WHAT MORE COULD ONE WANT?

It was Wednesday February 7th, 2001, when Munro and I landed in Singapore. We arrived just after midnight, after more than nineteen hours in the air and a change of aircraft in Incheon. From Changi Airport we hailed a cab, as one does. The car that arrived was like any cab anywhere: the dashboard had at its center a little golden Hindu deity and the driver a friendly smile. There wasn't much to see in the dark and, regardless, we were both close being in a dream state after an entire sleepless day inside a plane. The driver was quiet until about halfway to our hostel when he asked where we were coming from. We told him. He explained that it was too late for us to be out and that we were too young to be travelling all this way alone, unaccompanied by adults. He also shared with us that he wasn't too sure where we were staying but knew the landmarks we gave him (the Singapore Art Museum and Maghain Aboth Synagogue, near Bencoolen Street.) While that was a bit unnerving, Semsar recommended the place, and I trusted Sem. He'd said it was cheap and centrally located, that he’d been there many times over the years, and he even gave us a contact at the neighbouring museum.

(To this day, I have yet to book accommodation ahead of time when travelling. Seems a bit uncalled for, presumptuous or something. No? Seems a bit over-ambitious and maybe even naive to insist ahead of time that I'm even going to arrive, nevermind do so at some preordained place and check-in time. I mean, really, how many stars and planets and moons have to synchronize for you to travel in an aircraft across time zones and oceans, avoiding mechanical disruptions and volcanic eruptions, to have you alight on the stoop of a particular building, one that may or may not still exist, down some dark steamy alleyway halfway around the globe? Well, innumerable...)

After about half an hour in the cab the driver let us off in an alley. “This is it,” he asserted. So we gathered our backpacks, climbed out, and rang the doorbell at the only entranceway not behind bars. Quickly a man greeted us at the door, shuffled us into a tall, skinny, chilly building whose walls and ceiling were all white and whose floors were covered wall-to-wall with glistening white tiles. He took us too a desk, handed us a key, and gave us directions. We hiked up three or four flights to our room and collapsed there in the distant and unfamiliar surrounds as though the bed was our own.

Morning was like a open wound. A slash in the curtained window spilled stinging new-day into the room. Equatorial metropolitan morning orange (surely that’s in the Crayola box) crept and stretched and bled all over, until dawn was day and the city beyond was busy. Though the bed was still very appealing we had some business to attend to. Our accommodation was far from cheap and we needed to find another spot, really just to house our bags for a few days while we acclimate before heading off on the rest of our adventure. A local explained that the city was amidst a push to expunge the cheaper stays – a kind of government-mandated gentrification in an effort to become more of a destination for desirables, and not a stopover for sad lowlifes like us. I was told that prices were inflating as rapidly as the dust clouds plume-ing from hostel demolition sites; but, rumour had it, something less expensive was still possible and so we went looking while on a more primal hunt for breakfast.

From outside in the alley we heard and saw a commotion on the street. February 7th, we were unaware, was the semi-orgiastic apex of Thaipusam. This meant half the city was in the street and this was no commotion: no, this was the celebration of the goddess of love, devotion, and divine power, the Mother Goddess of Hinduism, Parvati (though she has about a hundred names, all derived from her many traits), gifting Lord Kartikeya, the god of war (who is known by more than a hundred other names), a spear with which to rid the universe of its evil tormentor, Soorapadman.

(For a touch more context, Parvati, beautiful and benevolent, is the recreative force in the universe, the source of the connective tissue between all creatures, and a means through which spiritual release may be achieved. She is technically Kartikeya’s mother; though Kartikeya, it is said, came into being when Shiva “the destroyer and creator” spilled his divine semen into the River Ganges, which was there preserved by the warmth of the Vedic fire god Agni until the philosopher-warrior was born. [My favourite side note about Kartikeya is that, ever the problem solver, as a baby he grew five additional heads so that he could nurse from his six caretakers simultaneously, ending their feud over who would get to feed him.] These are our protagonists. Question: Is it just me or does the Hindu put the Greek and Pokemon pantheons, combined, to shame? Just imagine for a second the perceptual shift, the rupture in worldview, needed to accommodate one hundred and twenty-four additional labels for Poseidon or Pikachu! Or imagine the reverse: the army of philosophical and metaphysical feller bunchers needed to denude this divine ecology, to strip this psycho-social-spiritual world down to just one, like the Judeo-Christian faiths, or even a handful of isolated individuals with singular labels...)

Out on the main street we were met by a sea devotees praying to Kartikeya to help them overcome life’s obstacles and their own personal failings too. After weeks of fasting, today these celibates would make their “dance of burden”. Many, with shaved heads, carried pots of milk or planks of wood. Others made mortifications of the flesh and walked with cheeks and tongues skewered by long steel spears, with some having backs and/or chests pierced with hooks weighted down by golf ball-sized golden spheres, fresh limes, jugs of milk, or even whole clusters of milk jugs, full and lashed together hanging from a single steel barb in their flesh. Still others, some of whom participated in all of the above – presumably those seeking greatest metaphysical assistance – carried shrines over their heads (brightly coloured floral elaborations with a square or circular base, maybe three or four feet in diameter, standing between three and six feet tall) as they made their pilgrimage through the streets.

(I couldn’t think of a North American comparison. For a pride parade to approximate Thaipusam participants would have to be engaged in an elaborate, month-long repentance including fasting for having had heterosexual thoughts. And then they’d need to be compelled by the notion that the only way to full redemption was by carrying their floats, not riding upon them, while sporting throbbing erections and foot-long Prince Alberts. But this would still be lacking the splendid disorder, openness, and, well, je ne sais quoi of Thaipusam.)

It was decided that this, totally and delightfully inadvertent as it was, was maybe the best possible introduction to Asia one could have. It was doubly delightful to be thrust into this loud, exotic, and somewhat chaotic mass of people in an authoritarian city-state that touts itself as being oppressively clean, impossibly straight, and at all times ultra-business-like. But there was business to attend to, so after gawking for some time we moved on.

We found the Singapore Art Museum around the corner. It was a two storey colonial affair, like that found almost anywhere in the city. It stood there, squat and wide, all white with an orange tiled roof. The whole building was ringed in arched passages, doorways, and windows. It seemed there was more gaping archway than there was wall on this structure. I’d read somewhere that it was an old school, which made sense looking at it. We went in search of the office of our contact, just to say hello from our mutual friend, but he was in a meeting. We walked around a little and, as it turned out, Semsar didn’t just have a contact at the museum, he also had work hanging in the Contemporary Southeast Asia section. He would. But we didn’t want to spend the day soaking up air conditioning so we quickly departed looking for eats.

There were coffee and croissants to be found on Bencoolen Street, as well as a rough little hostel slightly cheaper than the place we’d spent the previous night. Seemingly the best we could do, we took it and moved our belongings over. We’d intended staying a week in Singapore before making our way to Indonesia but decided we could probably live a month in rural Sumatra for the same sum Singapore sought for just a few days in her company. It felt a bit rushed but we planned to head out as soon as we could figure out a ferry ride across the Strait to Pulau Batam (Batam Island), our gateway to Indonesia.

(With my family I’d travelled a lot over the years. And that travel was quite unlike what I thought of as a vacation. For about a decade our summer holidays were largely extended driving and camping excursions to numerous national/state parks/monuments – mostly those in the western half of the United States accessible within a three week’s meander of Vancouver. Of course these sights to see were separated by the famously long and winding network of highways connecting the cities, towns, and villages of what I came to know of as America. And, to me, that’s where the real America, as I knew it, was found: not in the swirling cliches and reproductions of cities like Denver or Phoenix, San Francisco or Seattle, or even in any kind of arrival, but in the travelling of it. Do you know what I mean? Travel is about going, it’s about the experience and about discovery. It’s about uncovering in yourself and in the world both the mundane and the unexpected, out where it can only be found: in that amnion of place and time missing from every film and album and archive. And that kind of getting away isn’t about comfortably finding what you knew to be there all along or about retreating to what is familiar. Nope. Travel is about being out in the world, on the move, finding yourself somewhere not at all like home and not knowing what was around the next bend. That, to me, seemed to be the whole point of leaving home. And this is what I expected of my time in Southeast Asia, and what made immediately moving on an easy and even logical call.)

Fed and rehoused, we decided we needed to find a money changer if we were going to flee this commerce hub for the jungle. As recommended by Semsar, and corroborated by our guidebook, I’d brought with me the global currency, U.S. cash, in fifty and one hundred dollar denominations, along with some traveler’s cheques – each stashed in a different sweaty locations on my person. We quickly found a place that could transmute an inert traveller’s cheque into a small mountain of Indonesian rupiah and another into U.S. cash. I imagined it would be considerably more difficult to deal with this non-cash even immediately outside Singapore. The changer was exactly as any other I’d ever seen: a small room attached to an office building on a busy street, fitted with a wall of plexiglass separating employee and customer sporting a fist-sized hole and a divot where the glass met a countertop for passing money. However, this was just a facade. This place only looked like a regular money changer. We walked in and I handed the man behind the glass my cheques and told him what I wanted. He snapped them up and disappeared behind a door, returning swiftly with my cash. I took the stack of bills and walked out. I’d never seen rupiah, so there was nothing familiar about it and I just popped the lot into a pocket inside my bag. Unlike the Indonesian currency, I knew American very well. As soon as I separated it from the rest I knew something was wrong. I looked at it and stopped in my tracks. I was confused. I was looking at a really terrible photocopy of a Benjamin Franklin. No, like, really terrible. I just stood there trying to process what was happening. What I mean is that this thing wasn’t even a colour copy, it was done in black ink and on something the quality, weight, and colour of regular printer paper. It was also trimmed so off center as to appear a joke, a bad joke played by a rushed and careless seven-year-old. Like, if it had been a decent visible forgery, but without raised ink or something, maybe I would have immediately thought to call the police or walk into a bank with it; instead, I stood there looking at it. It just felt, somehow, too ridiculous to be malicious. It seemed that if there was a victim here it was the person who’d given me the bill. I couldn’t help but laugh, yet this was too expensive to be a souvenir so I returned to the window, “bill” in hand. I just looked at the guy a second and then slowly said, as I lifted the paper to the window, “This isn’t U.S. currency, can I get U.S. currency?” Then, for some reason, I added, “and a receipt, perhaps?” The fellow behind the desk replied, to my astonishment, “This is U.S., one hundred U.S.” I looked at him with wide eyes I’d inherited from my father and said in the friendliest tone I could muster, as I felt a little kick of adrenaline, “You gave me this,” I pointed with my left hand, “two seconds ago,” I said, pausing for effect, “and I would like to exchange it for a different,” I paused again, “U.S. one hundred dollar bill,” another pause, for confirmation, “please.” This word turned into a smile and with it I polished off my ask, through my teeth, with a “Thanks!” He snatched his handiwork from the gap below the partition and disappeared into the photocopy room, just as he had done previously, returning this time with something resembling real money. He handed it to me with my receipt (a small slip of paper with a cluster of seemingly random numbers on it that couldn’t have been printed in the time between now and when he’d turned his back.) I couldn’t figure out his game. He had in his possession two of my Canadian traveller’s cheques – whose serial numbers I had recorded in my notebook – and I had on my person sums of Indonesian rupiah and U.S. cash to those values at today’s exchange rate. Why would he screw around even after my returning? He knew that I knew the money was fake, that he’d been caught passing out counterfeit currency (or whatever that was), and he remained totally nonchalant about it. I mean, he didn’t seem like he was playing it cool, at all. No, I mean, I read nothing from him whatsoever: not a whisper of embarrassment or guilt or fear – nothing. The dude appeared unwilling or unable to muster the weak resemblance of one half of one seventeenth of a fuck; as though this happened three times a day and the chief of police was running the establishment, or something. I didn’t know what his demeanor, or lack thereof, meant but my gut told me it couldn’t be good. I didn’t fully inspect the new bill, though it had the colour and texture of real money. That was good enough for me. I didn’t know what was up with this guy and, best case scenario, I didn’t want to fill out a police report and get stuck in Singapore for a week or more, needing to remain contactable, so I left.

