Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (32 page)

Jongky showed me how the fishing is done. He stood legs apart, as though on a wobbly deck, put his left forearm through the donut, which he held with his left hand, then wound the twine several times round his right hand. The trick, he said, is to pull the fish in quickly, so that it doesn’t wear itself out. A titanic fight is bad for the meat quality and it tires you out, too. But if you bring it in too quickly, the fish has a better chance of snapping the line and getting away. He jerked up his right hand, demonstrating the struggle, and I saw that it was badly scarred. Why didn’t he use gloves? He sometimes did, he said, but it reduces your sensitivity, your ability to tell if the line is so taut that it might snap.

Jongky’s techniques, and his equipment, are probably not that different from those used by the first tuna fishermen, who Australian scientists say were at work south of here, near the island of Timor, some 42,000 years ago. Other than small inboard engines, there’s not all that much about the boats that couldn’t have been around for thousands of years either. But the market is very different indeed.

Jongky does not cut up his tuna to feed to his mother Elizabeth, to his teenage sister and to the posse of children from even smaller islands who board with them here in Tahuna so that they can go to secondary school. He does not hang it out on a washing line to dry, like the whale fishermen of Lamalera, to be stored up and parcelled out through the months when the fishing is lean. Jongky hopes that the fish that his hand hauls in on Thursday will be served over a sushi bar in Tokyo at the weekend. Sometimes it makes it, sometimes not. It’s a question of infrastructure.

Tahuna’s electricity, shaky at the best of times according to Elizabeth, had cut out during the storm. By the time the rain stopped it was dark; the potholed road outside the kiosk was a necklace of mud-traps. Jongky insisted on walking me back to my guest house, and Elizabeth gave me a little parcel of cookies to take with me ‘in case you get hungry in the night’.

As we walked through the soggy darkness, Jongky told me that he had worked for eight years in an office in Jakarta. His elder brother was still there, working for a well-known interior decoration and lifestyle magazine. When their father died, Jongky drew the short straw and came back to Sangihe to support Elizabeth. ‘I didn’t want to be a civil servant, and fishing is really the only other game in town,’ he said.

I liked this quiet, naturally courteous man who did not complain about the cards that fate had dealt him, who seemed pleased that I was curious about the profession he had wound up in. I asked if I could come out fishing with him the next day.

Long silence.

‘You’re that interested?’ Yes. Another long pause. ‘But we only eat rice.’ No problem. ‘The sun’s very strong.’ I’ve got a hat. ‘And it’s the rainy season.’ I’ve got a rain poncho, too. ‘Well, come if you want. But eating only rice gets boring after four days.’

Four days?
On an outrigger with one small piece of tarpaulin for shelter in a season of flashing thunderstorms? I had imagined a nice, out-at-midnight, back-by-sunset expedition. I decided the ‘just say yes rule’ didn’t necessarily apply to things that I had invited myself to.

Jongky could see what I was thinking. ‘Let’s talk about it again tomorrow,’ he said. Then, with impeccable tact, he never mentioned it again.

The following day, I watched a pair of fishermen load up their outrigger. The donut-lines were thrown over a pole at the back of the craft; an Indonesian flag fluttered above them. There were a couple of large jerrycans of petrol for the engine, some of water for the fishermen, a sack of ice-bricks to put the catch on, a sack of rice, a bucket of bait and a large wooden crate of smooth, round rocks that looked like stone grapefruit.

The rocks are tied on to the line when it is first dropped, so that it takes the bait quickly past layers of hungry but uninteresting smaller fish to the depths where tuna hang out. A bit of wiggling and the rock drops off, leaving the bait free to tempt the prey. I asked the guys how long they expected to be out. ‘
Tergantung rezeki
,’ answered one: it depends on our good fortunes.
Rezeki
is a word one hears a lot in fishing communities: it implies a livelihood that is in the lap of the gods. ‘As long as the ice lasts,’ said the other.

In fact, the trips last until:

1) the fish-coffin is full

2) the rocks run out

3) the ice threatens to melt before getting the catch back

4) the petrol or water look like they might last just long enough to get home.

The price the fishermen will get paid for their catch melts away along with the ice. Block ice is a common sight all over Indonesia, especially in the early mornings: flatbed trishaws delivering huge oblong blocks of ice from the local ice factory to the women and men laying out their goods on market stalls. And yet here even the bigger outriggers, the ones with eight-man crews that can load up to thirty tuna, use ice-bricks that the people of Tahuna make in plastic bags in their freezers. The fishermen call it ‘thousand-a-piece’ because they buy the little bricks at 1,000 rupiah each, about eleven cents. There’s no ice factory in Tahuna.

I set off to explore the island, stopping in at the tourism department’s office in search of a map. Behind a wall of large, faded photographs of ‘Tourism Objects’ pinned behind crispy yellow cellophane, was a large, open-plan office. Eight people wearing smart batik uniforms, each neatly labelled with their name like pots of stock in the freezer, sat behind eight tidy wooden desks. More than tidy: not one of the desks had anything on it. Not a single sheet of paper, not a pencil or a calculator, not even a phone. The liveliest thing in the room was the television, which was blaring out a sinetron.

I bid everyone a cheery good day, and asked if they might have a map I could look at. They turned their heads, panic-stricken. A map! A MAP! There’s a guest, and she wants a
MA
P
! Eight worker bees scattered in eight directions. Cupboards were opened, drawers were rummaged in. Someone produced a brochure about underwater volcanoes. There were blobs showing me where they were in relation to the larger blob of Sangihe, but no information about how I might visit them. ‘There’s a German guy in Manado with a boat, I heard,’ ventured one of the staff. Manado is the capital of North Sulawesi. It’s an overnight ferry ride away.

