The Long Hitch Home Read online

  “The Navy is the government’s way of taking people who don’t function in society and sticking them all together on a big tin can out at sea so they can’t harm the rest of society,” said Carl, clearly excluding himself and Mike from this summation.

  The guys had the day off tomorrow, so they offered to take me onto their naval base in the morning for a look around.

  This, I was well up for.

  We approached the security barrier at the start of Darwin’s sprawling Larrakeyah Barracks where Carl and Mike quickly flashed their I.D. in the direction of the sentry stationed there. He didn’t so much as glance at these before waving us through.

  “One of our mates took a photo of his own poo in a bowl to use as his photo I.D. and it worked for months,” said Carl with a laugh.

  We drove on round the base going past several barrack buildings and a section where, Carl explained, some unfortunate soul from times gone by had been imprisoned behind bars for seventy-three days, in a building with no roof to protect him from the elements.

  “Can you imagine what that was like in Darwin’s weather?” he asked.

  With brutal tropical temperatures, cyclones, and monsoon-like floods, it must have made for one hell of a trying stretch.

  We parked down a small hill by a dry-dock hangar, next to a man-made harbor with a large wave-break wall. Inside the harbor stretched a substantial concrete jetty where several huge, mean-looking gray patrol boats were docked.

  “We have to clean their hulls in little dinghys,” said Mike. “Got to watch out for crocs and box jellyfish in the water though.”

  To mention a squishy jellyfish in the same cautionary breath as a mighty sharp-toothed crocodile might, to some, sound a little too elevating of the jellyfish’s harm causing capacity; but don’t be deceived. The box jellyfish is the nastiest of Australia’s long list of animal nasties, and is loaded with millions of venom packed stingers along every centimeter of its multiple tentacles. It is the most poisonous creature on the planet, packed with enough venom to wipe out a football team. Brush against one of this translucent little invertebrate’s tentacles when out for a dip, and you can go into such convulsive shock as to end up drowning on the spot. Its toxins attack the heart, nervous system, and skin cells in a manner unlike any other creature, causing such unfathomable pain that victims have been known to continue screaming even when completely unconscious and heavily sedated.

  For such a fearsome creature you might expect it to have evolved this way to contend with some pretty hefty and armored prey, but it actually feeds on tiny fish and shrimps, surely qualifying as the animal kingdom’s ultimate example of overkill. Since box jellyfish are present year round in the seas off Australia’s tropical north—with the peak season being October to May—it makes the coastal waters around Darwin all but unusable for bathers at the hottest times of year, despite their “oh so tempting” appearance. Yet another reason you don’t want to get stuck in Darwin.

  Carl led us into the dry-dock hangar where a huge patrol boat was being renovated after an electrical fire.

  “Want to go on board?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  The guys cleared it with some nearby colleagues and then led me on board the boat.

  It was an interesting vessel that had apparently taken quite a beating from the fire, although much of it was now patched up. It had, Carl explained, been used in the highly politicized interception of boats carrying asylum seekers trying to make it to Australia, something both he and Mike had been involved in.21 There were lots of people on the lower decks fixing it up, so after a quick look around the cabins here, and at a massive gun towards the bow, we made our way to the cockpit where I plonked myself in the captain’s revolving chair. We had this area to ourselves and stayed here chatting for a while, before Mike showed me something sinister nearby, which he referred to as a “sound weapon.”

  “Its frequency can make people you aim it at convulse, spew, and shit themselves,” he said.

  This delightful coercion aid was apparently used to get boats full of asylum seekers to comply with the Navy’s orders.

  After a further look around the base we headed back to their apartment, where Mike crashed out in his room while Carl and I sat having a cup of tea and another little cupcake. A few minutes later, when discussing some of the operations Carl had been involved in, he told me something truly shocking. Now I’m not vouching for the validity of what he claimed, but the details are thus.

