The Promised Land

We were sat on a covered platform next to a dusty road in the middle of the jungle waiting for the next part of our Great Indonesian Goose Chase to begin. It was hot and and my road-bike was caked in mud and staring at me with the look of a motorbike that has been used for purposes viciously contrary to its job description. My two companions were asleep with flies lazily buzzing around their heads and I'd just finished my book. What on earth were we doing here?

It had started innocently enough, I had just finished discussing business with my friend and jungle-guide, Calvin, and was asking about a small village I had heard of near Bukit Lawang where a new home-stay had just opened.

“It has a lake, a waterfall and hot-springs,” I told him, “it could be an excellent place to take tourists. Have you heard of it?” He hadn't but his mother knew of a village which sounded like the place I was describing and it was in the right area so we arranged to head for it early the next day; we would ask for directions along the way.

The 'road' that we would be heading out on was one that I had taken a few months earlier, in the opposite direction, from Tangkahan. It had been a 'short-cut' which I had vowed never to take again, consisting, as it did, of a treacherous mix of mud, rock, streams and a sore backside; I hadn't got out of second gear. On that particular trip I had hooked up with a guy along the way who knew the route and had followed him. He'd stopped off in a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere for a cup of tea at his friend's house and so I joined them, chatted with his friend and, in one of those strange coincidences that always freaks me out, discovered that I was talking to Calvin's uncle.

Anyway, I digress. Off we went the next morning, Calvin and his friend on one bike and me on mine, and before long we were bumping, revving and sliding along a track that was even worse than I'd remembered it. An hour or so later we arrived at a small village and stopped at what you could call, if you had a very good imagination, a café. Calvin wanted to ask for directions and I wanted to steady my jangled nerves with a beer (“Find me a beer”-“But it's ten 'o clock in the morning and also it won't be cold”-“Just find me a bloody beer”). Calvin chatted with a couple of the locals while I watched a procession of turbaned and robed men on motorbikes with their wives, covered head-to-toe in black burkas, clinging bravely to the back and heading off to the nearest mosque which was Allah-only-knows-where. I toasted their devotion and drank to my own.

“This man's nephew's chicken knows a three-legged ox whose master once ate breakfast with the Governor's son's plastic duck who thinks that he saw a bloke who knows someone who knows where the place that we seek is,” said Calvin, or something to that effect and we waited while somebody drove off to find him. I took an instant dislike this shady character as soon as he arrived; he had sly eyes and a calculating manner and told us that we would have to stay overnight in the jungle before arriving at our destination. I was sure that he didn't know the place we were talking about and was just after some easy money. I suggested we ditch him and go on to Calvin's uncle who was the 'mayor' of the area and should know something about the place we were after.

On we went until we arrived, a little later, at Calvin's uncle's house who of course wasn't there. The village seemed to be made up entirely of Calvin's relatives so we waited at one of their houses while a friend went off to find someone who could help us. I lounged on a rickety old bench in the sun and drank cold tea and read. Waiting is always tolerable, if not downright enjoyable, when you have a good book. Eventually somebody returned to say that we would meet a friend's godson's cousin's monkey's uncle at the ninety seventh tree to the west of the third duck-shaped hump on the road to Never Never Land who would escort us to the very village that we were after. So that's where we waited, on the platform, where Calvin and his friend slept, I finished my book, swatted flies and wondered what the hell we were doing there.

After about an hour two guys arrived on a motorbike and we followed them. I hadn't realised it, but the track we had been on until then had been the equivalent of the the M-bloody-1 because then we really got off-road. For about an hour and a half we skidded and slid through muddy quagmires, splashed through puddles the size of Lake Toba , careened over rocks, traversed rivers (I kid you not) and generally crossed country that Ewan Mcgregor wouldn't have attempted without three back-up vehicles and a camera crew. I would dearly love to tell you that it was beautiful scenery but I had my eyes firmly fixed upon the immediate four feet of terrain directly in front of my wheel, and my mind on keeping my buttocks clenched lest I shit myself.

Eventually we arrived somewhere. I don't know where because it looked exactly the same as everywhere else: green and treesome. We left our mutinous bikes to lick their wounds and bitch while I followed my abductors on wobbly legs through leech-infested jungle, down muddy slopes, to a river which was showing all the signs of being village-less.

“Here we are,” announced our guide after several minutes of sloshing up the river. Catching my breath and looking around for a shy and lurking village I could find nothing that did not announce itself as river or jungle. At seeing my bewildered looks, the guide pointed across the river at a small steaming stream joining the larger flow. “Hot-spring,” he said proudly. Keeping my own counsel for the time-being, I waded across the river and examined the area around the spring and could find nothing other than a warm, dank and sulphurous puddle that would be of the remotest interest to the most optimistic of sight-seers.

“Calvin, where is the waterfall?” I asked.

“About twenty minutes walk up-river,” he informed me after a quick discussion with our guide.

“And the home-stay?”

“An hour that way,” he said after another consultation and pointing in an entirely different direction.

“Lake?”

“There doesn't appear to be one”

“Village?”

“Hm.”

“Calvin, in what way does this resemble a village with a home-stay, hot-spring, waterfall and lake?”

“I don't think it's the right place.”

“Indeed.”

Brief Consultation. “He says he knows another place.”

“Let's go home.”

Actually we didn't go straight home. We waded up the river to the waterfall which was, in fact, the last of twelve waterfalls, all cascading down through the jungle to the river below. It was an ideal place to camp on a trek through the jungle and after some discussion discovered that it could be part of a five-day trek from Bukit Lawang to Tangkahan; each night stopping at equally impressive sights. And as far as wild goose chases go, this was a rather picturesque wrong destination. All was not lost.

There was just that journey home...