Other side of the Wallace Line, just in case you were getting worried there. As in Alfred Russel Wallace, that is. And if you’ve heard of him, then you’ll know that the Line in question is the one that notionally divides the flora and fauna of Australasia from Asia. Which is an odd way of putting it, I suppose, since the Australasian part includes a chunk of what is geographically Indonesia, so that the islands roughly east of Borneo and Bali contain such treasures as Birds of Paradise and animals with pouches.
Next question, please.
So, please Sir, what are you doing there, then?
Foolish child. Did I not already mention Birds of Paradise? What else do you think would make me come all this way?
In truth, most of the heavenly birds are found in the Papuan island group. But there are a couple to be had in north Moluccan Halmahera, which is a tad closer to home and nothing like as inaccessible. And of the 20,000 or so islands that make up the archipelago, Halmera (as the natives pronounce it) is among the most westerly. Our other port-of-call is Sulawesi, west of Halmahera, east of Borneo and north of Java, and thus also on the right side of the Line for our purposes.
I’ll no doubt have more to say later about the Line and its progenitor. For now, you’ll be subjected to the same tedious and frustrating process of getting here as we were.
Sometimes you just get a feeling that things are going to go arse-over-tip. And whether you call these hunches or omens, really depends how much of an anal rationalist you are.
Now I may be anal, but I’m not much for rationalism. I mean, look where the Age of Reason got us.
So it’s ‘omens’ I’m going to call them.
Omen the first: Call it the clincher, even if it wasn’t the first in the timeline. When we got to our local railway station to take up our booked seats for the train to Stockholm, thence onwards to Jakarta via the aforementioned dubious Dubai, I took out my wallet to pay the taxi driver – only to find that neither of my banks cards were inside. Hence the hunch/ omen/ gut-feeling that this trip might be destined to end up in disaster/ catastrophe/ Bognor Regis.
As it turned out, I had left the cards in our photocopier after conscientiously photocopying them in case of emergency. This is not an omen in itself. But it is a splendid example of irony. In seeking to avoid an emergency, I helped to create one. (Luckily, my wife showed better judgement and had reclaimed hers.)
Naturally enough, I am not so foolish as to think that a one bad gallbladder makes for an accurate augury. But this was simply the last in a line of red lights that had flashed at regular intervals throughout the countdown to blast-off. Most but not all of these warning signals could be directly attributed to the travel agent that was in charge of arranging our flights and extra-curricular activities. As it turned out, he was not the only individual that tried his utmost to sabotage our holiday. He was just the first. Let us call him Mikael more for fear of law suits than out of charity.
One has to make allowances, or so I was told. Mikael’s is a one-man firm and was recommended by the tour organisers for the arrangement of al travel and accommodation to and from our starting point on Sulawesi. It was not so much that Mikael was unfriendly. Indeed he was so friendly that he commented on my own friendliness, which shows little judgement of character. Nor did he take offence easily, as he pointed out when, a few weeks before we were due to depart, I asked him who would provide us with an itinerary. But the greatest problem was getting hold of him. Not only did he deal with all bookings for the operators; he also organised and led tours of his own, quite often to places which had evaded the long arm of IT, which was jolly nice for him but not so much for us. So by the time we did manage to get hold of him, he had forgotten what we had agreed in the first place.
Still, we finally plugged the gaps and made our way to Arlanda, shorn of my financial integrity, but with all our luggage intact. Having met up with most of our party at the airport, we also survived the rigours of Dubai and the incomprehension of a duty-free cashier when I attempted to buy only two bottles of whisky when they were on a ‘buy two get one free’ offer. We even managed eventually to pass through immigration and customs in Jakarta, despite not having been warned that we would have to fill in an electronic customs declaration.
We should have been over the hump. We had only to get to our overnight airport hotel. Mikael had come up with a number of different versions of how we should manage this and finally told us to Whatsapp the hotel on arrival, so they would send out a shuttle bus. The flaw in the masterplan was that there was no Internet in the Arrivals lounge and nobody at the hotel answered the landline phone. Having thrown ourselves on the mercy of some vendors in the Arrivals Lounge, who were optimistically trying to sell us Sim cards and phones, we eventually got through to the hotel, only to find that the driver had been waiting hours for us outside with a sign. I’d ventured out once to check, didn’t see anyone, and was discouraged from repeating the attempt by the police preventing entrance to the Arrivals area.