We planned to leave for Sumatra the following morning upon one of the many ferries at the nearest port. Singapore seemed like a great place to explore, with its mix of cultures and foods, and with three or four languages on almost every sign; yet with money as a significant barrier, much of it felt inaccessible and so, ultimately (as a twenty-two-year-old with $2,200 to his name) it was a bit of a bust. So we went to sleep early and awoke just before dawn. Along with many of the city’s residents, we hopped a bus as the sun was coming up. Soon we were leaving the city aboard a little ship, out into the muddy waters pocked with an uncountable number of vessels, from globetrotting super-mega-oil-tankers to tiny personal fishing boats and everything in between. I could not imagine a busier waterway. Rapidly this vast city grew smaller and smaller and the boats became fewer and farther between. And suddenly the whole world, sea and sky, was remarkably brown.

In less than an hour we were docking on the small island of Batam, out there in the South China Sea, in the Riau Archipelago. Batam was just one of something like 17,000 islands making up the disparate conglomerate known as Indonesia, and just one of many homes to those notorious Malacca Strait pirates. When we made land we followed some folks from our boat, who seemed to be going our direction, to the dock housing boats to the big island, Sumatra. There was construction or something on the path and we were ushered through a hole in the chain link fence separating the inbound and outbound docks. We made it to the ticket window of a ramshackle building (a much smaller, more frail, and poorer cousin of the Singapore Art Museum – sporting white walls and an orange roof, but instead of clay tiles it was topped in rusted corrugated metal sheets full of holes and crumbling away.) As I stepped to the ticket window I felt someone behind me. I reached around, just reflexively, and grabbed said someone’s wrist – which was attached to a hand that was failing to extract my wallet from my back pocket.

(In hindsight this seemed like the wrong move. It seemed to me like making contact was the precursor to events going rapidly and uncontrollably sideways. I didn’t know where I was or what was going on, if this person was alone or with twelve others, if in his other hand he was clutching a rusty blade for just this very scenario we now found ourselves in. And, I mean, did I care at all about my wallet? No. Though my inexperience was abundant I was not entirely unaware or unprepared. There was little of value in my wallet. My passport, the bulk of my cash, cards, and other goods were not where they could be easily snatched. And yet, while I knew my wallet wasn’t a violence-worthy prize, this fellow, electing to potentially enter into a very intimate relationship with me, had none of this information. But, gladly, we didn’t share a worst-case scenario this day.)

His arm went limp as soon as I touched him and he pulled away. Obviously this wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. Just following my reach-around, I turned my whole body around to face this guy. He was probably stronger than me but maybe half my weight and maybe a foot shorter. Before either of us could really react others interjected. A woman and a second man both alarmed in urgent harmony, “It's okay, Mister! It's okay, okay? No problem, Mister. No problem!” As they made their verbal rebuke she moved away and he stepped in between me and his friend.

I have no recollection of what happened immediately after that. Rather than a lapse of memory, I think I don’t remember anything happening next because nothing really happened. This was just part of the deal. Nobody cared. Nobody was going to do anything. As it was, we were not, officially, any longer, in Kansas. It seemed to me it was likely that whomever was running the port, the girl behind the desk, the security guard, the owner, or all of the above were in on it to some degree. They were all probably friends or even kin I assumed, being on such a small and remote island. At the very least they knew what was going on and there was really no harm that could come to anyone here from my being pickpocketed, but there were just so many up-sides. They knew we intended only to pass through; but if my money and ID were taken we would likely be stranded here a day, a week, a month, or more. Forced to stay at the local accommodation we'd also eat at the noodle shop and spend money in the market, make a dozen long distance phone calls, and probably at some point bribe the local police while waiting for a friendly consulate or embassy to do what they do. Win-win-win-win-win. Or maybe not, maybe that was too cynical and pessimistic a take on the situation. But if I lived here this would very likely be my logic.

Regardless, though we had crossed an international border, I don’t remember going through anything like a security check. I do remember climbing down onto a dock and then into a much smaller ferry than we’d been on to get here, while having much farther to go. There were rows of bench seating and I took a spot at the isle in the nearest row – feeling a bit like I was already at sea, and without a raft. Soon we were off and Jenny was introducing herself to the only other non-Indonesian on the boat. His name was Tomas. He was an ethnomusicologist from Germany studying out of the National University of Singapore and travelling to some islands in the Indian Ocean, off the far coast of Sumatra, where he would be doing research for his thesis. Tomas had travelled this route several times and knew it well. He was going our way and offered to stick with us for some of the trip into the heart of Sumatra. His company was welcome.

We had a long boat ride up a wide river-like passage between a cluster of sparsely populated islands hugging the Eastern coast of the mother island. For two or three hundred kilometres we plodded along through a fairly changeless scene. The tide was high and only the tops of the mangroves were visible, sitting there trunkless like immense green bushes floating on a brown sea muddied by peak runoff, here at the height of the rainy season. The surrounds called to mind every film I’d ever seen shot from a boat travelling up the Amazon. Now if only there were pink dolphins following us. It did seem nearly astonishing how fast you could go from one of the busiest, most heavily impacted locales on the globe to what felt like just this side of the middle of untouched nowhere. I suddenly regretted not packing a week’s worth of food, or maybe two.

The waterway narrowed, widened, narrowed and widened again. If there were people anywhere I imagined they’d be down on the water, but saw only two small boats and one habitation with only a small rickety wooden dock along our route. Eventually our boat circled and landed on another dock at a clearing in the trees. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it. Tanjung Buton (Buton Peninsula), the nearest and most obvious entry point to the big island from the mainland, appeared a composition of maybe ten single-room huts. The structures all had walls of mismatched wood plank, none of which met their accompanying roof. Some had roofs of thatched grass or palm frond and others were topped in rusted corrugated metal. All were huddled next to a muddy logging track cut through the lowland marsh. Some were in the marsh, balanced atop wooden piles driven into the swampy brown next to the road. Others were set further back on dry land with a narrow bridge of thin inconsistent planks, really more gaps than planks, across the swamp-water. Just past these structures, between the road and low dense green, was a pair of pipes emerging from the ground and spilling significant amounts of what looked to be oil. Four buses and eight drivers sat at the foreground of this scene, waiting to take a handful of passengers to various corners of an island.

(The island, Sumatra, was roughly the size of France, if that has any meaning for you. It’s about 475,000 square kilometres, or about what you’d have if you cut British Columbia in half north to south. As well as being pretty close to the same area to a half B.C. it would also be a fairly similar composition: a few dense human populations, surviving by and large on resource extraction, separated by large remote forested tracts hosting few lakes, more rivers, and an abundance mountains and coastline. And it was with this thought that I tried to pretend we’d arrived in Prince Rupert or Bella Bella.)

Tomas had someone, a smiling face, there waiting for him. Together they investigated each bus (further evidence that he’d done this before.) As they weighed pros and cons, I had my bags tugged on by one fellow wanting to load them onto his bus, while another grabbed me by the arm wanting me to go with him in another direction. “No, no, I’m with them”, I said pointing at my crew. They persisted and so I tried my limited and very poor Indonesian on them. I said, “Tidak. Saya tidak– mau. Saya tidak mau– ini.” I think they heard “No. I don’t– want. I don’t want– this.” I only knew a dozen words at this point, what I picked up on the plane, but that seemed to be enough. They relented as Tomas and partner returned to explain that their first choice had its engine exposed and was having a makeshift fan-belt re-attached, and so that one was out. They felt the next best option was the bus nearest us because, though it had no windshield, it had seat belts, unlike all the others. Seemed like a good choice to me, so we bundled ourselves onto the bus and into some seats near the middle. I fiddled with my seat, the seat belt, and my bags, and shooed the little cockroaches that had been awakened and scared out from between the seats by our presence, as the bus started up and we set off.

Within moments the locals all tied handkerchiefs or t-shirts around their faces. I was confused by a lack of information. But after the bus powered through the gentle muddy slope near the dock and we got to dry earth it all made sense. This fine orange-brown dust was kicked up in great volumes by our transport and deposited throughout its cabin with the help of the ventilation system. It was amazing in its ridiculousness: ridiculous both in the amount of road we seemed to be sucking up and that no one had devised even a temporary fix for such an obvious, seemingly regular, and consequential mishappening. When I packed my bags originally I thought having a bandana with me might be good; you know, to tie off a severed limb, as a disguise during an elaborate bank heist (involving a stolen helicopter, and tall blonde Dutch woman in a tight pink dress named Maartja, and a pair of trained orangutan, Annisa and Wilhelmina...), or perhaps for washing something. Quicker that I supposed I might, I retrieved my navy blue would-be tourniquet from my bag and made use of it. Somehow it never occurred to me that I might need this thing to help me breathe.

