Travels with my Rant

Travels with my Rant

Martin Edge

Copyright Martin Edge 2013

Published at Smashwords

First Edition

Published in Great Britain

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Travels with my Rant

Tales of Wanderings in East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Central America.

Martin Edge

This volume is dedicated to my chum, Roland Burkhard, ‘Dr. Poo’. If he’d have made it to the places in this book, he’d have hung around and given most of them decent drinking water and sanitation, instead of just flitting through them, ranting.

Table of Continents

Preface: A Perfectly Good Lawnmower

Part 1: Nusa Tenggara and Timor

The Lobster

Old Spice

Dead Walkman

East East

Blofeld and the Giant Gecko

Part 2: Sulawesi and Borneo

Rubbish

The Non-Existent Crocodile

Canoeing Through the Sky

Part 3: Central America

Money!

An Arse of the First Order

The Teacher at the Luna Tica

Bluebeard the Magic Baggage Handler

Part 4: India

Hitchhikers and Eurovillains

Postscript: Fractal Planet

Preface: A Perfectly Good Lawnmower

The decade of the nineteen nineties was, I’m afraid, the golden age of travel and I took full advantage of it. Walls were coming down all over the planet. The idea that the world was becoming more and more accessible still seemed like an inevitable bit of social evolution. New airline routes were opening up all the time and the price of intercontinental travel was falling to hitherto undreamed of lows. It was a time when, if you can believe it, it was possible to get on a plane with a bottle of water – or even a penknife – in your hand luggage without immediately being strip-searched and airlifted to Guantanamo Bay.

At the same time the post-imperial European powers still dominated the world economically. This might not have been a very healthy situation for the people of Asia, Africa and most of the Americas, but it made for reassuringly cheap living as a privileged tourist abroad. When I were a lad, Greece and Spain were practically Third World countries. By the time I’m in my eighties I’ll be sitting on a step, on an Edinburgh street, looking aesthetically wizened whilst Chinese tourists push cameras in my face and snap pictures of an impoverished historical throwback to a lost world. Poetic justice. But in the 1990s the old fashioned differentials were still in place and we northern Euros were yet a privileged bunch.

As well as the cost of travel and the power of the European empires, another thing that was falling at the time was the quality of life of people who were employed by British universities. I worked about seventy or eighty hours a week, brainwashing surly Aberdonian youth into a condition in which they could be of use to industry. The only positive thing about this post was that, at that time, it came with ten weeks holiday a year. I took advantage of every minute of this ten weeks, every year, to explore some of the areas of the world less frequented by Europeans.

I had a look at East Timor, while the folk there were still fighting for their independence from Indonesia. They were also wondering if kidnapping me would further their cause at all. I wandered around the Spice Islands and up rivers into the heart of Borneo. I meandered around the countries of Central America, getting mugged and running borders, accidentally. This is the first of two volumes of rants about some of these travels. The other volume is called ‘The Front of Beyond’.

Driven to near insanity by the demands of the lecturing profession, I threw in the towel in 1995 and took a travelling ‘Gap Year’, like a superannuated middle-aged posh kid. At the start of that year I was discussing, with my elderly parents, my intention to spend the year hitchhiking around the Shan State and the Spice Islands, when we were joined in their holiday caravan by my Dad’s septuagenarian pal. He expressed the view that there was little point in travelling the world, since nowhere was as good as Britain. Apparently this country was simultaneously the most cultured, lovely, friendly country in the world, with an unparalleled cuisine. He knew this with an unshakeable conviction, never having set foot beyond these shores.

I tried another tack. I pointed out that world travel had become astonishingly cheap in recent years. In nineteen sixty, intercontinental air travel was pretty swish and posh. There was no queuing up to be strip-searched, but it was commensurately expensive. A round the world ticket would have cost around a year’s salary. By the mid nineteen nineties a standard, somewhat unimaginative itinerary of Thailand, Singapore and Australia, returning via the Pacific, could cost as little as an average week’s wage. My Dad’s mate remained unimpressed. I restated my case.

