Kijana Read online

  We anchored off the main beach, which we were surprised to discover was covered in ratty piles of junk. On either side of the beach were tall cliffs that contained what appeared, from a distance, to be termite apartments burrowed into each face, their small windows facing the sea. As we got closer, we realised they were significantly bigger than we had first thought, and there was washing flapping in the breeze from the windows.

  Nestled into the left-hand corner of the beach was a shack made of rubbish. Driftwood was combined with faded plastic sheets and rusted corrugated iron to make something that I could only describe as a chookhouse. Where the sand of the beach finished, concrete steps led up to street level where hawkers gathered and buses and bikes flew past.

  We arrived late in the afternoon and there was only one other sailing boat anchored off the beach. We decided to say hello and ask how we should check in with Customs. It was a large steel vessel with a dark blue hull, owned by two Australian men aged in their forties.

  As soon as we arrived on board they took one look at Kijana and told us to take our quarantine flag down immediately. This flag indicates that a vessel has arrived in the country and requires Customs to check the crew’s papers. We’d raised the flag to abide by maritime law but our new friends gave us a quick lesson in the Indonesian way of things. The local authorities, they told us, didn’t like to do any work and if we flew the flag, they were obliged to come out and see us. And this would make them angry. ‘Just check in over the next few days,’ they told us.

  We chatted some more about the local nuances, then bade our farewell. Our departure came with one final warning.

  ‘Your boat will be safe here. Just make sure you lock it every time you go to shore.’

  We rushed back to Kijana to lower the yellow flag, then made our way to the beach.

  A few kids gathered to watch us arrive. We jumped out of the dinghy and began pulling it up the sand. The children stood around watching us strain to lift the heavy outboard until a small, old man pushed them aside to help us up the beach. Following his lead, the children swarmed around the dinghy and together we hauled it above the high-tide mark.

  We asked the small man if it was safe to leave the dinghy there, but he didn’t speak English. He looked around at the kids, but it seemed neither did they. Using a few hand gestures, I pointed to the man, then at the dinghy and joined them together, then pointed to us and did a walking signal with my fingers. He said something and nodded his head. I smiled at him and he smiled a big toothless grin back. We had to trust him and his friendly demeanour.

  We said goodbye to the small man and climbed up the steps onto the street. The sun was quickly disappearing and the traffic headlights had already been turned on.

  There was no point in trying to locate Customs so we found a small eating place and ordered dinner. Maria came back from the bathroom with a puzzled look on her face. She was unsure if she’d ‘gone’ in the right place, for all she’d found was a floorboard missing in the corner with a bucket of water and a scoop next to it.

  Josh and Maria didn’t eat much of their meal. It was all weird stuff, and most of it contained meat, which automatically put Josh off. The guidebooks recommended eating only well-cooked meals and to steer clear of meat if we weren’t sure where it came from. Of course, how can you be sure of where any meat has come from unless you have caught it and killed it yourself? Beau and I, on the other hand, ate every morsel on our plate. Asian food has always been a favourite for both of us, and the Kupang offering was no exception.

  As we returned to the beach I was relieved to see our dinghy still on the beach. The small man was nowhere to be seen but a sheet of plastic had been wrapped around the motor for protection.

  The next morning we woke to the sounds of loud engines roaring past Kijana. The new boat in town was attracting quite a bit of attention. Small Indonesian fishing boats were scattered from the shore out to sea, laying fishing nets and pulling in their catches. While they waited, they would dash past our boat, their motors screaming as they waved madly at us.

  After a breakfast of cereal, Beau checked the emails. There was one from the office reminding us of the need to find something interesting to film for the first episode of the documentaries.

  But before that could happen, we needed to get ourselves organised. We needed to replenish our fresh food stores, then find Customs to stamp our passports. Only then could we explore and find some adventures.

  One of the blokes from the other yacht came over to check how we’d managed since we last spoke. We told him about the small man who’d covered our motor for us.

