alien corn

So I’ve seen a bit of Singapore now. People I’ve spoken to say what a naive society it is, how immature it is politically and I haven’t really seen anything to the contrary. Signs everywhere tell you how to be a good citizen (or just avoid breaking the law): the building site of a major casino development is plastered with safety tips on huge banners – ‘A spill, a slip, a hospital trip’ and so on – and toilets have helpful ‘how to use’ guidelines with cartoons to help the hard-of-reading. With London Underground’s recent ‘Be nice to each other’ campaign, I see the same happening at home.

Best of all are the anti-terrorism adverts playing on the screens in the metro system. In the fully-fledged drama, a suspicious man gets on the train with a large bag which he places under the seat and, inevitably, leaves it there when he gets off a few stops later. But we actually see him entering the kill code into his mobile phone, and the train exploding. Wait, though, because to add suspense to your journey, there’s another version where a concerned passenger follows all the correct guidelines and informs the driver that a great big bomb is on the train. She doesn’t appear so much a dutiful citizen as a vicious nosey-parker who no doubt goes home to indulge in a feverish bout of curtain-twitching.

I also spent a few days back in Indonesia on Pulau Bintan for a beach break. My helpful taxi driver (so helpful he offered to arrange a hooker for me, something he has in common with virtually every taxi driver I’ve had on this trip) took me to was perhaps the most ramshackle guesthouse I’ve seen but my room was suspended on stilts over the lapping waves so that was worth the price alone, even if the floorboards were somewhat bendy. But then the family running the place (Traveller’s Lodge past Trikora Beach, if you’re in the area) clearly have no money to do the place up and the gulf between them and wealth-generating Singapore (even the magazines in the hotel lobby are all business-orientated) couldn’t be greater. Yet only about forty miles of water separate the two.

It was brought home with real guilt-stricken clarity by Asep, the cook at the guesthouse. He was keen to know whether I was married, which I deflected with the usual ‘not yet’ line, but then he switched tack: why wasn’t I married? He wouldn’t let it lie, and eventually asked if I preferred boys. It turns out he likes boys too and the extra food he kept giving me (on top of the already generous portions) was probably a bit of a come on.

Before he left, he asked me for some money in Singapore dollars or euros. I wasn’t particularly surprised, but my initial contribution obviously wasn’t enough. He asked how much I earned a day and I’m ashamed to say I lied – I have no idea how much it is in rupiah but it’s a lot, lot more than I told him. Even so, he was gob-smacked and said he earned 15,000 rupiah a day, less than £1. So not quite below the poverty line but given he only works when there are guests there (and, apart from a Singapore TV crew making a reality show about ghosts and exorcisms, I was the only one staying), it’s as near enough to make no difference. So I was guilt-tripped into giving him more which again I didn’t really resent, but what I did resent were his half-hearted attempts to turn me into a sugar daddy. That really hurt.

The food was great, by the way

Last night and back in Singapore, I accidentally ended up on the roof of VivoCity, one of the hundreds of shopping centres here (there are more malls marked on my free map than bone fide tourist attractions), and this is what socialising in urban Asia revolves around. Even more so than in Europe, it’s about going shopping. And next door, the SuperStar Virgo, a colossal cruise ship lit up brighter than the vulgar Christmas tree on top of the shopping centre, was being boarded. Everywhere, there’s excess and over-consumption which is no different from Europe (and we’re one of the world leaders in squandering resources) but somehow it seems more exposed here. Or maybe it was seeing the two extremes within the same day which really slammed it home. But then it would have taken Asep two days to earn enough for the G&T I flung down my neck when I found the nearest bar.

And so suddenly, it’s all over. As we plunged into a week of action, time telescoped in both directions – crawling while waiting for something (anything!) to happen, but also hurtling forward to the abrupt end of my time on the Esperanza. Where the hell have the last six weeks gone?

A few brief snatches from the memory banks: dashing across Dumai harbour in the inflatables to scrawl slogans on the side of palm oil tankers; the agonising waiting, first for our ship to come in, and then for the big finale to kick off; eyeing up the blackboard in the mess for news, some news, any news!; the pervading smell of rancid palm oil which coated me for hours after hauling the mooring lines into place and being plastered in rancid palm oil mud; standing on the bridge deck watching our ship battle two tugs to return to the dock, while a huge tanker was moved into place, a real race against time and all I could do was watch.