  One particular patrol boat that Carl had been on board, HMAS Larrakia, had, according to him, received a distress call from a boat full of asylum seekers that was sinking in an area near the Cocos Islands. At the time, HMAS Larrakia was, apparently, just two hours away from reaching the stricken vessel but the captain received orders from his superiors not to assist. The asylum seekers’ boat then sank, killing all the men, women, and children on board. Despite being close enough to have attempted a rescue—a legal obligation under the circumstances—the official version reported in the press claimed that the nearest Australian naval vessel was two days away. According to Carl, the ship’s logs could prove this as untrue. “It was all a political decision,” he told me ruefully.

  * * *

  A week is a long time in Darwin, especially if you’re living off damper breads cooked up in the oven of your hosts’ apartment to preserve your travel funds. After seven painfully long days stuck there, I couldn’t really claim to having much, if anything, to show for it. Perkins had, of course, turned me down, as had the town’s sole remaining freight shipping company, Swire. My daily trips to the city’s yacht clubs to check whether anyone had arrived who was planning on crossing the Timor Sea had come to nothing. I had also pitched a local pearling company after being told (incorrectly) that their boats traveled to Timor, made inquiries with my Navy contacts in the unlikely event that one of their vessels was going to East Timor or Indonesia—and the unlikelier-still scenario that I could get permission to come on board—and even approached a local aviation club to see if I could hitch a ride on a light air-plane heading over the water. All avenues of inquiry came to nothing.

  The key to crossing the Timor Sea from Darwin was clear. You either had to do it out of cyclone season when the trade winds were favorable and you could crew on a yacht—either pleasure cruising or taking part in one of two sailing rallies that crossed the Timor Sea from Australia in July, The Darwin to Dili, and Sail Indonesia—or have crazy amounts of money in order to convince some nutter to risk sailing the route at the wrong time of year. Other than that the only feasible option was to jump on a commercial plane.

  I bit the bullet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gangsta’s Paradise

  Balancing myself on the rear of my old school friend Dan’s scooter was no mean feat, even before we got on the move. To fit myself and my cumbersome backpack on the passenger seat required some up-close and personal rearranging of the space between passenger and driver, to the extent that I was practically spooning on the back with Dan.

  Not a pleasant experience.

  We made our way from Bali’s western Uluwatu Peninsula through thin, twisting, and potholed streets, crowded with bikes, mopeds, trucks, cars, buses, taxis, pedestrians, and no small quantity of chickens, all of whom seemed to be following their own arbitrary “make it up as you go along” rules of the road. The chickens were the most orderly. Cars pulled out on the wrong side, mopeds overtook on blind corners, pedestrians walked in the middle of the road, and trucks just did as they pleased—with the right of way belonging to the biggest. Dan swerved from left to right, avoiding several near-collisions in the process, while yelling abuse at other road users where appropriate.

  “They don’t have a clue how to drive here!” shouted Dan so I could hear him above the sound of hot tropical air rushing past me on the back. “A truck wiped out a whole crowd of people just down the road from here. Its brakes failed at the start of the hill and instead of trying to pull over into a ditch, the
driver just jumped out. Picked up more and more speed the further it went downhill until it careered off the road. Killed fifteen people, smashed ten shops, about thirty bikes, two pickups and another yellow truck. It looked like an airplane had crashed!”

  It was clear hitchhiking in Indonesia was going to be a very different experience to the long straight empty roads of Australia.

  After about twenty minutes we reached, and then made our way through, the central city streets of downtown Kuta—the raucous main tourist district of Bali—heaving with early morning commuter traffic, a mass of multicolored metal that erupted into a triumphant chorus of throaty exhaust-pipes and high-pitched horn blasts. The majority were on scooters, many with several passengers crammed onto a single bike. Thousands thronged the streets in bewildering chaos, screaming along like a giant collective entity past war-like statues of Hindu gods, standing proud and strong beside intersections and roundabouts; the sheer quantity of traffic creating huge congested backlogs at junctions. When the center of the city was finally cleared, we pulled over at a small convenience store in the area of Changu. From here I was on my own. Dan had to head back to Uluwatu where he worked, so after thanks from me and best wishes for my trip ahead from him, we bade each other farewell.

