Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey

291 Pages·1991·7.51 MB·English

by  Lawrence Blair

Ring of Fire: an Indonesian Odyssey
dedication
This book is fondly dedicated to those special people who are least likely to see
it, the tribal peoples of the islands, who took us in hand, treated us as equals,
and opened their lives to us.
Ring of Fire: an Indonesian Odyssey
Lawrence Blair
with Lorne Blair
Editions Didier Millet
Acknowledgements
Of the numerous people who have, over the years, helped make Ring of Fire
possible, and who are not already mentioned in the book or credited in the films,
we would particularly like to thank the following:
Monie Adams; The Keraing, Andi Banawa and his wife, Ibu Desa; Julian
and Julis Boileau; Jan Butchofsky; Soedarmadji Damais; The Tans Hans family;
Raden Temenggung Jarjonagoro; Virginia Holshuh; Indonesian Directorate-
General of Tourism; Michael and Robert Kennedy; Perry Kessler; Claire
Leimbach; Donaldine Lourensz; James and Aune Nelson; Sydney Perret;
Dorothy Pittman; Putrayala; Robert Seiffert; James Seligman; Gusti Made
Simung; Alyson Steffen; Hal Stone; Harifin Sugeanto; Charles Twing; Jack
Weru.
All photos © Lorne and Lawrence Blair, unless otherwise stated. All photos
reproduced by kind permission of the copyright owners.
Foreword
W I I , 1990 , I
HEN WAS PREPARING FOR MY FIRST VISIT TO NDONESIA IN THE EARLY S WAS
holed up in a seedy hotel in one of Bangkok’s more disreputable
neighbourhoods. The hotel offered few services and no charm, but seedy as it
was, it did have a shelf of books that guests could borrow. One of them was a
well-thumbed, nearly disbound copy of Ring of Fire, recounting a grand tour of
the archipelago by ship by the brothers Blair. I snagged the book and brought it
up to my room to read. My first trip to Indonesia was also to be a grand tour,
beginning in North Sumatra, with a trip to Nias, and ending in the Bandas. I
consulted the book’s index and was disappointed to see that the authors hadn’t
called at Nias, but Banda was there. So I turned to page 130 and read: “On the
dawn of the second day we discerned the smoke-wreathed cone of the Banda
volcano perched on the horizon like a veiled Egyptian pyramid.”
I was hooked – on the book, I mean. I had been hooked on Indonesia years
before I came here; Joseph Conrad had taken care of that. No footloose wanderer
in Southeast Asia worth his flip-flops can long resist the siren allure of the great
tropical archipelago. I had previously read about Banda, its strategic importance
in history, how the Dutch had swapped Manhattan for the tiny islands’ nutmeg
groves. But the Blairs’ faintly lavender-tinged prose appealed directly to the
dreamy boy who grew up in Texas reading Lord Jim and Treasure Island, and the
whole romantic boy’s literature of sailing ships and deserted tropical isles. I
immediately turned back to the beginning and read the book from start to finish.
So while it would not be accurate to say that Ring of Fire inspired me to
undertake my first voyage to Indonesia, it did remind me why. “A veiled
Egyptian volcano”: Yes! A few weeks later when I cruised into the narrow strait
between the fairytale port town of Bandanaira and the smoking volcano, the
experience was just as magical as the Blairs had described it. That lavender tinge
in the prose was simply reporting: if anything, it was austere compared with the
spine-tingling reality of discovering an isolated group of islands like the Bandas.
To capture that sense of remoteness, of mystery, is an essential aspect of writing
about the archipelago, and no one in modern times has done it better.
I have recommended Ring of Fire over the years, blissfully unaware that it
had fallen out of print: how could that be? It’s one of the essential modern texts
about Indonesia’s far-flung islands. Now it is back, and all lovers of Indonesia,
its people and its critters, rejoice. As Lawrence Blair notes in his introduction for
this new edition, there have been many changes in the archipelago since the
voyage described in this book, and few for the better, but the air of enchantment,
the brute charm of these islands is indestructible.

J J
AMIE AMES
K , B 2009
EROBOKAN ALI
Outriggers slipping out to fish. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
Introduction
T B ,
HIS BOOK WAS HURRIEDLY WRITTEN DURING AN ICY WINTER IN OSTON
Massachusetts, while also writing the dialogue for our Ring of Fire film series,
which my brother Lorne was simultaneously editing. Our bluff had been called,
and after 10 years of independently filming nine separate expeditions in
Indonesia, followed by 15 years of being unable to sell them, Public
Broadcasting in the United States, in conjunction with the BBC, had finally
picked up our work and required that we condense our adventures into four one-
hour episodes – by yesterday.
The book was intended to match the film series and describe what isn’t seen
on camera, which of course is virtually everything. The films and the book are
thus corollaries, and have oddly circled and sustained each other, like twin-
orbiting stars, in various packaging incarnations, down to the present day.
Re-reading the book for the first time since correcting the proofs in l988, I
find my nose is rubbed in the enormity of change over these merely 20 some
years. There is the death of my brother Lorne, in 1995, the reduction of
Indonesia’s forests by nearly a third – the equivalent to the entire land surface of
Japan or California – the doubling of the nation’s population from 120 million to
more than 240 million souls, and the birth thrashings of a newborn democracy,
with its accompanying rising tide of plastic. If I was just sitting in Bali, watching
the rising tide, I might even feel depressed, but as I still produce adventure films
and spend several months a year exploring the out-islands on private charter
cruises, its heartening to know that vast tracts of the nation still remain
wonderfully wild and mysterious, and mirror the unexplored recesses hidden
within all of us, everywhere.
Just a few of the discoveries from Indonesia over these last two decades
include the world’s largest cockroach, the world’s smallest fish, a blood-sucking
‘vampire moth’, and the first known poisonous bird, the Hooded Pitohui (Pitohui
dichrous), with toxic oil in its black and orange feathers. Also discovered is an
Asian population of the Coelacanth, the four-limbed, 350-million-year-old pre-
fish, over six feet long, which hasn’t changed since long before the time of the
first creature to crawl on land and struggle for breath.
And there’s the Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), who was hard to
find because he’s seldom himself. He transmogrifies, at the drop of a hat, into as
many as 16 (so far counted) other marine species – including sea snakes,
lionfish, stingrays and jelly-fish. He mimics with sufficient accuracy to have
utterly fooled marine biologists who for 50 years have had the benefit of scuba
gear to look him in the face. To me, all these creatures reveal more about
ourselves, our protean diversity and our evolving capacity to see what’s actually
going on with this thing called Life on earth.
Also from Indonesia, in only 2003, was the startling discovery of the
remains of the ‘hobbit’, Homo floresiensis, not sapiens, like us, but a different
species of human, who was three feet tall and lived until as recently as only
10,000 years ago. We had thought that our species of Homo, sapiens, had been
alone for the past some 35,000 years, ever since the demise of Neanderthal man
in Europe – then up pops this little elf, our first cousin, alive at the same time as
ourselves, sapiens, hunting pygmy elephants and giant rats. The tiny people and
cow-sized elephants are gone, but the Giant Rat of Flores lives on! And
somehow, so do you and I.
It will become apparent, as you read (as it has to me), that my brother and I
started out as profoundly naïve romantics, who were amazingly fortunate to
come back alive, not once, but on numerous occasions. But life, and the
universe, as has been remarked, are not only stranger than we suppose, but
stranger than we can suppose, and it was a sharp irony that after surviving 800
miles together, largely on foot, through the jungles of Borneo – where a broken