Malaysia's Upland Retreat

The Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Originally published in the Jakarta Post, 08/11/09

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/11/08/malaysia’s-upland-retreat.html

The tropical haze of the Malaysian lowlands clears as the bus rolls along a rising road flanked by walls of dense green jungle. Here and there, where the mass of creepers and branches opens at the corner of a hairpin bend there is a brief glimpse of purple hillsides marked with skeins of white mist. Eventually the road levels out and the forest falls back. Neat little bungalows with red roofs and rose-filled gardens appear and the slopes of the surrounding ridges are marked with the dappled tiger stripes of tea plantations. Welcome to the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia’s best-known hill resort.
The Highlands – floating some 1500 meters up in the green hills of Pahang State at the heart of the Malaysian Peninsula – were first developed as a temperate, high-altitude retreat by the British colonialists in the early decades of the 20th Century. I am following in their footsteps, though with modern Malaysia’s excellent roads, getting to the Cameron Highlands now involves only a painless four-hour bus ride north of Kuala Lumpur, rather than the minor expedition of the colonial era.
The bus eventually rolls into Tanah Rata, a sleepy little town of quiet cafes and mock-Tudor cottages surrounded by forested hills. I check in to the charming Father’s Guesthouse, a converted British house on a flowery hilltop. The air here is deliciously fresh, and as I settle down to a welcome cup of local tea in the neat garden the memory of big city sweat fades away.

Wherever the British colonized they sought out places in the hills that offered a climate reminiscent of their temperate homeland. These “hill stations” remain marooned all over the uplands of Asia, a flotsam and jetsam of empire, enjoyed for their climate as much today by domestic tourists and international travelers as they once were by the colonialists.
The Cameron Highlands were named after William Cameron, a surveyor who first marked the stretch of elevated land while taking bearings of the surrounding Titiwangsa Ranges in 1885. Cameron noted the excellent potential of this remote, forested plateau for both agriculture and tourism, but it was only in the 1920s that the area was first developed as a hill station after the demand for a cool retreat from Kuala Lumpur outstripped the cramped resort facilities of the nearby Bukit Fraser.

Tea and Strawberries

In the misty cool of the next morning after a cozy night’s sleep under a pile of blankets I set out to explore on a rented motorbike. The main road north of Tanah Rata winds smoothly through forest studded here and there with hotels and golf courses. Beyond the little town of Brinchang I take a side road that winds along steep hillsides clothed with a strange mix of tropical and temperate vegetation – banana plants and pine trees. From a high corner a swelling view opens across distant ridges, dark under a damp gray sky. The nearer slopes are quilted with swathes of tea bushes, and down below I spot the red roofs of the Sungei Palas tea estate.
It was not only for holidays that the British headed for the hills. In 1929 a planter named J.A. Russell bought a sweep of land in the Cameron Highlands and set about clearing the forest. Tea, he discovered, grew excellently in the cool climate, and the company he founded, Boh, was a great success. Other planters followed, but Boh remains one of Malaysia’s biggest tea producers. Its three estates, scattered beneath the ridges, are open to the public.
All over the bright green hillsides are dots of color – workers, waist-deep in the tea bushes, picking the young tips from the upper branches. Though lowland tea picking is largely mechanized, on these steep slopes it can only be done the traditional way, with handheld clippers and a wicker basket. Each bush is picked once every three weeks, and this constant trimming gives the slopes a strange, sculpted look.
The Boh company not only grow tea; they also prepare and pack it, and inside the estate factory I watch the process. First the freshly picked leaves are left to whither for a day; then they are shoveled onto great mechanical rolling machines that break down the cells to release the flavor; next the already bruised leaves are left to ferment and darken, bringing a richness and color, and finally they are dried with hot air to halt the process. Each of these stages has to be carefully calibrated and the finished product is tasted and blended by experts with years of experience – and all for a cup of tea!
Inside the factory stocky Indian men in red uniforms hurriedly shovel the leaves from rolling machines to drying racks, and from conveyors to sacks. There is a rich, dark aroma to the place. Between this and its other factories Boh produces some 4 million kilograms of tea a year – which amounts to 5.5 million cups of tea every day!

