Member-only story
Mature Flâneur
When I Was A Monkey’s Mother
It happened on a remote Indonesian island
I visited the island of Nias because of the cannibalism. To be more precise, I wanted to visit a culture so remote that it was only two generations removed from the practice of anthropophagy. To get to Nias, I had to take a ferry from Singapore to Sumatra’s north coast, traverse that great forested Indonesian island, and then take another nine/hour ferry ride across open ocean. This was in 1985, forty years ago; transport was rustic, as were the accommodations.
I ended up at a beach hotel in the southern tip of the island in a small village named Teluk Dalam. I found a cheap hotel for about five dollars a day on the edge of a wide sandy bay. The hotel was built of bamboo poles and palm-frond walls, with an outhouse out back and no running water. The owner, Yunius, was about 22 years old, a very cool, handsome young entrepreneur who spoke decent English.
He told us to buy fish for dinner from the local fishermen who passed by each morning and offered us their catch. Yunius then took our fish to his family home, where his mother cooked them over coals in banana leaves and sent them back to the hotel for our nightly dinner. We would wash it all down with coconut juice and the local banana liquor.
