The Place at the End of the World II

We drove out of Sumbawa Besar in the hard morning light. The road ran close to the coast through Balinese transmigrant villages with concrete temples. Dark hills showed to the south, and sometimes the land gave way grudgingly to mud and mangroves on the right. There were dogs and chickens and dirty children at the roadside, and the sunlight shone back from the steel domes of the village mosques in blinding stars.

Sumbawa was poorer and dirtier and emptier than Bali or Lombok. We had left Bali the morning before, driven our little jeep, loaded with surfboards, along the howling main road of Lombok, Rinjani away to the north. We had to wait two hours for the ferry in the yellow-wretched heat among the flies at Labuan Lombok. The channel here looked almost narrow enough to swim, but we were passing beyond the reach of heavy inter-island traffic: at the next crossing, at the far end of Sumbawa, there was only one ferry a day.

We had come to Sumbawa Besar, a township of failed imagination, after dark. The room we shared – three of us – had flaking walls and many mosquitoes, and in the morning we drove back to the west then turned south at a filthy junction village of broken buses and bruised vegetables called Alas. Ahead the road ran towards the dark, broken hills.

The only guidebook we had was five years out of date. The one line it gave to Maluk, the place to which we were going, was quite open in its admission that the author had never been there. It spoke only of a rumoured beach and the vague possibility of staying with a village headman. We already knew that things had changed a little since then: two months earlier, still in the sodden-rot of the rains, we had met a monumentally broad-shouldered Australian with a face rotted by beer and sunshine. He was a surfer of sorts, and a drunk, and he claimed his wife was a Muslim, and talked shamelessly of his penchant for whores. He had spoken of Maluk with a degree of fondness, and mentioned something about mining.
But on the map the road through the dark hills still faded south of here, breaking down into a dotted line as it bent around the western haunch of Sumbawa’s crippled form before fading completely into the empty mosquito coast. The last places marked were tiny dots: Maluk and Sekongkang.

The road was not good. It shone yellow in the sunlight, and was fractured at the edges, but there was no other traffic as we lurched over the potholes. The great peak on Lombok looked very close to the right, but it was fading into purple cloud now and the light was paling, flattening. The road deteriorated quickly, and it rose through a bank of damp, thickset hills, then dropped and ran beside an overgrown lake. I could see the clouds of mosquitoes pulsing above the shining gaps in the water hyacinth. There was an air of sickness about the place.

Beyond the lake, Taliwang was scarcely a town; a few lost streets on a spread of level ground with the dark hills rising inland, almost without people. Beyond Taliwang there were no more houses. A few diseased dogs lingered in the bushes and watched the jeep with slow, mournful eyes. The potholes became deeper, and the trees and bushes formed a thick tangle at the verges, sending creepers fingering across the tarmac. The forest was beginning to take the road back, rip it to pieces and consume it.

I remember that we did not speak much as we drove, and wondered perhaps what we would find ahead of us, having only the reports of a drunk Australian and an out-of-date guidebook, and the very clear knowledge that surf-charter boats from Bali came and anchored offshore along this coastline.

There was a final bank of hills before Maluk. The sky had dropped lower and greyer now and we could no longer see Rinjani or the sea and to the left the green-backed ridges were blank and empty and Bali and pizza and beer and pasta and nightclubs and other tourists seemed far more than a day’s drive away.

And then, quite suddenly the forest ended and we passed a great set of gates and a road of black-smooth tarmac blazing away into the hills, and then on the right, great sheds and steel towers and taut, barb-topped fences, and heavy industry on a crook-cupped blue bay and we came to Maluk. On the rattle-trap mainstreet there was a crooked plastic sign pointing to a bank and an ATM, and there were frayed-cloth banners flapping outside Javanese warungs all the length of the street.

It was a town. No slow-yellow place of sick dogs like Taliwang; Maluk had hustled itself very rapidly into existence. They hadn’t even bothered to make sure that the sign for the ATM was straight; they just forced it in and it was there, coughing out money in this cleared space of concrete and tin, a long way from anywhere with the dark, empty hills behind. Except they weren’t that empty: they were full of gold and copper.

We stayed in a plain little room behind a bar on a side street. The bar was run by a drunk Kiwi. The bar had Guinness on tap and a huge television bolted to the ceiling.
Past the bar the track gave way to sand and there was a blinding bay. We wandered along it squinting and sweating and still not really speaking. The surf was very, very small. We went back to the bar. It was dark inside and the light came in from the hot, fly-filled outside in white sheets.
There was a white man in grey shorts sitting on one of the high stools drinking beer and watching MTV. None of this seemed quite real. But he told us that there were around a hundred of them – a hundred foreigners – living here in this half-real place. I complained about the condition of the road from Sumbawa Besar.
“Wouldn’t know mate; we come in by seaplane,” he said. He was a mine engineer. He had flown in from leave on Bali that morning.

We went out and drove a little way beyond the town. There were white buildings behind high concrete walls, and somewhere east of us, where the hills rose again, thick and green and empty, we saw the strip of smooth tarmac we had passed earlier, bending some private course into the forest. A huge metallic-blue pick-up truck roared past us. We glimpsed a shaven-headed white man in sunglasses behind the wheel.

At night the dirty main street was full of people from Java and our room was full of mosquitoes and we still felt a long, long way from Bali.

We went, a little nervously, into the bar, and sat together, feeling like the most lost of lost tourists. On the walls there were photographs of huge white men with guns and sunglasses, and the carcasses of forest pigs they had shot in the hills near here, or on white boats with the blunt-headed reef fish they had caught.
A dozen of these men were drinking noisily beneath the television. They seemed bigger than normal people. At the other end of the bar was an oily knot of dark-eyed whores. They had hard, down-turned mouths.
One of the men lurched over to us and thumped a pair of large hands onto the table.
“You Pommies?”
We nodded, like shy children.
“You surfers?”
We nodded again, feeling a long way from Bali. I wondered what had happened to the village headman who you might have been able to stay with five years earlier.

The next day we drove south, looking for waves. The road was potholed and broken, as it had been the day before. Again, to the east, we caught glimpses of the strip of smooth tarmac, cleared from the forest, running to somewhere locked and hidden. There were more white buildings behind high walls, and in other places shells of broken concrete people had built in moments of intense optimism, then abandoned without completion. Everything about the place felt broken.
We came to a hot white beach with mediocre waves, and stood, squinting and sweating again. On the map this was the end of the line, but we could see than someone had pushed the road on a little further, over one more high headland, so we followed it. At the top of the rise we saw that this truly was where the road ended. From here a bony, empty coastline, scoured by wind-cut waves ran on and on. It was backed by those empty green hills and that sickness-forest. There were no villages, nothing.
But before that, at the bottom of the hill, there was one more building. We drove down to it, and stood beside the jeep, not saying anything, just looking at it. It was framed by green-forested hills and empty coast where there weren’t even any fishermen. It had a lawn of trimmed grass and a miniature golf course. There was a sign above the open veranda. It said “Club Tropical”. There was an open-fronted bar under a pair of huge ceiling fans. A lone white man was sitting at it, drinking. He looked bigger than normal people.

© Tim Hannigan 2008