The Peace Correspondent (34 page)

THE exotic name Cox's Bazar has enticed me since I first heard it as a schoolboy long ago. Besotted by faraway places with strange-sounding names, studying maps of exotic climes, I made a mental note that I must visit it someday.

The name, and the brochure photograph of an elephant standing on the beach with head held high, a great orange setting sun perfectly framed in the curve of its trunk, attracted me to the town on the Bay of Bengal. Promoted as the “Tourist Capital of Bangladesh” with its miles of golden sands, Buddhist temples and excellent seafood, it sounds intriguing.

So I travel south from Dhaka, to see the sun set on the world's longest unbroken sandy beach, which stretches 120 kilometers, all the way from Cox's Bazar south to Burma.

To see something of rural Bangladesh, I travel overland by train and bus instead of flying. The arduous day-long journey is not for the faint of heart, with beggars pouncing on every passing foreigner, and villages with garbage and vegetation strewn in festering piles on the street - interspersed with bucolic rural scenes. Travelers concerned with comfort for body and spirit should fly.

Arriving in Cox's, tired and dusty after the long journey, I ride a pedicab to my seaside hotel, the Shaibal. Eager to sample the area's vaunted seafood, I immediately set off into town in search of a restaurant, and soon find a small place rich with local color. I am about to order a fish dopiaza (onions twice curry)
when I spot the waiter combing his hair with a fork, then putting it back on the table.

The hotel restaurant will have to do, I decide, and scuttle back to the big, empty place I had originally spurned. In fact, it is a delightful surprise. The pomfret masala is delicious, as tasty as anything I have had in five-star restaurants. The whole fish, large enough to cover the plate, along with rice, vegetables and tea, comes to just a few dollars. So the brochures are right about the superb seafood.

The next morning at dawn, Inani Beach is already active. Children swim in the clear Bay of Bengal water; women in saris stroll the beach; and fishermen are out with nets at the end of long poles, pushing them like wheelbarrows, collecting tiny fish in big aluminum pots. A sign on the beach lists charges for showers, inflatable inner tubes and “kit kots,” which I take to mean inflatable mattresses.

Over breakfast, I overhear a local refer to the many “anjos” (NGOs) in Cox's Bazar, and aside from tourism, foreign aid seems to be the main industry. Strolling the streets of the dusty, ramshackle but pleasant town, I spot numerous international relief organization offices. In a few short blocks, there is the Control of Communicable Diseases, Bangladesh. the Community Based Calamity Preparedness and Rehabilitation Program, the Cyclone Preparedness Program and others.

Sightseeing proves a challenge, even in such a small town. I commission a pedicab to take me to the largest bronze statue of the Buddha in Bangladesh, and climb aboard for the bumpy ride through the baking streets. Although it is the town's most famous sight, the driver drops me off far past it and wheels away before I know what has happened. But at least I am in Ramu, a Buddhist village about 10 kilometers from Cox's Bazar. After asking directions from several shopkeepers, I walk back down the road and along a deserted side street.

Finally, I come upon a collection of strange, rundown buildings, with worn teak floors and multitiered corrugated iron roofs
housing Buddha statues from Burma. An old priest and I are the only ones there, and it is peaceful in the jungle setting. But it isn't the big Buddha.

Back on the main road, I find a more informed pedicab driver, who takes me further out of town and down a jungle path with paved strips for the pedicab wheels and brick in between. This leads to a complex of 19th-century khyangs, or monasteries, timber-framed, with multilevel pitched roofs and decorative fretted carvings in a sort of Indo-Chinese Carpenters' Gothic style.

The temple guardian, a stooped and frail woman who the driver swears is 110-years-old, silently appears, hand outstretched. Despite her three-figure age, her eyes are sharp enough to assess the bill I give her before she opens the temples for me. Inside, she indicates the big Buddha, and disappears like a wraith.

Left alone, I read a school scribbler I find at the entrance. In childlike writing, it informs me that this, the most famous Buddhist temple in Bangladesh, was built in 1877. The temple holds the large bronze Buddha, cast at the end of the last century, seven smaller Buddha images - six bronze, one white stone - and a row of plaster Buddhas. Another wood temple nearby is stocked with Burmese handicrafts and 23 Buddhas.

Anywhere else, a place like this would be overrun with tourists and lined with snack and souvenir shops. Instead, I spend an hour here in blissful solitude, savoring a kind of serenity I haven't experienced since traveling around Southeast Asia in the 1970s.

Back at Coxybar, as some call it, a band of locals resembling the 17th-century Mogh pirates who ravaged the Bay of Bengal loiter around an old blue Toyota. After hard bargaining, I rent the wreck for a short drive up the long beach. Although I am the only paying customer, a half-dozen of the driver's friends pile in the back, and we take off for a long, smooth drive along the world's longest stretch of flat sand. There is no solitude here, however. In this crowded country, people live in thatched huts all along the beach.

My newfound companions take me to a waterfall, apparently one of the local attractions. It is just a thin trickle coming down the cliff, with a woman in a bright sari gathering water in a large metal pot while naked kids splash around her.

After more bargaining, I get these roguish land pirates to drive me further along the hard sand. The beach goes on seemingly forever, and if we continued for a few hours we would eventually reach Burma. Apparently my time has run out, as we turn into some soft sand dunes, drive around some basic thatched houses, where yards of colorful, filmy sari fabric dry in the sun, then head back.