It turned out that this plan was the brainchild of our tour leader, Bengt, who we meet up with the next day at Manado Airport on Sulawesi. There he cheerfully explains to us that he thought Driver With Sign was a more failsafe method of making contact with the shuttle. Which it was, if only he had taken the trouble to inform us (or even Mikael) about it. But that, we are soon to discover, is Bengt for you. He generally assumes we all had PhDs in telepathy. I suppose our suspicions should have been aroused, not so much by the oddness of his emailed information (which ranged from the helpful to the bizarre and misconceived), as by the fact that our tour leader had chosen not to lead us to our tour.
So here we are, all united.
As we gather round, Bengt also introduces us to Theo, who will be our main guide. They look the same age, early seventies perhaps, but there the similarity ends. Where Bengt is tall and fair, Theo is short and dark. All in line with the racial stereotypes.
We head off to the first stage on our tour – Tangkoko Forest and our first lodge.
Next morning I just about manage to shave before we head for breakfast. The shaving foam I had brought with me had undergone a slo-mo volcanic eruption in the bathroom of our hotel at Arlanda. The replacement I had bought requires a therapy session to coax it out. After brekkers, we set off – still bright and early – to catch the dawn chorus in the reserve. Poor Bengt has gone down with a cold but bears up manfully, and being the kind of outgoing chap he is shares his last microbe with the rest of us. Hardly a day will pass without someone else going down with a variation on the virus.
We’re introduced to our local guide, Samuel, who in turn introduces us to some of the exotic wildlife on offer. A troop of broad-hipped and jauntily quiffed Celebes macaques crosses our path, completely unconcerned by our presence. We even manage to see a couscous, an odd marsupial that looks a bit like Paddington Bear and enjoys sleeping upside down.
There are also many birds we two haven’t seen before. This is not surprising. Indeed, compared to our fellow-passengers, we haven’t seen many birds at all. Add to that the fact that Sulawesi and Halmahera, in common with many of the Indonesian islands, have an extraordinarily high number of endemic species. The highlight for me is the Sulawesi malkoha. Even for this freakish family of birds, this one is way out left-field, having a heavy technicolour two-tone beak. True to type, it skulks in a weirdly confiding manner and plays peekabo with us.
All very exciting. But given the lack of facilities for five hours in the bush, pretty hard on the bladder for the ladies. A sign of things to come perhaps, this lack of attention to minor details. It isn’t long before one of the ladies takes matters into her own hands and insists on a Swedish fika/ coffee break at regular intervals.
Also a sign of things to come – Anneli and I duck out of the afternoon session and tell Bengt of our plans. For reasons best known to himself, he fails to tell the driver and guide and the whole company spend 15 minutes waiting for us before leaving. In the interests of fair play, we repeat the exercise when Bengt oversleeps his nap for the evening session.
More and more we are understanding where we stand with Our Leader. So it comes as no surprise to find that he has a habit of leaving his wallet behind, as well as his bird book. Thus when it comes to tipping casual guides, he ‘borrows’ money from us (‘I’m sure Theo said he would take care of the tipping’) and he regularly borrows my bird-book just when I most need it myself. I’m too polite.
He is more open-handed with his virus. So on the third day, I fall ill – completely side-winded and sand-blasted by the bloody thing. I can hardly walk. Anneli too has fallen victim but does not make such a big deal of it. Fortunately the critical point blows over more quickly with me than it does when it reaches some of the others, though the after-effects linger for what feels like an eternity.
I decide to join the afternoon session (Bengt: ‘roadside spotting from the bus a long walk; sandals’ll be fine’). It turns out we have to walk some distance over sandy non-sandal ground. I have a relapse after dinner, so miss the discussion of tips for the local guide. (We move on tomorrow.) Anneli reports that Bengt’s advice was to tip low. One of the others claimed this will stem the brain drain from the country. I ask Anneli to explain the logic. She’s not sure but thinks it was because all the doctors will want to become bird guides if we tip too high.
Next day we have a long drive ahead of us. Sulawesi is less densely populated than, say, Sumatra. This is something to be grateful for in a country of 250 million people. Even so, we pass through quite a lot of urbanised areas before we hit open country. And even that is heavily cultivated. Still, the villages are pretty, their gardens are tidy and the fields are, well, fields. Against the backdrop of the volcanoes that range across northern Sulawesi, they make for a dramatic contrast.
