Edward Pollard

Central Sulawesi. May 2001

A curious thing happened last Saturday. I was quietly sitting in front of my house drinking the last of my good coffee and watching the world go by when 2 people turned up with the little man who lives in the shed at the bottom of my garden. No introductions or anything but I had nothing better to do that morning (went diving in the afternoon, saw a big Napoleon Wrasse too, and a new species of Sweetlips) so I sat and watched.  It quickly became clear that they were going to paint one of out outside walls, next to the garage.  No idea why they were doing this, though I assume the landlord had asked for it to be done.

They must have been Rolling Stones fans as the first thing they did was paint it black. An odd choice indeed and it got weirder. After the black dried, they added a coat that Dulux would probably call Latte, but this wasn't enough. The older man then proceeded to paint little white lightening bolts all over the wall that  after a while began to look like a fleet of starship Enterprises. We think they were trying to go for a 'marble look', but failed and ended up with a 'muddy brown with white streaks look'. They must have realised this too and so added some dusty black dots, which of course instantly made the wall look nothing like marble. Ah but then the final touch, use a permanent marker to draw straight lines all over the wall that give the cunning impression that it's made of tiles....but doesn't.

And then without a word they left.  And we went to the beach.

That's how exciting Palu is, it really is as exciting as watching paint dry....

Central Sulawesi, October 2001.

This last weekend instead of the usual trip to the beach and some diving I decided to take a couple of bike trips.  I thought that as I might be here for only another 3 months I ought to see a little more than just the Park. I know my folks are horrified by it but riding around here on a motorbike is a great way to see it, humming tunes from Easy Rider as I go.  I used to be scared shitless by them but now I love it, though I don't suppose they are much fun on busy roads or in colder, wetter climates.

Anyway Saturday took me to the imaginatively named Pantai Timor (east beach), which is on the eastern side of the 'neck' of Sulawesi.  I followed a road north out of Palu and then cut east to climb up to a pass at a place called Kebun Kopi.  Considering this was the main road out of Palu connecting it to the rest of the island, it was remarkably quiet. For long stretches I had it to myself as it clung to the forested valley side.  Every so often landslides had damaged the road but also created openings so that I could look out north up the spine of mountains that runs up the centre of the island, all well covered in forest.  Again this place surprises me, far from the park, with no protected status there is still lots of forest here.  And it was like this for about 20 km up to the aptly named Kebun Kopi (means coffee plantation) where it appears they grow lots of oranges.  The road then dropped sharply down to the east coast and the main 'Trans Sulawesi Highway'.  Another grand name for a quiet 2 lane road, but a quiet road that hugs the coast past coconut plantations, gorgeous, empty golden beaches and little fishing villages.  If this was Bali, or the Caribbean, or the Med it would have been a long string of resorts and hotels.  Here there's barely a soul in sight.  Only downer was on the way back passing 20 trucks full of illegal wood, which they had tried to disguise as instant noodles.  Oh and you can get very good carrots at kebun kopi - just as long as you remember to ask for carrots that is and not a telephone office.

Today I headed up the western side of the neck instead.  Less rainforest this time but the road was just a spectacular running along a cliff top and dropping down into quiet little fishing villages and coconut fringed beaches.  I also found an old, run down port town called Wani with dead boats and pre war warehouses and shops collapsing into the sea.

Lore Lindu. August 2001. 

A couple of Saturdays ago I woke up with stinking cold, which was a bit of a bummer as I had hoped to get some diving in that weekend and then go to the forest.  After 2 months with barely putting my head under the water, and 4 months of not even seeing a rainforest I was non-plussed.  This could scupper it all.  And to top that the weather wasn’t all that good.  A high haze and a few clouds in the sky made me think that it might rain, and so while I was drinking my coffee I literally did think twice about not going to the beach.  I then woke up, smelt what I was drinking and got on motorbike.

Another lovely drive up,  until I got to the final stretch.  A small road out from the sleepy, fishy town of Donggala over a ridge and down to the beach at Tanjung Karang.  About half way over I stopped behind a minibus to find that what was holding up the traffic was not an elephant but that somebody in their wisdom, or desire to pull a fast one on local government funds, had decided that this road needed to be upgraded.  There was a little sign that said the road would be closed from 10:30 to midday and then be open for 30 minutes to let traffic through.  As it was 10:15 at the time and the road was most definitely closed by a large boulder I sat and watched with the crowd and wondered when it would ever be open again.  The road building method appeared to consist of chewing huge chunks out of the mountainside and then bulldozering the whole lot over the edge of the cliff and on top of the reef below.  It seems that the old one lane road was not enough and that what was really needed was a 1km long 4 lane express way that links the single lane coast road with the narrow back streets of Donggala.  And to be honest I can see their point, I mean there have been several times when I’ve been grid-locked for minutes behind the other motorbike and a goat.  It really is quite insane.  Not only are they trashing the reef but the way they are building it means that come the first heavy rains later this year the whole lot will get washed away down into Palu bay.  But right on time at 11:05 the boulder was pushed onto the reef, the road opened and I made it down to the beach, expecting to find it full of backpackers only to be slightly disappointed to find only Ron and a limping Italian.  Not even a single German.  That changed later but it was still quite a quiet weekend.  A Brit turned up too for the diving.  Something of a dive bum actually and I was surprised to hear him raving about how good the two dives we did together were.  I must be getting terribly blasé or he really has dived some piss poor locations.  OK so the dives were pretty good for the sites we chose.  3 new nudibranch species (a type of marine slug that looks like it was coloured in by Hunter S Thompson on a bad day), a relatively large black tip reef shark and some big schools of the usual brightly coloured reef fish.  But compared to other dives I have done in on other sites around Tanjung Karang they were nothing special, maybe I should appreciate how good it is more.  The thing I have always liked about it the most is that it’s not all that well know, so many times I have dived with only one or two other people, I think I will be shocked if I ever dive some of these places where there are about 40 other people on the reef at the same time.  How does anybody ever seen anything.  It turned out that I was lucky with the cold too, I had not trouble equalising and it was fine.  For the moment.  Although it had the makings of a beautiful evening I then had to head back to Palu to pack, I still planned to get to the forest on the Monday.

