Archive for July, 2009
Forest People
Monday, July 6th, 2009
A night bus brought us to the to Kerinci National Park turnoff. The town was dead, only at the junction a roaring tiger cast in concrete was leaping over its own stand. We argued at length where to put our tents, and finally set up camp under the statue.
Surprisingly, barely anybody noticed our two little tents hidden in the tall grass surrounding the monument. We were woken up by the roar of motorbikes rushing by, and climbed out as if we were the newborn cubs of the cement tiger itself. The villagers didn’t seem to be too surprised – this might have solved the puzzle of where white people come from.
A short breakfast, a ride on a tomato truck, and we were in the forest. There was nobody in the ticket office, so there was nobody to pay an entrance fee to. That was just fine with us.
Kerinci didn’t disappoint. Gibbons announced their presence in the canopy as soon as we entered the forest, and I almost brought one down when it lost its grip on a branch frightened by the flash of my camera. Orange leaf monkeys let me get much closer, even though they sat relatively low and watched me tear through the jungle towards them.
We climbed all day and set up camp – one two-person tent for the four of us. Our little home was very cold but also very cozy. We didn’t bring much food, but as little as there was of it, it still required cooking. That turned out to be the biggest challenge of all – every square millimeter of forest around us was soggy and virtually impossible to burn. Shurik slaved for over three hours, using, among other things, a sleeping mat as bellows, before he was able to heat up some water Vova had found in a puddle in the forest.
Food was running out, and the cold didn’t make life here very comfortable. One day we met a Singaporean birdwatcher with a guide, and he gave us what was left of his chocolate. It hit me how hippie we must look to him – four citizens of the world, all with higher education and about ready to hunt for squirrels to supplement our diet
of forest blackberries. But the way we look, and the way we are are two very different things. Sometimes, even some of our parents cannot tell the difference. But it has become our educated privilege to pick our own path, and it is our right, nay, our responsibility to ourselves and to the lifestyle we have chosen to avoid being distracted by how somebody who doesn’t know us might perceive us.
We all fell in love with the serenity of Kerinci, and stayed three nights, keeping busy by boiling water, going on night walks, and playing everything from cards to charades.
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5 years
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
When I married him on the 4th of July I did have fireworks in mind… :)
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In the land of the Bull
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
On our last day together Rick took us to Lake Maninjau for a hike full of leeches and lime green lizards. The man knows all the best spots! Even the forest trails that have small local bars to have a cold beer on the way. We stopped to see if we could find some rafflesia flowers (biggest in the world) in Bukittinggi, but the only two we found were a dead one, and a bud that would take at least 2-3 weeks to open. Bummer.
Traveling with Rick we finally could stop and soak in the local architecture. Minangkabau, the local folks, are so obsessed with bulls that even the roofs of the houses are shaped as bullhorns. According to the old legend, a Javan prince once had a quarrel with a local princess. They were to get married, but she changed her mind, so he sent in the troops. But the smart Minangkabau suggested settling the dispute with a bullfight instead. Javans agreed and sent in a huge mean fighting bull, while Minangkabau sent a tiny little calf with razor sharp knifes strapped to its teensy horns. The story gets a little vague here, but apparently the calf was so hungry it tried to suckle from its male (!) opponent and slashed his belly open. Since then the bulls here are held in high regard as the symbol of Minangkabau cleverness.
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Will Teach for Food
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
We were looking for a cheap guesthouse, but found a job. Well, almost. Being joined by new travel mates always opens up doors to new ways to travel that I’ve never even considered. In Padang, our search for cheap accommodation was coming up with nothing but tired feet and sweat stains, so I entered a school to ask them if they knew something useful. Masha came along. “Maybe we can give them an English lesson in exchange for accommodation,” she suggested. I grabbed the ball and ran with it. Soon everybody in the building knew about the two white girls who wanted to teach English. An English teacher was summoned, but before she got to us we were introduced to the principal and a physics professor. It was just as well – Ewan, the physics professor, spoke better English than the English teacher.
kindergarten children of Padang
The school day was over, and we were ready to exploit our natural gift of yakedy-yak (in three to four languages if needed) the next day, but it turned out that it would be a “teacher enrichment” day, and children wouldn’t have classes. Nevertheless, Ewan took us in. He lived on the outskirts of Padang in a nice house with his wife and parents-in-law. The house was a simple Muslim home with few decorations and a prayer or two on the walls. Ewan’s mother-in-law has decorated the thorny bushes outside the house with empty eggshells, and those, from afar, looked like bulbs of white flowers.
But our fraternizing with the locals didn’t end there.
Expats are often the most useful people in a foreign country. While waiting for the boat from the city of Padang to Siberut Island, we stumbled upon Rick, an ex-Australian, who usually takes people to a gibbon sanctuary and arranges surfing vacations. He told us the time we had allotted for exploring Siberut was insufficient as it takes a lot of time to get around the island on the little boats using rivers as highways and costs a pretty penny. The deeper you go in, the more interesting it is, but the rivers were quite dry and the indigenous tribes in the bush are pretty fed up with tourists. We had enough of that in Africa.
I was not against seeing gibbons, and Rick looked like he needed some post-Soviet drinking buddies who wouldn’t mind discussing politics over vodka – his boat mysteriously gone up in flames a few days ago, a short time after a disagreement with the local government over some touchy environmental issues. We got along great and spent two nights in Rick’s guesthouse while island hopping in the day and drinking Smirnoff and beer in the evenings. This is the first and last time I’m chasing vodka with salted limes.
another unexpected though welcome guest at Rick’s house
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