the chance. The consul invested 500,000 rupiah ($70) and Thomas planted hundreds of lettuces.

Late one afternoon, Australian Mick, Scottish inmate Robert and Thomas sat drinking
arak
by the tennis court. Mick casually mentioned he’d read somewhere that the Chinese used human shit as fertiliser. Robert’s ears pricked up. ‘Must work – look how many people they have to feed,’ he said. It had been a throwaway comment from Mick before he ambled off to his cell for a late afternoon joint. Thomas left to shoot up, and think about it. Robert, seeing everything through a drunken haze, worked himself into a frenzy of excitement. He raced over to a couple of locals and offered to pay them in
arak
if they helped him smother shit over Thomas’s vegetable patch. They agreed, and grabbed a few plastic buckets and sticks to tie to the handles.

After shifting the concrete slab on top of a septic tank, they ladled buckets of steaming human shit and carried them across to pour over Thomas’s vegetable garden, spilling the stinking slop all over their hands and feet. They emptied three septic tanks. By the time they had finished, the lockup bells were ringing. The women were already padlocked in their cells, and the vapours of hot shit were wafting over the walls and into their block, causing agitation. They were fighting and accusing each other of making a foul smell. But, as the stink grew inescapably stronger, they fast realised it was coming from outside. They didn’t have a clue what was causing it. But it was so nauseatingly vile that they all sat holding their noses or smothering their faces with pillows for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Mick casually walked across the jail yard to pick up a blank art canvas from Iwan’s workshop near the vegetable garden. He was completely oblivious to the nasty little disturbance he’d caused, but halfway across the smell hit him hard in the face. ‘This is your fault Mick,’ a guard yelled across at him. Mick yanked his T-shirt up to cover his nose, quickly realising that it was his idea that had inflicted the stink on the jail. It clung to the air for more than a week.

But the human compost worked well and Thomas’s lettuces grew abundantly. He continued to use the shit as fertiliser, but more sparingly, only a bucket or two at a time. It gave them all a laugh to think of the tourists sitting in the expensive Swiss restaurant in Kuta, eating their delicious crispy green lettuce, and having no idea it had been grown in Kerobokan Jail using human shit.

Although the vegetable garden kept Thomas busy, he hadn’t stopped using smack. But, with very little cash, he was using
putaw
(low-grade heroin) and sometimes sharing needles. He regularly relied on charity to get food and cigarettes. After about a year, he was dealing again. It began gradually, after a friend had given him a few grams to sell in jail. He used his cut of the profits to invest in more. He started juggling the two businesses, often using his patch of earth to hide his drugs when he wanted a break from carrying them in his underpants. He would dig a hole with his hoe, put the heroin inside and cover it up, leaving it for a couple of hours rather than risk carrying it around. But eyes were always slyly watching and he lost his stash several times. After digging around for it, he’d eventually have to concede it had been stolen.

One afternoon, Mick walked into Robert’s cell and saw him chasing the dragon with a couple of local inmates. There was a huge bag of smack on the floor. ‘What the fuck? That’s a lot,’ Mick gasped. Robert quickly put a little in some plastic and passed it up to him, saying, ‘Take it, take it and leave’. ‘Okay, thanks,’ Mick said, incredulous that stingy Robert had given it to him so willingly. ‘It was like Christmas.’ But when Mick spotted Thomas agitated and muttering, ‘I’ve been robbed again. My smack is gone, thirty-five grams of smack gone,’ Mick instantly understood why Robert had been so generous, and why he had shooed him out so fast. He hadn’t wanted Mick to create a fuss and attract a crowd of westerners.

I was so fucking jealous. It was, like, 600,000 rupiah a gram.

– Mick

Mick seized the opportunity to get more smack. He walked back to Robert’s cell and asked casually, ‘Where did you get it from, Robert?’ ‘I bought it,’ he said. ‘Mmmm … where did you get the money from?’ Mick asked, menacingly now. ‘A friend sent it from Hong Kong,’ he replied, scooping up another gram, putting it in plastic and passing it to Mick. ‘This is for you,’ he said. The stash of stolen smack was worth $3000. Robert’s cellmate had pinched it from the garden, and during the next few days they sold it across the jail. Inevitably, Thomas found out, but there was nothing he could do. The locals fought in packs and Thomas didn’t stand a chance of winning.

The westerners could steal from and cheat each other but still be mates. Soon after stealing his smack, Robert went to Thomas, suggesting they try to grow magic mushrooms in his garden. They grew like crazy in Bali, with light rain and a sprinkling of cow shit. Thomas was keen. But the jail boss, aware of their intent, refused their request for permission to bring in cow shit. That only made them more determined. Several of the other westerners were now excited by the idea of growing their own drugs. Typically, they found a way to defy the rules and get the cow shit into the jail.