It was hours up this road through the forest and swamp, with little sign of human activity but for the occasional power line running someplace or an intersection where dirt roads would appear and then trail off to who-knows-where. At one large crossing stood a kind of public service announcement. It was the sort of driving safety warning you might see anywhere, but with the difference of being not an image of a car accident but the real thing. They'd mounted what appeared to be the wreckage from an actual speed-induced accident on some poles looking over the street. It was imposing in a manner never achieved by a graphic, however well-executed. It felt to me something like a skull on a stake. We roared on by. All else out my window was green and sky. I couldn’t help but think of all the beasts big and small that had to be living out their lives in this bush I would never get to explore. I couldn’t help but think of how every time a team of biologists head off into the wilds of Indonesia they come back with photos and samples of new species of banana, orchid, or impatiens, frog, bird, or spider. It was truly, deeply wild out there! And surely there was a civet or a pipistrelle within a day’s walk that nobody has seen in a century, or maybe even a green-kneed femtopede – the only of it’s kind and lacking formal description – waiting for me under a peal of bark. After four hours of this sort of daydreaming our bus came to the city of Pekanbaru, in Riau province, almost smack-dab in the middle of Sumatra.

(In my mind Pekanbaru roughly corresponds to B.C.’s Prince George. Like PG, Pek’ sits at a low elevation on a river, in this case the Siak. Both are also major supply and service hubs for the smaller outlying towns and villages, and both economies are dominated by forestry and the associated sawmills and pulp and paper plants. However, unlike Prince George, Pekanbaru and the region has oil too, a lot of it from what I understand, and so Chevron has a significant presence here. Temperature wise, Pekanbaru and Prince George actually have similar record highs, around forty degrees; yet here in Sumatra, right on the equator, day and night are about the same temperature, around 30C, and their two seasons, wet and dry, fluctuate only a few degrees – and, of course, it’s never dropped below ten degrees here while Prince George records annual lows close to minus fifty. The only other thing I knew about Pekanbaru was a terrible story I read in a guide book before leaving Canada, about what happened here during the Second World War. During their occupation, the Japanese decided they needed to connect this town to the coast with a 200km long railroad. [Yes, you know where this is going.] 100,000 Indonesians and around 6,000 British and Dutch POWs were forced to construct this thing, and do so under deplorable conditions. The job was not completed before Japan’s surrender, but in less than three years half of those who laboured here died of malnutrition, malaria, and dysentery. Brutal.)

From our bus the first sign of civilization was a dump on the edge of town with several children crawling over it, one with a kite in hand. From this approach Pekanbaru appeared a small town. (Later I learned that were something like 700,000 people in Pekanbaru. So I feel we mustn't have ever really entered the city, or even been able to see it, only somehow skirted the periphery.) Our bus trip terminated at a small intersection and a little nondescript building: a “bus depot” and “English school”, that tripled as a “hostel”, and quadrupled as the owner’s home, we were told. Just before arriving there was a three-way conversation in Indonesian – that I wasn't privy to, and wouldn't have understood if I had been. Though we were exhausted from the travel, it was determined we couldn't stay in this town. Tomas and his friend recommended sticking with him and moving on to a place high in the mountains on the the edge of a volcano, like almost everywhere in Indonesia, called Bukittinggi (literally “high hill”). Tomas wouldn't be able to stick with us the whole way there but together we could hire a driver to get us all much of the distance before going our separate ways. It seemed like a plan. (There was information clearly not being translated. That was fine. I was tired, hot, hungry, and still agitated from my earlier encounter. Whether it was some mishap, unfolding civil strife, a rash of kidnappings, or an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis, as happens, I really didn’t need the details.) So we would wait here at this stop, in this bus-school-hostel-house, for a vehicle and its driver to arrive.

Waiting around was surreal. Butterflies swirled in the fifteen foot space above our heads and occasionally, cautiously alighted on the whitewashed walls. Cecek (pronounced “che-chek”, aka: geckos) chirped loudly from their crooked vertical perches. A few old men dressed in collared, kaleidoscopic, black, brown, and gold hallucinations, sat on a bench along one wall not making any sound. Eventually one would ask where we were from. What they knew of Canada was that it is bitterly cold (dingin, dingin sekali) and that the rain falls as ice (hujan es.) None had any desire to ever visit such a terrible place. After a few hours of sweating indoors in the cool shade, the owner-operator heard we were downstairs and came to introduce himself. He was a super friendly and extremely smiley fellow who spoke a little English. Knowing we had time on our hands, he came to ask if we wanted to teach his English class. That sounded fun. We followed the man up a flight of stairs where we found a room full of people sitting around a large table at its center. There was a policeman in uniform, a school teacher, and a bunch of teenagers. They each took turns smiling widely and shyly using all the English they knew. We helped by mostly complicating their pronunciation and confusing them with our accents. They all wanted to exchange addresses so we could be pen pals and practice some more. Most of their addresses were elaborate, containing not just the usual street and house numbers but also directions, things like “down the alley behind the restaurant, the blue door next to Mr. Hatta’s house.” Larger cities here, like much of the rest of the world, tend to have some bairro or favela-like peri-urban un-planning. This was my first sense of that.

Dusk arrived and night fell before our minibus showed up. We would be four plus a driver. As is done, our ride blasted a Southeast Asian flavour of techno, so loud that you could barely hear the horn honking that occurred regularly before we swerved between slower and oncoming vehicles on a strip of pavement not more than two vehicles wide. We zipped and wound and screamed around in the dark with nothing visible but a thin wedge of road and greenery illuminated by the minibus' headlights. There would be no dozing, nevermind sleeping, given the the noise and the jarring of our F1 driver-in-training. I was told that it was typically electronica or coffee or amphetamines, though often all of the above, keeping a driver alert during just such a nightlong excursion. Many hours later we came to a stop high in the mountains. We pulled off the road and up to a wall-less covering with lights that attracted every manner of wild winged invertebrate found there on the edge of the jungle (which I totally loved). This was where we would be eating.

On the menu, along with the obligatory nasi goreng (fried rice) was a selection of Masakan Minang (Minangkabau cuisine). This included: sambal-infused chicken hearts on papaya leaves; smoked catfish with turmeric leaf and nutmeg; blackened boiled eggs on “mucus noodles” in a kind of peanut gravy; what I was told was stewed ox lung; something translating to “mixed fried chilli” but which was composed of, in addition to a pile of chillies, banana, potato, chicken liver, and quail eggs; “spicy cow bone”; “meat with rice”; and, to drink, “sweet corn juice” or coffee… I had the coffee, not because I didn’t want to try the food but because, though I hadn’t eaten all day, it was now well after midnight and I couldn’t think of eating, nevermind digging into something exotic and far spicier than I’d ever tried. However, I did have to use the washroom. This would be my first paperless squat, and I was game. What I found resembling the toilettes was, unfortunately, so challenging, visually and olfactorily, that turning off my bowels seemed a better option than wading into what was waiting. I’d never really considered it before, but this little mini excursion explained fully how outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, typhoid and the like spread like wildfire here.

When I returned, Tomas was standing in the dim outside the eatery speaking to the only other people around. There didn’t appear to be an exchange of money but, all the same, he told us that when we were ready this smiling and nodding pair were headed to Bukittinggi and would be very happy to take us in their minibus. Tomas and his friend would continue on, with our original bus and driver, to the coast, to Padang. It was 2:00 before we left. We had another hour or so on the road before Bukittinggi and for this leg of the trip the music would be at much more relaxed level, maybe only eighty decibels. This meant we didn’t talk to our travel hosts or one another, so Munro and I just sat like drunks in a club, alone in our heads, not wasted enough to pass out but too smashed to dance or sing or enjoy ourselves in any way.

After reaching civilization it was only a few minutes before we pulled up along a building with a large gate, somewhere mid-way on Jalan Ahmad Yani (Ahmad Yani Street) – a short, straight section of a road, part of a kind of main drag that changed names several times over just a few blocks. This, hopefully, was our stay. The couple assured us it was and wished us well before buzzing off into the night. We stood on a dusty road, dark and quiet and with no sign of movement. It wasn’t yet dawn and nobody was expecting us, so with no other options I timidly rattled the locked gate. We wanted in but we want far more to not wake the neighbourhood or even draw any real attention. After a few attempts I roused someone from their sleep to come extract us from the night. He ushered us in and gave us a room without asking any questions or taking any information. I passed out almost as soon as my shoes were off and I was horizontal.

Only a few hours later, with the human and siamang dawn call to prayer, it was time for ups. (Siamangs, Symphalangus syndactylus, are these large, crazy, black-furred, brachiating, tailless treefolk. They inflate a pouch in their neck, most wonderfully, in a manner resembling a frog, and call out with a sort of hypnotic hooting and gulping – like a frog chirp but slower and deeper, or maybe like a sped-up and higher pitched call of a humpback whale. It’s really great. Gibbons, like these siamangs, were and still are at the top of my list of favourite primates, so hearing them in the morning felt like a welcoming.) As my senses recovered and fully clued in I noticed and acknowledged for the first time the insects. I didn’t recall hearing them the whole previous day, though it must have been there (but maybe everything else was more pertinent at the time, or maybe in the mountains and during the day they were that much louder), but by dawn it was overwhelming. It was an acoustically effervescent white-noise. A kind of buzzing, undulating, electric rattle that seemed just too much, too omnidirectional, too pervasive to be originating outside my skull. It was like cicada/cricket tinnitus or something.