As we return in the late afternoon, a silver sheen shines over everything, blending the sky, water and wet sand beach without a visible break. Back at the main beach, I await the sunset, a major nightly event here, anticipating the noble elephant of the tourist brochure.

It seems as though at least 2 million of Bangladesh's zillion people are here, along this stretch of sand. While waiting, I chat with a few young locals who insist on getting their photo taken with me. And I watch the beach action, the women in brilliant saris, veiled or with kohl-blackened eyes, and the family groups. Small boys sell peanuts, bead necklaces and chains of sweet-scented jasmine; men stand thigh-deep in the calm sea fishing with long poles or nets; kids play soccer on the sand; a motorcyclist races by.

I am sitting on the hard, sandy beach, finally alone, watching the sun drop like melted butter into the shimmering sea, when from the side ambles a forlorn, cud-chewing black shape.

I wanted an elephant. I get a cow.

SOMEWHERE east of Java lie lands of timeless mystery, demons and magic, of ancient rituals, of sultan's palaces, and noisome white tribes roaming village streets. Centuries-old Dutch forts and the debris of World War II lie buried deep in the jungle or in the clear warm seas. Sacred eels dine on fresh chicken eggs, sad-faced orangutans peer balefully from trees, Komodo dragons gorge on carrion - including their fellow dragons.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, stretches 3,200 miles like a great Muslim crescent from west Malaysia to north Australia. Although not much visited, these 13,000 islands with their vast diversity of peoples and cultures, are easily accessible by Garuda, the Indonesian national carrier named for a mythical bird, which flies to most of them.

Sulawesi

From Makassar, now, more dully, Ujung Padang, it is a jarring eight-hour jeep ride north on the trans-Sulawesi highway to the heart of orchid-shaped Sulawesi island. My driver, Captain Hornblower, leans on the Toyota's klaxon as he races past bi
cycles and buffaloes and tiny ponies pulling cart loads of farm families in traditional dress. Hornblower, in Che Guevara beret and mirror sunglasses, rocks with childlike glee as he forces a bicycle rickshaw and passengers over into a ditch.

A pair of lateen-rigged Bugis pinis ships, part the world's last large sailing fleet, glide along just offshore. Small tin-domed mosques, like over-turned teakettles, dot the crowded road. Women in umbrella-sized cone hats work the rice paddies, and giant, gentle, mud-slathered water buffaloes with horns like Honda handlebars wallow in the ponds. A frantic hour from the airport, we reach the central mountains. Broad rivers brown as a water buffalo's' eyes slice through emerald green, terraced rice paddies reaching like steps up to the peaks.

My destination, Toraja Land, is a full-day journey on this hairy, though scenic, road. The Tana Toraja people, like Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle hill tribes in their mountain fastness, cling to their unique religion, costumes and customs. The Torajans, who it is said “Live to Die,” are known for their elaborate funeral rituals. Dead noblemen are mummified and buried or stored in a back room until the family has sufficient wealth in water buffalo and palm wine for a proper wake. It leads to interesting aromas in the houses, a guidebook notes, although the introduction of formaldehyde greatly reduced the odors.

The bodies are finally stashed in caves or buried in Hanging Graves, holes dug in the cliffs, like filing cabinets for corpses. Goggle-eyed wooden effigies, mute guardians in colorful garb, line the railings of balconies built alongside the Hanging Graves. Outside burial caves, youthful entrepreneurs scramble to escort me with kerosene lanterns (“You need two sir, one in front and one behind. Only one thousand rupiahs each”) to show us the caves full of skulls and skeletons of ancient relatives. Sulawesi sightseeing involves considerable crunching over ancient bones.

This is a lucky day for us. A nearby village is celebrating a Festival of the Dead, with singing, dancing, religious ceremonies and an animal sacrifice. Along country roads, men carrying
Toraja six-packs -- frothy, tuak palm wine in half a dozen three-foot bamboo tubes slung over their shoulders like crosscut saws -- make for the wake.

In Tallun Lipu village, traditional Toraja houses on stilts with upswept roofs face a muddy common crowded with 14 farmers caressing and murmuring to their water buffaloes. Relatives and friends of the deceased squat in numbered sections under the houses, like privileged baseball fans in box seats. At a command from an electronic megaphone, 14 knives flash at 14 throats and, within minutes, dead buffalo lie in black heaps on the rich red ground. Youngsters rush out with bamboo tubes to collect blood for the stew pot. A young mourner shoots souvenir photographs of his children proudly posing on top of the family beast. A half-dozen ashen-faced Europeans, hands clutching their throats, goggle at this unexpected extra to their package tour.

Moluccas

After the damp, cool Toraja mountain air, Ambon, capital of the former Spice Islands, is South Seas tropical. Near Papua New Guinea, the island is more Polynesian than Asian, with rows of graceful coconut palms arcing over empty beaches, spiky sago trees, clove and nutmeg trees, outrigger canoes and thatched sago leaf huts. A South Seas influence shows in the number of tall church steeples interspersed with domed mosques. Visiting them all would take a month of Sundays.

Only two other whites -- missionaries or businessmen, it is hard to tell with their clipped haircuts, short-sleeved shirts and briefcases -- arrive at Pattamura airport today.

George, a man who could be king, meets us on behalf of Indonesian Tourism. George's father is the hereditary ruler of Tanmbar, one of Moluccas 999 islands. His older brother, the rightful heir, has lived in Amsterdam for decades, and will not return to claim the throne. But George, seduced by the bright Ambonese lights, will likely leave the title to his younger brother upon his father's death.