Scrambling under snarls of rattan and thorny vines last week while tracking silver leaf monkeys and macaks through the lowland forest of Borneo, we were suddenly caught by a pounding rain shower and sought shelter under a huge hardwood. An American doctor named Kinari, who’ll you will be hearing more about in an upcoming issue of Reed College Magazine, reached out in front of her to grab some low shrubs. “These areas are so diverse; let’s take a look at these five plants,” she said, checking the variegation patterns on the leaves in front us. “See, five different species just right there.”

The hardwood behind us, on closer examination, was losing a battle to a strangler fig whose main root began thick as my thigh and then several stories up splayed into a massive choking bird’s nest of branches. Warrior ants the size of cockroaches also patrolled the trunk.

If you’re a plant or animal in the rainforest, there’s little time for dilly dallying. Competition’s fierce; life’s in constant motion. Stop moving, or growing, or reaching for the light for a moment and something else overtakes you, eats you, evolves to beat you.
It’s thrilling and humbling to be immersed in it just for a few hours.

My trip on assignment to Kalimantan – Indonesia’s section of Borneo — also wended through Singapore and Jakarta, and it was hard not to see those pulsing metropolises as outgrowths of the dynamic tropical forests they replaced.

Singapore’s obsessive sense of law and order keeps some of the tropical flourish at bay. But the powers that be can only control so much. Step away from the sleek malls and wide streets along Orchard Road and into the warrens of the Chinese markets and Little India and now the shops and hawkers jam together under neon signs while the smells of curry, incense, pad thai, and durian hang in the air. Shopping and gawking is once again a contact sport.

I watched a rabid scene one afternoon at a durian stand, where Chinese residents and tourists pawed and smelled the spiky-skinned fruit and some even fingered the eggy interior hoping to find just the right texture. Inside the food court, a Chinese woman carried on a non-stop mantra as she blended fruit drinks, “Fresh orange, mango, banana dolla, dolla-fifty!” Thirsty shoppers pooled around the counter, quickly siphoning off glasses of juice while the woman whirled to keep up.

In Little India, the streets came to life after dark, when expatriate Indian construction workers and professionals descended on the vegetarian joints and ever-busy faxing and copying outfits. Cars get crowded out of the streets by all the people; the sidewalks are for eating.

If Singapore embraces organization, Jakarta gives up on it. Here’s a concrete jungle long overgrown and overwhelmed by inhabitants. I didn’t get a good look at Jakarta’s infamous and growing slums, as I spent most of my time between the quiet expat burg of Kemang and offices in the business and government districts. But no part of the city is untouched by the teeming, chaotic churn of cars, commerce, smog, and people. Getting anywhere is a royal chore. It took me about half an hour to make the three-wheeled taxi trip a few miles to a mall area near where I was staying. Just too many cars on a narrow street. It was 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.

Kemang has jammed in just about anything a healthy American consumer could want — the latest episode of Harry Potter, wines from around the world, a double mocha frappucino from Starbucks, sushi and thinly sliced pastrami (no rye). The shops are modern, angular, glass-walled affairs; KFC is so stylish that rock bands play there on the weekends. The centralized malls nearby are a dizzying display of goods: petrified bugs in amber by the dozen, floors and floors of cosmetics, more brand name sportswear than you can get your head around. On one floor, four or five different sports shops all selling the same gear occupied the same room so you couldn’t tell know where one shop ended and the other began. Didn’t I just see that shoe…?

The side streets around the malls are filled with ramshackle stands of knockoff goods, covered in tarps. In the alleys and underpasses and plazas, more stands. There are few pieces of concrete in Jakarta unclaimed, it seems.

And so it was all too fitting when one afternoon, while stopped dead in traffic, I looked out to see a young woman in metal food stall that had claimed a sliver of shoulder along the road, between a concrete wall and the cars. Business had paused and the sun beat down on the spot and so she’d wedged herself into a sitting position in the small space where she usually stood to serve people. There wasn’t any room to spare. And, at that moment, it was the last niche available.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

Took the camera for a little ride around Lamaligang, our neck of the swamp.

Our street

New mosque under construction down the street.

These guys are taking a break from working on a house down the street. There’s not much mechanized in home building. “It’ll be done in a year maybe,” says the owner, far left.

The guys at the local metal shop are always trying to get me to install a surf rack on my rented motorbike.

Pak Oka came with the house. He runs the garden. Has braved several waves of NGOs as evidenced by the T-shirt from another Portland outfit NW Medical Teams.

My favorite local lunch spot. Get rice, put it on a banana leaf and add fish, beef, chicken, tofu, veggies, lots of chilies, all kinds of curries and fish sauces. They love to deep fry. Did I mention chilies?

These ladies were washing a diced chicken for a birth celebration tonight.

Off to mosque for Friday prayers.

Back at the ranch, a bulek party. We were sending off friends Dee and Graham, who are headed back to the States.

This is not in the ‘hood. Weh Island, a lovely little spot about 1 hour ferry ride away. This is where we’ll take you when you come visit. Turtles and dolphins sighted off the bungalow featured in the first two shots. You know who you are.

