Rick Hosking - Tripping!: Preview "ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE--'Olla'"

Rick Hosking - Tripping!: Preview "ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE--'Olla'"

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE--'Olla'

Olla

Losari Waterfront, Makassar

Makassar Sulawesi Indonesia 2000

I left Phil in the Jet Club about eleven pm and ambled along the dark, rain-puddled waterfront, back to the Makassar Royal Hotel. In the lobby, sitting straight backed and smiling primly, was a Mamasan and two girls. I was sleepy and said, ‘No’ to the offer of company but as I turned the handle of my room door, one of the girls stepped up beside me, smiling. She looked up at me, tilted her head and motioned to go in. She was a real beauty and I thought, ‘Oh well, why not’? Her name was Olla. She had long brown hair and stood about five feet tall. She had a beautiful white toothed smile, deep brown eyes and as I would find out later, a wicked sense of humour. For the next month, she and her 'family' commandeered my life. I let it happen because I was at a loose end, waiting for a boat to sail, and it was fun; we laughed a lot. The vessel I was waiting for was the 20 metre wooden, motor-sailer 'Toby B' which was being readied for its maiden voyage from Sulawesi to Dili, the capital of East Timor. A lot of construction work was going on in Dili, after the bloody withdrawal of the Indonesian Army in 1999, so there was money to be made. Phil and I had been working there, at the Metanaro army base, coating concrete slabs with epoxy resin and readying the buildings for occupation by the ex-guerrilla force, the new Timor Leste Army.

Tex, ’Toby B’s owner/builder, was new to the boating caper and had never captained a vessel, or even sailed before. Tex needed help, at least for awhile, until he gained confidence. So, Phil was to skipper the boat and I was to navigate. After parting with Olla, I made a two-day trip to Bira to check on the ’Toby B’ and meet the crew. I didn’t want to work on the boat. I had been in similar positions with other boats and I didn’t want to do it again, unless it was my own. I zipped back to Makassar before I found myself lugging sandbags or cleaning the bilge. I was willing to help sail her but I wasn’t interested in doing any heavy work to get her ready.

Olla knew immediately that I was back in town. While I was out and about, chasing up the bank, she moved into my room-just like that. The desk staff apparently had no problem with it. They gave her my room key! As I walked in through the lobby, the staff kept ‘mum’. I could hear a racket coming from my room. I opened my room-door and peered in to be confronted by a flotilla of females. Olla came with an entourage; her gypsy family, girlfriends, sisters, Mamasan and all that entailed. The room was full of cigarette smoke and chat. Mamasan introduced her thirteen year old son, Asri, a quiet lad unable to compete with the constant girl-talk and Mamasan’s younger sister, Mila. They stayed late; watching TV, taking showers, smoking clove cigarettes and singing karaoke. Olla ordered everything from room service, but didn’t ask me for money. At some point in the evening, upon a secret sign from Olla, they all said their goodbyes and a calm silence engulfed the room. We turned up the air-conditioning and cuddled up for the night.

The next day we spent curled up on the bed watching TV. Olla was eighteen years old but knew very little of the outside world. She could read and write, but not well. I showed her a dictionary but she couldn’t use it. Mamasan brought her two youngest daughters to visit; ten year-old Uti and twelve year-old Dosi. She told me that her husband had died in a head-on car collision and, true story or not, she had to feed the family somehow. Whether Olla and Tilsa were really her daughters I never found out.

Olla called room service on the slightest whim. She called for fresh towels, to order beer, forks and spoons to eat our take away food, to order taxis, to send the room boy out for her favourite cigarettes. When I came back with our lunch she fed me by the spoonful and placed her tiny hand under my chin to catch any falling grains of rice. She smiled and kissed my closed lips and whispered ‘luar biasa’. She moved a boom-box into the room so she could listen to ‘Indo-pop’.

One night, after drinking beer at the Semarang kiosk with Canadian Bruce, who was also building a boat, we went back to my room to talk. It was full of girls. They were friends and cousins, plus Aunty and Mamasan, a big woman with bearing, who at forty-five, was a formidable character. The two youngest jumped up and down on the bed, twittering like birds, ecstatic at my arrival. The older two were lazing, bodies stretched lasciviously across the bed, in white towels fresh from bathing. Mamasan, like a sentry, was perched on a bamboo chair by the wall, talking loudly with her own sister. We had brought sweet meats with us from the supermarket and everyone got a cake. Bruce stayed for one beer but couldn’t bear the smoke that billowed from the clove cigarettes and filled every corner of the room. We watched MTV while room service delivered anything that Olla's dialling fingers considered necessary. The girls chattered and Mamasan looked on. Bruce disappeared upstairs with Mamasan’s sister and the rest of us took showers and laughed and ate and drank and smoked. Room service remained on standby.

On Olla’s wink, Mamasan took the young ones home and the others went out to Zig Zag, a locals only sleaze-pit/disco; very crowded, very dark, very loud; alive with pickpockets and illicit sex in the dark, dead end corners. My first night in town I walked into the Zig Zag and it was pitch-black. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, people danced or more properly seethed around the dance floor. Two arms pushed me backwards through the crowd to the back of the room and sat me at a table and stool arrangement. I was wearing cargo pants. I had a lot of pockets to protect. She was pretty, about twenty and had calloused peasant palms and while distracting me with one, probed my cargo pants with the other. It was a gentle war of wills. I survived without losing my wallet or even my pride; it was too dark for anyone to see! Phil didn’t fare so well, his wallet gone in a flash.

