The Journey South (Part 2)

National law invoked to protect durian tree

This is the second post describing my vagabondage through the provinces of Jambi, West Sumatra, Bengkulu, and South Sumatra.  I'm currently at 1100 kilometers, which is a long way on Sumatra.  This post describes some of the things I saw during the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days of my trip.  The trip is part of my dissertation research, which examines the politics of conservation at Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park.  I've embarked on this long motorcycle ride to visit seats of government and to talk with elected and appointed officials about policy direction and their perceptions towards the park, because on Sumatra you have to physically go to the offices and talk face to face with people to get anything done.  It's a long road both literally and figuratively, but it's a good way to see this seldom-visited corner of the Earth.

With the elephants (again)

Monkeying around with elephants

The next stop on the journey was the Forestry Ministry's elephant center in Seblat, which is run by my friend Yanti.  Yanti is a veterinarian for the office of natural resource management in Bengkulu province, and she agreed to accompany me to some villages in the area.  Whenever I talk to Yanti I'm always amazed at the amount of responsibility she has; in addition to managing the elephant camp she also has a project on Enggano, a large island off the coast of Sumatra, and she is on call 24-7 to treat animals like tigers and bears that get caught in traps and need emergency surgery.  After about 3 hours on the road I arrived at the elephant camp, parked my bike, and took one of the camp's dugout canoes across the Seblat river.  I was happy to see my friend and all the mahouts, who are a pretty jolly bunch.  There were also a number of volunteers from several western countries under a program sponsored by the Dejavato Foundation, which is based in Surabaya and offers foreigners the opportunity to do volunteer tourism in Indonesia.  The participants told me that this particular trip cost 180 euros for two weeks, and during that time they get training from the mahouts and help care for the elephants.  It seems like a really good deal for an opportunity most people will never have.  Plus they get exposure to elephants that would never be allowed in "developed" countries.  If you want to learn more about Dejavato and their programs, visit their site here.

Trematode egg

In exchange for helping me Yanti cajoled me into doing some work at the camp, which including analyzing elephant poop for parasites.  So after a crash course on the types of organisms that sometimes inhabit the bowels of large pachyderms, I set to work making slides and examining them under a microscope.  Most of the elephants were "clean", but we did find that one has some "passengers", the eggs of which you can see in the photo to the left.  Over the course of two days we visited a couple of villages and some park personnel that are stationed at the post in Seblat.  One of the villages we visited was some distance away, located about 15 kilometers off the main road and accessible via dirt and gravel roads.  We had to pass through a palm oil plantation to get there, so it was a neat chance to see the facilities.  We had a good time chatting with the village head, who was quite a character.  He asked me to ask the park to move the border markers of the park a kilometer or so further away from the village, which entertained me because he assumed I had the type of influence that could get hundreds of hectares of protected land degazetted.

I had to break my personal rule of not driving after dark on the way back.  I don't like driving through the countryside in the dark because visibility is limited, but on the positive side you always know whether or not there is someone coming the other way on a blind curve.  But then about 2 hours into the 3 hour drive the sky opened up on us, and so I had to slow down.  Still the rain felt like needles on my chest as I drove, and to cap it all off the chain kept slipping off my bike until we were only going about half a kilometer between refitting it.  So there we were out in the middle of nowhere, very tired, very wet, and very frustrated at being stuck with a long way yet to go.  At this point I was about at my limits and I caught myself asking out loud "Why in the &%(@ am I doing this?"  Fortunately, though, I was able to find a villager with some wrenches which I borrowed to make the necessary adjustments to the back axle and get back on the road.  It was a trying experience though. 

Road Conditions

Seblat is about 3 hours south of Mukomuko city, which I mentioned in the previous post.  The road is quite nice and there isn't too much traffic.  You'll pass through a few small towns and there's a gas station at Ipuh, which is a larger market town.  Other than the beach and the oil palms there isn't too much of note, but when I was in Bengkulu city I learned that there are the ruins of a British fort somewhere on this stretch.  I don't know exactly where they are though.  Take sunscreen or wear sleeves because you'll spend a lot of time under the sun.  The road is suitable for bicycling, and as I mentioned in the previous post foreign tourists are occasionally seen making the trip on bikes. 

Watch your step...

After a couple of days at the elephant camp I again headed south in the direction of Arga Makmur, the district capital of Bengkulu Utara district, where I wanted to interview the district headman, talk to some people at the regional planning office, and pick up some policy documents.  The drive south from Seblat is quite nice until you get to Ketahun and then it gets really bad really fast.  There is a lot of coal in Bengkulu, and where you have coal you have coal mining and coal trucks.  The problem in Bengkulu and elsewhere in Sumatra is that the trucks are generally overloaded, which puts a lot of stress on the asphalt roads, which break into pieces, making for a very bumpy and slow ride.  Although people complain about the problem, the government hasn't taken any real action to enforce the weight restrictions or repair the road in many places. 

