Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (28 page)

The staple food in Maluku and Papua is sago, which is scraped out of the centre of a palm tree and made into a flour which can then be baked into dry pancakes or used to make a gluey paste which provides ballast to a good fish-head curry. The pancakes taste to me like so much dried cardboard, and the English adventurer Sir Francis Drake, visiting these islands in 1579, described wet sago as ‘tasting in the mouth like sour curds’, but it provides a lot of calories with a minimum of work. It takes a family about four days of cutting, scraping, washing and drying to harvest enough sago to feed themselves all year. ‘People around here never had to think ahead,’ said Edith. ‘We got lazy.’

It’s not just Maluku. In terms of land mass, Indonesia is the fifteenth biggest country in the world. But it is among the world’s top three producers of palm oil, rubber, rice, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, cassava, green beans and papayas, as well as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and vanilla. It’s also in the world’s top ten for tea, tobacco, maize and groundnuts, together with avocados, bananas, cabbages, cashews, chilli, cucumbers, ginger, pineapples, mangoes, sweet potatoes and the humble pumpkin. It’s a top-ten producer of forestry products, and pulls more fish out of its seas and waterways than any country except China.

And there’s another layer of bounty, under the crust. Indonesia sits above huge chambers of natural gas. The Grasberg mine in Papua has more known gold reserves than anywhere else on the planet, and it’s not even a gold mine; its day job is to produce copper. Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of tin and coal, after China, and it’s by far the biggest exporter of both minerals. It produces bauxite (for aluminium) and lots of nickel – again, it’s already the world’s number-two producer (after Russia, this time) and number-one exporter. It even digs out of the ground things that I had always thought were manufactured. Asphalt, for example.

When I was with the Bajo fisherman Pak Zunaidi in Sulawesi’s Banggai islands, I met a lobster farmer who told me that his brother Dauda managed an asphalt mine in Buton, which hangs off the bottom stroke of Sulawesi’s K. Huh? I had always thought that asphalt was a by-product of petroleum. ‘No, no. You dig it out of the ground. My brother will show you the mines.’ So when I got to Buton, I called Dauda. It turns out that Indonesia is one of the world’s largest producers of natural asphalt (though asphalt can also be manufactured as a by-product of petroleum, as it happens). And Buton is the biggest producer in Indonesia. On its website Buton Asphalt Indonesia proudly posted photos of highways as smooth as Formula One tracks. The highways were in China, admittedly, but still, they looked impressive. I inspected the map; the village where Dauda’s mine was said to be wasn’t marked, but it was in an area that seemed to be about seventy-five kilometres from town, a fair distance for a day-trip on the girly, automatic transmission motorbike I had hired in Bau-Bau, but doable.

Dauda was having none of it. ‘You can’t come by bike. The road is terrible!’ In Java I used to wave such objections away: I’m not scared of a bit of mud. But in recent months I had learned that in the eastern islands ‘the road is terrible’ means something between impassable and non-existent. I went down to the bus station and asked about transport to Nambo, but everyone shook their head. ‘No one wants to do that route any more. The road’s terrible.’ For the only time in that year of travel, I hired a car and driver.

With a punky twenty-two-year-old at the wheel, I could just enjoy the view. We drove through a pretty valley of tidy rice-paddies, incongruously dotted with Hindu temples. The punk described the village as ‘pure Bali’, a transmigration site that had been here since the 1960s. The temples were breeze-block imitations of the red-brick originals of Bali. While the houses in the surrounding villages were colourful wooden affairs built up on stilts, here concrete homes squatted on the ground. Along the roadside in front of them, election posters showed candidates for bupati of the fiercely Islamic district of Buton posed next to Photoshopped pictures of Balinese maidens with towers of fruit piled on their heads.