For the last 18 months we have had crews in the forest surveying the birds of the Park.  Sulawesi has a very unusual bird fauna with a great many found nowhere else.  With about the same number of breeding bird species, 230 or so, Sulawesi has 93 that are endemic, Britain and Ireland has one.  In fact Sulawesi is something of an international birding destination and I am constantly receiving requests from people asking for information about coming here.  Anyway for the purposes of the management plan, and well for the hell of it, TNC has done these incredibly intensive surveys, I followed on the last trip, transects 85 and 86.  The team had just completed a set of surveys in the far south of the Park and coughing and wheezing and all blocked up with cold I travelled down the West of the park to meet them at the end of the road, a village called Gimpu, they had walked for 2 days to get there.  That night was spend crowded over maps choosing a suitable location – it had to be at the right altitude, have good water supply for the camp and preferably relatively flat.  The place we settled on, although it was less than 10km from the village as the crow flies was apparently a day and a half’s walk.  Porters were found to carry the 150 kg of equipment we needed, survey in style these guys, wages were haggled and the 8 am departure time agreed.  Punctual as ever we were on our way at 9:30 the next morning.  With the survey team, mata jalan – literally road eyes ie the guide, Park staff, porters and assorted taggers on (me and a Javanese university student who I very much doubt realised what she’d let herself in for) we numbered 17.  It felt more like we were searching for the source of the Nile and not just popping into the forest for 4 days for a spot of birdwatching.

The plan for the first day was to climb over a ridge and then up a river valley to find somewhere good to overnight.  The next day we climb out of the valley and up the central ridge of the Park to survey an area of Montane forest at about 1300 – 1700 m alt.  After 6 months of sitting on my arse in the office and riding around on a motorbike this was quite a shock to the system.  The first part involved climbing about 600m in a horizontal distance of about 1.5 km.  I felt like a right wuss panting and wheezing my way up with a mere 12 kg on my back while the porters strode on with their 26 kg.  But then again they stopped for cigarettes every hour or so, so that probably made them stronger.  Stopped for lunch and to get attacked by sneaky little mites that give incredibly itchy bites that took about 12 hours to appear and formed nice rings at the top of my socks and pants, and the we descended down the other side of the ridge into a largish river valley.  I was amazed at how good the forest was.  I have seen such a small part of the park and all I have tended to see is the disturbed parts.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that here, even very close to a large population there has been little encroachment and logging.  They simply don’t need too, there is still plenty of land outside the Park for the chocolate and coffee plantations that are the problem elsewhere.  It was also the first decent lowland forest I have seen.  The vast majority of the park is above 1000m, at this altitude the forest tends to be a lot less spectacular (and less diverse).  It’s not really the rainforest of wildlife documentaries but more scrappy with smaller trees.  But as we descended from chiggerville and the lactic acid burn eased in my legs I noticed that here was some really nice forest, big trees and tall canopy.  Good to see that some does exist in the park.  Interestingly this was more like the rainforest of Victorian lore.  Time and again in text books they say that in reality rainforest is not an overgrown impenetrable jungle but that under the canopy the understory is open and you can move around quite freely.  Well Richards, Whitmore and the like have obviously never visited Sulawesi (or peat swamp for the matter).  Here the understory is a mass of bamboos, lianas and rattans palms.  The latter being the stuff furniture is made of and also the stuff that bears sharp spines and long fine shoots covered in hooks that reach out and grab you at any opportunity.  Luckily none of this seemed to phase our silent and indomitable guide Pak Esra, whose ever sharp machete never stopped and whose only disturbing habit was that when asked how far away something was he would always answer ‘oooh jauh’ – meaning ‘oooh far’.  The rattan may well be the bane of one’s life when trying to walk through the forest with a large pack, particularly when the trail has been cut by somebody who’s 5ft. 5, and on a steep slope where everything you grab for you have to check to make sure it’s not covered in 2 inch long spines, but to give it it’s due it can be quite a beautiful plant.  In the evenings where the sun breaks through the canopy and catches the fronds they almost glow with a vivid green, and when the leaves catch a light breeze the shivering geometric patterns of the fronds can be quite hypnotising.  

The trail dropped down an increasingly steep path and the sound of the river grew louder.  Finally we broke through the trees and found ourselves on top of a rock, with the river 2m below us, the path had disappeared and we all looked at each other a little confused before Pak Esra dropped down over the edge of the rock and into the river.  It turns out that when he said that we follow the river it doesn’t mean that the path is along the river bank but that the river is the trail.  So much for keeping my trousers dry today.  So with thoughts of flash floods I scrabbled down into the gorge.  As it was still jauh to the camp I dumped my falling apart boots in the top of my pack and put on my falling apart sandals.  And now I know why they call them river sandals.  They were great, absolutely the ideal foot ware for the next two hours of wading up the river, crossing from bank to back where ever there were exposed rocks or simply splashing along in the shallows.  The valley itself was spectacular and the walk up that valley will live long in my memory.  The forest was untouched and towered about us on both banks and at times the river was wide enough to allow us to look up at the deep blue sky and catch a few rays.  The river was low and at most knee deep as it wound it’s way along.   Camp turned out to be an abandoned rattan collectors camp on the banks of the river.  We arrived at about 3 pm and as some of the others collected wild fern heads and chillies, that had been planted there, for dinner I sat back and watch the river and the birds.  One of the most frequently seen was the endemic piping crow (Corvus typicus).  Now maybe I am wrong but I assume that the latin name means Typical crow.  If so then this has to rank alongside Mangrove Blue-flycatcher as all time stupid name (the flycatcher is only found over 1000m above sea level).  This thing is far from typical, firstly it’s mostly white, but most remarkable are it’s calls – here the common name gets it right.  It doesn’t ‘kaw’ like other crows but has a wide range of whistles, woops and screeches  that tend to sound like anything but a crow.  This is a weird island. 

