Empire of the East (4 page)

It was immediately after leaving Blangrakal that we were exposed for the first time to the vivacity and exuberance of the Indonesian rainforest. We were passing under the flanks of the ten-thousand-foot peak of Mount Geureudong, of which we caught an occasional glimpse through the trees, where the entrances to the jungle were guarded by a phalanx of leaves like great interlocking shields. Placed behind them were enormous ferns which provided a defence for trees soaring possibly to one hundred and fifty feet. Tucked into niches of this rampaging vegetation were tiny villages constructed almost entirely of corrugated iron, and here and there their occupants had quietly done away with a tree or two and crammed a minute paddy-field into the space, in which men with thin, sallow tropical bodies groped incessantly in the mud. Bundles of birds with white faces and long yellow bills had been trapped in these mini-swamps and were offered at the roadside, although the villagers showed no interest in them and there was no passing traffic. The area had somehow managed to avoid official scrutiny, for clandestine logging quite clearly went on in a small way. When we stopped to examine an orchid we discovered a pile of tree trunks, their peach-coloured wood laid bare by the axe, inefficiently concealed among the ferns. This bootlegging of wood was a dangerous business for the small people who practised it, for they risked long terms of imprisonment if caught. Great multi-national timber firms were clearing Indonesian forests at the rate of tens of thousands of acres a day. A hill tribesman living by the traditional slash-and-burn system, by which a fresh patch of an acre or two was cleared annually and cultivated for ten years or so before being returned to the jungle, might be sent to prison for ten years.

There were twenty or thirty miles of this impeccable forest, after which the road passed out of the steep hillside and down into an open valley where deforestation had taken place in past times, leaving a tangle of weeds, buffalo grass and secondary growth extending back to the distant mountains. Even as we passed, a woman swinging an enormous axe cut down a seedling large enough to supply a little firewood, and further on, where the forest cover had taken over, again a tree had been felled and left lying to be dragged away under cover of darkness.

Coming into Takingeun it seemed conceivable at first glance that it did in fact receive only one hundred visitors a year, for at this time of political crisis it came close to being a ghost town.
WELCOME
, in Indonesian, said a banner stretched across the street, but there was no one about but a few children, and the losmen which had been recommended to us was closed. The view of Lake Tawar was of extreme charm. It was five or six miles across, eternally placid according to all accounts, and enclosed in a coronet of low, pointed mountains which were mantled as if in velvet of the deepest green. At regular intervals little triangular valleys opened out on the lake. These were walled in by slopes which gave out a close-cropped, burnished appearance, as did the glades revealed in openings in the trees. This supremely tropical vista reflected the harmony and spaciousness of a landscape that has escaped interference. Fishermen from invisible villages were out in flotillas of canoes. The lake is said to contain large numbers of small fish, valued not only for their flavour but for their stimulation of the sexual urge. We watched the nearest canoe in action, consisting of putting down the net, then driving the fish into it by splashing the surface of the shallow water with a paddle. The result, so far as we could see, was unpromising, yet two or three fairly minute fish were caught in an operation taking a few minutes. With five or six hours out on the lake it all added up.

The Hotel Renggali had been built upon a spit of land just above the water. In this part of the world people like to put up notices and it came as no surprise that the hotel should have displayed at its entrance a large banner worded in
English: WELCOME TO ACEH THE SPIRITUAL DESTINATION OF THE EAST.
The building harmonized with its grandiose surroundings in a way that such intrusions so rarely do. It was faintly reminiscent of childhood fairy tales in which castles may be emptied of their inhabitants by a spell, for there were no signs of life in the vicinity of the hotel. A longish wait followed at the reception before there were stirrings in the remote interior of the building, and a clerk who might have been reluctantly aroused from sleep came on the scene.

This hotel came close to being a magnificent shell. We were shown to splendid rooms, admired the astonishing panoply of mountains, forest and water through windows cunningly contrived to embrace half the curve of the horizon. The door closed softly behind the porter and silence fell again. Everything about the Renggali impressed: the thick pile of its carpets, the furniture of dark, richly grained wood with its metal inlay based probably on Persian models of Islamic calligraphy, the antique panels carved and painted with ethnic designs decorating the lounge, the music-room in which a row of instruments, most of them unfamiliar, awaited on a podium the arrival of performers instinct told us would never appear.

