On New Years Day, Robyn and I took a boat across Manado Bay, to Palau Bunaken, an eight square kilometer island of jungle known for its marine biodiversity. It had seven times more genera of coral than Hawaii, seven of the eight species of the planet’s giant clams, and seventy per cent of all the known fish species of the Indo-Western Pacific, including over thirty-three species of butterfly fish, and graduate schools of groupers, wrasses, gobies, and damsels. I paddled mine in an outrigger along the eastern coast, until we found a small beach. Robyn was content to check into one of the small bungalows, but I had heard that the accommodation was better on the other side of the island.
“I’ll go check it out.” I said, and left her with half the water. There was a scarcity of fresh water on Bunaken, and drinking water had to be imported from Manado.
“How long will you be?” Asked Robyn.
“Not long.” I said. “It doesn’t look that big on the map.” Unless you got lost.
I started up the bushtrail to what I thought would be the most direct route to the other coast. The path grew steep and started to meander through the tropical forest, as the heat of the day began to penetrate the canopy. The streams of perspiration were the only streams on the island, and threatened to outpace my water supply. I trudged on and off the path, in the direction I thought should be due west, but I couldn’t see the sun above the green maze and, even if I could have, it was midday. Two and a half hours later, heat prostrated and parched with thirst, I finally punched a hole in the jungle, and onto the western coast. I almost collapsed onto the first two Bunakenese boys that I encountered, and they quickly revived me with water and reassurance. I explained that Robyn was still around the island on the eastern shore, and asked if there was a way we could rescue her from what, by now, must be a similar degree of dehydration. One of the boys disappeared down the mangroves. Not five minutes later he was back at the wheel of a deafening noise. It looked like a World War II American PT boat, and it was, except for the lack of torpedos, and the fact that it had been constructed of local hardwoods. But it had the same shape and displacement hull, and two seventy-horse Johnson outboards on the stern. It flew like a Sulawesi horeshoe bat out of hell, and we were around the northern tip of the island in no time. I pointed to the beach that Robyn should be waiting on, and they cracked open the outboards to warpspeed. I crawled onto the large curved bow, and stood up with my arms crossed, for added effect. As we roared into the shore, I saw Robyn emerge from the tree she had sought shade under, and I straightened my profile and pose, like MacArthur would have, if this had been the Philippines. I caught the first terms of endearment from my rescued damsel, just as the boys shut down the Johnsons.
“Where the hell have you been?” She demanded. I wasn’t so much offended, as startled, by what I thought was the rather inappropriate ingratitude that had been demonstrated, considering the lengths I had gone, to ensure her salvation. She piled onto the PT boat, and the boys roared us back around the island, to a small homestay, which was also ultimately deemed to be anything but an improvement on what I had initially paddle our outrigger to.
“Mangroves?” She said. “You brought us to mangroves?” They was nothing for it, but to admit the truth of her observation. The mangroves were fairly obviously there. We got the last room in the crowded homestay, next to the noisy lounge where the divers drank at night. And then the mosquitoes arrived, just to make it all perfect.
Our trip back across the bay next morning continued south and inland to the rusted tin roofs, donkey drays, and tarp-covered market stalls of Tonohon. We climbed to the caldera and sulfur smell of the Mahawu volcano, and its crater lake, before continuing on to the waruga stone sarcophagi of Sawangan. Gnarled frangipani trees contributed to the eeriness of the place. Ancient Minihasa, wearing huge copper necklaces and bracelets, were buried otherwise naked in a fetal position, squatting atop a china plate, inside stone graves shaped like a house. The rooflike lids were carved with scenes depicting the life inside the hollowed out rectangular base. There were almost 150 of them, the oldest dating back to 900 AD. The Dutch outlawed the practice in the early 1800s, because of outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis, long before they were able to outlaw the practice of Minihasa headhunting. The Minihasans were as fierce as the Bugis and Torajans. Ceremonial Foso feasts celebrated successful hunts with accomplished headhunters in their exclusive red garments, dancing their Kabasaran war dances. The novelist Thomas Mayne Reid, who was a drinking mate of Edgar Allen Poe, admired Lord Byron, and was admired back by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vladamir Nabakov, Teddy Roosevelt, and Conan Doyle, not only wrote The Castaways, about a party shipwreck in the Celebes Sea, but also The Headless Horseman.