There was also a growing realisation that, on the ship, we’re pretty much isolated from what people on the ground really feel. But a couple of incidents – one of the land team based in Dumai being threatened; a man on the dockside standing on one of the mooring lines to prevent the ship from moving, and being extremely angry in the doing of it – brought it home. I’m an outsider and, while I get caught up in the excitement of being all daring on a Greenpeace ship, I’m just here for the duration of the campaign. I have a grasp on the situation as seen through the lens of reports and press releases, but no on-the-ground experience.

And so to Singapore. As someone said to me, it’s like a theme park, or one of those alien civilisations the Star Trek crew beam down to with immaculately manicured lawns and no litter. We’ve been stationed in Little India which is great from an eating and drinking point of view, and it actually smells like India. But along with the incense and spice, now I know what to look for the sweet waft of refining palm oil still comes through.

Leaving the ship was, for a few hours, like having a limb cut off. Along with the realisation that I was no longer encased in a floating steel bubble and had the freedom to do whatever the hell I liked (in accordance with Singapore’s many legal codes, of course), I’d also lost the social circle I’ve had for the past six weeks. It was made worse by working in a chilly, air-conditioned hotel lobby on my lonesome all day Monday (not to mention the cack-up with my immigration papers, or lack of them, causing endless fun when I tried to get into Singapore), but one last bout of shore leave had some of us reuniting in a dingy backpacker pub.

(Technically, I was the only one doing the reuniting, but it’s my perspective that counts here.)

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.

The problem with working on a website all day is that, when I finally manage to finish, the last thing I want to do is go and work on my own one. So no updates for two weeks.

We crossed a time zone the other night. As we sailed westwards, sunset slipped progressively later. In Jayapura, it was almost bang on 6pm; by Wednesday, it had slid to 7pm. Then we crossed into GMT+8 and everything’s back as it was. And we’ve been passing islands and seas with the most bewitching names – Flores, Butu, Ceram, Halmahera – which evoke the spice trade.

But going back further, I was glad to arrive in Manokwari. The daily routine of chopper flights in the morning and afternoon was getting, well, routine. The stop in Manokwari meant an end to the flights for the time being and some public events, with the chance to meet and talk to people from outside the ship. It’s amazing how quickly a confined space becomes your entire world, and how rapidly it becomes all you know. Plus several people disembarked: some were going home, others were heading to Jakarta for a long planning meeting and we’ll catch up with them next week.

I met a Dutch couple who had grown up in Papua (or Dutch New Guinea as it was then) who were appalled at how things had changed and how the environment was being trashed. They were Greenpeace supporters who had made a beeline for the ship. I also had my photograph taken more times than I can count by the various volunteers who manned the open boat session and it was a relief when they finally left the ship.

Sunday is a day of rest, and a few of us were ferried over to a small island in Manokwari Bay for some time on the beach. The crystal water concealed fields of coral rubble so I can only imagine what the sealife must have been like in years gone by. I did spot some really freaky creatures though: a long, textured tube with black and white checkered markings; a coiled-up starfish that wasn’t a starfish as it must have had fifty arms; a tiny black sea slug with electric blue markings. Usnea and Silas, two of the deckhands, later showed us some pictures of a fish they’d seen and Kelly (our resident spear-fisherman) confirmed it was a dangerous one. Probably a lion fish. How we laughed.

With campaign work effectively suspended for the transit to Jakarta, I thought I wouldn’t have enough web work to keep me occupied, so I volunteered to help out on deck. To be honest, it was a relief to be doing something physical despite the sweltering heat and I did a fair bit of painting bulkheads. But somehow my real work seems to multiply – I think the tasks I set myself breed like rabbits when I’m not looking – and I had to cry off the deck work. My excuses sounded a bit feeble, and I think a lot of people wonder what I do all day. Sometimes, I wonder the same thing as my task list doesn’t seem to get any shorter.

I am, however, learning heaps, such as:

• how not to shoot a video in two languages;
• how not to dub a video into English to try and repair the initial mistake;
• how not to record interviews in another language, thinking I can just edit them willy nilly;
• how not to include idioms and cultural references which are completely pointless outside of the English language;
• how not to handle toxic ship paint with my bare hands;

and so much more.

