Asia 2008-09

The island of Flores has two good reasons to visit, both in the far west: the diving and the reptiles. You stay at Labuanbajo to see both. In this post I'll describe the diving.

I dived for three days, I think, and snorkelled for an afternoon. The diving is world-class. The currents can be strong and there are washing machines, but there are also large pelagics: sharks, trevally and manta rays. I dived with Bajo Dive Club, a shop run by a saturnine German; my dive guide throughout was Kira, who did an excellent job.

At Tatawa Besar, I saw boxfish, pufferfish, groupers and a few hawksbill turtles, some baby snappers and a school of black surgeonfish. This is a spotted boxfish.

This is a pufferfish.

At Manta Point I saw the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen; a huge moray eel, being cleaned; lots of clown triggerfish; several bumphead parrotfish and a Napoleon wrasse; a sleeping white-tip reef shark. A blue-spotted fantail ray swam right under me. I got very close to an angelfish, fins extended in ecstasy, being cleaned. These are fox-faced rabbitfish receiving the same treatment. Fish at cleaning stations typically hover, facing diagonally upwards, and extend all their fins. I have seen black snapper open their mouths so far for the cleaner wrasse that you can see through their gills from in front of their mouths.

Oh, and half a dozen manta rays. I got within about three feet of one. In fact, at one point, I was taking photos of something small when a ray came right up behind me. You cannot communicate underwater, so I didn't know. This is me taking photos once I had come to my senses.

The biggest was about 5 metres across. Another was being cleaned and I could see it up close: they have a long tail, a tiny dorsal fin, and the feeder aerofoils (which give the ray its Linnaean name, Manta birostris) are flexible. A great dive.

At Batu Bolong there were strong and variable currents, washing machines, and cold water. It was a rich wall reef, as rich as Sipadan. Several hawksbills; a couple of white-tip reef sharks; some large grouper and sweetlips; a mantis shrimp; a white-margin unicornfish; giant pufferfish; six big-nose surgeonfish; two lionfish, swimming freely; two kinds of nudibranch; and bluefin, silver and giant trevally.

At Sabolon Kecil I saw lots of bumphead parrotfish – one swam right beneath me as I fiddled with a camera.

Yellow and spotted boxfish; nice gorgonians; a sandy patch of garden eels; red-tooth triggerfish. These are the garden eels; come any closer and they retreat into their burrows.

I took several photographs of banded boxer shrimp, up close, before realising that my hand had been only inches from the maw of a moray.

Best of all, a white manta ray joined us and circled around.

At Sabolon Kecil, again, I saw more bumphead parrotfish; several blue-spotted fantail rays; the same patch of introverted garden eels; fantastic gorgonians and ever-grasping octocorals.

We also saw two juvenile shaded batfish. When younger still, they have an even more exaggerated pinnate shape, and are black with a ready-brek orange margin.

And a spotted eagle ray, black with white dots. It had a very long tail and was perhaps 6 metres long: it drifted very slowly, and then when it saw us it shot off very rapidly, flapping quickly.

At Castle Rock, we swam against a strong current and I never recovered, having to vomit slightly into my regulator. The current was occasionally downward. Nevertheless it was not a bad dive. We saw a bright white scorpionfish; a school of motionless ribbon sweetlips; a small Napoleon wrasse; tobies; spotted boxfish; clown triggerfish; a school of long-fin batfish; a big hawksbill, feeding; a blue-spotted fantail ray; several sizable reef cod; and a white-tip reef shark. But best of all were the trevally: schools of silver trevally, plenty of bluefin and lots of huge giant trevally, very dark, with big teeth.

And at Crystal Rock, it was a very good dive although we were restricted by washing machines at both ends of the dive. The divers’ bubbles go in weird directions; the fish shoot downwards and then struggle up against the current. We saw two hawksbill turtles, one I watched for a long time, feeding, a rusty stain on its rear shell and flippers. A huge Napoleon wrasse cruising slowly. A baby white-tip reef shark under a table coral. A lot of lionfish swimming free. Blue-spotted fantail rays and lots of unicornfish. Two huge fat Phyllidia nudibranchs, together, and a small Chromodoris.

Finally, strangest of all is a network lamellaria, sitting on Kira's tank-banger. It is about a centimetre long. It is not, as it appears, a nudibranch; in fact it is more closely related to cowries.

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On the Sabolon Kecil dive, a guy called Matias was stung by a lionfish on his first ever open water dive. He went very grey, and his hand swelled up and his finger went black in patches. He was in real pain for a while. But he bravely persevered and dived again a couple of days later.