After sun down and eating there was not a great deal to do, we were all in bed by 7:30.

The second day’s walk turned out not to be all that jauh after all.  Which was a good thing as we ended up needing most of the afternoon to set up the camp and scout the survey locations.  The walk was is anything more spectacular than the first day.  We continued to follow the river valley but it had broadened out and we spent more time along the banks through stands of beautiful forest.  At times the sulphurous smell of rotten eggs and steam rising from the river edge showed where hot springs joined the river.  We all gathered around the first ones like school kids marvelling at the smelly steaming water bubbling out of the bank.  And like my fiend Nick in Iceland a couple of guys dipped their toes in to find out how hot it was.  And like my friend Nick in Iceland one of them scolded his foot.  At one of the other hot springs was a Meleo nest site.  This is another of Sulwasi’s endemic birds, a large thing that grubs around on the forest floor like a chicken.  It also is a lazy nester.  Instead of building a nest, brooding it’s eggs and carry for the young, Maleo dig a hole in geothermally heated soil lay a large egg and then bugger off.  The chick has to dig itself out and then fends for itself from day one.  Unfortunately we didn’t see any of the birds, too late in the day and I’ll have to go and look for them another day.    Not long after this we cut away from the river and climbed steeply up to about 1100m.  In the end we found a lovely camping spot, flat, under a large strangler fig tree and with a good water supply nearby.  We finally managed to get a good reading with out funky little GPS navigation thingy and realised that we were miles from where we thought we were.  Wasn’t a problem but we gradually cottoned on over the next few days that the map in this area was woefully wrong.  It’s not a surprise that rivers and mountains are named wrong, but I think that they just made some of the contours up. The map makers probably thought that nobody would ever be going there anyway so what difference does it make.  So the relatively gently slope on the map turned out to be a steep incline bisected by a deep valley, that made for some long hard walks later during the surveys.

The camp consisted of a simple tarpaulin shelter that unlike the ones we used in the peat swamp was not raised off the ground.  As we settled in that night I knew I had truly come back to the forest as I heartily tucked into a plate of rice a salty fish.  Though here it was accompanied with boiled rattan stem and palm heart, real bush tucker stuff.  Being at 1100m was a bit of a shock though, it gets cold up there, even with my sleeping bag I was chilly at night a couple of times.

Now what happened the next morning I will probably regret for a very long time.  The survey teams were up and about at 4:45 and I woke up looked at them, thought about going with them and decided I wouldn’t bother.  The surveys run for 4 days and there was plenty of time, I could do with a few more hours sleep.  6 hours later I met the beaming team on the mountain side where they told me that they saw Anoa – a rare endemic buffalo only found in Sulawesi and very rarely seen.  They said that at 7 that morning they saw 2, only 15m away from them. (James, for the record they were both adults and black.  They were travelling together along a well used trail across the ridge top at about 1350m)  I have wanted to see one of these ever since I got here, this was probably my best chance and I blew it for an extra couple of hours sleep.  It turned out to be a very good area for these animals.  In the course of the next 4 days the trail cutters saw them another 3 times, far more than had been seen in the previous 18 months of surveys.  The whole area was in pristine condition.  Pak Wahyu, the man leading the surveys thought that the area was about as remote as he’d seen in the whole Park and had never seen so many signs of Anoa or as much unharvested large rattan stems.  And I agree, it was great.  After so long stuck in the office I was happy to just sit there and be in such a top place. The birding was pretty good and a couple of times I got watch the local troop of monkeys hanging out.  On the second day up there though my cold caught up with me.  Too many early mornings and long hard walks meant I suddenly felt like crap, I ended up crashing out and slept for about 18 hours.  Felt great when I woke up though, thank god as I was dreading having to walk out feeling crappy.  And by the 4^th day I knew that I had got away from it all when started dreaming about Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, though this dream was followed by one where I was in Singapore with Tom and Zippy, we were in Little India and Zippy revealed that he could speak Bengali, which came as something of a surprise. 

After 4 days the surveys were done and we had to come back to the real work.  Broke camp and walked out.  Downhill, with a clear path and the wind in our sails we did the same walk out in a day.  Long hard day but I think we were all glad that we didn’t have to overnight again.  The only thing of note on the way out was that the Park staff torched an abandoned rattan camp.  Good to see that they do it.  Couldn’t help thinking however as I walked away through the forest wearing my army trousers, pack on my back, bandana tied around my head with straw huts burning behind be that it looked just like something out of a Vietnam film. 

We overnighted in Gimpu again and then back up to the big city to find out what I have missed.  Grotty and smelly, with a shaggy 8 day beard on my chin I got home to find a young, blond, Californian woman sleeping in my bed. 

I must go to the forest more often.

Central Sulawesi, September 2001. 

Moving seamlessly on from the last instalment I can now exclusively reveal to you what happened to the aforementioned blond.  She’s called Jenny and she’s a freelance journalist who is currently making little films for National Geographic television.  Basically she travels around Indonesia with an impossibly small video camera filming whatever she wants.  She’d been over in Borneo filming something about the trashing of Gunung Palung and got in touch with me with some questions about Tanah Torajah.  Spotting a clear opportunity I jumped right in and suggested that she come and film TNC’s glorious work at Lore Lindu, and if pushed I’ll be willing to appear in the show.  I was too busy after the last trip so she went off to do the story on funeral ceremonies in Torajah and I got on with doing what I do.  Which thinking back was not all that much.  When Jenny came back she worked on the tapes of her Torajah trip.  Basically this meant doing the sound track and appeared to involve hiding in a room with a sheet over her back and her head stuffed in a Pelican case saying the same things over and over again in a slow, deliberate and somehow slightly disturbing way.

