a forest
November 8th 2008, 2:27 pm
So, after weeks in clear blue water and bracing sea air, returning to Jakarta was a bit of a shock. Waking up with brown smog on the horizon and junk in the water, not nice. A thick pall settled over the ship and clung to us for the next three days, and it didn’t help that the air-conditioning inside was getting increasingly worse. But after ten days at sea, returning to land was something of an adventure, not to mention the prospect of shore leave. I only managed to escape in the evenings, with one night spent D’Place in Sahrina shopping mall (where I played pool badly), and another night narrowly avoiding D’Place once more and going to Jalan Jaksa instead. We got drunk enough to stumble into a Nigerian hotspot where we were bought beers by a Huggy Bear look-alike and there was a shrine to Barack Obama.
The big political event the following morning was struggle, and with several new members of crew joining it was tough going doing all the introductions and small talk. John who works in my office was one of the newbies, and it was good to see a friendly face – seeing known people in bizarre locations (for instance, the VIP lounge of the Tanjung Priok port passenger terminal, the venue for the event) is getting increasingly commonplace. Also joining were four Chinese guys – one campaigner and three journalists – and I’ve been hesitantly experimenting with Mandarin again. I crammed some lessons from my iPod first to brush up on my vocab and managed to make myself understood about 20 per cent of the time.
Leaving Jakarta, the ship entered waters where there’s a higher incidence of piracy and security measures have been stepped up. Jokes about Johnny Depp jumping on board have grown old very quickly, but the sea last Sunday was preternaturally calm, flowing like liquid mercury around the ship. Somehow, Sunday night descended into drunken abandon for me and my cabin mate Ric, with a sound system set up in the heli-hanger. The frequent sightings of sea snakes I made weren’t believed (the waters round Java must be crawling with them) and I fell asleep in a hammock on the poop deck. But I was expecting more of a social life aboard ship – apart from a few isolated incidents (a barbeque here, a quiz night there), it’s been a quite trip.
But this week has been frustrating. Several activities that had been on the schedule suddenly disappeared: some were lost due to bad luck, but others appeared to slip through our fingers due to bad planning. I’d been treading water for two weeks (not literally) in the expectation of having some juicy stories to work on, but they’ve been a lot thinner on the ground than I’d hoped.
One exception was yesterday’s trip out to the plantations in Riau to hoist an unfeasbily large banner in a swampy, boggy bit of deforested land on the Kampar peninsula. Not only was it a trip off the ship, but it was a chance to see firsthand some of the stuff I’ve been writing about for nearly three years. The precariousness of the forest and the extent of the plantations (palm oil and acacia) is depressing, and given the mind-boggling scale of the areas we’re talking about, I’m inclined to think we’re all utterly screwed.
Still slowly getting images up on Flickr, and I shouldn’t really be gobbling up the bandwidth like this. I’m justifying it as a perk of the job. I can’t get FTP to work here so I can’t make modifications to the structure of the site like adding a Flickr badge. Oh well. And huge thanks to Jamie at my lovely host Ecological Hosting for doing the upgrade for me. If anyone’s looking for a hosting service with excellent service, go there.
