Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (17 page)

Because the route had changed, our plans were thrown up in the air. The day after tomorrow I was due in a tiny village called Cendana Putih to help UNICEF install a water filter. I just had to work out a way to get there . . . We had hooked up with a local guy called Berthy Joris who had agreed to travel part of the way and act as translator, but that was as far as we’d got.

Berthy had Dutch and Portuguese in his bloodline and also some Japanese on his mother’s side. He was a knowledgeable man and suggested we could make it as far as Sengkang tonight, via the towns of Maros and Watansoppeng. The best way to travel was by bus and we ought to head for the terminal.

I had seen hundreds of little blue buses when I came outside this morning, but of course now we were off and running there didn’t seem to be one anywhere. I flagged down a rickshaw instead; they’re called becaks here. I hadn’t been on one in a while. I did pedal one in Varanasi on the last
By Any Means
trip, mind you. I remember the delight it gave the onlookers and how confused the owner had been.

The owner of this becak was much younger than that guy, and less anxious-looking. His name was Nanharman and he said he could take us to the bus station in the heart of this bustling, noisy city. Of course, I wanted to have another go at pedalling and when I asked Nanharman he was only too happy to take a load off. When I ended up making a wrong turn, instead of yelling at me, Nanharman jumped out of the rickshaw, grabbed the bars and physically pulled the machine around so we were facing the right way.

We made our way along the front for a while before Nanharman directed me inland. We cut through narrow streets, passing a mixture of rickety old shops, bungalows and high-rise office blocks. It was a hot day and I thought of the miles ahead in a bus with some trepidation - I was glad to be in the open air for now at least.

The buses are very small and privately run. While they are all pale blue in colour, some of them are customised with go-faster stripes and racing-style steering wheels. But of course the only ones we could find were going in the wrong direction. Finally Berthy spotted one heading towards Maros and we flagged it down. The driver took us out of town to another stop and we changed to a second bus and finally a third that would take us all the way to Maros, about an hour’s drive north. The driver was a cheerful guy with large gaps between his four front teeth, and we chatted away with Berthy translating. He told us his name was Idris Dewa, which I thought was a pretty cool name, and he assured me it was after an Indonesian pop band.

I’m not sure where Makassar ended and the other towns began but as we headed north the city just seemed to sprawl along with us. Finally, though, we did leave the buildings, the dusty streets and tin roofs, and for a while at least we were in the country. Here the road was lined with trees, thickly forested hills climbing left and right. I sat back and enjoyed the view.

Half an hour later we got held up in a procession of cars playing loud music and hooting their horns. They stopped outside a tiny, tin-roofed house where smoke lifted from an open cooking yard and a stream of people in brightly coloured silks carried trays of delicious-looking food inside. Breakfast had been barely a snack and I was still suffering from the hunger pangs of New Guinea. We went to take a closer look and maybe hunt out some food. A young woman in a silk headscarf spotted me and came over to introduce herself. Her name was Opi Supiyari and she explained this was the final part of a three-day wedding celebration for a man called Sida and his bride Rasyid. She told us we were welcome to join in. It was fantastic! So much colour and music, a great chattering crowd all crammed into this tin box of a house. But I felt a little sorry for the bride and groom, who looked pretty flummoxed by the whole thing. They were very young, dressed in matching pink silk and perched in what looked like a grotto while their guests had a party around them. Opi explained that on the first day of celebration a cow is killed and the bride and groom each have separate parties with their family. On the second day they hold the marriage ceremony and on the third they get together for this party. At the end of today they would go off and begin their married life.

The family could not have been more hospitable. They invited us to eat with them, and I tucked in to a plate of curry. After that someone gave me a banana that had been baked for eight hours in a leaf. It was gorgeous. Finally, Claudio reminded me that we still had to get to Sengkang and the bus driver was waiting. We said our goodbyes and I wished the not-so-happy-looking couple all the very best. I’m sure that after three days they just wanted to get away by themselves.

 

 

Finally we got to Maros, where Idris dropped us at a dusty crossroads surrounded by ancient colonial bungalows with stone steps leading up to wide verandas. The next place on our route was Watansoppeng and of course there was no bus to be seen. There were a couple of guys in yellow jackets, though, standing next to a line of mopeds. I’d seen these before, they were ojeks, motorbike taxis, so we asked the drivers if they could take us. Claudio was given a rock-climbing helmet to strap under his chin, while I had this plastic thing you could bend any which way you wanted. I forced it onto my head, and soon we were on the back of the bikes and off down potholed streets, with every vehicle imaginable overtaking us.

I didn’t care. With the kind of protection I was wearing, speed was not the issue. I was enjoying myself. The air was hot and sticky and I could smell all kinds of spices. The noise was constant - horns blaring, people shouting, the streets reverberating with the guttural growl of diesel. It was all wonderfully manic.

Leaving the ojeks in the middle of Watansoppeng we set off to try and find another bus. Berthy pointed out a tree full of fruit bats hanging upside down and screeching at one another. He said they were not native to these parts and there was a legend telling how they came to be here. When their old land ran out of food, the god of the animals told them to find a new place to live. They flew for many miles until they found fruit here in Watansoppeng and they had been here ever since. It’s claimed that if one shits on you, you’ll be married inside a year. So bear that in mind if you’re single and ever in Watansoppeng.