As you can see from the picture to the left, there's another danger along this stretch of "highway": huge chunks of the road falling into the sea.  Though people had warned me that the road was "missing" in some places, I didn't quite believe them.  How could a road be "missing"?  But now I know.  The road is indeed missing.  I tried to figure out how you would go about repairing this kind of problem, and I guess the best way would be to build the road further inland.  Anyway, if you happen to be on the road between Ketahun and Arga Makmur be careful because the ground may give way beneath you and you might plummet into the ocean.

I went to Arga Makmur because I want to visit the district headman, but to do so I first have to get a letter from one of the superfluous bureaucratic entities, which takes time.  So I submitted my documentation and then left town, figuring I could pass back through in a few days, pick up the letter, and then go to the Bupati's office and the planning department.  In one of the villages I visited near the elephant camp I met a guy who runs a local NGO and is also a reporter for the local paper.  Coincidentally he lives in Arga Makmur and has inside connections and said he would help me with the visits, but I had to get the letter first.  

Road Conditions

It takes between 2 and 3 hours to get to Arga Makmur from Seblat, and the road is pretty bad in some places.  There are a lot of coal trucks, which move slowly and kick up a lot of dirt, so it's not a really relaxing road.  At Lais you turn off the main road to get to Arga Makmur, about 45 minutes.  I don't know if there is any touristy reason to go to Arga Makmur, so you might want to continue on to Bengkulu city if you make the trip. 

Onward to Bengkulu....

Bengkulu is the capital of the province with the same name.  It gets some, but not a whole lot of visitors, which is a shame because it's a neat place.  You can visit the home of Indonesia's first president (also one of the most revered heroes of the independence struggle) Sukarno, where he stayed when he was under house arrest by the Dutch.  There's an old British fort there (which I'll describe in a moment), and there's also some fairly decent surf as it's on the coast.  When I first rolled into town I needed to find a place to stay since there's no park office and all my friends in town stay in boarding houses.  As I was cruising around the town I saw the building in the picture to the right.  I've been around a bit but I rarely see anything that physically stuns me.  The Grand Canyon is one example.  This building is another.  When I drove around the corner and saw it I had to stop.  I don't know if you can grasp the level of weirdness from this picture, but this building is odd.  It turned out to be a hotel, and so naturally I wanted to stay there.  I rolled into the front desk and had the following conversation with the clerk:

Me:  "Man this place is great.  How much is a room?"

Clerk: "400,000 rupiah (about US$42) for a standard room...."

Me:  "400,000 rupiah?!?!?  But this place looks like it was built out of garbage!"

Clerk: "There's another hotel down the road..."

Me:  "Well can I at least go up to the tower and look around?"

The clerk graciously called a bellhop to take me up to the tower, which turned out to be an abandoned restaurant.  Evidently it was a pretty swanky place back in the 70s and 80s, but it's pretty rundown now.  I'm actually surprised that they let me go up there.  I took a bunch of pictures and the bellhop made a pass at me, and so I made haste for the exit.  One of my friends would later tell me that the tower used to rotate, but I have a really hard time believing that. 

After I found more reasonable priced accommodations I went to Fort Marlioborough, which was the center of the British colonial government from 1714 to 1741.  Though the British were the first colonial power in Bengkulu, they would later trade this colony to the Dutch for Singapore and Malacca in Malaysia.  The fort is quite nice and the government has done a good job of maintaining it and putting up interpretive materials.  I paid the 2,500 rupiah (about 27 cents) to go in and was greeted by a very enthusiastic young lady who turned out to be a student at one of the local practical high schools.  She was studying to be a tour guide, and wanted to practice with me.  I was really impressed with her knowledge of the history of the fort and had a good time overall.  It definitely is worth a visit.

My friend Yanti from the elephant camp was also in Bengkulu, where she is officially based, to take care of a tiger that had been caught in a trap.   She invited me over to the Bureau of Natural Resources to see the creature.  When we went to the holding area outside the back of the building the tiger saw me and immediately unleashed a roar that made my hair stand on end.  My tiger expert friend in Sungai Penuh had described the roar of the Sumatran tiger to me in the past, but you really have to experience it to understand it.  From three meters away I was immediately as scared as I've ever been in my life.  Then the tiger focused its gaze on me and I saw death in her eyes.  I hope to God that I never run into one of these in the forest.  This particular tiger will never be returned to the wild, as Yanti had to remove eight of her toes.  She'll probably be sent to the Taman Safari zoo in Bogor on Java, where they have several dozen tigers that have been caught in traps. 

After meeting with a couple of NGO folks and a reporter for the national news service I headed out for Curup, which I'll describe in the next post.