“Bob”, a likeable dude and an American foreign service officer, showed up at the July 4th barbecue on Wednesday night slightly sloshed, carrying a watermelon and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. As he plopped down in a friend’s backyard chair, he told me, “Read that second paragraph, that’s a beauty.” It’s the one that speaks of the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “I think that’s why we’re all here in this place in the world, to spread those ideas around.”

He’s probably right — even if it does sound a little swell — that ideas of freedom stirred many of us to go abroad. But once we get there, something just as important happens: a distant place shows us fully and completely the niche we’ve somehow earned in this world.

In 1998, I awoke inside a South African luxury coach bus in the early morning hours of the 4th as we approached the Zimbabwean border. Tucked up against the curb as we sped past were people sitting on their pickups and rickety Peugeots and bicycles piled high with sofas, bedspreads, lamps, TVs. Only after a couple of kilometers did I realize they were cueing to get across the border when it opened in an hour or so. When we finally got to the border post, we were through in 30 minutes. Those at the end of that long line of Zimbabweans would have been lucky to get through that day.

There’s been a study recently released that shows that as a result of the 30-year long guerilla war here Acehnese suffered a level of trauma only experienced in war-torn Bosnia and Afghanistan. And this was setting aside the issue of the tsunami. Yet among study participants, there’s countless folks who’ve plunged back into life and started selling cell phones and coffee and sodas at corner shops.

Last month, Danny, a 30-something Indonesian guy who runs the internet café down the street, said he was putting in a Wifi cloud for the neighborhood. He claimed it would be done around July 1st. I thought maybe by the fall. But just for kicks, I went in yesterday to see. “It’s going up right now,” he said (speaks clear English). This morning, he text-messaged over a password. “You can be our trial customer,” he said. Turns out it only works within about 50 meters of the café but it’s fast and it’s the only public cloud I know of in Banda Aceh. “We’ll get it to your house soon enough,” Danny said.

After watching the uneven function of electricity and telephone lines and transport from the nearest modern outpost of Singapore I can guess that this Wifi cloud will be a minor miracle. And yet I think back to how ubiquitous Wifi was in Portland, OR — in every coffee shop and hotel and even public parks.

Yesterday, I took my yellow and green Oregon soccer ball (courtesy of my brother-in-law) into the neighborhood pitch looking for a game. The field had been under water for a few weeks thanks to some heavy rain. One half just dried out, but the local cattle took to the fresh pasture and left land mines as they went. No matter; within thirty seconds of me taking a shot on some weather-beaten wooden goalposts, there were six kids kicking off their sandals and setting up for a scrimmage. It was me and the littles against the teenagers.

It turned out I had a budding star on my team. While the older kids laughed and yapped “Mister, we’re going to win, mister,” my 11-year-old teammate approached the game like a tryout. He showed dazzling footwork, once clasping the ball with his bare heels and spinning up and over the outstretched foot of a defender. He pulled off an acrobatic bicycle-kick shot back over his head. And after each brash pass at the goal he ran back up the field wiping his brow and looking at me humbly, like “How did I do?”

It crossed my mind that he thought I could connect him to something — some place, some person, some team — that would hook him up with a uniform and shoes and maybe some glory. But that seems a stretch. It’s enough to say that on the day after the 4th of July, he created something amongst the fresh cow pies and the uneven pitch. And though I didn’t really know it until it was over, that’s exactly what I’d come to see.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

It’s been a week colored by frustrations. We had rolling blackouts for most of the last seven days, and in the evening they often hit around dinnertime and lasted past when most people would want to go to bed. No AC, no water pumped into the house, dinner by candlelight (which wasn’t terrible). All in all, more tropics than we bargained for.

Hayley still hasn’t gotten her work visa, upon which a driver’s license depends as well as a general feeling of settledness. The length of my visa process to work as a journalist also continues to lengthen.

And we’ve also been up late nights hashing out how it is Hayley’s going to make an impact on an economy that had been whittled to a nub by the last decade of conflict, before the tsunami hit. Nobody seems able to remember what the economy looked like at full health, nor to decipher where it’s headed.

One thing I think I have figured out is why people keep latching the front gate to our house. When I head out on the motorbike, I sometimes leave the chain unhitched on the big, swinging, picket-fence doors. That way it’s easier to ride right back up the driveway when I get home. (I was a habitual door-left-open-guy growing up and my family never bought this sort of expediency argument) For the first several weeks, when I got home, the gate was closed. What’s the big deal? Was I breaking a cultural or neighborhood norm? The guy next door didn’t even have a gate. If I wanted to leave the gate open, let me leave the gate open!

Then I looked out the window one day when the gate was open and saw a gaggle of three goats happily chomping on our (landlord’s) plants and grass. One goat had stepped up on a low retaining wall and was hammering away at the new shoots of a young palm tree. Cheeky brotha. I shooed them out and… shut the gate.