We were going to go off to an area in the south of the Park.  We had decided that the central part to the piece would be the megaliths that are found around the Park.  More of these later, but these would form the basis of a 6 minute ‘news’ piece that will be broadcast on the National Geographic TV Channel prime time news show in the States.  And I was to be the guide/important person from TNC who’s saving the rainforest.  And with my experience of Faeroes TV it was clear that I was the most qualified.  All I needed to do was practice the trademark Pollard satanic glare and it was all set.

What with one thing and another we didn’t leave until evening, one consequence of this is that we went through an area of the Park called Dongi-dongi after dark, which is what David (the driver and fixer) was hoping.  This used to be a spectacular part of the Park.  The road ran up a long broad forested valley.  When I first got here I was amazed to see that it hadn’t been encroached.  The land is good and it got a tarred road going right through it.  Well in June it finally went.  In a mass ‘invasion’ hundreds of people went up into Dongi-dongi to clear land for farming.  Curiously enough this action has been supported by WAHLI one of Indonesia’s foremost conservation organisations.  Why exactly WAHLI is supporting the clear felling of a National Park is beyond most people.  This situation is still going on.  A lot of people have been persuaded to leave the forest, but there is still a hardcore of people up there and nobody is quite sure of what to do.  In contrast to the situation in other Parks there is general outrage that this has happened and a surprising amount of calls from other villagers to get them removed from the forest, the politics of it are all very complicated and I won’t bore you but the main upshot was that when we drove up the valley at night it was the first time that I had seen it.  Quite depressing really and amazing how much land can be cleared in such a short time.  Coming back through a few days later when the shock had passed it didn’t look to bad.  IF they can be persuaded to move then the forest will recover, the level of damage is relatively small, 800 ha in a total park area of 220,000 ha (which is apparently about the same size as Connecticut) and localised.  Whether this hard core of people will leave without heads being cracked is something that most of us try not to consider. 

The area we were heading to is called the Besoa Valley.  It’s a basin at about 1200m altitude set in the middle of the Park.  As Indonesian law says that you are not allowed to have villages in a National Park with area is known as an enclave, a hole as it were, in the Park.  We had to overnight in a town called Wuasa and then carry on down in the 4x4 to Besoa.  Unusually for me I didn’t listen to the radio that night.   Next morning, the 12th September 2001 here, I did put the radio on and was initially very confused.  It took us about half an hour before we could work out what had happened in New York and DC, and even then with patchy reception from the BBC in a small town in the middle of Sulawesi it seemed quiet literally unbelievable.   We had to hit the road early and still didn’t know what was going on.  The drive to the Besoa valley from there was about another 6 hours if the road was good and including a couple of diversions and pauses to film things.  Unfortunately it was rather overcast initially and so the area didn’t look its best but by the time we’d got to the town of Rompo and our first megalith the weather had cleared.  The bridge is out at Rompo and so we have to ford the river.  As this is something nice and spectacular for your average Nat Geo viewer we had to film this from several angles.  A slightly odd process when we only have one camera and something that was done many times over the coming days.  Basically David drove the car to the edge of the river while Jenny filmed it.  We then jumped on the little ferry and crossed the river, filming that along the way and then ran around to film David driving through the river.  David had infinite patience for this sort of thing.  We’d be driving along and Jenny would spot a good location, we’d stop, she’d run ahead and then film us as we drove past.  We stop again, Jenny climbs back in a we drive off again.  The megalith here was not all that interesting in the end so more of the filming tended to be of rice padis or coffee bushes or school kids or women with rice flour on their faces.  The road turned out to have been improved from here on.  It was still not tarred but at least most of the truck eating potholes  had been filled in.  Not a bad drive too.  The area was probably cleared of forest hundreds of years ago and is now mainly grasslands grazed by horses and cows.  There are a few small villages with a little bit of rice farming and this mixed landscape of grassland, rice and rainforest is not like anything else I’ve seen in Indonesia.  When it was overcast in the morning and before the coffee had kicked in I even thought it looked a little like the Yorkshire dales without the sheep (which I guess is what the Yorkshire dales are like now with the foot and mouth slaughter).  After another hour or so the road cut into the forest as we passed through the Park again.  The road deteriorated into the sort of bone jangling track through rainforest that you see on nature documentaries and true to form we filmed it too.  One thing that occurred to me at this point was how much I take this sort of thing for granted.  10 years ago when I saw that sort of thing on TV I would think how amazingly adventurous it was to be bashing through the rainforest in a beat up 24 year old landcruiser and never really thought that I’d do that sort of thing.  And now it seems perfectly normal.  One reason for coming home for a while I suppose is that it’ll put all this into perspective for me.  It’s a bit much when I begin to feel that driving through rainforest during the week and diving surrounded by turtles, sharks and millions of fish at the weekend is normal.

Paused for an hour up here to watch some more road building.  Thankfully this was being done slightly better done than the road to the beach and this is also actually needed.   Since the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (the same group that we knew in West Kalimantan) pulled out of this area 6 years ago this road was the only link to the outside world for 4 villages and in the past it was often impassable for weeks in the wet season.  Now there is a plan to create a new Kecematan (administrative district) in the Besoa valley and so they are getting a new road, electricity and a visit from the Provincial Governor.  A couple more pauses along the way and we came out of the forest and into the Besoa valley.  Again this is another area that is mainly grassland surrounded by a ring of forest covered mountains with 4 small villages that form the total population of the Behoa people.  Due to it’s remoteness this area had not yet had much of an influx of people from out side.  There were no transmigration camps and no voluntary migrants from south Sulawesi.  Around the northern end of the Park there has been a big increase in population over the last few years due to ethnic Bugis from the south.  The are coming in because there is thought to be plenty of cheap land that is good for growing chocolate.  And they are right, unfortunately most of this land is in the National Park.  The Bugis haven’t yet reached Besoa and the Behoa are proud of this.  They are determined that they will keep the land theirs.  The first language in the valley is Behoa and a lot of people still live in traditional style houses with roofs of split bamboo.  Though this is most likely an indication of poverty than any desire to keep traditional ways alive.  It was certainly one of the poorer areas around here that I have seen.  There were few tin roofs, hardly any cement houses and I think I only saw 3 houses with glass windows.  Another thing that surprised me was that despite most people being proud of being Behoa there appeared little desire to keep aspects of the culture alive.  Next door to the house that we stayed was a recreation of a traditional house that had been built a few years back.  Now it’s a little run down and ignored.  When I asked if it was used for any traditional events, music, dance that sort of thing the head of the village said rather dismissively ‘oh no, we don’t do that sort of thing anymore’.

