The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  But there was definitely witchery in the air that night. That same capricious god who had sent the whirlpools and the current decided to have still more fun by sending a lunar eclipse our way. Eventually, a third of the moon was obscured, enough to darken the sky and make us laugh nervously about what further tricks lay in store.

  Indeed, the bag of tricks was not yet empty. In the darkness, many little fishing boats began to appear out of nowhere. Some of them were lit, others were not, and soon our radar showed many alarming specks that could be uncharted rocks, unlit fishing boats, or something else altogether. Whatever these blips were, we didn’t want to hit them. We began zigzagging erratically through the water, dodging invisible and perhaps even imaginary obstacles.

  Yves and the boys had already gone to bed, and Herbert joined them while I piloted the boat around the last of the invisible fishing boats and safely out to sea. It had taken us seven hours to cover twelve miles, but at last we were free of the treacherous Komodo Strait.

  After arriving in Bali, we transferred our soggy, semi-frozen meat to the freezer of friends on an American boat. That taken care of, we left Northern Magic behind for a week’s vacation in paradise. My sister, Linda, and her eight-year-old daughter, Katie, had arrived. They were loaded with gifts from home, hugs, and big plans for their visit, and they had booked a hotel for us in Ubud, an inland village famous for its craftspeople and cultural events.

  Along the road to Ubud, the beautiful terraced rice fields for which Bali is famous were dotted with tranquil people in coolie hats planting, weeding, and winnowing. Beautiful women dressed in colourful sarongs walked slowly beside the road balancing enormous loads on their heads. Grandfathers too old for the rice fields held babies on their hips. The very old women often worked topless, their tired old breasts swaying as they washed clothes, dishes, and themselves in the running water of a roadside ditch.

  The next morning we walked from our hotel to the nearby village of Keliki, whose artisans are skilled woodcarvers. As we walked, passing row upon row of home-based factories with their finished products spread out by the thousands, we were greeted with friendly smiles and waves. The voices of small children rang out musically, singing “Hello! Hello!” everywhere we turned. After being mobbed by school children out on recess, we were invited into the home of Jengki, whose family, like virtually every other in this village, supported itself by carving wooden flowers.

  Jengki’s daughter, a Balinese beauty in her late teens, showed us how she used a lathe to fashion the basic flower shape out of a block of wood. We watched as a basket of unpainted blossoms slowly grew. Each finished flower earned the family less than two cents; a skilled carver might be able to turn out a hundred or two a day.

  Sheepishly, I realized entire villages of smiling, gentle people like these were toiling all day in the heat for no more reward than the amount I might unthinkingly throw away on an ice cream. If there was anything our children learned from sailing around the world, it was how fortunate they were to have been born in Canada. In Bali, Herbert and I began an endless series of discussions about whether it was better to buy these crafts for a song, thus providing hardworking people with at least some financial reward for their efforts, or whether this was just exploitation. It was an argument we continued for most of the rest of our trip, and to this day. As time went on, however, we found ourselves bargaining down the price of our souvenirs less and less, and looking for excuses to buy things from hardworking craftspeople, even if we didn’t really need them.

  The island of Bali is predominantly Hindu, while most of the rest of this diverse country is Muslim. Later that day we prepared ourselves to visit a Hindu temple ceremony. In order to do this, you had to be properly attired, which in the case of both sexes meant a sarong with a sash around the waist. Men also wore a headband, tied in front with a flourish. Our hotel provided these for us and helped to make us presentable, Balinese style. Our boys weren’t exactly keen on the skirt part of the costume, although I thought they looked quite fetching.

  As we approached the temple, we saw dozens of women, beautifully dressed with golden sashes and transparent lacy blouses, walking with huge pyramids of fruit balanced on their heads. This was the time of day for women to make their offerings, and after depositing these towers of food on a table, they fell to their knees and prayed.

  But where were the men? They were gathered on the other side of the street in tight circles placing bets on cockfights. We left the temple and watched with increasingly horrified fascination as the bloody spectacle unfolded. Linda, Katie, and I were the only females in a crowd of a hundred or so eager, jostling men.

  As the cockfight began, the men who formed the human fighting ring stood up to cheer, obscuring our view. It was just as well; after having watched them lash small knives to the cocks’ legs – not “spurs,” as our guidebook said, but truly lethal miniature daggers several centimetres long – I wasn’t sure we’d have the stomach to watch the birds slice each other apart.

  The actual contest lasted only a minute or two. At the end, the two cocks, too exhausted and wounded to want to fight further, were forced together inside a small woven cage. There they had no choice but to fight until one of them could no longer stand. The losing bird, bloody and barely breathing, had its neck wrung by its owner, whose considerable investment in this prized animal was now lost and whose family would therefore be eating chicken that night. Men who had earlier collected bets moved through the crowd dispensing cash to the winners while the next two combatants were prepared for battle. The winning cock, white feathers now stained with red, was placed in another cage to nurse his wounds. He would probably live to fight another day. Next to him, a dozen other birds waited unknowingly for their turn at glory – or death.