It was not long after I fully appreciated this wash of sound and had thrown my clothes on that the fellow who put us to bed was by, enquiring about the length of our stay and offering breakfast. On the menu was rice, eggs with tomato, and kopi susu (about four ounces of coffee poured into a small glass holding maybe two ounces of sweetened condensed milk.) Munro and I left our room and sat in the common area in little pink chairs where it seemed breakfast would be served. Our stay was something like the Indonesian equivalent of a bed-and-breakfast, sort of. It was a single level, mostly concrete building with a metal roof, maybe three thousand square feet. The entrance and common room resembled that of a house, with wood framed windows, whitewashed walls, and concrete floors, which sounds sterile but was cozy feeling. There were four rooms attached to the back of this houseness, up against a heavily vegetated cliff. Each room was square, maybe 10x10, with a cute wooden door and composed of poured concrete with concrete blocks sporting shapely holes at the top of each wall. (This reminded me of home and the 1970s room dividers we had in the basement made of similar blocks.) The metal roof above the rooms thundered with the midday mandi hujan (literally “bathing rain”, rain so forceful and in such volume you could easily shower in it – which is often done. Actually, on this topic, I found bathing in Indonesia pretty unpleasant. Usually you’re stinking hot and the mandi, washroom, contains a tile or concrete reservoir holding about a hundred gallons of stagnant and cruel ice water, often from a deep well, [and all the mosquito larvae you’d expect to find on the edge of an equatorial jungle] that you’re meant to toss over yourself with a tiny red bucket or ladle. By contrast, bathing in the rain would be brilliant; only, showing any skin at all or finding a secluded spot out in it just wasn’t happening…) The place was great in that it felt nothing like a hotel but more like someone’s house, the hosts were lovely, there were no other tourists around, the place was relatively quiet and had plenty of shade, and there was no air conditioning. It was ideal really, and a total accident that we found it.

I just wanted to eat and sleep for a few days, but we were almost out of cash. We’d blown through our intended first stop and spent a pile of money we hadn’t planned on for private transport into the interior. More than that though, everything was not less than twice the cost reported the latest guidebook – being probably two years out of date given the lag between research, writing, printing, distribution, and sale. (How troublesome and awkwardly archaic does the pre-digital analog epoch feel now twenty years later? Relatedly, it was around this same time that we tore out all the maps from our travelbook, along with a few pages containing some translations I wanted, the only useful information, and discarded the hundreds of pages of totally irrelevant nonsense that made up the bulk of the book.) So, at the very least, low on Indo-bucks, we’d need to find a bank. That should be easy enough, I figured. However, unbeknownst to us we’d arrived in Bukittinggi at the same time as a presidential hopeful – the Vice President, Diah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri, or simply Megawati, or more simply still, Mega – who was making the rural rounds, as you’d expect from a candidate. Along with her came the BRIMOB. This made me sick, something you might feel if you’d arrived in the Southern States amidst a Klan rally or some crazy Evangelical frothing. This, really anything involving or arousing the political or the military, was precisely what I was hoping to avoid while here.

(BRIMOB. So, in Indonesian they love these kind of acronymic compounds. Here BRIMOB is a shortened recomposition of the words brigade and mobile (identical in Bahasa and English). BRIMOB is the CIA-sponsored special ops corps of the Indonesian National Police. They’re a roving paramilitary legion of young psychos – renowned for torture, massacres, mass disappearances, and the like. There were noted incidents of BRIMOB terror from Northern Sumatra in the far west of the country to West Papua in the remote east, and, well, just about every place in between. I was first introduced to these folks in a video shot of them in East Timor in the ‘90s, after they were accused of slaughtering innocent women and children sheltering in a church – as just one of many horrific footnotes to the genocide there. Years later, when I first met Semsar he mentioned them when explaining why he walked with a limp: how they broke his legs for the crime of protesting the former dictator, Suharto. So here I was, with my first steps out onto the streets of Bukittinggi, on my first real day in Indonesia, greeted by a whole fucking truckload of BRIMOB. There were maybe forty of them standing in the back of a troop transport vehicle, slowly, too slowly, cruising the street. I was pretty certain I didn’t want to be anywhere they were; but, here they were: grey uniforms, blue caps, with machine guns facing outward, pointed at head-level, resting atop the walls of the rear truck bed carrying them as they bounced up the road in the same direction I intended to go. As they passed, I could see the last one in the bundle appeared to be wearing a large patch, a skull and crossbones, covering much of the back of his black vest. [Though, I’m not sure this last detail wasn’t a hallucination, or a kind of mnemonic mimesis of cross-contamination from the genocide footage I’d seen years earlier that was burned into my psyche, or even just a detail I added later for dramatic flare. Though I’ve recalled this element in the telling of my travels before, and call it to mind clearly, it now seems somehow a bit too cinematic, doesn’t it? Memory is a strange creature.])

By now this whole thing, the last few days in Southeast Asia, felt deeply dreamlike: the pious, zombie, self-made shish kabobs; the air hot and thick as fondu; the recognizable but alien food; the sustained, indirect, nearly-incandescent arthropodic static, that was almost felt as much as heard; the disorienting language, written in fully recognizable Roman characters yet often wholly indecipherable; this BRIMOB nightmare… That morning I supposed I was experiencing some amount of sensory fatigue. A big part of this fatigue, I realized, was that as a safety measure – for having imported myself into this faraway place I knew little about – I was burning a lot of fuel continually mapping the world spatially and in sound and smell, as well as memorizing new words and place names. All that was pretty draining, but also not something I could just turn off. I was a bit dazed. It was like being a young child, really.

Leaving our sleeping quarters behind, we crossed the street to head up a set of stairs that looked to me to be going to a parallel street, where we could get to the footbridge leading to the top of the hill above our stay, where the siamangs seemed to be hooting and hollering from. A wide set of stairs wound up to the right. As we marched up and rounded the corner we were confronted by a child, maybe two years old, naked and facing us, pissing down the middle of the walk. He finished, turned, and ran into an open door almost as immediately as I’d noticed he was there. He was probably as surprised to see us as we were him. I couldn’t decide if this added to the overall surreality or if it was the opposite, the most mundane possible occurrence. We kept walking and eventually got up to the bridge and crossed over it to the adjacent hilltop.

(Bukittinggi, population 80,000, is the name of the town that eventually emerged around the Dutch outpost of Fort de Kock, built atop a hill there in 1825, during the governorship of Baron Hendrik Merkus de Kock. While pillaging the region of all its wealth the Dutch, who’d had a presence there since the 1780s, were brought into a decades-long regional conflict called the Padri War. The native matrilineal animists, the Minangkabau, asked for and received assistance from the Dutch in fending off their oppressors the Padris. My understanding of the story is that the Padris, Muslim clerics inspired by the Saudi Wahhabism they were exposed to while in Mecca, sought to bring this ultraconservative [some might say deeply intolerant] brand of faith and law to a region and people they knew to be troublingly un-Islamic. Fort de Kock had been erected, so the story goes, to defend the five villages nearby. The Minangs and their Dutch allies eventually won the war after besieging the last of the Pradis strongholds in 1837 and exiling their leader, a guy named Tuanku Imam Bonjol, to Manado, a town on the distant northern tip of the island of Sulawesi. [That distance is something like 3,000km, and there are no less than seven countries whose capitals are closer to Bukittinggi than Manado. This would be like taking someone from Vancouver, B.C. and depositing them in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, or maybe Copenhagen to Cairo.] Since that time, of course, the locals have slowly merged what was already a deeply syncretic regional belief system – a symbiosis of animist, Hindu, and Buddhist worldviews – with just one more. But that’s not all, since then too the exiled leader of the Padris movement became a national hero, as one of the key figures helping transition the nation to full Islamisation, with his likeness found on the front of 5,000Rp banknote.)

What remains of this Dutch fort up there on the hill, we came to learn, is now a “zoo”. (Zoo is in quotes here because the animal prison found there was like something from of another time. It was a brutal, disgusting place I wish to forget but cannot. So sad and gross was it that I still occasionally have nightmares about the orangutan, siamangs, and camel I saw there. ...but I think you get the idea without me needing to pass on to you all the diabolical particulars.) We left pretty quickly and wound back down to street level. Along the way another item made it onto the afternoon itinerary. Some days had passed since arriving in Asia, and I was the first in my family to cross the Pacific, so I wanted to communicate with home and let my dad know that I was still alive. Surely he wondered. So I found a place to call from: the neighbourhood wartel. (This translates to something like “phone shop” but is another hybrid word-pairing combining warung [typically a small, informal, family business – of any kind] and telekomunikasi [telecommunication]. I don’t know that anything like this ever existed in Canada. If there was no tax base and little infrastructure, rather than having phone booths every few blocks and one in your kitchen I’m sure you would have friendly neighbourhood wartel: private, centralized call centers.) The wartel was a single room with blue walls and three large blue booths, each housing a small blue table up against the rear wall. Two booths were for local calls and the third was for long distance. The table in the long distance booth held a large office-style phone attached to several uncommon wires, some of which lead to different holes in the wall and others to a kind of LED display that would presumably read out the duration and destination of your call. I tried speaking to the attendant. “Panggilan” (call), I said, wondering if I’d pronounced the word in a discernible manner, while trying to remember words for anything else he needed to know. “...ke Kanada?” (...to Canada), I added. The man directed me to the phone and presumably offered directions for making the call; though he could have been telling me about his family or offering a prayer for all I knew. Me throwing out a smattering of simple and loosely encoded phonemes to someone fluent was one thing, but parsing and decoding a language I’d never really heard spoken was another thing entirely. I smiled and picked up the phone, dialed numbers, waited, and like magic it rang. As you’d expect, the connection was spotty with a considerable lag. Unlike a normal phone call, which is perceptually instant, the time delay gave a real sense of just how far this signal was travelling. The experience was entertaining but little was actually communicated given our inability to help ourselves verbally stumbling over one another. When the three minute call ended the shop operator wrote me up a receipt for the whole stack of Indonesian rupiah I had on me (65,000 IDR or about $10 CAD), which was supposed to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next two days.