We stayed with this head of village for 3 days while we explored the Besoa valley.  He was a nice fellow who is apparently well liked as head of the village.  He had a round face and unusually pale skin that was ruddy after working in his rice padi he also wore a small floppy hat that made him look curiously like an English farmer.  I kept on waiting for him to come round the corner with a shot gun under his arm to tell us to get off his land.  Along with us was David the TNC driver, who is not only the best 4x4 driver I have met and phenomenally hard working but also very knowledgeable about the area, and Mous (pronounced Moose) who was from a local NGO that we work with.  4 months ago TNC worked with that NGO to map all the megaliths around the Park.  It’s one of the lesser known things about the area, ok apart from the fact that it’s in the Lonely Planet of course, but this area is not only important biologically but also archaeologically.  The survey team found over 450 objects, mainly concentrated in the Besoa valley and another isolated valley to the south of the Park, the Bada valley.  They come in about 8 different forms from menhir like stones to flat stones with pits and lines carved into them, to others that are like large low stone tables.  These are fairly similar to objects found elsewhere in Indonesia from Sumatra to Flores.  What is unique about the ones here are 2 forms found nowhere else.  There are cylindrical stone vats 4 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter.  With most of them are large disk shaped lids.  Some of these lids have monkeys carved on them.  The most spectacular are known as Arca Menhir.  These are human figures from 1 foot to 10 feet tall.   They have large heads with very stylised faces arms and bodies but no legs and often large willies.   I was told there are some female figures too but I’ve not seen any or even any photos.  I’d seen photo’s of them but was still surprised when I got to them.  They are amazing, some sites have many objects all together usually on high ground above where the villages are now located.  These are to be the central part of the ‘film’, Jenny coming to find these barely known but amazing stone statues in the middle of the rainforest in Sulawesi.  We also pretended that the survey was going on now and so she filmed us with tape measures and taking notes.  As well as a few quotes from me proudly wearing my TNC cap (which took us hours to find back at the office, and we only had one because John had just brought at couple back from the States) pointing at rocks and saying things like ‘this is a rock’ and stunning interviews such as ‘so Edward you say there are also some sacrificial altars around here, where are they’  ‘er, well I am standing on one’, ‘oh’.  And after all that it may not have been a sacrificial altar after all, that just sounds good.  And that’s the other thing about these objects.  We know nothing about them.  They have no connection to the local communities.  They all have names in the local language but they tend to translate as things like “shattered stone” or “big rock that stands on the hill outside the village”.  One or two of the objects have some stories about them but generally nothing is known.  What is known is based on information from other sites in Indonesia.  The sites on other islands have been called the ‘megalith culture’ and was thought to exist from the Mekong valley to eastern Indonesia about 2 – 3000 years ago.  So it is assumed that the more simple objects here date from the same time, but they’ve never been directly dated.  It is assumed that the more complicated carved objects are newer, maybe 500 years old, but that is just speculation.  Similarly ideas about what they were for is based on knowledge of other sites.  The statues and the vats are more of a mystery.  We assume that they might have been some representation of spirits, or gods, or important people but we really have no idea.   Some people claim that the vats were baths or for water storage, but I find this unlikely.  It’s not like you need to store water in Besoa, all the low lying land is a swamp.  The most common hypothesis from the vats is that they were sarcophagi.  A new one was found in the 70’s that still had it’s lid on and human bones were found in it when it was opened.  Oddly though, like Kennedy’s brain, nobody knows where these bones are now.

There are several of these sites dotted around the Besoa valley and on the first night up there we had to go and see the head of another village to ask his permission to go and see the ones on his village's land.  On the way there we got totally bogged down in a swamp and didn’t make it too the village until well after dark.  As we chatted to the head of the village a crowd gathered outside the house the converted rice plough that served as a generator was cranked up and the only TV in the valley came to life.  Just in time for the 7pm news.  Watching the horrific footage from New York repeated over and over again without any commentary in a village in rural Indonesia only made it all seem even more unreal.  It really did feel like we were watching a bad movie.  And considering the sort of films and serials that are shown on Indonesian TV I wouldn’t be surprised if some people watching it thought that it was nothing special.  That sort of thing happens all the time in the US, right?  Besoa is a predominately Christian area and so conversation quickly turned to blaming the muslims and talk of what has been going on in Maluku. Not wanting to get involved in any budding internecine conflict, we decided that it was time to head home and to bed.

Thursday was spent filming in several locations and on Friday I was due to go home.  Jenny decided to head on south to the Bada valley, assuming that she could get her batteries charged, that the path was OK and that she had enough money.  I felt really guilty and kind of foolish about this as I’d totally screwed up in calculating how much money she’d need.  That added to my usual ‘guide stress’ meant that I unfortunately had a hard time relaxing and enjoying myself.  Guide stress sucks.  I had it when my folks came to visit and when Lara came over.  It’s a combination of worry over making sure that everything works, worry that the forest/desert island/interesting rocks turn out to be as good as I said they would and making sure to remember that everything that I think is normal, like speaking Indonesian, is not necessarily normal for whoever I’m with. 

