Sumbawa: Another Kind of Paradise Part II
July 17th, 2008 Posted in Writing portfolios, Indonesia, Education, Travel | No Comments »From Kabar Magazine, December 2005
Sumbawa: Another Kind of Paradise Part II
By Bruce E. Pohlmann
For some reason, mostly, I guess, due to the distortions of perception common to those who live in small villages, I had the impression that Sumbawa Besar would be a wonderland of shops, restaurants, hotels and perhaps even a bookstore. The reality is that it’s the sleepy little capital city of a large, sleepy island. After an uneventful night at the Hotel Tambora with only one offer of a woman (“I’m married.” “It doesn’t matter.” “It does if you know my wife.”), and a breakfast of toast and bitter coffee, I’m ready to head back to my little village of Sekongkang. I’m looking forward to the ride as the sky is a cobalt-blue and a soft breeze promises a pleasant journey on my trusty Honda.
Just outside of town I pass the Kencana Beach Bungalows which are owned by the same family that owns the Tambora in Sumbawa Besar. I take a quick peak, find the bungalows inviting and regret that I didn’t stay here rather than in town. But, the thought of getting back to my family encourages me to push on.
Before I arrive at the harbor of Poto Tano, Bungin Island pops into view; it’s one of the curiosities of Indonesia. Bungin is known as the most densely populated place in the country. From the coast line, I stop and take a few photos of the island since I don’t want to take the trouble to hire a boat to reach the island. Bungin Island is actually a coral reef on which stilt houses are packed together cheek to jowl. The residents make a living by fishing. I was told by an Indonesian colleague that the people of the island intermarry and rarely leave. A people with the mental fortitude that enables them to accept such insularity and lack of privacy seem far beyond my meager ability to understand.
I continue on and soon arrive at the turn off to the harbor at Poto Tano. Travel in an archipelago for people without the means to take an airplane requires moving from island to island via ferry. While far from luxury vessels, ferries in Indonesia serve their purpose in an unassuming, but fairly efficient manner. Ferries leave Poto Tano regularly for Lombok. The crossing takes about 90 minutes, and is one of the colorful aspects of traveling in the more remote parts of Indonesia. Families often bring box lunches and drinks with them to consume on the journey, but for those who haven’t had the time or inclination to pack some snacks, there are plenty of hawkers selling fruits, boiled rice packages, drinks, chocolate bars, and cigarettes. Cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles compete for space in the bottom tier of the ferries.
As I turn onto the highway that winds down the southwest coast, I think about stopping in Setaluk, a village just down the road where an Englishman who married a local lady lives, but I’ve forgotten his address so I slowly cruise past the market thinking that he might be there shopping with his wife and new child. While I don’t see him, I become an object of interest for the locals who obviously don’t get many foreigners in their village. A group of teenagers gathered on the edge of the market wave and shout, “Hello bule.” The attention that locals pay to foreigners in this part of Sumbawa doesn’t quite have the edge that foreigner/local interactions have in Bali. As tourism hasn’t developed here yet, locals lack an economic interest in their interactions with foreigners, and the resulting relations are generally ones of mutual curiosity. As I drive on, I think about my first contact with a Balinese outside of the tourist areas back in 1989. I was on a bus traveling from Denpasar to Singaraja via Pupuan. It was my first trip outside Irian Jaya in the five months that I had been living in Indonesia. Dressed in my teacher uniform of a Polo shirt and pressed slacks and carrying a bulging, battered red cloth suitcase, I stuck out on the bus filled with Balinese returning home from the capital. The ancient bus groaned to a halt just outside of Pupuan and a tiny old grandmother seated next to me asked if I would like to share some of her meal of fried rice and chicken. We sat and chatted for an hour over our lunch while the driver repaired the bus. When we finally reached Pupuan, the grandmother got down and invited me to visit her house if I ever happened to be in the area again. After a week of being hustled in Kuta, this small interaction elevated my frame of mind and opened me up once again to my imagined reality of Bali.
By the time my daydreaming is finished, I realize that I have just passed the Pertamina station just north of Taliwang. I make a u-turn and head back. There’s a small line at the pump, so I take my place. A government employee in a brown uniform is just in front of me on his Honda Kharisma. He turns, adjusts his brown government-issued cap on a slightly graying thick crop of hair. “Do you speak Indonesian?” he asks somewhat shyly.