I wanted to sleep. At intervals, during the night, one by one, my new friends appeared in the room to use the phone or the bathroom or just to talk. The night disappeared through a haze of door-knocks, phone-calls and changing CD's. By four am I was getting tetchy, someone was knocking again but I ignored them. I just needed to sleep. Olla let herself in, she was a little drunk-a tigress, demanding sex from a sleepy old man, nostrils flared, and a wild sexuality flaunting itself to the soundtrack of the buzzing neon sign outside the window. We made love as it flashed greens and reds on the windowpane.

Next morning, Olla, her 'sister' Tilsa and I wandered the market looking for an extra microphone, so two people could karaoke together. It was a bizarre situation and I was intrigued watching it play out.

Tilsa bought a microphone and they spent that day in talent quest heaven, singing Indonesian love songs, now with two singers! I found myself standing in the room as an observer thinking,
‘This can’t last.’
I couldn’t help but smile.

Phil rang from Bira wondering about the money situation.
'Whataya doin’? He asked.
'Well,’ I replied, ‘I'm lying face down on the bed with Olla spread-eagled beside me feeding me grapes. She has just finished shaving me with a Gillette, double-sided, blue blade. Holding the blade between thumb and index finger she sat on my legs and shaved my lower body from stem to stern and I can tell you, yes, I was a little worried but it is something she does to herself every day, so hopefully, I'm in good hands, I haven't annoyed her about anything so I wasn’t thinking mutilation’.
Phil laughed, and gave me an update on the ’Toby Lee’ departure.
'I'm coming back to Makassar, he said. 'I've run out of money.
‘So have I’, I replied.
Bira had no bank, so getting money meant a trip to Makassar.

Olla and I went out for lunch to her favourite ‘warung’. Wherever we went, building workers stared and laughed and shouted lewd comments. She’d look up at me, raise her eyebrows and grin. I think she liked the attention. Olla never tired of expounding upon the intimate details of our love making. She told the ‘becak’ (bicycle rickshaw) driver, street friends, and the shop-keepers she knew. She hammed it up, complete with boom-booms, hand motions and theatrics. She giggled about it, but, without sounding shrill or acting grossly. She was young, and a little gauche. She said I was ‘luar biasa’.

In the afternoons, about two o’clock, Olla usually disappeared into the bathroom to perform shamanistic beauty rituals, and freshen up. She’d reappear wearing the same short, blue-flowered, cotton frock every day. She’d lie down beside me and I’d give her a gentle massage and when I lifted her skirt I’d find she had no pants on. Then I’d look at her and she’d smile, and well, you know the rest. It was a ritual that we never tired of and when, eventually, I crept away from Olla, knowing I’d probably never see her again, I missed those afternoon shenanigans.

At seven-thirty pm the security guard knocked on the door and implored them to cease and desist with the karaoke. I heaved a sigh of relief as well. Mamasan arrived with the family and we watched Indo-pop on VCD. She massaged my feet and I got Dosi to walk on my back Japanese style. It was a cosy evening with the bed full of bodies sleeping like a pack of puppies. Next morning, Mamasan took us to see a house for rent. It was a two story pink edifice with stainless steel banisters and white tiled floors; the best house in the worst street but, no hot water and no fans and I thought we could find better. Rent was six million Rupiah a year. Olla keeps saying 'luar biasa' to me. I'll have to find out what that means. I went out to the Semarang Kiosk to see Bruce and when I got back there was a strange man in my room. Apparently he was a regular client of Tilsa's, who came to see her whenever he was in town. He sat on the only chair, unconcerned at breaching my privacy, as were the women. Not that I cared, it was all theatre to me. Phil and I went back and forth to Bira until the day finally arrived for us to move aboard the ‘Toby B’.

Before that time arrived, Olla’s evil twin descended upon us. They were the same size and had the same features but they were born fifty years apart. Olla’s grandmother arrived from Kendari wearing a long, floor-length, black lace, dress and a black lace ‘jilbab’. After being informed of my social position she said hello and asked for the plane fare back to Kendari. I didn’t have a plane fare to the centre of town let alone Kendari! That morning Olla had given ME money because she knew the bank hadn’t delivered yet.

Grandma’s arrival prompted the party to move upstairs where Mamasan had rented a room. I went upstairs with Olla, to visit. I shot some video with Phil’s new Sony and amazed the old lady, who had never seen herself on video before. The room was packed to the rafters with family, eating and talking and smoking all at the same time. I returned to my room to enjoy the peace and quiet, grateful to the old lady for providing a change.

One terrible day, it was time to leave; the boat was finally ready. Terrible for me, because I was making a cowardly exit without saying goodbye, and terrible for Olla because she actually liked me and probably thought she had a fish on the hook. I packed up and left Makassar for good. She told me she was pregnant. Can you know that quickly? I would never be sure. Olla thought I was going for a couple of days as usual, but I wasn’t, I didn’t see her again.

I still think of Olla. She came into my room when I was away, in Bira, once and wrote a letter in my writing pad.