If that was a lionfish (and that was speculation), imagine a stonefish wound. Its venom, a myotoxin, is ten times stronger. The pain is very severe, and may last for hours, days or months. Symptoms include difficulty breathing, delirium, vomiting, shock and cardiac arrest. Without treatment, the tissue at the wound inevitably becomes infected, ulcerated, abscessed and gangrenated within a few days.

The treatment for a puncture wound from a venomous fish is hot water, poured over a towel to hold in the heat. The hot water is thought to denature the proteins in the venom.

I read about this is a book called something like Indonesian Reef Guide, by Helmut Debelius, available in German and English. There is an extract from a 1951 article in a South African medical journal, in which Dr J L B Smith describes the symptoms after a stonefish punctured his thumb.

Many African victims had lost fingers and toes, which had become gangrenous and fallen off. Dr Smith did not suffer from this because his wife gave him 1,000,000 units of penicillin, repeated a week later. And it was she, I believe, who came up with the hot water treatment.

Even after this treatment, after 80 days Dr Smith reports:

Hand still weak… thumb barely moveable, toxin has had a marked adverse effect on my general health and condition.

Given the extraordinary toxicity of the spines, it is a shame that the stonefish is perfectly camouflaged – much more so than lionfish.

I’m back in Singapore. Five months ago I found it boring. Now, after four months in Indonesia, I am very glad to be here. Singapore: cheese; wine; wifi; English language cinema; English language bookshops; metro; Indian and other restaurants; cheese; hygiene; privacy; hot water; drinkable water; pavements you can walk along; cheese. A relative absence of: hawking and spitting (illegal); blowing your nose into your fingers and then flicking them; uneatable sugary bread; sucking your teeth loudly; litter (illegal); smacking chops while eating; malaria; hissing at someone to attract their attention; potholes; shouting ‘hello mister’ to any white face.

Here is a typical sign in Singapore.

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Flying into Jakarta this morning, the landscape looked very different from four months ago. The fields looked like flooded fens.

I recently read Empire of the Sun by J G Ballard. It is a fictionalised account of the author’s childhood experiences in Shanghai and in a Japanese civilian prisoner camp. It was perhaps even more interesting as an insight into the childhood experiences of Dirk, my roommate on the Papua tour. Dirk was born in the Dutch East Indies – his father was a Resident, or Collector or something – and Dirk was interned in a Japanese camp during the war. His father was interned in another camp and died during the war. After the war, the remainder of his family barely escaped the violence of nationalist Indonesia, sailing to Holland, where Dirk went to school with children four years younger than him, and learned to speak proper Dutch.

The book is beautifully written. Ballard describes a sunset thus:

The sun fell towards the Shanghai hills, and the flooded paddy fields became a liquid chessboard of illuminated squares.

It’s a nice image, and perhaps it works for paddy fields seen from ground level (padi, incidentally, is Indonesian for unharvested rice). From the air yesterday morning it did not work so well, because the fields lack the required rectilinearity. The dikes look more like the filigree pattern of a dragonfly wing, the fields like mercury.

This is an old photo, taken near Makassar; the fields were not so flooded here.

(And here is a cicada from the Baliem Valley, Papua, decorated in Australian colours.)

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Ack, gek, ptaw: durians are on sale on the street outside. I thought the season had finished for a while.

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I have been mildly worrying whether the butterflies I purchased in Sulawesi were protected by law. As I understand it, four species of Papilio and all Troides are protected by Indonesian law. The only one of my twelve specimens protected is the Troides helena. Actually, this one came from a butterfly farm, not from the wild, and is therefore the least objectionable of the specimens.

Which doesn’t quite make it all right.

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Who first formulated a theory of atolls? Charles Darwin. He suggested that an atoll started life as a fringing reef, around a volcanic island that subsequently sinks. The coral builds higher in order to stick close to the surface, forming a coral ring around a central lagoon. He was right. At Enewetak Atoll in the central Pacific, the volcano is 1,219 m below sea level.

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I wondered, a long time ago, why they drive on the left in Indonesia, which came under Dutch rather than British suzerainty. The answer seems to be that, while the Dutch were busy in Europe with the Corsican upstart, the British managed their possessions in the East Indies. Stamford Raffles was Lieutenant Governor of Java between 1811 and 1816, being appointed at the age of thirty. He published A History of Java in 1817 and received a knighthood in 1818.

Here is a statue of Raffles in Singapore, erected at the point where he landed in January 1819. In the background is the financial district. Although his name is for ever associated with Singapore, he only spent a few weeks here. He spent much longer in Java and Sumatra.

