Spent several hours cleaning house today, tucking into those hidden corners Mbak Ning never will for fear of upsetting something.
Came up with an old brown wallet, literally fluffy with some kind of sporous Jakarta growth, and packed with cards n stuff.
And so, Grinchtour Productions takes you on a tour down memory lane: hop aboard the way-back machine, set the dials four years back…..
And we walk into a department store (location unknown) where, the Grinch being in need of a new wallet to store his millions settles upon a brown leather Nautica model, with a flash green and gold strip of stitching round the middle (now deep in tropical fluff and mushrooms at the bottom of a waste basket).
Your basic model wallet: five sleeves on the left side, four in the right, a couple of places to tuck various and sundry, and two, separated Canadian-bill-sized folds.
Inside I find:
- 2 HSBC Interact Cards (that’s where they got to!) expiring in 09/04 and 05/05, only one of which is signed.
- A Best Western Hotel (Medan, North Sumatra) business card with the name Heruna (front desk clerk) and her cell-phone number inked on.
Stateless Ming and I spent a night there in 2001, on our way back from Aceh. We’d flown into Medan at least two weeks earlier, and bussed it out to Bukit Lawang, the orangutan ‘sanctuary’ near Leuser Park. The place was buried under meters of mud and millions of board feet of uncut tropical wood in a flash flood in the fall of 2003, an improvement as far as I’m concerned.
Leuser is one the site for orang ‘rehab’ in Sumatra but basically very little rehab actually goes on. Rescued animals, mostly too young to be on their own, are brought there and turned into the park’s main tourism draw. Every evening the people who run the place bring loads of food down to a deck in the “wilderness” and upwards of a dozen oranges swing down to eat. Because they’re unable to forage for themselves. Because its not in the interests of the hotel owners, ‘guides’ and the rest of the Leuser mafia to actually rehabilitate the animals because then they might leave the area and all those tourism dollars would disappear.
In other words the ‘rehab’ center isn’t. It’s a zoo. I asked the head ‘ranger’ what would happen if the orangutans stopped visiting the feeding station and the tourists dried up.
“We’d log the whole area and sell the monkeys to the biologists,” he said.
And every day minibuses disgorge packs of mostly young touristas looking for an authentic wild orangutan experience. Funny thing is that when I got back to Jak at that time I pocked around the Lonely Planet’s on-line ThornBush and found the number one issue among the women who visited was another kind of monkeying around. Seems the buff, long-haired young “guides” (none of whom actually come from the area, but drift in from Batak tribal areas to the south and urban Medan) provided a wide variety of ‘services’ on those overnight explorations into the jungle in search of “wild” orangutans (which don’t actually exist there).
Stateless Ming and I stuck around for a night and booked out for the actual conservation area where we were scheduled to hook up with a group of EU researchers who’ve been based there for many years, studying all manner of flora and fauna and trying in their own way to ‘protect’ Leuser Park from the tiger and elephant poachers, landless masses of disposed Javanese migrants driven from their homes in Aceh and now squatting in numbers inside the park, and omni-present illegal logging interests who will eventually drive a four lane (logging) road through the heart of the park.
This is going on a the moment despite the opposition of every environmental group in this country and abroad, and the EU (who’ve pumped something in the order of Euro 30 million into the park in the past decade), the current Environment Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources (similarly named) and anyone with a synapse still firing, because the project enjoys the support of the Indonesian president. Which is to say, that her evil husband has worked out a system of mutually beneficial business arrangements with the powers that be in Central Aceh (the only place you find pro-Jakarta groups in the separatist province) and the army to allow Leuser Park to be logged without actually, officially logging it.
A four hour dugout ride upstream we came to the camp. The biologists were earnest and bitter and we spent a couple of nights wandering around and admiring the elephants the local mahouts use to patrol for illegal loggers. They’re amazingly quiet we were told, and able to navigate the smallest jungle paths. And they really put the fear into the loggers when they come crashing into their camps.
I rode one of them for about 90 minutes. Several things struck me. The top of the Sumatran elephant’s head looks like a big walnut; their hair is incredibly coarse and stiff, and their skin wrinkled like a newborn baby; their trunks are incredibly effective at picking things up; they kinda walk through things unfortunate enough to be in their way; and if you ever, ever have a chance to sit on an elephant while its walking into a deep, cool river to bathe at the end of the day, DO IT! Wow. Too much fun sitting atop a couple tons of living, breathing animal that just wants to loll about and have fun. One of my all time favorite moments anywhere, anytime.
