On the trail of the Bilou - Travels among the Mentawai

Wednesday February 7th 2018

The plane landed in Padang in the middle of the afternoon. As we taxied towards the very small international terminal, delightfully constructed in the local Minangkabau style, I reflected on what it would be like to stand on Indonesian soil again. It was almost a year and a half since I spent a month here; a month frustratingly confined to Jakarta and Bali for the most part. Those places are fine in their own right, but it was the four days I had spent exploring the western end of Flores that had opened my eyes to what a wonderful country this was. On this trip I would be similarly constrained for time, but thanks to (theoretically) better planning I would at least be able to get a little closer to the edge of the map and give myself a better chance to see some genuinely unique sights.



Padang is a small city on the west coast of Sumatera (I'm going to use Indonesian spellings and names wherever possible. It's these kind of pretentious affectations that really give a trip thread character.). It took only an hour to fly there from KLIA2 in Kuala Lumpur and it's at this point that we will pick up the story; anything that had happened in the twenty four hours between leaving Shanghai and this point was either uninteresting or unprintable, although dare I say it never both.

The first obstacle in my path was to clear Immigration. Luckily I had had the foresight to be born in the UK and so I am visa-exempt in Indonesia for thirty days. Equally crucially I had already bought a plane ticket flying out of Jakarta on the 23rd of February. The girls in front of me were not so lucky and were not allowed into the country until they had bought onward travel on their phones in front of the border police. A lesson hard learnt.



I headed for Tourist Information in order to locate the bus heading into the city. They advised me the best thing to do would be to wander aimlessly outside the terminal fending off taxi drivers until I finally found a sign that said DAMRI with a bus that had DAMRI written on the side pulling away in a cloud of dust (this might not have been what they said but we both knew it was exactly what they meant). I bought an over-priced packet of ferociously hot prawn crackers in order to get change for the bus; it cost Rp23,500 which is actually very cheap.

Note: The Indonesian currency is Rupiah; Rp20,000 is about £1. It'll be relatively useful to remember this if you follow the thread.

As we drove into the city I had the chance to observe both the scenery and the effect of the crackers on my digestive tract; sadly the further the bus went the less happy I was on both fronts. It is certainly not an attractive city for the most part. The occasional splash of colour came from kitted-out bemos, a sort of minibus endemic to Indonesia that are run on established routes but with no sense of timetable. In Padang, it seems that the boy racer types have a monopoly on bemo ownership. Chrome hubcaps, lowered suspension, spoilers and garish paintjobs were ubiquitous. I thought this was an improvement on much of the rest of Indonesia where a rather more staid aesthetic prevails. Gastrointestinally of course, the occasional splash of colour was exactly what I was trying to avoid. It was a hard-fought battle against some spirited potholes but I thankfully prevailed.



We arrived at Damri Stesen at the end of the line and I secured passage on a mototaxi to the harbour for a further Rp15,000. I went straight to the ferry terminal to book my ticket on the boat that I knew was leaving the following morning (planning you see). My ferry ticket cost Rp295,000, which is a lot in Indonesia but remember that's still around £15, and I was told to report at 6.00am the next day with a stern warning that they absolutely would leave without me. I also made the startling discovery that the ferry didn't go every day as I had read on the internet. In fact it only travelled three days a week and it was thus pure chance that I hadn't wasted a day or two kicking my heels and waiting for it.

Ticket and greasy packet of sate ayam (chicken on a stick in peanut sauce) in hand I wandered back up the road that led to the pier searching for accommodation. Because the ferry partially exists to serve relatively well-off surfers there is a nice hotel directly opposite which I thought I might stretch too but sadly there was no room at the inn. Instead I found decent lodgings for Rp150,000 in the form of a private room at Grace Guest House, which I would happily recommend as long as you are prepared to be a bit adventurous in the bathroom department (and frankly if you aren't Indonesia is very much not the country for you). I arranged with the owner that I would leave a certain amount of my electronic and other less rugged items with him until I returned. He also advised me to take as much cash as I imagined I would need with me because there were no ATMs were I was going. This turned out to be very useful advice. I had good fun watching a series of machines rejecting my Chinese card until I finally hit gold and literally stuffed my pockets with Rp4,500,000.



On the way back to my room I bought a decent amount of dry food goods at a convenience store as again the internet informed me that this was the sensible thing to do. Having done so I retired for the night. Was I prepared for what was to come? No. But was I as prepared as I could be under the circumstances? Also no. There was however the very real comfort that I was more prepared than a man who had done even less preparation than me and so I drifted off to sleep .

