A busy road in Ujung Pandang
Sulawesi, according to the papers and travellers I'd managed to consult, was a dangerous place to visit in early October 1997. There were riots in the capital of Ujung Pandang between the Chinese and the Indonesians, resulting in a military infiltration to keep the peace, but not before a number of people had been killed and huge amounts of property burned; an earthquake in Parepare, some 100km north of Ujung Pandang, was supposed to have caused chaos; and northern and central Sulawesi was apparently on fire and full of smoke. However, like most news you hear along the grapevine, the facts had given way to fiction somewhere in the telling.
The earthquake and riots did happen, but by the time we arrived, peace reigned once again in Ujung Pandang, and Parepare was back to normal. The fires were tiny, too, but there was one major piece of news that Peter and I managed to confirm in an English-language paper we tracked down: the chaotic fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan were still burning.
A blatant rip-off of Planet Hollywood in Ujung Pandang, whose old colonial name was Makassar
It hadn't been a terribly good couple of months for Indonesia. On Friday 26th September a Garuda airbus plying the Jakarta-Medan route had crashed into a ravine, killing 234 people in Indonesia's worst ever plane disaster: the blame was put on bad air traffic control, with the pilot and the ground staff reaching a misunderstanding on the meaning of 'left' and 'right'. At around the same time the currency slump in Southeast Asia was devaluing the Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit, the Philippino peso and the Indonesian rupiah, and to cap it all, bushfires started raging in Kalimantan and Sumatra.
Plane crashes and currency slides are fairly common round these parts, but the bushfires are among the worst ever seen: at the time I was there a smoky haze was covering northern and western Borneo, Sumatra, most of Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and Indonesia was being squarely blamed. The smoke was posing a serious health hazard to people in affected areas, tourists were being warned off the area, airports were being closed, and the monsoon season was late, with rain not expected for months. Back in 1982 fires in Kalimantan had spread to the peat beds underneath the forest, and had continued to burn for two years, and concerns were rife that a similar disaster would happen this time. More affluent Malaysia and Singapore had had 'several sunless weeks', according to The Indonesia Times, and were evacuating their residents to better areas.
Fort Rotterdam
The blame for the fires was being apportioned in typical Indonesian fashion: the loggers blamed the farmers for their slash-and-burn farming techniques, and the farmers blamed the loggers for chopping down the trees and leaving dry, tinder-like areas behind, but whatever the real story, there was one thing that is clear: Indonesia is destroying its countryside by degrees, and fires like this are simply a symptom of a country that doesn't even know how to spell 'conservation'. The Borneo jungle is fast becoming a myth, and by all accounts, in ten years' time it won't even exist, especially if fires like this continue to occur.
However, I digress. Sulawesi, being east-southeast of Borneo, was potentially at risk of being smothered in smoke, but due to fortunate winds, it managed to stay clear and fresh for the time I was there. This was lucky: the thought of putting up with an environmental smoke hazard on top of the usual Indonesian kretek habit was fairly daunting, to say the least. Ujung Pandang, in reality, turned out to be a pretty cool place.
Fort Rotterdam
Maybe it was because I had gained a travelling companion – Peter and I decided to team up for a few days, as our plans coincided fairly well – but I actually thrived on the 'Hello Mister's in Ujung Pandang. And they came thick and fast: every two seconds there was someone calling out as we wandered the streets, first in search of a bank to exchange money and then in search of the Pelni office to work out times for boats out of Sulawesi. We bought a bus ticket for the overnight bus heading north, we went on a short bus ride to Old Gowa in search of some sultan's tomb that proved too elusive for us to track down, and we explored the city's sights such as Fort Rotterdam (an excellent example of colonial architecture) and the bustling market... but nothing prepared us for the Evening Meal experience.
In preparation for our forthcoming overnight bus experience, Peter and I decided to stock up on essential vitamins by buying some fruit from the market, and after some hard bargaining we were the proud owners of a water melon and a handful of sumptuous mangoes. So we sat down on the sidewalk to eat them.
The first observers turned up after about ten seconds, mainly people from the shop just down the road from where we'd sat. Then some more drifted in from the sides, some kids stood around watching, and before we'd got halfway through our melons, there must have been about 30 people just standing round, staring, and giggling to each other. Some brave souls attempted to talk to us, and one woman was so intent on practising her English with us that she got a chair and sat in front of us, as if we were a television. She screeched at us in pidgin, we smiled politely and ate our fruit, and marvelled at the total lack of privacy in a culture such as this. For some reason, the sight of two foreigners eating a water melon was the most exciting thing happening in Ujung Pandang that evening, and we drew a huge crowd, especially when we started eating our mangoes in the Polynesian manner, slicing off half of the mango, crisscross cutting it and turning the skin inside out to give a pleasing, cubist design, perfect for guzzling and amazing to the Indonesians, who had never seen it before.
It was here that I began to get an inkling of what it must be like to be a rock star...