  I had met up with Dan and another great friend from school, Mark, on my first morning on the small Indonesian island of Bali. They had been out here for years, living and working, but more importantly surfing, something that had drawn them to Bali in the first place. The waves were world class and waters warm, pretty much the diametric opposite of the U.K. We’d spent most of our time together on Bali split between the beach and a miniature “British pub” that Mark had constructed, in questionable taste, in the backyard of his Bali home. It had been great to catch up, but I yearned for fresh adventure and the clarity of spirit that came with it. The open road was beckoning me back and I had a tantalizing new objective driving me onwards: Mt. Bromo, a dark, cone-shaped volcano on neighboring island Java that according to reports was in a seriously tempestuous mood, spewing lava down its sides and a colossal ash cloud miles into the skies above. I had never visited a volcano before but I could feel its primal calling. A new experience awaited.

  Today was going to be an interesting experiment. Mark had been convinced that I would need to offer some sort of financial inducement to get a ride in Indonesia, but I wasn’t so sure. Nor was I prepared to do this. I was going to hitchhike, and that meant for free. If this entailed multiple drivers turning me down when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to cross their palm with silver, then so be it. I’d play the numbers game and wait it out until someone gave me a lift for gratis. After all, if I was to start paying for transport then it would be cheaper, and far easier, to catch a bus or train. Even if I handed over only half a dollar per driver, this would still equate to far more than public transport—considering the multiple scooters, trucks and cars a similar journey would no doubt entail on Indonesia’s heaving roads.

  Carrying a red scooter helmet that Dan had given me, I set off on foot along the road, prominently displaying my thumb. Streams of vehicles poured past and although plenty looked my way with a marked degree of confusion, for the first ten minutes none stopped. My luck changed when I had dropped my hand for a second and was, to all intents and purposes, just walking in my desired direction.

  A scooter ridden by a guy in his early twenties pulled up. The sight, it seemed, of a Westerner with a backpack hiking along a non-tourist road being sufficient to pique his curiosity.

  “Selamat Pagi,” I said, reading from a piece of paper that Dan had scribbled essential Indonesian phrases on—this one meaning “good morning.” “Err, Tanah Lot Temple,” I continued, pointing at myself, then gesturing down the road.

  “Thirty thousand,” he stated matter-of-factly in English.

  “It’s okay, I’ll walk,” I said, turning to do just that.

  “Wait,” he said, stopping me to discuss the situation.

  It took a couple of minutes to convince him that I wasn’t interested in paying for a ride, no matter how small the fee, and that I was, essentially, going from place to place relying on the generosity of passing road users.

  “You are like Buddha!” he said with a smile, then gestured for me to get on.

  As we made our way along the road, it immediately became clear that covering anywhere near the sort of distances I had managed daily in Australia, would be utterly impossible in Indonesia. With a population of over 240 million people, even if I got lucky and scored a ride with a truck or car, there was simply too much traffic, on roads too twisting, too minor, and in too poor a condition to get anywhere particularly fast.

  New life and intrigue presented itself around every corner: Hindu temples, grotesque angry-faced statues, mountainous piles of old coconut husks, street stalls hawking pink-tinged gasoline in see-through incremented containers, stray dogs, sparks exploding from angry-looking disk-cutters on workshop floors, consolidated mounds of discarded plastic bottles, puncture-repair shops, mechanics’ garages, otherworldly tropical trees, curious tube-shaped cages containing live pigs; and everywhere people, going to and fro, busying themselves with all manner of tasks ranging from the backbreaking to the casual. Some lugged towering bundles of unidentifiable vegetable matter or bits of steelwork, others stood chatting outside local roadside stores. At one stage a religious parade, complete with banners, gongs, and chanting, made its way along the street, holding up the traffic until it passed. My surroundings had changed beyond all recognition since Darwin, and I couldn’t have been happier. This was what traveling was all about.