By travelling south and west we cross into a different district. So far we have been in predominantly Christian territory. The new district is Moslem, as is most of the country. The multi-denominational churches are replaced by mosques. And when we arrive in the city of Kotamobagu and register at our ostensibly up-market hotel, we notice a difference in attitude, not least to alcohol, which we are not allowed to consume in our rooms unless we wish to pay a fine of one million rupiah. This is not as much as it sounds, but still… Apparently, however, it is still OK to buy beer in the restaurant at suitably inflated prices.
As we drain our glasses to the very dregs, we ask Bengt what time we are to start the next day. He looks surprised that we would want to know. He thinks 5 o’clock. But rings to check with Theo. As he thought. Five o’clock it is.
Next morning we are all (including Bengt) awoken in our beds by a call from the lobby at 4.15. The guides and driver are waiting for us. Oh well. We head further south to search for one of the target birds of the trip – the maleo. This is a biggish black bird with pink breast and belly that resembles a turkey that has had an appointment with an over-zealous barber. It belongs to the megapod (Big-Foot) family and thus is a prime Wallacean example of an across-the-line fowl, most of its kin being found in Australia. What is most striking about it is that it buries its eggs in sand or loose earth, having carefully calibrated the temperature so that it can bugger off down to the pub and allow the egg to incubate itself. They are therefore largely limited to this area of volcanoes and hot springs (and disturbingly regular earthquakes). We see a few of them, which is not altogether surprising since we are visiting a sanctuary where they are breeding and releasing the birds. Our jovial guide is called Leo, and he has eyes for and seemingly knowledge of only maleos.
Shortly before we are due to board the bus and head for lunch, Bengt, despite the fact he has claimed his illness is affecting his ability to function efficiently as tour leader, decides to head off down the road to check an area of waterland he spotted on the way here. Most of us follow him in blind faith that he has better eyes than us and has seen what no-one else noticed. Gradually his disciples straggle, then fall by the wayside in the baking midday sun (ca. 35°C) and are picked up by the bus as it catches us up. Last to be collected is Bengt who has presumably been the victim of a mirage, since no water is to be found in the area.
We lunch at a private house or homestay, then are invited to take a siesta in an unventilated room. When the sun has cooled slightly, we head out for an unproductive session with Leo who is now focussing entirely on an entirely different bird, which refuses to respond to the blandishments of his mobile phone. Bengt wishes to extend our stay for an ‘owling session’. We know what this means and vote him down. We are learning quickly. In any case we arrive back just in time for dinner. Anneli and I inform Bengt that we have decided to stay in the hotel the next day to recuperate.
Next morning we are woken, once again, at 4.15 from the lobby. Obviously the message has not got through. Later we find this is because Bengt has overslept and has had to be woken himself by a phone call. We have a relaxing day in our room, our idleness being punctuated only by a visit across the road to buy some water at a supermarket that will hopefully charge less than the hotel. On our way, a friendly member of the hotel staff asks where we are going. We explain. He follows us into the shop to check. We are not sure what for. This strikes us as weird and slightly sinister.
At least Bengt is not even vaguely sinister. But he continues to be very weird. His plans for the next day is to return to the unproductive area the group has spent the last two days exploring. We point out that we are heading back north to our next and final stop on Sulawesi.
B: No problem. It’s on the way.
It is in fact in the opposite direction.
So instead, we head back north, back towards Manado to a place called Tomohon, which seems to have 59 varieties of Christian churches. This, we are informed, is the throbbing heart of the religion on Sulawesi. We lunch at a café that hasn’t yet opened for the day. It is a Sunday and everyone is at church. So the wait is even longer than usual.
Our meal is enlivened by a fellow-diner who greets us on his way out. He looks like an overweight version of Fu Manchu and welcomes us in English, and then, oddly enough, in Swedish. It turns out he is the son of a previous Indonesian ambassador to Sweden and his Swedish wife. So he was partly brought up in Stockholm. His mother-in-law provided a lively commentary on all he said in Dutch, apparently assuming the two languages were mutually comprehensible.
As an interesting footnote, it’s worth pointing out, that for most of the colonial period, it was the Dutch East India Company that ruled Indonesia rather than the Dutch state. As a result, in one of those charming legacies that Europe bequeathed to its former subjects, the final treaty that gave Indonesia complete independence required the new Indonesian government to pay the debts that the Company had incurred when paying the Dutch army to fight against those fighting for that same independence. That is also called irony – though that seems too feeble a word in the circumstances.