We walked the whole length of the street that ran past our stay looking for a bank. Here the roadway was maybe twenty feet across with no lane divider (physical or symbolic) and vehicles travelling wherever there was a space. Occasionally there was a curb, painted in half-metre white and black stripes, or a narrow open sewer separating the road from the rest. More commonly, you would find a metre or two of unpaved non-road/non-sidewalk containing all the same trash you’d expect we’d have in North America if it weren’t for the legions of street cleaners brought in by your tax dollars. Between this flat, semi-ditch and the buildings was often found a narrow, maybe metre-wide sidewalk – but without civic agreement and its formal designation as an unobstructed space for pedestrians. On any given street, for instance, this would-be walkway harboured: large blue tarps where spices (typically cloves or red chillies) dry in the hot hot street-oven; piles of brick, rock, and concrete rubble, as well as a full selection of commercial plastics; motor bikes or car parts, vacant food and beverage stalls, and maybe a papaya tree or satellite dish, or just a massive gaping hole you could fall in and not return from. So, due to this common obstruction, you do like the locals and walk in the street with the jockeying motor bikes and microbuses. At every few intersections the not-sidewalk and part of the road is taken up by a community refuse deposition site that shrinks and grows with weekly informal incinerations. (When the garbage heap gets too big to walk or drive around someone pours gasoline on it and sparks it up, sending the wretched heap to heaven in acrid blue or black clouds of death – just as you would if someone didn’t come to your house in a big truck and make your personal mountain of refuse go away.) Most streets were lined with dense rows of one, two, and three storey buildings of all colours. Some, typically the three storey ones, sported a lot of glass or were covered top to bottom in polished tiles. Others, typically the two storey variety, had poured concrete frames with bricks making up the walls. The single level constructions were usually much more modest and made from a mixture of wooden planks, corrugated metal, and blue tarps – with each material taking turns in the role of roofing or siding. The ground level of almost every building incorporated a shop of some kind. In some instances there were rolls of bright fabrics filling the walls and pouring out onto the street in big bulk bolts, while others sold every kind of moulded plastic thing you might need or want, and in your choice of sickly pink, green, blue, or yellow. I also noticed tire repair shops, electronics dealers (selling S Q N Y branded radios), and little cafes. In addition to their main dealings most shops offered candy, cigarettes, plastic bottles of water, and little, almost antique, glass bottles of Coke and 7up. Almost every building was adorned in various flags, banners, signs, and posters – advertising everything from cellphones to smokes to skin whitening cream – but seldom displaying something available in the host shop. Aside from making the street profoundly visually busy (probably so just to keep in synch with the cacophonic acoustics), these signs were responsible for much of my language learnings. Also of note were the buildings topped in a roof of the adat (traditional) local style. I couldn’t help but think how different the town would look and feel if all or even many of the buildings had such a feature.

(Not unlike other East Asian styles you’ve probably seen – those Chinese or Japanese hip-and-gable roofs found on Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, or the many royal buildings across the continent – the Minangkabau have their own fancy roofing. In fact, Minangs are actually renowned for for their rumah bagonjong [spired roof house]. In this case, unlike the slightly upswept corners expressed on those other roof types, these have a wonderfully oversized and exaggerated central peak, often crowned in kind of a carved horn that points straight up, shooting maybe twenty feet high, making it something like the rhinoceros of roof structures. Originally these roofs would have been covered in ijuk [sugar palm thatch, said to be the toughest thatch material available, and rumoured to last a century or more.] I’ve seen the style reproduced in wood, tile, and metal. It’s pretty great.)

So it took some time but, with some vague directions from a pair of schoolgirls, we eventually found a bank. It must have been lunch time, as all the school kids were out on the street. Though I didn’t see anything resembling a school there were mobs of children in uniforms of light grey pants and butterscotch shirts. The girls were all easily distinguished by their perfect, crisp white headscarves. We weaved through several large ogling gaggles. Seemingly all of the boys said “Hello mister”, some several times, as we passed by. This was a title and phrase I was already starting to detest, though I’d only heard it half a dozen times prior. Somehow, in a town frequented by outsiders for some three centuries, I felt like a celebrity at all times. Standing out like the sorest of all thumbs didn’t help; though attempting to dress like the locals seemed likely to be about as helpful as wearing nothing at all. I didn’t like this situation, but what was to be done about it? Attention was fine from the occasional smiling child, as might happen at home, but people stopping what they were doing, continually staring, or following for block after block grew incessant and made me want to stay indoors. (Having this experience convinced me that I never wanted to have fame of any sort. That what one wants is some measure of success, yes, but being widely recognizable was surely a punishment, a psycho-spiritual violation, akin to torture.) Marching into a bank helped little my feelings of conspicuousness and discomfort. I mean, if I’d been juggling a trio of live squirrels while riding an orangutan riding a unicycle, together we’d have actually drawn less attention. (Rini, pointing, would say, “Look, Irma, look at that silly American!” “Like, oh my gosh. No, Rini, don’t even give this show-off, like, any of the attention he’s, like, so obviously seeking. Like, oh my gosh!” Groaning accompanied by synchronized and over-exaggerated eye-rolling would follow before they went back to texting, on their identical Nokia 3390s, the girls standing right next to them… [I don’t know why these girls from Central Sumatra sound, in my head, like their counterparts in LA but they do.])

The bank was ice cold with its heavy insulation, layers of doors, wall-to-wall tile, and full-throttled air conditioning. We walked over to a very well-dressed teller and I handed over a bill that had been in under the insole of my shoe since Vancouver. With it I was hoping to procure around 1.1 million in local currency, and wanted mostly the more practical 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 denominations. The teller went away and came back quickly with more cash, in terms of physical volume, than I knew what to do with. I just hadn’t done the math to realize that I was asking for something like five hundred individual bills. Of course I’d gotten the same sum in Singapore, but he’d given it to me in 20,000, 50,000, and 100,000 rupiah notes – probably assuming I was going to Bali or one of the urban centers on Java. The woman stacked the money in neat denominated piles and then passed each through a chattering counting machine, three times, and mostly for my entertainment I assumed. She had me sign a form I could not read, but that resembled a formal transaction record. When I returned it she stamped it loudly three times each with two different stamps, again seemingly for my amusement, but maybe her own as well, before handing over the somewhat absurd pile. It felt like I was buying a house and was withdrawing the full purchase price in small, unmarked bills. We then stood next to the teller’s desk and took the next few minutes cramming old, dirty, soft-edged notes into every bag, pocket, pouch, and sock on our collective person. It felt ridiculous, but what else does one do?

Fully stuffed, we exited the bank. Clearly we’d been in there too long. Too long because the dry five celsiusness emptied out into a wall of hot. It felt like walking into an obese and feverish triathlete’s armpit, at the end of her running stint; like a steaming wall of stink-hot dropped on us from an intestinally-synchronized family of wildebeest, together seething from a infection of snaily schistosomiasis, who’d all been waiting all day for our exit. It was hot, stinkin' gross-hot, is what I’m attempting to getting at. I’d never experienced anything quite like this – not in LA, not in Albuquerque, not in Las Vegas or even leaving our hostel in Singapore. I was never a fan of AC but it had also never before occurred to me that there may be such thing as a dangerous level of AC; that there should be restrictions on indoor and outdoor temperature differential; or that there should be a series of transitional spaces between being fully inside and fully outside a building, with winding airport-esque security queues to make the transition as slow as possible. ...Hot. It was hot.

Not far down the street, under a patchwork of blue and orange tarps and umbrellas, the market ladies sat. Each was perched there, as if on a high throne, ringed by shallow platter-like baskets of eats. One oversaw chillies, peanuts, dried shrimp, and krupuk (deep fried, starch-based, shrimp-flavoured wafers the size of your face and stacked like Pringles). Another lady had two dozen or so different fruits and vegetables on display, only half of which were recognizable (those being the limes and oranges, papayas and bananas, tomatoes and cucumbers). Another much older woman had at her feet a whole variety of green leaves, sorted, stacked, and bundled. One more oversaw piles of candies and colourful powders I didn’t recognize. Out on the pavement in front of them sat several men lounging, smoking kretek (clove cigarettes) in the shade of the canopy of their horse-drawn buggies. These wooden spoked, two-wheeled, single horse-power transports seemed like a remnant of the seventeenth century. Each was mostly red in colour but with a black, green, or orange splash of uniqueness on its canopy or in its cushioned seating. We strolled up, upsetting the calm, and decided on some oranges, a pile of stale krupuk (was there any other kind?), and something else snack-like that came in the form of thin, noodley, and rather tasteless spirals that were, the seller insisted, essential.

(I’d seen nothing labelled in the market or in other shops we’d passed. Apparently you just knew what everything was, and was composed of, and what it costs too. When there was a label it was only the price, which didn’t apply to me anyway, on account of my skin colour. I was keen to play the barter game, but it was nearly impossible without better understanding the language. Munro explained that it wasn’t just me but that she found folks speaking very fast and in local jargon she was having to work to navigate too. For me, conversation for the purpose of acquiring information of any kind only ever elicited strange responses. This was probably because I was shy, awkward, and only had at my disposal a few words; but something else was going on too. For instance, when I asked the lovely fellow at our stay what creatures various sounds belonged to or what that thing up in the tree was he almost always responded with the word tikus (interchangeably the label given a mouse or rat). It seemed that if it was a mammal smaller than a man it seemed to be a tikus. He was especially certain it was a tikus when the thing flew from one tree to the next. I knew what rats looked like. That was no rat. The real rats were abundant and huge, with tikus bakar [grilled rat – never mouse] available in the market, charred black and skewered on a long stick next to bats who'd met the same fate. Thinking myself clever I would ask follow-up questions, things like Tikus apa? Tikus terbang? Tikus anjing? [What mouse? Flying mouse? Dog mouse?] To which he would respond with the same old tikus. And it wasn’t just this guy, I tried with several folks in different settings. I suppose it was true that differentiating little furry things in the bush was a luxury, and a curious one at that. At any rate, I wanted to know everything and it seemed a serious miscalculation to be here, probably anywhere in Indonesia, without an ecologist along and maybe a personal translator. And, understandably, Munro didn't sign up for that role and wasn't going to make inquiries on my behalf regarding every mold and lichen and fern we crossed paths with.)

We headed back to our accommodation for some shade and, though unspoken, to escape the cameraless pseudo-paparazzi. Back at the stay I sat at a table in the common area and ordered coffee, but only after the girl working there came by and asked for the third time. It seemed she was keen to practice her English but needed me to initiate. So when she returned with my steamy brew I asked her some questions, most a couple of times for clarity. We spoke about what we knew, our very literal common ground, the geography of Sumatra. She felt I was confused about where Sumatra was and what was going on, geographically, in Southeast Asia. After some discussion it seemed she’d only seen maps of Sumatra on the wall at school, and typically only a cross section, central region composed of the provinces of Riau and West Sumatra. She was pretty certain that Malaysia was an island like Sumatra, not connected to the mainland, and was also very doubtful that Canada could be anywhere near as big as Indonesia. While very friendly about it, she was sure my map and what was taught was little more than classic Western propaganda. The more evidence I tried to bring in to corroborate what I was saying the more she laughed and resisted being taken in by what was clearly a charade, and one that I’d carelessly fallen for.