Some really cool things from last night: me and Locky the bosun won the ship quiz (a bottle of Jacob’s Creek was our booty); the bioluminescent dinoflagellates exploding in the ship’s wake, like a fiery nebula; the lights of Borneo to starboard, Bali to port, sunk beneath the horizon but reflecting on the low cloud.

And the whales from a few days ago. No one is sure, but they could have been fin whales. Second largest creature on the planet. We spotted a commotion in the water, schools of fish flapping about near the surface. Occasionally, spouts of water would rocket up and huge jaws broke the surface to scoop up the fish. Unreal.

Read Black Swan Green, which contains David Mitchell’s customary hallmarks, but sadly narrow in scope compared to his previous novels. Embarking on Divided Kingdom which I found in the ship’s library. Rupert Thomson’s fantastic scenarios often seem ludicrous but hide tightly-woven and sinster analogies, so I’m expecting good things.

It looks like I’ve got some malicious code being squirted in – huge thanks to Mildly Diverting for spotting that – so sorry if it’s buggering up the RSS feed. I’m trying to upgrade Wordpress but I’ve got stuck halfway through and FTP doesn’t seem to want to work over a satellite connection anymore. I’ll keep trying though.

But what a week. It was no sleep till Jayapura – the overnight flight on Saturday stopped twice, in Makasa and Biak, with hoovering and meals both times so sleep was impossible. I was on the verge of passing out, but we had to wait for other people coming in on a second flight and travel in to Jayapura together. I forgot both the names and faces of the people I met and had to be reintroduced later on, and could barely speak to the two or three people I already knew. I woke up at 5pm and it took several days before I got my sleep mojo back.

I didn’t get to see much of Jayapura, though, apart from a water-side fish barbeque (someone said the night skyline looked like Hong Kong, although presumably on a smaller scale) and a sweltering pool hall. A friend once told me how much he loved border towns and while Jayapura isn’t literally on a border (although it’s pretty damn close), there is a frontier feel to the place, like a boom town in the wild west where greedy fingers are trying to get at the natural resources further inland. But then that’s kind of why I’m here.

The Esperanza drifted in to the welcome ceremony on Monday morning and while I have to admit I’ve never been sure what all the fuss around Greenpeace ships is about, childish excitement began to bubble up. Once on board, however, it quickly dawned on me just how far outside my normal comfort zone I was – I got lost in the almost identical corridors and with the internet connection down, I couldn’t file my first story. By the time I realised the ship was offline, though, we’d already left the dock and were anchored in the harbour. Exhaustion and frustration dissolved together and I got really, really snappy – it makes such a bad first impression, and I had to spend the next 24 hours apologising to several people I’d been narky to.

So instead of moving straight onto the ship as planned, I had to return to shore and stay in the Hotel Yasmin where I could at least publish to the blog. When I did finally get on board, it took a couple of days to settle in to the rhythms of shipboard life which isn’t really surprising – it seemed like it took longer, but then maybe that was because I was stuck in a confined space, so everything is that little bit more intense.

But oh yes, setting sail: that was quite an experience. It was after dark, the moon was out and an electrical storm chased our tail as we sailed west alongside fearsome coastal mountains. The shore was in darkness apart from infrequent, solitary lights just above the water line, and I had an unhealthy urge to jump into the slick water. Oddly I still do, so I try not to lean over the deck railing too much.

The rest of the crew only got on a couple of days before I did, so they’re all settling in as well. Socially, things were kind of quiet for the first few days but now everyone’s relaxing a bit more and not heading to their cabins straight after dinner.

But the highlight of the trip so far (and it’s going to be hard to top this) was going up in the tiny helicopter over a huge expanse of rainforest. I’ve already burbled about this in an official capacity, but it was truly incredible. Not just zipping along a few metres above a beach at 120 mph as the wind tugged at my eyeballs, or leaning at 45 degrees suspended above the doorless doorway with only my seat belt supporting me, but the sheer lush forestness of the jagged landscape beneath us. Fellow passenger Usnea and myself were utter tourists, taking hundreds of pictures between us (although many of mine are blurred due to the speed we were travelling) and I tried to be all Englishly reserved when we got back, but I couldn’t help babbling about it for hours afterwards.

Today has been a day of rest, something I hadn’t realised I’d needed. But after two weeks on the go (and 13,502km travelled), it was high time for a break. There was a plan to boat out to a beach, but torrential rain and then inconveniently placed coral reefs prevented us. Still, we got to swim by the side of the ship and it’s given me a chance to catch up on some personal stuff. Even if there’s still a malicious whiff of spam around here.