Ten kilometres out of Bau-Bau, the tarmac burst apart into a spine-jolting mass of lumps. Further on, it joined forces with a stream. As we hydroplaned our way through a dark forest, the punk reached for a kretek, looked at me, put it back in the pack, looked at me again. After months on public buses, it hadn’t occurred to me that someone might have qualms about lighting up. I invited him to smoke. He grabbed a cigarette and lit up urgently. I laughed: wow, you really needed that! ‘It’s not that, Miss. The thing is, this is where the bad spirits are. The smoke keeps them away.’ When a wild boar ran out into the road-stream in front of us, the punk nearly drove into the jungle.

Eventually, the stream dried up, but the mud didn’t. As the lumps of tarmac became less frequent, we skidded around. We were laughing, but I held on to the dashboard and the punk’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. And then suddenly, close to our destination, the road smoothed out. It wasn’t tarmac, exactly, but it wasn’t mud either. I got out to have a look and found the road spongy under my feet, like that rubber stuff they put under the swings in children’s playgrounds so that no one gets hurt too badly if they fall. We were driving on natural asphalt, just sitting there on the earth’s surface, compacted into something that looked like a road by the weight of the trucks from the mines.

Mine manager Dauda had a degree in political communication from an Islamic university in Luwuk, in Central Sulawesi. He had no luck getting the dreamed-of civil service post; rather than do nothing, he took a job at an asphalt mine in his mother’s village. We walked together to one of the ‘mines’. It was nothing more than a giant bite taken out of the hillside. From a distance the ground looked like broken granite, but it had the same spongy feel as the road. I picked up a grey lump and broke it open; it was black, gooey, it oozed treacle and smelled of roadworks on a summer’s day. I had just mined asphalt with my bare hands.

When I think of mining I think of shafts and props, of smelters and railheads, I think of thousands of grubby figures streaming in and out of the bowels of the earth like ants in and out of an anthill, an L. S. Lowry painting. The asphalt mines of Buton could not have been more different. Here, three guys were sitting smoking under a blue tarpaulin set up to shelter them from the sun and rain. Two yellow diggers sat idly on a carpet of asphalt; all the lads had to do was activate them, position the claw over the ground, scoop up the asphalt and dump it into a truck. They weren’t doing even that.

‘
Istirahat dulu
?’ I teased. Taking a rest? No, they had run out of diesel for the diggers. I had spent the previous day at a petrol station for fishermen, and had heard chapter and verse about inefficiencies in the fuel delivery system, so I sympathized. But this wasn’t about late delivery. ‘They just forget to order it. Now they have to wait ten days,’ Dauda laughed. ‘It happens all the time. We’re not very good at forward planning in Indonesia.’

The failure to order fuel actually didn’t matter much, as it happened. Asphalt mining in Buton had more or less ground to a halt when I visited because the government had, maybe, banned exports of unprocessed ore and minerals. By law, the ban was not supposed to come into effect until January 2014. Then the Ministry of Mines and Energy in Jakarta changed its mind. In February 2012 it suddenly announced that mining companies had just three months to submit full plans for processing the minerals and ores they mined. If they didn’t put in plans by the deadline, they wouldn’t get any more export permits.

I visited the mines in Buton the week after the deadline. No one had any idea whether they were allowed to export or not. Does the regulation cover asphalt? No one knew. What constitutes processing? Dauda’s company smashes up the lumps it digs out of the ground and sticks the smaller lumps in sacks. ‘That’s semi-processed, we think, so we should be okay.’ But they were uncertain, and it was hard to check; the ministry had put the new regulation on its website, then taken it down the same day. The ‘build a processor’ measure was supposed to add value to exports and create jobs for Indonesians. But for now, Dauda had laid off all the day labourers at the mine. The few regular staff had shifted over to sewing sacks. ‘But there’s only so long we’ll be able to go on paying them, so we really need to know what’s going on.’

The export ban was struck down by the Supreme Court six months after it supposedly came into effect. A month after that, the Constitutional Court had its say. This time, the court handed back to the districts certain powers that the ministry had tried to swipe for the national government. That was just two days after another major confusion, about a regulation that required foreign mining firms to sell over half of the equity in their Indonesian ventures to Indonesian companies.