Hello Papa,

Papa I love you. I will never forget you. For the rest of my life, you will always be in my heart. You may have forgotten me. If you have, that’s ok. You can tell me and I can take that. I miss the time when we were together. I often cry alone. I don’t feel like eating and sleeping. I always miss you. – Maybe you don’t love me anymore? I may go far away and may not see you. You should find another good woman. I won’t be jealous. I love you because you are nice, but sometimes you aren’t nice.

Bye, Olla

luar biasa—extraordinary, amazing

Scooter Life! - Surabaya 2009

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Tunas Harapan - 1978 - Bud of Hope

Below is an account of a voyage taken by Bob Hobman, Nick Burningham and myself from Benoa, Bali, to Darwin, Australia via Ende, Flores in 1978.It was a dramatic voyage highlighted by blown out sails,monster swell,dragging anchors and a leaky boat that had to be continuously pumped out - manually!

Here is Nick's story.

Darwin to Bali

Meanwhile, Bob Hobman the erstwhile co-owner of SIOLA TAU had heard, from Peter Walker, of a lambo [a type of Indonesian sailing vessel] for sale at Benoa which sounded like a good deal. He began collecting loans from acquaintances to implement his plan — to go up to Benoa, buy the lambo named Tunas Harapan ("Bud of Hope"), load a cargo and sail down to Darwin before the wet season westerlies faded. He generously offered to pay fares and expenses if I wanted to go. He also took Rick Hoskings who had sailed with him on Siola Tau and had the distinction of being the only one from Siola Tau’s crew who had not been hospitalised after any of their voyages.
We flew to Bali with charts, sextant and compass, and in a day or three Bob had bought Tunas Harapan. She was a good looking, low sheered, Butonese lambo, obviously quite old but well-built. She retained a tall gaff riggers mast with only a short masthead above the hounds although she had been rigged with a gunter mainsail for a year or two.
I cut a new mainsail and jib, some local sailors made new standing rigging cable, laying up galvanised fence wire by hand — a new fashion on Indonesian perahu at the time. The hand laid fence wire cable looked bad because you could never get it completely straight but it was strong and durable.
We ballasted with sand bags and started loading large terracotta pots, stone statues, cane furniture and all sorts of stuff. An old acquaintance from previous visits to Benoa turned up. Professor Adrian Horridge of the Australian National University, had published a number of monographs about Indonesian perahu, including one about the perahu lambo. I didn’t agree with all of his conclusions but we corresponded regularly. He asked to join Tunas Harapan for part of the voyage as far as Ende on the island of Flores where Bob intended to stop.
We also met up with Dr Colin Jack-Hinton, director of the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, another distinguished scholar of Southeast Asian maritime culture. He and Bob discussed the finer points of Asian maritime culture over twenty or thirty cold beers while Rick and I got on with the loading and caulking the decks. Colin agreed to purchase Wayan Kerig’s jukung for the collection of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Darwin if we could transport it to Darwin. It was a bit awkward. The jukung was about seven metres long, and so were its outrigger booms, while the outriggers themselves were ten metres long. We strapped the jukung and all its bits to the starboard side of the cabin where it completely blocked the side deck and meant that one had to climb outboard to get to the running backstays which was decidedly awkward, but not impossible. Since the jukung weighed at least a quarter of a tonne and was carried as deck cargo it was fortunate that we had plenty of ballast and cargo.
We sailed from Benoa at about the end of February. The wet season westerlies were blowing consistently with plenty of westerly squalls. We got a good offing and sailed south of the Lesser Sunda islands. Professor Horridge proved to be prone to seasickness and perhaps that was why he always tried to make Tunas Harapan self steer when he was given a trick at the helm. He said it was an experiment but as I told him every five or ten minutes, a sloop rigged lambo with its great long main boom sticking out one side doesn’t self steer when running down wind.
Bob enjoyed a reputation as a man who appreciated a few stiff drinks, even in Darwin where nearly everyone has a thirst like a suction dredge. However, at sea Bob very properly restricted himself and his the crew to a single cocktail taken during the cocktail hour before dark. Bob always mixed the cocktail himself following a simple recipe of his own devising.
1 Tip a litre bottle of rum or Dutch Genever into the coffee pot and top up with fruit juice.
2 Decant into three very large enamel mugs.

