Amboina Star to Leksula

I felt suddenly overwhelmed walking down Leksula’s main drag on Wednesday night.  I say main drag, but it was the village’s only street, a pot-holed and puddled ribbon of tarmac running along the beach.  Darkness had recently fallen, the power had just come on.  The night gave me a cloak of anonymity – people couldn’t tell the strange “Mister” was in their midst until I was nearly upon them.

It’s hard for me to imagine flourishing outside of a major city; we forget that millions upon millions of people in the world live in tiny, remote villages like Leksula.  And that’s what overwhelmed me.

There are no roads to Leksula.  There is no Internet.  Nothing but sea and sand, palm trees and jungle-covered mountains rising behind the village where deep within, one man told me, lived people “with no religion.”  The engineer on the ship that brought me there said they were “cannibals.”  Leksula is hot, humid and deeply quiet.  Still.  Little moves, except children, who are everywhere, tumbling on the sand, diving off the pier, throwing each other into the ocean, playing with a joy and abandon long absent from the organized soccer fields and playgrounds of American cities.  Men walked down the street holding hands with each other, their arms around each other; I couldn’t grasp its quiet, its insularity, its interconnectedness.  “That is my brother,” said Hendro, Leksula’s English speaker, who had been summoned somehow from somewhere to be my guide.  “My aunt.  My cousin.  My sister.”

And Leksula was big.  It had a concrete pier!  The Amboina Star motored out of Ambon at 10 pm on Tuesday night, reaching the first village on Buru about 4 am.  We were 200 people in the Star’s waist, lying on sleeping platforms, the hold below full of lumber and rice and re-bar and eggs and everything a village needs.  From there we village hopped westward along the coast; each was thatch and pirogues and an onion-domed mosque on the beach, tiny out-lying worlds as removed from Facebook and the economic meltdown as Mercury or Pluto.  The Star’s horn beeped twice, its dinghy rode the waves onto the beach, picking up passengers, dropping off cargo, before heading to the next beachside village, until we arrived in Leksula at 3 pm.

The Star was crowded but clean; I never saw a roach.  A hot wind blew through the wide double doors, just three feet above the blue sea, and the crew’s cook fed me rice, greens and dried fish, flavored with a searing hot sauce freshly pounded out in a stone bowl.

Even better, the chief engineer had spent 18 months on a factory trawler in Alaska before getting arrested and spending six months in jail, where he learned English courtesy of the U.S. Government.  “In an Indonesian jail you go in big and come out small,” Jopy said, “but in an American jail you go in small and come out big.”

I don’t know what I had been thinking.  There was no place to stay in Leksula, no airport, no other way in or out, no facilities of any kind.  Hendro tried to get me to stay in his house, but Jopy let me sleep on the Star.  It was a good thing; I was as constantly surrounded as Britney Spears.  Hendro woke me at six am for coffee at his aunt’s house, and by 7:30 I had an audience with the high school headmaster, who laid a warm hand on my knee and said, through Hendro, “how glad I am that you have come to Leksula!”  I toured the school, of course, and then headed back to Ambon via all those little villages with the ship, this time full of chickens and coconuts and bananas.

The sun beat down, the swell came up, a child vomited repeatedly, but I felt privileged, riding along the distant capillaries of a still very large planet.  And when we docked at 3:30 am this morning in the heat of a very black, tropical night, Ambon seemed very big indeed.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 2:32 am and is filed under All, Ferries, Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.