Villagers were working on building a new cellblock, and dozens of them arrived in the back of a truck each day with their building equipment. An extra bag of shit wouldn’t be noticed. So, Thomas, Frenchman Michael, Englishman Steve and Robert kicked in 30,000 rupiah each. For the next ten days, the villagers arrived with a bag of cow shit for Thomas to spread over an empty patch of dirt. Like kids on Christmas morning, Steve, Michael and Robert raced over to the garden every day to see if a plantation of magic mushrooms had sprung up during the night. But they were always disappointed.

Thomas spent months trying to grow the mushrooms, even building a hothouse using bits of wood from Iwan’s workshop to make a box, putting plastic on the top, and then covering it with grass to hide it from the guards. But still, no magic. In a final attempt, Thomas put a bucket of soil in the oppressively hot machine room that housed a large generator for Iwan’s workshop. This also failed. Then, without any nurturing whatsoever, mushrooms started to sprout in a small flower garden in front of the mosque. Robert’s cell was opened first in the morning and he paid a boy 3000 rupiah (40 cents) to run out and pick the lot each day. He occasionally gave the others a few.

You eat these mushrooms, you fly. In Kerobokan, we ate them raw. You eat fifteen or twenty, and you’re smiling and laughing all day.

– Thomas

Thomas was having more success selling drugs than growing them, though. After a year of working in his vegetable garden, he gave it up and switched to dealing only and making small wood carvings in Iwan’s workshop.

Another way that prisoners beat the boredom of everyday life in Hotel K was by breeding creatures such as fish or birds. Thomas bred catfish in his watering ponds. Another inmate farmed ducks. He kept about one hundred next to Thomas’s vegetable garden, but his ducklings were regularly eaten by rats and
muses
(a nocturnal Indonesian animal with sharp teeth and a long tail). The long wild grass between the two jail walls was riddled with cobras and there were usually a few prisoners, besides Saidin, who would catch them and turn them into pets. One local inmate caught a cobra and put it in a box, but accidentally killed it by feeding it a poisonous toad. A Chinese inmate fished in the ponds all day for green frogs to eat. He baited a piece of string with grasshoppers and used a stick as a rod, moving from one stagnant pond to another each day. He sometimes even fished for them in the bathroom drains. During the rainy season, when the jail over-flowed with large pools of water, several prisoners used makeshift fishing lines to catch eels, frogs and fish.

Whether they were mad or just plain bad, Hotel K had a strange mix of prisoners. There were some seriously sick people, who, in most jails, would have been isolated, but in Hotel K, rapists, paedophiles and killers lived side by side with someone who had stolen a can of Diet Coke, or who’d been dancing at a club with an ecstasy pill in their pocket. Among the worst were a dentist who’d performed eighty-seven illegal abortions on foetuses, some as old as eight months, at the back of his clinic; another who’d killed twenty people in Timor – ripping the skin off their skulls; and a young man who’d hacked off his girlfriend’s head after finding her cheating. When police pulled him over on his motorbike for a traffic offence, they discovered the girl’s head dangling in a plastic bag from his handlebars.

Another Balinese man, Tanjung, was in Hotel K for the murder of five people. He had been working as a taxi driver in Bali when he went on a two-week holiday and let a friend drive his taxi. But when he returned and went to pick up the car, the friend refused to give it back. Tanjung went to his boss to complain. But his boss blew Tanjung off, telling him, ‘You know what … you always scratch the car, damage the car, the guy drives better than you. You don’t work for me anymore.’ Tanjung walked away quietly, but he was seething – and plotting his revenge. A day later he borrowed a car, bought drums of petrol, drove to his boss’s house and knocked on the door. As soon as the man answered it, Tanjung bashed him. He then stole the house keys, locked the doors from the outside and, with the terrified family stuck inside, he walked around the outside pouring petrol. Then he lit a match. The boss, his wife and their three young children were burned alive. Tanjung stood listening to their screams, not leaving until he was sure they were dead.

In Hotel K his psychopathic tendencies flared at the slightest provocation. One afternoon he was running one of his regular illegal gambling games, throwing three dice from a little Chinese cup, when a female guard turned up. She confiscated the dice, the cup and the cash, and walked off. Tanjung flipped. He snatched a piece of wood, and sprinted after the guard, screaming that he was going to split her head open. It was only the other prisoners struggling to hold him back that stopped him.