Bali to Flores

The first couple of days out, as we ran south of Lombok and Sumbawa, the wind was moderate with just a few windy squalls. On the evening of the third night, as we left Sumba strait, the weather astern looked very black indeed. Gradually the wind increased . We kept running with it and running before the wind didn’t appreciate its full strength. We hung on to the mainsail for too long. When the squall hit hard we had to let Tunas Harapan round up into the wind in order to drop the mainsail and as we did that the jib flogged its clew to bits . The foot of the main got damaged too. Once the main was approximately furled we had to furl the torn jib which gave us a hard fight. With the wind screaming from astern, the jib, with its foot laced to a boom, kept ballooning full of wind and trying to run back up the jib stay. It was all I could do to lock my arms around the jib, and my legs around the bowsprit while yelling for Rick to get a gasket round the sail. Though he was only a couple of metres away he couldn’t hear me. It was easier to get the jib furled when Tunas Harapan came round broadside to the weather.
We lay ahull for a while, broadside on, and the weather did not improve at all. We were drifting towards a headland and calculated that if it kept blowing just as hard all night we might be smashed into the cliffs of the headland before dawn. We had no serviceable sails bent and in those conditions we could not bend spare sails.
We got Tunas Harapan running under bare poles and found that she could be steered about 20–25º degrees from straight downwind and maintain steerage, but I was the only one who could judge the course and avoid stalling her in the black night with no visual clues to give the course. The binnacle light had failed so I steered nearly all night judging the course from the wind direction. That was the easy job. You face dead ahead and the wind tearing past your ears should give you an accurate indication of wind direction relative to heading.
I was glad to be steering. Once we got Tunas Harapan running on a course clear of the headland, we closed up the aft companion way because waves were breaking over the aft deck and slopping through the companion way. Then the bilge pumping started. In any sort of breeze Tunas Harapan needed a couple of hundred strokes on the bilge pump at the end of each three hour watch. This time Rick and Bob pumped for about an hour before the pump sucked dry and then had to pump for forty-five minutes in every hour for the rest of the night. About 4:00 am the weather had improved a little, but we were running slower and more seas were breaking over the aft deck. Bob issued very large tots of whisky which were delicious beyond belief and kept us going. At dawn Bob took the helm and Rick and I started repairing the jib clew.
At no time during the night had we seen Adrian. He must have had a terrifying night, shut in the cabin in complete darkness with a lot of water coming in and deafening noise from the wind and sea.
Repairing the jib was going to take an hour or two, so we set the main deep reefed because it was more or less intact above the reef band. We got the roughly repaired jib reset a little later and we were sailing again, running for the shelter of Ipih bay to the east of Ende. During the day the wind gradually eased. At dusk we rounded the volcanic headland south of Ende and sheeted in to sail into Ipih. Under the lee of the volcano the wind got lighter and lighter. It was hopeless trying to tack up to Ipih with the mainsail deep reefed so we had to bring out the spare mainsail. We'd never tried to set it. It was a polyweave sail and was said to be smaller than the mainsail we were using, but it turned out to be larger. With the gunter spar set as high as possible the boom hung down to the aft deck. Each time we tacked we had to lift the boom and carry it over the boom crutch, but it was a good sail for tacking in light conditions.
It was well after midnight when we felt our way into Ipih and dropped an anchor somewhere near the other anchored perahu. We shared a bottle of spirits and fell into deep sleep.
I woke an hour or three later and noticed that Tunas Harapan was rolling beam on to a surprisingly large chop. On deck I found that we had dragged our anchor out of the shallows of Ipih bay and it was now hanging straight down. We had drifted a couple of miles back out to sea. I called the others and we wearily hauled the anchor up and got under sail again. Even if your hands are hard and caloused, they can be very sensitive to hard ropes when you're fatigued. We anchored again at dawn.
During several days at Ipih we recut the polyweave mainsail and straightened out the rough repairs to the jib. We tried to stuff a bit of caulking in the most obvious above-waterline leaks. Adrian Horridge went ashore and immediately hospitalised himself for no obvious reason. Rick retained his record of being Bob’s only crew-member (other than me) never to have been hospitalized after a voyage.
In Ende we ate a very delicious oven-roast suckling pig thanks to a friendly Chinese shop keeper, Edi Setiawan, and his hospitable family.

Flores to Darwin

Then we went back to sea. We sailed across the Sabu Sea towards the southern tip of Timor and found ourselves a little too close to the lee shore of Semau island in the night. It was a moonlit night with quite a lot of cloud scudding across the sky and the wind was freshening, it was from the west and backing slightly south of west, so instead of broad reaching past the end of Semau into Rote Strait we were increasingly sheeting in and beginning to find ourselves clawing off a lee shore in a rising wind. At times in the moonlight we could see the breakers and the white sandy beaches of Semau. If the wind had got much stronger we would have had difficulty beating away from the shore, but it was a short-lived worry. By dawn we were slipping past the end of Semau and running through Rote strait to the Timor Sea. Our crossing of the Timor Sea was easy but the northwest wind was gradually diminishing. Sun sights and radio direction finding showed that we were being set very strongly to the north as we approached Beagle Gulf and in the lightening wind conditions we had to make a larger and larger alteration to our rhumb-line course to avoid being taken north around Cape Fourcroy.
As we sailed up Darwin harbour the winds were very light and just before dawn, as we approached the Port of Darwin anchorage, a slight squall came from the east — the first easterly of the year. We were lucky to sail all the way to Darwin before the southeast trades started to argue with the monsoon.

Surabaya East-Java Indonesia

Java's second city after Jakarta, Surabaya boasts some fine Dutch colonial architecture but it's disappearing quickly, especially the commercial buildings. Surabaya's classic pre WW2 mid-town street scape has all but gone except for a handful of examples led by the magnificent Majapahit Hotel. Even this building suffers from a 1930's addition to it's street frontage which when compared to the grandeur of the original wings is a complete joke.Old photos of the city show a civilised street life. Few motor vehicles, the clang of the streetcars and well dressed people meandering along the boulevardes. The difference with today's city life couldn't be more apparent.City life now is sequestered behind concrete in the many malls that spread the length and breadth of Surabaya.