So on the Friday I headed back to Palu.  Before that however there was one more site to visit.  This one involved a lovely walk through the rice padi behind the village.  It was in a variety of stages, some had just been harvested and was being ploughed in.  Most people were using the standard machines to do this but others still use the traditional method of rounding up a herd of water buffalo and letting them rummage around for a few days.  They eat up the stubble, turn over the soil and fertilize it as they go along.  Quite a good system all in all.  Other fields had just been planted and were still flooded.  The local man who was showing us around told us that most people still don’t use pesticides and fertilizers and grow a local variety of rice, which is why they can grow it up at 1200m.  Maybe it was because of this or just because it’s the time of year but there were lots of birds in the padi too.  Wild ducks, flocks of waders and the odd ibis, the coolest however are the Javan pond heron which looks like a small dull brown egret until you get to close and they fly off with an explosion of bright white wings.  The filming at the last site was cut a little short when the batteries ran out but it was another interesting place with a particularly large human figure.

Going to see this last site however meant that we had a late departure and I wasn’t back to Palu until late at night.  I’d agreed several weeks earlier to join a group of Germans on an overnight dive trip.  My housemate John and them had gone up to the dive place on the Friday.  I was too exhausted and so spent the night in Palu and went up there at dawn on Saturday.  Arriving just in time for breakfast.  We were sitting around and a bear cuscus appeared in a bush next to us.  It’s a type of marsupial that is endemic to Sulawesi.  I had wanted to see one for a long time and was amazed to see how large they are, about the size of a spaniel moving slowly like a sloth but with a prehensile tail.  I didn’t know they had a pet one up there, went to have a look and was surprised to see that it was carrying a youngster in it’s pouch.  Odd for a pet I thought.  I asked the staff whose it was and they said it was wild. Cool.  It lives in the trees around the hotel and every so often comes down for breakfast.  And that’s what it did, it climbed into the dining area and hung from the rafters waiting for us to give it fruit. Totally calm and not bothered by all the big Germans with cameras.

An hour or so later we were on the boat and away.  The people who own the hotel have had a local boat nicely fitted out for day trips and over night ones.  We headed north up the western coast of the ‘neck’ of Sulawesi to some dive sites on the equator that we had been told were pretty good.  Even without the diving the boat trip alone was great, boats are simply a fantastic way to travel.  The weather was perfect and the company good.  We cruised up the forested coast line with dolphins riding the bow wave and frigate birds circling over head.  We even the amusingly saw named brown boobies (seabirds related to gannets).  At night we pulled the boat into a little bay on the mainland surrounded by forest and lay back on the deck, dinking beer, looking at the stars and trying to explain to the Germans what a swanky bar and swanky people are.

And then there was the diving.  I know I have gone on about the diving before and end up sounding all blasé.  Well this time I admit it was something else.  The reef was in pristine condition and almost un-fished.  We did four dives in the two days each one of which by itself would have ranked as one of the best dives I have done.  On top of wonderful coral formations and  good visibility there were quite simply millions of fish.  Except for maybe one or two dives in Australia and north Sulawesi I’ve not seen anything like it before.  You’d pause and a school of ten’s if not hundreds of bright blue and yellow fish would take the opportunity to swim between you and your buddy.  Looking up the slope of the reef to the surface you’d see seemly infinite shapes of fish swirling around in silhouette.   I just didn’t know where to look.  And the just when you thought you were getting bored of looking a thousands of small red, yellow, blue and yellow fish a shark or turtle would drift past for good measure.  On the fourth dive a green turtle swam out from the coral and just hung there looking at us, trying to decide if it needed to panic.  In the end I think it got bored of the 4 weird objects with glass faces and metal backs and gracefully swam off down the reef.  We would come up to the surface on such a high, but disappointed that we had to surface because we were running out of air.  It was the sort of dive where you look at your air gauge and think, “Ok I’m at 6m, if I breath carefully I can squeeze another 5 minutes out of this.  Sod the fact that I’ve been down here 68 minutes and I’m cold this is just too good…..oooh there’s another new type of butterfly fish.”  With everything that is going on here and in the world in general it was a marvellous weekend away.  John and I even managed to have a couple of conversations about something other than work.

A couple of days later I was also relieved to see Jenny back in Palu.  Of course nothing went wrong and by all accounts she got some good filming.  That evening Jenny, John and I put back 2 bottles of wine that night and got pleasantly sloshed. John told his duck jokes and Jenny laughed at my t-shirt with Bea (the dead cat) on it and the way I say ‘chocolate’ and ‘splendid’.

Read Jenny Hile's report on the megaliths

Komodo, May 2003. 

Morning flight to Labuan Bajo.  Surprised at how dry it is.  There is some forest in Sumbawa but by the time we get to Bima it’s dry and kind of barren.  From then on we pass right over Komodo NP.  I don’t know what sort of size I was expecting, and I guess I should have know it wasn’t just a dot.  But it’s big.  Not a small island at all.  And looked amazing from the air.  All the fringing reefs, beaches and bays.  Then to Labuan Bajo itself.  Man I thought Tanjung was small.  It’s like Sukadana with a few tourists.  No mobile phones and no ATM.  Not such a bad thing maybe, but kind of surprising considering the number of tourists that likely pass through.  