***

Riding back from the tea gardens I pass a richly decorated Hindu temple, rising in the South Indian style to a candy-colored, god-encrusted pyramid above the threshold. The Cameron Highlands are home to the familiar Malaysian triumvirate of ethnicities and cultures – Malay, Indian and Chinese. Many of the first Indians here arrived to work on the burgeoning tea estates; Chinese market gardeners came to practice their own agriculture on a smaller scale. Further down the road I visit the cool, incense-scented Sam Poh Chinese temple, built in the early 20th Century by these farmers, and then I make a stop at the nearby Big Red Strawberry Farm. In the temperate climate the early agriculturalists found success growing crops more familiar in Europe than the tropics – strawberries, roses and camellias. These are all still grown here today, and there are farms, many with their own gift shops, all along the road between Brinchang and Tanah Rata. In the Big Red Strawberry Farm’s cafe I indulge myself with a gut-busting strawberry waffle...

Into the Forest

But there is more to the Cameron Highlands than tea and strawberries. In the cool quiet of the following morning I set out on foot, branching off the road beneath the guesthouse and picking my way over a tangle of exposed roots along a narrow path. Soon I am alone in the heavy green light of the forest.
All around Tanah Rata a network of numbered trails wind through the trees. This is excellent walking country, though it’s worth letting someone know where you’re going. In 1967 the great merchant of Thai silk, Jim Thompson, set out for an afternoon stroll along one of these trails – and never returned. Rumors of murder, suicide and tigers abound, but no one really knows what happened.
Hoping not to share a similar fate I press on. The dense canopy is full of noise: whistling birds, creaking insects, and the distant chattering of monkeys. I can smell the scent of moist earth and leaf mould. Light slants through the branches and the lower levels are full of bright-winged butterflies and dark shadow. From a gap in the trees at the top of a steep rise there is a vista of endless hills, fading into pale cloud. This is part of the great swathe of forest that still fills much of the heart of Malaysia.
The trail winds along hillsides and through dense thickets. I feel like I am moving deeper and deeper into the forest, and Jim Thompson’s disappearance begins to play on my mind. And then I hear voices coming though the trees. The trail emerges into watery sunlight in a broad clearing. Some 20 neat little wooden houses are stepped up a slope of clean, cropped grass. Children in multicolored tee-shirts scamper between the buildings and roosters crow from beneath the verandas. Strings of laundry flutter in the breeze. This is an Orang Asli village, a community of Malaysia’s “original people”, those whose ancestors lived in the forests here even before the mainstream Malay population arrived.
I sit down on to catch my breath and look out on the village and the wall of trees behind it, and suddenly I realize that the history of the Cameron Highlands stretches back far beyond colonialists, strawberry farmers, tea planters and holiday makers, deep into the forest...





© Tim Hannigan 2009

Sailing Surabaya's River of Gold

The History of Surabaya's old port district, Kalimas

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 01/11/09

http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/sailing-surabayas-river-of-gold/338890

Surabaya was once a name to conjure with. A century ago the East Java capital was one of the great port cities of Asia, a place mentioned on docksides and in the pages of romantic novels the world over in the same breath as Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. This might surprise many modern residents and visitors, for though it is still Indonesia’s second biggest city Surabaya has very much faded from the world map. Today I am setting out on foot in search of echoes of the maritime past that once made it the most important city of the Dutch East Indies.

A floodtide of cars, motorbikes and becaks is streaming across Jembatan Merah, the Red Bridge that connects Surabaya’s Chinatown with the old colonial quarter. No one pays much attention to the strip of murky brown water that oozes beneath the bridge, but this waterway, Kalimas, the River of Gold, was key to Surabaya’s trading past.
Dodging through the traffic I take a left at the eastern end of the bridge and find myself walking along a dusty, potholed track beside the river. There is a smell of fish and mud. To the right a rank of crumbling warehouses – hipped roofs and stout columns betraying their Dutch pedigree – are all that remains to show that this was once one of the busiest wharf-sides in Asia.
From its earliest beginnings Surabaya was a port. Local legend has the origins of the city in an epic battle between a shark (sura) and a crocodile (buaya) somewhere in the vicinity of Jembatan Merah. More tangibly the city’s founding is officially dated to 1293 when a wandering Chinese fleet was defeated by a local army nearby, but the first historical records of a place named Surabaya only appear a century later – as a key entrepot of the mighty Majapahit Empire.

Without a natural harbor Surabaya grew as a roadstead port. Sheltered from the storms of the Java Sea by the long, low island of Madura to the north, sailing schooners could anchor safely in the channel beyond the mouth of the Kalimas River. Only the smallest of the trading ships could navigate the mud-banks to come upstream, so most cargo was unloaded into open boats then hustled up the Kalimas to the trading houses and markets on the now decaying wharf along which I am walking.