Rote Island Indonesia - Bringing The Music Back Home 1976 - 2006

I love islands. I collect islands. One of the first islands I collected was Rote (pronounced Ro-tay), off the south-western tip of Timor in Indonesia. In 1976, hell bent on adventure, I left cyclone ravaged Darwin and joined a crew to sail to Rote and retrieve a foundered vessel with the tantalizing name of Siola Tau (Come With Us). While there, mono cassette recorder in hand, I recorded a local musician, Markus Tadak, as he played a curious stringed instrument called a sesando. That tape lay in my drawer at home for thirty years. I returned to Rote in 2006 and took the music back to the musician where my return was marked with a special treat - dog for dinner.

For three hundred years Makassan Bugis sailors seasonally visited Marege as they called the North Australian coast. It is incomprehensible to me that Australians, as well traveled as we are, until recently have pretty much ignored the Indonesian Archipelago. However, Bob Hobman and Robin Davey couldn't ignore Indonesia. They owned one of the first Indonesian perahus (boats) to legally enter Australian waters. As it turned out Siola Tau was the vehicle for my quest for adventure.

Siola Tau, fifteen metres long and weighing twenty tonnes was built in the Pangguran Islands, north of Bali, by local boat builders using hand tools such as adze, saw, mallet, chisel and a drill made from wood and string from plans drawn in the sand. Every swing of the adze could be seen in the planks of her hull. Caulked with paper bark and using antifouling made from a mixture of crushed coral (lime) and coconut oil, the boat was fixed with wooden dowels without a single screw or nail. She had a Nade or Gunter rig i.e. the mainsail had a short gaff that when hauled up sat snugly and upright against the mast. With no deep keel to help her steer the jib boom sometimes needed to be backed or held into the wind in order to encourage her to come about. She was built by eye and the starboard profile of the hull varied from the port profile. On a good day this trade-winds vessel could cover one hundred nautical miles. She was more than a vessel she was a work of art.

Before I met her Siola Tau had left Bali in 1975 and set sail for Darwin, Australia with a crew of five. They had no motor but plenty of chutzpah. By the time they reached the island of Rote, the last landfall before the Timor Sea crossing to Darwin, the crew were ill with malaria and hepatitis. To add to their woes the boat leaked like a sieve. The crew pumped the bilge continuously by hand barely making landfall at the port of Baa where they ran her up onto the beach. It was ten months before they were to return.

For the next four months, the townspeople of Baa and the Catholic priest, Father Franz, nursed the crew back to health. With astonishing goodwill they arranged for a family to feed and house each crew member. Because of that care and devotion the crew came through their ordeal and lived to sail another day.

That day came when Bob and Robin set about making plans for the retrieval and homecoming of Siola Tau. When I heard their story thoughts of cleaning up Darwin disappeared and with blind enthusiasm I offered my services to help bring the vessel home. Before long we were sailing to a place I'd never seen nor heard of, to the island of Rote in Indonesia. This is a story of two journeys thirty years apart.

We sailed out of Darwin Harbour in October 1976 aboard the wonderful wooden sloop Diva Jana. She was piled high with materials and equipment for the rescue of Siola Tau and goods for the people of Baa. After four days sailing westward across the Timor Sea, Rote rose from the horizon. The little port town of Baa grew larger, it's long wharf stretched out across the fringing reef like a beckoning finger. The returning sailors were greeted with gusto. During our weeklong stay we had so many dinner invitations that most days we ate four full meals. The food was delicious, usually a smorgasbord of rice, corn, pork, beef, goat, chicken, greens and chili. Unwilling to upset our hosts or seem unappreciative we ate with everyone who asked.

The Lontar palm is central to Rotenese culture. It provides food, shelter and entertainment. The milky white sap called tuak is a delicious glucose rich drink that has provided the Rotenese succor in times of drought. When the tuak is distilled the result is a fiery clear spirit called sopi, a moonshine produced clandestinely across the countryside in illicit stills. The broad-fingered leaves of the Lontar are used to make vessels to carry the tuak and to make the sound box of an unusual stringed instrument called a sesando. This was an instrument I wanted to hear and record.


To capture this music proved difficult. Some musicians just didn't play very well and one recording session ended in violent disarray. We were in the countryside at the hut of an old couple, whose names escape me now, but the episode will live long in my memory. The man played the sesando cradled on his knees in the traditional manner and they sang well together in a screeching high-pitched harmony helped by the lubrication of a glass of sopi or two. The thatch-roofed hut was full of friends and relations who, as the band played on, became louder and drunker. Something that started out promising descended into chaos.

A toothless old man wearing a sarong and sandals became a danger to himself and others and was ejected from the party. He returned a couple of times but couldn't stand still and bumped his way around the hut knocking people over. Three of his compatriots hoisted him horizontally and proceeded to evict him again. He screamed for release and as they speared him towards the front door he wrapped his feet around the central pole of the rickety building. The walls shook and the thatch shimmied. It was like a mini earthquake about to devastate the whole place. The harmonies became weaker and weirder. Thatch floated down through the air like confetti as the miscreant was unceremoniously dumped over the side of the small ravine beside the hut. He rolled like tumbleweed to the bottom cussing and spitting and we could hear him vowing revenge during his subsequent unsuccessful attempts to scramble to the top.

The old couple's timing became erratic and their harmonies descended into a squawk as they simultaneously fell sideways off their chairs to land in a single crumpled heap on the dirt floor. It was time to leave. Who was going to play definitive sesando for us?