We made general small talk about tourism in Sangihe (pronounced Sangur by the locals). Did they get lots of tourists? Hmmm. Hard to know exactly. Lots of them come from Manado, you see. But yes, probably lots. At least 200 every year. And how did they know what to visit? ‘Well, if they come here, we give them a brochure,’ said one of the ladies.

I rented a motorbike from a kindly Bugis trader in the market who gave me a little bag of salted bananas chips to stave off hunger, and headed off down the coast. The road hugged the lumpy side of the island, snaking above a series of beautiful curved bays, winding through villages of tidy bungalows standing in flower gardens. Painted shutters were flung open to reveal matching curtains; graduation portraits and crucifixes graced the walls.

After about thirty kilometres, the road dropped down to the coast and a triumphal arch announced the Dagoh special fishing port. I drove past a largish clump of buildings that looked abandoned; a commemorative plaque told me they dated from the 1970s and had been inaugurated by President Suharto himself. There was no sign of life.

Then I spotted a sizeable boat getting ready to cast off from a pier behind the buildings, a boat with a proper cabin, with bunks, with a kitchen. It had eight numbered hatches on its deck, each one a fish-coffin that could hold between ten and twenty tuna. The boat-owner was on shore saying goodbye to his wife and young son: he was bound for Manado, some 240 kilometres away, with a cargo of one hundred tuna that he had bought from the small traders in Tahuna.

What did he do for ice? I asked. ‘I get it from the factory,’ and he nodded his head towards the derelict building behind us. How come the fishermen in Tahuna all complain there’s no ice factory, then? Only one of the three ice machines is still working, the boat-owner said, just enough for the bigger wholesalers. There’s not enough electricity in the grid to run the other machines, and no money for a generator. He said he and other private businessmen would be happy to make the investment, but the local government wouldn’t let them. They said the factory is a state asset, that it can’t be privatized.

He excused himself, nodded at his wife, hugged his son, gathered his crew around him, and prayed for safe passage to Manado. It would take eighteen hours.

As they chugged out of the harbour, a tiny, two-man outrigger rounded the bay. There was much whistling and yelling, the engines of the bigger boat went still, there was some elaborate swinging about of ropes, and three more tuna were loaded on board. ‘The fisherman will be happy,’ observed one of the boat-owner’s staff, who had stayed onshore. ‘They get a better price if they cut out the middleman.’ I thought the boat-owner
was
the middleman, I said. ‘I mean the smaller middleman,’ he laughed. ‘You know how it is in Indonesia. The middle is very crowded.’

A couple of days later, Jongky called to say that some of his co-workers, Filipinos, had just come in and were about to take the catch down to the wholesalers. Did I want to go with them? What a sweetheart: having tactfully sidestepped the issue of the four-day trip, he was offering me ‘tuna industry lite’. I went down to Elizabeth’s kiosk, scrambled down the sandbank, and waded out to the outrigger.

One of the fishermen, a man in his late forties, was immensely smiley but spoke little Indonesian. The younger one was chattier; his Indonesian polite but idiosyncratic. Good trip? I asked. Okay, he said, they had been out three days and had caught one big tuna, two smaller ones. We puttered down the coast and tied up in the blinding sunshine below the sea wall near the centre of town. Up on the esplanade was a makeshift weighing station. There was a metal receiving table, a pile of Styrofoam cool-boxes, two big sacks of ice-bricks – the same ‘thousand-a-piece’ ones that the fishermen used – and a flatbed scale. A couple of chickens scratched around in the dust and a dog licked at yesterday’s blood. There was no sign of the wholesaler. We waited.

The older fisherman stretched out for a snooze on the bamboo platform that jutted at right angles from the side of the boat. ‘Bedroom,’ said the younger man. When it’s not raining and the waves are not crashing over it. He himself squatted on the other side of the boat, scrubbing at a plywood box that was balanced over the water on two sticks. ‘Kitchen.’ It was badly charred: ‘Yesterday, a fire,’ he said with a laugh. I read my book. We waited.

Another boat pulled up next to us and the lone fisherman started to tear open plastic bags of melted ice, throwing them one after another into the sea. ‘Dirty’, pronounced the younger of the Filipinos. Then he leant close to me. ‘People here get price, drink it all up,’ he said. ‘Make God angry.’

By the time the wholesaler showed up three hours later, the younger fisherman had given the older one a haircut he didn’t need and washed a big tub of plastic dishes from the trip, and we were all very hot.

The boys opened up the fish-coffin; I expected a rush of cold air but the ice was long gone; three eyes gleamed up from a soup of blood and droopy plastic bags, three magnificent fish were hoisted onto the shoulders of the wholesaler’s helpers and got pitter-pattered along the sea wall and up the steps to the ‘checking table’.

A teenage boy stuck a long skewer into each fish, just in front of the dorsal fin, then solemnly plopped three fat pink worms of flesh into the wholesaler’s outstretched hand. This was the moment of truth that decided the price: she poked and prodded each one, then pronounced, ‘One A, two C.’ The fishermen showed no emotion.

Luckily, the biggest fish was the A-grade, good enough to be shipped to Japan for sashimi; they would be paid 25,000 rupiah a kilo for that, about US$2.70. C-grade sells for 20,000 rupiah; below that is the dreaded ‘lokal’ – good enough only to go to the local market at half the export price.