Other Peoples' Journeys

His name was Asis. He had been sitting next to me on the bus since we left Ruteng in a molten dawn, but it was several hours, and long into the hard midmorning sunshine, before he spoke to me.

“Are you from Australia?” he asked, quietly, almost a whisper.

I had come in off the ferry at Labuanbajo in steaming darkness, sometime in the dead hours of the night; onto a shrieking bus, hung about with howling tout-boys with earrings. Up and up through darkness, then out into blue, wet light before sunrise, with green hills smoking into cloud and pigs in the villages and big white churches like farmyard barns at the crooks of the road.

I changed buses at a terminal of piss-stains and cracked concrete and Asis sat next to me as we rolled out of Ruteng. The light blazed at the dirty windows and lapped against the faces of the passengers – longer, darker than other Indonesians. Not far from the little town we began to drop into the thick green forest. For a moment a distant prospect of Gunung Inerie, a great dagger-cone volcano, opened far away across running green hills and deep forest, then it fell away as we swept back and forth through the switchbacks. I had passed this way two years earlier, in the sodden months of the Wet Season when all of Flores dripped like a wet haystack. Then the road had been broken in places and I remember the bus slithering over a stretch of mud churned to creamy brown. A truck that had come the same way before us had gone off the road and slouched side-on against a tree above a wet-grey jungle ravine. But today the road was good and dry, and the forest was empty, and when I saw the Sawu Sea, far ahead and far below, flickering behind the forest, it was childhood-blue.

Asis was a Bajo, one of the great tide-cast tribe who have washed ashore everywhere in thorny clusters of stilt huts around the driftwood lengths of the archipelago like geese-barnacles on sea-stolen logs. On every coast of Indonesia there are Bajo; on shit-mud creeks under hot yellow skies, and against hard goat-grass on islets without water. They are like that other great water people, the Bugis. In an island nation where people hate the sea, the watery ghost that haunts Indonesia’s green and shattered landmass belongs only to the Bajo and the Bugis. The place where the ferry had come in from Sumbawa was called Labuanbajo – the Port of the Bajo.

Asis came from Kupang, a lost, mouldering town on a level bay with bright-painted minibuses and a handful of drunk Australians from the cattle stations and open cast mines of the Northern Territories. Kupang is far closer to Darwin than to anywhere of consequence in Indonesia.

Asis was a fisherman. He was happy that I was not Australian.

“Australia is a bad country,” he said. He knew. He had just been there.

Asis was small, with hard hands and dark skin and hair touched on the top by burnt-auburn from too much time in the sun. He was a crewman on a rust-streaked squid boat running out of Kupang’s grey harbour, out past the long, lontar-flanked streak of Rote Island, out beyond Sawu, out into the blank empty water between the islands and the rotten, crocodile-coast of northern Australia. A yachtsman I once met, slurring over his beer on the Kupang seafront, told me of those waters. There were sudden little shoals that just scraped above the high-water mark out there; tiny nail-clipping sandbanks. He had come through that way one season, en route for two months of sad, slow drunkenness in Timor, and seen a party of Bajo fishermen, camped on a barren spit of sand, two hundred kilometres from any real land.

Asis’ boat had been caught over an unmarked line in the water and impounded by an Australian navy patrol boat, bristling with guns. Asis and his crewmates hadn’t known that they were across the line, though they knew that they must have been close. That’s what he told me. There were good catches of squid out there.

He had wanted to cry when he was marched along smooth-clean grey decks. That’s what he said; perhaps he did cry. They took them to Australia, and Asis and the other Bajo found themselves in a detention centre in Perth.

“The boat was burnt,” he said, “with a bomb, by the Australians.”

I asked how long he had been in the detention centre. “A long time,” he said.

No one came to see them, but they spoke to some slick-polished man with a television-Jakarta accent on the telephone. Asis spoke no English; none of the crew spoke English.

Somewhere, and I wasn’t clear where – perhaps in the detention centre, or perhaps somewhere else where they were held briefly – Asis met “Original Australia people”.

“Original Australia people?”

“Yes, original Australia people – with the black skin.” Asis was utterly bemused by the Aborigines. He mimed a tilted bottle; “Always drunk,” he said, “always drunk. I was scared. They don’t wear shoes,” he tapped his own, horny, splay-toed feet in their rubber sandals. “No shoes.” He shook his head sadly and looked past me, out of the grimy window to the bank of sun-touched forest; “No shoes, and they live in the trees.”

Eventually, after a long time, Asis and the other Bajo were taken from the detention centre to the airport. They were each given a top-zipped, shoulder-strapped black bag with their possessions inside, and checked onto a passenger flight to Bali. They sat among tourists and surfers and were bullied by the Balinese immigration officials at customs in Denpasar. They had been given a few dollars, nothing more.

From Bali they had taken the ferry to Lombok, sleeping across the cracked orange seats on the upper deck while Chinese action films played on a flickering screen and the boat rolled over the swells that run through the deep water in the middle of the channel. In Mataram they had milled in the hot white light, waiting for the cheapest bus across the island to the little fishhook port where the boats run to Sumbawa. Asis was sick.

It took 12 hours to cross Sumbawa and they had to wait a day in the wretched, mud-drowned harbour village of Sape for the ferry. At Labuanbajo a man sold them a ticket to Aimere, but he had cheated them and the bus only ran to Ruteng, and they had barely enough left for the extra fare. From Aimere – a concrete jetty on a gravel shoreline under the palm trees beside the road – they would take a ferry back across the Sawu Sea to Kupang.

“The boat was burned,” he said again; “no more boat, no more job.”

It was almost lunchtime when we got to Aimere. There was nothing there but a couple of dirty shops and a patch of ground where they held a market of dried fish and cheap cloth once a week. There was a weed-grown truck yard, empty of trucks, and a locked waiting hall with broken windows. The sea was flat and blank and empty; the hills were steep and green in the yellow sunlight.

Asis wished me a happy journey.

It was a happy journey. I had come the same way as Asis, at a slower pace, eating good fish and swimming in clear water and sleeping in a clean bedroom in a garden of hibiscus and frangipani the night before I caught the ferry from Bali. On Lombok I swam again in clear water, green over rippled sand, and watched the sky bleed behind Mount Agung, back across the channel. I rented a motorbike and drove through the highland roads and onion fields on the slopes of the Rinjani Volcano, and slept in a bamboo cottage in the ricefields with a gecko in the cobwebs on the ceiling above my mosquito net. I watched buffalo with old Dutch coins stitched into their harnesses racing on flooded rice fields on Sumbawa. And now, up through the switchbacks from Aimere there was the neat little town of Bajawa, just cool enough at night for the pleasure of sleeping under a blanket, and out in the hills, under that great volcano cone I had seen that morning, and beneath the dragon-back ridges lined with crooked Catholic crosses, there were villages of rough wood with rocketing thatch roofs and buffalo horns above the doorways…

I looked back as the bus rolled away. The ferry to Kupang was on Saturday. It was Wednesday. Asis and the other Bajo – a dozen of them - were standing beside the road in the fly-blown heat. Each of them carried the neat black shoulder bag they had been given at the airport. The white flight tags were still attached to the handles. The bags looked very empty.

© Tim Hannigan 2008