VAN DAMMNED IN HELL ON A FAST BOAT

Whenever anybody mentions fast boat my stomach always gets a little queasy and my mind travels back almost involuntarily to a ferry ride I once took from Penang in Malaysia to Medan in Sumatara. Now I have never been a fan of boats in general, I prefer to travel serenely across the water, but this fast boat is apptly named. It goes flat chat across the Melacca Strait, in a little under three hours, come wind, hail or shine, or perhaps more importantly gale force winds. It rides low in the water and the sitting area is actually below the water level. Tinted windows, which are always fogged over, make it hard to see anything but the sun reflecting off the water, and air-conditioning combined with all of the men on board smoking makes it hard to breathe. The port in Penang is on the peninsular side of the island so that day when we boarded we had no idea of what were we facing. It didn't take long to find out though. The wind was blowing a gale and the wind chop was probably about 4ft, breaking in all directions. Rather than slowing down the boat this only seemed to encourage the boat to go faster, which meant that the pitch and roll as we hit the chop was even more violent. After about 15 minutes everybody on the boat, from the little tackers to old grannys and all in between had hucked up their guts in to the plastic bags we all received when we boarded. New bags had to be handed out three more times during the trip as they were constantly being filled. The combination of the background sound of wretching, the smell of vomit in the air, and the sight of plastic bags filled with spew rolling around on the floor combined with the movement of the boat pushed me to the edge and I thought I was going to succumb and join my fellow chunderers. Howeve r I was distracted by the slowing of the boat, and the crew scambling around opening the side doors, never a good sign when you are surrounded by ocean with no land in sight. If you think Indonesian aviation is dangerous then let me just say that Indonesian marine transport makes planes in Indo look as safe as houses !! Somehow we finally made it, vomit and all, and I swoar I would never ride on a fast boat again.....until next time.

So there I was sitting on the fast boat again, fortunately the seas were calm, lost on my own world listening to music on my headphones trying to drown out the combination of engine noise and bad Indonesian karaoke, when a Van Damme movie appears on the TV screens. Now anybody who knows anything about action movies will tell you that Van Damme is in a class of his own. Somehow he has managed to make 20 or 30 movies in which basically the same thing happens, Van Damme gets challenged, then disillusioned, then a work out montage to get him back to peak fitness, and usually ending up with our man Jean kicking some arse, literally, and saving the day. As the noise of the boat was so loud I decided I would watch the movie without any sound to see if it made any difference, and the strange thing is, it didn't. I didn't need to hear any of the dialogue to understand who were the good guys, who were the bad guys and what was going on. The guy is a true genius. The added bonus was that the continuity errors were all the more apparent. (Van Damme went from no beard to full beard about 4 times, in no particular order)
The one thing I didn't quite understand was why if the movie was set in a Russian prison was everybody speaking English, including the fellow prisoners and the guards. Another one of those mysteries of the universe I guess.

Nias - Earthquake and tsunami to cargo cult

Nias had the misfortune of being struck by two massive natural disasters in the space of six months – it was hit by a 3 metre high tsunami wave on Boxing Day 2004, and then wacked again by an earthquake and another tsunami in March, 2005. Enough to make most people pack up there bags and move else where but Indonesians in general are a resiliant (and foolhardy) lot. I first visted Nias in 1995, and suprising not of the physical landscape has changed – which I guess in 12 years is fairly exceptional. Rebuilding after the disaters seemed to have occured at a fairly brisk pace. It seems the damage was so intense that most buildings were completely destroyed, so there isn't that much evidence of the destruction – other than a few buildings which appear twisted like mirages in the desert or Dr Seuss houses. Almost all of the losmens (small hotels) at Sorake Beach have been built – and no one seems to have learnt anything from building so proximate to the shore. I wonder if the builders ever paused to look at the foundations and ruins as they built the new places only metres away. The one big change I did notice was what appears to be the creation of a cargo cult by the descent of a proliferation of NGOs – the number and stripe were incredible – from UN agencies like UNICEF and UNHCR, to the Red Cross -from Spain, Belgium, Australia, UK etc etc, to private NGOs like HELP, LEAP, Save the Children, Oxfam etc etc. And they all have their own offices, there own shwanky Toyota Land Cruisers (which you can't normally get in Indo) and of course their own agendas. Whilst no doubt a lot of good work has been done, it does seems to have generated a mindset of what have you got for me ? So any foreinger faces a constant barrage of requests for everything, from money, to food to clothes to even surfboards. All in all it makes for a fairly unenjoyable time as there is no escape from the hassle – even in Bali they give you a break. The annoyance is amplified by the apparent unwilligness of any of the locals to actually do anything, most simply sat around waiting for the surf, and my UNICEF friend said they were struggling to find people to volunteer their labour for the community projects that they were funding. All of the tourists I met said they had experienced the same thing to the point that they didn't want to return to Nias.
And the wave... well the reef has lifted up a couple of metres, but it is still pretty much as perfect as a wave can be – even letting me get barreled a couple of times !!

Goodbye to some old friends

One thing I recently discovered is that going back to a place can sometimes be a big mistake - some things change for the worse, and what doesn't change is usually improved by the mists of time. Returning can also generate a bit of lament for the loss of institutions, and in the last two months I saw the death of two big ones.
Anybody who has been to Penang and not had much coin would have spent a night in the Hotel New China - a former grand old colonial house turned in to a rat warren/guesthouse. The old chinese folks running the place looked as old as the advertising on the walls - apparently from the 19th rather than the 20th century. The dorm was a couple of bits of plywood blown together by the wind and if the bed bugs hadn't got you by the morning the rats should would have. I once left some things in the stored luggage room, and I swear I saw a single fin surfboard that had been there since at least 1985 !! Most suprisingly of all it has been replaced by a boutique chocolate shop - the rats must be in heaven !!!

The second was two great waves in the Hinakos, small islands off Nias. These islands bore the full brunt of the earthquake in March, 2005 (hot on the tails of the tsunami in December, 2004) The earthquake pushed the islands up further out of the ocean, so much so that the tide line at Bawa is now about 20 metres further out than it previously was. This has had a disasterous effect on the waves. Bawa no longer has a wave and Asu breaks only when the swell comes from just the right angle, and it is shallower than it was before.
I returned to Bawa for a week in December, and stayed in the one remaining hut on the beach. Each day I would stare out the window watching the point reminiscing about the good old days, from when it was 15ft and a washingmachine too big to surf, to the last 30 days of perfection that I spent there in 2003.

RIP