Saratok

The little town of Saratok, where we now live, has a population of maybe 10,000, similar to Locorotondo, our hometown in Italy.  For a white European it is a bewildering cultural melange of indigenous people (the Iban), Malays and Chinese, with an overlay of influences from the British and American Empires.

At first sight it's an unassuming little place with a town centre comprising a few grids of concrete two-storey buildings.  It has a daily market, two snooker halls, several mosques and Anglican and Methodist churches.  There are lots of cafes where you can get a square meal for around £1 and these are divided between muslim and non-muslim (where beer can be had).  There are no restaurants.

Popular local drinks include Nescafe with condensed milk and sugar, tea, also with condensed milk and Horlicks.  The food is mainly traditional Malaysian and Chinese, but the two small local supermarkets also do a brisk trade in baked beans and Quaker Oats.  This being a rice rather than a wheat based culture there is no great tradition of baking and the bread is mainly white sliced and soft, but one local shop sells the best egg custard tarts I have ever eaten.

White Europeans are rare here and despite all the weight I've lost in the last few years I feel like a lumbering pink hulk compared to most of the locals.  In a shop today two tiny Malay women with covered heads were looking at me and laughing in amazement.  The shopkeeper translated that they were saying "he is so tall!"  At this I bent my legs and said "is this better?"  Which induced hysterics.  Sometimes small children look at me with wide eyes and occasionally burst into tears.  People in the street regularly smile and say "hello" as to a welcome stranger and I find the best thing to do is to smile and say "hi" constantly.  After a while my face often sets into a rictus like grin with the strain.

There are plenty of cars around, but also lots of small motorbikes and scooters which are used to transport up to three people at a time (Mum, Dad and baby) and any amount of shopping, including gas bottles and small items of furniture.  They are routinely ridden over dirt roads that would be reserved in Europe for trail bikes and four-wheel drives.

Because the climate is hot and humid the air is alive with the smells of growth and decay, so that in the space of a few minutes one can encounter the scent of new mown grass, drains, rotting fish, spices and charcoal-grilled chicken.

In the residential areas around the town centre dogs, chickens and cats roam free and generally seem content to share their space with us humans.  In the morning I wake up to the sound of cocks crowing and the occasional dog howl.  Oh and the local clock tower, whose clock I reported in September has stopped, now has no clock at all, just a bunch of new signs.  I'm sure this is symbolic of something, but I can't think what.  I think I'm going to like it here.

Primrose VII

We bought mountain bikes a couple of weeks ago and sometimes I sling my bike in the back of the car when Sue goes to a school and then cycle home.  Today she dropped me in the middle of nowhere at 7.30am and I decided to go home on a route that took me via a river ferry.  I cycled to the ferry and joined the queue of early morning workers.  The tide was ebbing strongly and the ferry was making hard work of the crossing, it was pushed a long way down river before reaching our side and punching back upstream in the slack water by the bank.

On the ferry I started taking photos when the Captain gesticulated at me from the bridge.  He looked very stern, but a deck hand motioned to me to go up to see him.  So I climbed up some rusty iron handholds and joined him.

"Welcome" he beamed.  Looking desperately around for a present his hand lighted on some sachets of instant coffee which he thrust at me.
"Drink!"
"Thank you."  I said, dropping the sachets in my rucksack.
"You sixty?"  (He sees my face drop).  "Fifty?"
"Fifty-six."  I say, smiling.
"You holiday?"
"No, my wife teaches in schools."
(He nods thoughtfully.)  "Ah ...  You teach?"
"No, I bicycle."  We both chuckle.
"I seaman."
"I Doug."
"I travel Macao, Australia, all over.  Now ferry."
"Ah, I see.  Tide very strong."
"Yes, King tide."  He says, frowning with concentration as he heads for the jetty on the opposite bank.

The bridge is like something from the "African Queen" with instruments held together with electrical tape and in one corner a gas stove with a wok and a chopping board next to it.  We hit the piles next to the jetty with a thump then lurch up the hard like a landing craft being beached then grind to a stop.

"Thank you."  I say, before going back down the handholds, nodding to the deckhand and wheeling my bicycle up the ramp.  Back on the shore I wave to the Captain on the bridge.  Before me lie miles of oil palm plantations.

The track dog

A couple of kilometres up the road from our house is the Saratok running track.  Three or four years old I am told and a really nice and well-drained surface, essential in this climate.  People go there in the morning and the evening when it is cool enough to run or walk round the track.  I am now a regular a few times a week. Sometimes there are thirty or forty people of various ages making their way round at varied speeds from a slow stroll to a fairly gentle trot.  Sometimes, for reasons I haven't yet worked out there is just me ... and the dog.

The dog likes to keep an eye on what is going down at the track and likes to go for a snooze in one of the straights, usually in lane two.  Sometimes he raises an eyelid as I stagger past, panting and bathed in sweat.  Sometimes we exchange a glance which may or may not mean anything to either of us.

Normally I do ten kilometres during which time the dog will shift his behind a couple of times and maybe give his crotch a disinterested sniff and perhaps a lick.  By about kilometre eight the dog often seems to get bored and trots slowly away in the direction of the main road which he walks down oblivious of the traffic.  When it rains he disappears altogether.

I think the dog understands this climate better than I do.

New Year's Eve in the swamp

We were invited for New Year's Eve to take an outing into the mangrove swamp by Sue's fellow mentor Ellie.  Ellie is based at Maludam, a remote community sandwiched between two large rivers which can only be reached by ferry.

We set off before dawn and reached the car ferry just as it was getting light.  There were only a few cars waiting to cross, but as the ferry approached from across the river I could see it was packed with palm oil trucks and motorcyclists who rumbled ashore like an invading army.

At Maludam we met Ellie and her brother Richard and went in search of our boat.  After the inevitable confusion about where and when the boat was to rendezvous with us, we embarked in a small day boat with a crew of two.  After a half hour or so we heard some thrashing noises in the trees which signalled the approach of a group of monkeys.  I saw them fleetingly then heard a crash as one missed its handhold and fell towards the swamp below with a cry that could easily be interpreted as "ah bollocks".  Even the crew laughed.

There was further confusion about exactly how long we had agreed to hire the boat for, but in the end we motored into and around the swamp for several hot hours.  In the heart of the swamp our man on the bow had to work hard in places to cut a path through the undergrowth with his machete.  In the early evening we returned tired and sunburnt to Maludam and the open river.

 Finally we motored through the village and out into open water to look for crocodiles, seeing several one metre or so long specimens basking by the river bank.  We also saw some of the local fishing boats return with their catch to the village at the end of the day.

Sat in the small boat in the creek above the village I was struck by how familiar it all seemed.  The smell of the mud, the cries of the seabirds and the fishing boats motoring their way up the creek against the tide taking me back to many evenings spent mucking about in small boats in the Thames Estuary.

We returned to Ellie's house and went to bed at about ten, too tired to see in the New Year.