But now you can buy an open ticket, for a year’s travel all the way round the world, via three continents, stopping where you will, for five hundred pounds.

Five hundred pounds! he retorted, shocked, You could buy a perfectly good lawnmower for that!

We parted without resolving our philosophical differences. I eschewed a lawnmower in favour of an airline ticket to Asia and hitch-hiked and took interminably slow, knackered buses, trains, trucks and ferries to places off the beaten track.

Life is, of course, always annoying and as ever I found travel an effective emetic for the brain. So I stored up a lot of rants about many of the places I visited and have regurgitated them onto these pages.

By the way, here’s a handy way of determining whether or not you are from the south east of England. If the title of this volume - ‘Travels with my Rant’ – doesn’t strike you as a rather obvious pun on a Graham Greene novel, you come from within sixty or seventy miles of London. In the whole of the rest of the English speaking world, ‘rant’ is a perfectly good rhyme for ‘aunt’.

Part 1: Nusa Tenggara and Timor

The Lobster

In January 1996 I flew from Darwin, in the Northern Territories of Australia, to Ambon. Where? said Australians of my acquaint in Darwin. Ambon, I said. They continued to look puzzled.

Ambon, in the Spice Islands I repeated... Blank looks. The Spice Islands? Maluku Province, Indonesia. About seven hundred miles north of here.

Where? they chorused.

Maluku is the nearest province in Indonesia. It’s your nearest neighbour. You know, a massive country, with the world’s fourth largest population? A country about one and a half times as wide as Australia. The nearest piece of land over there.

I pointed north. They followed my finger as it pointed to the wall of the bar, as if expecting to see this strange land materialise.

Do you mean Bali? one of them said. I stopped there on the way to Earl’s Court.

I explained that I didn’t mean Bali, or Bangkok, or London and they lost interest and turned back to concentrating on their cold VBs.

To Australian yoof in particular, the geography of the world was simple. It was a conveyor belt with one end in Australia and the other in Europe. Specifically a few streets, boarding houses and bars in the Earl’s Court area of London. The conveyor belt had stopping off points in Bali, Bangkok and Bahrain. This last was just for the airport duty free. But I had discovered that there was a whole world in between these cities and was flying to Ambon.

Just about everyone else on my small plane was an Indonesian National. The immigration official at Ambon airport was something of an amateur at bribery and corruption. He delayed me for some time, with suggestions that it might be appropriate to give him a ‘present’. I resisted, by asking him if it was his birthday and generally being too stupid to understand what he was on about. Eventually he gave up. I wandered out into the sunshine and waited for a small minibus, for the short trip around the palm fringed bay, into town.

Ambon is a hilly, tropical island, about thirty miles by ten, with a large population of almost three hundred thousand. It’s the capital of a province of many dispersed, mostly less densely populated islands, the largest of which is Seram. This island, sometimes spelled ‘Ceram’, is within sight to the north. With difficulty I negotiated the busy streets of the town centre and found myself a cheap room in a guest house. There weren’t many Euro-touros in town, but that evening I fell to talking with the two who were in my guesthouse and who themselves had just met.

There was a Canadian bint, in her mid thirties, travelling alone. She had the demeanour of a primary school teacher in her dealings with the local kids, adults and me, as she swept around in long hippy skirts, expecting people to do her bidding. She was perfectly pleasant and not massively demanding. It was just that you felt that, if she had asked you to make a nativity scene with bits of tinsel and cotton wool stuck to pieces of card, you’d have had no choice but to comply.

Then there was a French bloke. Now I’m not a devotee of the racial stereotypes of French people, routinely peddled by the English chattering classes and comedians on ‘Dave’. Along with the Scots, the Welsh and the ginger, the French have become the only people about whom it is now deemed acceptable for the English to be overtly racist. I don’t share these views, which you are far less likely to come across in Scotland than in England. But the French bloke was, I’m afraid, just typically French.