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The Republic of Indonesia has reasonably amicable relations with Papua New Guinea. The reason is simple: it is the policy of PNG that Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea, should be part of an ‘integrated’ Indonesia. A border post between the northern towns of Jayapura and Vanimo should open early next year (although, naturally, people cross all the time and families straddle the border).

Although there are arguments about alleged incursions into PNG by the TNI (Indonesian army), and alleged harbouring of OPM members in PNG, PNG is actually the only neighbour with which Indonesia does not have a border dispute. Indonesia contrives to have two border disputes with stamp-sized Singapore, one on the west and one on the east side. It has dozens of arguments with Malaysia, especially over the border in the Melaka Strait and the Ambalat oil and gas field in the Makassar Strait (both countries have awarded concessions in the territory of the field). With Timor-Leste, most of the land border is agreed, but the sea border is not. Indonesia’s northern border, with the Philippines, is also disputed.

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While we were dining at Two Fish Divers, on Lembeh Island, a tiny gecko fell from the ceiling and landed on the table, missing all the food. Unlike its bigger relatives, it was entirely unafraid. Put anything in front of it and it jumped on to it: so it happily jumped on to fingers, heads, shoulders... and noses. It tickled.

I am back in Makassar and have been reunited with my laptop, which I have hardly seen over the last three months (hence, partly, the lack of photos on the blog recently). I'll be staying in and watching a DVD - Spiderman 3, perhaps. Joy.

The main preoccupation, as it has been for the last month, is whether I can escape from Indonesia before the visa expires. I could not buy an international air ticket in Ambon (where the airport optimistically calls itself Pattimura International) and in Makassar the travel agents are closed tonight. The visa expires the day after tomorrow.

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I spent the last week or so in Ambon, which is in the rain shadow of the island of Seram. A few days ago in Seram a Christian teacher said something to a Muslim pupil that, when later reported at home, caused outrage. A church and a village were reportedly burned. So the religious violence in the Moluccas continues to simmer at a low level, it seems.

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In Manado, dog is on the menu. There it is called 'rw', the initials for 'soft fur' in Indonesian. The Minahasans eat dog, as do the Bataks of Sumatra and the Torajans. The Torajans, at least, reckon it keeps their peckers up. But I was not able to try any, as I was not really capable of eating solids at the time.

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Inevitably, I spent a lot of time in Manado at the Mega Mall. On sale on the ground floor of the mall were three dozen shiny new German grandfather clocks. Nasty kitsch things, they were retailing at about $1,000 apiece.

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Not only is there rabies in Indonesia, there is bird flu. On one day last month, 17 patients were admitted to hospital here in Makassar with suspected bird flu. Their chickens and their neighbours' chickens had all died of it. The week before, a man died from bird flu in Semarang, Central Java. The province of Central Java has had 11 human deaths from bird flu since 2003.

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In my post on the Kinabatangan I mentioned that Indonesia plans to increase production of palm oil significantly. That policy is now in reverse, because palm oil prices have plummeted recently, along with other commodities.

The average monthly spot price per ton on the Malaysia Derivatives Exchange was RM 3,857 in March 2008, RM 2,406 in September, and RM 1,505 last month. It has recovered slightly to RM 1,633 at Friday close. Similarly, rubber has fallen by more than a half, robusta coffee by nearly a half, and cocoa likewise. As with many commodities, demand and supply elasticities are low in the short term, so the price is volatile.

In the medium term, supply is elastic. Oil palms take only 3-4 years to produce fruit and are at their best at 6 to 7. They produce for 30 years or so.

Palm oil has well-known uses in food, but it is also used to make biofuel. One reason for the extraordinary growth in production of palm oil in the last few years - with massive resulting habitat loss for forest-dwelling species - is the crazy, irresponsible and damaging subsidies paid by rich-world governments for biofuels. Not only by rich world government, though: in Indonesia it is mandatory to add biofuel to diesel and petrol mixes. In transportation diesel, for example, at least 10% of the mix must be biodiesel.

The top importers of palm oil are China, India and the EU. The top producers and exporters are Malaysia and Indonesia. They share 90% of global production. This year Indonesia is likely to produce 18.6m tons of palm oil and Malaysia 17.5 m tons. Like OPEC, the two countries coordinate inventory policies. They have agreed to reduce supply growth sharply next year. Indonesia is to replant 50,000 hectares, Malaysia 200,000.

Palm oil accounts for about 15% of Indonesia's exports. Indonesia mainly exports crude palm oil; Malaysia exports processed product and gets twice the export revenue.

