It's pretty darn tough to follow that last blog from Anne on Banda Aceh; with all the good vibes and hope for a better future emanating from it I must say I got kinda teary. But, alas, in my way, I shall try. Sumatra is beautiful and terrible. Beautiful because the landscape is made up of volcanoes. There are about 5 volcanoes here on the island of Subang (AKA Pulau Weh) and these volcanoes are draped in lush and relatively untouched jungle. So, in a word, beautiful. Right? But also terrible and deadly because jungles are filled with dainty creatures that can stop your heart in about 45 minutes. (I'd download the photo of the pretty green poisonous snake which camped in a tree next to our guesthouse in Ibioh but, apparently, today is not the best day for downloading pics to the Internet. Trust me when I say it was rather little and bright green, and cute. For a deadly snake.) Also, the volcanoes these jungles hide sometimes detonate in a blaze of god-like fury. Krakatoa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa) is still one of the busiest and biggest of the world's live volcanoes. Right now there is a standing scientific warning not to approach it by more the 3 kilometres. Krakatoa is along what is called the "Great Sumatran fault" which spans the island of Sumatra and arcs into Java. Lake Toba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba), which also lies along this fault line in the center of Sumatra, is actually a massive crater which once contained a "supervolcano". It is theorized that the catastrophe there, the "Toba event" some thousands of years ago, killed most of the people then alive on the planet and altered the course of human history by creating a human bottleneck in Asia and thus reducing the gene-pool. Read: we're all inbred and it's Sumatra's fault, literally. In any case, volcanic lands tend to be accompanied by attendant earthquakes which themselves often spawn tsunamis. So, it's barely hyperbole to say the land itself here might be out to kill us all. While the Sumatrans we've met so far have mainly been wonderful and friendly, their land provides a brutal contrast to that. Since we've been here during the latest earthquake in Padang, I've wondered if they might be better off giving it all back to the jungle. The other major downside to life in Sumatra is the Indonesian love of smoking. Smoking is a national past-time. Some countries play football or volleyball or baseball. Indonesians smoke. Like convicts. They puff and suck and blow rings and really enjoy the myriad cigarettes available here. And they enjoy them everywhere! On the bus, at the Internet cafe, before, during and after meals, in bed... And everybody smokes (or so it seems): all men--young and old--of course, but also old ladies and even children. I could barely email in Medan for all the chain-smoking seven-year-olds. I kid you not. It's a weird thing to watch a small child with a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth while he plays a first-person-shooter-war game and roars at the monitor like he's got Tourette Syndrome. I'd have thought he was especially crazy if not for the fact that about a dozen other kids his age were doing the same. I even saw a guy smoking while he was working out at a gym in the basement of a mall. He was lifting weights. People were playing pool nearby. I thought I was watching an episode of "Oz" or some other prison drama (or comedy). This all means that bus rides are the worst. Imagine being trapped in a bus for 4 or 5 or 16 hours with a bunch of chain-smokers. It makes for hard travel. Harder travel even than India which has recently passed laws forbidding cigarettes on trains and buses, etc. The roads in Sumatra are better than India, but I'd take poor roads and clean air any day. So, how's that for a parallel? The volcanic land smolders, and so do the people. Still, we're having an interesting time. I'm not sure I'd call it "fun", exactly. But "interesting" is better; it's more exciting somehow. And we avoid the second-hand smoke and the small pretty green snakes as much as possible. NB |
Instant message from any web browser! Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger for the Web BETA
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment