Empire of the East (13 page)

The function of the centre is to take over orang-utans which have been kept in captivity and then released by their original owners, or confiscated by the state, and to organize their resumption of freedom in the wild.

This is shown as a complicated business indeed. After arrival a long period of quarantine follows, in which the orang-utans are kept under medical supervision in cages or a limited area surrounding their cages. A further interval of training follows in which an animal, deprived of the ability to fend for itself in the wild, is acclimatized to the forest existence. It is both extraordinary and sad that the life of these highly intelligent animals has been so deformed in captivity that they have to be retaught all the natural occupations such as climbing, making a sleeping nest, travelling in such a way as to keep clear of the ground, and — most difficult of all hurdles — discovering edible vegetation in the wild.

The fact is that with the awakening of eleventh-hour concern for the loss of so many species, and the increasing threat to those that remain, the ripples of alarm have finally touched these remote shores, and suddenly there are popular excursions from Sumatran towns to Bukit Lawang to see up to twelve animals out of the several hundred believed to have survived.

Thus, by the greatest of good fortune, orang-utans have become a major tourist attraction, so much so that a number of agreeable guest-houses such as the Wisma Leuser Sibayak, at which we stayed, have been built along the banks of the river. It is possible to forecast a time when this delectable village will have expanded into a modest town dedicated to the needs of people who come to watch monkeys.

Mild theatricalities have been built into the routine of the visit in order to foster a sense of adventure. Foreign visitors are directed to an office where they show their passports, which are solemnly studied and details entered into a register before a pass is issued. The official’s manner is congratulatory as he hands this over, mentioning that only fifty passes are granted each day. There follows a pleasant walk upstream along the river, then a crossing over to the further bank by a boat on a rope. This, the boatman’s gestures and expression suggest, calls for skill and caution. Landing is followed by a further small charade when visitors report to the park rangers in another office, where permits are minutely inspected before being put in a safe place until the return to the boat. Such precautions reflect measures instituted to baffle the efforts of armed poachers, said to employ helicopters to snatch the orang-utans from the treetops. These, it is believed, are sold for huge sums of money through middlemen to zoos — amazingly enough until recently in most cases behind the former Iron Curtain.

From this point, a short but exceedingly steep climb leads up to a jungle post in a clearing among tall trees, where a platform has been built, and where the orang-utans show up on time to the minute. Their arrival overhead through the treetops is sudden, but above all silent. At one moment the trees are empty; the next the animals are there with hardly the flutter of a branch, and not a twig broken. One by one the heavy, rubbery bodies drop down to the platform but there is no sound of concussion, for in this instant they demonstrate their difference from the humans they so much resemble by the flexibility and the smoothness of all their movements. A ranger waits with a blue plastic pail of milk, into which he dips a blue plastic mug and hands it to the nearest animal, who takes it delicately by the handle, drinks without haste or gulping and hands it back. As we noticed subsequently, he and his friends use only their right hands, and the ranger tells us that, although ambidextrous, the orang-utans, who are acutely observant, have picked this up from watching the rangers although they still use both arms to throw sticks with considerable accuracy. He thinks that they also like the blue plastic mugs — a colour with some religious associations in Islam, of which he, too, is particularly fond.

During the past seventeen years of re-introducing orang-utans to their natural habitat, a total of one hundred and seventy released from captivity were brought to the station. Of these one hundred and twenty were successfully returned to the forest, while thirty-five died in the process of rehabilitation. At the time of our visit fifteen remained in the care of the station, of which seven turned up on the morning we were there.

Conduct on the feeding platform seems ruled by some inscrutable simian protocol that calms and subdues the tremendous athleticism demonstrated in the trees. In this instance five adults — one a female with a baby clinging to her neck — gathered in a sedate contemplative group, with what might have been a pretence of taking no notice of an impudent foot-long youngster playing sly pranks in their rear. A latecomer appeared suddenly, carried through the leaves as if by currents of air before twisting headlong like the most accomplished of yoga exponents, to drop spongily on to the stage. For some reason he was ignored by the early arrivals, but on making a move towards the bunch of bananas supplied with the milk, one of the group of five simply waved him away.