  I couldn’t help but compare the bloodthirsty scene with the beautiful women still forming their stately procession in the background, bearing their offerings to the holy temple. There was something incongruous about this picture, and I left the cockfights feeling troubled, and liking the otherwise very likeable Balinese just a little less.

  Another day we went to a monkey forest, where we found ourselves walking around with living monkey-tail hats on our heads. Christopher giggled non-stop. We had been watching a handful of monkeys swimming and wrestling in an ornamental pool when Michael discovered one of them trying to kill a large black scorpion. The monkey had grabbed a leaf, and, using it gingerly to cover the scorpion and thus protect itself from a poisonous sting, was hammering on it with his fist. Scientists had been excited to discover tool use among chimpanzees and orangutans, but here we were, witnessing it among a lower-order monkey. The ten-centimetre long scorpion fought back, jumping out from under the leaf with its evil tail arched. As soon as the scorpion got too close, the monkey would leap in the air and swat it away. Once it batted the scorpion just a scant metre away from our feet, so we jumped away right smartly too.

  The macaque bashed that scorpion for five full minutes before it finally succeeded in tearing it in two. Both parts of the dismembered creature were still moving when the monkey scooped them up and, without further ado, stuffed them into its mouth. We watched the victor crunch away in noisy satisfaction until the last bit of still-twitching scorpion tail was slurped into his mouth like spaghetti.

  After making friends with a local artist and engaging in one last mad shopping spree in the bargain-filled shops of Ubud, we were ready to head out and explore the rest of Bali. We hired a van and driver to take us around the island for two days. Our first objective was to climb Ganung Batur, Bali’s second highest mountain and an active volcano. It is actually a kind of double-decker, tiered like a wedding cake – a huge ancient volcano containing a beautiful turquoise lake and a smaller, higher volcanic peak which had thrust up more recently from inside the old caldera.

  We stopped at a park gate in order to pay a small entrance fee, whereupon we were inundated by half a dozen aggressive young men on motorcycles who insisted on being our guides
. We knew from our guidebook, and from friends, that no guide was necessary, so we waved them away and continued driving towards the inner crater. We didn’t notice that four of them had jumped on their motorcycles and begun tailing us.

  At one point we stopped to study a possible route up the volcano. Suddenly the four young men surrounded our van. One, wearing a black leather jacket and clearly the ringleader, began speaking. His voice was not friendly.

  “You have to have a guide,” he said. “This is our holy mountain, and you cannot go up without a guide.”

  “Thank you,” we answered. “But we don’t need your services.”

  “Yes, you do!” he answered angrily, his eyes flashing. “You are our responsibility. If you die up there – which just happened to someone last week – we will have to bring down your bodies. You are under our protection, this is our land, and you may not climb the mountain except with one of us!”

  “We’re sorry, but we aren’t going to use a guide.”

  “Well then, you must go! We will not permit you to climb our mountain! We will stop you from climbing! Go away!”

  “Even if we needed a guide, we wouldn’t use you,” retorted Linda calmly. “You’re too angry. We don’t deal with angry men!”

  We instructed our driver to carry on, but as he rolled up his window, the ringleader made a threatening gesture and shouted, “We’ll follow you! We won’t let you climb the mountain!”

  What had we gotten ourselves into? While we continued over the bumpy roads, at least two motorcycles followed us through bend and turn. We wanted neither to associate ourselves with the local Mafia, nor to fight our way through them to climb the mountain. What would happen once we stopped the car again? I pulled out my little canister of pepper spray and Herbert attached it to his belt, just in case.

  By the time we made our way around to the far side of the mountain and found the path we wanted to use, there was only one motorcycle still on our tail. We decided that I would emerge from the car with a notepad, introduce myself as a journalist, and take down the name and identification of this last remaining thug while Herbert videotaped the exchange as if for TV.

  Luckily, the fellow standing before me as I got out of the car was not the angry ringleader. He looked almost apologetic. I pulled out our business card, which showed a picture of Northern Magic, and began: “We have come half way around the world on this boat without a guide. We certainly don’t need a guide to climb this mountain.”

  He took one look at the card, jumped back on his motorcycle, and tore off down the bumpy road without another word of protest. Another vehicle containing four tourists had just passed, and he must have decided they would be easier targets than a bunch of stubborn, self-reliant sailors.

  We began walking through a small village on our way up the mountain. Several people ran out, trying to attach themselves to us as guides, but we waved them away. One or two shouted angrily at us. It was a good example of how too much tourism can ruin a place, especially where the disparity of wealth is so high.

  One boy in his teens simply fell in cheerfully beside us.

  “We don’t want a guide,” we cautioned him.

  “Oh no, I’m not a guide,” he answered cheerfully. “I’m bringing drinks to sell at the top.”

  And so we joined up with Wayan, which in Balinese means “Number One Child” and is therefore a very common name, and began the long, hot climb. The flanks of the mountain were covered with small, loose volcanic rocks that were hard to walk on, and as we got higher up the path, we could see we were walking on a recent lava flow: in places, the smooth dried lava was a bright red colour. The mountain had exploded several times in the previous sixty years, twice wiping out nearby villages.

