Five hundred years ago the people of Bima, Sumbawa grew crops in volcanic soil,
built small fishing boats out of hard wood, and traversed the Indonesian
archipelago under lateen sail in search of fish. In 1993 when I visited them,
they still did. Sumbawa is fascinating, lying at a "transitional point between
the Indianized 'high' cultures of Western Indonesia and the traditional pagan
cultures of eastern Indonesia."
I had traveled eastward down the Nusa Tenggara from Jakarta, crossing Java,
Bali, and Lombok, and in Bima I was interested in boat schedules for a Pelni
ship that would take me back west to where a job and my next adventure awaited
me. But Sumbawa was too good to resist - even the name was delicious on the
tongue. Sumbawa is rough, rumpled, mountainous, and in 1993 at least it was
delightfully untouristed. From bus windows I saw not entreaties for foreign
visitors but simply farmers and fishermen doing what they’d always done. The
hillsides looked wild, untamed, even unused. The hillsides drew my eyes most
easily: steep and parched, draped over the higher summits by dark clouds that
seemed unwilling to shed their watery loads. It was no wonder people turned to
the sea. Drawing on my own experience in small boats on the Eastern seaboard,
Sumbawa’s rumpled coastline looked like a paradise for a small, maritime
gunkholer like myself. But Sumbawa was full of fragant sapan and sandalwood
timber too, as well as tobacco and lots of grains.
I took a benhur (dokar) cart from my losmen into town. It was market night, and
the roads were lined with merchants’ wares. I found piles of fishing nets and
stacks of reproduced books in Bahasa and Arabic. I wound up talking with the
seller of Korans: he had dozens of varieties of Islam’s sacred book, in
gorgeous Arabic script, or Arabic with Bahasa side-by-side. Other than the
muezzin’s frequent calls-to-prayer, it was my first close experience in
Indonesia with the peaceful kind of Islam that had crossed the Indian Ocean and
settled so easily into the Indonesian archipelago so many centuries ago. Even
now, it seemed like a good fit for these hard working traders, craftsmen, and
fishermen. In fact, Sumbawa is a deeply Muslim region, more prone to women in
headgear than elsewhere in Indonesia, and an area where the call to prayer
shuts down commerce more thoroughly than Indonesia's other islands.
Walking toward the outskirts of town I came across a small home; the family was
resting outside on mats, drinking hot tea. The father of the family saw me and
beckoned me over to join them. I counted seven children of all ages, but no
shoes anywhere. The mother ducked inside their little home under a roof I
noticed was of straw. The father spoke minimal Bahasa but I was grateful to
note it was enough for us to connect. What do you talk about in such a
situation? If you too grew up in myriad small boats, it’s simple: you talk
about the sea, sharks, tides, fishing, small craft. He asked me if the Pelni
ship Kelimutu were to sail to America, how many days’ sail it would take. I
hazarded a guess of thirty or forty days, and he was taken aback. I gathered
he’d never left Sumbawa, and probably never would. Maybe he wouldn't have to:
with farmland, fish, virgin forests, and a healthy, trading economy, Sumbawa
filled me with hope. It was also a lovely place to hoist my backpack over my
shoulders and walk around.
Talking sailing with Indonesians somehow neutralized all the “hello mister” I’d
gotten as I’d left Java. Indonesia was my first, serious adventure outside the
United States, and there in Bima, Sumbawa, drinking scalding tea while seven
little children eyed me nervously as I discussed tides with their father, I
thought to myself, I could live here. Maybe some day I will.
“I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent,
that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more
frightening to contemplate them."
— Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels
Indonesia was just the start of my travels. Writing this twenty two years
later, I realize I’ve spent most of my adult life living among the
disadvantaged in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and seen enough of the
so-called developed world to know the difference. Even in my lifetime, the
distinction between the haves and the have-nots has changed, and it will
change farther still. There’s something to be said for an island where you
have to slow down to avoid a herd of crossing water buffalo, where the markets
are lit by the orange glow of kerosene lanterns, where the kids mind goats and
chickens and ducks, where every meal is a blessing. I first noticed it in
Indonesia, but have seen it everywhere since: happiness has nothing to do with
possessions, and in fact it is frequently the simplest lifestyles that are the
most rewarding: travel Indonesia with nothing more than a backpack and it
becomes so clear.
