Daylight comes quickly to the tropics. Arriving before dawn in Ternate, the capital of North Maluku, I sat at a street stall waiting for it to get light. One minute I could see no further than my flowered glass of grainy coffee, the next, I was looking at the grey velvet outline of Mount Gamalama, the volcano which makes up most of Ternate. A few moments more and velvet solidified into hard-edged green. The platinum disc of the sun soared up from behind the mountain and the city, which patterns the south-eastern skirt of the volcano, sprang to life.
Gamalama is both the source of Ternate’s wealth – its clove crop – and of its repeated destruction. Just over a month before I arrived in January 2012, the volcano had started coughing out great clouds of ash. A few weeks later heavy rains turned the thick blanket of ash on the upper slopes of Gamalama into a river of black mud. The cold lava oozed down the mountain, gathering force and boulders, some of them four metres across.
By the time it was on the lower slopes, it bulldozed everything in its path. ‘Everything’ included around eighty houses and three lives.
I went to have a look at the area that had been worst hit. I found a man shovelling gravelly mud out of a house that had lost its windows, but appeared otherwise intact. His wife invited me in, apologizing because she couldn’t offer me a cup of tea.
The lava may have entered politely enough through doors and windows, but it had been less gentlemanly as it left, gashing
through the peach-plastered back wall, leaving a three-sided room a bit like an architect’s model, but muddier.
This area has always been designated high risk, and construction of houses is forbidden. But flattish land is at a premium in Ternate, so people build anyway. The woman hoped that the government would now resettle her family somewhere safer.
While waiting for a new plot, this family was living down in the local technical training centre. When the mud-flows started there were 4,000 refugees crushed into the centre; as the threat of more lava receded and the army bulldozed the mud out of the surviving houses, most drifted home. By the time I visited, around 300 people were still scattered around the training centre.
They had divvied up the assembly hall, marked out territory with towers of cardboard boxes, children’s bicycles, raffia strings of school uniforms, the forlorn remnants of a life before the all-embracing mud. People seemed remarkably resigned to their temporary fates, however, and for the kids, who had access to the swings and seesaws of the neighbouring kindergarten playground, it was an adventure.
It sounded as though there was a bit of a party going on out the back. I followed the sound of the music and found an olive canvas M*A*S*H tent: the communal kitchen. A volunteer trained in disaster preparedness used a stainless-steel garden shovel to dole rice from a waist-high cooking drum into family rice-bowls. Other volunteers plopped a few pieces of fried fish from a plastic laundry tub and a spoonful from a vat of soupy greens on top of the rice.
When the feeding was over, the music was cranked up and the kitchen turned into a temporary disco. People, mostly men, started dancing that bent-kneed, bum-jutting, twirly wristed dance that goes so well with dangdut music. Dangdut is an Indonesian pop music which combines vaguely Indian melodies with the dang-dut dang-dut beat of conical gendang drums, a sort of Bollywood–House Music mash-up.
Someone arrived with a clutch of durian. The dance floor cleared as everyone fell on the fruit, splitting open the spiky
oversized hand grenades to reveal the pale yellow smush inside.
You’re not allowed to carry durian on planes in Indonesia, or take them into posh hotels, because their methane smell oozes through the air-conditioning system into every corner. It’s an acquired taste that I’ve never acquired, less because of the the-back-of-your-throat taste than because of the stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth texture: creamy, oily and sticky all at the same time. But now people were competing to offer me the most luscious gobs of this aphrodisiac: ‘Here, here. Eat mine!
Mine’s sweeter than his!’ There’s always a lot of double-entendre in durian-speak.
There was a palpable sense of good-natured camaraderie among the volunteers. But when the supervisor was giving me a lift home, he looked up at the thunderclouds that had closed ranks around the top of the volcano and shook his head grimly:
‘That’s a big storm up there,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we cook for more refugees.’
Yes, the volcanoes destroy things. But the ash they cough out also makes these islands some of the most fertile on the planet.
Indonesia strings together 127 active volcanoes; down one side of Sumatra, the giant island that guards Indonesia’s western flank, and along the whole spine of neighbouring Java, volcanoes spur rice fields to extraordinary bounty. Many farmers manage three rice crops a year, against just one in less fertile regions, and they produce an abundance of fruit and vegetables too. The fire-mountains bypass Borneo, taking the southern route and sweeping up in a great arc through the hundreds of small islands that make up Maluku, and pimpling the northern tip of Sulawesi as well.
It is in these eastern regions, and especially in the smaller islands such as the Bandas and Ternate where sea breezes waft constantly over the volcanoes’ slopes, that the ash gives life to spices.
The vulcanology services can afford to monitor around half of the mountains that are currently active. Occasionally a big eruption wakes up some of the dozens that are sleeping. Mount Sinabung in Sumatra, which has been snoozing since at least 1881, for example, suddenly came back to life in 2010. This
Sleeping Beauty effect was probably a slow reaction to the kiss of an under-sea eruption six years earlier. That eruption led to the tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, that killed 170,000 Indonesians, mostly in Aceh, and that marks lives and behaviour to this day.
