Bon Voyage "La Fulica"

Looking back over this blog I realise that a landmark in my life has passed almost without a mention - at the end of December 2011 I finalised the deal to sell "La Fulica", so I am without a boat for the first time in about twenty-five years.  She's going to a good home I hope - a British engineer working in Montenegro, just across the water from Brindisi.  I bought her in late 1999 with the intention of using her for long-term cruising in the Mediterranean.  With her very traditional gaff cutter rig she was hardly the most practical choice, but she looked so pretty sat in the boatyard in the shadow of the Humber Bridge.

She became our home when we sold our house in Blackheath in May 2002.  They were exciting and anxious times, preparing for our journey and trying to squeeze in as many of our possessions as we could into her slim eleven metre hull.  She looked after us well over the next two and a half years before we moved into our house in Puglia.  We had one especially wonderful Summer cruising the islands of Elba, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, before over-wintering in Rome.

I particularly remember the first time we anchored in the Mediterranean and I looked down through four metres of crystal clear water and saw the shadow of "La Fulica's" hull dancing on the sand below and the joy of jumping over the side and following the anchor chain hand over hand down to the seabed.

But since 2004 owning her has been more of a weight than a pleasure until finally I realised I had to let her go.  So, "bon voyage 'La Fulica', thank you for keeping us safe.  I hope your new family look after you and you look after them in your turn."

Orang Putih

There is no getting away it - I am an "orang putih".  Occasionally I recognise these words when I overhear Malaysians talking together.  My Malay dictionary tells me that "orang"means "man" and "putih" means white.  So I am a "white man".  "Hutan" means jungle, so in the same way an "orangutan" is a "jungle man".  "Putih" sounds like "putty" which is not a bad description of the skin of the average Caucasian.  Out of curiosity I searched on "orang putih" in Google images and found these rather neat cartoons.  They seem to give a reasonably affectionate view of how some Malaysians may see white folk.

I don't usually sense hostility from local people, more curiosity because they see so few "orang putih".  Sometimes I see someone do a double-take - "did I really just see a white man in Saratok, what on earth is he doing here?"  Even in the days of British rule it would apparently have been very rare to see a white face outside of the major towns and cities. Actually, it's enlightening for a white middle-class bloke like me to be a victim of racial stereotyping, it gives me a tiny glimpse into what it might have been like to be a black person in London in the 1950s or a Bangladeshi working in the Persian Gulf today.  But then I'm free to get on a plane any time I want and that feeling of being judged before I've even opened my mouth will just evaporate.

Very occasionally I get a sense of real hostility - someone pointedly avoids my gaze or a car seems to drive deliberately close as I cycle down the road.  Maybe this is paranoia, but if I were a Malaysian might I not feel hostility to Caucasians?  Britain exploited this country for its own economic advantage for at least a couple of centuries and now American culture and economic hegemony is threatening it in different ways.  But, then there are some indigenous people in Borneo of non-Malay origin who view the government in Kuala Lumpur as just yet another Imperial power.

Maybe the best that I can do is to use this experience to try to be a bit more sensitive to my own tendency to hang labels on people.

Saratok Market

Before we left the UK in 2002 we used to do our shopping at a big new Sainsburys supermarket near the Millennium Dome by the Thames in Greenwich.  I remember walking round the aisles and thinking that it was a cornucopia of foods from all over the world and how lucky we were to have such quality and choice.  Had I seen Saratok market then it would have appeared to me a hot, confusing and fly-blown place, smelling of open drains and rotting fish.  But it's been a long journey since then and that Sainsburys seems to me now like a tomb for dead food, shrunk-wrapped, frozen, labelled and bullied into uniform ranks.  A place where words have taken over from taste, where we are endlessly told how good things are and the same head of broccoli can be badge-engineered as "basic" or of "taste the difference" quality.

My education began in the food markets of Italy, especially our weekly market in Locorotondo.  It took me two years to begin weaning myself off regular 100 mile round trips to the nearest hypermarket and to start buying local stuff in season and to learn some basic techniques for cooking the same things week in week out.  After a few years I began to enjoy the seasonal round and to get pleasure from anticipating the arrival of the first clementines, oranges or artichokes.  But Saratok market is a step even further back in time - a daily market used by practically every family in the area every day, where goods are bought and sold by local people for local people.  There is a fast food section run by stout Malay ladies slaving over woks and ovens; a main market dominated by Chinese and Malay stallholders and run on Halal principles and; a section where Iban people from the local longhouses come and sit and display whatever they have picked that morning in exchange for a few ringgits.  Off to one side there is also a pork butchery section run by Chinese men in aprons who furtively dismember their pig carcasses as if doing something not quite respectable.

Everything is open to be smelt and inspected.  Half the things I still don't recognise and I'm sure if you compared the product range to the average Tescos, Saratok market would win hands down.  You certainly can't get fox meat at Tescos, or live sago worms for that matter.  The whole place is an assault on the senses where you know you are buying real food, often picked or killed that day or about to be killed.  It's pretty classless too, everyone comes and you can buy enough stuff to feed a family of four for perhaps ten ringgits (£2) or fifty (£10), depending on your pocket and your taste for fresh fish and chicken.

I really feel privileged to know that I will be coming here for the next eighteen months and that so far I've hardly scratched the surface.

Among the oil palms

You can't spend much time in Borneo without becoming aware of palm oil and its implications.  There are plantations everywhere and the roads are full of trucks loaded with oil palm fruit for processing at one of the many mills on the island.  And, you don't have to drive far to find an area of forest being bulldozed into terraces to make way for new plantations.  In the West this activity is almost universally reviled: rainforest is being destroyed to make way for new plantations; if you have too many plantations you create a "monoculture" which reduces biodiversity and increases vulnerability to disease and disaster and; the oil itself is not as good for you as many other vegetable oils.

There is a large area of mature plantations a few kilometres from Saratok in which we have begun to walk and bicycle.  I've also talked to a few local people about the issue and as a result things seem to be far less clear cut than I had thought.  A mature oil palm plantation, especially if it's in a hilly area and mixed in with patches of forest, is actually a very pleasant place to be - shady and mysterious and full of the sound of birdsong and animal cries.  If you are a local with access to capital then buying a patch of land and turning it into an oil palm planation is a no-brainer:  the palms start to produce fruit after three years and the crop is continuous throughout the year; at current prices you can expect to achieve payback on your investment in less than ten years and; with increasing demand for bio fuels and food there is only one direction the price is going to be going over the next decade.

I'm not saying that there are not problems with the rapid expansion of plantations and one does hear dark talk of corruption and illegal planting and depredation of the rainforest is a major issue, but sat here in Borneo the criticism one hears from Europe and the US about palm oil does sound like hypocritical bleating from parts of the world that have already destroyed most of their so-called natural environment in the name of economic growth and development and now want to stop the rest of the world doing the same.  Take our home in Southern Italy.  When I stand on the ridge near our house and look out over the coastal plain to the Adriatic what do I see?  A monoculture comprising endless hectares of olive trees.  But, the utterly man-made landscape of Italy is considered to be "beautiful" and the fruit of the olive tree to be a "natural" and healthy product, largely because the virgin forest that covered much of the peninsula was raped hundreds of years ago not today.

To cap it all, since 2003 the European Union has been legislating for vehicle fuel to contain an increasing percentage of bio-fuel, thus further driving up demand and prices for the palm oil so many European greens seem to despise.

Double standards or what?