  ‘He lives on the beach,’ he told us. ‘That shack made of rubbish is his home.’

  He gave us directions to get to Customs, then wished us well.

  On the beach we were again greeted by the small man. He smiled broadly, revealing what appeared to be a mouth full of blood. We later discovered it was actually stained from chewing the betel nut, a form of stimulant chewed like tobacco.

  The only Indonesian word any of us could remember from the travel books was ‘nama’, which means name. Josh introduced us, saying ‘Nama Josh, Beau, Maria, Jesse’.

  His name, he told us, was Wadu. He helped us pull the dinghy up the beach, insisting we drag it closer to his hut. I pointed to the ramshackle construction and tried to ask if he lived there. His face lit up with another smile that again revealed the extent of his stained gums. He proudly turned and showed us through his home. He swept open a sheet of plastic to reveal his humble abode, looking back at us proudly. A rooster, tethered by a thin cord tied to its foot, was pecking through some ashes in the corner, searching for food. The place was definitely a work-in-progress. Additions were made by adding whatever the tide chose to leave at Wadu’s doorstep. Outside lay two derelict canoes with outriggers. A mess of netting was dumped on top of one of them.

  I wondered what Wadu did for a living, how he fed himself. He looked too old to work and a rooster and two leaky canoes looked to be all he owned. Still, his wrinkly face looked like that of a cheeky boy showing off his cubbyhouse kingdom. I gave him some money for looking after our dinghy the previous night, which he humbly accepted.

  We entered the main street to search for Customs. We walked past stall after stall on what could loosely be described as a footpath. Each stall sold almost exactly the same as the last – large bundles of dark tobacco, ancient weights, padlocks, knives, watches, calculators, small bottles of whisky and brightly coloured plastic buckets. It was an odd combination of goods for sale. It seemed to me that a few random trucks had been hijacked by thieves, who then offered every stallholder in town the same hot goods. Who knows, I might have been right.

  Beau decided we needed some green vegetables, bananas and eggs. We could have got all three at the first stall but, instead, we walked to the end of the stalls only to realise that each vegetable store stocked the same thing for the same price. The mixture of second-guessing traffic rules that seemed nonexistent, extreme humidity, and bargaining in a foreign language left us exhausted.

  We decided to stop at a small eatery for lunch. Josh and Maria asked if they had sandwiches, but no one understood what they meant. We were handed a plate with rice and pointed in the direction of the dishes displayed in the window. They were mainly curries, with chicken, beef, eggs and quail, as well as vegetable dishes that had the unappetising appearance of steamed gum leaves. Each bowl looked like it had been stewing in the sun for days.

  As Maria returned to the table with some food, a man approached and asked if he could sit down. He was the first person we had met who spoke understandable English. We said yes, of course he could.

  He introduced himself as Eric and asked where we were from and what we were doing. After we told him, he revealed he was a clearance broker. Nothing about his appearance gave the impression that he was telling the truth. His worn-out thongs and raggedy jeans certainly didn’t give him an air of being a businessperson. But he was pleasant enough.


  We told him we were on our way to Customs but he insisted it would take too much time. Sometimes the officials weren’t in the office and we had to get paperwork signed by three different authorities, he told us. He said it was his job to help all yachts checking into the country to get clearance.

  ‘How much?’ we asked.

  ‘200,000 rupiah,’ he replied.

  At only $30 Australian, it seemed fair enough, so we said yes.

  ‘What do you need from us?’ I asked.

  Passports, boat registration, cruising permit and some other thing I didn’t understand, came the reply. He seemed to know what he was talking about. He said he had some other business to attend to and asked that we meet him the following afternoon at the steps to the beach.

  Before he left, Josh asked him a favour. He explained that he was vegetarian and wanted to know the Indonesian sentence for ordering food without meat. He happily wrote the sentence down on paper – ‘Tidak daging ayam’. ‘No beef chicken’ it meant.