The Tadak house was like all the others on the hill above the town, thatched roof, split bamboo walls and earthen floor. Markus had been recommended to me as the man to see about sesando music. He agreed to let me record and so, with a bottle of sopi and the mono tapedeck, Robin Davey and I zigzagged up moonlit tracks to Markus's house. Lontar palms were silhouetted on the ground and Baa twinkled below. The evening warmed out across the Indian Ocean encouraging my fantasies about tropical islands. After the previous melee we approached Markus's house hoping for something better.

The yellow glow of a hurricane lamp painted our shadows across the beaten bamboo walls. In the two rooms were one table, four metal chairs and a bed. Rob, Markus and his brother Yakob and I sat down around the table and Markus Tadak began the arduous job of tuning his instrument. Today, sesandos sport guitar strings but in the 1970's strings were made from whatever came to hand. In this case household fuse wire and unwound motorcycle brake cables made up the eighteen strings each positioned length-ways around the circumference of a piece of bamboo 400mm long. The bamboo itself was positioned pole to pole within the semi sphere of the Lontar leaf sound box. This was an alien instrument.

Markus's wife sat on the bed in the other room. She made some appearances with snacks of gulah merah or solidified palm sugar, and biscuits. The sopi bottle clinked against the glasses and forty minutes elapsed before the musician was happy with the sound of his instrument. He tuned it by nudging triangular wooden bridges set between each string and the bamboo tube. Through this twiddling a rhythm emerged and Markus began a twenty minute flailing of his instrument playing with force and precision, segueing between rhythms, varying his speed and attack; the right hand forming the bass lines and the left hand conjuring up melodies. He began to sing.

Teomarinda...oh!...sama sai..ai... sama sai..ai...ai.

It reminded me of the guttural sounds of some of the early Mississippi Delta blues men, not pretty but heartfelt and on pitch. He played for over an hour segueing smoothly from one song to the next. Yakob tapped out the beat on the sound box. It was too loud for the recording's sake but I was loath to interfere; the brothers had been doing this all their lives.

We sat alone in Markus's house. There had been no invitations to party. We needed to take this seriously. By 9.30 pm the tape was full and the bottle was empty so we bid farewell to Markus and his wife and his brother Yakob. Stepping outside into the moonlight I had no idea that I would not see them again for a very long time. That cassette tape lay in my drawer at home for thirty years until 2006 when I took the music home to the musician.


A few days later, overfed and smiling, we left for Oiselli on the southern tip of Rote. Siola Tau had been moved there for shelter and security. The bay was cobalt blue and the white sand beach had a coconut grove behind it and was bordered by rocky headlands. Irianto, a young man with long hair and a long nose had been employed to live aboard and keep her secure and shipshape while the crew was away.

Father Franz, a native of Austria, was destined to spend his life ministering to the people of Rote and Savu. He is still there today. An extraordinary man, 190 cm tall with crew-cut hair, he wore short shorts with rolled up cuffs, sandals and towered over his parishioners. His thick black-framed spectacles curiously enlarged his eyes adding to his overpowering presence. In attempts to raise the islanders' standard of living and ameliorate the sometimes-brutal effects of the dry season he began experimental projects all over the island. Despite a jealous machete-wielding neighbour cutting down his banana plants he continued to grow them. He was a determined man.

Franz ferried our gear and us in a vehicle built in The Netherlands called a Haflinger. Like a cross between a Mini-Moke and a Quad bike this little all-terrain vehicle bumped and smoked and revved over the atrocious island roads. Franz drove crazily and fast. Momentum was needed to crest the hills on the rock-strewn tracks. The overloaded two stroke bounced and wheezed it's way backwards and forwards between Baa and Oiselli in clouds of dust and blue smoke until all the gear stored at the church was back aboard the boat. Franz was also an action man.

Siola Tau needed a new boom so a party walked to the forest and returned with a gigantic stem of bamboo ten metres long and 200mm in diameter. It was stripped of branches and a y-shaped yoke fashioned from mangrove root fitted to one end. It was then hoisted into place behind Siola Tau's naturally curved grown timber mast. Fertilizer bags filled with sand were placed in the bilge to augment the smooth river rocks already there as ballast and the sails bent onto the mast. New lines were spliced and diced from polypropylene rope bought in Kupang, Timor. We loaded 200 litres of fresh well water and a kerosene stove for cooking. On the night before our departure we had a mad sopi-soaked party on Siola Tau's deck complete with a gong ensemble. This consisted of people striking what looked like big rusty hubcaps with little sticks creating crazy offbeat rhythms. Village people laughed, sang, screamed, gonged, fell or were pushed overboard and partied until dawn.

The next day with the wind from the south and on our bow we kedged out of Oiselli Bay. Kedging involved a well-balanced crew in a sampan manipulating two anchors and line. One anchor was ferried forward in the sampan, deployed, and the vessel hauled up to it. The sampan was again paddled forward and the second anchor deployed and the vessel hauled up again. In this way Siola Tau inched towards the mouth of the bay whereupon the sails were hoisted and the tiller pushed hard over. She turned eastward and the gentle slap of the ocean against the hull told us we were making way. Next stop Port Darwin, Australia.