But good habits die hard. Another afternoon, I also failed to shut the gate and, peering out, found a heifer and her calf making a late lunch out of the small lawn. When I opened the front door, the calf immediately bolted and the mother did a fine Leipezamer move on her way out:

During both visits of the village wildlife, I looked around to see if anyone was watching: not a soul. Maybe they had given up on me, or had melted away to the cool recesses of their houses.

The heart of this neighborhood is beyond our house, where the road winds past some open, swampy fields, to a shady knot of small, well-kept concrete houses. Always, there are a collection of young kids playing in front of one, and an ancient woman with no teeth on the stoop of another. A group of young guys are usually gabbing at a third place. Someone’s hanging out washing; men work quietly along the street pouring concrete for a new section of gutter, cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips. The guys at a metal shop remind me that I need a surfboard rack welded to my motorbike. In the mornings, a fishmonger pedals his goods from Jerry cans attached to his bicycle. In the afternoons, another guy with fried rice on wheels passes through. In the empty lots, ducks and hens and dogs pick at the piles of half-burned trash. Nearly everyone utters a slow, almost pained hello when I pass. The kids yell excitedly at me each time like it was the first.

What I sense here on the neighborhood lane is not the frustrations of Aceh but a long-standing acceptance of the place for what it is. This, despite the change agents at the NGO and UN offices sitting a stone’s throw in any direction. Certain things you can control and so you do. But what you can’t close and latch yourself is not worth getting hot and bothered over. There’s only so much you can do to change it. And then you need to find some shade.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

Surfers are loath to offer up intelligence on good waves, even when far from their home waters. So a week and a half ago when I ran into Zach —sun-crisped, 30-odd years old, on a tour from Mendicino, Calif — and he explained how pleased he was to pass up the legendary breaks in Bali for those 20 minutes from our house, I snapped to attention.

“You don’t even know how good you got it,” said Zach, shaking his head. We were standing watching elephants play soccer, a local traveling show that packed a couple thousand people into a makeshift stadium in the beach village of Lampuuk. He had already been on the water for several hours that morning. “There’s a right breaking on a reef just past the rivermouth here that formed a 150-yard long barrel.”
“And there’s no-body out,” he added.

Four days later, my buddy Graham and I strapped our surfboards to the side of our motorbikes and headed south. The initial plan was to surf the more tame sand beaches in Lhok Nga (sounds like lock na). I’d been on the board I was carrying just once and Graham and I were still getting used to the local surf. But when we crossed the one-lane bridge over the river, I thought we should at least look at the reef break Zach had mentioned.

On the other side of the river, we tried the first dirt track off the main road and followed it along the empty bank. The flattened dunes were dotted with rows of saplings planted by reconstruction crews. In 500 meters, we came to the back of the beach — white sand, with a creeping, leafy vine above high tide.

Out in the water, some small waves lined up behind what looked like a reef. They were aways offshore, maybe another half a kilometer. They welled up quickly, cleanly, crisply and broke to the right. There was no one around. This looked like the spot.

Between the beach and reef was a deeper channel where the water swept in front of us and then out to sea. That aside, I was rapidly getting used to the idea that a couple of greenhorns could try the break. The surf wasn’t pounding too hard and I could see a route to paddle out. There looked to be a little warm-up wave left of the bigger lineup.

“Think we should do it?” I asked Graham. I was getting that same intestinal sensation I feel when looking over the edge of the high dive.

“Sure,” Graham said, shrugging. He goes about 6’4”, 200, did turns in Darfur and Uzbekistan and doesn’t seem afraid of much.

We made it across the channel from the beach without too much effort. Then we skirted left of the whitewater on the reef to where that smaller peak was breaking. When the first set of waves came in, they looked double the height I expected them to be — maybe five feet or bigger (They always look small on the beach). As each wave walled up, it sucked up a slab of dark calm water over the knobby coral underneath then exploded quickly down the line to the right. In one clear, shimmering face I saw a silver tuna speeding across.

The scene seemed a little intimidating — all the more so because nobody was riding these half-pipes.

I paddled slowly into a couple waves and looked down their steep faces before pulling up.

“I need bigger nuts,” I said to Graham. He was looking over the situation, too.

I spied a medium sized glossy and turned my board to face the beach. If I didn’t give it a good shot, I’d be up all night thinking about it.

Three quick strokes. The wave picked me up quickly but just gently enough so I could get to my feet. I floated down to the bottom, in happy disbelief.

And then: this boulder loomed clearly just under the surface, right in my path. Luckily, I had enough time to dodge left.

The wave petered out a few seconds later.

I paddled back out past Graham, spitting seawater and a mashed recap. “There’s this huge rock it was awesome we gotta move down the line that thing was quick and steep I don’t know how I got up…”

Going back out, I saw our friend, the rock, swirling in the meat of each new wave. I set up next time far from it and any other swirls. Otherwise, the bottom was deeper than me. I know because chasing successive waves, I went for a spin cycle under a few crashing lips.