“Headlessness seems to be another common theme in the Southern Sea.” Said Robyn. It was not too far wrong.
“Even San Juan Bautista, on Isla Robinson Crusoe, was named after St. John the Baptist, whose head was presented on a silver platter to Salome, at her request, as a reward for the dance she had performed for King Herod.”
We spent the night at a losmen on Lake Tondano, inside four walls of floor to ceiling carmine curtains, chunky faux French Provençal furniture, and tall vases full of pink plastic flowers. But the bamboo lakeside restaurant that supplied our lunch, from pens containing the huge carp we pulled up with nets, was a delicious fresh fish feast of gastronomic grandeur. Along the shoreline north were fisherman pulling up their oen Chinese fishing nets, and a manufacturer of prefab rare hardwood houses, that looked so much like alien crabs, I expected them to begin moving sideways with us, along the road.
The final stop of our Northern Sulawesi excursion south of Manado, was to the Tongkoko National Park, thirty kilometers from Bitung. We entered a forest of tremendous trees, buttressed with protruding fins like rocket ships, strangler figs, spiraled vines, and subdued light. We were so surrounded by crested black macaques, at one point, that I seriously feared for our safety. Twenty-five of them, baring their long eyeteeth and grimacing, moved in random patterns around us. One female turned to show us her red bottom, not a highlight of our journey, in any sense.
What Robyn and I had really come to see, was a tiny extremely shy nocturnal primate with soft velvety fur, and unusual anatomy. Only ten centimeters long, their hind limbs are twice this length, due to the elongation of their tarsus bones, from which they get their name. Each of their enormous eyes is as large as their brain, and their fingers are extremely extended, with their third finger as long as their upper arm. In light of how fast we are driving them to extinction, it didn’t seem like an inappropriate adaptation. We hired a guide to takes back in with flashlights, in the middle of the night. After scrambling around for what seemed like hours, one illuminating beam caught a small gremlin above us on a branch. It was a tarsier, with a baby, jumping at insects. She was magnificent. We spent the night in the ranger’s accommodation. The locals, including the women, were drunk on beer.
But in the early morning there were swooping hornbills, with large eyelashes. On an island where more than 60 percent of its mammals and more than one third of its birds are found nowhere else on the planet, Sulawesi has lost more than eighty per cent of her forests, from logging, agriculture, and mining. The animals themselves are disappearing because of habitat loss, hunting for bush meat and the exotic pet market, disease introduced by domestic animals, and the lack of any truly organized conservation measures. The Sulawesi and Knobbed hornbills are some of the most endangered, declining at a rate of forty percent over three generations.
“How does he hold his bill up?” Asked Robyn. His red comb and blue beard and yellow bill made one more pass throught the canopy.
“His first two vertebrae are fused together, and his neck muscles are very powerful.” I said. “It may confer some slight protection against the headhunters.”
We walked to the beach and rested under the huge mimosas. I made a big heart on the black sand with two dozen of its white and red-fringed flowers. On the way back through the ranger’s village, we came across a local marching ensemble made up of elaborately plumbed facsimiles of euphoniums, tubas, trombones, and some that had no comparators. They were made of bamboo. Just before the bemo back to Manado arrived, we were visited by a slow large marsupial Sulawesi bear cuscus, which seemed to have come to remind us of Alfred Russell Wallace. Or to plead for help.
We had three more days left in Kansas. Before we left Manado, I had made some inquiries. There was a place off the coast on an island called Pulau Gangga, that had a resort owned by some businessmen from Northern Italy. It was apparently empty and in trouble, but still open, and we negotiated a favorable discount. A heavy plank boat picked us up late morning and, with Robyn sitting on the anchor in the very bow, holding onto her Torajan conical hat, we plied the Celebes Sea, through pods of dolphins and square sailed outriggers, to the white beach and coconut palms of the last resort. We were greeted by Surat, who took on the role of man Friday. He showed us to a luxurious bungalow, and welcomed us every morning with fresh papaya and a Peter Lorre flourish.
“Enchoy you Brakefasst.” He would say. And we would. We spent three wonderful days on Pulau Gangga, eating pasta in squid ink in the Coconut Bar, collecting rare shells and red coral that had washed up on the shore, and playing along the waterline with the kids and dogs in the village on the next beach over. And then it was.
Surat gave us two coconuts to take on the plank boat journey back to Manado. They were carved. In the shape of heads.
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