The top producers of natural rubber are Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, which share 70% of global production. Last month they agreed to cut production by 210,000 tons by replacing trees. Indonesia is the fourth largest producer of coffee after Vietnam, Colombia and Brazil: it grows 450,000 tons a year, of which 250,000 tons are exported.

So its economy is heavily dependent on commodity prices, and the rupiah has fallen sharply against the US dollar recently. This would be good news but for the fact that traders have also decided that the UK is a banana republic. Despite growth averaging over 6% a year, Indonesian government debt is rated BB- by S&P: junk. This is probably because the tax base is narrow and the government's autonomy is constrained by an established and costly system of subsidies.

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And that reminds me. As I mentioned before, I had been wondering what the seaweed farms in Lembata were for. It turns out that the main purpose of seaweed farming in Indonesia is to extract polysaccharides called carrageenans, which are widely used as a thickening agent in food, especially in desserts and ice cream. The source I found, which could be out of date, stated that the seaweed is exported raw to Holland, where it is processed.

To get from Ambon to the Banda islands you go by Pelni ferry. (Or, in theory, you can fly once a week; but the plane is liable to be cancelled when a butterfly farts in Mexico.)

It takes, at best, seven hours. It looks OK in the photos, but the journey is no fun, since the ship is home to perhaps half a million cockroaches, and hundreds of mice.

Getting off is even worse. As soon as the ship docks, tens of people rush on to the ship before anyone can get off, thereby increasing overcrowding in the gangways. At this point my arms were pinned across my chest and I realised that someone was stealing my wallet, by slicing the back of my trousers open, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Apparently it happens on every ferry to Banda.

Banda is a bad place to have a wallet stolen. There is a bank, but it has no ATM (so I was carrying a very large wad of cash), does not change money and does not buy travellers' cheques. Without help from other tourists I would have been in serious trouble. But it turned out there were six of us staying at the same guesthouse: Hans, Bruno, Niek and Vire from Holland and Robert from Austria. I had met Niek and Vire in Tana Toraja. Niek and Vire and Bruno were kind enough to save my skin by lending me money, and so I was able to stay on the islands.

I spent most of the following day at the police station. The young sergeants tried to be helpful but did not speak English and my tourist Indonesian does not extend to giving a witness statement. Eventually the hotel manager came to help out. This was after a visit to the home of a man described to me as the 'chief of intelligence', who was not helpful. Some cash exchanged hands and eventually a man was found to type up a declaration of theft.

I hope that I will be largely reimbursed for loss and damage by my insurance company, that being the point of insurance, but I am left with overwhelming and painful feelings of stupidity and anger. After nine months, and three months in Indonesia, my defences have been lowered. I initially wore a money belt, but in the tropics they are very uncomfortable. In Indonesia, in particular, I have been trustful, even leaving my bag unattended at times, because, on the whole, you can. So I was just carrying my wallet in my back pocket - something I would never contemplate in Italy.

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Trouble, part 2

I am posting from Kota Ambon, the main town of the island of Ambon. It was home to a Japanese HQ in the Second World War, and so, like Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, was flattened by the Allies. Like the two Malaysian cities, it is spectacularly unattractive.

The city was further Beiruted between 1999 and 2002, when an extraordinary and horrific bout of religious violence gripped the south of Maluku. Christian mobs burned mosques and Muslim kampongs, and Muslim mobs returned the favour (radical Muslims travelled from elsewhere in Indonesia to participate in the fun). Many died. The area was put off limits to tourists. But amidst the general ugliness it is now hard to identify the physical scars left by that collective insanity.

As in the Balkans, people of different religions had lived side by side in the Moluccas, and exchanged favours. Now they don't, and the children are educated separately. Indonesia has a proud tradition of religious pluralism and tolerance, encapsulated in one of the five principles of the Pancasila. As conservative Islam grows in influence in Indonesia (following Malaysia), that tradition is increasingly in question.

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Anyway, that is all I have time for at the moment. I am hoping to go diving in the south of Ambon for a few days, and then to return to Makassar mid-month. And Selamat hari raya Idul Adha 1429 H to any Muslims out there.

I'm back in the southern hemisphere after my diving trip to Manado. I managed five dives in the Lembeh Straits, to the east of Manado. As Jaakko from Living Colours put it, Lembeh is "a dirty harbour", so whoever managed to promote it as a dive site is a genius.

But it is world-famous for its muck diving; there is very little coral, and much of the bottom is black volcanic sand. (Sulawesi is not generally volcanic, but the volcanoes that head to the end of Nusa Tenggara head north through Maluku and then back up through the north of Sulawesi on their way to the Philippines.) Here divers find and photograph unusual things.