Relaxed a little and enjoyed wonderful view across the harbour and bay to the silhouette of Komodo in the backgroundand.  I then wandered around the town, which took about 10 minutes.  I was here to dive and I went over to Reefseekers to organise it.  Quite a shock when she said they were full.  But then it appeared that they only took 4 divers anyway.  I asked if they could add an extra and some calls were made.  As expected I got the, how many dives? And when was the last?  Quite satisfying to answer 100+ and last week.  And they couldn’t really argue with that.  So it was booked.  Quiet night that night and then off on the diving the next day.  Sharing with a Belgian and 3 Brits.  Odd to hear the Brit accent again, especially as one was from Morpeth and had a gentle Ruth Archer accent.  Diving was good.  The dive guide wasn’t perfect but I’ve had far worse.  The thing is that they offer dives to any part of the park.  Good if you are based in Lab Bajo.  Not all that worth it if you only want to dive.  You only get two dives and you spend a lot of time on the boat.  The diving was very different.  The rock substrate leads to a lot of coral, and the protection clearly works as there are plenty of fish.  Some of it was really spectacular and I saw a hell of a lot.  Especially nubibranchs.  6 spp on the first dive alone.  Vis was variable, and the water was cold.  It got down to 24 C on the first dive (Cannibal Rock) and even in a 5mm wetsuite I was cold.  Added to by the fact that they run a dive until a 30 bar of air rule, meaning long dives.

The day was spent right in the south of Rinca, a bay with Cannibal rock in the middle.  For lunch we went up onto the beach.  The white sand was burning hot, but the location was spectacular.  It looked like an almost circular bay.  Slopes rose steeply on all sides, giving the feel that you were in the bottom of a densly wooded caldera.  The area must have been relatively wet as the forest was more of less completely covering the mountains.  The sky was clear and blue, the sea dark blue, and kind of ominous.  Or maybe I just felt that because of the name, and the still chilled bones from the long, cold dive.  No dragons to be seen, but abundant tracks on the beaches.  They are around, and you couldn’t help but wonder if they were just sunning themselves behind the beach.

Next morning I was up at 6 to take the boat.  A nice old wooden boat recently painted gleaming white and probably not used all that much.  The Bugis owner/captain said that since the Bali bomb and now SARS the tourists had stopped coming.  He mainly used the boat to go out fishing now.  He asked me if knew of anybody else who wanted to charter his boat next week.  He didn’t look to please when I told him I don’t.  We’d set off before 7 and slowly chugged our way out to Komodo.  The noisy little diesel engine didn’t give us much speed, but the sea was calm and the weather fine.  This felt like the real way to do it.  One always read about other people going to Komodo in rickety old fishing boats, and it would have felt like I was cheating to do it any other way.  I was in no hurry and just sat on the deck and watched the islands go by.  This was something I hadn’t expected.  I’d heard about the great diving and obviously the Dragons but I’d never really realised how spectacular the scenery is.  The Park is not just one or two large islands.  It’s made up of hundreds, from large Komodo that has peaks over 1000ft to myriads of small rocks and coral outcrops.  Add to this the forested 2000m mountains of west Flores and one has a beautiful landscape of azure sea, bays, white sand beaches, grassy ridges speckled with palms and the occasional broad forested valley.  The area is notorious for vicious currents and the usual cliché when writing about the place is to talk about the ship eating whorl pools and jagged ridges that would be the sort of thing to make sailors of old assume there were dragons anyway.  I’ll try and avoid those clichés.  Though I can see what they say about the ridges.  I apparently was there at a good time of year and the currents were down.  Still one would see strange patches of calm and rough water and the times the boat struggled to make any progress.  I read recently that this is not only because of the deep water and many small channels but also because the Pacific is actually higher than the Indian Ocean and so the water is actually flowing from one to the other.  Apparently.  After about 4 hours we finally approached the coast of Komodo island itself and dropped the captain in a little sampan to do some fishing.  His crew – two kids looking barely older than 15 took me around the corner to the National Park post at Loh Liang. The camp is set in a stunning location on a wide bay with a long sweep of sand.  It sits next to a dry river in a wide forested valley.  A tall mountain rises up at the head of the valley and the sides are covered with a grassy savannah with the odd Lontar palm silhouetted on the ridge.  It was mid day and starting to get hot.  This part of Indonesia is very different from all that I’ve seen before.  It has a monsoonal climate, seasonally dry and at this time of year, just coming out of the wet, it gets hot.  Thankfully the humidity was not too oppressive and there was always a breeze blowing in off the water.  This climate is the reason for the grassy savannah.  In some of the wetter valleys and hillsides there is monsoon forest.  Low canopy small trees and very open.  Quite a contrast to the Borneo forest.  Around the Park Camp this forest is dominated by wild tamarind trees and when I was there was all very green.  But as the dry season progresses many of the trees loose their leaves.  Deciduous like temperate trees, and for the same reason.  Lack of water.  It is likely that previously a lot more of the island was forested.  But clearing over 1,000s of years, grazing by goats and  repeated fires have led to a more grassy savannah.

I checked in, organised some guided walks and dumped my gear in the accommodation block.  I was the only guest and after the crazy previous week in Bali it was deliciously quiet.  The sun may well have been beating down outside but I had several hours to kill before the evening walk and so I thought I’d do some birding around the camp.  Wandered around not seeing much and was about to cut through behind the last building to the beach when I realise that those two large brown things by the house were not logs they were lizards.  Astonishingly large lizards.  As is always the case, one doesn’t have to go anywhere to see the star animal, they are just hanging around the kitchens waiting for food.  I backed up a little and went around the other side of the building.  I asked the park ranger if I could come up on his veranda and found myself sitting half a metre above a Komodo dragon.  And you know they are really damn impressive.  I’ve seen plenty of photos and film of them, and read lots too, but I was still taken aback at how big they are.  I’ve seen some large monitor lizards in the past.  There were some really big ones on Krakatau (for much the same reasons for the large Dragons here), one was certainly over 2m long, but they are much more slender.  These thing are just plain big and bulky.  The have large bellies, square, strong jaws and a big thick prop-forward’s neck.  There were 2 below me.  Lazing in the shade waiting for some scraps.  Big and fat and not doing much of anything.  Every so often one would look around and flick his long yellow tongue in and out tasting the blood of an English man.  This one also had pretty gruesome bit of drool hanging from his mouth too.  This stuff is essential to their hunting.  They take on some pretty large prey and it’s thought that a lot of the time they may only injure a deer during an attack.  The saliva however is laden with hideous bacteria and a wounded deer will most likely eventually die of septicaemia.  This also raises another interesting issue.  On Komodo, the neighbouring island of Rinca and a small population on Flores they live on a diet of pigs, deer, water buffalo, feral horses and rats.  However with the exception of the rats all of these have been introduced by man in the last few thousand years.  Varanus komodensis on the other hand has been around for far longer than that.  The question is what did they eat before?, why did they evolve to be so big?  There’s a paper that I really want to find now that goes by the title “Did Komodo Dragons evolve to hunt pygmy elephants?”.  Now that’s an image to behold.  The ones I was watching had much more lazy dietary habits.  Chicken bones, fish heads, and no doubt like all good Indonesians, rice.