He was in his late twenties and petulant, demanding and driven. He clung firmly to a romantic idea of exploration in the Spice Islands, about which he would wax lyrical. If he wanted something he would screw up his little face and pout dramatically and keep demanding it until he got it. He brooked no disagreement on any subject. That first evening I already had a small inkling as to his character. But I could also see that hanging onto the coat tails of this pair was likely to be interesting. They were likely to be able to get things done.

It soon became apparent that the French lad was intent on getting to the back of beyond if possible. He had a romantic notion – and let’s face it which of us doesn’t share it – of desert islands. He hankered after the pure, desert island experience. The ‘Full Crusoe’, if you will. He wanted genuine privation and Ray Mears style survivalism. The wifey from Canadia and I, on the other hand, whilst attracted to the general idea, were rather more wimpy.

Of course your proper desert island is not composed of desert. It is merely deserted by people. The genuine article has a beach, palm trees, a mountain, a tinkling stream of fresh water and plentiful sources of food. It was resolved that, the next day, we would go in search of such an island and get ourselves marooned on it.

By the end of the next day the deal – and a great deal of shopping – was done The French bloke had brokered it, but had taken rather less part in the shopping, which he seemed to find unnecessary. The following day, weighed down with our rucksacks and clutching large bags filled with a cornucopia of foodstuffs, we climbed into the back of an old pickup truck. We were then bounced and jolted out of town and around the mountains, for twenty miles or so, to the north east end of the island.

Here we boarded an old, wooden, open fishing boat, whose looks belied the speed that the old engine was capable of. We sped across the wide blue bay, northwards towards the large neighbouring island of Seram, enjoying the cool breeze over the sea. Our first stop, after twelve miles or so, was a small fishing village on the coast. Low, grass walled, palm thatched houses on stilts nestled under coconut palms behind the strip of pure white sand beach.

The sprogs of the Seramese (Ceramese? Seramistic? Ceramistic? Ceramic? Not sure, Ed.) village excitedly ran down to the sea, to help pull in the fishing boat. We jumped ashore and our skipper did a quick deal with one of the local fishermen. We carried a small, basic, unpainted, dugout canoe, about ten feet long, without the outriggers that make these craft useable by lumpen Euros, down to the shore. It was taken aboard our open fishing boat and laid across it, protruding out over either side. Then we were off again, speeding across the bay.

After about ten miles I could make out a low island rising over the horizon. After fifteen miles we drew close and slowed down. There was a long line of white sand, behind which was a line of driftwood, thrown up by storms, behind which was dark, green forest. The fishing boat picked its way slowly through bits of outlying coral and crunched gently to a halt, on the coarse, white coral sand.

We jumped ashore. The dugout canoe was offloaded. Our backpacks and bags of food were passed to us, together with several five gallon cans of fresh water. We impressed quite strongly on our skipper that he had only fulfilled part of the deal. If he wanted to be paid, he must return in five days time and pick us up. We pushed the boat off and, with a wave, he headed off back the twenty miles or so to Ambon. The three of us were alone on our desert island.

We looked around us. The forest behind the palm fringed beach was not, disappointingly, an impenetrable rainforest, filled with orangutan and Sumatran rhinos. Rather it consisted of scrubby, scratchy bushes, about twenty feet high, growing on the sandy soil. We hauled all our goods into the shade, in a clearing in the woods, hanging our bags of food up in a tree, to keep them clear of ants. I went to explore our desert Island. At the time I didn’t know its name but I now believe it to have been Pulau Kasa. This small, low, coral island sat in the middle of a sheltered triangular bay some twenty five miles across. The bay was bounded by the mountains of Seram to the north west and north east, and by Ambon to the south.

Our desert island was about a mile long and a quarter of a mile across. It was shaped like a long, streamlined fish, with the blunted head to the south