“Oh, a little bit,” I reply. My inquisitor introduces himself as Hassan and gives me a firm handshake holding it somewhat longer than a Westerner would. It took me several years before I grew past being uncomfortable with the long Indonesian handshakes. One of the hardest Indonesian cultural traits to become accustomed to is the minimalist idea of personal space. Americans generally have a large invisible space that they like to surround themselves with; Indonesians have almost none and think nothing of standing as close as possible to foreigners as they are unaware of this very significant cultural difference.
“How do you like the Kharisma?” Hassan says. I’m completely thrown by this very unusual opening to a conversation. I had already prepared my list of responses to the usual sequence of questions, but none of them included comments about my motorbike. Now I need to actually pay attention to the conversation. We chat for a few minutes about our bikes and then slide into the usual questions of where I’m from, what I do, married or not, children, etc. Hassan invites me to visit his house in Taliwang, but I tell him I’m late for a meeting with my contractor and take a rain check. I fill my bike with subsidized gasoline for the ridiculous price of 1 US dollar and head off for Jelenga where I want to stop for a beer and chat with Memed at the bungalows about how the tourist season has gone so far this year.
The road from Taliwang to Jereweh is smoothly paved, and I put the bike up to its comfortable limit of 100 for a short burst. It handles well and within 15 minutes I’m in Jereweh. Jereweh is a small, pretty town with well-ordered houses, several mosques, a number of shops and a high school. The cleanliness of the main road impresses me each time I pass through. Indonesians, unfortunately, have a propensity for throwing their trash anywhere outside of their immediate living environment even if it means throwing it in the vacant lot next door. For whatever reason, the citizens of Jereweh seem to have found a less public place to deposit their trash and that sense of civic awareness endears them to me. Just as I’m about to turn off on to the road to the beach, I see Memed driving down the road with a tourist. I decide that the 8 kilometer bounce down the potholed road is not worth sitting alone with a beer – so I drive on.
The road outside Jereweh climbs through a series of hills until you reach the high point which overlooks the village of Benete. This stretch of the road offers some of the finest of Sumbawan landscapes: a series of deep green hills and valleys reach far out into the distant horizon. Eagles circle in the clear blue sky looking for a meal. I stop at one of the clear points on the road where I can take a few photographs. Shooting the vistas and smoking a cigarette, I imagine a time when a relative of the recently discovered Flores Man (actually a lady) might have wandered these hills 18,000 years ago looking for the tiny elephants that roamed the area, or foraging for fruits and roots. The jungle at the edge of the horizon is still free from the development occurring just to the south and the north. This unspoiled space is an interlude of the primitive in the developing composition of modernity being written on southwest Sumbawa.
I descend into Benete which is an overgrown village alongside the portside facilities of PT. Newmont, the American mining company digging gold and copper out of the surrounding hills. Many of the Indonesian employees of Newmont live here within easy access of their place of employment. A few shops, schools, and mosques line the main road. A string of school children walking home from school, shout and wave. I give a quick wave and smile. Just south of Benete, I climb another hill and descend into the village of Maluk, the main center of activity in southwest Sumbawa.
Maluk has the look, feel and smell of a village hastily morphed into a town. Take the cars and motorcycles out of the picture and Maluk could pass for Dodge City in the U.S. West circa 1880. I slow down behind several horse-drawn carts carrying jilbab-covered ladies clutching bunches of greens and a few live roosters. Maluk boasts a dentist, several doctors, a public health clinic, telephones, electricity, and a public water system. The main road is lined with a variety of small shops selling the usual Indonesian foods, household supplies and building materials. Maluk also hosts the Kiwi Bar, a bar and restaurant with a somewhat naughty reputation, as well as Hotel Trophy which is owned by an Australian and his Indonesian wife. Residents of the local villages, including my own village of Sekongkang Bawah, do the majority of their shopping in Maluk. Goods here tend to be somewhat higher than in the more populated areas of Indonesia because of the transportation factor. I guide my Honda up to the Dunia Baru store which sells a variety of things including fishing gear, sporting goods, and stationary. I grab a cold bottle of Coca-Cola from the glass-faced refrigerator, ask the shop girl to open it, and take a long drink to wash the dust out of my mouth. Pak Haji, the owner, pulls up in front in his Kijang, and shakes my hand.
“Where’s your wife?” he asks looking around his shop. He’s dressed in his usual rumpled t-shirt and baggy knee-length shorts.