We spend a pleasant couple of days exploring the area around volcano closest to Tomohon for birds, the most spectacular of which are the Sulawesi pitta and the superb fruit dove.
It is high and pleasantly cool here, which probably partly explains the churches. The place must have started as a hill station and resort for the Dutch and their missionaries. The hotel is also much better than the one in Kotamobagu – well-designed and welcoming, though the restaurant leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately we eat lunch the next day at an excellent, though equally slow, Chinese establishment. Viro, Theo’s right-hand man, informs us that most of the population of the town consists of long-standing and mixed-race Chinese. Just in case we thought China’s new ubiquity throughout the world was a recent development. Indeed in some cases, they have been here for almost 800 years. And since they have prospered, mainly as merchants, their presence has aroused occasional hostility and envy among the locals. This was most notable in the 1960s, when a supposed Communist coup was ‘detected’ and ruthlessly suppressed by General Suharto, with I am sure, a little encouragement from the CIA. In the wake of the suppression of the coup, private scores were settled against, amongst others, the Chinese. It is estimated that thousands of them were killed then. Then again, up to a million suspected communists were massacred in the counter-coup.
What can you say?
‘Juicy fruit’, I usually manage before slipping back into blissful catatonia. It’s an alternative to weeping.
Tomohon has been the most relaxing part of the tour so far. With Tomohon, we leave our driver too, since we are heading next for Halmahera. During our last day on Sulawesi, I remind Bengt of the need to discuss a collective tip. He suggests we do that at dinner. Come dinner, I remind him again. We’re told the collection was taken on the bus. Nobody (ie not Bengt) asked us. Our driver has been outstanding. We would have liked to show our appreciation.
With or without our tip, he gets us to the airport on time for us to catch the plane the next morning.
We’re flying to Ternate, a small island just of the coast of Halmahera. Halmahera itself has, at present no airport, though we are told the Chinese are building one. As you might guess, this is not designed to promote cultural exchange. The islands here have nickel, gold and rare earth reserves, and a Chinese company has presumably obtained a licence to extract them. So it goes. Then again, the Chinese are only doing what the West has done for the last few centuries. I guess they just do it with more single-mindedness/ ruthless efficiency* (*delete as preferred).
On Ternate we are whisked off to the harbour where, after some haggling, a boat is hired by our guides. Apart from the occasional sea-bird, the main interest is provided by the fuel-juggling going on by the outboard. When we enquire, it turns out that our pilots are using unrefined petroleum when we are out at sea, and revert to the more expensive alternative only when within view of a harbour-master.
The journey is blissfully short and in little more than an hour we have arrived in Sidangoli, exactly where Wallace first set foot on Halmahera. He wasn’t impressed, describing it as an untidy collection of shabby wooden huts. Little has changed, apart from the fleet of 4x4s that are waiting for us.
We head south for Sofifi. We’d been informed that both infrastructure and accommodation on Halmahera were less developed. The roads seem fine to me. Perhaps the Chinese helped out. The hotel in this seaside town clearly isn’t. The fact that it does not appear to be en route to where we are going tomorrow might be explained by the lack of alternatives. But the only thing to be said in favour of the rooms is that they contain sit-down loos. The bathroom also has a shower, but lacks a basin and a mirror. I protest by not shaving.
We wait one and a half hours for our (delicious) evening meal – a new record. Bengt fills the time by asking Theo what plans he has for us on the island. Theo looks a little confused, perhaps because he knows that Bengt has already provided the rest of us with an itinerary which proves to be a pretty accurate forecast of what we get up to.
Next day we head for Binagara Field Station back up the road we came down yesterday, then cutting east and inland. We have been warned in advance and are warned again before we leave Sofifi – this is the most basic accommodation we will have during the journey. It is not a hotel – a fact that might come as a relief after the hotel in Sofifi, but might also induce fear and trembling amongst the faint of heart.
We turn off the main road, under an ornate gateway and onto a bumpy unpaved track leading through a village and along arable fields before reaching a house on stilts at the edge of a forest. For the first time since Tangkoko we are welcomed by smiling faces and for the first time on the whole journey, the food is waiting for us rather than vice versa.
The ranger of the station is very friendly and is the best birding guide we get on the trip. He is accompanied by four or five others who I take to be locals trying to earn a bit of extra. At least two of them turn out to be students from Java that are on a field placement as part of their training. One of them smokes roll-ups, introduces me to the Indonesian way of rolling them (between the palms). He gives me one of his perfectly-formed specimens to sample. In exchange I give him one of my deformed matchstick roll-ups. He does his best to look grateful. I keep his for later. It is exquisitely flavoured with god knows what.