“River of Gold” was always a somewhat hyperbolic name. Today the dropping tide is showing slabs of slimy grey mud. The water is the color of cappuccino, and the only boat in view is a battered green tender ferrying passengers from one bank to the other. The riverside is lined with flimsy wooden shacks. A lean, grinning man reclining in the shade calls me over. His name is Mahmud, and like many of the people now inhabiting this part of Surabaya, he is originally from Madura.
“They’re all from the Dutch time,” he says, waving towards the flaking white warehouses. “A lot of Dutch tourists come here to take photos of them.”
I glance up and down the wharf, half-expecting to see a gaggle of sweating sightseers from Amsterdam, but I am the only foreigner in sight, and with a smile Mahmud concedes that by “many” he really means “a few”.
Nearby a posse of thin, barefooted men are unloading sacks of dried fish from a truck into the dark, dusty interior of one of the warehouses. Watching over them is a Chinese man who says that his father bought this warehouse fifty years ago, at a time when the fortunes of the old Kalimas Wharf had already faded.
I walk on. Here and there a drooping bougainvillea bush gives a splash of bright color to the scene, but this area, once so prosperous, is now home to the poorest of industries – recycling of old bottles and sacks, and the gathering of garbage.

After the decline of the Majapahit Empire Surabaya became a rowdy city-state on the fringes of the Mataram Kingdom. Despite a series of sieges and rebellions the goods – and the money – continued to flow up the Kalimas, from the spice gardens of Maluku, from the river ports on the jungle fringes of Kalimantan, from Sulawesi and beyond. The first Dutch trading operations were set up in the late 17th Century, and in 1743 Mataram ceded full sovereignty of the city to the Dutch East India Company. The scene was set for Surabaya to become the biggest and most important of all Indonesia’s colonial cities.
Development of the sugarcane industry in the 19th Century saw the port grow into a teeming, cosmopolitan metropolis. Many of the now crumbling warehouses that line the river date from this time. The seafaring writer Joseph Conrad came to Surabaya during its heyday. He set part of his novel Victory in the city.

The vibrancy of that era seems far away as I cross to the left bank of the river. Here there is a chaotic market where bulky Madurese women are haggling over baskets of bananas and mangoes. Trade still goes on here, but the produce has been brought in by land; the river, slithering past to the right, is ignored. Beyond the market I find myself picking along a narrow, walled-in alleyway beyond which I enter a kampung, a working class village-within-a-city. I am greeted with a near-hysterical chorus of “hello misters!”
Beyond the kamung walls I can see stacked tiers of shipping containers. Surabaya is still a port – a big one – but changes in the world of seaborne trade in the late 19th Century ensured the death of the old riverside wharfs.

With the arrival of fast steam ships with schedules to keep an old-fashioned roadstead port and a narrow river served by open boats was woefully inadequate. At the same time railways to carry sugar straight from the mills in the south of the city to the port were laid. The Kalimas River became hopelessly congested. Sometimes it was entirely blocked with small, overloaded craft, and to make matters worse the sandbanks at the mouth of the river could only be negotiated at high water. It could take days to load or unload a ship. Something had to be done, and after lengthy debate the building of a modern, deepwater port was finally sanctioned. In the 1920s the new harbor of Tanjung Perak was built, north of the old riverside wharfs. Now even the biggest freighters could come alongside to be loaded straight from the dock. Kalimas was relegated to the sidelines, and the collapse of the sugar industry in the 1930s was its final death knell. The river silted up; the warehouses were locked and left to crumble.

But something still remains. I have lost sight of the river, but the excited kampung-dwellers point me down the narrowest of side alleys: “That way mister, there are lots of boats!”
I emerge in the evening sunlight on a crowded dockside. The huge international cargo ships now moor at Tanjung Perak – I can see the skeletal outlines of the cranes there, stark against the evening sky – but smaller inter-island traffic still comes to the river. The narrow waterway is crammed with boats. Evening sunlight falls on rust, flaking white paint, high prows and frayed rigging. There are decrepit tramp steamers and amongst them older wooden vessels. Some of them, though leaking diesel from the bilges, still have the graceful lines of pinisi, the sailing schooners of Sulawesi that were the original trading boats of Indonesia.
The first of these old wooden boats that I pass is, to my disappointment, no longer a working vessel. A man lounging on the steeply sloping deck tells me that it has been bought by a resort on Flores. When restoration is complete it will ferry tourists to the dive sites of the Komodo National Park. But the next boat is still trading, though it is being loaded not with spice or sandalwood but with boxes of instant noodles, bound for the islands of the Kangean Archipelago east of Madura.