When that rule was announced, some of Indonesia’s largest foreign investors made their displeasure known in no uncertain terms. The two ministries involved clarified the situation. We’ve decided to postpone the rule, said the Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources. No, we haven’t, said the Chief Economic Minister, the same day.

Asphalt brings in plenty of taxes and royalties, and the potential for future earnings is huge: Buton’s reserves are estimated at 3.6 billion tonnes; at current prices that’s a ‘street value’ of US$360 billion. Judging from the road we’d arrived on, not much of it seemed to be going into local infrastructure.

Dauda and I wandered down to the shore, where a long, low mountain of raw asphalt sat waiting to be shipped out – 50,000 tonnes of the stuff. Behind it, a dozen or so young men in cut-off jeans and torn T-shirts were filling little wooden cribs full of river-rocks, then scrambling around to pack them in between rusting steel rods and shaky wooden planks. This was the skeleton of a new pier that is being built to promote exports.

In front of the mountain, a billboard featuring a photograph of the pine-studded shores of Canada’s Lake Banff welcomed visitors to the asphalt mine and gave a cell-phone number, all in Chinese characters a foot high. Ban or no ban, a ship was scheduled to come in that night to cart the asphalt off to China. ‘They had the export permit before the ban came in,’ explained a young man who was squatting on the mountain. ‘They’ve just been a bit slow to ship it out because of other administrative matters.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘And they were hoping that the pier might be finished.’

It seemed quixotic, the idea that a functional port might blossom in this abandoned corner of Indonesia. But I had seen things just as unlikely on my travels. In North Maluku’s Halmahera, for example.

The promiscuous sharing of cell-phone numbers with fellow passengers on Indonesian ferries often leads to later encounters in port. In Ternate I had been invited to supper by an engineer I’d met on the boat. Sitting next to us as we feasted on great slabs of grilled fish down by the waterfront was a bird-like man with the broad, high-cheeked face of one of Halmahera’s indigenous minorities. In the way of small-town people when they come to the big city, slightly distrustful, slightly awkward, he kept his rucksack strapped to his back as he attacked a plate of fried chicken. But when he overheard us chatting about the relative merits of different nearby islands, he barged straight in with tales of Halmahera, his home village Lelilef, and the nearby town of Weda.

The sum total of the information I had about Weda was the comment of a website dedicated to travel in the extremities of Maluku: ‘a scruffy village with muddy roads’. But Pak Piter painted a different picture. The town was now the capital of Central Halmahera: ‘absolutely booming’. It was an especially good time to visit, he said, because the Bupati was marrying off his twin daughters. ‘Everyone who is anyone will be there,’ he said.

Halmahera sits right next to tiny Ternate. Geographically the island, shaped like a squashed spider, dominates North Maluku. Politically, though, it has always been overshadowed by its little neighbour, and much neglected. When I first visited Halmahera in 1989, it was one of the least developed parts of Indonesia. I had hitched a lift through the jungle by night in an army jeep – there seemed to be no other transport except bullock carts. In the middle of the velvety jungle, a single tree was fairy-lit with the greenish white of hundreds of fireflies. It was a magical sight. Over four hundred years earlier it had impressed even Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite adventurer Francis Drake, who described it thus:

Among these trees by night, did shewe themselves an infinite swarme of fierie-seeming-wormes, flieing in the aire, whose bodies (no bigger than an ordinarie flie) did make a shewe, and give such light as if every twigge on every tree had beene a lighted candle, or as if that place had been the starry spheare.
*

I had marvelled at the starry sphere but when daylight came, the sight was less magical: the beautiful beaches of Halmahera were littered with rusting Second World War tanks. The Japanese had a large garrison here, which they kicked into action in late 1944 after the American General MacArthur decided to use neighbouring Morotai as a base for his Pacific adventures.