I wonder where this conversation will go as local businessmen generally try to sell me things when I’m out on my own without my wife to put a damper on their energetic capitalist impulse. “She’s at home. I just came back from Sumbawa Besar. I needed to buy some circuit breakers.” Ah, put everything out there all at once. This is my ploy to end the conversation early so that I can go home and see the family and have lunch.
“What kind of circuit breakers?” he quizzes me while looking over my shoulder at my bulging backpack. Obviously the conversation is going to last longer than I had hoped.
I decline to pull the breakers out of my backpack still hoping to get out the door quickly. “25 amps.”
He shakes his balding head with the look of regret. “I could have sold you some. You wouldn’t have had to go so far.”
“Oh you have some?” I reply with genuine interest. This could save me some time in the future.
“No, but I could have ordered some from Lombok. They have better quality ones.” He’s waiting for me to order some at what I’m sure will be a significantly higher cost than what I paid in Sumbawa Besar.
“Oh well, maybe next time. I have to run now. I have a meeting at school soon.” I give his large hand a tight grip, break it off quickly and head off for home.
The village of Sekongkang is actually two small villages separated by a narrow, concrete bridge: Sekongkang Atas (Upper Sekongkang) and Sekongkang Bawah (Lower Sekongkang). Both are situated about 15 minutes from Maluk over a high hill laced with a narrow, curving road that I enjoy riding on with my motorbike, but dread driving on in my car. The two Sekongkangs have perhaps several thousand residents between them along with a new public health clinic, a doctor, a few shops, a few mosques, a few elementary schools and a junior high, and a new government office, the Kantor Camat. The Sekongkangs are the site of a frenzy of construction. It seems that everyone connected with the Newmont mine is building a new home or renovating their old one. The local government has hopes of developing a tourist industry based on the wild beauty of the white sand beaches and Sumbawanese culture. And while some tourists come for the surfing, a clear plan to develop the other enticements of the area has yet to be developed.
Most of the folks here are farmers or casual laborers. The mine also provides employment for some of the local citizens. A few work at one of the two local hotels: Yoyo’s or Tropical. Yoyo’s, named after the famous surfing spot in this area, and Tropical just down the road, mostly provide service for the expatriate population from Newmont. Occasionally they attract a few of the more well healed surfers, but generally their prices keep the hard core surfers looking for cheaper accommodations up north in Maluk or Jelenga.
This corner of Sumbawa is home to migrants from a variety of islands drawn here in the search for employment with the mine. My neighbors come from Flores, Sumba, Timor, Lombok, and Java; yet everyone gets along famously. Like small communities around the world, Sekongkang Bawah is a place where everyone’s business is public knowledge.
I pull up to the gate of our house and beep my horn. My neighbor, originally from Jereweh, comes over while I’m waiting for someone to come unlock the gate. “Where have you been?” he shouts.
Paul Theroux in The Happy Isles of Oceania says that, “Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage in your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid, and sometimes thrilling, is the juxtaposition of the present and the past – London seen from the heights of Harris Saddle.”
Sumbawanese from this part of the island have a rough and tough manner somewhat like a displaced New York taxi driver. They are harmless, but nosier and more aggressive than the Balinese or Javanese. “Just back from Sumbawa Besar for some electrical parts,” I reply in a muted, but strident tone. I pull out the three circuit breakers and he smiles and nods.
“It’s hard buying things here isn’t it? Can’t you get some from Newmont?”
I replay once again my set piece on not being an employee of the mining company, but rather the school that contracts with it for educating the expatriate children. Mining companies often have a somewhat problematic relationship with the local communities; Newmont has had its share of problems as well, but because of their proactive community development program, they have a good reputation with the local citizens. I start to drift off into a mental accounting of Newmont’s many contributions to the community, but Lupe’s nodding brings me back to the present interaction.
Even while nodding, the vacant look he gives me signifies that he doesn’t really believe my explanation. While Indonesians are differentiated here based on the island of their birth, bules (white people) are lumped together. It’s distinctly different from Bali, the tourist haven, where Balinese are quite skilled in assigning foreigners concrete identities based on their nationality. In this remote area of Indonesia, bules have two identities – surfer or Newmont employee. Since I work “inside” as the locals call the mining community, I obviously fit into the second category. Identity politics in an archipelago of travelers and migrants. My eldest daughter, Mercedes, bounces out of the house and unlocks the gate. One more trip through Paradise.