As I make my way along the dockside crewmen from other boats call out to me. They come from all over Indonesia; many are from Kalimantan, or from the distant islands of Nusa Tenggara – Flores, Timor and Alor. Their destinations too are scattered across the archipelago.
A sailor greets me. His name is Abdullah. He comes from Banyuwangi at the eastern tip of Java. He is one of eight crewmen on an old wooden ship carrying onions to Bali.
The journey will take three days. “Now it’s the season of big waves,” says Abdullah, “so sometimes it takes longer.” From Bali they will sail another three days north to Makassar, then south across the Java Sea to Jakarta, then east along the coast, back to Surabaya. These are some of the oldest trade routes of the islands.
Abdullah makes Rp50,000 a day. “Not enough to buy cigarettes,” he grumbles, and he rarely sees his wife and three children, back home in Banyuwangi.

A little further along the dock men are padding along the narrowest of wooden gangplanks carrying huge loads onto another old wooden boat. They are bound for Balikpapan in Kalimantan, and they invite me onboard, laughing at my tentative steps along their precarious gangway. Onboard there is a smell of tar and diesel, salt and rotten wood. In the hollow belly of the ship there are bags of cement and bundles of reinforcement bar for building; on the roof of the wheelhouse there are orange septic tanks, and in a hold beside the engine room in the stern there are boxes of mineral water and biscuits. I am shown up a worn wooden ladder to the wheelhouse where the captain, Pak Subur, is watching over the loading of the ship.
“We always carry a mixed cargo like this,” he says, “and we don’t go until the boat is full. We make a loss if it’s not full.” Subur is 51 years old and comes from Kalimantan. He has been sailing on these wooden cargo boats all his life. The wheelhouse is starkly bare. There is only the wheel, and a tarnished copper bell hanging from the ceiling.
“On modern ships they have radar, compasses, radios. They need to look at maps before they go. They think they know about the sea, but they don’t.”
I am astonished. Doesn’t Subur even have a map or a compass?
He smiles and shakes his head. “We know the way.”
Subur has a small, dank cabin next to the wheelhouse; the other 12 crewmen sleep below. The name of the ship is Usaha Bersama – Joint Effort. Looking out from the wheelhouse I can see the mouth of the river, and beyond it the hazy line of Madura with the big freighters moored in its lee. Subur will sail that way the day after tomorrow, at midnight on the high tide. It will be three days – without navigational equipment – to Balikpapan.
Surabaya’s Kalimas River may no longer be at the center of world trade, and its warehouses and wharfs may have long since decayed. But there are still ships like Subur’s, plying routes that existed long before the sugar industry and the colonial era, and even before Mataram and Majapahit.

As I nervously edge back down the narrow plank to the quayside one of the crew, a dark young man from Ambon, calls to me.
“Come with us, mister, to Balikpapan. There will be big waves, and for sure you’ll be scared, but it’s nice on a boat like this.” I’m not quite sure if he is serious, and I have other commitments to stop me running away to sea this time, but for a moment, in the late afternoon on this venerable old dockside, it’s a tempting offer…



© Tim Hannigan 2009

Sumba: Sensations Succeeded

Visiting Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, November 2009

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/beyond.html

It was my parents’ first visit to Indonesia, and I wanted to take them somewhere truly special. I pored over my map of the archipelago in the weeks before they arrived and considered the possibilities. Their visit was a short one, and the remote depths of Papua, the dense forests of Kalimantan, and the green uplands of Sumatra were too far away. But then my eye fell on an insignificant-looking island tilted south of the main chain running east from Bali. I had been there before and knew that it was one of the most strange and fascinating places on earth, and better still, there were direct flights from Denpasar. I would take my parents to Sumba.

Sumba is part of Nusa Tenggara, the Islands of the Southeast. This region is probably the most fascinating part of an entirely fascinating country, with gorgeous scenery, empty beaches and some of the best diving in the world. But for me the attraction has always lain in the diverse cultures of these islands. Among the nominal Muslims and Christians there is a wealth of traditions and beliefs that predate foreign religion. Sumba, isolated from the other islands of Nusa Tenggara, remained almost free of outside influence until well into the 20th Century. Even today this is a place where ancient ways are strongly preserved.

