Headhunting in Kansas 8

  “What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His
     real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.”
                                                                                       Mark Twain


The Trans-Sulawesi Highway was a little like the Trans-Canada Highway. Not much, as it turned out. There were violent forces of chaos on the Trans-Sulawesi, just over the horizon. I swear I had no idea, or I would not have brought Robyn.
The first clue should have been the absence of foreign tourists on our Batutumonga express. The second should have been the absence of locals. There was Robyn and I, and a couple of official looking government types from Jakarata, sitting in the front of the big multicolored Mercedes, making the ten-hour drive to Tentena, a town on the northern shore of Danau Poso. They weren’t making any money from us.
Lake Poso is the third largest lake in Indonesia, over half a kilometer above sea level, and famous for its profusion of wild orchids, including a black one. Tentena was also renowned for two-meter long monstrous eels and, after ten hours inside the Batutumonga Express, we were ready for a feed of several centimeters. We entered the small town on the Poso River, both sides of which were connected by a blue and yellow bridge. Blue and yellow horizontal stripes decorated large vertical flags outside each household, and blue and yellow and red outriggers lined the sandy lakeshore. It was a blue and yellow kind of lakeside resort town.
There were V-shaped eeltraps, and where there were eeltraps, we reasoned, there were eels. Robyn and I checked into the Hotel Intim Danau Poso, and went to the Lotus restaurant. They were eelated to see us, and served up eelongated eels by hurricane lamp.
On returning to the Intim, we asked the owner what time the bus left for Poso next morning. He looked like we had just hit him with a shovel.
“No bus.” He said, extending out his palms, like a tired Tau-Tau.
“No bus?” Robyn said. “So how do we get to Poso?” Now he looked even more tired.
“No bus. No bemos. No fly. No go Poso.” He said. Robyn and I tried to understand the concept of how it was not possible to get from one place to the next. His wife emerged from behind the curtain.
“Maybe one way, but not stop in Poso.” She said.
“Where then?” I asked.
“Palu.” She said. “You must go all the way to Palu.” My head, still on my shoulders, was beginning to hurt. We could get to Poso, but couldn’t stop in Poso, and had to go all the way to the west coast town of Palu, another 220 kilometers.
“How do we get to Palu?” I asked.
“Toyota.” She said. I nodded. She picked up the phone. Ten minutes later a young man with a ponytail and flipflops, and a packet of Kansas, appeared in the dimly lit reception. He didn’t look Indonesian; he looked Cheyenne. He was with two other flip-flops, a thick tough Chinese wearing a blue and white baseball cap, with a fish-in-mouth raptor emblem on it, and a thin dark younger one, with a single eyebrow. It was Boxing Day, and I heard the bell for the first round. These kind gentlemen would drive us to Palu. It would take all day. We would pay for the trip, and their trip back.
“How much?” I asked.
“Sixty dollars.” Said Cheyenne. And I thought the eels in this town were slippery.
“Forty.” I said.
“Fifty.” He said. “Very dangerous.” Cheyenne’s accomplices shifted ever so slightly on their flip-flops.
“OK.” I said. Whatever. I should have offered them more. Spectacular stars and meteors painted the black out of the dark sky that night, and shimmered on the lake.