The rest of the morning is spent waiting in a hide for the ivory-breasted pitta to appear, which appointment it fulfils most faithfully. A real and unusual beauty. As we return to base for lunch we ask what the huge cage-like structure lying by the side of the path might be. We are told it was used to breed white cockatoos with a view to reintroducing them to the area. They had been trapped to the point of extinction, mainly to be used as caged pets.
Once again our meal is waiting for us. During the course of it we are entertained by a couple of local boys who are enjoying themselves swimming in a ditch that could be for irrigation or for drainage or for both. It lifts the heart to see how much mileage and sheer joy they get out of the activity, the joy being, I guess, enhanced by their having an audience.
In the afternoon we climb a steep slope up to a shelter roofed by palm fronds and watch for birds flying across the stupendous valley below. In the process we see a couple of white cockatoos, proving the success of the breeding programme and also giving evidence of Wallace’s theoretical dividing line between Asian and Australasian fauna.
I return early not wishing to stay behind for nightfall and night-birds. The climb was pretty scary. In doing so, I miss a paradise kingfisher – imagine a European one with a racket tail about 6 inches long. I kick myself as well as I can manage with my tired legs. Some things are worth a broken neck.
The major downside to the accommodation is the bedroom. There are none of the threatened mosquitos, which is just as well because we decided not to bring our own net, even though we were advised to do so. But we sleep in rooms separated only by thin partitions. This makes for minimal privacy, which is not so much of a problem at our age. More of a problem is that we can hear everyone else’s conversation, and some of the more enthusiastic birders compare notes deep into the night. Since we are due to get up at 3am the next day, this we could have done without.
Now, I am not a die-hard hard-core birder by any stretch of the imagination. And if there are lines to be drawn, then getting up at such a time to walk 5 km through the jungle in the dark is not something I would normally be found doing outside of my worst nightmare. But the bait is birds of paradise. So we, or at least I, make an exception. This is the main reason I am here. The main reason Anneli is here is maybe that I am here. So she draws that line and sleeps in.
But I get up in time and head off with the rest into the heart of darkness. It’s honestly not as bad as I feared. Put that another way, my condition isn’t as bad as I feared. The going is rough in places and we have to cross a river that no-one had warned us about. (We had been told to bring Wellies on the trip – this would have the one occasion we had for wearing them.). Moreover, although we pick out a couple of roosting birds, there isn’t much to hold the attention or keep the spirits up apart from the prospect ahead.
Finally we make it to a kind of clearing on a natural terrace. Photographers are told to mount one viewing tower and non-photographers another. Pretty much everyone goes to the second tower, even if I’m the only one with a camera that would fit in a pocket. I can’t say I’m surprised. The way up to the first tower was by a long steep ladder, which would have been safe only for someone with a pocket-sized camera.
We don’t have to wait long for the performance to start. I’d expected maybe a couple of rather bored-looking birds going through the motions for the tourists before passing round the feathered hat for tips. Instead we’re pretty much surrounded by the little buggers. Not so little either, though these are Wallace’s standardwings and less impressive in size and plumage than some of the more spectacular members of the family. In fact they look pretty drab in photographs, being largely brown with a green breast.
We end up getting about twenty of them, screeching raucously in the canopy in front of us. They refuse to stay still long enough for us to get more than a fleeting glance of their display. But when we do my heart leaps into my throat. The green breast is scintillating emerald and shown to its full extent since they retract their wings and project their long, white, flag-like (hence ‘standard’) plumes at right angles. I can’t imagine what my reaction would be if I were a female standardwing. But clearly falling asleep was not an option. By the time they finished however, having expended so much energy, they must be ready for a sleep themselves. And I am definitely ready for breakfast. Fortunately the food is once again ready for us not far along the return route. As we eat, we are entertained by a kind of striptease performed by a giant coucal, who is tantalisingly close to us but insists on not revealing more than one section of him/herself at a time.
We eventually make it back to base camp (poetic licence). I immediately change into swimming togs and jump into a drainage ditch with the lads.
This was worth coming for.
So were the kingfishers.