I caught a few more — each one a clear wall of blue around me for a split second. They were clearer, I think, than any waves I’ve seen in person. The paddles out were tough each time; the whitewater on the reef tended to swirl and push and prevent any progress. We figured out how to return left outside the edge of the reef and then back right into the lineup. Resting once in the middle of a paddle, I saw a big skate skirting the edge of the reef.

After an hour or so, Graham floated in to try the beach break. I went back out for one more wave.

Sitting there alone, waiting, the ocean felt massive. On the small breakwater at the rivermouth, I could see the sillouettes of three guys with long surf casting rods. Behind them the few hagard fir trees swayed lightly, the leftover from what was once a huge grove. In the distance were the new roofs of the village — the concrete houses, shiny new mosque, school — and the radio towers with the tsunami sirens. Would I be able to get to shore in time? Maybe. But the fishermen were still there, casting.

The first heavy winds rippled across the tops of the waves: time to get one before they got mushy. I took off farther north than before and it paid off: up on my board, the whole line of the wave stretched out before me to my right. I rode on its shoulder for 15, 20, 30 seconds, carving easy turns. It collapsed just before the end of the reef.

Looking back out at the spot from beach, my shoulders tired, my blood running rich and salty, I had an answer for Zach: We did have an idea about how good we had it.

And its only fair that I pay it forward, for what it’s worth.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

 

Sometimes it’s the oceanic networks we’ve built to make our lives better that rise up and blindside us.

 

You’ve likely heard that one of Banda Aceh’s tsunami warning alarms went off by accident on Monday. This happened after a hoax text message had been circulating predicting a major earthquake or disaster around June 7^th. The prediction was “according to CNN,” said the text.

 

Shortly after the alarm started blaring through a downtown harbor area, around noon, the local agency in charge held a press conference saying the siren was triggered by a short circuit and not a real tsunami. But it was too late. People streamed away from downtown en masse, causing a massive traffic jam in the main shopping district. At least two other alarms went off down the coast, sending some villagers hurrying for the hills. (Others saw that the sea wasn’t receding, as it does just before a tsunami, and gathered around the alarm trying to shut it off).

 

I was in Lamligang neighborhood, just out of earshot of the alarm and out of range of the last tsunami waves. But word about the alarm, traveling by text messages and cell phones, was still halting everything and pulling people out in front of their houses and shops.  At the grocery store, the owner and his staff were working their phones and looking worriedly out into the street. Two NGO workers heard what was up and went back into the coffee shop next door. I hopped on my motor bike and went about my day.

 

I arrived at a friend’s house to drop off some food and their house staff was standing in the driveway looking like they had seen a ghost. I tried to tell one young woman that not only were many people saying it was just a mistake, there had been no earthquake. Without that, no tsunami.  But she would have none of it. She stared at me blankly. She seemed far, far away. There had been no logic to what had happened on the day —as they put it — the sea came. So what was it worth now? Her family was down near the main mosque in central Banda, and now, after getting word about the alarm, another thing happened: the cell phone network jammed. 

 

Now there was no way to find out where loved ones were or to get a quick update on what was really going on. Riding back through the neighborhood, everyone seemed to be either staring down at their cell phones or looking out toward the ocean, wondering which was going to betray them next.

 

I felt strangely removed from the emotions pulsing through the city. When I finally got in touch with Hayley at around 3, we were both amazed at the reaction. Some of her staff had left in a hurry to check on their kids, even though the agency security people were explaining to staff about the false alarm. I’m pretty sure that the trauma of the real tsunami won’t ever translate, no matter how well we speak Indonesian and how deep our friendships get. But I wonder if it’s a kind of psychological barrier that will continue to deeply separate locals from Westerners here?

 

Back in our own orbit Saturday, long after the alarm scare had dissipated, we got a knock on the door at 9 am. There were two guys and a minivan outside, with 32 boxes of our stuff from Portland. All the things we thought we couldn’t live without, but had for 7 weeks: a laser jet printer, two foldable kayaks, old tax forms, pieces of a mountain bike. “This is totally weird,” Hayley said.  It was the flotsam of a suddenly former life, plopped down on our living room floor. 

 

Most of the boxes are still unpacked. But I couldn’t resist opening up the one with my surfboard to see how it had survived the journey. Fine, as it turns out; a feat when you think about the 12,000 miles it traveled.

 

I’m sure it looked different though — that artifact for the sea — to the local guys who came to the house this morning to measure for replacement screens.

 

Take care until next time,

Oakley

We are still trying to figure out Sharia law and its extensions into custom here. It’s not an easy cultural merge. One thing we have discovered: on a Friday night, the Sharia atmosphere can bring back the sensation of a teenager on a covert beer run.

Acehnese seem to have this schizophrenic attitude toward the system, which criminalizes social behavior the West might simply frown on or ignore completely. There’s deep history here of a sort of informal societal code along the righteous principles of the Koran, with punishment meted out by elders backed by community consensus. The local legislature codified the religious law in the last six years.