Again there didn’t seem to be a bus anywhere. It was late afternoon now and we thought we would try to find someone who was driving to Sengkang and ask them to give us a lift. We tried a few people but either no one was going or they didn’t want to take us, so we thought we’d ask at one of the many business premises instead. It might be that some freight was going north and we could hitch a ride that way. Cutting down a side street we found a computer shop and a kid called Eddy. Eddy liked the camera. Arms folded and trying to look cool, he told us he had a truck and for a fee he would take us.

That settled, we went outside to wait for him.

Eddy took off upstairs and about ten minutes later he came down again, but now he was complaining of stomach problems. He didn’t think he would be able to take us after all. He had made a phone call, though, and his friend Joyle would drive us to Sengkang instead. Great, fine, brilliant . . . we didn’t care who the driver was just as long as we got there. Eddy took us across town in his truck to meet Joyle. He was older and somehow looked more reliable. Swapping places with Eddy, he climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘So, Joyle,’ I said. ‘Thanks for doing this, man. Eddy wasn’t feeling well, apparently.’

Pulling away from the kerb, Joyle looked sideways at me. ‘Eddy doesn’t have a driving licence,’ he said. ‘Eddy got caught by the cops, in a car after taking drugs.’ He glanced at Claudio’s camera. ‘We think it best I take you.’

Fair enough.

 

 

Sengkang was a small town with palm trees lining the streets. The houses were built closely together, most of them three storeys including a basement. When we arrived we met one of Berthy’s friends, a guy called Dedy, and were introduced to his family. He told us the area was renowned for silk and suggested we pay a quick visit to the Amina Akil silk factory. The following morning Dedy led us down a side street where all I could hear was the clack-clack of weaving machines coming from the basements.

The factory was run by a lady called Ida Sulawati, who sells the silk to Java, Sumatra and Makassar, as well as the local area. I had no idea how much work went into making silk, how many processes there were from the silkworm to a finished piece of material. Downstairs in the basement, the walls were slatted to let in light and air. Four girls were working at traditional wooden weaving machines, each one fitted with thousands of single lines of thread and operated with a hand bar and long foot pedal. Each worker could produce between seven and nine metres of silk per day. Upstairs the walls were lined with cabinets of finished material, some of it very expensive indeed. Ida told us that she wonders sometimes at the silk people buy - often they fall in love with stuff that’s hardly the best quality, yet ignore the really good stuff. She put it down to her weavers. She told us they had magic in their fingers and were able to create wonderful material from the poorest-quality strands.

The factory spanned a number of buildings up and down the street. One balcony was devoted to spools of silk, the threads spun across the interior like a spider’s web before being rolled onto a massive drum. In another room a handful of people were painstakingly inserting each strand of silk onto the rack that fitted onto the weaving machine; a process that took a minimum of two days. The raw silk came in thick, off-white braids ready for washing, and looked and felt like hair - ‘grandma’s hair’ was how Dedy referred to it.

I could have stayed for hours, but it was already late morning and we were due in Masamba tonight to meet Coco from UNICEF. Dedy led us to the main street, lined with small, open-fronted shops with tin roofs. There was no recognisable bus stop and talking to the shopkeepers we discovered there was nothing scheduled to leave today either. I was beginning to get a little worried. But then a red bus pulled in, the driver hopping out to get something from a nearby shop. The bus was crammed full, not just with people but baskets of washing, tyres and parts for motorbikes. The roof was stacked high with luggage and there was even a motorbike strapped to the back. As far as I could see there was no room for any more passengers, but Berthy said we should talk to the driver anyway. Following him into the shop, Dedy asked if he could take us to Masamba.

‘No,’ he said, looking warily at Claudio with the camera.

‘How far could you take us?’ Dedy asked him.

He didn’t look as though he wanted to take us anywhere, but he said maybe Palopo. According to the map, that was on our route, so we decided to pile aboard and go that far at least.

The passengers were mostly families and we gleaned that many of them had already been on the road for a day and a night. I couldn’t quite grasp where the starting point of their journey had been, but I did work out that by the time they made it to their destination, they would have been travelling for four days. There were two drivers and an assistant; one of the drivers had been doing the same route for fifteen years. He said he’d all but grown up on the bus.

We stopped at a place called Suli and ate some lunch. This was high country, the road twisty and the shops shoulder to shoulder. It was not unlike Papua actually, though there was more stuff on sale, more to eat, and it felt far wealthier. Taking a stroll across the road I was stunned by the sudden view. Below I could see a fish farm in a glistening valley - great banks of water where the sun sparkled, separated by wooden walkways.

‘It’s one of those views, Claudio,’ I said. ‘One of those moments when you stop and stare and remember how lucky you are to be here.’

 

 

Leaving the bus in Palopo, we located a pete-pete, a little yellow car/minibus that operates more like a taxi. After a brief discussion the driver said he would take us the rest of the way to Masamba.

When we arrived Coco was waiting for us. I’ve known her for years and she greeted me with letters from my wife and children. I tucked them away to read later. I love receiving them but they always make me homesick and a bit tearful. I was pretty knackered now. We’d been on the road most of the day again and the pink hotel where Coco was waiting looked more than a little inviting.

‘You’re not staying here, Charley,’ she told me.

‘No?’

‘You’re in the village with the head man’s family. You’re on a floor in a hut.’

‘Am I? Right. OK then, that’s fine.’ Desperately I tried to sound enthusiastic.

It wasn’t a hut actually. A hut was what we’d stayed in at Gapun. This was a house in Cendana Putih. I had a room to myself with a basin and squat-down toilet and the family could not have been more welcoming. Very humbly the head of the village apologised for the accommodation. He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a thin face and he shook my hand warmly.