We move onward and upward to a place called Subaim. The hotel here looks new. The town itself seems to consist chiefly of a dust road, lined by mosques and our hotel is opposite one of them. Even though Halmahera has a large Christian population, we are, obviously, in Muslim territory here. En route, however, we have passed through villages that are equally obviously Christian, proudly exhibiting churches and pigs’ heads.
Despite appearances, the hotel disappoints. In the room, there are no glasses, no kettle and no downpipe from the basin. The water falls from the basin and drains away along the floor. Maybe this is a Muslim thing. You wash your hands and feet at the same time.
The next day we head for Uni-Uni forest. We bird from the road – the same bit of road pretty much all the time. It would have been interesting to enter the forest, but I suppose roadside birding is what birders do. At first, at least, there is a lot to see. There must be something in the water here. Oriental hobbies and chattering lories are both mating when we catch sight of them. The king parrots are more interested in finding food.
We decide to duck out of the afternoon session. Bengt suggests we would get a kick out of visiting a school. I remind him it is Friday. He gives me a blank look and points out Friday is a weekday. No school on Fridays for Muslims, I reply. One of the selling points of the religion. Extra-long weekends.
We settle for a rest instead and then head out to the deserted café next door. There is only a young head-scarved woman presiding. We manage to ask for fruit juice. There is only orange and only enough orange for one juice. I have a coffee. We come to pay but have no change and neither does she. She undercharges us rather than the reverse. We pay a ridiculously small sum for the drinks. On the way back into the hotel, I read the banner they have hanging over the entrance. As far as I can make out, the rooms cost £7 per night.
We leave 3.30 the next morning to catch a night bird, the owlet-nightjar before it finishes its shift. Plenty of mobile-phone playback, pretty randomly it seems, but no bird. We are in the same area as yesterday, that is, the same bit of road. This is pleasant enough but unproductive. At lunch there is a discussion of what we should do during the afternoon. Bengt tries to persuade us to go on a boat trip that is not included in the cost. We decline as do most others.
The boat trippers return late, though not as late as a couple of others who opted for another alternative. Bengt decides we should go ahead to the restaurant without them. They’ll catch us up, and presumably he is hungry. At dinner, Bengt suggests we are all too tired to talk about tips for the drivers who we say goodbye to tomorrow. Anneli and I decide to go freelance on the tips from now on.
We breakfast with the nice waitress next door and leave a hefty tip. As we pack our bags, Anneli puts her foot down. Literally. She hurts her foot. (It turns out later she has broken it.) Karin, one of our party, requisitions Viro and they visit a chemist’s to buy a bandage. I hold her hand. (Anneli’s.)
On the way back to Sidangoli, we stop at a hillside hut and enjoy a beautiful panoramic view over the jungle and coast. The quest is for an azure roller (a stunning bird which Anneli saw from the veranda while we were looking for birds of paradise). Despite the usual interminable playback, it doesn’t show. While the others are consulting my bird-book in an attempt to identify a fairly nondescript raptor, I see a blur of blue flash by. I do a bit of a double take before I realise that it must have been the roller in question. I am too embarrassed to reveal the sighting.
Eventually we drive on back through the Christian villages. It is now Sunday. There are no pigs’ heads on display. But there are lots of men in suits and women in brightly-coloured dresses processing to church. They smile when they see us, and wave.
We drive to the boats and we boat back to Ternate, where we will stay the night at a delightful but deserted colonial style hotel. The most upmarket accommodation of the trip.
We have not been taking the recommended malaria tablets, but have seen no mosquitos and developed no symptoms. The same could not be said of poor Wallace, who caught malaria on Halmahera and was laid up for months on Ternate. Not much fun for him, but it did give him the opportunity to think about things like how species evolve. Having noticed the differences between the fauna and flora either side of his line, he began to think about the differences between the flora and fauna on each respective side. So that on the Asian side of the divide there were similar species on the various islands, but they all differed slightly, island to island and island to mainland. And the same went for those on the Australasian side. From this he concluded that the islands had separated from the mainland and from each other, by disruptions to the earth’s crust, at different times. The resulting distinctions he attributed to adaptation to the varying environments. Et voilà. We have evolution rather than Big-Bang creation of species.
I lie awake in bed and try to think great thoughts. I wonder instead if I left the gas on. Then I recall we don’t have gas. Oh well. We’re only here one night and I haven’t got malaria.