After a brief rest in Bali and a short dash through the western part of Flores, we landed from the ferry in Waingapu, capital of East Sumba. The recent launch of Transnusa Airlines has opened up the islands east of Bali for short visits, and you can fly from Denpasar to Waingapu or Tambolaka in Sumba. But for me the best way to arrive is by sea, watching the long, low bulk of the island rising slowly above the horizon after the green hills of Flores and Sumbawa have fallen away behind. According to the legends this is how the first settlers saw Sumba as they reached the end of a long island-hopping journey from India, hundreds of years ago.

A day after our own arrival we visited the place where these first Sumbanese settled. Sixty kilometres north of Waingapu, the isolated village of Wunga stands on a high escarpment ridge with spectacular command of the rolling countryside. The landscape of East Sumba is striking. Here the thick vegetation of the tropics gives way to an expansive tableland of brown savannah; it could be Africa.

Wunga is a special place, for as the fabled location of the first settlement in Sumba, old traditions have been meticulously maintained here. A dozen houses are built to the original design, with towering roofs of grass thatch. These roofs are a familiar sight in Sumba, but in Wunga even the low walls are made from woven grass, and there is no cut or shaved wood used in the construction. The ancestral graves that dot the village are made from simply piled slabs of uncut limestone, unlike the finely carved tombs that stand in other areas. Even the cloth, woven on traditional looms, is plain here, without dye or embroidery. And while elsewhere on the island many villagers have adopted Christianity and blended it with their old beliefs, the people of Wunga cling steadfastly to the old Marapu religion.

Marapu is the name given to the sacred ancestors, the first people of Sumba, and they are the focus of the old religion. The towering rooftops of the traditional houses are the home of their spirits where the clan heirlooms are kept along with the drying rice. The Sumbanese priests, known as Rato, can communicate with these ancestor spirits, and read the omens that they send in the internal organs of sacrificed chickens and pigs. Funerals are hugely important events in Sumba, for they mark the moment when the deceased goes to join the ancestors. Pigs, buffalo and horses are sacrificed to join the spirit on its journey.

From Waingapu we travelled west to the sleepy little township of Waikabubak. West Sumba is wetter than the east. Rice grows here in neat terraces, and there are stands of palm trees between the fields. Waikabubak is a remarkable place, for on the low hilltops above the main streets and bustling market stand some of the most traditional villages on the whole island. Kampung Tarung, just a couple of minutes walk from the heart of the town is the biggest and most important, but there are others: Bodo Ede, Tambelar, Waitabar. These are some of the best villages on Sumba to explore, for the villagers are used to visitors. Some speak English, and they are very welcoming, often inviting you into their homes – and perhaps offering you betel nut. The nut, with accompanying catkin and lime powder, is a key part of hospitality on Sumba. Years of chewing the stuff that give the old people of the island mouthfuls of red teeth, but trying it once or twice will produce nothing more than a numb tongue and a mouthful of scarlet spittle. My mum had a go – and said it was disgusting. After that when villagers offered she accepted politely and slipped it into her pocket – “for later!”

From Waikabubak we explored remote villages among the green ridges and valleys to the south. Traditions were strong here, and in many of the places they had seen few foreigners. Here the land ran away to a coastline of white shell beaches where turquoise waves broke on the offshore reefs. They were gloriously empty, the sand unbroken by footprints, and not a hawker in sight.

My mum wanted a souvenir from Sumba though, so back in Waikabubak we bargained in the market for a length of traditional ikat, the cloth woven by the women of the island on their back-strap looms. Every area has its own distinctive designs, with the more elaborate styles coming from the east. But we chose a piece from the west with simple, abstract patterns.

We had tickets for the short flight back to Bali from the little airport at Tambolaka, north of Waikabubak, but we still had three days to spare. On the recommendation of a friend I had booked rooms at the Newa Sumba Resort, on the north coast near the little port village of Waikelo. We arrived in the evening to find it a place of spectacularly splendid isolation. The resort has just a few cool rooms of dark varnished wood in buildings with high Sumba-style roofs. There were no other guests, and no one else for miles around, for the place stands on its own strip of perfect beach facing an empty ocean and surrounded by dense, dry forest. It was utterly peaceful, and for the next two days we did nothing but read and swim, watching the sun falling into the west and listening to the sound of the waves and birds in the trees behind the beach. It was the ideal place to reflect on our journey through the remarkable culture of Sumba – and strategically located despite the illusion of castaway remoteness: Tambolaka airport lay just ten minutes away, and Bali an hour beyond that.

As the plane banked upwards through the morning air my father craned his head to catch one last glimpse of Sumba as it faded behind us.
“I think that’s the most amazing place I’ve ever been,” he said. I smiled to myself: I had succeeded.

© Tim Hannigan 2009