The hotel had its wonderfully landscaped, empty gardens arranged in terraces and lawns through close-clipped hedges and shrubberies in blossom, which attracted a cloud of butterflies as they descended to the lake. Waiting at the water’s edge was the canoe mentioned in a leaflet picked up at the reception, to conduct guests in the mood for a dip in the lake to areas where it was safe to swim. Why safe when all the lake within easy reach was so shallow? The leaflet explained. Although devout Muslims, the locals also contrived to be animists and they refused to allow visitors to risk their lives in parts of the lake under the domination of local spirits. It was after reading this leaflet that Andy told us he preferred not to sleep in a hotel bedroom that night but would lock himself in the car.

We took a walk along the lakeside to visit the nearest of the villages. These were the busiest, liveliest of places, reflecting once again a local appetite for road signs in Indonesian,
SUBSIDENCE, HAIRPIN BEND, FALLING ROCK, DANGER, PROCEED WITH CAUTION
, which they had purloined for use as a form of decoration together with advertisements of all kinds: for car batteries, soft drinks, detergents, and above all those for Rinso. The village streets were full of small, strutting Lowry figures, coming and going in all directions, with men holding cockerels clipped and ready for the combat under their arms, women hanging up washing, herds of goats directed by their owners purely by arm signals and ginger dogs. Inevitably these people grew rice, and here the paddies’ sparkling attraction was intensified by the use of hundreds of brilliantly coloured flags planted in the mud or suspended from lines to keep the birds away. Small mosques were built in each village by the villagers themselves. The domes were what really counted in these buildings and they were made from scales of metal hammered out in local forges.

Despite the Acehnese reputation for social exclusiveness and taciturnity the whole population of a village turned out when we passed through to wave and shout something that we hoped was applause.

Surprisingly another guest arrived the next day to break the spell of the hotel’s emptiness. ‘Don’t even attempt to pronounce my name,’ he said. ‘To my friends I am Anatole. Where are you from? England? Well, of course, one glance was sufficient. I hope you will be staying over the weekend. It is a relief to have someone to talk to. Here it is hard not to feel cut off. I am in the logging business. This is a nice place to relax and the security is good, but let us face it, it is a little dull.’

Anatole’s father had been a diplomat and he had spent several of his formative years in Paris and London. He had black, gleeful eyes, his youthful appearance betrayed only by the tufts of grey over the ears. He stood as erect as a soldier on parade, but his hands were constantly in motion. I noticed about him, as I had done before in the case of upper-class Indonesians who ate frequently and well, a faint odour of the spices employed in their food. My impression of him was that he suffered from a lifelong struggle to use up energy. There was no time when all parts of his body were at rest. He had placed himself at this moment close to a table scattered with antique bric-a-brac, and constantly shifted the position of various objects. Thoughts breaking into the stream of consciousness provoked shallow bursts of action. He broke off in mid-sentence to dash to the window, from which he returned with a frown and a shake of the head. ‘Boat still not fixed,’ he muttered. ‘As I was saying,’ he went on, ‘this is a great place to go to earth for a few days. By the way, I just saw your man down there. He was running round in a circle. Anything wrong with him?’

‘He finds that it helps with the nerves,’ I told him. ‘He picked up some talk about hostage-taking and I think it worried him.’

‘Tell him he has no value as a hostage,’ Anatole said, with a sudden explosion of laughter. ‘Anyway he’s quite safe while he stays here. You must have heard of the GAM, the so-called Aceh Liberation Front. They’re the people who are causing the trouble, but it’s quiet in this season. Could be something going on round Meuseugit. That’s past Banda, where the road gets squeezed in between the mountains and the sea. They just killed a few loggers working on one of our concessions. Here we’re well placed. Trouble is it’s coming to an end. We don’t clear-cut in this area, and unless there’s an upturn in the price of timber and we have to come back for what we’ve left, we’ll be saying goodbye.’

‘What happens next?’

‘Indah Kiat might take me on. They have a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-hectare concession south of here. This is a clear-cut and replacement with a eucalyptus project. It’s very attractive but I’m sold on this place and I’d like to stay here. I’m thinking of moving into tourism.’