Tropical storms, known as line squalls, formed menacingly across the southern horizon. At times eight or ten hovered in the distance. We skirted the edge of one black maelstrom. The wind on it's periphery blew us safely away like Cassini sling-shotting around Jupiter. We dodged a couple more but it was inevitable that sooner or later we would be swallowed. When we did succumb Siola Tau was held captive and battered for eight hours. She began to leak badly and I thought, what am I doing here?

Below deck the water rose to the level of the seating around the saloon table. We took turns pumping the bilge using the traditional Indonesian maritime force pump; a bamboo tube, a stick for pumping and the cut up sole of a thong for a seal and a valve flap. Australians are not the only improvisers.

During next morning's calm I watched Robin Davey, a diver by profession, slip into the water amongst circling sharks to plug the leaking seam with plasticene. The leak slowed but we pumped continuously to Darwin. Great for the upper body but ultimately exhausting and luckily for Robin the sharks were not hungry that day.

Siola Tau was run up onto another beach next to the Trailer Boat Club in Fanny Bay and later sold for one dollar. She lived in Darwin for another fifteen years before sinking in the harbour on a Sunday sail, an ignominious end for a gallant vessel.

The tape of Markus Tadak's music lay in my drawer for thirty years. Every so often I took it out and played it. I don't think my friends liked it much - too raw - but it became an old friend to me.

Over the intervening years I toyed with the idea of taking the music back to Markus and his family on Rote Island and as 2005 became 2006 the idea became more fixed in my mind. After all thirty years seemed an appropriate anniversary for a return. Even so, I held no high hopes for the project. Markus was in his fifties in 1976 and may well have shuffled off this mortal coil. However, I knew Rote was a place of oral history and family legends so I could give the music to his relatives. Surely someone would remember the legend of Siola Tau.

Before leaving for Indonesia Cal Williams, an old friend and one of the driving forces behind the band Yothu Yindi, cleaned up the tape and transferred it to CD in the music room at Charles Darwin University. My return to Rote began one morning in July 2006 as the Air North Brasilia turbo-prop took off over a shimmering Fanny Bay and headed for Kupang, Timor.

El Tari Airport sits on a rocky plateau overlooking Kupang Harbour. The terminal buildings echo the high pointed roofs of traditional Timorese architecture. On my first visit there in 1973 the terminal was in a tin shed and I took advantage of the break in the flight to Bali to use the lavatory that was also in a tin shed out on the field. I fronted up to the cracked and mineral stained porcelain urinal and while sniffing the pervading aroma a fellow passenger with a greying beard and wearing a safari suit stepped up beside me. He saw my look of consternation so slapped me on the back and said with a chuckle,

You're in the Orient now, boy!

The Maliana Hotel was my favourite low-rent accommodation in Kupang. Situated on Jalan Siliwangi, the esplanade that runs along the edge of the harbour, it offers motel-style rooms with bamboo verandah furniture where you sit and look across the harbour foreshore. Mini buses called bemos, plastered with trashy iconography mostly about sex and movie stars, doof-doofed up and down the street with their horns bleating sequentially. They stopped and started willy-nilly as they touted for customers. If Bali is the front door for tourists going to Indonesia then Kupang is definitely the back door. The short flight from Darwin to Kupang reminds me of the times, growing up in Sydney, when I jumped our back fence to take a short cut to my friend's house in the next street.

Across the road from the Maliana was L' Avalon, a Bar with no walls. Edwin, the owner, was constructing the building around an already functioning business. Here I met Dave, a middle-aged Aussie, who spends half his year at Nemberala on Rote. He lived in the village of Sedowa assisting the locals to sink wells. He had also bought a bemo for the local youths so they could make an income by ferrying surfers from the wharf at Baa to the guesthouses of Nemberala. Luckily Dave advised me to take cash to Baa because there was no ATM capable of handling international transactions on Rote. Perched on the rocks above a harbour beach, L' Avalon became a place to source local information, buy hot chips and beer, get online or perhaps purchase some Ikat, traditional hand-woven cloth, from the hovering salesmen or just to socialise.

My anticipation was building so next morning I hired an ojak or motorcycle taxi that whisked me and my single piece of luggage around the winding coast road to the ferry terminal at Ternau for the fast boat to Baa. Arriving late, I was assigned a seat in the bowels of the vessel. Only a month previously an overloaded older ferry sank while crossing the Rote Strait so my eyes were constantly on the life jackets stowed above our heads. Were there enough to go around? I doubted it. This cigarette shaped Italian job flew out of the harbour and across the Rote Strait at 40 knots, white water whizzing behind. I was about to complete some kind of geo-social circle/cycle and Baa was just a "B" grade heist movie away.


The ferry docked at Baa two hours later and I disembarked into the brilliant morning sunshine to see the town for the first time in thirty years. A new jetty stretched 200 metres out into the clear water. Cargo dangled on derricks as Makassan perahus were loading. People milled, looking for relatives. Bus and bemo boys spruiked for passengers and motorcycles weaved through the throng. It seemed the sleepy town had woken up.

The town quickly threw up old landmarks. There was the lovely lady Foxy's shop where I had taken a shine to her younger cousin Linda, and she to me. Empty now, it had once been a bustling business situated as it was near the wharf. The office of Naval Communications and the Office of Animal Husbandry gave the area a more prosperous appearance. Thirty years had wrought some change. Around the next corner was the almost new Ricky Hotel, which I took as an sign, considering my name, and booked in. I had my bearings.