  The following day we decided to explore our surrounds. We found someone who owned two motorbikes and hired them for the day. Beau was the only one with any experience riding a motorbike. I’d ridden a friend’s Pee-Wee 50 in Grade 6, but that had ended in tears when I crashed into a hanging pot plant and jammed my finger against the clutch.

  Maria sat behind Beau, and Josh sat behind me with the camera at the ready.

  The rest of the day was spent roaring around the streets, down little dirt tracks into the countryside, then back into town again. We were constantly lost but that didn’t matter. As long as there was an open road ahead of us, and we knew in which direction the sea lay, we were happy. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, very different to sailing on the ocean. The speed was the main difference, and best of all, there were no rules. People waved as we rode past. We whizzed past goats grazing at the side of the road and a family of monkeys scrambled into the bushes before we ran over them.

  Beau rode much faster than me, so he and Maria led most of the way. They were often forced to pull over while Josh and I caught up. One time I slowed down and came to a wobbly halt behind them, only to notice we’d stopped outside a sign that read ‘Polisi’.

  Outside the building sat four men in brown police uniforms looking rather bored. I gave a quick wave and whispered to Beau to keep going. ‘It’s the police,’ I said.

  Not only did we not have international drivers licences, but we hadn’t even checked into the country yet. Beau was well versed at flitting away from the cops, so he sped off while I haplessly prodded the levers in an attempt to get it into first gear. One of the police stood up and said something in Indonesian.

  ‘He’s coming over,’ Josh said in a panic.

  ‘Just pretend you can’t hear him,’ I said as I continued to kick the gears. I finally got it into first gear, nonchalantly looked up at the approaching policeman and smiled as I took off.

  Once we felt confident that we weren’t being chased, we pulled into a shop for a drink where a couple of men told us about some caves that served as the local swimming spot. We agreed to follow them off the road and down a track to some boulders, where they pointed towards a small opening that headed underground. It looked like a good place to hide a dead body.

  We followed them into the hole, the darkness temporarily blinding us. As our eyes adapted we could make out stalactites hanging from the roof. The sound of water dripping was punctuated by a loud splash somewhere further down.

  We followed the two men along a worn path until we came to the swimming hole. A splash of sunlight made its way through a peephole above us, making the water an amazing deep blue colour. A few teenage boys were jumping off a ledge into the water. We paid the men some money for their troubles and spent the afternoon swimming. The cave provided welcome relief from the heat of the sun, and the water was a perfect temperature.

  The following morning was dedicated to maintenance of Kijana. Josh and I continued our daily ritual of throwing seawater over the decks to keep the timber wet. In the tropical sun it could easily dry out and shrink, leaving cracks that would let water leak into the cabin. Maria polished the stainless steel with a rag and Beau cleaned the galley of fallen food scraps and kero leaks from the pressurised fuel tank at the back of the stove. Our small outboard motor had developed a nasty cough so we mechanically minded creatures opened the lid and cleaned whatever looked dirty. It seemed to fix the problem.

  We had a video and a web update due so we decided to film our friend Wadu. We got some shots of his house, trying to frame in as much junk as possible, then left our dinghy with him and waited for Eric, the Customs broker.

  While we waited I started to think about what we had just done. I couldn’t help feeling we had used Wadu as some sort of prop, without really treating him properly. If he was not such a poor man, would we have treated him with more respect?

  I was deep in thought when Eric arrived. We’d seen about as much as there was to see in Kupang, so we asked when we would be cleared to keep going. Hopefully by the next day, he told us. He would meet us there the following day at the same time.

  We waited all next day, hoping we would soon be sailing. While passing time, we visited our Australian friends on the neighbouring yacht. Over a cup of tea they shared some of their stories of cruising Indonesia. The men were business partners, who bought seafood from the local fishermen and shipped it back to Australia. They employed a couple of young locals to maintain the boat while they flew between Kupang and Australia.