 

Is this the long-promised pig-tailed langur thread? I don't care anyway, I just love a trip thread!

I love it when we travel along with a poster, nothing like experiencing things in almost real time!

As a Brit this confuses me, my idea of a prawn cracker tastes of pretty much nothing and is just eaten with a Chinese takeaway. What am I missing out on?

 

You are missing out on soo much! They can be found in many different flavors, and some are really spicy. In the Asian stores in my area (I don't know about the UK), they sell the uncooked prawn crackers, in which you pop them into the microwave and watch them puff up, it's so cool. And, if you eat fresh prawn crackers (straight out of the fryer), I'll tell you, it's just crispy goodness.

 

And (often) in your case with hilarious results, and sometimes (in particular China) very frustrating results!

 

That sounds like a double entendre to me.

 

brilliant

 

Not recently no, but I suspect you may have hit the source all the same.

Haha, sadly no. Once you get off the beaten track in Indonesia and Malaysia a big vat of water with a small bucket in it serves the dual purpose of shower and toilet paper

 

Thank you. This is a good reminder that I quite like the beaten track.

 

This is probably not a good idea for confetti or a bridal shower.

 

Thursday February 8th 2018

Despite setting a very early alarm I was woken by the sholat or call to prayer from the mosques across the city. This is something else that the Indonesia neophyte has to contend with, and we'll hear more about that later. I hoisted my backpack and headed down to the boat, stopping to admire the fishing fleet in the early morning light on the way. I boarded the boat without issue and headed up top to admire the view as we chugged out of the natural harbour and headed for open waters.

------

It is said that the song of the female Kloss's gibbon is the most beautiful of all gibbons. For some time I had harboured the desire to go and hear the call in the wild. The only problem is that Kloss's gibbons are really only found in one place in the world: the Mentawai Islands. The Mentawai Islands are, if you haven't guessed yet, to be found off the coast of Sumatera, and the city of Padang is really the only gateway to get there. They are too small to have an airport, but thanks to apparently sensational waves there is a small tourism industry to serve the many surfers who flock there each year. There is an even smaller ethnotourism sector offering the chance to visit and live among the tribes people who still dwell in the forest. As for nature watching, well, I couldn't find a single trip report or account of anyone going there to look for the reasonably extensive list of endemics.


My plan was therefore to arrange for one of the locals who usually organise the trips to live with some of the Mentawai tribe to be my guide and at least point me in the direction of some good nature spots. From the IUCN page all I could get was which islands which primates were found on, and concerningly the entries were full of comments about declining populations or inadequate data. I decided to start on the main island, Siberut, which would theoretically give me the gibbons and also possibly the greater treasure, the Pig-tailed langur, the only member of its genus and another Mentawai endemic. The other endemic primates are a macaque species and a langur species, which have both been recently split in two, making the Mentawai and Siberut macaques, and Mentawai and Siberut langurs. If I could see one of each I'd be a happy man.

------



The trip to the Mentawai Islands takes about three and a half hours on the fast ferry. I had planned to spend this time alternatively admiring the view and studying my Indonesian phrase book, but one of my fellow passengers had other ideas. Wherever I found myself on the boat he would appear about ten minutes later, making polite conversation. Now one thing that western travellers will very quickly realise when they arrive in Asia is that ideas about personal space and body contact are very different here and if you don't adapt to that then you will have a pretty tricky time of it. I therefore paid no attention to the fact that this middle-aged man was stroking my arm while he showed me pictures of his family; until that is he asked me if I was comfortable with the arm-stroking! I suddenly found I was less comfortable than I had previously thought!



When we arrived I simply made my apologies and declined his offer to help me find a hotel. Some opportunities are perhaps better left untaken. My first task was to find a guide. In my research one name had come up several times: Sahrul. Not only was he recommended by those who had used him, but he actually featured in one memorable account as the man who had rescued a hapless couple after their own guide did a runner halfway through the trip. Because the port town of Maillepet was relatively small (I had read), I thought there was a decent chance that someone might know him. So as I disembarked I asked in my broken Bahasa (Indonesian) if this place had a Sahrul.

'Oh yes, he's just over there!'

Sometimes you don't have to be good, you just have to be lucky. Before I knew what was happening me and another foreigner were whisked onto motorbikes and went bombing off through the town and out to an adjoining village, where we arrived at a very nice longhouse. Tea was served and my attempts to start negotiations and explain my purpose were rebuffed, so instead we enjoyed the late morning heat and companionable silence for a bit. The other tourist turned out to not to be a tourist at all; he was a Belgian topologist named Yanel who was on the island for a month doing research, who had had to go back to the mainland to get more cash. As you can imagine my curiosity was piqued; why on Earth would he have to come all the way to this far-flung corner of the globe to study the mathematics of shapes? What arcane knowledge was sequestered here?