It was lunchtime so I strolled along the main street and popped into the first Nasi Padang restaurant on the strip. Delicious aromas of beef rendang and chicken curry wafted through the room. Half way through the meal an old man sitting opposite me asked,

Where are you from?
Darwin, Australia.
Ah. Where are you going?
I'm looking for a man named Markus Tadak. Do you know him?
Sadak?
No. Tadak.
Ah, Tadak, yes I know him. He lives up the top at 'Lete Langa'

My heart raced, at least he was pointing in the right direction according to my memory. He wrote down the address for me and left. I finished my meal, quaffed the sweet black tea and paid the bill. The mid day sun strobed my exit onto the rocky thoroughfare that passed for Baa's main street. The old fellow I'd just been talking to was standing on the road with a policeman who looked strangely familiar to me. Introduced as Irianto, he was Markus Tadak's son! He asked my business and I told him about my musical quest. He smiled and suggested we ride up to the house together. He was a big guy so I squeezed on the back of his little Yamaha and we putt-putted up the spaghetti-like tracks behind the town past lurching trucks and motor-cyclists who warned me to watch out because he was a crazy driver and how did I get a policeman to be my ojak. Markus Tadak's house was made from concrete bricks and had a tin roof. It was more substantial than the house I had known in 1976. I'd left home with the faint hope that Markus would still be alive. Soon I would know.

I peered through a grimy verandah window and saw an old man sleeping, taking his noonday nap. Irianto called out repeatedly.

Pak (Dad), there's someone to see you!

A wizened character emerged into the sunlight and his eyes, behind goggle-lensed glasses, appeared bigger than they really were. I couldn't believe it, here he was, alive if not kicking. Wracked with arthritis he would not be playing the sesando for me, but I would do that for him.

Someone found a boom box and we moved inside to hear the maestro's music. By then the whole family had gathered except for his wife, who had died. Two svelte old women wearing traditional sarong kebaya sat together on the floor. They were cousins and both called Lina, the two Linas or Lina dua. Everyone laughed because they looked so similar they could be interchangeable. The room was bare of decoration except for one photo of Markus holding his sesando.


A low hiss, then the clink and slop of sopi being poured into glasses slid out of the speakers. Markus's voice crackled down through time as he made small talk thirty years ago. The first notes of the sesando drifted through the house like ghosts. Lina dua's four eyes became wider and wider. Markus and Yakob sat motionless, apparently unperturbed. The children looked to their elders, beginning to understand the significance of what they were hearing. The emotion of the moment almost overwhelmed me. I'd left home thinking that Markus Tadak was probably dead. Experiencing this event brought a lump to my throat. It was amazing and as I watched the faces in the room I could tell that they thought it was amazing too. Did the enigmatic Markus think the same way? It was difficult to tell.

While the music played I was told some family history. Markus's son Johan, fifty five, a sailor and skinny like his dad, had spent five years in gaol in Western Australia for captaining a refugee boat that smuggled Pakistanis to Ashmore Reef. He served time in Kalgoorlie, Pilbara and Casuarina prisons from 1997 to 2002. Markus didn't say much. In fact, looking back, I hardly spoke to him at all. Everyone else talked so much he could not get a word in edgewise. On the other hand, he may have preferred it that way.

That evening the family held a spontaneous celebration to thank me for my trouble. The food was delicious, even the dog meat, that I'm sure they had gone to special trouble to prepare. I ate just enough to be polite. No, it didn't taste like chicken but instead tasted like beef. My western conditioning dampened my appetite for pooch curry.

Markus's music played all evening, Lina dua kept pressing the play button and smiling wistfully at each other. At one point a middle-aged woman danced in the traditional fashion, side on, knees bent and a shawl across her shoulders, moving to the rhythm. I joined her to cheers of delight. Irianto remembered our wild gong session aboard Sioa Tau and I came to the realisation that it was he who looked after the boat while the crew was away. Rote is a small place and everything is interconnected.

Thoughtfully, Johan took the picture of Markus off the wall and gave it to me. I was touched and asked Markus to sign it but he couldn't write. Johan sent someone off to find a ballpoint pen. He took his father's hand, inked his thumb and pressed it onto the back of the photo leaving an excellent impression. One of the Linas jumped up and disappeared into the back room returning with a faded colour snapshot of Yakob taken some years earlier. Johan repeated the process and inked Yakob's thumbprint onto the back of his photograph. You know how it feels when you want to achieve something and the pieces fall into place? Having the photos with the thumbprints on the back was winning the prize. I was going home with an Oscar for a job well done.

The owner of the Ricky Hotel called me the tourist asal disini or Rote's first tourist and later that week as we rode to the wharf to catch the ferry back to Kupang, Mus, my ojak, jokingly called back over his shoulder,

You're a legend!

Down at Nemberala, Emu, the young man who drove Dave's bemo, asked me if I was Mr Ricky and then proceeded to tell me the story of the procurement of the bamboo boom! Well, I'm part of the legend anyway.


That was my time on Rote island, a round trip that took thirty years to complete but was well worth the wait.

Kanchanaburi Thailand