  It wasn’t long before the crowded streets gave way to lush green rice paddies, offering expansive views across the rural heart of the island, and we were nearing the ticket office for Tanah Lot Temple, where the green and pleasant abruptly ended, replaced now by a large car and coach-lot surrounded by tacky commercialized tourist infrastructure. Somewhere, hidden from view beyond, was the sacred temple, an iconic symbol of Bali thought to date from the sixteenth century, and a place Dan had recommended I stop off at on my way across the tiny island. Purchasing a ticket from a little office, I made my way past a barrage of gift shops and market stalls, piled high with mountains of tourist junk: beach sandals, random bits of coral, sarongs, wind chimes, baseball caps, jewelry, and other tasteless souvenirs, before finally arriving at a coastal clifftop where the temple came into view.

  Perched on top of an exposed rocky sea stack, stranded a couple of hundred feet off the coast, was a collection of multi-tiered shrines that rose from the center of this craggy island. Being semi low tide at the moment, the foreshore of the island was accessible for those willing to get their feet wet, so I made my way down onto the shore, threw my shoes in my pack and waded into the warm but sloshing water for a closer look. There wasn’t much to see. Staircases led up the perimeter of the rock to the temple above, but they were prohibited for all but true devotees, and over a third of the “rock” turned out to be fake; an artificially enhanced sham, sculptured like a prop from a movie set to look like the real thing. I can’t say I was particularly impressed, a feeling hardly helped by the hordes of tourists and nearby infrastructure, which included an 18-hole golf course and spa resort, roughly 1500 feet away.

  The large scale commercialization of such a sensitive part of Bali’s historic, religious, and cultural heritage was initiated in the early nineties, to huge outrage among the Balinese. Developers with close ties to the country’s then dictator, General Suharto,22 skirted around planning rules, forcibly removing locals from their property surrounding the site to make way for the resort, and bulldozing land before owners had even agreed to sell.23 Protests erupted in what became the first proper challenge by the Balinese to unrestrained tourist development on their island. With as much as 85 percent of tourist assets on Bali owned by foreigners,24 all too often local communities shoulder the burdens of development, but reap very little of the benefits,25 with the lion’s shar
e of profits going abroad.

  Furious landowners presented a petition to the head of the regional government stating their grievances: that they had been told their land was to be appropriated “in the national interest” only to find it handed over to a private conglomerate, that lives had been threatened, land impounded by the courts, and irrigation water cut off.26 Despite protests succeeding in stalling the development, the military finally stamped them out,27 and the project went ahead. That there were protests in the first place is testament to the strength of feeling for this holy Hindu site, especially when you consider who was running the country at the time: General Suharto, a man the C.I.A. attributes as carrying out “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century,”28 and whose former atrocities on Bali alone account for at least 80,000 dead in a single year, many of whom, unbeknown to most tourists to the island, are buried in mass graves under the car-lots of major hotels.29

  Leaving the temple, I strode off along the road leading from it, waving off taxis as I went. From now on I would head straight to neighboring island, Java, the most populated in the Indonesian archipelago, which is made up of a mind-boggling seventeen thousand islands. If all went well I hoped to reach Java by the afternoon.

  Without any outward request for a lift from me, a second biker pulled over. This was a strange but welcome feature of hitchhiking in Indonesia, where simply looking out of place and making a journey on foot was enough to get a ride.

  “Where are you going?” asked its middle-aged male rider.

  “Kediri,” I replied.

  He asked for money, and this time really wanted it.

  With a polite decline I carried on my way, determined to clear a good distance from the temple where it seemed likely everyone would want remuneration for a ride.