I think about Wallace instead. I have been reading his Malay Archipelago religiously, so have food for my thought. I ask myself if it was absolutely necessary for him to shoot all those orang-utans on Borneo in the course of thinking his great thoughts. Not just the apes either. He killed pretty much whatever he laid his eyes on. It was part of the job, I suppose, and probably still is. ‘We murder to dissect’, as Wordsworth said on one of his better days.
Add to that, Wallace was perpetually short of cash, so he part-financed his expedition by shooting, skinning and sending the pelts back for stuffing and sale. I expect Wallace would have preferred the luxury of shooting them all with a camera. But still, it’s a shame. I wonder if the orang-utans would have been happy to know they sacrificed their lives for the benefits of a scientific theory that, at the end of the day, doesn’t really get us anywhere.
Such reflections are not helping me get to sleep. So I switch to happier thoughts.
Apart from being a homicidal (‘theriocidal’ if you want to be picky) maniac, he seemed quite a nice chap, with a neat line in irreverent humour. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had few delusions that he was of a superior race or civilisation and showed his greatest respect and affection for the least ‘developed’ peoples he met. And despite the fact that he was the first to describe evolution as the ‘survival of the fittest’, he refused to equate fitness with the so-called economic and social progress that Britain laid claim to. He had, moreover, little time for the eugenic theories thrown up by many later evolutionists. Instead, he evolved himself into more of a socialist than a social Darwinist.
Perhaps most famously of all, he was a very modest fellow. If he had been the pushy type, he, rather than Darwin, would now be credited with coming up with the theory of evolution itself. It was here on Ternate indeed that he had firmed up his ideas on the subject. But although he came to his own conclusions independently of the older man, he was aware that Darwin had been working on such ideas for some time but had not published his findings. So he contacted the Man Himself before he presented his own theories, and suggested they publish their papers at the same time. Darwin agreed, and Wallace gave his senior all the credit, even dedicating The Malay Archipelago to him.
He was probably more fun down the pub too.
Next day we have a decent breakfast with real coffee rather than instant for once. Considering that coffee is grown so widely here that ‘a cup of Java’ has become synonymous with the drink, this has been something of a disappointment.
Our flights off the island require us to get to the airport at 5am, which we just about manage. Bengt is as usual short of cash and heads straight for the dispenser outside the entrance. So our entry is delayed when he needs assistance with the ATM. As we queue to get our boarding cards, we are the only Europeans and Indonesians. The rest of the queue consists of Chinese mine-workers – going home, I guess.
Most of us are flying down to Makassar on the southern tip of Sulawesi. We say goodbye at the departure gate in Ternate. We are thankful we are not going on the extension the others have opted for. But we are touched by the farewells, which are unexpectedly warm. Bengt holds back, presumably overcome with emotion.
We are flying now to Singapore where we plan to spend a couple of days R&R to wind down from the punishing schedule of the birding trip. In Makassar we have a long wait for our bags – a search rather, since the carousels give no information. While I try to find someone to ask, Anneli sits next to a middle-aged head-scarved woman who is gazing intently at her phone. Anneli catches a glimpse of hard porn on the screen. The woman glimpses her glimpse and smiles back at her.
Reunited with our bags, we now have to find the international section of the airport. It is not signposted, but the people we ask are very helpful.
This cannot be said of the ground staff of Batik Air. We arrive in good time for check-in and are at the front of the queue. Forty minutes later we get our boarding cards after being interrogated at length by the check-in clerks who rotate on a 5-minute basis leaving us to answer the same questions over and over again – principally about how long we intend to stay in Singapore and whether we have filled in the arrivals form. We have the form online. They have no functioning wifi in the airport.
When we are given our cards, so to speak, we ask if we can have wheelchair assistance for Anneli, whose foot is paining her. We are told to enter an office, where we are in turn told a wheel chair is on its way. We wait for twenty minutes, during which time all the staff leave the office. We give up and head for the departure hall. There we stock up on water for the journey, only to have it taken from us at a second security check at the gate. No water is available inside the gate either. While waiting for the plane, we strike up a conversation with a lady in a wheelchair, expressing our admiration for her persistence in getting assistance. She explains that Batik Air is a low-cost airline and you have to pay for the help and the chair. Well, that explains it. She explained it. The ground staff didn’t.
Apart from another head-scarved lady carrying a soft toy in the shape of a pig, the flight passes without interest or incident. The cabin crew look surprised when we keep asking for more water. This comes in beakers with a stiff foil top along with a blunt straw, guaranteeing that if you manage to pierce the foil, you will get water all over your lap.