By the way, photos should be going up on Flickr soon.

So I’ve arrived in Jakarta, and have the dessicated aspect and stumbling gait of one who has severe jetlag and too many sleeping pills in his system. At least I’ve had my compulsory stupid foreigner moment, when I handed over 100,000 rupiah for a tuk tuk ride. It was supposed to be 10,000. Needless to say I didn’t see any change but at least I made the driver’s night. I blame profound exhaustion and I was planning to head out to the nearby bars of Jalan Jaksa but thought perhaps it was wiser to stay in the hotel before I did something really dumb.

Turning the clock back a bit, after all I’d heard about Singapore airport, I was mildly disappointed. It had a strong whiff of 1970s conference centre, or from another angle the shopping mall from Dawn Of The Dead. Or maybe that just reflect my own zombified state, and watching the vice presidential debate in the departure lounge. Even at this distance, Sarah Palin raises my heckles. I also wandered around some bookshops and the best thing I saw was a biography of George Soros. In manga.

I’m currently sitting in the Greenpeace office, trying to get some things set up before I get to the ship but my brain still isn’t functioning properly. Martin and Arie, my two handlers, have been very patient and I’m amazed Arie managed to put up with two hours of babbling as I tried to explain my ideas for the web site.

More jetlag to come as Ardiles the photographer and myself are flying to Jayapura tonight, another 2,000-plus miles, seven hours and two time zones away. Here’s my route so far:

View Larger Map

I’ve been doing some background reading to get some background info on my upcoming trip (I’m going here to join this ship for a couple of months), or at least I’ve been trying, but reading material on West Papua and Indonesia in general seems to be limited. I’ve found a couple of middle-weight general histories which didn’t really take my fancy, and I’ve been more keen to find personal accounts, travelogues, that kind of thing. And while the shelves are groaning with books on China, India, Provence, Patagonia, even Kurdistan (plus jokey books about fridges and backpackers), but very little on the East Indies.

One I did find was Sabine Kuegler’s Child Of The Jungle who has clearly had the most amazing life growing up amidst the Fayu tribe. Her life unravels when she moves to Europe and the extreme culture shock leads to depression and suicide attempts – all great personal stuff, but despite the potential here it was a book I struggled to finish it. The bulk of the book deals with her time in the jungle with her family and the Fayu people (her dad was on an anthropological mission to document their language), and while there’s a few interesting snippets about the social dynamics of the warring clans, it all feels a bit empty. I’m hoping for more from George Monbiot’s Poisoned Arrows which I’ve just tracked down. At least the print size is smaller and there are more pages.

In the St Ives branch of Oxfam, I also found an old, handsome Time Life volume on New Guinea. The author worked at museums in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and clearly came from the empire building school of academia. Nature is there to be mastered and tamed, it seems, although it was written in the early 70s. The man behind the counter, when he heard why I was buying the book, said, “Well, I hope you don’t get eaten by the natives.” I told him it was extremely unlikely.

I’m in Zennor for a few days, a small village near St Ives in Cornwall. With a mountain of leave to use and a reluctance to spend all of it bumming around London, I’ve come somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for about 30 years. I don’t think my significant other is terribly happy that I’ve taken myself off (given where I’ll be going in a few weeks and for how long) but there’s that whole empty spaces, clear mind thing going on. And the pub next door to the hostel is absolutely perfect.

I’ve also discovered that I can actually walk. As in, walking for pleasure, not just to get from A to B. I never really got into that side of things when I was growing up (and with the Lake District in my backyard, it was kind of expected), but tramping along the coastal path has been a revelation. I clambered over Gurnard’s Head (fanboys and girls: it’s a bit like being in The Sontaran Experiment), watched marines training on a cliff face (complete with real helicopter rescue for an injured soldier) and got wet feet.

Here’s something odd: having not seen anyone for hours, I glanced behind to see a spritely senior on my tail. Every time I looked back, he was closing the gap between us and I was nervous about what would happen when he caught up. I’ve read too many M R James stories not to be unnerved (I came over all Peter Vaughan in A Warning To The Curious), being persued by an unknown entity in the wilderness. But he just said hello and pointed out how muddy his trousers were. Which was something of a letdown.