I saw:

A good number of frogfish. These are also known as anglerfish. They live on the bottom, and walk-roll on four fins looking mean. The first dorsal fin is adapted to carry a lure, or esca, which is dangled and flicked in front of the large mouth, looking like a swimming shrimp or small fish. We watched a chocolate and cream painted frogfish (Antennarius pictus) for about ten minutes and it walked straight towards us like the sort of beefy Londoner that keep a hungry pit bull to compensate for the inadequacies of his character and anatomy. We also found a couple of hairy frogfish (Antennarius striatus; I found one, of which I am very proud), which are much prized by divers.
Lots of scorpionfish, including a striking purple paddle-flap scorpionfish, Rhinopias eschmeyeri, and a number of leaf scorpionfish, Taenianotus triacanthus.
A number of mantis shrimp, of the boxing type.
A couple of free-swimming snake eels, perhaps Napoleon snake eels.
A number of garden eels, Heteroconger species.
A bright yellow (female) ribbon eel, Rhinomuraena quaesita, up very close.
A lot of blue-spotted stingrays, Dasyatis kuhlii.
Half a dozen flying gurnards, which are extraordinary and beautiful.
Three sea moths, Pegasus species.
Some longhorn cowfish, Lactoria cornuta.
Several waspfish, Ablabys macracanthus. These are related to scorpionfish, but the dorsal fin begins above or forward of the eyes. They flop from side to side like leaves in the surge.
Lots of small Periclimenes schrimp, usually on tube anemones. They are transparent except for the purple joints.
A lot of commensal pairs of gobies and Alpheus shrimps. The gobies keep watch. The Alpheus, blind, build and maintain the burrow that they share with the goby. The shrimp always keeps an antenna on the goby, and when the goby flicks its tail in warning, the shrimp disappears into the burrow.
A barramundi cod, Cromileptes altivelis.
Several schools of very attractive Banggai cardinalfish, Pterapogon kauderni. These are beige with black stripes and they have very large fins. The pectoral fins are black with a dusting of icing sugar.
A lot of purcupinefish and related species, including a lot of small, rusty orbicular burrfish, Cyclichthys orbicularis, and a few balloonfish, Diodon holocanthus.
A number of flounders.
Lots of big painted flutemouths.
A pink-red ribbon of sea slug eggs, perhaps those of the Spanish Dancer.
Lots of nudibranchs, including Berthella mertensi, a huge Pteraeolidia aeolid, a tiny blue Phyllidia, Phyllidiopsis annae, more Nembrotha kabaryana, Halgerda bacalusia, and Ceratosoma tenue.
A mushroom coral pipefish, a tiny white relative of the seahorse.
A couple of thorny (or perhaps common) seahorses. They are very, very weird.
A dark red roughsnout ghost pipefish, in patch of dark red algae, Solenostomus paegnius.
A small Sepia cuttlefish, with which I tried to have a sign language conversation for five minutes. They communicate in colour, so it is difficult to answer back.
Lots of lionfish.

Unfortunately I have no photos. I rented a camera but it didn't work.

The diversity of fish in Indonesian waters exceeds that in any other part of the world. Pieter Bleeker spent thirty years in Indonesia as an army doctor from 1842. He pulled 800 species out of the waters of Ambon Bay and published the Atlas Ichthyologique, still something of a bible. 1,100 species of fish have been counted in Maumere Bay alone (cf 1,250 in European waters). It is not easy to know what you are seeing. The same applies to corals: there are 450 reef builders in Indonesia, against 50 in the Caribbean.

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More linguistic confusion: in an Indonesian accent 'fishing' and 'pissing' are the same. And 'potty', as a noun, is pisspot in Indonesian.

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A couple of weeks ago an eight-year old boy died in Flores of rabies. There have been 135 deaths from rabies in the last ten years in Flores. The boy was bitten in September, but received medical treatment only in November. By then he had reached stage 4, when the victim is afraid of water, wind and light.

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Lorenso's in Bunaken had a library of second-hand books, and I'm a bit light on books, so I read a lot while lounging in a hammock and watching the rain. Books read recently:

The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford (a very good book - but unfortunately I knew it all already)
Gorky Park and Havana Bay, Martin Cruz Smith
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
Sogni di Sogni, Antonio Tabucchi
Touching the Void, Joe Simpson
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque.

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I am off to Ambon tomorrow, and thence to Banda by ship if I can manage it. Banda is remote, and I am trying to get there as soon as possible in order to give myself a good chance of getting out of the country by the time my visa expires in the middle of December. I don't expect to find many internet connections along the way.

Right - now for a McDonald's! Bliss.