Back to the wallet…
- 1 chipped Quantum Athletics Daylight membership card. My one vanity when I was even poorer than today was to join this gym. I’m still there though not nearly enough1
- 1 2x2cm black and white photo of Antonio do Santos, the head of army intelligence in Gleno, East Timor. One of five or six photos I took from a looted army barracks in that mountain town in October 1999. Do Santos and several others were identified by local residents and the local Falantil as being involved in the rape, torture and disappearance of dozens of people both prior to and immediately following the independence v autonomy ballot.
In an odd coincidence, Stateless Ming was there that day as well, bungeed to the back of the two-stroke 150cc trail bike I bought in Dili from fleeing Indonesian soldiers for $200. It was a pretty horrible place Gleno. The smell of death and decay was everywhere. The few people who’d returned to the village looked utterly shell-shocked. Every night they returned up the riverbed to the hideaways where they’d lived for many weeks, too afraid to return to their homes and bury their dead. We found several bodies with their hands bound behind their backs, throats cut.
The worst were the rape rooms. In the final days before their withdrawal the locals told us, Indonesian soldiers abducted a number of local women and brought them to several houses belonging to policemen, or the off-base homes of senior military officers. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But I’m still haunted by the dried pools of blood on the floors and mattresses, and the bloody handprints on the walls.
I kept the (studio) picture in the back of my wallet, because Do Santos, a Timorese himself, is the most unremarkable man to look at. Kinda chubby looking, high forehead, slick, black hair parted to the right, the beginnings of a handlebar moustache. He’s wearing informal army attire, the top button open and you can just make out his name badge. He banality personified but for the people of Gleno he’s the Devil.
- I’ve also got a color, 3x4 cm photo of Jihan in a lovely flowered, purple shawal kamiz. She looks beautiful and fresh
- There are several cards: an expired British Columbia Care Card, which I would show on visits to the doctor. The last time was back in 98 when I stripped the ligament in my knee while hiking in Washington State. I got a basic x-ray and ultrasound. It took over four months to get an MRI done and several more months before the results were ready. Needless to say it was all a bit late. I still have trouble with my right knee especially after a long run, or if I turn hard on it playing tennis.
- BC Tel Calling Card, which I got for free and never used.
- $20 Singapore Calling Card with a photo of coy looking woman in some kind of trampy Indian dress. Must have bought it during a trip to Mustapha for electronics and tacky shirts.
- One Mustapha bill which I obviously used to claim $158.23 (Singapore) back in 2001 when I bought the PD-150. $5432.50 Sing. Gulp! Well, it has pretty much paid for itself already in rentals alone so…
- Indonesia International Bank (BII) ATM card I picked up in Banda Aceh in 1999. I needed it because the idiots at HSBC halted all transactions off my Vancouver account because I’d used it to withdraw money in Jakarta. Got to Banda, ran out of money and then ATM rejected my HSBC card. So, I had to get an Indonesian bank account and have the money wired in order to pay my hotel bills.
It is interesting only because of the contradiction between what is and what might be. Banda Aceh is pretty much as far north and west as you can get in Indonesia. Yet here I was able to get a functioning card processed in 30 minutes that included a digital photograph of myself on the front. To me it is quietly symbolic of the huge potential here in Indonesia, and the many wasted opportunities…
- Colorful Shwe Wa Thein handicrafts store business card from Bagan, Burma. Tripped there in November 2000. Bagan is awesome and I’ve no memory of this shop What more can I say.
- 1 Dua Musim Priviledge card which I got after the last visit there… in 2000/1 sometime. Nice restaurant, decent food, great rooftop and a fine pool table. But the food’s overly expensive and the staff slow to pull cold grog. After three visits I never went back. Still open though so obviously they’ve got some sort of a market.
- 2 plain white business cards for Gilles Lordet, Managing Director of something called the Indonesian Press Review. I’ve no idea….
- 1 business card from Serge Quirion at the Sony Store in Fairview Plaza in suburban Montreal. Apparently he’s a “Conseiller-Expert”.
- $15 Canadian! Money!
- $38 US! More Money!

So there you have it. The things one tucks away, memories and money.