Five painful and confusing minutes later I decided that Lionel the anthropologist might have the strongest French accent this side of the equator.



Unnecessarily hot beverages having been consumed, we got down to business. I explained to Sahrul that I wanted to see Bilou, which is the Mentawai word for gibbon, and hopefully Simakobu, Bokkoi and Joja as well (pig-tailed langur, Siberut macaque and Siberut langur respectively). Sahrul, whose English was luckily really excellent, said he usually offered a five day trip into the interior of the island; he was certain I would see at least bilou and possibly the others if we got a bit lucky. Well that was good enough for me. I managed to beat him down to a price I could afford by pointing out that I only had Rp4.5M and I would need the point five to get back to Padang. So Rp4,000,000 all inclusive it was! All that remained was to establish that when I said my name was Josh I emphatically did not mean as in 'Joshje Bush' and we were all set to head off.



To get to our halfway point, a village called Madobak where we would sleep that night, was a two hour motorbike journey. So, I put my heavy bag on my back, climbed into the pillion seat and off we went. The road started off as a well tarmacked affair; the Indonesian government is investing a fair amount into infrastructure on the islands which, for better or worse, has attracted a lot of Immigrasi workers. In fact we soon reached the end of the tarmac where a road crew was at work with a gravel track stretching beyond them. At this point the heavens opened in a fairly dramatic fashion and it became obvious that however I or my raincoat felt about the situation I was shortly to become very, very wet. Sadly this meant I have no pictures of what was quite an interesting journey. As the miles went by gravel turned to mud and mud turned to mire. Just as I thought the road couldn't get any worse we took a right-hand turn into an improbably small gap in the jungle.

Initially we made good time as even though the track was narrow it still had a concrete base and my driver happily threw himself into the corners with fear of what might be around the bend. The rain had stopped as well which was a real blessing. After a few more miles though the concrete ended and because the ground itself was so muddy the path now consisted of a series of planks or boards. Needless to say this was not preferred terrain for the moped. As the old saying goes: when the going gets tough, the tough get off and walk. Me and Lionel thus spent most of the rest of the journey either jogging in front or behind of the bikes depending on conditions under tire. After a lot more than three hours we finally arrived into the village, where we headed straight to Sahrul's house. As it turned out the previous place belonged to a brother-in-law. Very much a family business.



The village was slightly sprawling; houses spread out down the roads rather than simply existing in one cluster. I think this is at least partly because it was built by the government and it is much easier to build houses on the sides of a road you have already cleared through the forest rather than making further clearings. Despite being quite small the village has several shops, a mosque and sizeable school, the latter being one that attracts boarding students from the surrounding region.

We had more tea at Sahrul's house, and then my driver, whose name, it turned out, was Sulai, invited me to dinner at his home which was next door.

Almost all the people who live in the village are indigenous Mentawai. Their parents were born and raised in the forest, but a while back the government built all these villages and mandated that the tribes people move into them. One of the justifications for this was that they would have access to electricity, so we ate our dinner under the harsh light of a naked bulb with a generator humming somewhere in the village. Despite having left the forest the Mentawai for the most part still pursue a largely non-agricultural lifestyle. The staple diet, which forms the backbone of every meal and presumably accounts for most of the calories consumed, is Sagu (you may or may not know sagu as sago, usually a desert item in the West). Sagu is actually essentially highly processed wood pulp, from the sagu palm tree. In the village it is cooked inside bamboo, which is then broken open with machetes at the table. It comes out as something that looks a bit like a long stale bread crust. I had read that sagu was basically inedible but in fact it went down quite nicely with a bit of chilli sauce. Protein came in the form of pork, tree snails (garnished with salt) and 'sagu worm' which was basically a large roasted maggot. All good fun, but it was a bit of a relief to see bananas as desert!



Halfway through the meal a teenage boy and girl arrived and joined us for food. I found it quite hard to pin down a lot of the familial relationships I witnessed on my journey; partly this was due to extended family ties being a lot stronger I think and partly probably due to more people showing up at mealtimes because I was a bit of a curiosity. In any case I think these guys were cousins or something along those lines, either of Sulai or his wife. The girl was wearing a jilbab, the Muslim headscarf when she arrived, but this was only because she had just come from prayer. One of the darker things I learned on my journey is that when indigenous people in Indonesia get ID cards and thus citizenship; they HAVE to choose a recognised religion on the card. There are only five: Buddhism, Catholicism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. This means that none of the many thousands of other belief systems are recognised, including of course the local Mentawai religion which is, anthropologically speaking, animist. This would be bad enough but the government extends its control in this area to requiring children at least to actively follow their official religion, by attending church or the mosque or whatever. A soft and insidious form of cultural genocide is therefore being perpetrated all across the Malayan archipelago wherever this pattern is repeated.

