A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani

Author:Tiziano Terzani [Terzani, Tiziano]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-56573-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 1997-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

I had not tried to imagine Pulau Bintan, and at first sight I found it magnificent, still natural, not yet ruined by modernity. The boat tied up at an old wharf and we disembarked down a long wooden plank. The streets were narrow, the houses all one or two stories high. Nobody appeared to have air conditioning. I took a room in an old inn across from a mosque, and hired an interpreter and a driver who came to offer their services. We would be spending a couple of days together, and I thought the best way of getting acquainted was for us to go and have lunch. In hiring the driver I had not worried about what sort of car he had, and I was pleasantly surprised: an old-fashioned Chevrolet, held together with wire.

“We’re lucky,” said Nordin, the interpreter. “In the Riau archipelago we have cars that don’t exist even in America anymore.”

Pulau Bintan (pulau means “island,” bintan means “betel nut”), three times the size of Singapore and with a population of only 250,000 people, is the main island of the Riau archipelago, lying between Sumatra and Java. The Riau islands are rich in oil—they supply most of Indonesia’s crude petroleum—and other natural resources. Bintan itself has large deposits of bauxite, exploited in the past by the Dutch and now by the Japanese. The capital of the island is Tanjung Pinang (tanjung means “port”), with a population of about ninety thousand. The overwhelming majority are Chinese, who here, as elsewhere, control all the shops and all commercial activity.

The restaurant we went to, the best in town according to my two companions, was Chinese. We sat on a beautiful wooden deck, overlooking the sea. Everything you might want to eat was in a tank below: different sorts of fish, crabs, lobsters and prawns, all alive. You looked down from above and made your selection, then a boy scooped out the victims and sent them to the cook in a basket. In due course the bones and shells were thrown over the railing back into the sea to be carried away by the tide.

In travelers’ tales, even modern ones, one rarely reads about what people eat; yet in Asia food is still one of the great pleasures. The variety is enormous, the methods of preparation are still simple, and the smells and colors are as much a part of the pleasure as the tastes. Every dish has a magic property all its own: one is good for the liver, another for the circulation; one fruit warms, another cools; and many things are good for sex, a common obsession of all peoples in this part of the world.

Sex also dominated our conversation. Nordin began by telling me to be careful in Indonesia when speaking the little Malay that I knew. Indonesian and Malay are virtually identical languages, but several words have quite different meanings. Aqua, for example, means “water” in Malay but something else in Indonesian. A week before, the Bintan football team were in Kuala Lumpur.

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