The offered diet of milk and bananas is by intention monotonous, in order to stimulate the orang-utans to search for more appetizing food in the forest. It was taken as a hopeful sign that none of the animals seemed particularly hungry. Several did not eat at all, and the ranger explained that they were just there ‘socially’.

These orang-utans were on the verge of a totally natural existence. Once again I noticed how radically different is the behaviour of such animals from that of those, for example, denaturalized by associates in the vicinity of Hindu temples, or of course of those shut up in zoos. I find it hard to forget the spectacle of the luckless gorilla Guy, favourite inmate for many years of the London Zoo, hunched psychologically
in extremis
shortly before death was to terminate the long incarceration in his concrete cell.

Zoos drive many animals mad, inspiring suicidal frenzy or delivering them to the cataplexy of ultimate despair. The reflective manner and the calm of these orang-utans reminded me of the only occasion when I had had the opportunity to study monkeys at close quarters in the wild, when they, too, had seemed to me to exhibit reactions emphasizing the similarities with human beings.

I was in Mali, in north-west Africa, in the only hotel in a remote area, frequented exclusively, as it turned out, by big-game hunters. Its owner, Monsieur de Willfahrt, explained to me that the hotel was very expensive but that everything was thrown in. ‘You may shoot an elephant, or a bison,’ he said. ‘Both, if you like, but as you are inexperienced I would be inclined to recommend the bison.’

‘I’m not a sportsman, Monsieur de Willfahrt,’ I said.

‘In that case what would you like to do?’

‘Go for a walk.’

‘I’ll send someone to look after you.’

‘A quiet walk in the country by myself.’

‘Very well then, but our regulations compel me to ask you to take a gun,’ de Willfahrt said.

I took the complicated hunting gun, which I knew I would never be able to use effectively, and de Willfahrt went with me to the door. ‘If you see an elephant or a bison,’ he said, ‘it might be better to drop the gun and run for your life. You can climb a tree but remember that the bison will remain some hours in the hope you will come down. There are one or two hyenas about. The method is to lie down and remain perfectly still until the animal comes to investigate — then you can easily shoot it.’

I thanked him and walked out into a lightly wooded savannah. It was the height of the dry season, with the ground crackling underfoot. The small, grey shining leaves in the trees looked as though they had been stamped out of tin. A movement screened by some spiny bushes caught my eye and, finding a gap in them, I ventured cautiously into an open space, followed by a bird, alarmed at the intrusion, that made a noise like a creaking gate hinge at ten-second intervals. In this space I found a congregation of thirty or so chimpanzees, who had gathered there, as it seemed to me, to communicate with one another in an area like a monkey forum set aside for this purpose. I stood, keeping as still as I could, on the perimeter of this scene, knee-deep in tough savannah grass. The monkeys’ meeting place had been flattened and smoothed by their feet — it was to be supposed over a long period of time. The chimpanzees curled their lips in an expressive manner, and sometimes they gestured with their arms, but no sound came from them. Little groups had formed circles, heads close together, as if in earnest discussion. Others strolled in twos and threes, in one case an animal had flung an arm over its friend’s shoulder. Sometimes a promenader would break away from his companion to spend a moment with another acquaintance before continuing the walk.

There was almost an eerie mimicry of human behaviour in what was going on here, and all the more extraordinary since not a head was turned in my direction although it was certain that these animals, always on the alert against stalking predators, knew that I was there. In all the years of sporadic animal- and bird-watching in foreign parts, this was the strangest of my experiences.

