Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani

Author:Elizabeth Pisani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

I set off to explore the island, stopping in at the tourism department’s office in search of a map. Behind a wall of large, faded photographs of ‘Tourism Objects’ pinned behind crispy yellow cellophane, was a large, open-plan office. Eight people wearing smart batik uniforms, each neatly labelled with their name like pots of stock in the freezer, sat behind eight tidy wooden desks. More than tidy: not one of the desks had anything on it. Not a single sheet of paper, not a pencil or a calculator, not even a phone. The liveliest thing in the room was the television, which was blaring out a sinetron.

I bid everyone a cheery good day, and asked if they might have a map I could look at. They turned their heads, panic-stricken. A map! A MAP! There’s a guest, and she wants a MAP! Eight worker bees scattered in eight directions. Cupboards were opened, drawers were rummaged in. Someone produced a brochure about underwater volcanoes. There were blobs showing me where they were in relation to the larger blob of Sangihe, but no information about how I might visit them. ‘There’s a German guy in Manado with a boat, I heard,’ ventured one of the staff. Manado is the capital of North Sulawesi. It’s an overnight ferry ride away.

We made general small talk about tourism in Sangihe (pronounced Sangur by the locals). Did they get lots of tourists? Hmmm. Hard to know exactly. Lots of them come from Manado, you see. But yes, probably lots. At least 200 every year. And how did they know what to visit? ‘Well, if they come here, we give them a brochure,’ said one of the ladies.

I rented a motorbike from a kindly Bugis trader in the market who gave me a little bag of salted bananas chips to stave off hunger, and headed off down the coast. The road hugged the lumpy side of the island, snaking above a series of beautiful curved bays, winding through villages of tidy bungalows standing in flower gardens. Painted shutters were flung open to reveal matching curtains; graduation portraits and crucifixes graced the walls.

After about thirty kilometres, the road dropped down to the coast and a triumphal arch announced the Dagoh special fishing port. I drove past a largish clump of buildings that looked abandoned; a commemorative plaque told me they dated from the 1970s and had been inaugurated by President Suharto himself. There was no sign of life.

Then I spotted a sizeable boat getting ready to cast off from a pier behind the buildings, a boat with a proper cabin, with bunks, with a kitchen. It had eight numbered hatches on its deck, each one a fish-coffin that could hold between ten and twenty tuna. The boat-owner was on shore saying goodbye to his wife and young son: he was bound for Manado, some 240 kilometres away, with a cargo of one hundred tuna that he had bought from the small traders in Tahuna.

What did he do for ice? I asked.

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