When I was on Flores I visited a village where people attend church on a Sunday and still sacrifice a bull at the family totem pole when a daughter gets married; the meeting of old and new doesn't always have to be a zero-sum game. However, what I find most painful about this 'enforced religion' policy is that it is so thoughtless; I can almost forgive those proselytisers who go out to convert because they firmly believe in the 'one true path', but to simply force people to abandon their own beliefs for the sake of bureaucracy...... well, it's heart-breaking.

There are more anecdotes from my arrival in Madobak, but they will have to wait for another less narratively busy part of the thread. Suffice to say I really couldn't wait to continue my journey in the morning. There would be another relatively early start as we would be trekking into the forest to stay with those who still choose the traditional way of living. Obviously we had seen very little wildlife so far, but that should all be set to change....

 

A brilliant thread so far...thanks for taking the time to write about your adventures. By commenting now I'll ensure that I receive updates whenever a new post is produced. Great stuff!

 

Friday February 9th 2018

(Warning: Today's post contains descriptions of animal slaughter.)

At breakfast in the morning Sahrul told me that because he needed to take Lionel to meet some different tribes people for this part of his studies he would be leaving me with Sulei. Sulei grinned and swung his machete merrily. We hadn't actually spoken much the previous day but it turned out that his English was also quite good, though not in the same league as Sahrul. So I was in capable hands.

And feet as it turned out, because Sulei left his boots in the village as we headed off into the forest. It was made very clear that this was not an option for me personally! Sulei said that if we made good time on the way to the forest home we would be able to stay an extra night there and then go all the way back to the port on the last full day. It was important that we didn't miss the ferry time as there would be a long wait for the next one; something I couldn't afford financially or temporally. I thus tried to set a blistering pace as we headed up the side of a mountain following a trail. Twenty minutes later I collapsed in a quivering heap next to the tree root ladder we had been climbing and Sulei grinned down at me and pulled on his cigarette. I'd been lying there for long enough to have almost recovered when someone came round a tree, pointed an ancient but menacing-looking gun at us and said: 'Hands up!'



This turned out to be the third member of our merry band, Ogei (although it was literally days before someone explained to me that Ogei worked for Sahrul and wasn't just 'there'). Ogei spoke almost no English, so heaven knows who taught him to say 'hands up', and was a bit younger than Sulei (and me....). Certainly a capable woodsman but once it was explained that the gun was only an air-rifle in case we saw any wildlife I did wonder at the value of having him around.

As we continued Ogei would occasionally disappear off to the sides, then me and Sulei would have to stand very still until there was a loud 'crack' followed by quiet swearing. Then we continued, and as we went higher and higher I felt my chances of actually coming across any bilou were plummeting. Eventually we stopped for another sit-down with a beautiful view back down the way we had come; Ogei ghosted away again and this time the 'crack' ended with the sound of something falling through the trees. The Mentawai Islands have quite a few squirrel species, some of them endemic. You can work out for yourself which one Ogei had shot, I never got around to it. Whilst he had a celebratory smoke I was treated to a fairly unsettling display of how long a squirrel can survive in a plastic bag with a pellet embedded in its head. Finally it actually managed to make a woozy break for it and the butt of the air-rifle brought things to a merciful end.



We crested a ridge and then half-slid, half-climbed our way down the other side. It took us three hours from leaving Madobak to get to the bottom and then it was just a short twenty minute walk through what turned out to be essentially a swamp. My walking boots were soaked through and I could see this would be a regular occurrence over the next few days. We came to a clearing with a an empty house in it and Sulei explained that the owners were in the village at the moment; apparently quite a lot of people still move back and forward as they want. Soon after we heard the sounds of children and running water and came to a long-house nestled between the meeting point of two streams.



We were greeted by two men covered in tattoos and wearing only loin cloths. Back in the house were two women, two girls and three boys. Again, it was going to take a while to unpick the relationships here. Tattoos are an essential part of Mentawai culture; the different symbols on different parts of the body all have their own meaning. Because the thorns on a man's arms are a reference to the rivals he has killed the Indonesian government banned tattooing for a long time; this means that Sulei and his generation tend to lack them. Thankfully, after negotiation the thorns were agreed to henceforth represent more materialistic prowess and now it is more common for young Mentawai to consciously choose to embrace their heritage. It is a sobering thought though that when you see an old man with the thorns you know he has taken someone else's life.