A couple of days came and went but, to be honest, time was rapidly becoming irrelevant (more on that in a moment). It may have been two days but could have been four (some days there was more food and fewer kids, others there was more BRIMOB and less sleep – and each day had me wanting to spend less time out in the world) but we decided to escape the city to nearby Danau Maninjau (Lake Maninjau.) There we would go and rusticate at Lili’s Homestay, a little place the owner of our stay recommended.

In the morning, after both the 5:21 and 6:39 calls to prayer (which I was beginning to love; though I wasn’t well situated at the time to know whether it was genuine love or perhaps a kind psychologically necessary manifestation, something akin to Stockholm syndrome), but well-before midday, we got directions and made our way to the bus depot.

(Being from Canada and enculturated under the hegemony of strict scheduling, as well as being one who is notoriously on-time, I was pretty concerned about the precise when of things. The lovely people of Sumatra took my temporal uptightness, looked at it with curiosity and then, recognizing it for what it was, tore it from its hold, threw it on the ground, and shat on it; which, while traumatic at first, was eventually a great relief. This, at best, is what can happen when you travel and are immersed in other ways of being: you may expose some of the new- and old-world monkeys [and less commonly those great apes] you may be, often unbeknownst to you, burdened by. Here in rural Indonesia there was no schedule as I recognized it. Generally, as anywhere, business happened at pagi [early morning], siang [late morning, early afternoon], and sore [late afternoon, early evening]. But, again, though these labels exist, the appropriate orientation is to simply not be concerned about time, at all, however specific or vaguely defined. So you may ask, in a state of naivete, something silly like “Kapan bus berangkat?” [“When does the bus leave?”] or “Perahu berangkat kapan?” [“When do we have to be there to catch the boat?”] And the answer may arrive in the aforementioned form, pagi or maybe siang. This literally means “morning”, but isn’t at all an accurate translation, and definitely doesn’t mean anything like “your bus leaves between 8am and 10am”. In this instance, pagi translates most accurately to: “Well, stranger, I don’t really know what you mean. Your question arrives as a kind of riddle, a sort of cultural discorrelation. As ever, the bus/boat will arrive when it arrives, and it will leave some time thereafter, God willing of course. But, under no circumstance will departure take place before your transport is completely full – and not Western full, aka half empty, but Asian full, aka rammed so that you can't help but be rubbing up on all sides against human and beastly passengers or their half metre diameter bundles of cinnamon sticks or sacks of grain. You, my uptight friend, should arrive very early, so that you may partake in the fullest possible travel experience.”)

So, we arrived. Early. There we found a kind of dodgy plaza, calling to mind a scene from a Christiane Amanpour report out of post-war Iraq (this was 2001, so the first Iraq War); only here Amanpour had never been and there was no war. The main courtyard-esque zone could be arrived at on three sides though long, narrow, winding alleys and by a wider entrance connecting to the main road. It was overlooked on all sides by boarded-up, two or three-storey derelict buildings in various stages of decay. Some of these buildings had roofs, balconies, and broken satellite dishes the jungle, even here in the middle of town, was determined to reclaim. The courtyard itself was dirt, packed hard as stone, strewn with big rocks, scarred chunks of rusty sheet metal, rebar, and concrete (as though something had exploded at some point), and a lot more trash than other places in town. To me this spot was creepier than a ghost town. This place had the same level of care and upkeep as a ghost town, but was a key piece of transportation infrastructure in a major city. I didn't think it was a holiday, but where were the people? There were none of the ubiquitous kaki lima (street vendors and their little carts), there were no kids anywhere, which there always was, and there were only a couple minibuses, not the large interurban buses we were expecting to leave on. It felt weird to loiter in such a place, and in my experience so far nothing drew more unwanted attention from young men than loitering; however, walking around aimlessly made little sense. Fortunately for us, in the hour or so before the buses began to arrive, we only had to fend of maybe half a dozen guys. While a bus to Maninjau did eventually arrive, of course, there was no departure time. Initially the bus was a nice place to shelter from the sun and the touts. In time the bus would begin to fill with other folks, but all were more interested in staring than chatting or sharing snacks. After maybe two hours someone came by asking for money for the trip, which I believed indicated we would be leaving shortly. It didn't. Instead this only meant our driver would be hanging out in the stairwell of the bus, smoking, encouraging everyone in the neighbourhood with something to sell to climb aboard, or lean in through the windows, to offer their wares or just come look at the silly Americans trapped aboard. It became pretty comical. Maybe another hour or two went by before the bus was sufficiently overburdened that it was fit for travel.

Only once we hit the road did I realize that the bus wasn't equipped with windows that open. Ventilation wasn't wanted so much to moderate the temperature, though that would have been good, but because as soon as we left the bus stop many of the human passengers light up their kretek. After about half an hour in the smokey steam I went and sat on the floor in the aisle, thinking the smoke down there likely contained a little more oxygen. I was somewhat prone to getting car sick where roads were engineered and speed limits exist, and where the air was never hot, thick, and opaque. Down there I did stop feeling like I was going to barf. As my nausea abated we began our traverse of the hairpins, twenty-five sharp turns over less than a kilometre, leading down the wall of the extinct volcano inside which sat Danau Maninjau.

(Danau Maninjau was a big bean-shaped lake covering an area of maybe a hundred square kilometres. Between the lake and the caldera’s inner walls was a shifting tapestry of rice fields, plantations, and wild forest – most of which were on the north and east sides of the lake, and stretched between fifty metres at some spots and maybe almost a kilometre at others. On the way down into the crater I spotted many of the regional goods: coffee, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, jackfruit [which is known locally as nangka, and is my favourite fruit, has a pineapple/banana flavour with yellow flesh the texture of juicy rubberized leather], durian [the giant and concurrently stinkiest, smelling like foul socks soaked in sewer, and tastiest of all fruits, sometimes described as onions sauteed in butterscotch], rambutan [which translates literally to “hairy thing” and is – surprise – just that: a little hairy thing, whose edible bits resemble a longan or lychee], and jambu air [water fruit, also known as wax apple or Java apple, the red-skinned, pear-shaped fruit with a water to flesh ratio approximating that of a watermelon, a cotton-candy texture and a very mild sourness.] In addition to all the crops, at the lake's edge was a sparse smattering of buildings, with homes and shops dotting the whole circumference and two small villages at opposite ends. I would guess the in-volcano population to be around maybe 1,000?)

After snaking your way down toward the water you arrive at an intersection. There you are let out of your bus. If you turn right, north, at the main street and walk for approximately three-and-a-half kilometres, maybe forty minutes, past five mosques, you’ll see a sign for Lili’s Homestay. (If you reach a sixth mosque you’ve gone too far.) You just head down into the rice fields toward the water, down past the black-brown kerbau (water buffalo) – though she looks menacing in those horns, fear not, she's friendly – and into the cluster of trees at water’s edge. There, about two metres from the water, is your stay: a dreamy, simple, thatched shack, maybe eight feet cubed, standing on one foot stilts, housing a bed at its center that’s covered in a blue mosquito net full of dime-sized and fist-sized holes, and with a hole in the room’s floorboards big enough for the mother of the snakes you saw up at the road’s edge to come and go with ease. (Until now you had no intended purpose for the duct tape you brought along. What a treat it was pretending to be useful.) Here the cecek are abundant, happy, and sing in a chorus. Little snails traverse north and south, as if commuting along a highway within the first metre of the littoral zone. Fish pens by the dozen pen fish out in deeper waters. Skinny, unneutered kittens (anak kucing, "cat child") jump and flop and attack one another, or phantoms as they are wont to do, and will happily take a fried egg (telor goreng) if you’ve got one to spare. From here you can look out across the lake and watch the monsoon clouds billow and climb astonishingly, almost too fast, almost comically, almost as though an animated mushroom cloud. This show is really better than any television. Here a week, a month, or a year could go by all the same. You could just sit here, day in and day out, in a hammock (tempat tidur gantung "the place for hanging sleep") in a tree, sipping coffee and pineapple juice (jus ananas), eating banana pancakes (pisang panekuk) and writing Petrarchan sonnet/haiku hybrids about tiny, flashy fish trapped in murky land-ponds; ponds who, in concert, gift not less than sixty million metric tons of Borlaug’s high-yield.

Here you could spend a whole day or week, month or year hunting for the elusive Rafflesia arnoldii. (Referred to locally as padma raksasa [no idea what that means, but if you say it in the local tongue it sounds like a sci-fi character, like something out of Star Wars or Dune], Raf' is the largest and perhaps most disgusting flower on Earth. Being much more like a fungi than a plant, it lacks leaf, stem, or root, and doesn't even engage in photosynthesis; instead it subsists as a parasite of the climbing, tendriled vine Tetrastigma. It's fleshy plant-like parts, reeking to highest hell of death and decomposition, attracts fly and beetle pollinators, with the seeds that follow being dispersed by my favourite dynamic tag-team: treeshrew and elephant). Alternatively, you could just find yourself re-seduced, like a child first learning their senses, by the alien weed Mimosa pudica. (Originally described by His Royal High-Orderliness, Sir Carl Linnaeus Himself, in His 1753 Species Plantarum, and known more commonly as “touch-me-not” or “shame plant”, this bit of psychedelia-made-materia is a perennial of the pea family who sports showy pink pom-poms, is touch-sensitive and collapsible, and forms a mutualism with nitrogen-fixing bacteria who occupy its root nodules. As if that wasn’t special enough, through experimentation pudica has shown the ability to differentiate between stimuli, say a finger and a drop of water, and even appears to have memory, displaying learned responses to specific stimuli in a manner similar to that exhibited in animals. Further still, found in pudi’s root system, along with symbiotic bacteria and many other organic compounds, is the highly unstable and very rarely observed thiofromaldehyde. This elusive little chemo-gem has been found in no other plants and is observed nowhere else but – wait for it – in the interstellar medium, that diaphanous dispersal of matter permeating the space between solar systems.) You could. I did.