For children born in the village, Bukit Lawang was a paradise offering a legacy of childhood pleasures that must have helped set them on the high road to a successful adult life. For any child a river made this place. It poured in a clear, mild turbulence from the foothills of the National Reservation, thrashing its sparkling suds against the carved and polished limestone of the boulders lodged in its bed and its bank. In all probability the village had been deliberately established on a fairly sharp bend in its course; here water had been trapped to form an aqueous haven separate from the mainstream. This plunged over a drop of a few feet into lively but shallow rapids, manageable by all but the youngest swimmers, and it was this stretch of the river which provided pleasure and excitement of a kind which clearly never dulled. There seemed to be no time during the day when there were less than a dozen or so accomplished water babies in view. Were there ever any accidents, I asked. The answer was no, never. The children swam as soon as they walked. When the rains started the headman would order swimming for children to stop, and that would be that.

The Economic Guest House had built an open-air restaurant, elevated in such a way as to offer an excellent view of these aquatic activities, and a vantage point for the survey of village life in general. In the tourist season this was largely associated with the preparation of food saturated with spices of many kinds, few of which were to be found in other parts of the world. These tasks were accomplished by the women, who worked slowly but with intense concentration and a finicky regard for detail. Where there was butchering to be done, this was left to the menfolk. Families were huge and the children were everywhere, being treated with extreme tolerance. Bukit Lawang’s practice of the Muslim faith seemed fairly easygoing and less than exclusive. The river was under the supervision of a benevolent water spirit, and frequent dips in it were considered useful in the treatment of asthma and conditions of the skin. Smartly dressed visitors from as far away as Medan would come here to draw up a chair on the river’s bank and sit for hours on end, sometimes strumming a guitar as they absorbed curative influences and, if they were ladies, cuffing away dragonflies attracted by the fragrant unguents on their skin.

Several groups of foreign backpackers had taken much of the accommodation in the village. It was a situation adding to a longstanding confusion among the Sumatrans, to whom all Europeans, apart from extreme physical differences in the matter of size, looked roughly the same. It astonished them that this standardized collection of large pinkish people should speak a variety of languages, and it frustrated the ones who had painstakingly acquired a smattering of English to discover that only about one in ten of the visitors they tried to practise on had any idea of what they were talking about.

The staff at the Economic Guest House studied the racial assortment changing almost by the day, and assigned them recognizable characteristics. The Germans, said a waiter with whom I discussed this matter, were on the whole identifiable because they shouted at the top of their voices. It was likely to evidence high good humour rather than rage, and they were larger, pinker and had louder voices than the rest. All Belgians had been branded as a result of a single rash act, it seemed, when one of them, on being served unsatisfactory food, had simply thrown it over the restaurant’s handrail into the river. The Swiss made a note of the sequence in which orders for a meal were taken, complaining bitterly if anyone was served out of turn. French diners, the waiter said, played silly tricks. He described an incident where one had left the table to go to what he entitled in the prim Indonesian way ‘the little chamber’, and the man’s chair was replaced by one with a broken leg, causing him to sprawl on the floor when he came back.

Thus incurable misapprehension developed and was perpetuated. Every day in season the waiter had one or more incomprehensible foreigner to deal with and to be added to his list of stereotypes. His beliefs were damaging him and it was adding to the corruption of tourism that had already invaded the culture of Bukit Lawang. This man had come to dislike foreigners. The antipathy, I believed, concerned fear, and surliness sometimes showed through obligatory smiles.

Mr Pencastu, who had been in the States learning his trade before coming back to start the guest-house, called in at our bungalow to say he was getting married. The years in the United States had made him stand out among his fellow countrymen. The villagers as a whole tended to let life flow over them; Pencastu moved in a buzz of energy. He snapped his fingers, waved to attract attention, and shouted back when the Germans shouted at him. I noticed that staff members who drifted into his magnetic field straightened up and seemed to break into jerky action. He was amazingly frank about his private affairs. ‘A slight problem,’ he said. ‘Eighteen months ago I shacked up with the lady in question, and we just had our first child. Now I have to put myself right with the village and a bunch of nice old guys who run the religious side. The plan is to throw a party for them tomorrow when the knot is tied. Next day we’ll have a get-together for the whole village. I sure hope you’ll come along.’