Now there is a separate police force and court system that deals with moral transgressions; the most common — if the local police blotter is any measure — are premarital trysts. Often the guilty are netted after local villagers call the Sharia police on their neighbors — again, the grassroots support. There are also public floggings for adultery and gambling, and all draw a big crowd. (Aceh doesn’t go to the level of hacking off the arms of thieves).

But around town there’s also a lot of flaunting the moral law and the culture that comes with it. Teenagers — surprise — are the biggest scofflaws; girls wear the customary jibab head scarf but match it with a pair of tight jeans. Last weekend, on a hike past a popular swimming hole, I was constantly running into kids making out in dark corners. Apparently, extramarital affairs and divorce are quite common — one friend’s Indonesian boyfriend has four different sets of half-siblings, and possibly a fifth: one of his mother’s husbands ran off and has never been heard from since.

The aid community’s free living ways have been a source of tension for Sharia’s proponents, such that local authorities’ published a cultural “Dos and Don’ts” pamphlet for the NGOs. It suggests wearing long, loose fitting clothing and not being caught behind closed doors with an unmarried Muslim of the opposite sex. In case you’re wondering if even this appearance of unsavory actions stirs the long arm of Sharia: one agency we know well here had to move two staffers out of a guest house because they were unmarried colleagues and sleeping under the same roof, albeit in separate rooms. The neighbors didn’t like the looks of it.

Aid workers have not been stopped from consuming beer, however. Under Sharia, it’s illegal for a Muslim to sell alcohol. But there seems to be a blind spot for foreigners selling it to other foreigners. Store and restaurant owners are wary about appearing to exploit this loophole too brashly. They never list beer or wine on the menu nor display it in a store cooler (hard alcohol is nowhere to be found). One learns quickly where to look and what to ask for.

So it is we found ourselves at a small grocery store on a busy avenue Friday night, walking gingerly to the back while doing our best to look thirsty. We found a clerk far from other customers and asked for a six-pack. In hushed tones, he summoned the manager. “Six Tigers,” we said to the guy, who was wearing an old white T-shirt and tired eyes. He was not Indonesian (we’ll just leave it at that). He offered bottles of red wine from France and Australia, and in a twist of global finance or maybe a label, the French wine was cheaper. We added the French red; the refreshments would set us back the equivalent of $21.

We were sent to the front of the store to wait. The proprietor’s wife smiled down at us from the pilot’s chair in one of those raised cash-register booths that surveys the whole store. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to get us anything; the owner was fooling around behind the register and his clerk was staring out the window. Was there a waiting period? “This is like Prohibition,” Hayley said.

The hold up was a shipment of apples in from China. For the next ten minutes, we watched as young men in flip-flops unloaded 30 boxes of fruit from a huge open-bed truck idling outside. Meanwhile, the shopkeep finished up his receiving forms.

Our goods eventually came, in separate shipments wrapped in black plastic bags. We quickly stowed them in a backpack. On the way out, the owner rapped me on the back gently with two fists, smoothing over the last of our jitters. “Come back, again,” he said.

At home, we cracked the Tigers along with a wholesome American meal of grilled cheese sandwiches. The light, Singapore-made lager cut through the heavy night. And I had a very brief sensation of being an eighteen-year-old on a beach somewhere and drinking deeply in happy defiance.

Take care until next time,
Oakley
PS –Sorry about the tardiness of the post; we’ve been moving into a new house this weekend.

Last Sunday, I left the expat orbit behind and daytripped to a tennis match with a little team I’ve joined. In the early morning hours, two dozen Indonesian men in the their 40s and 50s, well-heeled, driving SUVs, struck out for Sigli, a farming hub two hours north.

I jumped in with two young lecturers from the local university, Johhni, a jovial engineer and Rahman, a quiet law specialist. We sped out across the rice paddies in Rahman’s vinyl-interior Toyota minivan, cheese pop circa 1985 blasting from the tape deck. Celine Dion made an appearance, as did Whitney Houston. In the paddies, stooped workers in straw hats sliced at the rice plants with handheld scythes. Behind them to the southwest was a massive forested ridge, maybe 2,500 meters tall. The cone of volcano loomed directly ahead, silhouetted in morning mist. I dozed in the back while the other two gabbed (I assume) about internal academy politics up front.

Banana plantations gave way to hardwood and softwood groves as we climbed up around the side of the volcano. Some of the forests had been freshly cut. A sign by the side of the road said “Stop illegal logging!” in English and Indonesian. We passed a small collection of wooden barracks where tsunami refugees were being housed, and also a huge police base.

Three years ago, this two-lane road was offlimits to tourists and both sides of stormy Acehnese conflict — rebels and Indonesian military — had alternating roadblocks. On this day, Rahman merely had to avoid enormous potholes, construction crews hiding behind blind curves, swaying buses and trucks, and leathery, old men in sarongs riding their bicycles against the traffic.

When we reached Sigli around 9am, the sun was already beating down on the two smooth hardcourts, just a stones’ throw from the main downtown mosque. The Sigli group looked younger, fitter, better equipped and, due to that simple math, just plain better. Sportingly, they did offer up plenty of little plastic water containers, sweet breakfast cakes, mandarins, bananas and peanuts.