Whilst the men sat and smoked (all the Mentawai I met smoked A LOT), the women were working in the kitchen in the back of the house. Bamboo doesn't grow in Atabai (the name of this loose collection of widely spaced houses) because the free-roaming pigs eat the young shoots so you can't use it to cook sagu. Instead the sagu leaves themselves do the work; sagu powder is placed in the crease of one and then another is wrapped around it before it is cooked over the fire. Needless to say this is nowhere near as easy as they made it look. I sat down to have a go but was quickly distracted. One of the women stopped her working, started crying, wrapped her arms around Sulei and started singing mournfully and quietly into his ear. It was desperately sad but also socially incredibly awkward since no-one else reacted or stopped what they were doing. I just followed their example and twenty minutes later the song ended and she and Sulei continued with the work. I asked Sulei about it after and he said that his older sister had died last year and Baitoplei (the name of the lady crying) had been her best friend. She and Sulei hadn't seen each other since and so she hadn't had a chance to share her grief. Not a moment I'll easily forget.



It turned out that Baitoplei is married to one of the men – Amatoplei. The other couple are just visiting for the night. Amatoplei wasn't too keen on me wondering far in the forest by myself, and because they hunt all the wildlife there wasn't anything to see or hear nearby. This point was reinforced by the fact that Amatoplei's house, or Oma in Mentawai is full of skulls from all four of the endemic primates. So I got some good photos but I think you'll forgive me at this point if I started to get a bit concerned about my chances of actually seeing any wildlife on this trip. I would still definitely hear the bilou calling in the morning though.

I was bathing in the river when Amatoplei came splashing past with a piglet expertly trussed up in leaves on his shoulder; tonight's dinner apparently. Sulei came running to make sure I got a chance to film the slaughter; something I had no desire to do. I was curious to actually witness it though and so I hurriedly dressed and got back to the oma just in time to see blood pouring from a massive machete wound in its neck. It was all over very quickly and whilst not particularly pleasant it didn't seem that bad all things considered. The middle son, who must have been aged about six, had the job of holding the legs in place whilst the cut was made. This certainly puts into perspective the ridiculous claims that children watching the dissection of already dead animals at Danish zoos will be scarred for life. Ogei quickly gutted the pig and then it was briefly burnt over a big fire to allow the skin to be removed more easily (To be honest I'm not totally clear on this point. Something along those lines anyway). After that Amatoplei and Amandiriogog, his guest, took over and butchered it using their machetes. It was astonishing to watch them work so quickly and precisely to reduce it to small cubes in a matter of minutes.



One thing I was extremely struck by is how seamlessly Amandiriogog and his wife (Baindiriogog?) integrated themselves into the work of the household. There seemed to be well-defined gender divisions in terms of labour, but whenever there was work to be done everyone worked together without discussion or negotiation. In terms of fetching water this is one thing, but when you have two large blades flashing around one small carcass it became very clear that the men understood not just what they were doing and how, but also exactly the movements the other would be making as well.

The pig was served that evening alongside more sagu and tasted delicious. After the meal I got Sulei to ask Baitoplei if she would sing some Mentawai songs for me; obviously not the mourning one from earlier but something else for me to record. She was quite shy about it but eventually took me off to the kitchen and sang a couple of lullabies for me and the kids. The four year old took the chance to steal a few drags of Mum's cigarette!

After this Amatoplei got in on the act and sang a few of his shamanic songs, and I sang some old British folk tunes. Once we realised we both knew songs with animal noises in the evening deteriorated quite quickly; Quentin Blake's 'Noisy Cats' proved to be a HUGE hit and the yowling and caterwauling was often heard echoing through the jungle over the next few days! I went to sleep that night happy and contented. It was warm, the insects were humming in the background and the pigs softly grunting underneath the oma. In the morning I would be woken by the sounds of gibbons calling to each other across the canopy.

 

This is certainly a thread that I'm going to be avidly following!

 

Yes, I'll do likewise...

 

Is it me or is not continuing this thread bordering on cruelty to zoochat-mankind?

 

Sorry! I started it just before a big trip, because I thought that would give me the motivation to finish it quickly, but obviously that didn't pan out. I'm currently doing a bit of a photo uploading phase and then in May there are several projects I want to address, including this one.

 

And that is precisely why you're yet to win Thread Of The Year!