  It took us almost three hours to reach the summit, during which our own Number Three Son, called Nyoman in Balinese, held hands with our likeable drink seller. Christopher even got a brief ride on Wayan’s shoulders. Three-quarters of the way up we bought some drinks, even though we were carrying our own, cheerfully paying rather more for the privilege than usual. There were four or five other young men already at the top of the mountain, but no other people to be seen. Obviously, the other car of tourists had either given up on their attempt or were still in a stand-off with the local Mafia man we had fobbed off on them.

  By now we had a good rapport with Wayan and his friends and began needling them over the high price we had paid for the Cokes. “Oh, but it’s such hard work carrying them up,” Wayan answered with a twinkle in his eye. “And I’m very tired.” We handed out little candies to everyone on the mountaintop, and as the local boys popped them into their mouths, we jokingly suggested that they now owed us 10,000 rupiah each, since we were also very tired, having carried the candies all the way up. They laughed and helpfully suggested 20,000 rupiah instead. We departed good friends.

  The view from the top of the volcano was spectacular. Although we couldn’t see any lava spewing, there was smoke rising from inside the crater. We picked our way around the rim of the caldera and then began our descent down the opposite side. It took us a couple of hours, scrambling down volcanic scree and then through a teak forest, past temples and finally a small village. We didn’t yet realize that we had ended up just a stone’s throw away from the site of our original confrontation.

  Our driver wasn’t there, because we had not ended up where we had agreed to meet him. Linda ended up hitching a ride with some Swedish tourists in a jeep and then on the back of a motorcycle with an Indonesian teenager before she was able to find where our driver and his van were waiting to pick us up. While waiting for Linda to return, a motorcycle man appeared, asking who our guide was. Without thinking, I answered that we hadn’t used one. He gave me a distinctly hostile scowl and roared off. When the next biker appeared, again asking which guide we had used, I simply answered “Wayan,” which, in Bali, I knew, wouldn’t narrow it down too much.

  “How much did you pay him?” he asked greedily. “A hundred dollars U.S.?”

  A hundred dollars U.S.?! That was double what the average Balinese earned in a month of hard labour. This guiding business was really nothing less than an extortion racket. We were doubly pleased that we hadn’t added to the profits of these young punks by succumbing to their bullying tactics.

  We drove several hours to the north coast of Bali before finding ourselves a lovely beachfront cottage for twelve dollars a night, which included access to a natural spring-fed swimming pool. After a refreshing swim to wash off the volcanic dust that still coated our bodies, we ate in a small restaurant, where we got to know a sweet young man named Ketut, who was our waiter.

  We had a long conversation with Ketut about his life. The contrast with the angry motorcycle gang at the mountain couldn’t have been greater. This gentle young man slaved away a whole year in that restaurant for about the same amount that those ruffians had tried to extort for an afternoon’s work. The waiter’s wage was fifty cents a day.

  Ketut questioned us carefully about Canada. Although he came from a very poor family, the boy was intelligent and ambitious and was clearly trying to figure out how to improve his situation. We considered how to answer him, wondering what we would do if we were in his place. In our country, a young man like him would have every opportunity. Here in Indonesia, though, he had very few options. The knowledge of his dilemma hit us in the face.

  As we left, we shook hands and wished Ketut good luck. Somehow as we parted, five dollars discretely made its way from Herbert’s hand into his. The fact that we had no good answer to give this young Balinese waiter as to how he might break out of his cycle of poverty continued to trouble us.

  Our family vacation in paradise was coming to a bittersweet end. Back on Northern Magic, our crewmember, Yves, was about to leave us to make his own overland journey. We were sad to see him go after all the fun we’d had together.

  Weeks before, a day or two after Yves arrived, he had asked me innocently whether I’d seen a certain grey plastic bag cont
aining some photos. At the time, we had his stuff stashed in little dribs and drabs all over the boat for lack of any one place to put it. I hadn’t seen the bag but said it was sure to turn up.

  Over the next weeks, he would ask from time to time about the missing bag. I didn’t understand why he was so preoccupied with it and kept answering that it would surely turn up. Finally, that last day, while the rest of us were off the boat and he was alone with Herbert, he found the bag. Herbert asked him what was in it.

  “Pictures of my girlfriend,” Yves answered.

  We’d heard quite a lot about this beautiful girlfriend, and Herbert, quite naturally, asked to see what she looked like. Yves shuffled through the photos and then confessed, blushing a bit, that he couldn’t show any of them. His meaning was clear enough.

  When I came back, Herbert whispered to me, with a wicked grin, about the supposed contents of the long-sought-after plastic bag. Yves was sitting up at the entrance to the cockpit, and could see me, but not Herbert.

  “Hey, Yves,” I called up, “I hear you found the photos where I stashed them.”

  Yves looked down at me with great big eyes. There was a moment of silence. “Did you look at them?” he finally asked, gulping.

  “Of course! That’s why I had to hide them! I wouldn’t want the kids to find them. You didn’t really think I had no idea where they were all this time, did you?” Beside me, Herbert was convulsed in silent laughter.

  There was another long pause, as Yves digested this information. A flush of colour appeared on his cheeks.

  Finally, he said, “I imagine you had a good time looking at them.”