But by 10 am, it was clear that all the peanuts in Sigli weren’t going to rescue us. They methodically took down our first several doubles groups (nobody plays singles in this heat, so hot that nobody bothers to measure). And the temperature only continued to rise. To combat it, players waiting on the sideline in a tiny, open cement clubhouse sparked up cigarettes. In the shade, they rapped dominos down on a wooden board. A pack of boys watching patiently started to play tag. And I just sweated it out on the sidelines, sucking down as much water as I could: I was the sixth and final group scheduled to play before lunch.

One of the Banda guys wanted to talk politics while blowing smoke at me. “Who do you like, George Bush? Clinton? Obama?” “George Bush bad, he just make War. Obama,” a big thumbs up. “Obama, Indonesia.” Apparently, his time in Jakarta as a grade schooler is scoring points.

Towards 11, the girl in a white head scarf behind the food table was getting antsy like me. “Mister, you don’t play?” I think the kids half expected Pete Sampras himself to lope onto the court, and this wait was only building the anticipation.

But thanks to the oppressive heat, I was a poor imitation. Through four games we hung tough, me and middle-aged, scrappy Mr. Hamza, and we kept the score tied. Then I started to feel drunk. After we switched sides halfway through, the sun was directly in our face. They threw up lobs and my legs wobbled every time I tried to get in position to hit an overhead smash. I dumped a bunch in the net and I think we lost 7-4.

But the loss was a small pain compared to sitting down. I thought I was going to pass out cold. I couldn’t focus my hands to grasp the water cups fast enough. One young player kindly offered up his pack of cigarettes. Another man handed me a cup of coffee. I passed them both up but after watching people throughout the day I see these are gentle coping mechanisms.

“Panas?” everyone kept saying when they saw my red face. “Panas.” Hot. Thankfully Johhni, the next youngest guy from Banda was also struggling. “Panas,” he said shaking his head after his match. Granted, he was wearing sweatpants like most of the older guys (I was in shorts). But he’d also lived here his whole life.

After noon, when the gang had downed a hot lunch of fish and greens on rice, the courts emptied out for prayer. Johhni and Rahman changed into slacks and cleaned up a bit and walked over to the mosque. I lay down on a bench in the shade and tried to relax. The muazin called over the loudspeaker. When he’d finished, a couple of boys in flip flops took over one of the courts. One twelve year old whalloped big looping topspin forehands with my racket, which he’d grabbed off the bench.

A couple of them came over and sat with me after playing. “Mister, Dari Mana?” They all wanted to know. Where are you from? Then we listed off players. “Rafeal Nadal,” they said. “Andy Roddick,” I said. “Roger Federer….James Blake…,” they said.

I got three of them to join me at dominos and we just barely finished one game before the men came back from the mosque, surrounded the table and booted the kids out. I stepped away as well.

In my second match, with a wily old guy, Isa, who has half his teeth, we stole seven games from an older Sigli pair. Sitting down after that one, I noticed a player from Sigli had taken off his shirt. In Banda, none of our group shows even a knee. I thought about it a while. My t-shirt was spongy. I looked at the shirtless guy a couple more times. Finally, I shed mine. And it’s never felt so good to take off my shirt.

Johhni and an older dude lost another match to a 50-year-old man in a stiff, green Che Gueverra hat and his teenage partner who could have been his son. Both the Sigli guys attacked the net like pros. Immediately afterwards, Che hat looked at me and said. “My friend, we play you.”

I rounded up a Banda guy with a massive forehand but we could not get to the Sigli pair. The more the heat wilted me, the stronger Che hat got. Everytime they needed to hit a strong return or big serve they did. The old man aced me up the middle in the final game and served out the match for a 7-4 win.

Four-o’clock approached. “We go to pray, be right back,” Rahman said. A match was going on between some younger locals and they halted and leaned against the fence for two minutes right at 4. When the muazin’s voice stopped, they picked up where they’d left off.

I’d had enough of the sweltering tennis life for one day and I asked Rahman if we could leave. “This is the last match; we wait till the end.” I went to the store for three more bottles of water and Pacari Sweat sports drink.

When I came back, the match had ended and everyone from both teams was in a circle. Two captains from Sigli and our organizer, Muhammad, each spoke; they started off with a “Assalamu Alaikum,” to which everybody responded the same, heartily. Then they launched into winding, 5-minute monologues, which Rahman later said were thanks yous and more detailed appreciations. During one speech, my teammate Mr. Aswa, grabbed a drink bottle wordlessly out of my hand. The gathering finished with a giant handshake between both teams. A couple of the Sigli guys, including the kid who I’d played last, gave me warm “Thanks yous.” “See you next time,” I offered.