I was in the highlands of Aceh in April 2012 when my phone started beeping madly, the messages coming in from Jakarta, Sumba, even more distant Papua. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Are you OK?’ I was in a minibus, clipping along over bumpy mountain roads on the way to Takengon, wondering why everyone was standing out in the street. ‘Massive earthquake in Aceh. Tsunami predicted in 20 minutes.’ That message was from Singapore.
In twenty minutes I was in the lobby of a quasi-posh hotel in Takengon where guests, staff and people like me who had come in off the street were all glued to the TV. The live coverage spoke of an earthquake measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale. In Banda Aceh, the coastal capital of Aceh that had only recently rebuilt itself from the devastation of 2004, people were screaming and running, getting on their bikes, in their cars, making for higher ground. As we watched the panic down on the coast, the kitsch chandelier in the mirrored ceiling above us started to tremble, then really shake. Everyone went deathly silent for a long moment; we looked at one another, as if waiting for leadership.
Then someone said ‘Here we go again!’ and we all quick-stepped out into the rain.
That second quake was even bigger than the one of half an hour earlier. My teeth rattled along with the windows of the hotel, and the pit of my stomach began to thrum. The hotel receptionist had seized on to me. She gripped my arm until my hand went numb. By the time the chandelier stopped its tinkling, we were soaked through. The vibrations in my belly continued for quite a while, and there was no let-up on my arm. The receptionist was utterly undone by the quake; all the blood had drained from her face and her knees were weak, but she wouldn’t sit down because then she’d feel the shaking all the more. She didn’t want to go back inside and get out of the cold mountain rain. ‘Trauma,’ she kept whispering. Just that one
word: ‘Trauma.’ Later, she told me that her mother, a brother and two sisters had been swept away in 2004. She had moved to the highlands to climb away from her memory, to silence the idea that buzzed like a mosquito in a darkened bedroom: it could happen again, it could happen to you.
People who have moved to a city, who live under a watertight roof, who control their body temperature with air-conditioning, can easily zone out the threatening downside of the nation’s geography, which can wipe out your present and change your future in a few minutes. But many millions of Indonesians still pass each day in the knowledge that they are at the mercy of this unstable land.
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Mother Indonesia can be menacing, certainly, but she is also extraordinarily bountiful. ‘The people of Maluku got spoiled because spice trees made us rich with very little effort, there’s lots of land, the sea is full of fish,’ Edith, a maths professor in Ambon, the capital of Maluku, had told me.
I’m never sure whether Indonesians know how unfashionable they are being when they trace human behaviours to climate and the wealth of the land and sea, particularly if those behaviours are laziness, profligacy, a failure to plan ahead. But they do it all the time. Maybe it is only unfashionable in the world of
‘development’, where (mostly white, cold-climate) people earn good salaries trying to atone for the sins their forefathers have visited on (mostly brown, warm-climate) people. The ‘generous earth makes people lazy’ argument seems to tar people in warm latitudes with a single, undesirable brush simply because of where they were born; akin to racism, almost. But from Indonesian mouths, ‘Kami di manja bumi’, ‘Mother Earth has spoiled us’, is something I heard over and over.
The staple food in Maluku and Papua is sago, which is scraped out of the centre of a palm tree and made into a flour which can then be baked into dry pancakes or used to make a gluey paste which provides ballast to a good fish-head curry.
The pancakes taste to me like so much dried cardboard, and the English adventurer Sir Francis Drake, visiting these islands in 1579, described wet sago as ‘tasting in the mouth like sour curds’, but it provides a lot of calories with a minimum of work.
It takes a family about four days of cutting, scraping, washing and drying to harvest enough sago to feed themselves all year.
‘People around here never had to think ahead,’ said Edith. ‘We got lazy.’
It’s not just Maluku. In terms of land mass, Indonesia is the fifteenth biggest country in the world. But it is among the world’s top three producers of palm oil, rubber, rice, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, cassava, green beans and papayas, as well as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and vanilla. It’s also in the world’s top ten for tea, tobacco, maize and groundnuts, together with avocados, bananas, cabbages, cashews, chilli, cucumbers, ginger, pineapples, mangoes, sweet potatoes and the humble pumpkin. It’s a top-ten producer of forestry products, and pulls more fish out of its seas and waterways than any country except China.
And there’s another layer of bounty, under the crust. Indonesia sits above huge chambers of natural gas. The Grasberg mine in Papua has more known gold reserves than anywhere else on the planet, and it’s not even a gold mine; its day job is to produce copper. Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of tin and coal, after China, and it’s by far the biggest exporter of both minerals. It produces bauxite (for aluminium) and lots of nickel – again, it’s already the world’s number-two producer (after Russia, this time) and number-one exporter. It even digs out of the ground things that I had always thought were manufactured.
Asphalt, for example.