Eventually one of them got a little frisky and apparently didn’t like the look of his companion.   He got up and started snapping at and scratching the other Dragon.  Judging from the number of scars on both animals this is clearly a fairly frequent occurrence.  It didn’t seem to be going anywhere and I could have almost begun to get complacent about these fat lazy lizards when suddenly one of them got up and made a run for it.  The aggressor was hot in pursuit and it was just a little scary to see how quickly they could run.  Not the sort of thing one could out pace.  They do take down deer after all.

The dragons moved on, and so did I.  I still had some time to kill and carried on birding around the camp.  Not too much around,.  The place has low diversity, it’s an island, it’s monsoon forest and it’s in Wallacea.  But what was around was interesting.  I really wanted to see the cockatoo.  But despite all I’d been told about how common they were there were none around.  What was there was interesting.  The calls were dominated by the varied screeched and cackles of Friar birds.  I eventually got a clear look and it’s the helmeted friar bird.  Exactly the same species as I saw in northern Queensland.  Rustling around on the ground were orange-footed scrubfowl.  Again, the exact same species that I saw nesting outside my hut in the Queensland forest.  But at the same time next to the friarbirds were great tits.  About as Eurasian as you could get.  Sulawesi may well be famous in Wallacea for it’s whacky wildlife and endemics, but here was real Wallacea.  The clear transition from Asia to Australia.  The first time I’d seen Australian species in Indonesia, and there they are, right next to Asian ones.  And to complete the picture there were a few endemics too.  A drongo, a white-eye and some flower-peckers.  Wallace never came here, but you couldn’t get a better place to represent his ideas.  The transition zone, speciation, island biogeography, and island gigantism.  From looking at Malay Archipelago it appears be passed by in a boat to Timor.  What a shame he didn’t stop.

Evening walk time came around and I met my guard.  He armed himself with a sturdy forked stick and we headed off up a valley.  The forest is really pretty.  As I say it’s more a woodland than a dense forest.  Open understory, short trees, frequently open.  The place was fairly crawling with things.  A hole in a tree was stuffed full for giant geckos (Geko geko).  About bloody time I saw this thing, been hearing them all over Java for years, but never seen them.  I suppose in this land if giant lizards it was appropriate to see this larges of geckos.  Scrubfowl and green junglefowl doing much the same thing.  The latter is a beautiful bird, ok, the male is, the female just looks like a farmyard hen.  Males are greeny-blue with a rainbow comb.  The guide was trying to get me excited about seeing more dragons, but stressed that they were wild and it’s not guaranteed.  I refrained from letting on that I’d already seen them hanging out in the camp.  He was doing a good job and I didn’t want to be a know-it-all prick.  They had been trained well, I have to say.  He knew a fair bit about the ecology of the dragons and did a good tour.  We went to a nest site and he told me all about the breeding cycle.  And we ended up at the old viewing arena.  They stopped doing the feedings about 6 years ago because too many people complained that it wasn’t natural.  The guide was slightly disappointed that we didn’t see any dragons.  We did see one or two little females and a large male.  This one spooked the guide slightly.  They obviously do have a deep respect for them and don’t take them for granted.  Made me think that they might be more of a real threat than I thought.  Of maybe it was an act from the guide, to make me think that I really was in danger, that after all is was tourists come here to feel isn’t it.  With this big male we also spooked a deer.  Clearly the dragon was stalking it.  He was probably pretty pissed that we’d spooked his dinner.  Sorry.  But I was happy.  After hearing many a screech I finally got a view of the yellow-crested cockatoo.  The guide couldn’t quite fathom why I was so keen to see it.  They’re so common as far as he’s concerned.  I did explain that they are basically extinct everywhere else, and that after more than a year in Sulawesi it’d turned into something of a mythical bird.  It is quite a good looking bird, not as large as the similar species in Australia, more dainty.  Of course again I needn’t have left the confines of the camp.  Back there after the walk I found a small flock of them roosting in a dead tree above the volley ball court.  More of the dragons here too.  One of the resident males made a move from his station behind the kitchens and waddled off into the bush.  I followed along at a respectable 10 m behind as he moved on.  One can’t really say he strode majestically.  He may have been big, but he was still a lizard and could only really waddle swinging his massive tail back and forth as he went.

Up early the next morning for another walk.  Not many lizards around that early so it was designed as a ‘birdwatching walk’.  Didn’t see much more than I’d seen already.  But it was well worth doing just for a nice morning walk.  It was a cool and crisp morning as we climbed up onto a ridge.  As the sun came up over the island the temperature would begin to rise rapidly.  But before 7 am it was perfect.  I sat on a rock on the Eastern ridge of the valley and looked down on the dark green carpet of woodland and out across the bay.  Flocks of up to 20 cockatoos were flying over the woods looking for fruiting trees, white dots over the jade canopy.  The sun crept up over the mountains and the birds took cover.  My guide led me down a parallel valley and out to the beach.  Lizard tracks dissected the sand where they had some to bask or search the flotsam.  But there were none around this morning, I was the only creature basking on the beach that morning.  It didn't last, I had a world to cross and couple of hours later the dive boat came to pick me up and I started the long journey back to London.