After the ordeal in Makassar, apparently for the benefit of Singapore Immigration, we arrive in Changi airport in a state of dread. Unwarranted. We glide through the hi-tech check without even queuing and collect our baggage in record time.
The taxi presents more of a problem. We have been reassured (by Travel Company Mikael) that the driver will be waiting for us with a smile and a sign with our names on it. Instead I have to contact him via Whatsapp. He will be arriving at a pick-up point and we should hurry to make our way there. We eventually figure out that we have to identify his unmarked saloon car by its number-plate. On the way to the hotel, the driver (a freelance Uber-type) entertains us by pointing out the architectural marvels of Singapore. This is not my kind of thing at all. But it is difficult not to be impressed by the imaginative designs of the buildings and the size of the green spaces that separate them. The green even extends to the apartment blocks themselves, since many are robed in roof and terrace gardens.
But we are heading downtown and end up on a dingy (by Singapore standards) back street where our hotel (booked by Mikael) awaits us. Our room may be par for the course amongst budget hotels here. But it is the smallest bedroom I have slept in since I spent two months sleeping in an airing cupboard in Oxford. As for the en-suite, it is multi-functional – you can shit, shave and shower all at the same time. It is something I could do without after three weeks of roughing it. As for the broken-footed wife, this is something up with which she will not put.
So after a dinner of cold pizza slice in the local mall, we head a block down from our dive where I have espied a rather grander edifice, which turns out to be called the Park Royal on Pickering, the latter being the name of the street. It has a familiar look, not least because of the massive amount of foliage that is growing from its terraces and balconies and because of the enormous number of travel programmes we watch. We book in for the following day and next morning move ourselves over. Five hundred quid a night, but who cares? You could swing a tiger in here without damaging the fittings. And after our night in the prison cell, the huge double bed looks very tempting.
But we are folk on a mission. So we book a taxi and head out to Bird Paradise, Asia’s largest bird park. Everything is going swimmingly and our spirits soar. But the first birds we see most emphatically do not. The great attractions of the park are the huge open-air enclosures where birds fly relatively freely. But the first birds we see are a series of magnificent raptors penned in cages the size of our first hotel room. After half an hour of this I feel like crying. As I expect the birds do.
Things (and spirits) look up again when we locate the promised enclosures, some of which are the size of several football pitches. This is more like it. The birds are spectacular and seem happy-ish. We reach the last of the pens, which is a variation on a theme of pink (ibis, roseate spoonbills, flamingos etc), when the skies open in a thunderous tropical storm. We are totally drenched before we reach the sheltered walkway back to the entrance.
We exit and look for a taxi rank, which is notable mainly for the absence of taxis. On enquiry we are told to phone one – numbers are displayed for all to see. But there is no wifi and our phones don’t work. We eventually get back to the hotel by bus, metro, trial and error.
Later we fall asleep basking in the knowledge that the next day we head home, but dreading the journey and Dubai airport. I walk along the river in the morning, admiring the surviving older houses that line a part of it but frustrated by the closing off of the only park in the area. Instead I count the number of statues of Stamford Raffles on display round the civic centre. There exist Malay and Indian Singaporeans, but I mainly see the Chinese that make up over 70% of the population. And tourists. I try to figure out why anyone would want to visit the place unless they had an obsession with hygiene and a morbid fear of human contact. It makes me quite suddenly nostalgic for Indonesia. All in all, the boys swimming in the drainage ditch looked happier than anyone here. I expect Wallace would have agreed. If this is the pinnacle of human progress, then give me good honest stagnation any time.
And that is that, basically. The return journey is less ball-breaking than expected. We have an unexpectedly good meal of chili crab with momo dumplings at Changi, which is better than anything we had in the hotel. (Plus, the service was more efficient and friendlier. To be honest, the Park Royal was a tiny bit all fur coat and no knickers.) Even Dubai wishes us god speed. We have coffee served by a jolly and stout lady in a black abaya, who strongly recommends a miniature or two of whisky to add to our drinks. I am happy to oblige. After all, we are going down with colds.
So we make it back to Stockholm in comparatively fine fettle. And then promptly walk into the wrong Radisson and demand accommodation. I mean, whoever decided to put two different hotels with the same name next to the same station? It was that kind of holiday really. But despite our manifest unfitness, we managed to survive. So there goes another good Theory.
All pictures courtesy of me and wikicommons
Thanks
Letters from Sweden 