The wind through the windows felt awesome on the trip back. An hour into the journey, we pulled into the town of Saare, on the back of the volcano. The markets and food stalls and coffee drinkers crept into the road here and traffic slowed to a crawl. We stopped with two other team cars and took over a table at a crowded café. They all ordered coffee and I tracked down some spicy mie noodles at a stall down the row.

There wasn’t a parking spot to be had and buses were emptying out: it was nearing 7 and people were flowing to a newly built, unpainted concrete mosque with a Turkish dome. My crew left me to finish my noodles and walked across the street to pray.

When the muazin’s voice stopped just after seven, the entire feverish village fell hush. I looked out on the road and the traffic had cleared. People seemed to freeze for a moment. On the hillside, a dusky, marine mist floated. Sittin in my shirt, now stiff with the day’s sweat, I drank deeply from the pause.

It grew dark as we descended into Banda. Johhni fell asleep at shotgun. Rahman and I rapped a little in English as he dodged motorcycles. He wanted to know if it was rude when he asked whether I was married with children, in, maybe, the first five minutes I knew him. My response there in the car was to go on and on about the dissolution of the American family and only 30% of kids in nuclear families and husbands doing the cooking. “So is it a problem, if I ask you?” he said again. “No, I said.” Then I asked: “What do you think of Sharia law?” “We need to have limits,” he said. “So you favor it?” I said inching closer. “It’s a good thing.” I thought about pressing him, about how Hayley is chaffing under the clothes restrictions and the paternalism that seems to come with it. But Rahman quickly turned up the radio. It was Bob Marley, singing ‘Could you be loved?’ And, after a long day, it was hard to argue with Bob.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

Last night, I was having déjà vu all over again — gasping about real estate with a couple of other folks around a living room. Apparently, you can’t escape the parlor game of the ‘00s, no matter where you are.

We are looking for a place to rent, and until very recently, that’s been a pricey exercise in Banda. The rental market has been hot here since the tsunami response drew droves of foreigners here looking for houses to both set up shop and bed down in. Local opportunists learned they had a captive market and the prices skyrocketed. One Spaniard sitting around the room last night said that in late 2005, when he began looking around for a solid, long-term rental with a couple of fellow aid workers the going rate was $30,000. “At first I asked, ‘Is that to own?’” he remembers. “And they said ‘No, it’s to rent for one year.’”

The street where we’re currently staying hosts many aid offices, expat residences and now two massive villas just being finished. They’re no doubt the fruits of local landowners’ labor in the rental market. One is a Dwell house on steroids – cool, sharp angles and grey and black hues with funky smallish windows, all weighing in at about 10,000 square feet. The other palace is Deep South meets the Middle East, complete with a 15-feet-wide coronating dome over the columned entryway.

With craigslist still holding out on a new Banda site, we’d been told the only way to find a rental house was to knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’re willing to move out for a year. If this smacks of passive colonialism to you, you’re not alone. On my first trip around town, I had a driver from Hayley’s agency to do the initial asking for me. (While I sheepishly waited in the car). We stopped at maybe five houses and got only one invitation in for a look.

But I did get an extensive tour of some of the neighborhoods, which have a charming jumbled quality. These palatial villas give way to a bumpy dirt track with a row of one-floor stucco houses, coups of squawking chickens, packs of cats, potted orchids and children running around the front yard. Then you’re in a palm grove all of the sudden, with a traditional Achenese rattan house up on stilts and a cooking fire smouldering in front, and then bang back out on the hustling main road.

Emboldened by the car trip, I set out solo this week on my moto, bound for a neighborhood nestled up against lush hills West of downtown. There’s a hotel there called the Green Paradise, where the walls are washed verdant and many expats have camped out long term. I stopped nearby at a rickety wooden coffee shop to grab a tea, and a bleary-eyed man with quick English began chatting me up. When he heard I was looking for a house, he paid for my tea and took me down the street to see a home near a whining sawmill. “You want?” he said. “Nah,” I said, pointing to the saw.

I told him I had another house in the area in mind – one with a rare “Rumah di Menyewa” sign out front. “That’s my brother’s house,” he said. A real estate market like this can create plenty of kinship.

We finally did get a look at the “brother’s” house. Apparently, it’d been used by a medical NGO. After a cozy entry room with some couches, it opened to a huge dining and living area with a gigantic 10-foot-by-10-foot photo mural of the Hajj at night. The back bedrooms were all still numbered; I stopped noticing at “5”. Certain that we weren’t looking to house a football team, I said to my new friend. “Tell your brother we’ll call him if we’re interested.” Some lines do work all over.

Hayley and I ventured out again yesterday in an expat-heavy enclave near the World Food Programme HQ. But the most promising lead was a WFP security guard-cum-real estate agent who insisted he’d keep an ear out for us: “I already have lots of foreign friends — you know Rob, Ceci…” and he rattled off a bunch more Western names.

That leaves us, at the end of this week, with one solid option: a medium-sized home at the end of a quiet street about half a mile from where we’re staying. It’s got an ample stoned driveway that’s prime turf for a potted plant garden, and an interior patio area with a fountain. It also comes with a kind, young landlord whose negotiations hint the ex-pat driven bubble here may be deflating.