When I was with the Bajo fisherman Pak Zunaidi in Sulawesi’s Banggai islands, I met a lobster farmer who told me that his brother Dauda managed an asphalt mine in Buton, which hangs off the bottom stroke of Sulawesi’s K. Huh? I had always thought that asphalt was a by-product of petroleum. ‘No, no. You dig it out of the ground. My brother will show you the mines.’ So when I got to Buton, I called Dauda. It turns out that Indonesia
is one of the world’s largest producers of natural asphalt (though asphalt can also be manufactured as a by-product of petroleum, as it happens). And Buton is the biggest producer in Indonesia.
On its website Buton Asphalt Indonesia proudly posted photos of highways as smooth as Formula One tracks. The highways were in China, admittedly, but still, they looked impressive. I inspected the map; the village where Dauda’s mine was said to be wasn’t marked, but it was in an area that seemed to be about seventy-five kilometres from town, a fair distance for a day-trip on the girly, automatic transmission motorbike I had hired in Bau-Bau, but doable.
Dauda was having none of it. ‘You can’t come by bike. The road is terrible!’ In Java I used to wave such objections away: I’m not scared of a bit of mud. But in recent months I had learned that in the eastern islands ‘the road is terrible’ means something between impassable and non-existent. I went down to the bus station and asked about transport to Nambo, but everyone shook their head.
‘No one wants to do that route any more. The road’s terrible.’ For the only time in that year of travel, I hired a car and driver.
With a punky twenty-two-year-old at the wheel, I could just enjoy the view. We drove through a pretty valley of tidy rice-paddies, incongruously dotted with Hindu temples. The punk described the village as ‘pure Bali’, a transmigration site that had been here since the 1960s. The temples were breeze-block imitations of the red-brick originals of Bali. While the houses in the surrounding villages were colourful wooden affairs built up on stilts, here concrete homes squatted on the ground. Along the roadside in front of them, election posters showed candidates for bupati of the fiercely Islamic district of Buton posed next to Photoshopped pictures of Balinese maidens with towers of fruit piled on their heads.
Ten kilometres out of Bau-Bau, the tarmac burst apart into a spine-jolting mass of lumps. Further on, it joined forces with a stream. As we hydroplaned our way through a dark forest, the punk reached for a kretek, looked at me, put it back in the pack, looked at me again. After months on public buses, it hadn’t
occurred to me that someone might have qualms about lighting up. I invited him to smoke. He grabbed a cigarette and lit up urgently. I laughed: wow, you really needed that! ‘It’s not that, Miss. The thing is, this is where the bad spirits are. The smoke keeps them away.’ When a wild boar ran out into the road-stream in front of us, the punk nearly drove into the jungle.
Eventually, the stream dried up, but the mud didn’t. As the lumps of tarmac became less frequent, we skidded around. We were laughing, but I held on to the dashboard and the punk’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. And then suddenly, close to our destination, the road smoothed out. It wasn’t tarmac, exactly, but it wasn’t mud either. I got out to have a look and found the road spongy under my feet, like that rubber stuff they put under the swings in children’s playgrounds so that no one gets hurt too badly if they fall. We were driving on natural asphalt, just sitting there on the earth’s surface, compacted into something that looked like a road by the weight of the trucks from the mines.
Mine manager Dauda had a degree in political communication from an Islamic university in Luwuk, in Central Sulawesi. He had no luck getting the dreamed-of civil service post; rather than do nothing, he took a job at an asphalt mine in his mother’s village.
We walked together to one of the ‘mines’. It was nothing more than a giant bite taken out of the hillside. From a distance the ground looked like broken granite, but it had the same spongy feel as the road. I picked up a grey lump and broke it open; it was black, gooey, it oozed treacle and smelled of roadworks on a summer’s day. I had just mined asphalt with my bare hands.
When I think of mining I think of shafts and props, of smelters and railheads, I think of thousands of grubby figures streaming in and out of the bowels of the earth like ants in and out of an anthill, an L. S. Lowry painting. The asphalt mines of Buton could not have been more different. Here, three guys were sitting smoking under a blue tarpaulin set up to shelter them from the sun and rain. Two yellow diggers sat idly on a carpet of asphalt;
all the lads had to do was activate them, position the claw over
the ground, scoop up the asphalt and dump it into a truck. They weren’t doing even that.
‘Istirahat dulu?’ I teased. Taking a rest? No, they had run out of diesel for the diggers. I had spent the previous day at a petrol station for fishermen, and had heard chapter and verse about inefficiencies in the fuel delivery system, so I sympathized. But this wasn’t about late delivery. ‘They just forget to order it. Now they have to wait ten days,’ Dauda laughed. ‘It happens all the time. We’re not very good at forward planning in Indonesia.’
The failure to order fuel actually didn’t matter much, as it happened. Asphalt mining in Buton had more or less ground to a halt when I visited because the government had, maybe, banned exports of unprocessed ore and minerals. By law, the ban was not supposed to come into effect until January 2014. Then the Ministry of Mines and Energy in Jakarta changed its mind.
In February 2012 it suddenly announced that mining companies had just three months to submit full plans for processing the minerals and ores they mined. If they didn’t put in plans by the deadline, they wouldn’t get any more export permits.
I visited the mines in Buton the week after the deadline. No
I visited the mines in Buton the week after the deadline. No