‘What about the GAM?’

‘They’ll have vanished by then.’ He tried to wink like a Westerner, but had to use the corner of his mouth as well as an eye. ‘From now on the only thing that matters in the East is Japan. It’s only three hours away, and given the right appeal the Japanese will come here in droves.’

‘Will you be leaving them any trees?’

‘It doesn’t matter one way or the other. There’s a lot of claptrap talked about forests. You can leave a forest a half-mile deep and no one will notice the difference. If they want animals we can even put them in at the maximum utilization rate; in the case of deer, for example, of fifteen per hectare.’

I found myself guided to the window, embracing a prospect of two-thirds of Lake Tawar, and as he came closer I again caught the faint whiff of cinnamon and cardamoms. There were fifteen or twenty canoes in sight, several of them with their nets down and fishermen splashing in the water with their paddles. Five small mountains almost as regular in shape as pyramids came into this view. It was early morning, the light was bluish and the densely forested little mountains were veiled in ultramarine shadows, although their coloration would alter continually throughout the day, from bluish tones to a glowing russet-red according to the position of the sun. In a calm, stealthy fashion this view was changing all the time. Almost overhead a curdling of small clouds appeared, then vanished. Down in the nearest of the paddies the rice-farmers were changing the position and colour of the flags. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Anatole said. ‘Sooner or later this is going to be the Acapulco of South-east Asia. Well, not quite Acapulco because it isn’t by the sea. As it is, nobody produces anything. They grow rice and they eat it. They catch fifty cents worth of fish a day. While gold awaits to be shovelled from the earth.’

He snapped his fingers loudly, a sound which I realized could signify frustration as well as enthusiasm, and frustration in this case was in response to the spectacle of the large speedboat by the hotel’s steps leading down to the water. ‘Nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed in five minutes,’ he said, ‘but they can’t get a mechanic to come up from Medan.’

Before leaving the hotel I wanted to clear up a point. The guidebook warns the reader to check with the locals before going on early-morning and late-afternoon walks from Takingeun or Lake Tawar, because that is the time when the tigers ‘which constitute a great danger’ come down to feed. It is to be supposed that they are particularly numerous in the area, for ‘if you get off the road’, the book says, ‘you see their tracks’. Having failed in many visits to countries where tigers abound to view any of these splendid animals, I was excited by news of their prevalence round Takingeun. I discussed the likelihood of a sighting with the hotel manager. ‘There are no tigers,’ he said. ‘If you find one footprint bring me to see it. I have lived here all my life and this is something I have not seen.’

W
E DROVE INTO BANDA ACEH
, birthplace of Muslim fundamentalism, early in the afternoon, and found ourselves under a dome from Byzantium, holding half the sky in its burnished curve. A taped voice from the minaret offered salvation in a language nobody understood. We parked outside a supermarket and were joined in a moment by a Mitsubishi Shogun from which descended a stately fundamentalist matron, shrouded from the world almost in the style of Iran. She was followed by her three fundamentalist girls, small demure faces cowled in the manner of a medieval jousting casque to cut off side-vision. Getting out of our car, Gawaine and Robin, tall, fair and ruddy, passed briefly through their narrowed vision and were lost to sight, when from one of them came, in such a context, the most extraordinary sound to be heard in all Asia — a wolf whistle.

We began a rather perfunctory exploration of the place discouraged by the heat and also by the lack of any identifiable centre to the town. At this time one longs for the inner sanctum of calm often provided by the cathedral cities of Europe, from which the stresses of commercialism have usually been banned.

Banda Aceh was part of the modern Orient, vociferous, full of lively hucksters and tiring to the visitor. There were mosques galore, for Banda presented itself as a fortress of the unsullied practice of the religion. The atmosphere in the way of social and religious matters resembled that of Franco’s Spain immediately after the last war, when women were followed by plain-clothes policemen with rulers intent on measuring their décolletage, and the obsession with covering the body was so great that even a male in shorts was legally obliged to conceal his kneecaps. As in Spain of old, many forms of censorship were rampant, including one by which so much could be cut out of films that in the end some ran to barely half their intended showing time. Aceh had become a Special Autonomous Territory, enforcing Islamic law, and although apprehended robbers do not lose a hand, sentences are said to be severe.