He had planned to fix up the house — a former aid-worker pad — and live in it himself. Indeed, the first time we saw it, there was a drop cloth and scaffolding in one room where a leaky roof was being fixed; Another room was piled with old clothes and household flotsam.

But the landlord’s restaurant, a heavy favorite among the humanitarians, has hit the doldrums. “In 2005, you needed a reservation to get in every night,” he said. When we went there on a recent Thursday, there was one other table occupied.

In the house, he offered to throw in amenities— air conditioners, furniture, internet — if we moved in. And he was flexible on price, as well.

So the terms of the market are changing. It has a familiar ring to it. But somehow, the stakes feel higher here.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

To live here is to live with, maybe even embrace, a lot of low-grade disorder. Litter crawls all over open spaces — roadsides, store entryways, parks, soccer fields — led by the irrepressible plastic water bottle. The trash combines with mud to create a kind of thin layer of sludge that gathers in cracks and corners of the open air bistros and shops.

There are the roadways: It’s a Baja rally out there everyday. The center line and what you and I might call traffic rules are afterthoughts. On my morning scooter commute, about two miles to a little office near Hayley’s where I squat and commune with the ‘Net, I can count on the following: large potholes taken at high speed, grandma coming in from driveway on the left without looking, junior screaming by down the center on his souped-up dirtbike (no helmet), an SUV – probably an NGO driver — surfing my back tire, becak motorcyle taxis doing Ueys whenever a customer hails, dude with his cart stacked with bread cycling along on flat tires. That’s all before the first and only stoplight (most people do stop) the commercial strip (add delivery trucks and shoppers and stir) and busy T-intersection where it’s every man for himself (if you slow down you might never make it, if you take it too fast a car might help you stop).

Nature also constantly lurks — you’ve heard of the earthquakes but this week we also had some afternoon downpours that sprung up quickly out of 90-degree mornings and pounded the tin roofs around here.

And finally there’s also the wildness of living off raw foods. This is a bit more negotiable. Banda has outposts of the Pante Pirak supermarket chain all over town. They have some frozen meats and fruit and rows upon neat rows of every imaginable canned and packaged thing. But we are living in the tropics and we’re perched on the sea and so I figured I needed to give the fresh fish market a try.

It’s in Peunayong, the historical Chinatown I’m told and neighborhood that today crackles with commerce. On this Monday morning, the blocks were lined with becaks and motorcycles and the shopfronts pulsed with a hefty bunch of buyers and merchants and coffee sippers; at the center of it all was the market, a two-story cement structure that smelled of low tide. (A shiny sign out front designated which international agencies had helped rebuild it.) The fray and the whiff intimidated a little, but there was an open space to park my scooter at the end of the block so I was all out of excuses.

I went up the stairs to the first level and waded into the rows through an inch of gut sludge and melted icewater. Everyone quickly wanted a piece of my wallet. “Mister!” “Sir!”, pointing at their catch. Mounds of squid and prawns and bony fish the size of perch. Some mongers had big, beefy tunas. I was after a white fish to go with an American chef’s recipe we’d looked up the night before. Everything was whole — anybody seen a whitefish? I was quickly lost. After passing a whole row of goods, I paused to regroup.

“Hello,” said a merchant nearby. He was an outsized Indonesian carving up a small tuna and for a minute it seemed like he wasn’t trying to sell me anything. “I’m looking for a white fish.” He looked at me puzzled. I pointed to a white stripe on my shirt. “This color.” He split open the tongol to show me the redish flesh. I shook my head. He called over a friend. And they figured it out. “We don’t have putih,” he said finally. Then, laughing, “No school for me. I don’t learn English.” He tapped his chest: “ GAM, we fight,” and fired off an imaginary round from a pantomine AK. “That one there,” he said pointing to his friend, was also a former seperatist: “GAM.”

When he heard I was from Amerikaaa he lit up. “Hasan Di Tiro,” he said and rattled off a few Indonesian sentences. Di Tiro, one of the GAM leaders, lived in New York as an exile for a long time. “New York,” I said. “Hasan di Tiro,” he said. Lots of nodding.

He took hold of fresh, silvery five-pound tuna with a round belly. “You want his one?” he asked. Why not? He had led me out of the wilderness of this place. I’m willing to fasten on to a semblance of a guide.

He macheted open a slit along the fish’s belly, pulled out the intestines and threw them in a pile behind his table. He dipped his hand in a bucket of burgundy water and then laid the fish on some banana leaves and sliced off the scales and fins. He cut two big steaks on either side of the spine and ribcage. Then he looked at me and said in Indonesian “How big?” I showed maybe two inches with my thumb and forefinger. He diced the steaks, the head and the spine pieces and threw them all in a plastic bag.

As I parted with my whole, bloody fish, he said his name. I don’t remember it just now. But I do remember what happened next: I asked where, in the sea of prawn dealers, were some good ones. He motioned to a place down the row. I went right there.

Take care until next time,
Oakley