In fact, for days on this lake, between un-poems and photographing giant spike-armoured grasshoppers, I considered these planty examples, turning them over and over in my head. It made me ask, for the first time, how we ever presumed and promulgated the myth of a world dominated by competition, of all things – when it’s so deeply, overwhelmingly, and obviously an eclectic and Jazzy improvisation of givesome-takeliness. (Givesome-takeliness, is just the kind of term you generate when you lock your head into poetry mode for a week. Or that's what happens to me.) I mean, the lovely Rafflesia simply could not and therefore would not without a timely symphony of participatory plants, insects, and mammals all acting to the greatest possible extent on ignorant and benevolent behalf of this other-self. If competition was the principal order Raf’ would not exist. In this way overt competition felt like a contravention to the dominant order. So, where one typically chose or was heavily entrained to see a kind of one-off, winner-take-all atmosphere, the World Series, say, I became determined to change perspective. I never wanted to be so narrow in my thinking again. I wanted to zoom both in and out, to see not just an entire season of baseball – including peanut and beer vendors, groundskeepers and turf growers, umpires and bench-sitters and viewers-at-home – but the whole of the modern sport: from Chadwick’s invention of the "K" to the reinvention of Camden Yards; from the dismantling of its own system of apartheid to the game’s wider effect on race relations in America; from baseball’s impact on urban planning to the impact of calculus and algorithm on the game of baseball. Though I was not exactly a sports fan, I could easily acknowledge that watching any one season, series, or game, or focussing on one team, player, or pitch missed out on all connection and context – on almost everything intriguing and wonderful, especially the gestalt sum that gave all of the meaning and flavour to this old and ridiculous sport. This, seemed to me, to also be entirely true of the micro, macro, and meta that was the quintessence of biology… (No, I wasn’t high. And if this was all I got, which it wasn't, the whole trip would have been very much worth it.)

While I was sad to leave this place, eventually the volcano’s inhabitants started to get used to our presence and with that a little too friendly. So we left, back to Bukittinggi to catch a bus north to Danau Toba, to the next crater lake, and Pulau Samosir (Samosir Island) nested at its center. Dusk neared as we waited for our interurban transport. After climbing aboard a German-speaking couple followed in all their sleek blondness. It was quite a relief to observe them, appearing orders of magnitude more out of place than myself. It became clear that they really should have been on an airplane. The fellow spent his first minutes on the bus fighting with his partner’s seatbelt and then complaining to the person who sold him a ticket, before pulling out a knife, taking apart the seat belt’s housing, and attempting to rebuild a mechanism clearly beyond repair, then giving up and demanding another seat. (Though the bus was not full and there was no assigned seating.) This provided sufficient pre-departure entertainment.

We would be heading north, some six hundred or so kilometres, along the Trans-Sumatran Highway. (Now, the word highway gives you the entirely wrong impression. This long screwy stretch of road was narrow: at its widest and most luxurious, in busier sections nearest civilization, it was a slab of unmarked concrete just wide enough to allow vehicles going in the opposite direction to pass.) These busses, as I was told, were typically driven by two: one guy was at the wheel and another was standing by, in the stairwell, watching the road and keeping the driver awake for sections of the drive, taking over when the other needed a break. For our nightdrive up the TSH this teamwork would be essential. Pretty quickly out of Bukittinggi the road grew narrow and winding. We would stop at many of the sharper bends, with light striking the vegetated cliff beside us, indicating an oncoming truck. There was no way for two larger vehicles to pass, given the absence of a shoulder, without one pulling as far as possible into the face of the hill, and the other creeping slowly along the lip of the guardrailless fall. In the dark the terraced valley below felt abyssal, a spreading black plunge, with nothing even to catch your eye. After getting used to the routine, the novelty of the drive wearing off, I tried to sleep; but soon there was excitement in the cabin and we were stopping. It was the rainy season and the path ahead was washed out. Rocks and mud made the way appear impassable. I assumed this meant the end of our northbound trip, but what was impassible where I learned to drive was, here, a challenge to be met. We were alone on the road and the driver rolled the bus up to the edge of the debris. (Doing so made one consider placing a coin between their teeth, for paying the seemingly inevitable toll to our determined ferrymen, pseudo-Charon and would-be-Phlegyas, on this brown wash, our Styx.) The muddy scree formed a ten or fifteen degree wedge of earth the driver seemed keen to attempt to cross, something his passengers were audibly unhappy with – and the Germans were just not having. Driver Two read the consensus, and the tone coming from Herr German who was now marching to the front of the bus, and dissuaded Driver One from moving forward. Instead, we all exited the bus and stood beside the landslide as the drivers rocked over the mass, with Driver Two hanging comically out the doorway as if his eighty-nine pounds three ounces would be the difference between sticking or rolling. They bounced and jerked and paused and jumped and jiggled across the ten metre wide blockage. Their not winding up at the bottom of the mountain created a tension between a heightened reassurance in their obvious driving skills and feeling they were totally batshit crazy and not to be trusted. When they made it we followed on foot and piled back into the bus. I slept much of the rest of the seventeen hour trip, except for a regrettable awakening when we stopped at a gas station, sometime just before dawn. There I watched Driver Two lighting up and smoking a cigarette with one hand while pumping gas with the other, standing next to a large sign reading, DILARANG MEROKOK! (SMOKING PROHIBITED!) Here I imagined this whole adventure as an obscenely long and elaborate joke – one that Munro had to be in on, if not orchestrating, for the purpose of testing my mettles – because at least in that there would be some sense and reason. A few hours after gassing we arrived in the village of Parapat, nestled at Danau Toba’s shore.

(Now, Toba is a special place. Toba is as the largest volcanic lake on Earth and sits within the largest volcanic structure anywhere, at one hundred kilometres long and thirty kilometres wide. It was formed as the result of a supervolcanic eruption, one plotted using potassium argon dating to around seventy thousand years ago. This was a truly massive explosion: ejecting something like three thousand cubic kilometers of rock, lava, and ash, and decimating everything for twenty thousand square kilometres – the largest volcanic event in the last twenty-five million years. To give a sense of scale, there are locations in neighbouring Malaysia, four hundred kilometres away, containing layers of Toba ash some nine metres thick, and as far away as central India, three thousand kilometres away, with ash layers from this event up to six metres in depth. You may have heard of the better-known Mount Tambora eruption, of 1815 [also in Indonesia], resulting in the “Year Without a Summer”; well, Toba’s big bang was one hundred times the strength. So cataclysmic was this event that it’s estimated by some to have created a global volcanic winter lasting a decade, followed by a millennium-long cooling period. Researchers also connect this eruption and its outfall to the collapse of the human population around the same time. The impact of this genetic bottleneck is said to be so great that everyone living today can see its effects in their own biology. Further still, it’s even been suggested the Toba catastrophe is what forced early humans to adopt new survival strategies, resulting in our overtaking of Neanderthals. Evidence of recovery from very low populations in apes, cheetahs, and tigers lend some credence to these theories by pointing to a catastrophic population-level event around this same time period. [Go look up the controversial “Toba catastrophe theory” some time.] So, one might argue, as I would, that Toba is a sacred site, possibly one of only two such sites [the other being the Chicxulub impact crater in the Yucatán, left by the fifteen kilometre diameter rock that ended the dinosaurs with an energetic event equivalent to ten billion Hiroshimas.] To me Toba, like Chicxulub, represented a profound and tangible axis mundi of a sort seldom manifest in the more metaphysical designations elsewhere. This, very clearly the navel of the Earth, is where we’d arrived.)

Happily on foot, in Parapat town, we walked down to the nearest wharf looking for a boat. We soon found a place to wait for extraction to the hilly island of Maninjau. Sitting with a group of other tourists, all Indonesian, a man came by and unfurled a blanket, asking the handful of waiting transiters if they would like to purchase any of his wares. His blanket held mostly blades – from sharpened eating utensils to a rusty machete and everything in between – and also a strange little gun the likes of which I'd never seen. I presumed the gun was a German or Dutch antique, like WWI vintage or earlier, and unlikely usable in decades. He had no takers and sat down with us for a smoke. Within a few minutes something resembling a small ferry arrived, operated by one of the stays across the way. Aboard was a tout, as you'd expect, who spoke English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and, for good measure, a couple of Indonesian dialects. Unlike the usual aggressive sellers this fellow was very happy to sit and chat, even after it was clear we weren’t buying what he was selling. He really wanted to know about the regional nuances of the language spoken in Quebec. Sadly, I had little to offer him. The trip over to the island, and our conversation, was short. Unexpectedly, our friend left us alone after reaching land. From a narrow stone pier we walked off the water and onto a little peninsula, like a mini Samosir connected to mother Samosir by a narrow strip of land. This islet-jut was ringed with accommodations and cafes; however, though it was clearly a tourist spot there didn’t appear to be other travellers, foreign or domestic, other than the small handful from our boat.

We wound around and found a little spot overlooking the water that seemed doable. Most outrageously they were asking 11,500Rp per night (approximately $1.70). It must have been the off season, and maybe a slow year. As with every-elsewhere, present were the requisite red, blue, and pink plastic chairs, roving chickens, tall glasses of ginger tea, and slick white floortiles. Ants, centipedes, cockroaches, and geckos were plentiful and would make regular pheromonal forays across the floor, sometimes in large trooply explorations and at other times as solo expeditions, circling or taking wide arcs across open space, never shooting shyly in the corners or crooks. Here, where everything was trying to be clean and hotel-like (a serious undertaking), these little friends were maybe just more obvious, not more abundant, than other spots we'd stayed which were more rustic and rough. Over the following few days, rather than exploring the very large island of Samosir we just strolled around near our stay and took short dips in the lake. We changed accommodation twice and ate everywhere selling food, to abate the transparent competitive off-season frustrations and make friends with everyone. Interestingly, every spot selling food offered some concoction with or without “magic mushrooms”. (I recalled Dr. Bodden referring to our planned route through rural Sumatra as “the classic Hippie trail.” This, the abundant and very public entheogens, was the first real sign of that.)

