It was a beautiful and bright sunny morning on the island of Samosir, Lake Toba; the sun tinging the bobbing water blue rather than the slate grey it had been for the past couple days when rain and wind had given me the perfect excuse to do nothing but read and drink beer. Today, I decided, I would take to the water, flex the old muscles, work off a few of those carbs.
I was sat on the terrace of my hotel, drinking a steaming pot of coffee and admiring the view which overlooked the lake and the grounds of the adjoining hotel. I didn't like that hotel. In the past I had been kept awake throughout the night by hoards of partying students staying at that hotel. They set up sound systems and played the same three whining, yearning love songs, at alarmingly distorted levels and usually not through to the end, before putting on the next. There would usually be somebody whittering away on a microphone who would invariably punctuate their twitterings with an amplified thump and blow followed by “One, two, one, two...” No, I didn't like that hotel and its choice of residents.
This morning I was suspiciously eyeing a sullen group of students who were gathering, worryingly, in the aforementioned hotel. A couple of them began walking in this direction, bringing them almost below the terrace upon which I was sat. I prepared to give them a hostile, “you don't want to be staying anywhere near here” look which I hope looked a bit like Dirty Harry but probably resembled Mr Magoo in a headwind. However, before I had a chance to scare them away, one of them unexpectedly pulled off his top and leapt into the lake. His friend, looking as surprised as myself at this abrupt decision to have a dip, suddenly appeared very agitated and began shouting and gesturing to the rest of his party while hopping from one foot to the other. His swimming friend, meanwhile, was returning to the wall that marked the edge of the lake. He passed something up to his mate. It was a leg. At first my brain refused to acknowledge what was happening, and it wasn't until they were both hauling the body up onto the grass that I realised that they had found a dead friend.
In Britain and most other Western countries we learn, from the lessons of television and crime novels, that dead bodies have to wait around for the arrival of the police. A doctor should be called to pronounce it dead and in the meantime, somebody who once went on a first-aid course, should be pumping the chest of the victim and performing CPR. But this is Indonesia.
A group gathered around the broken-doll body and within a very few moments somebody was taking photos with their phone. I debated running around, flapping my arms and shouting inanities but knew that I would be next to useless; I didn't know who to phone, didn't know first-aid and spoke little of the language. I stood for a while watching nothing happen and then sat down to watch nothing happen while drinking my coffee, feeling like I was being somehow disrespectful by doing so.
Eventually a beaten-up old ambulance that looked like it should be transporting OAPs to bingo appeared at the top of the steep drive and backed down to the garden. There was a very large fish pond separating the ambulance from the body at the water's edge and everybody watched the driver attempt a manoeuvre that would see him reverse down between a building and the pond, and then try, impossibly, to turn ninety degrees to the left in order to back up to the, by now decomposing, corpse. It was never going to happen, but we all patiently watched a good five minutes of excruciatingly inept forward-and-reversing, this drama almost eclipsing the first, before he finally admitted defeat and parked.
Then an odd thing happened. The deceased was adequately clothed in long shorts and a t-shirt and although the clothes may have been wet, I didn't really see him catching a cold. Regardless, a man, who I'm guessing was the teacher, appeared with a pair of trousers and a shirt. There then followed an obscene period while a few people changed his attire and a bit of material was flung over his groin to maintain a dignity that they had already deprived the poor lad by undressing him in the first place.
Satisfied that he was now decent for the ambulance ride, a few of the students and the teacher, with no help from the gawping spectators, the smoking driver, or, of course myself, lifted the sagging (ahem) dead-weight and struggled the twenty or thirty meters to the waiting vehicle. Where was the stretcher, I wondered? If the unfortunate chap wasn't already dead then he certainly would be by the time his assistants had finished banging him against the door-frame and floor as they bundled him into the back of the ambulance.
Then a ferry arrived. These small, faded and battered old craft take people to and from Parapat, on the mainland, every hour or so and this one docked a few feet behind the back of the ambulance; there was a brief discussion which resulted in the decision to retrieve the corpse from the ambulance and put it onto the ferry. I ordered another pot of coffee.
The body was extracted and, this time, on a stretcher; one of these types that is a piece of canvas stretched (oh, I see) between a couple of long sticks. You see them when one of our brave footballers is carried off the pitch after breaking a nail. Unfortunately, it being such a primitive sort of stretcher, it had no straps to prevent the corpse from sliding downwards whenever it was heaved up at the forty five degree angle necessary to get it on the boat. After a couple of attempts the stretcher was discarded and the poor dead lad, who must have done something terrible in his life to warrant this kind of treatment in death, endured another pounding as he was manhandled up onto the deck.
Well that's that, thinks I, slurping on coffee which I almost choke on when they remove another corpse from the ambulance and hoist it aboard: another teenage boy from the same group, I learn later. Two in one morning. Downright careless.
Today, I
decide, is not an auspicious day for a swim and pick up my book for a
long day of sitting.
Mt. Sinabung smokes nonchalantly and the bus tilts alarmingly into its first pot-hole. Inside, the initiated are already dozing and their heads roll with the blows while the limbs of one other passenger contort uncomfortably amongst a window, a bag, a seat and a girlfriend.
For a while the Malverns jog slowly by, but then orange groves, palms and cotton trees. A bent and ancient, mahogany woman tills ineffectually at a vast and unyielding field to be replaced by a frowning old man in a dirty old shack who stoops over a DVD player and doubtfully taps a screwdriver. The track, given the lofty status of road, bumbles through pools of jade rice-shoots and lurches over the Karo Highlands to Ketembe.
Buntings of faded washing, hanging from every hedge and fence, give the villages a festive air. Chickens squabble and gobble in dusty yards. A roof of old and grey palm fronds shades a preacher and his microphone, blasting his message to the faithful dozen incumbent on mats at his feet. The only prayers being answered are the ones for rain and before long we're searching blindly for a submerged road, bouncing through unseen holes, squinting into the darkness, wishing to arrive. We've spent a morning, afternoon and evening in this eleven-body-bone-cruncher and when we finally reach our destination the hotel we choose is the first one we see. We are the only guests and eat our meagre meal in squalid surroundings, barren of life, light and, before long, staff. Our room houses the former and current residences of a myriad of arachnids and it's possible that it is they who have slain the cleaner.
The morning sun does little to cheer up our abode and we walk the silent road through Ketembe in the rising heat while jungle-coated mountains peer curiously down upon us. Breakfast is eaten in a restaurant overlooking the swollen Alas River and their rear garden is a meadow of wild grasses and young avocado trees amongst which, three wooden bungalows nestle. The sun has not risen another inch before our bags are repacked and we are occupying one of them.
The storm has turned the river to latté and the day is spent upon the balcony, supping beer and watching as it calms and turns a hue of vending-machine coffee, cattle-urine green and eventually before the sun, dipping behind the mountain, robs the scene of timbre, the water turns a river-valley blue.
On our return journey the next morning, the driver treats us to ten hours of loud Indian/Indonesian pop on a one-tape loop and it's almost a relief to escape into the blazing sun while we wait for the obligatory flat-tyre to be replaced without the aid of suitable tools.
Trips like these should be fondly remembered but seldom repeated.
