As far as most of us are concerned our grandmothers were pretty cool people. However, not many of us have a national monument to remember her by.
“My grandmother was a real national hero,” says Alaraman-Batlyare Pius proudly.
Pak Pius has just collected me from Saumlaki’s Mathilda Batlayeri Airport, and we’re now parked at the entrance next to the monument to his grandmother, Mathilda.
The monument has not yet officially been inaugurated and it is still covered, awaiting the arrival of President Joko Widodo. A swirling black cloak shrouds the oversized bronze figure of the female warrior. But the Arafura Sea trade winds have started to remove the cover already and I can see that the heroine is holding a rifle defiantly aloft with one hand. The other arm holds a young child. The shadowy shroud adds mystery to the silhouette as it looms against the afternoon storm clouds that are gathering over Yamdena Island.
Yamdena is the biggest among the 60 or so Tanimbar Islands, lying about halfway between New Guinea and Australia. North of Yamdena is the island of Larat, and north of that still the ancient tribal homelands of the Fordata Islanders, the most traditional of Tanimbar’s inhabitants. I had wanted to get to Fordata since I first heard tales of mysterious traditions like their ancient shark-calling cult. The trip is a difficult one though, taking a day and a night by boat and only accessible in dry weather.
A single narrow strip of tarmac runs up the west coast from the administrative capital of Saumlaki all the way to the north coast. The drive takes about six hours and is an adventure that is made doubly dramatic by several sections of dirt track that can often involve desperately determined off-road driving. A new bridge, already under construction, will make the drive easier, but for the moment it further complicates things with a churned-up dirt track of greasy grey clay. The trip is probably not recommended without a 4x4.
Apart from the harrowing sections where we had to push the car and block branches under uselessly spinning wheels, the drive was a beautiful one. We passed curving white-sand coves, vast landscapes of coconut palms and hillsides covered in tangled jungle. Little hamlets of stilted traditional homesteads stand like sentries on the hilltops and, since so few cars pass this way, smiling children ran out to wave at us.
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| Small boys play happily in a Tanimbar village street |
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| A single narrow strip of tarmac runs up the west coast from the administrative capital of Saumlaki all the way to the north coast |
Yamdena is the biggest among the 60 or so Tanimbar Islands, lying about halfway between New Guinea and Australia.
Although we’d left Saumlaki a bit later than expected due to a problem with the car, it turned out the delay made little difference; on the north coast we finally pulled up at a dirt-track jetty only to find that there was no way to get the car across until high tide.
So, Fordata had eluded me. Travel among Indonesia’s outlying islands is not always predictable, but this is one of the attractions of travelling in remote corners of the world’s greatest island nation. There is often still a spirit of adventure to be found in what at first glance might look like the humblest of ‘expeditions’. I had already travelled enough in the remotest areas of Kalimantan and Sumatra to know that it is often when Mother Nature throws you those unexpected curveballs that you stumble across the most intriguing places.
It didn’t happen that night in the sleepy backwater town of Larat, however. But the next afternoon, on our retreat southwards again, we stumbled upon one of the gems of these islands. I realised that if we had made it to Fordata there would never have been time to explore the pretty village of Sangliat Dol.
“Selamat bobo lusin!” (Good morning) – I tried my single newly learned phrase of Yamdena on a group of smiling men who were sitting in the shade of a little wooden pavilion by the main square.
One of them introduced himself as Pak Herman and, with typical Yamdena hospitality, he immediately invited us to take some refreshments at his home. First, however, we went to investigate the huge stonework boat that is the traditional and cultural centrepiece of the village. It stands high above the sea on the jungle-clad clifftop as if washed up high and dry like some ancient ark.
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| A horseman rides along a deserted Yamdena beach |
The beach at Sangliat Dol is perhaps the most beautiful village beach on Yamdena.
“Nobody knows how old it is or who built it,” Pak Herman said. “It’s a complete mystery, but it’s believed to be at least 500 years old.”
Perhaps it was built as part of some ancient sea-faring cult or to celebrate the arrival of the island’s first settlers, who must have thought that they had stumbled upon some jungle paradise. There is a belief in the village that their ancestors came originally from Bali, about 2,000km west from here, but nobody seems to know for sure.
As I chatted to Pak Herman and his friends, I learned about a more unfortunate mystery surrounding the stone boat.
“There used to be a great curving pillar standing upright from the stern,” one old man explained. “Then one morning – about ten years ago – we woke up and it had just disappeared.”
It seems that nothing was heard by anyone in the wooden houses surrounding the square. There are only two cars in the entire village so the sound of an engine or shining lamps would certainly have been noticed. Likewise any motorboat would have been heard by the inhabitants of the fishing huts down by the beach. The only way it could have been moved silently would be with a canoe. It would have taken at least six men to carry the bulky 1.5m-high stone, and as Pak Herman led me down the 109 uneven stone steps to the beach I tried to imagine the almost impossible task of carrying such a weight in the dark with no torches. There were no clues as to what had happened but, as far as the people of the village were concerned, the ancient stone had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
The beach at Sangliat Dol is perhaps themost beautiful village beach on Yamdena. The villagers regularly clean their beach andit is devoid of much of the trash that seems to gather on the waterfront in other more popular tourist beaches. It is a sparkling curve of white sand, prettily overshadowed by curving palms and washed by crystal-clear waters from a sparkling reef.
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| Haunting carvings – reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island – are found all over the Tanimbar Islands |
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| Haunting carvings – reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island – are found all over the Tanimbar Islands. |
Pak Herman suggested that I should go with him to pay my respects to the kepala desa (village head). After that we went to meet the kepala tanah, the spiritual leader of the village. At only 34 years old Stenley Masriat seemed young for a traditional shaman, but his forefathers had been kepala tanah of Sangliat Dol for longer than anyone could remember. I handed over a bottle of sopi, coconut palm wine, and Pak Stenley spilled some sopi on the floor of his hut before uttering the traditional words of blessing, followed by what seemed to be the Lord’s Prayer in Yamdena.
Most of the Tanimbar islanders are Christian, and there are spectacularly big churches even in some of the most humble villages. By the church in the village of Tumbur I met Isaias Malindar, another young man who has risen to high position in his community: at only 29 years old he is the youngest kepala desa in this province of 70 villages. Ais, as his friends call him, was clearly very proud of his village and had also organised cleaning programmes and even an art centre where locally produced crafts could be promoted and sold. In the art centre we chatted to one old lady as she deftly weaved a colourful strip of ikat. These islands are famous not only for fine ikat but also for intricate wood carving.
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| One hundred and nine steps descend to the beautiful beach from the village of Sangliat Dol |
Ais introduced me to Pak Damianus Masele, who learned to carve as a small boy and is now one of the most talented woodworkers on the island. He’d recently completed a beautiful figure of a traditional island god called Tafu, probably dating back to the time of the fearsome Tanimbarese headhunters. Even more spectacular (and involving two weeks of hard work) was a fragile Suri war boat with the little ranks of warriors on the deck.
The bow of the boat was shaped like a fearsome dragon’s head and the stern was curved elegantly almost into a spiral. It was the same sort of shape that I’d been told had been at the stern of the stone-boat in Sangliat Dol.
I would be leaving the next morning and wished I could find space to carry the dragon boat in my hand luggage. With its curving scorpion’s tail it seemed to symbolise the air of mystery that surrounds so much in the Tanimbar Islands.