One afternoon I tried to chat with a wood carver. He had a hut on a hill overlooking the only road. The building was on stilts, maybe four feet off the ground with a tree trunk notched into a set of stairs. On little shelves and tables and hanging from the ceiling on hooks were all his crafts. There were bowls and boxes, statues and shadow puppets, flutes and mandolins – most of which were stained black. There were wood chips and shavings and dust in piles in all the corners of the building. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to cart around with me for the rest of our trip – another three weeks and 1,500 kilometres – but I was eyeing one of his chess sets. The board folded in half, holding all the pieces, and was carved in regional motifs. We tried to communicate, but it was difficult. Instead of words we used a lot of hand gestures. Of course there were no price tags, but by now I was fluent with the word berapa (how much). For his boardgame he wanted 1,375,000Rp (Satu juta tiga ratus tujuh puluh lima ribu rupiah). And it was worth that. Still learning numbers, and never dealing verbally in such sums, he said a bunch of stuff I didn’t comprehend before I registered words I knew. So I didn’t even pick up the satu juta, the most important bit, and believed him to be asking 375,000Rp instead. These are considerably different numbers. I thought this – a quarter of what he was actually asking – was very reasonable. (And, really, given that we were paying a tiny fraction of this for our accommodation it seemed like a relatively hefty ask.) I attempted to explain that I didn’t have the cash on me but that I’d like to come back besok (tomorrow) and buy it. We seemed to be on the same page, so we exchanged affirmational noddings and several more "besoks" and then I left.

The following siang I returned with Munro in toe and what I thought was plenty of cash. We climbed into his work/showroom and he seemed happy to see me. I handed over the cash, and told him what was there, tiga ratus tujuh puluh lima ribu. A funny look came to his face: it was confused multiplied by amused. Now, in my experience every business transaction in Indonesia involves some amount of bargaining (more so than a financial transaction of trying to get the best deal, bargaining here seemed a social act, one of conversation and of relationship building.) It seemed he felt I was trying to play hardball. Realizing that I had just been woefully inept in my language skills and that the fellow was also misreading my intentions, Jenny intervened and explained what was happening. She translated two ways. She explained to him that it was an honest error, that I had no other money, and asked him what could I get for what money I had. Then she told me that he wasn’t taking less than his real asking price. Everything he made was pretty cool but I wasn’t interested in anything else. I interjected, arguing, tidak, saya ada... (no, I have…) and pulled out the last of my local currency, another 100,000Rp. He laughed and asked where we were from, why we were in Sumatra, and where we were headed. We chatted a few more minutes and then, amused and content, he agreed to take this money for his chess set. Hilariously, this is the only time I successfully haggled for something, and it was a total accident. In fact, I didn’t even want to haggle and was thrilled to directly pay a craftsperson what their work was worth, something I never get to do at home.

(The amount I gave him was probably still decent. Minimum wage in Indonesia, which doesn’t really exist, is something like $0.50 per hour or maybe $1,500 per year. Many folks I met were involved in some kind of mixed economy of cash exchange and bartering, often rice for work and/or rice for rent – which is why there are nation-wide riots when the price of rice fluctuates even a little. In addition, there seemed to be a great deal of reciprocal ingratiation here, as informal social contract: where there’s no social assistance or health care but instead networks of relationships each bearing a wide range of favours one can call upon and be expected to honour. In this way money was a different thing here and, like the local alphabet or the food, only approximated what I was accustomed to.)

By the end of the week we decided it was time to move on from Sumatra and over to Malaysia. To me it seemed crazy to be in the one of two home territories of the orangutan and not go see any; but the news before we left was reporting outbreaks of violence where we would have gone. So instead of heading northwest to the orang’ sanctuaries of Taman Nasional Gunung Leuser (Mount Leuser National Park) and/or Bukit Lawang (Lawang Hill) – home to many of the last of the critically endangered orangutans on the planet – we would bus north to Medan. Doing so meant passing through Pematangsiantar, which was notable for us because this is where Semsar was originally from. Also I’d read the local delicacy – and a must at the wedding of anyone calling themself a Batak – was a dish called saksang (pork or dog stewed in the blood of the animal) and tuak (an alcoholic beverage made from sugar palm sap and the bark of the raru tree). Both of which, pig and booze, I thought, were pretty interesting as favoured consumables for a population that’s 99% Muslim and 110% impassioned by the most strict orthodoxy. Yet, the world, it seemed, was more messy and interesting than I supposed or would have granted.

(In Medan, where we'd be forced to stay overnight before catching our boat to Malaysia, the police and military don't exactly see eye-to-eye. There were stories in the local paper of members of the military being arrested by the police, and the military responding by driving a tank into the wall of the jail to retrieve their captive comrade. But such things don't just happen, randomly, without provocation or precedent. I'm told that here, like elsewhere across this profoundly resource-rich archipelago, powerful entities compete – apparently as unleashed, weaponized, football teams might, sans stadium – for control of any and all profitable commodities and markets. [Including everything from illegal logging and counterfeit tree labelling to the multidimensional drug and alcohol trades, carried out by only the most pious of men, to those most ancient of fundraising sources: piratery, piracy, and bribery.] As a result, it would seem Indonesia operates within parameters you might expect to find in the U.S. had the Depression-era mobsters and gangsters not been taken down but instead consolidated power and legitimated themselves by transitioning out of mere organized crime into the very highly organized that can only be performed at the upper levels of institutional power.)

We arrived in Medan and crashed at our stay downtown, on Jalan Sisingamangaraja (a street named after the last priest-king of the Batak, and just one of those amazing Indonesian names), next to the hundred-year-old and extraordinarily crackly Masjid Raya Medan (the Grand Mosque of Medan). Happy to come and go quickly, the following morning we were on a minibus to the port, to pass through immigration and hop a boat to Malaysia and the island of Penang. As ever, we got there early and were the only travellers around. After some time another foreigner arrived. She was alone and packing a guitar. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew her; but what were the chances that here, in such a random and far off place, someone I knew would also be travelling and we’d also cross paths? Seemed much more likely I was confused or that she merely resembled an acquaintance. The more time passed the more I was sure I knew her from somewhere. It was she that came and spoke first.

“I think I know you from somewhere,” she said, “You from Canada?”

“Vancouver,” I told her, and added, “I recognize you too, but I can’t place where from. I’m from Vancouver originally but live in Victoria these days.”

“That’s where I’ve spent the last few years,” she explained.

“Have you worked as a server, by chance?” I asked.

“Yeah, at Spag.”

“Ah ha! I worked in the back, mostly as a prep-cook and only in the mornings/afternoons, and you would have been up front. We probably never really interacted.”

“Wow, crazy chance meeting. I mean, there probably isn’t another tourist for a thousand miles” she proposed.

We had a nice little chat for a bit, but found we were headed in different directions. Eventually she went and sat in another section waiting for her ferry north, to Thailand.

(But this would not be the last time she and I would run into one another randomly, in unexpected places. The next time we would meet would be five years later, outside the public library in Newcastle, Australia. “Hey, it’s you!” I would say, smiling and pointing. The third time was in 2009 at a diner in Vancouver. We didn’t speak. I was with a friend and she was having a very intense conversation – an interaction that felt like it could only be transacted between current or former lovers – and not something one would walk up and interrupt. Despite this our eyes met and we acknowledged one another with smiles. It’s hard not to feel connected to someone, however loosely, after that. As a matter of fact, she became known, to me alone, as “That Woman” – named thus because I never remembered her name and our first and second meetings were pre-cell phone and pre-social media; so rather than “friends”, so called, as we may have become had our interactions happened a decade later, she remains this nameless, familiar stranger and a happy mystery of a sort – someone I feel almost certain to run into again.)

As she was walking away a tall, thin, jovial tourist came crashing through the doors carrying bags of as much fruit as personal effects. Soon he marched over to Munro and was asking her something. A few moments into the conversation she was laughing and pointing at me and were coming over – him with a grin ear-to-ear, bounding toward me with a sack of oranges held out in front of him. She introduced me to “Karl, the frugivore.” Munro had explained to him that she didn’t want his fruit but I would surely have it, and that I was similarly passionate about, if less singularly devoted to, fruit – feeling it superior in every way to other foods. He stood there with loudly lilting delight in his voice, telling the whole room that he survived only on fruit and that he wished one day to transition to breatharianism. “No meat, no veg, no fruit: only air and sex!” he said, laughing in what I later learned was South African accent. But his accent wasn’t purely South African, it turned out his tone was also coloured in Canadian; what was more, he was from Vancouver. In fact, further still, he knew, had worked with, and was a big fan of Munro’s uncle (who shared similar politics, ethics, and flesh-eating abstinence.) So enamoured with Munro and her uncle, and perhaps my fruitiness, he insisted we call him “Uncle Karl”. A passionate animal rights activist, Uncle Karl was at the end of a sojourn visiting the orangutans of Sumatra, high on his list of “one hundred things to do before you die.” He too was headed to Penang and insisted we travel together, that he knew the town and a great place to stay. We spoke for not less than half an hour about all the fruits of Southeast Asia and another half hour about the amazing orangutan. He explained how orangutans have such a varied diet that individuals need foraging territory of up to nine square kilometres, which partly explains why their so endangered. (Largely frugivore, like the enlightened Karl, orangs survive on more than ninety varieties of fruit; but, like me, eat just about everything else they can get their hands on too: everything from leaves, bark, and flowers to insects, bird’s eggs, mineral clay, honey and, in lean years when the fruit crop fails, the occasional malu-malu [or slow loris, Nycticebus coucang – the cutest primate ever.]) A lover of Wagnerian opera, Karl also took some time attempting to explain to me the epiphany regarding Wagner’s body of work that came to him a week earlier in the steamy jungles of Sumatra, something involving an ecstatic Brünnhilde. I had no idea what he was talking about, but Karl was delighted by every bit of it. (I didn't tell him about my own new gestalt theory, but it did seem clear that physical dislocation aided a kind of mental rehabilitation or reconnection.)

The vessel we ended up boarding was essentially a massive speedboat. This two hundred and sixty kilometre stretch of the Strait of Malacca warranted such a beastly craft. Karl wisely sat at the boat’s rear, having made the crossing before. Ignorant as ever, I found a seat closer to the middle of the ship. We launched, and as we got up to speed we slammed into the rolling sea, heaving up and dropping down with a range of motion I’d never experienced outside an amusement park. And, just like the rides at the park, there was no getting off this ride until it was over. In fact, that's exactly how the whole rest of my adventure with Munro went: full of such incredible, indelible, untellable ups and downs. And, really, what more could one want?

#travel #biology #language #food #life #ridiculousness #culture