  They were currently exploring the local seaweed market. Many Indonesians around Kupang are into seaweed harvesting. They use old softdrink bottles they find washed up on the beach, attaching them to the shallow coral reefs with fishing line. When the seaweed grows on the bottle they scrape it off, dry it out and sell it to businesspeople throughout the nearby islands.

  The demand for sushi rolls must have been strong around that part of the world. I couldn’t think what else they’d use it for. The two guys noticed the surfboards tied to Kijana’s safety lines and asked if we were surfers. We admitted we were novices who wanted to learn. Did they know of any good places we could visit, we asked.

  Beau went back to Kijana to get our chart of the area, while the two men quizzed their Indonesian crew about where some good waves could be found. There was a village near a few well-known breaks at the end of Pulau Roti, an island further south, the crew replied. Beau came back with the chart, which revealed it was two days’ sailing away. We thanked the men and their crew and headed back to shore to meet Eric.

  We waited on the beach for ages. As each minute ticked past the arranged meeting time, I became more worried. If he had done a runner with our documents we were stuffed. Not to mention what he would end up doing with them. Then, without acknowledging his lateness, Eric arrived and handed over our papers. Boy, I was relieved. I checked all our passports and paid him. They appeared to have the official stamps. We thanked him and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon on the beach.

  I imagined the waves at Roti as we watched a soccer match that had started on the beach outside Wadu’s shack. There were no boundaries and the goals looked uneven to me. But no one seemed to care. I saw Wadu pottering around his shack, gathering rubbish. It may have been an extremely dirty place but now that the sun was setting behind Kijana, the place was beautiful. This was Wadu’s million-dollar view.

  As we sat enjoying the sea breeze, I wondered about Wadu. What had happened in his life to lead him to where he was? We hadn’t really captured much about Wadu when we were filming – just a funny old man and a derelict house. How could we portray a man based on that? Next week we had to have a new update and that meant a new story at a new place. There was so much about Wadu that we would never know.

  Before we headed back to the boat to get ready to leave in the morning, I gave him some money for his help. We said goodbye and motored back to the boat. He stood on the shore waving. Did he think we’d be there in the mo
rning to give him more business or did he know we were leaving?

  Josh was the first to wake in the morning. He roused the rest of us and soon we had weighed anchor and were sailing south-west towards Roti. We initially made good progress on a stiff breeze, but as the day wore on the wind dropped and our progress stalled. We stayed a night in a small bay before continuing the next day in a light breeze. As we sat on deck hoping for the breeze to pick up, Beau got out the surfboards and waxed them to provide some grip for when we eventually hopped aboard.

  A few ‘wax on, wax off’ jokes later and we were again wondering how to pass the time. Then I had an idea. I climbed over the safety lines onto the outside of the gunwhale. Beau reached through the safety lines and held the front of the surfboard so the fins trailed in the water.

  I gave him the signal and he dropped the board as I jumped and landed on top of it. Still holding onto the side of Kijana, I found myself surfing.

  ‘It’s just like a skateboard,’ I yelled. I did a few swerves, then jumped back on board and Beau had a go, practising for when we would take on the real waves in a day or so.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived at the southern tip of Roti. Kijana rose up and down on the swell that wrapped around the point of the island and broke on the reefs lining the shore. To the south, we could see a four-metre left-hander rolling over the reef. To our north was a smaller right-hand break. Through the binoculars we spotted four boats – a small catamaran, two monohulls and a large power boat.

  When we got close enough we dropped the sails and motored between two surf breaks to where the other boats were moored. We dropped anchor 200 metres from the northern break, cutting the motor as soon as the anchor dug into the seabed. The noise of the motor was immediately replaced by the sound of waves crashing on reefs.

  The scene was in stark contrast to the grime and bustle of Kupang. Instead of the rush of traffic and crowded streets, we could see only small huts between the tall coconut trees that lined the beach. Closer to shore was a maze of floating objects, which I concluded was a seaweed farm.